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. 

Beauty #8

Hanging above my scale there's a list of five reasons to go for a run, RIGHT NOW,  instead of putting it off for another hour or day. They range from "race results are forever" to the name of a recent paramour with a line drawn through it.

A few months ago aforementioned overnight guest stopped the proceedings to say, off-handedly, "For someone who talks so much about running and cycling, I thought you'd be skinnier."

If I live to be one hundred, I will never, never forget how that made me feel.

A week later, on my way out the door for a run, I tripped and fell down the stairs, spraining my ankle, putting my spring half marathon on hold, and leaving me with nothing to do but to obsessively weigh myself and (equally obsessively) think about what he had said to me.

I thought you'd be skinnier.

***

I started running again, post-injury and post-rehab, three weeks ago.

It's been a pretty mixed bag.

I am, hands down, one of the least naturally athletic people I know. Running doesn't come easily, and I don't often leave runs thinking That went great! I'm also, you know, sort of hard on myself, so I very rarely know that I did well on a run. And it means something to me to know, unequivocally, that I did well at something. I've been working really hard to ramp up the mileage, go for more runs alone, get to a point where I depend a little less on my running partner for motivation and a little more on myself.

My motivation these days seems to be that goddamn sentence.

I thought you'd be skinnier.

More than the sentence itself, it's how I reacted when he said it (and other horrible things) to me. I didn't kick him out of my house. I didn't call him out on his shit. I merely accepted that These are the things men think about when they see you. These are the things they have always thought. These are the things they will always think. Get used to it. 

Looking back on that moment makes me feel weak.

***

Yesterday I ran my first race in years without my running partner. I ran it coming off of an injury and a bad night's sleep and after running without a watch for over a year. I had no idea what my pace was, I couldn't make an educated guess as to splits, but I knew that I had been running a little faster and that I might be able to set a new PR at this race. In the end, I grabbed  a permanent marker, marked my old splits on the inside of my arm and guessed that I was probably running about fifteen seconds/mile faster. I thought that if I pushed myself I might be able to pick up another fifteen seconds a mile. I put those paces in a column next to my old PR and decided that if I crossed the finish line one second ahead of the old one, I would be pumped. If I crossed slower than the old PR, I would just call it a day and be pleased that I finished after coming off of a non-trivial injury a few weeks ago. 

I beat my old PR by four and a half minutes.

This is, for those of you non-runners out there, not an insignificant improvement, especially over a four mile course. 

When I crossed the finish line I was dry-heaving. My iliotibial bands promised to make my life miserable over the next forty-eight hours. I was red-faced and taking huge gulps of air. It was not a photogenic finish (mine never are). But despite the blorchiness of it, I was grinning like an idiot.

***

Here's the secret, I don't run to be skinny.

I mean, I would love it if all the running I do would translate into a more delicate figure, but that ain't going to happen.

I run to be strong.

That's it. That's the reason I run. It's the reason that guy's name is still on my Go for a Run list. He's not there because I want to be as skinny as he (and all the asshats like him) think I should be. He's there to remind me what it felt like to feel weak. He's there to remind me that I never want anyone to make me feel that way again.

There's an impossibly good photo of me from the race finish yesterday. It is (to me, at least) the sexiest photograph I've ever taken (despite, you know, being spandexed up). As of today, it's hanging with the Go for a Run list not because it's an inherently good photograph, but because it reminds me (in the inevitable moments of vulnerability that come with, you know, weighing yourself) of what it felt like to know, even at the cost of dry-heaves and tight iliotibial bands, what it was like to finally feel strong again. 

Beauty #7

The first time I heard the Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings I was on a date.

It wasn't just any date, it was a top-over-tea-kettle kind of a date. A swoony, feelalittlelightheadedwhenhehelpsyououtofthecar kind of date. I had asked him to accompany me to the chamber orchestra and then out for a martini. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to keep my palms from sweating, to say nothing of being able to pay any attention to the concert whatsoever. But he was a chamber music fan and I figured that the concert would keep him engrossed enough that I could spend the evening staring at him (he was just gorgeous) with impunity.

Like I said, top-over-tea-kettle.

Imagine my shock when, forty minutes after the orchestra had taken the stage, I tried to explode into applause only to realize that he had both of my hands in his. I had little recollection of reaching for him, even less of apparently holding my breath throughout the concert, and absolutely none of starting to cry and borrowing his handkerchief.

