I Know Teddy Roosevelt is Dead

I've got a little case of winter madness settling in.

Don't get me wrong. I love winter. I love running through snowfall and the squeak your running shoes makes on the snow. I love sledding. I can handle ice-fishing. I love sweaters and Christmas getting cozy with the people you love over mulled wine and hot soup.

I love all of those things. It's part of the reason I haven't given the Upper Midwest the finger and packed my bags for somewhere a little more moderate.

But these days I spend a lot of time looking at flights to warm weather destinations. I can't stop thinking about last summer at the cabin(s). Of long lazy afternoons floating in an inner tube off the pier. Of the way raspberries taste when they off the bush and warm from the sun. Of long walks in the woods when the trillium blossoms. If I don't get into a canoe and on a lake in the next two weeks I think I might lose my mind.

Like I said, a little case of winter madness.

***

I've been thinking about trying online dating again. 

I love being single. I love coming home to a quiet house and being able to do exactly what I want with my weekends. Not having to share my bed is the best thing in the world. I don't have to worry about keeping someone else awake when I'm up with a book. 

But I spend a lot of time planning ideal dates. Long drives out to the middle of nowhere to see a meteor shower. Morel hunting if spring ever comes. Sneaking out of bed early on a Saturday morning to surprise someone with coffee and scones.

Like I said, thinking about trying online dating again. 

***

Over the weekend, I surprised the gang by being able to sing along with a country song. 

It was sort of unusual that commercial radio was even on. Normally we're a MPR/Pandora crowd, but for whatever reason it was. It was on a country station because, well, who knows? All five of us had grown up in the rural midwest, and while we're all a touch uppity about our music, we must have a certain fondness for commercial country music. 

I'd been reasonably quiet for most of the morning. My running partner and I had gone out together for the first time in seven weeks and came home to homemade caramel rolls and coffee. We were collaboratively doing the crossword puzzle and cursing Will Shortz. It was a fine morning. 

Anyway, this song comes on the radio and I immediately blurt out "I love this song!" One of my friends turns and just looks at me. I know what she's going to say before she says it.

"You're the last person I would have thought would like country music."

She's right, of course. I do probably give off that impression (have you ever been in a room when I'm talking about my love for Miles Davis?) But I can also sing along with every Dixie Chicks song ever written. Radio stations like this were a huge part of where I grew up. I have a certain fondness for them as a result. 

But it's more than that (isn't it always?). It's that I genuinely like the idea of throwing a backapack into the back of someone's car (Let's get real, I live in the city. No one owns a truck.) and going somewhere without cell phone reception for a weekend. I want someone to take me on a (non ice-fishing) fishing date. 

I love the city. I will never live anywhere with fewer than 600,000 people again. But there's a small part of me that still loves the idea of being in the middle of nowhere. Waking up to birdsong and wind in the trees instead of the goddamn Bix truck making a delivery to the restaurant across the street.  

***

The men in my life are hot right now. 

I don't mean they're more good-looking than normal. I certainly don't mean that they're overheating (ha!). I mean that they are extremely pissed. 

At me.

This is not an unusual turn of events for me. I am hyper-competitive and a total trash talker. I am extremely talented at stupid things, like cornhole, and can be unbearable when I win.

Of course, my backyard looks like Winterfell right now, so we're not talking about me being good at cornhole.

I received a barrage of angry messages after my last post about literary everymen and the complicated relationship I have with my father. And I'm talking angry.

You intentionally misrepresented an entire male generation for laughs. 
Could you paint with a broader brush, Kel?
This is the worst post you've ever written.
You're the most emotional person I know. You're uniquely badly-equipped to talk about men's emotions. 
Teddy Roosevelt is dead, Kel. Get the fuck over it. 

Yikes.

At the end of two days of furious invective (to which I am, apparently, overreacting because I'm emotional) I consider taking the post down and making a blanket apology to everyone carrying XY chromosomes. 

***

If I could be anywhere in time and space right now, it would be an indeterminate July weekend, at the cabin. 

I want to wake up slowly with endless cups of coffee on the porch, watching the birds on the lake. I want to go for a long bike ride through the woods and work up a good sweat that I rinse off by jumping off the pier and spending hours in the lake. I want to drift off in the hammock reading a book and spend the evening lying on the end of the pier watching the stars come out. At the end of the weekend I want to come back to the city and walk along the Mississippi, catch a late movie, argue about books, eat Ethiopian food, revel in the fact that I can do all of these things, that I can be both of these people. 

I want someone to do them with me. 

Listen, I know Theodore Roosevelt is dead. I also know that he was a once-in-a-generation man (let's gloss right over the fact that we've had a couple generations since he died without another man like him and maybe we're due). But the point that I was trying to articulate last week, the point that seems to have the guys in my life furious with me is that I don't think that it's asking too much to want a nerd who loves the outdoors, an outdoors man who realizes that, occasionally, it's all right to spend a sunny day reading in the hammock instead of tromping through the woods. 

