Musings

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

New Year – Now What?

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Have you ever noticed how the end of an old year seems like the perfect excuse to let good habits slide, because in a week or so you’re going to start new ones anyway? Maybe that’s just me. So I’ve been thinking about past resolutions I’ve managed to keep and new ones I’d like to try, and I’ve got it divvied up by a few different areas of my life:

1. This blog!

My posts here have been…irregular to say the least.  I’ll have to see what my work and class schedule is like, but my general goal will be to post at least twice during the week and once a weekend.  Fingers crossed I’ll be able to make this blog into a real thing!

2. Health!

The Southern Belle and I were pretty good about keeping up a workout routine this semester…until Dead Week rolled around.  Then we tended to go for Starbucks over the gym.  But I’d like to resurrect that workout routine with both cardio and strength training, as well as continuing to avoid packaged dinners.  I should probably also take my boyfriend’s advice and drink more water.  And eat more veggies.  You know.  General healthy eating.  But also not beating myself up over occasional slip-ups.

3. Communicating!

I seriously need to keep in better touch with my family.  And friends from high school.  I’m also filing more consistent journal writing under this, because I need to be better about communicating with myself and articulating what I’m feeling.  Along this same vein, I want to be better about keeping myself informed on what’s going on in the world, because for most of 2014 I seriously had no idea.

4. School!

This is my job right now, but I need to keep it balanced and give schoolwork the value it deserves, no more and no less.  Part of this is my resolution not to do homework at home.  Instead I’ll be utilizing the office I get a key to because I’m a managing intern for my school’s online journal (yay, power!).  I’ll also try not to rely on my tutoring shifts as time to get homework done – as nice as it is to get paid to do homework, it’s not a good habit to rely on that opportunity and then get annoyed with my students when I have to, y’know, actually do my job.

5. Fun!

I want to try new things.  I actually promised my boyfriend I would even *gulp* go skiing with him.  This semester I’ve realized that I got into a habit of writing off certain activities or aspects of life just because it’s easier to define myself that way.  For example, I tend to laugh about the idea of me going skiing because I’ve just automatically said that I hated it for so long.  I know that if I were to agree to try it, people would make a big deal out of it, so I don’t admit that actually I might be willing to try it again.

What are you trying to improve on in 2015 (or are you just staying your wonderful self)?

It’s Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Christmas

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I sat in Starbucks yesterday working on an essay and found myself grinning like an idiot when John Denver and the Muppets came on singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Singing along under my breath to Miss Piggy’s “BA DUM BUM BUM” earned some alarmed looks from the students around me, but I didn’t really care. Christmas music makes me so happy. Even when I’m stuck at school until only a week before Christmas (yay finals!) and it feels like I’m missing out on all the anticipation at home that makes the season so wonderful, I can dance around in my kitchen to Dan Fogelburg and sing along to Idina Menzel in my room and it feels something like the magical season I remember from being a kid. We only haul out these CDs once a year, but I never fail to remember every single word. They’re carved deep into my memory, an accessible form of time travel as this thing called growing up slowly seems to steal some of the magic left over from childhood.

Through the Looking-Glass of Weird Insecurities

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As I leaned at an awkward angle over the bathroom counter, peering into the magnifying mirror (a torturous invention, why do we even have those?) and yanking out rogue eyebrow hairs with a pointy metal tool (hint: tweezers), I wondered why. Why was I bothering? Even I hadn’t noticed the extra hairs between my actual brows until I glanced into the magnifying mirror. Just to confirm this, I looked at myself in the wall-mounted mirror, the one that didn’t show every blemish in horrifyingly high definition.

Nope. No unibrow.

And yet I couldn’t help trapping yet another hair between the tweezers’ points and pulling it out. Now that I looked closer, I also needed to slap one of those blackhead strip thingies on my nose. Except…oh great, I had blackheads around my lips too. A pore strip there would only pull out the (also unsightly) little fuzzy hairs around my mouth, not to mention exacerbate my winter chapped lips. (I only know this because I’ve tried to purify those blackheads before. And it hurt.)

