BLITZ! (or, A Defense of the Charm Offense)

On the evening of October 31, 1999, I caught sight of a rather good-looking boy on my friend Katie’s driveway.  We had gathered there for a Halloween party, and this attractive yet unknown male quantity was from another school.  I had had my fourteenth birthday party on the previous night, during which my poor eighth grade heart had been broken in a cruelly casual way: I had invited the boy for whom I had been pining for several months, and he simply hadn’t shown up.  In short, he’d never known I even existed.

The next night, I showed up on that driveway with a broken heart, a seething sense of injustice, and a shit-ton of black eyeliner.

I’d like to think that those circumstances sort of explain what happened next, but even half a lifetime later, they don’t… not quite.  Looking back, I wince slightly in embarrassment, but if I’m being honest, I also experience a bemused kind of pride: my eighth grade self sure had the courage of her convictions.

Because as a way of introducing myself to the unknown boy that Halloween, I made a running start and tackled him to the ground.

And I mean that literally.

Though in the intervening fifteen years I have refined my methods a bit, I tend to think of that night as the first time I really claimed ownership of my own kind of charm, which is probably best described as a “blunt force” approach.  This “charm” (if I can call it that with a straight face) and my ownership of it have not been without their own host of problems, of course.  However, I think I struck upon something valuable that night; a recognition of a phenomenon with which we become more comfortable as we get older: that doing things the way everyone else does might not work for you.

My blunt force methods and I, which at times are inseparable, are often terrifying, frequently off-putting, but occasionally fascinating to the opposite sex.  It is entirely possible that the full throttle, blitz approach scares off potentially very decent men, but ultimately I’ve concluded that weeding out the faint of heart is probably best for everyone if we do it early in the process.  Fortunately for me, the boy whom I tackled that night fifteen years ago seemed dazed, impressed, and—miraculously—intrigued.  It’s rare, but sometimes it really does work—and the results tend to be rather stunning.

I’m also aware, in a way that others might not be, that my firing a shot across someone’s bow is as much an indication of interest as it is a sign of my readiness to fight.  The two are pretty much inseparable for me.  After all, that is what I’m looking for in a partner: someone who doesn’t flinch, but fires back; I want a “skirmish of wit,” a scrum of romantic fission, not a soppy sonnet. 

I’ve been thinking about all of this recently because while my somewhat combative (or at the very least, assertive) approach enjoys only spotty success on dry land, it’s virtually useless in the realm in which I am currently pursuing a mate.  Alas, I have once again joined the ranks of the online-daters.

Heaven preserve us.

There is, naturally, an argument to be made for meeting your partner the old fashioned way (read: in person, on the hoof, so to speak).  I’ve had several close encounters in real time—those fabulous little interludes of chatting with someone on the train or waiting in line for coffee—but for some reason they seldom come to fruition.  At least on a dating website you’re pretty sure people aren’t just there to make small talk.

Online dating is one of those strange little anthropological funhouse mirrors, where the rules of engagement are seemingly similar but not identical to real life.  Call it the “online dating standard deviation.”  For instance, men who state their height at 6’2 or under may be reliably assumed to be two inches shorter than they say.  I myself have developed some personal rules of engagement, which include no bathroom mirror selfies and no exotic fish as pets (don’t ask).

So here I am, sorting through the most flattering pictures I have of myself (not many) and trying to write a marginally appealing yet simultaneously true(ish) personality profile (nearly impossible).  I’m finding that the tools I lack on a screen are the ones that make my in-person approach viable, as much as it ever is: there are no emoticons that signify the raising of an eyebrow, the pursing of lips, the tilting of a head, or the real life impact of a true, guns-blazing, head-on smile.  It's like trying to blitz an NFL quarterback with an anemic fourth grader.

The biggest problem with online dating, in general and for me specifically, is the fact that chemistry is nearly impossible to gauge through a screen.  Sure, you can mostly tell through email when someone is dumb as road tar or a screaming narcissist, but that’s only a small part of what I think of as romantic chemistry.  I am a very firm believer in the idea that you can’t know if you’re really, truly attracted to someone until can smell him or her.  I have had dates in the past with objectively attractive men who were perfectly good company—and zip.  Nothing.  Whatever it is that we seek just isn’t there, and you just have to go out on a metric crap-ton of dates to see if any of them sparks.

