California Dreamin', Minnesota Home

I have a California-themed playlist.

It's employed only to avert Weather Related Madness. Say, for example, it's November 11th-12th and it's suddenly cold enough to be February. February. Or it's snowing in September. Or April. Or it's the sixteenth straight day of subzero temperatures and despite the fact that that you really love Minnesota Jesusgodthisweatheristedious. 

That's when I turn on the California Dreamin' playlist.

It is, if I do say so myself, a good one. A nice mix of the expected (The Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding) and the slightly more unexpected (Jeffery Focault's cover of "Lodi." Rilo Kiley's "Let Me Back In."). It usually serves to pull me back off the edge. After a listen or two I can set myself back to my normal winter pursuits: building a model whaling ship while listening to Moby Dick, baking, eating my weight in simple carbs, winter running strictly to feel superior.

***

You know the feeling of stepping off a plane and immediately falling in love with a place? Instantly getting vacation high because you're somewhere that's new and interesting and (hello, I live in Minnesota and travel in the winter) warm? God, what a great feeling, having a new city woo you with its jazz clubs and rare bookstores and people who don't elongate their vowels (I discovered this week I can no longer say the word "bars" properly). It's a great feeling, one of my favorite things about travel. But I'm usually happiest at the end of the vacation when, exhausted and completely satisfied, I get back on the plane to come home.

Don't get me wrong. I'll be in New Orleans again this winter. If I had an extra $200.00 in my checking account, I'd be spending Thanksgiving wandering around D.C.. Chicago will always have a special place in my heart. I could rattle around Lower Queen Anne in Seattle on my own for hours. I still have dreams about Beijing and Lima.

But then there are those cities where you deplane and it's just . . . different, somehow.

San Francisco was the closest to love-at-first-sight I've ever been in my life.

It was, I suppose, inevitable. When I boarded my plane in Minneapolis there was a snowstorm bearing down and promises of a foot of snow. In April. When I hopped off the plane in San Francisco it was sunny and sixty-five. BART was, for a girl who was living the middle of a cornfield, surprisingly easy to navigate. I heard live jazz for the first time while I was there. I bought a copy of Howl at City Lights Bookstore (swoon) and then drank too much California wine sitting next to the ocean.

And Redwoods. Oh, my Sweet Jesus. Redwoods.

It was (is) hard to keep from comparing San Francisco to the windswept, icy prairie. Even without the heaps of ice and snow, the thirty-mile an hour wind gusts, the -40 temperatures before windchill, California outstrips Minnesota in one crucial way.

There is nothing sexy about Minnesota.

I love this state with every fiber of my being, but we don't have a whole lot going on here to brag on. Ok, yes, we're usually ranked in the top for healthiest states in the nation. We have decent public education, several Fortune 500 companies, the Mississippi Headwaters, Garrison Keillor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, but none of those are things that you would travel here to see. Minnesota is, by its very nature, cold, uninviting, and a little standoffish.

California, oh, California. No one once bothered to say "Oh, you aren't from around here, huh?" (Probably because it was crystal clear once you looked at my hair.) No one talked about the weather. I never once heard someone ask "Oh, so how spicy is it?" Everyone was preposterously good-looking, no one looked like they hadn't seen the sun for the past four months, there were bike paths and runners everywhere.

California is, it goes without saying, sexy.

***

I am rubbish at relationships.

There. I finally admitted it. I'm not single because I choose to be. I'm not single because I have anxiety or OCD or because the men in whatever city I'm living in suck. I am single because I am stunningly, breathtakingly awful at relationships. I get nervous during sex. I have a tendency to smush all of my emotions down until I accidentally (and usually inappropriately) blurt them out. Last weekend, I stayed in and read The New Yorker, drank herbal tea, and went to bed before 8pm. I hate making new friends, have never, ever made a good impression on anyone's mother, flatly refuse to introduce men to my parents, and tweak out about ohmygodmyindependence usually around month three.

I am fucking awful at relationships.

