three-screen girl

Well, readers, it's happened. I've become a three-screen girl.

Back in college I used to marvel and, I admit, scoff at my friends who had elaborate double-screen desk set-ups with a laptop hooked up to a larger monitor, or a couple of desktop monitors wired together for gaming or programming or design purposes. (Note that I don't remember any of these being set up by girlfriends... just guys.)

But when I started working with social media I had about a week of working on a single screen before I had to dive into double-screen work. Another confession: I don't think I could get by without it. I got used to having, on average, 8 programs open at any given moment; several tabs open within each application; and completely different projects, or different parts of the same project, open on each of my screens (and sometimes multiple windows open side-by-side on one or both of the screens).

On Friday, my supervisor burst out, "That's it! I need a third screen!"

I immediately turned around and said, "I have been thinking the exact same thing for at least a week now."

And on Monday, we came in to find triple-screen set-ups on both of our desks.

And so far this week, I have been using all three. It's terrifyingly easy to get used to. I used my parents' desktop computer for something last week and found myself trying to drag browser tabs onto my nonexistent other screen. Believe it.

J. just got an iPhone last week and ever since then Siri has been the third guest at all of our activities. And just to illustrate how that affects our activities, here is an example of a conversation we might have A.S. (after Siri):

Me: What used to be the Pope's name before he was the pope?
J.: Siri, what was the Pope's name before he became pope?
Siri: I don't know what that is, "the popesname beef ole bee cane pope." Would you like me to search the web for it?

Then J. usually watches Siri search the web for the Pope's ex-name, and tells me the answer to my incredibly mundane question, by which time I have moved on to talking about another topic and am put off by being so rudely drawn back to something that is so five minutes ago.

"He's just excited," my friends tell me. "Give it a week."

To be fair, it's putting into perspective my own mobile use. I have caught myself on multiple occasions in the past grabbing my phone when we're out at a restaurant, saying, "Oh! That just reminded me, I need to text Jess about this thing we're doing on Friday. Do you mind?" And of course he always says, "It's okay, go for it, babe." But after I spend half a dinner sending texts I've been meaning to send all day but forgotten, I start feeling really guilty and put away my phone and vow never to send another text from the table ever again... And look up to see J. on his own phone across the table. So it may have been me who opened the door in the first place.

I've done the same thing at work in the past few weeks, and spent more than a few lunch breaks "talking" with my coworkers while really I was catching up frantically on the 7 games of Words With Friends I had going, and never had time within a WiFi-enabled area to actually play. At first I was so gung-ho about this game, because I love Scrabble but never have a chance to play it, and also because it put me in touch in a really cool way with some friends I don't talk to much under other circumstances. But if it takes me out of the moment, is it really worth it?

I LOVE not having cable and internet at home, and while I do switch on my 4G from time to time to check Facebook or email or my bank account or to look up directions to a place I'm going, I like being discouraged from getting stuck online instead of reading books, or going out somewhere, or sitting in the kitchen talking to my roomies. I like the fact that it's impossible for me to walk through the living room and glance at whatever show someone is watching and then look up again four hours later and realize I got completely sucked in to something I don't even remember. I like having to go to bars to watch sports. I like having an excuse not to watch the news, which is always so gory and sensationalist especially on TV. (ABC's 11:00 news is the worst.)

But then, on the other hand, Facebook keeps me in touch with some really good friends who no longer live up the hall. There are people I wouldn't know how to start talking to again, but I still feel connected to them through Instagram. I don't know what I (or all of you) would have done if I didn't write this blog, at least for the first couple of months out of school.

I've also met and stayed in touch with a decent amount of new friends here in Delaware through the internet. My friend Johnny and I primarily email each other, and we met at an event I found through a local writers' group on Facebook. Recently, I commented on a Facebook post of a friend who now works in St. Olaf's alumni office about Oles in Wilmington, and a day or two later got a message from one such Ole now living in Wilmington... Long story short, we've been hanging out at least every other week lately. How would we have found each other without the digital grapevine?

I hope I don't ever get so sucked into my job that I forget how to interact with people face-to-face. I hope I don't ever get so sucked into my smartphone that I forget how to unplug and have an actual conversation. I hope I don't ever lose my ability to leave my phone in my purse while I'm at dinner, and turn it off. I am working on myself first, before I start picketing Siri. I will draw a line between tech times and face time. (Ha, ha, see what I did there?)

