30x30 #10: Formal Dinner Party

I spend most of my life looking for activities that will take me out of myself. 

It's the reason I run. It's why I've developed an interest in cryptography and lock-picking. It motivates me to go to live shows and read thick Russian novels. I often wonder if my desire to lose myself in something is a result of living so long with anxiety and OCD or if it's just a thing or if everyone feels like they would just like to spend some time outside of their own heads. 

Next to running, the activity I have the easiest time losing myself in is cooking/baking. I love turning on the radio and opening up a cookbook at making something amazing. Coming home from work and pulling together an excellent meal from whatever's in the cupboards delights me. Arriving at a friend's house with a plate full of Jammie Dodgers is my version of heaven. 

As with running or any of the other random lose-yourself themed activities I enjoy, cooking narrows the world down to a set of ingredients, a list of directions, and an intended outcome. I very rarely look at a recipe and think "I could never do this." More often it's "This sounds like an adventure!"

On my 30x30 list was the desire to throw one formal dinner party. 

But it's sorta hard to convince your friends to get all dolled up and come over for dinner when A) you live in an apartment the size of a postage stamp and B) scheduling never seems to work out.

So when some friends of mine invited the gang up to the lodge where they threw their wedding reception a little over a year ago, I pounced on the idea of having a fancy dinner on Saturday night. I wrangled a couple of my friends as sous-chefs, and we did all of the planning and prep for all the meals. On Saturday afternoon, one of our hosts shunted everyone out the door for the afternoon so we could make dinner. 

There have been very few moments recently that I would describe as joyous. Running a PR in my March race. Running for the first time after injuring my ankle. 

Making this meal was joyous. 

It's important for me to show the people in my life what they mean to me. The men for whom I was making this dinner are two of my closest friends. Often in my life when people get married they sort of fall out of my social circle. Their relationship has never been like that. They're two people I can always count on and whom I love beyond the ability to articulate it. 

So instead I made them Julia Child's Pâtê de Canard en Croûte.

The people with whom I made the meal are also, just, Jesus. Good friends doesn't even begin to describe what they mean to me. When I needed a place to live between apartments last summer, they loaned me their guest room. They've helped me move, made me dinner, snuggled with me on the couch watching Pride and Prejudice. They are the only two people I would have ever wanted in the kitchen while making an intense, crazy dinner. Cooking this meal with them is going to go in my memory bank as a moment in my life where I was incredibly happy with my life and the people with whom I've surrounded myself. 

During the course of the evening I wasn't thinking about much aside from how to get from one course to the next as seamlessly as possible (and oh my God, how good Metric's Synthetica album is). Now I'm thinking a lot about the 30x30 list and process. When I first made the 30x30 list, I considered it a list of 30 things I could do over seven months that would make me a better or more interesting person. I expected to come out of it with a few good stories, a handful of accomplishments, and a sense of satisfaction in accomplishing a bunch of crazy, interesting things. What I didn't expect was for something as simple as a dinner party to shake up how I think about my life. 

Carl Sagan wrote: 

For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.

He's right, of course. It's impossible for me to go stargazing without feeling very small indeed. But that's only part of it, isn't it? What I discovered during the course of planning and cooking for this party was that the depth of my own emotions for the people involved startled even me. The enormity and complexity of our relationships are bearable only because of the depth of my love for them.

Beauty #12

I've got a lot of thoughts surrounding the fleeting nature of jazz and how much it relates to my style of dating. 

I don't feel like writing any of them.

Suffice it to say, there are very few singers who can make heartbreak beautiful (Patsy Cline and Bon Iver are at the top of my list).

And Billie Holiday. Jesus. No one, but no one, sings about heartbreak like Billie Holiday. 

I love Billie Holiday because she can simultaneously indulge my need to feel like hell and (somehow) make me appreciate whatever relationship has just ended for what it was worth. 

And, what the hell, one more. 

Beauty #11

I love poetry.

