Musings

The backbone of this blog – my thoughts and feelings about pretty much anything.

Why Yes, You Can Sit With Us

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A follow up to yesterday’s post.

As my more reasonable readers could have probably predicted, my visits to the gym and the writing group did not, in fact, result in me getting chased out of the building.  Despite my apprehensions, it actually went rather well.

There was one employee at the gym who looked at me askance, but I just chalked that up to the fact that I sidled in wearing street clothes and not carrying anything that looked remotely like gym equipment.  The girl who ended up helping me was perfectly nice and answered all my awkward questions.

Similarly, the writing group greeted me warmly (I’d even met one of them before, even though my boss wasn’t there) – the proprietor of the coffee shop where they hold it noticed my laptop and asked if I was here to write.  When I said yes, the others looked up, asked what I was working on, and scooted over to make room for me.  The atmosphere was great, and I managed to get a decent amount of work done on my own stories for two whole hours!  There wasn’t much talking, but it didn’t feel oppressive – rather, we were all there to accomplish a similar goal, and that tacit support helped me make progress.  (My story is actually starting to look like a novel!)

Even though I slept through yoga this morning, and even though I probably won’t remember all the other writers’ names next week, it was reassuring to be accepted.

Now I just have to stop being so nervous about the writers’ conference coming up in July.  Sighhh…

Walk Into the Club Like Wait, I Can’t Dance

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I didn’t get invited to parties in high school. I don’t say this for sympathy, or to complain; honestly, I didn’t even know there was a party scene at my school because my circle of friends all hung out at the coffee shop at the bottom of the hill and didn’t care much for loud music and mind-altering substances. So it’s not like I ever really felt left out. I had my crowd, and the partiers had theirs. You do you.

Rather, I bring this up because that’s the only social situation I can really think of that might have helped me suppress my introversion to the point that I wouldn’t feel so supremely uncomfortable walking into a room where I don’t know anyone and where I am not completely certain that I’m welcome.

Cartoon from the fabulous Hyperbole and a Half
Cartoon from the fabulous Hyperbole and a Half which you should check out because it’s perfection.

For instance, I signed up for a gym membership on the island where I’ll be living this summer, so as not to negate all the progress the Southern Belle and I had made in Zumba during the school year.  But joining the classes means walking into the gym.  By myself.  Where people, stronger and fitter and taller people, are also working out.  And judging me.  Probably.  I feel like that would happen, anyway.  The employees will probably be perfectly happy to have me there – I did give them my money, after all – but the social situation of trying to improve myself while also being acutely aware that I’m in a group of complete strangers doesn’t exactly put me at ease.

And then tomorrow, my boss invited me to a writing group at the coffee shop on the end of the pier.  Now, I’ve never been part of a writing group before.  And I will know someone there (my boss) and I have been explicitly invited (again, by my boss).  But I can just picture myself walking in, laptop in hand, pulling up a chair to the corner of the table because of course there won’t actually be room for me, so right away I’ll be inconveniencing the people who have probably been coming there forever, and then I’ll have such bad writer’s block that I’l end up just rereading that horrible, horrible mystery story I tried to write in 5th grade and slink out at the end of the meeting, aware of my own utter lack of talent and convinced that everyone else could tell I didn’t deserve to be there.

Yeah, even as I write that it sounds ridiculous and a little paranoid.

The fact is, everyone at the gym will probably be in their own little world, just like me, and some of them might even be encouraging.  And the people at the writing group will probably be perfectly welcoming and eager to hear what I’m writing about and want to motivate everyone in the group to just get writing, no matter how terrible the first draft might be.

But this is how I feel anytime I walk into an unfamiliar place, like a gym or a writing group, on my own.  I can’t seem to shake the idea that I am somehow lacking, that I will be intruding if I ask for guidance or friendship, that I am annoying the one person I do know by sticking so close to them but also will commit some kind of social sin if I try to branch out on my own.  I feel like I stick out like Elle Woods in her bunny costume at her first Harvard party.

I may be faking it pretty well.  I may even be socializing even better than I think I am.

But all I really want to do is go home and read with a cup of coffee.  It’s so much easier to introduce my awkward self to the world through the written word, like this blog.  Socializing is hard, guys.