I am somehow, impossibly, equally awful at, uh, microrelationships (the ones that last between twelve and fourteen hours). I'm usually convinced someone is a serial killer and even if they pass the Not A Serial Killer Test (Don't ask me. I don't know what it is) I have to contend with the Crushing Former Catholic Guilt and Regret and 9.9999999 times out of 10, I'm reasonably confident it's not going to be worth it (Ugh, neck tattoos, seriously?) and just refuse to even try.

Let's not even get into friendships. I owe everyone who has known me for more than three years a cake, a bottle of wine, and some PTSD counseling.

You know what interpersonal relationships I'm great at? Where I unequivocally shine?

Flings.

Give me something with an expiration date, no shorter than a week and no longer than a month, and I will be the smartest, funniest, sexiest girl a guy has ever been with in his life. I don't like to brag (who am I kidding, I love to brag) but if we don't have longer than 31 days, when I finally drop him at the airport or hop the train back to the Cities, he'll think of me wistfully as the girl who got away. It's because I get a chance to be funny and sweet. I just get to be the good bits of me, the non or charmingly neurotic bits. There's a touch of emotional connection, certainly more than a microrelationship (all right, one night stand) but I don't have to tell him that I work too much, that I have all these wires crossed in my head, that I spend large parts of my day in silence or talk to myself or that I have on more than one occasion let the dirty laundry situation get so out of control that I've gone to buy new underwear rather than go to the laundromat.

Anyway, the girl who got away.

It's true. I've got the love letters to prove it.

That last part is a lie. I did receive love letters (or in one memorable case, a thank you card) but I didn't keep them. Because the thing I love best about flings, the thing that makes me so fucking good at them is the ability to walk away. At the end of the week or two or three I can delete a number from my cell phone, spend two or three days feeling wistful, and then go on with my life, maybe remembering the guy for a breathless moment or two throughout the years.

Flings are sexy.

Trust me, I know exactly how this sounds

***

Commuting to work today in the nearly zero degree temperatures (in November, I ask you) I cued up my California Dreamin’ playlist. And it helped, a little. Mainly it made me think about airline tickets and the fact that my favorite nonprofit on the face of the Earth is located in San Francisco. Also about wine and good chocolate and nearby Redwoods and the North Beach neighborhood. I wondered if Duluth really was a fluke, and if I relocated to a bigger city I could be happy on my own, if I could make friends in a city like San Francisco.

The playlist fades out on The Decemberists's "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade," hands down one of my all-time favorite songs. Before reaching into my pocket to restart the list, I flip my coat collar up and pull my hat down tighter over my ears, cursing the fact that my hair is going to be flat by the time I get to the office. When a new song rather unexpectedly starts I realize I've left myself an Easter egg, a protection against too much wistfulness over something I can't have.

Minnesota isn't sexy. It isn't.  How could it be with so many lefse recipes and so few natural tans? But here's the thing, despite the fact that I had tons of fun in San Francisco, that I think of it and look up plane tickets a few times every year, I haven't been back. I've been to Seattle (twice), Portland, Denver, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, and Chicago in the intervening years, but I've never made the trip back to San Francisco. It's a revelation that might sting, but for the Arctic wind that's wormed its way into my heavy coat. I pull off my sweater mittens and reach into my pocket, switching the music over to Trampled by Turtles and already arranging a decidedly unexciting, unsexy, but quietly, reliably, wonderful "My Minnesota Home" playlist in my mind.

Amen. Alleluia.

My apartment smells like homemade funfetti cake. It's clean, at least, as long as you don't open the closets. Miles Davis is playing ballads on the radio. 

"Oh my God!" One of two favorite former roommates walks into my apartment. She and her husband are not normally this effusive but within fifteen seconds of them entering I'm introduced to their daughter, hugged, and told "Your apartment is so cute! It smells so good in here! You look incredible." I warm up, almost instantly. I've been simultaneously excited for and dreading the evening all week. My phone rings and I run downstairs to bring up another guest. 

It's November 7th, the date of my annual birthday party for Lise Meitner and Marie Curie. 

