decisions, decisions

whole wheat pasta or veggie?

Do you ever suddenly feel completely overwhelmed and burdened, when somebody asks you to answer a fairly simple question? Or for your opinion on something that, in the long run, really doesn't matter all that much? Do you ever just feel tired at the prospect of choosing what to wear to work in the morning or what vegetable to cook with dinner or whether or not to go out on Friday night?

And then, you just know the asker of the question, or the person who invited you out, or the coworker hoping for some constructive suggestions, is just standing there looking at you and wondering why it's taking you so long to say "yes" or "no", "carrots" or "peas", "red shirt" or "the blue one"?

Lately I have been recognizing this feeling in myself more and more often. Starting first thing in the morning, when I have to decide whether to hit snooze or not, and regardless of the fact that I know it's almost always better not to hit snooze, in the long run... And then I go to work, and the day is one long series of decisions which feel increasingly like life-or-death decisions as the day goes on... And everybody is asking me whether they should send this email reminder, and who they should copy on it; what I think of the colors on this flier or cover photo; which word gets the point across better, or if I can suggest a totally new word that would do the trick; what time they should schedule a meeting with client X.

Don't get me wrong-- I do really like being in a position to answer questions and make decisions. I like that the people around me care what I think about anything. I like managing projects and people and being responsible for the outcomes of things. (And to the girls in my department who I know read the blog, by no means does this post mean you should stop asking for my opinion or anything. All I'm saying is, a girl gets tired.)

Plus, not that I need to pound this nail any deeper, but when I get home I have to decide whether to go to the gym or not (despite my set-in-stone gym routine, I still have this battle almost every day), and then when I inevitably decide to go, I have to decide what to wear to the gym. And then when I get back from there I have to come up with something to eat, and then decide what plate to eat it off of...

I know. I make things hard for myself. I like to keep things fresh and do things differently all the time. And there are about seven billion factors that influence every single one of these decisions, and I always try to take them fairly into account.

I heard this story on NPR awhile back, and it came up again at the writers' breakfast last month. It was an interview with a guy who shadowed President Obama for half a year and wrote a book about it. The bent of the article was on the decisions POTUS has to make throughout the course of a day.

What he said that struck me, the first time I heard it, was "about research that showed the mere act of making a decision, however trivial it was, degraded your ability to make a subsequent decision."

Fascinating. Apparently we each have an allotted amount of decision-making power per day, and if we use it up... that's it!

So Obama, as the President of the United States, has to make a lot of important decisions on a daily basis, I mean the kinds of decisions that impact an entire nation-- the entire world! And because every decision makes it harder for him to make another decision, he gets rid of as many extraneous decisions as possible. He cut out all choice from getting dressed; he now only has grey and blue suits, so he can literally just grab something and go. Somebody else schedules all his appointments and decides what he eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So all his mental capacity can go to running the nation.

This makes me feel a little better. I don't have a staff of people who can make all my minor decisions for me. Or even a board or a cabinet that can help me make the major ones. And when the major decisions have any infinite number of options and outcomes, and impact a good number of people, I think I have some license to waffle.

Just not too long, because then people will stop asking at all. As always, it is a delicate balance.

Seeing as it's Wednesday, the big choice I have to make now is what to do for date night, and exactly how to incorporate food into this plan. Better get on it.

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Thanks for tuning in again, dear readers! Like second set of baby steps on Facebook to stay tuned, see new posts right away, read other posts from fellow post-grads, get teasers for future posts... And I'll see you on Sunday for All Good Things!

weird time to be american

It's a weird time to be American.

A lot of people are questioning exactly what that means, to be American; not that this nation's history hasn't been rife with identity crises. In some ways it seems like the same story over and over again, with slightly different characters. That's what we get for being a melting pot, I guess. An eternity of lab-testing our ever-changing alloy, at super high temperatures.

This week also marks 150 years since the Battle of Gettysburg, widely heralded as the turning point of the Civil War, after which the secessionists had very little hope of winning and the Union began to take shape with greater certainty.

I can't say what it felt like back then, but if you ask me, the winners-and-losers paradigm doesn't apply very well to the wars we're fighting these days. Who really wins? Who really loses?

Especially because, 150 years later, the "Union" doesn't seem particularly unified at all.