But I can't in good faith say I want to cut this stuff out entirely. I hope it keeps getting easier to stay in touch with my farthest-flung friends and my respected classmates and colleagues. And when I say "stay in touch," I'm talking about maintaining meaningful connections. I feel like I'm doing fine on that front; so here's to my fourth and fifth screen of choice: your eyes, dear readers.

Thanks for reading! Now go outside and find someone to say hi to. If you're feeling really old-fashioned, you could even shake hands. Or hug.

cool your jets

In case anyone was wondering, posts with phrases like "most depressing ever" in the title get all-time low reads. Noted.

I am not on top of the world lately, as you might have noticed. I am having a few attitude problems; last night I fumed and muttered curses under my breath all the way to BodyCombat. I was late, despite my intentions of leaving half an hour early so I would have a few minutes to catch my breath and read and decompress. But there are not enough hours in the day. And then when I finally got into the parking lot with a minute to spare, I spent that minute plus one waiting in a long line of cars because someone at the front was waiting for one of the coveted close-to-the-building parking spaces to open up, and the vehicle leaving wasn't leaving as quickly as we all would have liked him to.

It never ceases to amaze/frustrate me when people cause this kind of mass disturbance only to snag a parking spot that will secure them a short walk from their car to the gym. Seriously?!

Anyway, as I pulled into a space (very far from the door) I realized: The only person who is feeling the heat of my generalized anger right now is me.

Which just made me more angry: if I could only get my shit together, none of this would have to be such a big deal and I could just be happy. But there are a few uncalibrated elements to my life right now.

A day or two after my last post, which I took as a "rock bottom" alert and the kick in the pants I needed to get back on the upswing, my horoscope hit the nail on the head:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21). In some way, you are recovering your balance. Don't expect that this will happen just once. The dance of life requires you to be in a constant state of recovery.

You may recall my past post about homeostasis, with the sine curve diagram. I've just looked it up and I'm actually surprised to note that I wrote it almost exactly a year ago. Is this annual downswing a coincidence? Might there be some larger correlation between early- to mid-February and rock bottom alerts?

(I might also note that there is something circular in the fact that the aforementioned post mentions the recent engagement of a good friend, whom I have just recontacted to collaborate on a new post feature, coming Sunday. Stay tuned...!)

Last February what I was aching for was social connections. Girl time. Close friends and love to celebrate outside of my family. This year, as you might have noticed, I am starving for me-time. I pine, with a certain sense of le-grass-is-always-greener, for a lull in stimuli. I may be in the wrong career (public relations is famously fast-paced and high-stress), or in the wrong family (I come from a long line of crisis-finders), or just in the wrong body, for that matter; but a girl can dream, right?

My family spent a few days in Disney last week, so it fell to me to hang out with the cat. Now, many of you may assume this is not my dream come true, given the amount of time I spend tearing my hair out over the cats I live with in the Little Italy house; but somehow I adore my parents' cat, claws and all. She likes to play tag, and she's so soft, and she has a tiny, sweet meow, and she did curl up with me to watch a movie on a few occasions. I had the whole house to myself, and the whole weekend to myself, and I skipped four days of working out (unheard of!) and I went out to eat almost every day, and I didn't have to run into anybody if I didn't want to...

And yes, of course I am in the wrong body to completely slow down; of course I filled every moment with something to the point that Sunday night I nearly panicked when the sun went down; of course my to-do list is not and will never be a finite entity. But I realized this weekend that I need a vacation.

I need a day off, a day out of town, where I don't have to be anywhere and I don't have to do anything and I don't have to meet anyone.

If you're not one for these lofty lifestyle statements and deep psychoanalysis, I've got a great metaphor for you. (Ha ha, -phor for! ...Ahem.)

This week I also noticed J. throwing his car into neutral to cruise down a long hill, and probably overreacted on a grand scale. "It saves gas," he explained. "Well, not a ton... but still."

So I got the scoop, and as he talked me through it this whole new world opened up through my expanding consciousness. "Do you even understand what this means?!" (I might have been yelling a little...) "I would use this EVERY. DAY. on 48 on the way home from work! That lonnnnnggg hill..."

So the next day, I tried it. I glanced around like a crook, like I was sneaking snacks right as my mom called everyone for dinner.

I was not disappointed. Let me tell you: it was so oddly exhilarating. Just cruising in neutral.

