hallowed, hollowed, obliterated by a memory

Just checking in here, guys, before the week starts again.  Happy Halloween, by the way!  I actually kind of hate this holiday, although I say that very good-naturedly right now.  This might come as a surprise to you since I spent two years of Fridays in costume, and it actually took me by surprise on Saturday night as my gypsy alter ego wiped down menus behind the hostess booth.  I was feeling relatively peaceful, just a little anxious about the SNOW (wtf?!) when suddenly I was obliterated by a memory.

The memory comes from this weird crash-scene of a Halloween two years ago, when everyone was out of their minds in nearly every way possible, and in costume.  I doubt if anyone could give you a clear and sensical account of anything that happened that night, because I don't think anything that happened was either clear or sensical.  There was a lot of love- and pain-induced delirium, a lot of people went M.I.A., and a few boulders were set to rolling that eventually changed everything.  And Halloween on the Hill was the Great Catalyst.

I'll spare you the disconnected details, because the only reason this particular college weekend is relevant now is that it blindsided me at work and I remembered why Halloween is complicated, and I remembered that it often makes me cry.  (I also noted no emails from Dean K asking me to be sensitive of Northfield residents, mapped no honor house strategy, and made no arrangements for transportation to the Slegion.  Halloween is different, and so far pretty sleety/snowy, in the real world.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

It's hard to believe that October is over.  Winter is coming.  I might be spared some cricket-killing through the colder months.  National Novel Writing Month starts in about 23 hours.  I'm apprehensive, and totally pumped, to take my first real stab at fiction in years.  I should also warn you that if you graduated college with me, you will soon receive an email message asking you to send me stories about your life since graduation.  Yes, I am St. Olaf's 2011 Class Correspondent, and I can't believe how excited I am about that.  I guess vocation is often, at least in my case, scribbled in the margins.  I think I actually like it that way.

November also means I'll be 22 in a few weeks.  I already know what the banks are getting me this year: my student loan grace period ends right on my birthday, the day after Thanksgiving, in fact, and a month before Christmas.  Good timing, right?  Just so you all know, I won't be able to afford Christmas presents this year, so don't expect anything from me, 'kay?  Semi-kidding.  There are a lot of big purchases and payments on the horizon, so on top of my to-do list is figuring out how to organize my assets to do what I need them to do.  (I'm drafting a post on financial planning in my head as I speak, so don't worry about that yet.  I've got the DL.  Or at least some of it.)

I function well with a plan to move forward.  I suspect I will always regard the Summer of '11 as this idyllic break from "The Grind," from my uninterrupted push forward, forward, from my inability to stop and lie down and watch the fan blades go around instead of the hands on the clock.  Looking back, even that unbelievably carefree summer involved a lot of working toward something.  Peace of mind, maybe.  Strength of character.  I guess I spent a lot of time pulling together my frayed edges, and trying to contain and explain and come to terms with all the memories that can and will obliterate me at some point(s) along the way.  I think I succeeded.  And a little lesson in chucking crab apples at a tin roof never did anybody wrong.

Not that I can't ever be obliterated by a memory again.  In fact, it helps to remember that I will be obliterated by a memory again.  Because that means I survived the last one, and held onto my heart.

like-a-love-song irrational

All I want to do these days is listen to love songs.  The song that's been stuck in my head for at least the past 24 hours is I Won't Say from the animated movie Hercules.  (You know the part where Meg's girl choir is accusing her of being in love with Hercules, and since she's been dragged over the coals in the past she won't admit that she loves him?  That's the one.)  The song that saved me is Melt With You by Modern English.  And since that fateful night when I heard it on Delilah, it's been EVERYWHERE.

Actually, I've basically been listening religiously to Delilah, which most likely qualifies as both the disease and the cure.

It might be that I can feel the holiday season coming up.  It's Halloween weekend, and I get to wear a costume to work tomorrow night.  The region's first snowstorm of the year is also forecast for tomorrow, with wild rumors about 10-24 inches of snow in New Jersey throughout the day -- New Jersey being a mere 7 minutes away from my house.  Also, today was frigid, compared to what it has been.  Even in the sun it was cold.  I really need the snow to hold off, because I need new tires on my car before it comes.  (As a matter of interest, this is my latest great talking point for Starting Conversations With Strangers.)

The holidays always make me feel like falling in love.  I know I'm not the only one, and that the feeling is one of the most cliche feelings to ever strike human emotions, but there's something about even the image of snowflakes floating down under streetlamps in the hazy winter twilight that makes falling look so nice...

