Games II

"This is some guy's fantasy."

"To be fair, this is about three-quarters of the way to way to one of my fantasies."

Krista and I are half dressed, in my bed, waiting for the air conditioner to catch up with the weather, and she's watching me play The Walking Dead. We've been here for about an hour and made it most of the way through the first episode. This wasn't the plan for the day, but when I got to the airport an hour and a half earlier, Krista got into car and found me crying. She got me back to my apartment, and immediately started asking if I wanted a cup of tea, to talk, a hug, to go for a run. I haven't slept in three or four days and am feeling a bit like a zombie myself.

"Honestly?"

"Yeah, Kels. Honestly. What do you want?"

 "I want to kill some zombies."

"Then let's kill some zombies."

So we're snuggled up in my bed killing zombies. After I drop a particularly vehement string of cuss words (fucking Kenny) she leans in and kisses me on the shoulder.

"I love you, Kels."

"Now we're nearly all of the way into one of my fantasies." I reply, distractedly, before I frantically start smashing buttons. "Oh, shit!"

"Careful, honey, that guy's about to eat your face off."

"Nope." I say, after a particularly gruesome scene involving a hammer and a zombie skull. "Got 'em."

I forgot how therapeutic video games can be. 

"Bad" does not even begin to describe the past few weeks. They've been a potent, emotional catastrafuck cocktail of stress, long days, bad decisions, and failures to communicate. I'm so worried about my coming race that running is only adding to the frustration that I feel (I cried, twice, after runs this week), my attention span is so short that the books I'm reading can't hold my attention, and I have zero emotional energy left over at the end of the day to invest in television. So I've been knocking around the house. I honestly couldn't tell you what I've been doing, sitting and staring at a page or the wall, probably. 

Until I started listening to the Love and Wario podcast. 

You know that feeling when you meet someone and instantly think ohmygodweshouldtotallybefriendsbecauseyou'resocool! If you're an adult with a functioning self-control system, you won't immediately blurt that sentence out, but will go about being friendly and kind and outgoing and the other things adults do to make new friends.

Spoiler alert: I don't have a functioning self-control system.

After binge-listening to the podcasts I immediately messaged one of the hosts and, well, let's just say there were a lot of capital letters and exclamation points. 

(I also maybe said that being a special guest on the podcast was my new life's goal.)

I can be cringe-inducingly fangirlish sometimes. 

So it's sort of a bad news/good news thing. The bad news, of course, is that I might have did come off as a total fucking nutjob. The good news is that I ended up with a long list of games that would run on my ancient laptop as well as a couple that I could play on my phone. 

I forgot how much I love video games. 

I met my first boyfriend at a LAN party. My younger brother and I used to spend hours in the basement testing Age of Empires strategies. I don't think I slept the week after we got Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (the nostalgia I feel for the game is incredible). I once nearly gave my brother a black eye after a particularly tense afternoon of playing first-person shooters. When Diablo II rolled out I created a special character (melee, I typically play ranged) specifically so I could go hack apart demons after stressful days. 

I stopped gaming kind of abruptly when I started dating someone who preferred we spend our time reading Great Books and listening to Bartok (that guy was the fucking worst). He made me feel really guilty about the amount of time I was spending playing games. After we broke up, the guilt remained and I switched to the occasional tabletop game because I could be social and feel less guilty about the time I was spending on games.

I was pretty fucking dumb. 

Don't get me wrong, the eight-twelve hours a day I used to spend on Diablo was probably a little much (between the game and my social anxiety, I was like a proto-Codex). But going cold-turkey, especially for an  pretentious asshat who didn't understand why I might enjoy playing video games (nerd boys for life now) was colossally stupid. Equally stupid was never picking them back up because of some kind of misdirected guilt about what I should be doing with my time. 

The truth, I realize as I choose to save Carly instead of Doug during a particularly tense moment in The Walking Dead, is that video games are as therapeutic and soothing for me as a long run. A good one can take me out of my own head and immerse me in a storyline as easily and completely as a good book. And when Krista reaches over and rubs my back I'm reminded they can be just as social as any of my other hobbies.

Thanks, Love and Wario. 

Grown Up

"I'll tell you what."

"What?"

Krista and I are sitting on my bed, drinking tea and staying up later than either one of us really needs to be up.

"This whole thing has made me so glad I never have to do my 20s over again."

"Really?" She's suspicious. "I've had a lot of fun."

"Really. They were great and crazy and fun, but I knew fuckall about anything. I had no idea what I wanted from jobs, relationships, apartment, cities. My sex life was grotesque." I repeat, louder, over her groan. "Was grotesque. I don't know if it'll be this way at the close of every decade, but I am so glad to be turning 30." I pause. "The Gospel According to Kelly."

"Thanks be to God."

***

"So basically everything is a whole lot of meaningless bullshit."

"You sound like we're back in college. But if you want to drink beer and sit up talking about the existence of God and the futility of our lives and sentient bags of carbon, we'll have to run to the liquor store."

My reaction when friends start existential crisis-ing around me is always one of three things. Best case scenario, I'll make them a cup of tea and listen. Second best case scenario, I'll say "Oh, honey" and give them a list of reputable therapists in the Twin Cities that I've compiled. Third scenario? I'll make fun of them.

That's what I do in this case. A friend of mine, normally the counterweight to my emotional excesses, has been reading a book of New Atheism. It's depressing him. I've spent the last few minutes listening to him talk about the meaninglessness of existence and how we're all wasting our lives eating, fucking, and shitting (three activities I know he enjoys thoroughly while in a better mood).

"C'mon," I say, tying my shoe laces

"What?"

"Put on your shoes. I'm taking you for a run."

"What's the point?"

"At the moment? Spiking your dopamine levels so you enjoy eating, fucking, and shitting again. It's either this or we're going to have sex. Your pick."

He puts on his shoes.

***

"I've been asking myself the same question a lot of people as around our age."

"What's that?"

"What would 18 year old me think if he could see me as I am now?"

"Well?"

"I think he'd be pretty zazzed."

Pause.

"The problem is that my reaction to that kid would probably be to yell 'You know nothing!' and punch him in the face."

"For what it's worth, 18 year old Kelly would probably stage a hunger strike over the life I'm living now." I wait for a moment. "God, she was such a cunt. But. Either way, maybe neither of us is getting it exactly right."

