what caf line are you?

My sister called me right as I was leaving work today. She is now a sophomore at St. Olaf and any Oles will know there are certain things that only Oles can truly understand. Like the weird J-term hangover when suddenly the caf feels more crowded than it did in December, and all the practice rooms are full, and suddenly everyone is busy catching up with each other and still somehow everyone feels lonely and left out of all the catching up.

(If we're being honest, St. Olaf has a weird knack of making people feel part of the strongest, closest, most tight-knit and esoteric community they've ever been a part of, while also feeling completely isolated - and not just after interim. Maybe that's not a universal experience, but I've talked to more than a few people who know just what I mean when I talk about it.

And yeah, I still miss it like hell.)

Anyway, we talked about identity, which is a common recurring topic for us individually and together. While I still wrestle with my own identity, and have done a lot of wrestling throughout the course of this blog, I made probably the most significant headway during college. That's where she is now. And it's fascinating because while we came from a lot of the same places, the labels we identify with most, and the way we struggle to find one the works across the board, are strikingly different.

She told me about an Indian culture class she's taking, and an assignment that asked about what the different "ethnic food" lines say about the cultures and the food they are modeled after. The next question was the eternal source of frustration for every member of our family: what culture do you most strongly identify with?

And because of the way these questions were placed next to each other, she said, "I realized that I am the Grains line!" And this is the closest she has ever gotten to being able to identify and describe her identity. (For those of you who have not eaten in the St. Olaf cafeteria, the Grains line is vegetarian and sometimes vegan, often gluten-free, often Indian-inspired. It's kind of the "hippie" option.)

"All the Indian students get so excited when they see it's Indian food, but then they taste it and it's just not quite right. It's really American food with an Indian influence." (Of course she described it better, but you get the gist of it.)

So I started thinking, what caf line do I identify with most?

The first thing that popped into my head was the Home line: your typical meat-and-potatoes option. Comfort food. But obviously, that is not true. That's the line I always wanted to identify with, but didn't quite make it.

A weirdly large number of people who knew me at St. Olaf, but didn't know me very well, would come up to me and tell me, "Did you see what's in the Grains line today? I saw it and immediately thought of you!"

True story: I rarely actually liked the food in the Grains line. It was never quite what I wanted it to be.

Then there was the Bowls line: your standard American-Chinese fare. Tortillas, or the Mexican-inspired dishes. A salad bar and a pasta bar, one or two pizzas-of-the-day, bread and toast, and the Grill: burgers and dogs and chicken breasts and fries. And, of course, dessert.

After my freshman year, when my weight changed more than it has since middle school, and since, I learned how to navigate the caf very particularly. I took one plate, and that was it. I had to take a lap right away to see what was there, and then I would pick and choose what I wanted from each line.

And I ended up with a smorgasbord masterpiece, exactly the right amount of food.

If I could choose something to be, it would be loaded baked potato or bacon cheeseburger or taco pizza. It would be white bean turkey or black bean corn or four-bean chili. In those two categories, whatever was made with leftovers from another line was always the best.

I know you can't just choose what you want to be, that there is a science to which Avenger you are or what is your spirit animal (the wealth of internet quizzes is proof). But I'll make my case.

If you take something from yesterday, the bacon from breakfast and dry baked potatoes from dinner, and chop them all up and throw them on a piece of bread with cheese and then throw some green onions on top, and bake it, you have a delicious well-rounded masterpiece.

If you take something from yesterday, something awesome that happened and something not so perfect, and throw them on a piece of bread (my unsocialized self), and bake it in the oven of time, you come up with a delicious well-rounded masterpiece.

What do you think, readers? Am I right?

If you were a caf line, who would you be?


Bonus points: this pizza is our dinner tonight and is made from leftover sauce and peppers from another meal. Bon apetit!__

posted from Bloggeroid

the same room together

I have been carrying this pervasive anxiety around with me for at least a few days now, with spikes every now and then. Not without reason. There are a lot of legitimate things to worry about these days, in the unexpected barrage of stressors following the 1-year mark after college graduation. I know for a fact that I am not the only one feeling this shallow-breathed constant state of near panic under the wave of "OMG-so-THIS-is-real-life." (Or is it, "OMG-so-this-IS-real-life"?) Too many things to do, and too many things to pay for, and too many things to figure out.

On Saturday I went to a birthday party at Yakitori Boy in Philadelphia's Chinatown. The party was for my boyfriend's twin brother's girlfriend's college friend, who I don't know that well in the overall scheme of things, but I've met her before and I like her.

