Though I’ve worked for a large university for almost two years, it was not until recently that I went to work on the main campus. I should have known the fall was truly upon us when small family groups—generally two parents and an anxious-looking upper-adolescent—started boarding my daily bus with enormous bags of bedding and shower accessories. It only really hit me yesterday as I walked through the main quad on my lunch break. Large tents are not uncommon on campus, but the one that now covered a large swath of grass had an enormous sign: FIRST YEAR KEY PICK UP.
My own beloved alma mater did not have such a tent—instead, there was a small office in the basement of one of the central dorms, accessible through a backdoor in a parking lot. My parents and I went there first when we arrived on campus. It must have been pretty familiar to them by then; not only the freshman key pick up, but that very office: both of my sisters had picked up their keys there before me. What we didn’t know (though I wonder if they suspected) was that of the three of us who attended, I would be the one who would love it the most.
The clearest memory I have of the day my parents dropped me off at school came towards the end of the afternoon. It had started to rain a little, and I was wearing my brand new college hoodie, which I had purposefully gotten about three sizes too big. Just before they left, my dad turned and called out to me the exact phrase his father had said to him thirty-five years earlier as he was departing for the same college. After they drove away, I took a deep, shaky breath and walked up the steps of a then-unfamiliar building. I knew that, good or bad, something very big was starting.
But more importantly, here are the things I didn’t know:
I didn’t know that my mother was desperately trying to suppress panic for most of the day: she was convinced that between the bad weather and my asthma, I would probably need to be evacuated by helicopter at some point during the canoe trip I was about to embark upon. I also didn’t know that after they left me, my parents were both crying so hard that they missed their exit and had to drive about fifty miles out of their way to the next one.
I didn’t know that the unfamiliar building I was entering would become my second home on campus (I do know for a fact that I spent more waking hours in that building than I did in any dorm I lived in). That I would eat innumerable lunches on those steps and meet people there who now form my insides. That I would lie in the grass, walk through the mud, stomp through the leaves, and roll in the snow outside that building for four very, very good years.
That a year after graduation, I would visit campus, sit on the same steps, and try very hard not to cry because something else was beginning—my adult life—and I felt like I didn’t know anything.
My parents took a picture of me as I was walking away that I didn’t see until a few years later. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans that I would later wear out while studying in Italy and the giant green hoodie that now has stains all up one arm from a radio-active hot chocolate spill at Homecoming. Having grown into my place at college (if not the sweatshirt), I was always surprised at how small I look in that photo.
Colleges go out of their way to welcome their incoming freshmen—I know that mine did, most obviously in the form of upperclassmen, who chopped off varying degrees of hair, dyed the remainder psychedelic colors, and danced around in resplendent flair. But the real world? Not so much. My college life began with an acceptance letter, and my adulthood began with nine months of rejection. Adulthood orientation has not been nearly as much fun as college, but I think that’s just part of the deal.
My current landscape continues to become more familiar, but eventually I will need to leave it to do something else. And I’m sure it will be scary in all sorts of unique and debilitating ways, so something I should learn is the ability to turn my faith forward. When you’re starting something new and suitably terrifying, it’s almost impossible to be confident in anything, save your own nausea, and the definition of faith necessarily includes confidence: “Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.” Maybe when starting something new, I need to borrow confidence from where I was before: I earned it, I saved it, and now I literally owe it to myself. The confidence I learned as a freshman before might be able to fuel the faith I need in the future.
There still lots of things I don’t know, but maybe that can be something that I believe.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Just One of Those Things
In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.
Call it object therapy.
I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.
Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.
When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.
A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.
I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.
A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”
Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.
We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.
I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.
And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.
Call it object therapy.
I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.
Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.
When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.
A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.
I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.
A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”
Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.
We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.
I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.
And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Twenty-Four Working on Thirteen
There is a girl who lives in my head. She can’t ever seem to nail down a good hair cut, but that’s probably because the odds are stacked against her in the form of greasy bangs. She has braces, but they haven’t been on long enough to have made much progress in combating a huge overbite and defining her previously non-existent chin. She has acne, but that’s nothing new—she’s had it for a few years, certainly before the rest of her peers. Her immediate family is populated by intelligent, funny, charming people who all have straight teeth and, at the bare minimum, seven years on her; she has been the odd man out in a family of pairs since day one. She is extremely fond of a blue, furry bucket hat and using big words that her oldest sister teaches her sometimes. She can’t articulate it yet, but deep down she probably knows that she is most grating and annoying when she is most desperate to be seen and liked.
Meet me, at age thirteen.
I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.
In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.
People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.
The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.
I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.
It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.
