Haunted

"And then what?"

Michelle and I are squished into a booth in a tiny Lebanese deli and I'm updating her on recent events.

"I had a panic attack."

She puts her head in her hands. "Of course you did. How bad was it? Was it one where you needed one of the bags? What was going on?" 

"Mostly kissing. And it wasn't that bad. I didn't need a bag. I just needed to . . . I don't know. Slow things down. Think rationally for a second."

"Oh, honey. The last thing you needed to do was keep thinking." She pauses. "I love you, but you're just a mess."

"But a good mess right? You know, like how I strive to be sort of charmingly crazy rather than don't-stir-that-pot-of-crazy crazy? Can I be a funny, smart mess? A mess who's also a good writer and a fantastic baker and pretty generally has her life together? Maybe a mess that you wouldn't be, I don't know, completely disappointed you spent the night with when you woke up the next morning?"

"You want stuffed grape leaves?"

"I hate you."

***

Here, in no particular order are some things that scare me.

Confined spaces. Heights. Being touched by strangers. That whatever guy I'm with is secretly a serial killer and I'm about to done in in some horrible, gruesome, Dexter-esque way. Anything jumping out at me. The Redneck Pain Family from Cabin in the Woods. The monsters from Hush. Basically anything Joss Whedon has ever created with the intention of scaring the shit out of you. The Exorcist. The Blair Witch Project. Walking down empty streets alone in the middle of the night. Anyone chasing me in any context ever (which is amplified when they have a chainsaw). 

That seems like enough for now.

***

I have two really bad moments in the haunted house. 

Haunted houses are emphatically not my thing. I like a good scare, yeah, absolutely. But I have a terrible startle reflex, so jumpy things and I are not the best match. I don't watch movies where things pop out of nowhere and I generally avoid haunted houses this time of year. 

But it's a dear friend's bachlorette party and I'm trying to be a good sport, so I agree "Yes, a haunted house sounds like fun!" all the time thinking "Oh my God. The last time I was at a haunted house I was twelve years old, got separated from my family, and was so scared I peed my pants. This is going to be bad."

I drink almost nothing all day and go to the bathroom four times before we get in line. 

Things start to fall apart when we board the hayride to take us out to the haunted house and are informed "Our monsters will touch you. You may not touch them."

Oh shit. 

We make it through the hayride with me squeezing myself into the middle of the wagon and pulling my hat down over my eyes and generally avoiding everything going on around me, which is a cacophony of bangs and screams and random people in costumes jumping on the wagon and ohmygodthere'saredneckpainfamilymemberstrokingmyback. 

Despite the fact that I can't stop screaming, this is not one of the bad moments. 

Jess is good enough to walk next to me and hold my hand over the next forty minutes. She takes the brunt of the attention, but there are still people jumping out and touching me every three to three and a half minutes.

Eventually, we're trying to get into some dark building and someone walks up behind me and starts stroking the back of my neck. 

As we were walking in, I had given myself a pep talk. "None of this," I told myself "is real. You are in control of how you react to this. These are human beings and if they see you start crying or you ask them to stop touching you they'll have some compassion."

False. 

The guy stroking the back of my neck just won't quit, not even after I shout "Stop fucking touching me!" 

So I throw an elbow. 

This guy is also apparently, a member of the Redneck Pain Family, because this just makes him lean in closer and start whispering in my ear, something typically reserved for people who spend the night. I'm freaking and Jess yanks me forward. 

***

"So," Michelle asks, after the grape leaves have arrived. "Why the panic attack?"

I play with my food for a little while and don't answer.

"Oh, Kels. Was it the serial killer thing again? You need to talk to someone about that."

"I do not need to talk to someone about it! We grew up in Milwaukee while Jeffery Dahmer was still at large. Our brains hadn't finished forming yet, I think it's perfectly reasonable that it scares the shit out of me."

"I've told you this before. You're not" she pauses here for emphasis, as if I don't already know what she's about to say "a gay man. As such, that particular fixation is not reasonable."

"It's not just Dahmer! It's the whole thing, the whole serial killer thing." Her eyebrows go up. "Shut up. I was reasonably confident he was not a serial killer and that was not what was making me panicky." 

"So what was it?"