I could still steer just fine; I could brake; I just couldn't accelerate. Any momentum I gained came solely from the results of some physics equation I never learned how to solve: the effect of gravity on the body of my little car, hurtling down the hill at 40...45...50 miles per hour. (The speed limit was 50, so cool your jets.) And I'd be willing to bet that I wouldn't suffer much from at least a temporary suspension of my ability to artificially accelerate. (Try coasting in neutral sometime, it's fun! Just don't forget to snap it back into drive before you put your foot back on the gas...)

I feel like I can say "cool your jets" to you guys because the universe has said it to me so many times this week. This is something that gives me hope, that gives me license to take a deep breath every once in awhile. First there was the horoscope. There were the two unusual invitations to go out and grab food with people I don't often go out and grab food with -- but great company, both of them. And then, another day or so later, when I was drinking tea like a fiend, looking for peace-- I got the same message twice on the tag of the Yogi tea bags. A gentle slap across one cheek and then the other. A mantra, not to follow dictatorially but to strive for. One of my now-and-then cosmic reminders to cool my jets.

 

and again i fail at not writing the most depressing posts ever

Happy almost-Valentine's day, readers! Also, happy Valentine's Eve and happy Galentine's day today; for tomorrow, happy Valentine's Day; and on Friday, happy Singles Awareness Day. I guess Monday is Presidents' Day too? Anyway, I hope you celebrate something this weekend.

I found this on my car today at work. Sometimes Jason leaves me windshield presents; sometimes I think I have a creepy stalker. I'm in a much better mood now than I have been for days, when I was pre-drafting this post in my head, but this really cute thing isn't a bad segue into my predetermined topic: gift-giving.

Sometimes when I'm writing a post I feel like my life is an episode of Seventh Heaven, where each episode is themed to a different life lesson and all the characters have individual encounters with the theme. It's really weird how things happen in sets; for example, this week I heard the following phrase twice from older male acquaintances: "I have a gift for you."

My first thought in both cases was, "Whoa." And quickly following that: "That's sad." Because in neither case did I really think there was anything implied in the gift; neither circumstance actually felt creepy. But I'm reminded of a post on my friend Liz's blog about the uncomfortable feeling of being objectified as an adult woman, which somehow feels far grosser and more threatening than being objectified as a college girl or even a teenager. What I got out of this post, at least, is that once you've been shamelessly ogled and drooled at by the last 9 guys you pass on the street, the 10th one can't do anything right. Even a genuinely friendly smile from him can't penetrate the 9 layers of dirt, which turns into armor when baked in the sun for even a minute.

What makes this situation even more disturbing to me is that both of these acquaintances fall into the category of writer friends -- not that writers can't be creepy, but I've found that writers in community give each other gifts all the time. And these gifts are often related to our shared passion: a poem or story; a book; a pen; a token of reminder to write every day. Yet I find it difficult to just say thank you. And the fact that I expect nothing good from my day to day interactions is a devastating fact to me.

This seems to be a common theme lately. Maybe I've just fallen into a late-winter darkness that will burn off like fog when spring comes. Already my afternoon commute is sunlit and that alone gives me hope. But then again...

If you're in the area, you probably couldn't avoid hearing about the courthouse shooting in Wilmington on Monday. Many of you nationwide probably also heard the news. In fact, I can say for certain that at least one of you has because on Monday evening, as I was sitting down to eat supper with my family, I got a phone call from someone who hasn't called in awhile. (I always try to take unexpected long-distance phone calls, for the record, friends.)

I picked up the phone and he said, "Oh good, you're alive."

"Yes, I'm alive," I said, confused.

"I was just listening to NPR and I heard that two women were shot in Wilmington so... I just wanted to check."

This is bizarre. I remember, too, when I was eleven and living in Upstate New York, and a very old friend texted me on September 11 to make sure everyone I knew was OK. It's always interesting to me what shakes the national conscience, what jogs our memory, what prompts us to get in touch.

And what puts us on the map. In 5th grade my hometown made the front page of Time for Kids with a picture of the frozen remains of First Presbyterian Church, which burned down overnight in the middle of January. It was a chilling, gorgeous photograph of a church in a town no one had heard of until it was struck by a particularly [visually] compelling tragedy. (For the life of me I can't find that photo.)

I'm getting distracted, though. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say there are shootings in Wilmington on a weekly basis; why did this one make the national news? I understand that too much happens in the world on a daily basis and the media can't report on all of it; the question has been asked before: What is newsworthy?