So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:
There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.
Meet me, at age thirteen.
I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.
In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.
People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.
The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.
I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.
It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.
So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:
There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Unpacking
Last fall, one of my best friends called me on a Sunday morning to get some advice on a relationship. There were many moving parts to both the relationship and our conversation, but I remember something she said very clearly: “I don’t think I’m as happy as I could be.”
Which is, I have come to realize, perhaps the bravest statement of all, particularly when one intends to do something about it, as she did.
For a long time, I thought that achieving happiness was, very simplified, the act of assembling all of the things you were supposed to have. When your collection is complete—Education, Job, House, Romantic Lead —happiness is when you can sit back and admire the full set.
(If there were a top 25 playlist for my therapy sessions, this phenomenon would most certainly be on it.)
In my own pursuit of a full set (insert obvious joke, as needed), I became more preoccupied with simply filling the roles and less with the quality of the things and people with which I filled them. My junior spring, I had my first college boyfriend—and with him the satisfaction of having something in that particular box. Unfortunately, I reasoned somewhere in the more injured parts of myself that the act of having that box filled was worth his consistently debilitating treatment of me.
A few years later, entering an abysmal job market with a liberal arts degree, I accepted a job that I knew was a terrible fit and spent the subsequent sixteen months being kicked around by my bosses. Frequently during those months, I would go home, plug in my phone, sit down on the couch, and weep. Being screamed at on the phone, having my education thrown in my face, and generally being humiliated and degraded—I thought that was just the price of filling the Job box. It is a strange thing to get used to: feeling obligated to be grateful for something that makes you miserable.
Disturbing trend, isn’t it?
Though my advice-seeking friend probably does not suffer from my special brand of near-pathological myopia regarding ridiculous boxes, we somehow eventually arrived at a similar realization. In my case, when I started dating my next boyfriend, I began to have some point of comparison to the one before him and was downright horrified at what I had put up with. Likewise, when I dismally applied for another job and miraculously got it, I had to adjust my expectations for the better—the first time I gave something to my new boss, and he told me it was perfect and thanked me, I very nearly burst into tears of gratitude. When you’re in a bad situation and you have to make the most of it, maybe it’s not the best idea to examine how wretched and absurd it is on a regular basis. However, when you’re in that situation by some form of choice, when you tell yourself that this is one of those things that will make you happy and it doesn’t, it is surprisingly difficult to lift up your head, look around and realize that you deserve better.
My friend was in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious situation where she was middlingly happy but believed that she could be happier. Maybe I lack that sense, or, more likely, maybe out of cowardice and my obsession with those goddamn boxes, I decide to ignore it. In either case, it wasn’t after the fact that my friend lifted her head up and looked around—it was when she had that box filled, but knew she was not as happy as she could be.
Let me tell you, the force is strong with this one.
It’s a fairly terrifying leap of faith: letting go of something that makes you kind of happy so you can go after something that may really, truly blow your socks off. Letting go of any kind of happiness is painful, and I've come to believe that the letting go and the leaping towards something that may or may not be there is the hardest and bravest thing you can do for yourself. I don’t think my friend has necessarily found that which will leave her stunned, sockless, and ecstatic, but I believe it’s out there for her, and I know she’ll get there.
And I? I need to think outside the box. Literally. Suddenly I imagine a scene of empty packing boxes, labeled with all of the things that I think will make me happy. Have you ever jumped full force on an empty box? For items that seem so upstanding and solid, they collapse with surprising ease (particularly when one adds a few extra stomps for good measure). And so I jump up and down inside my head, collapsing these ridiculous boxes that have been taking up entirely too much space in my mind.
Maybe in the future that will make it easier for me, if necessary, to lift up my head, look around and decide that I deserve better.
Which is, I have come to realize, perhaps the bravest statement of all, particularly when one intends to do something about it, as she did.
For a long time, I thought that achieving happiness was, very simplified, the act of assembling all of the things you were supposed to have. When your collection is complete—Education, Job, House, Romantic Lead —happiness is when you can sit back and admire the full set.
(If there were a top 25 playlist for my therapy sessions, this phenomenon would most certainly be on it.)
In my own pursuit of a full set (insert obvious joke, as needed), I became more preoccupied with simply filling the roles and less with the quality of the things and people with which I filled them. My junior spring, I had my first college boyfriend—and with him the satisfaction of having something in that particular box. Unfortunately, I reasoned somewhere in the more injured parts of myself that the act of having that box filled was worth his consistently debilitating treatment of me.