***

"Adulthood is a weird thing."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."  We're in the car with the windows down, covered in a fleece blanket because it's cold, but we like the feeling of the wind washing through the car. "I have this job that I love and that I'm actually kinda good at. I pay my bills on time, take grown-up vacations, juggle social obligations and personal needs. I had a whole fucking therapy session where I complained about all of the things my parents did wrong, cried, and then stopped blaming them."

"Those do sound like things you do as an adult." I can hear the slight, sassy edge in her voice.

"Phhhhhhhbt. But here's the thing. For years, that whole time I was in graduate school, and again while I was living Duluth, I was miserable."

"You were depressed."

"Yes, and I know there are a bunch of chemical reasons why that was happening. I get the brain chemistry, or at least as much as I'm ever going to, but I was heaping extra shit on top of an already enormous shit sandwich." I shiver and pull the covers up higher. "Since I was a teenager, I had this idea of what adulthood was like. It meant that you had to give up all the stuff you loved."

"Kels, I love you, but you are a complete fucking idiot sometimes."

"I know. So now. It's funny. I have ice cream for dinner sometimes. I read comic books on a regular basis, listen to a podcast about video games. I spent an entire hour and a half yesterday looking for a cosplay wig. And do you have any idea how many hours, hours I sit cross-legged on my livingbedroom floor in my underwear and a tank top blogging about comic books and video games and feelings. This is adulthood?"

"This is adulthood, honey. Welcome to it."

"What the fuck?"

Raw

"You are out of your goddamn head."

"No, you're too close to it to read it as a final product."

About twenty minutes into the argument, I realize the absurdity of what we're disagreeing about, and acknowledge (to myself) that I am complete shit at taking compliments. Truthfully?

It takes me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I'm not being teased.

He continues, despite my protests.

"Specifically, you should be writing plays."

"You're sweet, but I'm never going to do that."

"Why not? What you're writing is essentially the same as opening up the fridge and thinking 'Huh. I have all the ingredients to make an excellent Pate de Carnard en Croute.' Not doing something with it is the same as not making the damn duck."

"Yes, well, the difference is that when making a Pate de Carnard en Croute, you're serving up the duck, not your own heart."

***

This was my weekend.

The good part of it anyway.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved comic books. When I was young, I would read X-Men and Captain America when I could get my hands on them. As an adult, it's been Sandman, Watchmen, pretty much anything Brian K. Vaughn has ever written.

I love comics.

I find them soothing, even when they're horrifying.

I have a lot of grown-up reasons for loving comics. I think that because of the interplay between the drawings and the dialogue the storytelling both requires more skill and manages to take you deeper. Comics are allowed to explore darkness in a way that is compelling and evocative. Sometimes (as, in Saga, which every single one of you should read at least the first issue of) they can be, quite simply, stunning.

Frankly, though, the escapism also appeals to me. I like the idea that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, that your life can change dramatically in a flat second, and that you can be different without being wrong. 

So when I came home on Saturday night with my feathers ruffled and pretty close to tears, I pulled a stack of Preacher trade paperbacks out of my backpack, made a pot of tea (despite the humidity), curled up in my red armchair, and read myself to sleep.

***

"Can we hit the reset button on this whole conversation?"

"Um, okay."

"What I should have said was: 'Thank you, I'm flattered.' So if we could just erase my little tirade about Writing and Writers from both of our minds I'd be obliged." 

"Consider it said and unsaid."

"Thanks."

"I still think you need to do it."

"I'm going away now."

***

I am not at all completely embarrassed to admit that The Avengers is one of my favorite movies.

I watch it when I'm home with the flu. I watch it when I'm sad. I watch it and squee. I watch it when I'm at the cabin and it's raining and I want to talk with my younger brother about how much we love Captain America. I watch it the night before major work presentations while I'm painting my nails, and when I can't sleep. 

It may, in fact, be on in the background while I'm writing this entry.  

I love The Avengers. 

The Hulk has never been one of my favorite superheros, and isn't within a stone's throw of my favorite Avenger (Jean Grey and Captain America, for those of you wondering), but I gotta admit that Bruce Banner has my favorite line in the whole movie. In response to Tony Stark's prediction that Banner would be joining the rest of the Avengers, he responds

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

Oh, Dr. Banner. You speak to my heart. 

***

"Your writing utterly smacks of a one woman show. Insight, humor, intimacy, titillation, shock. It'd be great." 

"Not happening." 

"Your definition of a play, as I well know, includes one and maybe two intermissions, multiple acts, even more scenes, and likely includes iambic pentameter. Writing doesn't have to be Shakespeare to be good." 

"It's. Not. Happening."

"It's okay to be scared."

***

I hate feeling exposed. 

It's a strange confession, I suppose, for someone who spends her free time as a memoirist, but it's the truth. It's also the reason that I keep my writing almost exclusively to trivia and write for the same thirty people (all of whom are related to me by blood or might as well be) every week. 

Put another way, I feel the same way about writing as Bruce Banner feels about transforming into the Hulk. 

The people who read my writing, the people with whom I share it, regularly, are ones who have slipped in under my guard. They're the ones who understand that when I'm crawling between the covers of a comic, it's not because I'm trying to avoid them, but because my social tank is already overflowing, and I need to justohmygodbealone.

Extroversion, being outgoing, having a drink with a stranger at a bar, just being able to put myself out there, these things I've never been good at. For goodness sake, I have to actively make a decision whether or not a friend is ragging on me when he suggests that I become a playwright, I'm not going to be the person who writes a one-woman show about her life. The ability to be that exposed an vulnerable, it's just not on my utility belt. 

Except. Well, that's the damndest thing about eating and breathing comics. 

Bane breaks your back. You fall in love. You fuse with a half-angel, half-demon. 

You find something in your utility belt that wasn't there before. 

Repressed

My family is full of Repressed Irish Catholics.

When I was 14 my mother gave me The Talk. It consisted of the following:

"Kel, do you know how to keep from having a baby if you don't want one?"

As a good little Catholic girl, I quickly responded, "Abstinence!"

She nodded and said "Do you know the other ways?"

Uh, yes, theoretically? I was terrified to admit it that I even knew they existed. I whispered my answer. "Birth control?"

She nodded. "I think we're done here," and walked out of the room.

***

At 18 I was a precocious little shit.

The precociousness wouldn't have been as much of a problem if it was accompanied by some self-reflection. But I was my Tea-Party father's nightmare--the kind of kid who was ready to be molded and influenced by whatever I read and any adult who took an interest in me. So when I went to a college that encouraged us to read Millet, Dworkin, and Daly I soaked up their ideas without much reflection. Their opinions and theses became things that I would expound on a great length during dinner parties and classes. I did this not just as a first-year student, but all the way through my academic career.

