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My second essay is focusing on when I lost my virginity and the panic that ensued thereafter, followed by a brief contemplation of the virgin/whore dichotomy.  Or something like that. Anyway, this is what I’ve got thus far:

1. He is waiting in the cold, hushed and smoking a cigarette, when I come to the back door. I grab his hand and lead him in, taking off our shoes to make less noise once we get in the house, and then climb up the back staircase to the spare bedroom on the third floor. I can feel my blood rushing and my breathing getting heavier.

2.Our shy mouths find each other. They are hesitant, exhausted from anxiety. He slowly takes off my shirt and sees the scars on my forearms I engraved with the heads of old Bic shaving razors. He gently presses his fingertips to them, and I stutter trying to find an explanation, but he just shakes his head.

“I don’t understand how anyone as beautiful as you are could ever hurt yourself,” he says.

“It doesn’t have much to do with beauty.

3. We collapse onto the bed and his hands wander, beginning to unbutton my jeans. I think that maybe I should stop him, maybe this whole thing with us is going too fast, but the alcohol has made everything feel like static and I can’t seem to find the words.

4. He reaches down between his legs and inserts himself into me. And then we have “sex”, and about a minute and a half later it’s over before I really even have time to discern what is going on. I wonder if that’s as good as it gets; if that’s really what all the hype was about. It wasn’t painful, like everyone said it would be, and it wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all that great.

5. In five minutes, I have just crossed the bridge between virgin and whore. I am no longer pure, unadulterated. Suddenly I am a woman. I have given this boy I’ve barely known a week everything I have to offer. I panic. The rest of the world can now brand me as a slut. How could something with such a diminutive duration be so definitively momentous?

Essay 2 Linchpins

For my second essay, I will focus on the events surrounding my grandmother’s funeral. Not the idea of death or my sadness in her passing, but moreso a story that my dad told me shortly after she died. Here are the linchpins:

- I was in 11th grade when my grandma died, and flew out to Belgium in late November to attend her funeral. I didn’t take it as hard as my dad did, because I was never very close to her (I was only able to see her maybe once every 2-3 years due to the distance), nor was it the first time someone close to me had passed away (one of my lifelong friends was killed in a car accident when I was 14). Nonetheless, it was still a very deeply saddening experience.

- However, one benefit from the event is that I feel like I grew closer to my dad and developed a deeper respect for my family. Shortly before the funeral, my dad told me a story that changed my life. He told me that the man I had thought was my grandfather for my entire life was not actually my real grandfather. My real grandfather was actually a Nazi soldier who had raped my grandmother during the Nazi occupation of Belgium near the tail end of World War II. My grandmother met my grandfather soon after, and they had 8 more children. So basically, in a house with 2 parents and 8 other children, my grandma was my dad’s only complete blood-relative.

- Brief meditation on what it was like to realize that I’m related to a Nazi, and how horrible of a story that is for my grandmother, and what it must have been like for my dad to find out about all of this on his 18th birthday.

- Meditation on the newfound respect I had for my grandparents and my dad. My grandmother for forgiving the Nazi (and even maintaining touch with him) and raising my dad with the same care as she raised her other children, my grandfather for doing the same and my dad for being able to see his parents in the same way after learning the news. Basically a reflection on the importance of family and how it can so often transcend blood relatives

- End with a reflection on the funeral/flying back home and what I learned about forgiveness/family

This is just the rough sketch. I might end up focusing on just one of the three relatives I touch on, or (more likely) focus mostly on my grandmother and just lightly touch on the other two, but we’ll see.

Linchpins of Essay 2: “Major Depressive Episode”

I thought about memoir, and how not much interesting has happened to me that is more poignant than a funny story I might tell at a party.  I looked at my linchpins, and there was nothing I particularly wanted to write about, but there was one — well, two — that I definitely did not want to write about, and in many ways, have been avoiding really thinking through since it all happened.  For this reason I have decided to write about it anyway, despite how difficult it might be, precisely because it is hard.  They were numbers 7 and 8, pertaining to my friend’s attempted suicide.

Here are the linchpins of the essay:

- In December 2007, we meet Mike at a sushi restaurant he likes in a run-down strip mall off of Route 10 in Roxbury, NJ.  It is me, Nevin, and Andrew, but we’ll call him “Zuz” because that’s his nickname.  We wait for 10 minutes before he arrives.  We worry for a bit that he might not come — it was just as nerve-racking for him as it was for us, and under that I’m sure he felt a little bit of humiliation that we didn’t.  The place is empty.  He arrives, and we hug him in turn.  We do not talk about what he did or why, but rather what he’s doing now.  He’s into photography.  I see the scars on his neck.  I can’t see the ones that must be on his wrist because of the long-sleeves.  We do not talk about them.

-I learned about the whole thing through a grapevine of morbid gossip.  It happened on August 23rd.  Mike’s sister had told someone on her lacrosse team in high school, and the not-so-steel-trapped friend had spread it around.  My friend Scott had heard that he was dead.  Mike was not returning our calls, responding to texts, or generally communicating on facebook.  We knew something happened, but could not wrap our minds around the fact that he had killed himself, or that he even had the capacity to do it.  For a week we were unsure about our friend’s living situation.  I will probably write this part a bit more meaningfully, but the general idea is that I did not like the feeling of guilt and uncertainty.

-Now will come a general meditation on death.  Key questions: the shortness of our lives (he was only 19 at that point), why someone might want to end his life, how bad it felt afterwards.

-That night, after enjoying ourselves at the sushi place, we go to Mike’s house and stay up until 2am.  We decide that we will drive back him to Austin-Riggs the next day, a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts.  We still have not talked about “it”, but we’ve learned enough about his post-event life to know about his hospital.  We get up the next day at nine am.  I drive for three hours, Mike in the shotgun position and Nevin and Zuz in the back.  We talk, we laugh, we listen to music, we make fun of people in our graduating class.  Mike takes pictures, and takes one of a bridge that we cross that he particularly likes.  It’s just like a regular road trip, just like old times, except that we’re taking our good friend to the looney bin.

-A month after Mike’s attempt, I received an email from his mother entitled “Michael”, that explained in gruesome detail everything that had happened.  My own mother had written an email offering her condolences, and Mike’s mother had responded in long-form.  I assume it was a way of grieving or working through it, how candidly she wrote, but I was glad and mortified to have received it.  He had slit his wrists with a knife he bought in Germany, and then stabbed himself deep in the neck with it.  If his roommate in college — he’d been there one week — hadn’t come in 3 seconds afterwards, he would have certainly died right there.  The rest of the letter dealt with his hospital stay, his mental condition (he was a different person, she said, and for a long time he was not remorseful), and the future.

-Next I will detail the strangeness of the hospital.  Highlights: a guy with a lobotomy scar, another with several scars across his head, a woman who stared at us from a distance and with trepidation — Mike said she spoke to him once, saying only “I know what you’re doing here” and glaring at him before she walked away.  It was surreal to see my friend, who seemed normal, in this environment that was just pure, unadulterated insanity, and know that he had to be there.  The doctors said he had undergone a “Major Depressive Episode”.  It was a chemical change in his brain that made him severely depressed for between 2 weeks and 2 months (his was on the long side), insomniac, withdrawn, and sometimes culminates in suicide.  The worst part was that it’s fairly undetectable.  He acted normally, and the letter told me that while he was depressed, he drifted through conversations, repeating back what was said for the most part.  We hadn’t even noticed.

-Now a meditation on the point of life, in general, focusing on how I perceive things now.  It will be along the lines of “life is short, and there will be many bad things that happen, and while this may not be the worst one, most things will pale in comparison”.  Things like getting a bad grade, being dumped, or failing a responsibility will never be as bad as spreading dirt on your best friend’s coffin.

-Finally, and I’m realizing now that these linchpins are nearly 1,000 words themselves so sorry about the length, I will talk about the drive home.  It was late, maybe 10pm.  We left Mike’s hospital after a delicious dinner at a nearby specialty restaurant.  We hugged him goodbye, got in the car, and left.  We did not talk much on the ride home.  “That was a strange place.”  “Yeah I know.”  “I like this song.”  “Yeah, it’s good”.  We stayed silent for the most part.  I knew that things had changed, but they would probably become better for him, and in a wider degree, for all of us.  I had a feeling we were all thinking the same thing, and so we stayed silent.

Ok, so just for fun

Since I’m home NOT at jungle crush party and instead am alone in my den of leprosy (more commonly known as the Tridelt guest bedroom where we quarantine all of our sickly residents) I might as well force myself to be more specific than my cop-out previous post and try to imagine how I see my life at thirty-nine.

So here it goes.

My husband still sees the world through the lense of a five-year old going to the zoo.  He is happy and lively and makes me less serious.  He laughs more readily than he yells, and his presence is calming and exciting to me.

I hope we have kids who, in spite of their age, still put up with me feeding them endless, obnoxious declarations of my love and affection for them.  My mom put notes in my lunch on stressful days at school, and made special dinners for silly reasons and I want my kids to have those things too.  I hope they feel like they can talk to me or their dad if they’re sad, or in trouble, or even if they want to share something exciting that happened.

If I want anything for my kids, I want them to be uncool.  I hope they’re awkward and smart and full of curiosity.  Being part of the beautiful people, from what I have seen, gets you state school and an inclination to be reduced to a dull-minded shell of a person.  The outside is painful and hard, but to some degree, I think the inside can be too.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman said it best in Almost Famous when he’s consoling a heartbroken Patrick Fugit.  He says, “Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter…The only true currency in this bankrupt world… is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

I hope they trust me, even though I know they won’t, when I tell them there are greater things beyond high school.  For the beautiful people, life never stops being high school, and frankly, that’s just pathetic.

I hope my parents are still alive and that my sister is close by.  I’ll need my mom for reassurance when friends and Oprah are telling me seven thousand theories on constructive ways of telling my kid “no.”  I’ll need her to remind me how to make stuffing, real cranberry sauce, and what size turkey I’ll need at Thanksgiving.  My dad will make sure my kids don’t forget their Kennedy roots.  Even at fifty he can run three miles in under 19:59 (he insists on being faster than the year he was born) and I imagine at sixty-nine he’ll still try and kick a soccer ball around.  I have no doubt that he’ll teach them every Scottish/Irish song (the sweet and the obscene) he knows.  My sister will always put things into the most honest of perspectives for me.  She’s good at reminding me that there is rarely as much to any predicament as I think there is.

I hope to live far away from California — maybe in the northeast.  Anywhere where there are seasons and hills.  I would prefer lots of land over a big house.  I want lots of trees and hedges so I can have privacy without the frigidness of fence posts and gates.  I want horses — maybe one seasoned pro who raises my confidence and one project who I love for his potential.