I have, as I've noted in the past, keep some strange holidays. I can generally be relied on to read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July and recount the Haymarket Square riots on Labor Day, sure. I think anyone who has known me for awhile knows that I have a minor Lincoln obsession and will celebrate his birthday with a Mary Todd Lincoln almond cake every February (this is the holiday I celebrate instead of Valentine's Day). These are the somewhat normal holidays I repurpose every year. 

The odder ones are, in no particular order: the day Teddy Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee and continued reading the speech he had started before accepting treatment, the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the publication dates of The Great Gatsby and The Lord of the Rings and the birthdays of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Meitner, Curie, and Jane Austen.

Of those holidays, November 7th is the most important. It's my secular Christmas. It's a mash-up of all the things I love. History, science, feminism, excellent writing, discovery. Every year I celebrate with a birthday cake and when possible, friends over for tea and birthday cake and conversation about women in science or books or writing or that article in The New York Review of Books that's been irritating me all week. 

It's one of my favorite parties. 

This year I almost canceled. 

***

I am, as I wrote previously, having some issues with OCD and anxiety again. And while they're no where near as bad as what I experienced while living in the North Country, they're bad enough that other people have noticed and insisted that I return to treatment. The amount of frustration, anger, and disappointment I feel over being unwell is indescribable. I suppose I always knew that I would live with anxiety and OCD for my entire life, but there was a not insignificant part of me who hoped that it was really a function of loneliness and the place where I was living, that once I moved back to a city I love and was surrounded by people who love me, all of my mental health issues would vanish. 

I have a slight giant tendency to be extremely hard on myself. I'm also stubborn, proud, and am used to fixing things on my own. It is, of course, what kept me from getting treated for so long (which, of course, ultimately meant that I had a bigger hole to clamber out of when I finally did). Becoming a sane, stable individual is, for some of us at least, an entire life's work. 

There's still a version of myself who is constantly telling me "It doesn't matter. If you can't make yourself happy here, you won't be happy anywhere. You're a drag on all your friends, no one is ever going to love you, and you might as well accept that you'll die old, alone, and crazy." 

That Kelly is such a bitch. She's also unbelievably loud. And convincing. 

***

The Benedictines really did a number on me. 

After seven years of schooling with them it was, I suppose, somewhat inevitable. But they didn't make me want to become a nun, and they certainly didn't keep me a Catholic. What they did pound into my head were those damn Benedictine Values: Community Living, Taking Counsel, Listening, the Dignity of Work, Hospitality, Stewardship and the rest of them that have essentially told me for my entire adult life "A job that pays you piles of money, a big house, all of the trappings of the successful adult world are not the way to live." 

The Benedictines would ask "Are you doing God's work in the world?" and despite the fact that I'm an atheist, it's still a question I ask myself, on average, three hundred times a week, even if it comes out a little differently:

"Are you living a life of deep meaning? Is this the life you want to live, because your existence is so improbable and you only get one shot at this. It better be."

That's the damndest part of dealing with mental health issues. I feel like those Benedictine nuns are looking over my shoulder tsking at how because of anxiety and depression I'm not able to be my best self. I can't be the Kelly I'm supposed to be because when I come home these days I go right to bed or sit down in front of the television so I don't have to think. They serve as a constant reminder that this is not the way you're supposed to live, Kelly. 

***

Six people drop in for the Curie/Meitner party, which is the perfect amount for my tiny apartment. We end up talking as much about books and family law as we do about women and science, but we drink six pots of mint tea and eat all of the funfetti cake (homemade funfetti, who knew?). It's a fun, quiet party, full of the kind of conversation I love most. 

Despite the week I've had and the depression I'm struggling with, despite the fact that we used literally every single plate I own, despite the headache throbbing behind my eyeballs, I'm really happy. Happier than I expected to be. 

Those nuns, I realize as I stack plates in the sink and check the oven for what feels like the seven-hundredth time, aren't tsking over my shoulder. If anything, they'd be offering me a cup of tea and asking in that wonderful women-religious way how are you doing? 

I finally give in and take something for my head, switch out the lamps, and crawl into bed.  The bitchy, anxious side of my brain immediately starts up These aren't tension headaches, it's a tumor and you're going to die in your sleep. Your cake was terrible, people just ate it because they feel sorry for you. You are never, ever going to be well. 

