Midwestern Girl

"Today," I say, pausing to take a bite out of my corndog, "is everything I wanted it to be."

"You really are a Midwestern girl at heart, aren't you?"

"What the hell does that even mean?"

We're walking around the Minnesota State Fair. I'm happily eating a corndog and drinking lemonade, on my way to see the butter sculptures of Princess Kay of the Milky Way. I've been relentlessly, ridiculously cheerful the entire time we've been here, no small feat considering I've spent most of the past week really down.

"For all your love of big coastal cities, for as much as you talk about the West Coast in particular, you're just so damn Midwestern."

"Yeah. Again. What does that mean?"

We detour into the Horticulture building so I can talk to the beekeepers and see if I can identify the queen in the display hives. I charm the beekeepers with equal parts erudite questions about bees and hives and sheer, unadulterated enthusiasm. When we get to the crop art section of the building, I literally clap my hands and jump up and down when we see a picture of Nikola Tesla made out of grain.

"That's what I mean." He answers my question from half an hour earlier.

"Exuberance is the antithesis of Midwestern." I retort.

"Nah. That's not what I mean. I mean, well, a lot of things. Mainly that when you love something, it's unironic and intense and maybe just a little bit weird. And that you love, well, Midwestern things. Corndogs. Lemonade. The sound of Canadian geese migrating. Scott Fitzgerald. Winter."

"I honestly don't know if I've been complimented or insulted, but if you really want to see me love something, we should go get some cheese curds."

We go for cheese curds. We see the Butter Princesses. We talk and laugh and get stopped by an impromptu parade and listen to a marching band arrangement of Fireworks, which prompts a long, funny story. We marvel at the paddlefish in the DNR exhibit. We eventually say goodbye and he heads one way to his moped and I walk to the transit hub and board a bus home, ruminating on something Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby (have I mentioned how it's my favorite book?). Nick Carraway, reflecting on the summer and Gatsby writes:

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

The quote's been rattling around my brain for most of the summer. Time during which my private writing has consisted of me muttering about being discontent, distracted, and dissatisfied. There was nothing concrete to complain about, just a vague sense that settling here in the Twin Cities was, well, settling. That I've never done anything or been anywhere. Prior to now I've never lived anywhere for longer than nine months without actively scheming to go somewhere new and try something different and (trust me, I know how batshit crazy this sounds) spending this much time without being dissatisfied is making me dissatisfied. I spend a lot of time wondering about Gatsby and Nick and Daisy's subtle unadaptabilty to Eastern life, and wonder if I would be the same.

The discontent is something that I only discuss with Kerry. I spend an entire Sunday afternoon spilling my guts about how I'm worried I'm settling and that I've never done anything. My every instinct is to bolt, to pull up my stakes and head off to Boston or Seattle. When my landlord slides my lease for the next year underneath my door, I run for a paper bag. Kerry reminds me, gently (in the way of really lovely friends) that perhaps I've spent too long pulling up my roots, that staying is the uncomfortable, difficult thing for me.

So it's more likely I'll learn something if I do. 

My 20s have been about bolting, about learning to leave bad relationships, bad jobs, bad cities. Those lessons have, literally, saved my life. However, they also made me terrified, well, of things being right. I spent most of my 20s unhappy, either as a result of other people (aforementioned bad relationships) or because I was slowly going crazy. Happiness still feels a bit like walking on ice at the end of March. I'm reasonably certain that it'll support me, but it every creak and groan leaves me anxiously counting the steps until I get to the shoreline. 

I get off my bus a few blocks from the Mississippi and take the long way home, thinking about what, if anything, it means that I loved the Fair unironically. That I look forward to fresh squeezed lemonade and long, lazy summer afternoons on the boat. That I can't wait for autumn and anticipate winter with the kind of eagerness that would horrify my fellow Minnesotans (still a little shell-shocked from three Polar Vortexes).

Maybe it means I would be subtly unsuited for life on the coasts. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything. But for the time being, I'm going to trust that it means that I should be content to be content, and learn to trust the ice under my feet. 

And eat more cheese curds. It definitely means eat more cheese curds. 

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. 

Book Club

"She flirted with the moderator. That's how she got the list."

"I did not! We talked about Neil Gaiman and comics. And science fiction/fantasy." I pause. "And Brian K. Vaughn. Talking isn't always flirting."

"You maintained eye contact with a virtual stranger!"

We're on our way home from book club and I'm getting raked over the coals.

"Listen. It wasn't flirting. It was being articulate and witty and charming. I can do that sometimes. It's like a mutation I haven't learned to control. And besides. If it was flirting, rest assured that's the super power I only use for good."

"Yeah, what good is that?"

"Getting the list of the next year's worth of books ahead of time."

The car groans. Collectively.

I love book club night.

***

I'm thinking a lot about Neil Gaiman these days.

We're reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane for our July book club. It's nearly the one year anniversary of my first reading of it, and it's almost a year since I met Neil Gaiman and told him he saved my life. 

Ufff. I got a little teary just writing that. 

