things i want to do in life.

1. Set aside time every week to write letters. I am a Snail Mail Responder of epically snail-like proportions. Yesterday's mail yielded not one, but TWO letters addressed to me, both from Twin-Cities-based friends named Timothy (or some variation). One of the Timothys, typically a quick responder, apologized for leaving two months in between letters due to moving and other major life transitions. I felt a bit guilty about this seeing as 2 months is a pretty standard response time for yours truly. Plus getting letters is so great, every time I get one I am inspired to write letters and send them to all the corners of the globe. This epistolic inspiration leaked into the ambition centers of my brain and set it to churning out the following list of oft-repressed life ambitions.
2. Be a writing tutor. Why isn't there a writing center in this city?! If I could coach essay writers every Saturday I would be a happy woman.
3. Be the real-life equivalent of a CEL peer advisor. That is, I have a constant nagging urge to critique resumes and cover letters, to coach job search processes, share interviewing tips, give career advice, and administer personality tests like the Myers-Briggs. That being said, I have no real desire to actually work for the CEL. #CELyourself? Puh-lease.
4. Become a communication and team management coach. Probably a prerequisite of this is getting some serious communication and team management experience. I'm sure many CEOs and team leaders are dying to be bossed around by a 22-year-old lib arts grad with a nose ring.
5. Spend more time at the library. Like, go to book clubs and (nonexistent) writing groups and write a blog post on the library computers once a week and do research and tutor people in reading, writing, or English... Or just curl up in a chair and read something easy every now and then.
6. Find a grown-up poetry open mic, and get up the guts (and the memory) to perform.
7. Bring my exercise ball to work. I got a (blue) exercise ball for my birthday, and back in December I asked my bosses if I could replace my office chair with it as long as we didn't have any visitors in the office. They reluctantly agreed, if I could find a black one, and the issue kind of went to rest -- except for them making fun of me for trying to make our firm into a mini Delawarean Google/Facebook, wearing a nose ring, and eating organic unprocessed foods. But I did actually find a black ball, and just haven't got up the guts to bring up the issue again. My body cries about sitting in a desk chair 40 hours a week.
8. Spend time outside every day. Even if it's just 15 minutes. Vitamin D, baby.
9. Save more each pay period. (Translation: Be more frugal about entertaining myself and my people.)
10. Know how much moolah I have in my bank account at any given moment. I am infamously bad at this. One time (in college) I tried to buy a Subway sandwich on my debit card and it was declined. Punch line: When I went home and checked my checking account balance, I had just over $2.00 in there. #winning...
11. Go swimming once a week. I LOVE swimming. And it's SO good for the bod. And I used to do it every week, without fail. So why don't I do it more? I have to fight the community swim team and the little kids in water wings for a lane at the Y.
12. Get wild roses...and not kill them. This is pretty much futile since I have probably killed most plants I come into contact with, but they really make my heart beat faster. If I had them in my place of residence it would be impossible not to be content at any given time.

13. Dress up like a pirate for the Wilmington Pirate Festival this weekend. I haven't played dress up maybe in over a year. Have you seen my childhood?
14. Visit the Dogfish Head brewery and the brewpub in Rehoboth. It feels blasphemous to live in Delaware, be a craft brew afficionado, and not have been to Dogfish Head. Especially since I wear their earrings, but even though I dislike IPA, which is pretty much the specialty.
15. That being said, Get noticed for my Dogfish Head earrings when I go to the brewery. Fortune and fame, baby.
16. Get up from my desk a few times per day. I've been getting kinks in my hips, quads, obliques... Too much sitting. Too much switching between the gas and the brake pedals every day of my life.
17. Learn how to do basic maintenance on my own car. When I was little, I dreamed of growing up to be the woman who could fix the VCR by herself, without resorting to the help of a man. (Can that still be an allegory...?)
18. Watch Back to the Future. Yeah. Somehow haven't seen it yet. Happy (Faux) Future Day, by the way.
19. Write my own rap, instead of bumming of Luda's rhymes for the rest of my life.
20. Finish my girl talk research. Like...write the book about it.
21. Publish a book. Maybe girl talk. Maybe a novel. Maybe a children's book. Maybe poetry. Maybe a collection of essays. Who knows.
22. Get over my serious apiphobia. Fear of bees and wasps. 'Nuff said.
23. Visit the Pacific Northwest in October. Full itinerary over there, man. Wow. Portland, Seattle, Vancouver... Friends of all stripes.
24. Go to ALL the weddings. Already dropped the ball on this one. #KansasCity
25. Live in a small town or at least a city with public transit.
26. DO something about public health, instead of just writing angry blog posts/crying about it.
27. Visit the ocean at least once a year.
28. Be part of an active community. Again. Like St. Olaf, but...not.
29. Never stop learning new things and meeting new people.

