30 weird things we never would have thought to prepare for before "growing up"

This week's lunch break phone date covered a lot of really important topics, starting out about as sad-serious as you can get and ending on a much more lighthearted note. Still, though, the things we have to talk about are big. Important. Of consequence.

I want to take a moment (before I dive into topics I am actually equipped to tackle) to pay homage -- one of the sad starting topics for those Oles who read the blog. First, I must make tribute to Professor Jim Farrell, who I just learned passed away almost a month ago. This man made a huge impact on the St. Olaf community at large, and more specifically on my immediate circles, of which most members at least dabbled in environmental studies, campus ecology, the impact we make on our surroundings. To a man who knew the great extent of what that means: cheers.

You may also know that Pastor Jennifer Koenig has resigned since we left Olaf, due to illness. I must also pay tribute to her, the woman who taught so many of us how to communicate, how to smile, how to find peace. This week has brought some heartbreaking updates on her status, posted on CaringBridge. This is an uncomfortable thing to mourn at this stage, and yet we are in mourning. Please keep her and her family and the huge number of her supporters in your hearts in the coming weeks and months.

Now, I realize, this post can't be lighthearted in any universe. But I must take this, as I said, to a dimension where I can process it.

One of the amazing things about both of these people is how wide are the ripples of this news. Both of them taught my peers and me far more than could ever be encapsulated in a textbook or thesis paper. Or in two years of blogs. The things they have left us with clarified who we are and how we understand our lives, and continue to emerge to this day as we work through things like relationships and grief on the phone more than two years after our last class, our last coffee bought with FlexDollars in the Cage during senior week.

After Monday's phone conversation, which finished with a bittersweet acknowledgement of "the weird shit we have had to deal with since graduating," I read an article on BuzzFeed called "12 Things Our Parents Forgot To Teach Us."

(Since I am in the social media marketing field, I can't gloss over this prime example of native advertising: posts with some degree of actual substance, designed and paid for to promote a company or service. The topic of a future post, I'm sure... But back to the meat of the issue.)

My parents luckily at least mentioned once or twice that credit cards are not free money (number one), and that lending money to people must be done with extreme caution, if ever (number four), and they've definitely given me a crash course or 11 about how to read a paper map (number eight). But even if they did give me lessons in some of the others I still have stumbled over them once or twice. For example:

5. You never really stop feeling like a kid.
7. How to get along with your roommates.
9. How you feel after too much coffee.
10. How to deal with your first heartbreak.

And to be fair, a lot of this stuff would be pretty dang hard if not impossible to teach. I'm not sure whether the history of anthropological theory and the forced downtime and the infamous Project Without Parameters were intentional cover-ups for daily life lessons, but some of them sure served that purpose in the long run.

So, without further ado, a partial list of Weird Shit We Would Never Have Thought To Prepare For, But Kinda Wish We Would Have Known About In Advance. (Also known as, A Preview Of What Life Will Be Like From Here On Out.)

Disclaimer: Some of these are drawn from personal experience, and some of them are borrowed from undisclosed sources. You know who you are.

1. That we have food allergies, and spent all of college feeling really gross all the time and not knowing why.
2. Along similar lines, how to cook (and drink) gluten-/lactose-/meat-free...
3. Speaking of drinking, that we get more hungover, even if we drink less, higher-quality booze.
4. In other news, how to drink with bosses and coworkers without accidentally saying anything you shouldn't. Plus, what if everyone else is just hammered?
5. Also, how do you grocery shop in general?
6. What it's like really not having any money, but also not having a cafeteria that we, our parents, our grandparents, and/or our student loans already paid for.
7. How great it is to live somewhere that has laundry included.
8. How to meet our significant others' parents.
9. That we might want to move in with somebody before we marry them, and
10. How to talk to our parents about it, or
11. How to pretend like we are not living together so our parents or other important institutions don't find out about it.
12. How to work a job that didn't exist when we went to college, or even when we graduated college, or even when we got called in for the interview.
13. How to find something new to do if what we thought we wanted to do as a career turned out not to be the right thing.
14. How to leave a job properly. Is that a thing?
15. Deciding whether to sign our souls away to make monthly car payments on a new(er) car, or whether we would rather figure out how to get our old car into the shop every other month to get repairs done on it and parts replaced, and then how to get to work after that, and how to pay for it.
16. Or, whether it's worth it to live and work where you don't need a car. Really, there aren't that many options!
17. Facebook friends who get married and then change their names, and you have to look through half their pictures to figure out who they are and how you know them.
18. And then when your news feed is suddenly full of babies. Babies everywhere. Where did they all come from?! No, wait... I don't actually want to know.
19. Realizing that every conversation and relationship we have is a cross-cultural one and that you can never assume anybody is on the same page as you.
20. How to handle getting mugged, or robbed.
21. Is it ok to move away to get over somebody?
22. Or, if you move away for any reason, how do you meet new people you might like to spend time with? How do you meet anybody?
23. Also, how do you make friends in a new place if you know that you, or they, are going to be leaving after their gig is up?
24. How to get up and go to work when we really just don't feel like it.
25. How to grieve when life goes on and nobody around you knows about it.
26. How to wear black, brown, navy, taupe, or anything conservative without getting super bored.
27. That people make up responses and solutions to a lot of questions they don't know how to answer.
28. How to reconcile spiritual needs and personal faith, disillusionment with organized religion, and family expectations.
29. How to go on a cheap date without feeling cheap, or, if it is a first date, without making a big deal about it so the other person doesn't think you're high-strung.

And finally, number 30:
How to do all this stuff when your closest friends, the ones who know what you're dealing with and how you deal with things... When those people are who-knows-where, but they're definitely not up the hall, they may be in the same city if we're lucky but sometimes aren't even reachable by phone?

This is the really tough part. I have been fortunate to know that I am not alone in dealing with super weird stuff, and fortunate to be able to share it with people close to me and also with people who are really far away. (I must admit, I love Facebook and smartphones and text messaging for this reason...even though they are apparently causing the breakdown of our society.)

And I have been incredibly blessed to share it with all of you. Read on, dear friends. Live on!


