Air and Space vs. The Northern Lights

Thomas Jefferson, NPR, and The Library of Congress have conspired to make me cry at my desk.

There's a NPR piece on Thomas Jefferson's personal library and its sale to the Untied States. A number of his original books were lost in a fire and the Library of Congress has spent a significant amount of time trying to buy original copies to replace those that were lost. The story is about how there are books that they were unable to find. It's the books that they were unable to find that starts me crying.

A quick look back at my journal during my visit to D.C. in September confirms that I did, in fact, start crying while visiting the exhibit they talk about in the NPR piece, and for the same reason.

Actually, a quick look back at my journal entries from my visit to D.C. confirms that, in fact, I spent very little time there without crying.

Yeesh.

Anyway, the second the reporter starts talking about the exhibit I close my eyes and think about the Library of Congress and how I can remember, distinctly, what it felt like to stand in front of Jefferson's books and Lincoln's speeches.

More than any of the other trips I've taken, that one sticks out in my mind. I don't know if I was drugged out on history and jazz, woozy over actual public transit, or just sleep-deprived and a little loopy, but I never thought I would enjoy traveling alone as much as I did. I was relaxed and happy in a way that I had not anticipated.

I liked the person I was while I was there.

***

I'm spending a lot of time looking at plane tickets. 

I didn't take my normal winter/early spring trip this year and I'm starting to get a little nutty. By a little nutty, I mean that I can't stop thinking about going on a trip. It's a case of working too hard, being too busy, not making enough time for myself. Also of spending most of my vacation days visiting family. 

At this point I don't really care where I end up, as long as its somewhere I haven't been before, and that I get there before September. I love the feeling of waking up in one city and falling asleep in another. It's a little piece of magic that has never gotten old for me. More than that, I love the feeling of exploring a new city, of sitting in its bars listening to music, wandering through its museums, eavesdropping on its public transit. I love imagining my life there and deciding whether or not it's a place I would love to live (Seattle, San Francisco, Boston) or where I would punch someone in the nose two and a half minutes after unpacking my boxes (Portland).  

It's part of the vacation fantasy, isn't it? The idea that you could start over somewhere else and be a better, different version of yourself. 

***

Over the weekend I end up in a discussion about whether or not the Twin Cities are a destination. I'm strongly on the side of "Yeah, maybe for the Midwest" and I'm quickly met by resistance. Of course it's a destination. We have great museums, a fantastic park system, ridiculously good food and beer. Our Cities rival anywhere! 

I won't quibble with any of that, but I still don't think of the Twin Cities as a destination. I've never heard anyone who lives outside of the Midwest say "Hey, let's fly to Minneapolis for the weekend! I hear The Butcher & The Boar is phenomenal!" (Although, seriously, that place might be worth the flight alone.) I love living here and will defend my choice until I'm blue, but the fact is that the things that make me love living here (94% of us live less than six blocks from a park, one of the country's highest literacy rates, one of the healthiest and happiest states in the union) aren't really things that would make you want to visit here. When I think about things and places to visit, I think about mountains and the ocean, the Freedom Trail and Jackson Square. I don't think about the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Prince. 

Perhaps the coasts just have better marketing. 

***

About  three months ago, I was invited (encouraged) to apply for a job in D.C..

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I got the phone call. A friend of a graduate school acquaintance was looking for help getting his nonprofit off the ground and apparently my relentless self-promotion paid off (albeit, a year late), as the grad school acquaintance gave him my contact information.  

I got off the phone giddy. It had just snowed twelve inches only to dip into Polar Vortex #2 and the roads froze so badly that I couldn't leave my house. My skin looked like an alligator wallet. New York and Boston would be just a short flight away! I could go to the Library of Congress whenever I wanted! I could volunteer for my favorite national nonprofit! I could finally cross hiking Shenandoah off my bucket list and ohmygod think of how much closer I'd be to Civil War sites! 

If there's one thing that could make me consider leaving Minnesota, it would be proximity to historical sites. 

The giddiness lasted approximately two and a half minutes, or until Michelle texted to say that she has pulled up and it's time to go to brunch. 

"Oh shit," I realized. "My whole life is here." 

My friends, my family, my professional connections are all in the Midwest. I'm more comfortable in a boat in a pair of paint stained jeans fishing for panfish with my dad than I am at an expensive nonprofit event. I make a pilgrimage to the Mississippi Headwaters every three years to recharge. I love to swim but am petrified of the ocean, and I worship at the altars of Garrison Keillor and F. Scott Fitzgerald. How could I give all that up? 

At the same time, there's the part of me that wonders about Parallel Universe Kelly. The Kelly who lives in a bigger city, who bolted from fly-over country as soon as possible. The Kelly who gets to hear string quartets in the Smithsonian and spend her weekends tramping around historical sites. Surely there's still time for that kind of an adventure, and why not now, while I'm still unattached and my life is still flexible? 

