tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78754036781240731232024-03-13T00:10:35.203-04:00involutionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-72671430318094227692014-12-26T00:29:00.001-05:002014-12-26T00:29:38.334-05:00finished.<div dir="ltr">Well, that's it. I've been engaged for eight months. We have a wedding venue and date, a caterer and a photographer and a deejay and invitations. We booked a honeymoon and a hair salon. The wedding dress has arrived and it is the correct style, color, and size. The wedding is in five months, and we are all finished planning it.<div><br></div><div>Ha ha ha. That's a joke, of course, as you well know if you have ever yourself planned a wedding. Of course we aren't finished planning. Yes, we have all the major elements in place, without any major hiccups or newly-raised concerns. But it turns out a wedding is a Mandelbrot event of infinite complexity, full of tiny niggling details that upon consideration turn out to be vast universes of decisions and errands and things to do and arrange and plan, and each of those things is its own universe of subthings that open out into their own subsubuniverse of insane recursive never-ending wedding craziness. </div><div><br></div><div>Take, for example, the ketubah. This is the Jewish wedding contract, and up until very recently it has itself been a subcategory of the "ceremony" component of the wedding. But the ketubah does need to be ordered - in my case, from a relative who makes very lovely ones for a living - which entails a lot of back and forth about languages (English? Hebrew? Aramaic?) and wording (traditional or egalitarian?) and the spelling of Hebrew names. And then it needs to be shipped, and we need to make sure that on the day there is a place the principals can go for the signing of it as well as an appropriate pen handy. And after we sign it, the ketubah will need to be put in some sort of frame or case - something transparent and waterproof and hopefully sturdy - to be brought outside for the ceremony, and after the ceremony the officiant - who is also a friend of my parents' and therefore a guest at the reception - will have to make sure my parents or my fiance and I get ahold of it and put it somewhere safe. So, that's a few things (about five things, give or take), none of them huge - but that's a few things for the <i>one tiny element</i> of the ketubah. There are also a few things for the chuppah, and a few things for the glass (or the light bulb? a glass for each of us? a glass for him and a bulb for me? in cloth bags to prevent mess? should we keep the shards for a mezuzah?) traditionally broken to signify the bittersweetness of life, and a few things for the programs, and a few things for the vows (okay, one thing for the vows so far, which is that we need to write them)... and all of this is still <i>just the stuff for the ceremony</i> which is only half an hour out of about 24 hours of stuff.</div><div><br></div><div>My initial methodology of coping with the complexity was - okay, well, my initial methodology was blissful ignorance, combined with the firm belief that, as I am a straightforward, rational and down-to-earth person and my fiance is likewise, our wedding would be a simple affair that would require little planning and induce no stress. I was a freaking idiot.</div><div><br></div><div>After I stopped being an idiot (or so much of an idiot, anyway), my initial methodology was to flatten task hierarchies. I did this by combining several major published to-do lists from wedding websites and books and magazines into one vast calendar, on which - at the appropriate day, according to the lists - I would specify all the tasks. This led to three issues:<br>1) Some tasks were specified more than once, if they were included in two different time slots in different calendars. Not a big deal; I'd simply start dealing with the task the first time it came up and, if it wasn't yet finished, redouble my efforts each time it appeared on the master calendar. More appearances = more important.</div><div>2) Some of the tasks were not fully expanded. Like, "plan ceremony" might be a single item on one calendar, and on another it might be broken into "write vows" and "find an officiant" and "rent or build a chuppah if necessary" and on another it might be omitted entirely (on the grounds, presumably, that getting married is a trivial component of the modern wedding). But, okay, I could deal with that too. When a task came up in the calendar, I would expand it myself and place its subtasks at the correct date, and if I didn't know the subtasks, the first subtask would be research.</div><div>3) Some of the calendar dates became a bit... crowded. Like, six months in advance of one's wedding is apparently a Very Important Milestone and there are a lot of tasks associated with it. Of course, none of them have to be done on the exact date, so when the time gets closer I can just reallocate most of those tasks to other dates, right?<br>4) Which brings us to the final issue, not a member of the original tally because I had to be informed of it by my (brave, patient, long-suffering) fiance: my calendar was turning me into a crazy person. There were just so many things on it, and yet somehow those things were not all the things, and every week a new wedding-related task appeared in my (metaphorical) inbox, and if I ignored it I'd just have two the next week, and what if by the time I went to buy the miniature buckets for the centerpieces they were sold out and it was too late to order more and <i style="font-weight:bold">everything would be ruined forever</i>.</div><div><br></div><div>What was that I said about being a rational and down-to-earth person?</div><div><br></div><div>My second methodology for dealing, as proposed by my fiance - who is, remember, patient and brave, and who is accepting this entire wedding (distinct from the marriage) in large part as a favor to me - was to simply not do anything I found inconvenient, overwhelming, or too much work. The idea was meant to be that if something was really important I wouldn't find it too much work, or someone else - e.g. our parents - would be inspired to do it, and if nobody felt like doing it then maybe it didn't need to get done. Of course this sounded to me like a bad excuse for not doing homework and lasted all of about ten minutes, because the stress of even thinking about blatantly ignoring items on my to-do list was so much greater than the stress of doing them.</div><div><br></div><div>The third methodology was to power through my tasks in a rational way: each day I would assign myself one task, a small one if it was a weekday, a large one if it was a weekend. Then, on each day, I would do the task. Simple, right? If the task could not be completed due to factors out of my control, I would double up the following day. I would not allow myself to procrastinate or linger too long on any task; the sheer force of my to-do list would propel me through them.</div><div><br></div><div>I have to admit, this was a pretty good methodology. I got a lot done over the course of the fall mostly according to this method, although there were still occasional meltdowns and rather frequently all of a week's tasks were piled up on the Sunday evening. There's something to be said about limiting the amount of time you allow yourself to stew over the perfect beach-themed favor that is neither expensive nor visibly cheap, that is appropriate for all ages, that isn't breakable and won't clutter people's homes. (The answer, of course, is that no such favor exists. Fortunately, chocolate does exist, and while not beach-themed, it is very pleasant to consume while sitting on the beach.) The primary problems with this methodology over the long term are:</div><div>1) Maintenance. It is hard to do a wedding thing every day. Some weeks it is hard to do any wedding thing at all. It turns out that I have a whole other life that is not about getting married.</div><div>2) Task size. Some tasks - such as finding a salon - can be done over a period of a couple of days by a determined person. Others - such as selecting favors - require simply choosing between twenty million equally acceptable options for a trivial component of the event. But a few tasks are large enough that they require more time and energy than can be devoted to them in one day or even one week. In our case, the first dance is one of those. We were able, after only a modest amount of haggling, to select a song, but it turns out the we (he) also need to learn how to dance to it (or at all). So we are taking dance lessons. Which is fun, actually, and maybe now I will have a husband who knows how to dance, but it is a thing that cannot be crossed off the list, and it is now generating its own tasklets (e.g. we have to arrange lessons, attend lessons, and practice).</div><div>3) Scalability. Doing one task a day works - in the sense that, if I devote all spare time to wedding planning, I remain on schedule - at the six month mark. But what about at the three month mark? The one month mark? The one week mark? The task lists at those time scales are enormous; there is more like one task for every hour, and I wasn't actually planning to take a month off work to get married.</div><div><br></div><div>This has caused me to adjust the third methodology by adding to it a fourth: periodic controlled burns. Every few weeks I go through the tasks on the wedding calendar and delete anything that I have miraculously done ahead of schedule (like, we already booked a cake bakery! yay!), we definitely won't need (no attendants means no need to select bridesmaids' dresses) or that clearly aren't going to happen. As time passes, I think this last item - injecting reality into the process ahead of schedule - will be increasingly important. If two weeks ahead of the wedding I look at my to-do list for the day and see that I am meant to write an individual hand-written note to every out-of-town guest welcoming them to the wedding, I will probably sigh, grumble, become immensely stressed out, and then do it. But if I see that now, maybe I can deploy some of my remaining molecules of sanity to delete it before I become even more crazy.</div><div><br></div><div>Yes, I am pretty sure it's possible to become even more crazy. Check back in a couple months for confirmation.</div></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-51945204585024455462014-10-12T22:46:00.000-04:002014-10-12T22:46:00.825-04:00<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have been consistently surprised by which elements of wedding planning are difficult and which are not. Like, picking a venue was actually really easy. I always wanted to get married at the beach, and my parents recently retired to the beach, and my parents were more excited about helping plan the wedding than my fiance. So the town was all picked out, and it's not a big town. They helped me make a list of location possibilities - I think there were nine - and then visited all of them and collected information. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Yes, I owe this entire wedding to the unpaid labors of my awesome parents. I will be giving them a very nice gift.) After reviewing the information, I spent a weekend in town and visited each place</span>, and at the end there was a clear first choice on which we all agreed. And the date and time weren't a problem either, because apparently a year out is way too late to start planning your wedding, so the place we'd chosen had pretty much two dates left in the year 2015, one of which was in the dead of winter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The dress was also not as hard as I thought. Yes, it was a saga, but it was a <i>fun</i> saga. At pretty much any point I could have declared myself done, at at every store I went to I found at least one dress I could have happily worn down the aisle. I had thought it would be a miserable saga, a tale of size-two dresses and a not-size-two bride. White makes me look washed out and long dresses make me look like a salt shaker, but apparently wedding dresses have some kind of magic sewn into them - maybe that's why they're so expensive - because almost every single one I put on was beautiful.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The things that have been unexpectedly difficult include:<br />1) Registering. Choosing your own presents should be easy, right? Except when you're marrying the pickiest person on earth and you are maybe not Miss Easygoing yourself. Also, the 70's have come back in style, so half the plates in the world depress me because they look like something my parents would have thrown out during our 1995 kitchen remodel for being too old-fashioned.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) I already talked about save-the-dates, which were the hardest-to-choose postcards in the history of the world. What I didn't realize was that save-the-dates were the tip of the iceberg, and there is a whole <i>invitation suite</i> that has to be selected and personalized, with wording that does not offend anybody. Unless you edited a literary magazine with me in college, you would not believe the arguments it is possible to have about a comma. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3) Hair and makeup. Obviously I need to have this professionally done, because if left to my own devices I will get married in a frizzy ponytail and chapstick. What turns out to be hard is finding a hairstylist in a small town where you don't live and where most salons aren't open on Sunday, but they're happy to open specially for you and "your girls" (this is Wedding Speak for bridesmaids, because apparently all brides travel in packs. I am not having attendants, but if I were, most of them would be married with multiple children, or male, so the term would still not be terribly apt.). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fortunately, all these things are under control. We are 90% of the way through with registering, almost ready to buy makeup, and well on the way to locking down a salon. So that just leaves finalizing the menu, planning the ceremony, writing our vows, planning flowers and centerpieces and favors, addressing that giant stack of aforementioned postcards... piece of cake, right?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh, and we have to pick a cake.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-56276624046569081722014-09-13T17:11:00.001-04:002014-09-13T17:11:21.103-04:00the dress<div dir="ltr">I've been planning my wedding for about five months. Everyone I talk to is interested in it - where is it? when? can they see my engagement ring? And, most prominently, what is my dress like?<div><br></div><div>If I had my feminist hat on right now, I would go into detail about how the outsized importance assigned to the wedding dress - the thousands of dollars many brides spend (even brides whose wedding is, overall, not particularly pricey), the substantial fraction of wedding magazine advertising real estate devoted to them, and of course the sense that selecting the dress not only sets the tone of the wedding (this is what my mother, a typically very reasonable person not particularly interested in fashion, told me) but also says something fundamental about the bride. </div><div><br></div><div>But - yes, that was me being brief - instead, I am going to focus on my own experience.</div><div><br></div><div>I knew pretty early on that I wanted something with a mermaid or trumpet cut. I'd looked at some pictures online and those dresses seemed sleek and attractive and less fussy. I started with a trip to David's with an old friend, where I tried on seven dresses in that silhouette. I liked most of them - partly because it was pretty awesome to be trying on wedding dresses in the first place - and one in particular stood out (see it <a href="http://www.davidsbridal.com/Product_Strapless-Trumpet-Gown-with-Floral-and-Lace-Detail-MS251003">here</a>). The tight bodice flattered my curves, the tiered organza skirt felt appropriate for my beach ceremony, and I felt beautiful and bridal in it. But I had other stores on my list, and I'd agreed with my mother that I'd wait until she came to town, a month later, to make the decision.</div><div><br></div><div>My next stop was Kleinfeld's, with two very opinionated friends. I tried on many dresses - six? eight? - all with mermaid silhouettes. I quickly found out that I wasn't particularly drawn to lacey bodices and in fact found them unflattering. I loved what a corset back did for my figure. A couple of the dresses, Monique Lhuillier styles with sculptural skirts, were promising - but none of them won the unanimous approval of my friends, who liked me in sophisticated, unfussy cuts, and myself, who liked me in something with a little bit of pizzazz.</div><div><br></div><div>Third, I went to Lovely Bride, a boutique in Tribeca, with my brother's girlfriend. I tried on only two dresses there - because on the second dress we hit the jackpot. It was a Hayley Paige mermaid with a very simple silk satin bodice, a sweetheart neckline and a low back with a tulle strap held together with a jeweled clip, and a puffy organza skirt (I don't remember the style name, but I on <a href="http://www.kleinfeldbridal.com/search-wedding-dresses-by-Hayley-Paige.cfm">this</a> page it - or a dress a lot like it - is the leftmost one on the second row). The dress was a work of art, everything I had looking for, special and beautiful, and I almost bought it right then.