Enjoy

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to experience with joy; to take pleasure in

For someone whose brain rarely shuts up, I have a tough time with mindfulness.  The concept of being present, of taking in each thing as it comes instead of constantly planning and worrying, makes plenty of sense when I look at it objectively.  Executing the practice, on the other hand…

Sometimes it seems as though there’s too much space in my mind devoted to doubts, worries, rants, complaints, and failures.  My memories love to dredge up classic reruns of my most embarrassing moments, so much so that I’ll be squirming in my seat at the thought of something that happened years ago.  I may not be the best at this “adult” thing, but I feel like blurting out something awkward in 5th grade shouldn’t still bother me so much.  (Then again, if any of you have found a way to truly get over your middle school embarrassments, for the love of all that is good in this world, TELL ME YOUR WAYS.)

Some people call this “negative self-talk.”  These same people tell me of something called “self-compassion,” which is, again, a concept that sounds grand but is tricky to implement.  My thoughts have worn ruts of worry in my synapses.  I don’t have the time, it seems, to stop and breathe.

That’s why I’ve been thinking about the word “enjoy” lately.  It caught me while I was rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s excellent memoir A Circle of Quiet, where she spends several early chapters discussing the concept of joy.  She talks about existing, about resting, in that joy she feels in a simple moment – and she talks, too, about how rare it is for her to quiet herself enough to do that.  It comforts me that I am not the only one who has difficulty simply being.

The word “enjoy” originally came from Middle English for “to make joyful,” or Old French for “to give joy to.”  Joy, it seems to me, is a much more serious business than mere contentment or happiness.  “Happy” has something of a giddiness to it.  “Joy” has weight.  It leaves an imprint.  But that mark, that gentle, comforting weight like a hand on our shoulder, only comes when we let ourselves “enjoy,” when we let ourselves exist in the moment.  In joy.

So I’ve been trying to pay attention to the joyful moments, to the little things that allow me to exist “in joy” for a second or two, and to rest, rather than squirm, in the unusual quiet of my brain.

I started off easy – it’s all too natural for me to enjoy the first sip of coffee in the morning, or a well-written sentence that makes me close the book and stare off into space for a moment to absorb the craft of the words, or a monarch butterfly flashing across my path, or a fuzzy puppy rolling over and begging to be petted.

But it’s other things too.  It’s realizing that it doesn’t bother me to eat lunch alone in a strange town because I know I’m here for an internship that provides me with work I truly love doing.  It’s one-word texts from the Engineer.  It’s establishing witty rapport almost immediately with my new coworkers.  And it’s stepping outside the trailer in the evening and letting comfort seep down from a starry dome, even though it’s cold, even though I should go to sleep, because it feels good just to be – just to exist in joy.

Now I’m curious – what do you enjoy?

Water Water Everywhere

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So I’m on an island.

Not a tropical island, the kind that shows up in clip art with palm trees and sand and maybe a coconut or two even though I’m not even sure coconuts grow on palm trees and those are the only vegetation visible in these stereotypical island illustrations.

I am on an island between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound, one of those bumpy places on the map whose outline looks like the leftover dough after the cookies have been cut out.  I have a bed in a trailer in the driveway of the Engineer’s grandparents.  I have a one-cup coffee maker, and yogurt for breakfast, and my GRE prep book, and my laptop, and most of my dresses hanging from a tension rod in the shower because it’s summer, and I like to wear dresses, perhaps too many, though I sent some home with my mom because she said there was no way they would all fit.

I am on this island for the latest Big Exciting Thing: my internship with a company that actually does what I hope to end up doing (editing and publishing).  I haven’t actually gone to work yet, but I’m quite excited.  At the moment, I’m in an armchair in the public library, gazing out at the water (that’s the nice thing about an island – drive long enough and you find a spectacular ocean view!).  Now I think I’ll wander down to the wharf to try out one of the coffee shops, since I anticipate wanting to find a hang-out where I can caffeinate and read comfortably for what may be hours on end.

Yesterday I saw the most charming little bookshop.

I can smell the saltwater when I open the windows in my cozy little trailer.

I think I will be happy here.