Happiness is only real when shared

I recently went to my cousin Marcie’s wedding.  At the reception, before dinner was served, my uncle got up in front of the two-hundred and fifty guests Marcie and her husband Greg had invited to deliver his father-of-the-bride speech.  Before he could even begin, I was silently sobbing into my napkin.

My Aunt Lois, Marcie’s mother, died seven years ago in an unthinkable car accident.  She had been helping my uncle set out duck decoys in preparation for her two sons to come home for winter break.  My uncle always took them duck hunting.  When it started to get cold out, she decided to head back early in the old SUV they kept for off-roading.  On the unfamiliar gravel road, she lost control of the steering and drove into the marshy water that bordered the pathway.  Whether it was the impact of the crash or her inability to escape the flooding car that killed her, I am unsure.  I never asked and I never want to know.

In the absence of my Aunt Lois, we all knew that her only daughter’s biggest moments in life (graduating college, getting her first job, buying her first apartment, getting married) would be met with a mixture of celebration and mourning.

The speech began, and the words sounded muffled and distant to me as I focused all my efforts on keeping my tears silent.  But at one point in the speech, I heard a pearl of wisdom, the foundations of which I am unsure, that brought my senses back to the present.  “In all your accomplishments as a young woman, the pride you feel over everything you have succeeded in can never live up to the joy you will feel from now on, because happiness is only real when shared.”

Happiness is only real when shared.

I used to think that maybe I didn’t want to be married.  Not because I oppose to taking somone else’s last name or because I take issue with compromise.  I’m not at all afraid of the Betty Friedan Feminine Mystique misfortune in which I feel I never lived up to my true potential because I became a wife.  No.  I am terrifed of falling deeply in love, saying and meaning “forever,” only to be named “undesirable” further down the road. 

But in the case I do find someone I want to marry, what of having kids?  Having kids is a scary business.  First there’s the question of can I even have kids.  It’s not uncommon for women to have difficulty conceiving.  What then does that say about me as a woman if I can’t bear children?  Will my husband still want me if I fail to give him a child?

Let’s now assume I have no such troubles, and do become pregnant.  From the time of conception onwards, you are vulnerable to disappointment and pain.  There is always the risk of miscarriage, of having a stillborn, of having an infant too sickly to live for more than a few days outside the womb.  And what of birth defects?  Down syndrome, Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Diabetes, Heart defects, missing or deformed body parts.

And even if the baby comes out nine months later, crying soundly thanks to healthy lungs, and wriggling four little limbs and ten fingers and ten toes, what if he/she grows up to bear no resemblance to me at all?  Will I still feel like the rightful mother?  How can I feel ownership or pride in someone I feel I haven’t contributed to creating?  Or worse still.  What if he/she inherits all my worst traits?  A quick-tempered, stubborn, over-thinking, procrastinating little nightmare with a propensity to gain weight in the hips and thighs.  Who am I to pass on my flawed DNA to an innocent life form?

In all these fears, all of them combined cannot match my ultimate fear of being alone.  Those last six words that my uncle said were the most truthful I have ever heard regarding marriage.  What is being happy if you have no one to share it with?

So, to answer the question, all I hope for when I am thirty-nine is that I am near people who I love and who love me in return.

39 and Nowhere in Particular

I will live in Louisiana.  I will have dedicated my life to the pursuance of whatever catches my fancy.  I will have only recently arrived and will be getting used to the climate and be finding another job to pay the bills.  I will live in a modest apartment.  I won’t need much to live there and enjoy myself.  I will be alone, most likely.

During the day I will explore the area.  I will go into bars, jazz clubs, restaurants — whatever grabs my attention that day.  Once I get a job I will do that during the day and pursue my curiosity on the weekends.

I will probably write sometimes.  I will have no distractions, because I have just recently relocated.  Occasionally maybe a friend from some city I previously lived in will find me and take me out for coffee.  It will provide no inspiration.  I will not know where I find things to write about; perhaps this is why I will move so often.  I will say goodbye to the friend, thanks for coming but I need to get back to work.  They will leave either disappointed or satisfied.

I will most likely not have any children to worry about; if I do they are grown up and estranged.  I don’t like the idea of staying somewhere for a long time, bogged down by anything.  I like the freedom of being able to move and become someone else for a while.

Will I be happy?  Maybe.  I think I will like the freedom and the solitude.  It will probably get lonely sometimes, though.

Maybe I’ll have a faithful dog as a companion.  Or a cat.  Yeah, cats are better.

Educated Guesses

It’s obviously near impossible to say anything with certainty here, obviously, but I can guess that if I am lucky enough to be a parent at age 39, I will be an insecure one.  I will fight every instinct in my body to avoid being a “helicopter parent,” who never lets the kids leave the house without supervision, but I will do so at the expense of extra fretting on my part.  With every missed curfew, there will be frantic phone calls and lots of pacing, but there will not be grounding.

I will not, as far as I can see, be a housewife.  If I am the house will continually be a mess.

I will try to correspond with my brother as frequently as my mother does with hers, calling him once a week at least.  We probably will only end up talking a third of the time, however, and spend the other two thirds playing phone tag.  Because of my brother’s doting nature towards his significant others, and his tendency to attract manipulative women, there is 30% chance that I won’t think his wife deserves him, if he has one.  There’s a 95% chance my parents will agree.

I’m hoping that at 39 I’ve either avoided falling into a rut or am well on my way to getting out of one.  That is, of course, a huge assumption, that my career and family will be stable enough for a rut to start.  But there’s little that scares me more.  I think at 39 I’ll still go to rock concerts.

There’s a pretty good shot that I’ll be arthritic by that point, at least in my left knee.  I’m not even going to try to predict what medicine will be capable of at that point.  But however much it can be cured, I hope I won’t let keep me from walking or running or skiing or climbing stairs.  When I was in London with my parents, years ago, they wouldn’t climb with me to the top of a bell tower.  I begged but they told me they couldn’t.  I don’t want to ever have to say no to something physical because of one stupid slip in high school.  I think I’m nervous though that it’s thoroughly possible I will, in the end, have no choice.

By age 39, I will ensure that, if I have children, they spend at least one vacation on the beach.  I will tell myself that I’ll take loads of photos, but unless my husband or mother is there to pick up the slack, few photos will actually be taken.  I’ll be too busy trying to show them everything.

Choose Your Own Adventure

It is the eve of my twenty-first birthday – and also the eve of the new year. In approximately 27 seconds, I will take my first legal drink from a bottle of wine with a 1989 vintage; champagne is for the New Years’ revelers. Though I am unsure of many things, I am sure of this: I will hate my birthday at age 39 just as much as I hate it now.

I am a recent graduate, now, with a useless major and no job, but I have an itching sensation at the pit of my stomach. There may or may not be people around me; regardless, I am alone. I feel my parents’ house – on the precipice of 21, I have reached the age where this house is no longer mine, but theirs – looming over me. When the crystal ball plunges perilously close to the ground, the college fantasy ends and I find myself in a sharper, harsher world with zero and endless possibilities. I am the author of my own Choose Your Own Adventure.

1. 9:34 am Monday morning, January 4. My cell phone rings and I blearily grab it from underneath my pillow. “Hello?” I say huskily. Moments later, I bound excitedly from my bed, don all my workout gear, and bounce around the house. Men’s Health, after combing through hundreds of applications, selected little ol’ me for their paid internship program. “It’s a full-time reporting job, not a coffee-fetching, copy-making waste of your precious education,” says the flyer.

• a. I accept the internship. Proceed to #4.
• b. I decided that misery will be a good test of my perseverance. In a moment of utter stupidity, I turn down the internship. Proceed to #3.

2. It’s taken a couple months of searching, but I’ve finally landed a job in corporate fitness. I know that I will be the low man on the totem poll — but I’m really excited about the perks of the job — free food and access to a top-of-the-line gym, and numerous opportunities to try out experimental equipment. Every day, I discuss my passion: I talk for hours about the importance of shifting employees’ mindset from calories to macronutrients and the possible benefits of designing a lunchtime High Intensity Interval Training program. My coworkers engage in the conversation and even contribute.

• a. After a year in the job, I decide to go to grad school to get a joint degree in nutrition and physiology. Proceed to #5.
• b. Though part of me feels I should continue my education, I realize that I can achieve success in this career path without tacking on an R.D. to the end of my name. Proceed to #6.

3. It’s been several months and I’m still a card-carrying member of the unemployed. Nauseated, I log on to the Kaplan website and sign up for the LSATs. My first LSAT classes start next week.

• a. I go to law school and become a lawyer. Proceed to #7.
• b. I go to law school and use my degree to pursue health policy in D.C. Proceed to #6.

4. On the eve of my fortieth birthday, I sip on my staple drink of club soda, vodka, and lime, surrounded by fit bodies clad in one-of-a-kind designer dresses and tailored tuxedos. It’s my party, and I’ll drink whatever I want to, damn it! With one buff arm – I’ve only furthered my powerlifting ambitions since college – I set my drink down on the chromatic bar stool, and head to the loo to check my makeup. It’s only a few minutes until midnight and my husband hates kissing me when I wear “all that lip gunk.” He and I met on the top of Mount Washington, right beneath the small waterfall, when I was sans makeup. But hey, a girl’s got to get out of her Under Armour sometimes, right? Upon looking in the mirror, I smile slightly and turn my head from side to side, double checking my subtle botox job. Upon exiting the bathroom, I hear the familiar clink of a knife against a champagne glass. “Congratulations, Ms. Slater,” the voice says, “on another year of increased subscribers and a magazine we can all be proud of…and happy birthday.”

5. On the eve of my fortieth birthday, I sip on my favorite go-to drink: cocoa powder and stevia mixed in hot water. My husband rolls his eyes at me as he chugs down his second beer of the night. “It’s your birthday, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “Can’t you live a little?” This is why I hate my birthday.

At the party are a few of my former clients; I tried the whole private sphere for a while but got sick and tired of doling out advice just to have it ignored. I have only held my current position for a few years, but I love traveling from location to location and implementing real, tangible change. I just wish I got to see more of my two dogs — my husband travels with me, but it’s too much for the puppies. They pretty much live with my brother now. I wonder if I will ever live in a house I call a home.

