Perseids

I wanted to write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to watch a meteor shower
and commune with the universe
Then I looked at that sentence
"commune with the universe"
and realized that it makes me sound
like an asshole. Like someone who believes
in healing through energy fields and crystals
instead of antibiotics and good hygiene.

Instead I will write a poem
about how I went to the woods
to a cabin my family has had for generations.
Where for many summers, I swam
and ate raspberries off the bush,
fished and grew sunburned.
And how this time I drank beer.
And my oldest friend came
and some new ones joined us
and we watched a meteor shower.
And how, for the time, it was enough.

Angst. Or How McSweeney's Caused Crisis of Confidence

Over the past year I have been kicking around an idea for the McSweeney's annual column contest.

Over the past weeks I have been hammering out the details. Putting the words to the page. Editing. Writing. Editing again. Rewriting. Drinking. Crying. Rewriting.

Over the weekend I sat back in my wildly uncomfortable kitchen chair, scrubbed my face, and clicked send. In spite of all the emotional hand-wringing and stylistic issues I had mapping out the coulmn, it was some of the most fun I've ever had writing. More than that, it signified the most work I had ever put into a non-academic piece. It was an entire year's worth of thinking, sketching out installments of the column, rethinking the premise, chucking the whole thing and starting from scratch. It was a month solid of writing and stuttering to a halt. Rewriting and feeling like I was losing my mind. Now, with all that work behind me, I allowed myself to daydream.

I imagined what it would be like when my column was accepted. How I would take the prize money and buy a magnificent bottle of scotch and drink it in the breezy late-summer evenings on the porch. I looked forward to finding an agent who wanted to read my memoir and how in two, three years at the outside, I would be opening yet another bottle of magnificent scotch to toast my successful book release. Critics would adore me. Ira Glass would want to interview me. Mary Oliver would want to have dinner with me.


I know, right? Even in my daydreams I'm a pretentious asshole.
But I felt entitled to these pretentious asshole daydreams. After all of the work I had put into the entry, it was the piece of writing of which I was most proud. It was polished. It was professional. It was about something that actually mattered to me and that I hoped would be amusing to my readers. Eventually, though, the pretentious asshole daydreams wound to a close and I rewarded myself with a stack of X-Men comics and a book on introverts. I spent most of the day in my armchair, getting lost in some of my nerdier pursuits.

When I eventually closed the book on introverts, I remembered a conversation I had the day before with a friend. I told her about my contest entry and she asked if I had read the grand prize winner from the previous year. When I replied that I hadn't, she gave me her best eyebrow-raised, Sherlockian, "Oh-Watson-You-Poor-Dolt-You-Don't-Get-It-Yet" look.

"You should," was all she said.

Now, having finished not only a fraught writing project but the stack of books I had set aside for the day, I wandered over to my computer and pulled up the column. After reading half of it and using up half a box of tissues in the process, I put my face in my hands, utterly embarrassed by what I had so confidently submitted a few hours earlier.

It's one thing to know definitively that your favorite authors are better writers than you. I can handle Neil Gaiman's imagination and Jane Austen's dialogue far outstripping me, because it feels like they should. They've already passed through the crucible of amateur writing. It's quite another feeling to have another amateur, unpublished, young writer WHO DOESN'T EVEN WRITE FULL-TIME be so obviously better than you. I marveled over the fact that she could be so emotional without being maudlin, so evocative without being hackneyed, so darkly hilarious without being macabre. It was disgustingly unjust that someone who has as little experience as I do could be so much better.

I was horrified to realize that in a scant two weeks the editors that picked HER out of the crowd, who noticed HER genius, who offered HER work would be picking my pathetic offering out of the deluge of submissions.

Shit.

If I weren't on a massive dose of antibiotics I would have opened a bottle of bourbon, put on a Patsy Cline record, and climbed out of my depression sometime next Wednesday after lunch. Serendipitously or perhaps cruelly, the universe put a very effective stopper in my self-prescribed cure. At first I spent the evening trying to cultivate a devil-may-care attitude about my writing. Then I tried to distract myself with the approaching Curiosity landing, but even my love for space failed me.

