Month: January 2015

Decidedly Neutral Face

Grace1 Comment

The Southern Belle and I couldn’t help but shake our heads at the tightness and shortness of the skirts in the crowd around us. One girl actually pulled her hem up as she wobbled by like a baby giraffe in sequined stilettos.  Considering this was a business etiquette dinner and the dress code was supposed to be “business dress,” I could only imagine what “business” these girls were aiming for.

“Oh my gosh,” the Belle said, turning to me, “what if we get to our tables and we have to listen to them all night?”

I batted my eyelashes at her and said with a smirk, “Then we will wear our Decidedly Neutral Faces and focus on the food.”  She grinned; this was a plan my dear Southern Belle could get behind.

You know the expressionless expression described in books when a character very determinedly lets nothing of his/her emotions show on his/her countenance?  Well, the Belle and I have that down to an art.  Usually the idea is to keep our true feelings under wraps – except from each other.  We can take one look at the other’s face and know precisely how hard she is working to keep that Decidedly Neutral Face on.  It’s particularly useful in situations where outright eye rolling would be rather rude and we need a moment to muster up some faux enthusiasm.

We’ve utilized it many a time, but we first put a name to it during our attempt at Yogalates (yoga + Pilates) last year.  We had decided to take another class at the rec to balance out the cardio of Zumba with some muscle toning.  However, within five minutes of the class beginning, I knew I couldn’t spend a semester doing this.

As soon as the instructor said, “Namaste” and dismissed us, the Southern Belle appeared at the side of my mat.  “So, we’re never doing that again.”

“Oh thank goodness,” I gasped.

She laughed.  “I was looking at you to see how you felt about it and you had this Decidedly Neutral Face the whole time.”

“I was trying to be polite!” I protested.

“I know, but because I know you I could tell you were just so done.”

That’s the nice thing about our friendship, I suppose: we can communicate almost telepathically.  We also let each other rant and get a little bit judgey sometimes, because we both know that ultimately the other is a perfectly nice person with a little bit of sass that needs to be relieved every now and then.  Unfortunately, taking baby steps into adulthood means that the even nearly audible eye rolls of our adolescence are now harder to get away with, even if we are well-mannered enough to keep the actual thoughts to ourselves (we did complete the etiquette dinner with flying colors, after all).

I’m trying to shift my default thought process from the negative to the more positive side.  I’m dissecting why I have the reactions I do, and working on reminding myself that I don’t know the whole story from just a glance.  And generally, I’m getting better at not reacting so quickly based on my snarky inner monologue.

But sometimes, it’s really useful to just hide those habitual thoughts behind a Decidedly Neutral Face – and have a friend who knows exactly what I’m thinking.

Definitive

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  1. most reliable or complete, as of a text, author, criticism, study, or the like
  2. having its fixed and final form

I’ve been noticing this word a lot lately, particularly on Pinterest and Buzzfeed.  It seems like nearly every post involves a “definitive” ranking or roll call of some pop culture reference.  But by definition, every list cannot be definitive.  There are too many other people waiting in the wings of the Internet to rank the Pretty Little Liars’ season 1-infinity outfits, or the best animated Disney films (ALL OF THEM) or the things all 90s kids remember.

Some of these lists I might be willing to believe, considering the source.  Oh My Disney, for instance, might have a reasonable claim on being the “most reliable” place to find a list of the Disney princes’ hairstyles.  But they fail the second definition in that these lists, however authoritative the source, will never be in their “fixed and final form.”  Just try Googling “definitive ranking of” and finish the phrase with your own favorite fandom/fruit/fish family.  See how many results turn up.

definitive

124,000 search results in 0.36 seconds.  Nice work, Google.  But do these really deserve the title “definitive?”  Most can probably be dismissed out of hand because of their purely opinionated basis, with little or no authority to back them up, and the rest – well, as long as someone else comes out with their own “Definitive Ranking” next week, none of these will ever be the “final and fixed form” of the list.

Which begs the question, why are we so fond of this word on the Internet?  If the fluidity of our medium means that in the next hour someone else with more authority can come along and write their own post about the subject, why do we grasp at the title of “definitive” for ourselves?  The very place we publish these things undermines our credibility.