We had a private karaoke room reserved for the night. The room was supposed to hold 30 people, but it felt pretty packed with 17 or 18 of us there. The tables were loaded with food and drinks, and most people sang at least one song. We shook the place with rousing choruses of karaoke classics like Don't Stop Believing and HEY! Must be the money! The weirdest part was when everybody chimed in for songs I'd never heard before (Alive by Pearl Jam, for example), but as far as I'm aware everybody had a really good time. I know I did.

But I couldn't shake one nagging question: What would it take for me to get 30 of my closest friends into the same room for four hours?

Audrey answered that for me on the phone last night: "It would take 30 plane tickets."

That's almost true. It would take a few international plane tickets and a few domestic ones, a few bus or train tickets, a few hundred dollars' worth of gas. It would take a LOT of hotel rooms or empty beds or camping mats for out-of-towners to sleep on. It would take planning YEARS in advance to make sure everyone was available, which they still wouldn't be. And the question of the room still remains: Would my 30 closest friends fit into my basement lair? Would they want to gather there?

And I realized I am homesick.

Not for a place, not really. From time to time I ache for Amsterdam (the Upstate New York ghost town whose denizens are choking on their gravy fries at the thought of anybody getting out of there and wishing to come back). Lately I've been longing to return to the land of my birth, to Ecuador, the land of fresh juice and home to some serious family history and one fifth of the world's bird species.

I'm homesick for my mainstays, for people who know me really well because we've done our time together. As much as I hate that this is true, I am losing touch with who I am because they are not around to remind me.

Or maybe I am just not the same anymore. What an excruciating state of being. In flux, unknown, undefined, feeling the path in front of my carefully with feet I can't see through an aggressive haze. How am I supposed to introduce myself to people or have normal interactions with anybody if I don't even know who I am?!

That's not true. I do know who I am. I am a reliable ENFP; I'm a cat person; I'm more of a morning person than a night person, but I hate napping as a rule; my color is yellow even though I hardly ever wear it; I'm an organizer and a creator, according to the color test; I like original tart fro-yo the best in a row of interesting flavors; I'm an initiator, anxious to put things in motion but not quite as patient when it comes to seeing them through.

I am also not nearly as impulsive as I pretend to be when I take these myriad personality tests, so who really knows. I'm never as decisive in real life as I am when I have two options in front of me, and there are zero stakes for the outcome.

I guess I know, for the most part, who I am at my core. But how does that fit into my current roles? How does my Core Self interact with future best friends instead of past ones? What does Core Self want to be doing at work 5 or 10 years down the line? How much at odds is my Core Self with the vague set of house rules and family expectations, and what is Core Self's chosen form of rebellion?

What did the packaging around Core Self used to like to do for fun? What do I like to eat? What do I like to wear? What's my favorite color and my favorite flavor of ice cream?

A lot of the answers to these questions are changing, suddenly and drastically, or at least seemingly so. And that just makes my people seem so far away, separated from me by a year or more of unshared experiences, unfamiliar settings, diverging dreams. My close-fisted love cannot punch through that haze.

I've been drafting this post in my head for a few days, and the seed took root in my solar plexus probably long before that. And after addressing these life-shaking issues through a series of solid conversations and connections (via Facebook chat, phone, Skype, cross-country "<3" text messages, a trip to the mall and DIY pedicures with my sister, a sit-down family dinner with special guests Carly and CJ, and bantering with my mechanic about debit card culture) it feels unfair to say that I am homesick and that I miss my friends and I feel out of touch. It feels unfair and it feels false and fragmented.

My sister said Saturday that she is lonely. I'm afraid I was a bit dismissive of this comment at the time, not sure how to respond. I remembered being 16 and certain that isolation was both unbearable and interminable. I remembered being 19 and certain that the same isolation would cause me to die unheeded. I remembered being 20 and freely admitting that my number one fear in the world is being alone, and informing everyone who would listen with inherited missionary zeal that I was no longer afraid of that because it is, in fact, impossible. I can never be alone. My fear of loneliness stemmed from the misguided impression that the only relationships with enough weight to bear the burdens of the world were eternal romantic ones; not so, it seems.

And then I thought, "Well, everyone is lonely." It's a shared human condition. That's the beauty of it. We are all together in feeling alone.

So, once I recognize that I'm back in a (dark, scary) place I've been before, I can start to reteach myself that connections don't ever completely disappear, that some of them are stronger than ever even when they are just gathering dust, that there is always room for new ones. I can get a grip on who I am even in the absence of defining roles and characteristics.

And hope this time it sticks.