</div><div><br></div><div>And then I went home. I talked to my mother. I thought about it a bit. The dress was pricey, and it would need a lot of alterations since the chest and hips were the same size and no human woman is shaped like that. I'd have to have a bra sewn into it, and it wasn't very forgiving so I'd have to lose some tummy pudge to look good in it. Also, I could only barely sit in it - maybe losing weight would help? - and, because it was a mermaid, I couldn't walk fast. The sales associate and many of my friends assured me that it wasn't an issue: on my wedding day, I wouldn't be sitting, or eating, or walking much, or moving in any way. Apparently I'd be in a body cast, looking beautiful.</div><div><br></div><div>Still, I loved the dress.</div><div><br></div><div>And then I started looking at photographers. This entailed looking at a lot of pictures, in particular of beach weddings. Lots of women seem to get married on the beach in very sophisticated dresses, and some of them look silly and some of them don't. Others wear unstructured, vintagey, hippie styles - something I liked in theory, but that hadn't seemed to work on me at David's. One picture in particular stuck with me - a bride and groom running along the waterline together, holding hands. The groom's shirt was untucked and the bride held her skirt up with her free hand. </div><div><br></div><div>It wasn't the bride's dress that stuck with me, or the groom's outfit, and I didn't end up hiring that photographer. But I remembered the look on the bride's face - she was happy, and in love, and she was wearing her wedding dress, and she was running. There was no way I could run, much less along the water, in the Hayley Paige dress. I could walk in little, mincing steps; I could dance, a little bit; I could move my arms. In that dress, I would have been beautiful - it's impossible to wear a garment that amazing and not be - but I would have been trapped. I would have spent the day thinking about my dress, negotiating stairs and sand, checking the state of my tummy pooch in every mirror, worrying that sitting down too fast would split the seam. That's not the way I live - I won't buy a garment if I can't walk briskly for half an hour while wearing it - and it's not the way I want to get married.</div><div><br></div><div>So, the hunt was still on. I decided I should try shopping on my own - maybe fewer cooks would help me zero in on the dress that was right for me. I took the bus to New Jersey and went to Nordstrom, where I found some nice dresses - more Monique Lhuillier - but nothing inspiring. I went to the Nicole Miller boutique, where I tried on many very pretty silky dresses, all reasonably priced and reasonably flattering, that did absolutely nothing for me. They just didn't feel wedding-y enough. </div><div><br></div><div>And then, one day after work, I went to Macy's. Right away I liked the consultant - she was stylish, of course, but also down-to-earth. She wasn't a size two and didn't seem to think I should spend five thousand dollars on a dress. After listening to my description of what I wanted, which hadn't changed very much, she pulled some dresses and I tried them on. Eh, eh, eh. I had tried on so many dresses at that point - I may have actually forgotten some stores in this telling - that none of them made an impression. The consultant let me go out on the floor - the salon was pretty empty at that point - and choose some more dresses. It was hard to tell what a dress would look like when it was on the hanger, and I ended up with some pretty weird styles. I was having fun, but I was no closer to finding my dress.</div><div><br></div><div>The consultant was the one who pulled the dress I fell in love with. It was from their Destination Romance collection, and it had a low-key ballroom silhouette. It was strapless with a sweetheart neckline - I figured out early on that this works best for me - and a skirt with cascading layers of organza. It was lightweight, simple, and very bridal. It looked like me, like something I would pick and wear even if it didn't have a "wedding dress" label on it, and it was so easy to wear and made me so happy to have on that I could - and did - pick up my skirts and run.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-71743703024091927712014-09-02T21:22:00.000-04:002014-09-02T21:22:41.430-04:00Revision<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the problems of writing things down is that, to the extent anyone actually reads what you've written, it keeps you accountable. From a conventional viewpoint that's probably a benefit, and it's one of the reasons people (including but not entirely limited to myself) make schedules and lists. However, being accountable to one's later self is typically <i>not</i> why people write blog posts, and now I find myself feeling the need to answer for my many, varied, and highly certain statements about how I would never really grow to love New York.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of my reluctance to embrace New York is attributable to the simple matter of its being an acquired taste, and to the fact that when you come to the city alone, with not much money and nowhere to live, and with no real desire for an adventure, it's not an easy place to love. It's not <i>really</i> an easy place to survive. It took me weeks to stop being scared of the subway (some people might contend that I am still warier of certain lines and stops than is warranted, and it's true I have a suspicion of any train that does not run at least every ten minutes or that does not pass through my home borough). It took months to feel really comfortable in the city, to lose (or, if I'm being honest, much of the time to mask) the wide-eyed looking-around quality of tourists. And while I might have been more of a country mouse than most, I think there are others to whom embracing city life has been as intentional, gradual, and ambivalent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the other problem with New York is nothing to do with its inconvenience or its cost, its smells or its insects or its insane freakish thunderstorms that come out of nowhere. The other problem is, for lack of a better term, its personality.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I am not the first, or the dozenth, or the hundredth person to write - to think - about New York City as if it is a person. To be more specific, I am not the first or the dozenth or the hundredth <i>woman</i> to think of New York City as her <i>boyfriend</i>. Carrie Bradshaw popularized the idea long before I came to the city, and I'm sure her creators were mimicking Holly Golightly, whom I just realized she is an awful lot like. But probably half the single women from here to the Brooklyn Bridge think of the city as their great love. New York is a passion, a muse, a pounding pulse that will swallow you up.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />And, like most of the passionate lovers of literature, New York City is a very bad boyfriend. It is not reliable. The subway frequently does not run on time. It does not care for you the way you care for it. Your rent can rise twenty percent in one year. New York does not make sacrifices to help you realize your dreams. It does not make a place for you in its life. It does not introduce you to its friends. Sometimes it seems not to know you exist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is not an accident that these sentences apply also to the types of men women in New York often find themselves dating.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But New York is fun! Sure, it may be gritty, and crowded, and scary. There may be piles of trash accumulating on the street and people shouting curses at you on the corner. But behind the piles of trash you can find an Afghan restaurant - Afghan food! There's such a thing! - where you can eat pumpkin fritters and lamb and rice and leek dumplings on a table with a carpet as a tablecloth. Along the block are other restaurants: Indonesian, Hipster (also a cuisine, it appears), and Thai; and around the corner Alan Cumming is starring in Cabaret. A few blocks in every direction are fashionable clothing stores, farmer's markets, museums, a giant park where people train for marathons year-round. There's a new adventure on every block, and you can do a different interesting thing every day for probably your entire life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What changed, for me, was being able to appreciate that fun. What changed was that I found a stable job, an apartment of my own that I felt comfortable in, a few good friends, and enough comfort in the city to not be worried about losing my way. What changed was that I found - in a figurative sense - a boyfriend. I stopped needing New York to be my great love, my best friend, my caretaker. Now, when the trains aren't running on time, I know another way to get where I'm going. I don't need the city to be a stabilizer, a comfort, a home, which is good, because it's no good for that. What it's good at is providing fun and adventure and novelty, in its own way and on its own schedule, often at what seems to be the exact wrong time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New York is a very bad boyfriend. Generation after generation of starry-eyed lovers have realized that, and left it. But New York is a truly incredible wing-man.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-78179290518977786582014-08-31T22:44:00.002-04:002014-08-31T22:44:17.292-04:00Registry<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It has become de rigueur for couples to insist, on their wedding website, that the best gift invitees can give them is their presence at the wedding and that no material gift is necessary, and then to list one or more stores at which the couple has compiled a list of desirable material gifts. So of course this is exactly what we will do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It took us a bit of angst to get here. We really don't need anything and we really would never want our guests to feel obliged to spend money on us. We are inviting them because we want them to be present on the day and we want to celebrate with them, and we know that most of them will have to spend money and time to attend in the first place, so it seems almost unfair to suggest that they should spend even more of either resource on a gift. But I have been informed by a number of people and resources (some of them members of the Wedding Insanity Complex and therefore hardly disinterested) that not registering is actually rude, because then guests not only feel impelled to buy you a gift, but must spend additional energy trying to figure out what you would like.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, we are registering. We compiled a list of things to register for, which basically fall into three categories:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) Things we should probably already have. For example, a blender or a food processor. We don't have either, somehow, and we have survived, but it's an inconvenience. Also, a proper mixing bowl or bowls. In fact we have one mixing bowl, given to me by a former roommate on the occasion of her marriage (I think it was a wedding gift to her that she didn't want?). This was in about 2003. And there were originally three bowls, but only one has survived the five moves since it entered my possession, and while it is nice enough, it is not what I would have picked out for myself, and why at the age of almost 35 am I using a mixing bowl that was a graduate student's castoff?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) Things we have, but that we should have better (or matching) of. Both of us have long been in the habit of acquiring 2 or 4 of things, which means we have 6 or 8 of most things, but not 6 or 8 matching things. Fortunately we have not-too-dissimilar and fairly simple tastes; it isn't really that weird to serve Thanksgiving on two white plates and four blue ones with wine glasses of two different sizes, particularly when all parties are impressed that the turkey didn't explode and that the hosts have actually managed to rustle up six chairs. But it would be good to have six identical plates, and cups, and wineglasses, and forks, and so on. This presents the problem of what we will do with our bachelor and bachelorette dishes, which there are not room for in our big-for-NYC-but-not-actually-big kitchen, and some of which we are attached to (I am particularly fond of some bowls given to me a decade ago by possibly the same marrying friend, and my intended loves his discontinued cereal bowls; there are two of each so maybe we can just agree to be a household of mismatched bowls). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also in this category: towels. When we moved in together a year ago we decided to store our towels separately. This was not a completely insane decision because we have separate bathrooms, so there's no real reason our towels need to match. But it doesn't really make sense to maintain two towel repositories indefinitely, although I can't actually think what efficiency is derived from combining them. I have the vague sense, however, that being married will entail becoming more integrated over time, and towels seem like a harmless way to start that. Anyway, both of our towel situations are moderately bleak, so maybe marriage is a time to scrap them all and start over.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In fact, most of our stuff is in this category: pots and pans, steak knives, sheets. We have survived for many years with the stuff we have, purchased at Walmart and Canadian Walmart and gifted by friends and parents when they moved or married, but at some point we should give it all to Goodwill and commit to an actual kitchen of our own. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3) Things that seem like they will be fun to have. I have convinced my intended that we should register for salt and pepper grinders, even though neither of us likes pepper and we don't know where to buy the rocks for the salt grinder. But, so cool. Also, we registered for a casserole, on the assumption that sometime in our marriage one of us will learn to cook. There are some other things we think would be great to have (a bread maker, a griddle) but that we wouldn't use all that much and aren't practical to store.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, today we started the process. I say "started the process" because, after two hours of wandering around Crate and Barrel with our Registry Gun, it seems that - and this will surprise nobody who has ever met me, or him, or any other human being who manages to remain single past the age of thirty - getting two people to agree on how they want their kitchen table to look, even if they are very devoted to each other, is completely impossible. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-73310512416714541332014-08-27T21:28:00.001-04:002014-08-27T21:28:13.544-04:00Colors<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are a lot of decisions to make when planning a wedding. Like, a lot. That's probably the thing I understood least before starting. And the decisions are of all sizes, from the truly monumental (should you get married at all? to whom?) to the fairly big (should you invite friends and family to witness your ceremony and attend a reception afterwards, or get married on your own at City Hall?) to the medium-small (what should you do about food? music? a rehearsal dinner?) to the truly trivial (centerpieces, flowers, and everything to do with clothing).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course - and this is probably obvious to anyone who has ever been in any kind of proximity to a wedding - the importance of all these decisions is not only exaggerated by the Wedding Girlification Industry, the relative importance of each decision is completely blown askew from anything a reasonable person might believe. I was actually asked, when I purchased my dress - which is a reasonably-priced (on the scale of wedding dresses, which means that it is possible but not likely that I may someday own another garment as expensive), fairly traditional, thoroughly innocuous selection - if I was certain it was The One. Yes, really. Now, to the extent that I believe in a The One, I believe my fiance is it, but nobody has asked me if I was really one hundred percent certain about him. Because he's just the man I'm marrying; there's no reason I need to be certain of him. A few yards of organza and lace, on the other hand - that's what's really important to get right about my wedding.