I was totally mind-blown yesterday when Alex used the marvelous term "emotional detox" in an email, as in: "This is the emotional detox I need from four years at [St. Olaf], because there isn't anyone here I want to fall in love with."  Brilliant.  And semi-fortunate, since I really have been cringing at some of the memories I have of Love At and Around St. Olaf, and I can't think of anything that could be better for me now than a little break from drama and the whole who-was-more-screwed-up-before-we-screwed-each-other-up-even-worse-than-before thing.  It's also unfortunate: as he also noted, my straitjacket-esque defense mechanism keeps me from even wanting to talk to anyone, because it seems that he or she will inevitably turn out to be either more screwed up than me and therefore a threat, or less screwed up than me and therefore vulnerable.  Besides, the easiest and most fool-proof way to successfully complete an emotional detox program is to not really have any relationships, of any kind, with anyone, because relationships are inevitably complicated and there is always some miscommunication that just ruins the peace.

Ha.  I'm still captivated by Modern English and that image of snowflakes falling underneath a streetlamp...  Preferably one of those old, hand-lit cast iron ones, represented in Kincaidian brushstrokes...

It may come as a comfort to you that all my ranting and griping here actually does get me somewhere in life.  All that talk about vocation worked some magic on my self-image -- after a six-hour plunge into what felt like intense depression yesterday, which I decided was brought on by a combination of dehydration and widespread belly-laugh shortages.  I'm forcing myself to get comfy, so now my real personality is rapidly coming into focus for the benefit of the DE crowd.  For example, I took a break with The Partners yesterday to do the twist, and when the Boss-man teased me about it, I told him he hasn't seen the half of it.  "The half of what," he asked, cracking up, "your dancing abilities?"  That's right.  My dancing abilities.  I've got the moves like Jagger.

I love dancing, remember?  And Zumba.  I really try to recommend it to every person I ever talk to.  Also, I should really just win VH1's Motormouth right now, because I've taken to belting along with those power ballads Delilah plays when I'm driving home at night -- to the extent that I often get distracted wondering how Adele's vocal cords got to the point of hemorrhaging.  That's not a joke, and if it was, it wouldn't be funny.  I seriously wonder about this.

The human body is a pretty incredible thing.

The crickets have started coming back, after at least a week or two of their notable absence.  They're back in spite of my ultrasonic pest control plug-in and my giant, hairy spider friend that recently appeared among my boxes.  I tried to keep him in the other room at first, until I realized (a) that my efforts were futile, and (b) that the cricket count seemed to have significantly declined since he turned up.  The crickets are so gross.  I'm getting pretty good at smashing them with a flyswatter, but they're so juicy and disgusting and I really don't want them to eat my books and/or clothes.  (Please do not let this dissuade you, dear friends, from coming to visit me.  Like I said, I'm slowly becoming a cricket's worst nightmare.)  Otherwise, as my mom keeps reminding me, some cultures consider them good luck, and I'm starting to think that my long, jointy limbs look oddly cricket-like.  Speaking of bodies being amazing.  That was my segue, just at the wrong end of the paragraph...

I'm starting to recognize some signs of delirium in my writing, perhaps because it's long past my boring post-grad bedtime.  So I think I'd better cut this off here before it gets any worse.  I need to go dig through my old mix CDs for power ballads anyway.  Wish me luck, and boa noite!

vocation (disclaimer:

I am well aware of the mass eye-roll this title will elicit.  Also, having grown up Lutheran, survived and succeeded at St. Olaf College, and conducted intense research for a year on what might as well have been called "the Vocation Project," I am even more acutely aware of the complex historical, lexical, and emotional context surrounding the signifier: vocation.  Keep in mind as you read that I have critically examined the shit out of this word, and I'm choosing to use it anyway.)

The musical director at church is this incredible musician.  You wouldn't believe anybody could spice up the old Lutheran-plain-and-tall liturgy with just a piano riff here and there, a creative hymn choice, or sock-foot organ recessionals.  He'll sit there during communion and just fix his eyes on the altar to time the music perfectly with the religious ritual.  Meanwhile, his fingers are in no way fixed to any particular piano keys.  He transitions between the pre-chosen hymns with these soaring, rippling piano solos.  It may sound mundane, but trust me, it's completely (if subtly) out of this world.

Speaking of music, you might know that I love Delilah.  (In Delaware, she's on 99.5 FM from 7pm to midnight.)  Her voice is so syrupy and soothing, she picks the most hilariously perfect songs to match a caller's situation, and she's just so human -- I actually love that she gives horrible advice sometimes, and that although she's pretty regularly cynical she still makes a whopper of a living giving love advice.  Go figure.  Maybe I'm just jealous of her job.  But she's been doing it forever, and she really speaks to a TON of people.  Nationwide.  And she's been broadcasting nationally for as long as I can remember listening to the radio.

