elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight

2011-05-06T00:50:00.005-05:00

Have you lost your mind?
Tell me when you think we've crossed the line
No more drugs for me
Pussy and religion is all I need
Grab my hand and
Baby, we'll live a hell of a life

- Kanye West, "Hell of a Life"

Tonight for the first time I began seriously to consider the possibility that I might benefit from medication.

I had this article to write, a fairly simple profile of a local political candidate, and I just could not focus. For hours I sat at the computer, stood up, thought about writing the article and was filled with dread, cleaned the kitchen more thoroughly than I have in weeks, listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, checked Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr a thousand times, skimmed some blogs...and it’s almost one a.m. and I’m still not done.

Also, I’m not working this week (transitioning between temp assignments), and I’ve been reasonably productive as far as freelancing and applying for full-time jobs, but I could have and should have been so much more productive. Every morning my alarm went off and then I hit the snooze button and dozed on and off for another two hours, hating myself but unable to summon the willpower to get up and get going.

And like, I don’t feel depressed or manic. Not that I would know. But I am getting more acquainted with bipolar disorder lately, and I think that, plus wise words from a variety of friends, has made me more receptive to the ideas of therapy and medication lately. Like, maybe I don’t have to constantly struggle to get out of bed in the morning, maybe I don’t have to push myself through feelings of apathy and self-doubt to get even the simplest piece of writing done. OR maybe I do, maybe I just need to grow up and learn that adults work for a living and get shit done around the house and save money and return library books on time and exercise and eat something besides cookies for lunch.

What do you think? Drugs? Counseling? Old-fashioned Protestant-work-ethic getting the fuck over it?

2011-03-29T22:40:00.003-05:00

Talkin' talkin' talkin' talk
Baby, let's just knock it off
They don't know what we been through
They don't know 'bout me and you
- Kanye West, "Heartless"

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You know how the fact that communication is essential to a good relationship is one of the most common(-sense) ideas out there? And yet is still hard to apply?

It's amazing how much clarity and contentment can come just from having an open conversation with a loved one. Even if it's uncomfortable and emotional in the moment, working through those feelings and coming to a shared conclusion is ultimately rewarding and invigorating. I feel so much better today than I did last week at this time, and I think a lot of it is just the catharsis of being honest.

Last week, for example, I don't think I'd have been as inspired as I was by this quote from Psychology Today that I saw on Tumblr: "Important as it is to choose the right partner, it's probably more important to be the right partner. We focus on changing the wrong person."

It felt so good to get things out in the open with one person that I know I need to do it with other people, too. But initiating the conversation isn't easy. Neither is apologizing. A couple of weeks ago, I glibly called my grandma a racist on Twitter (in my defense, she had made some pretty racist comments). She saw it and sent me an angry e-mail; I sent a couple of brief, contrite replies and haven't heard anything since. The logic of good communication and my mom both suggest that I should give her a call, reach out, not let this rift fester. But I'm still reluctant to do so.

I know, too, that as good as it is to talk about things, that must be supported by actions. As that Psychology Today quote suggests, I must do my part to be a better person and invest my time and energy in my relationships. I have changes to make in my life in general. I need to be making more of it, learning more, doing more, meeting more people and making a greater effort to be productive and positive.

I was already thinking those things, and then a conversation with a near-stranger over dinner last night made me long to improve myself, to be the change I want to see in the world. Before she'd even gotten around to challenging me to push myself, she talked about the fact that peacemaking and -keeping must begin on a personal level. We can't strive for political and international peace if we don't have it in our own relationships with our families and friends and lovers (or ex-lovers).

It's funny; that reminds me of a hymn I remember singing at my grandma's church when I was little: "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me."

2011-03-25T21:43:00.002-05:00

The world is lazy
But you and me
We're just crazy
So when I'm with you
I have fun
Yeah, when I'm with you
I have fun

- Best Coast, "When I'm With You"

Scanning Feministing on a Friday night, I came across this piece calling for an end to the dichotomy between "casual sex" and monogamous relationships. The author says that every sexual experience can and should be intimate and meaningful, and that just because it doesn't happen within a committed relationship doesn't mean it shouldn't be positive and healthy. The idea hit home because, as I've mentioned before, I've been dating a man "casually" for about nine months now.

To his credit, he's never called it "casual"--just "not exclusive." It's certainly never been casual to me. And I think that's one of the problems I've had with our relationship (or lack thereof): the fact that he has never volunteered to be exclusive or to make me his girlfriend has made me feel as if he doesn't value me as a sexual and emotional companion.

But I know that's not true. He's hung out with me once or twice just about every week since we started seeing each other; he's let me share his bed on dozens of nights; he's introduced me to his parents and told me private details about his past and his family; he's invited me to events at his temple; he's engaged with me in countless stimulating conversations about politics and music and film and our personal responses to the world. And when I'm thinking clearly, I know that our connection is about all of these things, not the fact that we have a lot of sex but no Facebook relationship status to prove it. We've been open and honest with each other even at times when we were taking advantage of the non-exclusivity of our situation, and I'm deeply grateful for the time we've spent together.

That doesn't make it any easier for me that he's free to sleep with other girls--and if no sex is casual, then that isn't, either. But although I do still hope for long-term monogamy (with him or with someone else), I have to remember that I am lucky to have what I do. "Casual" or not, we respect and care about each other, and I'm happy every day for that.

2011-02-26T20:08:00.003-06:00

If what they say is, "Nothing lasts forever,"
Then what makes
Then what makes
Then what makes
Then what makes
Then what makes
Love the exception?

- Outkast, "Hey Ya"

It's a strange and lonely thing to watch someone you love becoming increasingly passionate about and involved in something entirely separate from you. Not that you dislike it. It's actually really sweet and inspiring to see so much excitement and fervor and impulse for good--but it's an issue and an arena you know nothing about, and so you can't engage at all, can only stand far away on the sidelines. Try to be supportive and encouraging and nod and smile, but at the same time worry that your lack of knowledge and understanding and, ultimately, interest will drive the two of you apart.

It feels like starting college again, and seeing everyone go off and find their own niches and start off on their lives. Seeing your best friends make new best friends that you don't know is unsettling. It's good and happy, but there's a dissonance. And you grow apart from people you never thought would be anything but your other half. It's inspiring and lovely to watch people grow up and find the places that fit them, but when those places don't also fit you, it hurts.

And you can't be honest about any of this, not even in an off-handed comment or moment of venting, because above all you must be supportive. You feel out of place trying to hitch a ride on the back of the bandwagon, but you're afraid that any hint of hesitation will lead to you being left behind in the dust.

Leaving people is something that happens. You know that. But not yet please please not yet.

2011-02-06T22:17:00.003-06:00

Did someone make a fool of me?
For I could show 'em how it's done
- Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone"

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- Plato

Last night on the way to our friends' house to watch the rough cut of their feature film, we stopped at the gas station and bought some Nutter Butters. I didn't have any, but I had a stomachache from then until we started watching the movie. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but I believe that Nutter Butters have at least temporarily been ruined for me.

They were item number two in my hand when I bought the pregnancy test at Walgreens last week--I grabbed them because I was hungry and because I didn't the test to be the only thing I was buying. I didn't really think I was pregnant, because all the sex I'd been having was safe. But I was paranoid, so paranoid. I'd lain awake for hours a few nights before, tossing and turning as I wondered what I'd do if I did have a baby growing inside me and how much time I'd have to make a decision and whether I could talk to the potential father about it. This morning I read this post on Tiger Beatdown. I was riveted by the whole thing, but the part that hit closest to home was Sady Doyle writing that she used to say, "I'm pro-choice, but I would never have an abortion myself." Such familiar words, and such an argument for never judging someone until you've walked two moons in their moccasins. How the hell could I make such a decision until I was there myself, faced with a life-changing, stomach-dropping road ahead?

The wait in line at Walgreens, clutching my three-pack pregnancy test and Nutter Butters, felt interminable. I was hot and uncomfortable in my bulky down coat; the credit card machine wasn't working; I wanted to escape. Then it was my turn and the forty-ish male cashier smarmed as he scanned my items, "Looks like you have a big exam to take, huh?"

I was in a fog and barely able to process what he'd said; I mumbled something like, "What? Oh, uh, thanks." The machine didn't work for me, either, so it was another two minutes or something before I could leave and I stared at my hands and at my debit card and at the plastic bag and didn't even glance at him or at the people standing inches away from me, waiting in line. When I emerged into the winter dusk, I mouthed, "Fucking fuck!" at the sky. At least one person probably saw me. I know the guy who brushed past me near my car saw me beginning to cry. I don't know if any other drivers on the road saw me as I sobbed my way down Hennepin.

I cried so hard, cried without really knowing why, cried feeling violated and judged and stupid. Luckily my friend Kris answered his phone and gave me some reassurance, and we laughed, and then later I talked to my friend Sonya and we also laughed, and it was fine. And I got my period without even taking the test and that was fine. And my boy still doesn't know anything about it but he is a good person, so when I tell him it will also be fine.

I just feel exhausted. I feel for the first time the intersection of the personal and the political on my body. The day before Walgreens, I called the office of my congressman to remind him to vote against HR3, a bill in the House that would extend restrictions on federal funding for abortions, making it all but impossible to get it even in cases of rape and incest. I ranted about how the bill amounted to violence against women, having lifted most of my points, I'll admit, from another Tiger Beatdown post.

I have absolutely nothing to complain about when it comes to my sexual history. Every guy I've ever been with has been completely respectful of me and my boundaries, I've had no problem getting birth control, and if the worst that happens to me is a mild scare with a side of insensitivity from a drugstore employee, then I'm the luckiest girl in the world. I just feel that I've reaffirmed what I've known for a while: you can never make assumptions or judgments about someone if you don't know what it's like to be in that position, so don't even try.

2011-01-18T02:37:00.003-06:00

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
- Sylvia Plath

With Twitter and Facebook, and with my official website, and on here, too, sometimes I get weirded out thinking about all the different groups of people they reach. When I post a tweet or a status, I'm usually thinking about a certain subset, sometimes even one specific person. Then it unsettles me to think of all of the others who can and maybe do read it--long-lost classmates or church acquaintances, people Googling my name, complete strangers, potential future employers, etc. Sometimes I'll get a comment on a post from someone I would never have expected to notice or care. And then I have to assume that for every one person who comments, there are at least three more who see it and have an opinion, maybe a negative one, and are just too shy or lazy to voice it.

Since high school, I've thought of myself as a "social butterfly." While I always had my best friends, I participated in different social groups and was slightly different in each of them. That transferred directly to college, where I had a core group of friends from my dorm floor but also hung out with my roommate's friends from a different floor, people from church and YMCA volunteering, people from the student magazine, and Italian classmates. I didn't always feel fully accepted by all of those groups, and sometimes it was almost as if by participating in a lot of different social circles, I couldn't really be close with any single one of them.

And now it's the same on the Internet and in the paths of social media and journalism activity that are opening to me. I've finished my magazine internship and find myself at another juncture, not sure which opportunity to pursue. And each one comes with a different persona, which I juggle as I try to present myself to the world. Am I just your average Liz Lemon-ish twentysomething girl? Am I a Minneapolitan dropping names, hopping bars, and surfing Twin Cities gossip blogs as I struggle to break into the local scene? Am I a politically conscious progressive who gives herself chest pains by reading feminist blogs and analyses of the financial crisis late into the night? Am I a hip-hop enthusiast? A movie buff? A bookworm? Am I profane? Witty? Down-to-earth? Romantic? It changes multiple times a day. It is not at all rare for me to think back on something I wrote just hours before, and about the specific people who might have seen it, and feel awkward and ashamed.

Maybe I'm making too much of this--after all, everyone has different personalities they put on for their families, their coworkers, their close friends, their romantic partners. Maybe I don't need to fret about my social media schizophrenia. My posts are usually completely honest and genuinely motivated, and "being yourself" is supposed to be the key to staying sane and being likable. But I do worry that by not sticking to one facet of my being, I'm sending out an incoherent message that won't attract any meaningful attention. And conversely, I worry that if I pick one thing to focus on--sarcastic commentary on my social awkwardness, heartfelt examination of my past, fired-up political and feminist opinions, in-the-know records of my local activity and media consumption--I'll be denying the rest. It's like foreshadowing my eventual (hypothetical) locking in to one career path or place to live: I'll need to narrow my focus and make a decision, but I'm already afraid of the alternate universes I'll be shutting out in the process.

I don't really know the correct answer. So I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. Here's hoping most people are okay with that.

2010-12-28T17:24:00.005-06:00

She is the fractured one sewn
From sums of fractured time
Her heart speaks a fractured tongue
Her life is fractured design
- School of Seven Bells, "Babelonia"

This is way too much, I need a moment
- Kanye West, "Power"

As many tears and all-nighters and boring classes and hangovers and unreturned texts and hours of stress over projects and obligations as 2010 contained, all I can feel is lucky.

I can't believe I've been given these past few years. They haven't always been easy, but above all and most pleasing to me, they've been eventful, full of travel and new jobs and new friends and good music and deep conversation and great stories.

At midnight as the year changed to 2010, I was grabbed and kissed by my ex-boyfriend, the first time I'd ever kissed someone at midnight on New Year's. A few hours later, we were on the floor of his friend's laundry room, ignoring the jeers of his friends outside the door. I left early the next morning, sitting outside in my van and waiting for the ice crystals to melt from the windshield so I could drive home.

The day after I returned to Minneapolis, as I was about to start my final semester of college, I got an unexpected message from a boy I'd met on Halloween. I giggled and speculated about him to my film friends as we convened for drinks after class that first week. Also during the first week of classes, I visited Hillel, the Jewish student center, for the first time. I'd signed up to film and edit contestants for a fundraiser called Semitic Idol, and I met and was charmed by the volunteer in charge of it, Evan. I also agreed to shoot and edit a promotional video for the honors program. I had no idea how I'd fit all of this in on top of my classes and my senior thesis, but I was on a mission to gain video production experience. At the time, I was thinking seriously about moving to L.A. and pursuing a film career after graduation.

In February, my sister and I went home one weekend and I called Tim, the guy from Halloween. He took me out to a series of trendy-seeming bars and we smoked cigarettes and kissed on snowy sidewalks. He drove me to a quiet park and we walked by the moonlit river--a move that was equal parts romantic and "Oh shit, is he a serial killer?" Still, I was won over. The next night, we went out again, this time to a bar with some friends of his and then back to his friend's house for a murder mystery party. Tim and I, uninvited and under-dressed, sat to the side and watched in amused silence as the other three couples acted and argued their way through the game. Later, the hostess took us on a tour of the house, which had been built by her uncle, the drummer of Cheap Trick. Half of the house was designed to look like the set of Gunsmoke, and was filled with antiques. Tim kept stealing kisses as we wound our way through the elaborate rooms, and I luxuriated in the surreality of the night. By the time I returned to school, I was head over heels for him.

Too much so: When I kissed a former dorm-mate at a party a few weeks later, I felt so guilty that I burst into tears and made the situation far more dramatic than it should have been. I returned home for spring break anticipating a week of basking in Tim's company. But he was busy for most of the week, and when we went out on my last night home, I got embarrassingly drunk. I blacked out and have yet to learn what exactly happened. He left me sobbing alone in my driveway, and I returned to school the next day devastated. My friends Erik and Kris listened to my sob story and offered counsel, but Tim told me he needed space, and I didn't talk to him for months after that. I did see him again twice more, but I realized he had no intentions of anything beyond occasional hook-ups, and that we had little in common.

I pitched a story about young women becoming nuns for a class magazine, inspired by my longtime friend Stephanie. Near the end of February, I met with a nun for coffee and was inspired by her joy and compassion. Writing the article reminded me how much I loved journalism. At the same time, my film class wasn't going well. I had a few great conversations with classmates about my script--a high school drama about the aftermath of a student's sudden death--and the actors I hired were eager and helpful. But I couldn't get the technical aspects off the ground, and was unsatisfied with the finished product. My professor's lack of encouragement throughout the semester didn't help, and by graduation I had more or less abandoned Hollywood dreams.

Despite falling newly in love with journalism, I was struggling in my actual magazine job, at The Wake. I had failed to work with the editors to apply for yearly student funding, so the magazine was going to take a major budget hit. I felt guilty and stressed for days, especially when a former editor--whom I considered a friend--sent an angry and accusing e-mail to me and the other staffers. I ran into her at a campus bar one Wednesday night and we talked it out, but I still felt awful about the situation.

But I did have those Wednesday (and Monday and Tuesday and Thursday) nights at the bar. At some point, I started going out with a group of friends at least once a week for drinks and games and "Party in the USA" sing-a-longs. Two members of the group, Erik and Joe, were some of my closest and most lasting college friends, and it was great to spend time with them and have some respite from the stress of my thesis as college came to an end. My last semester was also the first time I had a car at school, and driving friends around--home from the bars, to pick up film equipment, to the St. Paul campus (where my roommate Kris had classes and labs)--became one of my chief activities that spring. Most of it was soundtracked to Lady Gaga and involved stops for snacks, so I didn't mind.

The last time I went out with my drinking buddies was the night before graduation. Kris got accepted to med school the next day and I turned 22 the day after that, and all of the parties and nights out provided a warm, joyful end to the school year. But then Kris moved out, and the first part of my summer was boring and empty, filled with endlessly applying for jobs and looking for an apartment. I missed all of the TV watching and good-natured squabbling and personal storytelling he and I had done all year.

Fortunately, I had one thing going for me: an internship with the Onion. My friend Lexi had encouraged me to apply for the promotions job, which I hoped was a stepping-stone to a real position with the company. My first assignment was a concert on campus by Cloud Cult, one of my favorite bands. I handed out buttons and stickers for hours, proudly acknowledging when friends stopped by that, yes, I worked for the Onion. Throughout the summer, I enjoyed free entry to concerts and movie nights and one all-day beer festival. Sometimes after a long night of sitting on a muggy bar patio or in a mosquito-infested park, I'd stop by my friend Katharine's to gossip and watch YouTube videos for a few hours. Driving around to those events and to prospective apartments familiarized me with the Twin Cities, which I'd only known in relation to campus and a few bus lines, and I fell more and more in love with the place.

In early June, I went on a date with Evan from Hillel. We'd gotten along well in the time I'd spent there, though the video project hadn't really materialized, and we talked online sometimes. A few weeks after we had lunch, he invited me to work with him on an independent feature film, as the props coordinator. I was never really sure of my role on set and didn't do a great job, but I enjoyed watching people my age create with vision and authority (two things I'd never had in my fumbling student films).

Evan and I became closer as production went along, and we went out on another date a couple of weeks into filming, this time to a pornographic art exhibit in a hip part of town. We sat on the ground outside and smoked weed with strangers, and walked up and down the residential street. I commented on a house having Christmas lights up in July and he said, "Kissing you would be like a Christmas present." So I kissed him. He drove me to a nearby lake and we made out under a tree. But I was high and eager to talk out all of the feelings and uncertainty and pressure of the film crew, and so I pulled away and was nervous and we ended up talking more than anything. When he dropped me off and kissed me goodbye the next morning, I didn't think anything would come of it. But a week later we had an even longer and more intense "date," and after that I was his.

Around the same time, I finally got a job, soliciting survey respondents at the Mall of America. I hated the job from day one. It was made bearable by flatteringly lascivious comments from my coworkers, the chance to see movie trailers before their official releases, and one amazing day when I witnessed a dance-off between twelve-year-olds, but finally I couldn't take it anymore and I quit. It helped that by then I'd been hired as a full-time intern at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, a dream job that I'd been hoping for all summer.

My internship made me feel more grown-up than ever before, though I always felt dowdy beside my coworkers' fashionable outfits and awkward when they trotted out to lunch together. For the longest time I didn't feel that my fellow interns liked me, and I didn't know how to share my personality with them. I also sometimes felt detached because my life outside of work was so full: I applied for and got a second, unpaid internship at The A.V. Club (sister to my Onion job) in September, and I continued to see Evan a few times a week. Eventually, though, the girls and I bonded over Kanye West and Mad Men and being women in our early twenties. Now we've got one week left and I know I'll miss them terribly.

I'll also miss the down time at work that forced me to delve into Salon and Harper's and Slate and other smart, in-depth news sites. I felt more informed than ever before this election season, and I was motivated to keep reading not only by my own interest but by that of Evan and other friends. I wanted to be able to converse intelligently with them, and I think I've occasionally succeeded. And when I actually was working, I was calling people all over the U.S. and Norway, making brief but often warm connections with the voices at the other end and finding out new things constantly. My communication skills, especially by phone, improved a lot, and just by finishing my simple tasks, I got an invaluable education in Twin Cities restaurants, theater, and other culture.

Probably the biggest development of 2010 has been my love affair with Minneapolis. I always liked the city and felt a rush of affection when I came back to it after summers and breaks. But this year I really put down my roots, started learning and absorbing the culture of the place, and decided to stay in the area for the foreseeable future. That hasn't always been a good thing--often it's been a personal, selfish love that draws me away from my hometown. When my friends Emily and Sonya visited me, in the spring and the late summer, respectively, I was too wrapped up in my own life to be able to properly share the city with either of them. And at times this past Christmas break, I felt especially lonely and lost, snobbish toward the city of my birth and eager to get back to my apartment and neighborhood coffee shops and music scene.

Not that I've entirely turned my back on my past, of course. I've continued to love my high school stalwarts. One of the best times of my whole year was visiting Chicago for a weekend in October, getting to talk and dance and be crazy and explore parts of the city with my friends April and Sonya. We also visited Stephanie in the convent, which was interesting and enjoyable. I've also grown closer to friends in Minneapolis, sharing pop culture obsessions and speaking openly with people that were once just surface-level acquaintances, and I'm deeply grateful for that. In my last post, I claimed I'd given up on trying to be friends with Ben and Collin's circle, and then I ended up hanging out with that group a few days later and spending much of New Year's with them. It makes me think of one of Evan's favorite sayings, "Life is long"--you never know what you'll come back around to, which people will play a role (or a recurring role) in your life. Over the last few weeks, I've had wonderful times and honest connections with so many people, old and new. I'd love to be able to sustain that.

As 2011 begins, I'm still attached (unofficially) to Evan. I wish it didn't still bother me so much that he isn't actually my boyfriend and that he has been with other girls during our relationship (though I've been with other guys, too). I have short-lived but frequent breakthroughs of accepting and being thankful for what I do have: the fact that he likes me enough to have spent so much of the past six months together. His life has been turbulent, so it feels like a miracle some days that our paths happened to cross here and now, that we're part of each other's stories. I know, that's groan-worthy, but I really do feel lucky to know him at all. I'm lucky to know any of the people I know, to have had any of the conversations I've had or heard any of the music I've heard. My life still feels like a confluence of fickle and complicated forces that just happen to have turned out something relatively interesting and happy.

At the end of 2009, I had no idea what the coming year would bring. I thought I might attend film school or move to L.A. or move home to my parents. Part of me thought I might get back together with my ex-boyfriend. I could only barely see the light at the end of the college tunnel, and I couldn't picture what life would be like outside of that world. Whole relationship arcs happened this year that I could never have fathomed last New Year's. My resume doubled in size. I launched a personal website. I let a stranger convince me to sneak into an outdoor music festival. I became a fan of Twin Cities hip-hop. I saw at least fifteen concerts. I became a fan of Mad Men and of Glee. I developed and abandoned crushes. I made out with a 17-year-old and with a stranger in zombie makeup. I hallucinated after being awake for 40 hours; later that night, I fell asleep in a bar and got kicked out. I cried a lot, but I laughed far more often.

Resolutions: be proactive professionally and personally. Reach out to people. But in my existing relationships, don't force timelines and labels. Let things come as they are and be thankful. Be healthier, especially when it comes to eating. Cut out fast food as much as possible. Be frugal and be better about buying local, fair trade, etc. Keep the apartment clean. Spend more time reading and less time on Facebook. Don't procrastinate simple tasks. Be more patient with my parents and cherish the time I have with them. Try to have a good attitude about everything. Read and write every day. Do what makes me happy.

2010-12-27T00:34:00.002-06:00

Dance Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulder, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

- William Carlos Williams

One good thing, anyway, is that I'm not trying so hard anymore to get certain people to like me. I am supremely comfortable with the friends I do have, the friends who have always been there for me, and I'm not trying so hard to connect with people who never really wanted me in the first place.

(Of course, it's not that simple because I was friends with those other people once; they actually did say kind and caring things to me; but that's over now so it's okay. I'm done with that and I won't chase something that's gone.)

And I really do feel comfortable with almost all of the people around me, and I'm happy to know them. It's great to laugh and be silly and talk about the future and talk about the past. I feel closer to certain friends of mine than I have in a long time, and it's wonderful.

The only thing that worries me is that maybe all of this peace with most areas of my life is a result of one leg of the tripod, the romantic/sexual leg, being "taken care of." I have someone, and I'm happy with him, so I don't have to go looking for prospects in Rockford or at work or in my friends' lives, and I can just relax and enjoy those things on their own.

But that creates a problem: if that leg buckles, if it goes wrong and I no longer have my rock of regular physical contact and honest conversation and a date to movies and concerts, then will everything else collapse, too? And even if things stay as they are, can I handle all of the intensity and pressure focused on this one part of my life?

Somehow when I'm home in Rockford I always end up staying up late, hours after everyone else has gone to sleep, just binge-eating and watching TV and clicking around online. I used to do this when I lived with strangers my sophomore year of college, too. It's partly just needing alone time and partly making myself as tired as I can before bed so I don't lie awake thinking too much.

2010-11-13T19:59:00.003-06:00

Fifteen years from now you have to make a decision
The greatest love of your life is gonna call during dinner
- Dessa, "Mineshaft II"

"They were alive, and not asleep. Venita was dead, and asleep forever."
- Caroline B. Cooney, from Burning Up

Postscript to yesterday's entry:

I'm rereading a book I loved around freshman year of high school, Caroline B. Cooney's young adult novel Burning Up. It's about arson and race and inequality and segregation and violence, and every few pages I start to cry. For the characters, for the world, for the fact that some people have and others don't, for the fact that people are killed every day in places like Detroit and Darfur and Rockford, Illinois for no real reason.