My senior year in college I was in a Women's Lit class. It was taught by one of my favorite professors and I was confident enough to speak up in class.

By speak up in class, I mean intellectually eviscerate people who disagreed with me.

When the single guy taking the class dropped it because "There are too many man-haters in the room" I didn't take it as an opportunity to reexamine some of my more barbed remarks. I scoffed: "Typical guy."

***

I was 17 when I had my first boyfriend.

I don't doubt that we were really cute. A couple of nerds (Him: Math, music. Me: Sci-Fi, Fantasy. Both of us: LAN parties) who were ohmygodsoawkward together. My father, more accustomed to boys who played sports and were interested in cars wasn't quite sure what I saw in him. My mother kept trying to feed him.

I also don't doubt that we were completely revolting in that way that only sexually unsatisfied teenagers can be. We made out constantly, publicly, and really handsily. And not very well (So much tongue. Jesus). But I  still remember it with the kind of rosy-tinged fondness that accompanies your first love. Probably because it was the first time I realized "Oh. That's what that feels like."

There's one moment in particular that I remember with frightening clarity. Michelle and I had lifted weights after school and there was no part of my body that did not hurt. I went going to his house, ostensibly to watch an anime that he loved. He teased me the whole way downstairs because I had a hard time walking.

Once he got to the couch I, being a real empowered 17 year old, jumped him.

When we surfaced for air 90 minutes later he asked "What the hell was that about?"

I wasn't sure.

***

"What do you think left you more fucked up, Catholicism or radical feminism?"

I'm having a late-night Skype freakout to my old college roommate. The only good thing about her living in Thailand is that we're twelve hours apart and when I'm panicking at, say, 12:36am on a Saturday, she's awake and able to take a phone call.

We've been talking about sex and relationships for a few hours, in the open way you do with a very old friend. The bit of the conversation that leads to the question is about how, in our youngest days as feminists, if a partner asked us to do something (a bit of grooming, perhaps, or the dishes) our response, invariably, was "Fuck off." Do you know why?

Because our partner asked for it.

Trust me, the cuntiness of that mindset is not lost on me as an adult.

But for whatever reason, during my early 20s I thought that someone expressing a sexual or social desire was automatically stepping on my Rights as a Woman. How dare you ask me to shave! Women are supposed to have hair, that's why we haven't evolved to be hairless! (I know.) No I won't do the dishes because women to the lion's share of housework and I don't care that you made dinner! (I know.) You want me to put what, where? Noooooooooope. That's demeaning to the Sisterhood! (Trust me, I know.) I had some intense ideas about sex, relationships, and desire.

It's galling to think of the way I treated the men I met during that period of my life.

(It's also amazing to think that I managed to lose my virginity.)

And yeah, the feminism I was reading certainly outlined (or outright argued) some of those ideas. As intellectual exercises, they were interesting and led me to a lot of fascinating conversations. They're also part of the reason I work so damn hard in women's issues. I am indebted to a lot of those writers.

At the same time, they made me into a bit of a prude.

They wouldn't have done so if I wasn't also another Repressed Irish Catholic in a long line of Repressed Irish Catholics. Given little information on the particulars, sex (theoretically) was mystifying and a little bit scary. As a result of 18 years of Repressed Irish Catholic-ness, there was a right way to have sex (after marriage, on your back, with an openness to children). The little bit I knew about my own sexuality, the bits I knew about desire and what I found desirable, ran counter to that in startling ways that I didn't have the ability to articulate, but ways that I knew were bad, wrong, distasteful.

Mix up all that fear and guilt with a precocious shit of a young woman reading feminist theory by Andrea Dworkin and it's no wonder I had such messed up ideas about the way relationships were supposed to work, or that I was so blisteringly bitchy to men that they remained obsequious and zipped up around me.

It's taken six years to dig out of the hole created by that mindfuck of a cocktail, but if the recent uptick in my late-night dopamine production is any indication, it's been time well-spent. I still have my books of feminist theory. They're on the shelf next to a couple books by Dan Savage and a comic book called Sex Criminals.

I'm much less of a prude than I used to be.

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.

Super

I recently had to retake the Myers-Briggs for a volunteer gig that I'm contemplating. It seemed like an odd thing to have to do, but I like the organization and was willing to take it for them.

I got an INFJ.

I always get an INFJ.

I've taken the Myers-Briggs tons of times and regardless of the mood I'm in, what's happened recently, or the time in my life, I always get an INFJ.

***

As a kid I read comics intermittently, as I could get my hands on them. I loved loved X-Men (Holy Hannah, Jean Grey. How could you be a budding feminist and not love X-Men?). I was a dreamy, not-terribly-down to Earth kind of a kid, apt to lose myself in reading or games that I played alone. 

I grew into an equally dreamy adult. 

I was also a terribly shy, incredibly introverted kid in a family that (like everyone) prized extroversion and the ability to be outgoing under almost any circumstances. My father, who can (and will) start a conversation with anyone could not (and maybe still doesn't entirely) seem to understand my desire to go through life simply being left alone. 

He and my mom had whispered conversations about whether or not I was a loner. 

They also, I suspect, worried about my inclination toward geeky things. Harry Potter and comics, The X-Files and Tolkien. I distinctly remember a look that passed between the two of them after they had taken me to see The Fellowship of the Ring and I enumerated the ways in which the book was different on the car-ride home. 

Retrospectively, I feel for them. They were raising a nerd without being nerds themselves. My adolescence would have been a little bit less rocky for all of us if I had either turned up as a jock or a delinquent rather than the the quiet, bookish, rule-following kid I was. 

Like a lot of social out-casty, nerdy types, I found  a lot of solace in SFF and comics. I liked to fantasize about one day discovering my mutation or finding out I had a superpower. It got me through the tough moments of adolescence. I secretly believed that there was something special about me. That I would be able to save the world because there was something specific about me that would enable me to do things other people couldn't. 

I think I always imagined that I would grow out of my interest in SFF and comics. That when I turned into an adult I'd start reading and watching adult things, like Anna Karenina and Citizen Kane. 

Ha.

***

"Hey!"

I'm on my way out of a fairly long evening. It's been a work networking thing and I've been smiling and chatting with different people all night. It's been incredibly fun evening, my cheeks actually hurt from smiling so much all night, but I am completely exhausted and not looking forward to a snowy, slippery drive home. 

