Who let me adult?

Enjoy

GraceLeave a comment

to experience with joy; to take pleasure in

For someone whose brain rarely shuts up, I have a tough time with mindfulness.  The concept of being present, of taking in each thing as it comes instead of constantly planning and worrying, makes plenty of sense when I look at it objectively.  Executing the practice, on the other hand…

Sometimes it seems as though there’s too much space in my mind devoted to doubts, worries, rants, complaints, and failures.  My memories love to dredge up classic reruns of my most embarrassing moments, so much so that I’ll be squirming in my seat at the thought of something that happened years ago.  I may not be the best at this “adult” thing, but I feel like blurting out something awkward in 5th grade shouldn’t still bother me so much.  (Then again, if any of you have found a way to truly get over your middle school embarrassments, for the love of all that is good in this world, TELL ME YOUR WAYS.)

Some people call this “negative self-talk.”  These same people tell me of something called “self-compassion,” which is, again, a concept that sounds grand but is tricky to implement.  My thoughts have worn ruts of worry in my synapses.  I don’t have the time, it seems, to stop and breathe.

That’s why I’ve been thinking about the word “enjoy” lately.  It caught me while I was rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s excellent memoir A Circle of Quiet, where she spends several early chapters discussing the concept of joy.  She talks about existing, about resting, in that joy she feels in a simple moment – and she talks, too, about how rare it is for her to quiet herself enough to do that.  It comforts me that I am not the only one who has difficulty simply being.

The word “enjoy” originally came from Middle English for “to make joyful,” or Old French for “to give joy to.”  Joy, it seems to me, is a much more serious business than mere contentment or happiness.  “Happy” has something of a giddiness to it.  “Joy” has weight.  It leaves an imprint.  But that mark, that gentle, comforting weight like a hand on our shoulder, only comes when we let ourselves “enjoy,” when we let ourselves exist in the moment.  In joy.

So I’ve been trying to pay attention to the joyful moments, to the little things that allow me to exist “in joy” for a second or two, and to rest, rather than squirm, in the unusual quiet of my brain.

I started off easy – it’s all too natural for me to enjoy the first sip of coffee in the morning, or a well-written sentence that makes me close the book and stare off into space for a moment to absorb the craft of the words, or a monarch butterfly flashing across my path, or a fuzzy puppy rolling over and begging to be petted.

But it’s other things too.  It’s realizing that it doesn’t bother me to eat lunch alone in a strange town because I know I’m here for an internship that provides me with work I truly love doing.  It’s one-word texts from the Engineer.  It’s establishing witty rapport almost immediately with my new coworkers.  And it’s stepping outside the trailer in the evening and letting comfort seep down from a starry dome, even though it’s cold, even though I should go to sleep, because it feels good just to be – just to exist in joy.

Now I’m curious – what do you enjoy?

Dead Time

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A week is a weird amount of time. It’s both too long and too short. Too long to feel like it’s okay to take an entire seven days off. Too short to feel like there’s enough time to truly accomplish anything.

At least, that’s how I feel as I try to decide how many t-shirts to unpack in my wispy peach colored bedroom for the next week before I move up to the Engineer’s grandparents’ house to start my internship.

I dislike teetering on the cusp of things. I dislike the buildup to the downward plunge. (As you might guess, I also hate roller coasters.)  I dislike anticipating change for so long that all I can do is sit around making plan after plan.  Don’t get me wrong – I dislike sudden change, too, but at least I can spring into action and deal with it.  It’s far worse in my mind to have to simply, as someone once put it to me, sit with the uncertainty.

So this feels more like spring break than summer, which means I feel like I should have homework and be living out of a suitcase instead of unpacking and catching up on Once Upon A Time.  It seems as though this is simply the waiting room, and I have yet to be ushered into my actual summer.  Any routines I establish this week will be upended on Saturday when I leave again anyway.  And yet, if I get into that vacation mindset, I’m worried I’ll lose my momentum for productivity.