Today I got a regular update email from LinkedIn which shares what my connections have been up to lately as well as job postings I might be interested in.  One of this week's postings was for a Healthcare Research Analyst position, and it suddenly occurred to me (again) that I really love doing research.  Seeing this after I'd spent my morning putting together a report, and enjoyed myself immensely, brought the word vocation to mind.  I Love Making Reports.  And presenting them.  And lucky for me, I get to track data and trends, and report them, all day, every day.  That is my nerdy fact of the day.

My existential crisis of the day involved a "twittervention" from a couple of friends who got me on Twitter in the first place.  I should be embarrassed to admit that I was really quite devastated when I got their messages, and that I spent the whole drive to yoga debating with myself over the trump card: I really love tweeting, but I don't want to alienate the really important people in my life by doing it too much, because when it comes down to it, it's really not that important.  Fortunately, after yoga I was able to distance myself enough from the situation to see it clearly, and to see that it's really not such a dramatic either-or situation.  I can tweet a little less.  It would probably be good for me.

My "vocation" right now is not super clear.  It's like driving in fog, where you've got your headlights on but you can still barely see the stop sign.  That's mostly ok.  I'm learning a lot every single day and things keep happening that make it a little more clear.  Like all the positive messages I've received today from people I work with on different jobs and projects: "you are good at ____."  This is important to hear and to say.  Because it turns out I have not only good report-compiling skills, but some people skills that I really love to use more than most everything else in the world.  And I have been using them, as it turns out, but I haven't been giving them much credit lately and that is a shame.

For some people, it's very clear.  Even Jordan and Delilah probably still struggle from time to time.  And, all things considered, I'm in a pretty good place right now...

Namely, right up the (really gorgeous) street from the best coffee shop of all time, which I would love to link to but it's really not online -- which actually probably just adds to its charm.  Anyway, the crowning moment of today was that I spent the second half of my lunch break getting (incredibly delicious) French Caramel cafe au lait and I got to chat with the guy while he whipped up my delicious drink.  And then he gave me a discount, for no reason, on a two-dollar cup of coffee and I was PUMPED.  Not because I was particularly attached to that 50 cents, but because it was a real-life, real-nice moment.

eat your vegetables

Here's my latest realization: veg time is CRUCIAL.  I don't have one single day off in a week, between my two jobs and then church on Sunday, and even when I get home after a day of work I rarely let myself do nothing, or sit around, or "waste time" in any sense of the term.  Because I am a woman of action and the list of things to do is leagues long.

It makes me cranky.  Sometimes I have been so good at living in the moment, but in all honesty I do tend to look toward the next thing.  So I can't relax at all on Saturday knowing I have to go to work in the evening, even though work is not super stressful once I'm there.  That's why I prefer to frontload my days, and why St. Olaf's small walkable campus was an ideal Pietri dish for my now stifled spontaneity.

Last night I pulled into the driveway after work as Delilah spoke to a girl who was madly, outrageously, disgustingly in love.  I smiled a jaded smile, and then the first notes of Modern English's "Melt With You" overtook her gushing.  I thought, "Aw, too bad I have to get out of the car now..."  And then I realized I didn't actually have to.  It was this profound, devastating realization as I just sat there, really sat there, leaned my head back on the headrest and felt so happy.  I felt the song fill me up and felt my shoulders drop and it suddenly occurred to me, "I never do this."

This is why I decided not to take the paint off my cedar chest this afternoon, even though I'm anxious to have it done.  Instead, I whined a lot and shuffled around acknowledging my dissatisfaction with the state of my life.  Take two: now I am freshly showered, watching The Swan Princess with my sister and completely multitasking.  Because I want to.

In the upcoming weeks I really need to figure out a way to work in "me-time" into my life -- beyond spending my lunch breaks making phone calls to far-flung friends and singing loudly and horribly on my way to and from work.  I also, predictably, miss the social-ness of having a roommate, podmates, a housemate; living in smaller, more confined spaces -- because in this big house everyone just holes up in her own little corner.  I always want to do my own thing with a bunch of other people in the same space.

So.  Step one: veg the F out for a little while; it's good for you.

Also, eat your vegetables.  Some suggestions: stirfry, omelettes, Chinese takeout...

the news tonight

Those of you that pay any attention to me on Facebook and Twitter these days may have noticed the inordinate amount of news stories I now share on social media.  This is mainly because I spend my days staring at a computer screen, under the clever guise of a semi-corporate news consumer whose main interests lie in the realm of digital media and advertising.