When I say I've been thinking a lot about Neil Gaiman, what I mean is that I've been thinking a lot about The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I have a funny relationship with that book. I've read all of Gaiman's other work (with the exception of Sandman, which I'm just not ready to face again) multiple times. But I haven't been able to pick up Ocean again. It may be that while I was reading it my life was so unsettled and I haven't wanted to revisit that feeling. Maybe I secretly liked it a tiny bit less than his other work. 

Whatever the reason, I never picked it back up. Until it was announced as our book club's July pick and I realized that I couldn't just walk into the room and start enthusing about how wonderful Neil Gaiman is, that I would actually need to say something substantive about the book and the writing. 

I reread it in a day.

***

"I don't think I'll be able to go to book club in July."

"You know your schedule that far in advance? It's May, for godssake."

"No. I mean, I loved Ocean at the End of the Lane so much that I don't think I'd be able to handle a bunch of jerks ripping it apart." He looks in the rear view mirror. "Close your mouth, Kels, you look like a trout." 

I've been surprised to learn that among my immediate circle of friends, a number of them have read at least some Neil Gaiman. Many of them have read Ocean at the End of the Lane, of those who have read Ocean, all of them read it after hearing me gush about it all last summer. 

All of them kept it a secret.

They had varying reasons for keeping it a secret. Some of them didn't like the book. At all. And they didn't want to go thirteen rounds with me over why they didn't like it or listen to me try to convince them they should. Some of them didn't finish it and didn't want a scolding. But by far the biggest number of friends read it and loved it.

They still kept it a secret.

Anyone who has sat next to me during Joss Whedon's  Much Ado About Nothing or taken me to historical site of some personal meaning (sorry for making you tromp through all those cemeteries) knows that I have a hard time keeping it together around things that I love. I have actually jumped up and down and clapped my hands. (Do not do this standing in front of William Tecumseh Sherman's grave. Trust me on this one) On more than one occasion, I've kissed someone out of sheer emotional overflow. Let's call those reactions my baseline enthusiasm. Now multiply that baseline enthusiasm by Neil Gaiman. 

Yeah. Okay. 

***

I have a hard time sleeping on book club nights.

Obviously, it's stimulating for an introvert to be in a room full of a hundred people. It's even more stimulating to ask for the mic and to get into conversations with strangers. By the time I get home I'm usually vibrating and a little bit wild. 

It's not my inner introvert freaking out. 

There are few things in life that I enjoy, that I love as much as talking to people about books. Don't get me wrong, intellectual sparring in any capacity winds me up. Here's the thing, though, books have been my lifelong companions, my way of escaping when things become unpleasant. They've taught me the sheet music of stars and the history of modern medicine. I've cried over the deaths of hundreds of characters and still sigh a little bit when Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennett. 

I'm shy in big groups of people. I have to pep talk myself before dinner parties where I don't know a lot of people. Sometimes when I'm meeting new people or hanging out with people I haven't seen in a long time, I have to go hide in the bathroom for a few minutes because my hands are shaking. And, sure, these things might make me a better candidate for the Mars mission, but they aren't helpful in my real life. 

But ask me about Seamus Heaney? Solicit my opinion on the Sandman Slim series? Question why I think adults can read YA without being embarrassed by it? I forget that I'm shy and (more than) a little bit awkward. I'll have an animated, articulate conversation with you without stuttering once. I love talking about books with strangers and I'll happily chat up someone who asks me about the book I'm reading at a bar or while I'm perusing the shelves at Magers and Quinn. 

As a result, it stings a little when I realize that the same intensity that makes me articulate and funny at my book club is what keeps people from talking about Ocean at the End of the Lane with me. Talking about books makes me feel like the best possible version of myself and I want to be that person around the people who have seen me sick, tired, and crying. I want to share the books (and music and television) I love with them and not have them have to worry that I'm simply going to steamroller over them with excitement and delight. 

I want to use my super powers for good. 

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. 

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. 

Regency

It will not stop raining here.

The weather, combined with the fact that my landlords have turned the heat off despite the temperature tanking, combined with the fact that I haven't actually had a hug in awhile, combined with the fact that I've been, uh, tense recently, combined with a zillion other things had me trawling the internet for good romance novel suggestions on Sunday afternoon.

Here's the thing. Ms. Proponent-of-Birth-Control, advocate for the Women's Economic Security Act, gets-into-weekly-fights-about-pay-equality has a secret shame.

I love Regency romance novels.

I'm completely unembarrassed by the fact that I occasionally indulge in a trashy book (this is why Kindles were invented, isn't it?). It's the Regency thing (and, ohmygod, the titles) that I find humiliating.

When it comes to romance novels I have intense author loyalty. Unfortunately, my favorite author seems to either be invoking radio silence while finishing a new book or has stopped writing (a thought that actually terrifies me), so I turned to the internet for suggestions. Given my intense mortification over the Regency thing, I read some reviews and decided on a contemporary romance.

Huge mistake.

Let's get past the fact that there were grammatical errors in the book (Yes, my blog is riddled with typos and incorrect grammar, but I'm not a published author. With an editor.) and the fact that the story was totally fucking preposterous (I'm not expecting an Octavia Butler level of plot development) and jump straight into the fact that the romance part of the gorram romance novel was completely unexciting, leaving me to wonder:

Is there anything more disappointing than a disappointing romance novel?

