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.

Different

I've been a little, well, off lately. Part of it is quite simply, mid-winter blues. Eliot called April "the cruelest month" but he's dead wrong. February is the worst month, despite having both Lincoln's birthday and Spring Training. When snow falls on September 22nd, you've already had four months of winter and you're staring down the barrel of another two months, at best. It's still snowing, still cold, and even if they days are getting longer, they're still cloudy and grey for the most part. Even my Happy Light and multivitamins aren't taking the edge off this year. 

Then there's Valentine's Day.

I know, I know. Single, straight, female friend getting all angsty about being single on Valentine's Day, let's all just cross it off our sadness scavenger hunt and move on, all right? Additionally, as an ACHTUNG!, there will be no Public Radio AHA! moment at the end of this post . I'm not going to talk about how I come to love Valentine's Day because I meet some blind person on the street who tells me an incredible story about how their seeing-eye dog taught them that love comes in many forms. This post is also not going to end in the Rom-Com flowers being delivered to me at work from some guy who's been secretly enamored with me for years and is ohmygodtotallymyonetruelove.


I'm not normally the type of woman who gets all wigged out about Valentine's Day. I take some pride in that.  Personally, I'm usually more than a little amused by the fact that a Catholic Feast Day meant to celebrate a man's gruesome martyrdom has now become an opportunity for us to celebrate love and commitment. Call me pagan, but I don't like the vibes surrounding this one. Give me a good old bacchanal any day. Anyway, years ago, between boyfriends I decided to make Valentine's Day a non-holiday, much like I do for New Year's Eve. Since then, it's always been the same. Go to work, come home, make dinner, read or watch something on Netflix. No flowers, no candy, no boyfriends, but no angst either.

I don't know if it was going off birth control or what (by the way thanks, Skin, for assuming that now that we're off it you have to act like we're fourteen again) but my emotions are so out of whack lately that if I wasn't so busy almost crying/eating my weight in Girl Scout Cookies I'd make fun of myself. 

***

Andy and I are on a long walk around Lake Nokomis. We're in the middle of a snowstorm in the Cities, and the day is so ridiculously picturesque I feel like I'm in a Norman Rockwell painting. It's been an odd weekend for me, mainly because I've been, um, confessional beginning with my blog update last week. I spent a significant portion of Friday and Saturday nights with two of my favorite women, unloading all of the feelings I've had over the past week, kvetching about my various boy problems, and trying to expurgate the fact that I've been a stone cold bitch lately (it didn't work.) Regardless, I'm feeling a little more candid than I normally do, and Andy's always been easy to talk to. We're talking about houses, jobs, my love life, and he starts talking about kids. I can't run because we're 2.5 miles into our walk and I'm wearing Sorrel boots. When he pauses I blurt it out Idon'tthinkIwantkids. That confession is quickly followed by Idon'tactuallyreallylikekids.

Being a woman in your late 20s and admitting out loud, in public that you don't actually enjoy children feels a lot like what I imagine it would feel like to admit that you like to eat polar bear cubs. It's an admission I try to avoid making as often as possible because people react one of two ways. Either they look at you like you just kicked a puppy or (somehow more maddening) they insist that you haven't met the right kids yet!

I mean, for God's sake. I've expressed disinterest in any number of things in my life, but no one has ever tried to convince me you haven't met the right grizzly bear. I'm an above-average-intelligence, capable lady. I've met not an insignificant number of children and they're cute and all, but they're just not my cup of tea. 

I'm grateful for a lot of things about Andy. One of them is his ability to laugh at me and make me feel significantly less crazy. When he asks "Why?" I tell him everything that's been on my mind since my friends started having kids. I'm not the kind of girl to date a guy for a year and decide I want to get married, so by the time I finally do settle down, I'll be in the high-risk pregnancy category. I have, apparently, a family history of anxiety and I don't want to pass that on to my children and I worry about how much crazier I'll get after giving birth. I made the mistake of watching the documentary The Business of Being Born and am now terrified of and grossed out by childbirth. There are so many things I want to do with my life and having a family is going to keep me from doing all of them. Finally, let's be honest. Despite whatever advances women have made, we're still the ones who sacrifice something when we decide to have a family, whether it's our careers, our sanity, or our family life, something has to give. At twenty-eight, it just seems easier not to have a family. And since I'm not crazy about kids . . .