6. On the eve of my fortieth birthday, I savor my Cosmopolitan. “Is this the Diet Cranberry or the Cranberry Lite?” I ask the bartender. When I go to the bathroom, I avoid looking into the mirror. Yesterday, I took the plunge and cut my hair into a sensible, chin-length bob. I look…professional — the haircut only accentuates the austere lines of my two-piece suit. I walk passed a young girl who is leaning sensuously against my boss. Ah, the latest fling. But she’s got fabulously toned arms. I wonder if she works out or if she’s just a mesomorph. I miss talking about working out — now everything I say is brand-image-this and cost-efficiency-that.

7. On the eve of my fortieth birthday, I slurp at my hot chocolate, spilling a few drops on my holey pajamas, and watch Love Actually for what has to be the hundredth time. Did I mention that I hate my birthday? The phone rings:
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“What are you doing home?” she asks.
“Ugh, I’m still working on that big case. I thought Entertainment would be more interesting than Corporate, but I really don’t care if Miley wants to sue Billy Rae.”
“It’s your birthday. You should go out. Maybe meet somebody.”
“I don’t have time, Mom.” She sighs.
I know what she means. What’s the point of having this big house if you have no one to share it with?

39.

I fear that at age 39 I am going to be one of those women. You know, never married, completely psychotic, lives in a one-bedroom apartment with 9 cats. I don’t know why I feel destined to carry out such an existence; it’s certainly not who I want to be. But I can’t help shake the feeling that if I’m not who I thought I would be now, why would things be any different 20 years from now?

When I was younger, my life was carefully planned and strategized. I was going to make straight A’s and be volunteer of the year and have a part time job and be popular and pretty and graduate at the top of my class and get into my selective, prestigious university and then I would be happy and life could really begin. Unfortunately, I discovered that once I achieved all of these things and arrived at my selective, prestigious university I was utterly miserable. It wasn’t what I really wanted at all and I had spent the past four years of my life doing nothing but trying to obtain it.

So I don’t make plans anymore. I don’t try to figure out where or who I’ll be twenty years from now. It seems that it could only end in disappointment because what I want now is almost certainly not what I will want when I am nearing 40.

I imagine it would be nice to live in Europe. I would like to be in love, maybe even with the same person I am in love with now. But happiness is really the only goal I’ve set for myself at this point. I care about learning, but I don’t care much about school. I don’t care about degrees or prestige anymore. I’m not concerned with making any certain amount of money or writing for any particular publication. Because life is just too short to set goals that one doesn’t know will ultimately be fulfilling. So at 39 I hope to be happy. Whatever that entails.

I couldn’t even walk 19 years ago. So in another 19. It’s possible.

I would like to say that when I am 39, I will be happy to just be alive— just to still be kicking.  At the moment I can safely say that is not true.

I want to be something great. I want to be respected and have money.  I would love a wife who loves me. I hope I still have a complete fascination in all things related to women, I hope in some shape, that I still wake up and enjoy looking for them. I hope this does not conflict with possible wives or I hope to have no wife but a woman who would happily be a wife.

I pray I am still be fascinated by the world. I hope I still enjoy drives and walks, and the odd colors I see in things, and hope that I still wonder what colors I cannot see. I hope that the homeless men and women I meet on these walks and their stories are still of interest and I do not yet assume they are all bums and drunks, or at least do not assume they have no wisdom of their own.

I would like to still smoke, unafraid of the growing possibility of an untimely, painful, and entirely deserved death. I hope that when people ask me for cigarettes I will happily give them under the assumption that it will all come back around.

I hope to be a person who has a wisdom beyond his years, and is unafraid to have all of it challenged. I hope people enjoy talking to me, and I hope I still enjoy listening. I hope I still believe everyone has worth.

I would like to be done procrastinating. I would like to find a little more value in trying method’s of others before dismissing them as less than my own. I hope that I still have as much faith in my own.

I want to have directed a movie. A really good movie. A movie that will be called a film. A movie that may be called film and even said to contribute to the cinema.  I hope to be able to stop worrying so much about movies, film, and cinema so instead of worrying I can just make a movie worth watching. I hope I still like movies, film, and cinema.

I would love to still cry and yell. I hope to still hope for natural disasters for the adventure of it.

I hope I am not certain I have achieved any of these things in their entirety, but that it’s still worth a shot.

I do hope I am still alive.

 

Smiling and Dreaming

Most of the things in my life concern working for the future without much regard at all to the things I accomplished along the way. As such, I would like to pretend that at age 39, I will have reached a place in life where all of my dreams have come true, and there are no further frontiers to see and conquer. Wouldn’t that suck? How boring. I’ll try to be realistic with myself for the purposes of this blog post.

At age 39, I am a married man. I met her in grad school somewhere in the golden state. She was a badly-concealed wreck when I met her—like everyone else I’ve ever fallen in love with—but now she has conquered her demons. This is why we work. We have both conquered our adolescent demons. I have finally found someone unstable and managed to make them whole. She is an artistic person, definitely not an engineer, probably a writer—probably with several books published with decent success, although she has not yet broken the mold. I am confident that she will. She has a sense of humor that is not terribly corny, but she finds my corniness endearing. We have two children, and I am sure they are both boys, judging by my family’s genetics. They are both middle-schoolers. They often get on each other’s nerves and we have raised them very nearly as my parents raised me. Speaking of my parents, they are both still healthy, we live near them, in a good-sized city—probably in Texas somewhere. My best friend Matt lives in the same neighborhood with his wife and kids, and shows up periodically like the odd guy out in a sitcom. We have two dogs, and no cats.

At age 39, I have done research that I cannot talk about for a decade. The government appreciates my silence, as my work probably involves major issues of national security. I work in nanotechnology, a field that has exploded everywhere, probably for the DoD. I am in the process of considering assistant professorships at several state universities—the unclassified elements of my work are serving me well. I am talking to Matt about it, as he is considering the same. My name has been in print numerous times, particularly in articles from my graduate and thesis work, although I do occasionally publish something new these days. I work more than forty hours a week, but not so many that I am unduly absent from my family. I have probably left a better-paying job to make the that true. I have also been writing, both fiction and nonfiction. At this point, I am probably considering a serious attempt at publishing something.

At age 39, I have gotten very good at guitar, though I still do it for my own pleasure only. My wife likes it when I play, and one of my sons is taking lessons. The other is a fair pianist. Both are in their school band, the aspiring guitarist plays a brass instrument, and the pianist plays percussion. My wife is a very good singer. Sometimes I play songs we loved when we were young, and she sings with me. I have stopped liking most new music, and am permanently stuck in the 90’s. My sons are developing their own tastes and I am doing my best to keep up with them.

At age 39, I am as happy as I have ever been. There are the usual ups and downs. I have no more mystical meaning to my life than I have ever had, but I find comfort in the closeness of my family and the effect I have had on other’s lives. My bucket list has been scratched out and rewritten dozens of times. It’s longer than ever. I still have not conquered my dreams. I just keep on dreaming, dreaming and smiling, smiling and dreaming.

Chris ‘existentialist in the early morning’ Garcia

39

When I was young, I clearly imagined what I would look like as a teenager. I visualized sprouting into someone tall and leggy, with sleek, razor-straight black hair that framed my face in a bob exactly level with my chin. For some reason, I always saw myself walking through the halls of a pristine high school, back perfectly erect, in a fitting denim jacket. I imagined myself utterly secure in my present, and in control of my future.

Today, I bear no resemblance to the above person. My physician’s chart tracking my height has leveled off, and I stand at an obviously petite height of 5 feet 2 inches. My hair is long and wavy, falling into my eyes incessantly and defying any efforts at control. Though my life is structured, it is equally fueled by the forces of whim and uncertainty – and everyday is an exercise in re-writing my plans for the future.

I am not the pristine package I once imagined I would be, as a little girl who idolized plastic princesses and sitcom prom queens. Nor would I ever want to be.

Personal development is a jagged, circuitous path, impossible to predict – just as you cannot foresee how a printed page of MapQuest directions will blossom into a road trip with fiery sunsets, a straggling hitchhiker, flat tires and calls to Triple-A, and the warming sensation of the sun on your shoulders as it streams in through the open windows. Envisioning your future self is fun, but futile. It perhaps functions better to illuminate your present desires than to pin down the reality of your future.

Who will I be approximately two decades from now, at the age of 39?

I will be someone, somewhere, with unknown ideas and experiences swimming around in my psyche.

I will, hopefully, have taken years of exposition – from my childhood love of disposable cameras and jet planes to my current visions of being an international journalist – and have turned these clouds of thought into a concrete lifestyle.

I will either be in or out of love – or perhaps in the murky waters in between.

I will have a sun-lit studio in my house reserved for the activity I consider my lifeblood: painting. At the crack of dawn on certain days, I will steal away to this room, slather oil paint on a canvas, and breathe in the precarious present. I hope my life will not only have aspects of art within it, but that I can exist within my art, enveloped in a larger framework of passionate creation. (Then again, maybe my vision my fall flat. Maybe my “studio” will function as a dusty storage space, crowded with cardboard boxes, a reminder of unfulfilled promises to myself.)

I will, hopefully, be living in a world to which I am actually contributing.

I will, hopefully, be a mother to kids who like to finger-paint and at the end of the day come home with dirt between their toes – adventures had, lives lived.

I will be someone, somewhere.

My Life at 39

I don’t like thinking about the future. Every time I start, I begin to think that I have things figured out, and that I have a clear sense of where my life is headed. And every time I enter this train of thought, my life inevitably takes some wholly unexpected turn. The most glaring example of this is probably the time I had to move from San Francisco to Tampa. I know I’ve blogged about moving before, but this particular move was even more unsettling because it came at a point when I thought I was starting to figure things out. It was the first place I’d spent more than 2 years living in, and this was a really big deal to me. In my four years there, I had decided that I had made several lifelong friends (I’ve now lost touch with them except through the occasional Facebook greeting) and found the place in which I could attend college and begin a happy and successful adult life. All this fell through with one announcement from my dad that he had been offered a better job that would take us all the way across the country to Florida. 

The point is, I don’t really want to think too much about what my life will be like or what I want my life to be like when I’m 39. I’d rather just live life day-by-day and see where my decisions take me. For now, all I know is I would like to be happily married, have a few kids (probably just two) and a stable career that pays me enough to take care of my family. I would like both of my parents to be alive, although I understand there is some possibility they will not be (they would be 79 and 84, respectively), which is something that deeply saddens me. I think I’d like to live in California, but there are plenty of other places I would be proud to call my home. The little kid in me wants an elaborate mansion filled with useless distractions like a basketball court or miniature golf course in my backyard, but I would be just fine with a cozy home just big enough for my family. 