I settled on cleaning.

I write easily 90% of my first drafts by hand, regardless of whether it's a grant, a poem, or an essay. Something about the process of physically writing the words out in longhand is very soothing and helps me to get past writer's block more easily than writing on a computer. However, I have a hard time recycling these first drafts. It's amusing to me to read the marginalia I left for myself. I like to see how the pieces mature from ink first drafts to electronic final drafts. But in my present mood, I was relentlessly trashing everything I could get my hands on. And of course I came across my first draft for McSweeney's.

It's hilarious.

The writing is awful. I mean, sixteen year old Emo Kelly would be embarrassed by it. There's all kinds of marginalia, mostly cussing, about how bad it is. There are blacked out sections and places where my pen poked through the paper in a vehement editing sessions. It managed to wring a genuine snorting laugh from me.

The column I finally submitted may not be as good as last year's winner. It may not be as good as 90% of the other submissions they receive. But it's immeasurably better than that first attempt, which is better than what I was writing last week, which is better than what I was writing five years ago. It's unlikely that This American Life will ever call me for an interview. I will never have an obituary extolling my literary contributions in The New York Times. I will never be represented by the Steven Barclay Agency and outside of winning a contest, I probably won't go to dinner with my writing idols. But this is, irrevocably, the life that I have chosen for myself. Watching my writing evolve slowly over time is going to have to be good enough for me.

And since when have I ever needed an excuse to buy expensive scotch?

Solitude

One of my favorite nonprofits is the organization TED, based out of New York City. It's a nonprofit that believes in Ideas Worth Spreading. It brings together interesting people from fields as varied as particle physics to fashion to poets and has them give twenty minute talks on their big ideas. The talks are inspiring, hopeful, and some are profoundly moving. I have a list that I regularly recommend to my friends and acquaintances and it reflects my own passions. There are poets and philosophers of religion, physicists and architects. But my favorite talk, the talk that I regularly tune in when I'm feeling blue or exhausted is Susan Cain's talk on The Power of Introverts. It's a brilliant talk. I actually stole my idea of "writing dangerously" from what she says about learning to speak dangerously. It's a talk that literally had me standing still, frozen in the act of chopping a cucumber the first time I heard it. I was overwhelmed by simultaneous feelings of vindication and the sense of "Thank God! Someone finally gets it!"

Let me back up. I'm writing this blog post from an armchair in my parents' living room. My family has currently gathered for a post-wedding gift opening elsewhere. I'm in Wisconsin because my youngest cousin got married yesterday. I've successfully managed to beg off the third day in a row of  intense family time, claiming a headache and exhaustion. Both are true, but both have less to do with going out late last night or self-inflicted dehydration. The real reason I decided to skip the gift-opening today is a simple one that I've been unable to explain to my family for my entire life. I am the only introvert in a family of extroverts. 

Let me say that again. I am the only introvert in a family of extroverts. 

The issue of alone-vs.-together-time isn't a new one for me. As a child, I used to take books to family gatherings and my parents would light into me about how I needed to be a better mixer. I learned to adapt and fake extroversion. Or, at least, I stopped bringing books to gatherings. But I could never bring myself to participate in the rowdier discussions. I hate raised voices and the hours long bull-shitting situations in which my family engages. I love to tell stories and jokes and in the right company, manage to pull it off well. But when stimulation is non-stop for several days in a row, I struggle not to shut down completely. 

When I come back to Wisconsin, I have three and sometimes four or five days of time with not only my immediate family, but my extroverted extended family as well. On one level, I understand the necessity of it. I live hundreds of miles away and only see my family a few times a year. And it's fun and I love seeing everyone, but there's always a dog barking, people shouting, kids screaming, electronic toys going off. The television, regardless of the day or the occasion or the fact that no one is actually watching it, provides constant noise in the background. My family finds this time together stimulating, invigorating, or at least tolerable. I find it overwhelming. It's not that I dislike their company, I'd just prefer to see one or two of them at a time. In a quiet, television-less room. Where no one talk above a library whisper. Instead, I've spent many years faking extroversion. 

