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."

growing out (parental advisory)

PARENTAL ADVISORY: Mutti & Papa, I'm just warning you, you guys will probably find this very sad. New empty nesters, parents of college freshmen, and parents of any adolescents, teenagers, college students, and young adults will probably join in the cryfest. Like I said, I'm just warning you!

I.

Outgrowing

Remember when we were little, about 7 or 8, for example, and it seemed like we needed new clothes every week, because the dresses we'd been wearing suddenly exposed most of our skinny little thighs instead of ending below the knee? Remember how you had to wrestle the dresses away from us to "wash" them, and take them straight to the curb because they were so threadbare they were almost transparent, and anyway like I said they were suddenly 10 sizes too small? And you had to take them straight to the curb because if you didn't we would pull them out of the rag drawer and put them back on and get more grass stains on the grass stains?

(Totally made-up situation, of course...)

At some point you realize there are bigger clothes in the world that would fit us better, whether we like it or not.

Remember later on, when we were 11 or 13 or 15, and we started pretending to be asleep when you came to tuck us in at night, and learned how to roll our eyes, and stopped returning your hugs, and constantly schemed up ways to get out of your house?

I hope you didn't take it personally. At some point we realize the world is bigger than the world we have so far experienced, and we want to try it on and see how it fits -- whether you like it or not.

II.

Growing Up

I remember the moment my parents' faces and voices changed as it suddenly dawned on them that they had to pass on the baton and trust that they'd taught me well enough how to hold onto it.

I remember when I first pieced together the fact that my parents didn't have any grand secrets for navigating the world. Until that revelation, I was waiting for the ritual during which the key to adulthood would be bestowed upon me, complete with a detailed guidebook and map.

SPOILER ALERT: That ritual never happens (not yet, anyway). Or, it's at least not held in a dark room full of candles on the eve of your 17th birthday. Nobody is wearing cloaks (probably). There is no master of ceremonies who splashes holy wisdom water in your eyes, hangs the key on its thread around your neck, and sets the guidebook solemnly into your outstretched hands.

That ritual is much more drawn-out, over the course of years and maybe even decades, through every misstep and stumble and trial and error. It's drawn out over every new job and internship and tax return, over every courtship and breakup, every friendship and mentorship and through all our courses and classes and travels. Every now and then we dig up and dust off a key that looks promising, and we're cruising for awhile on our newfound adulthood, until we come up against another locked door and it starts all over again.

I can't say for sure, because I am by no means at the end of this epic quest, but I'd put money on the fact that there will always be another locked door ahead of us. No one hands us the key and the guidebook to adulthood because nobody has it.

Just a guess.

For now I'm jangling my ring of keys and just hoping I have one that works.

III.

Outgoing

It's been quite an exciting, fast summer in our house. Last night we had nine people at dinner; the night before you could see a different combination of 9 people around the fire pit in our backyard, and a bunch more people inside.

This morning I walked into the kitchen and Papa was washing dishes in there (atypical to run into him at 7:30am). He asked me how I was and I mumbled something amounting to "fine," and I after a minute I asked, "How are you doing?"

"Oh... I'm sad."

Which was, of course, heartbreaking.

More heartbreaking was the fact that I didn't even have to ask why, because the reason he was up so early was because he had just gotten back from dropping off Maria and Mutti in Philly, where they got on a plane to St. Olaf (via Minneapolis). Mutti will be gone until Sunday, but Maria won't be back until at least Thanksgiving, most likely.

Adding heartbreak to heartbreak, Thomas is leaving tomorrow to spend next semester in Berlin, and adding heartbreak to double heartbreak, the day after that is my official move-in day to my own place downtown.

I know both of my parents are in agony at the thought of three of their children going off into the world.

I know this because even I am a little sad about it, and also because they've both mentioned it to me on multiple occasions, together and separately.

What is even more sad to me is that they are being so supportive and excited for each one of us, and for Asha and Yana going to high school and playing volleyball and doing all their stuff, when they probably still see us as newborn babies that still fit in the crook of one arm, a la Father of the Bride.

And who would DREAM of letting newborn babies go out into the big scary world?! Or 7-year-olds, 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, and 22-year-olds, for that matter...

IV.

Growing Out

The original title of this post was some variation on "parting of ways." But of course I have come up with a way to spin even goodbyes into an upward twist.

It's not really spin, though. We're not outgrowing home or the family. The cool thing about family (and homes, the way we tend to conceptualize them) is that it grows with us. Unlike clothes; unlike childhood, for the most part. We're expanding our worldviews, but we're not ever going to lose the seeds that planted us in the world, and the world in us, in the first place.

As I am about to learn from the peaches and figs in the new "backyard," things that are planted require special tending and care. And, if properly cared for, they drop juicy, delicious fruit right into our baskets. And every season they drop fruit, and every season their roots reach out a little farther underground. The roots might crowd each other out (or crowd out the crepe myrtle) or they might fill up the garden box and start breaking through the soil and the walls that hold it in.

But instead of leaving destruction in their wake, they bring fruit outside the walls of the box, and they expand the box itself to include parts of the world that were previously excluded.