It's the Air and Space Museum vs. The Northern Lights. 

In the end, I called the Executive Director back and said that I was flattered, but this wasn't the right time. It was, I suspect, the right decision, but during the intervening months I haven't been able to stop wondering if I made a mistake. And it's now it's not just the Air and Space Museum vs. The Northern Lights, but the JFK Library, Lower Queen Anne, Shedd Aquarium, and half a dozen other cities I've traveled to and adored. It's all of the places where I've loved the person I was while I was there jostling for their turn to pair off against the Twin Cities.  And I don't know how much longer the Twin Cities is going to reign supreme or even if that should worry me. 

I do know that next year I won't skip my winter trip. 

30x30 #16: See Hamlet Live

When I was eighteen I read Hamlet five times.

It wasn't an early OCD episode. It was a series of assignments for my particularly mad AP English teacher. Hamlet was his favorite play, and he was absolutely convinced it could be used to answer any question the AP test writers could throw at us, so he wanted us to be able to cite it act, scene, and line.

I was a pretty huge smartass as a teenager so I spent a lot of time mouthing off to this particular teacher about how much Shakespeare sucked and how I would never write about Hamlet. I was going to write about The Great Gatsby or Lolita. 

You know how you had that teacher? The one who changed your life, who made you less of a terrible person, the teacher who inspired you to pull up your socks and start acting like an adult? My AP English teacher was that for me. He was the first person who told me that my work was sub-par, that being a smart kid was fine, but it didn't go anywhere if you weren't willing to apply yourself.

For the record, he was yelling at my about my AP Econ grades, not the work I was doing in his class. 

He's the reason I read The Great Gatsby, The Razor's Edge, Lear, Othello, The Dubliners. He gave me Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Maltese Falcon. When I graduated from high school he gave me my copy of Franny and Zooey, with a message written inside that still makes me cry when I read it. 

He's the reason I read Hamlet, the reason I learned one of the soliloquies by heart. I don't doubt that writing about Hamlet and being able to cite it, act, scene, and line was the reason I did so well on the AP Exam. When I left the exam he accosted me in the hallway and asked what I had written about. 

"Hamlet," I groaned, rolling my eyes. "But I still hate Shakespeare."

Over the years, despite what my smart-alecky eighteen year old self asserted, I've realized that I love Shakespeare. More than that, Hamlet has become my favorite play. 

I couldn't possibly tell you how it happened.

For whatever reason, Hamlet kept popping up in my life. I'd be sitting in church trying to pay attention to services and I'd think of Claudius "Pray can I not, though inclination be as sharp as will." In graduate school during a particularly intense fight about sex and ethics I remembered Ophelia's response to Laertes: "Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven." During an emotional move (and its attendant break-up) the man I was seeing kissed me on the forehead and quoted "Doubt thou . . ." before sending me on my way.

Having favorite things shouldn't be problematic. But I'm the girl who can always find a way to turn good things into problems and here's the issue: I can be insufferable when I love something. 

After sitting through Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing with me, Nick has vowed never to see another movie with me. During a live jazz show a friend of mine pinched me so hard she left bruises because I was holding my  breath and she suspected I might pass out. I will nearly always say "The book was better" after seeing any kind of adaptation. As a result, it was no surprise that I ended up having to go to Hamlet alone. 

I went to Hamlet expecting, well, I don't know what. After over ten years of loving this piece of theater so intensely, I didn't think I could be surprised by Hamlet anymore. 

Last summer I wrote about how experiences can be slippery, how despite my best efforts as a writer there are events or books or people who impact me so unexpectedly and deeply that it's impossible to talk about them and their effect. Early in May I wrote about the stories that you don't tell.

I can't write about Hamlet.

I can't write about it because writing about it feels like being back in that AP testing room. I can't write about it because in this case, the play isn't the thing. The important part of seeing Hamlet wasn't seeing how the director staged it or speculating why they did it in period dress when so much Shakespeare seems to be reset in the 1940s. The thing about Hamlet, about seeing it live was less about the play and more about what happened after seeing it,truthfully, what happened after having it in my life for the past eleven years.

A good show, be it Hamlet at the Guthrie or Doomtree at First Ave should leave you shaky, breathless, without words to describe what's just happened, perhaps a little uncertain that your legs will carry you out of the venue. It ought to leave you open and vulnerable in ways you did not anticipate, and fill something inside of you that you didn't realize was empty. Hamlet did all of those things to me. It started doing all those things to me on the first of the five read-throughs all those years ago. Seeing it live surprised me and left me vulnerable in ways that I'm still discovering nearly a month later.

My AP English teacher would be proud. 

Grown Ups Doing Emotions

"So then you're sad for awhile."

There's a certain "Duh, honey" tone to Michelle's voice.