"I don't know if we'll ever ask you to baby-sit."
"Thank God."

***

In my head a keep a running tally of the things I think would make me a good partner. It's the pep-talk I give myself before (and after) dates. I'm a good cook, a very good baker, an exceptional listener, I don't stay angry for long periods of time, I have an endearing laugh and a good sense of humor, am GGG, I'm well-read, and as long as I'm not leaving you a voicemail, I'm articulate. 

In my head I also keep a running tally of the things that worry me about dating someone long-term. I have anxiety, I can be self-involved, I'm devastated by criticism, I'm terrible at meeting new people, I can be a bit dramatic. I also bite my nails, curse like a sailor, use commas superfluously, listen to the same song on repeat for hours, and hate cleaning the bathroom. And let's not even mention the weird shit that goes on in my sleep. 

I've always felt like somewhere there would be someone who'd be willing to put up with all the crazy in exchange for the good things. That's the point of relationships, right? We never get everything we want and we put up with a lot of stuff we dislike, but we do it because the one outweighs the other. But now, when I see this list in my head what jumps out at me is not "exceptional listener" in the positive column or even "cursing like a sailor" in the negative column. It's likely does not want kids, which in my mind's eye is in red. With double underlines. And exclamation points.

It's stupid, I know, but I feel like not wanting children is going to be the one thing that pushes me over from quirky, adorable, still-dateable feminist to don't-touch-her-with-a-ten-foot-pole woman. Trust me, I can see the logical fallacy in this, but here in the Upper Midwest (particularly my family) people get married in their early 20s and have children by 32 at the latest. Any deviation from that norm makes you, to use the Minnesotan term, different. Now with Valentine's Day looming at the end of the week, it's hard not to wonder if  my passion for reproductive rights, my desire to go fifteen rounds over shit that matters with a guy before I can consider dating him, and my weird enthusiasms for cigars and comic books and Joss Whedon already make me different enough. I'm freaked that this kids thing is going to be one too many things different about me. 

Fuck Valentine's Day. 

Let me turn on my Happy Light, finish this Caramel Delite, and then we can see what's next on the scavenger hunt.

Misery

I'm sitting, head on the kitchen table, Dinah Washington on the radio, glass of Bushmills next to my hand when it hits me. I was in almost this exact same position three years ago. Well, sort of. Three years ago I was still reeling from a terrible breakup, the kind that you snap out of a few months later and wonder when you decided to Sinead O'Connor your hair and how you managed to get so fat. Then you look at the Patsy Cline albums, empty takeout containers, and Sam Houston bottles and think to yourself, "Ah yes. Hence the haircut and five pounds."

If Patsy Cline and Sam Houston are my breakup sedatives of choice, Bushmills and Dinah Washington are my form of self-flagellation. They're my symptoms not only of unrequited love (and if you've heard Dinah sing "Misery" you'll understand how appropriate they are) but of the irritation I have with myself when I'm, you know, acting like a melodramatic less aggravating Ophelia.

And I am acting like a melodramatic, only marginally less aggravating Ophelia. But not entirely for the reason you would expect.

The problem, of course, is a guy. Rather, the problem is two guys. The first adds the slightly unexpected twist.

I am by no stretch a modest or a humble person. I regularly subject my friends to pronouncements varying in their ability to grate on one's nerves from "I'm wonderful" to "God sent me into your life to make sure that you're less of a sanctimonious bastard." For the most part they, being relatively more humble and modest, take these comments in stride with few snide remarks to put me in my place.

Full disclosures and mighty pronouncements of my wonderfulness aside, my ego hits its own bumps. When someone asks me out knowing these things in advance my first response is usually somewhere along the lines of "Are you sure you don't want to think this through? I mean, you know I'm in therapy, right? And that I snort when I laugh? And that I will talk obsessively about Shakespeare or the Cassini mission or how sea turtles have a compass in their heads that records the latitude and longitude of their birth beach so they can make the migration home when they reach sexual maturity? And I sleep with my mouth open. All right. I mean, if you're sure." I'm incapable of making eye-contact with handsome men, much less stringing two syllables together. I don't necessarily understand when someone is flirting with me or when they're just being kind or a good conversationalist. This, I suspect, is why I have a bit of a thing for alpha males, but that's a whole different blog post.