Everything we are doing is just part of the equation, another leg of our quest for the Giant Ring of Grown-Up Keys, each one of which opens another door and expands the world again. Everything that happens creates new reality, and the infinite new possibilities that come with it. Everything we do and everywhere we go and everyone we meet becomes a part of us, and we grow out and our family grows out and we are all the richer for it.


***
Speaking of people we meet becoming a part of us, and of heartbreak, we also found out yesterday afternoon about the devastating loss of a family friend. Please direct your thoughts and prayers, dear readers, to this family, that they may find love, comfort, and support now, and strength through pain in the days ahead.

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.

productivity

Ann and I don't miss our internet at home; in fact, we love not ever turning on our computers.  The desktop computers at the library serve us just fine, and for the most part put a 1-hour limit on our web-surfing.  Today I've had my session extended because I haven't checked my email or Facebook all weekend -- once, sophomore year, I missed a job interview because I didn't check my email from Thursday to Monday.  This weekend, I didn't miss much of anything pressing.  Life is slowing down a bit.

On Friday I had trial shifts at both of the jobs I interviewed for.  I had decided not to work at the Indian restaurant after the lunch hours because I wouldn't make enough working the shifts I would get.  It's unfortunate, because I am particularly well-suited to serving Indian food in small-town Wisconsin, and I like the family feel of the kitchen.  So I was feeling bad about the way it turned out, but my boss said, "You're not working for me, you're working for yourself."

The afternoon at the Winery stretched into an evening and then into the night.  The sun doesn't go down until at least 9:15 in these parts, but it was dark by the time I got out.  I'd been washing glasses behind the bar for hours, watching all the servers rushing around with their heads spinning, watching how things went down.  A highlight of my shift was chatting with a research psychologist from Lafayette, NY -- an Upstater like me.  He was downtown to see Zed Leppelin, Led Zeppelin cover band, on the Overlook, and promised to let us know how it compared to the real deal when he saw Led Zeppelin live in 1969.  "My girlfriend and I had to be helped to our seats," he said conspiratorially, "if that gives you any clue of what was going on."

I think I'm going to love this.

After work Ann met me downtown and we got 2 beers for $5 at the St. Croix Tavern, where one of the Winery cooks was playing drum set in a band.  She'd heard about the concert from a guy at a stuff sale behind the Red Bird Music Store, one of those back-alley record shops that has more going on than records.  We're not totally clear on exactly what else is going on there, but when I stopped by last week a guy with a fiddle and a guy with a guitar were jamming and talking about bands in the shadowy interior of the shop.

To make a long story short, we survived our first downtown-SCF bar experience.  The band was great, though for the life of me I can't remember what they were called.

Saturday was Ann's birthday, and her family came up to check out the scene and take us out to lunch.  We spent the evening garage saling and grocery shopping.  One of the main activities that happens in our library quarters is clothes-cutting.  This weekend several T-shirts, dresses, and sweatshirts underwent drastic makeovers on our hardwood floor.  For dinner: 5/$10 frozen pizza and cheap beer.  Post-college, baby.

On Sunday we slept late and ate French toast brunch on the back patio in the sun.  Ann mowed the gigantic lawn while I cleaned house a little, getting more moved in.  She parked the riding mower in the garage and we hiked into the jungly garden to harvest some rhubarb and asparagus.  We spent the afternoon baking rhubarb cake for our neighbors -- something people don't really do anymore.  After our social walk around the neighborhood we threw together a delectable tuna casserole with French-cut green beans and cooked the rest of the rhubarb into a sauce for cobbler.  So domestic.  So much fun!

The other day a fellow graduate expressed frustration that our "productive" afternoons these days are spent not writing papers or reading lots of dry intellectual books, but finishing a load or two of laundry, writing thank-you notes and cooking dinner.  That's some Cartesian dualism if I ever saw it, some residual Enlightenment guilt.  Ann and I spend our evenings reading (for fun!) and wondering aloud whether taking care of ourselves is going to get old after awhile.  I get such satisfaction out of balancing our meals and tackying another poster to the wall.  Such satisfaction from dropping off a plate of warm, fresh rhubarb cake at our neighbors' front doors.  Such satisfaction that I smell like Cajun penne and wine when I disarm the alarm at the end of a long shift.  Such satisfaction falling asleep over my pleasure reading, and dreaming about my future jobs and projects.  I feel so capable.  Not that I can do everything, but at least I can figure it out.

will work for homeostasis

Monday.  Waking up feels like any other day of my life.

But it's not like any other day in my life.  It's not summer and it's not the school year.  It has never seemed more truly the first day of the rest of my life.  Today I have to be more self-efficacious than ever before in my life, and I feel strangely energized by the probably over-dramatized weight I'm putting on this particular Monday, June 6, 2011.

We've been hearing for years that nobody's getting hired these days, especially not right out of college.  I've been reading on Facebook and hearing through the grapevine about friends who can't find a job anywhere.  I was feeling lucky the other day at the number of "we're hiring" signs, and the overall bright responses I received to the question "Are you hiring, by any chance?"  But it's another story entirely to actually present myself for work, to fill out an application and turn it in.  It seems strange that practically shoving my (very valuable, if I do say so myself) time and energy at someone would feel so much like stepping on toes, but it does.  Maybe it's just my pride.

