AA Milne capitals

In his Winnie-the-Pooh books, AA Milne often creatively used capital letters, such as Christopher Robin giving Pooh a Special Pencil Case or calling Pooh a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness. These posts use similar capitals in an occasionally childish emphasis on the Importance of a Thing.

List

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a series of names or other items written or printed together in a meaningful grouping or sequence so as to constitute a record

I am a very happy writing nerd today.

As part of the Visiting Writers Series at my university, two editors from well-known literary reviews are putting on a week-long, one credit workshop on editing and publishing.  It meets for three hours in the evenings, so I was initially a tad concerned about this loss of such a large chunk of homework time (not to mention dinnertime!).  Still, I thought, when else in my life will I get this kind of opportunity, to spend so much time in a relatively small and intimate group receiving direct feedback and advice from a successful editor and writer?

So I went last night, our first meeting, and we worked with lists.

As evidenced in previous posts, I organize my life several times a day, usually centering around lists.  I list the meals I need to take time to eat, the homework I need to do, the extracurricular projects I need to complete, the friends and family I need to call.  Listing things, for me, is already powerful in that it corrals my thoughts and lends them sequence, categorization, order.

In the workshop, we extended this philosophy to creative nonfiction, producing lists under thematic headings.  We began our sentences with “I remember,” listing memories that may not have come in order but nevertheless hung together coherently by virtue of their status as List.  We scribbled down things we hate, love, or are embarrassed by.  We listed aloud the nuances that distinguish memoir from essay.

Many of us lauded the catharsis of writing this way, of simply letting the thoughts stream out and trusting that the format of List would make them somehow One Thing.  For me, particularly when writing I Remembers, the experience was both aching and freeing.

In one of my other classes, Shakespeare Before 1600, “list” tends to have another definition.  The Bard uses it to mean “wish” or “desire,” as his characters tell one another, “Do what you list.”  Sometimes the lists are even a physical place, referring to the barriers of the tiltyard where noblemen jousted and wore their ladies’ favors on their lances.

These associations bring new depth to our modern understanding of “list.”  To create order out of a jumble of tasks and thoughts, to explain and group discrete ideas, one must take into account one’s own desires, as well as the desires of others.  Occasionally, one must also be aggressive and run at the list head-on, barreling through it and emerging victorious with a series of unhorsed opponents lying prone on the ground.  (I speak metaphorically of course, although if anyone knows how to joust, please let me know in the comments because that is awesome.)  We “list” things to discover “what we list” and what is worth “going to the lists” for.

Choose and/or Combine:

Sequence.

Wish.

Combat.

Decidedly Neutral Face

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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.

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.

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.

Elephant & Castle: How Fond I Am of Trains in Other Cities

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When I was in London, I bought myself a day pass for the Underground and rode it all over the city. Underneath the confusing, not remotely grid-like streets, skimming along through the compact tunnels, I felt like I had unlocked a secret warren of passages. I was proud of myself when I stood in a jam-packed car without falling over, my grip resting only lightly on one of the poles, or my arm looped casually around it. Time didn’t seem to matter down there; I would get to my destination whenever I got there, and if I went a stop too far, why, I’d simply turn around and find my stop again. I fancied myself one of Those People, the well-traveled ones who snatch up a map of the local public transportation upon arrival and use the privilege for all it’s worth.

I felt the same way nearly four years ago when my father took me to Boston to look at a college. After a kind stranger showed us how to purchase the correct day passes and positioned us directly in front of where the doors to the car would be, I picked up the workings of the T like that. My dad helped me navigate, of course (he wasn’t about to let a Teenage Girl Wander the City Alone) but I began figuring out the geography of the city and how the T could bring us closest to where we needed to be. I could picture myself there, heading into the city for the day from campus, studying on my way back, my highlighter barely shaking with the motion of the tram.

When I went back to Boston with my mother, I was the one showing her how to use the T. She knew how to read public transportation maps, of course, but I remembered a good deal of the system from my first trip. She didn’t always trust me on which line we should take, but I knew. I was confident.

Confidence was a big deal for me then. It still is. It baffles me that the girl who only rides certain bus routes in this small university town for fear of ending up lost could step onto trams and trains in strange cities and feel perfectly at ease.