We're still fighting the injustices and questions that led up to the Civil War: Racism. States' rights. There are so many huge issues up for debate at the current moment, issues that bring to bear the very humanity of different groups of people. And in the absence of any foolproof or even somewhat workable solutions, we have resorted to a pathological aversion to agreeing on anything.

I can hardly criticize, because I see fallibilities in a lot of the alternatives that have been put out for review, and I can't come up with anything that I'm satisfied with either; but such is being human. There are rarely foolproof solutions to anything. But I am convinced that, faced with this situation, our legislators and people in "power" have stuffed their ears with cotton, tied their blindfolds on, and strapped on their boxing gloves before they go in to "negotiations."

Maybe this is just politics and I am too green to understand, but I've heard this expressed by people who have been around a little longer than I have -- that, on the political stage, we are moving farther and farther away from any kind of bipartisanship.

But then, I understand that the hugeness and diversity of this country makes it hard for any one decision to cover all the bases. Since my highly disputed post about feminism, my eyes have been opened to the variety of experiences even people in the "same" community live on a daily basis. The other day someone I know, a female business owner, asked me if I knew of any minority female business owner groups in the area. She told me about a female professionals meeting she attended: "I walked into that room and I was the only face that wasn't white. Those women don't know what my experience is like."

Women, so often clustered together as a unified interest group, are different from each other. Another blog post on that subject for those who are interested, on how many different kinds of women there are and why one woman cannot truthfully speak for all women.

A classmate of mine just wrote a post about a book called How to Be Black, which I haven't read but probably will now. Thesis?

"It doesn't make sense to work toward ending your personally offensive -ism and in the process make any of the others worse. It doesn't make sense to work toward equality for women but to worsen the inequality against the LGBTQ community, or the African American community, or those who are experiencing homelessness, etc. ...We really do all have to work together, on behalf of one another."

I spent a lot of today looking up patriotic (but politically innocuous) quotes to post on client social media sites. It turns out -- are you ready for this? -- that if anything is politically innocuous, it sure ain't patriotism.

The Founding Fathers were anything but innocuous. They were not content to sit and wait for things to change for the better. You've heard their quotes:

"Give me liberty or give me death!" - Patrick Henry

"Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

Things have changed since then. Americans are different. We are different from each other. We speak different languages and different versions of those languages, we come from different places and have different experiences from each other. We were not all born here, within these borders (which themselves are arbitrary)...

But there is something tying us together. Maybe it is that we live on this soil. Maybe it is that we define ourselves as American, whatever our reasoning and rationale. And for all the subdividing we do to our identity, there is some beauty to the holiday, tomorrow: It is an opportunity, whether we take it or not, to share something.

I hope that we someday learn to listen to each other, and to treat each other with respect, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. And I hope we can find enough common ground to stand on, to stand up for our neighbors even if they are different from us. Because no matter how many things are different, there will always be something the same. We just have to look for it.

picking up the storyline

It's getting weird seeing all the posts on Facebook and Twitter about finals, about people going home for the summer, about people GRADUATING.  My brother is home for the summer, looking for cars to drive to the job he's got set up, and my middle sister is in the throes of AP exams, put in her enrollment deposit to ST. OLAF (fram fram!) and is looking forward to graduating in about a month.

Meanwhile, my parents and Asha are looking at this huge house and thinking how empty it will be in a few months, with the two middle kids away at school and me (fingers crossed) in my own apartment somewhere in the city.

My friends, the ones I graduated with, are feeling the ends of their one-year commitments closing in on them, issuing ultimatums and maydays about the long-awaited "rest of our lives."  They are frantically scouring Craigslist for plausible careers, submitting resumes and cover letters and wondering what they really want to be doing with their time.  It's throwing into pretty sharp relief the fact that I am no longer a student (and perhaps nevermore) and that I have in fact been a graduate for almost an entire year now, and I have worked in my current position for more than 8 months.  My story has taken a different turn.  Maybe we're onto a sequel now.

This is making me think about the passage of time.  It seemed to take awhile to hit 6 months, but after that the months just fell like dominoes behind me.  Just as I start feeling tired because it's Tuesday, I'm playing Loverboy's Working for the Weekend on repeat and putting in my last posts on Friday afternoon.

