Lie to Me

One of my favorite writing projects ever was a blog that I did with a friend of mine, also a writer. Once a week we would come up with a theme and we would each post a variation on the theme. It was delightful. I love and admire her writing, it was good to have a theme to spark writing, and it was fun to have a joint project. As a result, it was one of the most fruitful moments in my poetic life.

The blog fell by the wayside, as blogs do, and we've both moved on to different writing projects. But it remains this golden period of six months or so when I was writing a poem every week and getting creative feedback. But the post that sticks out in my mind is not something I wrote, but her writing on jazz. I remember reading it for the first time and wondering at the post itself. She maintains that jazz is nothing but beautiful lies. I disagreed with her about her conclusion, but decided it was the creative space she was in.

I love jazz.

The very first jazz album I got was a CD of Billie Holiday tracks a friend of mine handed to me while I was a sophmore in high school. I listened to that album every day, sometimes several times a day. When my mother thought I was locked in my room with Slipknot blaring through my headphones, I was actually stretched back on my bed with Billie singing sweetly in the background.

I fell in the love with jazz for the reason any small town kid falls in love with jazz. I loved it because it encourages a kind of dreaminess that no other music has ever managed to bring out in me. When I listened to Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald, or later Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, I conjured up images of New York nightclubs stolen from The Catcher in the Rye. It was unspeakably glamorous and all I needed were the first notes of Bye Bye Blackbird to send me into a daydream.

When I finally saw live jazz for the first time I was a little disappointed, not in the music but in the atmosphere itself. Instead of a smoky, barely-lit club in New York, I was in a brightly lit, tiny wine bar in St. Cloud, the most prosaic place on earth. There was barely enough room for the four musicians, and there certainly wasn't enough space for a grand piano. I wasn't on a date, and I wasn't wearing some beautiful vintage 1950s dress. I was in a sundress and was there with a fellow writer who went often. However, once I got over my initial disappointment over the atmosphere, I settled into the music and it was wonderful. My writer friend and I went many times over the course of the next few years and those evening sitting in a bar in the sticky July heat, drinking a glass of scotch, and listening to Red Top still have a feeling of unreality about them for me.

I miss jazz.

Since moving last summer, my options for live jazz are pretty limited. I end up listening to a lot of albums at home rather than going out. I  can't complain too much. Nearly every night this summer I've fallen asleep to Miles Davis's Round About Midnight and I'm convinced it makes my dreams softer, warmer places. When I hear the phrase "A Love Supreme" repeated on John Coltrane's album A Love Supreme it takes on all the weight of a mantra for me. I listen to these albums when it's ok to get a little dreamy--when my writing has hit a wall and I need to think creatively, when I'm cooking, when I'm lying in bed reading a romance novel. But even as I'm losing myself in Johnny Hartman's voice and Jane Austen's writing, I can't help but feel a little twinge of envy toward my writer friend, who still goes to those jazz shows every Monday night.

This summer has been a strange one. Neither inherently good or bad, just strange. It's my year anniversary of graduating from Jesus School, taking a new job, moving to a new place. And my 28th birthday is rapidly approaching and I'm forced to look at some tough realities. Many of my favorite authors had published work by 28. Dating won't get any easier by simply moving to a new city. Hangovers are no longer something to be laughed at and bounced back from. Writing is hard and requires all of my attention and creativity.

These have all been difficult things to face, but the worst realization came tonight, as I was basking in a new romance novel and Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane's album. Jazz lies. The dreamy unreality it produces in me, the images it evokes, the daydreams its causes are lies. They're no better or worse than the sense of unreality caused by a good romance novel, but they are lies nonetheless. I pondered this. Wondered momentarily if I should quit listening to jazz, return instead to bluegrass, which reminds us that life is a struggle and then you die. Or perhaps I should revisit the Romantic composers in my library. Then again, there are all those indie albums my friends keep pushing on me.

