Life At School

Reclaiming Blue

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I’m something of a pen thief.  If someone hands me a really awesome pen, the kind of pen that rolls smoothly across the page without smearing and seems to suggest beautiful things will come naturally to one’s head when one uses it, I’m liable to slip it into my purse without thinking and only later realize my transgression.

And then keep that pen for five years.

One such pen is a light blue ballpoint that has lasted me since study hall my senior year of high school when I accidentally stole it from Ashleigh H.  (I’ll probably apologize to her at our five year reunion.)  It’s lived in my pencil case ever since, usually employed to note important events in my beloved planner (which, as we’ve established, I love to color code).

Freshman year of college, I designated this blue pen for events pertaining to the Catholic student center where I spent most of my free time.  Dinners, movie nights, youth group, etc. were all recorded in light blue ballpoint, next to the green fountain pen reserved for work and the orange highlighter that means something horrible like a test or a huge paper is about to happen.  Through the beginning of sophomore year, I associated blue with this student center, and because this place was such a huge part of my life, blue showed up a lot in my planners.

Then, midway through sophomore year, a Really Big Conflict arose.  The details are a story for another time, as is the extent of the fallout, but it involved A Certain Person from the student center, and led to me pulling away from some of that involvement.

I fought with a lot of mental murkiness following this Really Big Conflict.  I fought to regain my faith, and I fought to maintain friendships, and I fought to keep the community that had become central to my college life.  Things have gotten better – a lot better – in the year and a half since.

But I realized that I stopped using blue.

The events I still went to at the center were labeled in plain black.  Even my blue highlighter was getting far less use.  Green, which now represented a job I love, made me happy, but when I flipped a page in my planner and found an event I’d written months earlier in blue, I flinched.  I was avoiding a color I’d chosen originally for its calming qualities!

So I’ve made an Executive Decision.  I am reassigning blue.  Blue is now for things that are good for me, things that help me with self care, things that make me happy.  My anniversary with the Engineer, for instance, or my dad’s wedding, or a girls’ weekend with the Southern Belle.  (I might even put some dinners at the Catholic student center in blue again.)

I am reclaiming blue.  And it does feel good to write with that wonderful pen again.

Feminism and Texting Family Members

Grace1 Comment

“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.

Home

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Freshman year of college made me overly conscious of the word “home.” I consciously said I was going back to my dorm, or my room. When I did say “home” by mistake, my friends looked at me, puzzled.

“I don’t mean home home,” I said.  We used repetition for emphasis, as if we were gossiping about who like liked who else in eighth grade.  As the year went on, I slipped into using the word more and more often.  Now, in my third year of undergrad, my friends and I know when someone means “home” vs. “home home.”  There’s a subtle difference that truly collegiate ears can hear.  But it still strikes me sometimes that I now have three “homes.”  I have to wonder if it cheapens the word.

I had been through a phase like that before, when my dad finally bought a house after the divorce. I was determined not to bestow the term “home” on his bachelor pad, angry as I still was. But after a while I admitted that Dad’s house was just as much a home base for me as Mom’s, particularly as college loomed and I was clinging with white knuckles to everything familiar in the face of having to go away to a huge campus (by my sheltered standards, anyway) where the only people I knew were the ones I never really liked in high school.  “Home” was suddenly akin to “haven,” and it stayed defined that way for the first half of my college career, particularly since I found myself having to move once a semester for a year and a half for various unforeseeable reasons.

But now, as a new transition rears its head like the Cave of Wonders bursting out of the desert, I find myself thinking more about “home” as something I am about to create than something preexisting.  In a way, this is sad.  I love being able to return to the places where I grew up and revisit the life I used to have.  However, since Bird took over my room (I had the bigger one all through high school) as soon as I went to college, I haven’t actually gone home to the room of my adolescence for almost three years now.  Instead, I’m arranging the apartment the Commodore and I share, making it suit us both, and spending pretty much all my free time either here or over at one of my friends’ apartments.  I’m enjoying our little nest (and I love not having to move again until at least graduation!).  But even this is temporary by nature; I’m not even living here full-time, since I go home for breaks.  (Not that I’ll be home for the summer – I have an internship three hours away.)