nights of the (sort of) round table

I started this post last night right after getting up from the dinner table. A particularly full dinner table, with 8 chairs crammed around it.

We've always been a family of 6, and we've always been an infamously spirited family of 6. Tonight we were discussing the possibilities of a superpower that would allow us to switch off gravity in a predefined period of time within a certain area. Then Maria said, "People who have more birthdays live longer." And while we were all chuckling about that, Papa chimed in, "And odds are, if your parents couldn't have kids then you won't be able to either."

And then Mutti said, "...Didn't we have this same conversation a few days ago?"

On other nights we talk about linguistics, or architecture, or theology, or medicine. Or we talk about books we're reading and movies we've seen or want to see. We try to make plans and usually fail because of how impossible it is to coordinate 6 busy schedules full of life and ambition. We tell funny stories and bad jokes. We work through our issues, personal or collective. As cliche as it may sound, the dinner table is the place where our family status gets resolidified. Sitting down to eat, and, more importantly, to laugh together, does the same thing for our family as renewing vows does for married couples. It's like checking our vitals, syncing our personal devices to the familial network.

Sometimes other people join us at the table and we realize how completely strange our dinner table conversations are, and how intense we can be to people who don't yet know the ropes.

Case in point, my sister's boyfriend got an essay published in Teen Ink about meeting the family, his first supper at our house. He talks about feeling justifiably intimidated as we all haphazardly gathered around the table (typical) and then how that anxiety melted away as he realized we were just real, raucous people. Now he verbally spars with the best of us, rises to the occasion.

Another friend of my sister's was lucky enough to be present at a family dinner where the conversation somehow got steered to the logistics of a career in pole dancing, with side stories about the time my dad had to guess a Sensosketch (drawing with your eyes closed) of a "string bikini" at a youth group game night. (He didn't guess it.) Our visitor sat at the head of the table looking mildly shell-shocked, but laughing; and on the way home he mentioned, with typical quiet intellectualism, that we are "interesting" people -- but in a good way.

Friday was J's birthday, so on Saturday I went to have family dinner at his house. I was struck, as a relative outsider, by the warmth of the family table, the passing and sharing of food and, again, laughter. I don't think this is mere coincidence. That kind of intentional time spent together, gathered in a place, facing each other, is an opportunity for care, to nourish not only our bodies but our souls.

My family has been known to sit literally for hours after all of us are full, after all the food is gone and all the plates are clean and the clock strikes whatever ungodly hour. (We have also been known, on more than one occasion, to sit down to eat after 10:00 pm, so I guess the "after dark" thing isn't really a surprise.) Despite all the ruckus lately about headlines reading, STUDIES DEBUNK "FAMILY DINNER" MYTH: CHILDREN WHO EAT DINNER WITH THEIR FAMILIES STILL GET ADDICTED TO DRUGS! ...I still think that our family is a functional one because we eat together.


Because we enjoy our food together. We share our gratefulness that there is something on the table, and that it is usually delicious, and that we have people we love to share it with. I really think it boils down to the fact that we laugh together. And my sisters have mentioned on multiple occasions that the dinner table is where we hash things out. That's where we make plans, and work through issues, and take votes on major family decisions, like when and where to go on vacation, or whether it's time to move. It's the only time and place we all set aside (at least one or two nights a week, now that we're all older and busier) to be present with each other. When we were little dinnertime was the only time we didn't answer the phone, on principle. Our family has committed, for 25 years, to being with each other as we share the gifts we have been given.