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Like second set of baby steps on Facebook at www.facebook.com/theBabyStepsSaga! New posts show up there first, plus other articles about post-grad life, plus teasers and other important information. Thanks for reading! Tune in on Sunday night for this week's All Good Things list, and next Wednesday for more reflections on being a "new adult."

where did you come from, where did you go

I spent today at the Fair Hill Scottish Games watching dudes in tartan skirts play bagpipes and throw logs (theoretically) in flying arcs through the air.  More accurately, kilts and caber tossing.  And as kilts and caber tossing are outdoor activities, and it was a nearly perfect day outside, I spent today in the sun and my brain is fried.  I make bullet points about different blog topics throughout my week, and maybe I should transition my post-grad blog to a "daily thoughts on" format after the 1-year mark.  But I do enjoy reflective essays.

It didn't occur to me until we were waiting in line to pay the exorbitant entrance fee that I have Scottish blood!  Last Christmas, in fact, Granma was emptying out an old Ross steamer trunk and found a tie made of our clan tartan, which she gave to my brother, much to my dismay.  Yes, I am aware that I am not a man and therefore have little use for a tie (since Avril Lavigne slipped out of fashion) but I have a lot of use for heritage, and for the stories often couched in artifacts.

According to the "find your name" booth at the fair, the first Rosses set foot on this side of the pond in 1651 and '52.  Assuming that my Ross ancestors were not unrecognized stowaways, carriers of my blood have been shaping their corners of U.S. History for 350 years.  And now some of us continue to dip our pens in that pot--for example, the pen that inscribed "Ross" in the "middle name" slot on my brother's birth certificate.  Cool.  The clan lives on!  Although sadly it does not appear to have an active faction in the tri-state area.

I've been thinking about heritage and origin a lot since coming back from the Midwest this week, feeling myself lock into place as part of that landscape, and feeling that landscape lock into place within me...  And then being rudely ripped from that landscape, with a pair of psychological bolt cutters, and feeling disoriented upon my return to the Philly airport and to my house and my job and my life in Wilmington.  Jason said I didn't "come back" to Wilmington until Wednesday--2 days after my physical arrival.  Not coincidentally, I think, 2 days is approximately the amount of time it takes to drive (fairly comfortably) from Minneapolis to Wilmington.

Thesis: Jet planes fuck up our biological/psychological clocks.  You know how our eyes take about 45 minutes to fully adjust to darkness?  And the "twilight" part of the day lasts about 45 minutes.  (At least that's what my freshman year senior counselor told me, and I am inclined to believe it.)  There's some beautiful ecological symmetry there.

As much as I would like to dwell on ecological symmetry forever, I'm straying from the crux of the current issue.  Which is, eternally, belonging; originating; coming and going.  Pinpointing the location of my heart at any given moment.

I will probably never find complete security in this realm, and maybe that's just an occupational hazard of being human.  At some point I may also stop realizing new aspects and explanations and solutions to my rootlessness.  But I can never deny value in realizing the same thing over and over and over again: Love is a decision, and homes spring up where you invest in them.

For a second there, back in Delaware and not even able to pretend I was happy about it, I toyed with the idea of cutting all ties and heading back to Sunny V, St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.  To the physical embodiment of my ideal life.  The place I felt most happy, most at home.

But life is not ideal.  In fact, as we have found, the most beautiful moments are bittersweet.  The most beautiful moments are the ones that mix tears and laughter, the ones that finish chords of sadness, anger, disillusionment, with a flourish of hope.

And I have to remind myself how long it takes to turn a new place, new people, into home.  And how much energy it takes on my part, how many moments of feeling certain I would, finally, once and for all, give up.  Funny enough, it is those moments that make new homes possible.  Those moments slap me in the face and tell me straight to get a grip and work out the situation at hand.

I almost give up a lot.

And those aren't moments of weakness.  They lay the foundation for the moments I look back on and say, "Thank God that happened."  They lay the foundation for moments of glory.

super (bowl) weekend

Idiotic of me to try and write tonight.  I've been going full-steam since Friday--Thursday--Wednesday...  Yeah.  For weeks.  And I have finally hit the extreme point on the homeostasis sine curve (see Figure 1) where I remember that I need to take time for myself, to clean my room, for example, do my taxes, start up another vocational project, or write some letters.  Because the great thing about writing letters is it's nice on both ends: Everybody loves getting a handwritten letter in the mail, and it's cathartic and constructive to write.  So this is on my agenda.  Among approximately 2497573523957 other things.

Figure 1: Graphic representation of the Search for Normalcy

One thing that makes the Quest for Normalcy difficult, or at least complicated, is that I do not live in a bubble.  (Believe it or not...)  There are always other people involved in my life and the way it plays out, other obligations, desires, and demands on my time and energy.  And I would have it no other way.

Here's an example which has been killing me slowly all weekend:

I came home on Friday having just received a phone call from yet another friend recently engaged.  This makes at least 3 or 4 of my inner circles now engaged or married, and I mentioned this fact nonchalantly to my mother, who responded, "Oh, honey, I'm sorry!"

Seriously?!  "Mom!  I'm not sad about it!"  In fact, I am unfathomably excited for all of them and of course I wish them all the best with a passion that beats at the borders of my heart.  Mostly it's just strange that I've reached that point in my life where, not only are my peers getting married, but they're actually kind of ready to get married.  I most certainly am not, and I'm just as pumped about the state of my own affairs as I am about theirs.  The last thing I feel is left out.

Maybe I read into it too much (it wouldn't be the first time, nor the last) but my interpretation of this hilarious exchange plays into the beautiful burden of Legacy which has been haunting me for years now.  Like Christmas dinner, senior year of college, when Grampa said pointedly, "Well, Clara hasn't brought home a boy yet.  And if she hasn't I think it must be because of Clara, because I sure met a lot of nice St. Olaf boys when we visited there."

AHEM.

The point is, Grampa and Gramma were married at 18 and still are madly in love, nearly 60 years later.  Grampi has loved and still loves to a degree that is agonizing even for me.  Mutti and Papa are definitely, disgustingly in love 25 years later.  It's a beautiful thing, but none of them really get why I'm not jumping on the bandwagon.  After all, G&G had 2 babies by the time Gramma was my age, and Mutti was newly married and doing missionary work with her new hubby.  She actually said this weekend, in a really fascinating conversation about vocation I had with my parents Saturday morning, "We didn't really have a plan, we didn't know what we were going to do with our lives.  We just knew we were going to do it together."

Puke.