We've taken the paddle boat to the other, less populated end of the lake. When we're out of earshot of the cabin we take off our sundresses and stop paddling and spend the next two hours lounging in the sun in our bathing suits (Seriously, 85 degrees in the Upper Midwest over Memorial Day?) talking obsessively about everything from our favorite Game of Thrones characters (Littlefinger, of course) to our love lives (despite being non-existent, mine still requires thorough dissection). It's a long, lovely morning and the start to a long, lovely weekend that I need badly.

As the emotional equivalent to a supernova (or a black hole, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) it's helpful to me to have people in my life who are more, um, regulated. Who don't have huge responses to things. People who don't cry when a book by their favorite author arrives on their doorstep or forget to breathe while watching Hamlet. It's good for me to be around people who are a little less emotionally strung out.

After we discuss the finer points of Littlefinger's endgame, she starts in on a few things I said the night before, drunk on sleep deprivation and meteor showers, but didn't elaborate on. They're the kinds of things I don't want to talk about, but should. Those revelations you have about yourself that hit with tremendous force and leave you stunned an thoroughly disgusted. Those moments when you realize that you don't actually love your partner anymore and are with them because it's easier than being alone or that you're keeping someone around as your fall-back plan or for your next orgasm or emotional whipping boy. Or whatever your particular emotional pitfall is.

Mine has me so ashamed of myself that I don't want to tell Michelle a thing and when the words come out they're halting and physically painful to stay aloud. When I finally get them out, I follow up with the extenuating circumstances, the Things That Made Me Act This Way. They're bullshit, of course, I know what I'm doing and who it may hurt, but I'm doing it regardless, because it Makes Me Feel Better and it Keeps Me From Being Sad. I'm trying to use depression as an excuse for (knowingly!) behaving badly and she's one of the few people who can call me out on it.

She does.

***

Of all things, I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians. 

It's the passage that follows the passage everyone knows from every Catholic wedding ever (Love is patient, love is kind . . .). Shortly after that there's a part of Paul's letter that is slightly less well-known and has been running through my head all weekend: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." 

Oddly, the reason that it's on my mind has nothing to do with scripture or theology, but because over the weekend I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. 

Called "Harry Potter for grown-ups" (a label that seems to be stuck on every fantasy novel that had the misfortune to be published after Harry Potter) it's an interesting, if slightly maddening book. The plot is a little wonky here and there (I get fussy about the rules of fantasy universes being established early in the book and followed throughout it) and there are moments where the editor should have excised whole paragraphs, but it's a book that triumphed despite itself. 

The reason I liked it so much was because it dealt with the idea of getting your childhood fantasy fulfilled as an adult. Stop for a moment and think about what that would mean. Always wanted to go to Narnia? Poof. There. Been waiting for your telekinetic powers to manifest themselves? Bang. Wake up one morning and turn on the shower with your brain. You get bitten by a radioactive spider, find yourself smack in the middle of Diagon Alley, wake up with a harp in your hands in Rivendale. 

The question the book raises is whether or not it's good for us to want those things as adults, if it's not better to exist in the mundane world and struggle through the small trials and tribulations we have here. Sure, we'll never save Middle Earth from immanent peril, but if we continue to pursue childish fantasies as adults, we'll undoubtedly meet a messy, unfortunate end. Maybe.

That question, so central to the book, is the reason why I managed to overlook its structural failings. I mean, let's get real. I still read comic books and YA lit. I've been known to quote the phrase "We're grown-ups now, we get to decide what that means!" I've built forts alone in my apartment and spent the afternoon reading in them. For all of my cultivated adultness (high heels, jazz, scotch) and I can still summon the enthusiasm of an eight year old. 

I'm starting to wonder if it's healthy. 

***

I'm childish when it comes to big emotions. 

I'm not talking the sugar-coated "childlike wonder" at things that we're not supposed to lose. I'm talking temper tantrums and meltdowns. While I don't actually throw temper tantrums when things aren't going my way and tend to keep my meltdowns private (bourbon, gummi bears) emotionally I don't think I'm far off of those little kids who make you roll your eyes in grocery stores. I justify selfish motives with Adult Logic (I'm susceptible to depression and need to be happy and distracted, we both knew what we were getting into, I didn't make any promises) and call it good, even as I know I'm being selfish. When relationships, regardless of whether or not they're platonic or otherwise, start to have actual issues I cut and run. I pull the fade away or say that I'm opting out of the relationship because I really need to do what's best for me, and for now that's not having any contact with you. It's like when an eight year old gives you the silent treatment, pathetic, childish, and irresponsible coming from an adult woman. 

I act this way in an attempt to keep myself from having to feel any big emotions: shame, regret, anger, sadness, anything that isn't the sheer, manic joy that keeps me buoyed up most days. They're the actions and emotions Michelle calls me out on while we're drifting quietly across the lake. And while I recognize that what I'm doing is harmful not only to me but to my relationships in the long run, I don't think I want to stop doing it. It's time to grow up, and like every other overtired child, I'm stomping my foot and pouting. 