Like everything that I love, I love it intensely, deeply, borderline obsessively. I (would) have bookshelves devoted specifically to poetry. I try to memorize one poem a year. When I'm having a terrible day, I listen to Auden or Eliot reading their work and it, well, not cheers me right up but certainly helps me settle things into their proper perspective.

I believe (with the exception of Eliot) that poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of. It should be something that you read and that--just for a moment--breaks you open. It should be something that pulls your heart out of your chest and forces you to look at it closely.

"Misgivings" by William Matthews does that to me.

Of course it does. I'm commitment-phobic. I intentionally keep people out of my life because I'm afraid of getting hurt. I only tell people about the bits of me that I think they'll like.

But. But. But.

I'll admit it quietly.

I want someone to share my life with.

William Matthews has somehow managed to reach into my brain (maybe just the brain of all slightly-neurotic young adults) and scoop out all of my apprehensions surrounding undoing the safety line and going top over teakettle for someone and put them into a poem (a poem that I have seem to have accidentally memorized). It's exactly the kind of gut-spillage that I look for in a poem, the exact kind of poem that makes me want to think about love and my life and the people who are in it.

My favorite line(s) are . . . well, wait. I don't want to spoil it. Bonus if you can correctly guess them.

***

"Misgivings"
William Matthews

Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

The Woman I Am, the Father He's Been

"I really feel like, after reading that blog post, I suddenly understand your obsession with Teddy Roosevelt."

"Yeah?"

I'm chatting with a (male) friend of mine about some of the writing I've done surrounding my father and why it's a hard topic for me to broach. I'm also trying to articulate exactly why I feel so goddamn compelled to keep trying to write about our relationship with one another. 

"Yeah. The father/daughter stuff was good. Your (kinda unrealistic) expectations about men was super interesting. I felt like I could better understand those and how those tied back to the men you find interesting in history now that I've read about your dad." 

***

A friend described me last week as "snarffectionate." 

Man, I've got a lot of feelings. My predictive text now recognizes ohmygodfeelings as something that follows the words "men," "boys," "domestic violence" or "best friend emergency." But despite having a lot of feelings, I seem to be best able to communicate my affection for other people through a series of backhanded (at best) compliments and often through snark and sarcasm. 

When it comes to giving an actual face-to-face, real compliment, I'd rather hide behind sassiness. 

For what it's worth, when I receive compliments I generally change the subject or walk away. 

I don't receive a lot of compliments. 

***

I do not introduce the men in my life to my father.

He's met a grand total of two, maybe three of my male friends from college. He met one friend from graduate school, and since then, no one. It helped tremendously that throughout college I lived, you know, at a college for women in the middle of a cornfield (not Mom and Dad's idea of a vacation hotspot).

I do not introduce my male friends to my father and with the unavoidable exception of my high school boyfriend, I have never once even considered introducing a boyfriend to my father.

So this summer, while planning a trip to Milwaukee for a Brewers game with some male friends of mine, I made sure to arrange it over a weekend my folks would be at the cabin. Imagine my horror when Mom and Dad informed me that they'd be back on Saturday and would see us Sunday morning before we left.

"Are you sure you guys don't want to come back Sunday? I mean, after we've had a chance to get out of the house?"

"Kelly," Mom asks "who the hell are you bringing over that you don't want us to meet them?"

***

I can't stop thinking about my father.

I've been doing a lot of things lately that remind me of him. Whether it's boning a chicken and thanking the lord for all the times I watched him butcher a deer or logging running miles and feeling myself getting stronger and faster, I keep thinking about him. 

The consequence, of that much thinking about him is that I want to write about him, about us and our complicated, undramatic relationship. The problem is that whenever I try to write about him my chest tightens up and it hurts to breathe. 

My relationships with the rest of my family are entirely straightforward. I am the spittin' image of my mother. My brothers and I have friendly enough relationships, and I would bail them out of jail if they needed me. I can articulate why and how much I love them without any of the hangups I seem to have surrounding my father. 