This all, of course, came to a head recently when someone with whom I'm, shall we say, friendly intimated that he'd like to be on more than friendly terms. Like an idiot, I was caught by surprise. Didn't see all of the signs that were glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. Just kept on goofing around and being mildly flirtatious and generally acting like the interpersonal relationship ditz I seem to be. Then there's this thing and I don't know what to do about it.

I'm flummoxed for a couple different reasons. The first because I didn't see it coming down the tracks. The second and perhaps more important is the reality that this guy and I should be perfect together. He's bright. He's well-read. He's good-looking and likes Carl Sagan and Downton Abbey. I always have fun when we're together. I look forward to seeing him in the way I look forward to seeing all my friends.

That's what has me feeling like a prize bitch. I have no reason to not be attracted to this guy. There's no reason not to start dating him. Except there's this feeling. Maybe lack of a feeling is a better way to put it. We're missing something and I can't quite put my finger on it. And without it, whatever the hell it is, things just feel sort of flat. Fulfilling in a general sort of way, but not what I'm looking for out of my next relationship.

*Dramatic orchestral swell*

Enter guy two. (Of course.)

On the surface, he's disgustingly similar to the first gentleman. He's cracks me up. He's well-read. He can use palimpsest in a sentence. The difference is that something about him makes my stomach drop and my heart get palpitate-y. And I have no fucking clue what it is. And of course, in the great karmic payback for screwing over person one with all of my "Oh-thanks-but-I-only-like-you-as-a-friendly-acquaintance" he is for oh-so-many-reasons out of my reach.

There's a Dessa song that I love that she played at her show on Friday night. It hit home for a lot of reasons, but there's a line in it that I adore: I'm not trying to be sainted/I don't need to be good/I'm just trying to stay blameless. When I heard the song and that line on Friday night, I inadvertently put my head in my hands and laughed, which was precisely the wrong emotion for that song, that time.

I'm used to stumbling into my relationships without any premeditation whatsoever. For the first time, I find myself thinking about them, obsessing over them, worrying about them. I've tried so hard to transfer the feelings I have for the second person to the first, afterall, they're so similar that it should be simple, shouldn't it?

Of course it's not. As I'm continuing to get accustomed to this whole "You're a human. You're supposed to feel this way!" thing (which is exhausting and possibly overrated, by the way) I'm realizing that feelings aren't transferable. That attraction won't just go away because you're willing your brain to make it so.

The hardest realization (aside from feelings are stupid, men are stupid, and my brain is stupid) is that there are going to be moments in my life--not just my love life, but my life--where I want to be blameless, but am completely, utterly, finally to blame. And there's not a goddamn thing to be done about it.

Tonight, listening to Dinah and mulling over how there's nothing to for it, a small part of me can't help but wish for the easier days of Patsy Cline and a clearly wronged party. Tonight, the lyrics to "Misery" seem to be cutting both ways.

But I'm fighting a battle that can't be won.
'Cause you're on my mind more than you oughta be.
Thoughts of you should bring joy.
But they only bring misery. 

I get up to make a cup of tea and when I sit down again the song is nearly over. I hit the back button. Sing it again, Dinah.

Work

I do not know how Krista and I became friends.

I write that sentence with a great deal of trepidation  because I cannot imagine life without this hilarious, level-headed, supportive woman. But I cannot understand how we came to be friends. I can't remember meeting her for the first time, and most of our early friendship (actually, everything right up until we became roommates) only stands out in my memory as distinct moments. Driving home from dogsledding in Ely. Some night I passed in her room when she was a resident assistant. Having her in a few theology classes.