Five years later the guy is gone, but (and thanks to the SPCO) I can still hear the concert from that night. Despite not having a greek god of a man's hands to hold during it, I find that certain passages from it can still leave me holding my breath.

Beauty #6

I'm limping up the stairs to my apartment.

In the course of the past four hours I've been crushed, stepped on, kicked in the head, and gotten into a shoving match with a 200+ pound guy with a shaved head. I've wrecked a pair of jeans, lost my favorite pair of leather cuffs, and accumulated an impressive collection of sore spots that will definitely turn ugly shades of black and blue by morning. 

I can't remember the last time I felt this happy.

***

I have a beastly temper. 

It doesn't take much to trigger it either. Or rather, it wouldn't take much to trigger it if it weren't under such tight control. I keep it coiled up inside of me in a box that makes the Pandorica look like a dollar store lockbox. 

It's the reality of being an adult, is it not? You assess your personality for assets and liabilities. You amplify your assets and make every attempt to limit your liabilities and square them away as best as possible. Over the years I've learned to deal with my liabilities (depression, anxiety, a hair-trigger temper) pretty productively (usually by channeling them into some sort of grueling endurance event). And it works. It works really, really well for the depression and anxiety. The anger is another issue. I find that after a hard run or long uphill bike ride it's not that I'm not angry. It's that I'm too tired to care. 

So the anger is always there, just below the surface, even though most people wouldn't guess its existence. 

***

Tonight found me in a ton of smudgey black makeup and knee high boots congenially kicking the shit out of a bunch of people (predominately dudes) that I'd never met. 

Have I mentioned that I love punks? 

I cut my teeth on post-hardcore, post-punk bands. I was in my first mosh pit at fourteen and have been in so many that I've lost count. As I've grown older and my musical tastes have diversified, I've been to fewer punk shows, but I still love the wacky sense of community in a good pit. There's angry dancing and elbows and intense physical pain. There's getting kicked in the head by a crowd-surfer. There's shoving matches that look like they might break out into actual fights until the crowd swirls again and people move away from one another. There's also the knowledge that if you slip and fall, someone will be there to pick you up. There's the ability to reach out and grab someone around the waist when the crowd behind you is pushing too hard. There are the hugs that happen when your favorite song comes on and you're standing next to an equally sweaty, beer-drenched person who also happens to love the same song. 

Have I mentioned that I love mosh pits?

There's an elegance and a beauty to the ebb and flow of the people dancing and ricocheting off one another. I can never throw myself into a pit without thinking about Dylan Thomas:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My adult life is unbelievably buttoned-up. It's tailored dresses and briefcases. Budgets and bills. Meeting someone who doesn't necessarily want to stay up until 4am talking existentialism and Michel Foucault and Waiting for Godot but who you can take home and introduce to your family. Adulthood is about learning to quiet anger and frustration, finding ways to accept them as part of your daily existence and ignore them until they go away.

Punk shows aren't like that.

They're a place where you get to be furious and frustrated, where anger isn't a liability, but an asset. You can rage against all the things that piss you off about your life and the world around you without having to turn the volume down. Your anger can be let out of its box and people either won't notice or won't care.

No, it's note quite that they won't care. It's that they'll understand.

It's amazing how once you get the space just let it all out that rage gets transformed into something else--a kind of crazy exuberance, a strange, mad joy that doesn't just belong to you but to the entire pit, the whole show. You're still raging against the dying of the light, but about halfway through the show it also becomes a celebration that you've experienced any light at all.  

Beauty #5

I fell in love with Doctor Who from the first episode.

I adore Doctor Who. And by adore, I mean, you know adore. I wear my "Blink" t-shirt regularly. I can quote whole long soliloquies from the show. I have cried during every Doctor Regeneration I've seen (I am, admittedly, a bit behind on the Classic series). I refuse to watch the Matt Smith Regeneration until I'm in a less emotional space (which will be sometime next January after lunch). When I want to tell someone that I love them I say "I  ♥♥ you like I love Doctor Who."

I know, right?

I started the series with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. And it was pretty good. A little kitschy, but certainly enjoyable. I watched the first season shortly after I finished Battlestar Galactica, which just destroyed me on an emotional level, and a little goofiness was in order.

But, oh, the David Tennant series.

I was bound to love it from the moment he stepped onto screen. David Tennant is brown-eyed, skinny, and Scottish. With great hair. And he was playing a brilliant time-traveler with a superhero complex.