More importantly than the material things I desire at the age of 39, I just hope that I maintain my imagination and love of life. It’s easy to enjoy living when you’re in college, surrounded by some of your closest friends with no genuine real-world worries. But once you grow into a role when you become financially responsible for yourself and for others, it becomes easy to forget about the simple pleasures of life. I look up to both of my parents because I think they’ve done a great job of maintaining their happiness through the little things. Whether it be through reading a book or traveling on family vacations, my parents have found ways to stay happy even in some very difficult times. As long as I can continue to find ways to appreciate how wonderful it really is just to be alive, I really don’t give a damn how the rest of my life turns out.

When I turn 39, I want to be able to look back on my life and be proud of all that I’ve accomplished. I want to be able to say that I was mostly happy for all 39 of those years, lived with no major regrets and built a stable life for myself. That leaves plenty of unexplained variables, but as long as I can have these basic pleasures, that’s exactly what I want.

In a year, or two, or twenty

Something about the far ahead future is both terrifying and exciting. No, this is not a new revelation. I know many people have said that before, but I thought I’d at least voice my agreement.

The big mental and emotional block for me envisioning myself at age 39 is that that is my mother’s age. Yes, she’s a young mom, but sometimes I think my existence has made her age faster than most people. I think she acts like she’s almost 50, instead of almost 40. At 20, she had to act like she was 30. She had to play “mom.” She always had to play “mom” way early than she expected to. Now I’m 700 miles away, and she has little responsibility for me anymore (other than the financial and her occasional play in my emotional needs). I think she fails to recognize how much potential she has ahead of her. Her job isn’t her dream, but it’s necessary. She’s waiting for it all to be over. She lives the life of someone who is headed to retirement: one humdrum day after another, occasionally partaking in those things she most enjoys.

While part of me looks up to my mom, a huge part of me never wants to be like her. I don’t want her life. I don’t want to work at a desk, behind a computer, for my entire life. I don’t want to feel like the rest of my life is planned, cut and dry by 39. I don’t ever want to be “sure” of my role in the world for more than a few years at a time.

At 39, there are things that I want, but as I intend to never be sure of myself, I cannot say these are things I’ll have or even still want at 39.

But for now, I want a house. Not a big house. I’m afraid of big houses. I’m afraid of too much space. I want a husband. A decent one. I want him to be the first man I married. I want a dog. I want security, but not stability. I’m not sure if I want a child, but if I do decide I want one, I want him/her to already be born and in school.

Most importantly, I will be unsure of myself. Although I’ll have a steady job, I will be searching for another. I will spend late nights, awake, mumbling to my husband, pillow to pillow, about how I’m thinking about applying for a new job, in a new field. I will have a drive to keep restarting my life. This drive to bring myself to the unknown. I will have already spent time in one field and gotten sick of it. This brought me to the realization that I wanted to do something completely different and so, I will endeavor to do so.

In my family, we have this history of what my family lovingly refers to as “serial hobbies.” We find interest in one thing and immerse ourselves in the topic. We learn all we can (or care to), and then we get bored and find something new. For me, the “serial hobby” has manifested itself a bit differently. I have developed a set of interests that exist around me like a series of magnets. I am always pulled more so to one than another. Soon enough, the draw grows weaker, and suddenly another magnet is strong enough to pull me away and my mind and attitude change. My focus is different. As evidenced by my family, this will never change.

If I am not at least somewhat unstable at the age of 39, I will have lived life too fast.

Linchpins

I am five and I am in bed with the light off and the door closed.  I dream that a grinning skeleton is hovering above me, running back and forth between the door and my bed.  Each time he comes over my head he sprinkles salt and pepper on me so he can eat me.  I start sobbing, and when my mother opens the door to see what’s wrong, light floods in and the skeleton disappears.  After that night, I sleep with my bedroom door open and the hall light on.

I am six or seven and James is carrying me on his shoulders through New York.  He tells me stand still, goes behind me, and sweeps me up and settles me with my legs around his neck as he strides forward.  I feel like I’m floating.  I love looking down at all the other children on the sidewalks six feet under me, walking and holding their parent’s hands while I bob by.  I decide I have the world’s best brother.

I am maybe 9 and my parents are cleaning up from a family party.  They mention that one of the cars is parked on the street, to give our visitors more driveway space to park in, and neither of them wants to retrieve the car.  I tell them I’ll do it and walk out the door into the garage.  They’re laughing, and I want to prove them wrong but don’ t know how.  James comes out into the garage and tells me to come with him.  We walk down to the street and he unlocks the car, opens the driver seat and tells me to get in.  I ask what he’s doing and he says, “I’m going to teach you how to drive.”  He puts the keys in and turns them but keeps the car in park.  He has me practice pressing the gas and brake, reciting several times which is which.  I cringe when the engine whirrs at the press of the gas.  He puts my hands on the steering wheel, puts it in drive, and tells me to go.  We’re rolling down the street.  I’m perched on the edge of the seat just to reach the pedals.  Further down on the right, another car is parked, and it makes me nervous.  The road slopes downhill and we pick up some speed.  I yelp his name as a car drives up the street on the other side.  I feel trapped with the two other cars on the road.  He tells me to brake and I pound my foot down on what I hope is the correct side.  It’s the gas.  I screech and James grabs the wheel and pulls it right, so that the car jumps the shallow curb and drives in a long arc halfway up the yard of the house next door to ours.  The car stops.  He slips out of his door, comes around a lets me out.  We switch sides, and he backs out of the yard, back on to the street, and drives up the driveway back into our garage.  There are still tire tracks in the neighbor’s grass.  As James parks my Dad opens the door to the garage and looks at us with an emotionless face.  “He knows,” I tell James.  He hurriedly hushes me.  I swear, at his insistence, that I will never tell anybody.

I am 11 and I am in 8^th period English.  The principal comes over the loudspeaker and says she had an announcement: there was an attack in New York City on the World Trade Center, but that everything is ok.  I know my Dad works close to the Twin Towers.  I raise my hand and ask the teacher what happened.  She hesitates and tells us she doesn’t think she can say.  When the bell rings and I walk to my locker I hear a boy telling another World War III has started.  He sounds excited.  Thirty minutes later I run off the bus to ask my mom where Dad is.  She looks at me and tells me, very slowly, that there was an attack and the Twin Towers are gone, but he is fine.  His building was trashed, but he had been out of his office when the windows imploded.

I am 12 and sitting in a small room, taking a piano lesson.  Arlene asks how school is going.  I tell her it’s fine, that there are no issues and she doesn’t believe me.  She says she knows I’m at a tricky time in life.  I ask her if she really believes that and she tells me absolutely.  She says it’s hard because I don’t know who I am, but I know who I want to be.

I am 15 and he tells me he’s gay.  I realize that, although I’d been crushing on him for the past year, I sort of knew all along.

I am 15 on a school trip to Spain.  I am with three friends and we wander outside of our hotel in Seville and down the street to a gift shop.  The doorway is blocked by a woman with a stroller, so we look at the front window display.  My friend Nick says, ”guys” in a certain voice and points out a porcelain figure of a man in Klu Klux Klan robes, next to a crucifix.  Next to it are two other figures, but their robes are black and mint green.  We instantly back away from the store and rush back to the hotel, glancing behind us to make sure no one is following us.  The next day, we see the figures again in a different store.  We learn that the robes are worn by priests during Easter season in a large festival. We don’t leave the hotel for another day, but we never go back to visit the first store.

It is my 17^th birthday.  I have just finished class and am standing talking to friends next to the auditorium.  My prom date comes and wishes me a Happy Birthday.  He asks if I have a minute.  I say yes and we go into the auditorium and sit down on the top floor in the back behind the seats.  He says he got me a back massage for my birthday and begins kneading my back.  He has long, leans hands and he’s very good at it.  I turn around to face him and lean forward.  He asks if I want to.  I say yeah.  He gives me my first kiss.  He tastes so clean that I feel greasy.

I am 17 and I am being wheeled into an operating room.  My father has just kissed me on the forehead and he and my mother are very close to each other, and for second I’m convinced I’m not coming out.  I am on my back, prostrate.  I can’t look to my left because there’s an IV needle in my hand, and I can’t stomach the way it bulges against the thin skin there. I realize I’m tearing up and instantly try to hide it.  The doctors don’t seem surprised.  We slide through swinging doors and they help me slide onto the table.  I’m trying not to bend my knee, not to do any more damage.  One of men takes the tube coming out of my hand and screws it to a new bag.  He eyes me and tells me I might feel something.  Cold enters the veins of my left arm and slips up my shoulder.  I wait to feel it touch my brain.

I am 18 and in Grant park, just outside of the ticked area where Barack Obama is speaking.  I am standing with two girls from my house, and two friends of one of the girls from high school.  We’re watching the election on a screen.  It’s almost certain it will be Obama.  We countdown from twenty seconds as the west coast polls go to close.  The instant we say “one,” BREAKING NEWS hits the screen.  All five of us hug at once, in a circle, bumping into each other and the people around us.  Couples kiss everywhere.  An enormous voice booms, “I love everybody right now!”  I hardly know the people I’m with.  It doesn’t matter.

Julia’s Ten Linchpins

1.) I’m just tall enough to look over the edge of the casket into Themus’ closed eyes. I’m four years old and my patent leather Mary Janes are reflecting the dim light of the funeral parlor. I look over at my cousin; she is six and is standing beside me with her hands gripping the edge of the wooden box. I lean in toward Themus’ face. Her skin is olive-colored and her black hair cascades around her young face and onto her shoulders. I have the urge to touch her. I poke my little hand through the flowers that border the casket’s edge and place a small index finger on her cheek. It’s cold. “Touch her.” I say to Xanathea, “It’s really cold.”

2.) I’m in first grade at St. Athanasius grade school. It’s a “market day” fundraiser so all the mothers come after school to purchase food from the set up in the cafe-gym-atorium. My mom is conversing with Kate Jamison’s mom, Tina, about the Italian Dippers and chocolate covered cherries. Kate and I are allowed to go outside and play on the jungle gym. We see Alison Moreno at the other end of the playground. No one likes Alison. She is in our grade but is terribly annoying and can’t read very well. She always tries to play with us and we never want her to. Sometimes my mom makes me have play dates with her and I am miserable during them, but I kind of know it’s the right thing to do. Alison approaches Kate and I as we exchange glances in a silent communication of “oh brother, what are we going to do about this.” Suddenly, Kate’s eyes widen and a smirk appears on her face. She jumps off of the monkey bars and begins to run. Just as Alison reaches us, Kate is bolting across the woodchips toward the parking lot. I see Alison’s confused face as she starts to say something to me, but I don’t let her because I have started to follow Kate. “Run!” she shouts back at me, “Alison is the bad guy and we have to run away!” She is laughing, so I laugh too. But she has gotten a head start so I have to pick up the pace to keep up. We dart out of the parking lot and onto the sidewalk in front of our school. I am right on Kate’s heels, watching her sneakers pound against the cement. She seems incredibly fast for a six-year old girl. I follow her down the street, afraid to look back at Alison, who I can hear beginning to chase us, not sure whether we are playing or whether we are being mean to her. I’m not sure either. I can hear Alison start to cry, yelling for us to stop. Kate keeps going full speed ahead, so I do too. I’m giggling and we both are shouting, “Yeah Allison is the bad guy! Don’t let her get us!” I hate that I’m running away from her, but I also love it. This memory is disjointed because the next thing I remember is Allison’s mother yelling at my mom. This is the first time I can really remember feeling guilty to the point of nausea.