That Time I Almost Punched a Sexist

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As a freshman in high school, I was the type of girl who enjoyed stepping menacingly toward my male friends when they said something that offended me, even though we all knew I would never actually lay a finger on them. Besides, I was too short to be scary. (I’m still short, but I sometimes pride myself on the ability to be menacing when necessary.)  Violence was not, in fact, my go-to problem solving strategy.

Still, I knew I would have a hard time not slapping the smirk off P.B.’s face the minute I met him.

calvin and susie bug

We were in English, one of the few classes in which I was not on the honors track because my high school did not have an honors English class for freshmen.  While by junior year I could happily spend 75% of the day away from those students to whom I was merely a nerd who took school too seriously, freshman English required me to rub shoulders with people who still stopped at the end of every line, whether or not there was a period, when reading aloud.  (The teacher also frequently asked my help spelling things on the board, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in his pedantic abilities, but I digress.)

I don’t remember how it started – the teacher must have asked us to have a conversation about something in the lesson with a partner nearby – but somehow I found myself talking to P.B., who was twisted around from his seat in front of me and was draping one lanky arm across my open copy of Lord of the Flies.  Glaring, I slid it out from under him so he wouldn’t wrinkle the page.  Whatever we were originally supposed to be discussing, the conversation turned to grades and schedules.  He bragged that he had a B+ in the class, to which I nodded approval.

I was less approving of his shock at the fact that I had a high A.  He began quizzing me on my grades and how many honors classes I was in.  At first I didn’t care, but it quickly grew satisfying to see him attempting to process the idea that I was probably beating him in the GPA department.

“Well, I must have a higher grade than you in math,” he said finally, leaning back against the metal bar connecting his chair to his desk.  (His arm was still across my desk.)

I rolled my eyes.  “I’m in Geometry Honors and you’re in Algebra,” I said, trying to point out that he couldn’t really compare our grades there because we were studying entirely different things.

He smirked patronizingly.  “I’m still probably better than you.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Because guys are better at it than girls.  You just aren’t smart enough to think that way.”  The most remarkable thing, now that I look back on it, is his tone – there was no malice.  He was simply stating something of which he was utterly convinced.

“That…is..the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, trying to control my tone.

He shrugged.  “It’s true.”

Almost unconsciously, as though independent from my body, my left hand curled into a fist and my elbow drew back as though I was about to fire an arrow from a bow.  I had never punched anyone before, but P.B. was about to be the lucky first.

Until my teacher materialized at my side and asked, “How’s the conversation going here?” a little too brightly, having seen it all unfold from across the room.  I honestly don’t remember the rest of that class, although I do remember that when we next came to English the teacher announced we had new seats and P.B. was diagonally opposite me, literally as far away as the teacher could physically place us.  This was probably a wise move.

This incident, one of my earliest face-to-face encounters with the concept of sexism, sticks with me for several reasons.

One, I had never realized that people could be so certain of something that I found so obviously wrong.  P.B. was jeering at me, but he was just as convinced that females were inferior as I was convinced that the earth is round.  We had discussed discrimination and assumptions about women’s abilities in my family before (see: weirdest dinner conversations ever), but it hadn’t really dawned on me that there were people – people in my day-to-day world, no less – who actually thought of me that way. It was suddenly and newly personal.

Two, because it was one of the first times I had ever come right up against sexism, I had no idea how to react.  I was angry, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to correct him or explain to him why his certainty had no actual support.  (Sometimes I wonder, though, if one good punch would have convinced him much faster that girls are just as good as boys…kidding, kidding!  Mostly.)  And I realized how much I – and all the girls around me – needed to develop that vocabulary.

Dead Time

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A week is a weird amount of time. It’s both too long and too short. Too long to feel like it’s okay to take an entire seven days off. Too short to feel like there’s enough time to truly accomplish anything.

At least, that’s how I feel as I try to decide how many t-shirts to unpack in my wispy peach colored bedroom for the next week before I move up to the Engineer’s grandparents’ house to start my internship.

I dislike teetering on the cusp of things. I dislike the buildup to the downward plunge. (As you might guess, I also hate roller coasters.)  I dislike anticipating change for so long that all I can do is sit around making plan after plan.  Don’t get me wrong – I dislike sudden change, too, but at least I can spring into action and deal with it.  It’s far worse in my mind to have to simply, as someone once put it to me, sit with the uncertainty.