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Other elements of my wedding that have been blown way out of proportion have included - so far, and keep in mind we're still months and months out from the actual day - the photographer (which I think is actually a semi-important decision, in that we certainly want to have one, but you would not believe the amount of time I have spent looking at pictures of strangers' weddings on the internet in an attempt to determine which set of photos-not-of-my-wedding best represents how I want my wedding to look in photos); the save-the-dates (you would think, if you had never planned a wedding, that there would not be many conversations you could have about a postcard. You would be wrong.); and - most recently - colors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, I knew wedding colors were a thing. But I figured they weren't particularly important for us, since we're not having a wedding party (the bridesmaids' dresses being typically the main sample of the wedding colors), and our venue has some pretty spectacular natural decorations, which means our flowers and centerpieces and whatever other aesthetic bits are mandatory for a wedding but about which I've forgotten will be pretty minimal. I figured when we got around to planning this stuff - in the distant future, when important stuff like food and the ceremony itself are nailed down - we'd see what sort of decorations - flowers, table linens, centerpiece-y stuff - were available, and pick a couple colors which look good together and are easy to get.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course I was wrong. We've been having very preliminary conversations with florists, and apparently it isn't even possible to get an idea of what is available without specifying two or three colors. I have tried asking what is typically in season in May, what looks good together, and what most brides do (all of which is an invitation for them to present me some very expensive ideas as a starting point, so you'd think they'd love it) but mostly I get reactions of shock and horror. Apparently, in order to make a deep and lifelong commitment to my significant other, I need to also have deep-commitment-level feelings about a couple of very particular wavelengths of visible light. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-91446788773749226482014-08-24T19:49:00.002-04:002014-08-24T19:49:57.297-04:00Act Two ... Three? Four?<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When we last left left our heroine - that's me! - she was poised on the brink of a transition, and emphatically ambivalent about it. Having met a man whom she could not find any problems with, and who - for some reason probably having to do with an ill-advised vow to laugh at all of his jokes for the remainder of their relationship (yes, he reminds of that at least once a week) - had tolerated her company for the past two years, she was about to move in with him, and she was worried. What if she became boring and settled? What if she didn't like having another person around all the time? What if - horror of horrors - she had to learn to cook?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Now it is sixteen months later, and none of my worst fears have come to pass. We chose to devote our rental budget to size rather than amenities, which means we have enough space to close a door between us when one of us wants solitude or quiet. We learned to spend time in the same room without talking, and we got used to talking every day. And - while I have lately taken to mixing spiralized zucchini with angel hair - I have not, so far, learned to cook.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Also, I am getting married.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This will come as no surprise to most of the remaining readers of this blog, who consist of approximately two people with whom I am friends in real life and who have already heard the news. But it - still, months after the bestowal of a pretty topaz, well into the photographers-and-florists stage of wedding planning - surprises me. I found him! My lobster! My other shoe! The elusive Prince Pocket Protector! And - this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone except me - he was exactly where, and who, everyone expected all along. It turns out that the guy for me is not a stoner, criminal, or dropout; he does not live in Australia or Siberia; he has never been married and has no scandalous backstory; he is not cruel or inconsiderate or distasteful in a way that can only be excused by vast depths of perfection imperceptible to everyone but me. No, he is exactly whom everyone who has ever met me would expect: a mild-mannered ex-physicist, taciturn but funny, dependable and highly intelligent, with a large reservoir of patience and, at this moment, a book about machine learning on his nightstand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So, that's actually pretty awesome. I mean, it is awesome in a sarcastic way that my mother and everyone else was right and that all that time I spent looking under metaphorical dating-world rocks and dating the metaphorical slugs I found there in the hopes that one of them would magically metamorphose into PPP was more or less wasted, except that maybe I got some good blog posts out of it. But also, it is actually really awesome to find someone you're excited about seeing every morning and night for the next - hopefully - fifty years. You people probably mostly already know that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Anyway, after that long preamble - which as always, takes up the entire blog post - I will explain why I am (possibly) back: like I said before, I am getting married. Now, getting married is a very serious thing to do, and most of the issues it raises are too personal to be aired here. But I am not just getting married, I am having a wedding. More to the point, I am <i>planning</i> a wedding. A planning a wedding is... well, it's a lot. It's exciting and a lot of fun, but it's also occasionally emotional or stressful. And it's definitely hilarious. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So - assuming anybody's stuck around this long, and assuming I stick around to write more posts - my little Thesis Blog, which I started eight years ago to chronicle the writing of my thesis and has since then recorded - with varying intensity - the earning of my PhD, new cities and three new jobs, one thousand dates and a handful of relationships, two marathons, and any number of sarcastic remarks, is now, for a few months, going to be a wedding-planning blog. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Amazingly, the ceiling did not fall in when I typed that. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-48670085897028205392013-05-12T22:59:00.001-04:002013-05-12T22:59:52.776-04:00Is this thing on?<div dir="ltr">I'm back. You're gone, dear reader - any readers I still had when I last posted 18 months ago - but I'm back. I realized, just today, that I needed this outlet again, at least at this moment. Something has happened, something good but something that threatens pretty much everything about who I am, and I don't know where to turn. So I'm turning where I have, historically, always turned in my moments of confusion: to semi-anonymous writings on the internet, the comfort of an empty room where I can shout as loud as I want. If you're out there, go easy on me. It's been a while and I'm probably rusty. <div><br></div><div style>What happened to me - what had already started to happen when I stopped posting here - is that I met someone. A man. I met him almost two years ago, on - of course - the internet, and we started dating, and we haven't stopped. This man - I'll call him B for the purposes of this post - turns out to be perfect for me. He's smart and funny and calm and kind, and I love him more than I thought I could love someone I hadn't invented myself. Being adults in our thirties, we're both wary of commitment, but after two years of Wednesday and Saturday nights we've decided to move in together. This summer. We started looking at apartments yesterday.</div> <div style><br></div><div style>If you're out there, reading this - I am imagining two erstwhile readers in particular, among the most sane people I've ever known (although one of them, I've never actually met), nodding their heads and smiling, because they are happy for me, because they hoped that someday this would happen - you are wondering what the problem is. I haven't been able to explain what the problem is even halfway convincingly to anyone except B, and while it's great that we understand each other, he's not really the person I want to talk to about it. The problem isn't anything concrete about him or about our relationship; the problem is all about me. What it boils down to is - impressive dating resume aside - I had not ever really imagined myself ever <i>finding</i> the elusive One. When I was very young I thought, vaguely, that this guy or that might sort of morph into being him - or, more precisely, that I might magically morph into the sort of woman who had a - apparently, this is what B says we are becoming - a life partner. A Life Partner? Really? Do you people know me? If not, let me tell you - I am not the kind of girl who has a Life Partner. I am Comic Relief Girl, Epic Screwup Girl, the Sassy Spinster. In the movie of my life, I am played by Lizzie Caplan.</div> <div style><br></div><div style>So in addition to being excited and happy, I'm confused and alarmed and afraid. I never expected something like this to happen, not really. While it seems like something I want - B makes me happy, our relationship is a strong one, and we've talked through pretty much every major issue - what if it isn't? What if I'm on autopilot? What if I only think I want to be in a relationship because it's what everyone else wants, what movies and novels teach me to want, what my parents and friends want me to want? It's not that I'm worried B isn't the guy for me. I'm worried there is no guy for me. Maybe I'm someone who is better off alone. Do you ever see Lizzie Caplan characters trotting off into the sunset with normal, stable, decent guys? Maybe you do, I couldn't get to the end of Bachelorette because it annoyed me so much, but I can't imagine it. I worry that if it happened, her character would stop being wise-cracking and weird and start being someone who knew how to crochet, which seems to be what happens to women when they meet men they can count on. Am I going to magically going to learn to crochet if I move in with B? Is it, like, a requirement?</div> <div style><br></div><div style>Yes, I'm being silly. But actually I have significant worries - worries that start to sound silly as soon as I type them - on these sorts of mundane lines. Like, will I have to start eating proper meals with meat in them instead of yogurt and breakfast cereal? Will I have to eat them at a table, on a plate, instead of on the couch while reading a book? And what about these books - will I be able, when I am near the end of one, or 100 pages from the end of one, and it is almost bedtime, to stay up late to finish? Or will I have to go to bed at a normal hour like a proper adult? Which is what this all boils down to: the realization that, to some extent, moving in with B will force me to become an adult. Of course he's not a dictator and I'm sure I'll stay up late reading plenty of nights, probably while eating popcorn for dinner on the sofa, but also probably living together will shift my default. I'll actually <i>have</i> a dining room table, for the first time ever. And a bedroom, for the first time in years. Maybe it shouldn't be that settling down with another person pushes along the transition to sensible adulthood, but maybe I am one of those people for whom it is. And maybe if that happens it isn't such a bad thing?</div> <div style><br></div><div style>But still. I don't want to be... nailed down. Not in the sense of "I want to have date around" or even in the sense of "I want to move to Paris". One benefit of my extended bachelorettehood was that I <i>did</i> date around, and <i>I </i>did move to Paris, if only for a month. While there are still plenty of things I want to do, I've done a lot; of the obviously exciting, you-have-to-be-single stuff, I've done - at least, almost - enough. </div> <div style><br></div><div style>It's not about what I want to do, it's about who I want to be, and as always I don't know. In my mid-twenties, I felt that my single status made me an outcast, not because of the actual lack of a man, but because it made me confusing. When I had a boyfriend, people could see who I was: me-and-this-one, me-and-that-one. It seemed to me like people could make sense of a couple, they could measure each partner against the other and size them up, but a person alone - she could be anyone. <i>She could be anyone.</i> Later on, my understanding of this shifted. It was not that being in a couple helped other people understand your intrinsic self. Being in a couple <i>made</i> you the person you were going to be. Before you met the person who would be your mate, you were just a bunch of aspirations and confusions floating around. After, you were crystallized, decided. Immobile. That was who you were, and while you could be shattered you could no longer flow. </div> <div style><br></div><div style>This understanding scares me. I don't want to be frozen. While I like who I am now, it's a recent development. I haven't been this person for terribly long, and I'm not sure I want to be her forever. In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't. She's cool and all, but is she really me? Is this look going to work in twenty years? In two? What if I want to change my metaphorical hair color, or scrap the whole thing - the city, the job, the hobbies - and start from scratch? B is, of course, supportive and understanding, but still, with him in tow - with anyone in tow - the possibilities are limited. We might move, I might change jobs. But still, people will look at me and see me-and-B, me-and-B, me-and-B. They will finally know me. Who I am now is the person I will, it turns out, have been all along. And maybe that's true, anyway, and maybe my reasonably low level of angst these days has been why this relationship has been able to work. But, still. Am I ready to be all figured out?</div> </div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-10410554707196642622011-11-18T00:01:00.001-05:002011-11-18T00:01:56.626-05:00Nearly eighteen months after leaving academia, I'm still sorting out my feelings about it. That will sound odd to you, maybe, because didn't I spend years <i>trying </i>to leave? And wasn't leaving the breakout from nearly a decade of allowing inertia and other people to run my life? And isn't everything so much better now?<div> <br></div><div>Yes, absolutely, to all of them. I don't wish I hadn't done it. But academia is not like a regular job; it's like a relationship. An abusive, miserable relationship in my case, but still a relationship. And if you end a decade-long relationship, even if for very good reasons, you're going to experience some fallout. I know that leaving was the right decision because I didn't experience any of the fallout right away; I was relieved and happy. Really, I was thrilled. It was like I'd gotten my life back - except more so, because actually I had gotten my life, period, for the very first time.</div> <div><br></div><div>But I have flashes. I talk to friends who are professors and grad students and postdocs. Many of them are miserable, but still, they talk about their work, their grants, their conferences, and it feels bittersweet. That life was home for me for so many years, and it's gone. I helped a friend compose a letter to a professor I know well, asking for a postdoc, and the professor was interested, and the friend got excited, and I felt jealous that I don't have a promising scientific career ahead of me. And just tonight, I was Facebook surfing and saw a not-really-a-friend's new photos of the dog he and his girlfriend just got, and I was a little bit jealous of the clearly-now-permanent girlfriend because I had a flirtation with the guy that I was more interested in than he was, and then I was a lot more jealous, of the guy, because I saw that he has recently become an assistant professor at a fairly prestigious school.</div> <div><br></div><div>It's unclear whether I left academia or whether it left me. There are at least two stories. The first is that I wanted to get out for years but never had the guts, that my faculty applications were halfhearted and I turned down two semipermanent between-faculty-and-postdoc gigs because I wasn't willing to do what it took to get a permanent position, that everyone I worked with and for thought I would be a great professor one day but I couldn't be bothered. The second story is that I sweated blood for nine years as a grad student and then a postdoc, that I gave up relationships and hobbies, that I thought about my work day and night, and it wasn't enough. I applied for every faculty position in any department that resembled my field, even if the school was in Idaho. I went to interviews where I was treated like dirt and nobody had the courtesy to email me and say they weren't going to hire me.