Sorry I'm Not Sorry

Oh hey there.

I I were to put a number on my blogging average it would probably be "sucks" but with my defensiveness kicking in I feel compelled to remind you that I began this blog as a personal outlet and while I sure am sorry if my hiatus has caused you any inconvenience or existential longing, the reality is that I don't actually care.

For the better part o the last month I've been failing to work up the courage to post a diatribe on deities that I composed on my recent stay in hell (otherwise known as keeping the company of 39 teens in Israel for 3 weeks). It was irreverent and eloquent but also incredibly personal and while I imagine that I like all you anonymous numbers who accumulate into pageviews, it's actually the people I know that scare me more. So, I'm not offering my thoughts on the powers-that-be just yet, but I am offering thoughts.

Specifically, my thoughts on being 22. Taylor Swift has all but incorporated her thoughts on this subject into the national anthem, so I though it only appropriate that one of us mere mortals shout back. "Happy, free, confused, and lonely" at the same time isn't a bad start. Kudos, Taylor. But I feel like there are some nuances that a pop ditty can't necessarily accommodate. Confused? maybe. But questioning the validity of my self doubt would probably be more accurate. Lonely? not so much. I certainly have my moments, but of all the sensations that hit me like sponges in the face at a cruel carnival game, I would prioritize boredom and an unidentifiable longing high above loneliness. Happy? Every once in a while. But comparing to a college-happy, the 22-post-grad happy feels an awful lot like acceptably sociable. And I feel like free is probably just a lot more relevant to those who have achieved financial independence.

So...I am feeling 22. But I'm also feeling a little tired and a little lost and a little always in need of a glass of red wine.

So t.swift, Imma let you finish, so please do me a favor and fill in the blanks. Because I just can't figure out which of your four categories I should slot "losing interest in previously entertaining activities."

I'm BA-ack...

At long last the moment has arrived.

My three week hiatus with 39 16 year olds (by the way, my new least favorite age - all the sass with none of the redemption) was a convenient way to deflect people during the graduation inquisition, but that mistake has come and gone and now I'm really just applying to grad programs (a terrifying mountain of to-do lists) and seeking reasonable underemployment to finance travel in the Spring.

And so the Quarter Life Crisis begins. Until this point my anxieties have really just revolved around the onset of the QLC. Now it's really here. And while my pockets are full of a fresh 1K from 3 weeks in a dessert like hell, my pockets are also full of excuses.

I told myself (in a fit of delusion and defiance) that I couldn't look for a job because I was working this 3 week job in the summer I couldn't find a real job, and so I took this terrible position at a terrible camp to fill in the gaps. The cycle of frustration and misery is self imposed and self perpetuating, which is a fine classification but does nothing to explain why I insist on doing it to myself. Why should I preclude myself from gainful employment? Why should I set up a life that is underwhelming and unfulfilling? In short, why am I being my own worst enemy?

And then I remember that in a year where I actually want to be is a top Postcolonial PhD program, and I realize that these things are fairly irrelevant, but why should I let a single year of my life be irrelevant? Why can't it all be incredible and life changing? And that, I guess, comes back to me too.

Which brings me to a new appendage to my QLC definition: a self induced cycle of doubt and self-hate resulting in nothing positive but successfully impairing any sense of fulfillment or achievement.

Welcome to Euphoria. Your call is very important to us. Your call will be answered by a representative in approximately eight years.
In the mean time, dial Hell and I'll answer.

Wasn't Meant to Be

On a rainy day in May of 2010, I achieved a goal that had been on my radar for the majority of my childhood.  I graduated from college in one of the coolest and most unique cities in America.  During my time there, I witnessed a resurrection of a city that was brought to its knees and despite all evidence leading one to conclude otherwise, I can report that today, in July of 2013, it is back and better than ever.  This place and its people had every opportunity to close up shop and say, “Wasn’t meant to be”, but they didn’t.  When I left in 2010, I feared it would be permanent.  I would be leaving behind all the memories that I had created and I had no idea what to do next.  It was a crippling feeling.  I did not have a job and felt as if everything was falling apart.  It took six months, but I ended up getting a job, back in that wonderful city and a really cool one at that.  I was given the chance to make new memories in the same old place.  It was not until my last day of this wonderful opportunity that I realized why none of the other jobs I had applied for worked out.  This one was meant to be. 