So this feels more like spring break than summer, which means I feel like I should have homework and be living out of a suitcase instead of unpacking and catching up on Once Upon A Time.  It seems as though this is simply the waiting room, and I have yet to be ushered into my actual summer.  Any routines I establish this week will be upended on Saturday when I leave again anyway.  And yet, if I get into that vacation mindset, I’m worried I’ll lose my momentum for productivity.

Part of me is simply eager to get started on an amazing new job.  Part of me is impatient to have a routine I can stay comfortably ensconced in for the next three months.  Part of me is frustrated that, like the month and half of last summer spent preparing for the Big Exciting Thing, I am once again simply drifting in a kind of limbo.

Why can’t I just rush through it in a peppy montage and let the music fade as I drive into the town where I’ll be spending the summer?

Of course I love spending time at home with my family.  Of course I love getting to have some time to recharge after a semester of craziness.  Still, it’s difficult for me, as I’ve admitted before, to slow down for too long.  (And I really am excited about this internship.)

When Furniture Moves in the Night

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My dad used to come home in the middle of the night sometimes from work trips.  Trying to be considerate of his sleeping wife and daughters, he would tiptoe through the house – only to bang his shin and nearly take off a toe on the furniture that had moved since the last time he walked through the living room.

When we got older and Mom took it into her head to rearrange the house while Dad was on a trip, Bird and I had to help.

“Why,” we asked, wedging our shoulders under the arm of the couch while she lifted the other end like Wonder Woman, “can’t this wait until Dad is home to help?”

Mom shook her head at us, the upended couch swaying slightly in her grip.  “Girls, if we can do it ourselves – and we can – why wait?  Now, lift with your legs.”  We sighed.

To be fair, two generations of women in my family before her had repositioned furniture while their husbands were away – it was an inherited habit, one that sneakily followed me to college.  Last year, when the Commodore and I were sharing a room, we grew tired of the bunk bed arrangement and decided to unstack the beds.  I texted the Engineer to ask him to come help us move furniture while the Commodore paced out the new arrangement of our room.  The novelty of a fresh room arrangement (and the idea of no longer hitting our heads every time we got in or out of bed) was exciting.

Except the Engineer couldn’t make it.  Maybe this weekend he might be free.

The Commodore and I looked at each other.  And then we started shoving smaller furniture aside to make room for us to lift the upper bunk down from its perch.

Our third roommate’s boyfriend insisted on helping us, because he heard the scraping and sliding from the living room and, as he told his girlfriend, “I want to make sure these two don’t kill themselves.”  But the point was that, regardless of whether or not a Male Personage miraculously appeared to assist us, we felt like moving the furniture, so dammit, we were going to move the furniture.

When we settled down in our newly un-bunked (debunked?) beds that night, I told the Commodore about my parents and my grandparents and rearranging the house in the absence of one’s spouse.  She laughed.

“Of course your mom would do that,” she said.  “Still, it was nice to have help.”  She sat up straighter in her bed and declared, “We are Strong, Independent, 21st Century Women…who are quite happy to let guys do the heavy lifting if they feel so inclined.”

And that’s just what I love.  The lesson that I learned from my mother was not to reject a friend’s help, be they male or female, but rather to not put my life on hold until someone bigger or stronger can come and help me take the next step.  When Dad was home, of course he was roped into helping.  But if the mood struck while he was away, she made my sister and I feel that we didn’t necessarily need a man’s physical strength to get things done.  She showed us how to put towels under the feet of the couch to slide it across hardwood floors, how to come up with innovative ways to take a burst of inspiration and run with it despite potential obstacles.

And, of course, always lift with your legs.

Stuff To Do This Summer

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Pray.

Bible study with Bird.

Study for the GRE.

Enjoy and learn from my new internship.

Do DuoLingo or something to keep up my extremely rusty Spanish.

Maybe learn some basic Italian while I’m at it.

Keep up an exercise routine.

Keep up this blog.

Work on some of my own stories.

Get back in touch with old friends.

Go to a friend’s wedding.

Start research for my thesis.

Speaking of which, should probably get that proposal revised and turned in.

Visit the Engineer.