</div> <div><br></div><div>Usually the truth is between the two sides of the story, but in this case both sides were true. I was a very good scientist, and I worked very hard, and it wasn't enough to succeed. Perhaps if I'd been more persistent and less prideful, willing to take another temporary position, I'd have wormed my way into something. Perhaps if I'd been smarter, if I'd made different choices about advisors, if I'd picked hotter research topics. Maybe if government funding didn't keep getting cut, or if I could blend in with other scientists by being male. Whatever it was, it was something I couldn't, or wouldn't do. Looking at other people's interesting research and prestigious faculty positions and exciting conferences and being jealous is like looking at your ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend and feeling that way: completely natural, but not a feeling that should necessarily be acted on. My relationship with academia was messed up, and it needed to end. Would it have been nice if the relationship could have been healthy and happy and successful? Sure. But it wasn't, and whether that was because of our fundamental incompatibilities or particular mistakes, the relationship has been ruined.</div> <div><br></div><div>I'm better off without it. I haven't found a replacement, exactly. I like my current job but don't love it the way some people love scientific research or even the way I sometimes loved scientific research. But I'm a much better and happier person now. My life has opened up in ways I never would have thought possible even two years ago. I feel younger and freer; my days match better with how I imagine myself. And best of all, I feel a sense of agency. If I don't like something - my work, my apartment, my city, my hobbies, my friends - I have the ability to improve it. It's easy to scoff at that, say that everyone controls their lives, but for years I didn't. I ceded control of everything to the dysfunctional relationship that was my career, and I didn't understand that it was not going to voluntarily return my agency to me.</div> <div><br></div><div>I'm still a work in progress, of course. I haven't found my One True Career, and I don't know if I ever will. I'm prone to occasional bitterness, as tonight, about the way my past career ended. I feel jaded, used up, and a way behind. Other people much younger than me have progressed much further in my current line of work. But I don't think I came away from it empty-handed, and when I do find my True Career Love, I'll be a better worker because of what I learned from my first, horrible, marriage to academia.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-91860165199126823642011-09-08T10:59:00.000-04:002011-09-08T11:00:03.784-04:00another training post: on relinquishing goals<div>Training has officially gotten rough, and I think I'm now at the point where I can expect to feel tired, sore, even slightly sick as often as not until the marathon is over. Tuesday I made my first attempt at a run since Saturday's 16-miler - I believe I wrote about how short, slow, and unpleasant that was - and it left me feeling tired the whole day. I postponed Wednesday's run to the evening, and by midafternoon I was feeling reasonably good. </div> <div> </div> <div>Last night's run went very well, in part because it was done an easy treadmill. I ran seven miles, and although I cramped a bit around mile three, I slowed down briefly and then felt fine. I took a break at 4.5 miles because the treadmills only let you run for 59 minutes so I'd need to take one at some point, and then I ran the last 2.5 miles faster. The last mile of the run I felt extremely strong and fast (although I happened to be running next to a mirror, and I did not *look* very fast). The worst part of the run was coming home to an exceptionally painful shower and difficulty sleeping due to friction burns.</div> <div> </div> <div>I'm not sure if I'll run again before Saturday. I could run tonight, although I would prefer to do yoga, and I dread aggravating my skin further. I could run tomorrow morning, but my long run is Saturday. I feel like it's kind of pathetic to not be getting in at least 3 weekday runs, though.</div> <div> </div> <div>The biggest obstacle I'm having in my training this time around is my own expectations. The first time I trained for a marathon, four years ago, I'd never done anything like it, and as long as I was able - somehow - to get through my longs runs, I felt like I was on track. I was slow, but many of the other runners - and the only other marathoner - I knew were slow. It was hard, but I was mostly just surprised that I could do it at all.</div> <div> </div> <div>I'm much stronger now. It's easy to forget that. But my long runs involve more hills and much less walking. I haven't been timing myself, and I didn't time myself last time, so I don't know if I'm faster. But one of the most vivid memories I have of that training cycle was sitting down on the side of the road and crying twelve miles into my first fifteen-miler because I was so tired and in so much pain and had so far still to go - and I've now passed the fifteen-mile mark in this year's training with no such episode, so I'm at least mentally tougher.</div> <div> </div> <div>But I keep comparing myself to other people, or to how I would like to be. I read all these running blogs, written by people who are much stronger and faster than I am. These people eat twenty miles for breakfast on Saturday and then run five miles on Sunday to "recover", and they don't seem to suffer from sore, weak, or tired legs in the days after their long run, or the inability to sleep through the night without waking up to eat, or anything else unpleasant.</div> <div> </div> <div>Of course this comparison is unhelpful (except insofar as I can learn from their experiences). I'm not running to be as fast and strong as other people, or even as fast and strong as an arbitrary measure of how I "should" be. I don't know what I'm capable of at this time and on this course, since I haven't run a marathon recently or here. And I'm not advanced enough as a marathoner to reasonably set a goal on this race, other than to run strong, do my best, and not let the race beat me.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-32783847784917577682011-06-15T23:32:00.000-04:002011-06-15T23:37:01.005-04:00I learn so much, sometimes, from reading my own blogs and journals and poems. Or rather, I learn two things: how much I've changed, and how much I've stayed the same.<div><br></div><div>In so many ways, I've stayed the same. For something like fifteen years - basically, the entirety of my reflective writing life - I've had the same doubts and worries and insecurities, the same moodiness, the same gallows humor. Some of my closest and most challenging relationships have endured for a decade or longer. Even the central issue of my twenties - whether and how to continue in academia - while resolved, still informs a large part of who I am and the decisions I make.</div> <div><br></div><div>But in other ways, I've changed. Reading my writing from five and ten years ago, seeing how agitated and terror-stricken I was, is almost painful. Of course this is an unfair sampling - this spring marks roughly the fifth and tenth anniversaries of my graduation from college and my completion of grad school, and many people find such transitions overwhelming. Three years ago, when I was moving to New York, I was almost equally overwhelmed (although in a more beaten-down way).</div> <div><br></div><div>Still, I feel a lot more equilibrium these days (yes, really, the last year or so is what passes for calmness with me). Somehow in the last few years I've grown into myself more. I wouldn't say that I have a better handle on my life, exactly - I still couldn't say, with any kind of definiteness, what I want to be doing or where I want to be doing it, in ten or even five years - but I do have a better handle on myself. Ten years ago, I didn't really know who I was, or even who there was to be. Five years ago, I knew who I was, but everything in my experience suggested that I was aberrantly deficient in every way that mattered. Now, I have more sense of what my strengths are and how to deal with my weaknesses, and I'm comfortable enough with the whole package not to focus (most of the time) on why I'm not exactly like what I imagine the median person must be.</div> <div><br></div><div>The bigger evolution,has not been in how I see myself, but in how I see my life. For so long, I viewed my life as something that happened to me, a set of tests that I could pass or fail, with each performance dictating the next leg of the path. I rarely thought of it in terms of my own choices. Circumstance and the people around me and my own lack of gumption kept me from really making most of the major decisions about my life in my early twenties, and it was a habit that became more and more ingrained even as I struggled to shed it. </div> <div><br></div><div>But that has been, really, the story of the last few years - somehow, after I had resigned myself to it never happen, I took control of my own life. I took up hobbies nobody had ever imagined for me. I made unlikely friends. I traveled to places I never really thought I'd see. I escaped what had begun to feel like a life sentence in a modestly comfortable cage (that would be academia). And now, after almost three years here, I find myself with a totally different life than I'd ever allowed myself to imagine. A life full of evenings with friends and excursions to the theater and international travel, with a good but stressful job and a tiny, overheated apartment, the kind of adult life I would have imagined hopefully at the age of twelve and probably never afterwards. It is a life I really, really enjoy.</div> <div><br></div><div>Five years ago, dreading leaving the town that I hated and that had become home, I wrote that I loved travel because it was so anonymous. On a bus or a plane or a train, nobody knew anything about me. They didn't know me as the grad student with tons of papers and no job offers, or the disappointing daughter, or the weird ex-roommate. I was just a girl reading a book or drinking a coffee. And that's how I've felt in New York, as well. Nobody knows me here; all the friends I could make in a lifetime are a vanishingly small fraction of the people I see in one commute to work. To all the people around me, I'm just a girl with a kindle. I could be smart or stupid, disappointing or exemplary, weird or normal.</div> <div><br></div><div>I could be anyone at all. Even, somehow, after all this time, myself.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-62103698922005060472011-04-24T22:22:00.000-04:002011-04-24T22:23:18.079-04:00I was at a dinner the other night where people were telling horror stories about emergency rooms and paramedics. A girl who'd had food poisoning talked about being ignored for six hours as she lay on a cot throwing up into a bucket, not given an IV or any fluids, because they thought she was just a kid strung out on drugs. She'd ended up at a hospital in a bad neighborhood, apparently, and - according to another girl at the dinner - most of the people in the emergency room would have been kids strung out on drugs. Still, I pointed out, they would have been kids strung out on drugs who needed help, and everyone nodded but they weren't really listening. They kept talking about how incompetent and mean paramedics are, how emergency rooms don't help anyone. And maybe they're right, for the most part. But I had to leave the room for a minute, because it reminded me of my only experience with paramedics and emergency rooms. <br> <br>I would have been twenty-four. It was springtime, probably just this time of year. I was asleep and my phone kept ringing and I kept getting up and ignoring the call. It was four in the morning and the call was from my close friend and former boyfriend, who was having trouble in his relationship with another woman. But he kept calling back, and finally I answered it. <i>I think you'd better come over</i>, he said. So I got my car keys and, still in my pajamas, drove to his apartment less than a mile away. When I got there, I could tell right away that he was drunk, but we talked for fifteen or twenty minutes - about the girl, how she'd left him for good, how he'd tried to stop her by force and scared himself with his own violence - before he told me about the pills he'd taken. I told him we had to go to the hospital but he refused. I pleaded, and argued, and bargained, but he kept saying no. He went into his bedroom and I called 911 from my cell phone. I couldn't give his address, though - he lived in a big apartment complex and, while I knew the name of the complex and his apartment number and exactly how to get there, they couldn't dispatch an ambulance without the exact street address. I'd have to call back from the landline, I was told. <div> <br></div><div>My friend had taken his phone with him into his bedroom, and I was afraid of him, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn't do anything. So I stormed the bedroom and wrestled the phone out of his hands. I think he must have been fading then, or afraid of hurting me, because he was trying to fight me off and I wouldn't have been able to get it away from him if he'd been more coherent. I ran back to the living room with the phone, dialing, and talked to the same dispatcher - this was a small town, a small emergency service area - and with the landline she could pinpoint my location, and then my friend came out of his room and was fighting for the phone back.</div> <div><br></div><div>The paramedics came. I don't remember how long it took. My friend had gone back into his room and I was afraid to go back there. There were men, it seemed like a lot of them, in heavy boots. They went into his room and brought him out. They all seemed much too big for the apartment. I was sitting on the couch then, not really awake, and there were policemen who told me they needed a statement. They needed to know who I was, why the drinking had started, who the other woman was. His life - my life - our lives - seemed tawdry when I was telling it to an officer of the law at four-thirty in the morning. I didn't have proof of anything. I just knew what my friend had told me, which was that there had been a lot of alcohol and a lot of different kinds of pills. I was afraid it wasn't really anything meriting an ambulance, that I'd wasted their time.</div> <div><br></div><div>I hadn't wasted their time. Outside - this must have been only a few minutes later - they were loading my friend's stretcher into an ambulance. They asked him which hospital he wanted to go to and of course he didn't know. I wouldn't have known either, and I wasn't nearly unconscious with an almost-lethal cocktail of drugs. One of the paramedics took me aside and told me that he wasn't allowed to give advice, but if it was his friend lying on the stretcher, he'd want them to go to a particular clinic. So I told my friend to request that clinic, and he did, and that's where the ambulance went.</div> <div><br></div><div>I followed the ambulance. I sat in the waiting room. It was clean and quiet. It wasn't like an emergency room on television, because this wasn't New York or Los Angeles. It was the middle of nowhere in Illinois, and my friend was the only person there who was close to dying that night. I used the restroom, which was a single room like you'd find in a midpriced restaurant, except with specimen jars. At five-thirty I called my mother. <i>Is everything okay? </i>she asked me. The last time I'd called her in the middle of the night, my best friend from college had died in a car crash very late on her fifty-fourth birthday. <i>Of course everything's not okay. </i></div> <div><i><br></i></div><div>A lot of time passed. I saw my friend; he seemed really cheerful. They'd pumped his stomach and he was going to be fine. I called his other close friend, who came to the hospital. They decided to transfer my friend to another hospital fifty miles away, where his veteren's benefits would pay for a longer stay. He'd be in a psych ward. He seemed happy about this.</div> <div><br></div><div>What I remember about that night is mostly two moments - in the apartment, talking to the policeman who had seen so many lives as wrong-headed as mine, and outside, with the paramedic, who put himself in our shoes and told me what to say to help. I don't know what the other hospitals in town were like, but I know that the one we went to was nearby, and clean, and saved my friend's life, and maybe if he'd ended up somewhere else the night would have spiralled into even deeper horrors.