My phone rang and it was a friend with an actual problem rather than existential mutterings about music. She needed comfort and support and I think I gave it to her. When we hung up over an hour later, I looked guiltily between the massive history of the French Revolution I've been reading for months and the romance novel I had been devouring that evening and would finish the next day. I listened to Johnny Hartman sing "You Are Too Beautiful" and thought about the advice I had just offered my friend about the break-up she was going through. As a soon-to-be bona fide adult, shouldn't I do the adult thing and put away the lies, pretty, compelling, and comforting as they were?

Eventually, I picked the romance back up and turned up the stereo without changing the album. Because with adulthood and its responsibilities rapidly closing around me, there are nights when all I want is someone to lie to me. 

Just Kiss Me Already

Here, in no particular order, are some things I find irresistible in men: brown eyes; a self-deprecating sense of humor; a house full of books; a love for jazz; a deep-rooted love for American history, the French Revolution, or World Wars I & II; exceptional grammar; beards; the ability to fix things; working knowledge of feminist theory; and book smarts.

My first boyfriend had almost all of these things. Best of all, he was a nerd.

He was my peer math tutor and devastatingly, breath-takingly, annoyingly bright. I fell for him in that devastating, breath-taking, annoying way you do when you're seventeen and emotional. Which is, irritatingly enough, still the same way I fall for people. I nearly failed second year Algebra when we discovered our mutual interest in one another because I wasn't really interested in learning and he was, well, less interested in teaching. I still think that he had moments where he couldn't decide if he wanted to go park with me or teach me how to use my TI graphing calculator.

Part of the reason I fell for him was his brightness, I loved the fact that he was significantly smarter than I was. The other thing I adored was his unabashed nerdiness. His love for anime and math and Romantic composers. He was my gateway to nerdy boys and ten years later I'm still simultaneously pathetically grateful and furious.


My type hasn't really changed in those ten years, despite my Sisyphean efforts to become attracted to men who don't have strong opinions on Battlestar Galactica. If I'm out on a date and a guy is talking about how much he can bench press or how much money he makes or his love for restoring vintage cars, I get a little glassy-eyed. I nod politely. I look discretely at my watch. I imagine screening his calls the next day. But a guy talking about his favorite American president prior to FDR? I'm right there with him arguing the merits of Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies. Meanwhile, I'm simultaneously plotting how I can get him back to my apartment where I imagine him seeing my first edition Tolkien, my extensive library, the books on Revolutionary France that constitute my before-bed reading material, and, um, a few other things as well.

The problem is that I've been dating this kind of guy for ten years and it still hasn't panned out. To date, tying down my very own nerd has been impossible and heartbreaking, but I just can't stop. If Ryan Gosling was standing in a room wearing an Armani suit next to a skinny particle physicist wearing a space t-shirt and glasses, I would go for the particle physicist.

Of course, this shouldn't be an issue. In fact, as I sit here re-reading this, I wonder what I'm so worked up about. So I have a type--a type that happens to be generally smart and self-deprecating and well read and thoughtful--how in the hell is this a bad thing?

The bad things are less a result of nerdy guys and more a result of my own neurosis. Sweet Merciful Jesus, trying to date--just date--a nerd guy is one of the most fraught things I have ever experienced. Every guy I have ever dated seriously and most of the men I've dated casually I've asked out. I think that this is probably unusual. It's also a little frustrating. I'll meet a guy at a bar or through friends and the next thing I know we're talking about Carl Sagan and Nova and the most recently updated TED talks. And it'll be great and we'll really be clicking and then he's walking me to my car and I'll have crazy stomach flutters and POOF! He's gone. Like he stepped through a wormhole. 

I'll get into my car and sit there wondering what the hell just happened. Have I, after years of dating, misinterpreted the signals? Did he not notice my hand on his arm all right? DID HE MISS THE FACT THAT I LOOK LIKE FREAKING JOAN HOLLOWAY IN THIS RED DRESS?