The Southern Belle and I were discussing our plans for the summer, and she brought up a good point.  She told me that although she looks forward to returning to the South, it’s not because she wants to see the people and places she left behind, but rather because she is excited to see how she as an adult fits into that space.  It’s about her, not her past.

I agree.  “Home” is shifting from “origin point” and “haven” to “where we fit/belong in the world” – and that might not be the places we grew up anymore.  I’ll always love going home to my parents, but soon my “home home” will change.

Part of me wants the glamour of city life, living in some brick apartment building with plenty of character and becoming a regular at the coffee shop down the street, walking to work or taking the subway in flats and changing into my heels in the elevator.  Part of me wants the quiet of suburban or even secluded country life, where I can putter in the yard and make a house a comfortable place for me and my family to spend our days, not having to venture too far into society if I don’t feel like it, having a view of something other than concrete.

Surprisingly, only a very tiny part of me wants to run back to the “wispy peach” room at my mom’s house and the “papyrus green” one at my dad’s.  It sounds more exciting to me right now to have the agency to create my own home – furnished, of course, with the beloved, familiar, castoff furniture we’ve been saving in the basement for years.  And for once, I’m okay with the uncertainty.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Perfectionist in a Group Project

Grace2 Comments

I have trust issues.  More specifically, I have trust issues when it comes to group projects.

You see, the trouble with group projects is that in my formative years, everyone in the group got the same grade regardless of the amount of work they had put in.  I learned very quickly that if I let most of my classmates half-ass our posterboards and say “I don’t care” the whole time, the end result would be a posterboard I was embarrassed to stand in front of while we presented to the class.

So I took over.  The way 5th grade me saw it, they didn’t want to do the work, and I didn’t want them to do the work, so everyone was happier if I just made everything just the way I wanted it.

But then high school came, and even though I still ended up taking over most of my group projects, I had a new weapon at my disposal: evaluations.  Secondary education, apparently, was not quite so idealistic in its assumptions of how children would divide the labor.  These new teachers knew perfectly well that the nerds and perfectionists (and believe me, I stand proudly at the intersection of that Nerdy Perfectionist Venn Diagram) would end up doing all the work if the slackers had no carrot or stick to move them along.  Suddenly I had power; instead of being the group workhorse or overachiever, I was the taskmaster.  With a gleam in my eye that was the precursor to my Soul Burning Glare, I quietly but significantly jotted down notes of who was and was not working during group meetings.

I was usually a benevolent dictator, or at least I tried to be.  After all, I only wanted what the rest of the group wanted: to get a good grade.  But it was often difficult not to wish that I could just do the whole thing myself and only have to worry about my own time management.

Of course, group projects have taught me some valuable skills, though probably not the teamwork and collaboration my teachers hoped I would get out of them.  More accurately, I learned that most of the other kids actually didn’t mind pitching in but were afraid to try to wrest control from me.  (To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have responded well to an outright coup.)  I learned to delegate, to reluctantly relinquish little bits of the project, and to pretend to be okay with relying on other people.  And I found allies in unexpected places.

Sophomore year of high school, we had to draw a map of the Odyssey, including quotes from the book.  My group sat around on the floor of the hallway, staring at the markers and the terrifying expanse of blank butcher paper in the center of our circle.  They all claimed not to have a mental picture of Odysseus’ journey.  Conscious by then of my domineering tendencies, I had been trying to bite my tongue, but at that I pulled out a pencil and started sketching the islands as I had envisioned them the whole time we’d been reading.  After I placed the islands, my group members followed behind with the markers to color them in and add some scenery.  That night I went home and compiled a list of short quotes we could write next to each island and showed up to the next class ready to write and draw, feeling as though I hadn’t done much.  At the end of that meeting, as we divvied up the remaining labor for the weekend, I volunteered to take the poster home and finish it.

