Falling is Funny

Free Fall

2010-03-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

Words of poets are for some reason floating through my consciousness, filtering through the haze of tears and despair, sometimes comforting, other times mocking. After a great pain, a formal feeling comes. I have never been drawn to poetry. As an English major, I took a poetry class with a past poet laureate, Robert Haas, but remember nothing except his kind eyes and sentences buried within sentences within sentences. In the past, I've turned to books, but today it is poetry I haven't read since high school, words I didn't even know had made an impression upon me. With that has come memories of myself and my choices during my early twenties. Before the relationship. My best friend told me this would happen, remembering who you were before him, but only since finding out yesterday that I was not accepted to any of the graduate programs I applied to have I been able to see her and look at her in wonder and disbelief. The best-laid schemes o mice an' men. Did she really just never think of the future beyond the following year? How did she not know to watch her finances? Did she enjoy those experiences traveling with joy equal to the hunger with which I look at them now? But mostly, it is gratitude she did these things with disregard for the trappings that weigh me down now: career, marriage, family, money.

The thoughts that rush to the front of your mind after receiving such jarring news often reveal more about our true feelings than years of therapy can unearth: I have to get out of here. I tried, for five years, to live in one place and follow a career path and save money and buy things, and now that that life has crumbled, the desire to go has bubbled up so fiercely that it takes my breath away. I have to get out of here. I learn by going where I have to go.

Was I just running away from something in my twenties? But from what? None of those things weighed me down then. I have always looked at it as learning to be an independent, self-sufficient woman who was comfortable being by herself. But France nearly broke me, and I realized I needed people around me who I care about. I wanted a relationship. I deserved a relationship. And I suppose I proved to myself that I could have one, and the failure of that relationship -- no matter how I much I understand that it is not as simple as blaming one person -- has hurtled me back to who I was before I started traveling as if my life depended on it. Traveling saved me from insecurity, fears, loneliness. And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

Coming down

2010-02-20T22:04:00.000-08:00

Though it is well past the new year, I now feel I am ready to write my New Year's post. I've pretty much fallen into a dizzying montage of friends, booze, and Facebook updates for the last two months, a fall that began with My First Hook Up After You. Or perhaps it began with my solo venture to a New Year's Eve wedding of two good friends at which I did not drink myself into oblivion. Or maybe just a few days before that when I confronted a long ago ex-boyfriend whom I had fallen stumblingly in-love with after two short months of dating (of which one of them he denied to me and the world that we were dating). Hard to tell, for in each of these moments and for each of these audiences, I dumped my insecurities and desires plainly out on the table for others to see. What I did not expect was how I would feel staring at them: wonder, fear, and even admiration. Such a feeling of exhilaration tinged with desperation is a drug like no other, and only now am I ready to come down.

Surprisingly, looking back on my soul-baring trip, I don't think I've hurt anyone else, myself, or any faction of people. I don't think I've even burned any bridges. In fact, it may be that I've strengthened a few relationships, particularly with the females in my life. Which is odd considering that I've always had a cherish-disdain relationship with the females in my life.** The women I respect; I'm yours till eternity. Those that I don't; I'll forget that I've met you previously each time we cross paths. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, or something I was particularly aware of until my best friend since age fourteen subtly shined a light on it for me a few weeks ago. (She has a similar attitude towards males which I sanctimoniously brought to her attention; she was considerate enough to just let me draw my own conclusions about my attitude towards females.) A quick flip through my middle school and high school memories file clearly reveals a pattern of feeling left out of, out of place in, or disrespected by groups of female friends. Not that I didn't find my own group of supportive, intelligent, caring girls who absolutely helped me survive high school in a new city, but those earlier experiences established a distrust reflex that automatically kicks in and dismisses any female who I label (often within ten minutes of meeting) as: superficial, aggressively insecure, falsely friendly, or uninterested in intelligence.

Now that I'm 30, not in a relationship and newly aware of this nasty habit, now what? Part of me still doesn't want to give it up, for there is that part of me that can't stand to be around women who fall into those aforementioned categories. So logically I ask myself, would I feel the same if it was a man ascribing to those virtues. Basically, but with a lot less venom. Suddenly, I need to add another category to the list -- judgmental and nasty -- and put my picture after the dictionary definition.