When Krista and I met one another she was, well, a Christian. A listen to Jars of Clay, go to lots of hands-in-the-air-Jesus retreats, want to be a youth minister Christian. She was also effortlessly outgoing, funny, and very, very kind. I was a bookish academic. A radical feminist with a Dorothy Day streak and a desire to upend patriarchy and hierarchy, get ordained as a female priest, be a nun, and live out my days on a Catholic Worker farm, writing and praying and loving the Lord while simultaneously racing to get excommunicated for my "radical" approach to egalitarianism in the Church.

Over Christmas, when Krista and Carliene were here, we had a good, long laugh about the women we used to be. Not a mocking look-at-how-dumb-we-were laugh, but an oh-my-God-look-at-how-far-we've-come laugh. Krista told us that when people in Boston ask her what she was like in high school and she says she was way into Jesus they all look at her a little sideways and ask the same question. "What happened?"

She laughs and gives the same answer every time. "I met my friend Kelly."

It's a funny thing, knowing that you were apparently the first tug at the secure knot of someone's faith life and ultimately led to its undoing.

I don't regret it. Not for a second.

The Krista I know now, the woman who has lived among refugees in Kenya, who has helped victims of torture find healthcare and solace and a future in the United States, who has personally gotten me through some of the hardest times in my life, is so much more interesting and loving and compassionate than the women who could quote the Catechism to me.

***

I can't stop thinking about grace. 

This is both an usual and unusual state of affairs for me. As a theology student, I was obsessed with the concepts of grace and redemption. All of my independent papers were on it in some capacity or another. I could twist any conversation around to Karl Rahner. I spent hours ruminating on Romans Chapter 3. I loved talking about grace. What it was, how we receive it, how it changes us. 

I have not, however, spent a whole hell of a lot of time since I chucked God by the wayside thinking about grace. It was too painful, too sad, too much to think that the moments in my life that I always though of as imbued with God's grace were, really, just coincidence. I stopped thinking about grace like I stopped thinking about prayer and justification and works vs. faith. 

Then over the past few weeks a few things happened that have made me pause, have made me think about grace again. I have, rather unexpectedly, made a new friend (given my shyness and general status as a curmudgeon  this in and of itself is a goddamn miracle) who is smarter than I am and pushes me to think harder, be more precise in my language and arguments. Some writers I admire started talking about grace in the way that always hit home with me. Grace that fills and fuels our daily lives, that bubbles up and gives us the strength and courage to keep on. 

***

A few weeks ago a friend in the corporate world asked my why I continue to work in nonprofit. 

I inadvertently led him into asking the question. I had mentioned an article that I read saying how most nonprofit workers who hold my job leave their nonprofit, if not the field, after eighteen months. They leave for a variety of reasons, mainly dissatisfaction with their organizations, their pay, their executive directors, etc. I mentioned that if I ever do decide to leave the world of nonprofit, it's unlikely to be any of these things. 

"What'll it be?" 

"Exhaustion." 

He then remarks that he doesn't know why I stay in the nonprofit world, particularly when my ambition and (let's face it) competitiveness would make me a natural fit for the corporate world. 

The work I do, not my job, but the real work I do on my own time is no easy thing. Working for women's access to healthcare, for reproductive rights, for justice for women and children who experience domestic abuse and sexual violence, is exhausting. It's crushing to realize that because of where I live and the profession I've chosen from myself, I still only make .76 to every dollar a man makes (even after adjustments accounting for education, experience, etc.) 

So this man's comment has stayed with me long after that conversation. It has been especially resonant this past week, during the 40th anniversary of Roe and as I'm reading statistics on child prostitution and rape and domestic violence, as I'm really fucking angry that we still haven't managed to renew VAWA. And as I've started to think to myself I can't do this anymore. I can't care this much, keep this level of passion going. I can't be this angry all the time. I can't keep fighting. After ten years, I don't know if I have it in me anymore. 

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I thought about the women Krista and I used to be. How blithely certain we both were of our faith, our work, and our place in the world. How much we've both grown and changed in knowing one another. And I thought quite a bit about my life as a Catholic, as a theologian, as a feminist. About grace and how maybe it isn't only the province of theologians and people of faith. 