Kristy and I measure the passage of time by Tuesdays and Thursdays and girls' nights.  We always laugh because when someone asks what day it is, Kristy looks at her watch, and I use relativity to figure out what day of the week it is, and then which week it is.  "Well, two days ago we went to yoga, and last week you were in Chicago, which is the week my parents went to Boston to pick up my brother..."  But looking back, the days and nights and big events and boring afternoons and the mornings I didn't think I'd make it through all melt together into this blurry, psychedelic GIF that is my life.

Between the two of us I think we create a pretty workable narrative.

I'm picking up the storyline now of this blog, of my life as a post-grad.  I'm picking up this meta-story from December 27, when I talked about the storyline of the history of fruitcake.

Here's a story I like, about watches making their way back into fashion after being shut out by the cell phone revolution.  I like it because it's tangible.  It's built out of images.  It pulls in history, economics, fashion, practicality.

It's essentially about hipsters.  I am haughty of hipsterdom, but I will be the first to admit that it's all a ruse because, in fact, I am the Worst of the Hipsters.

Also, the composite storyline is the reason I am so obsessing over public radio these days.  The long reports and interviews, the multiple subjective insights they reap over the course of days, weeks, or months digging into the same story.

I value this storytelling style as a counterpoint and a complement to the flash news we get as we go through the day.  To be fair, our brains really have an incredible capacity to process information.  Part of the reason we are able to take in so much is the fact that people make snap judgments that are completely and unavoidably subjective.  Sam McNerney (a classmate of a friend of mine) writes this often mentally-straining but always jaw-dropping psych blog.  In a post I read today, The Irrationality of Irrationality, connects subjectivity to the narrative in the passage below:

[M]ental shortcuts are necessary because they lessen the cognitive load and help us organize the world – we would be overwhelmed if we were truly rational. 

This is one of the reasons we humans love narratives; they summarize the important information in a form that’s familiar and easy to digest. It’s much easier to understand events in the world as instances of good versus evil, or any one of the seven story types. 

...In the process, hooking up my inner anthropologist to my inner writer for some serious intellectual fireworks.

Anyway, McNerney first raises our hackles and guilts us into recognizing our inevitable bias in every decision we make--and then promptly soothes our smarting egos with the assurance that "It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas."

He wraps it all up with a warning: Take every new story as a new side to the same story, a new puzzle piece.  Life in society is complex; court cases are complex; arguments and fights between friends and lovers are complex.

And what do I get out of this?  Acknowledge your story.  Own it.  But let it change.

a study in touch

Today I'm thinking about phantom limb syndrome and other phenomena of touch.

About a month ago I noticed this little lump in my palm, right below the base of my right ring finger.  I lived with it for a week, freaking out the whole time, of course, and finally made an appointment with a hand specialist for a month later--this morning.

During that time I had to learn to live with my little lump.  Got a new mouse at work.  Started thinking differently about how I distribute pressure and movement around my hand, how I use my fingers and my wrist and how all the parts fit together.

And it stopped bugging me, almost disappeared completely except for a tiny reminder on the tendon in the ball of my writing hand.

So I went in this morning for a consultation with the hand doctor and had my first-ever X-ray.  The X-ray technician took X-rays of my right hand in a few different postures, like thumb and forefinger pinched together, the other three fingers fanned out beneath.  "You should be my hand model," she said.  "Most of these guys don't get it!  ...Most of the women don't either, in fact."

So I sat and waited for the doctor, and he came in and felt the lump and said it is a ganglion cyst and that since it's not irritating me right now I could either leave it alone until it starts bugging me again...  Or I could get a cortisone injection that will make the tendon casing scar over and not fill up again.  Nip it in the bud.

I went for the injection, which also had some Novocaine in it, so my right ring finger and half of my pinky are numb like they dropped off somewhere and I've been at work all day with only 3 working fingers on my dominant hand.

Thus the phantom limb sensation.  Or phantom digits, I suppose.

"You can go about your business, but you won't feel anything for a few hours," the doctor said.  "Papercuts, hot, cold...  You won't feel any of that.  So just... be aware."

This has been an intensely weird experience for me, who has never had a surgery or a broken bone or a concussion.  Me, who likes to be barefoot and/or naked just to keep my senses sharp, to minimize the buffer between my nervous system and my environment with its endless stimuli.  Me, who hasn't taken a painkiller in two years.  Me, who types and clicks all day as a basic job requirement, and for whom writing (right-handed) is an identity.