One of the other attendees comes bolting out the door after me. I'm buttoning up my coat and weighing the pros and cons of getting a coffee before I leave when he accosts me.

"Hey!" 

I'm feeling considerably less bubbly than I did when I arrived, but I smile anyway and say "Yes?" 

He looks a little uncomfortable, like he didn't think out this encounter entirely before hailing me. "You're on Twitter under your real name, right? I mean, I'm not following someone else?"

My smile becomes considerably more genuine. "Yup. That's me. But you should really be following my work account to get a better idea of the role we fill in St. Paul."

Before I can tell him our Twitter handle he shakes his head and says. "No, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to ask you" he hesitates. He is obviously nervous and super uncomfortable. "Hey," I tell him "I can guarantee that I've said something weirder in the past 24 hours than whatever you want to say." 

He smiles and blurts out his thoughts "It's just . . . you Tweet so much about being an introvert. How did you do that?"

"Do what?" 

"You were amazing in there. I mean, it was crazy. I would've pegged you as an extrovert."

My smile genuinely grows again. This isn't the first time I've had this conversation, so I have an answer at hand. "I actually get that question a lot in professional settings, so it's not weird for you to ask at all." I can see him relax, and I forge ahead. "I really love the work I do. It's important for me to help other people understand why I'm so passionate about it. That makes it easy to talk about." 

I've given him something like the truth, and while it doesn't entirely satisfy him I can see an escape opening up. I extend my hand, give his a firm shake, and say "It was great to meet you. I'll see you again in a few weeks." 

I slip out the door and get into my car without scraping all the windows. Now that they're covered with snow, the car serves as a mini-sensory deprivation tank.

I just need a minute. 

***

I get a lot of (affectionate, I think) ribbing from my friends about the amount of feelings I have and the intensity of those feelings. At this point, I think we all accept that it's the way I'm hard-wired and there's nothing I can do about it. 

Well, that's not quite right. 

I do spend a lot of time trying to tone things down. I keep a fair amount of my geeky enthusiasm for things under wraps until I know someone well enough to let that side out. I am not an easy person to be friends with because I will rhapsodize on any number of odd things. When there's a project about which I am passionate, I will dig in with everything I've got, sometimes to the detriment of my own health. I am weirdly in touch with my own emotions and hyper-respectful of anyone else's. I am easily frustrated when others don't react as intensely to something or quickly notice when someone is upset or hurting. 

I've said it before, but it merits repeating. Going through the world hard-wired like this makes me feel a little bit like a freak-show. Because I simply feel things so much and am apt to get so passionate about things that I think matter (modern feminism, jazz, ending domestic violence and sexual assault) I suspect  know that it's difficult for other people to relate. 

It can be a surprisingly lonely way to go through the world.

***

I am ohmygodbeyondexcited for the new Captain America movie.  

I love Captain America. 

Oh my God, how could I not? I'm a history geek with a super-hero fetish of course I love Captain America. 

There's also, you know, a little bit of the fantasy in the Steve Rodgers to Captain American transition, that those of us who are less than our best can somehow be transformed into the best possible version of ourselves. 

Maybe I never entirely grew out of wanting to have a superpower. 

***

It turns out that, as far as Myers-Briggs is concerned, INFJ's tend to be sort of rare.

It's something I discover after this last round of personality testing. I actually read the information the well-meaning volunteers give me rather than simply ripping it to pieces and using it for notepaper. I'm a little shocked by what I read, and how accurate a description of my personality it is. Turns out I'm an odd combination of idealism and decisiveness, profoundly introverted with the ability to communicate passionately, intensely (especially via the written word!) about the things that matter to me.

When I finally get out of the car to scrape the windows down, I think about the guy I just talked to inside and his observation that I seem like a pretty extroverted-introvert and I think about my passion for esoterica and the weird intensity I apparently display when I'm talking about something that interests me. I reflect a little on the evening I just spent and how bone-tired I am at the moment and how much good I did by simply talking about something that moves me.

And when I get in the car and hear and advertisement for The Winter Soldier I start to think a lot about superpowers. About how as a little girl and as a teenager, and yes, even as an adult, I want(ed) to have world-saving superpowers.

I feel corny for even thinking it, but I wonder if this weird mash-up of personality traits just maybe might be my own version of a superpower. It's certainly not as cool as telekinesis or the ability to move between dimensions, and I'll never be able to save the whole world from certain destruction, but the ability to get people excited about ending domestic and sexual violence, the capacity to recognize when someone is upset or hurt or furious (especially when they might not recognize it), that's gotta be worth something.

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. 

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. 

Love, Love, Love

For the majority of my life I thought ee cummings was a hack.

I'm not, you know, proud of it, but I did. I've always belonged to the school of "poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of" and cummings, from the time I first read him as a child (which was probably my first mistake) seemed like someone less interested in telling a story and more interested in being clever.

Until recently.  Until Kerry sent me a reading of May I Feel, Said He.

Woah. Good Poetry.

***

"The issue is the lexical gap." 

In almost any other circumstance I would instantly be embarrassed by the fact that this sentence came tumbling out of my mouth. But it's late, I'm among friends, and we've been up and talking for hours. There's a pause in the conversation and someone interjects:

"Have you thought at all about the Greek?"

There's are a lot of things I love about having friends who are theologians. For the record, there are a lot of things I love about having friends with esoteric interests. But theologians are nice because they have access to Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew.

And because they like to drink scotch and talk into the wee hours of the morning. 

This is one of those conversations. As a former theologian and generally sort of curious person, I can sit up and talk academic theology for hours. As someone who spends a not insignificant part of her life wishing she could believe in God in some capacity, I can sit up all night and talk about the soul's desire for union with the Divine, about the emotional parts of faith, about knowing in your gut that there is a God who loves you.

Anyway, the conversation has been winding on for hours, there's been a fair amount of yelling (me, of course), some pounding on the table to make a point, and at times five-minute long breakdowns into laughter. This is precisely the kind of evening I love, the kind of socializing where I feel most at home and most like myself.