I don’t know why I love train travel. Maybe it’s just nice to feel so in control, to look at those multicolored webs and know exactly where I’m going. College is a lovely time of life, but I’m not always certain as to where I’ll end up. When I heard the robotic voice say, “Tower Green,” on the other hand, I knew I’d found my stop.

Cosmic Comfort

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Bath & Body Works is a dangerous, dangerous place – for my wallet, at least.  But today I think it was exactly where I needed to go.

I ventured into the store firmly telling myself that I was here solely for the hand soaps that were on sale – some for my mom and some for me to take back to school for my new apartment.  That was it.  No more lotions or shower gels or God forbid another buy-two-get-one-free deal on lip gloss.  I had enough at home.  That was my mantra.

A perky employee popped up from behind one of the pyramidal displays and asked how I was doing.  As was my habit, I said, “Good, how about you?”  We ended up chatting about how boring an empty store was and how excited she was to have a customer at last.  When I told her what I was looking for, she led me to the hand soaps, where we exulted over our mutual love of apple smells and fresh scents.  As other customers drifted in, the salesgirl bounced back and forth between all of us, asking me how my selection was going (it’s surprisingly difficult to choose 7 flavors of hand soap) and generally being friendly.  

Of course, I realize this was her job.  She was no doubt chosen for her ability to converse easily with customers and make them feel welcomed.  But it wasn’t that – laughing over my addiction to lip gloss and picking out a car freshener in addition to the soaps (I am weak, don’t judge me) was typical.  It wasn’t her sunny demeanor or ready smile, either.

It was something she said while ringing up my order. 

It came up somehow that I would be studying abroad for a month this summer (remember the Exciting Thing?) in England.  She told me, “Oh, you’ll fit right in – you look like a stylish English girl already!”  I thanked her and found myself admitting, with a laugh, as if it were no big deal, that I’m somewhat apprehensive about the awkwardness of making new friends.

“You’ll be fine!” she cried.  “You made a new friend right here!”

I chuckled and thanked her, heading out with my ridiculously heavy bag of good-smelling things, but she made a point that I felt the need to analyze in this blog.  

See, I tease my parents, specifically my dad, all the time for their ability to “make friends” wherever they go.  (Seriously – my dad can get our waitress to tell her life story in about two minutes.)  On some level, I suppose I’m aware that I have learned/inherited this ability, since I often find myself finding something to chat about with the stranger next to me on the plane, etc.  But I’ve also been rebuffed in such advances, I still think of myself as “shy” more than anything else.  Why would someone who’s outgoing get the kind of nerves I do when faced with a new situation?!

But I’ve been overlooking an important part of the two-way interaction – the perky girl at B&BW was required by the social context to make a connection as well.  I was not alone in making overtures of friendship; in fact, I made her job easier with my reciprocal enthusiasm.  And the other Select Few participating in the Exciting Thing will also be looking for new friends among the group of strangers.  It’s kind of like being a freshman all over again: we’re all in the same new-kid boat, which hadn’t really sunk in until this little encounter today.

Cosmic comfort is cool (and I got citrus soap too!).

An In-Between Girl at an In-Between Time

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I like school. It is what I am good at. I like it even better now that I am in college and can live at the place where I receive education. I understand how to operate within the boundaries Life At School.

Summer vacation, however, is a transitional period from one school year to the next, during which I have no idea what to do with myself. It used to be enough to simply hang out at home with my sister, go for walks, do a few chores. But now, Young Adulthood means that although I “deserve to relax,” although I “earned my vacation,” I also “shouldn’t waste the whole summer doing nothing” and should probably “be productive and make plans.” The problem isn’t that I shy away from a summer job or that I dislike work. I know what do in those situations. The problem is that when I’m casting about for a substitute structure to replace Life At School, conflicting advice hits me from all sides – and because I am no longer at school, where my decisions are my own, I am expected to once again take these mentors’ opinions into account.

I guess that’s the funny part of this point in life: I can make decisions about my own career path, nutritional habits, sleep patterns, sex life, etc. while I’m away. But when I come home for summer or spring break or winter break, I hover somewhere between having to ask permission for everything again and “You should be able to do this without us by now.” During the school year, I know what my role is. During the summer, I can feel like everything from a guest to a little kid to a grown-ass woman to a high schooler to an intruder within the space of a day.