Of course I am also mulling over the possibility that the Novocaine will have a permanent nerve-dulling effect on my fingers, which would be unfortunate and also a very strange scar to carry with me throughout my life.  And exploring the possibilities of living with some kind of sensory void.  The way I used to ask people I cared about to let me explore their faces with my hands, eyes closed, so that if I ever went blind, I would be able to recognize them.

Touch is a two-way sensation.  This is suddenly mirror-clear to me.  My fingers feel completely different in texture when they can't feel back.  The senseless finger feels like an alien, inanimate object attached to my hand where my really useful fourth finger used to be.  But the weirdest part is that it's not inanimate at all.  In fact, I'm using it to type as we speak and it still has weight and the tendons are still connected and it still bends and it still grips things.  It's just alienation of labor, and I am suddenly strangely aware of the physiological middle man that comes into play with muscle memory and contractions and response to environmental stimuli.  I feel like I'm playing the claw game in the arcade.

My mom once told me (when I was like 15, like she didn't think about how dangerous this wise tidbit could be falling into the wrong hormonal teenaged hands) that "Human beings need skin-to-skin contact to survive."  And in the current state of my hand I am profoundly struck by the mutual connotations of skin-to-skin contact.  Touch creates the most physical connection we can have with anything that is not ourselves, the most tangible, the most visceral, the most real.  And to share that connection with someone creates the intimacy of shared space, of intermingling, colliding surface atoms.  Poetically, the blurring of boundaries between two separate entities to confuse their separateness.

So touching ourselves is reflexive and similarly intimate and important in establishing our individual wholeness.  (Yes, some erotic undertones intended.)  And when I can't mutually intermingle the atoms of my separate fingers, the wholeness of my hand becomes confused.  This is why check-ins, and goodbye kisses, and hello kisses, and hugs are so important and keep us all from falling apart.

I'm arguing for a literal interpretation here.

so the story goes

Merry Christmas, readers!  I will spare you all the "politically correct holiday season" rant, as I know we've all heard it before (at least 4,000 times this year alone), and as it says in the Bible, "Do not be [offended], for I bring you glad tidings and great cheer" and so on.

Anyway, what does it matter, because I have missed not only the actual Christmas, but Boxing Day as well.  So I am not only politically incorrect, but increasingly tardy as well.  We're coming up on New Years now.

My Boxing Day did, in fact, involve some boxing.  Of fruitcakes.  Tomorrow I intend to do the actual posting of those boxed fruitcakes, and any recipients should know that my fruitcake-boxing battle was not a particularly neat or quiet one.  Please appreciate my countless trips to the recycling bin in the freezing cold garage for packing materials.

Something about the convergence of events (and the escalation of my coffee shop book exchange) lately has me thinking about storylines.  I first saw Google's Zeitgeist 2011 video framed as a bit of brilliant digital storytelling, intentionally and evocatively constructed.  If you haven't seen it already, please take a moment.  Or, if you have, take a moment to watch it again.

More generally, social media news has been lately dominated by headlines about Storify and the new Facebook Timeline and the new Twitter app, all created to somehow "organize stories" that build our lives online and, increasingly, offline.  That's the idea, anyway.  It's making me think about what a story actually is, and how we tell them, and what role they play in our lives.  It's making me wonder whether the meaning of the word "story" is taking on new digital meaning, similar to the way "viral" has.  (In case you missed it, you can read more about my thoughts on going viral here.)

Also in that post you will find what anchors my storyline fixation in the physical world: fruitcake.

Aside from the fact that I legitimately love fruitcake, especially fruitcake from this recipe, I have been most excited about carrying on the family legacy of making and sending fruitcakes.  This is a personal storyline that crosses, now, four generations, in a very simple frame: a recipe.  (Remember Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco?  Brilliant.)  I already told you about getting fruitcakes in the mail every Christmas, wrapped in Sunday comics.  Actually I think I left out the comics before, and the fact that we always had to wait until Christmas morning to open and cut into the fruitcake.  And as we all know, waiting for something makes it taste that much sweeter.  This storyline includes not only my childhood, but the unknown plot deviations of Aunt Judy struggling to locate candied orange peel in modern supermarkets, trying different substitutes, maybe once pickling watermelon rind in the summer to use come Christmas in the cakes.  And the beginning of this story is completely blank; I can only tell you bits of the middle and the ellipsis of an end.