I give her the Cliff Notes version, the same thing I've told two other people, one of whom was my therapist. I tell her and despite the fact that she's been my closest friend for fifteen years, it's really, really hard. She, not one for physical affection, gives me the last grape leaf. "Oh, honey." 

***

I do all right for the remainder of the haunted house, holding it together through a room where the walls are soft, black, weighted, and literally pressing in on you and through strobe-lit corn mazes and on and on. It's the last maze, the one with the black walls, black hallways, and no lights where I dig in my heels and say "No. No. Nononononononono. I can't do this." I get tugged forward and the next thing I know I'm in a long, dark, hallway. 

The are two men in masks running straight at me. From opposite directions. With chainsaws. 

There are moments in your life where the rational side of your brain checks out. Where the calm, reasonable, thoughtful person you've always thought you were goes out for lunch without you. Say, when someone you love calls you and says "I never want to see you again." Or when you're kissing some devastatingly cute guy and you flash back to the last time you were kissing some good-looking guy and how that ended. 

Or when there are two people representing one of your worst, most archetypal fears chasing you down a dark hallway lit only with strobe lights. 

Jess can feel actually feel my fight-or-flight-response kick in. When we finally got out of this damn place she said "I knew you were going to bolt, that you weren't thinking clearly, and that you were going to get lost. Alone. That would have ended badly." She screams at me "Pull it together, Prosen!" 

I close my eyes. We run.

***

Michelle and I pay our bill and step outside the restaurant. In the open air of the street she finally asks.

"Panic attacks . . ."

"Attack. I only had one. And it was short."

"Panic attack aside, how was it?"

I just smile.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your poker face sucks. I knew the second you stepped out of your car." 

I hug her. "I knew you knew. That's why I told you the rest of it." I pause "I'm just afraid . . ."

"Nope." She shushes me. "Don't even go there." Then she hugs me back. "Way to . . . you know . . . face your fears. We'll get you to watch The Exorcist yet."

"Actually," I brighten up a little. "I'm going to a haunted house at the end of the month."

"I'm so, so sorry for whoever is going with you."

I jingle my keys as I'm getting into my car. "I don't know. I've got a good feeling about this one."

Snob

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

“That’s one of my favorite songs!”

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

I mean, everyone does that, right?

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

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

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

***

I hate Anna Karenina.

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

Overreaction to a book? Yeah, probably.

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

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

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

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

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

Shoulda taken that as a sign.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very funny, guys.”

The entire room broke up again.

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Date a Nerd

Date a nerd.

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

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

Date a nerd.

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

Argue with her about anything.

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

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

Scars

I have a tendency toward keloid scars. Keloids are, for those of you uninitiated into the realm of gross-but-non-lethal-things-that-can-go-wrong-with-the-human-body, enthusiastic scar tissue (Of course I'd end up with enthusiastic scar tissue. Jesus.). Keloids are scars that don't know when they're supposed to stop growing. As a result the scar tissue keeps growing past the point of the original injury.

It sounds very sci-fi doesn't it?

But like I said, non-lethal. But non-lethal doesn't necessarily mean that they're not painful. They itch, especially after showers. They're ugly and they're deeply embarrassing and I have three of them and I hate them with all of the intensity of a supernova.

Two of them are visible. One, on the top of my right breast, is from some small childhood injury. It's the one that makes me most self-conscious because it's not just visible, it's incredibly visible (Thanks, giant rack, no real way to draw attention away from the red lump on the top of you when you're calling so much attention to yourself). The second is on my left knee and is the result of a cycling accident a few years ago. That one I mind a little bit less because it's easily covered by tights, long(er) skirts, or crossing my legs. The third one, on the side of my right breast is, thankfully, always covered. That one comes from one of those particularly scary ohshiti'manadultandineedtofigurethissituationout moments.

I don't like when people ask about them (because people always do) not because of any particularly traumatic experience surrounding them, but because I hate being reminded of these small imperfections. I don't like to acknowledge them, to say Yes, these are a part of my past. I'd prefer to gloss over them, pretend they don't exist. 

While in graduate school, I spent several thousand dollars that I did not have for steroid injections into the scars in the hope that they would flatten out and fade.