3.) I am nine years old and I’m getting my makeup done for Chicago Light Opera Works’ Hansel and Gretel. I am in the basement of the Athenaeum theatre in my white chiffon “baby cherub” dress with a silver barrette in my hair. My white tights and ballet shoes are snug. I feel incredibly small in my chair, and the makeup artist is really going to town on my face. I have never gotten my makeup done before. The room I am in is full of wigs and costumes and props. I am listening to opera singers warm up their voices in the hallway. I am thinking how bizarre the theatre world is.

4.) It’s fifth grade and Jordan Hynes’ mom throws a sleepover surprise party for Sarah Adler, our best friend who is moving back to Oregon during winter break. We go on a scavenger hunt to all of our houses. It is an unusually warm autumn night, and I am with all of my friends and Jordan’s mom. I am part of an adorable gaggle of ten-year old girls flouncing down the street. I feel liberated, grown-up, and excited. I love Sarah and I think to myself how I don’t want this night to end.

5.) I am watching Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. I have seen them many times before, but this particular piece is a new work. It is 2006 and I am a senior in high school. The piece is entitled “Crytpoglyph” and is choreographed by world famous choreographer, Lar Lubovitch. The music is an original score by Meredith Monk. It is a duet, between a man and a woman. It is whimsical and ethereal, it seems to defy gravity and hang in the air in a bubble where time doesn’t exist. The dancers are in bright yellow, and giant letters of the alphabet hang from the ceiling. They intertwine and extend themselves smoothly and innocently. The piece is otherworldly. I am enraptured. I am stunned and speechless. When it finishes, and I immediately want it back.

http://www.exploredance.com/upload/gallery/5/512_3784.jpg

6.) It is the summer before my freshman year of high school. I am in the Georgian Bay of Canada on a nine-day kayak trip through my camp. It is evening, and most of my group is asleep in their tents. We are on “Hen Island” as it is affectionately called because of its shape. I am sitting on the edge of the island; it is not that big at all, with my friend Morgan. It is the most spectacular night out. The water and the sky are the same glowing darkness, but the water glimmers as if someone had painted it. The stars are immaculate. The night is calm and we are so close to the water it feels like we are sitting on top of it. The moon is giant. We both agree that we wouldn’t be surprised at all if the flying ship from Peter Pan were to float across the sky. I can safely say about this moment in my life, that it was truly magical.

7.) I’m a freshman in high school, and I have just turned fifteen. I’m in “Ragtime,” my high school’s musical and I am enthralled with the two girls I have become close with in the production. They are both older than me, and I think they are beautiful and fun and talented. We are a great trio, and we instantly click with each other. It is a Friday night during spring break, and we have rehearsals all week so we aren’t allowed to go out of town. Since all of our other friends are on vacation, we spend a lot of time together this week. Kira, Emily, and I sleep over at Emily’s and plan on going to rehearsal the next day together. Emily steals a bottle of wine and Bacardi from her parents’ vast collection of alcoholic beverages. I have never been drunk before. We start to drink copiously, and I realize I am in over my head. But I drink and drink thinking I must be some sort of wonder woman because alcohol seems to have no effect on me. When I stand up from the couch, the room is spinning. Oh. It appears I am plastered. We laugh, we cry, we stay up late and then crash on Emily’s giant bed. I close my eyes on the blurred colors of the room. An hour later, I wake up and roll off the bed onto the floor. I am crawling toward the edge of the carpet and manage to make it to the wood panels before I throw up. I throw up seven more times during the night.

8.) It is my junior year of high school. Harrison is very much in love with me. I sure like him a lot.

9.) It is six am. I can’t remember being awake at this time since…ever. But I am in line in the historic student Union at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with my roommate Jen. We get to our individual booths and I color in the bubble next to Barack Obama’s name. I color it in hard, as if somehow that would make it worth more. Then I color in the bubble next to the legalization of medicinal marijuana in the state of Michigan.

10.) I am in “Ruby of Siam” looking at my father across two bowls of Pad Thai. Our table is next to the window. My dad is a man of few words, but when he has something to say, you know he means it. He is sincere, and has the potential to be quite poignant at times, if you can sift through the hard exterior. It is winter break of 2008, and I have left the University of Michigan. I accepted at Northwestern and would begin in two weeks. I feel uprooted, floating in suspended animation with no sense of grounding. “What am I doing?” I think.  “Who do I think I am?” My father looks over at me; I appear to be anxiously rambling on about my plans for the future when I really am terrified to admit that I have no idea. “Julia,” he says to me. “Don’t worry too much. You are my daughter, and you happen to be incredible. You’re smart as a whip, and you dance like a dream.” Then he takes a bite of noodles and I don’t want him to see that I might start to cry.

 

 

 

10 Windows.

2 ½. I was walking past the box painted with wolves, rabbits, and zebras that formerly held all my balls. It was empty, and as I approached my window I saw that I had built a tower of them reaching the window. I climbed to the top as some gave way and rolled out.  For the first time I looked out unhelped, onto the gray courtyard of our building in New York. It was the first dream I remember, and I made a point to never forget it.

3. I was told I would have a sister. I imagined her as a girl dressed in all red, wearing a pea coat, a beret, and shiny rubber boots. She sat on a window seat her body faced me from where I sat on the couch but her head was twisted towards the window until she turned her head and stopped staring directly in my eyes, unblinking.

6. At my grandfather’s wake I remember giving myself the duty of waiting for him to breathe. I saw his chest quiver, and ran up to mother to tell her the news and she laughed and then cried and without looking told me he was not breathing. My mother never looked.

7. It is Christmas and I hope to get an Nintendo 64. I wake up early and open all the presents. I find it and run to my parents excited to tell them that Santa had found one, and brought it. They are shocked, they come to the living room to find all the presents open and say I cannot have it for another week. I spend the rest of the morning trying to show my sister how nice her, already-been-opened presents are. I hated my reckless excitement.

14. I am on a three day school camping trip to start my freshman year. I have been in Los Angeles for a week and we have just gotten off the buses. My jokes have failed, my sports hold no weight, and I am very short. They do a roll call. There is not a single familiar name and it is so dry my lips are already chapped. I start to tear and say “I’m fuckin’ allergic to California” before anyone asks, I never thought of it as a lie.

16. My mother yells at me for not trying and she is right, I am not. I start to yell over her cursing and making a show. I shout back, “Fuck you.” She slaps me and before her hand has left my face I have grabbed her by the wrist and hit her back. I notice my sister standing in the doorway behind her. She is crying too. My mother grabs her face and runs out. Her jaw is dislocated.

17. I am headed home after school. I have bought cigarettes with a friend’s driver’s license—I stole it as a joke. I detoured on the way home to avoid being seen. I light a cigarette it was a Marlboro 27, with a light blue Bic lighter. It is the first time I will smoke alone. I am awkward with it and smoking and driving is hard and everyone nearby seems like a spy, watching me. I am ashamed. I finish it, and light another. I get angry that strangers have such a profound effect on me.

18. I throw my fists into the wooded ground of Vassar’s campus. I start yelling quietly and with each punch I get louder. I am terrified of being heard.  I throw my fists harder, but I refuse to yell louder. I throw my hardest punch and the pain rips a beast’s scream from my lungs and then my fists fly, and my yell becomes a continuous cry. I am left panting, crying, and hoarse. Both my fists are bleeding and there are wood chips splintered between my knuckles. I can yell again.

18. I am watching a rehearsal of Indians by Arthur Kopit in the Barber theatre. I see a beautiful girl onstage. I imagine everyone turning red or green. Green if I will sleep with them, red if I will not. She is the only one in the room who turns green. I tell myself I am idiot and decide to try anyway.

19. Her period is not coming and I am going to be a father. Abortion had sounded like the only option until I faced the idea of a possible person. Whether it was alive or dead at any given moment had no bearing. Killing a possible person, with a possible future, a possible family, all created from this girl who I think is as good as they come and myself, who I do like—we would have a cool kid. I cannot tell her I am worried, because she will worry.  I read up on pregnancy. I have accepted my fate, and I can only wait for her to realize.  She is a week late until that monthly blood is spilled, and I am free—I will no longer meddle with life I cannot carry.