***

I've never received flowers from a boyfriend.  

In fact, the only man in my life to send me flowers has been my father. For years my mother would ask about the men she (with her crazy sixth sense) knew I was seeing. What we did, who paid, if they ever did anything nice for me, when was the last time one of them bought me flowers. 

She could hear me rolling my eyes over the phone. "Ma. I don't need that stuff." 

I could hear her rolling her eyes over the phone. "Yes, honey, but some day you're going to want it."

For most of my 20s I thought she meant that I was going to want those things because I was lady. As a lady, it was pre-determined that I would want my partner to send me flowers and give me Tiffany's. Retrospectively, of course, what she meant had less to do with the trappings and more to do with the idea that it's nice to see someone put forth a little effort, a lesson I only seem to have learned after never having had a date offer to pick up a check. A lesson that sunk in when I was laid up with strep and asked the guy I was dating if he could bring me some soup and he said "Sure, if I'm not too drunk. I'm going to go play poker first." A lesson that finally stayed with me after a paramour announced "Yeah, I know you didn't, but I did and I'm bored so I'm going to bed."

Is there anything more galling than having to admit, years down the line, that your mother was right?

***

As I said, Sunday's romance novel was disappointing for a lot of reasons. The part that gets me the most though is that the whole thing reads too much like an OkCupid date where you both know what the score is before you even leave the house.

I love Regency romance novels because, yeah, the smutty bits are there, but there's a bit of a build-up to it. It's one of the things I love about the constraints of setting the novels in the Regency period. Things are put on a slower timetable. There's lots of character development and because authors are taking cues from Idon'tknowJaneAusten there's lots of verbal sparring and sexy one-upsmanship. Yeah, they're not flowers or paying for a date at Cafe Barbette, but they're the sorts of things that make me swoon (among other things). The characters are putting in a bit of effort prior to taking a tumble. 

Yes, the fact that I read the novels, the fact that I find them so enjoyable is slightly mortifying, but dating can be unromantic and disappointing enough. I don't want to relive it in my romance novels.  So you'll forgive me, but I'm going to go try my luck with The Viscount Who Loved Me. 

Seriously. These titles. 

Patterns

I like books as much, and often times more, than I like people.

It's one of those facts that I've known about myself for more or less my entire life. As a middle school student, I would read at recess. I used to climb up onto the side of the chimney at my childhood home because there was a ledge there large enough to curl up on, hide from my parents, and fall into a book. As a college and graduate student, I still made time to read outside of class because I knew it would help me preserve the vestiges of my sanity. So of course, I've been geekily into all the "Girls Who Read" things floating about the internet lately.

It's not that I don't like people. Of course I do. But people are, frankly, terrifying. All those emotions, thoughts, opinions. All those opportunities to do something wrong. I am, in addition to being one of the most introverted people I know, one of the shyest. These two things are almost a guaranteed one-two K.O. for making new friends, as meeting new people both exhausts and scares the beejezus out of me.

Books, of course, offer all the the emotional catharsis of, you know, real life minus all of the tricky interpersonal navigation that has to come along with actual human interaction.

***

Patterns, for people with OCD, are vital. 

Patterns help us stave off psychological panic. They keep the world in order around us and allow us to function during the course of our days. So we count to one hundred or recite the ABCs when we're upset. We touch brick walls when we pass them, check door locks and irons, eat the same breakfast every morning at the same time. All the while preserving, hopefully, some ability to leave the house in the morning and go to work and lead successful, adult lives. I got a graduate degree, passed my comprehensive exams with honors, and raised nearly a million dollars for an organization while suffering from ever-increasing OCD compulsions. 

Patterns allowed me to do so.

***

I've become a blurter. 

For years I've successfully managed to tamp down my emotions. Or, possibly simply become a Vulcan and not have emotions. When my mental health began to crumble, I stopped journaling and have zero record of my emotional state during that period in my life, and I don't trust my memories. What I do know is that if  I had them, I kept my emotions under control. Feelings for someone who clearly didn't have them back? Shove them down the memory hole. Pissed at a friend of yours for canceling plans last minute? Go for a long walk. Sad and guilty because your grandfather died and you failed to see him over Thanksgiving because you were lazy? Tell exactly one person literally sworn to secrecy (your priest) and then never speak of the incident again. 

Last fall I was writing frequently about how I felt like I was walking around with my skin turned inside out. All of the emotions that I had spent so long avoiding were suddenly flooding back in and I didn't have the capacity to deal with them, so I felt overwhelmed and vulnerable most of the time. Apparently, over the course of the year, my solution to those emotions has been to blurt them out, often in public places.

This particular section of blurting comes on a Saturday night in the middle of a Kitchen Window. 

Victoria and I are looking a tea towels and I start emoting, big time. A cookbook has triggered a desire to talk to a (former) friend and I'm upset about the fight we've had (while still convinced that what I did was right) and miss them tremendously and just want to send them a photo of this completely ridiculous cookbook and fast-forward to the part where I'm done processing and one of us has apologized and we're back to being friends again. 