Yeah. Bound to love him.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I thought Russell T. Davies an excellent story-teller. And that you got all of the shining genuis of Steven Moffat without any of the downfalls (a dearth of intelligent female characters, no real consequences in any of his universes, too-clever-by-half syndrome). But what I love(d) most about the David Tennant series was his ability to make me feel something, whether it was goofy joy or anger and holyfuckingshitripmyheartoutofmychest sadness.

It feels weird to be talking about a television show as beautiful in the same series where I'll be talking about Hamlet, Auden, Faure's Requiem Mass (Spoilers, Sweetie). As though comparing a British sci-fi television show with which I have a total fangirl relationship to capital A Art somehow diminishes either of them.

As I've been writing these posts, I've been ruminating on what, for me, moves something from the realm of "loveliness" or "brilliantly crafted" to something beautiful. How is it possible for me to put a four minute segment of Who the same category and a painting by Matisse?

During the course of the week I consume a not insignificant amount of emotional material. Thursday I read a case of a woman whose boyfriend beat her (literally) senseless and then attempted to set her on fire. Then I came home and read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and listened to some Bach cello suites.

This was not an unusual day for me.

When you live on the edge of the bell curve, high dynamic range of emotionalism and consume highly emotional content day in and out, it takes a little more to push you over the edge, to really pack an emotional wallop that sticks with you over the course of time. During any given week a novel, a Lorde song, a comment made in passing may all move me, but it's the things I remember at the end of a few years, that still impact me when I see or hear them again that are allowed to move out of the "impactful" group and into the "beautiful" group.

There were two moments from the David Tennant run on Who that I considered for this post although (again, Spoilers, Sweetie) this won't be his only appearance. They both come from the same season and have, I suppose the same theme, which is 10's love for Rose.

I am a total sucker for a good star-crossed lovers story and how more star-crossed can you be than an un-aging spacetime traveler who falls in love with a human woman? This clip comes from the last four-ish minutes of the episode "Doomsday," which I have only watched in its entirety once (I can't stand to sit through an hour f television when I know the ending is going to murder me emotionally). I have, however, twice in the past four years, used this four minutes as a break glass in case of emotional emergency. When I'm too emotionally exhausted to deal with said emotions, I've cued up these last four minutes and allowed the catharsis of them to help me deal with my own shit. (Full disclosure, I couldn't even watch the whole video for this post because right now it's too much.)

I'm not the only person who has this emotional reaction to Who or even the only person to have this emotional reaction to this episode of Who. A friend of mine refuses to watch it because "it reminds [her] of every horrible, gut-wrenching, heart-shredding breakup" she's ever had.

In the end, isn't that what art, what beauty is supposed to do? To reach inside of us and tear out our guts and show them to us? To squeeze our heart and our lungs until we feel like we might die and remind us this is what it means to be human? 

At least, that's what I've always thought it was supposed to do. That's why, with very little embarrassment, I can leave 10 and Rose here, amid Matisse and Auden and Faure.

Allons-y. 

Beauty #4

This is one of the few pictures taken of me that I, without any reservations, love.

It's me, crossing the Headwaters of the Mississippi up at Itasca for the first time. 

I was an invited third wheel into a nascent relationship. Things were a little awkward (I was along for a weekend trip I didn't know was a weekend trip until much later) until I mentioned that I had never seen the Headwaters of the Mississippi River. The couple took me to the Headwaters and I nearly lost my mind for joy.

I've had a lifelong love affair with the Mississippi River. Whether it was because I read Mark Twain early on or the fact that it links my early years in Wisconsin and my later years in Minnesota. That river has wound its way throughout my entire life and crossing its Headwaters for the first time was one of the most profoundly spiritual moments of my life.

When I wrote in the first post that I fear a sort of Loss of the Creature moments with these entries, this was the one I was thinking about. Unless you've stood at the Headwaters or seen the Mississippi where it empties into the Gulf, it's difficult to describe the beauty and fragility of the river. It's a force onto itself. 

I return the Headwaters once every few years and take off my shoes (always in the fall. I've got to go sometime when the weather is warm) and wade around. I like knowing that however polluted and full of Asian Carp the river is even a hundred miles downstream that this place exists. That there is this one moment in space and time where the Mighty Mississippi is just a stream that you can walk across. 

Beauty #3

I attended one of those snooty college preparatory schools. The kind where an emphasis is put on The Classics. My four years there were basically an agonizing, protracted course in Great Books, Great Poetry. As a result, I made some interesting literary decisions. I memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at sixteen. I read Lolita before I was really old enough to understand what was going on. 