As I'm not writing a dissertation or teaching high school students theology, I don't have much to contribute to those bits of the conversation, but eventually things turn to my life and work. I touch on how fulfilling work has been and how much I like where I'm living. We get into writing for awhile and I confess that I feel stuck. I've been doing a lot of writing about Love, and I feel like I'm starting the repeat myself. The issue is, of course, that the writing I want to do about Love isn't necessarily about ohmygodILOVEYOU love. I mean, yeah, I'm single and really fucking angsty about it, so a fair amount is pretty emo, but there are people and things I love and want to write about, but language is failing me. Hence the lexical gap. And the suggestion to look to the Greek. The conversation doesn't linger here too long, we're almost instantly on C.S. Lewis's book The Four Loves, and then to his friendship with Tolkien and then to books we covet. 

But the thought of the Greek keeps me up even after I've ushered everyone out into the snowy evening and ensured that they have means of getting home. 

Yes. I am exactly the kind of person who is kept up at night by lexical gaps and Ancient Greek.

***

I seem to have accidentally memorized the poem [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)]. 

I have, over the course of a few years, attempted to memorize a few poems. They feel very much like prayers and come to me in much the same fashion. When I'm foundering on at work, the first lines of Sonnet XXIX come to mind. When I'm upset about a relationship, I repeat Mary Oliver's "The Uses of Sorrow" to myself under my breath. When I'm frustrated by how the world is GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL and shouting about how the Boomers have just bitched everything for us, I recall the line "Love someone who does not deserve it" from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front." 

Memorizing this poem by ee cummings came as a surprise. 

Shortly after Kerry sent me "May I Feel, Said He" I was helping some friends choose readings for their wedding. As a former poet and poetry enthusiast, I was pulling up a number of love poems. The poems, however, didn't feel much like the couple, so I bookmarked a few of them to enjoy later. But the cummings, for whatever reason, has stuck in my head like the hook from a great pop song. 

i carry your heart with me. (i carry it in my heart)

Over the past weeks I've wanted to use that line more times than I can count. The problem, of course, is that [i carry your heart (i carry it in)] is a LOVE poem. It's a poem you would read at someone's wedding. It's the kind of poem I can imagine tumbling out of my mouth after a long evening in with someone I'm dating (I'm more fun than this makes me sound, I promise.)

But I can't stop thinking about the poem. And I nearly recite the line over the phone as a good friend tells me about a gut-wrenching breakup. I think about it when someone else tells me about a family member diagnosed with a terminal illness. I actually write it in a card I'm sending to a friend going through a rough spot before thinking it might be a little overblown and rewriting the whole damn thing.  

***

Lexical gaps annoy the hell out of me.

Of course they do. I write for a living. I emote for a hobby. I've been told that I feel things more deeply than most people. So I need to know that there are words to express whatever the hell it is that I'm feeling. 

The lexical gap for love annoys me more than most. I need a word that means "We're related and I care about you, so I will always buy you remote controlled robots for Christmas and if you're ever in jail I'll come bail you out." I need another that means "I will spend an entire Sunday helping you Keratin treatment your hair and watching Game of Thrones (probably giving myself cancer in the process). " I need another one that means "Every time I think about you I want you here, now, so we can [censored] and then spend the rest of the night talking about modern literature and feminism and cracking up over terrible puns." 

But I don't have any of those words. I've got a big, ridiculous lexical gap that I can't fill. And as much as I would like those words, as much as I not-so-secretly want to employ the Ancient Greek, it isn't coming back into vogue any time soon. So instead I find myself repeating the simple truth behind all these kinds of love.

I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart.

Turns out cummings wasn't as much of a hack as I thought. 

Snob

“I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body.”

This comment is met by laughter so loud the other people in the bar turn to look at our table. I reflect that it would have been more successful were we not in my favorite bar—a slightly higher end scotch and beer place—a place that blows my budget to hell if I’m not careful.

I take another sip of my drink and roll my eyes. I was entirely serious—we’ve been talking about books and music with the intensity that comes with unwinding at the end of a long week. I’ve just finished shredding a book a few of us have recently read featuring vampires and werewolves and witches. It’s a hot mess of a book, and not even a fun hot mess. It’s in response to this that I get called a snob and retort in kind. Honestly, I’m just happy to be out among friends talking about music and books and art. It’s been a long time, and I’m nearing the shiny-eyed intensity that comes when I’m the exact right amount of stimulated.

The waitress takes advantage of the lull in laughter and talk to come around ask if we want another drink. One of my quicker friends beats me to my order.

“Yes, Kel here will have your least snobbish scotch.”

I give him a hand gesture indicating he’ll get his comeuppance and the table breaks up again.

***

“That’s one of my favorite songs!”

I’m walking down the street with a guy who will break my heart more than once in the coming months. But we don’t know that yet. For now, we’re walking down the street in that lovely, early stage of going top-over-teakettle for someone. When you keep discovering things you have in common and ohyeahmetoo-ing and grinning like a fool and thinking ohmygodthisistheone.

I mean, everyone does that, right?

Our current conversation has touched on everything from a shared interest in trying foie gras (I know a place in the city we should try!) to what we’re reading (Me: Les Mis. Him: Moby Dick.) to our shared love for Bon Iver (to this day hearing that song in the fall makes me really nostalgic for this exact moment in our lives.)

We’re dawdling as we approach my house, slowing our steps and lingering over conversation. Eventually we run out of sidewalk and get to the front door. He puts his hand on my elbow and I turn away from the door, where my hands have been shaking so badly I can’t get the key in the lock. He smiles at me and I honest-to-god almost fall down. Skinny guys with nice smiles always completely undo me and this guy is no exception.

Squeezing my arm he says “I’ve never met a girl with such good taste.” And while he doesn’t kiss me, the extra bit of air he’s just given my already over-inflated ego almost makes up for it.

***

I hate Anna Karenina.

There. I said it. I fucking hate that book. I hate it the way I hate my boobs. I hate it the way I hate listening to voicemail. I hate it so intensely that just seeing it on my bookshelf makes me nearly apoplectic with rage.

Overreaction to a book? Yeah, probably.

I tried three times to read Anna Karenina. Three damn times, and each time took me weeks. The first two times I managed to make it two thirds of the way through the book. You know, the spot where (spoilers!) the titular character throws herself under a train? Also known as the part where the book should just oh my god end already? The third time I slogged through the remaining two hundred pages because, damn it, this was a classic and it was a book I was supposed to enjoy and I wasn’t going to quit.

When I finally finished I was just disgusted with the amount of time I had wasted on the book.

Then I sat down and read the Millennium Trilogy in a weekend.

I lied when I said I finished it because it was a classic.

I finished Anna Karenina for foie gras boy. He loved it.

Shoulda taken that as a sign.