Chew on this: My uncle, a professor at Duke, investigates the connection between mental illness and violent crime. A week or two ago he was invited to interview with Anderson Cooper on a gun violence special; when they read up on his research they cancelled his interview. That freed him up to interview on Fox at the same time, but again when they read up on his research they cancelled.

So you might be wondering, what did his research say? Mental illness is not an accurate predictor of irrational violent crime. You can say that 7 percent of people with a serious mental illness have committed a violent crime, while only 2 percent of everybody else has done so. Or you can say that 96% of violent crimes are committed by people who are not diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

I mention this because it freaked me out to remember, so close to home, how subjective the news media is. I have even been struggling to listen to NPR lately because of all the violence. Not to mention the epic battles on my Facebook news feed on Monday about whether the courthouse shooting or the Pope's resignation was more important.

Here's what I think: WHO CARES?! We're talking about human experience here. We all look with our own eyes at everything, and everything that happens impacts someone very closely. Uncomfortably closely. We want to blame people with schizophrenia for mass shootings; we are afraid there is a deeper scandal broiling beneath Ratzinger's resignation; we are buying guns faster than ever before because "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

The problem is, nothing is either/or. I realize I think singularly in shades-of-grey (not FIFTY shades of grey, mind you -- just plain ol' shades of grey), but where I am black and white is that I cannot for the life of me understand why people forget that there are always two sides of every story. Scratch that-- there are at least two sides to every story, and I would venture more often than not there are hundreds. I'm like a little kid watching a movie that's just beyond my comprehension level: "Who's the bad guy, Daddy? Which one is the good guy?" Well, who are you? The bad guy or the good guy? Because the answer to that question will flip the answer to the first question on its head.

Not to mention, I personally get stuck on the question about who I am. I'm neither bad nor good 100% of the time; I'm sometimes one or the other to different people, or one or the other on different days to different people. I've made enemies, I've done things I'm not proud of, I've definitely been responsible for more than one person's pain (at least emotional, with some mostly accidental physical pain interspersed).

What I'm struggling to say, yet again, is that this all signifies to me a grand-scale cultural malaise. This world is full of pain. The mere knowledge of it keeps me up at night. It drives me crazy during daylight. It gives me an adrenaline kick when I'm getting ready for bed or driving to work or walking through the grocery store parking lot. I am afraid a lot of the time lately. Because I cannot predict or control the way things are or the way things will be tomorrow, and it's too easy to get sucked in to feeling vulnerable and susceptible 100% of the time.

That's where I spent a lot of my weekend and the first part of this week: somewhere lost inside that vulnerable, terrified black hole. So last night, I put on my LOVE T-shirt from RoadTrip and went to BodyCombat. It's a thin armor against the onslaught of despair being thrown at us 24/7 these days, a hollow effort to regain my sense of ownership on my block, my city, this nation. But I need constant reminders that love is something well worth fighting for. It can't be stolen or shot or blown up. It can be shaken. But it always bounces back.

I haven't bounced back yet, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it reallllly hard and hoping so hard that things keep happening to restore my faith in humanity, on any scale I can get, and to restore my sense of security in my own body and my own home.

Things, for example, like this video here: http://youtu.be/sP4NMoJcFd4

"single girl living"

Among the huge transitions involved in moving out of dorms and/or out of our parents' homes is buying food, and cooking it. I am just starting to get the hang of eating at 7:00 when I'm hungry instead of at 9:45 when the food I started cooking when I was hungry got ready. I still have not quite mastered Efficient Shopping for Singles -- I consistently buy too much food at a lower unit price, and then have to throw it away. And I always make either WAY too much or too little rice.

I've started eating lunch most days with bunch of girls at work. We all sit in the back room and compare notes on what we brought: leftover home-cooked food, leftover Domino's pizza, hummus and veggies, PB&J... We talk about a lot of things, actually: weight; our roommates/children/families; exercise and happy/healthy living; beers and bars; our social lives and dating lives or lack thereof; current events; what it's like being a working woman. You know the drill. Girl talk. I spent my final semester at St. Olaf independently studying it; and every other day I find myself wanting to add to the study or expand it or reiterate all the points I made in the first round.