It didn't seem to work. 

***

"Yeah, you got very huggy last night."

Michelle and I are out to breakfast the day after my birthday party. I'm a little rough around the edges, feeling like I should be wearing my sunglasses indoors and wishing to the gods that I could take all of the fucking silverware away from the child the next table over so maybe he'll just keep shrieking instead of shrieking and banging on the table with everything he can reach.

"What do you mean very huggy? I'm almost always flying in someone else's Soviet Airspace."

The kid at the next table over has now gotten out of his seat and is running around the table shouting "Pow! Pow! Pow!" I'm looking for the waiter. It feels like 200 years since we ordered coffee and if I don't get my biscuits and gravy (pepper gravy being well known for its healing properties) I may literally die. My organs will just give up the ghost.

"Yeah, it was worse than normal."

"Oh Christ."

The kid trips and starts screaming. I put my head on the table.

"Wake me up when the coffee gets here. Or I die."

"Sounds good."

***

 I've been weird about physical intimacy lately. 

Once again, I am emphatically not talking about sex. I'm talking about the back rubs, the hugs, the sitting-super-close-to-people-on-the-couch, the sleeping next to people intimacy that I love(d). I've been like this since . . .June? I can't figure out what the hell is going on with me. It's unsettling. And it's not that I don't want to be as close as I've always been with people, it's just that something's holding me back. 

I've been weird lately.

***

I'm on a dating time-out. 

It's been probably a month since I've gone out with Blah. We went to a sports bar to watch a baseball game sometime in . . . August? Afterward I pulled the fade-away, something I hate doing, but I just couldn't muster the emotional energy that conversation would have taken.  

I'm trying to figure out when and how you tell a guy that you're seeing "Oh, hey, so a year ago I had a nervous breakdown. I spent some time under a psychiatrist's care for OCD, anxiety, and depression. Sometimes I still have flare-ups, but for the most part I think I'm waaaaaaaaaaaay saner than I used to be. Who's your favorite Firefly character?" 

I haven't been playing well with others lately, and it seemed like an appropriate moment to put myself on a time out and figure out what I want and who I want and how the hell I'm going to drop what feels like an atom bomb on some poor unsuspecting schmuck. 

***

I want to start a relationship a month and a half to two months in. 

I want to skip all of the stupid, unfun getting to know you parts. The career summary without talking about the parts that interest either of us. The sibling listing. The "where did you grow up?" 

I want to fast-forward t the part where seeing their name pop up on your mobile makes you dizzy. The part where you gross out all of your friends with the dopey look on your face. The part where you know one another well enough to plan dates that are actually interesting and fun and engaging. The part where you go fifteen rounds over something you're both passionate about and then take forty-five minutes to say goodnight while you're parked in fifteen minute parking. The part where you can't keep your hands off of one another. 

I want to start a relationship there. 

***

During one of my rare moments of honesty with myself, I admit that my desire to go on a dating time-out and my lack of interest in physical intimacy are part and parcel of my unwillingness to let other people see my scars and my desire to start a relationship partway in.

I am petrified of getting hurt.

The idea of any kind of vulnerability--physical, emotional, whatever--is scary enough that I'd rather just sit it out. I'm ridiculously, deliriously happy with my life right now, and letting someone else in is just going to fuck it all up. Or rather, it feels like it's just going to fuck it all up. I know. I know. The right person won't care about your stupid scar tissue. Maybe they won't notice. And you're not as crazy as you used to be, and hell everyone's a little crazy anyway, you'll probably be one of the more normal girls he's dated.

Trust me. I know. I did go through therapy. I can do the pep talk.

But opening up means acknowledging the scars, letting someone see them, saying "Hey, I've gotta tell you something about the person I used to be." Instead it's just so much easier to keep injecting the steroids and hoping this time will smooth everything out.

Though, that doesn't seem to be working. 

Settle Down

I've gotta be one of the few people in the world whose closest friends gives her advice based on early 19th century literature.

I've sent one of my two best friends a loooooooong, feelings-heavy email. The length and email content are not unusual for us. She's one of the few people I confide in on a regular basis. She'd be delighted and horrified to know that I think of her as my Mother Confessor. Oh well. One of the best things about our relationship is that she's always let me communicate the things that are hard for me to talk about through text, and I'll always be grateful to her for it.