But I don't want to. 

Trouble

"You are trouble."

I'm cutting vegetables at the counter when his arms slide around me and his voice murmurs in my ear. I set my knife on the counter and lean back.

"Oh, really? You want to tell me how, exactly?"

I can feel him smile.

"I'd rather have you show me."

I forget about the vegetables.

***

I was once (somewhat sassily) described as a member of "the pearl-wearing, julep-sipping, classics-reading set" during an argument. 

As I was actually wearing pearls at the time and had just finished haranguing someone about never having read The Great Gatsby, I was forced to acknowledge the truth of the remark. I can be tightly wound. A book I finished recently (Sam Wasson's fabulous Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.) talked a little bit about the same phenomenon, admittedly in a different context. There are the good girls, the buttoned up girls in the world and there are the Holly Golightlys, the girls who can only be described as "trouble." 

My grown-up life, as I've written elsewhere, is remarkably buttoned up.

It's an approach that has served me well, especially while navigating the early years of academia and starting a career. It's not just easier but smarter to be cool and reserved, to keep your head on your shoulders and play according to the good girl rules. And for as much as it feels like [insert feminist rant about the patriarchy winning here] it just makes more sense to follow the rules.

Being a good girl paid off. It continues to pay off.

I hate it.

God, I even detest the phrase unless it's, you know, being used in some sort of transgressive specific context.

I have a naturally hot temper, a (at best) bawdy sense of humor, and an almost pathological need to stir things up.

But regardless of the desire to smart off to someone in a position of authority or the need to tell a dirty joke in mixed company, I manage to stay pretty buttoned up.

I manage to stay good.

***

I lied.

I misbehave.

Quietly. In small ways that either pass unnoticed or are so insignificant they pass without censure. I mosh at punk shows. I use "the c-word" and "the f-bomb" in familiar company frequently and with great relish. My favorite panel in Saga is dirty enough to be considered NSFW.

The tininess of the infractions frustrates me to no end. Because, admittedly, I don't want to be tiny bits of trouble, I want to be (as Sam Wasson puts so marvelously in his book):

Two big handfuls of heat-packing trouble.

I'm an adult. I get that you can't be the person you are with your best friends when you meet new people. I'm not looking for permission to cuss at board meetings or wear a mini-dress to work. I don't intend on making "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails my karaoke song. The problem is that the more time I spend working or meeting new people the more time I'm spending  in my good girl mode. The more time I spend buttoned up and toned down the harder it is misbehave even in the small ways that make me feel like the person I am.

It's been far too long since someone thought I might be trouble. 

Beauty #13

"Am I going to sound weird if I say it's sexy as hell?"

"Kel, when in your writing, when in your life have you ever worried about sounding weird?"

"Point taken. "

One of my favorite feelings in the world is when someone or something gets under your skin. The moment you realize that you've been thinking about a person or a book or a song for hours and that even if you wanted to, you couldn't stop it. Obviously, it's most enjoyable when it's a person who gets under your skin (Correction: it's most enjoyable when it's a person who gets under your skin and you know they feel the same way about you.) but I certainly still appreciate the sensation when it's a song or a book.

Right now, I can't stop thinking about Saga.

Of course I can't stop thinking about Saga. It's exactly the kind of story to catch my attention. It's a love story set in space in the distant future. There's a large puma(ish) cat that can detect when someone is lying and lets its owner know. The spaceships are made out of trees (a change Brian K. Vaughn made because Fiona Staples (*swoon*) hates drawing mechanical things). There's a character named Prince Robot IV who is drawn just like a person except he has a television for a head.

Is this all sounding a little too weirdly grand?

It is. It's a completely mad, brilliant story. Everything that happens is completely improbable and it requires more than a normal comic book suspension of disbelief. But if you allow yourself that suspension of disbelief and crawl into the story (a process made SO much easier by Fiona Staples's art) you wind up with a story that is, well, it could be the plot line to almost any romance novel ever written. Girl meets boy. Girl and boy fall in love. Girl and boy overcome tremendous obstacles to be with one another.

The problem, of course, is that Saga is still in production, and Brian K. Vaughn is second possibly only to Joss Whedon for killing off characters you adore, so I'm certain that at some point I'm going to end up on Nick and Victoria's couch crying like an idiot. 

It'll be worth it. 

There are so many things I adore about this comic. The originality of the characters, the gorgeousness of the artwork, the way Vaughn makes a (let's face it) somewhat tired storyline feel fresh, the fact that ohmygod there are moments when Alana is talking that I feel like he's been poaching things from my brain.

But the best part of the comic (for me) is the relationship between Alana and Marko.

I frequently get sort of frustrated when reading or watching something that depicts couples who have been together for years, or couples who are married, or couples who are anything except just starting out. How often are those couples depicted and either estranged or as madly in love as they were when they first started out?