I know I've written about this before, emotional detox and this awesome chance I'm getting right now to figure out what I like and what I want and who I am.  This is a completely different way to start my adult life than figuring out what we like and what we want and who we are.  Really, though, it is a lovely legacy and I am fully aware of how lucky I am to have it.  Unlike a lot of my peers, I wholeheartedly believe in everlasting love.

Speaking of everlasting love, one thing I have been throwing under the bus with my wild schedule lately is girl time.  Oh travesty!  I of all people, author of a study on girl talk, should know how crucial female community, company, and support is in a woman's life.  And I have not been getting enough of that good solid girl time.

So Thursday my Delaware wingwoman and I went to Zumba at the Y and followed our intense sweat session with drinks and apps at Applebee's, because we both love it and neither of us is ashamed of that fact.  Plus there's half-price appetizers after 9pm.  This is key.  We also planned to spend pretty much the whole weekend together.

Now, let's be clear.  I like guys, I like hanging with them -- one in particular, these days.  But there is just something refreshingly awesome about spending an entire weekend attached at the hip with an awesome girl friend.  Which is what I did this weekend.  Or with multiple girl friends, I guess.  We ate pizza and read trash mags and watched chick flicks (Friends With Benefits consistently takes the cake over No Strings Attached in the hookup movie category).  Our mixed drinks were lumpy because I bought creme de coco instead of coconut milk.  (Take heed!)  We discussed goldfish psychology at 3:00 in the morning, and polished off almost an entire bag of inspirational Dove chocolates.

And then we headed over to Craig's for the Super Bowl.  I know, since when do I watch football?!  (Since when does my family watch football?  I swear my jaw hit the floor when I came home and both my parents asked what I thought of the Giants' win.  ...Whaaaat?)

I admit I spent most of the time giggling in a sleep-deprived delirium, and heading to the kitchen when the game came on to grab more snacks or another beer.  Lots of snapping going on, and "that's what she said."  I had even watched most of the commercials online at work over the last 2 weeks, since they have all been trending videos lately.  But I did watch the halftime show and the fourth quarter, and I was actually really into the end of the game.  It helped that Kristy is a die-hard Giants fan, but that wasn't a hard wagon for me to jump on seeing as at least part of my heart is and will forever live in New York.  I even said "Blockbuster" in my Amsterdam voice this weekend, without thinking about it.

Incidentally, Blockbuster has apparently copycatted Redbox with Blockbuster Express kiosks, or perhaps kiosk, since I have only ever seen one: tucked on the edge of the Food Lion in Claymont.  I am also dead over the Food Lion and the medieval logo: 

I've had a fantastic weekend and tomorrow I'm taking the evening to myself to check some things off my list and do my own thang.  Or, you know, catch up on the sleep I missed out on this weekend and last week and the weekend before...  I'm also pumped for a lunch date with my dad this week, and visiting Queens next weekend to spend some time with my girls up there.  It's been too long, and we all know my last (barely overnight) excursion up there was a flaming success.  In a more vague sense, I've decided to start more actively looking for a community of writers in the Wilmington area, or figure out how to do some coaching.

Right now, though, I'm about to pass right out.  True to form, I couldn't be more pumped about it.

Q&A

Please believe me when I say that I am at least as concerned as you are by the increasing number of my posts lately that start out: “I’m sorry I haven’t written in 4/5/6/7 days, but…”

Then again, maybe I’m not that concerned.  Keep in mind always Tolstoy and the Writer’s Dilemma: How To Live Life and Also Write About It.  And I can assure you, the reason I haven’t written in 5 days (or responded to a growing stack of letters and emails in much longer than 5 days) is because I have been living pretty fast & furious.

Here is what astounds me about this: 2 or 3 months ago, my life consisted of working two jobs, sleeping through church, working out a few days a week and blogging on the days I didn’t.  Every now and then I would take a weekend off and drive north to visit my people.  Far-flung friends would text, call, email and Facebook me to ask how I so successfully found work; how I meet people; how I deal with homesickness or physical sickness or heartsickness, or with a painful breakup.  And I have by and large felt highly unqualified to answer these questions: I found my job on Craigslist in a flash of luck.  I don’t actually know anyone yet in the state of Delaware.  If you learn the secret to getting over a breakup, or if you find a way to teleport to where my besties are, please let me know.

But suddenly on Sunday I found myself at Buffalo Wild Wings, surrounded by Ravens fans, drinking beer with two people I met at two separate networking events, some people I met through them, and an ex-suitemate from college, talking about Southern accents and speeding tickets and planning a Super Bowl party, of all things.

Life is very, very strange, but very good.

Here are a few reasons why:

Anna Linn, my TMI Pod protege, flew up from Nashville this weekend to hang out in my new life.  We haven't seen each other since May, which was MORE THAN 6 months ago!  Also, she is newly 21.  This combination of factors means only good things, as we all know.

When we first planned this weekend, months ago, I had planned on taking the weekend off from hostessing so I would be able to spend the whole weekend with my guest.  The way things started rolling in 2012, though, I had to quit at the restaurant so that the end of my 2 weeks fell right on this weekend.  I couldn't very well ask for my last 2 days off, so I decided to just man up and apologize profusely for leaving A.L. on her lonesome.

On top of that, Maria was going to have an audition in D.C. this weekend, so I would have to take Grampi to the airport before Saturday morning while our parents took her to Washington.

Around 1am on Saturday morning, though, it started snowing.  Everyone was ready for it; but by morning the entire area was covered in a couple of layers of snow, all sealed in with a fifth of an inch of ice.  Pleasant.

This Major Winter Weather Event dissuaded my mom from driving over the mountains to D.C., which meant she, my dad, and the van were available to drop Grampi off at PHL.  This turned out to be a massive windfall, because when they finally made it to the airport there was a huge fiasco involving Grampi not being registered on any flights until the next morning, among other things.  I don't have a lot of patience for this kind of fiasco, especially at 6:00 on Saturday morning (after not hitting the minimum recommended hours of sleep once in the past week).  Saved by the Hielo*, I guess.

Translator's Note: "Hielo" is the Spanish word for ice.  It's just a little closer to rhyming with "bell," which brings me a little bit closer to some terrible wordplay.


So Grampi is cleared out of our place now, and en route to his new abode in Cumbayá, Ecuador, via my cousin Andrew's wedding (!!) and a few other events in Cali and Florida.