When I use my blunt force charm, going in hot for a cold introduction, that’s exactly what I’m looking for: a spark.  And believe me, with that approach, you either spark or you don’t—and you know either way right quick.  But since I can’t complement (or, I guess, temper) my assertiveness online with all of the physical and pheromone-related cues to which I have access in person, I feel like I have to sort of rein it back and try to come across as more… normal.

Which, quite frankly, feels a lot like lying.  And it feels like I’m being untrue to the brave, reckless eighth grader I was. 

I want to be liked for the person I actually am.  I hope against hope that I’ll find someone who likes a little pushback, not to mention pixie cuts, but so far I haven’t even found enough of an online spark (I imagine a sad little asterisk) to generate the mutual interest that could lead to a date, which could lead to a real live ZAP. 

Do I believe I will meet my partner online?  I don’t know.  Do I believe I will meet a partner at all?  I don’t know that either.  But I keep at it, because it’s better than doing nothing, and in spite of it all, I still hold out a little hope.  In a weird way, I owe it to a very hurt fourteen-year-old girl to make this leap metaphorically, since she was the one who made it literally.  And I can say with authority that she didn’t regret it.

So here we go: Omaha, Omaha—hut, hut—DATE!

The Newsweek Syndrome

In July of 2008, I wrote and submitted an essay to the Newsweek guest columnist section.  I honestly didn’t think anything would come of it, but I fired it off anyway since I didn’t have anything better to do in the immediate aftermath of my college graduation.  A few weeks later, I got off of a plane to find a voicemail on my phone: the magazine had accepted my submission and wanted to know when and where they should send the photographer to do my portrait.

I doubt that the Manchester airport had ever known, or has since known, a noise quite like the one I made when I listened to that voicemail.

As someone who has been a closet case writer for most of her life, the idea of publication induced nothing short of ecstasy.  But there was a practical element as well: the essay (found here) was about my job search as a recent college grad with a passion for art.  I thought there might be a reasonable chance that some museum director might read my essay, be completely charmed, and want to hire me.  The glimmer of hope I had been nursing that summer became glaring: maybe my life really was about to get going.

For reasons that were never clear to me, however, the article was pulled a few days before it was set to print. 

Looking back, I wonder which was worse: the fact that this incredible break had suddenly and inexplicably evaporated, or that I had told everyone I knew about it by the time it did.  That same day, a very good job prospect fell through, and I remember the sensation of being very close to broken.  I was in the territory of the two in the morning phone call to my best friend because I was genuinely frightened by the sudden weight and breadth of hopelessness that seemed to block out everything else in my mind.

The short version is that my best friend talked me through and out of it, and I stopped reading Newsweek.

The long version is that since then, when something in my life seems like it’s about to go really, truly right, I experience a sudden, crippling fear that it will all go to hell at the last minute. 

A good example is when I moved from my first job at a business school to the same university’s art museum—a miraculous and unexpected opportunity to actually start doing the thing I had wanted to do for so long.  Naturally, I was convinced something would go wrong.  One day not long before I was to transfer, my new supervisor called.

“So, I got a call from your main professor,” he said cautiously.  I immediately froze, because I knew that a) said professor had been massively pissed about my leaving and b) I had never told her in which department or for whom I would be working, so that meant she had gone through the trouble to wrangle it out of someone.  I braced myself for the news that she had torpedoed me, of which I believed her to be fully capable.

My soon-to-be boss continued: “She told me she wasn’t pleased about your leaving and said that we would need to work out some sort of split-time situation to share you.”

As though I were a ski condo.  My outrage spiked but did little to temper my still freezing fear as he paused again.

“She… ah… she doesn’t really live in the real world, does she?”

As it happens, this professor’s Anna Wintour-esque scare tactics did not quite translate across the river, and my new boss, for whom I would work happily for two years, was not impressed.  I left the b-school and never looked back—not time-shared I might add.