I think of the people who have just spent the evening with me, the conversation we had, the list of books I have to read, the suggestions for therapists I've procured. I consider the holidays I celebrate, and the fact that despite being a bit odd they hold deep meaning for me and that the friends I've made are willing to celebrate them with me. I remember my favorite bit of Marie Curie's writing:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this something must be attained. 

Anxiety, depression, and OCD are, truthfully, going to make my life extremely difficult for at least the foreseeable future. I will struggle with them to varying degrees for my entire life. While that's a pretty grim reality, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be able to live the life I want to live, the life the Benedictines taught me was important. And as the medication I've taken for my head gently tugs me towards sleep, I murmur two words that haven't slipped out of my mouth in a long time.

Amen. Alleluia.  

Waiting for Superman

Is it overwhelming to use a crane to crush a fly?

It's a good time for Superman. 

Being an adult has not been treating me well lately.

It's early on a Sunday morning, and I am up trying to redact a conversation from the night before. It's not working and I'm getting frustrated with myself. I'm a writer, damn it, this shouldn't be so difficult to do. And I should under absolutely no circumstances be allowed to carry on a conversation after 10:00pm. Ever.

Here's the truth.

I've been hopelessly cocking up all of the things that feel like grown-up life lately. I'm in the middle of a fight with both my bank and student loan companies, I have, perhaps irreparably, damaged several close friendships, there's soap scum in my bathroom tub, and I literally laughed in my date's face last night. Although, to be fair, he responded to hearing about my Higgs Boson Halloween costume with "Oh, quantum mechanics! I'm really into reiki."

This, apparently, was not a joke.

I failed the date.

Is it getting heavy? 

But then I realize, is it getting heavy?

Because I thought it was already as heavy as can be.

Less than a mile into our run I start gasping for breath. 

"We gotta walk." I manage to get out. 

It's not unusual for my running partner and I to walk a little during our runs. Depending on the say sometimes I just need a break (usually on things over five miles). Some days I'm tired or stiff. Some days I'm not feeling it. 

"Are you all right?" He's concerned. 

"Yeah. I'm just . . . I don't know. Really tired today. I don't want to be doing this. I nearly forgot to come over today." 

"It's fine. We'll just do the normal loop and when you need to walk, we'll walk." 

I'm so tired we walk nearly all of the five miles. 

Failed that run. 

Is it getting heavy? 
But then I realize, is it getting heavy?
Because I thought it was already as heavy as can be. 

I nearly forgot to vote. 

I'm slouching through the sleety, wet evening, desperately wishing I was back at home in my slippers and sweats, drinking tea and watching the final season of 30 Rock. But I'm slouching through the sleet to my polling place because I nearly forgot to vote. 

To put this into perspective, every November I watch Iron Jawed Angels. Alice Paul's quote "When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row" has hung above every desk I've owned since I was eighteen. I have not only participated in every election since I was eighteen, but I've been in the first twenty ballots cast of every election since I was eighteen. You know what ballot I was tonight?

148. 

I swear as I'm trudging back up the street to my house, tension headache forming somewhere behind my eyeballs, I can feel Alice Paul walking behind me shaking her head.

Failed the feminists.

I asked you a question.

I didn't need you to reply. 

"You need to start therapy again." 

There are two people right now who are really clued in to my mental health. The first, as always, is Kerry. The second is my running partner, as running is how I'm dealing with all of my emotions lately. When Kerry suggests I need to start seeing someone again I tell her no, I'm working the program. I'm eating right. I'm working out. I'm seeing my friends. I'm trying to put some distance between myself and work. I'll be fine. Things are just stressful at work and will settle down after the holidays. It's just falling for someone. It's just falling out with someone. It's just this time of year. It's just homesickness.  

I'll be fine. 

My running partner's first words when he walks into his house are "You need to get back into therapy." There's no hello. There's no "how was your day?" There's no "How many miles you wanna do today, Kels?" Nope. Just "You need to get back into therapy. Put your shoes on. We're going outside." While we running I indicate that I'm having tension headaches, that I'm having problems with insomnia again, that when I eat I get sick to my stomach. 