Usually the answers to these questions are No, Yes, and Absolutely Not. For whatever reason the type to whom I am attracted is either nervous about closing the deal or has extreme social anxiety. And I realize that as an empowered, successful, pretty-in-the-right-light, 21st century capital F Feminist, I can just ask him out. But the other part of me, the part that was brought up on Disney Princess Movies and Barbie dolls really wants to be pursued, to be asked out, to not be the one to initiate the date or relationship.To a certain extent, I feel like I've earned it. After all, how many times can a girl ask different guys "Were you planning on kissing me, or should I just go to bed?" TOO MANY.

The second and more problematic issue with my type of guys is the knowledge that a nerd will break my heart like no one else. My relationships have been split, half nerds, half non-nerds.While no breakup is, you know, pleasant, my nerdy boyfriends have been the most devastating. Those have been my "listen to Patsy Cline and drink bourbon" breakups, the times when I have cried, literally, so hard that I've thrown up. Delightful.

I've puzzled for years over why these breakups are so much tougher, why I get so much more emotional, why I cease to function like a normal human being for six months. Part of the reason is that the breakup is initiated not out of incompatibility but out of "I just got offered a great job . . . in Louisiana." or "I was accepted to study Russian history in Moscow." Call me crazy, but somehow getting dumped for having giant personality flaws is less upsetting than getting dumped because of geography. I can blame personality flaws on the guy misunderstanding or bringing out the worst in me. Who am I going to blame for massive geographic challenges? Thomas Fucking Jefferson and the fucking Louisiana Purchase. That's not super satisfying.

This usually instigates the Patsy Cline and bourbon portion on the breakup.

The worst part comes later, during the "We're Still Trying to Be Friends!" part of the breakup. It comes as I have to watch, read, listen to this guy I adore fall for someone else. To be clear: I watch as a guy with whom I click with on every level, who dumped me not because I'm crazy or unattractive or stupid, but because of fucking GEOGRAPHY, fall in love with someone else. The worst part is that I generally can't hate him or her. He's still smart and funny and wants to be Lee Adama and she's stunningly pretty and brighter than I am and owns a Starbuck costume.

That's a lie. I can hate her. Vehemently.

Engage crying like an idiot sequence.

After years of struggling to get a nerdy guy to ask me out, after breakups that make me feel like I've lost my sanity, I've tried to date guys with whom I have less in common. But the truth is that I don't fall for them breath-takingly, devastatingly, annoyingly, which is the way I want to fall for someone. In spite of my efforts to recondition myself to fall for non-nerds, I seem to be incapable of liking anyone who can't Settle Catan. Whatever chemical attracts me to men with brown eyes and beards also makes me want to be with someone who owns tons of books, loves Patrick Stewart, and wants to spend his Friday evenings playing Scrabble and drinking scotch.

Perhaps it's time to start looking for another math tutor.

Smartass

"Hi Daddy."

I've said those words, literally, thousands of times over the course of my life. I said them as a child, racing up the driveway on my bike. I said them as a teenager, crashing into the house two minutes before my curfew. I say them now, as an adult, when I enter my parents' house for a brief holiday visit. He's always responded with a gruffy, slightly raspy "Hey Kel" or "Hi Honey" and a big hug.

My father always appears to me in vivid, full-color 3D when I think about him. I can see him sweeping out the garage or fixing one of the cars, a classic-rock station on in the background. I can see him sitting in his recliner and hear him yelling at the Packers. I can smell the not entirely unpleasant aroma of motor oil, tobacco, and Lava soap that he always smells like, even after he's showered and changed out of his work clothes.

Dad is a diesel mechanic. He owns a shop with his brother and while he's reasonably happy as a small-business owner, he often talks about what he would do if he had a chance to do his life over. His biggest regret, apparently, is dropping out of college and not becoming a teacher like his mother was, like his eldest son has become. Given the scars, the burns he sustains, the hellish heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter and the tinnitus he has in both ears, I often wonder if he wouldn't have been better off as a teacher myself. Unless I've done something profoundly stupid like neglect to check the oil in my aging Ford before driving to see him or forget the lyrics to Badlands, he's always been infintely patient when teaching me to do something. He taught me how to take a fish off the line and the joy of finishing a project and the quiet pride that comes with knowing you've done a good job. He even gave me my first lessons in writing, correcting my early short stories or poems before I handed them into my language arts teacher.