I feel like an asshole.

That's the rising action and the denouement. I feel like, and am, an asshole.

The bit in the middle is the complicated bit (isn't it always). It's the part of the email I rewrite seven times trying to find a better way to say that I feel blah about Blah.

The fact that my short name for a guy that I've been out with a few times, a guy who is genuinely interested in me, who returns my phone calls and texts with surprising promptness, who has a good, steady job, who owns his own house (in a part of the city I love). and pays all his bills ahead of time, Blah, concerns me.

It's--security, stability, niceness--what I'm supposed to want, right?

The email becomes less of an email and more of a journal entry on why dating Blah feels like settling. He is confused by the motion I make that means my heart is exploding. Like, actually doesn't understand the emotional intensity that I'm trying to signify. When I recite (Recite, people, there's no book involved) one of my favorite poems, for him he looks at me blankly and says "Oh, you like poetry?" He has asked me more than once to describe what I mean when I say seeing jazz live switches me on and makes my head buzz. When we go out we talk about work and baseball, sometimes about American History and I just feel . . .

blah.

***

I settle. 

My therapist knew it. My friends all know it. My mother regularly reminds me of it. 

It's easy to defend, especially as a woman. We get so many messages about how holding out for the exact right guy is going to leave us old, embittered spinsters. How there's no such thing as Prince Charming (as if the women who espouse settling never figured out Self-Rescuing Princess). How no one will ever be perfect and ohmygodyourjunkisgoingbad and you might as well just cut a few of those dealbreakers off of your list.

Do guys feel the same pressure?

I settle.

I regularly punch in a weight class that's justalittle beneath me. I date men who can't keep up with me intellectually, or who don't find arguing about Art and Fiction and Whether or Not Women Self-Select Out of Scientific Careers to be a turn-on. I date men who would rather meet me at Brothers after I've spent the night at the Artists' Quarter and who aren't curious or engaged in anything beyond work-family-home-sports. 

Look, I know how this sounds. Unless someone can finish the Sunday New York Times crossword in ten minutes or fewer I'm going to kick them out of bed. I am the worst person in the world because if you can't appreciate the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Concertmaster's solos on Mozart's Serenades I'm going to like you justalittlebit less. 

I know. Pretentious to the Nth degree. 

Go to hell. 

Most of the time the men I'm dating meet none of these criteria. None. And most of the time I end up miserable and hurt and disgusted with myself. But it's just so much easier to settle. It's easier to tell myself "Oh, these things aren't actually important. I don't actually need to be stimulated by someone's mind or passions or what moves them. I can handle football and happy hours and talking incessantly about cars." 

It's so much easier to settle, to drop a weight class than it is to try for the guys I actually want to date. I'm terrified that the men I want to be with--the brainiacs with weird passions, the Picard-types, the types of guys who can explain quantum mechanics or game theory to me--will be settling by dating me. 

I don't want to be the person someone settles for. 

***

The email that I get back from my confessor regarding Blah is characteristically sweet and funny. It's nice to have surrounded myself with loving, interesting people who genuinely care about me. 

The advice I get is based, on all things, Gone with the Wind. "Don't settle. Don't even think about settling. You will not be happy. The other person will not be happy. This is what I learned from Gone with the Wind. Nothing else needs to be said about that."

She's right, of course. I've got to break it off with Blah. The truth is that when we're together I find myself trying to switch off, trying to settle down because he finds my constant exuberance and enthusiasm odd. (And not charmingly odd, which seems to be the best I can hope for.) The problem, of course, is that once I'm switched on--about art or jazz or the book I'm reading or the food I've just made--it's really hard for me to switch it back off. 

And I don't want to switch it back off. 

The way, of course, to be able to live the kind of switched-on craziness that I crave is to stop settling. I've got to stop worrying that my beloved brainiacs are going to feel like they're settling because I require a simple(r) explanation of coronal ejections or irrational numbers. I mean, there's gotta be one out there who doesn't mind doing so if it means he gets his own walking database of poetry and fiction, philosophy and world religion, right? 

Right?

Blah. 

Stories

Ford's Theater really gets to me. 