A few years later, entering an abysmal job market with a liberal arts degree, I accepted a job that I knew was a terrible fit and spent the subsequent sixteen months being kicked around by my bosses. Frequently during those months, I would go home, plug in my phone, sit down on the couch, and weep. Being screamed at on the phone, having my education thrown in my face, and generally being humiliated and degraded—I thought that was just the price of filling the Job box. It is a strange thing to get used to: feeling obligated to be grateful for something that makes you miserable.
Disturbing trend, isn’t it?
Though my advice-seeking friend probably does not suffer from my special brand of near-pathological myopia regarding ridiculous boxes, we somehow eventually arrived at a similar realization. In my case, when I started dating my next boyfriend, I began to have some point of comparison to the one before him and was downright horrified at what I had put up with. Likewise, when I dismally applied for another job and miraculously got it, I had to adjust my expectations for the better—the first time I gave something to my new boss, and he told me it was perfect and thanked me, I very nearly burst into tears of gratitude. When you’re in a bad situation and you have to make the most of it, maybe it’s not the best idea to examine how wretched and absurd it is on a regular basis. However, when you’re in that situation by some form of choice, when you tell yourself that this is one of those things that will make you happy and it doesn’t, it is surprisingly difficult to lift up your head, look around and realize that you deserve better.
My friend was in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious situation where she was middlingly happy but believed that she could be happier. Maybe I lack that sense, or, more likely, maybe out of cowardice and my obsession with those goddamn boxes, I decide to ignore it. In either case, it wasn’t after the fact that my friend lifted her head up and looked around—it was when she had that box filled, but knew she was not as happy as she could be.
Let me tell you, the force is strong with this one.
It’s a fairly terrifying leap of faith: letting go of something that makes you kind of happy so you can go after something that may really, truly blow your socks off. Letting go of any kind of happiness is painful, and I've come to believe that the letting go and the leaping towards something that may or may not be there is the hardest and bravest thing you can do for yourself. I don’t think my friend has necessarily found that which will leave her stunned, sockless, and ecstatic, but I believe it’s out there for her, and I know she’ll get there.
And I? I need to think outside the box. Literally. Suddenly I imagine a scene of empty packing boxes, labeled with all of the things that I think will make me happy. Have you ever jumped full force on an empty box? For items that seem so upstanding and solid, they collapse with surprising ease (particularly when one adds a few extra stomps for good measure). And so I jump up and down inside my head, collapsing these ridiculous boxes that have been taking up entirely too much space in my mind.
Maybe in the future that will make it easier for me, if necessary, to lift up my head, look around and decide that I deserve better.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
One Step Forward, Two Steps Removed
“Cary Grant, right?”
"You know that movie?” Meg Ryan’s face, yet undisturbed by plastic surgery, lights up with hope.
“One of my wife’s favorites.” The crusty old Empire State Building desk clerk, who has a well-timed soft spot for romantics, waves her to the elevators so she can make her date with Tom Hanks, and by extrapolation, destiny.
That I know the lines from this scene, and most others, in Sleepless in Seattle is probably not all that surprising. Many women of my generation, myself included, developed their cultural consciousness in the age of the romantic comedy, and I personally have a mind like a steel trap for ridiculous and useless information. That I was reciting these lines, almost without realizing it, while folding my laundry this weekend is admittedly a little weird.
That a large part of the movie I was reciting is based on its own characters’ reciting another movie’s lines—that’s when the level of removal becomes downright strange.
As we continue into our twenties, many of my friends and I have increased the frequency of our griping that romantic comedies have completely warped our expectations for how our relationships should happen. A co-worker of mine, who grew up in Russia, recently commented to me that the fairy tale and the idea of happily ever after, replete with Prince Charming and perfect, straight, white teeth, is a distinctly American preoccupation. Reflecting on my own fantasies and four painful years in braces, I couldn’t help but think she was on to something.
The collective movies of our childhoods (generally of the Disney persuasion) had no qualms about labeling themselves as fairy tales. As I got older, I was able to rationally separate myself from the main characters—I can acknowledge, for instance, that I am neither a mermaid nor an Arabian princess. My life is not populated with helpful, singing rodents and crustaceans. I am, in the most literal sense, not a cartoon character.
I am, however, in my Mid-Twenties. I live in a City. I have Supportive Girlfriends. I have been known to carry a Baguette in my Cloth Tote when walking from the Alternative Grocery Store. I feel as though I am constantly at the ready to become one half of a meet-cute. I am performing the modern equivalent of sitting at a window and singing about how someday my prince will come: I am waiting to become the star in my own romantic comedy.
God help us all.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton must be rolling over in her damn grave.