Consider also the cultural storyline of fruitcake.  As I churned the exotic dried fruits into the batter, it suddenly occurred to me to ask where fruitcake came from.  What genealogy does fruitcake follow in our family?  Is it British?  German?  Under what rule did it gain the honors of tradition?  In which empire?  Which traders brought the fruits to fill it?  And how did it get such a bad rap today?

Not that you will probably be called on to share any fruitcake trivia, but if you think there is a chance of this happening I recommend this article from TLC.  I can't say for certain that it is the most accurate or comprehensive, I just like it best of all the ones I've seen.

Now, for the sake of time and attention, let's make an undeveloped allegorical leap to the Christmas storyline.  In fact, we can take it full-circle to the whole politically-correct thing and ask which storyline each of us prefers to follow at this time of year.  Is it Santa Claus?  St. Nicholas?  Festivus?  Solstice?  Kwanzaa?  Hanukkah?  The birth of Jesus?

Grampi has been featuring heavily of late, and while I fear some of you might be cringing at the apparent disregard in which I hold my elders, please take heart in knowing that any confrontation is both the result and the catalyst of important learning experiences, I dare hope, for both of us.  As Maria has reminded me over and over again these past few weeks, coming to face opposition forces us to grow in ways we might otherwise atrophy.

Anyway, Grampi and the birth of Jesus.  On Sunday morning in church he went out of his way to point out to Mutti and I that the baby in the manger had been set up directly beneath the cross hanging over the altar.  The significance of this symbolic placement brought him to tears.  I admit I rolled my eyes the way I do when he skillfully relates any topic to missionary work, but even I can't deny the brilliance of this nativity setup.  I do revere the Biblical storyline, the way it unfolds over thousands of years, the careful genealogies, the outstanding characters, the fulfillment of prophecies.  (This year I found myself wishing the Gospel writers paid more attention to Jesus' childhood, because the Terrible Twos are notably absent, and for some reason I have developed a sudden urgent curiosity about Jesus as a 6-year-old.)

I'm focusing on the Christian storyline of Christmas because it's the one I'm most familiar with, and the one that is most significant in my family tradition; but I am well aware, and fascinated by, the pagan influences on this endless tale.  I appreciate the fact that I can't escape the materialistic aspects of this holiday, and that the giving and receiving of gifts is not something I could easily extract from my own experience of Christmas.

These complicated details only make the storyline more intricate, more unique, more fascinating.  I always have to remind myself that each storyteller constructs the story differently and each listener understands it differently.  No frame is quite the same, no language holds the same weight or connotation, no scene is so well-constructed that it excludes the possibility of misunderstanding, of a wrong color in a corner or a detail slightly misaligned.

And yet I consider my storylines carefully.  I see a story in everything.  I see a story arc everywhere, a conflict, a happy ending.  I have endless prepackaged choices: fairytale, Judeo-Christian, origin myth, comedy, tragedy, series of snapshots.  But I delight most in the deviations from the predictable introduction, escalation, resolution, the allegedness of everything, the details and the soundtracks and illustrations and, most of all, the fact that in real life, the story doesn't end with a slammed-shut cover, but with a ...

fruitcake

As of today my father has officially spent half his life with my mother.

In other words, today was my parents' 25th wedding anniversary so I am sitting at the dining room table blogging in front of a beautiful bouquet of purple and white flowers.  (And when I say today, I mean I haven't slept yet since I woke up on December 20.  You understand.)

Remind me to plan that my important wedding anniversaries (if I ever do settle down) will never fall on a Tuesday.  Our house was like a sprawling, overpopulated game of musical chairs with a few inanimate players tonight.  Which resulted in, long story short, all of us sitting down for dinner at 10pm.

And now I am sitting up waiting for the raisins on top of my second batch of fruitcakes to burn, just slightly, so I know they're done.

My life has not been quite this complicated, on a regular basis, in quite some time.  This is what I get for moving back home, I guess...