Still, my shoulders tense at the memory of sitting there at my desk and waiting for another amazing break to crumble before me.  Sometimes I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I described this phenomenon recently to my dad, who’s a very level-headed person, not prone to fits or freak outs (too bad I’m on the shallow end of that part of my gene pool).  He told me he knew exactly what I meant, noting dryly: “I only ever believe it when it’s bad news.  I’m not sure what to do with good news.”

A few weeks ago, four years out from that frozen moment at my desk, I sat at yet another desk watching a few truly remarkable things come over my horizon… and the dread was almost unbearable.

I was extremely lucky that shortly after I finished graduate school, I found out that the woman who had replaced me at my old museum job was leaving, and they asked me to pinch hit for a while.  This teed me up nicely for a position at the same museum I’d had my eye on for a few months.  I was a strong internal candidate with several important people going to bat for me.  Not a bad state of affairs.

At the same time, my sporadic Craigslist apartment hunt one day turned up a pre-war one-bedroom in Watertown.  It’s the unicorn of rentals: gorgeous, cheap, in unit washer/dryer.  To top it off, my landlords are alumni of my college, and they were ecstatic that they’d chosen a fellow grad as their tenant.  Also not a bad state of affairs.

So there I was with these amazing prospects, and a part of me was convinced everything was going to fall through.

For the record, I am aware that this fear could not possibly have originated in that first incident with Newsweek; that particular disappointment probably just gave concrete expression to long-held, bottom-feeder anxieties.  I’m also aware that there is, in fact, such a thing as “too good to be true,” and that anything that seems perfect should be examined even more closely than things that seem merely passable.  Ultimately, it’s probably true that a good dose of reality-based skepticism will serve you well.  My problem is that my anxiety swan-dives off the edge of skepticism and straight into an ocean of borderline paranoia.

As usual, I find myself on one end of a spectrum, wondering how to make my way back to a reasonable middle.  One important thing to remember is that something can be amazing but not perfect.  A good example is that my fabulous apartment was filthy when I moved into it—I spent my first four hours in it wiping down baseboards and sweeping up cat hair.  There are things that are wrong with it (one psychotic, 2:30 a.m. carbon monoxide detector episode being one of them), but on the whole it is wonderful.  I never trust things that are perfect, because very few things actually are.  But maybe I can learn to trust things that are really great.

The second thing to remember is what my best friend told me when I expressed all these anxieties to her.  In the way that she has, cutting swiftly but lovingly to the heart of the issue, she said: “Honey, good things are allowed to happen.”

And in this case, they did: my job offer came through the day before I moved in. 

The Hearsay Rhinoceros

There is a statue of a rhinoceros outside of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where (incidentally) I do not have a job.  It looks like a rhinoceros—you immediately register it as such, not as a whacked-out version of something that started in some artist’s mind as a meditation on rhinocerosity.  But if you look more closely, there are some telltale scrolls on its body armor, almost like calligraphy or runes.  Interviewing for a job a few months ago at the SMFA, I recognized the design immediately: the sculpture was the three dimensional manifestation of a woodblock print that Albrecht Dürer, the rock star of the Northern Renaissance, had done early in the sixteenth century.  And the rhinoceros that he had done was based on descriptions and possibly another sketch; Dürer never saw a live one himself, so he essentially made a hearsay version.

As I stood there in a suit skirt, about to go in for a second-round interview, I thought about exactly how many layers of abstraction and artistic license stood between the sculpture in front of me and an actual, living rhinoceros.  It seemed to me that the actual rhino, the living version that started this whole chain, in the end didn’t matter as much as the exchange and renegotiations of ideas that went into its representation.

These are the things you tend to think about, on the tail end of your art history MA, about to go in for an interview.  Otherwise, you have to think about the extremely daunting task of getting a job in the arts and how the next indefinite amount of time in your life is going to be extremely stressful.

Well, okay, you think about that too (in fact, you never really stop thinking about it), but sometimes it’s nice to squeeze in some ruminations on rhinos.

But of course, it’s never quite as simple as a rhinoceros, is it?