"Go. Back. To. Therapy." 

"I can't" I want to blurt out. "That means I failed." 

Tell everybody who's waiting for Superman

To try to hold on the best they can. 

The end of the month is supposed to be a big milestone for me. 

It will have been one year since I had a major OCD symptom. One year since I was unable to leave the house because I was so anxious. One year slowly rebuilding my mental health. One year clawing my way back from crippling depression. I've been looking forward to this anniversary for an entire month already. It was going to be a day I celebrated quietly, where I made tea in the morning and left the house completely carefree, not worrying about burning the place down. 

If I even notice the day when it arrives, I'll be shocked. 

He hasn't dropped them, forgot them, or anything

It's just too heavy for Superman to lift. 

Here's the truth.

I was supposed to be fixed. I was supposed to work the plan my doctor and I came up with. I was supposed to learn how to cope with stress on my own. But the truth of the matter is that despite the running and eating right and finding a new job and moving and checking everything off the damn list I'm backsliding. I'm anxious. I don't feel much aside from worry these days. The wiring in my head that I thought I had finally redone seems to have shaken loose again.

And it happened so damn fast. And I don't know what caused it. 

I can't describe how frustrating and disheartening it is to realize that even after all this damn work, after remaking my life, after finally starting to live the life that I actually want to live these illnesses can still sneak up on me. I have been so happy for the past few months, and I don't know what caused these illnesses to come back. I don't know what triggered them and apparently this time through, I don't know ho to get rid of them. And, horrifyingly, despite therapy and education, I'm still at the point where while they're  taking over it they can convince me that there's nothing wrong with you. 

I failed. 

If It Isn't Exactly Love

Here's the thing about my mother.

She looks like your classic mom. She wears cardigans with birds on them and glasses. She has a plaid apron with moose on it. If she's sitting still, she's knitting.

She also has the habit of springing embarrassing or perceptive or just plain strange conversations or questions on you at the oddest moments.

Say, for example, it's a few days before Christmas. You'll be sitting in the living room, I don't know, updating your blog about how your extroverted family stresses you out. She'll be putzing with the decorations on the Christmas tree and she'll stop and say:

"Hey, Kel?"

"Yeah, Ma?"

"Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey?"

"Uhhhhh. No."

"Why do you think people do that . . . what is it called . . . You know. That weird stuff?"

"Bondage, Mom?"

"Yes! Why do people do that? Are they sick?"

After years of questions like this, my brothers and I have all developed our own coping mechanisms. Two of us will tell her she's being inappropriate and redirect the conversation. One of us will simply learn to close her laptop, get up, and walk away.

Once, over a college break, the two of us were sitting in the living room. She was knitting, I was reading. The boys were all out trap shooting or making sausage or doings something testosterone-y. I was enjoying the rare quiet in our house. Mom was making me a new scarf because Oh, it's so darn cold in Minnesota. I looked up from the novel I was reading and caught her eye.

"Hey, Kel?"

My wariness increased tenfold, instantly.

"Yeah, Ma?"

"You know your father and I have been married over 25 years, right?"

"Yes. I threw your 25th wedding anniversary party, Ma. I know."

"You know," She said, looking over her knitting at me. "Your father has changed an awful lot over that time."

Huh?

Even for her, this is unusual. My mother has never talked to me about her relationship with my father. Never. Not once in the twenty-one years I've been alive has she said "Your Dad is driving me crazy." Or "I love [whatever] about your father." We're Upper Midwestern. We don't write in dream journals. We don't see therapists. We don't talk about our feelings. We certainly do not discuss our long-term monogamous relationships with our children.

I get ready to leave. I love my folks, but I absolutely do not want to be the sounding board for whatever's coming next.

She sets her knitting down and I'm already getting out of my chair.

"You know. He's a completely different person than he used to be." She smiles. "And I love it. I get to fall in love with him all over again." She picks up her knitting and leaves me so stunned I have to sit back down.