The truth is, I’ve had a weird thing about plucking my eyebrows ever since sixth grade. That was the year the boy in front of me, who I may or may not have had a mild crush on, turned around and said, “Do you tweeze your eyebrows? Because you’ve got a unibrow goin’ on there.”

As a result, that weekend I endured the painful ministrations of a friend and her tweezers. It just so happened that this cosmetically gifted friend had also gifted me with another random insecurity – when I wore my hair in a ponytail to school one day, she commented, “No wonder you wear your hair down all the time. Your ears are filthy!”

Who says those kinds of things to a 12-year-old? But more importantly, how is it that these off-hand remarks to the 12-year-old I once was still affect my view of myself to this day? Psychologists say we remember seven negative things for every positive comment about ourselves; to me, this ratio is unsurprising. I always used to journal or somehow record the compliments I got so they wouldn’t slip away, but I’ve never had trouble remembering the times people have asked me why I never tried lightening my freckles.

Now that I’m in college, you’d think the opinions of a few sixth-graders from way back when wouldn’t affect me so much. But if I’m being honest, it’s not even their voices I still hear anymore. I see stray eyebrow hairs and yes, I think of that boy twisting around in his desk to make a blunt observation, but it’s my own internal criticism saying, “Better get rid of that unibrow. We don’t want a repeat of Fred’s comment.” I put my hair into a ponytail and it says, “Shouldn’t you clean your ears, just in case? Remember what Sally said.” The fact is that although I am older and at least a smidgen wiser, I have so deeply internalized these critiques of my appearance that I no longer even need the memories to bolster them. They are standalone insecurities. I have made them my own.

I have learned from experience not to pin all my self-worth on others’ opinions. I am still learning, slowly, to accept my body and the self inside it. First, though, I’ll have to put the tweezers down.

Making a List and Checking It a Lot

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This couldn’t be happening. It was always right here. I put it in my backpack every single morning – how could I possibly have forgotten?

But my beautiful, organized, color-coded, checklist-sporting planner was conspicuously absent from the set of binders and notebooks in my backpack. An empty pocket where my life should be.

This may sound a bit overdramatic, but it wasn’t until I had to spend the day without my planner that I realized how much I use it. It’s not so much the actual planning – I can remember assignments pretty well, and there’s always the syllabus if something slips my mind – but the security blanket part of it. You see, I love to make lists. Lists of chores, lists of assignments, lists of miscellaneous emails that need to be sent, lists of time slots in which to accomplish each of these separate, color-coded sets of things. It has become my habit to rewrite, reorganize, and otherwise revamp any and all of these lists whenever I’m bored, nervous, stressed, or overwhelmed (oh look, there’s two lists in this sentence alone!) or at intervals throughout the day. It’s how I convince myself that I have my life together. My planner gives me the proverbial handle on things. When I flip through and see the scribbled beauty of its check marks and highlights, it both soothes and empowers me, like the montage of Elle Woods buckling down and kicking ass at school while “Watch Me Shine” plays in the background. (I may or may not also watch that montage whenever I need some quick motivation.)

So at first, I felt adrift without my planner there to guide me. I reached for it at all the usual times. When Spanish class got boring, I made do with scribbling funny nicknames on my boyfriend’s practice test, to which he retaliated by adding “Her Majesty” to my own name. When I had to go last for a presentation, I made mental notes and adjustments to my prepared talk and asked a few questions of the two people who had gone before me. Now, as I sit at work waiting for people to walk in (I’m on receptionist duty this hour), I’m working on another post for this poor, neglected blog.

Generally, when life is a bit too much, seeing it all written down and prioritized helps me stave off anxiety and further stress – as I said before, a security blanket. But maybe, just maybe, I need to put the planner down every once in a while. I did survive a whole day without it and I didn’t go too crazy. Besides, what good is there in being organized if I’m not really present?

Mysterious Water Leaks Don’t Care About Feminism

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I came home last night to a squishy floor. My roomie informed me that water had been pooling in our hallway (really more of a smallish space between doorways, but we call it a hallway) ever since she got home, and it was starting to soak through the carpet. As the evening went on, we put down more and more towels, the water spreading until our floor looked like laundry day dumped out on the rug.