“I think,” a boy named Will said, looking at the printed list of quotations in my eager hands, “that since Grace has done pretty much everything so far, she shouldn’t have to do anything else.”  A murmur of agreement ran through the group, and I blushed down at the poster.  He didn’t say it meanly, as though he thought I had steamrolled all over everybody.  He simply acknowledged my work and kindly pointed out that they could take it from there.  It was a nice moment.

But then I had to keep six people on task for an entire semester-long government project senior year, and my exasperation with group projects was cemented.

I understand that they have their place.  Really, I do.  I’ve learned from having to deal work with other students and communicate with them.  But college is so busy already that I would rather not have to track down five other people and twenty disparate pieces of the project just so we can pass the class.

As for the basic argument that we’ll need to work in groups in our careers?  Just one more reason I want to be a happily introverted writer tucked away in my garret.

Everyone Thinks I’m Graduating

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“Wait. You’re going to be here next year?”

I had just told one of my coworkers about my plans to apply for a slightly elevated position (think Supervising Student Employee instead of just Student Employee) at our job next semester when utter confusion clouded her face.

“Ye-es…” I said, equally confused.  “I’m a junior.”

“Oh my God!  We all totally thought you were leaving this year!”

My boss had the same reaction when I popped my head into her office to ask when the applications would be out.  I mean, she seemed excited that I’ll be sticking around for another year, but she definitely thought I was leaving in May.

When I asked another coworker, she said, “Yeahh, I thought you were a junior because you’re the same year as the Commodore, but everyone else seemed so sure you were graduating.”

This is all very strange to me.  First off, it’s always weird to find out other people discuss you when you’re not around.  I suppose the fact that I’m well-known at work bodes well for my plan to take on more responsibility there.  And it’s not like they’re all rooting for me to leave.  It’s just strange to think of myself being referred to in the third person in my own absence, a little like realizing that all the people you pass by briefly and think of as extras or one-dimensional characters in your own life in fact have their own three-dimensional lives in which you are merely an extra passing through the background too.

Secondly, this idea of me graduating anytime soon, though terrifying, is quickly becoming a theme in people’s assumptions.  “You’re a senior, right?”  Um, no.  “But you’re graduating early, right?”  Again, no.  “Are you gonna get an internship for next year?”  Maybe I just give off Almost Done With College vibes or something.  Or I just appear incredibly mature for someone who is only in her third year (yeah, right).  Or somehow, because I was always the Smart Girl, finishing school in the traditional time span of four whole years seems too long, too commonplace to people looking in on my life.  But I’m happy here.  I’m good at this.  So yes, I will be here another year, which puts me graduating right on time – for me.

Conversation About Conversation

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I like to joke that typical dinner conversation at my house delves into the Big Questions, discussing Life, The Universe, and Everything.  It’s true that what Bird and I consider normal mealtime chat includes the stigma on mental illness, the treatment of women throughout history, the state of the education system in the US, and so on.  I never knew this kind of thing wasn’t necessarily typical until I began having dinner at friends’ houses and learned that when they talked about their day, they stopped there.  They literally just talked about their day, and maybe what they had planned for the next day, or the weekend, and maybe a funny story from last summer when they all went inner tubing and the youngest dropped her sunglasses and cried.  I mean, we had those conversations too.  (Believe me, there are plenty of stories we love to bring up at the slightest provocation.  Remind me to tell you about the time Dad got a speeding ticket.)

But we also enjoyed going off on extended tangents about abstractions and Important Concepts while our dinners cooled in front of us.

And I am so grateful for that.

My family’s tendency to engage in abnormally esoteric dialogue gave me a foundation for extracting themes from the literature I read in All the English Classes Ever.  It gave me a vocabulary for identifying abstract concepts.  It gave me practice for listening to others and having a Real Discussion as opposed to a shouting match.  And it gave me the mindset that led me to the Writing Center.