During my first year of college I had a professor who introduced me to poetry that didn't require footnotes or a working Latin and German vocabulary (I'm looking at you, Eliot). She reinvigorated my love of poetry and my desire to one day be a poet myself.

Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac picked up where that professor had left off. I read the poems on the website every day. When a poem strikes me, I cue up the audio and listen to Garrison read it (he really does have a very fine voice).

I found Eleanor Lerman through The Writer's Almanac, through this poem particularly. One of her lines in particular just knocks me out. It simultaneously expresses one of those moments that is so mundane and so odd that you have to stop and think to yourself "Did I slip into a Neil Gaiman novel?"

I'll let you guess what line it was.

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Beauty #2

If I had to pick one word to describe myself it would be exuberant.

I have, admittedly, some emotional connection to Dale Chihuly's work. From the ages of sixteen to eighteen, I spent the majority of my time in the Milwaukee Art Museum (more on this in a later post). I had two favorite pieces there that I would go visit on a bi-weekly basis. The first was a huge abstract expressionist canvas. The second was a glass sculpture by Chihuly.

When my very first boyfriend and I started dating, he (having picked up on my love for Chihuly) took me to an exhibit of his work and it was  . . . remarkable. Of all of the art exhibits I've seen in the course of my life, it was one that stuck with me. I can still remember walking through the rooms marveling that something could both fragile and, well, exuberant.

The excitement I feel over walking into a new art museum (because, let's get real, that's where I spend my vacations) and finding a Chihuly can only be compared to the excitement I feel running into an old friend in an unexpected place. It's an emotional, physical reaction to the sheer loveliness of the thing, and upwelling of joy that I'm too much of a hack to be able to describe.

Beauty #1

When I was getting a degree in Jesus, I chose the most esoteric branch of theology I could uncover.

I went into graduate school knowing that I had one intense theological question. I wanted to understand grace, how we were redeemed, why it had to happen through the crucifixion of a Palestinian Jew.

I also knew that I wanted to be a poet (rereading some of those old poems is embarrassing. Roundly I think switching to narcissistic, unproductive self-probing was a better move). I knew that while I loved (and continue to love) encountering new ideas, using bits of my brain that hadn't had a workout in awhile, I also loved simply being moved by the beauty of something.

During my first Theological Aesthetics class the professor started the course by playing Mary Oliver reading Mary Oliver. He followed it when some of Glen Goldberg's performance of The Goldberg Variations.

I was smitten.

One of the underlying tenets of Theological Aesthetics is that we come from Beauty. We talked extensively about what it meant when we said that God was Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. How Beauty and beauty interact in the world. The role that grace plays in our lives. We also listened to a lot of incredible music (I heard Faure's Requiem mass there for the first time) read some astounding poetry, and looked at heart-meltingly good art.

I loved that class. If I could have simply done a degree in Aesthetics and ignored the whole "I'm not terribly sure about this Jesus-died-for-my-sins" thing I would probably still be a Catholic. They're discussions I miss having, little bits of Roman Catholicism that still catch my eye heart now and again.

One of the times I miss Theological Aesthetics the most is during Lent. It sounds crazy, I know, but have you ever been to a really good service on a Catholic High Holy Day? Ash Wednesday, Tenebrae services, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday are all magnificent when they're done well. So today when I was scrolling through a social media feed and I saw a fellow theologian's comment that every day during Lent he was going to try to post something beautiful (because we come from Beauty), I sat back and my chair and thought "Huh. That's an idea worth stealing."

Because regardless of my feelings about J.C. specifically or God generally, I do believe that we come from Beauty. We live in a universe that is improbable, complex, and stunningly, breath-takingly beautiful. I don't know about everyone else, but I have a tendency to get a little caught up in thebusislatei'vegottagogroceryshoppingwherearethetpsreports that I can forget about it. So (hopefully) once a day during Lent (I can't help it. I feel an upwelling of religiosity this time of year) I'm going to be posting something I find beautiful.

I admit some trepidation in doing this. First because the things I'm sharing are, well, it's hard to explain. The best I can do is that they're not things that are close to my heart. They are my heart. Opening up is always a scary, free-fall-y thing for me. This time it feels particularly intense.

There's also the worry that you'll have a Loss of the Creature experience and won't get what I'm saying. I suppose that's okay. The goal is not to convert everyone to the Cult of Heart-Exploding Reactions to Things but merely to say "these are some things I find beautiful."

I hope you do too.