</div> <div><br></div><div>My friend lived another six years. He got over the girl, eventually. He met someone else and they were together for a long time, and frequently they were happy. That relationship ended, as relationships do. He moved to another city and took another job. He had other friends, other joys and sadnesses. Last summer I went to Paris for a month, and he was going to be there too during that month, and look me up. I worried - with what now seems like an inane self-centeredness - that his intermittent desire to rekindle our long-ended relationship had returned. </div> <div><br></div><div>I remembered the last time we were in a French-speaking city together - Montreal, six months after our breakup, for a conference. He'd sent pastries to my hotel room. It was the kind of romantic gesture women, stereotypically, dream about, and he knew I was no exception. If the right man had done that for me, if a <i>random </i>man had done that for me, I would have been swept off my feet. But he wasn't the right man, he was worse than a random man, and the gesture meant nothing good to me. I hated myself for not being able to love him, for being the sort of person who hurt someone so thoughtful. The pastries were obviously expensive and well-made, but in my mouth they tasted like sawdust, and I couldn't bear to eat them.</div> <div><br></div><div>I needn't have worried about a repeat of this, because he never made it to Paris. He died at the end of June. I was in Reykjavik, and I learned it from Facebook. It never gets dark, at that time of year, and nothing about the trip seemed real. He died of an overdose, it appeared, and nobody was specifying how, or how intentional. It was in the early hours of his thirty-seventh birthday.</div> <div><br></div><div>So his life is over. Has been over, for nine months. He was a person with problems long before I met him. But he was also a person with so much sweetness. When he and I were together, he did everything he could to keep me from feeling pain. He watched stupid television shows on Lifetime with me and made chocolate-chip pancakes. He came to my best friend's wedding halfway across the country even though he knew I was about to break up with him. One time, in the heat of summer, when I was in a bad mood, he put on all his old army gear, including a giant heavy backpack, and hopped across his living room like a rabbit in order to make me laugh. I don't think he really loved me - I don't think he really <i>saw</i> me - and I know I didn't love him, but he was good to me, always, even when I wasn't very good to him. He deserved better than he got, better than he set himself up for. I think most of us do.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-57612804894861737822011-04-13T23:53:00.000-04:002011-04-13T23:54:04.888-04:00Everyone is Being Cool Without MeNothing good ever happens on a Tuesday, and yesterday was no exception. After a particularly frustrating day at work and the umpteenth consecutive day of being ignored by my office crush, I decided that it was time to treat myself and use the Leonidas gift certificate my parents gave me for Valentine's Day. (Oh, you are thinking, how sweet! Her parents gave her chocolate for Valentine's Day! You are thinking this because you do not know my mother. This was Guilt Chocolate; it was Why Don't You Have A Boyfriend, Preferably a Jewish Lawyer Boyfriend, To Buy You Chocolate So Your Parents Don't Have To Get You a Gift Certificate Chocolate. But I figured it would still taste good, once I actually went and purchased it.)<div> <br></div><div>So I set out from the office to Leonidas, except it is not, as my mother told me, "right next door"; it is about fifteen blocks away. Three blocks into my walk it started to mist, and by the time I got to the shop it was definitely raining, and I definitely did not have an umbrella. Plus, due to my eternal-yet-irrational optimism, I had convinced myself that something good would happen that day and so was dressed nicely, which is to say not-waterproofly. Plus-<i>plus</i>, I arrived at the store on the stroke of seven, which turns out to be when they close.</div> <div><br></div><div>So, no chocolate. I set off for the subway station, which was another fifteen blocks (Midtown is not evenly tiled with subway stations, and half the ones it does have only seem to go to Brooklyn). This was a really fun walk, because the rain intensified and became a thunderstorm - a really loud, kind of scary one. By the time I got to the train station, I was drenched, and the first train that came was too full to get onto. On the second train, I ended up standing right next to a woman I know vaguely and spent a few hours with last weekend - and she didn't recognize me. When I smiled at her, she looked at me like I was a crazy person (which is exactly what I must have looked like) and moved away.</div> <div><br></div><div>So, crappy evening, and nothing about its crappiness was specific to my personality or circumstances. Bad days at work, bad weather, commuting woes, the failure of chocolate to simply materialize in one's apartment - these are pretty much universal annoyances. But the way they all coalesced into a perfect storm of crap was, I think, uniquely enabled by New York. You live here long enough and you forget that it is not, actually, a regular feature of life everywhere to be pushed and shoved and squashed, to climb a ladder or unfold your couch when you're ready to go to bed, to be constantly competing with nine million other people for every square inch of space and every penny of rent money and every iota of attention or interest or humanity. You forget that a concrete path between a road and a river does not constitute nature and that dog poop on the sidewalks is not evidence that you live in a great neighborhood. You also forget that you could survive without ballet and Broadway and access to every amazing thing ever created. Or you don't forget, and you know that eventually you'll have to leave.</div> <div><br></div><div>Sometimes I think about where I'll go when I leave the city. Seattle, maybe? San Francisco? Boston? I know I prefer cold to warm, and I want to be near mountains or water or both. It should be a real city, or close to a real city, but also close to somewhere with space. And I have to be able to find a job there, and there has to be a decent population of single people over 30 for me to hang out with. It would be nice, too, if I could afford to buy a smallish house with a yard big enough for dogs.</div> <div><br></div><div>But, really, those are not my criteria. They're considerations (and having a job is indispensable), but they don't rule much out. Everywhere has some sort of nature or culture and most places have both, there aren't too many places where real estate is more expensive than here. No, the real consideration is the type of people who live there, the attitude of the place.</div> <div><br></div><div>What I want is related to - is the antithesis of - the latest manufactured buzz of the New York Times: FOMO (available online <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/business/10ping.html">here</a>, although because I am a New Yorker I read it in print, a definite benefit of residency). This stands for Fear Of Missing Out, and it refers to the sense, when you look at your friends' Facebook posts, that they are all happier and cooler and more interesting than you. They are at the latest gallery opening or the hottest nightclub; you are in your pajamas watching reruns of The Office. They have an adorable baby in a pink snowsuit with its own ears; you have a four hundred dollar cell phone that nobody except your parents ever calls. They are reading interesting books and making new friends and taking vacations to France; you are going to work and playing sudoku and eating leftovers with your roommate. Whoever you are, whatever you are doing, at this moment somebody - and probably somebody you met once, at a bar or your sister's high school reunion - is doing something infinitely better.</div> <div><br></div><div>This feeling may be familiar to all users of Facebook or even all people, but I think it's particularly strong in people who live in New York. New York is a city run by people who have to have the best, do the best, and be the best, and the rest of us either go along for the ride or settle in for a long haul of being told we're not good enough. (See: Penelope Trunk <a href="http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/11/do-you-belong-in-nyc-take-the-test/">here</a> and elsewhere on her blog. Also, a lovely and talented (erstwhile?) reader once said, either here on her own blog, that part of the reason she left the city was that dating was difficult because men were always looking over her shoulder for the woman who might be just a little more... whatever... than she was. I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, but in the years since I have thought of this comment always and it seems more and more true with every man I date.) New York is a place where - yes, I have become ones of those people who says this, and believes it - you can see and do and be amazing things, more so than possibly anywhere else, and consequently it is a place where there is a lot of pressure to see and do and be amazing things all the time. </div> <div><br></div><div>The thing is, I don't want to see and do and be amazing things all the time. Sure, sometimes I want to see a great performance or visit a world-famous museum or experience an outstanding restaurant or do some other of the things that New Yorkers think you can only do in New York and in reality you can do in any major city and a lot of minor ones. And sometimes I want to hang out with friends, and sometimes I want to practice yoga alone in my apartment. This is obvious to you, if you live anywhere but New York, because you probably have an apartment big enough to lay down a yoga mat in. </div> <div><br></div><div>There's nothing stopping me from living my life the way I want to here, and I mostly do, but this isn't the best place for it. This is a city made of crazy aspirations and driven by the fear of missing out, where just the thought that someone else might, somewhere, somehow, be doing something a little more awesome drives people to deprive themselves of sleep for years on end, inhale a pack of cigarettes' worth of pollution every day, and work and party themselves into a frenzy just to stay a little ahead of the curve on some hybrid skinniness/wealth/hipness scale, and wake up ten years later wondering where the time went and why they haven't figured out, much less accomplished, anything they really care about. This is a city composed almost entirely of a profound insecurity that nothing - no salary, no party, no apartment - will ever be enough to mark its bearer as a success and that all of it, the money and the women and night after night of awesomeness, will not keep one single filmmaker or investment banker or trust fund artist from eventually, and at the exact same rate as his peers in tiny towns in Wisconsin or possibly faster, getting old.</div> <div><br></div><div>When I leave New York, in two or five or ten years, it will be to go somewhere that isn't driven by fear. It will, hopefully, be somewhere with good weather and good public transportation and a decent feeling of community - but more importantly, it will be somewhere that isn't about being beautiful or successful or awesome. It will be somewhere that's about being happy and healthy and helpful and yourself. And when I go, I'll still have Facebook, and I'll still have all my Facebook friends, in New York and San Francisco and Pennsylvania and Japan, and when I log on I'll see their status updates, and I'll know that everyone I've ever known, plus the nine million total strangers who live in New York City, is being cool without me, and I won't care at all. </div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-33933806242328064222011-04-02T23:38:00.001-04:002011-04-02T23:38:21.706-04:00People occasionally ask why I left academia. Actually, people ask frequently, but most of the time they are satisfied with the answers I give first - that I'd been doing it for ten years and was ready for a change, that I was tired of living in tiny towns and working all the time and getting paid next to nothing, that I wanted a job that was interesting and absorbing but that could sometimes be just a job.<div> <br></div><div>All of those are true answers, but they're not really <i>the</i> answer. I'm a passive person; I don't make big life changes out of boredom. I knew I was giving up a lot in the way of excitement and material comforts, but most of the time I simply didn't care; even now that I have access to them, I'm not a big one for excitement or material comforts. And academia wasn't as much work as it could have been; as a theorist, I could do less work by being smart, and I always had other things in my life. So, while those things are all true, in the sense that I appreciate those benefits of being out of academia, they're not the reason that I left.</div> <div><br></div><div>I was talking to a younger colleague today; after a couple years in the workforce, he's considering going to grad school for a PhD and wanted my take. I told him, honestly, that it's not always an easy life, even if it looks like one; that it requires dedication and focus and that your advisor has much more power over you than any supervisor in a regular job, and much less incentive not to abuse that power. I also told him that I though he's someone who would enjoy it, because he really is dedicated, and he's very good at what he does.</div> <div><br></div><div>He asked me why I left, and I gave him the standard answers, and he didn't buy it. "You gave up doing research just so you wouldn't have to live in Idaho?" he asked, incredulous. This is a guy who should be getting a PhD, because to most people in this city, being able to live in New York instead of a tiny town in northern Idaho is reason enough to change careers. But then again, he's right, because when you love something, you follow it wherever it takes you, even to the middle of nowhere.</div> <div><br></div><div>And then he told me what got him thinking about grad school: he was watching a documentary about waste disposal, and saw the marine biologists talking about the effect of trash on the ocean ecosystem. And he was thinking, <i>these guys just get to be out there, on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, enjoying the sun, and they're improving the world. And meanwhile I'm a desk all day, trying to write better code so the company can make a little more money.</i></div> <div><i><br></i></div><div>And he's right. Kind of. Those guys get to be out there on a boat, but they also <i>have </i>to be out there. They don't get to go home every night; instead they sleep in bunk beds and eat dehydrated meals. They don't get to see their spouses and children every day; if they're single, they have a hard time dating. They can't run five miles every day after work, as my colleague does now, and they're probably always smelly and wet.</div> <div><br></div><div>But, sure, they're improving the world. Maybe, a little bit, sometimes. Not as much as they wish they were, and not as much as my colleague thinks Because that's the thing about academia, and maybe about all science - progress is slow, and frequently there is no progress. At a corporation, there are incentives to always be doing more, getting better, staying ahead of the game - even if those incentives are just money. But in academia, for everyone not working directly towards tenure, the incentives are fuzzier. Sure, yes, there's the drive to contribute to the world, to make a difference, to make it better. But that contribution will come in years, maybe a lot of years, maybe too many years for you to be around for, and it's a pitiful counterweight against the desire to go home, watch television, get some sleep. For really good scientists, the love of learning and exploration is the animating factor. For others, it's the desire for renown, or a sense that science is fun, or simply inertia. Or there simply is no motivation at all.</div> <div><br></div><div>I had a difficult relationship with my work throughout my academic career. I was never as devoted to it as most people start out. I liked it, and I was good at it, and I have anything else I really wanted to do, and frequently that was enough. I liked learning new things that nobody else had ever learned. I liked assembling my work and discussing it with others. I liked reading papers and attending conferences. I had bad days, band months, even bad years, but so did everyone else. Whenever I got close to leaving, I told myself that I was doing something important, that I was making new knowledge, and that compared to this no job as a keyboard-presser was ever going to measure up, and that the joy of discovery outweighed the hassle.</div> <div><br></div><div>After grad school, I spent two years as a postdoc in each of two groups. In the first group, I performed research with applications to drug delivery (how do we get drug molecules to the parts of the body - the cells, or the parts of the cell - that need them?) and separation mechanisms and the general area of nanofluidics. It's not a super-hot field, but it's an area of active research. The work I did had two distinct parts, and before I left I wrote up two papers, which - in accordance with standard practice - were to be revised and submitted in the next few months, while I ramped up work on my next project.