But fake extroversion for prolonged periods of time is exhausting. Over the years, I've stopped doing it. I'm not doing anyone any good by showing up to family gatherings cranky and exhausted. I've started trying to talk to everyone, but apart from the constant din. It's more enjoyable to catch one or two people outside for a smoke or while they're pushing their kids on the swings than it is to try to hear something in the immediate hullaballoo of holidays or celebrations. Last night, I spent a fair amount of time catching up with one of my favorite cousins. We talked about autism and working with children. It was an amazing, rewarding, wonderful conversation that we had outside of the hall where all the dancing and mingling was going on. 

It has taken me years to get to this place, to the place where it was ok to tell my folks I needed some alone time, to opt out of the large conversations. Years of unsolicited suggestions that I seek to overcome my introversion by therapy, by anti-depressants, by jumping into the deep end of the socializing pool. I had to endure constant questions about what happened to me in my formative years that made me so disinclined to spend time with other people. Imagine years of having your family--honestly trying to help--tell you that a major aspect of your personality is deeply flawed and needs fixing. That something about you isn't quite right. 

It's easy to be hard on them, mainly because I don't understand their frames of mind any more than than they understand mine. Why go out to a noisy, crowded bar when you could have friends over for dinner? Given the choice between a party and the option of curling up at home with a movie or a book, I'll almost always take the evening at home. It's a difficult conversation to have, especially after nearly twenty-eight years of trying to explain it, but I think I'm starting to make headway. I'm starting to convince them that, as Susan Cain says: 

Solitude matters. For some, it's even the air they breathe.

At least this afternoon, sitting the silence of an empty house, rejoicing in the two luxurious hours I have to read and write, I'm beginning to hope that's the case.

With the Morning

There are a lot of things that make me cry. Battlestar Galactica. Doctor Who. Space. The Night Circus. The movie Atonement. However, I emphatically am not a crier when something goes wrong in my personal or professional life. I can't do it. I always hear my daddy's voice in my head asking me if crying will make things better and no, it never does, so why do it? 

A few days ago, I attended a seminar on "The Status of Women and Girls in Minnesota." I attend seminars like this for work a few times a year, and normally I manage to handle them pretty well. I go, network, take a bunch of notes, and  bring the information back to my professional writing. This conference though, it was different. It was the first time I sat down in a room full of other smart, dedicated, passionate women and heard that the status of girls and women in Minnesota isn't getting any better.

Let me repeat that. Girls and women in Minnesota are not much better off than we were two years ago, the last time this report was published. More than that, the statistics I read were shocking. In a state that I love enough to consider calling home permanently, the status of women and girls is actually worse than I had anticipated. One in three of us will be sexually assaulted by midlife. Minnesota is in the top twenty worst states for child prostitution. Given equal qualifications, equally sized organizations, equal everything, I still make only 80% of what a man makes in my line of work.

There were more statistics, many of them as depressing as the ones I've just shared. At the end of the presentation I booked it out the door, got into my car, pulled my sunglasses over my face, and wept.

I pulled myself together eventually. But the knowledge that the past ten years that I've spent working for women's equality have, apparently, been for naught was exhausting in a way I've never experienced. When I came home for work the day after the conference, I wanted to do anything except think about the status of girls and women in Minnesota. In fact, I wanted to do anything except think, and in my pursuit of something fluffy, I happened across one of the most devastating articles on global warming I've ever read.

I closed my laptop and started crying again.

I've never been the kind of person who's inclined to despair. I'm not even inclined to bad moods. I have a ridiculous impulse to keep on sunny side of things, as it is, but in this instance I felt like I had been sucker punched. I've devoted my life to nonprofits. To making the world a better, safer place for girls and women. To building a sustainable, just world where everyone has enough to survive. For years, I've believed that if I just work hard enough, if I just convince one more person to take the bus, or that they don't really need a giant flat-screen television, if I can get one more girl to camp where she can learn self-dependence and self-respect, the world would get (albeit slowly) a little better. Here I was confronted with definitive proof that all of my actions, all of my incandescent light bulbs and bus passes, all of the money I've raised for women in crisis and all of the advocating I've done for girls and young women amounted to, essentially, nothing.