As a general rule in art, and I suppose in other, more far-reaching areas, every abstraction removes something a little further from its reality (if, in fact, there was a reality to begin with).  It keeps getting more and more funny-looking until the original trace of the thing is gone and you’re not sure of what you’re looking at anymore.  What I wondered was this: how far do you have to abstract something until it stops being the thing that it was?

If asked, I guess I would have always defined myself as type-A.  Good evidence of this may be found in the fact that I committed myself at the age of seven to getting good grades so I could get into a particular college.  The ambition that sprung from that peculiar commitment became a significant part of who I believed I was in the years that followed.  In a way, the abstract concept of ambition came to overshadow and even replace the commitment that had inspired it, especially after I did get into that college.  I was an ambitious person—and it felt good.  It felt like some sort of a righteous calling that could justify my intrinsic stubbornness. 

After college, though, my ambition, which had shifted from college to career, took some pretty substantial blows.  But I muscled through, because that’s what I do, it’s what I’ve always done: I worked a crappy job that led to a not crappy job, which felt like a reward for my sheer doggedness.  I went to graduate school and earned the damn Master’s and came back looking for the job, only to find that it was not as near a possibility as I had thought. 

So there I was—again—prepping myself for the long, stubborn haul—again—and the only thing I could think was how tired I was.  It took me a while to articulate it to myself, and I’m still coming to terms with it, but the issue essentially comes down to this: I do not feel particularly ambitious at the moment.

I was absolutely repelled by this realization: I’m ambitious.  It’s what I do.  It’s who I am—or was.  Who the hell am I now that I’m not ducking my head and pushing through, always with my eye on the prize?  I demanded these things of myself, angry and shaken.

Surprisingly, there was a dry but compassionate voice in my head that answered with another question: “What exactly is this prize?”

I was more or less stunned into silence by my own internal voice.  Who knew, right?

At first, ambition was the means to the end reality: it was how I set about getting the thing that I wanted.  But eventually, the abstract concept of ambition solidified into something I saw as a characteristic, a thing I just did because that’s what I did.  Sure, there were concrete goals along the way, but as I look back, I wonder about the things I missed in my relentless pursuit.  More importantly looking forward, when does the ambition end?  When, where, and what is enough?

The abstraction had become more important than the original reality, so I started looking for the real-live specimen, the original rhino: What exactly is the thing that I want?

Fortunately, I’m a bit better equipped to answer this question as an adult than I was as a precocious seven year old. Here's what I came up with:

I want to be happy.  I want to genuinely like the thing that I do with my days, and I hope what I do will have something to do with the arts.  I want to be in a place where the people I love are nearby and ready for adventures, even and especially the ones that happen in a living room.  I’d like to be mutually bonkers about someone, and I wouldn’t mind having a bathtub and hardwood floors. 

Will all of these things look like what I had imagined for myself in the haze of ambition?  No, probably not.  But that’s the funny thing: abstractions are never quite as terrifying and marvelous and satisfying as the realities.  Just think of the rhino.  It’s still difficult for me not to feel like I’m giving up on something; it feels weak to admit that my own blunt force determination can’t eventually batter down certain realities about dream jobs and other fantasies.  And hey, maybe in a couple years I’ll feel the same old itch again (and it’s not as though I’m going to miraculously become less stubborn any time soon).  What I hope, though, is that I can keep the reality of what I want in mind, and not let it become obscured in habitual abstractions.   

Because I’m fairly certain that had he met one, Dürer would have agreed that a hearsay rhino ain’t got nothing on the real thing. 

Circles and Squares

 

“Where are your people?”

           

Two years, sixteen states under my Subaru, and one graduate degree later, those four words still haunt me.

When my oldest sister uttered them, they were the final push I needed to accept an offer from a graduate program in Colorado.  And I really did believe I was right: I thought that my proverbial people, the post-graduate equivalent of my collegiate pack, were more likely to be in Boulder than anywhere else on earth.  I headed west convinced that, not counting brief visits, I would never really come back.

To put it simply, I was wrong.