And whether it's a case of winter madness or just plain lonliness or who the fuck knows, it seems really important to find someone right now, when the weather is frigid and awful so that by the time the snow finally melts I'll be ready to ask him to take me fishin' in the dark.

Passive

If this book were an actual paperback, I’d fling it across the room.

I’ve thrown my Kindle exactly once, after The Red Wedding in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It was a childish thing to do but I was definitely feeling pretty childish (an author can only murder so many of your favorite characters before you lose your temper).

This is Where I Leave You didn't inspire that kind of rage. In fact, over all, I really enjoyed the book. It’s, for lack of a better way of talking about it, a book that’s about family drama. I read it shortly before packing my bags to depart for my own Upper Midwestern Euripides play and it rips me up.

It’s a book that’s like a punch in the emotional solar plexus. This seems to be my default setting for reading these days. Quite unintentionally, all of my reading in 2014 has been casually devastating and has left me with the urge to read existentialism (River of Doubt, Life After Life), pissed (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles) or just sad (Eleanor & Park, This is Where I Leave You). But sucker-punches aside, the more I think about This is Where I Leave You (and I think about it all night while I’m cleaning the house, making tea, settling in for a snow-bound Thursday) the angrier I get.

What has me so worked up is the main character in the book, Judd. One of my pieces of furious marginalia reads “Christ, we’ve already got one Hamlet. Who needs another?”

I’m pissed because the main character in the book reads like a walk-on character in his own story. He’s passive. He’s wishy-washy. He’s dissatisfied with his life without the courage to hit the reset button. He, quite frankly, is unsympathetic despite the fact that his father dies in the opening sentence of the book. The book is personally gut-wrenching, absolutely, but in spite of (rather than because of) the main character.

I’m unkind to fictional men.

***

You read a lot about fathers and sons.

It’s one of those tropes that has run through writing since Oedipus. Fathers and sons and the conflicts they have with one another and the love they share. How sons can never measure up to their fathers, who are actually muddling their way through fatherhood and are secretly terrified and, and, and . . .

You don’t read much about fathers and daughters.

Who knows why. Maybe we collectively decided that simply saying “Daddy issues” would sum up all the permutations of relationships between fathers and daughters. Maybe we aren't interested. Maybe ladies are too busy trying not to become their mothers.

I have a complicated, if undramatic, relationship with my father.

Complicated if undramatic could sum up most Upper Midwestern relationships. Every time I travel anywhere else in the United States I come home convinced that we are the most emotionally reserved people in the country.

My father is the epitome of Upper Midwestern emotional stoicism.

His daughter, on the other hand, is the emotional equivalent to a supernova.

We have a complicated relationship.

***

This is Where I Leave You isn’t the only book I’ve read in the last few months that features a man-child as the main character. Both Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of Poets (didn’t even bother to finish that one) had the same. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s main character is so passive he literally sits at the bottom of a well for the majority of the book (yes, I know there was deep metaphysical work going on there *Bronx cheer.*) Those are just a couple examples (I could give you scads more) of books where the male main character is so passive I would like to reach through the pages and slap him. Most of the novels are written about men in their early 30s who are experiencing emotional alienation from their (invariably) beautiful wives. Who are objectively, outwardly successful but still wander through their lives bitching about how their wives are falling for someone else, and they’re experiencing spiritual ennui and . . .

YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWN.

***

I’ve spent the majority of my life trying not to disappoint my father.

I often joke that the only three ways in which I’ve disappointed him are that I don’t like football, I can’t drive a manual, and I have flatly refused to learn how to shoot.

In reality, I feel like I’ve never known where the bar was set for me. I’m the only girl in the family, but I am decidedly not interested in traditional gender roles (not that there’s, you know, a lot of emphasis on this in our family). I was also uninterested in many of Dad’s hobbies over the years. There was NO WAY I was learning to hunt or fix things. I'd rather crawl into a hole and die than make small talk with strangers. The prospect of playing a team sport has me pulling on my running shoes and dashing away from whatever pickup game is starting in the backyard.

But despite never knowing where that bar has been set and the fact that it’s made our relationship tricky for me to navigate, I love my father. It’s really that simple. When I think about him I feel like someone is reaching into my chest and squeezing my heart with their bare hands.

My love for him is a visceral, complicated thing, and it hurts.

***

When I was just starting out in college I was on the phone with my father talking about how unhappy I was with the education classes that taking. I was really wound up, and gearing up for a full head of steam when he brought me up short.

“If you’re unhappy with something, change it.”

In 29 years of trying to figure out where the damn bar has been set in our relationship, in attempting to navigate the tricky intersection of emotional stoicism and, well, whatever the hell I am, this advice is the one thing I've been able to fall back on. It’s the advice that you get from your father that serves as the one inalienable truth in your life.