My university’s Writing Center became my haven during a semester when things were pretty rough for me.  I found an affirmative place where like-minded people weren’t afraid to have conversations about their enthusiasm for language.  Even though the required job trainings take chunks of valuable Netflix  time out of my evenings, I love them.  I love getting to talk about the importance of body language while working with a student and our desire to change the campus perception of us as a personification of spell check.  It almost feels like spending an evening at home again.

The environment that encourages these conversations is slowly helping me figure out what I want to do with my life.  Not the answer to the perpetual question of What I Want To Do, as in a job, but the values I believe the world needs to see more often and how those should influence my own choices.  If I never talked with anyone about these things, I would probably be facing those looming Life Decisions with even more paralyzing terror than I currently have.  As it is, I am buoyed by the knowledge that somewhere out there are other people who like to have conversations about conversation.

others

Productive Procrastination

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College

Productivity is weird, particularly in college.  One can be domestically productive, or scholastically productive, or literarily productive (I may have made that one up), but it seems that one cannot be productive in all these areas at once.

This morning, in a burst of motivated energy, I did three loads of laundry and put them all away, changed my sheets from flannel to cotton because it’s finally above 50 degrees, did the dishes, tidied the kitchen and living room, read my Shakespeare assignment for Monday, found articles for my Coleridge presentation on Tuesday, caught up on Doctor Who recaps on my favorite blog, read a great deal of my leisure book, and planned out my homework schedule for tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this leaves me with a presentation and an HTML project to finish, two papers to start, a five page rough draft of a creative nonfiction piece to write, meals to plan, and grocery shopping to do, not to mention preliminary research to do for my thesis project.  So although I feel like the day was well-spent, academically speaking my to-do list has not shortened by much.

The Commodore pointed out that I’m laying the groundwork for the homework I have to tomorrow, since I found sources for the projects I have to finish this week.  And now that some domestic chores are out of the way, I’ll have the uninterrupted time I need to delve into the more time-intensive tasks I left for tomorrow.

At least, that’s how I keep rationalizing it to myself.  Yes, I was productive today…just…not with homework.  But in college, little else tends to matter.  So tomorrow should be…busy.

Housing

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any shelter, lodging, or dwelling place
the act of one who houses or puts under shelter

I’ve been frantically thinking, texting, and talking a lot about housing lately.  An internship for this upcoming summer would only work out if I could find a place to live for the duration of the internship – within a week.  I work best in specifics, so I don’t think it helped that the vague term “housing” could mean “any” place I could find to live.

“I would live under a bridge to make this internship work,” I joked to several people – and I half meant it, too.  This was my dream internship: an editorial position with a small company close to home that had connections to the larger publishing industry.  The interview process was nerve-wracking precisely because I wanted it so much, and I was so happy when I got the job, that to have it rescinded because I couldn’t find a distant cousin willing to let me live in their attic for the summer didn’t bear thinking of.  It frustrated me that I had too many options, rather than not enough, because it meant I had to investigate more of them, and choose from several, and investigation and choosing took time.

Eventually it worked out that I’ll be staying with the Engineer’s grandparents, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  I grew up in a home with a mother who is, as the Southern Belle put it, “an honorary Southern lady,” so I know the depth of true hospitality.  Housing someone is not just allowing them to sleep under your roof.  It is protecting, sheltering, providing a haven.  It’s appropriate that the word can be both a verb and a noun.  I will be housed.  I have found housing.  And someday, I hope, I can house and shelter and protect guests of my own.

The Flowers on My Kitchen Table

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images (2)

I got flowers yesterday.

My boyfriend, the Engineer, knows very well that my favorite flowers are sunset colored roses.  I don’t know why, exactly, I love these particular blooms so much, but they bring me a specific kind of joy.  Their subtle scent, their soft, smooth petals, their paleness tinged with fire – seeing a bunch of them on my kitchen table just makes me smile.

And yet, they’ll be gone, drooping and withered, within a few days.