This morning Grampi came down to the kitchen earlier than usual--"So I have time to eat lunch before physical therapy," he explained.  Oh, the men in this house!  The other night after dinner I passed along Time magazine's Person of the Year article, about the Protester.  His main worry, before reading the article, was about protest information getting into the wrong hands (i.e. certain religious-political groups) with a nefarious agenda, so I quickly excused myself to avoid a blowout.

Anyway, this morning, on top of his usual "time for work" opener, he says, "I've been reading that article you gave me, and you know, it's realllly interesting."  Of course he's going to get his own thing out of it, but I'll tell you he's been exploring the spectrum of conservatism a little more adventurously these days, so I don't mind discussing things with him quite as much as I used to.  He continues, "I'm really fascinated, they're saying it's like a virus, that it just spreads like an infection, these protests."

It takes me a split second to process this comment, and once I put two and two together I am struck dumb by the gaping chasm of understanding that both changes and reflects the differentness of our perspectives.  I open my mouth to explain to my doctor grandfather that "viral" to my generation has less to do with epidemiology than it does with the internet, but then I remember the hours I've already spent explaining, to various degrees of failure, social media and how it works and how I use it on a daily basis, and the moment passes.

This is a thrilling sociolinguistic dilemma: My grandfather's thoughts on protesting feed into the way he understands the use of the term "viral," and his understanding of "viral" spreading color his reading of global sharing and mobilization.  What excites me most about the protest phenomenon is almost completely lost on him.  His worldview comes pre-installed with a firewall against being able to fully grasp the way I use the internet, as well as my deep appreciation for social movements.  This is a much more enmeshed situation than you want me to get into here, but I will tell you that my brain is exploding quietly about it.

Speaking of the men in this house, I let my brother use my car today to do some Christmas shopping.  The joke in our house right now is that 50% of accidents happen to drivers under the age of 20, and 50% of those happen within the first 6 months of those drivers getting licenses.  No wait, that wasn't the joke--the joke is that my brother will be 20 in about a week, and if we can make it through the first 6 months of his licensure without him having to actually drive anywhere, then the danger zone is over!  Ha.  Yes, we are hilarious.

Anyway, him borrowing my car meant I needed him to drop me off at work and pick me up afterwards.  So last night I said, "That means we'll have to leave at 8:30."  To the guy whose usual bedtime is about 6am.  But he replied cheerfully, "OK, just wake me up 10 or 15 minutes before you want to leave so I can splash some water on my face."

He's not a bad driver, but the poor guy gets such a rap from the family.  And for some reason, riding shotgun while my brother drives my car (or any car, if I recall correctly) stresses me out beyond belief.  I may have control issues, which I expressed by letting him know ahead of time when the speed limit was about to change.  By the time I got outside at the end of the day he was already buckled into the passenger's seat so I could live out my neuroses in peace.  This might be something I should work on.

So we are a family of seven, with two cars, three jobs to work around, and a LOT of Christmas shopping to do.  This means that various family members and vehicles have been M.I.A. at random times and for undefined lengths of time, and that this happens more and more the closer it gets to Christmas.  I'm losing my mind.

Check out my muscles! Ohh yeahh...

Not to mention this week has been a series of wild goose chases for me.  I spent Monday afternoon trying to track down mace (the spice, not the spray) and never actually found it.  The fruitcakes seemed to have turned out OK in spite of that.  I love this living recipe, and I'm so excited to adapt it based on my lifestyle and the ingredients I can get my hands on.  When I was little, my aunt Judy used to always send fruitcake from Oregon for Christmas, wrapped with her other gifts in Sunday comics pages.  For the longest time I didn't like it (big surprise) and then one year I think I realized that if I started liking fruitcake I would be the only one of my siblings to like it, and this was an obvious source of superiority for me.  Then I discovered I really do love fruitcake, and as Coffeeshopcrush hilariously put it yesterday, it's packed full of energy in case you just so happen to spend a lot of time in the woods...  Anyway, Aunt Judy gifted me her simplified version of the recipe she got from her grandma Allene.  And now it is up to me to fashion and ship 8 fruitcakes.  It's a more interesting and delicious version of those dumb chain letters that were going around in the 90s (another thing I love).  (Not chain mail--the 90s.)