So A.L. and I slept in, and then drove some errands.  The Golf weighs about 4 pounds and therefore didn't want to stick to the road.  To make matters worse, I had forgotten to park at the top of the driveway in anticipation of the impending dump and it took a heavy foot and a careful hand to make it to the road.  Which, not being one of the 7 highways that triangulate my position in this state at any given time, was not plowed or salted.  This made for several days of delightful driving.  (The second, third, fourth, or fifth spring of the year melted the ice trap this morning with a 50-degree January day.  ...what?)

Anyway, around 2 o'clock my manager called and said there had been so few tables in all day that I could stay home that evening.  What a way to go.  Typical, really.

So I spent the afternoon whacking my driveway with an ice pick so my dad and Anna Linn could shovel our ice luge of a driveway so Mutti could cover the whole thing in kitty litter.

We stayed in on Saturday night.

Also, I visited my first-ever IHOP on Friday night.  Obliterating that bucket list, baby.  What up.  Mostly it reminded me of all my weird late-night excursions to Perkins in Northfield and Owatonna, but without the raspberry muffins and Natalie Merchant.

So.  How do you find a job?  Apply.  Search and apply to as many jobs as you can possibly find, and try a few different industries.

Where do you meet people?  Networking events.  Open mics.  Twitter.  Church.  Your favorite coffee shop (or Japanese restaurant).  Bars and gyms tend to be superficial as a general rule -- but we all know how I feel about rules:

So use your own best judgment.  I've got a team working tirelessly on this question day and night (that's getting more and more literal by the day) so I'm sure the list will grow.  Don't lose hope, dear readers.

How do you deal with homesickness, heartsickness, or a really nasty breakup?  Cry.  Watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall for the billion-and-1th time.  Get too drunk at least one or two times and probably send an ill-advised message or two.  Become a compulsive texter/Facebook wall-poster/Tweeter. Blog obsessively until things get better.

Because they will.  In all honesty, I left some things out of that last list, like find someone to hold you accountable.  Even if that person is 1000 miles away (totally hypothetical), somebody loves you and misses you.  It's like a New Year's Resolution -- mine, as a refresher, is to express my appreciation and admiration more often.  So I semi-accidentally stumbled upon someone who will come right out and say, "I think you just complimented me under your breath, but I didn't really hear it...  I think you said I'm sweet?"  And a few people who prod me, explicitly or with a pointed look, to graciously accept a compliment or praise.

I don't have The Answers.  I perhaps have some, but they are far from watertight.  I'm afraid to say I'm getting closer to the real deal, but it feels like a lie to say I'm getting farther from it.  So we'll just leave it at that for now.  I'll enjoy myself and probably come back with an existential dilemma or an ocean of tears in 5 days or so.

rubber-banding

I'm on vacation!  Out of the office until Wednesday, and the restaurant too.  I'm definitely looking forward to having some time off, but I'm also mildly terrified about having nothing on my schedule, no obligations or anything.

...Besides carrying the star into the crèche on Christmas morning.  I have graduated from my days of playing Mary, Mother of Jesus, and my days of co-writing and co-directing overambitious nativity villages and talk shows.  I am moving into a new role.

Speaking of changing roles, my latest realization is how utterly awful I am at transitions.  The other day I walked into Bishop's after work and I must have been acting weird because the guys said, "Hey, are you OK?  You seem... distraught."

First of all, how pumped am I that that's the word they came up with!  Secondly, after they called me out, a lot of my tension evaporated, and I smiled and realized that I am often distraught when I walk in there.  I'm easily distraught from one side of a new situation to the other, and it takes me so long to adapt.  Which is a strange thing to realize (over and over again over the last few years) when "adaptable" used to be a pretty accurate descriptor of me as a kid.  Of course, back then I had to be.

And I guess, if we're being realistic, I still do, because life is basically a series of changes.  I wouldn't want to become prematurely stuck in my ways at the age of 22.  I hope to at least be 80 before that happens.

I can't knock on my need for routines, though, and on a more fundamental level, some sort of stability.  Thus my uncharacteristically vehement response yesterday morning to certain suggestions about my future...

When I came upstairs in the morning, Grampi was already up and bumbling around.  Now, first off, you need to understand that the communication centers of my brain don't fire up until I've been bumbling around for at least 20 minutes.  Also, I'm definitely not interested in small talk over breakfast.  Breakfast with other people is a time for communal basking, or important discussions.  And when I say important, I mean touchy-feely important.  Like relationship-talk.

Anyway, he asked what I studied in college (even though he totally knows, and brings it up himself from time to time) and then asked if I'm planning on going to grad school in the near future (the answer is no, because I'm sick of school, I don't know what I would study if I went back right now, and I love working).  My early morning mumbling problem also makes conversation difficult, especially with someone who doesn't understand me very well on a regular basis.  So I mumbled that question away, and then he said, "You know, anthropology has been one of the great passions of my life" (an odd contradiction to the anti-anthropology creationist sermon he preached to me on a flight to India 4 years ago).  "Have you ever considered mission work?"

I think I actually snorted, and responded shortly in a definite non-mumble, "No."  Not that don't revere the incredible work of my grandparents (all four of them) and appreciate the experiences I was able to have as a result... I just feel quite certain that the type of mission work he's talking about is not my life's calling.

"You have some skills, though, that could really serve you well as a missionary!"

For some reason it took me twice as long to eat breakfast and get ready for work.

Every semester, every vacation, every project and job I've been amazed at how long it takes me to settle into a new routine, a new way of thinking and of doing things.  I feel like it used to be a lot easier, and I'm wondering now if I'm subconsciously resisting change as a defense mechanism, to protect my seemingly fragile core and foundation.  Things--my future, my control--feel uncertain.  This is disconcerting.  It makes me act irrationally and defensively, to protect the delicate balance I have worked out to move forward.  Ironically, when I am existentially so unbending, it makes me more vulnerable to the threatening aspects of change, and I bounce back less readily.  A la bridge pose mantra, "I am vulnerable.  I am strong.  I can be vulnerable because I am strong."

As far as getting comfortable goes, I'm just now starting to settle into my jobs and my routine, after how long?  I'm starting to feel actually comfortable with the people I work with, to feel some rapport.  On Wednesday I brought a fruitcake to work to share, and--it's not too early to share this here--my top New Year's resolution is to express my appreciation more openly, to say thanks more often.  So I wrote this in an accompanying note, and it's always strange to me when people are surprised to hear that I like them, or to hear anything that I think, in fact.  It's just so transparent to me!