I'm still telling Victoria all of this ten minutes later when we hit the sidewalk. 

***

It's not unusual for me to finish a book in less than 24 hours. 

Most recently it was a novel, Something Missing, by Matthew Dicks. It was a funny, sweet book. It had a few structural problems (I doubt anyone's first meeting with an estranged father would go that well) but I was willing to overlook them for one simple reason.

The book was one of the kindest, best, most sympathetic looks into the mind of a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder I've ever encountered. It was like reading my own thought patterns on the page, everything from obsessing over conversations that you've had or will have and refining your answers until they're perfect to the deep sense of relief and calm that you feel when you finally walk into your own space. 

It was that last part that really hit home with me, a long description of what our hero feels when he walks into his pine air-freshener scented garage primarily because when I shut the door of the apartment and am surrounded by my things, my books, my pottery, my music, that I feel an overwhelming sense of thankgodnothingbadtomecanhappenhere. 

Oddly enough, that feeling has never been about place. It's always been about the things with which I surround myself. The quilt on my bed, the deep red armchair where I do most of my reading, my coffee mug my friend Richard gave me, the smell of lavender and vanilla in the air. 

Reading Something Missing was like getting slapped across the face. 

I've thought for a long time now that OCD was, in total, about the obsessions and compulsions that I deal with. When I thought of those things, I thought about the stove, the door, the iron, the fact that every time I'm driving down the freeway I can't stop thinking about how I'm about to crash into the concrete median and die. What I didn't realize was how deeply patterns were ingrained into my life. How my need for privacy and things to be just so in my house without being tidy or organized is a manifestation of this disease. 

How that deep sense of relief and calm that comes when I flick the deadbolt is about staving off psychological panic. 

***

People interrupt patterns. 

I'm having a moment of existential crisis after an email with the subject line "Run Tonight?" pops up in my inbox. It's from my running partner, we skipped our long run on Sunday and he wants to know if we can make it up tonight. 

I run alone on Mondays. It's a short, fast two mile run around my neighborhood right after work. I run without the encumbrance of a cell phone, headphones, music. I just run. My running partner and I run on Wednesdays and Sundays. That's our time. I depend on those days because I know I'll have enough time for recovery and strengthening my weak hips in between. 

I run alone on Mondays.  

I hesitate a few minutes before sending back a one word response. 

"Yes." 

***

Marie Curie Day finds me entirely fired up and ready for thirteen rounds of intellectual bare-knuckle boxing with anyone willing to fight me. I am not, however, fired up about anything even remotely topical. It's not women in science or the preponderance of science events "just for women" that has me riled up. It's an article by a pretentious blowhard in The New York Review of Books. 

He claims (and for the record, he says that these claims only hold true in his own life) that the novel has lost its meaning. That we trick ourselves through fake catharsis, or are disappointed when our own lives don't following the similar arc of introduction, issue, resolution, emotionally satisfying denouement. 

I read literary criticism. Frequently. I can expound on Stanley Fish, dissect Kate Millet, explain Focault's author function. Lit crit classes were my favorite classes in college and were the capstone of my liberal arts education. I went to one of those colleges that wanted to teach you how to think, and lit crit did that for me.

This is all to say that I, too, am a pretentious blowhard.

But I've never made the claim that "because I dislike this form (or author or conceit) the entire genre lacks meaning." And I've never gone on to publish invective against whole genres in magazines (mainly because they wouldn't publish me). What really gets me, though, is the fact that I've had this argument so damn often lately.

I read almost exclusively fiction and poetry among a group of loud non-fiction advocates. Despite the fact that I love history, most historical non-fiction bores me. I don't like memoir (probably because I write it), and I understand science better when someone explains it to me and I can ask questions.

Those are part of the reasons I read fiction.

The other part is that fiction has changed and saved my life. Sandman made me feel something long after I had I thought I lost the capability to feel anything. Pride and Prejudice regularly gives me hope that I may not die old and alone.

Something Missing has made me realize that people interrupt patterns.

They do. With wanton disregard for schedules they invite you out to happy hour at the last minute. They forget to RSVP to dinner and arrive regardless. They rummage around in your bookshelves and forget to put things back in alphabetical order. They invite you to run on Mondays instead of Sundays, they take you to Kitchen Window and listen as you mope all over the store. They blow into your well-ordered life for a weekend or a month or fifteen years and spin your life completely, irrevocably, out of control.

People interrupt patterns.

They show you what life without patterns, without rituals and rules and set times and activities can be like. You run on Monday and still manage to do your hip-strengthening exercises. You kiss a stranger and live to tell about it. You share your feelings with a friend in a hugely public space without giving a damn that you're close to tears.You rearrange the books on the shelf and categorize them based on the impact they made on your life rather than by author's last name.

You realize that there's a slim chance you're starting to like people more than books.

Lists

My life is governed by  lists.

I make a to-do list every single day, whether I'm at work or hanging out around the house. I make them on the weekends. I make them when I go on vacations. I write them down on legal pads, on scrap paper, on checklists on my phone. I get an incredible feeling of satisfaction from crossing things off the lists. I am uneasy when that to-do list still has all of its items listed on it at the end of the day.