I immediately started entertaining  all kinds of maudlin and macabre thoughts. "When food shortages start, will the world turn into something resembling my nightmares inspired by Cormac McCarthy's The Road? Should I move back to Wisconsin now, because when fuel prices go through the roof, I might not be able to make it back? Why bother to have children, because I'll be bringing them into a science fiction novel world, a world I had never intended to raise a family in?"

While one part of my brain was furiously steaming through worst case scenarios, the other part was occupied with "Well, clearly my actions aren't making a difference, so why bother? Why continue to work long, exhausting hours for comparatively little pay? Why take the bus to work? Why compost? Why bother with any of this?"

These thoughts have been with me since the latter half of the week and I haven't been able to shake them. Then this morning I woke up with an answer. Washed up on the shores of my dreams from last night were two pieces from flotsam, left over from my years as a Catholic. The first was a line from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, an activist who was arrested on a picket line in her 80s:

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that. No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. 

I got up this morning and wrote letters to my senators and the president about climate change and the drastic changes that are necessary to ensure that this planet is here for my children. I wrote a letter of inquiry to request funds to make some major repairs on a camp for girls. I made a donation to a battered women's shelter. I bought a new bus pass. It may be that these actions will have no effect on the status of women and girls or climate change in the long run, that the changes we need are so profound, huge, and long-overdue that we cannot make them in time. That's probable, but it's not for me to say. For the time being, I need to continue to do go through the motions of building a more sustainable world brick by brick, shepherding  this state along to true equality step by tedious step.

The second piece of Catholic debris that came to me out of my sleep last night was a line from the psalms:

Weeping may last all night, but joy comes with the morning.

Amen. Alleluia.

Danger

When I was 21, I took a riverboat down a portion of the Yangtze river. The trip on the boat was beautiful and complicated and full of dichotomies, much like all of my time in China. I'd like to say that I remembered more of the trip, but the intervening years have swept away many of my clear memories. I'm left with a series of snapshot like moments that have a measure of unreality to them, as if they were simply vivid dreams. There are, of course, memories that stand out. They were, perhaps, the most emotional moments of my four months there, which is probably why I remember them with cinematic memory.

Getting lost in Beijing after my flight landed and miraculously finding the way to the hostel. Standing on the Great Wall. Walking through the Forbidden City. Seeing the clay soldiers at Xi'an. Hiking over a treacherous trail in Tiger Leaping Gorge and watching the sun rise over the Hu mountain range.These were all beautiful, terrifying, breath-catching moments during my four months in China.

Not all of the moments are quite so picturesque or pleasant. One day I woke up with a serious eye-infection at the top of Mount Emei-Shan (an infection, interestingly, that was only finally correctly diagnosed six months ago.) My best friend ran off from the middle of a city square and left me alone at 2:00 am to find my way home. Having to knee a fellow program participant in the stomach when he had backed me up against a wall and was drunkenly trying to stick his tongue down my throat. These moments stand out sharply as well.

By far one of my favorite nights occurred during a night that was neither worthy of a travel-writer or a feminist diatribe against male privilege. It was a night I spent sitting up against the bunks on the riverboat as it drifted down the Yangtze. Another participant and I decided that we were going to write our bucket lists together. We had a bottle of Irish whiskey that someone had sent me for my 21st birthday sitting on the floor between us and we were drinking and goofing around with the other people in the room between jotting down our life goals.

The guy had huge, impossible, Gatsby-esque dreams. Mine were simple by comparison. Work for a nonprofit, write poems that were worth reading, get a Ph.D., finish my honors thesis. Every time I brought one of these up, the man sitting across from me would shake his head. Finally, I wrote "Learn how to mush a team of sled-dogs." He sighed. "Kelly, this is your bucket list. Have things on it that are worth doing." He scribbled something on a sheet in his own journal, ripped it out, and handed it across to me.