On Veteran's Day, I saw countless online posts by my friends and acquaintances thanking the men and women of the military for their sacrifices, and for the writers' "freedom." I read these posts with a kind of confusion and ambivalence. It's not that I don't support individual soldiers, but I can't support war. And when was the last time a war was actually fought for "freedom" and "democracy"? And the fact that I do live in a democracy, that my parents were always able to feed and clothe and educate me, that I have lived safely until the age of 22, always seems just a miracle or stroke of luck or accident of fate. That I alive and well in this moment in the vast history of time, that I am in Minneapolis, Minnesota right now typing words on a Mac computer and waiting for the call of a boy to go out to a club--that's just the roll of the dice or the grace of the creator.

I have my bed to sleep in and my food to eat and my car to drive in and my family and friends to hold me close. It's time I started remembering the people who don't have those things. It's time I started figuring out just why I'm here.

2010-11-12T18:35:00.006-06:00

I know way too many people here right now that I didn't know last year
Who the fuck are y'all?
I swear it feels like the last few nights we been everywhere and back
But I just can't remember it all
What am I doing?
What am I doing?

Oh yeah, that's right, I'm doing me
I'm doing me
I'm living life right now, man
And this what I'ma do 'til it's over
'Til it's over
But it's far from over

- Drake, "Over"

On Tuesday of this week, I went to a memorial concert for Twin Cities rapper and major hip-hop personality Eyedea, who died in October. The show involved video clips of Eyedea, a poem of his read by his mother, heartfelt performances by his friends, a DJ set by his partner Abilities, a surprise appearance by Kimya Dawson (best known for her contributions to the Juno soundtrack), interpretive dance, a giant freestyle competition... It was a surreal, emotional night, and I'm unbelievably glad I got to be there. The message that death pushes the living to be better, and that Eyedea always pushed those around him to be the best they could be, lingered with me. So did the words of the rubber stamp that inked my hand as I entered the club: "Listen Carefully," it said.

Listen Carefully.

Last night I went to an exhibit of photography by Alec Soth, which I wrote about here. Both that and the Eyedea memorial show were cases of me taking the initiative to attend a local event and participate as fully as I could. Of me thinking seriously about what I was seeing, and being inspired by it. Of being moved to write about what I saw later.

Getting those opportunities has made me realize more fully than ever just how incredibly lucky I am, and what a rich and good time this is in my life. I have always had a loving family that provides for me and a hilarious, good-hearted sister, and I've always had wonderful friends. I've always had my health and my brain and the good fortune to avoid illness and injury. But now I have a steady job in my chosen field. I have an apartment of my own in a city that I love more every day. I have the chance to see great art and music, to read great books, to walk and run outside and stare at the sky and breathe in air. I have a man that is always ready for meaningful conversation, and that respects me and encourages me, and that likes me physically and emotionally--and yes, he's shied away from commitment, but for the most part it has worked.

About a month ago, I posted on Facebook my thoughts about journalism, and my education in it, and how I've come back around to loving it and wanting a career in it despite the constantly shifting and occasionally dire-seeming state of the industry. Many of my friends and former classmates who commented on my post, as well as others to whom I've spoken, have given up on journalism--they don't like it, they're disillusioned with it, they don't want to put in the time and effort to succeed in an industry where jobs tend to be low-paying and precarious. But I continue to believe in journalism, even as I criticize a lot of examples of it, and for now I do want very much to work as a writer and/or editor. This puts me in a strange position: I know I'm far from the best writer, reporter, or editor to come out of the journalism school. But I'm doing it. I'm not a great writer, but I am writing.

So much of my life has just been about planning and getting ready--for tests, for college, for a career--that to just be living and working feels exhilarating on a daily basis. In some ways, I am still in that transitional, preparatory stage: my job now is still just a temporary internship, and it would be nice to find a long-term relationship and perhaps some more stability in my career and living situation in the coming years. But I still resent it when people I meet say things like, "Journalism, huh? So what do you want to do with that?" I am writing. I am working in journalism. I am living in the city and going out several nights a week and meeting lots of new people and reading all the time and learning new things constantly. To be lucky enough to have those chances--it makes me overflow with gratitude every day.

2010-11-03T20:51:00.002-05:00

Quick bit of self-promotion: today I launched my new website, www.colleen-powers.com. I'll be blogging there daily (that's the plan, anyway), and it will be more light-hearted and professional and succinct than this blog. Don't worry, I'll still be using this as the outlet for introspection of a more embarrassing and indulgent kind. But please visit the new site and leave comments!

2010-10-30T15:29:00.007-05:00

Everybody wanna see you with your hair down
Wanna hear you hit the high note
Wanna know what they can you get for a little less, girl
I don't
I know
Had the stones to fly
Had some hard goodbyes
Call me up, day or night
Free drinks and bad advice
- Dessa, "Dixon's Girl"

"The possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, at he wouldn't be entirely wrong--nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was any of those things, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn't pretty, and on top of that I didn't take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn't even one of those unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he'd somehow been misled and would eventually be disappointed, or that he had very low standards."
- Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

When I was a sophomore in high school, my school's quiz bowl team frequently crossed paths at area tournaments with the players from Sterling. Their captain was a short-haired, serious South Asian girl who was quick to answer all questions in a gruff monotone. That year, I usually played for the varsity "B" team, and we were coached by a former player with a reputation for drinking and swearing a lot and generally not giving a fuck. (Needless to say, quiz bowl was a lot of fun that year.) He jokingly referred to the Sterling captain as "Man-Woman," which was always good for a laugh when we played them.

The other night, I idly decided to skim the Illinois quiz bowl Facebook group I made as a freshman in college and through some minor stalking efforts made a discovery: that girl is now a man. She actually was transgendered; now he has made the transition, and is hopefully happier for it.

I've only met personally three transgendered people in my life, all within the last year. It's still a little jarring for me. And this case is especially so, for natural reasons: it's someone I knew in high school, pre-transition and before I had any real awareness of anyone being trans, much less someone my age. There is something that fascinates me about changing genders, and about the knowledge that there are people who feel profoundly wrong in their own bodies. It makes me want to keep looking, keep asking questions.

I have never seriously struggled with my own gender identity or sexuality. But most of what I know about gender theory comes from Judith Butler and her idea of performativity, that (in a very simplistic summary) binary oppositions of gender are not biological but conditioned and performed. In that context, I've definitely had an awkward relationship with the performance of my own gender. On the one hand, I was never a "tomboy" as a child. My sister, with her short haircut, love of sports and martial arts, and tendency to climb anything that could possibly be climbed, fit that role perfectly. I'm not athletic at all, and I'd definitely choose Barbies over baseball as a child, but I was never exactly "girly." I still don't wear makeup except for parties and going out (and I haven't even done that for a few months). I remember my friends taking me to a clothing store and trying to force me to try on dresses, and me stubbornly refusing. The times when I did dress or act particularly feminine in my younger years were always anomalies. For example, cheerleading for my elementary school's basketball team one year: I had fun, but even just a year or two later, friends and teachers expressed skepticism that I'd ever done such a thing. And in truth, I only tried out for the cheerleading squad after trying and failing to make the then-co-ed basketball team.

I think complicating this relationship to gender has been my tendency and my desire, for almost as long as I can remember, to be different. I always had to make myself stand out in some way, or to show I was above the people around me. To show that I was too smart for their silly pleasures. It was that impulse that made me check out a book on philosophy from the library and read it conspicuously at Christian day camp the summer before eighth grade. That made me refuse to buy a dress for the eighth-grade dance--I just went in my plain school clothes. That made me wear my dad's authentic Scottish kilt to school one day freshman year of high school. And it's that impulse, too, that sometimes makes me feel guilty for loving "chick flicks" like You've Got Mail, while at the same time not feeling feminine enough or something when I revel in a Sam Raimi horror movie.

Of course, these gender distinctions are just simplistic stereotypes. There's an infinite number of ways to be a woman or to be a man. And I really am comfortable in my own skin--and it doesn't hurt, problematic as this may be, to have my body validated by male attention. But sometimes being around women my own age still makes me feel inadequate. I'm almost two months into my magazine internship, and I still feel a little awkward around the three other interns, all about my age, who share my work space. They talk about waiting for engagement rings from their boyfriends, take breaks together to go grab coffee (which I don't drink), ooh and aah over designer accessories online and each other's fashionable clothes. And the thing is, we get along fine--they're all likable and funny and love to read and write like I do, and every so often someone will forward a funny blog post or photo to the rest of us and we'll all crack up. But somehow feeling that I'm not poised and fashionable and effortlessly feminine like the rest of them keeps me feeling like I'm on the outside.

If there's anyone to be "blamed" for my unease with certain trappings of womanhood, it's probably my role models. My mother, of course--she's always been extremely low-maintenance and unconcerned with her clothes or hair. She never showed me how to put on makeup or taught me what various accessories and pieces of clothing are called or gave me a family recipe or even helped me figure out tampons.

And I can probably chalk some of it up to my closest friends. Most of them are just as low-maintenance as I am (if not more so), and even once some of them began to wear makeup and nice clothes and attract boys, our conversations were always more about classes and books and movies and music and religion and politics than about those "girly" things. And again, I think it has to do with this idea--borne of our personalities and our "Gifted" education--that we should be above such things. I remember this sort of struggle I had with a few of my friends in seventh grade, where I would try to bring up boys and which ones we all "liked" and they would evade the question. We had always spent a lot of time making up goofy fantasies and games and stories, and it was a lot of fun. But I felt like we were growing up and I was starting to really notice our male classmates, and I couldn't get them to acknowledge that. And it frustrated me--I remember venting about it one day to my mom and sobbing that, while I loved my friends, I didn't feel as if I could actually talk to them.

It's the same with my sister--she had the same mother as I did, after all, and as I said she was always a tomboy. In the last few years, we've opened up a lot more about having crushes on actors and musicians and occasionally coworkers, and we'll compliment each other's clothes or hair. But it's still tentative. We still retreat quickly into our familiar and wonderful world of inside jokes and funny anecdotes and privately mocking people we know and reminiscing about our childhood.

But am I supposed to blame the people I love most for not feeling like I perform well as a woman? Of course not. It would be stupid to want to trade love and acceptance and stimulating conversation and thousands of belly laughs for the ability to braid hair and put on eyeliner. And if confiding crushes and learning about makeup weren't part of my friendships, then neither were catty gossip and overblown drama and fallings-out.

Tomorrow is Halloween, and so most people are celebrating tonight because it's Saturday. Tonight I will put on a skirt and blouse and lipstick and heels and attempt to style my hair so that I look like Mad Men's Peggy Olson, one of my favorite female characters on TV. Tonight I will perform, but I will also drink and hug and dance and laugh and reside in the love of my role models.

2010-10-11T20:24:00.002-05:00

If we die in each other's arms
Still get laid in the afterlife
- Kanye West, "Lost in the World"

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside, remembering all the times you've felt that way.
- Charles Bukowski

I could be so much happier if I only learned to let go. Spread my palms out, let water run over and through my fingers, let sand spill out and disperse. If I weren't so insistent on letting my mind spin away from me with fantasies and plans and labels and containers, I think I could lay back and let myself be free.

For example: if I could just accept dating this man openly. Today we're happy in each other's arms, today we can have honest and meaningful and analytical conversations about ourselves and our pasts and our futures and each other. Maybe tomorrow he will want to sleep with someone else, and maybe the day after that he'll be back to me. I don't know. And even if we were in an exclusive relationship I wouldn't really know. When I sit with him and talk candidly and allow myself to accept the not-knowing, I feel at peace. But alone in my apartment the fear and anxiety creep in like a stone weighed down at the bottom of my stomach, and I can't hold on.

For example: if I could have just taken Saturday night for what it was. I felt confident enough then in my "open relationship" to respond boldly to a stranger's advances, and we kissed and his hands were everywhere and he called me beautiful. And he asked me repeatedly how he was going to get in touch with me. I skirted the question for a while, until finally I accepted his phone number and asked his full name so I could look him up on Facebook. Later I thought, maybe I should just leave it alone. Leave it as a giddy memory, as the "zipless fuck" that Erica Jong fantasizes about in Fear of Flying. But there he was on Facebook, so I sent him a friend request with the happy little message: "Hey, fellow zombie--you don't have to add me as a friend if you don't want to, but I had fun the other night." And he accepted the request without replying to the message, and I discovered he has a girlfriend.

I hate these gut-punches that Facebook delivers with no warning, and with no recourse. At least you're hidden behind the computer screen so the culprits can't see your pain, but maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe you need to scream your frustration at someone, and all you can do is send desperate instant messages to random friends. And then turn off the computer and go to bed and wish for someone to call you beautiful and ask to see you again and actually mean it.

2010-10-02T22:12:00.005-05:00

Waiting for that sinking feeling
It's all that keeps me together
And I'm so scared to let it unwind
Waiting for that same old feeling
- Jeremy Messersmith, "Franklin Avenue"

I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground and
Bully winds came around
Pushed them face-down in the snow
He got the urge for going
And I had to let him go
- Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

WARNING: this post contains a lot of gossipy, not-well-written details of my life. I've been trying to cut down on that aspect of my blog, but it's October, and a lot of big personal milestones are coming up. I knew this year of my life--senior year of college, graduating, and looking for and starting a new job--would bring a lot of changes but it still surprises me to realize how eventful it's been.

(Note: most of the names here have been changed.)

The Zombie Pub Crawl, one of the biggest Twin Cities events of the year, is next weekend. I'm not really a zombie person, but the crawl has been a highlight for me since I was a sophomore in college. That year, my friend and I just happened to cross paths with the horde of made-up, costumed, drunken twentysomethings. The next year, I didn't dress up but took advantage of the wealth of people-watching fodder. Last year, though, I was 21 and happy to paint my face and meet up with friends for the event. It was just over a month into senior year and I'd been going out to bars and house parties several nights a week. I'd already had my share of wild nights and hangovers to match.

At the pub crawl I met up with Molly, one of my friends from studying abroad in Rome. She shoved me together with her friend Devon, a skinny, black-clad folksinger she assured me I'd love. We danced and held hands, and he did seem nice enough and into me. But any interest I'd had was destroyed when I came back from the bathroom and he loudly asked me how the "pisser" was. (That's a dealbreaker, ladies.) As the night went on I kept running into Roscoe, the bassist in Molly's boyfriend's band. I'd met him before, and our slight familiarity coupled with the mysterious power of zombie makeup kept pulling us together. At first I couldn't tell if he was just being friendly, but then he confessed that he had in fact been flirting with me. At that point I more or less ditched Devon and began pursuing Roscoe. And all this time I was getting drunker and observing ongoing dramas among Molly's friends and dancing crazily with Molly. As the night ended, I was glued to Roscoe's side. A Harry Potter zombie pointed his wand at us and ordered us to kiss, which we uncomfortably evaded; before long, though, we were making out in the parking lot as Molly, her boyfriend, and Devon took off. Roscoe drove me home and spent the night (a first for me). We saw each other twice more and spoke on the phone several times, but though I liked him a lot, we weren't especially compatible. Not long after that, Molly and her boyfriend broke up, and a few months later, she started dating Roscoe--a happy ending.

But before I had really stopped seeing Roscoe, Halloween happened. The summer before, I had spent a lot of time with two girls I knew through my ex-boyfriend Collin (who at the time was barely speaking to me). When one of those girls invited me to her Halloween party, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit Rockford for the weekend. I made plans to stay overnight and proceeded to down Jell-O shots and dance the night away in my yellow Power Ranger costume.

Late in the night, Paul showed up. He and I recognized each other instantly from the Rock Valley Mass Comm department, where he'd taken a class and I'd interned the summer before. We had never spoken, but we admitted that we'd caught each other's eyes in that class. The next thing I remember: lying in the middle of the living room floor, Paul on top of me and kissing me furiously, the entire party staring at us and laughing or making snide comments. We adjourned to the bathroom--at one point I was in the bathtub with Paul leaning over me--and then the bedrooms, which were occupied by passed-out partiers. Finally Paul just led me to his car, which was parked outside. Later we returned to a mostly emptied house and continued to make out on the couch as the hostess, her boyfriend, and her sister cleaned up. We slept on the floor and endured a slightly uncomfortable morning after. After a few days of cheerful mocking from the other party guests (one of my good friends compared us to jungle animals who were going to mate at all costs), I found Paul on Facebook and he suggested that we should get together next time I was in town.

But the weekend before Thanksgiving, when I headed to his page to set up a reunion, I saw that he was newly listed as "in a relationship." I was crushed. The next day, I saw that he had removed me as a friend, and was further crushed. (If anything good came of it, it was this: when I confessed the situation to my friend and laughed "I'm pathetic," she responded, "You are not pathetic for liking someone, Colleen. Never think that." I prized those kind words.)

That same pre-Thanksgiving weekend, Collin invited me to meet up with him and his friends (the same crowd from the Halloween party, which he hadn't attended) on the Wednesday night before the holiday. We had renewed our friendship that semester when we kept being drunk online in the same wee hours. His messages had taken a turn for the flirtatious, and I detected a subtext to his Thanksgiving invitation. I had mixed feelings about giving him a second chance after he'd intermittently ignored me in the fifteen months since we'd broken up, but we were getting along, and being dropped by Paul might have made me more vulnerable. In any case, Collin and I hooked up that Wednesday, and again the day after Christmas, and again on New Year's Eve (in his friend's laundry room during their party. I can only imagine the opinion this group of people has of me). If I thought we were getting back together, I was repeatedly proven wrong: he was often distant and reneged on promises to hang out between hook-ups. It bothered me a lot, but I was too stupid and too eager to get out of the house that winter to just let it go.

I wasn't happy with how things ended as Collin and I returned to school, but on the first day of the new semester, I received a message from Paul. He apologized for being an "asshole," explained that he had been in an off-and-on relationship when we met but that it had ended, and offered to take me out next time I was in town. Just after Valentine's Day, that's what happened: a slightly awkward reunion turned into one of the most romantic weekends of my life. We stood on cold sidewalks and smoked cigarettes and kissed, and talked about religion and relationships, and he called me beautiful. The next night we went out with some of his friends and crashed a murder mystery party at his friend's fascinatingly decorated mansion (half the house was designed after the set of Gunsmoke and filled with antiques). For about a month, I was smitten. Despite the distance, I believed in our future together (not least because he hinted that we should both move to California to pursue our creative passions). I even tearfully explained to Collin one night, after he hinted at a spring break rendezvous, that I loved someone else.

Paul and I had another euphoric interlude over that break, but our last night together was a lifetime low point for me. I already felt him being distant as we downed beer and shots at a trashy country bar with his sister and brother-in-law, but it was at his friend's house later that things went downhill. Except I don't know exactly what happened, because I blacked out. The next thing I remember is sobbing violently in my driveway as Paul's car disappeared down the street. I returned to Minneapolis, he texted me that he needed some space, and I didn't hear from him for two months. It hurt a lot. I relayed the whole sad story to my best friends and let them comfort me, but I thought about it almost every day, unable to believe that I'd destroyed my chance for happiness. (Among other things, Paul was the best-looking guy I've ever dated.) I did see him once more over the summer, and this time he seemed to want only to hook up--the romance was dropped. Now his compliments seemed like insults: when he called me "very pretty," I inferred that pretty was all I was to him.

I started dating someone else in July, about two weeks after the last time I saw Paul, and for a long time I didn't think of him. I was creating new memories, having nights that were longer and more interesting, conversations that were deeper. And aches that were fresh--my new paramour's continued refusal to commit has been almost as painful as Paul's abandonment. These past few months, I couldn't even really remember the intensity of my feelings for Paul.

But Halloween is coming up again, and he is on my mind. His gentleness and intelligence still make me wonder about him, where he is and what he's doing. (He appears to have deleted his Facebook.) I don't really speak to the girls I partied with last year, so I doubt I'll be driving home to Rockford for the holiday. Maybe this year I'll celebrate with my boy; maybe by then he won't be mine anymore. I don't know if I've learned anything from the turmoil of the past year (and of course I'm leaving out a few smaller flings, as well as stress that has nothing to do with the opposite sex). I still drink too much, still tend to pursue my own selfish ends, and still let my mind spin out of control with fantasies of long-term romantic happiness. I still end up making out with guys in front of the entire party on far too many nights. No matter where I end up on Halloween, I'd bet good money that I'll end up embarrassing myself, or at least offering up some PDA.

During my brief idyll with Paul, I allowed myself to entertain thoughts of Halloween 2010, of laughingly comparing our whirlwind "first date" to partying as a couple one year later. Of course, it didn't turn out that way--but that no longer hurts as much as it did. The square on the calendar for Halloween 2011 is a blank. I don't know what job I'll have, who (if anyone) I'll be dating, or whether I'll even still be in Minneapolis. But even though I don't want to leave the impetuosity of youth behind just yet, I hope I calm down at least a little over the next twelve months, gain some wisdom and insight and perspective. Or at least spend more nights kissing to the Pixies than crying in driveways.

2010-09-30T23:10:00.004-05:00

And I wanted to hold you
Before you made your escape
But now I should have told you
When your eyes were alive and awake
Always in life we all must make this mistake
And so I go it alone
And the pressure is great
- Neutral Milk Hotel, "You've Passed"

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
- Benjamin Disraeli

Last Sunday night, after a whirlwind weekend (ask me later), I put on a hoodie and some shorts and put in my iPod earbuds and went for a walk. It was a warm night, and my neighborhood with its changing leaves and beautiful old houses was bathed in the golden light of dusk. I passed an elementary school and its playground, and impulsively decided to swing. There's something magical, utterly freeing, about that rhythmic motion. Each time I swung forward I pushed myself slightly upwards, staring into the cloudless blue sky, over the top of the jungle gym, listening to the pounding keyboards of the National and the jangling guitars of Death Cab for Cutie. I felt like I was flying. And I needed that solitude and respite. And time to think, but also freedom from thinking about everything in my life. It was a moment of being.

Since then, as I returned to work and dealt with minor fallout from the weekend's events, I keep resolving to return to that swing. The weather has continued to be beautiful, and I've relished my walks to and from the bus stop and around downtown on my lunch break. Tonight I finally made it over there. And that exhilaration and refreshing solitude were still lovely. But it was different--later, for one, so it got dark soon after I began swinging. People pulled in and out of the school parking lot, several feet from where I was. I started worrying about the potential folly of being out after dark, even in a well-lit, semi-upscale area just a few blocks from my apartment. Those fears weren't exactly eased as I endured a few catcalls on my way home. And when I arrived back at my place, I discovered that the swing had left large welts on the backs of my thighs, wounds I somehow didn't suffer the other night.

I guess you can't ever fully recreate those moments of perfection. They just sort of unfold, even if you feel like you're consciously creating them. And the world intrudes. Though of course safety issues are nothing new for me and other young women, I feel like the story of Tyler Clementi obliquely influenced my unease tonight. His story, which has been all over the Internet today, is one of the more detailed and therefore disturbing of the recent horrifying spate of teens who have committed suicide after enduring homophobic bullying. While the rest of the boys that took their own lives this month were in junior high or high school, Tyler was a college freshman; he'd just started at Rutgers. And while those boys apparently suffered months or years of torment, the incident that supposedly drove him to suicide was specific and very recent. His roommate saw him kissing a man from another dorm room via webcam, posted about it on Twitter, and then threatened to broadcast video of a second encounter between Tyler and the guy. That roommate and a girl are being charged with invasion of privacy and could face jail time, though many supporters of Tyler want them to be charged with manslaughter.

It terrifies me how much hatred there is in the world, and how much of it is casual and socially acceptable. Part of me is inclined to feel at least a little bad for the students responsible, if only because they're young and were just goofing around in the self-centered, insensitive way of lots of teens. And even if the cruelty was a contributing factor in Tyler's suicide, he almost certainly had other, pre-existing issues. But goddamnit, this is 2010 and they're college freshmen and they invaded someone's privacy in a callous, clearly homophobic manner. Maybe one of the reasons this particular story hurts is that just a week ago, Dan Savage of the sex column Savage Love launched his response to these young suicides, "It Gets Better." The video project aims to promise teens that despite the awful treatment and lack of acceptance they face in high school, it does get better, often immediately after graduation. But Tyler's suicide shows that even after high school, even at a huge public university in the Northeast, hatred can still rear its ugly head.

Anyway, I've got a lot going on in my life right now, personally and professionally (I just got offered an editorial internship with the Twin Cities office of The A.V. Club, so I'll be taking that on in addition to my Mpls.St.Paul Magazine workload), but I feel a strong but unfortunately unfocused desire to act. I feel so deeply that this issue, even more than marriage equality or Don't Ask Don't Tell, is crucial and urgent.

Maybe it seems sketchy or self-centered to draw a line from homophobic bullying-induced suicide to fearing for my safety as a woman. But a glance at the Facebook pages that have been set up to condemn Tyler's Rutgers roommate and his accomplice show that not everyone gets the connection between types of tolerance. The pages are full of violent threats (including calls for them to get the death penalty) and racial slurs. I don't understand how people can condemn homophobia and personal cruelty and then turn around and advocate violence, or be casually racist. I don't understand why people don't see that it's all connected, that tolerance for one group should mean tolerance for all.

2010-09-07T21:09:00.003-05:00

Baby, we'll be fine
All we've gotta do is be brave and be kind
Put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile
I don't know how to do this

- the National, "Baby, We'll Be Fine"

I thought it was only fitting that my magazine internship, which is my first-ever paid full-time position, started on the same day as classes at the University of Minnesota. The Tuesday after Labor Day has been my first day of school for the past four years, so why shouldn't it be the first day of this new stage of my education? At the beginning of the summer I read J. Courtney Sullivan's Commencement, a smart chick-lit novel about four close college friends figuring out their lives and their relationships after graduation. In it, the friends half-jokingly referred to their first post-grad year as "freshman year of life," and that's exactly what it felt like today as I hopped out of bed and prepared for my big day.

The trappings of a first day of school were all there: carefully picking out my outfit, stepping onto the bus to start my day, shyly making overtures of friendship over lunch with my fellow interns, trying to find the right balance of eye contact between engaged and creepy. (That last one might be more my issue than a first-day ritual.) The day pretty much mirrored the opening session of almost every college class I had: going over basic procedures and rules (with an "intern guide" instead of a syllabus), self-conscious introductions, and not much else. I spent the second half of the day sitting at my desk staring at the clock as I scrolled through articles on Slate and Salon and waited in vain for an assignment from my supervisors.