***

I am horrified to remember some of the conversations that I had with this guy. Or by some of the dates we went on. I once spent eighty dollars (Eighty dollars! Also known as a student loan payment, two tanks of gas, or my grocery budget for two weeks) on a picnic for the two of us. A picnic we ate overlooking the Mississippi River (Me: heels, dress. Him: button-down, jacket.) prior to a orchestra concert and definitely prior to him inflicting Bartok on me for several hours while he expounded on music and I fought off yawns.

I’m also deeply embarrassed by a lie I told him. I had picked up the phone (he was traveling) and when he heard my heavy breathing he asked what I was up to and why I sounded so out of breath.

“Uhhhhh.” I stalled. I’ve never been terribly good at dissembling. “Lugging groceries up the stairs,” I said, kicking open the apartment door and dropping a desktop computer on a kitchen table. “I’m making a wild mushroom and Stilton galette this weekend. Then I’ll hang out reading Les Mis.” I pause. "Yes. I know you love it. Yes. I know it's a beautiful book. Yes. That's why I'm reading it."

People looked up from their various cables and pulled headphones off. I made a sushing gesture and hooked up my monitor. There’s just no way I would tell him I was LAN-ing for the weekend. That I would spend the entire weekend drinking coffee, catching a few hours sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, and playing my way through Diablo I&II. When he told me to have a good weekend, we’d go out for wine on Sunday I said “Yup, uh-huh. Sounds good” and quickly hung up the phone, barely trusting the men and women in the room to keep it together. As soon as they saw my phone is off the shouting started.

“Why did we order pizza?!”
“Clark, watch out, I think Lois is starting to see through you!”
“You’re embarrassed to be seen with us!”
“-20 to passive awesomeness, Kels!”

When they’d finished we put our headphones on. As we logged on, it took a few seconds to realize that characters are showing up with names like Marius and Javert.

“Very funny, guys.”

The entire room broke up again.

***

“You know what? Bartok JUST SOUNDS LIKE NOISE, I like Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready, sometimes I’d skip the opera with you so I could go game, and by the way, Les Mis is the single most tedious book I’ve ever encountered. It's nearly as tedious as 70% of our conversations.”

The best-worst conversation of my life ends with me shouting that into a phone and promptly hanging up. I’ve just been told by foie gras that he loves someone else. That he never loved me. That my taste is ohsomuchmore pedestrian than he thought. Also that I'm crazy and unstable. And that he never loved me, did he mention that?

I take Les Mis to the used bookstore and exchange it for Game of Thrones.

***

“What I mean when I say I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body” I say, as we walk to the car, (We had that second round, and a third, and are now on our way out for cheap pizza before we go spend the night playing Cards Against Humanity.) “is that I still like some nice things, scotch and good food, mainly. But I still like cheap pizza and I’ll happily drink a Miller Lite. What I mean is that I don’t care what other people like to read even if it’s stupid vampire fiction. I don’t think that you should read or eat or drink things just to make other people happy.”

The guy who ordered the least snobbish scotch for me reaches for my arm and squeezes it. “Kels, we know.” His eyes sparkle as he leans in and despite the fact that he’s gay, my knees still go a little weak. He says:

“And it’s fine that you never finished Les Mis. The musical is better anyway.”

And despite the fact that he was never going to kiss me, the boost he's given to my self-worth is just as good.

Date a Nerd

Date a nerd.

You owe it to yourself to date a girl who celebrates Ada Lovelace Day. Who has definite opinions on women and STEM, who cares deeply about coded desire in Victorian Literature, who can expound on Civil War Battles, who knows how to use affect/effect correctly.

The girl at trivia who’s wearing a Doctor Who t-shirt and tall boots? Buy her a beer. Ask her about Davies /Tennant vs. Moffat/Smith. Listen to her when she talks about faith and reason in The X-Files. The girl crying in front of the Lincoln Memorial? Pass her a tissue and say “The Second Inaugural has always been my favorite. You?”

Date a nerd.

Take her out for good scotch. She can handle it. When she says she wants Marie and Pierre Curie’s relationship counter with Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Find out what excites her, whether it’s sea turtles or immunology. Take her to see if you can spot the Aurora Borealis. Argue with her about Great American Authors. Argue with her about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Argue with her about jazz.

Argue with her about anything.

Date a nerd because she’s spent years nurturing loves for a hundred odd things. She’ll never love you ironically. Date a nerd because because if you can break through her shyness and social awkwardness she’ll reward you with a thousand odd scraps of culture, things she’s discovered and kept close for years. Date a nerd because the sex will never be boring. Because a girl who has a brain and a vocabulary will always be able to tell you what she wants, and it will usually surprise you.

Date a nerd because girls who won’t push back are boring, and thoughtful verbal sparring is an automatic +10 to intelligence. Date a nerd because smart really is sexy. Because you’ll never be her everything and she’ll never expect you to save her, but she’ll love you when you play ranged to her melee. Date a nerd because she’s a self-rescuing princess and dragon-slayer and dungeonmaster all rolled into one.

Stories

Ford's Theater really gets to me. 

Ford's Theater gets to me in a surprising way, but then again, the entire weekend has been surprising.

It'll take me hours to work out exactly why it gets to me, but when I leave I'm feeling funny--just a little bit off--and I don't quite know why. 

I'm wandering around the museum reading a story I already know and know well. It's the story of John Wilkes Booth's escape from D.C. after he shot President Lincoln. I'm familiar with the details, the places he stopped, his co-conspirators, how has plot changed after the Confederacy's surrender. What surprises me the most, what really worms its way under my skin, isn't Lincoln's assassination. It's not standing in the room where he passed, it's not even reading his second inaugural address later (my favorite piece of non-fiction word-smithing ever) at the Memorial.

Although, Jesus. That was incredible.

It isn't until I'm finished with Ford's Theater and the Lincoln Memorial and am sitting on the steps eating a PB&J that I realize what's upsetting me. It's Booth, unequivocally one of the greatest villains in American history that I feel sorry for. More than that, I feel like I understand Booth. At least, understand a little bit more about him than I expected.

Like I said, the entire weekend has been surprising.

***

A few years ago, on a road trip with a friend from graduate school, I started to tell stories about my childhood. 

I was driving and couldn't see the reaction the woman next to me was having, but I probably could have guessed. 

After about fifteen minutes, she reached across the car, put a hand on my arm and said "Kel, this is the most I've ever head you talk about yourself at one time and you're talking about feelings and what you think about things that aren't God and space and poetry. She paused and then continued. "I really want to affirm you in what you're doing right now. I think it's wonderful." 