My dad told me a couple of months ago that there is no such thing as the Right Decision: the single option that is correct, and if you choose it, all will be well, and if you don’t, God help you.  He said that you make the best decision you can, based on the best information you have at any given time.  Whatever comes after doesn’t change the fact that you did the best you could with what you had.

There are so many things I couldn’t have known about graduate school.  In general, there really is no predicting cohort chemistry or departmental drama.  Specifically, I could not have known that my year of graduate students would be filled by crazy people (I guess I have to include myself in that), nor could I have known how dysfunctional our department was.  A friend back in Boston told me at the end of my first year that graduate school was not a team sport, and I took her words to heart: at the end of that semester, I severed all social ties with my cohort, avoided the art history office like the plague, and managed to finish my requirements with out-of-department classes.  Not surprisingly, my second year went much more smoothly than my first.

That didn’t make it less lonely though.

Another key element I could not have predicted was how badly I would miss my Boston people.  It wasn’t that I saw my friends and family every single day, but that they were there, and when shit hit the fan, they closed ranks around me immediately.  I vastly underestimated the value of proximity: having at least a dozen people you can hug without preamble, a few houses where you can show up unannounced in the middle of the night and not be turned away, and clusters of friends and family with whom to spend the small holidays that do not merit major travel.  Colorado is not, in fact, the edge of the known universe, but it felt that way sometimes. 

Even stranger to me was how much I missed Boston itself: the trolley bells and alarming creaking of the Green Line; the oddly onion-like smell of Harvard; the shockingly high ratio of Sox hats to heads anywhere in the city; the fact that anyone born and bred here over the age of forty calls me “dear” (pronounced “DEE-ah”); and that in spite of the ridiculous, meandering curves of the streets, the whole area is full of squares: Copley, Davis, Porter, Sullivan, Inman, Kenmore… and the list goes on.  And above all, I missed the loyalty: it’s what Boston does best.  They know who they are and who they cheer for, and somehow in my first four years here, I became a part of that identity too.

Hell, I even started giving a marginal crap about baseball, and believe me, that’s saying something.

When the bombs went off on Marathon Monday, I had an irrational and shockingly strong urge to get on a plane and go home.  I was exceptionally lucky in that none of my loved ones, who are often at the finish line for most of the day, were hurt (I will thank God for the rest of my days for one particular knee injury and one characteristicimpulse to do the dishes before heading out the door).  I was even luckier that I was able to get a hold of everyone almost immediately: all accounted for, all safe.  I thought I had mostly pulled myself together when I overheard two people talking on my bus in Boulder, mentioning the bombing as though it were an interesting news item and not an attack on my people, my city. 

My home.

I damn near vomited right there in their laps.

Visiting Boston a few months later, I figured out fairly quickly that there was one place I wanted to be, and ironically, it was the place I had left in pursuit of my supposed destiny.  There is potentially some wisdom in the idea that leaving—something, someone, somewhere—can clarify and intensify your need to go back.  Still, sometimes I feel a little stupid, as though I’ve come full circle right back to where I started.  The thing I have to keep in mind, though, is that I may have come back to where I started, but that does not mean that I never left or that I’m the same simply because the zip code is.

I’m proud that I left, that I struck out and did something completely uncharacteristic.  I’m glad that I figured out that I am not built for academia and, observing my fresh-out-of-undergrad cohort, that I had taken a few years off to do the figuring out and growing up that I needed to do.  I love the thesis that I wrote and the thinking that I did, and I’m simultaneously aware that it’s very important to figure out a way to talk about those things without sounding like an over-educated asshole. 

So in retrospect, I was wrong about where my people were, but ultimately my decision to go west was not.  My decision to come back east does not change that.  Those two equal and opposite decisions can in fact coexist.  Unsurprisingly, the lived geometry of my life directly contradicts the basic laws of mathematics: if you complete a circle, you will be right back where you started. 

Maybe that’s the key: I’m where I started, but not who I was when I did.  I’m still trying to do the best I can with what I have.  And what I have right now is a bemused awareness of the universe’s sense of humor, since it seems this circular path has brought me back to my city of squares.

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.