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

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

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

Although, Jesus. That was incredible.

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

Like I said, the entire weekend has been surprising.

***

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

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

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

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

***

I spend too much time in my own head.

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

I don't know how to fix this.

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

I suspect it does.

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rock Me

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

Every sweet song that comes on the radio is about me. Rather than walk through my neighborhood in the gathering dusk, I dance. I skip. I sing. Twice in the past week you could have driven down Marshall at around 7:40 and seen me pirouetting, for Christ's sake. I'm so frustratingly gooey and ridiculous that there are soberer, quiet moments where I think:

Oh my god. I hate myself.  

I can't help it. I haven't felt like this in ages.

***

I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I'm cuddled up on the couch, wrapped in a cottony, fluffy blanket. There's a woodstove at my feet and the sound of rain on the roof. The entire room is lit by twinkly white lights and candles. I am warm. I am happy. I am loved. 

I've woken up to the sound of a cello, a guitar, and a three part harmony on one of my favorite songs. I sing along (quietly enough that I don't disturb the delicate balance of the other voices) and smile to myself. 

Wagon Wheel was my introduction to bluegrass. It's the song that inevitably is played whenever my musical friends get together. It's a song I can remember hearing for the first time with the kind of crystalline clarity that makes me suspect it's actually a false memory. It's a song that I have to hear to the end whenever it's started. It's the song I sing in the shower and we sang on my 25th birthday sitting on the floor of my shitty, mouse-infested graduate school apartment. 

Yikes. I suddenly realize how gross that floor was and by extension, how  gross sitting on it was. 

When I was attending a Benedictine college I heard a lot of chatter about the values of hospitality and community. I did not realize how deeply those values would impact my life until full of risotto and wine and conversation, I would stay up late having marathon conversations about God and Love and Truth and Children. Conversations where things that had influenced my life abstractly as a theologian (Faith, Love, Charity) were brought to bear on the life I was living and the decisions I was making about community, kindness, and sustainability. 

Somehow everything was always proceeded or followed by music. Huge, angry intellectual sparring matches devolved into harmonies and melodies. Hurt feelings were soothed away by familiar choruses and even if we didn't all believe in an afterlife, we sure as hell loved to sing about it.

And always (usually at my request) came Wagon Wheel. It's been such a part of my life that I can remember each of the specific instances in which we sang it as a group and why those days were important and what they meant in my developing adulthood. I smile when I think about the future times we'll sing it and wonder what those occasions will mean and how they will shape me the way all those past late nights have. I can't help but feel like the song has wormed its way into my DNA. That, should I ever actually have kids, loving it will be passed down through the generations until a 100 years from now some descendant of mine will be around a campfire asking "Hey, does anyone know that old song . . ."

***

The past ten years of my adult life have been a series of experiments on how to (and please forgive the douchiness of what I'm about to say) live authentically. I've learned how community grows organically and what I can do to help that community thrive (Pro tip: live nearby). I've failed in building that community and authenticity in some places (the North Country) but have laid down deep roots in others (who knew that Stearns, Hennepin, and Ramsey counties could all occupy the same space in my heart? Jesus, who knew that I would fall in love with Stearns County?). Growing up has been a process of deciding that I want to live a life where community, charity, patience, and kindness are not just things I think about on holidays or when someone shows me some small example of them, but are things that I want to influence my daily life and work. 

And before I sound too ohmygodi'mtotallyselfactualized here, I need to say that these things are really difficult for me. They're well, virtues I guess, that I don't have. At all. Anyone who has had the misfortune to drive with me through a traffic jam or catch me when I'm late can attest to how quickly I lose my cool. I'm not particularly good at being attentive to the present, when I'm tired or hungry I have a razor-sharp tongue, and nine times out of ten I would love to tell community to just sod off already. 

***

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

I'm so in love that it makes me giddy.

Have I mentioned that I'm so in love that it makes me completely fucking annoying? 

God help the entire world when I actually fall in love with someone rather than something.

For the time being, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that what I'm in love with is the life that I am slowly, agonizingly building for myself. A life where special occasions are where frustration and kindness, community and solitude, silence and harmonies all co-exist.

So rock me, momma like a wagon wheel.