No offense to the dog

1. I sit up in my “big girl” bed to see my baby sister, Claire, standing in her crib, both hands over the railings, staring at me with her mouth slightly agape.  I yell at her to stop and she doesn’t even flinch.  I pull the covers over my head to hide, but I can still feel her wide, staring eyes boring into me through the sheets.  I want her to disappear.  I am almost three.
2. Smoothing the comforter around each of my shoulders, my dad sings to me.  I gaze up at him, watching as his mouth forms the words to “Molly Malone.”  At the line, “Where the girls are so pretty,” he pets my hair and I tuck in my chin, trying to hide my smile.  I don’t know what “cockles” and “mussels” are.  I imagine they are like the oysters in “Alice and Wonderland,” happily dancing behind the walrus along the beach.  Dublin must be magical.  I am five.
3. It’s my first trip to the snow and my parents have enrolled my sister and me in ski school.  I am determined to be the best in my age group, but I am interrupted in my concentration by another ski instructor calling my name.  I look up and see Claire being towed up the slope, tears and snot streaming down her face.  She is bright red and screaming “I JUST WANT MY SISTER!!”  I am deeply mortified.  Before I can escape, she has launched herself on top of me, her wet face buried in my shoulder and her hands gripping my coat in desperation.  I want to throw her off of me, but she is stronger in her resolve to stay near me than I am in mine to push her away.  I am six and she is four.
4. After my lesson, I run over to the stall where the mare and foal are kept.  My teacher slides open the door, and I am greeted by fuzzy muzzle.  The colt is my height and smells wonderfully warm and new.  His eyes are bright with curiosity as he snuffles my hair with his little nostrils.  He nips at my shirt and sucks on my fingers with his toothless gums, making playful little nickering sounds in his throat.  In this moment, every fiber of my six-year old being longs to be a horse.
5. I freeze the scene.  The one in Beauty and the Beast where Gaston rips open his shirt to proudly display his broad chest full of curly hair.  My sister and I swoon in mock of the blonde women on the screen, but I am hardly acting.  Something about his confidence and aggression makes me catch my breath right as he pulls away the fabric to reveal those cartoon perfected pectorals.  I stare at the frozen screen and sit with my legs crossed tightly together – I feel slightly like I have to pee.  I am almost seven.
6. Sleeping is difficult for me.  For Claire it’s so easy.  I stand over her and demand to know how she does it.  “Just close your eyes,” she says.  I don’t understand.  “But what do you think about?”  She sighs, slightly exasperated, “Nothing, Catherine.  I don’t think about anything.”  “That’s not possible.  How can you not be thinking about anything?”  She’s already asleep again.  I’m seven.
7. The only make-up I really know how to use is the mascara and lipstick I’ve seen my mother put on when she gets ready in the morning.  I like the taste of the lipstick as I rub my lips together to even out my heavy-handed application, and I almost blind myself as I attempt to comb the sticky black liquid through my lashes.  Looking for other things to try, I open the less familiar drawers in my mother’s bathroom.  I find a red lacey bra and thong that match.  The bra looks sad on my adolescent shape, sagging pitifully over what has yet to come.  But the thong instantly makes me feel curiously excited and powerful.  I want to try it on under my jeans, my favorite dress, even my soccer shorts.  I was thirteen.
8. The librarian asks me to sit outside if I’m going to eat my lunch – there’s no food allowed in the library.  I turn bright red and promise to put it away, but she’s resolute in her decision to evict me.  I’ve been estranged from my vastly popular and wholly vapid friends for a whole year now, and haven’t really bothered to make new ones.  I don’t even exist on the dreaded hierarchy of the “quad.”  Rolling my eyes at the “golden retriever” girls as I have dubbed them (happy just to flip their straightened hair and wag their sun-tanned tongues in gossip) I go to my next class and find my teacher preparing his lecture.  I still have time before the bell, so I sit down and reabsorb myself in reviewing for the history exam I have later that day.  I am fifteen.
9. Sitting with my back straight and my chin raised, I am ready to present at my first Constitutional Law Debate.  I am visualizing court cases in my mind, feverishly trying to review before the judges come in and the testimony begins when I notice one of my teammates staring at me.  “What?” I ask.  “You look like your name should be Princess WASP.”  This is ridiculous, coming from Fred, who is Chinese and doesn’t understand that “Kennedy” definitively disqualifies me from ever being considered blue-blooded.  But I can’t help liking the ring of “Princess.”  I don’t stop the rest of the team from calling me this from now on.  She becomes the girl who saves me from being consumed by self-doubt for the rest of the year.  I am seventeen.
10. My two best friends both have sex for the first time in the same week.  The first, who we jokingly refer to as the “half-virgin” due to two previous incomplete attempts, finally did it once and for all.  The second I discover had actually done it months before without telling me — without really telling anyone.  To my surprise, I’m less affected by the insult of her secrecy and more aware of how alone I feel.  I am truly the last.  Somehow, I knew I would be, but now I am.  What’s wrong with me?  That’s all I can ask myself.  What’s wrong with me?  I am twenty.

“To getting caught”

I imagine there are many other linchpins holding my life together, but these are the those that came up first—sorry there are 11, couldn’t figure out which one to scrap:

1. Age 5 or 6—The first friend I ever had was an Iranian girl named Shayda. She lived right across the street. We spent an afternoon planning the house we would live in together when we grew up.
2. 8th grade—I made a B in algebra. I was distraught. I wished all kinds of horrible things on my teacher. My parents laughed.
3. Spring ’03—A friend and I decided not to pitch a tent we had lugged eight miles. We fell asleep under a tree listening to the thunder and watching lightning play across the distant sky. Woke up to torrential rains. My friend’s parents let him in their tent. Mine didn’t. They laughed. Hysterically.
4. Summer ‘03—I stood atop Mt. Phillips at Philmont, NM. We had backpacked around half of our 70-some mile trek through the mountains. The climb was brutal. There were no switchbacks. At the top though, there was SNOW. And then… then there was the view.
5. January 2001—Mom told me grandpa died. He had been visiting my uncle in the hospital in Chicago. My Uncle got better. Grandpa had a stroke. The stress was just too much for him. When she told me, the look on her face was awful. I held her forever in my arms that night. She couldn’t stop herself from crying. I cried too. It was a devastating loss. That night, I realized for the first time in my life that my mother isn’t invincible.
6. May 2007—High school graduation. I was the salutatorian. Which meant I was first up. It was at the Erwin Center where the Texas Longhorns play basketball. More than 10,000 people stared at me at once. I felt completely naked. I was not confident. I went for humor in my speech. I hadn’t wanted to take it seriously. I’m not good with accolades. It went much better than I thought. I watched the valedictorian give hers after I was done. I always thought she was incredibly hot… but I gave a better speech.
7. Summer 2007—I skydived with my best friend. My mom flew in and clasped hands with me in freefall.
8. Summer 2007—Family vacation to South Padre. My then-angsty kid brother punched me in the face and stormed out of the condo. It hurt. Not physically. I realized then that he, himself, is a linchpin of my life. I told him so. For the first time in six years, I cried. So did he.
9. Winter 2007—A CA caught us drinking in Sargent. It was my second time. The CA wrote us up and closed the door. I stared at it, wondering what was going to happen to me. Behind me, I heard someone say, “to getting caught.” I turned around just in time to see my roommate and his friend taking a shot.
10. May 2008—I asked a girl to marry me at the lakefill. She said yes. I gave her my mom’s ring.
11. September 2008—Sophomore year. 1200 miles apart proved too much for her. Five years ended in five minutes.

Chris “making new linchpins daily” Garcia

Red Hair & Carnie Hands

It is Thanksgiving and I am ecstatic to be swimming with my cousin Maddy in her family’s fancy pool. I am secretly terrified of the automatic vacuum curling around my legs and sucking me under like a giant squid, but I would never pass up an opportunity to hang out with Maddy – although to be honest, she’s not very nice to me and I don’t think she likes me very much. But she has the most beautiful red hair in the world. My hair hangs in wet tangled mats around my face, while Maddy’s auburn hair lies in glossy, smooth perfection against her head. “Close your eyes,” she instructs me, “and lean back into the water until it hits the top of your forehead. Then lift your head up slowly.” “Will it make me beautiful?” I ask. Maddy nods.

Filled with a powerful rage, the origins of which I cannot remember, I watch from the kitchen window as my mom pours chlorine into the pool. Slamming the door behind me, I walk purposefully down the patio steps towards my unassuming mother. I wait expectantly for her to turn around and address me, but she doesn’t acknowledge my presence. My hands shoot out from my arms and attach themselves to the back of my mom’s muggy t-shirt, and shove at her hunched over body. I bring my hands to my face and stare at them in disbelief as my mom tumbles perilously close to the toxic water. She lifts herself off the deck as a few drops of blood mar the beige tile. I realize, in absolute horror, that I just tried to kill Mom.

I suck air into my lungs: “Little girls, little girls, everywhere I turn I can see them,” I warble, dancing drunkenly (or at least what my ten year old self perceives as drunkenly) across the stage. I am Miss Hannigan and I want this building to shine like the top of the Chrysler Building! None of my classmates have heard me sing before; Elesse said the only reason I got the part was because I was the class suck-up. I am determined to prove her wrong. I finish my rendition of Little Girls, quivering with adrenaline and exhilaration. I have found my calling. Elesse comes up to me after rehearsal and apologizes.

I’m visiting my Opa in the hospital; the doctors suspect he only has a few weeks left. Visiting him is uncomfortable; he makes a weird grumbling sound when he eats food, and even on his deathbed, he’s still rude to my grandma. I go to the bathroom down the hall. “Holy shit!” I squeak — only the second time I have ever used that expletive. I tug on my mom’s sleeve, “Mom,” I whisper into her ear, “I think I just got my period.”

James claps me on the shoulder: “I wrote you a song,” he says, and strums his guitar:
Sally’s got big boobs,
And really tiny feet
And little baby Carnie hands–
But she’s got big meat!

I return home from the admitted students’ preview of Cornell, and debate calling my boyfriend. Cornell is his dream school, but despite his near-perfect boards, he and I both knew before he ever applied that his GPA barely even qualifies him for UConn. I call him anyway; tonight is our six month anniversary and he has promised me a big surprise. I have already decided that tonight, I will tell him that I love him. “Hi, Mike,” I coo into the phone. Pause. “Hi,” he replies wearily.
“Is everything alright?” I ask.
“No.” Mike has never been a man of many words.
“What’s wrong?” I prod.
“I can’t really say.” Well, that’s just frustrating.
“Are you having problems with…you know…again?” Mike is still recovering from a horrific snowboarding accident, the details of which are better left unsaid.
“No.”
“Um, an emotional problem?”
“Maybe.”
45 minutes later, Mike finally opens up: “I was shopping for our anniversary gift,” he says. “And it hit me. We’ve been dating six months, and I don’t love you.”
“Well, I love you,” I say. “But if you don’t think you can love me, then we should probably break up.”
Mike pauses before saying, slowly, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t make myself love you.”
And that is the first – and only time – I have ever said “I love you” to a boy.

The night is eerily quiet; the only sound to keep me company is the wind rustling through the trees. I am completely and utterly alone on the street, and I am terrified. I pass the sign for Grahampton Road. Only one more street. I jog faster in an effort to keep my heart rate up, but it seems to be doing a pretty good job of that all on its own. I’m not sure which I believe: that every looming tree is a monster (irrational) or that behind every tree is a predator (slightly more rational). I’ve always been afraid of the dark — I slept with the light on until I was 12 — but I’m more afraid of being fat. Why’d the damn treadmill have to break? When I sneak into the back door of my house, I check the clock: 3:47 a.m. Something has got to change.

It’s the third night of New Student Week and I have just introduced the girls on my floor to Hungry Girl’s Magical Low Calorie Margarita. I’m feeling pretty magical. A tall boy taps me on the shoulder — I’ve always been a sucker for giants — “You’re HRH!” he says. “Excuse me?” “Hot Redhead,” he explains. Apparently he’s always been a sucker for redheads. He leads me outside Willard and asks if I want him to grab a condom. I laugh in his face. I have an out-of-body experience as we make out in the sorority quad bushes. I have problems grappling with the idea of being hot. He leaves to take care of a drunk friend. I find another tall guy ten minutes later. “I love college,” is the last thought I have before blacking out. I wake up and look in the mirror of Tall Guy #2’s single. I am missing all the skin on the left side of my upper lip. I go to Searle and the doctor attempts (and fails) to hide her laughter before prescribing me an antibiotic to treat Human Bite.