But there is a minor saving grace -- the strengthening of female friendships I mentioned earlier. I reconnected with my best friend and her group of female friends. I accepted two invitations to hang out with female acquaintances I only knew in brief and had a great time. I've become a daily communicator via text, email or chat with a woman from work. Go me! But honestly, those women had passed the ten-minute rule already. It's the women who I meet when hanging out with a mixed group of males and females that get passed over. Given the choice, I'm much more willing to give a guy a chance to prove himself not-uninterested in intelligence or not-superficial. Again, flipping through my memory Rolodex (will anyone under 25 even get that reference?) the handful of women who Really Had Problems With Me begin to surface and behind them, a story about man that I passed them over for even if just in friendly, non-sexual way: their cousin, their best friend, their crush, their boyfriend.

And that's the drug hangover I have to deal with at the moment.

** This whole soul-baring, honesty thing means I'm going to reveal to the whole virtual world at large some unflattering things about myself. In the spirit of taking care of one whacked out on drugs, please be gentle.

Cut and paste brain

2009-12-30T22:54:00.000-08:00

After sweating my way through three days of what I secretly hope was the swine flu, I reemerged shiny and feeling as joyous as only one who recovers from a near fatal disease can. Possible dramatization of seriousness of disease, but the flu really sucks. During my fevered state, I managed to turn in (I think) two more grad school applications. Most of the work had been done the previous week with the first two applications, so it was really just a cut one name of program and paste another. At which point, this whole process began to feel a little artificial, like the raspberry taste endless cups of TheraFlu left in my mouth. Writing has always been a personal process for me, yet the personal significance of my re-entrance into academia has become so muddled in the last few months, my personal statements have become carefully designed to please admissions committee members. In other words, they just might be brilliant.

I seem to have neatly folded up and stashed away one major factor in the decision to pursue my doctorate over my master’s—the previous stated reasons still applying of course. I was getting married, and two years into a marriage and a graduate program, nearly eight years into a relationship seemed a great time to have a baby. Without that, suddenly I feel very distant towards exactly what it is I want to research, thus removing all ability to edit essays for bullshit. In other words, they just might suck.

I am good at planning. It was such a clever plan to start a family while in school – at least while someone else was actually earning money to feed us all. I rejoiced and the fortune of finding a great program in Chicago where the fiancé had family and friends already. My brainy plans made me greedy and prone to cackle with delight so that I didn’t really notice the relationship was becoming stale, had been stale for some time. Or perhaps just chose to ignore the signs: recurring dreams of dating other men, flashes of irrational rage at an unanswered phone call or toilet seat left up—those were just cold feet, right? We women are remarkable in our abilities skillfully ignore what doesn’t fit into whatever plans we have invested time and energy in, be it our outfits, our men, our plans for the future.

But I shook myself out of the planning stupor, wouldn’t just keep sleeping next to a tall, good-looking, charming man just because I had planned to do it for the rest of my life. Which makes me look at these mess of applications and the apathy with which I approached the last two. Is this just the blind continuation of the plan because it is The Plan? Will I wake up in three years dreaming that I’m dating other graduate programs? There are all the rational reasons I keep in the back of my head that reassure me I’ll just figure it out when I get there; that regardless, change is needed and change is good.

Ray of light? A friend recently related an annoyingly gimmicky ‘psychology’ test a guy at a bar had tried out on her in a twisted pick-up line way. The schtick goes to imagine a variety of different things and when you finish, he tells you what each represents.
As I lamented to the friend who had shared this psych test with us about the dismal results of my analyses, she asked what my storm had looked like—an object we were to imagine. My storm was beautiful. A large expanse of blue-purple sky with heaps of clouds lined in silver in the background. The wind was blowing leaves into swirls of tossed confetti in rapturous celebration of nature. At least you have that, she said. The storm represents your problems. At least if your plans are crumbling around you, to everyone else it looks like a party.

Balancing act

2009-12-08T23:28:00.000-08:00

Just when you have all the responsibilities and tasks and deadlines of your life delicately balanced on a tray—much like the cardboard discs of food you would balance on the tray of the wobbly maitre d' of the "Don't Tip the Waiter" board game you played as a kid—a frigid apartment, a careless comment, or a bad night’s sleep can send them all cascading to the floor. Strewn on the floor around me are my day-and-a-half-away application deadline for grad school # 3, the noisome* cat litter box, cooking nutritious meals, the gym. Still perilously perched on the platter are work responsibilities, an increasing ability to discuss the not-wedding without tearing up and/or getting indignant, and my facebook status (very up to date).