***

My love for Ryan Adams knows no bounds. 

I debated for awhile about how I should start this series off. I have well documented love affairs with all sorts of things: poetry, space, particle physics, the outdoors.

In the end, music won out. Of course it did. Music and fiction/poetry are the art I consume most often. Of those, music is the one that can impact my mood quickly and profoundly. The wrong song at the start of the day and I'm in a rotten mood for the duration. I'm unable to shake off the feelings it gives me like I can shake off a poem that reminds me of my ex or a book that kept me up the night before. 

So, Ryan Adams. 

Admittedly, part of me loves him because he has such a ridiculous Rock n' Roll past. He's what I think of when I think of a rockstar. He writes these songs with lyrics that just destroy me. He has an album for whatever mood I'm in. 

Usually when songs hit me in the guts, when they become songs that I know I'll listen to endlessly on repeat it's because of the lyrics (I can't help it. I always wanted to be a poet). I like well-arranged songs, and I like interesting melodies, and I'm a total sucker for complex harmonies, but it's the lyrics that usually rope me in. 

That didn't happen with this one. 

The first time I heard "New York, New York" it was the version off of the Gold album, which is very different from this version. It's a rock song, and a damn good one. I liked it instantly, but was completely enamored with the rest of the album, so I let it pass. 

Then I heard this version. 

And it just . . . hit me. The combination of the piano and Ryan's voice and the obvious emotion he feels singing it blew me out of the water. When he sings the lyric "I'm still amazed I didn't lose it/on the roof of the place/when I was drunk and I was thinking of you" I feel like he's writing about every breakup/unrequited crush I've ever had. I loved this version from the opening bars of the song.

Music is funny like that.

Ryan Adams is funny like that.

This song is funny like that. 

Note: Start the video at 1:34

Feelings

Joel Stein is an idiot.

It's a thought I've had many times over the course of the past two years. I had it the day I read the entirety of Patrick Ness's exceptional Chaos Walking trilogy. Again when I was until four in the morning reading Shipbreaker. My motion sickness kicked in when I couldn't put the Birthmarked series down. When I got off the bus and made myself a cup of ginger tea I repeated the mantra to myself.

Joel Stein is an idiot. 

***

Michelle is the only person with whom I actually enjoy going to history museums.

Scratch that. Michelle is the only person with whom I actually enjoy going to museums. 

Full stop. 

We spent the majority of the day today at the Minnesota History Center at an exhibit about Prohibition. It was incredible. It was infinitely better than I could have imagined. I stood in front of the 21st Amendment. I got my picture taken with a banner saying Votes for Women. I got to tell Michelle that William Jennings Bryan not only supported women's suffrage and the temperance movement, but also prosecuted the Scopes trial. We talked about how people we knew in Milwaukee and Northern Wisconsin had known Al Capone (no joke) and benefited directly from his largess.

It was a good day. 

Because we're both nuts for museums we spent part of the day in the Minnesota's Greatest Generation exhibit. I wandered away from her at some point and started reading the story of a Minnesota veteran who was an incredibly talented jazz musician who worked seven days a week at an laundromat and played gigs in the evenings. The story made me think of how difficult that life must have been--balancing what you love with the financial necessity of having to work and before I knew it I was tearing up in the middle of the museum.

Some people cry when they cross the finish line of a race. Others get a little misty at the top of a mountain they've hiked. Church or books or music can set others off.

I cry in museums. 

Lingering in art museums I will inevitably happen upon a piece (intentionally or otherwise) that I find so lovely I dissolve on the spot. Wandering through science museums, I think about the improbability of our own existence or stand in front of an early prototype of Voyager and consider us reaching out through the stars to find intelligent life and I break down. Perusing history museums I imagine receiving a telegram that my brother  or father or boyfriend will never come home as the result of a war and my heart feels like it's breaking. 

Michelle, being the intrepid best friend of sixteen years, is my ideal museum companion because discovering me wiping my eyes in front of a poster about a long-deceased saxophonist is no longer unusual. It's not even cause for comment. 

***

I read The Fault in Our Stars cover to cover, in about three hours. 

Today, in fact. 

I didn't time it well. I started it before the history center and finished it after, so I was already rubbed a little raw. But once I started it I couldn't put it down. It's an emotional lulu of a book, at times infuriating (No sixteen year old talks like that! What seventeen year old read Waiting for Godot?) at times hysterically funny and at times a real emotional sucker-punch. 