In one respect, I was glad we were both girls, because my boyfriend would never have had enough towels to deal with this. (I once had to explain to him what a linen closet was.) Not to stereotype, but girls just tend to accumulate more fabric goods, if only because our relatives don’t know what else to give us for graduation and Christmas.

But toweling needs aside, when we realized we didn’t want to wake up to an entirely flooded apartment, we called – you guessed it – a male friend to come over and look at what was wrong. Our neighbor, who is a friend of ours, stopped by and showed us how to turn off the heating part of the water heater, but he couldn’t turn the valve to stop the water flow to the tank.

After he left, we started thinking of who we knew who might have the tools we needed. I actually ended up calling my boyfriend’s roommate, because I knew my boyfriend was already asleep and turns his phone off at night. So BF’s Roomie graciously came over, even though he had almost been asleep himself, and figured out a way to bust through the corrosion on the valve and cease the water flow. I rejoiced!

Except we could still hear dripping.

Turns out it was a pipe behind the water heater, which BF’s Roomie found with the help of my little ladybug mirror from B&BW (three cheers for sparkly impulse buys!). I called maintenance at precisely 8:00 this morning, and a very nice man is now draining our hot water tank and explaining to me how these older apartments have this super awesome design where a drain is placed behind the water heater where only house-elves could possibly reach it to keep it clear and clean. So that’s clogged, obviously, but he says we’ll have it fixed by the end of the day.

But once again, as with my car, I found myself succumbing to an instinct that told me I had to justify my decision-making in a home maintenance problem. Even as BF’s Roomie was working away at the shutoff valve, I was rambling about the evidence that suggested it was the water heater, or something in that area, and how shutting off the power and the water made sense. BF’s Roomie patiently listened and agreed with everything I said, but he gave me a few funny looks, so at one point I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but as a girl I’ve sort of been raised with this societal instinct that whatever I decide to do about home maintenance stuff is probably wrong.”

“Yay stereotyping,” he answered dryly.

I was able to recognize, identify, and control the ingrained tendency to second-guess myself this time, so I suppose my experience with my car breaking down has made some inroads into my mental definition of Me As Female Dealing With Problems of Male Expertise. And even though it turned out it wasn’t the water heater leaking, we would never have found the real problem without the logical decisions my roommate and I made.

A Book About College

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I want to write a book about college. There’s a startling lack of fiction set during these years; it’s like everything skips straight from high school to office life and marriage. But, to paraphrase a friend, we naturally seek out representations of ourselves. And it’s hard enough going through college and all the adjustments therein without having the up-to-now comforting world of fiction to back you up. It’s just a gap I’d like to fill.

But I don’t really know how to begin.

The Many Layers of Lizzie Bennet

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Yesterday I received my very own copy of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. And today I finished reading it. All 377 pages of it.

I have loved the Lizzie Bennet Diaries ever since my freshman year of college (NOTE: If you have not watched them, stop reading right now, go to YouTube, and watch them. All of them. Right now.), and have only grown to love them more as I rewatched them over and over again (occasionally I find myself just binge-watching all 100 episodes plus the related secondary arcs in a matter of 48 hours. Much like reading the book. But I digress). At first I simply enjoyed watching the creativity of updating Jane Austen’s classic novel and translating it into modern media. Then, on the second or third go-round, I started to think about the online community Lizzie was creating. So I started scrolling through the comments section below the videos, reading the conversations people were having, the reactions. I even commented a few times.

I was absurdly proud when my comment became the top one on Episode 18.

Then came the watch-through at the beginning of my junior year of college, right when all the undergrad stuff starts to give way to the “better plan something for after graduation in two years” pressure. Even though Lizzie’s story takes place in grad school, the connection between her fear of departing the Bubble of Academia and mine had strengthened. I was staring down similar questions of what I wanted to do with my life, battling similar tendencies toward prejudice, struggling with a similar workload.

