The Gratitude Paradox

Several years ago, my grandmother asked me how my then job was going.  This was the period during which I had perfected the fine art of weeping silently in the bathroom if I couldn’t hold it off until I got home.  At the ripe old age of twenty-three, I braved a new technique: the honest but mature answer.  And so I told her, honestly, that it was very difficult to be grateful for something that made me so miserable.

I remember she cocked her head in that gentle grandmotherly way and said with reproof, “Yes, dear, but you need to be grateful.”

Owch.

On the one hand, I took and still take her meaning.  It was the winter of 2009, and the economy was still freshly in the tank.  Mine was a job that, as a friend noted, paid for the peanut butter (among other useful things, like rent).  In the broadest strokes, yes, I was grateful that I had a job.  It’s the kind of grateful that you try to remind yourself to be on a regular basis: the basic thankfulness for food, shelter, clothing, health, and, in this case, gainful employment.  But still, I had trouble being grateful for the specifics of that job: being screamed at, humiliated, and generally made to feel like mud.  Ain’t no way, no how, I was grateful for that.

I take from this a few subtleties: that you can be boilerplate grateful for the fact of something, but hate it for its specifics.  You also, on occasion, might consider the wisdom of lying when someone asks how your job is going.  In fact, my best friend and I perfected the polite brush off that year: when shit is hitting the fan and some well-meaning relative asks you how it’s going, you reply with a confident nod and say, “I’ve got it covered.”

I think about these subtleties now as I prepare to move back to Boston.  I graduated with my MA a little less than two months ago and have been on the job hunt for about four.  I decided last summer that Boston was home—no two ways about it—and that I would do my damnedest to get back there as soon as they handed me my diploma.  Unfortunately, I am still at this time jobless.  Leases wait for no woman, though, so I made the decision to move back to Boston and crash with my aunt until I can shake something out.

Again, in those broad strokes, I am exceptionally grateful to my aunt for opening her home to me.  She did so back in 2009, when I had to move to Boston for the soul-sucking job before I had an apartment.  She is, in many ways, the hub of our east coast family. 

The pesky little subtlety that colors my gratitude, though, is that she drives me absolutely… fucking… insane.

I’m not sure how the psychological meteorology works out, but it’s like I exist at the eye of the perfect storm for her.  I certainly owe her for my stay at her house when I first moved to Boston, and I am her oldest brother’s youngest daughter.  I also, perhaps unsurprisingly, give a shit what people think about me and am therefore in some ways vulnerable, and I worked for a few years in the outskirts of her industry.  As a result of these factors, I am fair game at all times for the most amicably delivered criticism you have ever witnessed.

A brief sampling goes as follows: I eat like a man, I don’t smile right for pictures, I look like a scrub when I travel, I sleep too late, my shoes are ugly, and I am childish and willful if I don’t sit at her feet in wide-eyed wonder and absorb every piece of wisdom she has about getting a job.

I am reminded of the Friends episode in which Chandler proclaims: “Hannibal Lecter?  BETTER ROOMMATE THAN YOU!”

At least I could tell Hannibal Lecter to eat me and probably get a good laugh.

Because therein lies the rub: I have precisely zero recourse.  While some of her criticisms come point blank (“You eat like a man”), others come in little side comments and that passive aggressive shrug and rueful expression that signals if I can’t listen, I deserve what I get.  You can counter the direct ones; I actually called her on it recently when she commented on my eating habits (which, by the way, are perfectly fine).  But it’s the sideways ones, the ones that someone could claim weren’t meant in the way I took them, that grind the most.  It doesn’t help that she can dismiss my reactions (like most of my family does) because she considers me overly emotional and claims I take things too personally.

Call me crazy, but when comments are made about my person, I take them personally. 

(But I digress.)

So here I am, not exactly on the most even emotional keel as I apply for job after job, and I am about to move into what is essentially an emotional minefield in a great neighborhood in Brookline.

When I step away from the psychological mire, I have to remind myself that I am twenty-eight years old and have done very well for myself so far.  I’m not a child, and I’m not an idiot.  Everyone I’ve spoken to in my months of networking (and dear God, there have been many) tells me I’m doing exactly the right things and that something will turn up.  And, in my better moments, I kind of believe them.

The issue is that my aunt, my soon-to-be roommate, doesn’t see me like that at all.  She sees me as some kind of protégé, a perpetual fledgling, and in that very strange and pernicious way that close family members have, she manages to get me thinking that I’m those things too.  Even when I can clear my head and realize I am not those things, I still bump up against the massive obligation of gratitude: because whether I’m a protégé or a professional, a twenty-eight year old adolescent or an actual adult, I’m still living with her through the grace of her generosity.