I tried to think of places I use or hear this word in my everyday life.  I realized that I, too, want to create something “most reliable and complete,” hopefully in a “final and fixed form.”  For several years, I’ve told anyone who would listen that I want to write the definitive work on the Arabian Nights.  That obsession is worthy of its own post(s), but now that I think about it…can I really claim for myself that my eventual tome will be the definitive work?  Or is it something that others will have to decide about my work later?

How does one dare claim this word?  It’s just daunting.  And yet, I applaud those who put forth their opinions and personal research with this brave word attached – as repetitive as it is to see so many supposedly definitive lists on Pinterest.

Attempts at a Schedule

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As you may have noticed, my new semester resolution to make this blog a semi-regular thing has not gone quite as well as I might have hoped.

However, I do have a vague idea of topics tied to specific days that will probably make it easier for me to keep it up. On Tuesdays, I’ll be doing One Word posts, focusing on my new category that delves into the connotations of a single word that’s been bouncing around in my head at the time. On Thursdays, I will do the anecdotal sort of posts that make up most of this blog. And on weekends, I’ll just have…weekend thoughts.

Or something. It’s a work in progress, much like me.

Anyway, my hope is that by sharing my ideas for a schedule, I’ll actually feel accountable and maybe kinda sorta try to stick to it!

Immersion

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My creative nonfiction professor has instructed us to immerse ourselves in a subculture somewhere in our little university town and write 4-5 pages about it by next Tuesday. We are reading In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s compelling nonfiction novel (a genre assignment many are still uncomfortable with) about a violent quadruple murder in Kansas, told in riveting – but to some people, questionable – detail. Capote moved into the little town where it all happened and spent months exhaustively investigating the crime. This book ruined his life, our professor tells us. He never quite recovered from the experience of immersing himself in the murders.

And this is the guy you want us to imitate? I can’t help thinking.

I chose to immerse myself in my roommate’s work at the daily newspaper on campus.  The newsroom swallows up hours of her life, yet I have very little idea of what she actually does there, and despite fending off multiple suggestions/hints/nudges that I should come work there too, I’m curious and perhaps willing to look a little closer.

What does “immersion” mean, anyway?  I’ve most commonly heard the word attached to study abroad programs that promise you’ll return fluent in another language thanks to the miracles of “language immersion.”  When I’ve found my subculture, must I eat/sleep/breathe it?  Should I attempt to dive straight in, or am I allowed to observe for a little while?  Should I ignore all other concerns, even if those around me are doing homework or browsing Pinterest?

The infinitive, the command “to immerse,” calls to mind that moment of slipping underwater, taking a deep breath and letting the surface close over me and saturate my scalp, tendrils of hair drifting indifferently upwards and outwards while I float, suspended, between planes.  There’s something to the word that connotes downward movement into some substance or place, while also allowing me to be weightless.  I don’t know how that works, exactly; but it makes me think of dipping my head underwater, and it makes me thirsty.

Immersing oneself in water carries significant symbolic weight, too.  Going down into water often represents baptism, or at least some kind of vital change in a person or character’s life.  Capote had certainly changed by the time he came up for air from the little town in Kansas.  Ideally, an experience that results in a truly good creative nonfiction piece will probably change the writer somehow.  But, so far, we have not discussed what we’re supposed to do when we do finally break through the surface again and withdraw ourselves from the subculture.  We have not talked about what that will do to us.  We are supposed to be leaping off the docks here.

That’s the thing about “immersion.”  It sounds timeless, yet permanent.  To completely go into something, after all, is quite an undertaking.  And once you are there, suspended between those planes, with the dappled light and all your sensory information shifting in new and interesting ways…the word seems to suggest you might want to stay.

A Day Off

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I’ve been thinking a lot about intentionality lately, about how much control I have over the way my life is going right now, when it’s a good thing to hold onto those decisions and when my grip is getting a little too white-knuckled. For the past few semesters I’ve had plenty of say in how my schedule and general way of life is set up, but sometimes that level of ostensible control results in high hopes that are inevitably dashed when circumstances arise in which I can’t control what happens.

The flip side of this is that I tend to be far more intentional about the new tasks and opportunities I take on, rather than making conscious decisions to give myself a break, so I accelerate the pace at which I hurtle through life when I should probably be putting on the brakes.