I make immense lists of the books I want to read, the historical sites I want to visit, the films I need to watch, the pieces of writing I'd like to do. I keep these lists on my desk at work, with a photo of them on my phone so that if, say, I'm at the library and I can't decide on a book to check out, I can whip the list out of my purse and think Oh yeah, I never did read The Glass Key. Or, Oh God, what was I thinking? I'm never going to read Moby Dick and I have to come to terms with it.

I love lists.

***

This week I crossed something off my bucket list.

I haven't been great about what's on my bucket list. There are the big things I want to achieve: write a book about the Scopes Trial, go to Gettysburg, see The Royal Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet. But as far as the smaller things, things like "Seeing the Dred Scott Courthouse Site" don't occur to me until afterward. I've always wanted to see General Sherman's graveside, but it was never on the bucket list. More than that, I put a ton of things on the list that don't actually matter to me, but are reflections of . . . the people I'm dating? The friends I've made? I don't know, but they don't belong there. So usually when I "cross something off my bucket list" it's because I've decided that it shouldn't have been there in the first place.

This was not one of those. This was an actual ohmygodIcan'tbelievethatactuallyhappened moments. I'm pleased there's photographic evidence of it happening because I'd be tempted to think that I dreamed it otherwise.

I met my favorite author.

I've met a number of authors that I admire throughout the course of my life. It's the gift of going to a college that takes bringing in writers to talk about writing very seriously. I remember all of the questions I asked them, what they said to me as they signed my books. Sarah Vowell and I talked about the Kennedy assassination. I told Billy Collins my mother hated my poetry but loved his. I laughed so loudly from the second row of a David Sedaris reading that he shot me a look. 

This was different. It was, simply, too intense to describe. I can't even remember what this man said to me when I said hello and told him what I had to tell him. I can say that he was very, very kind to a sweaty, shaky, stuttery, earnest young woman. And that when I made it back out to my car I cried. And I walked away deeply grateful for this man and his work. 

When I got back to my bucket list on Tuesday afternoon I looked at it for a long moment before reaching out to scratch the item off. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

This week has been a messy, emotional one for me. In the space of seven days, I flew to St. Louis, attended one of my good friend's wedding, spent the 4th of July at the site where Dred Scott was tried, visited a ton of Civil War graves, flew back to Minnesota, met this author, came back up to the North Country and packed the rest of my house. I'm not complaining. It was a really good week.

But now that my entire life is in boxes, now that the internet has been disconnected, and my clothes have been sorted into vacation, second vacation, need after first move, can be stored until after second move suitcases, now that I've read literally all the books left in my house I find myself with a little too much time on my hands. 

Of course I would use that time for unproductive self-reflection. 

I feel like a failure. 

I confide this to exactly one person during the course of the week in a moment of profound vulnerability that I hate myself for later. 

***

I'm slinking out of the North Country.

I'll admit it. This place whupped me. The winters were too dark, too cold, too snowy. The summers (ha!) were brief and cool. The people were (with a few notable exceptions) distant. The goddamn roads have potholes that could take off your front wheel. 

When I moved here two years ago, I didn't know if it was permanent, but I anticipated leaving with some indications of success. A boyfriend (or at least, a relationship that lasted longer than my normal six months), a hugely successful professional tenure, I was going to write my book, figure out how to be a spiritually fulfilled adult without being Catholic, finally learn to play my harmonica . . .

I did not succeed here.

More than that, I suspect I could have succeeded here. I could have made this city work, these people open up to me. I could have adapted to snow and darkness and cold. I could have done it. I could have done it if I had gone to see a therapist earlier. I could have done it if I had started taking anti-depressants. I could have done it if I just learned how to be happy. 

But I didn't. I didn't accomplish any of those things on my North Country list. And now instead of leaving amid tearful going away parties, poetic break-ups, and enormously lucrative counter-offers, I am sneaking out of town with as little fanfare as possible. 

***

I feel like a failure. 

I feel like even more of a failure for opening up the way I did this week. For getting shaky and struggling not to cry while I said "This book saved my life." For admitting that this part of the country pushed me right up to the brink and left me mess that I've been slowly sorting out. For saying out loud "I couldn't make this work."

***

Somehow, despite never having added "Surround yourself with kind people" to a list, that is exactly what I've managed to do. When I stutter out what I want to say to the author he pauses and reaches out for my hand and lets me give him a hug. While I'm mentally slapping myself for admitting to failing here in the North, I receive a thoughtful, insightful response that burns me with its compassion.

I'm never going to be able to shake the habit of writing out lists for myself, like I'll never be able to stop measuring success by what I've managed to cross off. But I hope that I've finally managed to learn to put the right things on the list. 

Cool

I'm seated in the Guthrie on a Wednesday night, about to be up way past my bedtime and risking severe sleepiness on the long drive home.The play starts and before I know it, I'm swept up, watching her and holding my breath as she utters some of my favorite lines from any play. 

The raven himself is hoarse/that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/under my battlements. Come, you spirits/that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full /of direst cruelty! 