My dad told me once that all of these things say a lot more about her maturity than mine.  That’s cold comfort, though, when I’m still required to grin and bear it, stiffen my upper lip, lie back and think of England, and make sure that my gratitude shines through the whole time.

It makes me kind of sad that my aunt is essentially foreclosing the possibility of our having a good relationship without even knowing it, because I think she thinks all the things she’s saying to me are in some way helpful, rather than harmful. Maybe that’s the trick to the equation: just like you can be grateful broadly and miserable specifically, your advice can be broadly well meant and specifically very damaging. 

I try to be mindful of both ends of the spectrum and live by my own personal code, which is essentially trying not to be an asshole to others or myself.  I try to remind myself to be grateful but allow myself to be ungrateful sometimes, and give myself credit when I manage to turn the other cheek, especially when no one notices that the other has been burned. 

But I have to tell you, sometimes it’s a damn thankless job.

Lacking Least (or, Why There Are No Cardinals in Colorado)

About an hour outside of Boston, my bus from New York pulled off the pike for a rest stop.  I got out to stretch and resolutely not go into the gas station and buy any snacks (hell, I still had a sodium hangover from the Cheetos we’d eaten the night before).

            

As soon as I hit the air, I knew I was in Massachusetts.  I could smell it. 

            

The less sentimental among us would point out that what I was smelling was humidity and the green that comes with late spring on the East Coast.  Not surprisingly, I have very little time for less sentimental people.

            

Because to me, it smelled like Massachusetts.  And it smelled like home.

            

I was watching Garden State recently, which has taken on all sorts of new significance now that I’m actually out there exploring my own personal infinite abyss, and something struck me about Zach Braff’s ruminations about the idea of home.  It’s slipperier than you think when you’re a kid, like most of the essential, simple, and fundamental things you have to learn how to make sense of (love, grief, family, disappointment, insurance), and I found an odd period in my mid-twenties when I came to realize that my parents’ house was no longer properly home.  Instead, after some growing pains, my studio in Boston had become home, which I now gauge to be the place in which you miss the fewest things, people, or other places.  It’s the place where you lack the least.

            

I spent the first part of spring break this spring in Illinois with my best friend; in spite of Boston’s being home, I still consider myself to be “from” Illinois.  (Negotiating the language of origin, location, and allegiance is a bitch in this decade of my life.)  As a result, I’d had to go back to Boulder to hysterically research and write the papers I’d been putting off for weeks.

            

On Easter Sunday, I talked with the various members of my family on the phone, most of whom were in Brookline with my aunt. 

            

And that afternoon, I found myself very, very lacking.  In fact, the lack was pretty much incapacitating. 

            

I lacked that perfect, springtime Boston humidity, where it’s always a little too warm inside until you get fans going and even then you feel faintly sticky.  I lacked the obscene amount of food, some of which would be forcibly shoved into Tupperware for my lunch the following week.  I lacked the white wine buzz that inevitably comes from a quorum of my family members gathering in one place, and I lacked wheedling a sober family member (usually my dad) to borrow a car and drive me back to my apartment, where I’d mosey the last few steps from the curb into my building for a relaxing afternoon of silence after the familial white noise of people who generally talk too loud (myself included).  I lacked the friends to call for a leftovers potluck and a post-family vent.

            

I lacked my family, my friends, and my home, and I cried like a child for hours.

            

So much for my research.

            

If you had asked me five years ago what would be the top reasons I would move to a particular place, I’d instantaneously answer “job.”  A little further down the list might be “guy,” although I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, without extreme embarrassment. I had thought of these things as being the constant, and the location was just window dressing.  The dream job anywhere is still the dream job, right?

           

That, however, was a hypothetical five years ago.  This currently is my life.  And so help me God, I want desperately to live it in Boston.

            

I, along with most of the people who know me, had thought that I would move west to Boulder and never look back.  Of all the places I would be ecstatically happy, Boulder seemed a likely candidate: fresh powder to ski on, creeks to swim in, and open spaces to bike across, gasping the thin air and trying not to pass out.  In theory, the foothills would be alive with the sound of my happiness.

            

In reality, not so much.

            

That afternoon, standing within earshot of the Pike and waiting to get back on the bus, I realized something for which I have been grateful ever since: I know what I’m willing to do to go home, because I know that the dream job will probably mean precisely jack shit if I don’t have my people there to toast it with. 