And what I like about this now is that we have spent a long time building up our family dinner foundation, so that now we gladly invite others to join us, to be grateful with us, to enjoy food with us, to laugh with us. They bring new jokes and facts and topics of interest and even new tastes to the spread.

We are all infinitely richer for it.

elements

I am feeling pretty all-American this week. Friday afternoon I went to a baseball game, courtesy of work. I spent yesterday at the beach with the fam, and today is Father's Day. We're not planning on grilling, and we're not beer-drinkers, but we ARE ice cream people. So to Woodside Creamery it is.

Yesterday I also got stung by a bee (my worst fear) on the inside of my right wrist (most tender spot ever). It's not as stiff or swollen or red as it was yesterday, but now it itches like the dickens.

The cool part about this is how resilient our bodies are. Bee-stings irritate our skin, and even inside our skin, because they have poison in them. They are strategically designed to protect the hive, kamikaze-style, by doing damage to intruders who are often much larger than the bees themselves. I am fortunately not allergic to stings, but that tiny stinger embedded in my wrist laid out my dominant arm for an entire day. The inside of my wrist hurt. I imagined the bones and muscles screaming against the venom, and felt my body rushing to the aid of the injured limb.

But today, I woke up to find the sting pinched up zit-style. Overnight, while I slept, my body collected the venom and pushed it toward the injury site. "Thanks for coming, see you never!" my immune system calls out after it. And I've been awed once again, as I am continually since the extraction of my wisdom teeth: Every morning I wake up and feel more normal, feel my body rushing to get the evidence of trauma cleared up and back to business. I'm sure I've shared this before, but my grandfather the doctor once comforted me by saying, "Our bodies are pretty amazing. They can mostly take care of themselves... It's just sometimes they need a little help."

That being said, I've been looking forward to going to the beach all week. I always feel cleaner after a run-in with salt water. I always feel fresher and haler and tougher. Maybe because my mom always said salt water (and kisses) have healing powers. I wholeheartedly believe that, and will testify in an exhilarated heartbeat to the truth in that statement. And in spite of bee stings and bird poop (yes, I got hit with that shit yesterday too) and humblingly huge waves, I do feel healed and re-energized.

Speaking of humblingly huge waves, and of being re-energized, and Father's Day, my dad always says the beach is where he feels most alive. He pines for it 12 months out of the year. He makes career decisions based on proximity to the ocean. This year, he even suggested we take a family trip down to Rehoboth in Februrary. His eyes light up any time he has the chance to tell stories about a half-century's worth of trips to beaches around the world. Even though a lot of them are sobering testament to the dark side of water and its overwhelming power.

Yesterday he brought up a conversation he'd had with someone about the duality of every element, the constructive and destructive powers held by water and fire specifically, but by all the elements. "It says something about us, which element we identify with," he said. "I definitely identify with water." We both turned silently to watch the uncharacteristically huge waves crashing on top of each other and across each other and in quick succession, and the dwindling number of beachgoers who dared to face them or ride them in. My brother joined us a moment later, having fought his way back to the foaming shallows, warning that the undertow was getting stronger.

While I let the salt water soothe my sting and buff my tiredness away with every crashing wave, the lifeguards had a busy day dragging bold swimmers back to shore against the stubborn sucking tide. Fewer and fewer bodysurfers dared catch these waves as the afternoon wore on and I, a strong swimmer with strokes built in ocean waves, feared the currents I knew I couldn't fight. I went out once but stayed in knee-depth water after I had to tumble into shore on a big wave since I couldn't face the drag otherwise. This roiling sea, like the floods of Hurricane Irene back in August, perfectly pared the element's soothing qualities against its disturbing ones. We regard both sides of that divide with awe: It cleans and it drowns. Same with the other classical elements: we have campfires and forest fires; windchimes and tornadoes; gardens and earthquakes.

There is also duality in deadlines. The limitations they impose help us to get things done, keep us moving forward; but they also cause stress and, sometimes, bring good things to an end.

I created this blog in May of 2011 and promised to update it a few times a week for the first year after college graduation. That year is over. So do I stop writing in the name of discipline?