Speaking of saying thank you, Coffeeshopcrush finished (and loved--no surprise) The Princess Bride...  And he introduced himself, and now that I know his name, the saga is over.  As promised.

Happy Christmas weekend, Merry Christmas Adam, because Adam came before Eve (via @jensentweets on Twitter)!  More to come this weekend, I'm sure.

Until then, I'll get a headstart on 2012 and say thanks for reading!

timestamp.

... hard to concentrate ... you read me like a book (I read with my hands) ... toma ... likealittle ... naked hula-hooping, the first and the last time ... snowflake extravaganza ... the time Alice spilled a cup of coffee on Brigid in government class and the poor girl had to wear a collection of everyone's gym clothes for the rest of the day ... doomtree blowout v, the two-door and the astrovan ... land shark, smirnoff ice, capital brewery, fosters ...


Yesterday I spent my evening ticking things off my list, and it was great.  But after hours of sending text messages about minor details that sparked profound memories, listening to songs that made me feel something from another time; after a conversation about staying in and getting out of relationships; after responding to the "too much reminiscing" comments with a semi-self-deprecating and melodramatic "I don't really know how to make new memories..."  Well, after all that, the thought struck me that, maybe, I live in the past.

With the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future hovering so close this time of year, this thought is not entirely a surprising one.  And as it turns out, today, all astrological signs point to an unusual fixation with these abstract divisions of time.  Especially Saggitarius--check me out: Some people are disturbed by thoughts of the future. Not you. You know it will be better than the present because you keep getting more and more savvy about how to make it so.

Sidenote: Certain person(s) like to remind me that I'm more Scorpio than I think, since I am, after all, a cusp baby, and there is no doubt some truth to this statement.  However, I have long committed myself to Saggitarius status--a la Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat.


...Please, Scorps, focus on the concept behind that analogy and not the fact that, by default, I just compared Scorpio to Slytherin.  That's not what I'm trying to say at all.


My point, to tie it back, is that my commitment to my zodiac sign is yet another lingering legacy of the Past.  So, moving on...


My dad told me once that I live so fully in the present moment that it's hard for some people to follow.  I must have been 12 or 13.  That character judgment, at least at the time, I think, reflected my ideals more than my reality.  And it perhaps became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In any case, the comment stuck with me, and I have spent years appreciating, sometimes painfully, my current situations.  I have worried whether living in the present makes me a hedonist, and whether it would be such a bad thing if I was, if it meant I could be fully in the moment all the time.  (Beneath this mostly ridiculous worry lies my ancestral moral foundation. But I have a post in the works on that topic, so I won't go into that right now.)

Yet, despite my most poetic "be here now" idealism, here I am, a Dweller.  My ghosts are swarming, Christmases Past clamouring for their place in front of the ghosts of non-Christmases Past.  It's a little hard to see them clearly through the whiteout of 22 snows, give or take; but there are special gifts and romantic moments and a few faces I couldn't see again in person no matter how many frequent flier miles I had.  A lot of tears and disappointments and a lot of Beautiful Moments too.

Christmas Present is pretty straightforward: It's wrapped up under the tree and every day leading up to Christmas, when you think nobody's looking, you shake it to try to guess what it is, and just hope it's not particularly fragile.

OK, OK, enough (lame) jokes.  My Ghost of Christmas Present is pretty sparkly overall despite the fact that many of the loves of my life are scattered far and wide (and I dream about them) and I would accumulate a space-travel-worthy number of frequent flier miles if I did manage to visit them all.  Ask me how things are going and what I've been up to lately and my mind goes blank.  I shrug and reply, "Good" and "Nothing...  Not much at all, and nothing of substance."

I was talking to my friend Steve recently and I mentioned that I've never really been able to envision my future in any of my past relationships.  I know some people who had to reconstruct their entire life in goals and visions after breaking up with a significant other.  Maybe my relationships just haven't been very long in the overall scheme of things, or maybe I've erased those visions as a coping mechanism.  I sometimes suspect, though, that one scar I bear is future-blindness.  I don't trust the future enough to depend on it.  And so I struggle to make plans.

Now, I say I'm scarred and you think the worst.  But I'm still young, and I've never undergone any major surgeries, or any minor surgeries for that matter.  Scars signify to me that something happened and you survived, and you're more interesting because of it.  If you think I'm naive for this belief, rejoice that I have not been irreparably paralyzed by hurt and try to remember what that feels like.  It's liberating.

So, my future is undependable.  My present is too dependable.  By default the past is all that's left.  We suit each other perfectly.  It's always there when I need it, but it doesn't hang around or get clingy.  It doesn't love me too much and in fact it knows just where to hit me so it realllly hurts.  On the flip side, it also knows all the best spots to kiss me and make it better.  Perhaps most appealing is that it changes to fit my needs and my current situation...

And here we get rolled up in the conundrum of past, present, and future: None of them actually exist, except in the present.  That's awesome.  Hedonist or not, I can't escape the timestamp on my perceptions.  (Case in point: I wrote most of this post on scrap paper at the restaurant earlier this evening, and by the time I got it out and got home and got to my computer it seemed irrelevant already.  Ha.)

I guess it still is relevant because I'm twenty-something and I have my whole life ahead of me and part of what is so difficult and daunting about this is that I need to know my trajectory if I'm going to be able to follow it.  Or at least that's what they're telling me.  Apparently what makes life worth living is still to come, you know, eventually having a nice house and a nice car and a nice husband and nice kids.  We could easily get religious here and say Heaven is what makes it all worthwhile, or Nirvana or whatever.  It's starting to feel more normal to think about "forever" now, to think about myself or my friends spending "forever" with some other specific person, to predict my career path as something that starts here and now and continues on indefinitely, to feel exhausted by life-extending medicine and the thought of life without death.  But can't we do things now for the sake of doing them now?  That doesn't make us aimless hedonists, does it?

I'd better stop before I get in an argument with myself over moral psychology.  This has been pretty rambling and academic and self-absorbed, but please weigh in if you have thoughts or experiences with this.  I have a hunch I'm not completely out in right field here.

the 22 review

My personal special edition weekend paper, featuring traffic and sports reports, dining and entertainment reviews, and editorial.