It's the second YA novel I've read in 2014 and while it didn't have quite the same Everyoneneedstoreadthisbookimmediately quality that Eleanor & Park had (Oh, haven't you heard me talk about how much I loved that book?) it was still funny, smart, and deeply moving. I was pleased that I read it. And when I closed the book and went to make myself a cup of tea and find some tissues I thought (again):

Joel Stein is an idiot. 

***

No fewer than six acquaintances have sent me the HuffPost article "16 Habits of Highly Sensitive People." 

It's kindly meant, and I usually send back a quick "Thanks! A couple other folks have emailed this to me too!" 

What I really want to say is "Send me something peer-reviewed, with footnotes, and I might take it seriously."

Have I mentioned I'm a real snot when it comes to things that even come remotely near smelling of pop-science? 

You've probably seen the article Or, at least, if you're not a Luddite you've probably come across it in some capacity. Even without the emails, it's shown up in my Facebook newsfeed at least a zillion times in the past week. It was trending on Twitter. A workshop at a conference I attended recently made reference to it. At first I can't tell what's annoying me about the article but apparently because I'm highly sensitive, I'm more annoyed than the rest of the world.  

My feathers, I'll realize eventually, are still a little ruffled by the fallout from one of my recent posts (Note: do not tell men they have the emotional capacity of Peter Pan and that their literary heroes are entitled, passive, egotistic shitheads. Even if both are true). I'm pissed because I've been told a number of times in the past week You're too emotional. You're so sensitive. You have no place commenting on the emotions of men because you have lady feelings. Get on medication because you're clearly bi-polar. 

Here are some things I know about myself. I cry more easily than some people I know, less easily than others. I often cry when thinking about things that have no direct impact on me whatsoever. Books, television (ohmygodthedoomsdayepisodeofwho), music, museums, they all hit me hard, in the emotional solar plexus. I'm wired in such a way that I seem to be more reactive to things, good or bad. It takes me longer to process my emotions, and I'm often not ready to talk about them until weeks later. My default setting is for privacy and pushing people away. 

These things all seem to qualify me as a Highly Sensitive Person. 

***

I try not to be too fussy about the things that people read. 

When I read a book I love, I do have a slight tendency to evangelize about how wonderful and life changing it is, but all in all, I try not to judge people based on what they read. I don't, you know, always succeed (It still find myself flabbergasted when people tell me they haven't read The Great Gatsby) but I make an effort. I think people should try to read omnivorously, but because I believe it both broadens and deepens your relationship with books when you cane make connections across the things you read (if you ever want to see me have an intense geekout ask me about how The Code Book made me understand a throwaway scene in Life After Life). 

All of that said, I love YA books. 

I am an unapologetic reader of YA novels. I stopped reading Moby-Dick so that I could read The Hunger Games. Once, I went to work without sleep so that I could stay up and finish Ender's Game. When I missed Paulo Bacigalupi at the National Book Festival in September I was devastated. 

One of the most frustrating parts of becoming an adult is the feeling that everything about you needs to have a different label slapped on it. You're INTJ, you have anxiety, the results of your StrengthsFinder analysis suggest that you like bran muffins, you're experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder, that's clinical depression talking. The feeling of constant diagnosis (sought or no) is what gets me so hot about the HuffPost article (that and lack of footnotes. Seriously, guys). There are times when a diagnosis is extremely helpful and necessary (OCD, depression, and anxiety). There are other times when it just feels like one more label. One more way in which you are not being the person you're supposed to be. It's not enough to say "you experience the world in a different way, and that's cool" instead you're a Highly Sensitive Person.

One of the reasons I love YA books is their emotional vulnerability. They're nakedly, hugely emotional in a way that so many adult novels aren't. I suspect it's because as a teenager all of your emotions and reactions to things are so intense, and so it resonates well with them. 

And it resonates with me. Not because I'm emotionally stunted or crazy (Fuck you, Joel Stein). I don't throw fits in public. I can count on one hand the number of times I've raised my voice when I've been upset. I don't smash crockery or throw things across the room. It resonates with me because my emotional hard-wiring is just different. I have a lower threshold for stimulation or reaction. When I experience an emotion (particularly a strong one like love or lust or jealousy) it hits me harder than it hits other people, But, honestly, who the fuck cares?  I read and love YA books because they hit me where I live emotionally and because they take me back to a time when having those emotions and expressing them wasn't something that need to be diagnosed. 

At least, that's what I tell myself as I use the last of my tissues to mop up after the last five pages of The Fault in Our Stars.