In the past year, I have wrestled publicly with moving, at least twice; looking for jobs, twice; starting new jobs; dating; getting over; missing people and places; traveling; making new friends, and taking old friendships into a new context; being robbed; car trouble; money trouble; medical trouble; church; and perhaps a thousand other things. I have written about these things in part to process them, to figure out life as I now live it, to separate the things I know how to deal with from the things I don't even know how to begin to deal with.

But more importantly, I have written a post-grad blog to maintain connections with those scattered souls who are doing the same things as I am doing, or variations of the same things, at least. I hope to put words to our common struggles and victories, to remind my peers and myself that we are not alone. I have continued to post these past few weeks because little has changed: our post-grad experience has not ended. We continue to face unfamiliar situations, and we continue to take in new things we need to figure out. We continue to be hit with the duality of elements, we continue to rejoice and to mourn, and life goes on.

I could pose the same question about life as I did about reading a couple of posts ago: is it better as an individual or a shared experience? But it would be futile. Life is a shared experience.

A lot of us are facing a second round of changes, as service corps placements wrap up, leases run out, grad school approaches, knots get tied (this summer brings a hearty round of weddings for Class of 2011 grads). Is this our third set of baby steps? Maybe we are starting to walk more confidently, to take longer strides. But in my opinion it's still nice to fall into step with someone else. And as long as it is mutually helpful and joyful for me to share my footfalls, I don't see how I can quit. Writing is my sanity.

Over the next few weeks I'm hoping to make some changes to the blog, the way it looks, the features and labels and organization... I'm thinking about making a Facebook page. I might try to write shorter/more on-the-fly posts, and I'm trying to figure out blogger for mobile, which so far proves pretty un-user-friendly. I want to stay true to the core spirit of the blog, but to grow it up a little to match the steps we've taken since graduation. Some things will definitely change. But don't worry -- I'll keep you posted.

love in the time of fists and choler

When you look back on your college years, you won't remember doing homework. You'll remember studying abroad, volunteering, playing sports, participating in student organizations, [not remembering at least a few "last nights,"] and spending time with your friends. 

- American proverb

I woke up yesterday morning on a crinkly bedbug-protected mattress on the floor in a guest room of what I know as Karin's Convent. Audrey rolled over on the mattress next to me, and instead of getting up and booking it over to Brooklyn Bagel, we talked for at least an hour about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

And then we got up and booked it to Brooklyn Bagel.

Anyway, somewhere in the course of that conversation it occurred to me that I really don't remember doing ANY homework.

Those who know me might legitimately question whether that's because I really didn't do any homework or if all the papers and projects and case studies and readings just melted into the hectic humdrum of the Life of a Lib Artiste.

Judging by the fact that I did in fact manage to pass college, and by the blank look on Audrey's face that mirrored my own awe at the sudden, tangible truth of this cliche, and the fact that my grandparents are still (for some reason) proud of me and also read my blog, I'm going to say it's the latter.

And yes, I will begrudgingly acknowledge that there are some other, more notable experiences throughout my college career that overshadowed the time we spent doing homework. (I almost wrote, "time spent in the library," but to be honest I don't even remember where I used to do my homework, and I remember the library pretty well. Using the logic I gained presumably from doing my homework, I can infer that my time spent in the library was not homework time. Weird...?)

In the process of writing this post I made a list of a few things I do remember from my college years, which I will not share because if I do then none of you will buy my memoirs in the future, and also because you would get pretty bored pretty quick. But my favorite thing on the list so far is watching "The Bachelor" with a living room full of friends at a house called Huggs.

The name of the house was entirely coincidental; but it is not a coincidence that our driving subject of conversation this weekend was love. Specifically, open-handed love. Inviting-the-fickle-and-fateful-whims-of-the-universe love. Agendaless love.

The kind of love my mind doesn't like to wrap itself around.

But, as Audrey so wisely and beautifully put it, "You have such a range of motion when your hands are open. When they're closed, the only thing they can do is punch."

I would like to add that closed hands tend to grab things. Like a baby who gets hold of a chunk of your hair. Infant vice grip = pain.

Closed hands don't really facilitate the most love-inspiring activities.