Black Friday morning was stunning, shot through with rays of sunshine like sheets of muscovite.  I got up and out of the house before anyone else even woke up.  Apparently everyone in the mid-Atlantic region was also either still asleep, or being trampled at WalMart, because the roads were so clear, which made the drive very pleasant.  I won't tell you how fast I got to Amsterdam, but I'll just say Mike didn't believe me when I called to say I was half an hour out.

The whole point of leaving so early, if you recall, was to make it to the Annual Turkey Bowl ultimate frisbee game.  The Four Diamonds were covered in mud--foreshadowing for our state a few hours later?  It was so warm people were stripping down all the layers they usually needed to play outside on Black Friday, but a few people refused to shed their traditional Underarmor.  Not that it probably mattered much; everybody looked and smelled just about the same by the end of the day regardless of what we were wearing.

I love AUL, mostly because I love playing anything with that crew; but I might have to learn how to play football by next year because I really miss the tackling that used to be a lot more common before anybody actually knew how to play ultimate.

Maybe I should just learn how to play ultimate.

I hate rules.  And strategy.

As Rich aptly pointed out at dinner, those of us who grew up in Amsterdam (whatever growing up I didn't do there I made up for in passion--I insist!) tended to perceive the Raindancer as this untouchably fancy restaurant, "a five-star joint, like if you went out to eat there, you would probably run into Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, they go there all the time."

This is not true.  The chances of Jay-Z or Snoop Dogg having even heard of the town of Amsterdam are pretty much zero, even though Jay-Z did grow up in New York.  The chances of any of you, dear readers, having heard of the town of Amsterdam, is nearly as negligible.  Oh, wait--did I mention my hometown to you once?  What's that?  You don't remember?

That being said, the Raindancer historically does hold the position of Amsterdam's "time-tested local 5-star restaurant."  One of the only places in town you ever make reservations for.  It sort of feels like Applebee's, covered in a vinyl cucina-style vodka penne sauce, and garnished with Rainforest Café light strings and plastic ivy.

The food was delicious, although of course there was too much of it, and there were too many people there to focus on eating anyway, and my mojito margarita was too delicious.  I was delighted to see and catch up with a few people I hadn't seen literally in years.

Rich later complained that there was too much reminiscing throughout the evening, a mostly harmless statement I latched onto the same way my parents latch onto my passing comments about persistent absenteeism and feel horribly guilty about it.  The dilemma is, I come back to Amsterdam once a year or so, and usually miss out on seeing half the people I want to see.  When I do run into them, they ask me what I'm up to now and I really can't think of anything I desperately want to share with them about my incredibly mundane life.  So I boomerang the question, hoping they'll tell me what has made them laugh and cry lately, their drinks of choice, who they're constantly checking their text messages for these days, and the latest developments in their life trajectory.  You know, the important stuff.  I just don't quite know how to ask.

Also, there are too many skeletons and too much dirty laundry hanging around after 10+ years together for us to stage a non-awkward dance party, and I have very little interest in drinking games.

Although, come to think of it, my birthday this year has involved what seems like an inordinate amount of icing.  Yes, there was a lot of it on my various cakes...  But I meant the other kind of icing:

A St. Croix Falls friend wisely thought twice about sending this package.
"I like my bread like you like your men: ICED!"
...Or was it coffee?  I forget.

All I wanted was to split a few bottles of wine with a few close friends and sit around and talk!  But instead, predictably, we ended up with a house full of good friends, a mysterious amount of beer, wine, and Ice, and a collective headache for most of Saturday.

It was completely worth it.  As we have found, I refuse to go uncelebrated.

Saturday at the G.W.I.B. (which is on the market! How badly do I want it?!) we decided to go see the movie Hugo in 3D.  I was skeptical, because 3D movies usually give me a splitting headache--as if I needed a headache on my headache!  But it was actually very well-done.  The cinematography and imagery was really beautiful, and despite a few moments of really awkward/unsuccessful dialogue, we all enjoyed ourselves quite a lot.  Rich and I, at least, were laughing, and I'm pretty sure I cried at some point.  Not that that is unusual at all these days.  (I also cried at Ramona and Beezus last week, and yesterday at The Muppets.  Just to put things in perspective.)

On the topic of 3D, Titanic is coming out in 3D and I have never been so excited in my life.

Full circle, back to traffic.  Back to traffic circles?  I took a route sans traffic circles back from Amsterdam, and ended up getting stuck in traffic on the north end of the Jersey Turnpike.  Both Bizz III and I tend to get cranky in stop-and-go traffic, once I get sick of my solo sunroof dance party and eat all my snacks, I start noticing all the weird things her 10-year-old engine does, and freaking out about it, and then she freaks out and stops shifting gears properly.  So I pull off frantically to a rest stop and make a phone call, and by the time I get back on the road traffic has mostly dissipated and the transmission is back in action.  Can we apply this to real life relationships?  Couldn't hurt.

It took me a little longer to get home to Wilmington than it took me to get home to Amsterdam.  (Ha, confused yet?  Welcome to my life.)  But my family was waiting for me and we all went to see The Muppets, which I'd been waiting for with bated breath for WEEKS.  It fulfilled all my wildest dreams.  I laughed so hard, and for so long, especially at all the 80s jokes and the 21st-century celeb cameos (Neil Patrick Harris, John Krasinski, and Zach Galifianakis, to name a few).  It's hard to say whether my tears were a side effect of intense hilarity or of the touching moments interspersed throughout the script.  Lots of real issues addressed in this film.  I definitely recommend this movie to any diehards, and anyone who knows the song "Rainbow Connection," and anyone who watched Sesame Street back when it was still good, and anyone who likes puppets or Jason Segal or Amy Adams or basically any hip young celebrity out there--except Justin Bieber.  Sorry Beliebers, no sightings in this flick.  But you should still see the movie.

I'm feeling a little dazed still, but my feeling after this weekend is that 23 is going to be a good year.  Emotional detox is going well and I could be ready to get back on the horse.  But greater than this is less than three, my mantra/amulet/lucky charm.  I am SO amazed and thankful and just completely blown away by all the wonderful people that make my life what it is, interesting and agonizing and rich and hilarious and drunk and soft, in the case of my brand-new birthday flannel sheets!  This sounds cheesy, but I really mean it.  Everyone was teasing me on Friday night (and every other day of my life) because I kept walking into rooms full of these people and just laughing.  And they would all stop and look at me, because I obviously had no idea what was going on in there before I stepped in.  But all I could say is, "I am so. happy."