What is more interesting (even to me) than a former non-consumer's sudden explosive interest in news is this: most of what I read comes packaged in blogs and trend feeds.  I learned more about the Occupy Wall Street movement from the #OccupySesameStreet hashtag and a blog post by an old friend in LA than I did from any mainstream news articles, and I've hardly even glanced at a newspaper in months.  I remember the raucous debates of Mrs. Delorme's AP English and Palczar's AP Gov class, about what kinds of sources were legit for writing papers or finding current events articles.  Wikipedia was unacceptable under any circumstances; blogs were too tainted by subjectivity, misinformation, and unqualified sources to be of any real use.  Twitter?  ...What even was that?

I'm not saying that this blog or Twitter feed are unbiased sources of information about a major movement, but they weave essential perspectives into this strand of the historical fabric.  They represent a segment of human history that may have gone largely unrecorded and unreported at another time.

Today one of the articles that jumped out at me was about a startup called Kyoo, which aggregates data from social media outlets into categories of world events, in real time, 24/7.  Essentially, this tool draws out the buzz already created by millions of web users worldwide, and packages it for further consumption -- without filtering for sarcasm, misinformation, expertise, or idiocy.  We don't need to go into the difference between "factual" and "legitimate" news sources, or whatever terms you want to use.  Truth is nebulous at best.  For all intents and purposes, reality -- especially now -- is crowdsourced.

I first encountered this titillating term in an article about the dangers of web-searching medical information, self-diagnoses, and home remedies.  Most medical web searches just create unnecessary anxiety (recall the time you developed a brain tumor during finals week, or that other time you were pregnant while actually suffering PMS).  But for women, who tend to be the source of medical knowledge in their families, crowdsourcing has to a great extent replaced the sharing of medical knowledge in the privacy of our homes while our men went out to win bread.  It works like this: someone posts, "My kid has XX symptoms," and 6 people post back, "That happened to my kid last year, this is what it was, this is what we did about it," and 8 other people post, "It could be this, my grandmother always used to..."  You get the picture.

*For the life of me I can't find this article!  I must have read it in the September issue of Better Homes and Gardens in the waiting room at Simon Eye...

But I digress.  My ultimate conclusion is that, as social media and the internet play a larger role in our daily lives, we value a different kind of information. What matters in our day-to-day interactions is what a lot of people think is important or true -- at least within our own immediate networks.

And so we crowdsource our news and our truth.  Social media gives us an active role in creating common knowledge.  We can contribute to the news.  We post our personal experiences of Hurricane Irene on Twitter, and they end up on the Weather Channel, so people all up and down the East Coast can see that the effects of this major weather event extended beyond cities big enough to have world-famous acronyms.

St. Olaf's Soc/Anthro majors learned in Quantitative Research Methods that experiential knowledge is not a valid source of information -- and yet that's what it's based on.  Who knows what really happened to the exotic animals roaming residential Ohio?  All we can know for certain is what we'll tell our kids about it.

under construction

I'm building myself right now.

I like these constructive metaphors, just like I love extended metaphors.  (Can anyone tell me exactly how many brown cows came to the job fair?  Anyone?!  ...Another reason I love my day job.  Also that I get made fun of for using words like syntax in a meeting.  Not that it's the first time in my life I've been made fun of for that.)

Extended sidetracks aside, I am building myself.  For example, I've been developing a newer, more professional and 20-something version of my creative style.  I know that there are those (some very close to my heart) who will accuse me of being superficial for my meticulous attention to such compositions.  There are so many factors to consider: whether it fits well and flatters my shape, whether the color looks good on me, whether I could wear it in the company of XX important official, the care and material, and how it fits into my budget.  This is important to career development, and even to personal development.  Who am I, how do I express that, and how do I fit into the greater system?  Because as Mrs. Morse told us back in 7th grade English, you have to learn the rules before you can break them.  (Please, temper your reading of this with a bit of critical questioning.)

I'm also learning new skills, and refreshing old skills, and reapplying all these skills over and over and over again.  I'm learning new ways of communicating (welcome to the Twitterverse, Class of 2011) and, more importantly, how to recognize, diagnose and fix miscommunications before somebody/everybody blows up.  I stayed after my shift at the restaurant on Saturday night to listen to the band, have beers, and get to know my coworkers.  This is very exciting to me.  I'm refining my own interests, desires, and goals.  Not that goals are my strong point right now, but I do have small goals that are important to my daily functioning (i.e. keep the Tfol relatively cricket-free, keep the Bizz III engine well-oiled, get sweaty every day, blog 3 times a week).  The long-term stuff can wait just a little longer.