Reading the book has added another layer to my experience of the LBD as a whole. Besides adding new twists to the plotlines and revealing specific details in settings we never saw on camera, the book even better translated Lizzie’s inner turmoil, not only over her sister’s love life, but over what to put online, what content she wanted to generate, what she wanted to contribute to the world.

And damn. As much as she procrastinated some of those decisions, girl got stuff done.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been…stuck.  I might elaborate a bit in future posts, but for now suffice it to say that I was sorely lacking in motivation to even go to class, let alone answer my professors’ questions about whether or not I’m considering grad school or what internships I’m pursuing for this summer.  All I ever wanted to say to them was, “I don’t even have a complete resume right now.  Leave me alone.”

As sappy as it might sound, reading about Lizzie Bennet’s success in pursuing what she loved, both familial and career-wise, helped jolt me at least a few inches back toward reality.  I’m going to make the most of this vicariously earned productivity – and not just by making blog posts.  Hopefully.

Honestly, that’s what amazes me about multimedia storytelling these days.  I adore books; they were the background to my childhood, and will always hold a special place in my heart.  But there’s a big difference between reading something and sitting down a week later around a cheese plate in someone’s family room to talk for a few hours, and being able to contribute to an immediate and growing shared forum. It’s fascinating to watch the communities that spring up around projects like LBD and Vlogbrothers.  Even SnarkSquad, the blog that got me re-interested in blogging and online content, has its own little band of followers.

Membership in such communities around multimedia projects extends well past mere Internet fame; because the narrative originates in a platform that allows immediate sharing of reactions to the content, a viewer also becomes a contributor in real time.  Passivity becomes a choice rather than a fact of the medium.

And discussion of the content is no longer confined to whoever else is in the living room while you control the remote.  Worldwide critical discussions take place every day around every type of narrative possible.  It’s beautiful and intriguing to watch as the swirling conversations on Tumblr connect with the YouTube comments which intertwine with the Facebook and Twitter threads.  We get to watch and read and listen to these amazing creative things – and then we get to join in.

Over here in my own little narratively nerdy corner of the Internet, I’ll be trying not to take that for granted.

Selecting a Library For Optimal Productivity

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I have learned that I cannot do homework at home.

It’s just too hard to focus in a place that I associate with relaxation and hours of catching up on Hulu Plus. And I don’t want my apartment to become a place that I solely associate with homework, because then the stress and anxiety will just follow me home. So I decided to do the typical student thing and go to the library.

But I don’t like my on-campus library – half the shelves are empty, and the study carrels are carved up with generations of initials and crude drawings of genitals, and someone’s cell phone inevitably goes off and someone else is always laughing and it just doesn’t feel like a library. The other campus library, for engineering and science majors, though not actually exclusive to those areas of study, is little better.

The Honors library, on the other hand, is just quiet enough, with cozy window seats and cushiony armchairs and soft lighting. But it’s also incredibly small, and depending on the number of strangers in there, it can feel a bit like you’ve intruded on someone else’s class, which makes it difficult if you want to study with a friend. We can’t all have study partners like Elle Woods when she’s cramming for her LSATs.

My third and final option, then, was the public library downtown. This required driving, which was just as well since I left my laptop at home and would have had to drive home and back anyway. Off I went, laptop in tow, and I settled into a comfy chair in a back corner of the library surrounded by windows and the pleasantly gray day outside and I read my homework and made my discussion post and worked on my resume and just like that I had done everything I needed to do except go shopping.

Lesson? Libraries are magic.

Feminism at the Mechanic’s

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As I’ve already told you, my car broke down a few weeks ago. I chronicled the stress of the experience in the previous post. But now that I have some emotional and temporal distance from the incident I’ve thought about it more and managed to identify one contributing factor to my general anger at the situation.

I realized that part of my stress came from the fact that, subconsciously or otherwise, I had been conditioned my entire life to believe that if I, a lone female, entered a mechanic’s place of business, they would think me gullible, naive, and an easy target. Somewhere deep in the dusty file labeled “Car Stuff” in my brain, I had noted that if I ever needed to visit a mechanic, I should take a friend – no, a male friend – with me so that he could lend me some credibility. Mental images of scruffy men in oil-spattered coveralls elbowing each other and saying, “Heh heh” played over and over in my head. So I obeyed my socially conditioned impulse and took my male friend with me.