So, life is complicated.  And living at home is like secondary education with a major in compromise, and a double minor in patience and sharing.  I have felt blessed all throughout college to have learned these important people skills through growing up in a big family, but after four years of blatant selfishness I'm realizing how rusty I've gotten at moving in a pack, at making decisions that impact 4-6 other people, at somehow taking up both more and less space than I do as a party of one.  (Cue track below.)

I think it's doing me a world of good.

oh, anthroPOLogy

So I swear I meet anthropologists everywhere I go.

Last night I went to UD's Main Street Journal poetry open mic.  The venue, Mojo Main, hosts a regular open mic from 9pm to 1am every Monday night, but this was a coffeeshop-style poetry open mic in a bar.  I dig.  And I could tell this is my zone because I felt no hesitation in sitting down at the table with the editors of the journal, introducing myself, and striking up a successful conversation.

...Why have I been freaking out about meeting people again?  Remind me.

The lineup, predictably, was full of music, but even a lot of the musicians showed a gift for lyrics.  One other poet did read, and he is a Word Whisperer -- really, I am blown away.  As I was leaving (around 11, when I usually like to go to bed) he called after me, "Hey, you coming to the release party on the 30th?  I'd like to see you there, I really like your stuff!"

Can I say it enough?  I love poetry.  And despite the amount of time I've spent complaining about the label, i love poets too.

Anyway, the PR person and the editor-in-chief were both anthro majors at UD.  I was pumped!  Because as any good anthro major knows, anthro majors all speak a certain language.  And today I noticed that a friend of the PR person posted the same link on her Facebook wall as Liz posted on mine, within an hour of each other last night.  It's about sex ed.  Meant to be?  You bet.

To understand the emphasis in the title, watch the following video.  The important part starts around the 2-minute mark.

Tonight I went back to Newark -- let's be honest, if all the action is in the college town then why should I be lame at home alone just because I'm not in college anymore?  I shouldn't.  UD's engineering sorority was hosting a fundraiser at Grotto Pizza on Main Street -- and I know because a girl from church is in this sorority and invited me to the event on Facebook.  (Social media does it again!)

I'd made plans to meet up with a girl I met at a networking event downtown about two months ago.  She's an AmeriCorps VISTA worker down in Dover -- and guess what she studied in college?  Duh: anthropology.  I'm telling you.

Believe it or not, there are popcorn bars outside of the Midwest!  I may have missed Froggy's, but I still get beer and popcorn.  But instead of Leinie's or South Shore I get Dogfish Head.  It's a fair trade.

Carly brought one of her VISTA coworkers along, and after pizza the three of us set off in search of another bar to hang in.  The cold suddenly set in like whoa, so we shivered our way up and down the main drag before settling on the Iron Hill Brewery.

And let me say, what a cool place.  Carly had met the owner at some event so she pointed him out when he appeared on the floor for a moment, and started telling us stories about him and the startup, which has now grown to nine or so sites, and pretty successful ones at that!  The restaurant was fitted with a row of huge brewing tanks behind glass that reminded me of KC's 75th Street Brewery, where I have never failed to meet interesting men.  All good things.

We took to people-watching: a group of professor-esque men that reminded Carly of a band of PhDs, just hovering by the hostess stand for a good 5 minutes; the Leader of the Loudmouths, a trio standing right behind us practically yelling their conversation; one of those unfortunate couples you see in public where she's more interested in him than he is in her, and he's mostly concerned with the game on the screen behind the bar.  Give it up, girlfriend, we said.

Anthropology.  The study of people.  I'm remembering my knack for this, my love of observation and research, my passion for communication.

This was significant: On Sunday at the Bishop's house, as I lamented my inability to navigate Wilmington's social scene, one of the sympathetic crowd nodded understandingly and uttered two simple words: "culture shock."  I had somehow managed to completely overlook this very basic fact, but now that they've been said everything looks different.  Everything is easier.  I am finding my voice at work -- at both jobs.  I can hold a mundane but afternoon-altering conversation with the redhead behind the counter at Walgreen's.  I can connect with other poets and offer to help build a writers' workshop at UD.  I can be the person, in a joint I've never visited, in a town I'm not yet familiar with, who table-bounces and brings people together.  Because that's my thing.

It's anthropology.

Next on the list: Convince Coffeeshopcrush to give me his take on Wilmo's best bars and hangouts.  It'll happen.  I can feel it.

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.