And as I discovered this sunny Sunday morning, I struggle to understand and accept open-handed love. Which is ironic since as a baby I used to sleep belly-up, hands fallen open at my sides. Now, though, they spend most of their time in various degrees of curled up. But throughout the course of this conversation Audrey gently took my hands (literally and figuratively) and opened them up, smoothed out the crinkles and the clenched knuckles and the terse palm.

And just in time, too.

By evening I was back at home and on my way out the door to see Jason when I noticed some dental insurance letterhead sticking out of the pile of mail on the kitchen counter. I pulled it out, expecting the relief I'd been promised the week before my surgery, but what I saw shook my hands and closed my throat and churned my stomach. I felt like I was going to puke. Covered by insurance: 0.00. Patient responsibility: Over $2,500.

Now, this is really getting to me. I am upset that the original estimated amount I would have to pay, and a condition of me going ahead with the surgery, ended up being less than one third of the final amount that now falls under my responsibility. I am upset at the fact that it will take me months to pay this off, even if I give up every penny of my paychecks until I'm out of the red. I'm upset that at the very least I will have to give up some things I wanted to do this summer and into the fall because of this outstanding balance. These are my selfish complaints.

On a fundamental, societal level, though, I am angry that a fairly routine and preventative procedure is so financially out of reach for me, someone in a stable financial position, to say nothing for the millions of people in this country who struggle to make ends meet. I am angry that nowhere in the surgery office is there a posted list of prices: anesthetic, single tooth extraction, extra dose of anesthetic, stitches, markup for skill and precision. Nowhere in the pharmacy nor the GP's office are those costs posted either. I am angry that income influences so many doctors' decisions to enter the medical field, and that income influences so many families' decisions to stay out of those doctors' offices at all costs, until they can no longer put off a trip to the emergency room. By this time it is too often too late.


[Note: For an easy, enjoyable read that addresses a lot of these societal factors, check out T.R. Reid's The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.]

I'm angry for the people I know bearing the burden of exorbitant medical bills on top of the burden of pain and illness those bills could not cure or even ease. I'm angry for families left with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills to fill the void left by the death of a loved one who couldn't have been saved with millions. I'm angry that health insurance is so expensive, so exclusive, and so apparently worthless (if my personal experience in the last 8 months is any indication). I am angry that business owners oppose healthcare reform because of the added cost it will place on their straining bank books. (I understand the threat this added cost can pose, but where does the cost come from? Something is wrong here.)

I'm angry that this country is growing increasingly obese, increasingly over-medicated, and increasingly polarized in political debates about public health. Public health. The very title indicates an issue that affects every constituency in the nation. People in every party die of cancer, stroke and heart disease. People in every party get colds and break bones and live with chronic diseases.

I am saddened by all of these things, and perhaps most of all saddened by the fact that there is no easy fix, that there is something broken in our system that I can't pinpoint, cannot package into the perfect legislation, cannot encapsulate in a widespread activist campaign. There is something broken in our system and it is too broken to fix itself. And I don't know what to do about it.

Anyway, I tried to contain this wave of anger and sadness and general unrest by fleeing to the basement to gather my things and my thoughts. But it wasn't going away. It's not just going to go away.

A few moments later my dad came down the stairs after me, and my impulse was to push him away. But I thought of Audrey opening my hands, and tried not to resist.

"You're not going to have to pay that," he said. And I launched into all the health-related angers and sadnesses and general upsets I just spelled out here. And his reply was something along the lines of, "Yes, but don't lose hope yet. Don't lose control. Just go there tomorrow and try to sort it out."

"But I don't have TIME!" I broke down.

"I do," he said. "I don't have to work tomorrow. Let me go for you."

I shook my head. "I don't have time or money to deal with this right now!"

"I have time!" he said again, more forcefully this time. "Let me do it."

"But I want to take care of it MYSELF!" I wailed, collapsing like I was 6 again and feeling like the world was caving in on me.

At which point my dad just burst out laughing, and squashed me into his arms. "You've been taking care of everything yourself since you were 15," he said. "You've been taking care of some things since you were 2." (That's the year my brother was born.) "I want to help you. I want to take care of some things for you. We are a community and a family and that's what we do. We help each other and take care of each other. You don't have to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, all by yourself."