The best part about this construction project is that it's so intentional, and we all know how I love intention -- BUT there are also all these side products, like a secret crawlspace in the attic eaves, that get worked into myself as I move forward.  Or side to side, whatever.  Today a man in a grey suit and navy blue patterned bowtie tapped me on the shoulder after church and said, "You must be the one who went to St. Olaf."  He told me that his grandfather graduated from there (way back when) and that he himself is officially an "Ex-alum of '51" or sometime in the fifties...  But he had to leave school there to help his father through some tough times on the family farm.  His family members note incredible accomplishments, every last one of them.  He advised me to take what I'm given and add to it, multiply it, make something new and unheard of out of it -- innovate.  "My father always used to say, we know where we're trying to go -- but sometimes going straight from here to there isn't the best way to get there," he told me.

Hear, hear.

In terms of that visible "There," I'm seeing some old dreams come up again.  The poetry cafe revived itself full-force in my ambition for at least a day last week -- my mind's eye pulled a never-before-seen updated blueprint out for review.  I'm honing down my mentorship dreams to forming a church group for college kids struggling to balance real life issues with spirituality and connecting within their sometimes very separate communities.  (Yes, I realize this is abstract, but it's still a work in progress.)  At the Den on Saturday, Jeff spent a decent amount of time encouraging my professional development as a server: "Seriously, I think you could be making a lot of money.  Take home a menu, learn it.  You would be so good."

After my talk with Owen this afternoon, I'm also very seriously considering composing a collection of stories told by the generation closest to death -- particularly stories that don't often get told.  I know the oldest members of the Swanson family have brilliant gemstones hidden away, and the next-oldest members have re-cut versions of those diamonds; I'd love to mine all of them.  (Unrealistic -- I'll settle for many.)  And I can never forget the time I sat with Sharon in the back of James Gang's Hideaway for an hour and a half, taking notes about her incredible life.  The three-page "interview with an entrepreneur" is, as far as both of our lives are concerned, a Golden Scroll.

I am so happy in my current jobs.  And I would never have got here without a few key influencers, cross-country phone calls, Facebook chat, and a whole ton of prior text.  Sometimes these people know things about me that I've forgotten, or things I would never recognize without them.  Yes, there are times when we just agree with our friends or tell them what they want to hear; but I maintain that mostly happens when we already know what we think about the situation and we're just looking for justification.  I can't count the number of times my friends and I experienced life-changing realizations throughout the course of a conversation.  It's just part of the process of figuring out where we are, and then calculating and recalculating the route ahead of us, in long or short form.

Someone asked me last week, "But really, aren't we all just point A to point B?"  I think it was Andy Shearer, but I can't remember for sure.

awe(love)struck

The mail has been pretty sparse lately.  No big loss, really – the average piece of paper mail these days is just trying to sell us something.

But yesterday, I received a FedEx box far more weighty to me than to the USPS scale that determined its shipping cost.  It was from some dearly beloved, a second family, postmarked Amsterdam, NY, and it was FULL of DVDs and jewelry.

The women of the house thoroughly enjoyed divvying up the pretty things, but diamonds (not that I own any) don't shine a candle to a girl's best friend!  The exhilarating part of this package was the "love" in the signature, in the lavender tissue paper, and the individually ziploc-packaged pieces; the fact that, all across the country and across the world, people are thinking of my family and I through our struggles, and that they want to help.  I have received several packages since the robbery (just over a month ago, now) from good friends who stuffed the packages with replacement music, movies, and jewelry -- not just for me, but for my family.  Better yet, they wrote letters saying, "I'm thinking of you and your family and I'm amazed at how well you all seem to pull through."

Really, every single one of those authors and text-messagers and phone-callers and package-packers should take some credit for our resilience.  I am completely awestruck at how strong those bonds still are after hundreds of months, thousands of miles, and a few scattered battles, and the impact of just a word or a message on my state of mind.  I feel that love breathing in, on, and around my physical diaphragm, and beating somewhere in the general vicinity of my heart -- every single day.  It's incredible.

Now, not to take an egocentric turn here, but I'm also amazed at how many different things I can do, and how much I can really handle.  Actually, there is a segue: my Mainstays are as important to my capacity and stamina as food, water, and sleep.

Lately I've been enjoying setting up my living space -- what my mom calls my "tfol," a warehouse-style basement loft.  Its walls are made of unfinished drywall, partially-spackled and partially-painted cement blocks, floor-length purple curtains, and a staircase.  I'm using old milk crates as my (overflowing) bookshelves, and so far most of my stuff is still in cardboard boxes.  My clothes hang from a pipe suspended by chains from the ceiling beams, which are covered over with brown paper.  I've put up some posters and stuff on the walls now, mounting things in the ever-difficult drywall anchors, thumbtacking a few things up there, sticky-tacking other things.  I rewired an Indian lamp last night...  The list goes on and on.