The 22 Review brought to you today by my parents, my grandparents, and all my other ancestors, without whom I would not exist; also my homeboys and -girls in the Dirty, especially Mike, who planned everything; and just a general thanks to everyone who made 22 what it was.  I'm investing in 23.  You in?

cusp

So The sun enters the fiery realm of Sagittarius.

This part of the solar journey brings the longest nights of the year,

nights filled with festivity and exploration, new friendships, travel, reading,

study and passionate work toward the goals we believe

will help ourselves and our loved ones prosper.

- Horoscopes by Holiday

How fitting. Just so you're all aware, we are now officially under my sign. (I refuse to acknowledge the apparent horoscopic glitch about all the signs being off by however many months; I was, am, and always will be a Sagg at heart.) So, please celebrate. How could you not, with "nights filled with festivity and exploration" and all that?! I think I'm finally ready for this. Let's hope I haven't missed my chance with Coffeeshopcrush. He seemed less receptive to my halfassed non-advances today.

Either way, he'll have to wait until next week, because I'm tired and cranky already just thinking about 2 days of holiday hostessing...

On the plus side, my new mattress is being delivered tomorrow, and I was just reading "The Entrepreneur's Guide to a Good Night's Sleep." Not that it said anything new, but it just struck me as particularly profound today. Maybe because I somehow managed to trick myself into napping last night, and I feel a little better overall ever since.

I also finally got through my Box of Papers to Sort and Process, and at the very bottom I found two brochures from St. Olaf's Counseling Center, one titled Loneliness and one titled Addictive Relationships. I picked them up at the mental health fair in the spring, stuffed them in the bottom of the box and completely forgot about them until right now--which is pretty ironic considering I probably set them aside with this transition in mind. This is the first time in awhile that I look at these brochures and think, "Maybe someone I know will need these" instead of "I wonder if there's anything in here I don't already know."

To summarize, in case someone I know DOES need these, the loneliness brochure basically says, "Use this time to figure out and enjoy yourself." Check. And the addictive relationships brochure says, "If you know you're in a relationship that's bad for you but you're convincing yourself to stay in it, find a support group and work your way out." Also check. Awesome.

I interrupted the writing of this episode in my life to go to Zumba, speaking of enjoying myself. An hour of busting moves really gets those endorphins going, and driving through a blinding rainstorm to get to the move-busting is almost as inspiring.

By 8pm, the torrential downpour had subsided to a drizzle like a gazillion dancing ladybugs--NOT Asian beetle bites. The kind of drizzle that makes you feel like you're stuck in the movie Push, or maybe American Beauty. I drove to pick up Asha with the window open and Lady Antebellum blaring on the radio.

This is why I moved home. To pick up my sisters when my parents can't, because the conversations I had with my mom when she chauffeured me around in high school were the ones that solidified our relationship.

I tried to listen more than talk. But I realized, my big sister never gave me any love or life advice (probably because I don't have a big sister). I blundered through all that on my own, and figured everything out in hindsight, since I'm always too immersed in the present moment to lift my head and check out the scene. She looked at me as I talked and said, "I never knew of any boyfriend you ever had, but now I realize you dated like 20 guys." Yeah, ok, great. But now I have something to share.

If I could give one piece of advice to everyone I ever meet, it would be this: Forget what you "should" feel in a certain situation or relationship, and spend your time figuring out what you DO feel about it. At least be honest with yourself to avoid digging yourself into a hole, where suddenly one day you look around and realize you can't tell which way is the sky anymore.

This sounds really dark and sad and morbid. But if I was ever lost inside the Earth's crust, I can see the whole sky now, and I can tell when it's sunny and when it's raining. And I'm taking this time to really feel the sun and the rain on my skin, and figure out what I like to do in all kinds of weather.

November has always struck me as a grey month, but this one has been enlightening. I really love it, despite the tempests and the indecisive sunshine, and the total whiteout that will no doubt engulf me on my way north this weekend. Praying for a smooth drive, but I can't wait to go "home."

like-a-love-song irrational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human body is a pretty incredible thing.

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

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

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

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

(Historical examples from my life include:

 - Chapstick

 - Depression

 - "I'm [still] in love with you"

 - "I'm not in love with you anymore"

 - "I'm lonely"...)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this little piggy built her house of... ?

So my "2-3 times a week" thing has taken a fall since my laptop was stolen...  But we all know I kinda like it that way, right?  A la St. Croix Falls...

I'm getting over The Robbery, as I've started to think of it -- in caps.  It's maybe a little like getting over a breakup: the first week you feel like your insides just got ripped out like pages of your diary and strewn all over Times Square...  Then the next week you're kinda sad about it but you know by then that you're not gonna die so you'll have to just get on with your life -- at some point...  And then after a few weeks or months or whatever you start realizing occasionally that you haven't thought about it in a few days, and then eventually you decide you've gotten over those vulnerable feelings enough to replace your mp3 player.  ...Or start dating again.  Whatever.  I think in either case you get new shit and start dating at around the same time, because you know your life isn't over.

Yesterday, though, just when I thought I had discovered everything they'd taken, I realized my Bourbon St. flask was also missing.  Travesty.  Fortunately I am no longer in college.  Plus, I am going back to Nawlins so I can acquire some other paraphernalia from the Big Easy.

Anyway, I'm feeling a little more steady on my feet these days, so I'm starting to collect cool items to build and furnish my new lifestyle.  On Wednesday I rode the bus to this Downtown Visions networking event (not completely aware that it was a networking event, or that just about every other person there was representing some downtown business).  Anyway, I walked in and scoped out the scene, feeling out of place, but then introduced myself to two younger-looking women at a table in the corner.  Turns out they are both AmeriCorps VISTA workers with the Delaware government, and one of them also graduated in May, from the University of Alabama.

After the event she and I stopped in at a display in an artists' loft around the corner, an opening event for the Wilmo Fringe Festival.  She paints for fun, and she loves spoken word.  Unfortunately she lives and works in Dover, so she had to get back, but I went back to the World Cafe Live at the Queen for a Fringe Preview Party.  It was actually the perfect event to go solo, and I was laughing by the end.  Worried that I didn't have enough cash for a decent tip, I wrote a note to my waiter on the check (I always loved that as a server) and told him he's the bomb.  He shot me a nice smile later.  Makes the world go 'round.

