Parenthetical phrases populate this post

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.

That Time I Almost Punched a Sexist

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As a freshman in high school, I was the type of girl who enjoyed stepping menacingly toward my male friends when they said something that offended me, even though we all knew I would never actually lay a finger on them. Besides, I was too short to be scary. (I’m still short, but I sometimes pride myself on the ability to be menacing when necessary.)  Violence was not, in fact, my go-to problem solving strategy.

Still, I knew I would have a hard time not slapping the smirk off P.B.’s face the minute I met him.

calvin and susie bug

We were in English, one of the few classes in which I was not on the honors track because my high school did not have an honors English class for freshmen.  While by junior year I could happily spend 75% of the day away from those students to whom I was merely a nerd who took school too seriously, freshman English required me to rub shoulders with people who still stopped at the end of every line, whether or not there was a period, when reading aloud.  (The teacher also frequently asked my help spelling things on the board, which didn’t exactly inspire confidence in his pedantic abilities, but I digress.)

I don’t remember how it started – the teacher must have asked us to have a conversation about something in the lesson with a partner nearby – but somehow I found myself talking to P.B., who was twisted around from his seat in front of me and was draping one lanky arm across my open copy of Lord of the Flies.  Glaring, I slid it out from under him so he wouldn’t wrinkle the page.  Whatever we were originally supposed to be discussing, the conversation turned to grades and schedules.  He bragged that he had a B+ in the class, to which I nodded approval.

I was less approving of his shock at the fact that I had a high A.  He began quizzing me on my grades and how many honors classes I was in.  At first I didn’t care, but it quickly grew satisfying to see him attempting to process the idea that I was probably beating him in the GPA department.

“Well, I must have a higher grade than you in math,” he said finally, leaning back against the metal bar connecting his chair to his desk.  (His arm was still across my desk.)

I rolled my eyes.  “I’m in Geometry Honors and you’re in Algebra,” I said, trying to point out that he couldn’t really compare our grades there because we were studying entirely different things.

He smirked patronizingly.  “I’m still probably better than you.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Because guys are better at it than girls.  You just aren’t smart enough to think that way.”  The most remarkable thing, now that I look back on it, is his tone – there was no malice.  He was simply stating something of which he was utterly convinced.

“That…is..the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, trying to control my tone.

He shrugged.  “It’s true.”

Almost unconsciously, as though independent from my body, my left hand curled into a fist and my elbow drew back as though I was about to fire an arrow from a bow.  I had never punched anyone before, but P.B. was about to be the lucky first.

Until my teacher materialized at my side and asked, “How’s the conversation going here?” a little too brightly, having seen it all unfold from across the room.  I honestly don’t remember the rest of that class, although I do remember that when we next came to English the teacher announced we had new seats and P.B. was diagonally opposite me, literally as far away as the teacher could physically place us.  This was probably a wise move.

This incident, one of my earliest face-to-face encounters with the concept of sexism, sticks with me for several reasons.

One, I had never realized that people could be so certain of something that I found so obviously wrong.  P.B. was jeering at me, but he was just as convinced that females were inferior as I was convinced that the earth is round.  We had discussed discrimination and assumptions about women’s abilities in my family before (see: weirdest dinner conversations ever), but it hadn’t really dawned on me that there were people – people in my day-to-day world, no less – who actually thought of me that way. It was suddenly and newly personal.

Two, because it was one of the first times I had ever come right up against sexism, I had no idea how to react.  I was angry, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to correct him or explain to him why his certainty had no actual support.  (Sometimes I wonder, though, if one good punch would have convinced him much faster that girls are just as good as boys…kidding, kidding!  Mostly.)  And I realized how much I – and all the girls around me – needed to develop that vocabulary.

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

Lent

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1. simple past tense and past participle of lend
2. (in the Christian religion) an annual season of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and lasting 40 weekdays to Easter, observed by Roman Catholic, Anglican, and certain other churches.

I grew up hearing a lot about what I should give up for Lent.  (By the way, guys, I’m Catholic.)  There were the traditional years where chocolate hypothetically never touched my lips.  When I got older and my mom introduced the idea of giving something to God instead of giving something up, I said a few rosaries before bed.  Lent was the technically-40-days-but-feels-like-forever season before Easter, when my parochial classmates and I had to sit through weekly Stations of the Cross and go to extra all-school Masses and I looked longingly at the Easter dress hanging in my closet that I couldn’t wear yet.

Meanwhile, I heard another version of the word, uncapitalized this time, in the old-fashioned books we read.  The people in them talked about having “lent” someone a book, or a cup of sugar, or a carriage.  Like “dreamt,” it seemed so much more romantic than saying you loaned something to someone.  So, naturally, I tried to use such vocabulary whenever I could.  (I probably sounded pretentious to my third grade classmates, but then again I could spell “pretentious” and they didn’t know what it meant, so they just called me a nerd instead.)

And yet I never connected these two meanings in my head, the capital L and the lower case, until recently.  The term for the liturgical season originally came from an Old English term lencten, which literally meant the lengthening of the daylight hours.  This is the part of the year when the days oh-so-gradually begin to stretch themselves out like cats elongating their spines in the sun, digging their claws in for summer.  (And yes, when I was younger, the Lenten season seemed to lengthen itself just to torment me.)  But, ideally, isn’t this time of preparation for Easter meant to help us stretch our spiritual muscles a little bit?  The idea of lengthening, to me, now calls to mind the idea of reaching out toward God, lending Him something precious to me and, having lent Him the time I used to spend on that Very Important Thing, perhaps realizing that the hours were always meant to be devoted to Him anyway.  It’s not really lending God anything, because I already believe that everything is His.  So maybe Lent is about stripping away the arrogance that leads me to believe that I am doing Him a favor.  Maybe it’s about realizing it’s He Who is doing the lending here.

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.]

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.

Through the Looking-Glass of Weird Insecurities

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

Nope. No unibrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a List and Checking It a Lot

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!).