</div> <div><br></div><div>Except the papers didn't get revised and published. My former boss ignored them, and he ignored my emails asking about them, until after a year I submitted one paper without his assistance or approval and dropped the other. This wasn't just one bad experience; it happens all the time. Work isn't published because the student can't write, or the advisor is too busy or dislikes the researcher or has too many grants to write. During my nine-year career I spent at least four years doing research that was never published (that's four papers that I actually wrote, and a couple other papers' worth of research that never got written up) for reasons mostly unrelated to its quality.</div> <div><br></div><div>In this case, the problem with my papers was that they were mundane; interesting and relevant work, but not exciting. My former advisor already had tenure and didn't need any more bread-and-butter papers. If he was going to be famous - which was the only place there was for him to go - he needed revolutions, and my work wasn't revolutionary. Most work isn't revolutionary. And most revolutionary work isn't as revolutionary as it sounds, either. Most of it is built on years or decades of small, quiet, incremental ideas and experiments and calculations that lead to a cataclysmic insight - or maybe just to a buildup of small, quiet, incremental ideas and experiments that are, as a whole, very important. But when those incremental findings don't see the light of day, when they're not published and not discussed, other scientists can't build on them. Nobody can do different or more specific work based on those findings, nobody can develop a theory to explain them or an experiment to test them, nobody can be inspired about a whole new line of thought. It's as if that work - that year or two years or four years of labor - never happened.</div> <div><br></div><div>Work goes down the drain everywhere. My company could pull the plug on a project I'm doing that I think is useful and cool, and that would kind of suck, but I would accept it more easily. My job is fun and satisfying and remunerative, and if sometimes my work doesn't lead anywhere, well, eh. But in academia was job was less fun and less satisfying and way less remunerative; it was usually a slog, and it was frequently hellish in a variety of ways, and the payoff was knowing that I was doing something that really mattered. And when suddenly, because someone I used to work for was busy and absent-minded and not terribly fond of me, I realized that a lot of the work I had done was not going to matter at all, it was hard to accept the bargain I'd made. </div> <div><br></div><div>I may not be improving the world now at my job, but at least I don't hate the world anymore, which is probably an improvement for the people around me, at any rate.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-2471025917505791092011-03-30T22:44:00.001-04:002011-03-30T22:44:59.786-04:00One of the things I don't like about New York is how people are always leaving it. It's an exciting and dynamic place, and people are always moving here or coming to visit (one of the things I do like about New York is how frequently I see friends who don't live here, sometimes entirely by accident), but it's not the kind of place, for a lot of people, that is suitable as a permanent home. It's a difficult city to put down roots in because the soil is always shifting. This summer a good friend of mine will move away to begin a marriage and a master's degree in Kansas, and the tragedy and beauty of the city is that, although I'll hopefully stay in touch with her, her place in my life will quickly be filled. Nothing stays empty here for long.<div> <br></div><div>I've lost one friend already this year, and in a more upsetting way. A woman I'd become friends with last spring, and become much closer to over the course of the fall, stopped speaking to me abruptly in January over my unwillingness to enter into a relationship with the IB. I feel that this is unfair and a little bit ridiculous, but I'm still bothered by it.</div> <div><br></div><div>My friend - ex-friend, I suppose - is an intelligent, vivacious, likable person. Our lives were very different, but we used to get together once every week or two for lunch or a drink or a shopping expedition, and we became each other's sounding boards, in large part because our lives were so different. Her husband and I always had plenty to say to each other, and we liked each other's other friends. (Yes, it sounds like I'm talking about a guy I used to date, but the similarity of friendships to dating relationships is hardly accidental.) I knew her friendship would change when she had her baby (which happened a couple weeks ago, according to Facebook, ever the go-between in these situations), that I'd see her less and that she'd always be preoccupied, but I didn't expect it to be so thorough, and I didn't expect it to start three months before the baby's birth.</div> <div><br></div><div>I understand it, though. She's not the first friend I've had whose gotten married or had a child, or for that matter taken another job or found an amazing hobby. People's lives change, and their friendships ebb and flow. New mothers have more in common with other new mothers - at least, in some ways - than with single women, and people who make lots of money have more fun going to fancy places with other people who make lots of money than eating stale pizza with postdocs. People change when their lives change - but, also, people like to <b>think</b> they've changed. They like to think they've outgrown or evolved past or transcended who they were, and sometimes that means outgrowing the people they were once friends with. If they didn't - if, while working their amazing job and living in their huge house and raising their three children, they still wasted their time with people who were important to them in college, people who don't have any of those things, well, that's a little bit threatening, isn't it? Because if you can still respect the people who don't have the things that you think make you respectable, maybe those aren't the respect-bestowing things after all.</div> <div><br></div><div>It takes a lot of guts to be exactly who you are, even when other people are different, and that seems not to be less true at thirty-five than it was at fifteen.</div><div><br></div><div>I've almost-lost friends to this sort of thing before. My best friend and I went through a rough patch - okay, we went through approximately two dozen rough patches, but I'm talking about one in particular - right about the time she got married. There were a lot of components to it, involving all the expected bridesmaid/bride clashes plus my own unhappiness in my then-current relationship, as well as some more difficult stuff going on in both our lives. But the part I remember most clearly is a comment she made to me over instant messenger that she was more interested in selecting the correct sofa for her apartment than in discussing my "non-committal relationship issues". What stung so much was not that she was more interested in her life than in mine, but that she really did view the most emotional aspects of my life as less important in an objective sense than the decorating quandaries of her own.</div> <div><div><br></div></div><div>Fortunately, time tends to even things out. Eight years have passed, during which time I've bought two sofas and she's had two children and both of us have weathered plenty of ups and downs in all areas of our lives. While we don't always understand each other's viewpoints, she's a good friend and an impartial one, it's been valuable to me to have her in my life if only to have a differing viewpoint as well as some idea of how a person with her life lives. I can't imagine what our friendship would be like now if we'd followed similar paths in our twenties.</div> <div><br></div><div>I'm sad that my ex-friend and I seem destined not to develop a friendship like this, but I know there's nothing that can be done. It takes patience to tolerate your friends when they are living your lives in a way that seems blatantly wrong to you, and it takes a lot of honesty and humility - more than I have most of the time, anyway - to accept that maybe your choices aren't right inherently or for everyone, or even - possibly, some of the time - for you.</div> <div><br></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-21036756205502766572011-03-29T00:09:00.000-04:002011-03-29T00:10:20.145-04:00vacation: a recapI recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica. Because I've been so intermittent about blogging lately, I'll save background information and generalized catchup for a future post (the sort of much-anticipated backwards-moving series of recaps that generally never gets written) and just tell you about this one trip.<br> <br>I went on a group tour with Caravan, which is about as white-bread and cliche as it sounds, but it was mostly alright. I wanted to go to Costa Rica because several of my friends had been there and had amazing photographs and stories, and I was overdue for a vacation, but I didn't have a lot of time to plan. So I signed up for the "Costa Rica: Natural Paradise" tour, ordered binoculars and hiking boots and waterproof pants from L.L. Bean, tossed them in my bag along with a random assortment of clothing and more sunscreen and bug spray than could possibly be reasonable (no, really... my bag weighed 32 lbs when I checked in at Newark and I think around 8 lbs of that was bug-and-burn ointments) and headed off to San Jose.<br> <br>It turns out, Costa Rica is super-bright - I was very glad to have my new prescription sunglasses - but not all that hot. Even though the latitude is only about twelve degrees, there weren't a lot of times that I was too warm in pants and a t-shirt. However, it is very very wet. You know how they say, "it's not the heat, it's the humidity?" Well, in Costa Rica, it's not the humidity, it's the fact that much of the time you are actually inside a cloud.<br> <br>Quick itinerary (at least, what I can pick out from the blur of awesomeness):<br><div><ul><li>Arrival in San Jose, the capital, where they were in the middle of a holiday that lasted - depending on whom and when you asked - a day, a weekend, a week, or a month. I get the sense they have about thirteen such holidays per year. The primary celebration consisted of a daylong music festival in a park; the musicians were multinational despite the festival being about Costa Rican heritage. The attendees were mostly very young and could have easily been Spanish or French.</li> <li>Visit to a volcano, with actual steam coming out of it. In some parts of the country, there is rainforest, and in some parts, there is "cloud forest", which is what they call it when you are so high in elevation that it cannot actually rain, but it is just wet in the air all the time.</li> <li>Visit to a coffee plantation, with actual coffee samples (turns out, they are happy to give you free chocolate or coffee or whatever, almost everywhere, and the distribution center is usually the place where you can buy more of it to take home)</li> <li>In the same vein, but now largely departing from chronology, visit to a pineapple plantation, where I discovered that I like pineapple when it is not soggy, and also a visit to a banana plantation, where we learned about the bizarre and interesting lives of banana plants and the men who harvest them.</li> <li>Visit to another volcano, mostly from a distance. Visit to a "hot spring", which was more like a set of hotel swimming pools (except warm) than like I imagine a hot spring to be.</li><li>Stay in a rustic hotel reachable from civilization only via dirt road and 90-minute boat ride. "Hotel" was actually a group of cabins separated by paths, kind of like girl scout camp. The coolest parts of this were being inside my cabin and looking out at the trees, and seeing monkeys on the way to meals and iguanas by pool. While we were there we went on a number of boat rides and such to view the more skittish wildlife.</li> <li>Stay in a way-less-rustic resort by the beach on the Pacific side, where I went horseback riding. This part of the country was much dryer, and looks a little like I would imagine the African savannah to look.</li><li> So much wildlife: monkeys, birds - including ibises, which I had thought were mythical, crocodiles and caymans, iguanas and other lizards. Also so many plants, growing out of the soil and the water and each other. </li> <li>Probably some very important insights and conclusions and the like, but it is far too much after my bedtime to think of what they are now.</li></ul></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-20801763743101026212011-02-12T00:55:00.000-05:002011-02-12T00:56:20.321-05:00The comment on my last post still confuses me. When I first read it, I felt like I should apologize for ending my post on a bit of a down note; later, I felt persecuted for not being cheery enough. Now I feel like the comment is part of the point I am trying to make.<div> <br></div><div>A big part of your life, especially when you're youngish and especially when you're single, is how you tell it to other people. People expect a certain script, or one of a small set of scripts, and when they meet someone who doesn't follow it, they can get a little bit confused and very inquisitive. They want to know why: Why did I leave academia? Why did I choose my current career, and apply for the job at my current employer? Why do I live in New York, and why do I like it? Why am I single? Why don't I have a closer relationship with my brother? Why do I tell my mother so much? Why did I stop being a vegetarian? Why do I run? Why do I write, or why don't I? People are endlessly demanding that I explain myself, and the small variations in how I express myself at given times seem to lead everyone in my life to have totally different ideas about who I am. Worse, sometimes I can't answer their questions, and the general response to that seems to be that if I can't explain who I am, then I must be wrong about it. I feel like this is trying to begin with, and more so because people whose lives seem easier to understand don't seem to have to deal with this as much. But I also feel like I should not take it personally, because probably people who I perceive as nosy and domineering just want to make sure I'm happy.</div> <div><br></div><div>And I am happy, in general. But more important than being happy, at least to me, is being real. Sometimes I don't have an answer to "why are you single?"; worse, sometimes I have depressing answers (I can imagine the lists my exes would give, for example; "too awesome to settle down" does not top them). Much of the time, I don't care what the answer is. Single is what I have been for my entire adult life with only brief t interruptions, so it's kind of like wondering why I have eyebrows. Sometimes, I'm very glad to be single; I truly don't know how or even if I would deal with having another person just <i>around</i> a lot of the time, and I'm frequently thankful that at the end of the day I don't belong to anybody else and nobody belongs to me. I do have periodic pangs of wistfulness, on a quiet Sunday when it would be nice to have someone to read the paper with or on Valentine's Day when it would be nice to treated to a romantic surprise, but these pass when I find something else to do or think about.</div> <div><br></div><div>Still, there are the occasional moments when I am struck by the magnitude of my potential for aloneness. I guess to an extent I buy into the fairy-tale idea, where you meet Prince Pocket Protector and you fall in love and get married and then, well, that's sort of it. You slot comfortably into place, and your life is just, from that point on, solved. I know that isn't the case, that married people - which includes many of my friends - have plenty of confusions and dilemmas, some the same as single people and some different, but still.... it seems like your life is classified and constrained, maybe not in a way that would actually make me happy, but certainly it sounds comfortable. And the thing is if you don't get married you just go on, and on, and on. With more stories and more adventures, and every phase of your life has a different cast of characters and possibly a totally different scenery and of course that's all great, but sometimes - the hugeness of time, and the sheer magnitude of stuff in my life that nobody really experiences but me - it's just a little bit... daunting. </div> <div><br></div><div>There is a little part of me, about the same size as the part of me that believes in reincarnation, that thinks the right man for me is out there and that I will, still, someday, meet him.* If he exists, he is probably exactly as anyone who knows me would imagine, and we would live the life together that anybody who knows me would expect, and othen the pieces of my life will start to look like they fit a little better because, anyway, there will be one bit that people can understand. The reason my last blog post was a little bit sad - and I think the awesomeness that is my new life can stand up to a little bit of sad - is not that only a small part of me believes that this man exists. It's that, even if my life would be easier - more friends, more money, possibly even better health - with the right man, even if my life would be <i>happier</i> with the right man, more and more of me knows that this easy, happy, pocket-protected life is not the right life for me.