You're not supposed to like Lady Macbeth. You're not supposed to find her in any way appealing or sympathize with her in meaningful way. She's a foil for Macbeth, an illustration of what goes awry when a woman takes ambition into her head.

I can't help it. Despite the fact that she's a complete and utter sociopath I adore her. I feel for her. I want her to make it through the play alive. I have more sympathy for her than I ever had for Juliette or Ophelia or Lady Anne. I was always annoyed by those women in my high school English classes and being an opinionated, brainy, snotty high school student I made sure that my English teachers knew how spineless I found them. In one paper I wondered "Does Shakespeare hate women? Because his lady characters suck."

My grade on that paper wasn't great.

***

I read the novel Gone Girl in five hours. 

Snuggled up in my armchair in January, I ripped through the entire novel in the course of an evening. It was exactly the right book for that month. Not terribly emotionally taxing, thrilling, with enough twists and turns to keep even me guessing. But what made me love the novel, what pushed it from "this book is great" to "I'm completely fucking obsessed with this book and I will not stop until everyone in my life has read it" was the that there are no heroes in the book. 

Let me say that again, it's a mystery without a Single. Solitary. Hero. 

Combined with its myriad unreliable narrators, and the brilliant Amy, the novel is probably one of my all time, top ten favorite books. Honestly, I can't say enough good things about it. Except that I think that it might be the kind of book that connects with, well, ladies. And I don't say that because the main and most sympathetic character is a woman. I say it because there are two or so pages around the 220 page mark that  cold-cocked me. 

Men always mean it as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind. I'm a cool girl. [ . . .] Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version--maybe he's a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed  bespectacled nerd who loves comics.  There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain. 

In my copy of Gone Girl, this passage is is marked, starred, the page is dogeared, despite the fact that the diatribe is uttered by a(nother) complete and total sociopath. A villain of the first order. The rest of the book hasn't been marked.

***

The hardest part about dating isn't what you think it is.

It's not meeting people. It's not constantly lowering your expectations. It's not making small talk with three different guys on three different dates in the same week. It's not worrying about how the dress you're wearing makes you look. It's not wondering if it's impolite to see if the guy picks up the check or running to the bathroom to make sure that you don't have lipstick on your teeth or waiting to see if he calls you. 

Yeah. Legit(ish) concerns, but those aren't the worst part. The worst part is trying to keep yourself from faking the Cool Girl. I'm serious. It sounds dramatic, and it's possible that I'm being dramatic because it's February and I'm having my annual bout of winter madness and the universe keeps sucker punching me and someone recently ripped my goddamn heart out of my chest and did the fucking tarantella on it, but after ten years of dating, I'm convinced I'm right.

Over the summer I went on a date with a perfectly nice guy in the North Country. We were out for coffee, talking about the new Batman movie, the pros and cons of it and he was enthusing over Anne Hathaway (vomit) as Catwoman. I couldn't help it. I honestly could not help myself. I snarkily commented "Yeah. Just once I wish they could give us a Catwoman who wasn't doing backflips in stilettos."

We never had a second date.

The Cool Girl is so fucking easy. She's convenient and uncomplicated and it's tempting to pretend to be her instead of the person I actually am. The occasionally hotheaded, relentlessly ambitious girl with the sometimes inconvenient  loudmouthed feminism. The girl who sometimes gets a black thundercloud over her head for days, is deeply skeptical of children, and holds herself and everyone around her to a level of perfection that's unreasonable. The girl who despite her best efforts, still does not look like Christina Hendricks. The girl who eventually has to disclose to her romantic interests that she has obsessive compulsive disorder and should they someday get to a point where they start considering children they might want to consider adoption because this shit is genetic.

It would be so much easier to stop asking why there are so few kickass female characters in X-Men.

***

You know who was a Cool Girl? Juliette. "Kill my cousin, spirit me off to a wedding after two days, and oh yeah the priest conducting the whole thing is a goddamn idiot with a dumbass plan, and then, Romeo, take my v-card (my only real currency in this world), cock up said dumbass plan and, yeah, I'll kill myself."

Cool Girl.

Or Lady Anne. "Oh, hey, hunchback with a withered arm who killed my husband and my father-in-law whose casket I'm currently following to the cemetery. What's that? Repartee! The knowledge that you did this all for the love of me? Of course I'll marry you despite the fact that I know you're are murdering son of a bitch."

Cool Girl.

Or Ophelia, so sassy and so promising in the first third of the play. "Hamlet, you sent me a cryptic note, killed my father and faked being a crazy person just to find out of if your uncle killed your father. And I have Daddy issues? Oh, sure. You're right. I might as well go crazy and jump in the river."

Cool Girl.

I like Lady M. I like (and sympathize with) her ambition and to a certain extent, her ruthlessness. Her inability to let her boring, complacent husband keep her from realizing her ambitions. I like that when she goes crazy, she has a good reason for going crazy. Unrequited love, *blows raspberry.* Try high treason and homicide. I like the fact that she's not an easy character, that you can't just love her because her actions are so abhorrent, but you (I) can't entirely hate her either because she's a real, complicated character. And, yes, saying that your favorite Shakespearean character is Lady Macbeth and that your favorite passage from recent literature is a giant fuck-off to men with unrealistic expectations and the girls who fake personalities and perpetuate those expectations probably isn't, you know, great on a dating website. And it goes without saying that I'm not promoting either high treason or homicide, especially as a way of starting your career.