Despite the familiarity of the first-day routine, it still was scarily clear that I was entering a new phase of my life. In the last few months, I graduated from college, found and moved into a studio apartment by myself, interviewed for several jobs, drove alone from Rockford to Minneapolis for the first time, and shopped for fresh ingredients to cook a non-Lean Cuisine meal for myself. But none of those felt like adulthood, not really. It wasn't until today, weaving among the well-dressed businessmen and -women in the skyways of Minneapolis' downtown, that I felt the stomach-dropping realization that I am actually "grown up." A few days ago I was out in the college neighborhood of Dinkytown, getting drunk on Coors Light and feeding late-night munchies with McNuggets just as I did on dozens of similar nights over the past year. But today I donned high heels and a pencil skirt and marched off to get paid for work that actually has an effect, work that sees a result in print in an upscale and widely read magazine. Today I entered the cycle of getting up before 7 and going to bed before 11 and only getting respite on national holidays that will define my life for the next few decades.

I'd say "It's like I'm a real person," but it's not really--it's like I'm a character from a TV show. It just so happens that I watched a lot of The Office and Mad Men this weekend, and my reaction to my newly cubicled life was an odd mix of wanting to liven the day with a glass of scotch and wishing the magazine had a cute, funny Jim to make me into a Pam. But the character-driven dramas at the forefront of those shows is surrounded by mundane, often subtly funny details of real workplaces. Receiving my phone extension and recording a voicemail message, filling out pages and pages of HR paperwork, the dull-eyed elevator ride with my fellow employees to start and end the day--these things are familiar to me even though I've never experienced them before because I've seen so much of them on TV.

Maybe that's why I still feel like an impostor as I go teetering on my heels through the rows of cubicles--like an actor playing a part. I'm sure I'll get used to the work environment over these next few days as I'm assigned tasks and learn how to complete them, and as I remind myself that I'm here because I earned it, because my resume and my work gained the respect of professionals. But I think it will take a bit longer for me to stop feeling a little lost in this world called adulthood.

2010-08-29T16:39:00.006-05:00

These days my life I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They're calling at me, "Come and find your kind"
- Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
- Plato

I'll freely admit that I've used Facebook to look up old classmates and childhood friends, fascinated by how they've grown up, the paths their lives have taken so far, whether they're still in Rockford or far away. But a somewhat more embarrassing habit of mine is to search specifically for those people who feature prominently in my memories as either bullies or bullied. I have a special desire to see how these people turned out, these major players in my schoolyard dramas.

Bullying stories have become more prominent in the news media in the past few years, largely focusing on the relatively new and pernicious role that social networking can have in bullying. Just yesterday I read a heartbreaking news story about a Twin Cities-area boy that killed himself after being tormented for being gay, and how even after his suicide, a conservative parents' group continues to fight against counseling and support programs for LGBT teens.

Anyway, I usually don't connect those stories with my own experience. In high school, bullying and cliques weren't something I really thought about at all. I mean, sure, there were certain kids I'd identify as "popular" and I wasn't one of them, but I got along well with most of my classmates and teachers. I had my niches, newspaper and quiz bowl, and I think that's what most people do by high school: find their passion and pursue it. Auburn High School may have had its flaws, but it definitely had a welcoming niche for just about everyone: ROTC, Multicultural Club, the IT kids in the tech wing, the anime kids in the library. If you liked sports, you could more or less walk on to any team--most of them weren't competitive enough to be exclusive. And while race and class issues definitely existed, I don't think they were a source of open hostility.

But somehow all that easygoing acceptance has let me forget just how much bullying did go on in junior high and elementary school. How could I discount the time I casually smarted off to a hulking eighth-grader in gym class, only to find my head shoved up against a locker as she warned me never to cross her again? Or when I had to use the bathroom on a field-trip coach bus and Ryan N. loudly mocked me as a dozen of our classmates snickered? And it's not even those isolated incidents that rankle now; it's the memory of those few kids we did, as a class, single out. The ones who dressed strangely or had speech impediments or thoughtlessly said things that could be taken as innuendo. We traded gleeful stories about these people. We made them the constant, open subject of our ridicule. I remember one time at poms (yeah, I was on an after-school community poms squad), I bragged to the coach about all the "hilarious" stuff we'd done to one of my classmates, whose only crimes were being scrawny and having a bad temper. She just stared at me, not just disappointed but repulsed by my eight-year-old cruelty.

So it's not just curiosity that makes me type these people's names into the Facebook search bar, but a kind of desperate need for reassurance. I want to know that I personally did not fuck up someone's life.

What I find isn't altogether comforting. The smirking blonde Limp Bizkit fan who represents for me both the archetype of a bully and everything bad about the late '90s seems to be doing pretty well. Hot girlfriend, college degree, still sleazily good-looking. And those kids I helped bully, at least implicitly...well, they're here. They've grown up. They have friends. They might even have niches like the ones I was lucky enough to find. So I'll close the Facebook window and try to breathe easy, try to lay down to sleep and say a prayer that I have been a force for good.

2010-08-17T15:08:00.002-05:00

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."
- Drew Carey

"There is a point in one's life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one's collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive. Thankfully, for some, this all passes... It's fashion, and I don't like fashion, because fashion does not matter. What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand."
-Dave Eggers

I quit my job the other day.

You might not have known I had a job; I only started it about a month ago. I solicited people at the Mall of America to watch unreleased movie trailers and answer questions about them. It meant getting rejected by people dozens of times a day. It also meant lying on virtually every survey to meet our daily quotas, and sometimes making people up completely.

The lying bothered me from the beginning, not only in itself but the fact that it made the entire job more or less pointless. But I was especially disturbed by the fact that when one of my bosses would ask me to make someone up for a survey, they'd persuade me by saying, "You want to make some money, don't you?"

When you're in your late teens or early twenties and you're into rebellious or alternative pop culture and you have a special love for movies like Dazed and Confused and The Graduate, selling out is one of the worst things you can do. No one wants to be a sell-out. But even just a few months after leaving college, I'm seeing it happen for a lot of people: they'll take any job they can get just so long as it means a paycheck, just so they can keep living in trendy apartments and going to bars and concerts whenever they like and buying food and clothes and books and music.

And for the short time I've worked at this job at the mall, I saw how easy it is. How nice it feels to be able to cash a check at the bank and for the next few days feel like you can drop a few extra dollars on beer or a new dress. How you let the moment-to-moment details of the job distract you from the flawed ethics of what you're doing. Leaning on a railing smoking a cigarette in the sun with a nice boy, gossiping about coworkers, commiserating about the different food court options--those made it worth it for the time being. They made me start to consider keeping the job for as long as I could, enjoying the paycheck and just gritting my teeth through the dishonesty.

Because what this experience has made me realize is that I like having a job. Sure, it's hell to drag myself out of bed and drive out to the suburbs on a day when I'd otherwise be sleeping late, going for a leisurely stroll and reading all day, but I like the daily dramas and camaraderie of a workplace. That's what I really loved about Showplace, why it was so easy to lose myself in that environment, though of course that also had the plus of funny customer stories and free movies and coworkers I actually loved beyond work. The mall job has helped me look forward to whatever jobs I might have in the future, knowing that I can be reliable and learn quickly and establish a rapport with the people around me in a work setting despite my general awkwardness.

But it made me realize too that this is how the world works for everyone. Of course there are exceptions, but the average adult in our culture struggles through a job he or she hates because of the necessity of that regular paycheck and health benefits, and because of the coworker interactions and fleeting joys that make the actual work, even if it is wrong in some way, an afterthought. That must be how so many people in the country get by, even those who work for corporations that do great harm: they let the monetary and social rewards distract them. Of course fudging a few market research surveys is a far cry from, say, causing a major environmental disaster, but I think the connection is there.

Besides, part of the reason I didn't want to quit is because I don't like quitting in general. Whatever else you can say about me--and lazy is definitely high on the list--I generally stick with projects I've taken on, even if only because I'd be embarrassed to quit. And I don't like knowing that with a job like this, I have the luxury to quit. I have something to fall back on, a little leeway until I find something else. Not everyone does.

Maybe in the future I'll end up letting myself get lost in the details of a job without facing up to the larger fact that it's pointless or not fulfilling. For now, I guess I can feel good about the fact that I didn't stay at this first unethical job. Two customers within the space of a few hours confronted me directly about the fact that I was lying. The second one, an older man who knew exactly who he was and wouldn't apologize for that, almost made me cry. And I couldn't do it anymore. Maybe someday I'll sell out, but not yet.

2010-08-01T20:47:00.003-05:00

On top of every mountain
There was a great longing
For another even higher mountain
In each city longing for a bigger city

After all that we've been through
I know that I will always love you
From now until forever baby
I can't imagine anything better

- Dirty Projectors, "Stillness is the Move"

Narcissism: I'm happy with how my last post turned out, but those intense days don't happen very often (though it's been an eventful few weeks). This post is going to be my usual self-centered mope. Thanks for reading, anyway.

Since dating Collin, the only person with whom I've been "Facebook official," I've never been asked to be someone's girlfriend. I've had flings, some that went on for months, but I hear always the same phrases: "I'm not looking for anything serious right now." "I'd like to keep this casual." "I just don't see us having a long-term relationship." It's the same with the guy I'm seeing currently, who on our second date, as he leaned me up against his car to kiss me, decided to make it clear that he doesn't want a commitment. Later he clarified that while he doesn't plan to hook up with anyone else while dating me, "stuff happens."

That attitude has been weighing on my mind these past few weeks, both despite and because of the fact that in every other way, our time together has been wonderful. I feel supremely comfortable around him; he's considerate, intelligent, reliable, and easy to talk to. But I feel as if at any moment it could all break apart. He could meet some other girl, or simply grow tired of me and decide to call it quits. At times I've felt annoyed that he can't exercise enough self-control to try a real relationship, or that he doesn't seem to think I'm worth the effort. I feel so natural and open around him in every other way that this area of tension (which I've kept to myself) registers as a particular blemish on our relationship. I've considered telling him I'd like us to be exclusive to each other, weighing the importance of letting him know how I feel against the danger of driving him away by being clingy.

But last night I spent the night with him, this morning he cooked me breakfast, and then I went to work and met someone else. Though I've been at this mind-numbing minimum-wage job for a couple of weeks now, I hadn't met this coworker before. We hit it off immediately, exchanging easy smiles and conversation, and he kept inviting me to sneak off for smoke breaks during which he asked me interested questions about my life. I half-expected him and his roommate, who also works there, to invite me out for drinks after work; I ended up getting sent home early and abruptly, so it remains a mystery whether that would have happened.

I don't know if my coworker's interest is anything other than a natural curiosity about and enthusiasm for the new girl (I have to think of Mad Men, in which queen-of-the-secretaries Joan tells plain, quiet Peggy to enjoy being the office novelty while she can). And I don't know whether I'd like him quite as much outside of the work setting, where any connection is a welcome distraction and a bright spot in a long, boring day. Or if anything will happen between us whether or not we genuinely like each other. But suddenly I understood what my "boyfriend" of the past few weeks meant when he said that stuff happens. And why monogamy is so hard, because of course you can't stop that sudden, random attraction. I wonder whether I would have felt guilty about my workplace interactions today if I were in an official relationship.

As much as I crave the comfort and stability of a real boyfriend, I think I ultimately dread being trapped almost as much as guys do. Or maybe I'm just destined to never be happy with what I have. The relaxed domesticity of breakfasting with someone I really like was sweet and lovely, but it may have played a role in my sudden interest in someone else. When I went to Rome, it was nice to be able to talk about my boyfriend back home, and to spend dozens of euros calling him up from across the Atlantic. But here's a confession I don't think I've ever made: one night in the Campo di Fiori, in almost the exact place where I'd had a long and happy phone conversation with Collin a few hours before, I briefly and very drunkenly made out with an Italian man. It was stupid and meaningless and anonymous (I don't think I ever learned his name), but it's there to make me feel guilty. So are all the times I flirted with Collin's friends in front of him, sort of jokingly but sort of seriously. And then of course the joke was on me when Collin broke up with me and suddenly I wanted no one else.

I know I've covered this ground before, but Sylvia Plath speaks the truth about my dissatisfaction whether I'm torn between commitment and freedom, Minneapolis and Rockford, journalism and filmmaking, winter and summer, the city and the country: "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."

2010-07-20T14:36:00.004-05:00

Your voice is swallowing my soul soul soul
Your voice is swallowing my soul soul soul
- the National, "Afraid of Everyone"

"Do you want to see real insanity?"

We had just seen Inception and he was turning out of the parking garage to drive me home, so I thought he was just prefacing a fancy bit of driving. But when I didn't reply, he said, "I'm going to visit Tom in the psych ward."

Tom--tall, gangly, his beard and hair sticking out of his face like twigs--was one of the lead actors on the film we had been working on. Max was the production manager; I was just an assistant who showed up on set to run errands. Tom had been raving about this idea he had, an actors' studio that would allow his friends and colleagues to practice their art in a creative space. He'd found the studio, claimed he had all kinds of film equipment, and spent most of his time on set chain-smoking and holding forth on the phone in his booming, John Wayne voice. For the first few days of shooting, Tom's mother had been on set, hovering in the wings, helping him run lines, laughing excitedly as she watched him act.

Max confided to me that he'd noticed Tom becoming more and more manic over the past few days, until he felt he had to take him to the emergency room and call his parents. He recognized the symptoms, Max explained, because he was bipolar himself; he'd been in that very same psych ward eight years before.

After a long silence we began talking again about the movie we'd just seen, parsing theories, comparing it to other movies, ones that had connected with me on a deeper and more emotional level. When we neared my apartment, Max offered me the chance to accompany him to the hospital, so I agreed. As we sped along the highway, I stared across the river at the skyscrapers of downtown, my hands cold with anticipation. It had been a few years since I'd visited anyone in the hospital, and I'd never visited someone my own age, or someone there for a mental illness.

Visiting hours were almost over, so we strode down the hospital hallways, rounding corners with frantic purpose. When we reached the psych ward, we were told that Tom had left on a temporary pass. I slumped in a chair while Max made urgent phone calls to Tom and his parents. I laughed uncontrollably as his conversations were repeatedly interrupted by the loud, seemingly endless chimes that played over the P.A. system to signify the birth of a baby.

Max explained that Tom and his parents were at the studio where he planned to host his artists' community. We drove to a seemingly deserted part of town, full of faceless brick buildings. When we entered the studio, Tom's parents were sitting near the door; they hugged Max and greeted me warmly. Tom himself was, as usual, pacing, smoking, on the phone. He greeted me with some confusion but cheerfully. For the next hour or so I stood off to the side as the rest of them talked about Tom's treatment. The space was large and fairly empty, but the few tables were cluttered: a typewriter, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, some uncapped Crayola markers, a toy helicopter. Other friends of Tom arrived and we all ambled around the room, making awkward conversation. A tall, racially ambiguous boy with an eclectic wardrobe began strumming his guitar and singing. Tom directed another friend to set up lights and a camera to film.

Tom's parents went out for McDonald's and brought us back dinner. I awkwardly devoured my chicken sandwich while sitting across from Tom's mother and beside Max, who was telling her about his own experience. She kept apologizing that I was in the middle of all of this, and I tried to seem heartfelt as I assured her it was no problem. She sighed and cried, "Everyone kept asking at the hospital, 'Is this his first visit?' And I wanted to shake them and say, 'Yes, it's his first visit, and it's going to be his last!'" When Max walked away for a moment, she smiled at me and said, "Isn't he a nice boy?"

It was time for Tom to go back to the hospital. Max, the guitar boy (who had asked for a ride), and I stood outside as he and his parents gathered his things. Tom suddenly came out with his eyes red and his cheeks wet. He thanked us in a strangled voice for being there for him. He hugged his friends tightly and then said "Might as well bring it in" to me as we hugged. I turned away and willed myself not to cry, knowing that this was not my pain, that I had no right to call attention to myself. I squeezed hands with each of his parents before the three of us bystanders got in Max's car and left.

When we got to Guitar's place, he invited us up for drinks. We stopped at a small market so he could buy orange juice. The place was dingy, its shelves sparsely furnished with spices, pasta, and terrifyingly trippy-looking piñatas. The Sunday comics lay on the counter; someone had doodled all over Doonesbury. As we stood there, Guitar introduced himself; unfortunately, his long, foreign name has already escaped me. The three of us went up to his apartment, which overflowed with sculptures, Post-Its, bicycles, cans of spray paint, mirrors, audio mixers, amps, paintings, and all manner of creative debris. We drank; the two of them smoked. Guitar showed us his work: experimental video pieces that were collages of abstract animation, man-on-the-street interviews, found audio, and other bits and pieces that added up to radical activist messages. He served us slices of melon that were fresh and juicy and purely delicious.

Then Max and I left and drove to a park and walked up and down the sidewalk and kissed and talked about religion and fetishes and high school. He teased me that Guitar had been openly into me, which I knew. We went for a slice of post-midnight pizza, alternately drove around and parked as he played hip-hop tracks he liked for me, and then finally we went back and slept in his bed till morning.

2010-07-12T01:00:00.002-05:00

Nameless you above me
Come lay me low and love me
- TV on the Radio, "Love Dog"

Come on, Alex, you can do it
Come on, Alex, there's nothing to it
If you want something, don't ask for nothing
If you want nothing, don't ask for something
- Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood 2 (Laika)"

I spent time in two different beds that were not my own this weekend. It's not something I'm proud of...well, maybe I kind of am. As I said in my last post, much of the time my decisions are based less on sense and more on their potential to make a good story. And I'm not a secure person. I was 17 before I was asked out for the first time, 19 when I had my first kiss and other sexual experiences, and 20 when I had my first boyfriend. It continues to feel nice to simply be wanted.

It was that more than actual pleasure, at least partially, that drove my enjoyment of these encounters. Honestly, I was having a good time simply sharing personal revelations with the one guy or laughing uncontrollably at standup comedy with the other, and a large part of me would have preferred to just keep doing those things rather than move toward sex. And though I love leaving my apartment and being out in the city at night and having unexpected experiences (like smoking pot with strangers at a pornographic art exhibit), I'm so comfortable just reading or watching TV or going for walks or listening to music on my own that I'm not sure how much I want a real relationship. Or maybe my enjoyment of simply spending time with these people indicates that I'd actually be better suited to a relationship than to one-night interludes. (It hurt me when the boy I was seeing a few months ago said that we could keep hooking up but that he didn't want anything serious. Not because of the request in itself, but because our serious conversations and being introduced to his friends went out the window as soon as he made it.)

I don't really know what is wrong with me, or if anything is. Though I haven't read Sasha Cagen's book Quirkyalone, I'm at least superficially aware of the Quirkyalone "movement," which some of my friends have taken to heart. The idea is to be well-adjusted as an individual without relying on relationships, to take pleasure in solitude and oneself, and to not engage in random dating just for the sake of it but to hold out for a meaningful relationship. That's definitely something I can accept. But my neuroses are also at play here--those of being contrarian and wanting something up until the moment I have it, or being disappointed when reality fails to live up to fantasy. Sometimes I can feel crazy within me, percolating beneath the surface. I don't really know how to change for the better.

2010-06-29T00:52:00.003-05:00

Rate yourself and rape yourself, take all the courage you have left
Wasted on fixing all the problems that you made in your own head
- Mumford & Sons, "Little Lion Man"

The decisions underwritten by the cash in his hand
Bought a sweater for his Weimaraner too
Now I'm no mad man but that's insanity
- TV on the Radio, "Dancing Choose"

One of my favorite TV shows lately has been Mad Men, the popular and critically acclaimed depiction of a glamorous ad agency in the early 1960s, and one of my favorite characters is copywriter Paul Kinsey. Paul's ideas for campaigns are almost always overridden by his superior, Don Draper, and his ambitions as a novelist and/or playwright have come to naught. But he fancies himself an artist and a bit of a hipster. He parades his cultured, "interesting" life before his coworkers. He grows a beard and smokes a pipe, and throws a party to show off how "bohemian" he is and proudly introduce his black girlfriend. The show tends to make him a figure of slightly tragic ridicule (though I'm only partway through the second of three seasons so far). But I'm realizing that my enjoyment of him as a character might be partly because I can see his tendencies in myself.

I've been noticing more and more that I take actions because I think they'll make a good story, and attend events or buy items for the kitsch and/or irony involved. It usually enhances rather than detracts from my enjoyment of situations--I can take a kind of observant pleasure in, for example, the trashiness of sitting on the floor of an apartment drinking cheap beer and watching people play UFC video games. Or be enchanted by an antique store called "Mid-Century Miscellany." I think it's this impulse that has helped convert my disdain for my hometown into something like love.

Have you ever done something just because you could? Or because it satisfied some kind of desire for poetic justice? Maybe I just read too many books and watch too many movies and TV shows to not crave narrative even in the chaos of actual life. Surely the desire for closure, and perhaps the juiciness of the details, is what found me in the backseat of a car in the wee hours of the morning, being tickled by a boy who tasted like Doritos.

I don't like leaving business unfinished. And I believe that you regret the chances you don't take more than the ones you do. I've had plenty of interesting experiences in my life without trying, but sometimes I feel like I'm consciously trying to have ones that will be fodder for a novel or memoir, or at least dinner conversation. I guess I'll just have to be careful. I can see myself choosing a not-so-nice apartment over a newly renovated one just because it has character. Only when winter came would I find that kitsch doesn't keep you warm.

2010-06-22T02:51:00.004-05:00

Let this be my annual reminder
That we can all be something bigger
- the Hold Steady, "Constructive Summer"

Two days ago, my sister took our car to drive to the lake with her friends. Normally dependent on the car, I figured I'd just stay home all day, reading and doing laundry. But on a whim, I decided to take the bus downtown, stop at the library, and head over to Rock the Garden, an annual mini-festival of popular bands in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden downtown. I wasn't interested enough in any of the bands to buy a ticket, but I thought I'd sit outside in the sun with a book and hopefully be able to hear the music. I ended up finding a perfect spot to listen in a secluded lot behind the garden, and was standing there listening to OK Go perform when a hipster-looking girl around my age strolled up and stood beside me. I exchanged polite smiles with her, and after a while she began asking questions like whether I was from Minneapolis, if I knew the band, how old I was, and so on. She mentioned a few times that she thought it would be easy enough to sneak into the event from where we were, and I admitted that I'd noticed a space in the fence. I didn't really believe we'd sneak in, but the girl continued to bring it up, and finally after OK Go finished she strolled in through the gap. She urged me to come along, so I did. The two of us wandered through the sweaty, sun-bathed crowds, continuing to chat a bit. I was sure a security guard would notice our lack of wristbands, even as I basked in the colorful noise of the event. I parted ways with the girl before the next band, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, went on, but I stayed for another couple of hours and heartily both enjoyed the Dap-Kings' set and people-watching.

Today I realized that I had locked my keys in my car, so I took the bus across campus to borrow my sister's car key. I decided not to put on my iPod (as I usually do) after sitting down next to a girl about my age. She didn't say anything for the first few stops, but after our bus nearly collided with a car (resulting in a sudden stop, loud honking, and the laughter and exclamations of most of my fellow passengers), she struck up a conversation. She asked whether I was in school, what I'd studied, what I wanted to do for a job, and I responded with similar questions. She explained that she wants to become a nurse because she likes helping people, and that she's hoping to go to school for that soon. I was embarrassed to reveal my study of relatively frivolous topics like film and cultural studies, and that even after four years and thousands of dollars I still haven't really decided on what I want to do.

(It reminds me of a conversation I had with my then-roommate, Kris, a few months ago. Talking about majors and careers, I blithely asserted that one should study and pursue whatever he or she loves to do, whether or not it makes any money. His reply, which stopped me in my tracks, was "You can only afford to say that because you already have money.")

These two occurrences were the most extreme and most recent examples of brief encounters with strangers (I never learned either girl's name), but I've had a lot of these experiences lately. For my internship, I'll work at concerts and events, have long conversations with the other interns or the band's merch staff, and then never see them again. What might be most unique about these events is that, not so long ago, I don't think they'd have seemed out of the ordinary. People strike up conversations; they bond over temporarily shared experiences; it's not weird. But for me, often insulated by my iPod when in public and used to keeping tabs on people with Facebook (I've become friends with people after working with them on class projects or spending one evening with them with mutual friends), it's strange to have a connection with someone without instantly making it official on the Internet. Maybe the desire to want to continue to know someone you've met isn't really new--I remember frantically exchanging e-mails with everyone I'd met at my piano and quiz bowl camps, vowing to keep in touch even though we rarely actually followed through. But I do think Facebook intensifies it.

I've always been interested in the lives of others--I wouldn't be a journalist, lover of documentary film and found photos, and general gossip hound without that interest--and I get a thrill out of listening to other people's stories and conversations. And that includes compassion and empathy: for nameless sufferers around the world, for film and TV and book characters, and for friends and acquaintances. Unfortunately, in my day-to-day thoughts and especially on this blog, I tend toward utter self-absorption. I'm lazy, impulsive, and obsessed with my own neuroses, memories, and desires. It's been weeks now since I expressed a wish to overhaul this blog from my usual self-involved rants, and since then my entries have followed the same patterns of talking, talking, talking about myself, not even saying anything new. And that is cathartic for me, and I'll probably continue to do it, but I want to renew my vow to improve. I'm going to redouble my efforts to turn outward, to notice the people and the world around me, to be aware of everything and to strive for meaning in my relationships. It's summer, a time for taking risks and having fun and starting projects. I want my project to be looking outside myself.

2010-06-22T01:41:00.005-05:00

"Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quickly you hardly catch it going."
- Tennessee Williams

Stand inside an empty tuxedo with grapes in my mouth
Waiting for Ada
Ada, hold onto yourself by the sleeves
I think everything counts a little more than we think
- the National, "Ada"

It's hard to think of an event in my life that I haven't blown out of proportion, made significant beyond all reality. My blog is emblazoned with the quote "To find everything profound--that is an inconvenient trait" for a reason: I do. I replay most social interactions in my mind, investing not only each sentence and action but each inflection of the voice, each fleeting look in the other person's eye, with weight and meaning. I've worn conversations and evenings from months or even years ago into the ground by replaying them over and over in my head, forcing myself to remember.