When I pull myself up short and actually examine thoughts like that, I feel vaguely nauseated. I perform so many other useful, independent, important functions, and this? This is what preoccupies me? Ye gods, for lack of a better interjection.
The romantic comedies with which we grew up are fairy tales in contemporary drag: they are stories we tell that reflect not only our values but how we see ourselves in our culture. As we get older, the stories with which we are presented sometimes begin to look a lot more like the lives that we find ourselves leading. The catch is that, as far as I can tell, the plausibility of the romantic scenarios does not increase proportionally with the visual similarity. And therein lies our problem.
Sometimes I wonder what it means that the romantic comedies to which I refer in fact themselves refer to an earlier generation of romantic cinema. I can’t help but remember an interesting phenomenon in Western art, which follows a similar trajectory: artists reach a level of classicism that is regarded as ‘perfection,’ equidistant between nature and an ideal. The Greeks did it, the Romans copied them, and the Italians made their way back to it in the 16th century. However, things always get very interesting with the next generation of artists, because where exactly do you go from ‘perfection’? It seems that the artists take one step closer to the idea, the abstraction, rather than to nature, and from there, things get just plain weird. As an enthusiast with a soft spot for the younger, less perfect siblings of art history (wonder why), I’ve always liked the Hellenistic and Mannerist movements—they may be kind of weird-looking, but they’ve certainly got imagination.
If you take the classic romantic movies—the Affairs to Remember and the Roman Holidays—and you remove them one more step from nature, you get a kind of mannered (or comedic) romance. After all, it’s one hell of a leap to go from Cary Grant to Tom Hanks—there has to be some manner of abstraction in there.
So where exactly does that leave us? I’ve noticed lately that movie critics mention in passing the demise of the romantic comedy in favor of even more far-fetched genres (bromance or insemination comedy, anyone?). I think the first step is to stop abstracting and start trying to figure out what real relationships look like, beginning with the fact that they don’t tend to follow a script. Still, I believe there’s hope for the thing that we’re really looking for, in our own twisted ways: real live, sustainable love.
A few weeks ago I watched my sister marry the man she loves, and I realized something very important. That day, there were two functions: a wedding and a marriage. The wedding was a great party, but it was an abstraction, something that culture teaches most of us to want in a certain way. The marriage was my sister and her love, standing up in front of their friends and family, committing to one other for the rest of their lives. In the movies, ‘the rest of their lives’ means about four minutes of credits (ever notice how romantic movies don't tend to have sequels?). For my sister and her husband, it means the actual heavy lifting of promising to love each other for every day of their lives together.
My sister won’t wear that beautiful gown for the rest of her life, but she’ll be married to her love for that long. And when I really think about it, it’s not the ball gown or the meet-cute I want forever. It’s what comes after when I get to change back into my blue jeans and go back to being who I am in my life rather than the star of my own abstracted romantic comedy. Because, in the words of the Avett Brothers,
Real life is more than just two hours long.
"You know that movie?” Meg Ryan’s face, yet undisturbed by plastic surgery, lights up with hope.
“One of my wife’s favorites.” The crusty old Empire State Building desk clerk, who has a well-timed soft spot for romantics, waves her to the elevators so she can make her date with Tom Hanks, and by extrapolation, destiny.
That I know the lines from this scene, and most others, in Sleepless in Seattle is probably not all that surprising. Many women of my generation, myself included, developed their cultural consciousness in the age of the romantic comedy, and I personally have a mind like a steel trap for ridiculous and useless information. That I was reciting these lines, almost without realizing it, while folding my laundry this weekend is admittedly a little weird.
That a large part of the movie I was reciting is based on its own characters’ reciting another movie’s lines—that’s when the level of removal becomes downright strange.
As we continue into our twenties, many of my friends and I have increased the frequency of our griping that romantic comedies have completely warped our expectations for how our relationships should happen. A co-worker of mine, who grew up in Russia, recently commented to me that the fairy tale and the idea of happily ever after, replete with Prince Charming and perfect, straight, white teeth, is a distinctly American preoccupation. Reflecting on my own fantasies and four painful years in braces, I couldn’t help but think she was on to something.
The collective movies of our childhoods (generally of the Disney persuasion) had no qualms about labeling themselves as fairy tales. As I got older, I was able to rationally separate myself from the main characters—I can acknowledge, for instance, that I am neither a mermaid nor an Arabian princess. My life is not populated with helpful, singing rodents and crustaceans. I am, in the most literal sense, not a cartoon character.
I am, however, in my Mid-Twenties. I live in a City. I have Supportive Girlfriends. I have been known to carry a Baguette in my Cloth Tote when walking from the Alternative Grocery Store. I feel as though I am constantly at the ready to become one half of a meet-cute. I am performing the modern equivalent of sitting at a window and singing about how someday my prince will come: I am waiting to become the star in my own romantic comedy.