It's a dichotomy I wouldn't notice if I wasn't surrounded by so many people in long-term relationships (many about to close out their first decade of coupledom) but because my immediate circle of friends is made up primarily of people in long-term relationships (and because we are all ridiculously involved in one another's lives) it's something that stands out to me. None of their relationships are perfect, but they're not miserable either.

It's what I love about Saga, it's what makes Alana and Marko stand out among comic book characters I've encountered over the years. I know how this sounds coming from a self-professed socially awkward nerd, but they have the kind of relationship I want, the kind of relationship I see in the couples I hang out with regularly.

They're a couple that's obviously deeply, crazily in love with one another. They also get pissed at one another, and fight, and fuck and make up and make one another laugh. Their relationship is sexy as hell and not just because of smutty bits (although, Holy Jesus). It's because their relationship is complex and complete. It's a real relationship, drawn and written into comic book form.

It's the kind of relationship, the kind of story that gets under your skin.

Silver Bullet

"Have you tried online dating?"

If you are a single woman over the age of twenty-two (and living in the Upper Midwest, I can't speak to what it's like elsewhere) you will get this question, on average, two hundred times a month.

The people who ask it are always incredibly well meaning, invariably married, and did not meet their spouse through online dating.

Seriously.

I have a number of friends who have met their partners through Match or through OkCupid or through [insert latest dating fad site here] and never once has one of them recommended that I try online dating. Most of them heave huge sighs of relief when they talking about meeting someone and finally getting off of their dating site. "The people were so weird," or "I honestly worried that one of my dates was a serial killer. He had dead fish eyes," or "It just got overwhelming" are sentiments I hear often over dinner.  I've also never met another person using online dating who has encouraged me to join. Usually their responses range from "Meh" to "It's completely undignified" to "It makes me want to jump in the Mississippi."

But I still get the question. Like registering for OkCupid is the goddamn silver bullet to the heart of singleness.

I hate(d) OkCupid, for a lot of reasons (unsolicited package pictures, Nice Guys of OkCupid, grammatical errors in messages), not the least of which was ohmygodthepressure.

I'm normally good under pressure. My work requires me to keep my head under tight deadlines and to be able to compartmentalize whatever emotional nonsense I'm dealing with in order to communicate effectively with stakeholders. I've developed enough positive coping mechanisms that I feel I deal with stress efficiently and well. Most of the time. Yet when it comes to interpersonal relationships, the prospect of meeting new people (specifically meeting people for a first day without any kind of real-world knowledge of them) stresses me out to the point where I can't remember an OkCupid first date that I didn't actively dislike. I prefer to date people I already know socially. I've always been this way. 

In January I made a devil's bargain with myself. I was allowed to quit OkCupid if I made a concerted effort to hang out with different people than the gang from the neighborhood. I've already documented the intense relief that came from that decision and even when I have relapse-y moments, I don't regret it in the slightest. Being the kind of person I am, I decided that I had to have some measurable outcomes, so I settled on an average of one activity a week where I wasn't socializing primarily with the gang from South Minneapolis or was trying a new activity.  

It has been ridiculously fun. 

I have a bookclub I adore (attending it is the high point of my week). I got MPR Loud at the Library. I'm going to Prom over the weekend. I'm sitting on a board of directors for a local nonprofit organization. I saw Hamlet live and went to my first stand-up show. Last Friday, over wine and a long, gossipy evening with some of my girlfriends, I confided that this was my new approach to life. 

"Is the purpose to meet dudes?" 

There was some skepticism that I might be able to meet someone outside of a pre-arranged "meeting someone" kind of situation. I paused. 

"No." 

When women (and maybe men, I can't speak for you all) are asked why we're not seeing anyone there's tremendous pressure to come up with a palatable excuse. I'm working on my career right now, I'm really focused on me, I don't want to limit my options. As if there's some kind of shame to just not looking. As though we need to want to be with someone. I can appreciate the sentiment. There are moments when I really wish I was with someone (making crepes on Saturday morning, when I've finished a good comic and I want to immediately give it to someone I love so they'll be equally enamored with it, on Friday night when I realize there are no batteries in the house) but those moments aren't making me crazy, sad, or disappointed. At least, not for long periods. 

I love and enjoy all of the things I've added into my life recently. Talking about books with other people makes me so excited I have a hard time sleeping. I can comfortably chat with the person sitting next to me at the Guthrie about revenge and betrayal in Shakespeare without feeling like I'm struggling to come up with the next sentence. Getting called on at trivia and being the center of attention doesn't make me want to crawl under a chair and die. While none of these things may be the silver bullet to singleness, I'd rather do any of them than spend one more day on OkCupid. 

Lessons Will be Repeated Until Learned

"The problem is that you want all your relationships to be forever."

Michelle and I are having our weekly check-in. We're at our favorite pho restaurant, and I'm grateful for the spiciness of the jalapenos and Sriracha. They give me a plausible reason for my streaming eyes. 

