Solitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the Morning

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

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

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

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

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

I closed my laptop and started crying again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen. Alleluia.

Danger

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

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

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

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

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

"Run the Iditarod."

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Weight

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

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

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

***

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

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

Take a load off, Fanny.

Take a load off for free.

Take a load off, Fanny.

Put the load right on me. 

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

***

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

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

Romance

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

I love romance novels. 

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

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

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

***

I have a comfortable life. 

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Bookish

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

"Uh, actually, I missed that one."

"Really? Ok, how about Inception?"

"Nope, missed that one too." 

"Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?"

Long awkward pause.

"Tell me you've seen Drive."

Longer pause.

"BUT YOU LOVE RYAN GOSLING!" 

"I have seen some movies recently!"

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

***

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

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

Neutrinos

Neutrinos


I know so little


about them 
aside from the fact
that they are 


tiny


beyond my ability
to comprehend.
And, that somehow
they make their way 
across


spacetime.


The result, I think,
of a reaction 
inside of the sun.


They are, apparently,
coursing through me
at this very moment.
By the billions
and billions and


billions. 


Stardust mingling with
stardust.