God help us all.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton must be rolling over in her damn grave.
When I pull myself up short and actually examine thoughts like that, I feel vaguely nauseated. I perform so many other useful, independent, important functions, and this? This is what preoccupies me? Ye gods, for lack of a better interjection.
The romantic comedies with which we grew up are fairy tales in contemporary drag: they are stories we tell that reflect not only our values but how we see ourselves in our culture. As we get older, the stories with which we are presented sometimes begin to look a lot more like the lives that we find ourselves leading. The catch is that, as far as I can tell, the plausibility of the romantic scenarios does not increase proportionally with the visual similarity. And therein lies our problem.
Sometimes I wonder what it means that the romantic comedies to which I refer in fact themselves refer to an earlier generation of romantic cinema. I can’t help but remember an interesting phenomenon in Western art, which follows a similar trajectory: artists reach a level of classicism that is regarded as ‘perfection,’ equidistant between nature and an ideal. The Greeks did it, the Romans copied them, and the Italians made their way back to it in the 16th century. However, things always get very interesting with the next generation of artists, because where exactly do you go from ‘perfection’? It seems that the artists take one step closer to the idea, the abstraction, rather than to nature, and from there, things get just plain weird. As an enthusiast with a soft spot for the younger, less perfect siblings of art history (wonder why), I’ve always liked the Hellenistic and Mannerist movements—they may be kind of weird-looking, but they’ve certainly got imagination.
If you take the classic romantic movies—the Affairs to Remember and the Roman Holidays—and you remove them one more step from nature, you get a kind of mannered (or comedic) romance. After all, it’s one hell of a leap to go from Cary Grant to Tom Hanks—there has to be some manner of abstraction in there.
So where exactly does that leave us? I’ve noticed lately that movie critics mention in passing the demise of the romantic comedy in favor of even more far-fetched genres (bromance or insemination comedy, anyone?). I think the first step is to stop abstracting and start trying to figure out what real relationships look like, beginning with the fact that they don’t tend to follow a script. Still, I believe there’s hope for the thing that we’re really looking for, in our own twisted ways: real live, sustainable love.
A few weeks ago I watched my sister marry the man she loves, and I realized something very important. That day, there were two functions: a wedding and a marriage. The wedding was a great party, but it was an abstraction, something that culture teaches most of us to want in a certain way. The marriage was my sister and her love, standing up in front of their friends and family, committing to one other for the rest of their lives. In the movies, ‘the rest of their lives’ means about four minutes of credits (ever notice how romantic movies don't tend to have sequels?). For my sister and her husband, it means the actual heavy lifting of promising to love each other for every day of their lives together.
My sister won’t wear that beautiful gown for the rest of her life, but she’ll be married to her love for that long. And when I really think about it, it’s not the ball gown or the meet-cute I want forever. It’s what comes after when I get to change back into my blue jeans and go back to being who I am in my life rather than the star of my own abstracted romantic comedy. Because, in the words of the Avett Brothers,
Real life is more than just two hours long.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Baby Steps
There’s an anecdote in my family about how it’s a miracle I ever learned how to crawl. Evidently, about the time I was supposed to be learning how to strike out across the carpet on chubby hands and knees, our house in Florida had a flea infestation. Understandably, my mother was not too keen on putting her baby down on a floor quite literally hopping with fleas, so she carried me instead. It was not a great couple of weeks for the entire family, I’m told, particularly for our golden retriever. Eventually, though, I did learn to crawl, and with the help of the same golden retriever, I learned to walk. The story goes that I’d haul myself up by the hair of Cariad’s rump—a more patient, saintly dog there never was—and she would kind of slither forward, forcing me to walk to keep up. When I would face plant, as was inevitable, she’d scoot back towards me so I could once more take a hold and try again. My grandmother always liked to say our dog taught me how to walk.
I started wondering recently about why exactly I felt the need to crawl or walk. I imagine it had something to do with necessity—after the fleas were gone, and my mother put me down, I probably found it necessary to become my own means of travel from point A to point B. I have to wonder, though, if it’s something a little more adventurous—do we learn to walk as a sort of infantile version of Manifest Destiny? How far afield we travel as adults is often a function of resources and personality, but I’d imagine almost without exception, where a baby is able, that baby will learn to crawl. We don’t know how at first, but eventually we figure it out. With all of the research being done on babies, I wish there were a moment scientists could pinpoint when the sedentary baby looks around, sees the distance and how he or she is not in it, and thinks, “Well this will never do.”