That’s what makes me craziest about this new literary everyman. I could get really self-righteous about how these fictional men reflect the actual men that I date, how I’m disgusted by the emotional retardation that these characters exhibit (I recognize that I’m probably not the best person to pass judgement on the emotional capacity of other people. Emotional supernova, remember?) and the fact that some of us seem to venerate it (or are, at the very least, are engaged enough by it to keep buying the books) is terrifying to me. Yeah, those things just throw kerosene on my dislike for this literary trope. I could hash out with my shrink how having the father that I do has impacted the relationships I have with men (real and fictional). Uh, yeah. No doubt.

I worry that if the heroes (ha!) that we’re enamored with are disaffected and disengaged that it’s a bigger reflection of the people who read the books. And that’s where my real frustration lies. I grew up worshiping at the altar of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps. Instead of making me a Republican it’s turned me into a person for whom long-term existential angst and spiritual ennui and whatever the hell else these authors are trying to convey is idiotic.

The number one lesson in the gospel according to my family?

You don’t get to be a passive observer in your own life.

It is the complicated, undramatic truth that has kept me anchored throughout the course of my life. It’s the lesson I had to relearn on the other side of five years doing just that. It’s the reason I’m frustrated by the characters in these books, and yes, damn it, with the men that I date.

Perhaps it would have been easier to say at the outset that I am unkind to men. But that isn't quite the truth. I'm this harsh with everyone I perceive as sitting and waiting for their lives to begin. Male writers and the characters that they create are the recipients of my ire right now because they happen to be what I've been reading.

That's an uncomplicated, undramatic truth.

The 2013 Book Post

2013 was a bad year for reading for me. I don't mean to imply that I read bad books. I mean I didn't read much. Over the past few years I've averaged around 35 new books a year (I reread Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald a few times a year). Last year I didn't crack 30 (this is pretty embarrassing and I feel like a giant slacker). I can't quite remember why, but I read four books straight off in January and then, excepting John Scalzi's excellent Red Shirts, nothing until April. That long without finishing a new book is virtually unheard of in my life as a reader.

The other sort of, well, surprising thing regarding my reading last year was that I didn't read a single romance novel. Okay, before you get all judge-y (I know you people, you're book snobs) I've read some heavy shit in my lifetime. A Fine Balance. Anna Karenina. I've started Charles Dickens more times than I can count and it's so boring I want to rip my hair out. Last year I suffered through Lady Chatterly's Lover (which, I suppose, if we were just going for smut content could be considered a romance) and wanted to die the whole time I was reading it. Hand to God, sometimes the antidote to modern, single life is crass and immediate retreat into a really good regency romance.

2013 was heavy in science fiction. I read a few novels by Octavia Butler, discovered Sarah Pinborough, destroyed The Shining Girls (which is utterly brilliant and you should pick it up immediately). Writing this, I suddenly realize that in a genre dominated by male authors I managed to read primarily ladies. Wooo, feminism. Or something.

I read a couple fantastical books that I just adored. Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore is the runner-up for my favorite book in 2013. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a holyshityoucouldknockarobberoutwiththis a book and it took me all summer to wind my way through it, but it was absolutely work reading.

Then there were the rip your heart out and do the tarentella on it books. The books that left me a sobbing, shaking mess. The Ocean at the End of the Lane (it seems impossible that this was not my favorite book this year, and I can't tell you exactly why it isn't, only that the other ones just are. I suppose we'll see which books stick with me over time). And then there was my favorite book of the year, Love Minus Eighty. Holy shit. It's based on a short story that appeared in Asimov's in 2006 called "Bridesicles." It is a gem of a book. It's funny, sad, oddly relatable. I think, ultimately, the reason that I loved it was it was a collision between science-fiction, and well, romance (the non-smutty kind). The writing is rock solid, and I completely over-identified with the character Veronika. It's the kind of book that I can't recommend to everyone (as I am doing with my favorite read thus far in 2014) but I know that there are at least a couple people in my life who will adore it. And I'll love them all the more for it.

2013 Reading

Garment of Shadows (Laurie R. King, Mystery, Mary Russell Series)
Wild Seed (Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Patternmaster Series)
Lady Chatterly's Lover (D.H. Lawerence, Classics, Snoozefest)
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn, Mystery)
Red Shirts (John Scalzi, Science Fiction)
Mind of My Mind (Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Patternmaster Series)
Fledgling (Octavia E. Butler, Horror (?))
Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman, Fantasy, Cried so Hard my Eyes Swelled Up. Seriously)
Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn, Mystery)
Kushiel's Dart (Jacqueline Carey, Fantasy, Romance (?), Oh My God, is it Warm in Here?)
Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel, Historical Fiction)
Mayhem (Sarah Pinborough, Historical Fiction, Horror)
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (David Sedaris, Memoir)
The Silent Wife (S.A. Harrison, Fiction, Forgettable)
A Matter of Blood (Sarah Pinoborough, Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror (?) Dog Faced God's Trilogy)
The Hangman's Daughter (Oliver Potzsch, Historical Fiction)
The Shadow of the Soul (Sarah Pinoborough Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror (?) Dog Faced God's Trilogy)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Suzanne Clark, Fantasy)
Help for the Haunted (John Searles, Fiction, Mystery, Damn you, Kindle)
The Shining Girls (Lauren Beukes, Science Fiction, Holy Shit, Go Buy this Immediately)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood, Science Fiction)
Beautiful Ruins (Jess Walters, Fiction)
Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloane, Fiction Ohmygodsqueeeeee)
V for Vendetta (Alan Moore, Graphic Novel, I Can't Believe I'm Admitting to Never Having Read this Before Now)
Something Missing (Matthew Dicks, Fiction)
Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi, Graphic Novel)
Submergence (J.M. Ledgard, Fiction)
Love Minus Eighty (Will McIntosh, Science Fiction, It's Ok, I Wasn't Using My Heart Anyway)
Vn (Madeline Ashby, Science Fiction)