In the end, I don't know what liking these characters and hating Cool Girls means. Probably nothing. Maybe that I'm just angry about getting my heart stomped again and feeling more cynical than usual. Maybe that I'm unwilling to throw ambition and drive to the wayside just to land a signif. Maybe that I have really fucking good taste in villains. Maybe it's late and I'm tired and it's best just to close up shop and go to bed.

First I think I'll have a glass of warm milk. Laced with human kindness.

Bookish

I'm not a great person to invite to parties.

When it comes to interacting with large groups of people I don't know outside of a professional setting, I am one of the shyest people to ever walk the planet. Put me in a professional setting and I can network like a madwoman. I shake hands. Hand out my business card. Remember all the interesting things I've read in the New York Times. I'm charming. Invite me to a dinner party with five people I don't know, and it's as if I've suddenly reverted to a better dressed version of my high-school self. I'm self-conscious. I have sweaty palms. My voice is always a few octaves too high. I'll be creepily silent until my inner monologue, hysterical from trying to remember how one makes conversation, will (apropos of nothing) burst out with "there are ice fountains on Enceladus!" Or "I saw Abraham Linclon's death certificate in a museum!" Or "On an atomic level you're not very different from that dog poop you just stepped in!" I will then laugh a nervous-high-pitched-oh-my-God-I-think-she's-a-serial-killer laugh and abruptly leave the conversation.

On Sunday, attending a barbeque, I had no fewer than three of these moments in a row. Devastated by my inability to simply calm down and interact like a normal human being and by the beer that I had spilled on my new dress, I skulked off to the kitchen. At least there I could do the dishes and have a legitimate reason for avoiding all the new people laughing in the backyard. When the screen door banged shut behind me I heard a familiar hello. Standing at the counter casually fixing a salad and blessedly not surrounded by strangers was an honest-to-goodness friend of mine. Someone who laughs at my jokes, has participated in more than one top 40 dance party, and has shared a beer with me. Someone who I somehow managed to meet without sounding like a psychopath or idiot-savant. At that moment, I was so pleased to see someone I knew I could hold a normal conversation with that I almost kissed him.

We caught up casually as he put together his salad. At one point I asked him if, a few months previous, I had discovered his love for The Great Gatsby, high-fived him, and recited the opening page of the book. I had. Thankfully, he's also a Gatsby lover and we started chatting about the upcoming movie and our disappointment in the way it appeared to be filmed. Before I knew it, the kitchen had a few other people in it, all of whom were enthusing over different aspects of the book and trashing on the film. I was pleased to discover that my voice had remained normal and that I wasn't running in the opposite direction or searching for something to to say. The conversation was effortless, the way it always seems when my slightly-hysterical self is when watching the way other people interact at parties.

***

I've been living in Minnesota for nearly ten years, all of my adult life, actually. I assume that everyone who lives here has read Gatsby at least once, the same way I assume that everyone's heard the Prince song "Raspberry Beret" or gotten over a broken heart by playing "Don't Think Twice" on repeat for two weeks. Reading Fitzgerald in his home state seems like a given, but I've recently discovered a whole host of people who have lived here for their entire lives and have never gotten around to reading it. I am absolutely unable to fathom this, but then again, I spend one Saturday morning every couple months sitting in Fitzgerald's old neighborhood, sipping coffee and pondering his life when he was still living here.

One of the images I've always loved from Gatsby is his vast, beautiful library full of unread books. I love the image because it's so odd and perfect. It's another thing I cannot fathom. I read constantly and more than a little obsessively. There have been more days than I can count where I will curl up in my armchair at 8 am in my PJs with the intention of reading a few chapters only to look up, blinking, at 9:30 pm. I realize that I've finished my book(s) but I've neglected not only to take out go to the grocery store and scrub the floors, but to change, eat, or brush my teeth. 

I would rather read than do any number of other things, which probably accounts for my social-awkwardness. I didn't realize the role it played in my life until my film-loving friends pointed it out. We were discussing the merits of Joss Whedon's Avengers  and he was trying to connect the movie to some other film I had seen.

"So, you've seen Avatar, right?"

"Uh, actually, I missed that one."

"Really? Ok, how about Inception?"

"Nope, missed that one too." 

"Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?"

Long awkward pause.

"Tell me you've seen Drive."

Longer pause.

"BUT YOU LOVE RYAN GOSLING!" 

"I have seen some movies recently!"

It's true. I have seen some movies recently, but they've all be based on books that I've read an loved. And, to be 100% honest, I go for the snarky, superior satisfaction of being able to say "Oh, well, in the book..." and then making some asinine observation on a tiny detail that only an obsessive fangirl would remember from the 3,000th time she's read something. In addition to being a terrible party guest, I'm a pretty shitty person to see movies with as well.