            

Boston, and my people in it, are my priority.  And in the ongoing existential crises of my twenties, a loud and ringing priority is a miraculous thing.  It is also a miraculous thing, as a lifelong type-A, to finally understand that being happy, that not lacking, is in most cases a much, much better way to be than mercenarily successful. 

            

Later that week in Boston, perched on one of my aunt’s stools in the kitchen, I heard a cardinal’s chirp from the trees outside, and it made my heart ache.  I’ve always considered them personal good luck charms, little signs of good from the universe.  I also realized in that moment that I hadn’t heard or seen a cardinal since moving West.  Technically, the northern cardinal inhabits a southeastern swath of Colorado, but I’m not so big on technicalities, especially when I feel like somebody’s trying to tell me something.

            

That something runs along the lines of head east.

            

And so, another nine months, and I will be headed back to cardinal country.

We've Got a Pulse!

It has been a week or two of novel sensations.

The other day, I finished what I needed to do for the morning and then realized I had nothing to do for the rest of the day.  It was genuine leisure, and I was honestly floored by the nearly narcotic sensation that washed over me.  I wasn’t even borrowing personal time from myself, which I would have to pay back the following day with significant interest: I just didn’t have anything left that needed doing.

It was the best contact high I’ve had in years.

I will, for the sake of clarity, state something for the record: graduate school has eaten my life.

Here I am living in one of the most beautiful cities and landscapes in the US, and I feel like I haven’t been able to enjoy any of it.  It wasn’t just the work, which took a drastically different form from my nine to five of the last four years: I have a very small cohort, very few of whose members I like.  Everyone in my year is fresh out of college, and periodically over the last few months, I have wanted to put my hand over my eyes and say to them, “Children, please go to your separate corners—Mommy hasn’t had her cocktail yet.”  I miss Boston.  I miss feeling like a person, which (as I have learned) is not necessarily compatible with being a graduate student. 

 

I had to find a panic place in my new apartment.  In my apartment in Boston, there had been a space between the kitchen cabinets and the wall immediately inside the doorway, and I would curl up there to weep and wail.  Similarly, here in Boulder, the space between my kitchen drawers and my dishwasher is exactly the right distance in which to sit, with my feet against the drawer pulls, and try to keep the sadness and panic at bay, usually without good results.  I had never realized it until someone pointed it out, but not only was I unhappy in my program, but I felt as though somehow I was failing additionally at not being ecstatically happy in Boulder—isn’t that what people do here?

It has been, to put it briefly, a very rough several months. 

That is, until the end of this last semester. 

With my final papers turned in and last exams given, taken, and graded, I found myself able to sleep again; to not feel guilty or budgeted in my free time, of which there has been a significant increase.  My occupation this summer is researching and volunteering at a barn, and I can essentially fall off the face of the earth as far as my program is concerned. 

The bliss is monumental, and I am finally starting to feel like myself again.

At the invitation of a friend who was participating in the event, I attended a very Boulder-esque lecture series tonight, at which people have five minutes to discuss, with automatically advanced slides, anything they want.  The topics ranged from small town nerdhood to saving the trees through a poetic adaptation of Dr. Seuss.  And one talk was on the joys of being awkward.

I knew I liked this person as soon as he started talking, speaking up for the bad rap that “awkward” has gained.  He was intensely charismatic and very funny, and by the end of his five minutes, I was completely smitten.  I looked for him afterwards, with little success, until I bumped into him completely by accident at the after party. 

Standing there in my blue dress with my blue pixie cut, I believe I said the following to this complete stranger:

“Oh my gosh—you’re brilliant!  I would like to hug you.  Would that be okay?”

He assented gracefully to being hugged, and we chatted for a while about this start-up.  Being up close to him was even worse: he was the perfect height, scruffy, and had a wonderful smile.  He offered me his email so I could get more information about some of his company’s upcoming events.  Having been hysterically (and thankfully, silently) trying to figure out how to get his contact info, I settled for email rather than phone. 

When I got home a little while later, I found myself prowling around my apartment with what turned out to be a really goofy smile on my face. 

It was a miracle: I not only had the joy of leisure, but somehow I had also found a real live crush. This is what being human feels like.  I had nearly forgotten.

I know myself well enough to know that this euphoria probably won’t last.  I will need to get down to business and start my research eventually, and the odds are that my sudden and intense crush will mirror awkwardly onto what was probably just networking for him (the awkwardness, at least, will have the sting of irony). 