Which I am trying to squash, for a lot of different reasons.  It's a hard balance, to be proud enough not to stand for things that are hurtful to my self but not so proud that it's an obstacle to action.  Not easy to figure out and not easy to do.  Better just to plunge into it and work it out later -- at this point inertia is one of the most terrifying pathogens I think most of us can imagine.

Speaking of balance, living seems to be right now a series of pretty precarious balancing acts.  In the front of my mind right now there's the social consciousness-financial feasibility tightrope: do we buy organic foods from the co-op downtown or buy everything for a dollar at Aldi?  After four years at an institution like St. Olaf that puts so much emphasis on sustainability, living "green," avoiding products assembled by blind children in third-world countries or sprayed with deadly pesticides, it's been a bit of a struggle not to read the label on every product before we buy it.  The truth is, it's just not practical.  I want to care for the world I live in, but sometimes that means eating canned black beans grown and processed who knows where for 79 cents a can, just so I can get through the day.  And I'll try to turn off the lights when I'm not using them.  I really will do my best.

Another unexpected shock comes when we have been, so far, locked inside our house before nightfall every night we've stayed here, with the alarm system turned on.  My work availability is limited because I am not comfortable, as a young woman, riding my bike home alone from a late-night shift or hangout at a bar downtown.  I'm hardly even comfortable walking past uncovered windows after dark, not knowing what's out there.  Even though this seems like a fairly safe, small town, I perceive danger in my gender and my age, and the fact that after four years at St. Olaf my street smarts are baby-soft like my feet at the end of winter before I start running around barefoot on beds of hot rocks full of biting insects.  Or some variation of that feat.

In any case, it seems our party days are over.  And for Bizz-squared(TM), this could be a big adjustment.

I realized today that, when left to my own devices, I Get Things Done.  I tend to feel paralyzed when I know that my actions impact someone else, someone's schedule or living space or conception of the world.  This is a good thing to realize, so that I can start to sort out what is important for me to do for myself and how much I can feasibly take into consideration other people's toes, as it were.  Inertia.  Paralysis.  Terrifying.

So today, I turned in 3 job applications.  I put an important envelope in the mail and rented a P.O. box.  I visited the Chamber of Commerce for information about local businesses; the county information center for new resident resources; the Lucky Cup Coffeehouse for lunch; and the local Edward Jones branch office for a quick refresher course in personal finance.  I imported all my mail and contacts into gmail.  I checked out The Help from the library.  And I sweated through every item of clothing I put on this morning.

I think I can go home satisfied.

TICKing things off the list

100 Facebook notifications (mostly from my sister)

20 file folders

15 boxes (give or take) in the back of the truck

8-dollar swimsuit bottoms

5 wood ticks (and counting...)

4 years' worth of Asian beetle carcasses littering the floor of our summer home

3 job applications

2 (HUGE) scoops of ice cream

1 enormous farmhouse

I know I should be able to count by now (I remember when Steve from "Blues Clues" got replaced on the show so he could go to college and learn how to count to 50) but I'm going to use the excuse that in real life sometimes numbers in the countdown get skipped.  At least I can get from 5 to 1 backwards without too much of a hitch...

Ann and I have been moving for days, Monday and Tuesday spent moving our entire lives out of Northfield and, step by step, up to St. Croix Falls for the summer.  We're feeling pretty accomplished, since we already cleaned most of the space we're going to be using in the house and have moved the bulk of our items into the downstairs library, where it should stay cool enough to sleep comfortably at night.  We'll ride bikes to work (and to church, and to wherever we go for fun on Friday nights).  We plan to live simply, in two rooms of the huge farmhouse and mostly outdoors, without air conditioning.  We're still deciding if we will splurge on internet, and the Monthly Grocery Bill Bets are open.

On the plus side, we walked up and down Main Street this afternoon and a decent number of places are hiring!  I'm feeling a bit overqualified, but right now I'm mostly concerned with diving into the community so I just want to meet as many people as possible, and be friendly to everyone.  We've been waving at other drivers and so far everybody seems receptive.  We already got a warm welcome at the Lucky Cup (which has Wi-Fi!) and signed our brand-new St. Croix Falls Public Library cards!  We plan to hit up the Music on the Overlook on Friday evenings and the Farmers' Market on Saturday.  This weekend, there is a safari-themed petting zoo.  Our new friend Cole at the library enticed us into going by naming an animal we'd never heard of, and said we'd have to come back and pet it if we wanted to find out what it was.

The ticks will take some getting used to.  It's a bad year for ticks, i.e. they are EVERYWHERE, and while EmRo got the bulk of them last week today Ann and I squashed about 10 overall.  I'm working on the bug thing, sweeping up the Asian beetles and daddy long-legs without squirming too much, not screaming at bees or ticks, and basically just discovering how to be comfortable with the parts of nature that bite and sting.  This should prove a character-building summer for me.

I couldn't be more pumped.