V-Day

There's a bookstore about a mile and a half from my house that I love. Every pay day Friday since I've moved in, I've made a habit of stopping in and browsing, occasionally picking up the odd book of poems or novel for their book club that I never seem to be able to make it to.

It's a great bookstore. It's locally owned, has a fantastic selection, and they don't seem to mind if you buy something and then curl up on the couch. The staff makes excellent suggestions and write reviews of books that are useful and funny.

I haven't been there in two months. 

The reason I stopped going is because one of the clerks is, well, astoundingly good-looking. Handsome men and I already have a tumultuous relationship (I can't look them in the face and my stutter comes out) but this guy is not only painfully good looking (he has David Tennant as Doctor Who hair!) but he writes the best reviews in the shop (they're funny, pithy, smart) and ohmygod likes amazing books. 

As such, I am utterly incapable of having a normal interaction with him. Once I spit my gum out while talking to him about the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've walked smack into him when he's taking me to find a book. I stammer and blush like a fourteen year old girl trying to ask a boy to homecoming. When he followed me on Twitter, I had to go hide in the storage closet at work to calm down. 

Anyway, about two months ago, I was in the shop doing my normal Friday browsing and I decided to pick up Eleanor & Park. I needed a quick read and it's the book for book club in April. As I was walking up to the counter, past the table of biographies this guy asked me a question out of the blue about the book and I was so startled and nervous that I walked right smack into said biography table, upsetting it (and me) and spilling nearly half the books on the floor. Guiltily, I offered to help clean up, and when he (graciously) said thanks but no (probably envisioning the havoc I would continue to wreak in the store) I turned scarlet, turned tail, paid for the book, and fled. 

***

I spent last Valentine's Day explaining, in tedious, exhausting detail, why a friend of mine was an idiot. 

In my defense, he was being a little bit of a curmudgeon. I had been telling him about a close friend's recent break-up (two days before) and how it had screwed up my Valentine's Day plans (which, let's face it, were to get drunk with a couple lesbians in the city's brewpub) and his response was, well, not cold, but he didn't get why someone might be so broken up over breaking up. 

Oh man. He completely underestimated that I a) am an emotional person b) have a pathological need to be both the smartest person in the room and c) am an narcissist who will never use one word where I can use 1,000 (actual count in the email).

Seriously. He's lucky he didn't get a footnotes.  

I am, retroactively, more than a little embarrassed. 

I still think I was right. 

***

I've gone through a lot of versions of Valentine's Days.

Let's clear the air first. I am 0/29 on being with someone on Valentine's Day. Zero for twenty-nine. That's pretty fucking grim. Never once in the whole series of tempestuous relationships I've had have I ever spent a Valentine's Day with someone. Not. Once. As such, I've had twenty-nine years to figure out the best approach to the holiday. I've tried ignoring it. I've tried staying in and ordering takeaway. I've tried bourbon and Patsy Cline, bourbon and Miles Davis, bourbon and bourbon. I've tried dinner out with friends, I've tried picking other malcontents up at the bar. I've tried workshops at the local feminist sex shop. I've gone to and performed in The Vagina Monologues. 

I've tried everything to get through it, get over it. 

***

"I'm wigging out about Valentine's Day."

My running partner and I are out for a long walk and because of that special bond that forms with someone who has seen you through, well, some gruesome side effects of being an endurance athlete, I confide in him. 

"Oh, Christ. You're turning into one of those people." 

"Oh, shut up." 

He laughs and we change the subject to body image and thigh gap and The Biggest Loser and I'm forced to tell him that he was right about my cracked out conception of my body. He teases me, with less bite than usual and when we get back to my car, I spend the moments waiting for it to warm up in quiet gratitude for our friendship and the ways in which it's grown over the past years. 

***

"Kel, I don't know how you stay so positive about dating." 

The comment comes as something of a surprise and from one of my closest friends. She has the kind of adult life I envy and that seems impossible for someone who isn't even thirty. She's respected at work and good at her job, she has a husband, a house that (at times) feels more like home than my apartment, and a comic book collection in the basement. 

I start laughing. "Really? I always feel like I'm being really negative." 

She waits for a moment. "No. I mean, I think you're being funny and sort of lighthearted about it, but you manage to be so upbeat. I don't know how you do it. It seems so hard." 