I've realized that I have a more vivid and detailed memory than many people, that I can recall specific moments and situations from as far back as when I was four or five. (Of course, memory is subjective and not to be trusted, but I have no reason to doubt at least partial truth in all of them.) Many of my most powerful memories (and desires) are intensely sensory. There are certain days and nights and moments that constantly resurface in my mind, and some of them are about a fragment of conversation that stands out as particularly funny or strange, or that I remember for no reason at all. But many of them are about a sound or a smell or a feeling. The smell of saltwater and the up-and-down of the waves of the Tyrrehnian Sea. The sensation of my thin shoes gripping and slipping on the cobblestones of Rome's streets and piazzas. The sound of trickling rain outside a screen door and the prickling heat of arms around me.

And not everything I force myself to remember has emotional meaning. I just want to remember everything; I don't want to forget even the small details of my life. I want to remember the feeling under my fingers of the plastic blue and gray coat hooks at King School, and the whoosh of legs clad in snow pants brushing against each other. I want to remember the stuffy heat of Auburn High School, of the sticky grime my hands would acquire over the course of the day, and how when I exited a classroom and cautiously joined the throng of wall-to-wall people, I always thought of merging onto a busy highway. I remember exactly what a classmate of mine was wearing when he flirted with me in the hallway after B lunch. I remember the feel of a boy's neck stubble on my forearms as I slow-danced with him awkwardly at piano camp. I remember the smell of the quiz bowl captain's breath (Frappuccinos and Cheez-Its) when we would lean together to discuss our answers. And I want to remember these things; I want never to forget them.

My short-term, practical memory leaves something to be desired; coupled with my general laziness, it's led to my locking myself out of my car or apartment many times, getting detention in high school because I forgot my ID at home, reaching a location using Google Maps and then not being able to retrace my steps to get home. But I'm glad for this trade-off, for the specificity and lastingness of my long-term, emotional memory.

But there's that one effect that makes it a burden, the fact that it allows for over-analyzing everything. When I'm embarrassed or self-conscious about something I've done, it's not because I think it will ruin someone's opinion of me or necessarily have any long-term effect. I can be reasonably sure that whether the person's a friend or a stranger, my inarticulate or clumsy blundering will be forgotten within a larger context. But I can't stand even that momentary look of discomfort or impatience I see in the other person's face. Because I do see it, even as it comes to be smoothed over with laughter or changing the subject, and I know I'll be able to replay it forever.

2010-06-02T23:23:00.003-05:00

Nothing is on my horizon except for everything. Everything is on my horizon.
- Dwight Schrute

Today I visited a few apartments in my search for a place to stay for this next year in Minneapolis. Looking at and comparing my options served to underscore just how open my future is. Technically I want a job at least somehow related to one of my three majors, preferably involving journalistic writing or video production. But in reality I want nothing and everything. I could live in an old apartment in a hip neighborhood near downtown Minneapolis, washing myself in a claw-foot bathtub and smoking American Spirits on my front stoop on warm nights. I could move to the inner-ring suburb of St. Louis Park and live on a street lined with beautiful mid-century homes, a Catholic grade school, and a roller-skating rink called the Roller Garden. I could "go back to school," padding my resume with filmmaking courses at the community college. I could work for a nonprofit teaching kids to read or working with victims of domestic abuse. I could be a freelance editor. I could spend weekends watching classic movies with my friends who will be juniors in college. I could move to New York or L.A. and meet famous people. I could move to Chicago and live with my best friends. I could teach myself German or how to cook.

It reminds me so strongly of one of the most iconic passages from my favorite book, The Bell Jar. The narrator, Esther, reads a story about a fig tree and makes it a metaphor for her own life:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

It terrifies me to think of choosing any one of the many possibilities before me, because it means giving up, at least for the time being, all the rest. Finding an apartment now means signing a twelve-month lease, staying in Minneapolis another year so I can be with my friends and continue exploring the city and be an upper Midwest hipster, but also living apart from the ocean and the film industry and the landmarks of my childhood and many people I love. And I don't know yet whether any of those other things lies ahead of me. But at the same time, it's exhilarating to have this blankness ahead, waiting for me to fill it. Dwight's assertion from The Office is funny, but it's also true: having no plans means having every plan. I just have to start exploring.

2010-05-26T23:55:00.005-05:00

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.
- Sylvia Plath

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
- David Foster Wallace

My roommate is a student of history, a lifelong Twin Cities-area resident, and a Korean adoptee. She's written about her powerful connection to the past--both her own and that of the places she lives, and of her excitement at being able to see historical artifacts, actual objects that played a role in events of the past. I'm no historian like she is (though I did always enjoy history, of the twentieth century especially, and could see myself studying it if I hadn't picked journalism and film). I don't get chills when I see an old yellowed document or an authentic flag. But I do get a thrill from seeing old photos, especially from the '60s and '70s. Whether they're of people I know or famous people or not, there's something about that glimpse into people's lives that electrifies me.

I'm at home in Illinois now for a week's break and, as usual, have enjoyed seeing the slideshow of old family photos that my parents have set as the screensaver on the living room computer. (It's been that way for years; my friends will remember the time when our lengthy debate over which movie to watch was rendered moot by us watching that screensaver for hours.) Anyway, my dad recently uploaded a wealth of photos that pre-date my sister and me, of my parents' wedding and his childhood and teen years. One is a postcard my dad sent home to his younger sister and brother while on a trip he took to Hawaii just after graduating from high school. There's something about reading "It was a dissapointment [sic] when we found out the hula girls were all over eighty years old and 200 pounds" that makes me catch my breath. I don't know, it's just fascinating to see that connection to someone who I know intimately but who at the same time is a stranger to me, this 17-year-old version of my father.

I guess that personal connection is what draws me especially to photos more than historical artifacts and documents, even of people I don't know. The way they contain stories--stories are, I suppose, what my life is about, whether they're told in news features or books or films. The last few weeks of school, my other roommate Kris and I started telling each other stories about our childhoods, the strange inexplicable events or misdeeds or moments that have shaped us, stayed with us, sometimes for no reason. I'm not good at telling stories myself, though I have been able to prompt shock and laughter from him; I get too bogged down in the details that I remember as I'm telling them. The words spill haphazardly from me, I lose track of what I'm saying, and I don't have the benefit of editing my own words on a page. But I love doing it, reminiscing, trying to entertain and one-up each other. It feels primal in a good way, as if we're reconnecting with the storytelling tradition or function that TV and the Internet have since superseded.

I think telling my own stories and listening eagerly to my roommate's helps reaffirm my humanity, in a way. I always respond to fictional stories; they bring me to tears and stick with me years later. For instance, I was thinking the other day about a made-for-TV movie my health teacher showed sophomore year of high school. Molly Ringwald and her boyfriend committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, choosing to die together in the face of scarily strong feelings and parental disapproval. The boy's mother was utterly broken by her son's death, but over time began to regain strength. One night she even sat down at the piano, which she played beautifully but hadn't touched since her son's suicide, and began to play for her husband, smiling and laughing for the first time in weeks. But then she turned the page of the sheet music and found photos her son had hidden there, photos of her husband with another woman. For some reason that one-two punch, the horror of being kicked to the floor again just when she was beginning to struggle to her feet, made me feel for the character in a way that I still remember. But she isn't even real, that woman--though her story surely has some truth in its connection to real women who have lost sons and husbands to death and infidelity--and sometimes I worry that I only care about things when they're onscreen or in a book. There's that part in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden says, "You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding."

Of course, I can get invested in people who are real. I've read Misty Bernall's book She Said Yes, her account of her daughter Cassie's life and her death at Columbine High School, several times. Cassie was hailed as a martyr by Christians around the country immediately after the 1999 shooting because she had supposedly been asked by the gunmen if she believed in God, responded "Yes," and been shot and killed. The book buys into that story and tells of Cassie's conversion to Christianity in the years before the shooting. Official investigations since, however, have revealed that Cassie was not actually the girl who said yes. There's something heartbreaking in thinking of Misty Bernall, brought to her knees by her daughter's death but able to find strength in the knowledge that she died nobly, and then having that story, about which Misty herself had written a popular book, proved false. How even the small comfort she'd been given was taken publicly from her. I don't know why that stands out to me in all the tragedy surrounding Columbine--and I don't know the personal stories of the other victims--but it still makes me sad.

There's something about all of this that makes me a little worried about myself. As my seventh-grade science teacher's son wrote in my yearbook at the end of that year, "Don't forget to see the world around you, from outside the pages of a book." Maybe I invest too much in the stories of strangers or fictional characters but don't consider what lies beneath the surface of people I see every day or pas on the street. That's what I mean by affirming my humanity by trading stories with my roommate. Telling your stories, what has happened to you and how you felt about it, and listening to others--I think that's fundamental to being human, and to not being alone.

2010-05-22T20:12:00.003-05:00

This is my third blog of the day (daaamn, girl), but it may be the most important because it's a question for you, the people who actually read this thing. I've had this for almost five and a half years and written almost 200 posts. Some were better than others; some I'm actually proud of. But here's the thing: I'm almost starting to worry that I'm running out of things to say.

That can't be true, right? I'm barely 22 years old, and I just graduated from college so surely there's a wealth of experiences and discoveries waiting for me. And I hope that's true. The thing is, though I've documented some concrete events in my life--Rome, Collin--yeah, mostly the summer of 2008--that's not really what this blog is about, but more for my abstract musings. And while those musings are almost always triggered by real events, and while the real events surrounding me are always changing and destined to change more in the future, I find myself returning over and over to the same themes.

About a week ago, my friend Katharine's assertion that she doesn't like TV prompted me to start an entry about my dislike of pop culture elitism and the fact that I tend to embrace both high and low culture. I got all the way to the end of it, five or six paragraphs, when I realized I'd written something on the very same topic just a few months ago. I've now written about my ongoing struggles with my mom at least three times. My relationships with the University of Minnesota, Showplace 16, and Rockford, Illinois are always more or less the same. And I'm usually loathe to write about my romantic entanglements in any but the vaguest terms, which ends up making them overly precious and all alike. Besides, I think I used to be a better writer. I remember turning detailed sketches about specific dreams or memories into representations of what I was thinking and feeling at the time. Lately I feel like all I can do is complain, or mope.

So what should I do? The very fact that my meditations are almost always the same makes me shy away from the idea of starting a new blog; besides, I'm attached to this one. And while I have zero plans for the future now, I'm confident that the next year will yield new things: new jobs, new places to visit, new friends. New books to read and films to see. New projects to create. But for now I feel like I need a blogging kickstart. Any suggestions?

2010-05-22T19:23:00.004-05:00

So come out of your cave walking on your hands
And see the world hanging upside down
You can understand dependence
When you know the maker's land

So make your siren's call
And sing all you want
I will not hear what you have to say

Cause I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

- Mumford & Sons, "The Cave"

It's insane the power that parents have over children, how even the best ones--and I would have to say that my parents, who are funny, smart, firm, and devoid of vices, certainly rank among the best--can inspire guilt, resentment, and embarrassment in an instant. My parents aren't rich, but they also aren't poor, and my sister and I have wanted for nothing in our lives. We're lucky to have received scholarships so that we're escaping college debt-free, and my parents have rewarded us by replacing my beat-up, crash-prone laptop with a shiny new desktop Mac and our reliable but flawed old minivan with a new (to us, anyway) car. I feel awkward relaying the news of these gifts to my friends, who have had to slave away at jobs on top of their schoolwork to pay for their cars and rent and food and luxuries.

But it's funny how those very blessings can come to feel like a burden. How, when I'm staying at home and try to go out with friends at night because I'm an adult, my mom snaps back with the quite-right response that she and my dad pay for everything I have, barring the minimum-wage supplementary income from my jobs. I'm legally an adult, but financially still dependent on her in every way.

My sister and I were supposed to drive home for a week-long visit tomorrow, but I found out at the last minute that I have to work at an event tomorrow night here in Minneapolis, for my internship with the Onion. You'd think that an internship with such a prestigious publication, which is all standing between me and utter failure as a college graduate right now, and at which I must excel if I want it to lead to letters of recommendation and/or a real job with the company, would take precedence. But no, my sister is "disappointed" about having to put off going home one extra day, so now my mom is lecturing me about needing to "put family first" and not be selfish. And even as I get riled up about such claims, I feel a little sick at the thought of all she and my dad do for me, how spoiled I am and how little I've had to work for everything I have. I teared up at the thought of that car they bought, yet another material asset for which I didn't have to work at all. And maybe that's a curse in disguise--despite having a job and monitor my own finances to some degree, I haven't really ever had to skimp and save, not like some of my friends.

When I'm in Rockford and allowed out of the house only at the whim of my mother, my friends sympathize with me only up to a point. Mostly they're just annoyed, urging me to simply defy her and leave the house, stay out as late as I want. I tell them that they don't know my mom, offering stories of her snatching my keys away from me, blocking the door, threatening to take away my car entirely. And that has happened. But mostly what keeps me coming home before curfew and, after a round of fighting, caving to her rules isn't so much the fear of punishment but plain old guilt. It'll get you every time.

2010-05-22T14:31:00.004-05:00

Still the wanting comes in waves
And the wanting comes in waves
- the Decemberists

Honestly I don't know whether it will ever stop hurting that I ruined the best thing I ever had. Days go without thinking about it but then suddenly I'm back in it, aching. Lots of my friends, including a few former love interests, have recently started dating people and I want to be happy for them, and I am, but it hurts. Not that I'm not with them, but that I'm not with this one boy. It still baffles me that one night I was in his arms, he was practically worshipping at my altar, and the next he was staring coldly at my drunken tears. I can't stop turning the facts of the situation over in my mind, convincing myself that he never officially ended things and that, though we haven't spoken in over two months, he could still come back. They almost always come back--maybe not to stay, maybe just to drop by on their way to better, realer things--but they come back. He himself already came back once. I've worn a groove in myself by replaying ad infinitum that look he gets in his eyes, startled and tender at the same time. He could still come back to fill it.

2010-05-21T20:32:00.003-05:00

Privacy and security are those things you give up when you show the world what makes you extraordinary.
- Margaret Cho

Babies...you're better off raisin' tomatoes!
- Mrs. Wormwood, Matilda

My cousin and his wife had a baby last fall, and the mother, who had already kept a blog about her life, now updates every few weeks or so with photos and videos of the baby. Watching the latest videos she posted, of her and her husband playing with the child, I couldn't help feeling a little uncomfortable, like I was invading their privacy. The moment of this couple playing peek-a-boo and talking baby talk to their son was such a personal family moment that, even though I am related to them, I felt as if I shouldn't be watching.

I don't know why this is something at which I vaguely draw the line when it comes to Internet sharing. One of the common charges leveled against social networking and blogging is that it has helped eradicate privacy in our society; not in an invasive, Big Brother way (although Facebook has been getting worse on that front), but in an expansive, over-sharing way. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I note random moments and observations from my life on Facebook and Twitter as often as the next person, and I share photos of my friends and me. And I obviously keep this blog, which, while it doesn't directly identify me and is mostly read by close friends, is linked from my Facebook and serves up quite personal anecdotes and reflections for anyone with an Internet connection. I want to be honest with myself and my friends, so I haven't really toned down the intimacy of what I write here even when I've been confronted with the fact that anyone, from a published author keeping tabs on his own book to a new acquaintance idly perusing my Facebook page, can see it.

So I don't know why my cousin's wife's videos gave me pause, why images of their family life are so much more private than my love life or beliefs or opinions about my peers. And I don't know whether I would or will post videos of my own hypothetical offspring, if and when they arrive--whether my habitual over-sharing would extend to that realm. Maybe I'm more uncomfortable with the idea that my life will someday revolve not around abstract ideals, creative impulses, long lists of things I want to read and watch, and romantic longing, but around a tiny, demanding person who rends my life from top to bottom. I just finished an excellent book about a mother struggling to love a son who is malicious, cold, and spiteful; do I want to risk the same, destroying my body and my autonomy in the process? It scares me how much pregnant women and young mothers must give up every aspect of their lives that does not involve their children, how they're subject to constant, uninvited judgment and advice from everyone around them, how their individual identities become subverted to their roles as mothers. I guess I'm still in my selfish early twenties, haven't even had a serious relationship, and don't yet know the tick of the biological clock or what it might be like to want to create and raise a child with someone I love. The subject has just come up a lot lately, and I know I can safely say that I don't want a child for years yet.

2010-05-13T19:34:00.004-05:00

I want to live so that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.
- Katherine Mansfield

I am trying to find a job for the summer, one that will hopefully continue into the fall if I decide to postpone major decisions about where I will live and what I will do for another year. But it's hard to put my heart into the search, in part because I haven't so much as heard from any of the places to which I've applied, and in part because I really want to enjoy this summer, my first one (at least in sixteen or seventeen years) that does not have school again at the end of it. I want to bask in the sun, smoke, drink, make films, play and listen to music, go to concerts, sit in the grass, make films, write write write, take photos...

My concrete goals:

Work out five times a week.
Write a blog entry for my pop culture blog (http://youdontstop.wordpress.com) every day.
Write a personal journal entry every day.
Become a better filmmaker and still photographer.
Read Infinite Jest and at least five other books.
...Get a job. I guess.

2010-05-03T02:18:00.002-05:00

Don't slow down
Pen versus pencil
Don't slow down
I don't make the rules
Don't slow down
Physical mental
Don't slow down
Don't slow down...

Gardens and trashcans
Hoodies and Chuck Ts
Arms, fingers and hands
Don't slow down

- Matt & Kim, "Don't Slow Down"

I swear guys are like coin-operated machines. Except instead of money it's your tongue, and as soon as you stick it in them out comes the refrain: "I just got out of a long-term relationship, I'm not looking for anything serious, etc. etc." It's not as if I'm begging for a boyfriend, between my current busy schedule and my utter ignorance of the future. I'd just prefer it if they'd save the "You're-great-but-I-don't-want-a-commitment" speech for when I'm not still in their arms. Might be slightly less demoralizing.

I've had reinforced for me how much I need sleep, and how I should probably not drink PBR on an empty stomach and 40 straight hours of wakefulness if I don't want to hallucinate. I've also reinforced what a terrible student I am and how it's a good thing I'm getting out of college now, before my grades go even further down the tubes. On a vaguely related note, I suddenly remembered how, on the very first paper I ever wrote in college, I received the following comment: "You're either an idiot or a genius. I flipped a coin and gave you a B."

Despite being a bit of a mess these past few days and still hyperventilating a little when I think of what I have to accomplish in the next few weeks, and barring unforeseen circumstances, I am going to make it out of college alive and, apparently, summa cum laude. So that's something.

2010-04-01T21:58:00.002-05:00

Something that I think is true about the modern world, the Internet, etc. is that it desensitizes us to information. We are so inundated with words and images and sound at all times that it becomes rare for something to actually pierce us, to make us stop and respond emotionally or intellectually. I have a Twitter (140-character blurbs) and a Tumblr (posting photos, quotes, sound files, and so on). I follow a lot of people on both who are funny and interesting, who post intriguing links and wise quotes. But the very format does not lend itself well to genuine engagement with the material. Sure, on Tumblr you can "like" something or reblog it to your own page, adding your own comments if you wish. But for me, at least, even something that catches my eye will only be on my mind for five seconds as I hit "reblog" and then fade as I continue passively scrolling through my feed.

My point is that it's rare for me to read or see something, especially online, that really gets my attention, that reaches past the computer screen and grabs hold of me. Tonight I saw something that did. It was this excerpt from a piece covering a tribute to Allan Ginsberg held in 1994:

[A] woman from the audience asks: "Why are there so few women on this panel? Why are there so few women in this whole week's program? Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?" and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: 'There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the '50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them."

Just an...unexpected punch to the gut. Maybe it's because I saw where Gregory Corso is buried in Rome, next to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Maybe it's because it made me think of The Bell Jar. Maybe it's because that last line feels like a call to arms aimed at me. But I can't stop thinking about it.

2010-03-23T18:50:00.005-05:00

Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten
Chairs to sit and sidewalks to walk on
Oh, you had it but oh no you lost it
Looking back you shouldn't have fought it
- Vampire Weekend, "Horchata"

So wake up
Run your lips across your fingers 'til you find
Some scent of yourself that you can hold up high
To remind yourself that you didn't die
- Neutral Milk Hotel, "Three Peaches"

In the script for the film I'm making this semester, a character says about another's thought of suicide: "I just can't imagine that despair, that...deep sorrow. Yeah, sometimes I get depressed about school or my thighs or evil corporations. But then, you know, I walk outside and look at the sky, or I watch Hannah and Her Sisters or listen to 'Lovely Rita.' I can't imagine wanting to give that up."

It's probably no surprise that the character speaks for me. It's not that I don't know deep sadness, whether about my own problems or the world's, or that I haven't gone through periods of time when I can't stand myself or my circumstances, when everything seems sour. But most of the time I just can't understand wanting to leave life, wanting to stop the desperate thumping of one's heart and the electricity in one's brain. I can't see not being able to count one's blessings, though I know I've been insanely lucky with the fortunes I've been dealt. One of those blessings I don't even realize sometimes is the ability to write as catharsis, a major reason for this blog. Being able to just sit down and write, rarely feeling blocked, sorting out my feelings and options on the page, is something so second-nature to me that I rarely recognize that not everyone can do that.

And then something hits--romantic rejection, academic failure, a night or weekend of being blown off by friends--and suddenly I get it. I understand going to sleep with an ache in the pit of my stomach, silently repeating to myself that tomorrow will be a better day, and then waking to that same constant ache and not having the slightest will to emerge from under the covers. When I'm at a good place in my life, I have trouble comprehending others' inability to rescue themselves through art, consuming and creating it, and through others' company. But when something drives me into despair, I remember that it's physical as well as mental. I don't know why my stomach clenches and remains sickened whenever I'm unhappy. I don't know why I lose my appetite, or toss and turn and then can't get out of bed the next day. It's not as if I remember whatever's making me sad and then my stomach hurts; it's that pain that reminds me of my unhappiness.

The last few days, I've been tortured by my own chagrin and desperate worry that I'll never get back what I had for a few precious weeks. I went to see Vampire Weekend last night and while they put on a great show, I had trouble losing myself in the crowd and the music (though my detachment from my friends and only casual enjoyment of the band's output probably added to that). But today I went to class for the first time this week, and got to see my friends and talk about filmmaking and have dinner with a friend and, perhaps most importantly, walk around in the warm sunshine listening to the Shins. Seeing everyone lying out on the grass these first warm days of spring is always one of the best moments of the semester, something I've looked forward to annually since my freshman year, and it matched pleasantly with one of the last times I strolled through the main part of campus, after a snowfall that brought dozens of students out for a giant, jubilant snowball fight. Maybe all it took was time, and maybe I just needed to get out of bed and spend time with people who like me and want to be around me. Either way, I now believe that I can get through the week. So that's something.

2010-03-18T23:33:00.003-05:00

I had visions
I was in them
I was looking into the mirror
To see a little bit clearer
The rottenness and evil in me
- Harvey Danger, "Flagpole Sitta"

You know, parents are the same
No matter time nor place
They don't understand that us kids
Are gonna make some mistakes
So to you other kids all across the land
There's no need to argue
Parents just don't understand
- DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, "Parents Just Don't Understand"

NBC's new-ish show The Marriage Ref invites celebrities to poke fun at plebes' relationships with the premise of "giving couples what they've always wanted: a winner" (or something like that). The commercials make the show look painfully bad, and the critics seem to agree, so I don't condone the show in general. But I'm co-opting the basic premise for one of the primary relationships in my life: that with my parents, or more specifically, my mom.

Here's my side of the story: I will turn 22 in May, and therefore have been an adult for almost four years and a legal drinker for almost one. I am about to finish my fourth year living as a college student in Minneapolis, during which I also spent six weeks in Rome. When I'm home, though, my parents hold a curfew for me and demanded that I keep them updated on my location with frequent calls and/or texts. If a social gathering takes me beyond the east side of Rockford, I am almost never allowed to attend. I have been able to push these limits, mostly when I was dating Collin--with him to drive me around, they were willing to let me stay out for a whole night a few times, even. And I got to celebrate my 21st birthday properly. But occasionally they will shut down a plan that to me seems perfectly reasonable to me because the friend I want to see lives in Roscoe or Belvidere, or because I just went out the previous night, or something. Their two biggest hangups, both of which seem ridiculous to me, are these: that I should make plans at least a day in advance (they see the practice of texting to determine meeting times and places an hour or two ahead of time, which is de rigueur for virtually all of my friends at home and at school, as annoying and uncouth), and that one night a week or so is plenty for going out (a common argument: "You just saw so-and-so three days ago. Can't you just stay home?").

While these issues cropped up in high school and continue to apply to my high school friends, they've become particularly touchy as I've hung out with Collin's group of friends over the past couple of years. That group hangs out what seems like every night, sharing meals and long nights of drinking and games, sleeping on each other's floors and staying out til 5 or 6 a.m., regularly going to the bars in the middle of the week. Aside from occasional parties or other planned events, they simply text each other every evening to let each other know at which house or bar they're meeting.

My parents can't fathom that kind of on-the-spot planning, and they blame me for not making plans with friends ahead of time when not even the friends know until 8 or 9 at night. What makes it worse, and what has definitely complicated the situation this spring break, is that while that group of friends seems to like me and while I have lots of fun with them, they can blow hot and cold, sometimes ignoring my texts or backing out on plans at the last minute (with reasonable excuses, though). My family knows this, and that's become part of their defense: my mom says I shouldn't keep trying to hang out with them (even though I've become fairly close to a few of them).

Besides that, my parents don't see my age as any reason for me to be able to come and go as I please. My friends do just that, and often tell me to just defy my parents by saying, "I'm 21 years old!" But my parents counter that, while legally an adult, I have no actual adult responsibilities. I live under their roof while on break, eating the food my mom buys and cooks and (while I do my own laundry) using their detergent and hot water. I take care of myself and maintain my own finances (supplemented by my job at the magazine) and, this semester, my car while at school. I manage to get back and forth to the bars or parties most weekend nights. But my parents pay for my tuition and a pretty nice apartment, as well as giving me extra spending money when my account runs low.