College is wonderful in that it allows us to take baby steps away from home as we practice becoming self-sufficient while knowing we have a soft place to land. But it also has the admittedly obvious side effect of making those who leave and come back chafe at the remaining restrictions of their old life. I want to return home, but don’t know where I fit in anymore. I’m not at school, so I can’t act as I do there, but neither do I want to relinquish the of control and self-assurance I learned while there.

Perhaps this discomfort is the push meant to send me out after college, extending my baby steps into larger strides taking me to a new apartment, new workplace, new life.

But that doesn’t make me any less squirmy and bored this particular summer.

The Banning of “Kindergarten,” or, Acy Doesn’t Like New Things

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When I was six or so, my parents had to ban the word “kindergarten” from our household.  I kicked, screamed, cried, and basically had meltdowns every time the word was mentioned in the months leading up to my entrance into “real school,” so they finally just decided to stop mentioning it.  Ever.

I mention this as a benchmark for the first time my irrational dislike for anything new made me inconsiderate to those around me (to a point beyond normal toddler tantrums).  And I mention this because at lunch today, while discussing an exciting summer opportunity that just became available to me, I found myself complaining more than celebrating.  I complained about how people at my university were asking for press releases so they could put a blurb about me somewhere on the website.  I complained about how when my family and friends found out, they were going to ask me all sorts of questions.  I complained about how I would have to take a huge chunk out of my summer to participate in this Exciting Thing.  I complained about how I wouldn’t know anyone at the Exciting Thing, or even really what all was involved, and how I felt like at any point they were going to email me and say, “So sorry, so awkward, but it wasn’t actually you who got the Exciting Thing but the other girl with similar contact information and a vastly superior resume.”  And I would be half-relieved.

My boyfriend pointed out that some of those complaints bordered on being selfish; he said, as nicely as possible, that my reluctance to publicize the Exciting Thing could be construed as dismissive of it, as saying that it was so easy to obtain the Exciting Thing that I hadn’t thought it worth mentioning to others.  

My sister pointed out that the Exciting Thing is “one of those things you apply for, not something you actually get,” meaning, of course, that it’s one of those things that you meet the criteria for so you send in the forms and letters and essays and then you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the rejection email that doesn’t sting too badly because after all, you spent the whole time you were filling out the application telling yourself that it’s a Nationwide Competition for this one Exciting Thing, and only a Select Few can get it and, nice as you are, you are probably not one of those Select Few.

 

However.

 

I somehow got it.  And now I have to deal with that.  Because, as evidenced by this post’s title, I do not like new things.  I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.  

Preparing for my first high school dance?  Almost called all my friends and cancelled the plans we had already made.

 Starting my first job?  Stayed up all night worrying myself sick.  

Heading off to my freshman orientation for college?  Went nearly distracted with half-baked schemes to change my mind and take a gap year (or five).

First week of college before classes started?  Subsisted entirely on Goldfish and coffee with powdered creamer and Skyped my best friend from home for eight hours straight, never leaving my dorm room.

You see the theme.  When I am faced with a situation which involves uncertainty, in which I have no experience, I freeze.  I look around for the nearest exit.  And sometimes I do actually try to bolt.

This Exciting Thing, attractive and impressive though it is, has set me off on one of those phases.  I recognize the signs: I’ve thought of emailing them quietly and telling them I’ve changed my mind, then covering up with my family and friends; I’ve thought largely about the downsides, like not seeing or talking to my boyfriend for several weeks, as opposed to the aspects which drew me to apply in the first place; I’ve imagined scenarios in which none of the other Select Few like me and I am ostracized and miserable for the entirety of the Exciting Thing; I’ve avoided telling others about it in case I do chicken out.

As I’ve gotten older, regardless of the degree to which a thing is new, I still have this same reaction.  Perhaps the ability to identify this behavior and tell myself (however unconvincingly) that I’ve always survived before can be counted as progress, but at this particular moment, as I view furthers emails regarding the Exciting Thing and cringe, all I can see is how far I’ve regressed.  Yes, it’s ungrateful and a bit selfish and maybe even kind of hypocritical (I wasn’t exactly forced to fill out the application, after all) – but I’m scared.  

So I’ll try to hold in the complaining (despite my boyfriend and sister’s niceness about my Dislike of Newness) until I can face the Scary-But-Admittedly-Exciting Thing like any other fear.

 

Oh, and kindergarten?  Dashed away from my mother’s side on the very first day, calling, “Bye Mom!” over my shoulder.