Grad school #3: As much as I can argue that this program barely aligns with my research interests and inchoate* ideas about what I am looking for in my grad school experience, the truth is I just don't wanna. Problem is, my better sense is boxing with my beleaguered self, telling me I can’t rightly justify not turning in an application to a school that I’ve already had letters of recommendation sent to. The counter punch comes from my beleaguered self who argues that if I do that, then it will be waaaaay harder to justify not turning in to the same school an extra one-and-a-half page statement for a pre-doctoral fellowship that might pay for 5 years of school. Are other people hip to this game, by the way? That by agreeing to work at what is essentially a crappily paid internship with excellent training for 4 to 6 years, you won't have to pay for school yourself? And you'll come out of it Dr. SuchandSuch? And there's the better self with the knockout.

Which means that tomorrow I'm setting my alarm for one hour earlier than I have been lately, which means that I might actually get up at the time I've been aiming for. Which means forget about writing with wit, humor, or superfluous, GRE-y vocab words, and just spit out 500 words that don't mention any of the reasons for applying to graduate school you stated in the previous paragraph. blerg.

* What good is learning 400 words for the GRE if you never get to use them?

30 years and 30 days

2009-12-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

It suddenly occurs to me as I carefully monitor the rate of cheese meltage to crust crispiness on a slice of pesto pizza: I've become that woman. The one who turns to food when stressed/depressed/obsessed—and we’re not talking vegetables and fruits here, we are talking cheesy, fried, refried, candied, glazed, marinated, triple crèmed, slow roasted food. The fact that the break-up of our five point five year relationship coincides with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and not to mention, my 30th birthday, seems either downright cruel or culinarily advantageous. It started with banana chocolate crème tart on my birthday, and now 30 days later, leftover pizza that we ate together during our wallow-in-cheese break-up week. Some might call it a self-punishing desire that requested for my birthday—which also happened to be the year anniversary of our engagement—the very tart that would have been served to our wedding guests eight months from now. I call it a delicious fucking tart.

Either way, something has got to change. At 30 years and 30 days, you just aren’t the wisp of a woman who could skip breakfast for a few days to drop a pound or two. Not that I ever was able to do that (skip breakfast, I mean); the cause behind the rise and fall of the numbers on the scale was always an enigma to my younger self. Until about age 29 when the numbers only seemed to rise--but that didn’t mean I had to change my eating habits, did it? One year later, and my brain is only just catching up to my body, which has a head start that would put the tortoise and the hare to shame.

The only thing that might save me is a fierce determination to not be that woman: the one who drowns herself in hot chocolate and wine after a break-up. Rephrase: to not be that woman whose chocolate and wine drowning can be attributed to anything other than a healthy appreciation for liquid aphrodisiacs. Which I suppose either means reigning in this food orgy or ramping up the weekly yoga workout. I suppose both are probably good ideas, but remember that brain lagging behind body problem? Maybe when I'm 31.

Fail better.

2009-11-29T21:20:00.000-08:00

After agonizing for weeks over a user name, I finally chose one, only to realize upon login that I still need a name for the actual blog. blerg. (the first of what will probably be many future references to Tina Fey). Sorry if you are drunken frat boy surfing the web or a cute-kitten-falling-off-the-bookcase-video lover who found this blog hoping to entertain yourself by laughing at videos and/or animals demonstrating Newton's infallible law of gravity. While I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, you won't find that here. (Though send me some funny videos, and I just might be swayed.)

Instead my intent is to try and make some sense of and find some humor in the tangle that is my life at this moment. Plus, writing all day about how perfect you are for Super Special People Only Graduate Program (SSPOGP) and how great you were at Really Brilliant Geniuses Only Job (RBGOJ) really makes a person think that everyone wants to know more about your life.

I realize I've perhaps backed myself into a figurative corner by promising humor and some witty metaphor for falling in every blog post. But what are corners if not the meeting of two solid ideas? At the very least, I will strive to live up to Samuel Beckett's advice: "Fail again. Fail better."