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I've never thought of my reading habits as something that might need to be corrected, even when my parents used to yell at me for taking books to family parties and hiding in another room to finish them. I thought that I was catching up for lost time. I didn't learn to read until I was seven, and I still remember the exhilaration that came when I finished my first book at the appropriate reading level. When I eventually found my way to sci-fi and fantasy I found that I could inhabit worlds where I could be something extraordinary. They were worlds where a moral question wasn't whether or not I should copy my best friend's history homework when I forgot to do mine, but what to do when given the choice of absolute power and authority or an ordinary life. It's adolescent and escapist, but there's still a part of me that wants those things to be true. It's why I let myself get so wrapped up in these other worlds and forget to do every day things.

Yet at the same time, I want to be the kind of person you can invite to parties. The girl who can converse easily. The one who can strike up a conversation with someone at a bar rather than whipping out her Kindle and updating her Readability downloads. I don't really know if reading is the root cause of my social ineptitude, after all, Gatsby's books were all uncut and he was a solitary figure at his own parties. And I'm not certain if I really want to be the chatty, outgoing girl at parties, how to become her if I do, and if giving up the joy of reading 4,000 pages in a month is worth it.  I do know that when I was talking about all of these concerns with a friend she said "I just read a great book about that."

Books, Resolutions, and the New Year

I am terrible at New Year’s resolutions. I can’t remember what my resolution was for 2011, or even if I had one. Typically my New Year’s Eve’s tend to involve something like half a bottle of Chilean wine and some horribly depressing movie (No Country for Old Men or The Company of Men were two memorable ones.)

However, in the past few weeks as I’ve been working on wearing out my library card, I hit upon a resolution that feels like a good fit. As I’ve been crossing books off of my reading list, I realized that I couldn’t remember all the books I’ve read in the past year. Tragic, I know. After digging through Amazon receipts, library records, and facebook photos (I knew that taking pictures of the books I’m reading would pay off sometime!) I managed to construct a pretty complete list of books I read in 2010. It hit me that it’s about time I started actually keeping track of what I read and what I thought of it, something I’m also hoping will keep me writing on a more consistent basis. I write so much for work that by the time I get home I’m unexcited about writing. Hopefully reading will inspire some writing.

That said, I think I might as well make some reading resolutions. Apparently in the past year I managed about 35 books, not counting rereading (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, The Great Gatsby were all reread in 2011) or school reading. I think 35-ish is all right for having been in graduate school for four of the past twelve months, finding a new job, and relocating. Next year I intend to go for 47 (an extra book a month) and hereby resolve to try to read more nonfiction. It’s not a guarantee, but I managed to find a few bits of nonfiction that really appealed to me in the past year (David Grann’s writing in particular.) I’m also going to attempt to read some huge books in the next year, including Life and Fate and some Chekov. I’ve also decided (God help me) to tackle Moby Dick if I get a Kindle for Christmas.

All of that said, I should probably say a bit of something about what I read.

Sandman was my absolute favorite. I fell in love with Neil Gaiman after the first 25 pages of American Gods (which was also wonderful), but Sandman hit me so hard and so fast that before I knew it, I was reading The Wake and crying my eyes out. It was unexpected, amazingly written, and breathtakingly illustrated. It is, hands down, the one comic book I would give to anyone who disses comics as low-brow (or who loves comics and hasn’t read it.) It is, quite simply, one of the most imaginative, provocative, and moving stories I've ever read in my life. 

As an aspiring young adult fantasy author, The Hunger Games trilogy was amazing. Hell, as a reader in general, The Hunger Games trilogy was amazing. When it comes YA fantasy fiction, girls get the shaft. There are way, way fewer smart, resourceful, kick-ass heroines than there are heroes. Katinss Everdeen is the kind of girl I’ve wanted to be for my entire life. Eventually I'm planning an extended entry on Sandman and why it's so wonderful, but I need some more time to think on it before I sit down to that piece. 

On the non-fiction front, Tina Fey made me laugh so hard I nearly peed my pants. David Grann’s writing is full of twists and incredible investigative reporting. Capote scared the crap out of me with In Cold Blood.

Now, without further ado, the somewhat-complete-list of reading I did in 2011.

American Gods (Gaiman)

In Cold Blood (Capote)

Anansi Boys (Gaiman)

Dune (Herbert)

2010 Nebula Awards Showcase

Dune Messiah (Herbert)

The Wandering Fire (Gavriel Kay

The Summer Tree (Gavriel Kay)

Bossypants (Fey)

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz)

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (Sedaris)

Kill Shakespeare (McCreery, Del Col)

Hunter’s Run (Martin)

Sandman (Gaiman)

The Archer’s Tale (Cornwell)

Angelology (Trussoni)

The Sparrow (Russell)

If You Have to Cry, Go Outside (Cutrone)

Woman in the Dark (Hammett)

Generation Kill (Wright)

Coraline (Gaiman)

The Hunger Games (Collins)

Catching Fire (Collins)

The Mockingjay (Collins)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson)

The Girl Who Played with Fire (Larsson)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Larsson)

A Visit From the Goon Squad (Egan)

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (Grann)

The Lost City of Z (Grann)

The Commitment (Savage)

Stardust (Gaiman)

How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (Yu)

The Pirate King (King)

Fables (Willingham)

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