And suddenly I felt my hands unclench. Literally and figuratively. I felt this wave of universal whim swirl around us and it made me dizzy, so dizzy, but in that corkscrew I caught a glimpse of love sans agenda. Hands spread wide, flat, open. Reaching out toward my fists and waiting. Just waiting, so patiently, for my stubborn flailing fists that might just keep pulling farther and farther away forever.

I'm still terrified of this. I'm still working on faith and I'm still working out the kinks in my palm, tied up in there from years and maybe even decades of clenching and punching and pulling. I still cringe when someone approaches me open-handed. But I am starting to understand. I am circling closer every time, and I am finding it easier to resist biting the hand that feeds me. Open. Agendaless. I know that I am very lucky to have many sets of open hands around me, despite my thorns and bristles. There are too many hands to count.

pressing questions of a word nerd

I want to run something by you guys.

Months ago, I read an article on PRdaily.com called How to improve your writing in 15 minutes. I read articles like this because they keep my wordcrafting muscles toned and agile, and sometimes there are good tips. (Tip for my fellow writer friends: PRdaily has a lot of good articles about writing, so if you want to stay sharp, check out their writing exercises and word-nerd features.)

Anyway, leave it to me to get more out of the example than out of the article itself. I got hooked on the example topic: "How to become a better communicator." In particular, the third talking point under step 1, "Read often so you're able to speak confidently about a number of topics."

At the time it struck me that I OD'ed on this in college, being able to speak confidently on tons of different topics, because at any given time I was taking 3-4 classes in which that was how we spent our time: reading (or in my case, "reading") lots of books and articles, and talking about them.

Actually, I've been doing this my whole life. My lifelong book addiction hooked me up with a love of language, an outlandish vocabulary, an atrophic social life up to age 14, the most random pockets of expertise you can imagine, and something to contribute to almost any conversation. The difference has been mainly what I read. As a 6-year-old, it was Babysitter's Little Sister; at 8 I devoured Encyclopedia Brown; the summer before middle school I burned through the juvenile fiction and into the YA section at my local library, and then housed Harry Potter interspersed with the entire bibliographies of Madeleine L'Engle and Philip Pullman, and the misadventures of Georgia Nicolson, until I graduated high school. In college it was a lot of heavy academic stuff, philosophy and social theory and ethnographies (a genre I still get jazzed about even though most academic literature makes me gag and pass out).

Now? I read PRdaily meta-articles about writing. I read post-grad and travel blogs. I read vampire novels bought as a ploy to get me to go on dates with coffeeshop crushes. I read Facebook terms and advertising guidelines, New York Times and Huff Post articles about the impending apocalypse, and interview tips. And I read the nerdiest book you would have never heard about if Borders hadn't gone out of business and madly sold their entire inventory for $2.

It's called The Great Typo Hunt and it's about two dudes who go on a Pan-American road trip documenting and correcting typos in the name of better communication across the nation.

Yes, I'll be the first to admit what a honking big word nerd I am.

So a few weeks ago I was sitting in my car on my lunch break, reading this book, and I thought, "This is pretty good for a mediocre book." And then I realized what I had just thought and my head snapped up. I am loving this book. It makes me laugh out loud on a fairly regular basis, and I've actually had to close it a few times on something that blew my mind so I couldn't focus on reading anymore, and I needed to process it for a few days before picking the book back up. Also, I kind of love travel writing. Holy Cow!: An Indian Adventure, for example, or Eat Pray Love, in spite of all the criticism. (Yes, those are Goodreads links. Feel free to friend me.)

So why would I file it away in my mind as "mediocre"?

In that moment, I decided I put it there for its obscurity. The fact that I didn't hear about it through the grapevine, and in fact I had never heard about it before, and didn't know anyone else who had read it either. I couldn't talk about this book. It would be complicated to reference in conversation because I would have to explain the whole principle, or give a synopsis and include a link to its webpage if I wanted to mention it in a blog post.