I am confounded by her comment. I feel like out of all the aspects of my life, the one about which I am most consistently negative is my dating life. But it's one of those cases where I'm willing to take the compliment so I just say "thanks." 

***

I had really thought that by twenty-nine I would have a better grasp on my personality than I do. 

I'm probably going to be the only person who was amazed by what I am about to say, but when I realized it, I didn't know what to do with myself. 

I have a Pollyanna streak a country mile long. 

A colleague pointed it out to me a few weeks ago. I have a tendency to, even in the face of great adversity, be relentlessly upbeat. Even if the anxiety-fueled part of my brain (which is most of it) is churning away on the number of worst case scenarios, I am outwardly pervasively (perversely?) cheerful. 

Whether it's using humor to deflect my actual feelings or if it's simply my normal personality, I have no idea, but I am apparently the worst person to have around if you want to bitch about what's going on in your life without someone telling you about all the things you have to be grateful for or the myriad ways in which it could be worse, so just buck up already. 

***

I've been listening to Billie Holiday all week. 

I've been turning Spotify onto a private session, pulling up Billie, and putting One for My Baby, One More for the Road on repeat for hours. 

Man, no one can sing about heartbreak the way Billie sings about heartbreak. 

As the week went on, I made plans to spend Friday night in with a bottle of bourbon, Billie Holiday, and Wuthering Heights. That should give you a pretty good indication as to how I feel about love these days. 

Except it doesn't.

For all the Billie Holiday and novels about doomed love and jealousy, I'll wear red to work on Friday. I'll pull out my heart-shaped cookie cutters and make Jammie Dodgers to mail out to people on Monday morning (I've never been great with timing). I'll watch Pride & Prejudice while baking tomorrow night. 

I've spent a lot of years trying to be grouchy about love because it seemed like the thing to do on Valentine's day.  As a result, I've been grouchy on a lot of Valentine's Days. 

But the issue isn't the singleness. It isn't that I'm awkward around men and knock over or run into things. The issue is that, well, I love love. 

It turns out that the Pollyanna streak in me is fucking irrepressible.Put another way, my default is to such an intense level of cheerfulness and everything always works out for the best that even when I think I'm being negative, harsh, or angry I'm still radiating positivity.

This year it's changing how I feel about Valentine's Day. Or rather, it's making me less wigged out. The walk with my running partner shook up the Etch-a-Sketch. Instead of getting angrysad about the fact that I'm going 0/29 this Valentine's Day all I can think about is the people who brought me soup and crackers last week. When my best friend and I have sing-alongs to Dashboard Confessionals at the top of our lunch. How Kerry and I video chatted for hours on Monday about books and science. That my family is alive and healthy and growing and (Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, here comes the Pollyanna streak) there are so many people in my life right now that I consider family. The number of people who love me, and love me deeply, is more than I deserve.  

And, yes, I want the Eros kind of love (you had to know I'd bring back the Greek at some point). I want all of the foolish, ridiculous, top-over-teakettle stuff (the mooning about, the can't-keep-your-hands-off-of-one-another, the late night giggly phone conversations, the exchange of books and movies and music). I want it so badly that sometimes I feel like I might shrivel up and die without it. But for as much as I want it, I'm no longer willing to let it run roughshod over an entire day. 

So, this Valentine's Day, no Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith. No four-page-long emails to men telling them they're idiots (whatever idiotic assertions they might make). There may be bourbon, but instead of Wuthering Heights it just may be accompanied by something I've picked up from the bookstore on my way home. 

Looks like I finally did have that moment of Public Radio insight. 

Verification

"How much breakfast food do you think we've consumed in one another's presence?"

Michelle and I have weekend brunch down to an art. We know when to go out (prior to 10am) in order to get a table without having to wait. We've learned how and when to share food. At this point we could probably order for one another.

It's early-ish (9:30) on a Sunday morning and we're having coffee and Creole inspired brunch and chatting about our next trip to NOLA when, during a comfortable lull in the conversation (the kind that comes with someone who has known you for over a decade), I mentally start to add up all the brunches we've had together since I came back from the North Country. And all the brunches we had when she came to visit me in the North country.

"Oh, God. A Metric ton."

A cinnamon roll the size of Hennepin County gets deposited on our table and she adjusts her answer "Metric tons."

***

I am . . . not great in social situations. Awkward is the word. I am incredibly, embarrassingly awkward in social situations. I don't like being the center of attention under any circumstances. I have been known to go hide in the bathroom when it looks like party games like Celebrity or Charades are immanent so that teams get picked without me. I will happily stay in the kitchen cooking the meal rather than actually interacting with my guests. My favorite way of being with my friends is to all be in the same space reading separate books.

I'm also not great with social cues.

As such, I like independent verification of friendship. Unsolicited invitations to dinner on a weeknight. A text asking if I want to go to the Minnesota History Center. An email saying "Hey, the kids really miss you, when can you come out?"