Part of the problem is that, while I definitely had my share of fights with my mom when I was in high school, and was occasionally frustrated at not being allowed out, I never really had my rebellious teen years. I never once in high school stayed out very late or drank or smoked. I went to church and youth group every Sunday and spent most of my school-year Saturdays getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. to play scholastic bowl with a bunch of other social misfits. I never experimented with drugs or sex. I never once skipped class, except that time I told Ms. Greene I was sick and then went and hung out in the library. (The library, see?) I wasn't an amazing student--I missed the occasional homework assignment, I almost failed calc--but I was a National Merit finalist and all that. It wasn't until college that all of my misbehavior began, and even then not until late in my freshman year. I didn't have my first boyfriend until the summer after my sophomore year. So now, while most people I know have already gone through that struggle and now have achieved their happy medium of coexisting with their parents while living as freely as they wish, I'm still trying to make my parents see how people in their early 20s act.

But what really throws a wrench in the works is my conscience. Like I said, my friends always just tell me to defy my parents, or to sneak out. And while I did sneak out and misrepresent my whereabouts to my parents a few times over this past Christmas break, for the most part that kind of deceit and/or open defiance just isn't part of my makeup. For one thing, I've seen enough TV and movies to believe that if I storm out of the house after a fight or deliberately flout their rules, one of them will die, or I will. For another, though I've done a lot of tearful shouting, such battles are always followed by a sense of regret as I remember how much my parents do for me, how my dad drove me to Urbana to see the Decemberists three years ago, how they've been helping me search for jobs online. I don't exactly want to feel that sympathy. I do think they can be awfully close-minded and arbitrary about which activities and friends they veto. But I know, as sickening as it sounds, that they genuinely want what's best for me.

So what do you think, refs? Does my parents' financial and occasionally physical care entitle them to make specific rules about where, when, and with whom I can have fun?

2010-03-15T20:09:00.003-05:00

Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
- Mumford & Sons, "Sigh No More"

I just saw a PostSecret submission with a picture of the Jersey Shore cast and the caption, "I hate 87% of my generation." I don't necessarily support exhibitionist, lowest common denominator shows like Jersey Shore. But I can't bring myself to hate people who love it, or even the cast members. I wish wholeheartedly that they were better educated and exposed to pop culture and media of a better quality. But that's not the same thing as hating them.

This may sound self-righteous, but here's a fact about me: I don't have much capacity for hate. I really don't. I hate myself sometimes, but only in the moment, only when I'm frantically rummaging through the piles of papers and books and empty Diet Coke cans in my room looking for my keys, or when I leave for class too late and then find myself bursting into the room out of breath and sweating. Other people annoy me. Sometimes a momentary statement or tone of voice or assumption will cause fury to rise in my chest. But I don't hate anyone. I watch movies and feel sorry for the bad guy when he dies. I've noticed more and more lately that my sister will complain vehemently about a mutual friend, or my friends from class will mercilessly rag on one of our classmates when we sit around gossiping, and I won't be able to join in with the same fervor. Again, yeah, people irritate me, but I still talk to them, try to be friendly. I don't just write them off and make across-the-board judgments...at least, not usually.

Of course, I don't get along with everyone. But here's what I'm realizing: as long as I'm able to have a comfortable interaction with another person, they're fine. If my interactions with that person are awkward but we still get along and have a basic understanding between us, that's also all right. The only people with whom I can't work at all are those who don't seem to like me and don't even appear to try to like me. People who act like talking to me is an unpleasant task (like a girl who has been in some of my journalism classes), or who seem to become best friends with everyone else around but treat me with the barest politeness or ignore me (some people at Showplace). And even them I don't hate. I just feel uncomfortable, wondering what's wrong with me, trying harder to be friendly and natural and still failing to reach them.

So maybe that's all my inability to hate is, low self-esteem. I can't hate anyone because if I have a problem with a person, I assume it's somehow my fault. Or maybe it's vanity: I want to appear nice and have everyone like me, so I make an effort to like and be friendly even to the people that everyone else hates. I'd like to think, of course, that I'm just naturally a nice person: empathetic, sensitive, generous. I guess even if it is just a product of my hyper-self-consciousness, it's one that I actually want to keep.

2010-02-28T21:10:00.003-06:00

“Boys and girls (in America) have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
- Jack Kerouac

It's so nice to feel physically close to someone, but when it happens suddenly, without that preliminary talk, it leaves one feeling strange and regretful, even violated. I need to be more thankful for the conversations and not just the kisses. I don't regret Halloween. It was lovely. But I'm so unspeakably grateful, I feel the need to give thanks constantly, that we got a second chance. Even if it was just for those two brief but great nights, I actually did get to hear a little of what you think about the world and God and your life. I miss your collarbone and your nose and the palm of your hand but I also miss being quiet and honest with you, and everything in me burns with hope that it will happen again. But if not, that one chance was almost enough.

2010-02-26T17:30:00.004-06:00

It's the thoughts that you feed
It's the habits you need
It's the things that you don't think that you're seeing
When you're really seeing
That man jumped out the window
(Come back in the window)
- Cloud Cult, "That Man Jumped Out the Window"

They say that I'm a lunatic
They say that I am full of it
I say that it's worth dreaming
Just for the dream of it

It's all about passion
It's all about perception
Don't call me on my cell phone
'Cause there ain't no reception
When I'm gone
- Cloud Cult, "Journey of the Featherless"

I just had coffee and interviewed a local Franciscan nun for my magazine class. Though the last few years have seen me drift away from my lifelong Catholicism and religion in general, her words and attitude were beautiful and inspiring. "God has been so good to me," she told me with real gratitude in her voice. She said that the women she meets who are thinking about becoming nuns are wonderful human beings: "The earth is in good hands." And she said that one must always take time for quiet prayer and reflection. I felt uplifted as I walked down the street in the sun after receiving a goodbye hug from her.

I've become so cynical and so prone to letting the world's stress weigh me down. Lately everything seems to be telling me to simplify and to be joyful and loving. My film friend Katharine (with whom I really need to sit down and have a good conversation one of these days; she's a smart one) just posted a Facebook note all about how she got a chance to take a few hours off from the crush of information and time demands and stroll around her neighborhood in the middle of the day, observing her world and not feeling rushed by appointments and deadlines for once. And then she got to learn something independent of classes, something productive and interesting for herself. The note made me wish that I did those things more often. My dear friend April just wrote to me about taking a break from her iPod and being more open to the world around her, and about helping to make the world more loving. I need to do that, too.

In that spirit, I just deactivated my Facebook. It's definitely a temporary measure, if only because it's an essential tool these days for getting information about events and quickly contacting classmates and friends. But I've become way too dependent on it--I automatically type in its URL virtually every time I open an Internet browser window--and it both clutters my life with meaningless chatter (not all of it, of course, but a lot) and distracts me from my increasingly demanding school and work duties. I'll see how long I can go without it. Probably not long, but I think taking a break might do me good.

Being an active citizen of the world means being aware of and passionate about its problems. So often I try to hide from that because it all feels so beyond my control, and because thinking too much makes me feel powerless and desperate and pessimistic. Yesterday I witnessed a conversation between two coworkers, one of whom said he has to hide from himself on a daily basis how little he lives up to his own ideals. I definitely do that sometimes. But somehow I think there needs to be a separation between awareness and cynicism. I want to strike a balance between recognizing the world's shortcomings and still taking joy in it.

And tonight I get to see one of my favorite bands, the ever-uplifting and emotional Cloud Cult, in concert. What a blessed couple of weeks this has been--full of stress and tasks, but also of unexpected new experiences, closeness with other people, productivity, and introspection. I can only hope my life continues this way for some time.

2010-02-25T00:28:00.005-06:00

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry --
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll--
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
- Emily Dickinson

I see haters and I'm looking at 'em like
Please, let me breathe
Why y'all niggas hating on my skinny jeans?
- New Boyz, "Crickets"

I've been wondering this about relationships lately: how much of a dealbreaker is pop culture to you, both friendship- and relationship-wise? If a love interest doesn't like your favorite band or movie or book, is that enough to write him or her off? What if he or she hasn't even heard of something you consider essential?

What if, for example, a potential paramour of mine has never heard of The Bell Jar, a book I've read probably ten times and referring to which I have a tattoo? Dealbreaker? What if he dismisses rap and hip-hop as not real music, or something he has no interest in as a whole? That's a major pet peeve of mine, so is it enough to make me discard an otherwise intriguing potential relationship?

I haven't decided yet. I do know that, while I have a fierce and evangelical love for certain works of art, I'm increasingly disgusted with elitism. I don't mean politically; it drives me crazy when people criticize Obama for being too intelligent and well-spoken and equate the "real America" with being white, rural, and working class. But culturally: more and more I have no patience for people who sneer at movies like, I don't know, Mean Girls, or even this past weekend's new release Shutter Island. Or who get annoyed with people for not knowing the name of a certain band or author. Yes, there is good stuff and bad stuff, and people should be aware of what is good and seek to consume it, and I would like to surround myself with such aware people. But the high/low culture divide has, for me, increasingly little meaning. My film professor's belittling of Martin Scorsese or the Coen brothers (though I know it stems from a deep passion for the cinema) increasingly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Films teach us about life, yes, they show us beauty and suffering and love, but they also entertain, and more and more I can't stomach dismissing a well-constructed, captivating movie because it's not highbrow enough or something. I want to be able to jam along to one of today's top-40 hits because I genuinely enjoy it, without feeling like I'm being ironic. I should make more time to read great literature, yes, but some of my honest-to-God favorite books will always be the earnest young adult novels and chick lit I still have in my room at home.

On the other hand, I hate when people claim that the Oscars are out of touch with the public because they don't reward popular movies (though in the past few years I think they've done a lot more of that than highlighting the actual best films). Or that hipsters will only listen to bands if they're obscure enough. I guess a part of me will always be a little bit elitist. But I no longer see any reason to be condescending. I don't want to let my pursuit of what culture has deemed as good ever close me off to joy.

2010-02-16T01:22:00.003-06:00

And so I stayed up all night
Slept in all day
This is my sound
Thinking 'bout tomorrow
Won't change how I feel today
- Matt & Kim, "Lessons Learned"

I've started working out lately. Nothing too major, just forty minutes on the elliptical every other day or so--but for me, who has shied away from almost all physical activity all her life, it's almost revolutionary. I still feel like an impostor every time I trot downstairs in my stretch pants and tank top and gym shoes (jeez, I haven't owned a pair of actual athletic shoes since middle school) and hop on the machine with my ponytail bouncing and my iPod playing '90s dance-pop.

I've been lucky so that I've never before had to work out. I grew up in a family where a dietary emphasis on mac'n'cheese and pizza and Pop-Tarts was matched with a blessed metabolism. My mom always emphasized daily exercise and time outside, something my bookish childhood self rarely appreciated, but it's not like I needed those walks around the block to stay slim. And my brief grade school forays into cheerleading and swimming were about fun, not exercise. In college, walking instead of taking the bus to class, sometimes choosing the stairs over the elevator, and taking occasional voluntary walks around campus--a contemplative form of exercise I actually love--have kept up that daily exercise. But even if I noticed a slight pudging out of my stomach and thighs the past few years, I never felt the need to work them off. And weight loss was no more than a tiny part of my desire to start exercising in earnest now--mostly I just want to combat my embarrassing habit of practically gasping for air after scaling a flight or two of stairs.

Despite my almost total lack of endurance--I remember getting immediately winded whenever I participated in day camp games of soccer, tag, and Red Rover--I've found my relatively short and low-impact workouts fairly easy and energizing so far. There's something very cleanly satisfying about working your way through a designated period of time of physical activity, pushing harder, going faster, feeling a burst of energy as the song in your ears hits its upbeat chorus. It's hard to resist psychoanalyzing myself here, though: these last few weeks have been packed with responsibilities and appointments, nights lying awake worrying and planning for the next day, personal fuck-ups and embarrassments. I made a major, costly mistake in my job. I skipped class a couple of times to work on homework for a different class. I lost the key to my apartment. I was single for yet another Valentine's Day. I still have no idea what I'm going to do with my life after graduation, but I can't even begin to think about that because of all the concerns currently vying for my attention. And on top of all that, I can't stop myself from constantly taking on more, volunteering for more projects, biting off more than I can chew. Is it any wonder that I'm gladly embracing this new part of my life that makes me feel accomplished and in control on a daily basis but that at the same time helps satiate my inexplicable appetite for constant productivity and risk-taking?

And though I don't think I'm anywhere near becoming one of the boring, body-obsessed exercisers that helped scare me away from working out until now, I see the effect it can have. I'm no stranger to examining my body in front of a mirror--not a day has gone by these past two years, for example, that I haven't taken off my shirt and smiled at my tattoo's reflection--but now I find myself critically examining my stomach and thighs, trying to eyeball any shrinkage. I've never in my life counted calories, but while working out I stare at the digital readout of number of calories burned, wanting always to make it higher. I feel my muscles to see if they seem bigger or firmer. And why? My general goals are just fitness and cardiac health; why does it always have to come down to what I look like, what might be more perfect or attractive? It bothers me in a small way that I reduce even something designed to make me healthier and better-feeling to appearances and the potential for male attention. As always, I blame society.

But more positively, I find it kind of heartening that I've been able to quickly and cheerfully start a new activity that was completely foreign and even distasteful to me for most of my life. Whether working out remains a lasting part of my routine or whether it falls by the wayside like various fleeting interests of mine (theatre, guitar, cross-stitching...), it gives me hope for the constant possibility of change and learning new things. Maybe I'll finally get over my fears and laziness and go to a Unitarian service or re-learn to ride a bike, or pick out Matt & Kim's "Daylight" on the piano or read Ulysses or take a road trip. I hope my ability to take on and try unexpected things (like, say, getting my tattoo) never fades.

2010-01-17T14:55:00.002-06:00

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

I recently created a profile and posted my resume to Monster.com, and I will likely spend the rest of this year looking for gainful employment. I've also been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, both essays and journalism. The combination of those two has helped present a slightly unnerving truth to me: though I've spent the last year turning my back on journalism and focusing on a career in the film industry, the prospect of a job in journalism that suits my particular tastes--feature writing and/or copy editing, specifically--is just as if not more attractive to me as a film job. Though I thrill to images and the cinema and want to create for myself, I still approach the medium primarily through the written word. I journal obsessively about my projects, my feelings about class, my ideas for films. And maybe that's just what one does, but it reminds me that writing is, at a more basic and constant level than film, what I do.

Though it's not a requirement for me to pick a career and stick with it forever--I can try one or the other and move on if it's not for me, or go to grad school in a few years--my fickleness in all things worries me a little. Maybe it's just the human condition to always be uncertain, to wonder what would have happened if you'd chosen that other path, to always believe the grass on the other side to be greener. I can look into the future and suppose that I will eventually have settled into a relatively rigid path: a certain professional trajectory, maybe a husband and kids. And then I will probably look back and speculate on what might have been if I'd made a different choice at this point or that. But I don't want to do that prematurely.

2010-01-16T01:50:00.003-06:00

You criticize the practice
By murdering the plans
Ignoring all the history
Denying them romance

The pin-striped men in mourning
Are coming for to dance
Forty million dollars
The kids don't stand a chance

- Vampire Weekend, "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance"

I'm reading a book by Jonathan Franzen, a collection of essays and articles written mostly in the mid-'90s, called How to Be Alone. The book alternates interesting, journalistic explorations of the history of smoking and its place in our culture, the dysfunction of the Chicago postal system, and federal prisons with more personal and doom-threatening pieces about the decline of the novel and the worsening of civilization represented by technology. (Though the book is interesting and in some ways relevant, it's almost quaint to read Franzen's laments of the death of the rotary telephone and the rise of the "information superhighway" now, in 2010.)

Franzen half-accedes to the inevitability of change and technological process, and that the serious literary novel is never going to re-assert its popularity over TV and computers. But his general thesis is one of decline, of things getting worse, of society losing something valuable. I always hesitate to subscribe to that kind of gloom. For me, saying that things are getting horribly worse or that the time that we live in is particularly culturally dire exhibits the same kind of near-sighted narcissism as the idea that we're living in the "end times." Besides, though I don't want to take this idea to the extreme, it's often useless to condemn modern developments: might as well accept and adapt to the inevitable.

One thing I do worry about is education. It not only frustrates but enrages me when I realize how much many people who didn't have the benefit of the Academy (not just the poor or disadvantaged but my college peers) don't know about literature or geography or history. I guess I was just lucky to have the Longhenrys. Pure knowledge is an important commodity to me--I wasn't an accolade-winning, camp-attending quiz bowl player for nothing--and I hate when people don't know facts that I consider basic.

It's this feeling, weirdly enough, that makes me understand the impulse to have children. I mean, I want kids (I think) because they're cute and I want to get married and pass on my genes and see the human I created grow into adulthood, or whatever people have kids for, but I also want to alleviate my fears about ignorance in the small way available to me. If I can't force every kid in America to be able to locate countries on maps and to read The Great Gatsby, I can at least do it to one or two. I know, trying to mold your offspring in your image and/or live vicariously through the kid is one of the classic missteps of parenting, but damn it, my child's going to read for fun.

Of course, the really terrifying thing about parenting, one of the things that scares me away from the idea, is that despite your best intentions, you never know what can happen. I don't just mean freak accidents like crib death or drowning in the swimming pool or getting cancer. I mean like what the kid chooses to do, how he or she turns out as a person. A few months ago I read Dave Cullen's Columbine, the recently published definitive book on the 1999 massacre (a secret of mine is that I'm kind of obsessed with that event and enjoy reading books and watching movies about it). The book outlined the day's events, explored local administrative response, and followed parents and survivors in the aftermath. But what has stayed with me was the bewildered reaction from the killers' parents, especially Sue Klebold, and the assertion that Eric Harris was a sociopath. Contrary to popular belief, the Klebolds and Harrises weren't bad parents; they sought help for their sons, who had gotten into legal trouble in the past. And according to the psychological analysis presented in the book, a sociopath like Eric Harris could fool professionals and even his parents with a falsely kind and repentant exterior. Now that worries me: my kid could be a sociopath, someone who gleefully plans and executes a massacre of innocents (and remember that Columbine was supposed to be much, much worse; the school was rigged with bombs that didn't go off). That's scary. I may dream of passing on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arcade Fire and Annie Hall to my progeny, but stuff like that--it makes me not so sure about procreating.

2009-12-28T00:59:00.002-06:00

I was feeling sad
Can't help looking back
Highways fly by

Run run run away
Lost lost lost my mind
Like you to stay
Want you to be my prize

- Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Runaway"

Do people really DO that? Do they kiss and hold you in the dark, tell you they'll see you again, and then straight-up ignore you less than twenty-four hours later?

This isn't the first time I've cried for someone this year, and it's always borne of the same emotion: incredulity that someone would knowingly hurt me. Those people seemed so honest and sweet and guileless when their faces were against mine. I've heard that guys lie and make empty promises, I know that abstractly--I even see it as a comedic trope in every episode of one of my favorite TV shows, How I Met Your Mother--but somehow when it's me I feel like a little girl having her puppy taken away for the first time, or some equally labored metaphor. I crumple.

And at the same time, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, assuming, letting the long empty hours and my own hyped-up emotions overwhelm me. My parents have reprimanded me for staying up too late and then sleeping in too long, but I'm just trying to fill my time with books and TV and the Internet, trying to postpone and minimize the lying-in-bed-before-sleep moments that allow too much thought. And then trying to avoid opening my eyes to the solid, ever-present ache in my chest.

2009-12-26T01:52:00.004-06:00

After all that we've been through
I know we'll make it after the wait
The question is a truth
There is nothing we can't do
I'll see you along the way, baby
The stillness is the move
- Dirty Projectors, "Stillness is the Move"

I know it's not quite New Year's, but hey, it's Christmas night and I'm waiting on a phone call and feeling (as usual) reflective.

During and at the end of 2008, I knew it was a great year. Not a wholly happy one, but a monumental one: I went to Rome, I had my first serious boyfriend and the wonderful new friendships that went with it, I helped elect the country's first black president. I took Anthropology of Hip-Hop. I started listening to Cloud Cult. My sister joined me in Minnesota. A lot of firsts, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of intense emotions.

I didn't expect 2009 to live up to the same standard. Last year I was living with people I didn't really talk to, hanging out with random groups of friends but spending a lot of nights alone, hurting because friends from home didn't seem to want to talk to me anymore. I didn't talk to anyone in my classes and the ones that were supposed to be fun--Comedy, Photojournalism--were uncomfortable and time-consuming. There were major events--the Spring Jam riots come to mind--but it was a fairly undistinguished semester. I didn't see much coming of another summer at home, which I thought would be dull and disappointing compared to the previous one. But things happened--I turned 21 (and threw up in Perkins). I met a new crowd of quiz bowl friends in May. I saw the Decemberists (for the third time, which would be followed by a fourth in October). I loved my internship and made new friends and learned a lot there. I had perhaps my best summer yet at Showplace and grew closer with coworkers (and danced in a popcorn vortex and picked up a dead goose). I saw the National. I got to hang out and belly laugh and see movies. And then fall and a new semester brought the best living situation I've had yet (roommate fights, but also letting loose with laughter and watching game shows til all hours), the chance to make films, and the best group of classmates I've ever had, people I now feel closer to than some of the friends I've had since freshman year. Beyond just our creative bond, these people make me feel comfortable, accepted, happy.

Resolutions seem odd for this next year--my main goals are just to finish my thesis, graduate, find a place to live, and get a job--but one broader thing I do want to do is figure out where I stand on religion. I've more or less left the Catholic Church behind but there is still a lot of ritual there that I'm connected to, that I don't want to let go of completely. And I don't want to give up on the idea of God and spirituality. I've vaguely planned to explore new faiths for some time now, and I need to actually do so. I have talked with a friend about visiting the Unitarian Universalist church this break, so I hope that works out. And I'd like to keep writing and working as much as I can. One added bonus of my great film class was the assignment to journal and keep track of favorite quotes, lyrics, pictures, etc. I've been doing those things for years but the class gave focus to them that I'd like to hold onto. Henri Cartier-Bresson said something like, "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." I want to just create, produce--I need to pour everything out and work toward making something good.

But I find myself, these past few nights, staring at Facebook and TV late into the night, the ache of loneliness heavy in my chest. Things never turn out the way I want them to--or almost never--but I can't help working over these plans in my head, making them so full and cinematic that I'm disproportionately crushed when they fail to materialize. I didn't want to work this break; I planned to fill my time by reading all kinds of books and watching all kinds of movies and making short films and planning my feature film for next semester. And to a certain extent I have been doing those things. But somehow I can't concentrate fully on any of them because of my antsy longing--and I can't even decide what it's for.

Maybe these questions will be resolved by or shortly after the New Year--maybe not. What's striking about the passing of this year is that I have absolutely no idea where I'll be when 2011 arrives. I graduate in just over four months and I do not know at all what comes after that. 2009, as I half-suspected, may go down in history as a transitional year, the relative calm before the storm of a new decade that will transform me from a young, single, uncertain college girl into--I can only hope--someone with a job and accomplishments and a new place to call home and maybe even a new family. It's exhilarating and terrifying. At least I can look back on this year and say that I had, overall, a really good time.

2009-12-17T20:50:00.003-06:00

Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all
- Neutral Milk Hotel

Every so often I get strangely--nostalgic?--looking at photos of myself. I'll think, "Hey, I recognize that crook-of-the-arm! That's mine! I see it every day, I know it by heart." It's so strange to think back to my past and realize that was me doing those same things, my body, my brain. I mean, I have those memories, some of them shockingly vivid, but somehow I only really believe it's the "real" me in this moment, now. Just as I don't really believe in my future self as a filmmaker and/or writer and/or wife and/or mother. Or that I'll die someday.

2009-12-17T00:38:00.003-06:00

Happiness is only real when shared.
- Christopher McCandless

I just finished rewatching Into the Wild, one of my favorite movies from a couple of years ago. Based on the book by Jon Krakauer, it tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who donated his savings to charity, abandoned his car in the desert, and spent over two years traveling around the U.S. and eventually to Alaska, where he lived alone in the wild for a few months before starving to death. It's beautifully shot, capturing the simplicity and beauty of the free life that McCandless (going by the name Alexander Supertramp) chased. And it's wonderfully acted by Emile Hirsch as the personable but fiercely independent "Alex" and Catherine Keener and the amazing Hal Holbrook, among others, as people whose lives he touched.

I don't know if it's just my mood tonight--I don't remember crying this much when I saw it in the theater--but Into the Wild makes me feel deeply and painfully, more than any movie I can remember since I last watched Eternal Sunshine. Chris/Alex's quest is admirable and the experiences he has are amazing. It's easy to envy the free spirit with which he walks into the wild, his search for truth and "spiritual revolution." But the pain of those he leaves behind--especially Hal Holbrook's character, who in the film's most heartwrenching moment asks the young man if he can adopt him--is hard to stomach. One can't help feeling that he should have stayed with the man, or in the wheat fields of South Dakota, or in the hippie village.

Into the Wild came out around the same time I first saw Grizzly Man, one of my favorite films. A documentary by Werner Herzog, it tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, who spent thirteen summers living with bears in Alaska before being eaten by one. All of the footage of Treadwell was shot by the man himself; while living alone in the wild, he recorded himself, often giving long speeches to the camera about his work with the bears. It's impossible not to draw parallels between Treadwell and McCandless--both were extremely idealistic and individualistic characters who sacrificed themselves to nature. Their unfortunate ends may inspire condescending assertions that their quests were stupid and meaningless. My then-roommate came home while I was watching Grizzly Man and scoffed at Treadwell, bringing up McCandless and saying both didn't know what they were doing.

Maybe there's some truth in that--though both managed to survive in the wild for quite some time--but I can't dismiss either of them. I admire and envy Treadwell and McCandless; I feel drawn to them. I've always had vague romantic dreams of road-tripping around the country; I've always liked the idea of quiet meditation and study in solitude. Purification, adventure, freedom. There's a part of me that agrees with McCandless that "nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future... The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences." The assumption in our society is that success is equal to stability, but living day to day, traveling and seeing new people and things, that must really be living.

Of course, though I still hope to do some exploring--the memory of my weekend alone in Germany and Switzerland remains exhilarating--I'll never have the gumption to simply wander. Maybe that's part of what draws me to these independent men who take on nature: they represent vague desires in me that will never be fulfilled. I like being comfortable: I like hot showers and fast food and TV and the Internet. I don't even like camping. And more importantly, I become very attached to people. I return to Rockford and to Showplace year after year because of the people there, my parents and my sister and my good friends. I can make friends wherever I go--I've become part of wonderful groups of people from quiz bowl camp to my freshman dorm floor to, just this semester and maybe best of all, my filmmaking class. But the idea of constantly moving on and leaving good people behind as inevitably fading memories makes me sad, even uneasy. I guess I'll just have to keep shedding my tears for Christopher McCandless, living vicariously through his wandering spirit.