For instance, when a Three Day Weekend such as this one rolls around, and I’m a little under the weather, I still can’t help but spend the day making a list of all the things I need to get done. I may be curled up on the couch under a comfy blanket with Scrubs playing on Hulu, but I’m also scribbling down every single tiny chore/assignment/personal goal for the weekend in 15-minute increments and religiously checking all three of my email accounts and color coding my schedule for the next week and…

I can’t seem to give myself permission to slow down, even for one day. I feel like I have to make up for the fact that I slept in this morning so my afternoon and evening had better set world records for productivity – even though I have Monday off and this was only the first week of classes so I don’t actually have insane amounts of work to do (yet).

Part of this discomfort with taking time off is probably linked to the similar discomfort I feel whenever I spend much time off-screen. You know what I mean; even when I don’t have anything pressing to do, my go-to entertainment is usually mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr or checking web series Twitter updates on my phone, and trying to step away from the screen once in a while is surprisingly difficult.

I’ve made small steps. I used to turn on my laptop to go on Pandora while I was getting ready in the morning, but I kept checking emails or opening other new tabs between putting on jeans and putting on a shirt, and then again between eyeshadow and mascara. Now when I feel like listening to music, I turn on my iPod and find that I’m ready a lot sooner and feel less scattered in the morning.

Of course, then I go out to the kitchen and check my email (all three of them) over breakfast. But hey, baby steps, right?

For now, I’m going over to a friend’s house and giving myself the evening off. The To Do List of Doom can wait.

Emphasis

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Emphasis: special stress laid upon, or importance attached to, anything

I like to overthink single words sometimes, particularly when one keeps following me around in my everyday life. As the new semester gets underway and I introduce myself over and over in all my new classes, I find myself confronting the word “emphasis.” It crops up as professors describe what we will emphasize this semester in our coursework, in the rules they would like to emphasize most, in my own descriptions of myself as I say I am an English major with an emphasis in creative writing.

I’ve often wondered why there is no Creative Writing major, why it must remain a subset of English. We can’t simply major in English; the university requires us to eventually choose one of four emphases. For all intents and purposes, when choosing classes or giving someone the short answer to what we study, we are in fact Creative Writing, Rhetoric, English Education, or Literary Studies Majors. But the language we use (and of course language is vital to us English Emphases Majors) divides us based on which part of English studies we choose as our focus. The language surrounding these courses of study is actually a bit of a mouthful (just imagine capitalizing all that on my diploma: English With an Emphasis in Creative Writing) but they’ve never bothered to change it.

My professors, for their part, have “just wanted to emphasize” so many stipulations and contexts and phrasings that they undermine the weight they desire to lend those things. Not everything can actually be that important; emphasizing every other thing, particularly when three other professors are doing the same thing in all my other introductory lectures, actually ends up losing meaning.

The word even keeps popping up in conversations with my friends about grad school and all the importance placed on the prestige of what we do after graduation. With all this Capital-Letters-Implied EMPHASIS on Advanced Degrees and Networking and Impressive Job Offers and Financial Success, anything less than that is dramatically disappointing…but the funny thing is, I get the feeling that actually attaining All! The! Things! would simply be meeting expectations. We’re expected to excel. We’re expected to outshine. So when we do, these accomplishments that had so much “emphasis” are suddenly just par for the course. Rather like the word itself, they have lost their original weight.

Like many overused words, then, I suppose I should be more intentional about using emphasis in my own life.  As the definition states, emphasis should be special, particular, discerning – not just tossed about willy-nilly.

On Ordering Books for Next Semester

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I despise ordering books.

I have requested that my password for my campus bookstore account be reset no less than five times, but has the email shown up yet? Nope. So here I sit, with a cart full of books that will probably be gone by the time I can finally sign in to pay for them.

Now, I realize that compared to my engineering and accounting friends, I, the English major, have it pretty easy (read, cheap). My textbooks, which tend to run along the lines of writing handbooks, are more like guidelines than actual requirements, not to mention most of the novels I read for class can be found at Half Price Books even cheaper than renting from the campus bookstore.

However.

It never seems to fail that I forget to order books until only a few days before the new semester, and that means that the rental and used book options are more limited, increasing the price and causing me extra stress when something inevitably goes wrong with the website. The whole process is just annoying, and I would so much rather spend money on the books I truly want to read.

How do you cope with ordering required materials, whether for school or work?