It's an odd thing, I know, but for a long time the vast majority of my friendships were conducted via text or the internet (thanks, North Country) and I grew to like it when there was something . . . more to those friendships. An offer to go out of the way to pick me up on the way to the cabin. An unexpected delivery of Cafe du Monde to my doorstep when I've been talking about missing New Orleans. A note in the mail. A long videochat on a Saturday night. The kind of stuff that takes just a tiny bit more effort than a "Hey I saw this article and I thought of you" email just knocks me out.

Partially, I suspect, because that's the way I show people they mean something to me. A poem or a pie sent through the mail, a random text on Wednesday after lunch saying "Hey. I'm glad you're a part of my life," handing over my copy of Eleanor & Park immediately after reading it and saying "You're going to love this book and cry."

That's part of it, as I'm sure part of it is just checking to ensure that I've understood the appropriate social cues, and that I haven't misjudge what, if anything, I mean to another person. The larger part is simply social ballast. The knowledge that there are at least some of my relationships that go beyond the casual. People who notice and care when I'm lying in sweat and sickness in the bathroom, who miss me when I'm gone on vacation, who care about me enough to know that I want my birthday to be Great Gatsby themed and what it means when I spend the run-up to Valentine's Day listening exclusively to Billie Holiday. 

***

"Hang on just a sec." 

I pull my angry, disgusted self together for a second and shut my damn mouth. My hair is still wet. My skin is bright pink an a little raw. I've showered four and a half times in the past twelve hours. Michelle and I are at the the breakfast place across the street from my house, a place we've been a million and one times since she started college down the block forever ago. 

"I'll have the breakfast sandwich and home fries."

The waitress takes her menu and turns to me. 

"The largest glass of water and cup of coffee you have. And some oatmeal." As the waitress is walking away I add, under my breath "And possibly some cyanide." 

"It couldn't have been that bad."

"Shell." I take a breath. "He approached oral sex with the same enthusiasm and technique with which he probably approaches a Chipotle burrito." 

Her eyes widen less in shock and more to indicate that our server is standing behind me because she forgot to ask what I wanted on my oatmeal. 

***

"So many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just as a bright haze of loyalty." 

In my copy of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore I've underlined and turned down the page (34) that the above quote came from. We read Penumbra for my bookclub last November and I've rarely geeked out as hard in public as I did when we discussed the book (my bookclub is around 100 people, so raising my hand to take the microphone requires an intense geekout). It was funny and odd and ohmygod preposterously nerdy. It was my second favorite book that I read in 2013 (Love Minus Eighty beat it narrowly because of the sheer holyfuck emotional catharsis of reading it. It beats WHO for ability to make we cry.) 

Returning to the point at hand, I loved every minute of Penumbra because I would never suggest it to Michelle. 

Kindly sit still, I 'm getting there. 

It's a book about geeks and the way we love other people. It's about the kind of fierce loyalty that springs up among people who deeply, passionately, unironically love dorky things, be they D&D or rare books or computers or cryptography. It's about friendship that no longer requires verification. 

I love it because while I can't give it to Michelle to read (too many geek shibboleths and not enough historical drama or evil dictators) it's a book about our friendship. About how my mother's phone number is in her cellphone and we're one another's emergency contacts. About how she knows to pick me up and take me to The Happy Gnome when I'm sad or to widen her eyes and shake her head discreetly when I'm being too loud about an awkward sexual encounter when we're in public together. How she once drove 100 miles to see me while I was in graduate school and we sat outside in chairs on opposite sides of the patio (she in the sun, me in the shade) and read separate books and drank Arnold Palmers without speaking for six hours and at the end of it said "That was really fun."

It's the kind of friendship where I can tell her "I read a book you would hate but it reminds me of us" and describe the whole thing to her anyway and know she won't understand, but will listen anyway. And at the end of the conversation, when eggs and cinnamon rolls and coffee and chicory arrive and I say, a little awkwardly "I want to write a blog about how much I love you, would you mind?" She'll reply "Jesus, it's about time." 

DTNV

I'm lying in a puddle on the bathroom floor when an incessant knocking on the front door wakes me up.

All right, maybe it's not a literal puddle, but my shirt and shorts are soaked through. My brain feels like Jello left in the sun too long, and every single part of my body is aching. I have no idea what time it is or even if it's still Thursday night. I'm shaking and not completely sure if I'm going to be able to sit up, but the knocking at the goddamn door is relentless. My apartment is tiny, but dragging myself to the front door is a nearly Sisyphean task.

"Holy shit." I've barely opened the door and the friend on the other side of it is already nearly shouting. "What the fuck happened to you!?" And then, some what quieter (which is scarier) "Do you need to go to the hospital?"

I can only lean up against the doorjamb and fight back tears.

***

A few years ago, my younger brother got a sort of strange birthday gift. 

I was, for whatever reason, home for his birthday that year.We all got him stuff to do with ropework. It's a little less surprising, I suppose, when you consider that he's a rock climber and general outdoorsman, but it was still an odd set of birthday gifts. 