In the Internet frenzy recently leading up to Valentine’s Day, I saw an image of a girl with about five bouquets of a dozen red roses.  The caption, emblazoned in large white print over her, asked, “Am I the only one who would rather have something useful than this?”  I used to agree (even though everyone in my family and friend group says I’m impossible to shop for) that I wanted something that would last.  I took a utilitarian approach to gift giving and receiving.  Books I could keep for years, coffee I could use to power through the day, a gift card I could use to fund the purchase of something I needed or wanted.  Other than looking pretty for a few days and maybe making for good Instagram pictures, what purpose did flowers serve?

But for the few days they survive in their vase on my kitchen table, I truly can’t help smiling every time I walk past my roses.  So maybe I’m allowed to have something with no purpose beyond that of making me happy.  After all, that William Morris quote doesn’t say that the things in your house must be both useful and beautiful – only that they should be one or the other.  If both, so much the better.  If only one of the two, well, the human spirit needs Beauty to survive as much as it does the Plain Jane Useful Things.

As for their transitory nature, their fleeting existence, the roses are perhaps all the sweeter for it.  There’s something about knowing they aren’t a permanent new fixture in my house, that I won’t become accustomed to their presence and hardly notice them at all in a few months like I do with my artwork and other Useful And Beautiful Things, that makes the short time I do have them around all the more special.  They make me smile precisely because they are new and beautiful and their beauty will not cease to be new to me by the time they wither.

Throwing Sharp Things

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I had just walked into the apartment when WHUMP!  Something flew into my roomie, the Commodore’s, closet door, followed by cheers from her and our neighbor, the Hamster.

“Um…whatcha doing?” I asked, tentatively tiptoeing toward her door.  The Hamster popped his head around the door frame, grinning at me.

“We’re practicing with our throwing knives!” he announced.  Sure enough, the two of them had stacked a pyramid of cardboard boxes in front of the Commodore’s closet and stood over by her window.  With a flick of the wrist, the Commodore sent another blade flying into an Amazon Fire box.  It stuck.

“This is so fun!” she exclaimed, reaching forward to pull her weapons out of the cardboard.

The Hamster proffered his knives to me, hilts first.  “Do you want to try?”

“Is that even a question?!”  I took the set of three knives and, after a few practice flicks, sent one hurtling toward the boxes.  It hit, bounced off, and lay flat on the carpet.  I sighed.

The Hamster and the Commodore told me they’d had several throws just end up sticking in the carpet, or even the closet door above and around the pyramid.  (Oh well.  We probably would have lost our security deposit anyway by the time we finally move out of the apartment.)  But as the night went on, a lot of throws flew straight and true to their targets.  I even had one go through a hole in a box to pin the back wall of the box to the closet door behind it!  The Commodore was aiming for a specific box with an enemy’s name on it, while the Hamster and I were just sort of trying to stab boxes in general.  The poor cookie mascot on one of them ended up rather tattered and scarred.

After a particularly bad round, where none of my throws stuck, I noted, “Even when they don’t hit, there’s something really satisfying about throwing sharp things at a great speed.”  The Hamster and the Commodore enthusiastically agreed.  It was like being little again and illicitly running with scissors (not that we ever did that, of course…).  It was the heady feeling of realizing that we were all legal adults and could, if we felt like it, spend the evening hurling sharp bits of metal at a pile of cardboard in our own home.  It was cathartic, stress relieving, and just plain fun.  I could imagine myself as one of my childhood heroines in battle – never mind that the target was stationary and less than five feet away.  Even though I’d never thrown a knife before in my life (and keep in mind, boys and girls, these were sets of throwing knives, specifically designed and balanced for the purpose, not like your ordinary Cutco stock), I’d always wanted to try it.  And I didn’t need anyone’s permission.  The opportunity just presented itself.

Of course, I never exactly expected to come home one evening and find two people in my apartment tossing blades around as a way of blowing off steam.  But then again, that’s why I love my friends: we’re all a little weird.

[I feel like I should put a disclaimer: no one was hurt.  We took turns and stood well out of the way while throwing and never even jokingly aimed at one another.  Ironically the next day I stabbed myself while cutting an apple, but that’s another story.]