My legs know how to walk now, largely without conscious coordination with my brain (watching where I’m walking, however, is a separate issue). It’s only one example of muscle memory: the actions you learn and earn until they can live latently in your muscles, waiting to be cued. I like to think that my muscle memories are one quirky facet of my personality and my history. I measure flour the way my sister does, tapping the dull edge of a knife across the cup measure’s rim. I twirl a pen between my index and middle fingers when I’m not paying attention—something I picked up from the debaters in high school English. I drive a standard, and whenever I’m in an automatic, my foot reaches for the clutch and comes up empty. My muscles simply remember.
I have another muscle memory that I became aware of recently, one that involves most of my insides between my collar bone and my hips. People talk about a sinking feeling; for me it’s more of a hollowing out, a quiet little whirlpool that forms somewhere around my stomach and expands from there. And it’s triggered by the same thing, over and over after so many years that no wonder my muscles remember: that exquisite moment when your crush is crushed. Since I learned that feeling, it’s grown with me; larger disappointments and high stakes make for bigger whirlpools.
I can’t think of love as a thing you experience only emotionally—I’m the type of person who occasionally feels the need to crank up the musical theater and dance around my apartment like an idiot. Waltzing along with Mitzi Gaynor is all well and good, but thus far I’ve only been able to waltz straight in to disappointment, with a greater or lesser sense of awareness as to my elation’s imminent demise. And so I fall flat on my face—I don’t think even our golden retriever, long since gone to the happy hunting ground, could help me up. The only thing left to do is pull myself up and try again. While my brain deals with the emotional fall out, my body goes through the motions of disappointment. It’s hard for me to tell if it makes me feel better or worse that the ache in my stomach is so familiar.
And again I have to wonder: when was that moment when I decided that being alone was just not good enough? I’m capable of being alone—I’ve gotten quite good at it, in fact—but there must have been a moment somewhere in my own emotional development, when like that sedentary baby I looked around and thought, “Well this will never do.”
I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently about the moral development of babies, and how some scientists have postulated that in order to learn and absorb morals, you have to have a relatively receptive blank slate. That is, you have to be preprogrammed to accept the knowledge by having some basic form of morality (or something like that). Is it that healthy legs are preprogrammed to walk, and our bodies somehow know it? Am I preprogrammed to offer up my heart to others? It is as if I was born with a series of muscle memories, things I do without even realizing it or even needing to learn how. Maybe the best way to define it is “instinct,” but the way I perform it feels a lot like memory.
The saying “if at first you don’t succeed” conflicts directly with that fact that I know insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I try, I fall, I pick myself up: I’ve done it so many times that the accompanying disappointment has its own muscle memory now, another unfortunate part of my personality and my history. Parents start getting worried if their baby isn’t walking by a certain age; sometimes I feel like I’m up against an unknown deadline after which I need to be happy and in love, or somehow dysfunctional. My brain flashes with a funny image: a baby on the floor, glancing up in irritation at anxious parents, wondering why he won’t walk. The baby thinks, “Chill out. I’m visualizing.”
Maybe that’s what I need to tell myself: chill, because maybe I’m just visualizing now, but I’ll probably figure it out eventually.
I started wondering recently about why exactly I felt the need to crawl or walk. I imagine it had something to do with necessity—after the fleas were gone, and my mother put me down, I probably found it necessary to become my own means of travel from point A to point B. I have to wonder, though, if it’s something a little more adventurous—do we learn to walk as a sort of infantile version of Manifest Destiny? How far afield we travel as adults is often a function of resources and personality, but I’d imagine almost without exception, where a baby is able, that baby will learn to crawl. We don’t know how at first, but eventually we figure it out. With all of the research being done on babies, I wish there were a moment scientists could pinpoint when the sedentary baby looks around, sees the distance and how he or she is not in it, and thinks, “Well this will never do.”
My legs know how to walk now, largely without conscious coordination with my brain (watching where I’m walking, however, is a separate issue). It’s only one example of muscle memory: the actions you learn and earn until they can live latently in your muscles, waiting to be cued. I like to think that my muscle memories are one quirky facet of my personality and my history. I measure flour the way my sister does, tapping the dull edge of a knife across the cup measure’s rim. I twirl a pen between my index and middle fingers when I’m not paying attention—something I picked up from the debaters in high school English. I drive a standard, and whenever I’m in an automatic, my foot reaches for the clutch and comes up empty. My muscles simply remember.