Part the the issue, I expect, is that I'm afraid to simply be labeled as the girl with "Daddy Issues." 

Part of the issue, I expect, is that when it comes to really strong emotions, I never learned how to deal with them aside from wrapping them in a bundle of snark and sarcasm and hoping that everyone would see through those layers to the affection that was inside. 

It is, to a certain extent, a defense mechanism I learned from him. 

***

I don't introduce men in my life to my father for a lot of reasons.

One is because of his politics. We are at opposite sides of the political spectrum (aren't most children/parents?) and he really likes to argue. I tend to back down from disagreements with him (or with anyone outside of a completely academic setting, where I will eviscerate you if I can). Another is because the men I date/spend time with tend to have little interest in professional sports, hunting, beer-brewing, shooting, or fixing things. I suppose to a certain extent I'm worried that my father will look at the men I'm spending my time with and think "is this it?" 

That last part is extremely unlikely. My father likes just about everyone. 

More than anything, I think I'm trying to protect my father. 

It's a silly sentiment, especially if you've met him, but it's one that I can't shake. 

It is deeply, profoundly important to me that the men in my life like and respect my father. And I worry that because of his idiosyncrasies, he might be a tough sell to the academic, comic-booky type men in my life. The reason I need them to like and respect him, I realized in a moment of therapeutic breakthrough, is not because he's my father and I have a bunch of Midwestern conceptions about the roles of men formed because he's the person he has (although these are certainly part of it), but because more than anyone else in my life, he has formed my personality. 

I am the woman I am because he's been the father he's been. 

We are polar opposites when it comes to everything from politics to religion to our feelings on American car manufacturers. But all of the aspects of my personality that I like: my work ethic, my ability to hold my own in a conversation about cars or cooking, the capacity I have for finding wonder in stupid, silly, every day things, are all a result of him. 

I love him so much for teaching me these things. 

I don't introduce the men in my life to my father because I'm afraid that they won't love and respect him the way I do. And, when it comes down to it, not loving respecting him the way I do feels a lot like a direct rejection of the best parts of who I am. 

Beauty #10

One of the happiest moments of my adult life was when a friend took me to hear live jazz at the Bohemian Caverns. It was about a week before my birthday, I had flown into D.C. specifically to geek out on American History as a birthday present to myself. After arriving mid-morning I spent most of the day standing in front of The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and wandering around various monuments and thinking about history. The evening was a total surprise--I had asked to be taken to do something I wouldn't find on my own. I didn't find out where we were going until we were there, and I barely had enough time to jump up and down before we were in and seated and listening to jazz.

I don't think I breathed the entire night. 

I love jazz. I love jazz like I love history and poetry and Doctor Who. My older brother introduced me to Thelonious Monk while I was in college and it was the start of one of the great aesthetic loves of my life. Throughout the years my brother has sent me Charles Mingus and John Coltrane albums. We've sipped Scotch and listened to free jazz.

My favorite jazz musician is Miles Davis. Undoubtedly. It's a little predictable, I know, but Miles is the one who reliably pulls at my heart, whose music I turn on after a long day or a bad day or when I'm just feeling kind of quiet and introspective. 

There was a great story on NPR about Miles Davis's concert at The New York Philharmonic in '64. If you haven't heard it, you should go take a listen. That concert resulted in two of my favorite jazz records of all time, and a version of "Stella by Starlight" that is unimaginably good. 

It's one of a very few jazz recordings that can do what the show at the Bohemian Caverns did. It makes me stop breathing, stop thinking, stop doing anything but listening to the music. Every time I hear it I can't help but think of that night in Bohemian Caverns--and revel (however briefly) in good music's ability to take you outside of yourself. 

Beauty #9

My last couple posts about beauty have been esoteric (pits, PRs, Doctor Who). Here's one that's a little more concrete.

My family owns a bit of land on a lake in Northern Wisconsin.

It's the most beautiful place in the world.