Visit the Southern Belle.

Learn my way around my new town, including finding a bookshop and coffee place to frequent in my down time.

Start journaling again.

Put on sunscreen.

Drink a lot of coffee.

Be happy.

Feminism and Texting Family Members

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“Take your boyfriend with you.”

I had just texted my dad that the teeny-tiny cracks spidering up the side edge of my phone, which hadn’t been a problem up until now, had left a snowflake of glass in the flesh between my forefinger and my thumb yesterday.  He said that the Phone Store should replace it, no problem.  Then my screen flashed again with a second text.

“Take your boyfriend with you.”

Now why should I have to do that?  Why should I have to drag the Engineer along as a buffer so the Phone Store Employees won’t sneer at me and patronizingly tell me that the only way I get a new phone is with a new contract that will (obviously) cost my father millions?

The Engineer, as much as I love him, is useless when it comes to my phone.  He can’t figure out touchscreens to save his life.  He has a flip phone with a QWERTY keyboard and is quite happy with it.  But the Phone Store Employees will not know that.  They will know only that he is a man, and therefore automatically more knowledgeable of technology and money-handling in general and less likely to be trifled with than me, a woman.

Grr.

I don’t blame my dad for this.  Honestly, I’ve never particularly enjoyed going in to try to get someone to replace or repair something for me without an adult there.  But I’ve also grown up around my mother, who can make a grown man turn pale in the face of her righteous indignation when she is dissatisfied.  Not that she flies into a rage if her soup is tepid, but she also isn’t one to back down if something needs to be made right.  As I tentatively step into adulthood, I’m slowly learning to hold my ground and evenly ask for decent treatment and service, the way my mom has my whole life while my dad was off on trips for the airline.  I may be a daddy’s girl in some cases (if I were at home, I would probably barely look up from my laptop long enough to hand Dad my phone to go get it fixed, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy), but here at school, I do have to run my own errands, fill up my own car, take care of my own apartment, etc.  And why shouldn’t that independence of school life extend to getting a warrantied phone replaced?

Furthermore, it’s a sign of a deeper societal issue that Dad didn’t even have to explain why he thought I should take my knight in shining armor with me.  He wasn’t suggesting it as a date idea – our family has some weird ideas about love, but getting a phone replaced is not exactly a typical couples activity – nor was he saying that the Engineer should tag along to learn the ropes of getting Phone Store Employees to listen to him.  The implied subtext, the only underlying message that makes sense as Society has taught us, is that I needed the Engineer, the man in my life in a protective role, to accompany me the same way my other friend did to the mechanic’s last semester, and for the same reason: that I would not be taken seriously on my own.

ADDENDUM: According to the Commodore, the acceptable reason that you should ever have to have a male accompany you anywhere is just in case you need someone to sacrifice in Trial By Combat.  Obviously, since we are Strong, Independent, 21st Century Women, we could handle such a challenge on our own, but it’s much more convenient bringing someone to sacrifice in our stead.  These things happen.

Running Pell-mell

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You know when you were a kid and you used to fling yourself headlong down any hill you could, not caring that you might trip and roll to the bottom because grass was soft and you were invincible and even if you ran smack into a tree and got a knot on the head you would probably lie there grinning because it was a joy just to run?

You know when you started to grow and your limbs were too long or too uncertain for the rest of your body and you cartwheeled like a starfish, slowly and heavily, and suddenly halfway down the hill you became aware that the upper half of your body was leaning just a bit too far forward and would get to the bottom just a bit quicker than your legs could and it pulled you up short, heartbeat staccato, because suddenly you cared if you tripped because there were rocks embedded in the soil?

You know when you first stopped at the top of a hill to examine, objectively, whether or not it just might be too steep, too much like the obtuse angles in the textbook in the backpack weighing you down, and ended up edging down sideways because it was safer?

You know when a hill started sounding more like an obstacle than fun?

You know when going downhill started to have a negative connotation, because when a business or school or a relationship went downhill it was bad news?

You know when you seem to be perched at the top of an impending week, peering over the edge of Sunday night and wondering how fast you’ll end up rushing down Monday’s slope into the fray, and you can’t remember when running pell-mell down a slope went from exhilarating to overwhelming…