But this week of free time, this electronic charge of a crush: I have missed these feelings.  They feel oddly hopeful; they remind me of the person I usually am, under non-graduate circumstances, and I’m surprised how much I missed that person.  She is not nearly as self-loathing as the person I’ve warped into over the last several months.  I also remind myself that potentially one of the best parts of these feelings is that they're fleeting: crushes crush and leisure turns to boredom.  But right now, here in this perfect set of days, I am sleeping, I am crushing, I am sparkling, and I am thinking about lines from a song that seem to sum it up perfectly:

Hello my old heart, how have you been?  Are you there still there inside my chest?

I’ve been so worried, you’ve been so still, barely beating at all…

Because nothing lasts forever, some things aren’t meant to be,

But you’ll never find the answers, until you set your old heart free.

 

Hic Sunt Pheromones

I knew a guy in college who had radioactive pheromones.  At least, it always felt that way, because whenever I would come within a certain radius of him, my IQ would seemingly plummet, and all of my attention would be devoted to eliminating any physical distance between us.  My reason, shouting dimly in the background, would rein me back barely within the confines of common decency, but the compulsion was a force to be reckoned with.  It was entirely puzzling, because once I exited the radial range of those pheromones, I would regain higher function and wonder what on earth had happened to me.  He was good-looking, to be sure, but there were a lot of good-looking boys who didn’t have this effect on me. 

 

I eventually decided that it had to be chemical.

 

There is a whole host of issues that falls outside of reason.  Essentially, in the map of my rational mind, these are the areas marked hic sunt dragones: here be dragons, including pheromone sandpits and gut reactions.  Hormones, adrenaline, instinct, and intuition all percolate beneath a neat little world of reason and empiricism, and I think it’s when the one tries to find meaning in the other that things get unnecessarily complicated.

 

Take the aforementioned male specimen for example.  As I experienced strong—ahem—compulsions, my brain tried to make sense of them.  We live in a culture where it is colloquially acceptable to assert that your body is “telling” you something: that you haven’t been sleeping enough, that you’ve pushed your endurance too hard, that someone shouldn’t be trusted.  For a while I thought my body might be aware of something my brain was not: that he was special somehow, that the strength of my attraction was indicative of something my brain had not caught on to yet.  The sensation feels different from intuition, but it is hard to resist for the same reason intuition is hard to ignore: something about it is powerfully instinctive, and often, instinct is trying to tell you something important.  I thought maybe the intensity of our chemistry was telling me that in spite of his idiotic tendencies, he was worth pursuing romantically. 

 

I’ve gone through a few versions of this scenario since then and started to notice that my brain’s desperate need to organize the universe also extends inward to the land of instincts and hormones.  These feelings, these unexpected chemical interactions, must mean something.  Right?

 

Maybe not.

 

As it turned out, all my instinct was telling me in the case of this guy was that I should bang him over the head and drag him back to my cave, so to speak.  It’s instinctive all right, but I think it’s also a felony when taken literally.  Fortunately, reason intervened before I went too Neolithic, but I still managed to make a fool of myself by trying to make a boyfriend out of a caveman.

 

I began to think that the common saying “better living through chemistry” should come with a few caveats.

 

Recently, I was biking home from campus on my new commute.  Now, instead of a forty-five minute bus ride, I have a fifteen minute bike ride on a well-maintained path beside a babbling brook.  (It’s almost embarrassing—but not quite.)  As I coasted down a hill, hair on end and bike humming away beneath me, out of nowhere I suddenly felt an intense sensation of contentment bloom in my stomach.  It felt certain, and in my first month in a new place in a new graduate program, the certainty had a borderline narcotic effect.  My brain instantly interpreted it as an indicator that I had made the right decision by coming here.

 

Only at a stoplight did I stop to examine that thought, in light of what I’ve learned about chemistry and rationalizing.

 

First, I hadn’t exercised in an obscenely long time, so my body was probably just overwhelmed with exercise endorphins.  Second, and more importantly, I have been trying to move away from the idea that there is a right decision, a right path, and if you choose correctly, you get some sort of cosmic prize or positive reinforcement.  I made a decision, I invested in it, and I am (so far) pretty happy here.  That doesn’t mean, though, that there was one road to happiness, and through luck or skill I happened to choose correctly.

 

The problem is that my brain wanted to desperately to believe that my body had told me exactly that.

 

I believe in intuition and, with some chagrin, I believe in signs from a benevolent universe.  I also believe, though, that it is dangerous to depend on chemical combustions and planetary alignments to prove ourselves right.  If you want a sign, you’ll probably find one.  What bothered me was that I had thought I was utterly and completely certain about my choice—why then did my brain seize on some chance endorphins as additional proof?  Probably because I’m never quite as certain as I think I am, and I think that’s where I run into trouble.