"Run the Iditarod."

I eventually let him goad me into thinking bigger, into setting incredible, impossible goals for myself.

When I look at that list now, I am delighted and embarrassed by it. I'm not the sort of unapologetically grand person it takes to do those things. I don't even want to do some of them. What delights me is the fact that for a brief moment, in a boat drifting down the Yangtze, I thought I was.

***

I've been spending more time with my friends from college lately.  We spend a lot of time talking about politics and policy, law and nonprofits. The conversations are simultaneously stimulating and soothing. They make me hopeful that if the world isn't entirely screwed over by the time my generation gets a chance to run things, there's possibility for real change. These are people who are not disillusioned by the political process or hopeless about our fate. Our conversations are refreshing. They're fun and challenging, and I never leave one without considering running for office myself one day. It's hard to be together and not dream about the future, about what my life is going to be in five years, ten years, twenty-five years. 

As a direct result of these conversations, I'm beginning to think about going back to school. Not for a Ph.D., I'm through with academia for academia's sake and not right away. The novelty of being able to do what I want when I get off of work hasn't worn off and I don't think it will for another few years. I'm thinking about law school and eventually working for Legal Aid or a women's health organization. It sounds dopey, I know, but I believe that we can make the world a more peaceful, just place. Law school, at least at the moment, seems like an incredible way of doing just that.

***

I've been trying to declutter my house lately. As I've been sorting through boxes, I found the list I made on the Yangtze River. I also found a few more versions of the list written, as I've gotten older and my interests have changed. The Iditarod is no longer on the list, but visiting the LHC at CERN has made an appearance. But one thing stays consistent on all of the lists and it's not law school or a trip to Paris. It's writing. Writing a young adult trilogy, writing a book of poems, writing a comic book, writing a memoir. These things were on that first list, they've been on the lists that followed, and they're on the list I jotted down and have hanging in my workstation. Their appearance across the years isn't unexpected. I've wanted to be a fiction writer and a poet since I was in the fifth grade. It's what I fantisize about when I close my eyes at night. 

So why do I keep making these self-negating choices? If my desire is to be a fiction writer and a poet, why did I go to graduate school for theology? Why am I thinking about law school or a master's in public policy? Writing, telling stories, scratching poems out on a legal pad, these are the things I find fulfilling, not writing research papers and sitting in a library cramming for exams. Why do I find so many excuses to keep from writing? 

I've made compelling excuses for myself. As a professional grant-writer, I spend my days researching and writing for audiences that are more critical than my worst editors, and for higher stakes. At the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is write more. I'm just getting started in my career. Later, when I get settled, there will be time to write. I'm just going through a dry spell, I'll get to it eventually. Reading these books is actually research for what I want to write. 

None of that is true. Rather, those are challenges I face, but not a single one is the true reason I don't write. The real reason, I suspect, as something to do with the quote that opens this blog and a commencement address I heard recently by Neil Gaiman. In the commencement address where he admonishes all of us to "make good art" he also says: 

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Writing and sharing my writing is intimate and self-revelatory in a way that scares the shit out of me. When I write poems about science, they're my expression of love and awe for the universe. When I write about my mother's gardens, I'm thinking about how she's made me into the woman I am and wondering what it will be like when she's gone. When I describe the heroine of my novel, I'm imagining the girl I wanted to be when I was sixteen. The things I post are, for the most part, heavily edited. I can't stand the thought of putting my heart and mind on display for other people to read, to share, to criticize. That is the real reason why I hide behind advanced degrees and claims of exhaustion.

I'm sick of it. I don't want to keep writing things and editing them until the heart has been cut out because I'm afraid of sharing too much. I'm tired to making excuses not to write when finishing a piece is one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. It's possible that law school or a degree in public policy is in my future, but before I take the LSAT or look at the Humphrey School's website, I want to spend some time writing dangerously, walking down the street naked. I want to spend the next two years writing, without self-censoring "bad" ideas and without all the trepidation about sharing. I hope that at the end of two years, I discover that I have some talent, that I can share myself, that I can make good art.