I realized that this work I do, all of these causes that make me mad as hell, frustrated, crazy, all of the hours I spend researching depressing statistics, writing grants and appeals and letters to the editor, all of my downtime that I spend trying to educate people about contraceptives and wage gaps and the number of times a woman will return to an abusive relationship and why, all of this work is my love letter to a God in whom I do not, and cannot believe. 

(For the record, I recognize the cognitive dissonance that comes with an atheist ex-Catholic feminist saying her work for reproductive rights is a love letter to God.)

I am not a person of faith. At this point, it would literally take divine intervention to make me Christian again. But not being a Christian does not mean that I've stopped yearning for and and being tormented by the desire for faith. In the absence of that faith, the best I seem able to offer is the work that I'm doing here and now.  It's rather like saying "Hello, God, I know you're not there. But I love the idea of you so much that I'm going to devote my life to trying to make this hopelessly fucked up world a better, more just, sustainable place." 

Martin Luther must be rolling over in his grave. 

Sleepwalker

I would pay someone, hourly, to crawl into bed with me at night.

This is one of the first thoughts that pops into my head this morning at 6:06, which is about an hour and a half before my alarm is supposed to go off. I've been insomniac for a few months now, with one or two good nights of sleep to keep me from going completely mad. But with the exception of when I was staying with my folks in Wisconsin, I've barely had a full, consistent eight hours of sleep a night since . . . early November? 

Sleep issues are my leitmotif. I've been an insomniac since childhood, and a sleepwalker for much of my life. I have frequent, intense nightmares from which I wake screaming. 

Sorry upstairs neighbors. Also, I know we live in Minnesota and consequently do not ask about the private lives of our neighbors but, really? Screaming in the middle of the night doesn't deserve a "Hey, are you all right?"

Over the years, I've learned the things that trigger sleeplessness or walking, but the older I get the more I feel like I'm trying to exercise control over a part of my life that makes very little sense. I know that stress triggers sleepwalking, but despite running fifteen miles a week, having an active spiritual life, and being surrounded by people who loved me, I still had a sleepwalking incident in graduate school that starred me as the Grand Empress of Prussia and a fleet of attacking trebuchets. I know that going to sleep requires a ritual and that having the computer on in the bedroom, checking your cell phone before bed, and using your bedroom for anything except sleep or sex interferes with your ability to fall asleep. But despite having banished all these things from my bedroom, I still can't sleep. 

Last week I wrote about the lack of physical affection in my life and how that takes a number of forms. There are a couple that trouble me more than others namely the lack of hugs, (seriously, North Country) and sleeping alone. 

A few weeks ago I attended a wedding with the gang from Minneapolis. The Sunday after the wedding we were all hanging out in the living room of the cabin where we were staying, lounging in our pajamas, reading, talking about comic books and Battlestar Galactica vs Firefly. As people slowly absorbed caffeine  we started talking about how everyone slept the night before and room temperatures. Then the conversation took a funny turn and suddenly every partnered woman in the room (which was all but two of us) started talking about how her boyfriend had a core temperature that rivaled Mount Vesuvius on Volcano Day.  

I wear wool socks and gloves to sleep. There are seven blankets on my bed. Most nights, I crawl into bed with a heating pad. This is my general state of affairs from October until May. During the summer, I still keep my quilt on my bed. As a result, I couldn't see the downside of having a personal space heater crawl into bed with me. Then the women present (and a few of the men this time) started talking about how their bedtime compatriots like to fall asleep cuddling and suddenly I was on board. Snuggle up on the couch and watch TNG or read with your partner? Absolutely. Yes. Where can I sign up? Try and spoon me while I'm making my nightly pleas to Morpheus for a quick drop into dream? I'll submit, but I'll also hate you, quietly. Mainly because I'm restless when I'm attempting to fall asleep and if you want to cuddle I will feel (inevitably) that I have to stay in one position all night and then I really won't sleep. 

I am really good at a lot of things. Baking cakes. Impressing funders. Raising money. Consistently reading over forty books a year. Quoting The Great Gatsby. Salvaging recipes that should be all but lost. Intellectual bare-knuckle boxing.To name a few. But I am unequivocally terrible at vulnerability in my real life. Before I continue, I acknowledge a certain amount of vulnerability inherent in, well, blogging. However, the things I write about here are things I have trouble discussing in real life unless I've recently taken OTC cough syrup or am with one of my college friends. 