</div> <div><br></div><div>----</div><div><br></div><div>* Now is as good a time as any to mention that, whoever this man might be, he is not the IB. He came, I saw him, I experienced a rare moment of clarity in which I realized that he is a decent and reliable and trustworthy person who is offering me a perfectly reasonable kind of relationship - companionship and common interests and the security of having known someone for a decade and still not being totally sick of each other - and it is emphatically not enough. I do not think he will return.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-28431063167953482422011-02-01T23:23:00.000-05:002011-02-01T23:24:16.023-05:00I.<br><br>Today I had lunch with someone I went to high school with and haven't seen since; in fact, most of my interactions with him were probably in eighth grade. He was in New York for a few days - one of the things I love about living in New York is that so many people come here to visit - and for whatever reason, after well over a decade, we decided to catch up.<br> <br>The yentas among you are now assuming I am about to tell you how wonderfully he grew up, how intelligent and interesting and attractive he is, and also how interested in me. In fact, he seems to have turned out reasonably well, although less geeky and more oily than I would have expected. If he were single, we might both be interested enough to pursue further acquaintance.<br> <br>In reality, of course, he is not single, because nobody my age is single. Which is not a major loss since I barely know him and until a couple weeks ago hadn't thought of him in years, and all in all it was a nice lunch and, who knows, he might come back to New York sometime and we might have lunch again.<br> <br>How he got to be not-single is what gets to me. Basically, he went to a foreign country for work, met a woman there, and brought her back. As I understand it, she gave up her career and basically her life to be with him, and now she follows him around during his work-related travels. Presumably this makes them both happy, but something about it bothers me. I would like to say it is solely that such an existence would not appeal to me on either side, and therefore my narrow little mind doubts it can work for anyone else indefinitely, and that I worry that they will join the ranks of those who waste years or decades in a marriage that isn't working for them.<br> <br>But it is also, of course, partly, the very old and very worn annoyance that in my simplistic mindset of beatific equality, intelligent, interesting, geeky men are supposed to end up with intelligent, interesting, geeky women, women who of course are not me but with whom I might feel some commonality, and of course they rarely do. Intelligent, interesting, geeky men, like all other men, are not interested in intelligent, interesting, geeky women; they are interested in beautiful and nonthreatening women, and railing against this is somewhat like railing against dogs for playing in their own shit. It's how they are, and it works for them, so while I might consider myself intellectually superior if only because I actually realize that physical beauty and human merit are not equal, at the end of the day it is still they who are playing happily in shit and me who is cleaning it miserably off my shoes, so who's really putting their brains to work here?<br> <br>Overdone analogies in which I unfairly compare relationships to canine excrement aside, this is an old story and an annoying one, and it wouldn't go any further except it reminds me in a way of myself.<br><br>II.<br> <br>I'm still seeing my gentleman caller, the much-younger one who plays the guitar. He continues to be wholly inappropriate for me. We had a conversation very recently in which basically we determined that (1) it does not seem to be running its course as quickly as either of us had expected, but (2) due to differences in age and lifestyle, there is a limit to how real it can become, which is rapidly being approached. We also determined that (3) we each have some sense that we would be holding the other back and preventing the other from having the experiences we should be having if we continue seeing each other for too long, but also (4) neither of us wants to stop just yet. So that is all wholly inconclusive, although in reality there is only one way for it to go, and it will go there pretty fast I think due to newly-relevant scheduling issues.<br> <br>But I'm not sorry about it. He's been good for me, in part because of the differences in our age and lifestyle and in part because of who he is. He's made me happy. He said, once, that he hoped he would renew my faith in love, which clearly he has not, but I think he's come as close as might reasonably be hoped in a few months of this sort of thing.<br> <br>I've also learned a lot about the people in my life from being with him - or, rather, from seeing their reactions to my being with him. Most people have been supportive; if I'm happy, even if I'm doing something silly, they're happy for me. But a few people have been critical, and while I can't say I'm surprised at exactly who, I was surprised at the strength of some reactions. Two people have cut off contact with me entirely, basically because they believe I should not be wasting my rapidly-waning moments of plausible appeal, in which I ought to be trying to attach someone more suitable for permanent capture, with someone who is clearly neither suitable nor desirable as a long-term partner. Another is barely speaking to me, for basically the opposite reason - she thinks I should live a life of absolute solitude rather than pursue interactions with anyone who does not absolutely meet all my (read: her) most unattainable standards. And none of these people, believe it or not, is my mother, whose heart I have refrained from breaking by telling her about this affair.<br> <br>The real reasons, as usual, for these people being upset with me have very little to do with me. They are trying to live their own lives in certain ways that they have decided are correct, and to the extent that it is a difficult or frustrating or regretful task they are taking it out on me. But I have also noticed - from long, miserable experience - that there is no use bringing it up to them. Some people will always disapprove of me, a list that is apparently growing to include not just most of my family but also some of my formerly-good friends, and if it is not because I am dating someone I am not going to marry, then it's because I'm dating at all, or because of my career or where I live or how much or little I work out, or my height or my weight or my shoe size, or what time I get up in the morning, or the order in which I eat my m&m's. Nothing is too big or too small for people who are in the business of making themselves feel better by objecting to other people's lives.<br> <br>Which of course brings us back to my objections to my former classmate. If he's happy, and she's happy, then who am I - a person who doesn't really know either of them - to roll my eyes? Even in the semi-privacy of my own blog? Their relationship cannot possibly be any more doomed or self-destructive than mine. And anyway, why should it bother me even a little bit that a person whom until now I never thought of has found happiness with a person whom I have still never met?<br> <br>The obvious answer is the one I already alluded to, that men like him should be marrying women like me, but that begs that question, because how do I know this wife of his isn't actually an awful lot like me? Which brings us to our answer: I know she is nothing like me because if a man - no matter how intelligent and interesting and geeky - appeared from a foreign country and wanted to take me away from my life and my career and marry me, I wouldn't go. If a man appeared from <i>next door</i> and wanted to take me away from my <i>studio apartment </i>and marry me, I <i>still </i>probably wouldn't go. <i>Nobody</i> marries women like me, because women like me do not get married. Instead, we date the most inappropriate men we can find - men who can't deal with commitment, or with women, or with their own laundry - and when we accidentally, despite all our best efforts, find someone who might have a shred of potential, we start conversations about whether maybe we should break up because otherwise it might or might not turn into something. <div> <br></div><div>And so the moral of the story is what is rapidly becoming the obvious answer to what is rapidly becoming everyone's favorite annoying question to me: Why am I single? I'm single because that's who I am, and I'm not interested in being the person I would be in order to attain, maintain, or retain a relationship. Anyone who doesn't feel that way is, male or female, is fundamentally dissimilar to me, and I suppose there friendships that are simply not going to be able to span that gap.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-58768615772206566942011-01-02T11:13:00.001-05:002011-01-02T11:13:27.317-05:002011Last year was a good year for me. Not always a fun or easy year, but a year in which I accomplished a lot. Most notably, I upgraded from a job I disliked and a career I was unhappy about to a job I enjoy and a career I'm excited about. In addition, I had a unique travel experience, spending a month in France preceded by a few days in Iceland (truly awe-inspiring) and Frankfurt. I also made significant strides in developing my local social circle in New York.<div> <br></div><div>In 2011, I'm not looking for big changes. A lot of what I want to do is consolidate my gains - learn the ropes at my job, make more friends. But there are some areas in which I'm hoping for continued or renewed progress:</div> <div><br></div><div><ul><li>Running. I ran a lot in the first half of 2010, but in the last six months other priorities (travel, the new job) have taken precedence. I'm not completely out of shape, but I haven't been training with any seriousness. Since I'll be running a marathon in November, this will need to change - and soon, as I'm running a half-marathon in three weeks. (I'm giving myself permission now to wimp out on that, but hopefully it will kickstart things for the year.)</li> <li>Travel. I am planning a major trip in the next few months - a ten-day tour of Costa Rica. I'm also hoping to take another major trip in the fall or early winter. In addition, I'll be travelling to visit family and attend a couple of weddings. This doesn't precisely count as travel, but I'd also like to join a hiking group and take a few days hikes (when it gets warmer) - I enjoy that sort of thing, but it's hard to organize by myself since I don't have a car or a ton of outdoor experience.</li> <li>Social life. A girl can never have too many friends! Especially in New York, where they are endlessly reshuffling and moving away. At the moment I find that I have plenty of people to do things with, but fewer people I consider "real friends". Hopefully this is just a matter of time.</li> <li>Clothing and other possessions. I have noticed that I have slightly too much stuff, and that a lot of it does not make me happy. There is resistance to getting rid of much of it because it is nominally useful, but it does not actually serve any positive purpose for me (i.e. I have some perfectly good clothes that I do not like, or that do not flatter me, or that I have been wearing twice a month for years and am sick of). I am trying to gradually get rid of things, which is less stressful than doing a single massive purge, and to not buy anything that I don't love. The idea is not primarily to have less stuff, but to have only stuff I really want to have. </li> </ul>In the sense of making resolutions... well, of course I would like to get up at 5:45 a.m. every morning and go straight out of bed to the gym, and then eat nothing but whole grain flax seeds and unsweetened yogurt and go to bed at 10 p.m., but this is an ongoing effort. More relevantly, I have noticed I have a tendency to avoid making decisions; this is a bad habit that stems from fear of making an uncorrectable mistake but often results in the even-less-correctable mistake of not deciding anything at all. I am working on making decisions in small intervals to try to conquer this.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-27044437321753692442010-12-17T23:29:00.001-05:002010-12-17T23:29:36.264-05:00I have a dilemma. It is one of those things that seems to be near-insoluble to me, but that seems trivially resolvable to everyone I have talked to about it. (Of course, they do not agree on what the trivial solution is, which perhaps suggests it is not as trivial to think, but who am I to argue with the people who think everything can be boiled down to whatever the answer they have already chosen is?)<div> <br></div><div>I mentioned on this blog that the IB was in town several weeks ago, and I also mentioned that he was in a relationship-wanting phase of our friendship. He has been this phase with increasing frequency and intensity for a few years, the main obstacles being (in rough order of increasing severity) the thousand-mile distance between our homes, my periodic unavailability, his inconsistency, and my general lack of interest. Over the weeks since his visit, he has been more consistent than usual - more consistent than ever, I think, except when we first met and might have actually been having a normal relationship - about staying in touch. I've been replying to his emails and texts in large part because I don't find correspondence burdensome; I don't mind being in regular contact with him, but I don't particularly crave it.</div> <div><br></div><div>He is coming back to the area for ten days over the holidays, because his parents live here; it would be reasonable for him to make a day- or weekend trip to New York. He has done this before, and we discussed him doing it again. But it seems a little more serious, perhaps because it would be over New Year's, perhaps because it would be the second visit in as many months, perhaps because he has become unrelentingly clear about his intentions.</div> <div><br></div><div>The IB is a good guy, really a catch. He's intelligent and successful. He reads for pleasure and enjoys traveling. He's a good talker and a good listener. He doesn't have many hangups, and he's adventurous enough to be good company in most situations. However, I can't seem to get on board. I'm not opposed, exactly. I understand, intellectually, that his thinking makes a lot of sense. We have always enjoyed each other's company, there have been intermittent periods of non-platonicness that have seemed to have potential, and now that he has decided finding a partner is the big item on his agenda, I'm a promising - perhaps the most promising and/or only - candidate. It is a perfectly reasonable way to go about choosing something that will be important in your life, such as your car or your home or, I suppose, your spouse. </div> <div><br></div><div>I'm not rejecting the idea because of anything superficially unappealing about him. The problem isn't the amount of money he makes or his looks or his confidence level (none of which I would classify as unappealing anyway). The problem isn't even that he lives somewhere I don't want to live, or that I cannot seem to get interested in sleeping with him. Maybe the problem is just that I've known him for so long that I don't find such a dramatic shift in intentions plausible, especially unaccompanied by any substantial shift in the tone of our interactions. </div> <div><br></div><div>The good thing is, well, how would I like to feel when I am with someone who is going to be my partner? Happy and confident and safe. I feel all of those things when I'm with the IB. But also, I would like to feel stimulated, like I am growing, like I <i>have</i> to grow a little bit to keep up with him. I don't feel that way with him. I feel relaxed, which is also good, but a little bit <i>too</i> relaxed. Like I can go ahead and be my worst self and it's okay. I don't want to always have permission to be my worst self.</div> <div><br></div><div>Also, I am not in love with him, but I suppose that's immaterial.</div><div><br></div><div>Finally, there is an obstacle that should not matter but, a little bit, does, which is guitar boy. Things have intensified, not necessarily to a point at which I would call him my boyfriend (although that is a little bit because of how ridiculous it would be) but probably to a point at which it would not be cool to spend a weekend with an old flame in an attempt to rekindle the relationship. It is obviously ludicrous to compare these two men, and it would be insane to forgo the a rewarding long-term relationship for an exciting but short-lived fling. Except that the fling is making me happy, and I am not convinced that the rewarding long-term relationship would.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-34177091814954406132010-12-15T22:54:00.001-05:002010-12-15T22:54:50.574-05:00on being goodI have a lot to say and very little excuse for why I haven't said it yet, since I do have a decent amount of free time. But I'm tired, which makes me forget what I have to say.