Part of me is simply eager to get started on an amazing new job.  Part of me is impatient to have a routine I can stay comfortably ensconced in for the next three months.  Part of me is frustrated that, like the month and half of last summer spent preparing for the Big Exciting Thing, I am once again simply drifting in a kind of limbo.

Why can’t I just rush through it in a peppy montage and let the music fade as I drive into the town where I’ll be spending the summer?

Of course I love spending time at home with my family.  Of course I love getting to have some time to recharge after a semester of craziness.  Still, it’s difficult for me, as I’ve admitted before, to slow down for too long.  (And I really am excited about this internship.)

When Furniture Moves in the Night

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My dad used to come home in the middle of the night sometimes from work trips.  Trying to be considerate of his sleeping wife and daughters, he would tiptoe through the house – only to bang his shin and nearly take off a toe on the furniture that had moved since the last time he walked through the living room.

When we got older and Mom took it into her head to rearrange the house while Dad was on a trip, Bird and I had to help.

“Why,” we asked, wedging our shoulders under the arm of the couch while she lifted the other end like Wonder Woman, “can’t this wait until Dad is home to help?”

Mom shook her head at us, the upended couch swaying slightly in her grip.  “Girls, if we can do it ourselves – and we can – why wait?  Now, lift with your legs.”  We sighed.

To be fair, two generations of women in my family before her had repositioned furniture while their husbands were away – it was an inherited habit, one that sneakily followed me to college.  Last year, when the Commodore and I were sharing a room, we grew tired of the bunk bed arrangement and decided to unstack the beds.  I texted the Engineer to ask him to come help us move furniture while the Commodore paced out the new arrangement of our room.  The novelty of a fresh room arrangement (and the idea of no longer hitting our heads every time we got in or out of bed) was exciting.

Except the Engineer couldn’t make it.  Maybe this weekend he might be free.

The Commodore and I looked at each other.  And then we started shoving smaller furniture aside to make room for us to lift the upper bunk down from its perch.

Our third roommate’s boyfriend insisted on helping us, because he heard the scraping and sliding from the living room and, as he told his girlfriend, “I want to make sure these two don’t kill themselves.”  But the point was that, regardless of whether or not a Male Personage miraculously appeared to assist us, we felt like moving the furniture, so dammit, we were going to move the furniture.

When we settled down in our newly un-bunked (debunked?) beds that night, I told the Commodore about my parents and my grandparents and rearranging the house in the absence of one’s spouse.  She laughed.

“Of course your mom would do that,” she said.  “Still, it was nice to have help.”  She sat up straighter in her bed and declared, “We are Strong, Independent, 21st Century Women…who are quite happy to let guys do the heavy lifting if they feel so inclined.”

And that’s just what I love.  The lesson that I learned from my mother was not to reject a friend’s help, be they male or female, but rather to not put my life on hold until someone bigger or stronger can come and help me take the next step.  When Dad was home, of course he was roped into helping.  But if the mood struck while he was away, she made my sister and I feel that we didn’t necessarily need a man’s physical strength to get things done.  She showed us how to put towels under the feet of the couch to slide it across hardwood floors, how to come up with innovative ways to take a burst of inspiration and run with it despite potential obstacles.

And, of course, always lift with your legs.

Stuff To Do This Summer

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Pray.

Bible study with Bird.

Study for the GRE.

Enjoy and learn from my new internship.

Do DuoLingo or something to keep up my extremely rusty Spanish.

Maybe learn some basic Italian while I’m at it.

Keep up an exercise routine.

Keep up this blog.

Work on some of my own stories.

Get back in touch with old friends.

Go to a friend’s wedding.

Start research for my thesis.

Speaking of which, should probably get that proposal revised and turned in.

Visit the Engineer.

Visit the Southern Belle.

Learn my way around my new town, including finding a bookshop and coffee place to frequent in my down time.

Start journaling again.

Put on sunscreen.

Drink a lot of coffee.

Be happy.

Feminism and Texting Family Members

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“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.

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.

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.