Sleep, when it comes, is the one place where I not only can be but have to be vulnerable. I'm not a pretty sleeper. It's a fight that I have almost every night, and when I finally do drop off it's, well, gruesome. I have a hard time breathing so apparently I either snore or sleep with my mouth open. I drool on everything. I talk and walk in my sleep. My pajamas are the most utilitarian, uninviting things in the world (I mean, wool socks.) I have bad or embarrassing dreams and they're audible. 

Perversely enough, it's these weird, kind of gross realities of who I am that make me long to sleep next to someone, to find someone with whom I can truly let down my guard and be my sleepy, insomniac, sleepwalker self. 

Touchy

Once, when a friend of mine was an hour late for brunch, the first words out of her mouth were: "I'm so sorry! I know you are (insert Meyers-Briggs Personality type here.)" She couldn't see me because I was at the stove attempting to resuscitate a dried-out quiche, but I rolled my eyes so hard I was afraid they would stick.

"I saw that." She said from behind my back.

We laughed and sat down for a cup of coffee.

I've never put much stock in personality tests. At best, I think they confirm what most of us already know about ourselves. At worst, I think they become excuses for our bad behaviors. This particular friend and many of my graduate school friends, now that I think about it, love personality tests. I mean, will discuss their results for hours, talk about the ways to best manage different personality types, how our group is strongly skewed toward the "Woos." I usually interject some smartass comment about what do personality tests say about people who think personality tests are a load of bullshit?

"That you are strongly cognitive and evidence based. Also, you're kind of a bitch."

As I said, confirming what we already know about ourselves.

***

I'm really squicked out by strangers touching me. 

There are a lot of reasons for it, some having to do with being an obsessive-compulsive, some are leftover hang-ups from a Catholic upbringing, some are bad relationship remnants. Whatever the reason, I really, really, really dislike when strangers touch me. Handshakes are fine, but please don't fly into my Soviet Airspace otherwise.

However, when I'm among people I love and trust? All bets are off. There's no such thing as too much touching, sitting too closely on the couch, getting hugged too often. If I walk past one of my friends, I will pat them on the back. I will hug them when I show up to a party, when I leave, and probably twice in-between. I sleep best when I'm in bed with someone else and can reach out and put a hand on their arm to reassure myself that they're there. 

In the greatest karmic tragedy of my life, I've had breathing-while-sleeping issues since I was five and am apparently the worst possible bedtime companion. 

Back to the point, touch. My tendency to be innocently physically affectionate with friends has led to some, um, miscommunications. I've never been particularly good at navigating that weird close friendship vs relationship line, and I think a part of the confusion stems from the fact that I will practically sit on your lap on the couch. My personality-profile type friends tell me that this is because touch is my "love language" and has some profound insight into my metaphysical self and how I fall in love and where I've made mistakes in the past and better understanding my love language will enable me not to make those same mistakes in the future. 

Personally, I think it says less about my metaphysical self (I mean, honestly) and more about the fact that I was raised in a shame-based religious tradition with a bunch of repressed Irish Catholics. 

I suppose the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

***

I cannot say this with enough emphasis. Adult friendships are strange. 

It's entirely possible that I say this because at the moment, my friendships are hopelessly cocked up by the fact that many of my close friends live elsewhere. When I'm getting ready to go on a date, I can no longer run down the hall to borrow a straightening iron or run over to see Krista to have her talk me down off the oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-throw-up-all-over-this-guy's-shoes first date panic.

If you haven't had that feeling you should probably just quit reading this blog.

My friendships now are strange because they're based primarily on email, chat, or Facebook. There's a part of me that loves these methods of communcation. I've always been far more comfortable writing my ideas down before I say them aloud. It gives me a chance to consider my word usage, how the other person will respond, and my arguments. And, let's be honest. Anyone who has had the misfortune to allow me an opening to talk about Enceladus or sea turtles in a conversation can attest to the inarticulate mess that I become when things about which I am passionate come up. So the text-based friendships are a way for me to be a slightly more articulate mess about the subjects that make me jump-up-and-down-in-my-chair excited. 