 

I am in a new place, doing a new thing, starting a new life.  Of course I’m terrified, but that just means that this is all important to me.  I chose my choice, and that has to be the thing I depend on.  If the universe or my hormones wants to send me some additional chemical signals, that’s fine, but I need to have faith in the choice first, and the signals second.  I also need to remember that sometimes chemistry is just chemistry, and just as my brain is not all-knowing, neither is my body.

 

My life is complicated enough without the messy business of self-auguring. 

 

One complication is that there is a man in my life right now who seems to have those magical pheromones (just how many of these men are there, anyway?).  This time, though, it’s not just proximity I want—I also have an irrational desire to bear his children.  I swear, I go a little cross-eyed whenever I smell him.  Incidentally, he happens to be a great human being as well (not a Neolithic bone in his body, as far as I can tell).  Nevertheless, when I exit that fatal radius, my brain knows that something isn’t quite right yet.  I think I understand by now, at least in theory, that for a thing to work, the chemistry and the reason have to line up.  I’d love to find meaning, find proof of something, in my chemical reaction to this man, but I also have to admit that there are a lot of things I still have to understand in the misty realms between mind and matter, rationality and pure chemistry.  So maybe his smelling good is just a function of good hygiene and excellent taste in cologne, and neither of those things should effectively lobotomize me, nor indicate anything about his suitability as a partner.

 

In the meantime, I resolve to have faith that somewhere between the Neolithic and the neurotic, there really is an adult in here who will be able to figure this stuff out.  

Of Pretty and Pigs

There is a lovely set of children’s books, which I read while babysitting my niece, about two pigs named Toot and Puddle. This charismatic pair of pigs lives in the woods, though one of them enjoys traveling to far off lands. I remember an illustrated scene in which the traveling pig encounters a foreign tribe of boars, which I believe he identifies as the Pig Brothers of Wildest Borneo (or something like that). While the American pig looks on with some trepidation, the Pig Brothers, resplendent with tusks and colored feathers, examine him with expressions of mild amusement and polite interest.

Shortly after I read these books with my niece, I traveled abroad on an art history program and came to understand something very, very important about myself:

I am a Pig Brother of Wildest Borneo.

(No, seriously.)

I came to this epiphany after several weeks of painful observation. I myself traveled as I am comfortable, wearing hiking boots and a Key Biscayne 10K shirt from 1982. By contrast, many people on my trip sprang from that elusive pool of women who seem to have no pores, no bulges, and some sort of direct communion with the Vogue mother ship. It must be stated that some of these women were wonderful human beings, albeit poreless and bulgeless. Nevertheless, in terms of pure aesthetics, in my own mind I suffered greatly by comparison.

That is, until I stopped comparing apples to oranges—or, if you will, pigs to boars.

I do not buy expensive sunglasses, because I sit on them and they break. I do not wear high heels, because I have previously fallen off of low-heeled shit-kicker boots and broken an ankle. I accept that by the time I start to wear a fashion, it has been out of stylish circulation for many months, and I grudgingly acknowledge that while my oily skin does me no favors now, I will probably age well. And yes, I have a regrettable tendency to bulge sometimes.

The good news, though, is that over the last several years, I have begun to worry about these things… well, at least a little bit less than before.

The truth is that I am happiest when I am sitting by a campfire or swimming in a river, soggy undies be damned. My tusks and feathers are Tevas and cargo shorts. Life does not get much better than sitting on a beach with a few beers, my fellow wild Pig Brethren, and a couple of beached kayaks.

I am not pink, I am not polished, and I am more likely to play in the mud than those who are.

Anyway, it takes all kinds.

This is all beatific and self-affirming on the face of it. However, this weekend I walked into a situation in which I was the only one of my kind: pretty, pink, poreless pigs as far as the eye could see. And suddenly I was a little less certain of my tusks and feathers.

I had been hauled into the opening ceremonies of my cousin’s bachelorette party. Citing fiscal constraints (rather than my abject horror), I declined the party bus and table service portions of the evening. I arrived at a screamingly luxurious apartment building, the interior of which looked like a very stylishly appointed mental institution, and entered an apartment in which any woman there could have been the prettiest woman in most rooms.

And there they were, all in one room.

When they started taking off their tops to don the bright pink “party” shirts, I’m fairly certain several boys in the immediate vicinity spontaneously entered puberty. The resident pug was in imminent danger of death by stiletto, and the radiant heat from so much bared, tanned skin made the ambient room temperature soar.