When she was finished, I cleared my throat and asked about her thesis. Things were quiet for the next fifty miles. 

***

I spend too much time in my own head.

My graduate school friends would tease me about it. I could, apparently, intellectually eviscerate someone in class without much pause (a fact I attribute less to intelligence and more to writing in books and a good long-term memory) but the second someone said something that hurt or upset me on a personal level I'd get quiet and polite, leave the situation as soon as possible, and then resurface a few weeks later ready to talk.

I don't know how to fix this.

I don't know if it needs to be fixed.

I suspect it does.

***

The first time my friend accuses me (accuses, really, Kelly?) me of  "weirdly in touch with my emotions" I accuse him of being out of his head. 

It strikes me as a stupid thing to say, especially as the conversation that we've just had is about how it takes me the aforementioned two weeks to consider how I feel about, well, whatever. Sure, I can articulate immediate reactions to things "Your argument is specious." "I love jazz!" "Citation needed." "Everyone's I.Q. just dropped ten points based on overhearing that comment." But anything deeper than intellectual disgust or anger or sheer mind-blowing joy takes me longer to sort out. 

He takes a pull from his pint an insists. "Weirdly. In touch. With your emotions." 

It's a recurring fight we'll have for years, the sort of threadbare, comfortable argument that you good-naturedly bicker about without really caring about citations or I.Q. points but just need something comfortable and familiar. 

***

Anyway, I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking over notes and journal entries from the past few days when I turn to something I scribbled sometime in the past twenty-four hours, but I can't particularly remember where.

The problem with creating your own narrative is that it doesn't require peer review.

It sounds like the sort of thing I'd flip on the bedside light to note to myself (sleepily convinced of my own brilliance) or would pause to in front of an exhibit to write. Either way, I don't remember when I put it down, but when I read it I feel like someone has yanked my head back.

If you know anything about the history of the Lincoln Assassination it's that John Wilkes Booth was completely, utterly convinced that people would applaud him for assassinating Lincoln. For God's sake, he saw himself as an American Brutus, going so far as to shout sic semper tyrannis after he shot Lincoln.

Although, taking a moment for brief historical commentary. The suspension of habeas corpus? Dick move, Lincoln.

Back on topic, John Wilkes Booth spent a lot of time in his own head. He constructed an entire narrative in which he was the hero, where the somewhat controversial head of a nation was not merely controversial  but tyrannical.

This is what's sparking the strange feelings of . . . not empathy. Not understanding. Pity, probably (ask me again in a week) for Booth that I'm feeling.

The stories we tell--no, that's not quite right. The stories I tell about myself matter. The things I decide to air out, the places where I air them out, those are all reflections of how I view the world and my place in it. The fact that I can only say some things via text or when the lights are out, that it takes me weeks to be able to say how something impacted me matters. They're real life, edited and portrayed through the filter of a woman who struggles to spend time outside of her own head, who feels things (and feels them deeply) without being able to explain what she's feeling. And it's problematic, because there's no process for peer-review in these stories, the narrative that I construct is just that--the narrative I construct. The based upon a true story version of the world with which I interact every day.

While I'm certainly (I mean, I hope I'm not) engaging in narrative self-deception at the same scale as John Wilkes Booth, the possibility that I feel like I have even this much in common with him is deeply, profoundly disturbing.

At least, I think it is. Ask me in another two weeks and I'll be able to tell you for sure.

Love and Rockets

Might as well turn on some TNG.

It's the thought that runs through my head when my eyes pop open at 11:00 on Friday night. I was asleep, deeply, for about an hour before a nightmare woke me up. It was one of those nightmares that requires me to switch on the bedside lamp and put my feet on the floor. I know this kind of post-nightmare awake. I'm not going to get back to sleep for another hour at least, and I still have that last season of The Next Generation to get through, so I might as well watch an episode or two. I am entirely annoyed because I wanted to get back into the swing of things with this Saturday. I was going to get back into my North Country schedule of working out and errands and a logical, orderly Saturday. Grumbling, I crawl out of bed and head to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I flip over my phone to check the time and realize I have a string of messages from a friend. He's awake, he stayed up to watch a rocket launch, and is jazzed about it. There's also a hilarious not-entirely-subtext of one-upmanship about the messages that's also not, well, exactly unwarranted. He's been on the receiving side of a bunch of gushy messages about how much I love my new city and how happy I am with my life and the magical course my summer has taken. (Should I revisit? Biked 150 miles in two days, Dessa, Gaiman, St. Louis wedding, family vacation, Milwaukee road trip, moving to my favorite city, swimming underneath the stars in Northern Minnesota, pause for breath, phew.) But despite the fact that I've had a remarkable summer and have been extremely ohmygodmylifeissowonderfulandiloveeveryoneandeverythinginit I am still so jealous that he got to see this rocket launch that I could spit. And I don't hesitate to tell him. The conversation (d)evolves over the next few hours and after dwelling briefly on love and how we fall in love differently and if we're to blame for being (a little bit) crazy, we wrap up with Christina Hendricks (seriously) and the next thing I know it's 2:00 am and I never did get around to those Trek episodes

***

Realizing that you've been dead wrong in how you perceive yourself is a completely humiliating experience.

Last fall, right around this time of year, I wrote about how I suspected that I might be part Vulcan. It was partly the fault of graduate school, where I was among the least outwardly emotional people there (unless you dissed Karl Rahner in some capacity). My friends joked that I was a cyborg and that they weren't certain what to do with me.

When I wrote that post last year, it felt right. It felt like "This is what I've going through. This is how I've always been. This is how I will always be."  

It felt true.

But the course of the past twelve months has consisted of slowly pulling my heart out of the glass jar where I was keeping it hidden away (all of which has been, of course, painstakingly documented here) and discovering how to engage with my emotions appropriately again.

And it's been complicated and difficult and blah blah blah. And I absolutely do no trust the person I am these days. And I need permission to be happy. And I largely expect that this whole grand experiment is about a day and a half away from crashing down around my head.

But the fact of the matter is that I was never part Vulcan. Or I was, but it was because I did some kind of crazy mind-meld with an equally crazy bitch who then took over my life for ohidon'tknow FIVE YEARS. That person was never actually me.

Part of the reason I finally realized this is because I've recently(ish) met people who actively turn off their emotions. They choose not to feel things, I suspect in the same way I decided that I was going to turn over the reins to the other woman living in my head for all those years. Granted they don't seem depressed, anxious, or angry, but they do just choose not to feel things.