The reason I remember the gifts is less because of their oddity and more because of a conversation I had at the time. I Skyping with Krista and my younger brother popped into frame to say hello. When they got to talking about his birthday gifts and he excitedly showed her the book she couldn't stop laughing. 

"You are so exactly like your sister." She finally managed to choke out.

"What do you mean?"

"You both immerse yourself in something completely, master it, and then move on to some other hobby. And it's never anything, well, normal."

My younger brother and I both looked bemused. She just kept laughing.

***

I have a low threshold for obsession. 

I know. Yes. Duh. You, Kelly, have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Of course you have a low threshold for obsession. 

I have a low threshold for obsession and a love for . . . the esoteric. I have a slight tendency to get deeply involved with, say, the Smiths? BAMF U.S. Presidents? Early 20th Century ACLU lawyers? It doesn't matter. I frequently get deeply involved in a subject, learn as much as I can about it, and then move on to the next topic. Whether it's a function of natural curiosity or of OCD or of whatever doesn't concern me overmuch. I like being curious and I like learning things, so who cares what the motivation is? 

My latest, um, hobby has been frequency analysis. By hand. 

It started a few months ago when someone suggested Simon Singh's The Code Book to me. He gets into frequency analysis in the beginning chapters and, well, it sort of struck me. I like puzzles and I wanted to see if I could figure out some simple ciphers. 

I wish I could describe what deciphering my first code was like. It was like getting kissed for the first time by a boy you really like. It was like meeting your favorite author. It was like watching the sun rise over Tiger Leaping Gorge. 

It was indescribable. 

Frequency analysis is really hard for me. I don't have a brain for patterns, and fine detail work has never been my thing. 

But I. Love. It. 

I love it. Singh's book is sitting relatively abandoned on my Kindle while I'm watching online courses on cryptography. I started work on a small cipher last week at a Superbowl party. I've been working on frequency analysis on the same letter for a week now, and while I can't quite seem to get it I can't stop trying. It's a silly hobby, a weird thing to get hung up on, especially because the letter is likely to be either some strange, complex nerd shibboleth that I won't understand or a historical document deciphered hundreds of years ago.

It is, empirically, a weird hobby. 

But, weirdness aside, it just knocks me out. I like love  am mildly obsessed with frequency analysis because I'm so bad at it (this is an unusual thing for me). It requires all of my concentration and, like when I go for a run, it takes me completely out of myself. There are no other Kellys in my head, there's no stress about work or what I've had to eat in the course of the day or my love life, just a string of letters that mean something, damn it. 

I've got to know what they mean.

***

I haven't been taking care of myself. 

When you are as health-conscientious as I am, not taking care of yourself doesn't just mean not getting enough sleep. It means not getting enough sleep or exercise or eating as well as you normally do or seeing your friends or doing any of the things you're supposed to do. 

During times like this it's usually my mental health that goes straight to hell. My more minor OCD symptoms flare up. Anxiety spikes. Depression settles in. 

I'm not taking care of myself because there's this huge project that ended up on my lap. It's absorbing and exceedingly difficult and due on a short time line. In conjunction with my normal volunteering, work, personal writing, and friends, it's too much. I should say no, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Because it's interesting. And vital. It's a game-changing, world-saving project. 

Of course I'm going to end up involved in it. 

I work too hard and too long on it. I become obsessed with it and add the hours that I work on it to the hours I spend deciphering whatever I can get my hands and add those hours on top of the work them I'm already doing on because I need the challenge. I need to push myself because I've been sorely lacking in challenges lately. But the tiny, rational part of my brain recognizes that maybe this time it's a little bit too much. I'm not even sleeping my normal (paltry) four hours a night, I'm struggling to eat 1,200 calories a day because I don't want to take time away from my projects to cook, and I'm running primarily on sugar-free Redbull and coffee (at one point in my life this would have been coffee and nicotine so, I suppose, progress). Thankfully, by Wednesday the project should be wrapped.

I've got to finish. 

***

I don't recall most of Thursday. 

I have a pretty normal immune system. I mean, it's not great. It's not terrible, either. I get a few serious colds every year. A sinus infection or two. I have intense allergies to anything soft and adorable, but my immune system does its part. 

I spent the entirety of Thursday lying on the bathroom floor, alternately sweating so much I went through three pairs of pajamas during the course of the day or shivering so badly my teeth were actually chattering.

Have you ever felt your teeth chatter? I have a low threshold for cold (yet I live in the real-life equivalent to Winterfell) so it happens to me probably about once a week during this time of year. It is an unpleasant experience in the best conditions, and these are far from the best. 

I've been pretty (inconveniently) sick during the course of my lifetime. I had something resembling cholera on an overnight train in China. While traveling in Peru I threw up for what felt like 36 hours straight. The day after I turned into my graduate thesis I developed a cold that would turn into bronchitis. 

I have never been sick like this. 

This was couldn't handle drinking water sick. This was dizziness and fatigue and a migraine so bad moving anything hurt. This was an utter refusal to get up off the bathroom floor all day because I couldn't decide if I'd be able to make it the twenty-one steps to my bed without passing out. This was a half a degree temperature away from hospitalization. 