I found myself lurking on the edges of the room, trying to become invisible, though I knew I was painfully obvious in rolled up khakis, flip flops, and a blue-streaked pixie cut. I was that person: poking earnestly at my phone because I had no idea what to say or who to look at, which is not a problem I often have. A few of the women were friendly, but this was clearly a tribal activity, and I was just a random cousin, far out of my own frame of reference. I may as well have been wearing a sealskin parka on Fiji. I felt actively bad about myself and entirely furious with myself for feeling that way.

I think the question comes down to this:

What is it about being surrounded by things that you aren’t that makes you feel bad about the things that you are?

To add insult to injury, my biggest frustration was the knowledge that I didn’t even want these things. The life I lead and the way I look are in line with the things I value. I generally like who I am—I am a Pig Brother! I am happy to be a Pig Brother!

At one point, I fled to the bathroom and examined myself in the mirror. Except for the addition of a bright pink bachelorette shirt, I was exactly the same person who had walked out of my apartment earlier that night. As I looked at myself, it was almost like my vision briefly returned to normal: there I was, looking the way I do—on purpose—and that was just fine. I knew that this return to sanity was fleeting, because I would eventually have to leave the bathroom and go back into the smooth-legged, short-skirted fray.

Thankfully, as the party bus departure neared, I was able to excuse myself and make a run for my Subaru. Before I left, my lovely bridal cousin, who has no pores, no bulges, and a good heart, told me it had meant the world to her that I came. I told her I had been glad to and silently reflected on the things we do and the lies we tell to the people we love.

Back in my own territory, I walked to my apartment in the pouring rain. I had figured by that point that I needed to stop judging myself and just lick my wounds for the night, which one can do to fuller effect when one looks like a drowned rat. I came in thoroughly soaked and very thankful to be back in my own country, the small island refuge of one rather shaken Pig Brother.

What bothered me most about that night was not that I felt out of place—after all, I was out of place—but how small I felt, how inferior. What the hell was going on here? When I had made all of this progress towards figuring out who I am, had I missed some small corner of my personality? In an amongst all the things I believe, was there some traitorous little value that had hidden in plain sight, secretly longing to be someone I very clearly am not?

These are more or less rhetorical questions that indicate how rattled I was. I bank on knowing who I am, on believing that this person I turned into is the most genuine version of myself. I think the thing that frightened me most is that the nasty, niggling insecurities I experienced at the party brought to light the fact that my idea of self may not be quite as whole as I thought. There are fault lines along old injuries from the time before I embraced the inner tusks and feathers, when I still wanted to be blonde and devastatingly pretty and before I realized my own beauty takes a different tack and always will.

Maybe it’s naïve to think I would ever completely shed those old desires, even if I’ve come to value and want something very different for myself. After all, I came to be who I am now in part because I eventually did something constructive with those insecurities, hauling them out into the sun and realizing with some surprise that the things that I thought were so embarrassing were actually just the things that made me interesting.

And so a Pig Brother was born.

I hate the idea that I would only be comfortable around people who are just like me—how boring is that? In the end, though, I know that all of this is just some learning curve or another, so perhaps in case I’m feeling a bit less than enlightened in certain pretty, pink situations, I should have an escape route on hand. In the case of my lovely cousin’s wedding, I was pleased to discover that there is a swimming hole in the woods within walking distance of the reception.

So if I really need to, I can return however briefly to my own element, kicking off my heels and playing happily in the mud.

Right Time, Wrong Me

Last night I accidentally caught the first five minutes of My Best Friend’s Wedding on TV. I say “accidentally” because I had clicked out of my BBC America on-demand, and I made the terrible error of not immediately turning off the TV to do my dishes. I never even really liked the movie—I find it irritating when people behave like assholes and idiots and yet are still somehow considered adorable as protagonists. Nevertheless, I briefly remembered the amusing opening scene with Rupert Everett and decided that five minutes couldn’t hurt.

I believe these are what people call “famous last words.”

The plot had established by this time that Julia Roberts (the apparently adorable asshole protagonist) had received a call from her best friend, with whom she had a marriage pact. The pact was to be called into action by a certain age, which she is fast approaching as the movie opens.

And what, ladies and gentlemen, is that certain age?

Twenty-eight.

As soon as the words were spoken on screen, something in my stomach curdled, and the rational voice in my head commented I really would’ve been better off doing my dishes.

What followed was a truly pyrotechnic hissy fit in my living room, after which I called a friend to holler at her about the injustice of the romantic universe. She empathized and agreed. When the movie came out in 1997, we were both in our early adolescence, a time at which twenty-eight did seem like a theoretically reasonable time to be thinking about your marriage back-up plan. Now, a year and a half shy of twenty-eight myself, I have a slightly different take on the matter. Hence the hissy fit.