2009-11-22T01:18:00.002-06:00

And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones...

And if you don't love me, let me go

- the Decemberists, "The Engine Driver"

Why're you doing this to me, man? I guess I've done well beyond my part in encouraging it, but...I thought I had this under control and all of a sudden it's not just friendliness, it's all these flirty little hints and inviting me out and bringing up memories I thought you'd long since decided to deny.

And I guess I should just wait to see what will happen but, being me, I can't help but play different versions of the scene in my mind and wonder how I'll act when the time comes. I don't know what I'll do. There's more between us than I have with almost anyone, and yeah, I wouldn't mind another chance. Not just to be better for you, to treat you as I should have then--though I want that so badly--but to tell you things I never could. There's still so much pain and anger there. The memories are vivid, and I've replayed being in your arms more times than I care to admit. But that party the night of the funeral has overridden a lot of them with its deep current of shame. There's still a part of me that wants to tell you how much it hurt to see you with another girl on your lap, or to stand there and only be able to stare as you broke down crying.

And would things really be different? I'd like to think that I've learned my lesson from that summer, but maybe not. I still don't know if I can give you what you want. I'm scared, okay? Opening myself up is terrifying. I'm still afraid of my body, of being vulnerable. I'm afraid I'll embarrass myself. And I'm scared of being judged, and of closing myself off to the opportunities that have lately cropped up. Hell, I'm scared that this is just a pathetic delusion and all you're doing is being nice to me. But part of me knows that if I wanted this to happen, it would. I just can't tell if I want to.

2009-11-14T01:13:00.005-06:00

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
- Stanley Kubrick

I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!
- Howard Hawks

I've written a lot about writing and my own creativity lately, so I apologize to cover the same ground again so soon. It's just an impossible topic to escape these days: over the next month, I will be writing and revising a short story for one class and shooting and editing a short film for another. Both are entirely open-ended, meaning I must conceive of an original fictional idea and produce it with some level of artistic skill. I'm no great fan of academic papers (though I have enjoyed writing some of them in my time), but to me these two projects are much harder than cobbling together some readings and observations into a persuasive argument. And trying to carry them out simultaneously is extremely daunting.

I think that's because of something I've had cause to consider a lot in the last few months: the relationship between literature and film. On the surface level of typical pop culture, the two seem to be closely connected, almost two sides of the same coin. Film simply visualizes the complex characters and captivating narratives that make up books. That's the common thinking--after all, countless books have been adapted to the screen, with varying degrees of success, and it's assumed to be a natural process with reasonable expectations of success.

But that's wrong. Film and literature are not the same. I've read a lot of film theory at college, especially recently as I prepare to write my senior thesis, and all of the really meat-and-potatoes stuff that has sought to define the medium from the beginning says the same thing: the cinema is a particular, unique art. Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim "The medium is the message" suggests that the content of film cannot be separated from how it is presented: on a screen, by a projector, shot by a camera in distinct units that are arranged in a certain way. Even the most basic exchange between two film characters, shot and edited to show them standing together alternating with closeups of each alone, plus choices of sound and lighting, is utterly different from reading that dialogue on a page or seeing it performed onstage.

And that's why cinematic adaptations of novels are almost certainly doomed to failure. The Harry Potter movies--among the most highly anticipated book-to-film translations of recent years--can fill the screen with bright special effects and charismatic actors, but they'll never be able to capture the slyly funny, Britishly no-nonsense tone of J.K. Rowling's prose. The most distinctive and memorable sequence in the most recent Harry Potter movie, interestingly enough, was one that had no basis in the book but was unique to the screen adaptation. The scenes of characters running through tall grasses and splashing in water as they attempt to escape elusive predators were visceral and striking; they made real use of the medium. There have of course been more successful film adaptations of books, but it's rare that a film goes beyond its source material and creates a world all its own--which is what an adaptation pretty much has to do.

I guess all of this is just my backup for the assertion that after a semester of making and watching my friends make movies, of coming up with ideas meant to be conveyed purely visually--our first film had to be silent and even our films that added audio have been mostly dialogue-free--it is extremely difficult to make the transition back to prose. We've had to write short pieces for class before, but they've all had specific parameters that made it easier to create a story. This final, major assignment requires me to have a fully fleshed idea all my own, and the only things I can think of could only be conveyed visually, onscreen. True, it's hard either way to simply sit there and think of a worthy idea for a story--but I used to be able to do that, back in high school. I think it might just be impossible to write prose and for the screen concurrently. Which is to say...anyone have any ideas for me?

2009-11-12T00:05:00.005-06:00

Oh but the longing is terrible
A wanton heart under attack
I wanna love you all the way off
I wanna break your back
- TV On the Radio, "Lover's Day"

I should probably never pursue a long-distance relationship. Rome kind of killed me for many reasons, but being away from my boyfriend at the time--whom I'd been dating for a month and had seen almost every day for that month before leaving--was a major one. But before that I felt it: right after we first got together, he left town for a short vacation. I missed him so much during that time. I wanted to be around him, to find out what it was like to just watch a movie with him or hang out in his arms. And I got that wish, a little over a week after the first time he kissed me.

But now I can't have that, physically, logically cannot. Almost every day since then I've thought about what it might be like to see him again. I've wished for lips and hands on me. I know I sound pathetic and I know people hook up drunkenly and then never speak again, people have one-night stands, it's what happens. But I feel like if we could be together, we would at least have tried it by now. When you're suddenly drawn to someone, you want to run more tests, get a second opinion, find out if it's real. These long weeks are dooming it to an undignified death. I feel like my desire will sour, or sharpen into impossible-to-meet expectations. Maybe we'll just forget about each other, and I don't like just forgetting about people.

And even writing this I feel like my memories have gotten so distorted, weighted with perhaps unnecessary meaning. Maybe I should leave it alone on faith that there will be other nights and other kisses. It's just a scary leap to make.

2009-11-11T22:05:00.003-06:00

Art was always a means to an end with me. You get an idea, and you just can’t wait. Once you’ve started, then you’re in there with the punches flying. There’s plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can’t back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it’s exciting. Our whole business is exciting.
-Walt Disney

Being part of an artistic community--however small and amateurish it is--is staggeringly amazing. The kinship I've been able to share with the other students in my filmmaking class has been over and above everything else this semester, infinitely more absorbing and exhilarating than most other developments in my life (even, I don't know, making out with that kid on Halloween). Every Tuesday I look forward first to the three hours of intense, awkward, hilarious, emotional class. And then I eagerly hop down to the sidewalk outside for cigarettes and loud rehashing and complaining and film references and New York vs. L.A. debates. What's wonderful is that I know they love it just as much as I do, have come to see it as a fixture in our routine. They jump at the chance to hang out together outside of class just as much as I do. I've probably become annoying in the last week or two as I've begged my classmates to join me in signing up for the same class next semester, but I want this to go on. I want this to continue being a part of my life.

Between the extensive journaling I do for that class and the actual filmmaking, I find myself lately filled with intense creative energy, the nervous desire to produce something. Anything. Writing, painting, composing, filming--I don't even do half those things but something in me wants to do them all the time lately. Somehow, though, that doesn't translate to actually producing anything good. I'm supposed to write a short story for creative writing class next week and I've barely started thinking about it. I wanted to do NaNoWriMo as an easy outlet for that energy, but my would-be novel never got off the ground. Maybe because when I actually have free time to do any of these things, I end up sprawled on the couch watching Will & Grace with my roommate, or sitting online for hours talking to my friends.

There is so much that I fantasize about all the time but rarely (if ever) actually do, even when given the chance. I'm afraid that if I ever do end up in a situation where I'm poised to make films, I'll get bogged down in my own inevitable laziness. For now, I suppose, it's enough to just be around people who understand the drive, at least.

2009-11-07T16:38:00.002-06:00

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
- Chuck Palahnuik

I thought seriously about doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. I was successful with it two years ago, reaching my 50,000-word mark over the course of November, and I still enjoy going back and reading that novel, which I ended up getting printed and bound for free through NaNoWriMo. I'm in a creative writing class now, and this would help force me to get my writing flowing, which is what the exercise is intended to do. (You're not expected to finish a full-fledged novel in that month, just get words onto paper.) Maybe I'll still try, though I'm almost certain to fail after not having written much of anything yet.

Honestly I just don't think I'm that creative. Two years ago, my novel was deeply autobiographical. It was my own version of The Bell Jar or Prep, two of my favorite books--a curious and introspective young woman's thoughts on the world and her isolation from those around her. I invented characters and events and the central story, but the vignettes and observations that surrounded that story were almost all taken directly from my own life. It was relatively easy for me to reach the word count goal because I was writing about myself. If you want to know who I was in the fall/winter of 2007, read that novel.

I could have done that again, and maybe I will end up doing so--writing a "novel" that is really just a thinly veiled version of this particular moment in my life. While a lot of my thoughts about myself and the world are the same, I have changed a lot in two years. The specific loneliness of the main character of my novel belongs entirely to that time in my life. I had exchanged the close-knit dorm community for a trio of strangers who were nice but whose lives were foreign to me. I would wait until they went to sleep and then enjoy the silent solitude of our apartment, staying up late watching TV and talking to a friend from home online. My sister had yet to join me at school, and my best friend in Minnesota was a guy with whom I wanted to fall in love but couldn't. I occasionally went to parties, and they were all right, but I was kind of detached from the college culture. (I remember one party my friend and I ended up at--we were standing together and then suddenly she was making out with a boy, and then I went and fell asleep on the couch.) I went to church every Sunday and I had never been kissed.

The next semester, Val moved in with me and we became close, and I kind of found validation by watching movies all the time and caring deeply about the presidential election. And then that summer I immediately started dating Collin (we met at a party at his house my first night home) and by extension all of his friends. These last two years, I've stopped going to church and started drinking a lot more. I've made new friends here at school and become closer to people I've known since freshman year. I'm busier, I keep active, but I'm somehow less involved with the world around me.

Anyway, this time around, I didn't want to simply document my life. I didn't want my character to be a smart, socially awkward college-age girl. I wanted to write something truly fictional. But I don't think I know how to do that. I used to--I won first prize in short fiction at the UW-Whitewater Creative Writing Festival my senior year, for a story about a young man questioning his choices as his wife dies of a terminal illness. I do not remember where that came from, or how I was able to write it so well. I'm not that person anymore, and I don't know why. I'm not a novelist or a short story writer--if anything, I'm a memoirist.

Maybe it's all of the journalistic and academic writing I've done in the past four years. Maybe spending so much time on my own in college has just made me draw inside myself. I do see myself as extremely introspective and self-conscious. Maybe that's why my favorite thing to write about is myself. But how I do know that all people aren't like this? A person can't help but think about herself all the time, right?

Anyway, all my life I have defined myself as a writer, and it's strange and sad to think that maybe that's not who I am anymore. I can only hope that it's not being replaced completely, and that what is replacing it--filmmaker?--is real and substantial.

2009-11-01T21:31:00.002-06:00

Chased the good life my whole life long
Look back on my life and my life gone
Where did I go wrong?
And my head keeps spinning
Can't stop having these visions
I gotta keep winning
- Kanye West, "Welcome to Heartbreak"

Three words that became hard to say
I and love and you
What you were then I am today
Look at the things I do
- the Avett Brothers, "I and Love and You"

Sigh.

What do you do when you know you've fucked up?

Not in a huge way, not like losing all your money in a pyramid scheme or getting in a car accident because you were messing with your iPod. Not like getting arrested for possession or skipping class the day of the final.

But just...really embarrassing yourself. In front of people you don't even know that well.

And not really in a cute way, just in an awkward, loud, your-body-is-everywhere way.

And it's not even the first time this has happened. And you know that this isn't an anomaly; you can't use that excuse anymore. This keeps happening and you keep having these mornings after where you can't tell if your stomach hurts because you're hungover or because you're deeply ashamed.

I mean, it's still funny, it still works for you, and it's not like you're drinking alone or during the week. You haven't thrown up or fallen down in public. People probably don't even judge you, but still you somehow know you've reached a low point. And you never intended to become this kind of person.

And besides all that, you--you of all people--are leaving a trail of broken hearts in your Coors Light-flavored wake. It happened so suddenly that you can't even imagine how to behave. And since when does it happen that you have to make a choice between two people you really like, or keep stringing them along? That's not how this works. Your shtick is pining silently and hopelessly, not meeting a new guy every weekend and wondering how to keep them all happy.

Maybe you just need a good night's sleep and to throw yourself into creative work for a few weeks. Just tell yourself that and maybe the ache in the pit of your stomach will go away.

2009-09-29T00:53:00.002-05:00

Say say my playmate
Won't you lay hands on me
Mirror my maladies
Transform my tragedies
- TV on the Radio, "Wolf Like Me"

And in the daylight I don't pick up my phone
'Cause in the daylight, anywhere feels like home
- Matt & Kim, "Daylight"

Deepest apologies in advance for sounding like a sappy woman's magazine--I can't help it right now. And I hesitate to say this because I don't want to jinx it but: I think I have inner peace?

School is kind of amazing this semester. My classes are all fun and relatively easy so far, and even the one that causes me the most stress is great because I'm finally getting to make films and (maybe even more importantly) be around people who love what I love and want to do what I want to do. My classes are smaller and more creatively oriented than they have been in the past, so I'm more emotionally invested in them and have quickly bonded with classmates. I am extremely busy, but aside from lugging around heavy and humiliating film equipment, the workload has yet to faze me much.

My life goals are frightening but relatively well-formed at this point. I know I want to work in the film industry and not go to grad school, and I know that means probably moving to L.A. I don't know for sure what will happen next year, but for now I'm not worrying about it too much.

My roommates are two of my best friends at school, people with whom I've spent a lot of time and am incredibly comfortable. We can belly laugh together and unabashedly vent about school and social awkwardness, and I feel more at home here than I have for the last two years.

I'm comfortable (more or less) with being single. Yeah, I still crush on guys but I can enjoy bars and parties without feeling like I have to attract a guy. And I'm actually able to relish the new friendships forming with guys I've just met without instantly pining for them forever. Of course, now that one has come along who just happens to make me swoon inside even as we've palled around like instant best friends...well, that just adds to the elation currently bursting out of me even more. Because the best thing about it is that we have paired up effortlessly, walking together out of class, understanding each other's references. So I know we'll be friends even if that's all that ever happens, and for once I'm all right with that.

Now that I'm 21 and have accumulated a sizable and diverse group of friends at college, I have both the ability and the opportunity to go out and drink often. And I'm consciously taking advantage of that--I've gone out every single weekend night (Thursday through Saturday) since arriving at school. Though that schedule may not survive the winter--the bars are less appealing when you have to walk there and back in subzero temperatures--I'm happy with it so far. And because I am more comfortable with being single these days, I've been able to relax and enjoy good conversation, good music, and cheap alcohol without nervously or desperately seeking male approval.

I think the real difference this semester is that I'm finally somewhat friendly and outgoing. Maybe it's that I'm a senior and have some sense (earned or otherwise) of experience and power. But I think what actually changed was that this summer happened. I had to meet new people and figure out unfamiliar, sometimes confusing or embarrassing situations in my internship at Mass Comm, and I continued to revel in my Showplace job. I made dozens of new friends between the two and became closer to people I'd known before. I really think that gave me personal and professional confidence. One of my unspoken goals for my final year of college was to actively participate in class and attempt to meet and befriend classmates. In the past, I usually stewed in my own bubble of awkwardness, barely interacting with the people around me. Aside from exceptions like Italian class, which brought me friends that I still talk to and party with often, my classes were chances for me to watch the people who always sat beside or in front of me, listening with interest to their conversations but never adding my own two cents. Now, finally, the goofy openness I've long had at Showplace--one of the reasons I love my job--is beginning to show elsewhere. My summer was so wonderful that I feared Minnesota would never measure up; instead, summer has informed my school year. And yes, winter is coming and school will become more stressful and drag me down and I'll get fed up with slow Internet and snotty neighbors and late buses and icy wind and football fans. But somehow I feel like the good things--especially this one new friendship, both comforting and exhilarating--will continue to season my semester with joy.

2009-09-27T22:11:00.002-05:00

Now the warriors of winter, they give a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight, flapping and a-racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going, and they've got the wings so they can go

- Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

I don't know what's wrong with me. I know my mom loves me and I love her, and except for a few irrational freakouts she's only ever friendly and loving with me. But for some reason her very personality sets me on edge, so that when she's around I'm distant and irritable, almost openly rude sometimes. She came up to visit last weekend, and I just coldly muttered my way through our few hours together. And our phone conversations consist of me rolling my eyes whenever she asks personal questions, dropping monotone monosyllables while she cheerfully chatters away.

Maybe it's just the normal, even cliched, reaction to a mom asking leading questions about every male I mention and lecturing me about keeping my apartment clean. But I always associate those kinds of characters on sitcoms with querulous old women, not MY mother. And it doesn't explain why every word out of her mouth makes me want to jump out of my skin, even though realistically it's perfectly understandable for her to ask about my life. Maybe what really annoys me isn't the prying about my personal life, but her obtuse responses when I do try to explain something that's going on. Her bland, patronizing "oh"s make me shut down in annoyance.

The real problem is that I'm always stricken with guilt only after we hang up, or after she's left Minnesota or (when I'm home) when one of us leaves for work. I feel mean and petty and childish, and like I should apologize. But for some reason, despite this deep and nagging remorse every single time, it continues to happen. The next time my mom calls, it'll probably happen again: she'll start asking questions that miss the point of my life or that I don't care to answer, and I'll start grinding my teeth and waiting for her to wistfully say goodbye. And then as soon as she does, my stomach will drop and I'll feel like an asshole.

I guess it's inevitable, or at least pretty typical, to grow apart from your parents as you get older. My first two years at college, I talked on the phone with my parents probably every other day. My sister still lived at home, so getting to talk to her was part of it, but I remember long conversations with my mom, telling her all kinds of stories about what I'd been doing. Now our phone calls are just stilted and painful. Like I said, it makes sense: my life has become separate from hers. Back then, I was an active churchgoer and volunteered with middle school kids. Now I go out to bars and parties every weekend night--I couldn't tell her about that. She doesn't know much about film, and I'm skittish and defensive about my filmmaking aspirations even with my friends; her condescension would and does infuriate me. I guess she's getting to the age of wanting grandchildren, because if I even hint that I'm crushing on a guy, she'll pester me about him forever. But there are still things I could tell her, and I don't know why I don't, or can't. Maybe it's nothing unusual to grow apart from one's parents, but it still hurts like hell.

2009-09-16T22:06:00.002-05:00

Still it's a shock shock to your soft side
Summer moon, catch your shuteye
In my room, in your room
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Soft Shock"

Sometimes my sister answers the phone and her "Hello?" is unexpectedly vulnerable; her voice breaks and she sounds kind of sleepy and distant. It's almost painful to hear, her voice being a little too childlike. It's a Maureen I don't hear often, because she's so confident all the time, so guarded and strong. I know I'm her closest friend as she is mine, but there is so much she never shares with me, or that she parcels out in moments of honesty that are few and far between. We very rarely hug or say "I love you"--she always shrugs those off with sarcasm or annoyance. Most of our relationship is laughing and joking about our shared memories or funny incidents we witness, or her condescendingly bossing me around and berating me for being messy or forgetful. In many ways she's more of an older sister than I am. She spends more time with our parents than I do and is quicker on the uptake, so often she's one step ahead of me when it comes to goings-on in our family. And there's no fooling her: she always sharply observes my habits and weaknesses and gets brutally to the heart of them.

So hearing her voice on the phone like that is a rare instance of feeling older than her, protective, as if she's my baby. She so rarely opens that part of herself. Almost the only time I've seen it was five years ago now, her freshman year of high school. She'd been hanging out a lot with the guy who's still her best friend, and had asked him if there might be more to their relationship. I guess he blew her off coldly; in any case, I found her in the hallway during lunch, sobbing against a locker. In a red sweatshirt, her long hair loose around her tearstained face, she looked as scared and sad as I've ever seen her, and I wrapped her in my arms--one of the few times she's ever let me do that. And then I went off to find the kid and...I don't know, beat him up or something. I stood over him in the classroom where he was eating with other students, demanding that he tell me how he made my sister cry. I remember having to turn away and stare at the wall to force myself not to burst into tears myself.

My sister is far more capable than I am, physically and emotionally. She can fight her own battles. But it's a good feeling to get angry on her behalf, to fight for someone other than myself.

2009-09-16T20:38:00.003-05:00

Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease
One man's temper might rise
Another man's temper might freeze
- Peter, Paul & Mary, "Too Much of Nothing"

I just heard that Mary Travers of 1960s folk group Peter, Paul & Mary died today. Those guys' music was integral to my childhood--my grandma would play a cassette of their songs while I drifted to sleep when I stayed at her house, and I remember watching a video taped from PBS of them in concert. Maybe it was those early influences that later drew me so strongly to the '60s: my high school years were spent obsessing about the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Their music, especially their sweet, sad version of "Blowin' in the Wind," remains lovely and evocative for me.

It's a blow of sadness on top of a slightly gloomy night for me. I'm very satisfied with the semester so far, especially the warm weather that makes strolling around to class or heading out to the bars at twilight especially pleasing. I seem to be better than before at making friends and interacting with people. I have a good job at the Wake, I have great creative outlets in my filmmaking and fiction writing classes, and I may even have some romantic prospects, or at least one. Really, I should have no complaints. Maybe that's why this undercurrent of nameless sorrow, and my continuing feeling that I don't quite connect with people around me, is so troubling.

And about that romantic prospect...I mean, he's a nice guy. Whether he's for me is debatable. While I wouldn't go so far as to say I like my romantic leads dark and brooding--that sounds way too Edward Cullen for my taste--I do tend to prefer them grumpier and more biting than this one. And besides, I'm worried enough as it is about spending as much time as I can with my beloved friends before they or I graduate and leave these parts. Though I never thought I'd say it, I'm just not looking for a boyfriend now. But I know there will come a time when I will want one, and maybe there will be none to be had and I'll wish I'd gone for it when I had the chance. As sorority-girl-Facebook-quote as it sounds, I do think that you regret the risks you don't take more than the mistakes you actually make.

I'm about to make a short film for class on this very subject: giving your heart to someone is fucking terrifying. I fought it a year and a half ago and then it happened anyway, and I hurt for a long, long time. So maybe for now I'll just stay in my room and listen to Mary wail "If I Had a Hammer" and put off sharing myself with a stranger for a bit longer.

2009-09-13T12:13:00.003-05:00

He was drunk and exhausted, he was critically acclaimed and respected
He loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn-out winters
He likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration
- the Hold Steady, "Stuck Between Stations"

Do you ever just have the urge to write something that happened all down to preserve it? Last night was a quintessential college night, and even though I've been having a good time since I got back to Minnesota--classes are good, friends and beer are plentiful--it was the first real reminder that I really need to cherish my last year in this place.

Friday I went to my friend's birthday party and had kind of an awkward time making overly friendly and/or stilted advances to strangers there. My hangover Saturday morning and the lingering shame of being annoying made me resolve to take at least a week-long break from partying, as I'd been out almost every night since moving back here. I spent a lazy day watching movies, talking to people online, and half-heartedly reading for class, getting a little bored and restless as seemingly the entire rest of campus flocked to our new football stadium for the first real home game of the season. Then suddenly my friend messaged me to ask if I wanted to go to a house party, and despite being tired and despite having resolved not to drink, I quickly agreed.

The entrance to my new apartment building is always lined with people lounging around, smoking, playing hacky sack, spotting friends and coolly sizing up anyone who passes by. I waited for my friend there, sort of basking in the feeling of a Saturday night on a college campus where the football team has just won a big game. A group of guys peeled off from the crowd and stumbled away from the building, off to some party or bar. One of them, a black guy with no front teeth, came up to me and asked me my name. He introduced himself as Carlos but said I could call him "Black," and then almost knocked me over with a hug before running off after his friends.

My ride arrived, we drove to the party and met up with more friends, and then we filled up on beer and lounged around in the near-empty house for a while. I felt a little bored and awkward, since my friends were mostly just concerned with getting on the waiting list for beer pong and talking about people and events unknown to me. As the place filled up, clusters of guys kept smoking pot in really open and obvious places--like on the front steps--and we breathed in clouds of it as we circled through the house. I ran into guys from classes and my freshman dorm and made small talk. Police cars rolled by frequently but no one seemed nervous, though we all joked about the riot of last spring. I chatted up a few guys but mostly just stood around on the front lawn with my friends, yawning and laughing and listening.

Then suddenly I turned and saw five cops materialize out of the shadows, slowly advancing on the house--it was cinematic in its creepy suddenness. My friends and I casually got out of there, though we're all of age, and ended up standing around on the sidewalk a block away. The friends I'd come with had biked from their house, so they put me in the hands of two guys who also just happened to be standing there, strolling off with the admonition, "Take care of Colleen for us." Luckily, I'd met one earlier in the night and the other one had a car, so we drove back through Dinkytown. The streets were full of people, and McDonalds overflowed with hungry drunks. I bought myself some McNuggets and my new friend a snack wrap in the drive-thru, and we drove home leisurely down frat row to the calm, perfectly fitting sounds of Andrew Bird. At my building, the guy I'd met earlier hopped out and asked for my number. And then I walked back through the hordes of kids still outside the doors, smiling to myself, and went upstairs and ate my McNuggets and talked to my ex-boyfriend online about how the thought of our exploits still turns him on. It was really a good night, and even though house parties and bars and kegs and football are mundane, and even though a steady diet of beer and McNuggets can't be good for me, I love college for nights like that. I love running into people I hadn't thought of in months and having conversations with new ones. I love the moments when you stop feeling constantly judged by the strangers around you and can relax in the party haze. I love how plans to stay in can turn into an unexpectedly great evening. I had a wonderful summer and I didn't want to come back here, but nights like that remind me why I'm happy I did.