Although, if that doesn't work out, there's always the Iditarod.   

 

The Weight

I'm standing at the top of a a cliff in an abandoned iron mine, looking down into some of the clearest water I have ever seen. Friends are treading water beneath me urging me to jump. I, being deathly afraid of heights, am standing at the top shaking so hard I'm afraid I may just vibrate off the edge. One of the friends in the water is calling encouragements up to me and saying that even if I don't jump in it's all right, because I'm obviously terrified. For whatever reason, his kindness was the push I need. I screamed an obscenity and jumped.

My mantra while attending graduate school was "I want this to be challenging, but not difficult." The distinction, at least to me, was that something challenging would force me to think, grow, change my perspective. Things that were difficult were the equivalent of beating my head against a desk for an hour and a half. They were painful without the reward of growth. I like the sensations of mastering a new set of skills, stretching myself intellectually and physically, overcoming a fear.

Cliff-jumping, as I learned, is challenging. It's also fun.

***

I've never really had a difficult time making friends. Oddly enough, both my nerdiness and introversion have proved to be great assets in meeting new people. I'd rather listen than talk, so I'm inclined to ask a lot of questions and I'm generally curious about other people. More than once knowing with that "T.I.E" stands for in T.I.E Fighter or a shared enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln has led to intense friendships. I don't have large groups of friends, but the ones I have are as close to me as my family. 

As a group, we have songs that we sing when we get together. Many of my best memories involve a bluegrass rendition of Billie Jean or a group sing-along of Wagon Wheel. One of the songs, surprisingly, is one from my childhood called "The Weight." You may have heard it, it's one of those songs that's been covered 3,000 times. Its chorus runs:

Take a load off, Fanny.

Take a load off for free.

Take a load off, Fanny.

Put the load right on me. 

It's a song I love in no small part because there's always been something significant for me in singing that chorus with the group of people who I love and trust most in the world. We've shared one another's major milestones and disappointments. They've held my hand while I've cried sitting through Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald and argued with me about politics and God's existence. When I'm facing something difficult, they're the ones I call.  As a person who doesn't share herself easily, the inroads they've made with me are astounding. They have managed to convince me that sharing one another's joys as well as disappointments makes things just a little bit lighter.

***

The past year has been one of the most difficult of my life. I've had my fair share of challenging situations. I started a new job with a new skill set and a new level or responsibility. I've started dating again after being on a year and a half hiatus. I've moved hours away from my closest friends. It's this last thing that has moved everything else from "challenging" and way past "difficult" to "really fucking hard." I'm used to being able to walk a few blocks or drive five miles and talk to people who know and love me. More often than not, when things go wrong they don't go hugely, drastically, life-changingly wrong. They just go a little awry. But something that has shocked me has been how these small disappointments manage to add up after time when I can't tell them to someone over a beer or while listening to American Routes.

Over the past weeks I've managed to meet a group of people whose company I enjoy tremendously. They're bright and funny and have been more welcoming than anyone I've met in my year here. We'll go out for a drink or have a meal and a bonfire and it's fun. I don't talk much, and when I generally open my mouth it's to ask a question, make an joke, or share my love for space or romance novels. But when it comes to sharing something meaningful, some part of the weight that's been accumulating for the past year, I find myself freezing up. It feels like I'm standing on the edge of that cliff in the Iron Range. I can keep holding back, keep the things that are meaningful or difficult for the people who live hundreds of miles away from me. Or I can trust in the kindness and hospitality of the people here, let loose an obscenity, and jump.

Romance

Over the past year, I've written a few posts that have caused me no small amount of trepidation. There was one where I poured my heart out about moving to Duluth. Another where I talked about emotional and physical vulnerability. There was that post where I finally admitted that I was an agnostic. This post is much the same, but not because of any imagined emotional vulnerability, but because of intellectual and aesthetic vulnerability. As a feminist, as a life-long English major, and as a writer myself, this is a difficult admission to make. 

I love romance novels. 