While I love textual methods of communication, I worry that I'm losing my ability to carry on a conversation with people who don't know Kelly shorthand. I am so intrinsically awkward on the phone that I still horrify my friend Andy. I'm actually concerned that when I try to have a normal conversation with someone who doesn't already know me, and who hasn't already known me for years, I'm going to shut down completely. I'll just sit there and stare, silently or ask for a pen and paper and scratch out the conversation like I'm deaf/mute. As I've blogged about before, when I meet people for the first time I'm already trying hard not to shut down entirely. Now I'm conducting the majority of my relationships through the internet, this has to end well. 

Oh Christ. That is literally the saddest sentence I've ever written. 

Of course, the other downfall to friendships conducting at a distance is what I've already set you up to think about. 

Physical intimacy has dropped to almost nothing. 

And to be clear here, I am emphatically not talking about sex. That's a whole different blog entry that I will never post. What I'm talking about is, quite simply, the lack of physical closeness I have to people here in the North Country. I really didn't think that anyone could be more repressed than my aforementioned  Irish-Catholic family, but damn, Scandinavians have them beat. I don't hug my friends here. Partially, I think, because most of them are friends from work and hugging your coworkers is objectively weird. But even taking that into consideration, the people I know here are just not physically affectionate in the way I'm used to being physically affectionate.

I didn't realize how much this was impacting me until I went in and had a massage a few months ago. I have a love/hate relationship with massages. I mean, they feel wonderful, but I have the aforementioned squick factor when it comes to having someone I don't know touch me. In graduate school I solved this by what my shrink calls exposure therapy and just kept going to the same massage therapist until I got used to her. Up here, it came down to necessity. I had been sleeping oddly--really twisted up and pinching a number of nerves until my back was a mass of knotted, uncomfortable muscles--and I needed to do something. I mentioned my squickiness to the massage therapist and said that it usually makes me really ticklish, and if I started squirming it was unintentional, and I would say if something was painful or uncomfortable. 

About ten minutes into a fifty minute massage, something happened that has literally never happened to me before. 

I started sobbing. 

And by sobbing, I don't mean mean getting a little teary. I mean, full-on-I'm-watching-Atonement-after-having-not-slept-for-four-days sobbing. With those terrible, racking inhales and a runny nose and general gruesomeness. 

Have I mentioned I'm not one of those girls who looks cute when she cries? Do they even exist? I call patriarchal mythos.

To my massage therapist's credit, she didn't seem terribly phased. She paused, asked if I was all right, gave me a tissue and continued.

I'm not great at admitting when I was wrong, and it took me months to acknowledge that while I still don't buy into the meta-personality bullshit, my Meyers-Briggs loving friend may have a point. When we're not being loved and cared for in the ways we want--no, need--to be loved and cared for, it feels an awful lot like not being loved at all.

Black Hole

I'm in my early twenties, sitting in my Literary Criticism class with one of my favorite professors. I've spent the first part of the class discussing Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. I'm pretty fired up, as I always am when we're discussing gender, sex, politics, and writing. Somehow the conversation takes a turn toward the movie The Notebook, which another student recently recommended (idiotically) to our feminist firecracker of a professor. When we start discussing the movie, the professor gets really wound up and eventually shouts, SHOUTS at us:

"Come on you guys! This is like dumping laudanum on your ice cream!"

The class dissolves into silence and then raucous laughter. Everyone picks up their pens and scribbles the quote down in the margins of their texts. We collect ourselves and resume the thread of the conversation.

I've never forgotten that professor's description of romantic comedies, partly because it's hilarious and partly because it's so apt.

***

"So, what does Mr. Right look like?" 

My therapist and I have been talking at length about loneliness and isolation before she asks the question. I, still incapable of not being a smartass, answer:

"Ryan Gosling." 

We sit quietly for a minute and she rolls her eyes at me, which is my cue to stop being flippant. 

"Smart. Preferably a little smarter than I am or smarter in a different way so I don't get lazy. Well-read." I pause. "Articulate and equally ambitious. Funny and interested in science-fiction and board games and going for walks after dinner."