He's not the kind of person to really ask for help with a big project. He might inform me or more likely, my younger brother, that there is wood to be stacked or weeds to be pulled, but he doesn't ask for help. He simply announces that there's a project that needs to be done whether it's hanging gutters or re-terracing my mother's gardens. People, usually my younger brother Stephen, will show up to help. Or they won't and he'll do it himself. Either way, it gets done. I inherited a similar independent streak from him. I was the first person in my family to attend a college out of state. I moved away when I was 18 and since then have been paying my own bills, taking care of myself, building my own bookshelves, seeing to my own oil changes. But regardless of that independent streak, when something big comes up I always find myself calling the house and asking for Dad's advice on how much I should be paying for new tires or whether or not I should make a career change.

So, as a child, I watched my dad's independence. His self-reliance and confidence. I also watched him kneel in our small-town Catholic Church and ask God for help. my parents aren't church people, but they are very devout Catholics. Weekly Mass, Eucharistic adoration, praying the rosary, these were all parts of my life as a child. And they would have made sense if they were limited to my mother. But to watch my father--the most self-dependent man I knew--get on his knees and ask someone else for something, even if that something was a benevolent, divine Creator, shocked me. Dad taught me the importance of prayer the same way he taught me to land a bass or my younger brother to reroof a house. We watched him do these things over and over and it was carved into our minds.

I think about watching him in church now, when we're on the phone or sitting across the dinner table from one another. Dad has two tones of voice. When he uses the first one and calls me a smartass, my hackles raise and I immediately go on the defensive. I know what's going to follow will be a drawn-out, angry conversation about politics. But there's another, softer tone of voice that he uses that makes it sound like he's actually happy to have a bright daughter, one who questions not only his authority, but my teachers' authority, my bosses' authority, even God's authority. Surprisingly, this last one has caused the least amount of difficulty in our relationship. It is, at least to him, necessary that I cede a certain amount of authority to him, to teachers, to bosses, because they had a direct impact on my life. God, of course, directly impacted my life as well, but his authority was so established it was beyond questioning. While if I smarted off to a teacher there would be serious immediate repercussions in the form of detention of poor grades, when I smarted off to God nothing happened. There were no floods, not lightening strikes, no smiting of my family. Smarting off to God was an academic pursuit, and I could feel free to question his authority as much as a I wanted. And I have.

He seems to think I'm a smartass too.

Perseids

I wanted to write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to watch a meteor shower
and commune with the universe
Then I looked at that sentence
"commune with the universe"
and realized that it makes me sound
like an asshole. Like someone who believes
in healing through energy fields and crystals
instead of antibiotics and good hygiene.

Instead I will write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to a cabin my family has had for generations.
Where for many summers, I swam
and ate raspberries off the bush,
fished and grew sunburned.
And how this time I drank beer.
And my oldest friend came
and some new ones joined us
and we watched a meteor shower.
And how, for the time, it was enough.

Angst. Or How McSweeney's Caused Crisis of Confidence

Over the past year I have been kicking around an idea for the McSweeney's annual column contest.

Over the past weeks I have been hammering out the details. Putting the words to the page. Editing. Writing. Editing again. Rewriting. Drinking. Crying. Rewriting.

Over the weekend I sat back in my wildly uncomfortable kitchen chair, scrubbed my face, and clicked send. In spite of all the emotional hand-wringing and stylistic issues I had mapping out the coulmn, it was some of the most fun I've ever had writing. More than that, it signified the most work I had ever put into a non-academic piece. It was an entire year's worth of thinking, sketching out installments of the column, rethinking the premise, chucking the whole thing and starting from scratch. It was a month solid of writing and stuttering to a halt. Rewriting and feeling like I was losing my mind. Now, with all that work behind me, I allowed myself to daydream.