She gives me that significant best friend look. "Honey, the only person you're allowed to count on forever is me. And that's only because I don't trust you not to poach my life events for your memoir." 

I laugh and start crying again. I'm in what women's magazines call your "mourning period," that really dreadful part of any splitting up when you realize holy shit, I'm never going to see this person again. And, you know, you fall apart. 

And it's fucking awful. 

True to form, I'm having my meltdown about seven months after the fact. It's the reason I spent the last five days in my apartment with the doors closed. I had confided in the people I was going to confide in, aired all the emotional shit, and then tucked in with my emotional reset button and didn't see people again until I felt like I wouldn't be blowing my nose every two minutes.

That's not to say when I emerged I was super-sociable.

***

I've spent most of my weekend with my nose in a book 

I set reading goals. Normally it's simply a number of books that I'd like to read in the course of the year. This year, in addition to wanting to read fifty books I am trying to read significantly more nonfiction than the single book by David Sedaris that I read last year (I don't even know if he counts as nonfiction anymore). I've already made that goal with River of Doubt and The Code Book (both of which I enjoyed tremendously). 

When I say I spent most of the weekend with my nose in a book I mean I spent most of the weekend with my nose in a nonfiction book. I took it to a friend's 30th birthday party (before you get all judgey, it was at a roller rink and I don't rollerskate) and read it while everyone was roller-skating. I spent most of this morning making marginalia and laughing out loud.

The book is Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis. A more correct title would probably be Against Monogamy or Against Teenage Conceptions of Love as an Adult but despite the titular deficiencies, it's been an enjoyable read. 

After getting about a third of the way through I was tempted to ask the person who suggested what the fuck he was thinking. I had to pause and wonder if perhaps I was being baited. I'm a self-professed lover of love and precisely the wrong audience for a polemic against it. 

But, baited or no, I kept reading it in little five to ten page chunks. And this weekend it sucked me in. 

I believe firmly that books can rip you apart and build you into a new, better person. I just also happen to believe that the books that do so tend to be fiction. I have a list (of course I have a list) of books that unmade me and forced me to look at the unsavory bits alongside the good parts and come to terms with the whole complete mess (list available upon request, but regular readers could probably guess at least a few). So my reaction to Against Love is remarkable, because I don't typically react this way to nonfiction.

I don't think that Against Love is quite going to be one of those books that remakes me. But it's a book that reads like a conversation with Michelle. It grabbed me and asked if the way that I've always considered something that seems so basic (love and relationships) was the right way. 

It's been enough of a smack upside the head to keep me absorbed all weekend. 

***

In October of last year a band I love came out with a new album. 

The first single off the album, "Shake," was the perfect song for that period in my life. In many ways, it persists as the perfect song for this period in my life.  

I am not good at just being in the present moment. Whether it's a function of anxiety or modernity or simply my personality, I have a tendency to think a week, a month, twenty years in the future. It's a character trait that makes it hard to settle down into relationships, be they romantic or otherwise. 

I am, as a result of a lot of factors, a difficult person to get to know. As a result, when I finally do make new friends or start dating someone (and actually let them in under the enormous, silly defenses I've erected) I want it to be forever. It seems stupid to be to invest all the emotional energy in someone who's only going to be around for a few months or a few years. There's no possible way that I can get anything worthwhile from someone who isn't going to be in my life forever.

It's a stupid, silly way to think about relationships. The one that ended last fall and that I'm finally dealing with now has years worth of memories attached to it that (even if they're making me kind of weepy these days) I wouldn't sacrifice for anything. I regret that it ended, I regret the way that it ended, but to say that I'm not a better, different person as a result of it would be foolish.

It's the lesson Michelle tries to impart to me over our steaming bowls, it's the lesson Against Love, it's the lesson of The Head & The Heart song, and it's the lesson I feel I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

Things don't have to be forever to be valuable. 

Good God, Lemon

"And then she comes at you, big words, no clothes. What do you do?"

Michelle has to pause the episode of Game of Thrones because I'm cheering so loudly.

"I thought you hated her as a character?" She asks.

"Yes, but I think an exceptional vocabulary should be a turn on for everyone."

"I almost find it hard to believe that you haven't gotten laid in awhile."

I stick out my tongue at her and we start the episode again.

***

There are moments when I can't decide if my life is like an embarrassingly inspiring thirty second Diet Coke spot or the incredibly depressing first twenty minutes of a romantic comedy.

Tonight is one of those nights.

It's been an emotionally exhausting week, with the kind of events that normally leave me twitching in the corner. So tonight when given the option to take a raincheck on my evening plans I gratefully pulled on a soft old sundress and a comfortable cardigan, picked up Chinese from the takeaway down the street, poured myself a large glass of wine, and curled up in front of 30 Rock.

All right, that part doesn't sound so much like an inspiring Diet Coke commercial.

***

I would rather watch television than movies. 