I have no idea where this lesson came from. It only just surfaced now, so I don’t remember if my dad or my mom or some well-meaning authority figure once told me that I should never go alone to a mechanic’s “as a girl” for fear of getting swindled. I asked my boyfriend about it, and he expressed surprise that I would ever feel that way. He had no idea what I was talking about. My female friends, on the other hand, yelped, “Exactly!” before I had even finished describing the situation. None of us could figure out where we’d learned it, but there it was – something in the air of the society we live in had taught us that we as females would not be respected as clients paying for a service in a traditionally male-centered industry. And we believed them.

When the mechanic initially only directed questions at my male friend, I resented it. I butted in to the conversation as if to say, “I’m here too.” Of course, once the process got under way and I became the real client in that I had to approve all the specific repairs and ordering of parts, everyone was perfectly nice. They explained each problem they found without condescension, gave me reasonable estimates, and bantered with me each time they called. Needless to say, they were not, in fact, rubbing their hands with glee at the chance to rip off some clueless female. They were skilled professionals performing a task for which I paid (or rather, my dad paid) a reasonable price.

And yet, even after this, I wonder if I’ll have the confidence, when I’m in a new city on my own, to waltz into a strange garage without a male friend at my side. It’s funny (in a sad kind of way) how deeply sexism runs.

Car Troubles

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So my car broke down this Saturday.

Well, it didn’t so much break down as start shuddering like crazy and need an absurd amount of acceleration to climb the hill to my apartment complex with my roommate and I cheering it along the whole way. I got it into a parking spot, turned it off a little more violently than I probably needed to, and promptly dragged my boyfriend out to look at it. He couldn’t find an obvious problem besides, well, the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light on the dash, but we obtained a sensor thingy that informed us a cylinder was misfiring. Which can apparently mean several things. But it’s a start.

So then it was Sunday, and I called my dad, who will actually pay for the repairs because I am a broke college student and the vehicle is not actually in my name, and there were no mechanics open because it was Sunday, so I just caught a ride to church and sort of pushed it to the back of my brain.

So then today came, and I realized several things. One was that I had to walk to work for the first time this year, a feat which ended up only taking me 20 minutes and was actually probably the most peaceful part of my day.

Another realization was that I now had to select a mechanic, get someone to tow my car to said mechanic, and inform the lovely people at the mechanic’s of what was going on. Somehow.

My natural instinct was to ask advice. Normally I would defer to my dad, who would take the car in wherever he chose and return it to me in a few days good as new. But he is on the other side of the state. So I asked my boyfriend, and my friend who’s good with cars, and my boyfriend’s brother, and our neighbor who had given me a ride to church. They all had varying levels of expertise, of course, but I trust their judgment and knew that they would genuinely care about whether or not my car continued to function.

The problem is that every time I came up with what I thought was a workable solution based on the information I had, and then shared it, someone would pipe up, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” No, I didn’t know what I was doing, but everyone seemed to have a different opinion on how I should resolve the problem, and since I had asked for their advice, I felt like I had to take those opinions into account.

I have spent today in this weird chasm of conflicting feelings. As much as I told myself I am a 20-year-old woman who can navigate situations like these just fine on her own, I was, in fact, dependent on other people’s advice. Ultimately my dad had to call our insurance company to get a tow truck for me (because yes, I legitimately never thought of calling them to deal with this) and even then Lightning ended up being the one who told the guys at the shop what was going on with my car. Not that I really minded, but I hated being the stereotypical girl who needed to be rescued from car troubles. Despite my desire for independence, I couldn’t seem to stick with the choices I kept making.

This is the first time my car’s ever been undriveable, so I suppose I should just look at this as a learning experience. Hopefully the next time this happens, if I’m interning somewhere on the other side of the country, I’ll have the presence of mind to call a damn tow truck, arrange my own transportation, and inform the mechanics myself of what’s happening with my own car.