Beyond the spectacle of filling up my motor oil at a high-traffic corner Exxon station in my work clothes, or the utter satisfaction of having mounted a corkboard on my wall or dripping with sweat and/or dust-coated from hard work...  Beyond the relatively fleeting rush of those things, what is exciting to me is the thought of presenting my finished work to my friends, inviting them into my interesting, comfortable tfol and offering them a beer or a cup of tea, a place to sit or to sleep, some nice music to listen to.

And even on the worst days, when there is no fleeting rush, a letter or a package or a phone call or text message is more refreshing and energizing than a nap, a snack, or a cool drink of water.

appreciation

Considering how terrible I typically am at keeping in touch, I have spent time in person with a surprising number of Ole classmates since May 29.  Thanks to Bizz III, and to Grampa and Thomas for making her possible.

I swear that car is the automotive version of me -- she's cute, in a flashy-granola kind of way.  She's gas-pedal-happy, likes to be on the open road, hates waiting in traffic; hates changing gears but when it comes down to it, she's got a tiny turn radius.  Comfortable cruising speed around 60mph.  She likes to flirt with trucks, other VWs, hatchbacks, station wagons, and Rovers.  Also cute boys in SUVs with Minnesota license plates, who went to Wayzata High School.

I spent the weekend in Boston visiting my brother at Northeastern -- asked for Saturday off since his studio project was due on Friday and he wouldn't be working on it all weekend as usual.  Despite the fact that I spent the majority of Saturday's daylight in the car, I clocked 90,000 steps and got a mild sunburn.  Boston is a really cool city, but going back there this time I was surprised at how fiercely fond I have become of Wilmington.  The past two times I visited Boston I was scheming up ways to move there; this time, I found myself comparing it constantly with "home" -- not always favorably, but definitely fondly.  And like I said, the fierceness of that fondness is what struck me most.  I hook onto the strangest places.

Ann once accused me of liking to defend people, and I think she made a really interesting point.  I do tend to enjoy the company of difficult, dysfunctional, or abrasive people, and I fiercely treasure their selling points despite all the external spines.  I could easily translate this to places, too: the infamous Amsterdam, for one, and now Wilmington.  Although it does bother me that it's so hard to walk or ride bike around this city...  I do really love that about Boston.  And don't get me wrong, I had a really wonderful time there this weekend.

I didn't even mind the driving as much as I normally do -- a la Friday's "patience" reminder.  That being said, I was not by any means immune to the stresses of traffic and wrong turns.  One section of I-84 was completely closed off -- after waiting in an hour of confused bumper-to-bumper traffic I rerouted myself to rural Connecticut, and stopped at two separate gas stations to ask for directions.  The second time I asked, "Can you tell me how to get to Waterbury?"  And the guy just looked at me and said, "This is Waterbury."

I blazed by Christian in Hartford, Karin in Queens, stopped for a quick falafel in New Haven with Audrey, and narrowly avoided impulsively turning west on 87 instead of east, to hit up Amsterdam's homecoming weekend.  I carry your hearts, I carry them in my heart.  Feeling strung out, I finally pulled onto Andrew and Britta's Jersey City street, parked a fuming Bizz III on the curb, and decided to tackle the Jersey Turnpike first thing Monday morning.  We stayed in, eating Chinese delivery and drinking Brooklyn Oktoberfest while watching Dude Where's My Car.  Classic.  I really am lucky to have such great friends.

And I left Jersey City at 4am, startling a skunk eating trash on the sidewalk (fortunately no stinking at me, he hid in somebody's wheel well while I passed by).  I had to stop 10 miles out of Delaware to get gas -- seven-dollars' worth to be exact, and self-service is illegal in New Jersey.  So I had to give a kindly old gas attendant my measly seven dollars, just so I could get home, and get to work in another 2 hours.  "Have a nice day now, Hon," he said with a smile as I drove away.

I love the people in my life.

I know a lot of us are feeling a little desperate right now, dissatisfied with our jobs or maybe lonely, or maybe that there is no end in sight.  What I'm remembering is that it takes time to adjust, and as it turns out we have plenty of it.  We just have to be patient.  (I am the worst at that.)  It also helps to pick up the phone, or to stop in Jersey City every now and then.

a few things that are greater than, or at least equal to, misery

The first step of the 12-step program should really be my Cause, because the whole "admit you have a problem" thing has turned my life around on more than one account.

(Historical examples from my life include:

 - Chapstick

 - Depression

 - "I'm [still] in love with you"

 - "I'm not in love with you anymore"

 - "I'm lonely"...)

Predictably, I'm feeling much better today, after a really delicious local craft beer, a decorating spree last night, two phone conversations with good friends in far-off lands, some good tunes, and a good rock-like sleep -- although I did dream that I was robbed at a beach bar during an impending hurricane, while wearing a mini-skirt...