Fast forward 2 ½ years and here we are.  That fantastic job was temporary and has just come to an end.  I have been looking for a job since April 2012 in the wide world of sports and have had no success.  Could it be worse?  Most definitely.  I am blessed to have the greatest “sponsors” in the world who have made my search for happiness possible.  Is this how I ever imagined my life at 25? Most definitely not.  I’m single and unemployed.  Although I love being 25, it’s just not what I had in mind.  I thought my life would be a little bit more together at this point.  The thing that is hardest to swallow is how little things have changed since the crippling month of May 2010.  I made progress, but find myself back in an all too familiar place.   I’m on my knees, looking for a sign with no idea what to do next.  I will most likely be leaving that city down South I love so much, but where I go next is the real unknown.  I have applied for more jobs than I would like to admit and have been told far too many times, “Wasn’t meant to be.”  The question I have is, what IS meant to be?  When will THAT one appear?  As I struggle to keep my sanity, I don’t have to look far for an inspiring example and another popular phrase, “It will all work out.”  22 year-old me was worrying about the same things, paralyzed by the fear that it would just never work out.  I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong.  I learned the meaning of, “Wasn’t meant to be,” as I found the exact opposite.  Like the city I love, I feel I have no choice, but to keep on fighting until I find the WAS meant to be I’ve been looking for. 

“Everything will be alright in the end.  If it is not alright, it is not yet the end.”              

Passing the Torch (temporarily)

Hey hey party people!

I apologize for being the world's worst blogger, but if it's any consolation I'm also the world's worst daughter, friend, and student as I flounder around this post grad realm. (It's very dark. I keep bumping into things.)

But actually I've been working at a day camp and seeing a ton of people and now I'm running away to lead an international travel trip with 40 11th graders.

In the interim I am having my resident expert on the QLC (aka mi hermana) drop some knowledge bombs. Enjoy the break from radio silence.

See you in 3 weeks!

xoxo gossip squirrel

Thank God For Memory Loss

On the eve of what is likely to be my last round in the ring with institution of American Summer Camp I feel...nothing. Except anxiety over my inability to fall asleep because my body refuses to believe that it has left California.

I have none of the pangs of nervousness that preceded the bus ride up to my sleep away camp every June. None of the suffocating realizations before the kids arrived when it was clear that I was responsible for human lives. I feel none of the social apprehension about making friends, making a good impression, or making sure everyone knows I take myself seriously. And at this moment of levity I a recurring thought resurfaces: How great is it that we forget things?

With the slightest prodding, riptides of prepubescent awkwardness and the cyclical feeling of inferiority that accompanies any age that ends in "teen" baptize me with shame anew. I remember times I laughed cruelly, and made people feel bad, and made embarrassing mistakes, and wore clothes inside out. I remember feeling frozen with fear that I would spend the rest of my life alone, unworthy of attention or social contact.

Wasn't high school terrible? Wasn't middle school worse?

And yet, for 23.75 hours a day I am completely free of these recollections of my mediocrity. I can live in the now and aspire to things despite my moronic inner voice reminding me of  my own mistakes. It feel fabulous to live in the now and make decisions based on the recent past. To be free on the constraints of my own expectations is as liberating as skinny sky diving.

And to not just be free of my own behavior, the way I treated my sisters (pulling their hair and punching them in the face) and the way I treated everyone else (like they were wrong and I was right), but to free for even brief pockets of time of the I understood the world, allows me refreshing clarity.

It's upsetting and disorienting and challenging to forget. Being so close, nothing seems sadder than forgetting the minutiae of my sophomore apartment or my on campus job or the organization I loathed to be a part of. But in reality, they'll soon slip from the foreground, and I will be left with rosy memories, the highlight real, and will be spared the embarrassment of my wrongdoings.

I know that if I had Alzheimers I would wish for it all back: the good, the bad, and the ugly. But as I attempt to trudge through this time around, I can't help but imagine how much more burdensome life would be if we had to carry everything around with us. Packing is not a skill reserved for travel. And how wonderful that we get to choose what we carry around with us. Not mosquito nets or sun hats, but rather the parts of ourselves, our compassion or our wit or our resolve, that we want to inform the future versions. The versions that will eventually and hopefully become the past we can be proud of.

I'm struggling with the past-present-future pull because being back in my old house, in my old town, with my tragically overbearing and dismissive parents (an impressive combination if I do say so myself) I am so readily reminded of all the parts of myself that I hate and what I could so easily become. So how do I let go of that while holding on to the more recent past which seems so at odds with every feature of this snow globe to which I've returned? I changed, but how do I avert regression? How do I forget the reminders without forgetting the convictions which I now know to be true?

A challenge for certain, but perhaps one that I need to face to earn the life I want. Or perhaps this is the bullshit I am obligated to feed myself in order to survive the next twelve months.

Warning: My next post might be about apartment hunting

Don't be Such a Bitch

My topic today is inspired by a friend who has recently found herself on the front lines of the war for human decency, and I"m referring specifically to the battle for some sex etiquette in our 20s. A friend of this glorious gal slept with her ex-boyfriend whom she had only met because my friend was helping her ex find some friends in his new city, and this is after my friend explicitly asked both of them to cool it on the touchy-feely-flirtation situation. I can't imagine it was easy to acquiesce while he was inside her. Just a hunch.