Is it prior text status that takes a book from mediocre or good to great? Does the shared experience of having read some 300 pages, the shared familiarity with characters and plotlines and settings, make a book a favorite? Is this why we recommend books to fellow lit-lovers? So we can talk about them, and thus bump the book we enjoyed into greatness, among the monuments of our formative experiences?

Tell me what you think. I'm dying to be back at school to be around people that like talking about such things, but I'm not. So PLEASE hit me up with thoughts and comments.

"There's 2 parties in here, and us.
...We're a party. Let's be honest."

Meanwhile, I will mention that I spent Sunday in Philly's Chinatown in search of flaming drinks, lotto tickets, fortune cookies, and a great birthday for my girl Kristy. We found all of those things. Like a boss.

Also, my phone (i.e. my life in device form) decided to go swimming in the cat bowl on Monday, and I've just now turned it on after a 2-day rice bath. It's just graced my ears with a symphony of message alerts, so here's hoping there will be photos in future posts.

Though I will never admit this if you ask me in conversation, my life is never boring.

when things go up in flames...

Today my sister graduated high school.

Congrats, Maria & Brandon!

I have enjoyed recently being the Enforcer of Rites of Passage. There is something compelling to me about the cliches of prom, graduation, and all the photos and speeches. I made sure Maria took the obligatory Awkward Prom Photo, and I took notes on the speeches at her graduation ceremony.

The principal found a fan in me with his message: "Find your own definitions of success." I appreciated the recognition that different people need different things out of life, and that there are many respectable ways to live well. Mr. Murphy offered 3 definitions of successful people:

1. Those who dedicate their lives in service to others
2. Those who find their call, do what they love, spend their lives doing good work and doing it happily
3. Those who get up every single day, no matter how tired or out of sorts they feel, to go to work and support their family, to care for the people they love.

I know that many of my fellow St. Olaf graduates feel pressure to fulfill a certain definition of success; scathingly, "getting a high profile job, making enough money to give generously to the College, and changing the world."

I also read a commencement speech referencing a quote that really stopped me short:

“One of my favorite quotes is this: ‘For every 10 people who can handle adversity, there is only one who can handle success.’” – - Dom Capers, Green Bay defensive coordinator, University of Mount Union (Ohio)

Only 1 in 10 people who become successful can handle it. What a strange and frightening concept, when much of the world spends lifetimes working to achieve this Pinnacle of Societal Acceptance. Working to Win.

Dom Capers explained that once a person reaches his or her ultimate goal, ultimate success, that person has to spend the rest of their life defending that position, protecting themselves against those who would try to take it away, trying to avoid the pitfalls that accompany wealth and the anomie of no longer having something to work toward.

But to me, success is a process, a state of being. It requires maintenance and awareness and alertness, and it changes just like everything else. The danger is thinking you've made it, letting your guard down, failing to continue doing good work. Live well, do good work, be successful.

The district superintendent's core message was this: "The most important thing you will have in your life is your name." He continued, "What people think of you will define the course of your life."

It is important to consider how our actions will affect our social standing, and thus our access to social resources and opportunities. I agree with him: "The most important thing you will have in your life is your name." But more important than what people think of you is what you think of yourself. Your name is important because it reminds you who you are.


And that is what will define the course of your life.

The salutatorian is going into the military and his speech was little more than a review of the past four years at John Dickinson High School. The student speakers in general appealed to the sense of class-ness on the floor, over the past four years. They told in-jokes that would naturally go over my head, a head which had never even passed the threshold into the school building.

We heard the typical messages: Thanks to my friends and my teachers; Learn from your mistakes and move on; Your failures are as important, or more important, to your success. And a beautiful speech from a student who transferred from a dangerous situation in southern California two years ago.

But the valedictorian repeated wholesome, inspiring messages from some of their teachers. And then she said, "But the most important thing I learned was that when Mr. Peck sets a table on fire in chemistry, you grab your best friend and run."

Perhaps the most poignant tribute to friendship I have ever heard: You grab your best friend and run.


I will leave you with that, and with best wishes to the Class of 2012: May you define success and achieve it, every day of your lives. May you discover beautiful things. When things go up in flames, grab your best friend, and run.

Always forward.