I have another muscle memory that I became aware of recently, one that involves most of my insides between my collar bone and my hips. People talk about a sinking feeling; for me it’s more of a hollowing out, a quiet little whirlpool that forms somewhere around my stomach and expands from there. And it’s triggered by the same thing, over and over after so many years that no wonder my muscles remember: that exquisite moment when your crush is crushed. Since I learned that feeling, it’s grown with me; larger disappointments and high stakes make for bigger whirlpools.
I can’t think of love as a thing you experience only emotionally—I’m the type of person who occasionally feels the need to crank up the musical theater and dance around my apartment like an idiot. Waltzing along with Mitzi Gaynor is all well and good, but thus far I’ve only been able to waltz straight in to disappointment, with a greater or lesser sense of awareness as to my elation’s imminent demise. And so I fall flat on my face—I don’t think even our golden retriever, long since gone to the happy hunting ground, could help me up. The only thing left to do is pull myself up and try again. While my brain deals with the emotional fall out, my body goes through the motions of disappointment. It’s hard for me to tell if it makes me feel better or worse that the ache in my stomach is so familiar.
And again I have to wonder: when was that moment when I decided that being alone was just not good enough? I’m capable of being alone—I’ve gotten quite good at it, in fact—but there must have been a moment somewhere in my own emotional development, when like that sedentary baby I looked around and thought, “Well this will never do.”
I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently about the moral development of babies, and how some scientists have postulated that in order to learn and absorb morals, you have to have a relatively receptive blank slate. That is, you have to be preprogrammed to accept the knowledge by having some basic form of morality (or something like that). Is it that healthy legs are preprogrammed to walk, and our bodies somehow know it? Am I preprogrammed to offer up my heart to others? It is as if I was born with a series of muscle memories, things I do without even realizing it or even needing to learn how. Maybe the best way to define it is “instinct,” but the way I perform it feels a lot like memory.
The saying “if at first you don’t succeed” conflicts directly with that fact that I know insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I try, I fall, I pick myself up: I’ve done it so many times that the accompanying disappointment has its own muscle memory now, another unfortunate part of my personality and my history. Parents start getting worried if their baby isn’t walking by a certain age; sometimes I feel like I’m up against an unknown deadline after which I need to be happy and in love, or somehow dysfunctional. My brain flashes with a funny image: a baby on the floor, glancing up in irritation at anxious parents, wondering why he won’t walk. The baby thinks, “Chill out. I’m visualizing.”
Maybe that’s what I need to tell myself: chill, because maybe I’m just visualizing now, but I’ll probably figure it out eventually.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Darwin, Gershwin, and Me in the Middle
I have found something rare and wonderful, completely by accident, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.
As a matter of observation, things that are rare are not often simultaneously sturdy or robust. That’s not the sort of thing you can really test, either: someone hands you a Faberge egg, you are not likely to assess first-hand how well it bounces. You believe, through some instinct or education, that this thing in your hand is rare because it is frail—uncommon and valued because of its proclivity to be broken.
Approaching the matter scientifically, Darwin might have you believe that something rare is doomed—fragility will eventually and inevitably be selected against. How many creatures will we never know about because they couldn’t quite bear up against climate, predators, environment, or the distance between Boston and New York?
Okay, I may be referring to a very specific species that is at risk for that last one: a population of two that may or may not be viable in the long run.
Most relationships don’t stand up against selection pressures—from both within and without. You could say a selection pressure from within is just the act of being picky: the female bird is so not impressed with that particular feather display. Move along, pal. Relationship selection pressure from without has nothing to do with choice: if some manner of jungle cat eats the male bird, the female, no matter how much she approved of the male’s plumage, would seem to be shit out of luck.
I take no issue with my chosen bird’s plumage. When he met me on the corner of 34th and 8th this weekend, I saw him before he saw me, and I took a minute to simply admire him. Those are some fine feathers, let me tell you.
I know I am in trouble when Frank Sinatra starts singing in my head—that generally means I have passed out of the realm of reason and straight into fantasy, replete with imagined embraces in fog and fedoras. For the last few days, Frankie has been singing a George Gershwin standard, which begins: “There are many, many crazy things that will keep me loving you, and with your permission, may I list a few?”