Now I know Gretchen Weiners would be outraged. And I know that everyone informed of this tragically non a-typical scenario is equally disgusted by the ex and the ex-friend. Except that it's not equal. Except that by some sort of deranged instinct we claw at the girl's face and throat, rip out her beating heart by running through the abomination-bitch-cunts of vicious rhetoric designed to make her seem less than us and subsequently make our friend feel better.

Why?

Seriously, when did we learn to do that? I mean it's easy for me to imagine a cavewoman knocking over a neighboring woman's pile of pelts upon learning that her husband hadn't been coming straight home after hunting. And I know that the salons of Europe in the 19th century must have been chock full of judgmental sideways glances at the women who wore necklines that showed off the girls. And I KNOW that in any high school lunch room in the country there as many conversations about ho bag, slut faced, skanky, boyfriend stealing peers as there are tables. But the idea that this is some sort of natural evolution from the more passive (or passive-aggressive in the case of the cavewoman) demonstrations of feminine strength is bullshit.

Ms. Norbury said that calling each other sluts and whores just makes it OK for guys to call us sluts and whores, which is true, but is not the whole story by a long shot. Not only do these instinct demean women but they demean us. There's a two fold implication when I hear a woman call another woman any of the aforementioned slurs:
1. I lack the proper education or  depth of vocabulary to be more eloquent, descriptive, or intelligent
2. I am defined by the way men see me relative to other women

Hell to the NO.

Over the course of history we have given pardons to SO many men who have slept their way through life in favor of remembering how they helped, changed, or impacted the world. Who cares how many women JFK slept with, his wife was still epicly fabulous and he inspired and challenged a generation of Americans to dream bigger and follow suit with their actions. But we continue to define women by their numbers: by the number of people they've slept with, the number of times they've been married, their height, shoe size, hip-waist-bust measurements. Because apparently, despite believing that our sisters and daughters and mothers and friends are destined for greatness despite of their monthly periods, we are not actually convinced that in the general sense women are capable of much of anything besides stealing a man.

And there are exceptions, but so often to admit greatness we must deny femininity, as if the two are mutually exclusive, despite the rainbow of masculinity that manifests in great men the world wide.

What I'm saying is what we've known: that women define themselves by men and destory themselves and each other with the slightest provocation. And I don't have the slightest idea how to fix that. Because honestly, it doesn't really seem to be getting better over time. As we get older, as generations cycle, nothing stops women from being vindictive and cruel.

As a lover of well crafted language there are few things I love more than a good put down. Whether it's on TV or in a book or a movie or some witty retort in a column my heart races and my lips curl at the encounter with a person intelligent enough to find the weak spot and plunge the sword into the evil enemy's hide. It's the same instinct that popularized Pamplona's bulls and the Coliseum's gladiators. But I worry. Because in these scenarios, women against women, women against men, there doesn't seem to be a clear enemy. The enemy is only the weakest link, the easiest kill. And the only effect that pattern seems to have is to make us feel terrible once we realized we've killed someone in our uniform. So maybe in the battle of the sexes, which at present seems to be a battle within the sexes more and more, we need to take our outstretched bitch slap, extend a hand, and pull someone up to the high ground.

We're clearly not all on the same side in the fight for a nicer world, but I say let's take it one battle at a time. And I think that not performing intimate acts at the disrequest of friends with people who are deeply emotionally linked to them for the pleasure of inducing pain is as good a place to start as any.

More Pleasant Musings Soon

The process of writing is a process of discovery.

And for the past 5ish months this blog has been a locus a discovery, a space in which I can uncover and encounter the recesses of my consciousness in an effort to sort through my own feelings before I'm forced to acknowledge them in the real world.

And then I graduated college. And then I moved home.

And suddenly the composite hour I spent on the phone with my parents every week has been blown out of proportion, and the sanity provided by meals and work and general time spent with friends has been shrunk to some infintissimal percentage of its original. I feel my mind shrinking and growing lazy. I feel my social skills losing their finesse. And I feel all the self doubt and sense of not belonging (the kind I associate with adolescence, not with the growth and exploration of the college years) returning in tidal wave force.

So it's not that I haven't been thinking about what these changes mean, what ripples out from these pivot points in life, but rather that i've only been thinking about them, and haven't been sure how to put words on this new brand of loneliness I'm experiencing. I'm afraid that when I sit down to write I'll discover that reading a book a week, learning to knit, and studying for the GRE aren't actually doing anything to stave off impending misery. I've been more comfortable not knowing one way or the other.

I'm hoping that as I return to the writing table my own thoughts will become more cogent and that I'll regain some semblance of control over my own experience, but I ask that you understand that if I fail to post it really isn't you, it's me.