There were, as usual, a lot of moving parts that contributed to my unexpected hysteria, not least of which is my recently having given up an indulgent and questionable marriage pact with a friend. Compounding matters is the fact that over many of these moving parts hangs a general air of embarrassment: it is horrifying to me that romantic comedies still influence (or at least inflame) the romantic expectations I have for myself.

My friends and I laugh and scoff at so many of the logistical details in these movies: the unemployed ingénue who lives in a high-ceiling one bedroom in the North End; the twenty-eight year old who has somehow already become a renowned food critic; and the writer who can afford five hundred dollar shoes. These conceits are preposterous, and I know it. These are not the women I want to be, most importantly because these women do not exist. Not only are they fictional characters, but in many cases, even the fictional lives they lead are simply implausible: I just can’t suspend my belief that far.

All of this is good, sound logic—the hard-earned knowledge that comes from actually having to live in a responsible, sustainable reality. I have learned the distance between a happy life out here in 3D and a happy life in a work of mannered pop culture.

At least, in some areas:

I laugh at the logistics, and yet I still flinch at the mention of twenty-eight as an appropriate age for back-up plans.

When it comes to careers and expensive shoes, I’ve generally managed to reconcile my expectations with reality (it helps that I have very little use for expensive shoes). When it comes to my love life, I feel… inadequate. Exposed. And in a very painful way, somehow fundamentally flawed.

After all, it’s not just romantic comedies that are affecting my expectations anymore. It used to be that wedding announcements came from my friends who were a few years older than I am, or from friends who got married ahead of the curve. Now we are smack dab in the middle of said curve, and it feels as though I am caught in an avalanche of announcements and wedding albums. And I’m not even in a relationship—nor have I been for a long time. I am so far away from the commitments my friends are making that the idea starts to feel like a mirage, alluring but unattainable.

I’m the right age, I’m the right demographic, but I still can’t quite seem to get the whole relationship thing right. Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply me that’s wrong: that there is something about me in particular that is inherently undesirable.

Which is so absurd and pathetic I can barely bring myself to write it. It is so frustrating to understand how ridiculous these emotions are but to have them anyway. I remind myself repeatedly of what I know: that my life does not run by a script, that I am beholden to no romantic deadlines, and that in times of stress or sadness I simply figure it out. I am capable. I am adaptable.

But at the end of the day, I am also still single.

(And around and around I go.)

Perhaps what’s so embarrassing about this situation is that I feel like I’m going through a second adolescence, in which I am constantly and apocalyptically convinced there is something wrong with me. As it turns out, there wasn’t anything wrong with me in my first adolescence (other than too much eyeliner); it was simply a matter of finding the right environment: a place in which and people with whom I finally became myself. That sounds very plausible in terms of finding a partner: right place, right time, right people. The issue is that I can’t predict those circumstances, and the only thing I know for sure is that at the end of the day I will still be entirely myself. And that self hasn’t had a great romantic track record.

Part of me believes that these anxieties will be laughable in retrospect, and I have spent most of my twenties trying to learn how to not be ridiculous in my own present. I don’t know why I am so convinced that because it hasn’t happened yet, it ultimately won’t.

I was talking with a friend recently, who had been wronged by a spectacularly inconsistent man-child. After describing a familiar trajectory of events leading to disappointment, she admitted to me—with the same evident self-consciousness and hopelessness I experience—that it’s hard sometimes not to believe that she herself is the problem, that there is something about her that is essentially unlovable.

This, coming from one of the most beautiful, charismatic, intelligent, wickedly funny, and completely lovable women I know. I was hit simultaneously with horror and relief: horror that she would think that about herself, and relief that—thank God—I’m not the only one. What I told her was that I felt oddly hypocritical denying with all my heart that she was unlovable, when I directed the same self-doubt at myself. Still, I told her I honestly did not believe that there was a world in which she would not be entirely, ecstatically loved by someone really wonderful.

The funny thing is, she believes the same for me. We just can’t quite seem to believe it for ourselves. I suggested to her that rather than trying to trust in our own unknowable future, that we trust each other. The logic is just twisted enough for us to conceivably buy it—like a faith redirect. We each see the other as an intelligent, clear-minded person, so if that person believes that there isn’t anything wrong with us… who knows?

She might just be right.

Meanwhile, I will work on becoming a person who experiences a healthy proportion of joy to jealousy when a friend gets married. I will try to remember that sometimes I have to hold onto who I am just a little bit harder than usual and not get carried away by things I don’t really want or believe anyway. And in case that doesn’t work, I will make an effort to turn off the TV a little bit sooner.

