Here’s my two cents

Tired

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1. exhausted, as by exertion; fatigued or sleepy
2. weary or bored

When did this become our default setting?

It seems that nearly every time someone follows the polite convention of asking another someone how they are, the answer ends up being, “Tired.” Or some less blunt variation: “Oh, I’m okay. Tired.” “Pretty good. Tired.” “Great! But also tired.”
Is there something in the water here that makes it impossible to get enough sleep? Is coffee not actually all we need to function? (Just kidding. #CoffeeIsLife) Are we all just lagging in our efforts to maintain the breakneck speed of college life?
Heyyy…wait a minute…

Someone told me last week to take a moment and see how my body felt when I tried to push away a negative thought – not my mental discomfort, just my body. Weirdly enough, it takes physical energy to put up a roadblock for distracting/insecure/negative/angry/inappropriate thoughts, so I can only imagine how physically draining my homework load must be. Not only carrying around the textbooks (I pulled something in my elbow this week picking up my backpack!), but carrying around the mental load of an ever-shifting To Do List takes its toll.
Add this to the fact that we are going going going 12+ hours a day, then have to go home and do homework, and yeah, we’re going to be tired.

Bird read somewhere that the average high-school student these days has the anxiety level of an average mental patient from the 1950s.  She told me this in the same phone conversation where she informed me that she had done homework for more hours than she slept the previous night.  I remember being tired all the time in high school too, and how I thought being able to focus on the things I’m passionate about in college would make me at least a little less exhausted.  But now we’re expected to be adults while still adhering to school standards, making huge life decisions (Shall I become one of Those People with an Advanced Degree?  What if I Graduate Early?  What if there’s a Major Upheaval in my life in the next few years?) in between classes and completing job and internship applications in the little time we have left over from homework.

I love school.  School is what I am good at.  I value my education highly.  But I also think it says something, not necessarily a good something, that the default State of Being for my friends and I is “tired.”  I can’t help looking forward to a time in my life when someone can ask how I am and I can say, “Good, thanks” and leave it at that.

Decidedly Neutral Face

Grace1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh thank goodness,” I gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definitive

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

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

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

definitive

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

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

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

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

Emphasis

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Ordering Books for Next Semester

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I despise ordering books.

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

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

However.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Thoughts on Recent Hashtag Controversies

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You can learn a lot on Tumblr.  Or, if you’re like me and still don’t have a Tumblr, the Tumblr stuff that makes its way to Pinterest.  For someone who sucks at current events (I still don’t know who/what/where Benghazi is), it can be quite an education in social justice issues plaguing our world.  The most popular posts tend to contain multiple viewpoints, usually quite reasonable (in my opinion).  But the quality of these posts is not the point.  The point is a particular issue and my personal experience with it.

My sister, who just got a Tumblr, showed me the #YesAllWomen hashtag a few weeks ago, and I started reading some of the articles, blog posts, and general responses it’s generated so far.  Some of them were inspiring.  Some were repulsive.  Some were just dumb.

But others were frightening.

Not frightening in that I suddenly felt threatened by some idiot on a commenting power trip saying he would rape every woman who subscribed to these ideas (although there were comments to that effect).  Frightening in the sheer number of men who truly believe this isn’t their problem.  They went on the defensive, creating the hashtag that #YesAllWomen was responding to.  The reigning sentiment seems to be, “I’m a nice guy.  I’m not going to rape or assault anyone.  I’m not bothering you.  So my part is done.”

My response to them, in words frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, is this:

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

 

I, myself, was reminded just how incredibly lucky I am a few weeks ago.  Like many girls in our society, I grew up believing that I was not sexy enough, and that failing or succeeding in this regard was incredibly important.  (This was not my parents’ doing – they were wonderful – but it’s hard to ignore society on the word of two grown-ups who don’t seem to be doing too well in the way of love themselves.)  Now that I’m in a relationship, I’m still struggling to let go of seeing myself that way, even subconsciously, even though my boyfriend initiates conversations about consent and making sure I know he does not believe he deserves physical pleasure from me, whether we “usually” do it or not.

This cultural double standard (which cheats boys too, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day) affects all of us.  Those of us in relationships, those of us who are single.  All of us with our varying beauties, inner demons, sexuality, beliefs, education, experiences, etc.  And I’m only just starting to learn how many people don’t seem to know that.

I wish I had a more conclusive way to end this, but I don’t have a solution.  I don’t have any ideas.  I just know that it’s important to think about these things.