<div><br></div><div>At some point there will have to be a retrospective, because 2010 was a hell of a year.</div> <div><br></div><div>The biggest thing I have learned this year is that in life there are no brownie points.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm big on brownie points. This is perhaps because I screw up a lot, so I need them. But it's mostly because the way I'm constituted makes me always want to be looking over my shoulder, checking if I am earning all the gold stars. I like to be thorough; when I play video games, I like to kill all the bad guys rather than just dodging them. I don't like to test the system; if I'm told I absolutely have to be at work at 8:30 on the dot every morning for training and it takes half an hour to get there, I'll leave at 7:45, every morning, even after I see other people waltz in at 8:32 and 8:35 and 8:45 with no or few consequences.</div> <div><br></div><div>This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's good to be conscientious. And there are certain areas of my life in which I could afford to be more conscientious (these days, alarmingly, that's the Not Eating Yogurt-Covered Pretzels For Lunch area). But overall I tend to live as if there's some sort of gold-star chart at the back of the classroom, and maybe when I die there will be an award for the girl who has amassed the most. And what I've learned this year is, well, there had better be such an award when I die, because there is certainly not going to be one before that. Nobody ever says, "gee, you were at work early every morning for sixteen weeks, even the morning the entire subway system flooded. Great job!" Similarly, there are not prizes given out for never taking a long coffee break, or for going to the gym every morning, or for getting good Xmas presents for your whole family. In general, there is no reward for being good.</div> <div><br></div><div>So being good has to be its own reward, which means you have to choose what of it you do. Going to the gym before work is its own reward about three days a week. The other days, sleeping an extra 90 minutes is a better reward. Getting good presents for people is its own reward - but paying extra to ship them faster is not. Getting a project at work done is rewarding, but staying until seven just because everyone else is that day, is not. Going to bed early... well, somebody needs to find way to bundle that with something I actually want to do.</div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-73950082679488145202010-12-03T00:46:00.001-05:002010-12-03T00:46:38.775-05:00Gift Hierarchy<ol><li>The best gift is one that the recipient wants very much but does not realize she wants. How could person not realize what she wants, you ask? She might know this thing exists - it might be a book she hasn't heard of or a gadget she didn't know of. Or, even better, she might simply never have considered how much such a thing will improve her life. This is a very hard gift to find, highly recipient-specific, and is even harder for well-adjusted recipients who know their own desires well. I generally don't try to shop for such gifts for a given occasion because they're so rare, but if I see or think of something that will be perfect for someone, I buy it immediately or make a note of it for later.</li> <li>Special category for romantic gifts: the first romantic gift between a couple of a given romantic-gift category, or an unexpectedly-but-welcomely-romantic gift (i.e. between people who are not yet officially involved).</li> <li>Something the recipient already wants but would never allow themselves to spend money on because they are perceived as too expensive / luxurious / hedonistic. This gift is best if it is actually a very small luxury and the means of the giver and recipient are similar. (Example: buying $30 worth of expensive chocolate for a good friend, when $30 is a typical amount to spend on each other, is really sweet. Buying a $200 bottle of wine for that friend, when $200 is their food budget for the month and play money to you, is - in my opinion, anyway - less impressive. The beauty of this gift is not that it is a wealth transfer; it is its permission to indulge oneself in a way one wouldn't ordinarily allow.)</li> <li>A gift elaborating on a known fondness of the recipient (i.e. some people are always happy to have books; others are always happy to have jewelry, or new music, or gadgets) in an unusual, giver-specific, or especially welcome way. For example, gifts bought on exotic travels or made by the giver. This is the highest realistic goal for most gift-giving occasions.</li> <li>Other romantic (relationship-appropriate) gifts.</li><li>A "this made me think of you" type of gift - i.e. one whose tone, humor, character, or etc. made the giver think of the recipient. Sometimes these are things the recipient likes; frequently they are not. But they're usually interesting and thoughtful.</li> <li>------------------------------- line between good gifts and okay gifts -----------------------------------------------------------------------------</li><li>A gift elaborating on a known fondness of the recipient in a typical way. </li> <li>A generic gift. Many people keep gift closets full of scented candles, bath products, and nonperishable foods that they give out - over the holidays or throughout the year - as hostess gifts, holiday presents for neighbors, offerings for the kids' teachers, and any other time a gift seems called for. These are perfectly good gifts if the only thing that needs to be said is "look! I got you a gift!"; otherwise they are disappointing for everyone.</li> <li>Something the recipient has specifically asked for. </li><li>Money (if given by parents or older relatives).</li><li>------------------------------- line between okay gifts and bad gifts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------</li> <li>Most gift cards. A generic gift card, i.e. from Gap or Bed Bath and Beyond, has no advantages to the recipient over money and a few obvious disadvantages. Some gift cards are actually other kinds of gifts - for example, a spa gift card for a person who would never spend money on a spa visit is actually type 3.</li> <li>A gift meant to improve the recipient. My parents are masters of this gift form. I have been carrying an electric wok around for the last four moves because they seem to think it is something that a person who lives alone and doesn't cook needs to have. In my current kitchen, it does not fit on the counter. They also like to give me cookbooks. </li> <li>No gift.</li><li>Something totally orthogonal to the recipient's personality and interests, the kind of gift that makes you wonder if the giver knows you at all. Sometimes the only difference between this type and type 6 is presentation.</li> <li>A gift for which the best, and sometimes only, possible explanation is that it was meant to hurt or offend. Closely related to type 14, but more negative and usually given to women, by their significant others.</li> </ol> I have three more holiday gifts to buy, plus cards to write. Fortunately, that will not be the end of the gift-giving because in January two friends have birthdays and I'm going to a wedding, and then possibly another wedding in March. I say "possibly" because this wedding is to be held in Palm Beach, at The Breakers, a resort so fancy even the website is intimidating. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-55417004458677210172010-11-30T19:58:00.000-05:002010-11-30T19:59:00.708-05:00the PillI will tell you something that really shouldn't be controversial, but is: I'm on the Pill. I have been on the Pill continuously for over nine years, and I intend to remain on it for the foreseeable future.<div><br> </div><div>If you are a sensible person, your response to this is, "okay... so?" Because this would be like me telling you that I take allergy medicine or fish oil supplements or dye my hair every six weeks: I choose to do it for reasons somewhere between purely medical and purely personal, at the expense of my insurance when I have good insurance and at my own expense when I don't, and the side effects and risks it entails are ones that a reasonable adult might accept. </div> <div><br></div><div>However, many people I know seem to have totally different responses. The Pill, they say, is unnatural (often they say this while drinking apple martinis that contain absolutely no apple). Also, it will mess up my body and my "rhythms" and make it harder for me to have children and possibly lead to birth defects in said children if I do have them, and doesn't it make me feel weird to be controlled by medicine? Now, of course, most of these objections have been scientifically demonstrated to be bullshit and/or are completely irrelevant; moreover, almost all of them could be made for many other things. If a person who eats only organic food and uses only organic skin products and refuses to take any kind of medicine and so forth wants to lecture me about this, well, I don't know that I'll listen, but I'll at least respect where she's coming from. But it's a pretty weak argument when it comes out of the mouth of someone who's happy to engage in every subjugation of her "natural rhythms" that modern technology can offer, except one that relates to her reproductive organs.</div> <div><br></div><div>I'm writing about this now because of <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/69789/">this</a> article (and <a href="http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/nothing-natural">response</a>). The author here also manages to include a sort of "if you go on the Pill you'll forget to have children" argument - forget? really? what, is society going to stop reminding me for longer than eight seconds? please? - that is actually more ludicrous (in my opinion) than anything I've mentioned previously. Most people on the Pill still get a period every month, or every three months, so it's not like - to the extent that blood in your nether regions is womanly or motherly - we're missing out on this reminder. We just don't <i>want</i> to be pregnant in our twenties in such large numbers, and the Pill - now only one of the reliable methods at our disposal, and not the best for anyone who wants to be truly carefree - helps us to fulfill this desire. Women who wait too long to procreate may regret it (although the ones whose stories I read seem to mostly feel that waiting was their best option). But so may people who don't take advantage of their youth in other ways - and I don't see this author telling women to stop suppressing their "natural" urge to each chocolate while their metabolisms can still handle it.</div> <div><br></div><div><br></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-10165384969608303412010-11-28T20:58:00.001-05:002010-11-28T20:58:59.666-05:00in which I attempt to watch a Woody Allen movie, so as to educate myself<div>6:29. I really wish I could like, or at least understand, Woody Allen. I've been able to tolerate some of his more recent movies, i.e. <i>Vicky Cristina Barcelona</i> (which might have been good, even, if not for the vaguely vapid presence of Scarlett Johanssen in place of an actual actress) and <i>Melinda and Melinda</i> (which I actually almost liked). <i>You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger </i>was, well, no more stupid and misogynistic than most of what comes out of Hollywood, so I suppose that's an improvement.</div> <div><br></div><div>It's really vintage Woody Allen - the stuff that's supposedly so great - that I can't stand. I am watching <i>Manhattan</i> right now, or trying to, but the problem is that by six and a half minutes into the movie I'm already bored (from the actionless overture at the very start of the movie) and pissed off (from, well, Woody Allen). What would happen, so you suppose, if a <i>woman </i>with a massive ego and an unpleasant face made a series of movies about her sexual conquests? Also, I realize this movie was made in the 70's but I'm pretty sure statutory rape was at least frowned upon back then.</div> <div><br></div><div>8:11 Seriously?? I don't know which of the two male characters I hate more, the one who is sarcastic about his friend's affair despite his own many affairs, or the one who has the "great marriage" because he's only had one or two affairs. Please tell me this is not how normal, non-movie men sound when there are no women around.</div> <div><br></div><div>9:54. Young Meryl Streep. movie just got a lot better. Wait... how could she have been married to this turd?</div><div><br></div><div>14:59. Almost didn't recognize Diane Keaton / dark, curly hair. </div> <div><br></div><div>Suddenly feel like less of a grave-robber next to Woody.</div><div><br></div><div>16:40: Realize where I got my rampant-feminist-trying-to-scare-off-men act: Diane Keaton. Love her.</div><div><br></div> <div>18:42. Woody Allen was alive during WWII???</div><div><br></div><div>21:22. W says his first intelligent thing of the whole movie, that it is ridiculous for him to be sleeping with a child and he should stop.</div> <div><br></div><div>25:51. W just told Diane Keaton she probably doesn't get many dates b/c she has opinions. Nice. Good to know nothing has changed in the last 40 years.</div><div><br></div><div>32:22. Of course, the female characters are not much better than the men. So naive. Women in New York aren't that nave these days, even on TV.</div> <div><br></div><div>37:48. There is an hour of this still to go. HOW?</div><div><br></div><div>38:49. Life is too short. I give up. Still hate Woody Allen.</div><div><br></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7875403678124073123.post-73979034584203167772010-11-25T22:15:00.000-05:002010-11-25T22:17:34.371-05:00giftsI spent Thanksgiving in New York this year, because I have to work tomorrow so there isn't time to go to DC. I also spent it entirely by myself, which was mostly by my own design, or rather my intentional failure to design any sort of companionship. I could have gone to my cousin's house near Philly, but I wasn't invited until the last minute, and I didn't particularly feel like inviting myself even though my cousin is pretty relaxed and wouldn't have minded, and by the time she invited me I'd bought my Harry Potter ticket, which was a good enough reason not to trudge down there. I also could have tried to do something with friends; many of mine stayed in the city and either would have included me in their festivities or would have liked to have a festivity. But I needed a day off from people (I need a lot of days off from people) and especially from running around. <div> <br></div><div>It was a good day. I slept in a bit, loafed around, did most of the catch-up tasks that usually occupy a full day on the weekend (which means I'll have a wonderfully free weekend). I ate rather more than is good for me, although not of turkey, and I did not go to the gym (tomorrow...). Both of my gentleman callers sent happy-thanksgiving tests, as is proper. My parents did not call, even though they said they would. Just now I came back from Harry Potter, which was not awesome but was worth seeing, and was pretty enough to be worth seeing in IMAX, and was only slightly insane.</div> <div><br></div><div>I am particularly pleased because I feel like I've gotten a handle on the holiday shopping. I have purchased and sent presents to my grandmother, uncle, and father, plus cards to them and an aunt, and my mother's present is packed up to go to the post office tomorrow. Those are all the ones that must arrive at some time that resembles Hanukkah. There is also my brother, who is not really a gift person, and his girlfriend... maybe I will get them some kind of householdy thing since I didn't get them a housewarming present, although I have no idea what since (a) my brother is way more domestic than I am, and (b) they are Brooklyn-y and probably don't approve of consumption. Maybe mittens and coffee beans? Also there are a few friends I will buy gifts for, but this doesn't feel like an emergency quite yet. Finally, there are my two gentleman callers. I am hoping for gifts from them both, ((1) I informed the IB that he should do so, which I think is entirely fair since he showed up and announced that he wanted to have relationship in the month of November, and when he whined that he didn't know what to buy, I told him to get something on his upcoming trip to Hawaii. So the bar is fairly high for him and I do not feel bad about this at all. (2) I did not inform guitar-boy that I would like a present, and I think he is likely not to give me one, but if he shows up sometime in the next thirty days with a used book and a candy cane I'll be thrilled.) which means I must give them both gifts. Neither of them is particularly hard to buy for, but of course I want to find something that is just right. So I have a nice amount of shopping left - not a terrifying amount, but enough to keep me busy and happy for the next few weeks. Yay!</div> <div><br></div><div><br></div> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0