I will also try to remember that just because it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Because one of the things I still really do believe is that if it’s right, then it only has to happen once.

Well Lived, Well Loved: A Tribute

About a month ago, I walked into my grandparents’ apartment and handed my grandfather a plastic baggie from behind his armchair. He held it up to examine its contents: three thick, brown ponytails, each about fifteen inches long.

“You did it!” he congratulated me. I’d been threatening to cut off all my hair for the better part of a year. What I had learned from getting a tattoo is that the longer and more loudly you threaten to do something out of the ordinary, the more ordinary it is when you finally do it.

I came around to stand in front of my ultimate patriarch, and his eyebrows rose as he saw the broad swath of indigo blue I had dyed into what was left of my hair.

After a moment, he asked dryly, “What’d you do, fall on your head and bruise your hair?”

I’ve gotten quite a bit of positive reinforcement concerning my hair since I cut it, but his stamp of approval will always be my favorite.

Later that night, I was on the couch, trying not to get in anyone’s way. My parents, my aunt, and my grandmother were all exhausted, on edge, and trying to hide all of the above. When I came that night, I had brought a bouquet for my grandmother, and someone had put the flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Grandpa was sitting in his armchair across the room, coming in and out of awareness, when he suddenly caught my eye and nodded at the arrangement, which was dripping with lilacs.

“Nice flowers,” he said simply, and quirked a wry smile at me.

All I had to do was smile back.

It was an entire conversation in two words and two nearly identical grins.

In a way, those last two interactions—the hair and the flowers—were perfectly representative of our relationship: sarcastic, dry, understated, but always with an essential underpinning of love and approval. Our exchanges that night were so much more genuine than the constant, fearful refrain of my telling him I loved him, which I had been doing with more and more panic as he got sicker and sicker. He already knew that I loved him—of course he did.

And anyway, self-conscious sentimentalism just wasn’t his style.

I wish so badly that I could draw together some definitive statement, a coherent narrative, about what my grandfather’s life meant to me, but it all comes out in bits and pieces: ski lessons, angel food cake, shuffling cards, Ford Explorers, and the smell of mothballs. I think I’ve come to realize that the whole of his life in my life was so massive, so integral, that it’s difficult for me to wrap language around it.

But I wouldn’t be his granddaughter if I didn’t try.

Spending time with my family in the weeks after he died, I noticed that we all tried impersonating his voice and intonation, as though there simply wasn’t enough of him in the stories we were telling. We wanted to hear him, to be comforted by him, to keep the sound of him present in our lives. Over the weekend of his memorial service, one thread in the countless stories became clear: the events in our lives may have been separated by decades and continents—from stories beginning with “so there I was in Pago Pago” to Indiana canoe trips ending up in jail—but our experience of his immersive, unconditional, dryly hilarious love was constant.

What I began to understand intuitively a long time ago, but only articulated after he died, was how much that love said not about us, but about him.

Recently, I got a new phone, and my voicemails didn’t transfer over. Before they were lost in the ether, I managed to record onto my new phone the only one I wanted to save; the one I knew was there, but that I didn’t have the courage to listen to until recently. Grandpa was nearly deaf for my entire life, and in spite of a successful cochlear implant, he still didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. As a result, he only called when he himself had something important to say. In this case, he had just learned about my GRE scores, and he was calling to congratulate me and to tell me that he was sure I would end up in Williamstown yet. At that point, Williams was still my first choice, and when I got the message, I wept with relief, because if he believed it, maybe I could let myself hope too.

Months later, he was honest to God equally as thrilled when I accepted an offer from Colorado.

What he wanted for me was not prestige. Prestige is inherently selfish, and there has never been a man in this world less selfish than my grandfather. What he wanted for me, what he wanted for all of us, was that we do everything we could do be the best version of ourselves: to be responsible, to be kind, to be honest, and to be happy. He was invested in nothing more than our integrity and our happiness. When I think about what that meant about his own integrity, his lack of ego, and the breadth of his love for all of us, it makes my chest truly, physically ache.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that he was the funniest, most charismatic old fart you ever met.

Every deck of cards, every ski lift, every voting ballot, every hiccup, every mint julep, and every piece of angel food cake I will ever encounter for the rest of my life will belong to him. He will be there every time I turn a card face down and smirk at the relative I have just beaten at gin, asking casually, “What's the name of the game?”  Every time I purse my lips and arch one eyebrow to show amusement or correct a bill for being less than I owe, I’ll be channeling him directly.

I’ll try to make him proud, at least a little bit every day, and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.

I guess that’s just the name of the game.



In loving memory of
Jack Roberts
1923-2012