I imagined what it would be like when my column was accepted. How I would take the prize money and buy a magnificent bottle of scotch and drink it in the breezy late-summer evenings on the porch. I looked forward to finding an agent who wanted to read my memoir and how in two, three years at the outside, I would be opening yet another bottle of magnificent scotch to toast my successful book release. Critics would adore me. Ira Glass would want to interview me. Mary Oliver would want to have dinner with me.


I know, right? Even in my daydreams I'm a pretentious asshole.
But I felt entitled to these pretentious asshole daydreams. After all of the work I had put into the entry, it was the piece of writing of which I was most proud. It was polished. It was professional. It was about something that actually mattered to me and that I hoped would be amusing to my readers. Eventually, though, the pretentious asshole daydreams wound to a close and I rewarded myself with a stack of X-Men comics and a book on introverts. I spent most of the day in my armchair, getting lost in some of my nerdier pursuits.

When I eventually closed the book on introverts, I remembered a conversation I had the day before with a friend. I told her about my contest entry and she asked if I had read the grand prize winner from the previous year. When I replied that I hadn't, she gave me her best eyebrow-raised, Sherlockian, "Oh-Watson-You-Poor-Dolt-You-Don't-Get-It-Yet" look.

"You should," was all she said.

Now, having finished not only a fraught writing project but the stack of books I had set aside for the day, I wandered over to my computer and pulled up the column. After reading half of it and using up half a box of tissues in the process, I put my face in my hands, utterly embarrassed by what I had so confidently submitted a few hours earlier.

It's one thing to know definitively that your favorite authors are better writers than you. I can handle Neil Gaiman's imagination and Jane Austen's dialogue far outstripping me, because it feels like they should. They've already passed through the crucible of amateur writing. It's quite another feeling to have another amateur, unpublished, young writer WHO DOESN'T EVEN WRITE FULL-TIME be so obviously better than you. I marveled over the fact that she could be so emotional without being maudlin, so evocative without being hackneyed, so darkly hilarious without being macabre. It was disgustingly unjust that someone who has as little experience as I do could be so much better.

I was horrified to realize that in a scant two weeks the editors that picked HER out of the crowd, who noticed HER genius, who offered HER work would be picking my pathetic offering out of the deluge of submissions.

Shit.

If I weren't on a massive dose of antibiotics I would have opened a bottle of bourbon, put on a Patsy Cline record, and climbed out of my depression sometime next Wednesday after lunch. Serendipitously or perhaps cruelly, the universe put a very effective stopper in my self-prescribed cure. At first I spent the evening trying to cultivate a devil-may-care attitude about my writing. Then I tried to distract myself with the approaching Curiosity landing, but even my love for space failed me.

I settled on cleaning.

I write easily 90% of my first drafts by hand, regardless of whether it's a grant, a poem, or an essay. Something about the process of physically writing the words out in longhand is very soothing and helps me to get past writer's block more easily than writing on a computer. However, I have a hard time recycling these first drafts. It's amusing to me to read the marginalia I left for myself. I like to see how the pieces mature from ink first drafts to electronic final drafts. But in my present mood, I was relentlessly trashing everything I could get my hands on. And of course I came across my first draft for McSweeney's.

It's hilarious.

The writing is awful. I mean, sixteen year old Emo Kelly would be embarrassed by it. There's all kinds of marginalia, mostly cussing, about how bad it is. There are blacked out sections and places where my pen poked through the paper in a vehement editing sessions. It managed to wring a genuine snorting laugh from me.

The column I finally submitted may not be as good as last year's winner. It may not be as good as 90% of the other submissions they receive. But it's immeasurably better than that first attempt, which is better than what I was writing last week, which is better than what I was writing five years ago. It's unlikely that This American Life will ever call me for an interview. I will never have an obituary extolling my literary contributions in The New York Times. I will never be represented by the Steven Barclay Agency and outside of winning a contest, I probably won't go to dinner with my writing idols. But this is, irrevocably, the life that I have chosen for myself. Watching my writing evolve slowly over time is going to have to be good enough for me.

And since when have I ever needed an excuse to buy expensive scotch?