Now that I'm out of college, I spend a lot less time talking about grand topics and a lot more time talking about basic survival: sleep, food, body pain, and work/life balance. This is what it's all about. No time for existential musing anymore. I don't mind it one bit! These are the things we spend most of our time doing, and so they are the things we spend most of our time talking about. And thus I continue my Life as a Series of Self-Improvement Projects.

Once, when I was complaining about running out of leftovers, Lori told me about a friend of hers who spends one whole day per month cooking. She makes a bunch of family-sized recipes, packs them up in serving-sized plastic containers, and freezes them. Lunch for a month! I know this genius as "The Queen of Single Girl Living."

I have been dying to emulate her for weeks or even months now, but given my whirlwind schedule I only got around to it this past weekend -- forgetting, of course, that I had a football-watching party to go to and sub sandwiches to make at church in the morning. And so I learned something very important: I need to set aside an entire day for this project. Nothing before it, nothing after.

I was shooting for 5 dishes, but I only squeezed out three. In round 1, only the lasagna turned out delicious. I ended up being 2 hours late to the Super Bowl party, and even that only after calling my mom in tears asking her how I could possibly fix the watery slow-cooked chili and the soupy jambalaya full of crunchy rice.

Which brings me to the second very important lesson I learned: I'm not really a "single" kind of girl.

Yes, I am fiercely independent, with a strong history of commitmentphobia. But I like company, and I need moral support. I have been blessed, pretty much since birth, with a family like football padding and first aid combined. I have sought out and been blessed with a series of good friends like crutches, wrist braces, and pacemakers.

I wrestled myself out of bed on Saturday morning to go to the First Saturday writers' breakfast at Panera. I almost didn't go because my mom wasn't going, but I'm so glad I did because I got to talk to a some great people. One of them mentioned her son, soon to be a college graduate, and how she feels she can hardly give him any advice because when she was in his position she was already with her husband.

My parents were the same way. It is strange being young and single and plotting out our lives as individuals instead of as a couple and a family, especially when our parents and grandparents often have very little context for our situation. So we craft these lifestyles centered around things we like and things we need to do to get by, and in many cases spend a good portion of our time trying to meet someone good enough to build our lives with. It can be a lonely road.

I force myself to get up and run every Wednesday morning, on the treadmill, with my earphones in; but every single week as I watch the miles tick up toward "3.0" the only thing I can think about is Anna pushing me to run another lap around the track, every Monday and Wednesday morning at 9:00. When I swim on Monday mornings I miss my lap counters for the 500 freestyle, and Kristi who always swam the butterfly races.

On Sunday, I was so late to church I missed nearly the entire first service. So I stayed for the second one, and walked into the sanctuary alone and sat down -- alone. And just as I did so, someone in the second row cleared her coat off the seat next to hers and beckoned me up to join her. It's a good thing she did, too, because when I started feeling dizzy in the middle of the service she mothered me nearly to death, and as hard as it was for me to admit there is nothing I wanted or needed more in that moment.

Wednesday night, as we have established, is date night, but here I am at the library by myself first, writing a blog post. This is my time. I have had to carve it out of a slew of other things I could do on Wednesday afternoons, and I need it. But what do I write about? And what do I write for? After my last post my dad recommended a few books to me. New Facebook friends liked and shared the post. And an old friend sent me an email saying she appreciates my constant focus on love.

Out of all the ways I describe my blog to people, somehow this has never made the list: a constant focus on love. I think of it as my log of adversity and (hopefully, eventually) overcoming it. It is about the struggles of young adulthood. It is about moving to a new place and meeting new people and rediscovering or evaluating the things that make my life meaningful. It is about depression and financial worries and the undeserved feeling of getting old. I write all of this in hopes of putting words to things other people feel but can't -- or would rather not -- express. Secrets rarely do anybody any good, so in an effort to conquer the struggles of being 20-something in the 21st century, I'm blowing that shit wiiiiide open. I'm crowdsourcing solutions to a world of problems, and at the very least asking questions that need to be asked.

And here I am, week after week, writing posts about love, of all things, and how I couldn't live without it.

I am going to try the cooking extravaganza again. Yes, I saved the jambalaya and the chili is on its way to goodhood, but I'm going to do a few things differently next time. The learning curve still hasn't leveled out, which continues to take me by surprise. I'll make different dishes, use my gut a little more, but most of all I'm going to love what I'm doing and I'm going to set aside the entire day for cooking and I'll probably bring a buddy (and maybe some wine) into the mix.

I'm going to be the Queen of Single Girl Living With Other People.