I close my eyes and sign the dotted line. I am no longer a theatre major.

Linchpins

I definitely have a lot more than 10, so I did my best to narrow it down.

1. What I consider to be my first real memory: stomach-down on a tiny yellow skateboard with pink wheels, pushing myself across the tile floor of our kitchen in San Diego. I was a little older than 2 years old.
2. When I was about 4 years old, I went to Belgium with my parents to visit my dad’s hometown and his side of the family. My dad was busy reconnecting with old friends, so my mom took me to the park. A dog chased me around a particularly gravely area, and, scared, I tripped and got a stone stuck in my tooth. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, crying, until my mom drew a picture of a horse on the chalkboard that made me feel a lot better.
3. In keeping with the trend of my most painful childhood injuries, I was 6 when I biked into a tree. I didn’t know that bikes with handbrakes existed, so I tried to pedal backwards instead as I hurtled down the hill. My whole face was cut and bloody, and I had to get 7 stitches on my gums. The first time I went to school after that, everyone was staring at my face. That was the first time I remember being self-conscious.
4. This one is actually two related memories. First, when I was about 6 (post-bike accident), I scored 6 out of 7 goals in my team’s soccer game. Second, I made a game-winning buzzer beater for my fourth grade basketball team when I was 8. These were two of the happiest moments of my childhood, and heavily influenced my childhood dream to become a professional athlete. I’ll never forget the pure joy and disregard for reality that comes with being a kid having fun.
5. I moved from San Francisco to Tampa in January of 2001, the middle of my 6th grade year. It was a small prep school (about 400 kids in the entire middle school), but still a lot bigger than my previous school (20 kids/grade). I was really shy and nervous, but it only got worse when my principal made me stand up in front of everyone at our daily convocation. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so petrified. 
6. The summer after 10th grade, I went to Hawaii for the National Math Convention (yes, I was in Math Club in high school). During our free time, my friends and I walked down the beach and found a 60-foot cliff overlooking the ocean with a sign that said “Do Not Go Past this Point: Death or Serious Injury Possible.” We spent the next hour taking turns jumping off that cliff.
7. The summer after 11th grade, I went to a summer program at Stanford with my friend Stephen. I spent four years of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had in that time decided I wanted to go to Stanford. This program re-affirmed my love for the school, and was also memorable for bringing me even closer to Stephen and introducing me to the first girl I fell in love with (although she has since turned into something of a raging psycho bitch).
8. If there’s one activity I can’t live without, it’s basketball. I got a plastic basketball hoop when I was 2, saw Michael Jordan play on TV for the first time when I was 4, and have been hooked ever since. I spent most of my childhood thinking I would be a professional basketball player, and even though I figured out that probably wouldn’t happen by the time I got to high school, I still thought I was pretty good. I was a two-time MVP for my team’s JV team, and when I made the varsity team junior year I was excited for a new challenge. Instead, my coach never really gave me a chance and I sat on the bench for 2 entire years, one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had with sports.
9. Other than becoming a professional athlete, my biggest dream was to get into Stanford. In December of 2006, this dream was crushed too when Stanford rejected my application. This was the day when I realized just how unpredictable and unfair life can be.
10. After months of turmoil with aforementioned psycho ex-girlfriend, almost transferring to a different school and seeing my parents go through the most difficult time of their lives (financially speaking), I made a decision to stay at Northwestern, met my current girlfriend, and my dad got a new, better job, all in the span of a few months early last year, taking me from one of my lower points in recent memory to one of my highest points in the span of one academic quarter.

More Like Lightbulbs That Have Not Yet Burnt Out

These may not be in any particular order.

When I was in first grade, my teacher, Mrs. Holden, made a yarn octopus for every student in the class.  They were arranged on a bulletin board, pinned with care in the shape and coloration of a rainbow.  I picked last, and received a hot pink octopus.  I described it this way in the 4-sentence essay we wrote about it: “It is hot pink”.  Mrs. Holden reads it to the class.  “He didn’t just say pink,” she explains, “He tells us what kind of pink.”  I still have the octopus.

I have only marked something in a book one time.  I know people who highlight and underline nearly every word — but nothing has struck me in such a way until I read Anna Karenina in freshman year of college.  There is a part where Levin, a main character, first sees the woman who will become his wife skating towards him on a frozen lake.  “He felt as though the sun were coming near him,” the book read, and I borrowed a highlighter from the room next door to mark it.

During my grandmother’s last days, my dad brings us all to the hospital to say our goodbyes.  She was dying of liver cancer, and her skin was a disgusting yellow.  At the funeral, they had painted her face and hands with white make-up, to make her seem healthy and happy at the end.

My favorite Aunt Beth had been single for most of her children’s lives after divorcing their father when they were young.  She met my now-Uncle Bob at a party we were throwing for my brother before he left for Iraq.  Bob went to college with my dad and had shown up for no particular reason — and left starstruck, completely in love.  In less than a year, some of my family had gathered at Bob’s house for a small Christmas party.  They had been planning the surprise secretly for weeks, we learned afterward, when a civil clerk friend of theirs stopped the music and pronounced them man and wife.  It was the best wedding I’ve ever been to.

In my freshman year of high school I am woken up by my mother around 4am on a school day.  My brother was leaving in a cab with three other Marine recruits to train for 3 months at Parris Island.  We all lingered in our hugs, my mom and sister especially (they cried for a long time afterward, and I’m told my mom didn’t go back to sleep but sat in the kitchen until I left for school), as he squeezed into the car and drove away.  He now describes his job for those four years as “bullet catcher and handyman”.

I used to work at a laundromat in a rich suburban town in New Jersey.  One day, I’m flipping through Oprah magazine in the half-hour before closing time, when a tall, skinny black man riding a tandem bicycle alone arrives.  He buys a can of Coke for fifty cents, realizes how cheap it is, and buys another.  He puts three pairs of jeans and a t-shirt into the biggest machine we have, buys 3 packets of bleach and 1 of Tide, and calls a panel of friends while the machine runs.  He speaks loudly, attempting to locate his friend Q, who works at the airport and wasn’t answering the phone.  When his clothes are ready, bleached beyond recognition, he doesn’t dry them, but buys another Coke and rides away on his tandem bike.  It was not the most surreal encounter of my life, but it came close.

On August 23rd, 2007, the month before I began college, my best friend attempted suicide.  He survived.  There was a week when our core group of friends knew nothing — not what happened, not why, not whether we would see him again — but the guilt that we had not seen it coming.  I never want to feel that way again.

The most surreal encounter of my life occurred when I drove that friend up to Massachusetts that December, returning him to the insane asylum from which he was on Christmas leave.  We walked through the halls, meeting the friends he had made, seeing people with lobotomy scars who stared lifelessly at us from their doorframes.  This was my friend, he seemed normal, he seemed out of place — I seemed out of place — but he needed to be there.  I will not forget that place.

I lived in a German fraternity this summer.  A fraternity of singers.  They invited me on their annual “Bierwanderung”, which is a bar crawl, that would run from 9am to 9pm.  I blacked out around 7pm, piecing together the rest of the night by the pictures I had taken.  But I will not forget walking through the forest (we walked about 9 miles between the 6 or 7 breweries), discovering a flock of friendly deer on a farm, and feeding them hay soaked in beer.  Something clicked at this point, a sort-of cross-cultural revelation, that made me realize that these people, though they speak a different language, are just as ridiculous as myself.

My now-ex girlfriend is sitting on her windowsill last winter, smoking a cigarette in silence, something she hates to do in front of me.  She doesn’t want to finish the rest of the movie (it was stopped at the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Brooks kills himself).  I go home.  It is on this cold walk that I realize that the sun was slowly going away from me again.

Addenda by Age

1. Age 2yrs 9months: My first day at preschool. My classroom is down a ramp. I have a plastic cup and its handle is a giraffe’s neck. The rest of the giraffe’s body is on the actual cup. I trace sand paper letters with my fingers.

2. Age 3 1/2 yrs: This is the first time I see my sister. That’s what I wanted, a sister. I love getting what I want.  She has a full head of black hair and everyone says she looks like a porcelain doll. I am fat and have bowl cut bangs my mother trims every month. Mackenzie is swaddled in white hospital blankets: A little pig in a blanket treat, with a massive tuft of black hair, nestled into my mother’s side. I get to hold her and I carry her to the window where the sun is coming in. Everyone holds their breath while I cradle her.

3. Age 4: I have discovered what my mother refers to as “rubbing” myself. I like it, but it is strange and makes everything warm. And if I close my eyes while I do it the reel that plays is the scene from Little Women where Winona Ryder kisses Professor Bear outside her house in the rain. My teacher catches me doing it, eyes scrunched tight to play the movie in my head, while sitting in the reading corner of the kindergarten classroom. She is placid but politely concerned. When I get home, my mother tells me not to do it outside the privacy of my room. My face is hot and I am angry at her for trying to take this from me. I don’t know what I did wrong. I never get in trouble.

4. Age 5: Liam asked me in class if I wanted to have sex with him. I could tell he was making fun of me. I told my Mom and she cried and then my Dad got angry, which never happens. They made a lot of angry phone calls in the room off the kitchen. Liam had to apologize to me in class the next day and I was really humiliated by that – so much so, I started crying and had to be excused to the nurse’s office.

5. Age 7, 8 or 9, I am not sure: I bought my Mom a long pink dress with flowers and a high neck at the boutique downtown for her birthday, and spent an hour pulling the store’s logo off of the wrapping.  I want to be able to tell here where I bought it after she opens it, so she can marvel at my gift in two stages. First: my taste and second, the label.  My Dad got her a bike, which we can see outside the window, triumphantly bearing a white bow.  We eat dinner in the newly-painted dining room and my sister has to sit on a stack of phone books to reach the table to stuff her little rosebud face. After dinner my Mom and Dad tell us about their wedding song: “I’ll Still Be Lovin’ You” by Restless Heart, a real relic of the 80s to go with my Mom’s affinity for perms.

“I’ll be yours until the sun doesn’t shine

till time stands still.”

I only heard it once but I remembered enough of the chorus to YouTube it years later. My Dad puts it on the stereo so that they dance around the living room, fingers interlaced, his hand on the small of her back. I snicker, and my sister pouts.