There. I admitted it. I love television. 

I wasn't always like this. For years I poo-pooed T.V.. I would announce, rather hipsterly (and pretentiously as all get-out) that I would rather watch a black and white movie or read a book, that I had little interest in switching off my brain with television. 

God, I was just the worst. 

Fortunately, I have an older brother who is smarter and less of an asshole than I am. While I was in graduate school and having a meltdown over finals he suggested that I walk over to the library and pick up The Wire. 

It was a revelation. 

The Wire was the first time I had ever experienced the addictive power of a television series, the way the storytelling can pull you in and not let you go until you realize that it's 3:00AM and still find yourself wondering Can I maybe fit in another episode? Sleep isn't really *that* important.

The Wire was just the start of my love-affair with television. I've binged on everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I didn't watch most of Joss Whedon's oeuvre until I was twenty-five) to Mad Men to Battlestar Galactica. There are series that were so good I've seen them more than once (I can practically recite season five of Buffy) and shows I never finished because I thought they were idiotic (never, never in my life will anyone convince me to watch Lost). My love for Doctor Who is fangirl obsessive and well-documented.

I never told my older brother thanks for that push in the right direction. 

***

I have two favorite moments from Firefly. 

They're thematically related. I unpacked the first, from the episode "Heart of Gold," a little bit last summer. The second is from the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds" (which is, hands down, one of my all-time favorite Joss Whedon anythings). Captain Tightpants Mal is attempting to explain how he was seduced by a woman (a younger Christina Hendricks, prior to her becoming a sex symbol). 

Mal: But she was naked and all . . . articulate!

When I saw that moment for the first time, Maggie had to pause the episode because I was cheering so loudly. I loved it for the same reason I loved Gendry's line in the recent Game of Thrones episode. Quite simply, the idea that a lady can be sexually attractive not only because, you know, she's stunningly gorgeous but because she's articulate and clever and completely not afraid of being all of those things turns my crank.

Put another way: Brainy's the new sexy.

And how. I mean, at least for me. 

It's the fantasy that's at the heart of most of my television consumption. Many of my favorite characters are bright, beautiful women (Laura Roslin, Irene Adler, Buffy Summers, Echo, Dana Scully) who have their shit together in ways that feel incredibly distant on nights like tonight. And yes, I realize they're television characters, but when Leslie Knope got engaged I cried like an idiot and am not at all only a little chagrined to admit that I felt like maybe there was hope that I would find my Ben someday too (Oh my God, seriously. Skinny. Writes Star Trek fanfic. Works in government. *Swoon*) When 30 Rock went off the air, I honestly believed that there is a way for women to find a balance between a home life and a fulfilling professional career. 

Yes, I know that these things are fiction. And not only are they fiction, they're television. But I don't really see much difference between the stomach swoops I get while reading Pride & Prejudice and the cheering that happens every time a gorgeous character in a SFF show is thunderstruck by a naked women using polysyllabic words. 

Or that's what I tell myself on nights like tonight.

Stories You Tell

My first blog was a My Open Diary in or around the year 1998.

It was your typical teenage angsty crap, and was something I kept up in addition to the extensive journaling I did during that time in my life. As I grew up I moved on (who remembers Live Journal?) to different platforms, eventually landing here in 2007. Adventures in Poor Grammar is my second longest relationship (marginally beat by my love affair with the state of Minnesota). More importantly, I've been writing, and writing for an audience (other angsty teenagers are an audience, and a thoroughly bitchy one at that) for sixteen years. 

Sixteen years. 

Of course there are a number of things I learned in the process. Namely, no one likes to read song lyrics (I still use them anyway), that my poetry was terrible at sixteen and wasn't much better at 28, first drafts will always be shitty, and there's no substitute for the sheer, grinding work of sitting down at the keyboard especially when you don't want to be there.

I've learned that there are the stories you tell.

Mine vary, based on audience. It's the same for everyone. You don't want to tell the story of the one-night stand that made you quit online dating in front of your grandmother and there's just no way you're telling any of the stories of you as a a gawky teenager to your (somewhat) merciless adult friends. 

Then there are the stories that you hold close to you, the moments in your life that were so startling, beautiful, or unreal that you stop and think to yourself "Did that actually happen? Is this really my life?" Those are the stories you pull out at dinner parties, with new friends, and with the occasional indulgence of very old friends. Mine are about a particularly bad sleep-walking episode (Grand Empress of Prussia), watching the sun rise while hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge, and meeting Neil Gaiman. They're the funny, surprising, moving moments in my life, the moments that I've decided mean something and are worth retelling. 

Then there are the stories you don't tell. 

There are the bad ones. The times you failed someone close to you, cheated on an exam, stole a candy bar from the corner store, broke someone's heart just to see if you could. Those are the stories you don't tell because they reflect on you badly, they highlight all of the terrible things you know about yourself. 