I've spent years trying to come up with justifications to myself about loving romance novels as a feminist, fiction loving author whose shelves are filled with Kate Millet, Eve Ensler, and Betty Friedan. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and Dostoyevsky. With literary giants and women at the forefront of sexual politics surrounding me on a daily basis, with a reading list full of acclaimed authors, why do I spend two days every month devouring trashy, escapist fiction?

I've tried on a couple different excuses, everything from "I'm planning on writing a romance novel to cover my student debt and this is research" to "I'm reading it to format a crushing feminist critique of the commodification of women's sexuality." 

The plain truth of the matter is that I love romance novels. 

***

I have a comfortable life. 

I have a job I enjoy and find meaningful, enough money to pay my bills, and a quiet, if a little solitary, life. During the week I go to work, grab a drink afterward, make dinner, chat with friends online, watch television, occasionally write a little. Friday-Saturdays I read, watch movies, visit friends in other parts of the state. I date. Sometimes I see the same guy twice. Sundays are always reserved for the New York Times in bed with a pot of coffee. It's a life that satisfies the independent streak that caused me to move to Minnesota when I was eighteen. It's a life that's uncomplicated and almost entirely drama-free. I spend my spare time pursuing my interests, whether those are a love for art museums, a desire to learn particle physics, or writing narrative non-fiction. I have friends whom I find challenging and enjoyable. I actually still believe that I'm going to change the world. 

***

I once had a friend tell me that one of the most charming aspects of my craziness is that I am fully aware of and occasionally apologetic for it. I recognize and own up to my social anxiety and obsessiveness about ingredients for recipes. I alert people to my personal space bubble and my OCD tendencies. I freely admit to being bombastic for the sake of making a story more entertaining. 

As if that wasn't enough charm, I'm a bit of a control freak. When I travel I have an itinerary. When the weekend rolls around, I have a To Do list that I have to get accomplished or I feel like the world is going to end. I don't do well at unplanned or uncoordinated social events. I can be pretty inflexible. 

As a result, I find the prospect of long-term relationships terrifying. I have a hard enough time relinquishing control of a shopping list to another person, why on Earth would I want to let someone else plan a second date to say nothing of having a say in where we should go on vacation or with which family we should spend Christmas. This is why I do my damnedest to avoid relationships. An amazing man to be the father of my eventual children and companion for the rest of my life? Yeah, that sounds pretty good. But spending Sundays in my pajamas until noon listening to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and reading the New York Times Book Reviews? That sounds even better. 

***

It's a childish and erroneous way of looking at relationships, I know. But it's also one I can't seem to shake. This is why I love romance novels. Sure, there's the sex and saccharine romance and fantasies of broad-shouldered lumberjacks who secretly read Rumi and are looking for a feminist firecracker of a girl, that's all part of it. But more than any of those things, what gets to me is the fantasy that smart, educated, independent women find someone with whom they not only relinquish control but happily gives up her independence to her lumberjack, WWII soldier, or seemingly caddish but secretly honorable aristocrat. During the three hundred or so pages of the book, I can stop asking questions about agency, or whether or not the relationship is unhealthy or sexual politics, and fantasize about what it would be like to give up a little of my independence and solitude. I have three hundred pages where I can imagine what it would be like to give up the New York Times and Friday independent movie nights and always getting to decide what to have for dinner for having a companion who understands and loves me despite the social anxiety and particle physics. 

But in the end, romance novels are always escapism, aren't they? Because giving up major Civil War battles as dinner conversation doesn't always equate to a torrid vacation to Fiji or even the promise that your boyfriend will give up some equally irritating habit. Relationships aren't like romance novels, but they're not soul-crushing series of compromises I've made them out to be either. Somewhere there has to be room for both Kate Millet and Danielle Steele, the acknowledgement of mutuality and partnership as well as the desire to let everything go and trust in another person. 

At least, I hope it's true. Just like I hold out hope that somewhere there's a broad-shoulder physicist who chops wood in his spare time. Someone who keeps The Essential Rumi next to his collection of X-Men comics.