I spent summers up there as a kid. Once I turned 18, I got my own key to the place and free license to head up there whenever I wished. Over the years I've had a number of bluegrass sing-alongs on the front porch, cooked and consumed fantastic meals in the kitchen. I learned to take a fish off a line, the rudiments of butchering a deer, how to count while playing cribbage. I've cried over broken hearts and written long essays about my father and smoked endless cigarettes at the end of the pier. I've seen the Perseid meteor shower and gone skinny dipping and swamped canoes.

In the spring I go on walks through the woods and see the Trillium blooming. Summers I try to spend at least one weekend fishing with Daddy. Fall I cook Thanksgiving dinner. Winters I head over and read curled up next to the fire. The natural beauty is one part of why I love it so much. The other is that it's a place of deep memory. My grandfather became enamored with this part of the state when he worked in the CCC. He and my grandmother finished the place in 1959 and every summer since then my family and extended family has spent time on the lake. My great-aunt had the place next door and when we were children we would run back and forth between cabins, swimming all day and playing cards with Dorothy when we got cold. My grandmother's best friend, an elderly Czech woman used to let me eat raspberries out of her back raspberry patch and always made me these special Czech cookies that were my favorite.

It's the place that I think about when I think about my gram (still fishing at nearly 90!). When I remember the happiest moments of my childhood and my adult life they were here, in some capacity. I have, on more than one occasion, tied an inner tube to the end of that pier and floated off of it reading a book for hours. My favorite bike rides have taken place on long, hilly roads surrounding the place.

There are a few things for which my dorky enthusiasm knows no bounds. History is one. Doctor Who is another. Also on the list is: urban bee-keeping, running, baking, and French cooking. Building things with other people. Learning what "home" means.

As I've gotten older, the sort of rural area where I grew up has turned increasingly into the kind of suburban nightmare I can't stand. Mom and Dad's house feels a little less like home with each passing year. It's inevitable, of course, but it's still a little sad. Minnesota has become home in a way that Wisconsin can't be. I have not just friends here, but an honest-to-the-gods community. It sounds not only dorky but sentimental to say that we're building something together, but it's true. Each random Monday night dinner at someone's house, each bonfire, each mile we run together is building a home that doesn't exist for me anywhere else.

Except on this tiny bit of land in Northern Wisconsin. Out in the middle of nowhere, on this wooded lot there's a sense of place and belonging that my family has built together. From digging the foundation back in in the 50s to putting on new siding sometime in my early adulthood to a Jarts tournament on the place's 50th birthday to pitchers of sangria on the porch with my brothers this summer, we've built this little place that will always carry the feeling of home for me.

To Hell or Barbados

I have a tense relationship with St. Patrick's Day.

Let me be clear about something. I celebrate St. Patrick's every year. I love St. Patrick's Day. My family is Irish-American Catholic. Mom brought us up to be proud of our heritage (on her side, French and Irish). I celebrate the same way every year. I have a party for the people here who are like my family. I make boiled dinner and raise a glass to my maternal grandmother and my mother. I remember the people in my life I have loved who have passed. God knows I consume a little bit too much of everything from bread pudding to whiskey and have been known to belt out Molly Malone at the top of my lungs.

I still get pissy when, at 8:00am on a Monday I'm accosted by drunks on my way into work. Drunks who are slammed just because, you know, it's St. Patrick's Day.

And everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.

***

My favorite moments in world history are bloody revolutions in service of freedom and self-determination. Being of aforementioned Irish and French descent, when a useless royal gets their head lopped off in the process I tend to buck up quite a bit. Throw in a little class warfare and I'm probably swooning a little bit. 

There's neither enough guillotining nor class war in American History. 

When I say these are my favorite moments in world history, what I mean is that they're the moment I find most fascinating and most horrifying. On the fascinating side of things, you have ostensibly ordinary people pushed to extraordinary measures. They're motivated by concrete concerns (food, shelter, the distribution of wealth) but also by, well, intangible ideals. The desire to determine your own destiny is no small thing. 

