Transitions

Thoughts from those in-between places

Mysterious Water Leaks Don’t Care About Feminism

GraceLeave a comment

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

Aside GraceLeave a comment

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.

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.

Familiar Amusements in Unfamiliar Airports

Aside GraceLeave a comment

I write this in an airport.

Now, airports do not inherently make me nervous.  I am a pilot’s daughter, after all.  Ever since I can remember, we’ve flown standby.  I flew alone for the first time when I was 12.  Getting a boarding pass, going through security, navigating unfamiliar airports, etc. are not difficult tasks for me.

Having to let someone else make all my travel plans is another matter.

The organization through which I am participating in the Exciting Thing sent me the flight info only two weeks ago, and made sure to give me “as much time as possible” to make my connecting flight in DC – which apparently means I needed four hours to kill in between my flights.

Being a good little child of the internet, I found a quiet, empty gate in which to putter away on my laptop, having wasted spent many happy hours at home on Pinterest, Facebook, and the like.  I can amuse myself for four hours, no problem.

Except I quickly realized that there is a vast difference between aimlessly scrolling through Pinterest board after Pinterest board on my own couch where I can burst out laughing or sobbing without fear of judgment, and checking the same time-wasting websites awkwardly taking up three airport chairs while strangers walk past.  I was surprised by the discomfort produced by trying to replicate my private amusements in an unavoidably public setting.  Where normally it’s all too easy to slip into the hypnotizing whirlpool of Online World for an afternoon, I found myself looking up every time someone walked within five feet of me, jolted out of my own train of thought and awkwardly aware that other human beings surrounded me.  The interesting thing is that I’m not entirely sure if this uncomfortable feeling originates from a sense of obligation to interact with these other people (even though many of them don’t care to begin a conversation and would probably look at me strangely if I tried), a mild self-absorption (then again, who doesn’t wonder if strangers are noticing them while out in public?), or simply the disconnect between a normally homebound activity and my new, busy setting.

But I guess my predicament really says more about my ability to communicate/interact/be around other people in general.  Spending as much time as I do either somewhere with a specific purpose (e.g., class) or on my way to a specific purpose (e.g., walking to class), I don’t really spend a lot of down time just existing in the world at large.  My time without an assignment tends to be spent in solitude, which explains why I’m blogging to no one instead of striking up a conversation with the other people who have slowly joined me in the formerly empty gate.  But as we all sit here with at least three seats between us and anyone else, I can’t help thinking it’s not entirely my fault.  We are all wrapped up in amusing ourselves, not taking advantage of whatever we might have in common, just smiling awkwardly whenever we accidently make eye contact.