The moment I really snapped out of it, though, was when I accidentally let a construction truck turn out of a gas station in front of me on my way to work this morning.  I almost sighed and rolled my eyes, but then the driver raised his coffee cup to me and I felt his smile blast straight through the tension in my solar plexus.  I laughed, relaxed my death grip on the steering wheel, and reminded myself to enjoy my beautiful drive -- and my string of unusually green lights -- to Hockessin.

I should stick a reminder on my steering wheel that altruism and patience on the road sloughs a ton of the stress off of driving.  I kick myself every day for not letting someone cross, not letting someone turn, being so anxious to get from point A to point B that I forget to be nice.  Reminds me of keys to happiness we came across in Tom's Med Anthro class 2 springs ago.

Also on the plus side, the sun has been shining in that crisp, Daylight-Savings-impending way it does come autumn -- kind of the way my knuckles start to dry out in the fall, so does the air.  Harvest-time sunshine doesn't drench you the same way summer sun does.  I spend my lunch breaks these days soaking up those rays as they slip out of reach into the southern hemisphere for a few months.  There are also delicious things about this season, like Pumpkin Spice coffee and pumpkin beer.  Mmm...  And on my way home today I saw three small kids get off the school bus to meet their moms at Hockessin Woods.  The biggest one was this tiny Asian boy who must have been the oldest, because he hurtled across the road to hug his bouncing younger sister, so excited to have her older siblings home from school.  Really warms the cockles of my bitter heart.

Let me (re)iterate my life philosophy: happy endings can exist.  The story of my life is based on true events, but it's up to me to write it.  I get to choose where I put the periods, where the story ends.  I can end it happily if I want to.  And when it stops being happy, the next sentence starts and will eventually come to resolution.

On failure leading sentences to a fruitful finish, I recommend this somewhat odd take on a tribute to Steve Jobs.  Despite my not-remotely-secret Apple boycott I am personally struck by his brilliance and resilience, and by the incredible impact of his death today on our incredibly broad and diverse society.

As if I need another reminder that I've still got plenty of sentences to write.  Thanks, Steve.

...And thanks to the driver of that construction truck on Highway 41 this morning, and his coffee cup.

ridin' solo

Now, the state of crisis seems to be settling down.  (Knock on wood!)  I'm starting to feel more secure, or at least rooted, here.  My energy level is up, which means I'm getting a lot of good things done at work, and I'm usually in a pretty good mood.

But it also means I'm getting antsy.  Last year I started working out regularly, hoping it would help me focus on my work, and it did -- but then I just had so much energy I would stay at the gym for an hour... then an hour and a half... then two hours... then I'd go there after class and stay until I had to run up to Buntrock as the caf was closing.  I don't know how much weight I lost, and that really had nothing to do with me being there.  The point is, I realized that I was living with this unsettled feeling of something being wrong and unresolved in my life outside of the gym.

Which is where I am now.  Now that I'm settling into my job, depositing a few paychecks, and putting together a living space I'm excited about, one of my old discarded worries is resurfacing.

I'm lonely.

Back in The Bubble, my friends and I would sit around in the quad on a sunny afternoon, eating ice cream and dancing around barefoot, and worrying that once we left St. Olaf we wouldn't be able to meet anyone as cool as the people we were with.  We always reassured each other, "Oh, but you're interesting and fun and smart... and plus you're cute!  You won't have any trouble at all."  And I legitimately put it out of my mind as a non-issue.

But here I am, stuck in between 5 different highways, 15 minutes from just about any-where, and I don't know which-where to go.  I know that I could meet people I'd get along with at a poetry open mic: there are none, it seems, in the entire state of Delaware.  (Guess I'd better go to Philly...?)  I could meet people at a coffee shop, if I went there often enough.  I could meet people in liquor stores or co-ops or bars (not ideal) or even at the post office.  There is the endless problem that 18-to-25-year-olds seem to exist off the beaten track of any place I've ever been: it's the same in Amsterdam, in St. Croix Falls, and even in Queens when I went out with Karin and Audrey.  We're an incredibly hard demographic to tap.  We probably just drink beer with our friends in our basements.

The thing is, it takes time.  I want to meet someone I've seen around often enough, or who knows the people behind the counter at any given establishment, that it stands as a character reference.  Alex wrote me this beautiful email about introductions, and how the most important people in our lives never get introduced because it's too complicated to go into it.  I want that.  But I have to put in the time to get my own character reference and my own inarticulable introduction, and we all know I'm the most impatient person ever.

It will come.  It always does.  It'll hit the breaking point and I'll go and do something drastic that will just blow the whole problem right out of the water.  That's usually how I fix the big things.