2009-08-19T13:33:00.002-05:00

Don't say it's over
'Cause that's the worst news I could hear
I swear that I will
Do my best to be here just the way you like it
- the Avett Brothers, "If It's the Beaches"

Hey now, hey now
Don't dream it's over
Hey now, hey now
When the world comes in
- Crowded House, "Don't Dream It's Over"

I realized something kind of terrifying the other day: at school, I say "I hate my life" or "Fuck my life" (in the common parlance of the day) to myself frequently, while at home it never enters my thoughts. It's a depressing thought, a quick reminder of all the daily embarrassments and annoyances that await me in Minneapolis: squinting down the street for long minutes looking for the bus, sharing an awkward elevator ride with neighbors from my building, accidentally stepping into a biker's path, suffering through a class period with a horrible cough or runny nose, simply having to trudge across campus in the bitter cold or squeeze into class five minutes late. Summer is just so comfortable--being at home, surrounded by people I know and like, having a car instead of having to laboriously figure out bus times or walk twenty blocks. Having a job that takes up most of my time is not only a dandy excuse for a social life, but sometimes an entry into one. I don't have to plan a day around a trip to the grocery store or spend evenings in a stuffy little room pretending to read something boring about the mass media but really going on Facebook every five minutes.

Maybe it's just that when you grow up and live your late teens/early 20s in a boring, unpretentious town, you learn to find joy in small things. Like drunkenly belting "Summer Nights" in a tiny apartment or staring at the cloud-streaked sky from the swings of your childhood playground or becoming fascinated with a rubber ball for an entire evening. I feel like everyone I know in Minneapolis is trying way too hard to be sophisticated and upwardly mobile, while everyone in Rockford knows actual excitement is a lost cause and just embraces being goofy and nostalgic and childish--which is more fun, anyway.

I know there would still be winter and schoolwork and my own awkwardness and the loneliness of weekend nights with nothing to do if I stayed here. I know that I got into a good school and am very close to getting a degree and I shouldn't long for things that I have been taught to consider below me. But so many of the friends I made and people I loved this summer are at Rock Valley. And so is the place where I spent most of my weekdays this summer, full of people who have the same interests and goals as I do and people who can teach me about what I love. I can't really wish that I had stayed at Rock Valley and gone through Mass Comm. Life would be too mixed up--I'd have known Ben and Susan and Collin in a very different context, and I wouldn't know the Minnesotans I love at all. And I do love them, and I'm excited to see them again and to re-immerse myself in that life. But maybe I've just forgotten how bittersweet this always is, or maybe it's especially bad this year because it feels like I'm leaving more than ever behind. Last year at this time, I just wanted to get out of the place where my heart had been broken. This year, my heart is breaking just to leave it.

2009-07-22T18:48:00.002-05:00

"I want to look back and say that I did I the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could while I was stuck in this place."
- Dazed and Confused

You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun
- Wilco, "Jesus, Etc."

Do you ever have the sensation of walking through your garage into your house and having to stare at the shoes on the rug and the framed pictures on the wall and smell the rain-soaked streets outside to force yourself to remember that this is where you live? This house, of all the houses on the street, is yours and you have lived in it all your life. "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife."

I'm really going to miss this place. I'm getting preemptively homesick. Or maybe just panicking about the idea of someday not calling it home. I've been doing that for years, imagining the very last time I'll run my hand along the banister or stare at the spidery plaster ridges on the ceiling, and how terrifying and lonely that will be. Wanderlust and fortune-seeking are strong in me, but so is the comfort of home. I know there is beauty other places in the world and sometimes I ache for it, but there's something very particular about grain elevators and long rows of soybeans and people mowing their lawns in quiet suburban neighborhoods.

I think I'd be perfectly happy if I could just decide between my warring halves. No matter what decision I make, there's always an opposite side tugging back. Like one of my favorite quotes from The Bell Jar: "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."

And I will.

2009-07-21T01:40:00.003-05:00

Baby, we'll be fine
All we've gotta do is be brave and be kind
I put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile
I don't know how to do this
I'm so sorry for everything
I'm so sorry for everything

- the National, "Baby, We'll Be Fine"

I've definitely reached the point in the summer when I start to get really sick of Showplace. I'm still having fun with my friends but now it's reached a point of desperation of squeezing everything in, too many demands on my time, feeling like a bad person if I don't have the means or inclination to hang out all the time. And summer's on a downward slope, so it's hard to feel hopeful about any new friendships starting because the inevitable end of it all looms ahead.

But at the same time I can't help hoping like that. I always do this, stake everything on a ghost of a chance and then mourn disproportionately when it fails. I feel as if this new thing could be perfect, even though it'll be a miracle if it works out. Part of it, I have to admit, is his approval: that still means everything to me, even when it's not him I'm actually seeking. But I'm also starting to have increasingly defined plans for myself, and the idea of something that aligns with those is more tantalizing than I can bear.

I still think movies and books have made me way too determined to find structure and meaning in everything. I always search for an overarching theme or trend in any part of my life. This summer, despite its many bright moments and stand-out days, lacks that common undercurrent that last summer so obviously screamed. Maybe that was what made that summer so significant, so real-seeming when it was happening, because it was so glaringly a summer to remember, a summer to write a novel about.

I'm really excited about my internship, and I love Showplace and I love my friends, but at the moment that is all retreating into the background of this tiny idea. Because I always do that. And still I want this. I want it I want it please let me have it.

2009-05-25T01:15:00.002-05:00

Nameless you above me come
Lay me low and love me
This lonely little love dog that
No one knows the name of

Curse me out in free verse and
Wrap me up and reverse this
Patience is a virtue
Until its silence burns you

- TV on the Radio, "Love Dog"

I don't even like partying that much, and as recent events as shown, I'm less self-possessed and agreeable when drunk than I like to think I am. And I like being alone; many of my favorite activities are solitary. Really my desire to be socially active is all about perception, how people see me. If I'm on Facebook at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, it means I have nowhere better to be and therefore am open to being judged a loser. There are nights when I just want to fuel my energy into being around people, and it's then that the narrow circle of people I feel comfortable texting is painful.

I don't know why everything always has to be so personal. I don't know why I can't just function without looking like an idiot, or why people shy away from me when I try to be close to them. I don't know why I can't appreciate the meaningful and laughter-filled times I do have, without endlessly re-evaluating them later. I don't know why it's suddenly so awkward and angry with people whom, not too long ago, I loved, around whom I wanted to be. It's not even about having a boyfriend or anything like that, although I'd love if something happened; I just want to have the stereotypical summer of spending a lot of time with friends and staying up late and so on.

I suppose I really want last summer back, as I knew I would. One of the reasons I initially told myself I would not come back to Rockford is that I knew I would inevitably and unfavorably compare this summer with last. Nothing will ever live up to the summer of 2008--I lived in Rome, I had a boyfriend--though as I must remind myself, it wasn't at all perfect at the time. It's as if I'm just waiting for this summer's memories to be created, and though there have been some great times already, I still feel bitter and clunky. I have all these creative impulses but no actual drive to complete them; I've spent most of my time since getting home online, watching movies (which has been good), or scooping popcorn into tubs. I'm just so in limbo right now; Rockford suspends my academic and career plans, while leaving me too exhausted and uncertain and not at college to think about larger social or existential issues. But it also provides the perfection of staring at the beautiful sunset through towering glass windows or driving down a deserted Mulford Rd. listening to TV on the Radio in the dark or having deep conversations over Perkins breakfast potatoes. I guess I made the right choice, but I'm waiting for that to be proven true.

2009-05-03T23:34:00.002-05:00

Look me in the eye and tell me
That I'm satisfied...
I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied
- the Replacements

Adventureland makes me feel so much. You know those movies, right, the ones that pierce you in a way both agonizing and beautiful? Number one is, of course, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I don't think I'll ever find a film that makes me ache all over like that.

I want this summer to be like Adventureland. I want it to be like a novel. I believe that the shitty stopgap job you take turns out to change your life; I believe in people you started out looking down on and ended up loving, or at least knowing in a real and unexpected way. I believe in the sunset sky through huge glass windows and the smell of popcorn in your bones. I want to have that again, and I want to have lights and music and hugs and the smell of beer and cigarettes.

Things are always more complicated than movies would have you believe. Sometimes I feel like this is the central problem of my life, but maybe it's more endemic to the human population in general. Even movies that try to make it real fail, because you can't just show up in the rain and take off your shirt and say something endearing and draw the one you love towards you and melt into one. There's too much hair and skin and saliva and fingernails and wondering what you look like and what you feel like and whether you're doing the right thing and whether you should go further, pull back, shift to one side or the other, say something or keep silent. Or maybe only I feel that way. Maybe for other people it is as simple as the movies. Even then, though, there are gray mornings and bus fare and toilet paper and laundry folding and produce sections of grocery stores. Maybe the real tragedy of life is that it can't be lived at 24 frames per second.

2009-05-02T02:52:00.003-05:00

Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
- Erica Jong

Do you believe in you?
'Cause no one else can do that for you
Are you ready yet?
ARE YOU READY YET?
- Cloud Cult

Aaaand that is why you are not my boyfriend. One of the reasons, anyway. You can hold me and kiss me soft, smell delicious, make me feel beautiful for once, but if you don't have the decency or the interest in me to listen when I'm talking to you then it's just not happening. I am desperate and I know that, and I think everyone knows that, but I don't need to be around someone who is barely civil when not trying to get in my pants. Maybe I am boring, but you could listen, you could not interrupt, you could give me some fucking respect.

Erica Jong, goddess, was right: it's an inescapable paradox. You can be a feminist and independent and brilliant and creative OR you can have a decent love life. But not both. And when I am trudging off to class or languishing off to the side at a party with my good GPA and my scholarships and my three majors and my grad school plans rattling around in my bag, all I care about is someone's fingers laced through my fingers and someone's lips and tongue on my lips and tongue and someone's eyes looking approvingly at my allegedly good-looking ass. I want someone gazing lovingly into my eyes and nuzzling my neck and running fingers over my thighs while we lie in bed. But somehow when you do those things it is not enough, because you don't really know me and you don't really want to know me. You just want to bounce your jokes and your libido off me like a sounding board. Walking home in the dark, it's like we're strangers and you couldn't want less to do with me. And then I miss being known for my brain. So fuck it. I want respect and I want my mind and body both to be worshipped, and I'll keep hoping that such a possibility exists despite my doubts.

Thanks, anyway for the validation.

2009-04-07T17:31:00.002-05:00

I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
- Allen Ginsberg, from Howl

"All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It's all over everywhere. I don't know what I could call it. It's like I can't get enough outside it to call it anything. It's like horror more than sadness. It's more like horror."
- David Foster Wallace, from Infinite Jest

This isn't going to be coherent but if I wait until it is I won't want to say it anymore. One of the saddest things to me sometimes is how emotions don't last. Even when my whole body fills with pain and stress and despair, it's somehow galvanizing and real and I don't want to lose it, even as I try to dull the pain.

I don't even know what to say about today. It really started last night, when I couldn't get to sleep. I hurt so much and I couldn't stop thinking about Saturday night, replaying it in my head and wanting it to be the jumping off point for something good. But in reality it will probably just recede into the distance as a particularly memorable weekend night, one among many. I just want to have something to look forward to, not something built on ones and zeros and words like resume and internship but something of arms and hands and shoulders and teeth and lips.

And then I woke up this morning and went to class, Cinema and Ideology, and the professor, my favorite professor in the world, started talking about All the President's Men and suddenly it turned into a full and intense class discussion of how America and the University of Minnesota are just terrible. What can you even say about our country? It's run by rich old men whose funds are the reason we're fighting wars and perpetuating a health care system of inequality and destroying the planet. And there's no way to escape it. I feel so powerless. Why don't people DO anything about this? Why didn't I march in the streets and shout "NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!" last semester when I had the chance? Maybe throwing a park bench through a bank's plate-glass window wouldn't have solved anything but it would be something. My professor freely admits that she's a Marxist and, you know, I am too. People are alienated from the products of their labor and the working class is kept ignorant and impotent and I wish I wish that someday people would rise up and revolt against the elites.

We're all going towards the same place, anyhow, but I don't see why it can't be a little happier on the way. There's already enough out of our control--diseases and floods and famine and freak accidents--why do we have to make it even harder on ourselves? Why does America have to be built on this endless fucking cycle of work and money and taxes and striving all your life at maybe something you love but maybe also something you hate just to feed yourself and your family from one month to the next? Thinking about it exhausts me, fills me with dread. It makes me not want to grow up.

2009-03-24T18:11:00.002-05:00

He’s a what? He’s a what?

He’s a newspaper man

And he gets his best ideas

From a newspaper stand

From his boots to his pants

To his comments and his rants

He knows that any little article will do

Though he expresses some confusion

'Bout his part in the plan,

And he can't understand

That he's not in command

- TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

I recently read (most of) a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the shift from a typographic to a televisual culture in the twentieth century, and how that has negatively shaped society and the way we think. It was extremely interesting, and very dependent on an idea with which I firmly agree: Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message.” The form of a message is just as important and ideological as its content—it’s an idea that’s been emphasized in my cultural studies classes, but not, curiously, in any of my journalism classes. But it’s one we’re going to have to reckon with. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1986, well before the rise of the Internet, but its ideas must be applicable today.

You can’t be a journalism major without being acutely aware of the fact that the media world is radically changing, and I’d argue that even those outside journalism who aren’t paying attention should open their eyes. Last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its print run: it’s online-only now. Several Michigan newspapers, including those in Flint and Saginaw, have cut print production to only three days a week. The newspaper as we know it is dying. That is a fact. Journalism has shifted online, and while it’s still adapting and shifting, it’s irreversible.

I’ve seen a lot of comments—online, of course—along the lines of, “There will always be journalism, whether or not there are newspapers.” A noble sentiment, I suppose, and maybe a true one, but it ignores a major and fundamental truth: print news and online news are not the same, because the medium is different. The Internet is by nature vast, saturated with content, and fragmented. Whereas you might subscribe to only one daily newspaper, most likely the local one for your town, the Internet allows you to quickly browse stories from that paper’s website, the sites of TV news stations like CNN and MSNBC, those of news sources from other cities, and those of major national and international sources, like the New York Times or the BBC. It allows you to connect from one story you read to similar stories, more in-depth coverage, video footage, and so on. It allows you to instantly offer your own opinion, whether it’s well-formed or not, and to argue anonymously with equally faceless strangers. (I recently read—online, of course—an argument that suggested that these message-board conversations allow people to judge each other and recklessly hate different views, because the anonymity and lack of real-world context prevents them from recognizing each other’s humanity.)

I actively try to never dismiss or demonize current trends, especially widespread technologies. I want to be realistic and to not be left behind. To me, calling Twitter stupid or pointless when it’s clearly becoming a major forum for information and discussion is simply ignorant. Blaming the Internet for society’s ills or bemoaning the fact that it has replaced newspapers is counterproductive because it is a huge and influential part of society whether you accept that or not. But the idea that it has taken precedence over other media, and will continue to do so to an even greater degree, does worry me somewhat because it does mean change: an increasingly prevalent new way of thinking and being, which is still at least partly in development.

My documentary cinema professor complained cheerfully the other day that cell phones have just created lots of useless conversation. Because the technology is there, because people can talk on the phone whenever and wherever they want (up to a point), that’s what they do: talk all the time. But it’s not as if people didn’t talk enough before: they said what they needed to say, so all this added cell phone talking is just surplus, as my teacher said. And that’s how the Internet is: because it is more or less democratic and infinite, because people can fill it with their meaningless talk, they do. It becomes so self-congratulatory—how many stories have you seen in the past two or three weeks, on the Internet, about Twitter, in itself an Internet phenomenon? I’m not saying that media trends shouldn’t be discussed and analyzed, but so much becomes news about news about news. How often does anything actually get said online? When newspapers go online entirely, how much of their sites will be real journalism, and how many people will read it?

I realize the irony of adding yet another pointless voice to the discussion, one more voice lost amid the giant clamoring sea, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.

2009-02-20T10:58:00.002-06:00

&amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;altcast_code=1a4e153d33" &amp;gt;Oscars 2009&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

Yep, I'm liveblogging the Oscars...meet me back here Sunday night.

2009-02-18T01:54:00.003-06:00

When the contact high from the real life adventures wear off

You find in the tiny moments that bomb

Your old files rain down from the sky

- the New Pornographers, “From Blown Speakers”

I’m a county lineman

On a high line, on a high line

So will be my grandson

There are power lines in our bloodlines

- the Decemberists, “The Engine Driver”

In the spirit of Facebook’s 25 random things, and as a way to lump together things I’ve happened to think about lately…

I try to be socially conscious, though more often than not that translates to sitting around my room watching online videos about gay marriage and Darfur and then watching TV shows and eating. I’m a terrible person. I do care, though, and I have certain “favorite” issues. For example, the fact that same-sex couples are prevented from marrying and adopting makes me cry and feel both energized and helpless at the same time. But I have a hard time mustering any emotion regarding, say, cancer. I know cancer is bad; I know it kills people and that efforts to raise funds and awareness are important. But it doesn’t hit me on a gut level. (“I’d like to hit this guy on a gut level.”)

Related to my feeble attempts at contributing to society: I go to McDonalds way too often. I love Chicken McNuggets but am inevitably seized with guilt after eating ten of them. I can feel how unhealthy it is for me and it makes me feel gross and trashy and bad for the environment. I just go because it’s a block away from my apartment and thus a quick, easy detour from class when I need to eat quickly, or from a party when I just want to stuff myself with grease while my roommates sleep. Anyway, I try to alleviate my guilt by being extra nice to the employees and depositing any coins I receive as change in the Ronald McDonald House donation box. This paragraph basically sums up why I am Liz Lemon.

While I wouldn’t exactly call myself a romantic, I do always want couples in TV shows and movies and real life to end up together. I even feel bad when people I don’t really know that well at all break up on Facebook. On a strictly personal level (not aesthetically critical), I hate when TV shows set up couples that are really cute and good together and then push them apart with various obstacles, because TV shows have to be tumultuous and interesting.

But I’m not really a romantic. I’m horribly cynical, thus preventing me from enjoying most romantic comedies. (Like The Holiday. All I can think about watching that movie is, “Yeah, RICH people can afford to fly around the world and mope and have sex with Jude Law; real people have to worry about money!”) As such, and as I am terminally single, I should hate Valentine’s Day. But I don’t, really; it just makes me kind of uncomfortable. And I attribute that to the flower (and Crush) sales in high school. It wasn’t that I ever expected a flower or would have wanted to date a guy who would buy one, but…it just created heightened anxiety every year.

The older I get, the more collapsible time seems. I never used to be able to wrap my brain around the idea that time is a construct and that everything really exists seamlessly and simultaneously. But now I can sort of believe it. I can remember sitting in a group of four desks in Mrs. Ginestra’s class singing a song about “Peace is the world smiling” with Chris Vanmanivong and it doesn’t really seem that long ago, at least no longer ago than sitting at Auburn in Mr. Ockerlander’s class, numbly copying notes about the Civil War and imagining crawling onto the empty desk at the front of the room and curling up and going to sleep. What it feels like, actually, is like being a replicant in the movie Blade Runner. It feels like being one of the advanced replicants, the newest batch that includes Sean Young, and you have all these memories inside you that make up who you are. (That’s why her model is most advanced, because memories are what make us human.) But sometimes the memories almost don’t seem real, because they are all the same in a way, and because it feels like they could have happened yesterday, and I can hardly believe that I have actually lived for over twenty years and did and saw all of those things. Maybe they were just programmed into me like they were into Sean Young. It doesn’t seem that impossible. (Sure, there are physical signs, like the scars on my hands, but the Tyrell Corporation would be smart enough to include those flaws and match them with my memories.)

Speaking of memory, I feel like mine is getting worse over time which of course terrifies me. Maybe it’s the drinking I’ve done over the past two years. (Almost exactly two years, in fact, since the first time I got drunk. And that, too, sitting on the floor of Austin’s room taking shots of blue raspberry Pucker and then slinking around the hallway with Lexi, giggling at ourselves, seems like it could have happened yesterday.) Anyway, I tried to remember the Auburn fight song today and for some reason couldn’t get the Mickey Mouse theme song out of my head. They both have spelling, I guess. But then I couldn’t remember who plays George McFly in Back to the Future and that worried me even more.

I don’t think I’m going to be a journalist, which is too bad because I do actually like journalism. I like working on my own but also tossing ideas around in the newsroom; I like the freedom that reporting gives you to enter different situations and talk to people you never would otherwise; I like writing in a journalistic style. Unfortunately, I am too lazy to acquire the skills and motivation to survive as a journalist in today’s world. Besides having to fight sexism, I think I would have preferred being a journalist twenty or thirty years ago, when everyone smoked and had tough-as-nails editors and banged out stories on their typewriters, rushing them to the presses to be printed as breaking news the next morning. If I am romanticizing All the President’s Men too much, it’s only what every journalism student does. Before they go to journalism school at the U of M and are told their future is writing 45-character headlines for iPhones. I just hope I actually have the ability to be a filmmaker. I don’t know if I do, and that scares me. A week and a half ago at a party, talking to a friend and fellow journalism major, I suddenly felt the bottom drop out from under me and I put my hands on my face Home Alone-style and shouted, “What am I going to do with my life?” I keep thinking about that moment.

2009-02-03T20:13:00.004-06:00

Hell is – other people!

- Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

I feel I must interject here

You’re getting carried away feeling sorry for yourself

With these revisions and gaps in history

- the Postal Service, “Nothing Better”

My last couple of weeks, besides school and the Wake and Facebook and the other usuals, have been dominated by Friday Night Lights. I’ve known about the show for a while; the A.V. Club frequently talks about the show’s greatness (despite having low ratings and never getting any Emmy nominations). The first two seasons are available to watch instantly on Netflix, which has been miraculously working for me so far this semester, so I’ve started watching and have almost gotten through the first season now. It’s a wonderful picture of a small town with all its hopes resting on one thing, the high school football team. I’ve become strongly attached to the characters, invested in the storylines, even tearing up at least once an episode. One of the best things about the show is that in its large and talented ensemble cast, there isn’t one character that’s completely “bad.” There are those I love and sympathize with more than others—shy, good-hearted Matt Saracen; fiery, wise Tami Taylor—but even the characters that might be one-dimensional and wholly unlikable in another show—bombastic Buddy Garrity, his prissy daughter Lyla—are dynamic and multi-faceted. It’s a testament to both the writing and the acting that we get to see the characters’ inner struggles, their complex emotions, and understand what they’re going through—even if their actions (from cheating on a boyfriend to taking steroids) are questionable.

There is one character, though, that I just don’t like. It’s not the show’s fault; I think she’s supposed to be at least somewhat likable. But Waverly, the intelligent and passionate love interest for running back Smash Williams, just rubs me the wrong way. And I know why. She takes herself way too seriously. In one cringe-worthy scene, she recites a poem from memory in a booth at the local diner, closing her eyes and rising to her feet as she grooves to the words she’s spewing. Her confidence, her willingness to stand out, should be laudable. But it’s just…awkward. And kind of annoying. She doesn’t care that she’s making everyone think she’s crazy, that shouting out the words of a poet her peers have never heard of isn’t exactly how to succeed in high school. Even after she’s done, she never apologizes for getting carried away, doesn’t even blush or laugh self-deprecatingly.

Watching Waverly, rolling my eyes at her behavior, I realized that this is one of my pet peeves. I don’t like people who refuse to apologize for themselves, who put themselves on display and ignore the subtle conventions of social interaction. I don’t like people who don’t care about being cool, and who are defiant in their not-caring. That’s why, even though “nerd” is a social category with which I could easily self-identify (and often have), I’ve always been a little wary of the people who unabashedly announce themselves as nerds. Or people who are loud and proud about the fact that they don’t drink or party.

(Side note about that last one: If you are in college, especially a large state school like the University of Minnesota, people. Drink. A lot. That’s how it is. It’s also pretty fun, if you care to try it. There are some groups of people who don’t drink, though they're fewer and farther between than you might think, and if you find one of them to hang out with, good for you. But don’t blame everyone else for being American college students. Don’t look down on them for their behavior. Don’t assume that people who party are skanky sorority girls who throw up every time they drink, and don’t assume that such girls aren’t worth your time. Do not think that you are superior to those around you because you “don’t need alcohol to have fun.”)

Anyway, these unapologetic people aren’t exactly rare—I’m looking at you, girl in Comedy: Text and Theory who has to make a snarky, holier-than-thou comment every three minutes—but really my problem with them has to do with Tyler Kerr. I’ve known Tyler since about second grade, and he has always been one step ahead of me. He was always calmly better than everyone else. He called himself a “Darwinist” in middle school. He supported Ralph Nader as a twelve-year-old. In high school, the structure of our relationship—him as the unquestioned best, me the unwilling sidekick—was firmly established through Scholastic Bowl. People who talked about Auburn’s team always mentioned both of us (“Kerr. Powers. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”) (Is it horribly pathetic that I still remember message-board comments from three and a half years ago? Yes.). But Tyler was the real star. I was just the “lit chick.” And he drove me crazy. In quiz bowl, because I was comfortable with those people, I was hyper and passionate and got into screaming matches and cried and ran around. But Tyler was like the eye of the hurricane. He never let anything touch him. I hated him for being so unperturbed.

This all came to a head at the New Trier Varsity tournament when I was a senior. It had been a good day: Patrick heard that he got accepted to the University of Chicago; we made Brad Fischer cry; Patrick almost made me cry teasing me about flirting with players from other teams. We were undefeated going into the final round against Bloomington and it came down to the last bonus. I knew some of the answers; I knew them for sure, but Tyler ignored them. And that made the difference; we lost the match and the tournament. It was right before Christmas, and Tyler was wearing a Santa hat. In that dingy classroom, putting away our buzzer system after Bloomington had left with their first-place trophy, I hated him and his stupid, oh-so-funny Santa hat and his superiority and his refusal to get mad or to blame himself for our loss. He didn’t apologize for not taking my answers; he didn’t apologize for himself. It still infuriates me, irrationally.

This past New Year’s Eve, reveling in the chance to interact with my former classmates after all of us had had a few drinks, I sort of attacked Tyler, asking him why he always had to be right, why he was always better than me. And he just looked at me in that way of his, cocking his head, that sort of detached way of not really understanding, not caring enough to understand. He told me that I wasn’t really as drunk as I was acting, that I was more psychologically drunk than physically drunk, that I was just taking advantage of being drunk to act even drunker. I couldn’t handle it and walked away. Nothing has changed.