I also fell madly in love with one of the performers -- unbeknownst to him, of course.  His name is Slash and he is chiseled and self-deprecating in the way of someone who could never quite figure out how to be cool when he was 13, but now that he's (over?) 30 he realizes it doesn't matter.  Sadly the Fringe is a little out of my budget, but at least I got a preview.

I'm starting to fall into a groove at work.  I'm useful.  This is good.  I am also quiet, so everyone just takes cracks at me about being this earthy kid and weighing 25 pounds.  (Not true.)  (Mostly not true.)  Yesterday they took us out for lunch at this new (very expensive) restaurant up the street.  I was intimidated by the menu but it really was beautiful, and the food was delicious.  The coffee was also delicious.  The discussion was wild, touching on what seemed like every possible controversial topic from President Obama to the institution of marriage to addiction and the social conditions that often accompany drug abuse.  Those who know me and my characteristic silence in politics might laugh at the hilarity of finding me in this situation.  I found myself on a few occasions tempted to drop into the debate, "Well, I'm skeptical of everything."  But I knew the outcome of that would be even more agonizing as they grilled me on my hypocritical and inconsistent jadedness.  Plus how I can possibly justify widespread skepticism as a naive, 25-pound 21-year-old fresh out of college and with an entire lifetime ahead of me.

But now I have a YMCA membership and I'm starting to line up the bricks that will build my Wilmo lifestyle: a fulfilling job and work environment, cash flow, exercise facilities, a cool person in-state, plans to visit my brother in a few weekends -- plans in general!  And, I have successfully ridden the bus now so I don't feel totally cloistered in Stanton.  Marvy.  Now on to lifestyle interior decorating...

Plus, I have good friends nationwide (worldwide!) who are sending me earrings and music and text messages and facebook messages and phone calls.  And I'm learning to keep in touch.  And I'm friendly and cute and resilient and I can learn how to trust new people and a new city, and I believe in love again.

chestnuts

We have in our front yard a giant chestnut tree that arches over both the driveway and our electric lines running from the street to the house.  Its branches are big enough that we can hang a hammock between them.  I discovered the joys of chestnuts the first week, playing frisbee barefoot with my brother in the front yard -- and neither of us came out unscathed.  We both had chestnut spikes lodged in our fingers, palms, and the soles of our feet for at least a week afterward.

With the changing of the seasons they have started to drop.  If I'm outside when it happens I can hear it -- an ominous THUD you know would hurt if you were standing under it.  My mom has taken to spending most of her free time picking up the nuts, at first still encased in spiny shells, then the cascara splits and the dark, shiny nuts scatter all over the yard, leaving shell fragments behind.  She'll take a reinforced trash bag outside in her leather yardwork gloves, and fill it to the top with the spiky slivers; then she'll fill an H&M bag to the top with nuts, leave enough for the squirrels, and take them inside to roast on the stovetop.

15 minutes later, she walks outside and again the entire yard is as full of fallen chestnuts as it was when she'd started the project an hour before.

And the other tree hasn't even started to drop yet.

***

The change of seasons is a good time to do something new.  Waking up early, layering up to go for an autumn morning run on Saturday felt so incredibly exhilarating, and I felt a sudden change of air -- like if I was going to start a new section of my life there could be no better time to start.  If I was going to change my attitude, or my wardrobe, or my outlook.  You know.  It's cheesy, but you know how I love cliches.  They've been said too many times because they're true.

I'm going to get a gym membership, and actually go, running, swimming, Zumba-ing...  I'm going to be the youth leader at church, for an incredible group of kids (some of them only 2 years younger than me, haha) who have such energy and warmth and richness that I'm blown away by their spirit.  We're starting to fundraise for the tri-annual youth gathering in New Orleans next July.  (Is this why I decided to take on the task?  For NOLA?  ...That had nothing to do with it.)

(Ha.)

But really, I am excited to work with them in general.  I think we'll be really good for each other.

I'm finding my DE-legs :)

honey

I'm on the schedule at work today until 6, but Linda let me go twenty minutes ago even though I desperately wanted to take the table of two guys on a business meeting, one of whom looked like a European biking-backpacker and the other of whom looked like a rugged Australian outback guide.  Desperately.

I finished reading The Help, which galvanized me to write.  That's how I know it's a good book, or a good poem, if it makes me want to do it too.  It doesn't happen very often anymore.

In fact, I've realized over the past two days that I've been avoiding writing for a few months now, even this whole year.  Academic papers are easy to write, and I even enjoy writing them; but there's less of me in them and therein lies the appeal.  Like Eminem said, way back when: I got some skeletons in my closet and I don't know if no one knows it, so before they throw me inside my coffin and close it I'm gon expose it.  Not that my skeletons are particularly grimy but there are definitely some bones in that closet I've been meaning to clear out for awhile now, I just haven't been ready to grab them and pull them out quite yet.  Maybe I'll even bleach them and string them onto a really pretty necklace.

Too far?  What I'm getting at is: emotional baggage.  So many of us are still carrying around what feels like literal tons of pain and I've been saying for awhile now that I'm worried no one will want to share mine with me.  What I'm realizing now is, I just feel guilty sharing it.  And I know a bunch more people who do.  As Liz said last night, "I think we're all kind of starting to realize the gravity of love and heartbreak."  Beautifully put, and painfully true.

I'm a little bitter, sorry to say.  And I want to sweeten up so I can get on with my life and carry honey with me instead of oil.  This is important because it comes up every time I speak to anyone, especially someone I've never spoken to before.

But I've still got some, even if I try to stretch every bottle to ridiculous extents.  Honey is one of the hottest items in our pantry.  This morning I had it on toast and in both tea and yogurt (yes, separately).  Unfortunately it's very expensive, especially the pure local kind which, I've heard, assuages allergies to local irritants (and anything that eases allergies sans side effects is starting to look REALLY attractive right about now).  Maybe, if I wasn't plagued by apiphobia, and if I had more time, I could get my own hive and harvest my own honey and eat as much of it as I possibly could.

...Or maybe I should just skip the middlemen and become the queen bee myself.