On the horrifying side you have the wholesale slaughter of individuals. You have casualties of war. You have the systematic rape and prostitution of women and girls. You have the inevitable inequality that springs up in the wake of a movement based on lofty principles. 

***

I've been feeling fussier about St. Patrick's Day than normal this year. 

It could be a result of living two blocks down from a college and having drunk students wandering past my window starting at about 7:00 this morning and lasting, I'm sure, until unbelievably late tonight. Perhaps it's that I work right off of the parade route and traffic was already hopelessly snarled when I went into the office. It could be the drunk guy who tried to grab my ass while I waited to cross the street today. I'm almost positive that the sheer cultural incompetence belied by drinking green beer to celebrate a culture where people died with their mouths dyed green from eating grass because they were starving  really gets me riled up. 

Regardless of the reason, I spent most of today pretty pissed off. 

***

In Ulysses James Joyce writes "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

You and me both, Joyce. 

The study of history regularly makes me cry. On my bucket list is seeing how many different major historical sites I can visit without crying (to date, zero). It's not the dry name/date/diagram flanking maneuvers that I grew up with, but a snapshot of (for lack of a better way to put it) real human lives. I can't think of the French Revolution without imagining the poor old priest who was guillotined or the students who were gunned down in the June Rebellion. 

The study of history is also something I just can't quit. It's an obsession in the same way that lock-picking, cryptography, and bee-keeping are obsessions. It's something at which I want need to excel. I (with complete, horrifying earnestness) believe that people who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it. 

But regardless of the number of first-hand accounts I read about Gettysburg or Japanese Internment Camps in California, I can never seem to switch off the emotional response. 

***

My current reading is called To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland.

I'm no slouch when it comes to Irish history. I'm at the very least conversant about the Easter Rebellion. I can tell you the importance of Irish monasteries in preserving the last vestiges of learning in Medieval Europe. I can explain the myriad injustices that underwrote the Great Famine. 

I'd never read about the Irish slaves in Virginia and Barbados. 

It's a hugely affecting book, a period of history of which I was peripherally aware without understanding the ramifications of Oliver (censored expletives) Cromwell's hatred for the Irish. It's the kind of book that requires a unicorn and puppy chaser at the end of it. 

Realizing that there was a huge section of history with which I consider myself passingly familiar that I didn't realize existed was . . . I don't even have the words for it. 

It is the reason why I'm so upset this St. Patrick's Day. 

Let's discount for a minute the incredibly depressing history of Ireland itself and focus just on Irish in the United States (which, honestly, isn't much better).  Immigration was largely a result of famine, entrenched xenophobia and mistrust of the Irish generally and Catholics specifically, which lead to things like No Irish Need Apply, which lead to grinding poverty. 

Yeah, you get it. 

Once you get your head around that, imagine that the same people came from a place where they were systematically exterminated over the course of hundreds of years. Where they were consistently denied basic human rights. Where they were reviled everywhere they went. Where somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 of them were sold into slavery and we'll never know because they were sub-human and records weren't kept. Where 25% of their population starved to death while produce was shipped to England. 

It's what frustrates me, what makes me crazy about this holiday. Yes, leprechauns and shamrocks and the Luck of the Irish. Those are all fantastic things to celebrate. God knows I laughed at a sign during my race on Saturday that read "Run Like Leprechauns Are Chasing You." But this holiday is about so much more than that. It's about keeping your history alive in a hostile country and remembering the people who passed who meant something to you. It's a day that should be about history at its most vibrant and alive. 

Right. But it's not, is it? We're all Irish on St. Patrick's Day without understanding any of what we're celebrating, without so much as a hint of why some of us might get angry when we run into you shitfaced on the side of the street. 

So today, go to a parade. Have a whiskey or a pint. See some Irish Dancers. Dance to some Flogging Molly. Sing Whiskey in the Jar. But while you're doing it maybe take a minute and raise one of those glasses to the men and women who are buried in unmarked graves in Barbados or who passed quietly as a result of famine. 

And for Christ's sake. Stay away from green beer.