I know why I can’t stand these people. Okay, so maybe some of them really are pretentious fucks, like the girl in my Comedy class. But I’m sure my own crippling, constant self-consciousness has plenty to do with the unease I feel when I meet someone who seems oddly free of that burden. I guess it’s that Tyler—with his Nickelback listening and his active membership in Facebook groups like “Nice Guys That Finish Last”—doesn’t seem to care about being cool. And I care about being cool more than I’d like to admit.

2009-01-14T02:44:00.003-06:00

Those were the days of Elaine

That was the phrase that she used to describe to her son

All the fun she had had

- the Decemberists, “Days of Elaine”

Maps won’t show us where we’re going

All they are is just the boring facts—relax…

All the plans we wrote on paper

Going down the street somewhere

I wonder how we wound up here

-Immaculate Machine, “Dear Confessor”

I still remember fairly clearly a dream I had when I was a freshman in high school. I dreamed I was at a kind of summer camp. The other kids at camp didn’t like me much; they kind of ostracized me and I spent a lot of time sitting alone at the top of a hill on the far side of the swimming pool, looking down at the rest of them with my knees pulled up to my chest and my chin resting on my folded arms. I was lonely. Then one night I was standing by myself in front of a TV, idly watching a football game. A boy came in, a guy from school in real life, and without saying a word stood beside me and put his arm around me. The most vivid part was the feeling of his hand on my waist, a solid, warm pressure. Both our eyes were still on the TV screen as he led me gently to an armchair, sat down, and pulled me onto his lap. I sat there in his arms as he silently stroked my hair. It sounds boring and silly—like the scene in When Harry Met Sally in which Sally describes the great sex dream of her life, and it’s just a faceless man ripping her clothes off, which underwhelms Harry—but especially for a completely inexperienced freshman, it was kind of sexy and mesmerizing. I clearly remember sitting in class all day, replaying the scene over and over in my head. I still have those days sometimes, embarrassingly enough—reliving a dream, usually one in which I have a sex-tinged run-in with a fictional male. The sad thing is that I used the dream to immediately form a crush on the kid, previously a casual friend that wasn’t even that cute or smart, that lasted a depressingly long time.

Not long ago one of my friends told me about how she used to have dreams in which she and random classmates would get in adventures, and then she’d feel oddly close to them the next day even though she wasn’t actually good friends with or attached to them. I instantly thought of that dream freshman year, and was kind of embarrassed at how much I took it to heart.

I don’t know what the point is, except that one of my friends has this in her about me on Facebook; I Google-identified it as an excerpt from the poem “Falling” by Patrick Phillips. It hits home:

The truth is

that I fall in love

so easily because

it’s easy. It happens

a dozen times some days.

It was never easier than at Showplace 16. All those cute, friendly boys running around; always something to talk about (there is ALWAYS a crazy customer story to be told); boys who like movies, boys who flirt shamelessly with you despite being three years younger. That’s not what I’ll miss most about the place, those easy crushes, but it’s there.

I’ve told some people that I cried on the way home from Showplace on my last day of work—no less than on the way home from Auburn that last day, almost three years ago—and they usually laugh at me, but it’s hard to describe the intense pull that place has, especially once you’ve been there a while. I’ve heard other employees talk about it. Especially for me, since I always came back from school to work there, it was always a solid constant in my life. I looked forward to and reveled in the easy conversation and repetitive tasks of menial labor and dealing with the same old customer issues after months of boring class and studying and awkward parties and elevator rides and solitary dining hall meals. Obviously there were bad times at Showplace, awkward moments, but it was easier to fit in there than most places. It’s impossible to imagine life without the people I met there, some in particular—Bjorn Ben Jesse Jake Jason Leandra Ali Linda Chris Nate Mike. I learned about movies from Bjorn and Ben. I learned about pseudo-relationships that never end from Mike. Ben introduced me to Collin, about whom I’ve already talked far too much on this blog. Actually, I was sitting in my car in the Showplace parking lot when he broke up with me over the phone, in almost the exact spot where we stood and kissed at the end of our first real date. I cleaned up shit (literally) from the floor. I filled countless bags and buckets of popcorn, I swept popcorn from under seats after countless movies, I drank countless paper cone cups of Diet Coke. I don’t even want to think about how many millions of kernels of popcorn crossed my path in that time. I stood by guest relations or in the break room, talked and flirted and hoped, got excited, felt rejected. I’m kind of panicking just thinking about all the memories from there, how it’s all over now.

A few days ago I went to Auburn to help with the annual frosh-soph quiz bowl tournament, always a stressful affair for Ms. Greene and the team. None of my classmates were there, but the younger kids I had played with were, as well as some of my contemporaries from other schools that have become figures of the Illinois quiz bowl world (believe me, it’s more serious and complicated than you’d ever want to know). I really enjoyed hanging out with those people, laughing at stories only quiz bowl people would care about, rehashing old jokes and grudges. It really was a great day, but it was strange to me to revisit that world, both utterly familiar and strangely distant. I have all those memories, but I can’t quite recall what it was that made those times so great. I can’t remember exactly why or how I got out of bed at five and six a.m. on Saturday mornings, routinely, almost every weekend from October through March, to go sit in an uncomfortable desk in some musty high school with the same five or six kids every week, holding that slim cylinder in my hand and waiting for a chance to press a button and prove that I knew more than some other high school nerd about Dostoevsky, or Faulkner, or Thomas Hardy. I saw many of the same rivals week after week; I got to know and like a lot of them. And now…I barely talk to most of them, some not at all. I’m Facebook friends with some of them, but I can think of plenty that I will probably never see again. Soon Showplace will be that, too, and it makes me sad. I wish I could keep memories from fading and blending together; that frustrates and frightens me probably more than anything else.

Maybe I should feel hopeful, though. I was pretty sad when quiz bowl ended, and though I don’t think I articulated such thoughts to myself, I didn’t really anticipate finding such a complex and fun community in which to immerse myself, at least not so soon. But there was Showplace, and for a while that meant everything to me. So there will be something new. The Wake, maybe. Maybe something I don’t even know about yet. And just as I haven’t fully forgotten or lost touch with quiz bowl, I’m sure Showplace will always be there for me, even if I’m no longer the one slinging popcorn and tickets to the next godawful sequel or Dane Cook vehicle.

2009-01-07T01:37:00.001-06:00

All the leaves are brown

And the sky is grey

I been for a walk

On a winter’s day

I’d be safe and warm

If I was in L.A.

California dreamin’

On such a winter’s day

- the Mamas and the Papas, “California Dreamin’”

Don’t change your plans for me

I won’t move to L.A.

The leaves are falling back east

That’s where I’m gonna stay

- Ben Folds Five, “Don’t Change Your Plans”

I’m too full of energy right now. I’m bursting at the seams. And what’s terrible is that I know it won’t last; my moods and plans change way too easily, but at the moment this feels so right and I’m almost out of breath with it.

Given that:

1. I love movies, an immutable fact;

2. I am currently studying studies in cinema and media culture, which is just as much my major as journalism is, even though I usually just stick with journalism when introducing myself;

3. The disgusting economy, terrifying media world, and my own indecision have led to a sense of panic about my post-graduation opportunities;

4. I have considered grad school off and on for a while now, and have always told myself firmly that, if I should attend grad school, it would be for film production;

5. I have (like most Midwestern kids, probably) (maybe) the usual golden romantic ideas about California even though they sit side by side with ideas about it being too sunny and fake. These are able to coexist mostly because the former applies to San Francisco and the latter to L.A.; and

6. California is where it’s at as far as the film industry—

I’m seriously considering going to California for film school. Remember my idea about road-tripping to California next summer and making a documentary about it? Maybe the trip can be to visit schools. Maybe I’ll use the resulting documentary in my portfolio to apply to said schools. Maybe not; who knows. But I am researching schools online, looking at what application materials they require, forming a list of possible schools. (I’m also thinking about Columbia College Chicago, in case I suddenly decide California’s not for me.)

There’s a very good chance that I’ll get back to Minneapolis and fall in love again and not want to leave. But today when I was standing inside theaters waiting for customers to file out so I could sweep up their popcorn and Screaming Sours from the floor, I watched the credits roll past and was seized with a powerful desire to have my name on a screen like that. Everything about it, all the positions—best boy, second assistant director, sound design coordinator, whatever—it all still sounds magical to me.

And I know, who doesn’t want to work in movies, who doesn’t want to see her name in lights, but I really do feel like I’m homing in on what I want to do. I’d thought of myself as a director, but I’m thinking now that I’d really like to see my name beside “film editor.” The idea of planning out and setting up shots as a director, of storyboarding scenes before they’re even shot, has always seemed daunting to me. But taking existing filmstrip, choosing the best takes, juxtaposing shots and scenes for maximum and precise emotional effect—that interests me, even exhilarates me. I made a video just for fun at the end of this past semester, a sort of experimental documentary without a clear purpose except to use the privileges of the journalism school equipment and computer lab while I could. I spent something like six straight hours sitting in the lab editing it in Final Cut Express, playing the same clips over and over, switching things around. I’m fairly happy with the way it turned out, and I was proud of myself for controlling the pacing and successfully pairing the visuals with music, bits of modernist meanderings recorded as a favor to me by my friend at school. Behind the camera, I was nervous and self-conscious; maybe I’m better suited to the more individual and sedentary work of editing. And the exciting thing is that when I think about it, it really does play to my strengths. I can’t draw or paint to save my life; I’m not even especially good at taking photographs, but I love making collages of photos cut from magazines and newspapers. I’ve made them for years. I’m more comfortable editing, excising and paraphrasing and synthesizing, than I am writing, especially creatively. I like synthesis; it’s why the word paper came relatively naturally to me. From a film standpoint, Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage has come up in every film class I’ve had, and I understand it; it makes sense to me. He talks about the idea of two unlike images being juxtaposed to offer a new idea or emotion, the idea of thesis and antithesis giving rise to synthesis. He says montage can violate the rules of continuity editing and assumptions about spatial relationships. Editing really is something I notice and respond to when watching films. The strange, seemingly sloppy jump cuts in Frank Capra films, for example, or the intentionally jarring ones in Breathless or Bonnie and Clyde. I bristled when a video project submitted for class this past semester was docked points for having too many jump cuts. Damn it, I like jump cuts.

Anyway, one more thing about film school that excites me: the hope that I will be surrounded by people who are just as obsessed with movies as I am, who want to talk about them as unceasingly as I do. I still don’t really have anyone at school who cares about movies like I do, though I frequently pontificate about them to my roommate and other friends (and always feel obnoxious and boring). Rockford always had reliable movie-loving friends, but not all of them even talk to me anymore. It may seem stupid or trivial, but honestly it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world when I can find someone who wants to talk about good movies, or who will talk intelligently about them while I listen appreciatively. It’s probably not something I need to go all the way to California for, but it’d be a nice perk.

2009-01-02T22:03:00.003-06:00

Memories fade, like looking through a fogged mirror

Decisions to decisions are made and not fought

- MGMT, “Kids”

These are things that I keep hidden in belly
I can’t see them but they control my life
For a moment you could see right through me
See right through me
Help me make this right

- Cloud Cult, “Take Your Medicine”

Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington… It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep. It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

- Barack Obama, Chicago, 4 November 2008

2008, man. Two Thousand And Fucking Eight.

One for the history books, and I’m not just talking about the election, even though that was a huge part of my year as well as the world’s.

I think 2008 was about the dialectic of feeling more comfortable with myself and my surroundings and at the same time feeling separate from everyone around me. One day I’d feel connected, welcomed; the next, alienated. This wasn’t always in my head.

2008 was partly about becoming happier at the University of Minnesota. I embraced the winter; I embraced Minneapolis. I found people who seemed like me, and people I knew I didn’t want to be like. A lot of my increased comfort came from being with people from Rockford, bridging the gap between my two homes. Rooming with Val last semester was great, and I became closer to her than most of my fellow U students or most Auburn alumni aside from my best friends. Then, of course, my sister arrived, which really has made all the difference. I may still feel clunky and awkward and horribly self-conscious and not poised or fashionable enough much of the time, but there’s at least one person who understands me. I’ve also really grown to love my friends from Italian class and from the Wake. It’s these people that have made me start to seriously consider settling here after graduation; in fact, I’m almost sure of it now, though the idea of grad school in a different city still beckons.

2008 began all about one person, the same way 2007 had ended. On New Year’s Eve, lying among my friends, I confessed my lingering attachment to him. In the weeks that followed, I hung out with him a few times, saw some movies. Later, when I was back at the U and deep into another semester, we began having online conversations. Sometimes we’d talk for hours. I’d log onto Facebook to find wall posts that made me ache all over from smiling. I remember hunching over handouts in Journalism 3101, Mondays Wednesdays Fridays at 9:30 a.m., trying to force the lines of text from swimming and jumping before my eyes, and it was all because of those nights of 3 a.m. sitting on the couch eating chips and salsa and typing out the pain of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Boyz N the Hood. I don’t think I’ll ever find someone with whom I can talk about movies as easily and wonderfully, which still makes me a little sad. (Movies were a huge part of my life in those months, more so than they are now (unfortunately). I was watching two or three a day with the help of Netflix.) Despite what we’ve got in common, I think he and I were only ever meant to be good friends. I hope we still are and will continue to be.

That semester was also about politics, mostly because of my friend Kris. He made a Hillary supporter out of me, and I genuinely believed in her ideas, especially when I saw her speak in person. I was wary of this inexperienced Obama with all his vague talk of change and hope. And I stand by that wariness, because I think he didn’t solidify his positions until some time after the major primaries. It wasn’t until the summer that I fell in love with him. Then came the Republican National Convention, which really shaped the first weeks of the school year. I’m glad I participated, even if I wasn’t arrested or tear-gassed like some of my friends. And the weeks and months of supporting Obama, of the visceral fear of McCain/Palin, of watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report religiously and checking fivethirtyeight.com. Staying up almost all night before the election to cover Dinkytown with posters. Standing among joyful Minnesotans of all ages, cheering and crying as Obama’s election became real. Walking home that night listening to the pockets of joyful shouting in the distance. That really was one of the greatest nights of the year, something I hope to tell my grandchildren about (even if that became a cliché about thirty seconds after he was announced as the winner).

In the last weeks of last semester, I met Chuck D (well, shook his hand after he posed for a picture for me), saw Cloud Cult for the first time in concert, and met a pretty cool guy with whom I had a pretty nice time. But then I came home, and met another guy, and launched into a relationship with him immediately. That summer still defines the year for me, despite everything else that happened before and after it, despite having a pretty good pair of semesters at the U. For a month and a half, I had a boyfriend and a whole new group of friends and was happy with that. It was strange and wonderful to suddenly go out every night of the week, to stay up till all hours playing board games and laughing uncontrollably at each other. I almost didn’t want to leave for Rome, despite having made plans all the previous semester. At the same time, Rome helped me postpone facing questions that kept surfacing, like whether I really wanted to be in this relationship. I was happy, I liked Collin a lot, but I can’t sugar-coat that time. The night before I left was just one instance of drunken drama, of crying and lying in my boyfriend’s arms and not sure whether I was crying because I was leaving him or because I didn’t want to be with him in the first place. There were some really great times, and there were times when I would have a moment and a strange understanding not with my boyfriend but with his best friend. That made me nervous; it made me pull away from a guy who at the time genuinely liked me.

It’s strange now to talk about Collin because of how much has changed. I was upset when he broke up with me, but he still talked to me and we remained friends for a few months. At times we would talk easily online and it was as if nothing had changed; other times he was cold and distant. When we both happened to be at NIU on the same night, we talked on the phone and made plans to meet up; even though we never did, it still seemed like we were fine with each other. Then, suddenly, he simply stopped talking to me. He did not acknowledge my occasional IMs or the curious message I finally sent, asking what had gone wrong. It’s been the major source of stress for me for the past few weeks, because I still wanted to be friends with the whole group of them. Last night a few of them came into the theater, and they all said hi to me and I stood around talking to them, including Collin, afterwards, and it was fine. So that’s up in the air right now. Either way, I think I’m just going to have to relinquish the idea that things could go on as they were in the summer. I just wish Collin would be willing to maintain some semblance of friendship between us, but maybe that won’t happen.

Of course, the summer was also all about Rome. I don’t even know what I can say about Rome that I haven’t said a million times. I knew I wouldn’t appreciate it enough at the time and I didn’t. I focused on the heat, the mosquitoes, the daily exhaustion of getting from point A to point B. Squeezing onto crowded buses, dragging myself out of bed to go to the boring Italian culture class. (Now it’s fodder for endless jokes among those of us who were there; then it was mind-numbing.) Puttering about at school or in the apartment, lying restlessly on my bed in my little closet of a room, listening to the others’ conversation but too lazy or awkward to join them. A lot of it was wonderful: watching two impossibly adorable Italian boys chase each other around on the beach at Ostia; the gruff woman at the gelateria urging me to branch out from my customary two scoops of “biscotti”; laughing at the obnoxious Californian boys we met in the Campo di Fiori; waiting for the bus beside huge, ancient, beautiful churches; smoking cigarettes on the balcony and spilling our secrets; listening to a street musician playing “Imagine” and dozens of people singing along as we walked through the Piazza Navona at night. I also never quite felt that I fit in with the rest of them, but that’s not really anything new. Now I love running into them at school, shivering in our bundles of winter gear as we reminisce about those suffocatingly hot days in Italy.

I was unbelievably excited to come home and take normal showers and eat fast food and see my boyfriend again. For a few weeks when I came back to the U.S., things were a bit strange as I adjusted to being home again, but with Collin and his friends it was still fine, happy. Then he broke up with me and I was hurt and confused and I went off to school hoping only to get all of that out of my mind. And it has continued to plague me until now. Not that I think of him and his friends constantly or every day, or that I still wish we were together, or that I want him to drop everything and come back to me. I don’t. I just miss the bliss of the summer, and I miss the people with whom I can no longer feel close and comfortable. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never fully fit in except with the friends I’ve known forever, but the summer at least made me know it’s possible.

I spent New Year’s Eve not with new friends made this year but getting exceedingly drunk with people I knew when we were six years old. I liked it, strange as it was. But I’m also ready to leave this town, even if I won’t let it go completely. I’ve been back at Showplace 16 these past weeks and it’s been consuming as usual. I don’t think I’ll be back after this break, though. One thing I think 2009 has in store for me is becoming more independent and putting down more roots in Minneapolis…even though lately I’ve been considering leaving that city, too, going to film school in New York or California after I graduate from the U.

Resolutions: Read. Write. Watch movies. Make movies. Treat all boys as potential friends, not just potential boyfriends. Figure out what I’m going to do.

2008-12-05T18:42:00.003-06:00

There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations
Making sure their makeup’s straight
Crushing one another with colossal expectations
Dependent, undisciplined, and sleeping late

- the Hold Steady, “Stuck Between Stations”

I stand outside under the fluttering flakes of snow, bare tree branches against a purple sky, frat boys’ Christmas lights flashing in the distances and a glowing cigarette between my fingers, and there is something very real and very communal about it even though I am alone. I can’t stop thinking about this lately…

We are the young people of America. We are bored and jaded but we still long for a Messiah and rally ‘round the closest thing we’ve got. We deaden our pain with cigarettes and pot and cheap booze. We can’t trust our government and we can’t trust our churches and we can’t trust the markets (whatever those are) and our parents are just as fucked as we are. Our money isn’t real and our media isn’t real and every day more things are distillated into ones and zeros, unblinking and infinite. Any original ideas we have are stolen from us, wrapped up in bright shiny packages and sold back to us. If it don’t make no dollars it don’t make no sense. We sit in Midwestern basements on winter nights and talk about things that matter and things that don’t. And we grasp at it all with our mouths open like sad transparent Nearly Headless Nick, floating back and forth across rotting food trying to catch a hint of real taste.

I don’t know how or why or where I’m going to end up but sometimes it’s nice to feel like part of something even if it’s alienation.

2008-12-03T01:11:00.001-06:00

When it’s dark you sit and listen and hold your breath and count to ten
The seconds pass like hours until the wall, it opens up and then
The light will blind your eyes
The light will blind your eyes

For twenty seconds time

The light will make you blind

- Immaculate Machine, “Blinding Light”

I just saw someone’s status on Facebook: “if only each week had eight days.” Pssh, who could handle it? I need the cycle of renewal, the chances to start again, even if it all turns around too fast to notice sometimes. Time is so collapsible.

I realized tonight while listening to Immaculate Machine and waiting for an episode of Six Feet Under to load online that I am not the only person who thinks this way. It was like an egg breaking open inside my abdomen and the ripples spread out. So often I imagine these conversations that are me yelling at him, angry at him for treating me badly assuming that he’s cold and that he’s turned from me completely, when maybe he’s just as confused and torn as I am. Maybe not. But maybe.

I don’t know why I can’t stop feeling antagonistic towards the world. Even on a day when I put “Things Done Changed” into my ears and revel in Biggie’s voice and the crisp air and the blue sky, even then I look out on the world fearfully, expecting everyone to stare at me like I’m a sideshow freak. And why shouldn’t they? I’m burdened by the inescapable feeling that I’m obviously, irrevocably different from all the other girls and that everyone knows it and that no one (except maybe my sister, as we finish each other’s sentences and crack up together at the idea of Munchkins and notice the same messages in the Berenstein Bears books) can fully understand everything I am.

(Speaking of which, the line “Everything I’m not made me everything I am” speaks to me more simply and directly than anything else Kanye has said, and maybe any performer. That’s completely how I feel. If I’d been athletic or coordinated or if my mom had raised me to care about my appearance, I would be an entirely different person.)

A couple of months ago when I was reading Infinite Jest, I came across a description of unipolar depression and it was very familiar. Here: “Classic unipolars were usually tormented by the conviction that no one else could hear or understand them when they tried to communicate. Hence jokes, sarcasm, the psychopathology of unconscious arm-rubbing.”

I’m not saying I’m suicidal, not in the slightest. I’m not even saying I’m depressed. Every so often, though, I think it’s noteworthy that the writers that seem to speak to me most piercingly and directly—David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton, John Berryman (who I just discovered, chillingly, threw himself off the very bridge that I frequently walk across to class), and most of all Sylvia Plath—took their own lives.

2008-11-26T06:00:00.002-06:00

If you find out what you want

Hope that you can save it

As the days come back to haunt

You might have to give it up

- the Owls, “Forever Changing”

Everything’s gonna get lighter, even if it never gets better

- Mates of State, “Get Better”

I spent most of the evening among my token hipster group of friends, the Wake crowd. These are the kind of people with whom I wish I spent all my time—smart, liberal, aware writers with no qualms about beer, pot, or David Bowie. They’re the people I long for as I sit in journalism classes with rows of bland, focused students, or as I hunch over my meal in the dining hall, surrounded by stocky red-faced boys and blonde girls clad in Minnesota gear. Though my own crippling shyness rendered me silent for much of the evening (aside from occasional side one-on-one conversations, I mostly just listened), I had a good time. These people and their friends can be a funny bunch, definitely funnier and sharper than the beer pong-loving, Twilight-exclaiming Middlebrook kids. At one point a kid obviously high on something more than life told the room at large about the tiny fish he had at home. He was worried the bigger fish would eat the little one. Someone suggested that he move the tiny fish to its own separate tank, and he protested, “Then he won’t learn to survive in the real world! I don’t want to home-school him!” (This was followed by a general agreement that all the home-schooled kids we all know are a little bit strange.)

What I’m sure will stand out in memories of the night, however, happened only when about half of the people had left and the music had been turned off. The rest of us sat in a circle, going around and around and arguing about everything from whether inner-city minorities can succeed in the American education system to whether “bitch” is a sexist insult. It was one of those fabled deep conversations, and everyone openly acknowledged it. It was late and I didn’t know how I was going to get home, but I didn’t want to get up and leave, didn’t want to break the spell—or miss anything.

More than once, one of the guys on the Wake staff pointed out that I and some of the other girls don’t say much in group conversations. He didn’t act as if it were a bad thing; he acted as if it were a failing of his, that he talks too much. In such situations, I certainly am hyperconscious of my own silence, especially if I’m the only one not contributing. I try to be an active listener, nodding and making appropriate faces, but I think that often comes off as creepy and/or dumb. I can’t even figure out why I’m perfectly able to chatter on and on when I’m with my sister or friends with whom I’m comfortable, but can’t even offer a response when I’m in a group with people that, for whatever reason, make me more nervous.

It’s not always that I don’t have anything to say. More than once during the conversation, especially as the night wore on and I got a bit braver, I tried to say something but was shut down or ignored. One of the guys explained that the word “vagina” comes from roots meaning “a sheath for a sword,” claiming that some feminists want to find a substitute for a word with that meaning. Other people questioned the offensiveness of that definition, and I tried to suggest that a sheath would not exist without a sword; its whole existence and purpose is predicated on the sword (which can, on the other hand, exist without a sheath if it must). I started to explain this idea, but was ignored. A guy mentioned that one of his friends called American History X a racist film, laughing at such an obviously incorrect assessment. I quickly thought of a few ways that the overtly anti-racism film could be construed as racist: the film focuses on two white brothers while keeping its black characters nameless and shadowy. They cruise by at night; their side of the story is never really told. And (um, spoilers) the two white protagonists are allowed to realize the stupidity of racism and repent from it. The black characters are not, and a young black boy ultimately shoots one of the white boys with no concrete motive. The black boy’s act makes no sense—why bring a gun to school and shoot a fellow student point-blank in a bathroom when you’ll obviously be caught and arrested, or shot by the cops, right there? The boy is barely more than a device. When I tried to explain these ideas, though, people talked over me or paid me no mind.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, being talked over and ignored is nothing new for me. Mostly I was just glad to have been privy to a conversation that cheerfully tackled subjects people usually skip over, and that allowed everyone to argue fiercely without it ever getting tense or awkward. It reminded me, naturally, of the time in New Orleans when all of us there for quiz bowl huddled in the dark, reading questions from scraps of paper and answering them in turn. I wrote a piece about that for my magazine writing class, saying that I crave meaningful discussion despite it being hard to find sometimes. Tonight may have come closest to meeting that gold standard. It was distinctly different from New Orleans; then, we talked about ourselves, our own hopes and fantasies and fears, and tonight it was more about the world. These people my age are older now; we’ve grown up a little and we’re thinking about what’s around us, what’s wrong with the world (so many things…so many damn things), and how it could change, even a little. And that makes me happy.