Sounds a bit sociopath, doesn't it?

***

Inevitably after three hours of talking about love and rockets, I can't get to sleep. I make a second cup of lavender tea and pick up my book about the Victorians and the invention of modern crime (I wonder why I'm an insomniac who's prone to nightmares.) I should, if anything, be even more annoyed at myself for staying up so late, for allowing myself to get drawn into a conversation that would keep me awake and just bitch my Saturday plans. I shouldn't be the type of woman who makes such illogical decisions. 

When I finish my tea and snap off the light, I mentally rearrange my next day. I cast aside the workout in favor of an afternoon nap and hopefully catching up with one of my best friends, who is in town for the day. I leave myself some time for reading and push away any thoughts of how I made the wrong decision. Because for as illogical as it is to toss aside a lovely, planned Saturday morning with lots of crossing things off to-do lists (which would, objectively, be delightful) I think that this is the person I actually want to be, the person I was once, the kind of girl who's kept awake thinking about love and rockets. 

Pretty

My favorite moment in Firefly comes in Heart of Gold.

Don't get me wrong, I think Our Mrs. Reynolds is the best episode, hands down. It's funny, it's smart, it has Christina Hendricks, but my favorite moment in the entire show, the moment I find most relatable, comes during a conversation Kaylee and Wash have.

Kaylee: Everyone's got somebody. Wash, tell me I'm pretty.
Wash: Were I unwed, I would take you in a manly fashion.
Kaylee: 'Cause I'm pretty?
Wash: 'Cause you're pretty.

When I first watched this episode with my roommate Maggie (who introduced me to Firefly) I made her rewind that particular bit of dialogue about five times. It became shorthand for us, the thing I would text here when I was feeling fat or ugly or was on my way to a date and need a confidence booster.

Wash, tell me I'm pretty. 

***

Over the weekend, I had an hour long conversation with a friend about boobs.

I fall into the category of women who are euphemistically called "busty." Busty would be a great word if we still all wore corsets and clothing made to, you know, make the most out of a large chest, but in a world where I can literally spend an entire eight hour day looking for a button down shirt that both buttons up over my chest and doesn't look like I'm wearing a circus tent, I prefer the truth. 

I have enormous boobs. 

***

Back in December, I wrote a post about having beautiful friends and what that does to a woman over time. And it was popular. People liked it and what it said and the way it was written. But, as I do with this blog, when I told a truth, I only told half of it. Here's the rest. 

There is no part of my body I have not thought "Huh I could use (insert cosmetic surgery)" about. 

Teeth Invisaligned? Where can I sign up? Jaw reset so it stop clicking and I actually have a chin? I could do food through a straw for a few weeks. Scars from bike accidents and teenage acne removed? As long as it doesn't leave more scars, yeah, let's go. 

***

While writing this post I have, no fewer than eight times, paused to consider deleting the whole damn thing. Because I'm not trawling for sympathy ohmygodkellyyou'retotallybeautiful. (Ew.) But moreso because I hate admitting that the one thing I'd change about myself is my looks. And it's true. If I had two buttons sitting in front of me, one that would increase my IQ 25% and one that would make me 25% more beautiful, most days I would push the button to make me more beautiful. 

It seems I've already got the attendant shallowness down. 

***

When I was in college, my roommate Krista used to give me advice before I went to parties. 

Just fake it, Kel. 

Fake being comfortable in a large group of people. Fake the ability to talk to strangers. Fake being the chatty, outgoing person that you want to be. Fake confidence and eventually you'll have it. 

It is, as I discovered, pretty standard advice to people going into socially uncomfortable situations or job interviews. Fake confidence for long enough and you'll eventually have it. 

I am really fucking good at faking it. 

I can make offhanded comments Oh, it must be so hard to be around a woman who's bright and beautiful and funny fairly frequently. It seems to work. Or it seems to work in groups. But the second someone pulls out a camera, I instinctively wince and think "I will be untagging this picture on Facebook" or "Oh, God, I need to shift around so no one can see my chins!" Or "Shit, a picture at breakfast? What the hell is the matter with you!? Can't you see I'm not wearing a bra?" On one very memorable occasion, I got into bed with a guy I had been seeing still wearing my bra. Have you ever tried to sleep in an underwire bra? Probably not. You know why? It's really fucking uncomfortable and no woman in her right mind who is dating someone will do it. 

And, somehow, those aren't even my low points. When I'm home alone I only look in the mirror when absolutely necessary. I realized recently that my medicine cabinet is almost always open so that I don't have to look in the mirror until I'm actually ready to do it, until I've . . . I don't know screwed up the courage to do it or something ridiculous. 

Just fake it, Kel.

***

I hate my chest with all of the intensity of a star going super-nova. 

I have very few good reasons for hating it so much. Yeah, a big chest makes buying clothes that fit sort of tricky, but I don't have any back problems. My boobs don't make it difficult to go running or biking or do any of the things that I enjoy doing. I just don't like them because I just don't like them. They're not trying their best. They're not working hard to ensure that we're a package deal. Nope, they're just there, apparently doing their best to undermine all the work my brain and my personality and my intellect are doing.

The thing that frustrates me the most about my boobs, about my body. the thing that makes me (yes, occassionally, so sue me) hate it beyond reason is the fact that the genetic lot I got stuck with is just that: the genetic lot I got stuck with. I'm always going to be five-foot-three-and-three-quarters. My thighs are always going to touch. My hair is always going to look like a madwoman's and I will never, never in my life learn how to flip it seductively. 

I'm comfortable enough with myself intellectually to know that if I don't know something I can always go out and learn it. And, yeah, I'll never understand complex mathematics, but I write well and I can think through arguments, and I have a weird propensity to remember things I've been told in the form of a narrative. I can't raise my IQ, true, but I can fake convincingly enough that I manage to believe it myself. 

Our hour long conversation about boobs isn't really about boobs as much as it's about breast reduction surgery. About the pros and cons of losing two pounds on each side of your chest (believe me, they're mostly pros.) Really, it's about whether or not with a smaller, different, better body part I'll actually be happier.

The answer is, of course, no. My insecurities, my desire to be pretty have very little to do with with my actual component body parts or even the whole that they make up. Just like losing weight, buying new clothes, getting a new hair cut, etc ad nauseam are never going to make me stop saying Wash, tell me I'm pretty.