We talk a little more about what I expect out of my romantic partners and whether or not I'll be able to find someone in a city as small as the one I'm living in currently (short answer, no.) We finish our session and I put in my headphones and turn up my coat collar for the walk home. 

As I'm walking I think about what I held back in that session. After all, it wouldn't be me unless I refused to disclose some tiny part of what I was thinking. In this case it was that I want the proverbial laudanum my ice cream.

Not all of me and not all the time. Most of the time, I want exactly what I told my therapist I want: an intellectually stimulating, emotionally and sexually satisfying man in my life. Who likes jazz. And science-fiction. But there's this tiny part of me, a part that often goes unacknowledged, who wants to be carried away. 

Let's be honest, that Kelly is kind of a dope. Inclined to pop-sentimentality and gooey love songs, romance novels and daydreaming, she's a real drag to be around. She starts nattering on about surprise trips to Paris with her hypothetical boyfriend. She sighs, audibly, during parts of Pride and Prejudice she's seen/read so many times she can recite them from memory. 

Thankfully, that Kelly doesn't have a whole lot of resiliency. She can usually be dealt with by putting on a Bessie Smith album. 

***

I feel like I'm letting the home team down lately. 

After a lot of hard work, my career feels like it's finally going in the direction I want. I have incredible friends. My OCD is slowly coming under control. I've discovered in the past few months that I'm a pretty tough person. I have all of these things heading in exactly the direction I want them to be heading. I'm really proud of the challenges I've faced, the risks I've taken, the things I've achieved.  By all accounts I should be happy. 

No, it's not that I'm unhappy. I'm . . . wistful, maybe. A little too inclined to go back and read old love letters and think about what old boyfriends are doing now. A little too teary at weddings. Feeling a touch too much like I want to watch Bridget Jones's Diary. 

It's the wistfulness that I find troubling, the fact that I feel like something is missing from my life because ohmygodhowfuckingclichedcanyouget? I might as well put on a pair of yoga pants and eat an entire pint of ice cream. Covered in laudanum. 

It's my hangup, of course. But from the conversations I've had, it seems like it's the hangup a lot of smart, successful, single women have. It's as though we've all acknowledged that we're bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies and that's what we project to our families, friends, coworkers, whomever. And that's great, because that's who we are. Yet at the same time, we all seem to have made the decision that the bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies are the only aspects of ourselves we're allowed to show the world. Ever. We've bought into the bullshit that in order to be successful and respected we can't expose these small parts of ourselves that need to be loved and cared for to other people. Because the second you say "Yes, I'd like to be dating someone" or "Yes, living alone can be really lonely" what you're really saying, or what people perceive you as saying is "Oh my God. I need a boyfriend six weeks ago and I'm going to settle for the first guy who comes along because I'm lonely and desperate for companionship." 

Suddenly, instead of being the woman who's single by choice or inclination you're the friend who's single because she's a huge swirling vortex of neediness. A relationship black hole and any guy who gets too close is going to experience emotional and mental spaghettification. 

This, of course, isn't the reality. Or rather, it's not the reality of who all of us are as people. It's the reality that's been put forth in those laudanum-on-your-ice cream movies. And while none  few of the women I know who admit to occasionally feeling lonely or isolated or who just want to be dating someone are actually at emotional black hole, I think we all fear being perceived as it.

 As a side note, I wonder if men feel the same way, or if this is just the gift that entertainment has given women.

Back to my point. It's this emotional clusterfuck that has me feeling like I'm letting down the feminist side of things. The part of me that wants to be swept up, swept away, the part of me that was raised on princess movies and who still reads romance novels is slowly becoming more resilient, less inclined to be silenced by a blues record. That Kelly is not a bad person. Sure, she's a little dopey, a little dreamy, but she's also a hell of a lot more sincere and less jaded and less angry. There's nothing anti-feminist about wanting to fall in love in that breath-taking, heart-stopping, annoying way in which I like to fall in love. Just like there's nothing inherently feminist in listening to Graveyard Blues.

Pass the ice cream.