And until then I'll just be aware of my anxiety, settle into my new space.  I'll do things I enjoy doing, and on the way there I'll make eyes at hotties in cars that pass me on the highway.  I'll ask for a Saturday off now and then so I can go visit my brother, call my far-flung mainstays on the telephone, and try to track down some Delaware postcards for the far-flung people that have had a positive impact on my life.  I'll make it.  I always do.

state of crisis

When I interviewed for my social media job, the team warned me that life at this firm is a constant state of crisis.  I laughed, because crisis runs in my blood.  Only two days earlier, in a conversation with my parents, my dad had said about some people we know, "She gets exhausted because she thinks he runs in constant crisis mode, and he thinks she's not taking things seriously."  And I said, "I say that about you actually, that you're in constant crisis mode."  And then I had to explain (probably unsuccessfully) how fond I am of that particular quality in my dad -- especially since I have almost definitely inherited at least some of it.  Mostly, I think it shows how much he really, really cares.

Speaking of crisis (how unusual, ha), the first thing I heard when I got into my car this morning (at 7am) was that there was an accident on some major highway.  I passed another one, L. passed one, and B. passed one on our way to meet up for the presentation.  We passed another accident on the way back from the ReStore and Lowe's this afternoon, and a car got totaled right outside the Den tonight while I was working.  The blue flashing lights of the police car sparkled through the rainy windows, just like in the movies.

That's a lot of accidents for one day.

When I turned into my street on my way home from work, early, I saw two cop cars parked in front of a house.  Immediately I said out loud, "That better not ******* be my house!"  Maybe if I was less selfish I would have just been sad for whoever's house it was -- and after my initial adrenaline rush, I was sad for that person; it was a neighbor of ours, about three houses down.  Apparently she decided randomly to come home for lunch today, found her door wide open, and ran into the guy inside her home.  Terrifying.  So she threw her keys at him, he ran, and she chased him up the street yelling for help.

Long story short, the guy was caught, along with an accomplice.  There is some likelihood that this is the same guy/team of guys who robbed our house.  I care less about "justice" than I do about the security of our neighborhood.  It's supposed to be a quiet neighborhood.  Neighbors recall two robberies in the past 15 years.  People grow up here, move back as adults, raise children here.  This is unusual.  Our district, of course, wants to keep it that way.

Delaware has not been doing the best job at convincing me that this state is not normally full of disasters -- that it is not a State of Constant Crisis.  Fortunately I am increasingly charmed by many aspects of the state, and meeting a lot of wonderful people.  But I can't help but wonder...

I have this semi-constant apocalyptic inkling these days -- or, I am acutely aware of The Economic Crisis, Climate Change, Unemployment, The Disintegration of the Family, Terrorism, The Problems With Oil and Gasoline, Cancer, The Rapture, 2012, and so on.  My question, at least since college graduation, has been: is it just me, or is the world falling apart?

Fortunate soul that I am, I spent my free afternoon driving around with people who have been alive twice as long or four times as long as I have -- i.e., they might have some perspective on the Current State of Crisis.

(For the record, I'm not just living at home right now because it's cheap and I can't handle independence.  It's also because my family is pretty cool in general, and I basically haven't lived at home for 6 years now, and during that time I have been making mental lists of things I still want to learn from them.  Case in point.)

Grampi mentioned that he watched his father fight in World War I, his family suffer through the Great Depression (both national and personal Great Depressions), and his brother fight in World War II.  I would say this is a pretty intense prolonged state of crisis.  He did concede, "I could see now, with how fast we can get the news, that it feels more present now than it did before when we had to wait for our headlines.  But these things were probably happening just as much before."

My dad commented that it was not unusual when he was growing up for kids to assume they would die in a nuclear war.  This is wild to me.  Now, he suggested, we worry that we'll die in a terrorist attack.  "We feed on disaster," he said grimly.  "That's why we have reality TV."

Yes, they said, environmental change does seem to be causing fluke natural disasters.  Everyone, even my bosses, readily admits that the economy is taking a toll on our society and our lifestyles.  But also, "your age right now does kind of feel like a major crisis," my dad pointed out.  "You're suddenly having to take all this responsibility, depend on yourself for some things you're not used to and then learning how to depend on other people for those things sometimes."  "It is a pretty big deal," my mom chimed in.

I've decided to give Delaware another chance to prove itself to me.  We may spar a bit, but I think we're learning to get along.  Despite the number of times I've said or thought something's gotta give in the past few years, I don't need to waste my time waiting for something to give.

I should really spell it out on my resume: Just because it's a State of Crisis doesn't mean it's not Business as Usual.  When it comes down to it, you still just have to push through and hope you break the surface for a moment long enough to fill your lungs with good, clean air.