***

"Were you planning on making a move?" I'm equal parts amused and irritated. "Because if not, I've still got to get work in the morning."

The guy next to me starts laughing. "You're so direct." He's staying over because the weather outside has taken a turn for the worst and it is legitimately dangerous to be out driving, even for the most stalwart Minnesotan. Things have been confusing between us for months now, and now despite the serendipitous confluence of cute girl, wine, Bon Iver on the radio, and snowstorm, instead of going for it, he's been inching closer to me for the past hour. 

Being a real Can-Do kind of a girl, I start to get progressively more direct. 

In an hour, he'll be asleep. I'll be restless.

***

Here's the thing about my father. 

He shows that he loves you by changing the oil in your car while you're still asleep on a Saturday morning. He will give you hubcaps for Christmas because he thinks it's funny and practical. 

He also loves my mother so much that it astounds me. 

To be perfectly clear, I adore my mom. I adore my whole family. Dad astounds me because I actually did not know it was possible to love someone the way he and my mom love one another. 

I can't remember a Valentine's Day, birthday, or anniversary where Dad didn't bring home flowers for her. He completely redoes her gardens for her every few years (this involves a staggering amount of work. My mother has lovely gardens). Years ago, when she started rock climbing he mounted a board for her in the basement so she could work on her upper body strength. He makes her soup when she's sick, breakfast on Mother's Day, takes her out to hear jazz on her birthday. He hates being away from her for more than a few days.

"So we'll be home over Thanksgiving."

My younger brother and I are discussing Thanksgiving plans. Normally, he and I spend Thanksgiving with our father, butchering deer (Full disclosure: I do very little of this.) and listening as Patrick Stewart narrates an imaginary documentary about dragons (Full disclosure: This actually happened last year and remains one of the best moment in my relationship with my younger brother). I'm a little taken aback, mainly because my Thanksgiving plans recently changed, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend in the woods.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, you know how Dad gets."

Last year he decided to spend an extra few days at deer camp. The entire three days I was there he said, on average six hundred times a day, "I miss your mom. I wish your mom was here." When she called, he raced for the phone like a teenage girl. 

"Hi honey, I love you."

***

"You can't stay."

I've barely taken my shoes off. "Excuse me?" He's finally told me where he lives and it's made me feel . . . better about our relationship.

He's in the kitchen opening the wine I've brought over. "I don't live here alone. You can't stay."

"I thought you said it was a one-bedroom." 

He looks at me and just lets my comment hang. 

It takes me awhile to understand what he means. I'm still young, afterall, and if this isn't exactly love I certainly didn't expect it to be this. When things do connect I walk though the house flicking on lights and peering into closets and medicine cabinets and dresser drawers. When I come back out I grab my wine glass, drain it, put my shoes back on, and walk out. As I'm opening the door he grabs my arm "This isn't a big deal." 

I leave. 

We'll see one another again.

***

Here's the thing about me. 

I like to be alone. I've always liked to be alone. As a kid, my Barbies had careers, fancy cars, swimming pools, tons of friends. You know what they never had? A Ken doll. They never had boyfriends or husbands. I played dress-up-as-priest-and-distribute-Communion, not dress-up-like-a-bride-and-pretend-to-get-married. As an adult, I like to stay in on Friday nights and read. I have solo dance parties to Prince in the kitchen. I am at my happiest when, after a few nights of seeing friends I come home to a clean, quiet house and spend the night doing exactly what I want to do. 

I also want to be with someone.

God, I do. I want it badly. And I hate it. I hate that my life right now isn't enough, that there seems to be something missing and that what's missing is a goddamn romantic relationship. I want to stop wanting it so badly. I'm tired of feeling like a supporting character in When Harry Met Sally.

I can't.

I can't. I don't know how. I want someone to take me out dancing to jazz on my birthday. I want to make Mimi soup for someone when he's sick. I want a chance to wear my couples Halloween costume idea with someone who will genuinely think it's awesome (A black hole and spaghettification! Come on. That's pretty great). I want to fall in love with someone again and again over the course of thirty years. I want someone to answer the phone:

"Hi honey, I love you."

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.