6. Age 10: I am drenched, climbing out of a pond full of duck shit in South Carolina. I look down at my knee and see the inside of it. There is blood all over my calf and fat popping out of the gash. I feel acid in my throat. I was trying to get something my sister dropped in the water when I fell in. Everyone is standing on the grassy hill, laughing. Their faces look manic through the tears that are starting to form in my eyes. Then my Mom is running from the single-level house. It is my grandfather’s house. We are here because he is dying. He has a brain tumor and he pees the bed now at night.  This is the first time I have met him and he is barely recognizable from my parents’ wedding photos. He tells me I have strong-looking arms for a girl. We go to the hospital where the doctor drawls and takes hours to get around to me. My mother looks faint in the fluorescent light. This is the first time I have been in a hospital for any sort of injury and the numbing drug they shoot up into my knee feels like a hive of wasps is preying on the ripped flesh. I start whimpering and the doctor leers at me with his stupid southern accent. When we get home everyone is asleep. I can’t swallows pills so my mother mashes up five Excederin extra strength in butter pecan ice cream. I eat it and am high as a kite. I listen to a book on tape in an antiquated walkman and fall asleep to some story about a dragon, thinking it is the narrator’s voice and not the feel-goods coursing through my system that have brought me this reprieve.

7. Age 10: My parents take me for a walk in the State Park one late afternoon in August. They are looking anxiously for a place to sit. I feign a stoic expression for them, because I know what is coming. They keep looking at me with concern and I really wish they wouldn’t. I am waiting to get this over with so they can be assured that I am not angry, or permanently disturbed and can go back to dealing with their own guilt. They are making small talk and it is obvious that in that moment the only thing we feel for each other is begrudging obligation. We sit under the pines. They are getting divorced. I already knew because I listen under Mom’s door when she talks on the phone sometimes. I don’t know how I developed this habit since she isn’t prone to keeping secrets. But my parents haven’t touched each other in months and they move around the house like they are about to break something. I know why this is happening, but I don’t say it out loud. My Dad looks tired. My Mom cries, I don’t.

8. Age 12: I find my Dad’s cigarettes in his duffel bag while we are vacationing on the Vineyard. I throw them out, but am too scared to say anything to him. I know he is sad, and guilty for being sad. Later he tries to talk to me about it and I scream and cry, for myself because to admit his momentary defeat is too terrifying. The tears sting my sunburn. Two days later it is his birthday and I buy him a present with all the money I have.

9. Age 14: I have just gotten home from a choir trip to England, where several boys flirted with me. One of them had curly hair, which I have decided I like. Another boy was an ass and called me “man-brows.” My Mom sends me to my room to unpack and trails quietly behind me. On my bed is the package I have been waiting for since I was seven-years-old. It’s my acceptance letter to Andover, complete with several personal notes from faculty and admissions officers who have scrolled Congratulations in neat, academic lettering. I know that this is my greatest acceptance. I feel huge in my success.  I cry self-indulgently until I am gasping and covered in snot and tears and my mother has to push me into the shower. This is the happiest I have ever been.

10. Age 18: My Dad left me at college. I go out and get drunk and go home with a boy I just met. I wake up and feel like dehydrated shit, but properly desirous for the first time. I knew this was what it meant to be an “easy freshman,” but I was wanted and now my hair was rumpled suggestively and the mascara from last night made my eyes look older and sexy. I thought of the lines people author’s like Fitzgerald had penned on wanton abandon. I had been so enamored with them in high school, because they most aptly described many of my beautiful, lean, old money classmates. For a moment I could imagine myself as a creature among them…free and easy in my excess. I was, in that instant, a hedonist, a sensuous glutton and my future bounty stretched as deceptively far as Lake Michigan.

Pins

1. I stare at this other kid’s little red fire-truck. His mom took him to the bathroom. I have my first experience of stealing something consciously. It was a hallmark moment. I was 4 years old.

2. The hallway is old and dingy with a low yellow light. I just finished my first lesson. I leave the room with my violin case in my right arm and my “foot-placement” manilla folder in my left. I am 5 years old.

3. It’s the ride back from school on the “red” bus. I hated riding this bus. David, Michael, and Billy always made fun of me, my eyes, and my last name. I never cried nor did I ever tell my parents. No one told me this what bullying was. I vividly remember their contorted, laughing faces. David and Michael were brothers: one had brown hair and the other was blond. Billy was a black haired neighbor of there’s. I’ll never forget the one day when I could no longer take it anymore especially when Michael started pushing me around. Billy grabbed Michael and told him to stop. Why did this happen? Why was he being nice all of a sudden? I never figured it out. I don’t remember if the bullying stopped after that, but I don’t think it did. I was still 5.

4. My close childhood friend waits for me to grab the other side. We pull hard, and I end up with the longer end. Her eyes soften and smiles, “It’s a wishbone, and you got the bigger bone. Make a wish.” I was 7 years old.

5. I kiss her, “Be my girlfriend.” We had been flirting shamelessly for about 2 months, and plus, she made me feel all funny. Suzi was my first girlfriend. I was 15.

6. Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The last movement begins with the horns and trumpets gathering the orchestra with their grand notes. I sit excitedly for our entrance. The cellos start with a murmur, while more sections of the orchestra join the polyphony of sound. I remember each emotion of every section of this movement. Nothing compares to the last page where the strings are creating waves of scales, the brass are powerfully building the melody, and the winds are caught in between with their scales, rhythms, and counter-melodies. Finally, the brass pound out the most incredible five notes that carry the strings and winds to a final triumphant scale. The maestro is in tears as the orchestra stands proudly. My face is flushed and my eyes are getting blurry. It was our last concert at Tanglewood. I was 16.

7. I drop out of my private all-boys academy half-way through my sophomore year. I decide to pursue music, and I never looked back. This was the winter after Tanglewood.

8. I meet an old acquaintance of mine. We haven’t talked in 3 years. We talk for hours: family, girls, and life. We both saw in each other a drive to be something, and a chance to grow into the men we envisioned within ourselves. We are still growing up. I was 17.

9. I hit the brakes, while the bike skids out of control on the gravel. It was a bad idea to brake. My face is about to hit the road, and I see a bloody, mangled face in my near future. The helmet hits the ground with a large crunch, and I can see the scratches on the visor as my left leg gets caught under the bike. While I’m staring at the blue sky, I clearly remember thinking “Thank God for this gear,” and “I’m in a motorcycle accident” as my body skids on its back for about 70 feet. In an adrenaline rush, I run over to my bike as I try to pick it back up. My left calf is kind of hurting. A bicyclist, who saw the whole thing, runs over with wide-eyes yelling, “Are you okay!?” This was over the summer. I am 21.

10. I hold my mom’s hand. She just got out of surgery. It was not cancer. I am 21.

You’re a magnificent cunt, aren’t you, Miss White?

I’m pretty unflappable when it comes to curse words.  I worked on a cattle ranch throughout middle school and high school, and no one I worked with ever felt the need to censor themselves when in my presence.  In times of stress or frustration, cursing is really the only relief you can give yourself.

“Son of a bitch!!” was shouted regularly, and, in my opinion, is way more fun to say than just plain old “shit” or “fuck.”  Its almost like you have a drumroll with the “son of a” before you hit the “BITCH” loudly and with conviction at the end.  “Fuck” was only really used when you were in deep shit.  If you forgot to close a gate or pissed off a bull or got you and your horse stuck on a steep hill with loose footing in pursuit of a stray….Oh FUCK.

Of all the artful combinations and re-workings of hideous swears, no one ever used “cunt.”  A cow could easily attract the word from anyone.  Cows are among the stupidest of living creatures.  They’re dirty and lazy and are only motivated by food.  Sex isn’t even all that interesting to them.  A bull would much prefer to lay around and a heifer would rather have her nose buried in hay.  Yet for all their irritating qualities, when a cow was uncooperative, no one ever called it a cunt.

The first time I heard the word said aloud was in the movie Inside Man with Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster.  In one scene, Foster’s character, a woman of power via her well-connected affiliates, is called a “magnificent cunt” by the mayor who is less than pleased with the favor she has asked of him.  In all her strength of mind and character, even if Foster didn’t show any reaction, I immediately felt like she had been reduced to some cheap whore.

The worst part about this word is that there’s no male equivalent.  I don’t know of a single word that has the ability to make a man feel powerless the way “cunt” makes a woman feel powerless.  My sister, much to my disgust, calls her guy friends “vaginas” when they’re being lame or stupid.  That tends to make them pretty pissed off, but if they were smart enough to stop and think about what she just said, she really just insulted herself.  A man being a “vagina,” by the implication of my sister’s usage, is a man channeling obnoxious female characteristics, like being huffy and generally perterbed when things don’t go their way instead of being laid back and relaxed.

In the end, I guess its just the shocking bluntness of the word that strikes me.  I wish I could say I agreed with the “Vagina Monologues” argument that “cunt” is an empowering word that women have taken back from men, but, alas, I can’t.

In absence, I feel lonely

We’ve all been so consumed by our essays/haven’t had any blog assignments that we haven’t posted. I feel like the blog got sick and took a week off.

I kind of wonder why we’re hesitant to post off-topic things on our blogs. It’s almost like there is an unwritten rule: assignment or there shall be no words shared (save the spamming– thanks for the blip of life, Lauren). We all consider ourselves “writers,” and yet we’re still kind of stuck in the realm of students. Our writing is stunted by how much work we have to do.

I have a blog of my own, completely unrelated to WordPress, that I have, surprisingly enough, been keeping up. It’s rather new, as I recently transitioned, after abandoning and thus disassociating myself with the private blog I kept in high school. (Is this wimpy? Probably.) I found out that a friend of mine uses WordPress for her personal blog, which I believe is completely unrelated to any sort of curriculum and wondered why I didn’t just use my WordPress blog (not the208) for my general blogging. I have no explanation.

Are you all writing, even when you’re not doing so for class? Anyone else blogging on a far-off site? Is anyone still sort of whimsical and antiquated and writing in moleskins? Actually, it’s unfair to call that antiquated. In fact, I have the utmost respect for you. I cannot seem to keep up a journal for the life of me. The entries in the one I do keep are so utterly sporadic, I would say it’s borderline pathetic and hardly worthy of being called a journal.

If you do have a blog, can I read it?!

I’m not sure I honestly can say that I have an understanding of what “great writing” is, but I enjoy reading what you all post on here. I’m not sure if it’s “good,” but I like it, and in it’s absence, I feel lonely.

I swear, I’m not delusional. It’s not that late yet. I will not, however, claim sanity in my day to day life.

Sincerely,

AK