I don't recall most of Thursday. 

What I do recall was stumbling to the door at some time after six in a fug of sweat and germs and godonlyknows to have Gatorade and aspirin and chicken pho broth shoved down my throat. To have my temperature taken and get tucked into bed. To have the last thing I heard before the door clicked shut stick in my exhausted, feverish mind: "Girl, you've gotta start taking better care of yourself." 

When I woke up in sixteen hours later to a broken fever and a body feeling decidedly less volatile than it has in the previous seven days (of course, Holly Hindsight could see that I'd been getting progressively sicker for weeks), I realized that my cryptography notes and project details had been placed in a drawer safely out of sight. 

I left them there. 

For the time being, at least.

I've got to start taking care of myself. 

Dear Chicago

I am hiding in the bathroom at my own party.

One of the nicest, most understanding things someone has ever done for me was a few years ago at a Memorial Day party. My friend Kristin came up to me and pulled me into her bedroom.

"I know," she said "you have a tendency to get overwhelmed at parties and you just leave. I want you to know that if you need to come be by yourself for awhile, you can come sit in here and no one will bother you. You don't have to leave."

It was an incredibly kind gesture, one that indicated how well she knew me and how much she loved me.

Anyway, that was a few years ago. Tonight, Saturday, I'm in the bathroom at my own party, crying so hard I'm running the water so no one hears me.

***

I keep looking at apartments in Chicago. 

My browser window, at any given point in time, has between ten and fifteen tabs open to different apartment hunting websites in different cities. The majority are Chicago and Seattle, with a few token ones open for D.C., San Francisco, and Boston. 

Call it winter madness or a case of the doldrums or whatever the hell you want, but I can't stop thinking about . . . being somewhere else. 

***

My love life is a disaster. 

I'm serious. FEMA needs to be called. Religious people bearing bowls of soup need to stage an intervention. Someone should have a benefit concert because this thing is a certifiable calamity. 

The winter months have always been a little tricky for me. My past relationships have all started November-ish and run through the spring, so it's hard not to feel like I should be with someone. The weather is nasty and the thought of having someone to snuggle up and read with is, well, appealing. I am freezing from the months of October until May, so another body in the house would be deeply appreciated. 

On top of that, nearly everyone I love has gotten married in the winter. And in the face of my parents' thirty-second (thirty-second!) wedding anniversary and the prospect of going to another wedding alone I made some extremely regrettable choices (the kind that make you want to take a bath in lye). 

It's a tricky thing, wanting someone to want you. It almost never shakes out the way you hope.

***

It's the prospect of buying bookshelves that has me looking at apartments in other cities. 

A friend and I make a special trip to Ikea to look at getting me some big girl bookshelves, enough that all of my books will actually fit in my apartment. Despite the fact that I've put the money aside to purchase said bookshelves, when we get there I dither over exactly what I want (as if I didn't already research them online and come in with a shortlist and an estimated number for the square-footage I'd need to comfortably house all my books.) 

"None of these will fit in my car. But I think I've made a decision. Maybe we can come back another time?" 

I have schlepped my goddamn library across the state of Minnesota more times than I can count. Do you have any idea how much space several hundred books take up? A lot. They take up a lot of space. And I've never had enough bookshelves to house all of them. 

Buying shelves just seems like such a commitment. It's a statement that I am going to be in this apartment in this city, in this life for long enough to settle in to something. 

***

I'm in the bathroom crying because of a conversation I overheard.

I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up. Some of the party stragglers were in the other room chatting. Because my apartment is the size of a matchbox, I could hear the conversation they were having. It was about work and what projects they have going on (these are my artistic friends) and I overheared one say to the other "Yeah, I stopped doing pro-bono work, but Kel seriously needed help with this work project, and you know, she's just fantastic so I said yes." He paused "I hope that girl gets everything she wants out of life." 

I didn't hear the rest of the conversation because I'm hiding in the bathroom crying fit to beat the band. 

***

I cut and run. 

I've done it my entire life and in every aspect of my life. Work gets tough? Find a new job. Don't like a city? Move on. Relationship getting to be more work than you anticipated? Dump the guy and move on. 

I talk and write so much about my desire to unhook my safety line of self and fallfallfall for someone. But the truth is that I always have a backup line. There's always a way for me to back out when things start to last for a minute longer than I want them. It's so much easier to get wigged out by commitment and have an extremely regrettable one night stand, or to fall for people I know won't work or I won't like in two month's time than think about why I don't have the kind of relationship where we're celebrating an anniversary. It's. Just. Easier. 

I am living a life I love. I am actually surrounded by people who would do anything for me, who want to see me successful and healthy and happy and who are willing to make actual honest-to-God sacrifices to make those things happen for me. And my response is to think about moving somewhere else. 

That realization hits me with all of the force of a cast-iron skillet to the face on Saturday night, when I overhear the conversation taking place in my living room. That kind of pathological fear of commitment isn't living. It's just suicide by tiny, tiny increments.