There are the other stories you don't tell. They're not inherently either bad or good, they're just the stories you don't tell, the stories you instinctively know to keep to yourself. I have a lot of these. Moments of such extraordinary beauty and grace that the prospect of sharing them with someone feels like it will diminish them. Conversations I've had with other people that are so surprising I'm thinking about them weeks later. Things I've sighed to another person in the dark that still elevate my heart rate and dilate my pupils. 

In my earliest years as a writer, I didn't know how to make the distinction between the things you write about and the things you don't. I wrote about the most deeply, intensely personal things for the sake of having people read them. I mistook over-sharing for honesty, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to sort out the difference between the two. Part of the difficulty in separating the two is that I write to process, to understand and interpret a lot of complex emotions. And because I'm a self-involved person, it can be difficult to write something and not immediately post it and wait for accolades and support to come flooding in. 

A friend of mine one described my public writing persona as a "based-upon-a-true-story literary character." It was an amusing distinction, and one that was not entirely correct, but he was right insofar as the things that I write publicly are rarely all of the truth. They're the stories I tell, the details I choose not to keep private. I make the distinction between public and private writing not, as my extremely young self would think, out of a desire to be disingenuous or to hide something.  I still write to understand complex emotions, and I've lost none of the explicitness that was evident in my early writing, but I've learned that those things are best kept in a private journal (although I am amused by the thought of grandchildren someday discovering the mildly salacious journals of my 20s). There are stories that are best written for one set of eyes, things you say to another person that belong to the two of you, words that are best revisited in private.

They're the stories you retell to yourself. 

May Day

Today was my first complete May Day.

For the past five years I've had to skip part of the festivities. I was studying for my comprehensive exams or living in the North Country and had to leave early in the day to get back and grocery shop and prep for the week ahead. I would try to go, when possible, but often I was missing part of the day.

May Day is a mashup of many of the things I love about Minneapolis. A slow morning with coffee and doughnuts from The Baker's Wife. A long walk through South Minneapolis to the parade route. Getting to see all the weirdos and friends from the neighborhood at the parade. The puppets, the weird mad joy of the thing, and afterward, a long cookout in the backyard, drinking lemonade and talking about important and not important things.

I love May Day.

Especially this year, coming on the heels of a particularly emotionally intense week. I socialized or had a work function every day for seven days straight, leaving my inner introvert screaming bloody murder at me. I saw Hamlet live, fulfilling a dream I've had for the past eleven years (and crossing something off my 30x30 list). I got a promotion and had my ED tell me what a fantastic job she thinks I'm doing. Our new website won a redesign award and the guys who designed it started crying when they talked about how much it meant to them to get to work with us.

Today when I got out of bed, it was like the preceding seven days took my knees out from under me. I was exhausted and my emotional tank was running on fumes. I couldn't even begin to fathom spending the day with people I knew only slightly (May Day festivities are open to more than just my immediate circle of friends) and I seriously began to contemplate texting my apologies, barring the door, and spending the day inside with books and tea and Mozart.

My love for May Day won out and I told myself that I only had to go for the parade. I was allowed to skip the cookout afterward if I was still exhausted.

When I got to the house where we were all meeting to walk over together, I was immediately greeted with Baker's Wife doughnuts. I got to sit down and talk to two people I've known peripherally for awhile now and they were incredibly kind, welcoming, and warm. We walked to the parade and I geeked out over a Pete Seeger puppet and an entire section of the parade devoted to the importance of bees. When the parade was over we walked back and cooked out and when more people I don't know terribly well arrived I managed not only to keep my seat, but enjoy myself and drop something on myself once.

My last May Day was two years ago. I had to leave early to hurry back to the North Country and I remember when I arrived home I burst into tears. It had been an intense weekend in the Cities, and I was pathetically grateful to return to a quiet house where I could snuggle up with tea and books and Bach. My emotional tank was running on fumes and I was as over-stimulated as an introvert can get.

When I was in college the Benedictines made a huge deal out of a couple things. A commitment to hospitality and a dedication to vocation were at the top of their list and influenced me beyond my ability to articulate. They are values I try to emulate in my life as an adult. But the value the Benedictines pounded into my head, the one that I never stop thinking about, is the desire for an authentic community. I think constantly about how we are only as strong as the relationships we're part of and the people we let in past our guard.

When I got home from the festivities today I dropped my bags, took the longest, hottest shower imaginable, and fell into bed in my bathrobe with a warm washcloth over my eyes. My inner introvert was having a panic attack, my emotional tank was completely dry, and I was too tired to move. I couldn't help it. I started to cry.  But this year it was less from over-stimulation and more from the simple realization that I didn't have to leave early. For the first time in years I got to spend the entire day with the people I love most without having to leave early or take a day off work. I am immeasurably lucky to have chosen these people to let in under my guard, and even luckier to finally be back in a place where they're not just friends, but are back to being my community.

Happy May Day.