The request for permission was probably a rhetorical exercise; it’s entirely possible that whomever Gershwin was writing about never knew such a list existed. In that possibility, I feel George’s pain. One of those selection pressures that could crush this fledgling romance into extinction is the act of my listing those many, many crazy things that keep me loving him… so I write them to the ether, on a whim:
I love the way your eyes crinkle up when you grin, like a cheeky little kid who’s quite pleased with himself for having been caught covered in peanut butter. I love your selective use of anachronisms when you talk. I love how the universe saw fit to create you with a breathtakingly perfect blend of irony and self-awareness—the personality version of a dry martini—which goes so well with your corduroy blazer. I love that I love your friends and your favorite book. That you are excellent at receiving gifts. That you drink ‘dark and stormies,’ which are awful. That you have expressed strong opinions about my shoes (you hate my Tevas, which recently broke and made me think of you). That you remember certain places where I have left pieces of myself. That you see me, my lowest common denominator self, who prefers blue jeans, talks too much, and is filled with obscure Star Wars facts, and you like all of those things. That sitting across the table from almost every date I have had in the last year, I have thought that I would rather be with you.
The memory of all that? No, they can’t take that away from me… but I don’t want the memory of it. I want the reality of it. Unfortunately, reality is the biggest threat to our population of two; something along the lines of “cause of death: blunt force reality.” Love and evolution aren’t mutually exclusive: I believe the best kinds of relationships evolve. Sometimes I worry, though, that giving something time can cut both ways: if you don’t make something happen, how can you make anything happen?
I’m not quite ready to drop the egg and see if it bounces; I don’t know that he’ll ever know of this list of many, many crazy things. But sometimes Nature does give me hope: there is miraculous footage of ducklings essentially BASE jumping out of their nest high in a tree.
They are fragile and wonderful too. And they bounce.
As a matter of observation, things that are rare are not often simultaneously sturdy or robust. That’s not the sort of thing you can really test, either: someone hands you a Faberge egg, you are not likely to assess first-hand how well it bounces. You believe, through some instinct or education, that this thing in your hand is rare because it is frail—uncommon and valued because of its proclivity to be broken.
Approaching the matter scientifically, Darwin might have you believe that something rare is doomed—fragility will eventually and inevitably be selected against. How many creatures will we never know about because they couldn’t quite bear up against climate, predators, environment, or the distance between Boston and New York?
Okay, I may be referring to a very specific species that is at risk for that last one: a population of two that may or may not be viable in the long run.
Most relationships don’t stand up against selection pressures—from both within and without. You could say a selection pressure from within is just the act of being picky: the female bird is so not impressed with that particular feather display. Move along, pal. Relationship selection pressure from without has nothing to do with choice: if some manner of jungle cat eats the male bird, the female, no matter how much she approved of the male’s plumage, would seem to be shit out of luck.
I take no issue with my chosen bird’s plumage. When he met me on the corner of 34th and 8th this weekend, I saw him before he saw me, and I took a minute to simply admire him. Those are some fine feathers, let me tell you.
I know I am in trouble when Frank Sinatra starts singing in my head—that generally means I have passed out of the realm of reason and straight into fantasy, replete with imagined embraces in fog and fedoras. For the last few days, Frankie has been singing a George Gershwin standard, which begins: “There are many, many crazy things that will keep me loving you, and with your permission, may I list a few?”
The request for permission was probably a rhetorical exercise; it’s entirely possible that whomever Gershwin was writing about never knew such a list existed. In that possibility, I feel George’s pain. One of those selection pressures that could crush this fledgling romance into extinction is the act of my listing those many, many crazy things that keep me loving him… so I write them to the ether, on a whim:
I love the way your eyes crinkle up when you grin, like a cheeky little kid who’s quite pleased with himself for having been caught covered in peanut butter. I love your selective use of anachronisms when you talk. I love how the universe saw fit to create you with a breathtakingly perfect blend of irony and self-awareness—the personality version of a dry martini—which goes so well with your corduroy blazer. I love that I love your friends and your favorite book. That you are excellent at receiving gifts. That you drink ‘dark and stormies,’ which are awful. That you have expressed strong opinions about my shoes (you hate my Tevas, which recently broke and made me think of you). That you remember certain places where I have left pieces of myself. That you see me, my lowest common denominator self, who prefers blue jeans, talks too much, and is filled with obscure Star Wars facts, and you like all of those things. That sitting across the table from almost every date I have had in the last year, I have thought that I would rather be with you.
The memory of all that? No, they can’t take that away from me… but I don’t want the memory of it. I want the reality of it. Unfortunately, reality is the biggest threat to our population of two; something along the lines of “cause of death: blunt force reality.” Love and evolution aren’t mutually exclusive: I believe the best kinds of relationships evolve. Sometimes I worry, though, that giving something time can cut both ways: if you don’t make something happen, how can you make anything happen?
I’m not quite ready to drop the egg and see if it bounces; I don’t know that he’ll ever know of this list of many, many crazy things. But sometimes Nature does give me hope: there is miraculous footage of ducklings essentially BASE jumping out of their nest high in a tree.
They are fragile and wonderful too. And they bounce.
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