Anniversaire

Here are twenty three things that happened while I was twenty three:

1) I broke up a fight involving scissors.

2) I saw the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then recapped the film, the novel, and my entire senior thesis for my confused viewing companions.

3) It took me two and a half hours to drive home from work in the only serious snow of the winter.

4) Cousin The Street came to visit and we rediscovered the fact that we operate at exactly the same pace.

5) I saw a bunch of plays at the Steppenwolf. After one of them, I carried on a multi-layered text message conversation with friends back home that left me feeling as if I had been right there with them.

6) After getting up at 5:00 AM to take the GRE, driving to Aurora to meet up with friends, following them to Batavia to watch The Hunger Games on the big, big screen, and finally carpooling to a pub in Geneva, I stole my first beer glass, finally coming into my genetic inheritance.

7) I met Sir U von L when Subcontinent came to visit Chicago and the three of us took an architecture tour on a green river.

8) With three months left in my fellowship, I was asked to apply for a job at the Center. My first reaction was a resounding, "I'm outta here." Upon reflection, I upgraded that response to, "Hey, why not." Later, I was happy and excited to accept.

9) I decided to renew my lease.

10) I went to visit Subcontinent in New York and ate and walked my way across Manhattan.

11) I went to visit Roommate J in Baltimore. We can still live harmoniously in a very small space. This bodes well for our marriage at age 65.

12) I made profiteroles in honor of my mother and drank bourbon in memory of my grandfather.

13) I explained to my parents what a BAMF was. We all took comfort in Martin Freeman's wise words.

14) My parents moved away from my childhood home and I was so good at making the best of a painful situation that I am still patting myself on the back.

15) I broke down cardboard boxes and broke out in mysterious rashes in a 108 degree Kansas July.

16) I channeled a year of a despised job and beloved students and coworkers into my art and started writing again.

17) I went on a quest for the best pain au chocolat in Chicago.

18) I recorded classic family stories with StoryCorps.

19) I started volunteering with Big Brothers Big Sisters and recognized that I'll probably have to get back on the Spanish-learning wagon sooner rather than later.

20) I voted in Chicago--once--and celebrated until the early hours. I called my dad the Marylander and we got excited about progress.

21) I took a storytelling class and decided it was time to stop self-censoring and fly free.

22) I travelled to Ann Arbor. I tagged along to vegan restaurants. I listened as my history as a writer was recounted to third parties. I realized that, as self evident as it is, my friends care about me as much as I care about them.

23) I read Cloud Atlas, and got excited to do it all over again.

Now, a day into 24:
1) I'm doing it right.

Merci à tous!

my coworkers who saw straight through me; the unexpected and welcome return of Friday night pizza, albeit in a slightly different form; David Mitchell; those kids who brought my writing back; the University of Kansas; escape to Colorado; Marylanders; Subcontinent, and my introduction to Sir U von L; StoryCorps, for planting the performance seed; Detective Sergeant Hathaway; voters; The Four Feathers; all the girls who worked with me on the play at the Center, whose deep-thinking ways really lightened my load; Lake Shore Drive, for providing the perfect backdrop to cathartic music blaring, sightseeing, and (once, memorably) hysterical breaking down; ZooLights at the Lincoln Park Zoo; Owen & Engine; "It is what it is."; a hard-won East Coast trip; Skype; "I feel like a character in an after-school special" and unexpected safety everywhere I went; "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"; those people I keep mentioning here; those characters I keep mentioning here; family and friends for whom distance and time is no barrier; Iowa City; Peppermint Joe Joe's; tea; introspection, supervised and unsupervised; growing up; my version of adulthood; BAMFs

Would(n't) Rather be Music

December 18th, 2011. A red letter day. One of many days when it became obvious that sometimes the answers lie outside yourself. My dad, on that day, on any writing I might do on the film I had just seen: "You have to get it into your soul first." The film was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, whose many other versions were already firmly embedded. He knows how I work.

To no one's surprise, I am still obsessed with Cloud Atlas. It definitely got in my soul, and it didn't even take repeat readings (pending, but first I have to read the entire oeuvre of David Mitchell), or repeat viewings (accomplished). All it took was one good go-through and, if I'm honest, listening to the Lion King orchestral suite on repeat. Everything else was just reinforcement.

It's not a new concept for me, and it wasn't in December 2011 either. What Dad did was articulate a lifelong manner of relating to material--fiction, film, social causes, anything--that had me drawing "dream pictures" of my favorite Wolves Chronicles characters at age ten, taping them to my wall in my bedroom in Paris, and lulling myself to sleep with a heady mixture of art contemplation and a Zouk soundtrack gently emitting from my old boom box.

It worked, too. I had more dreams that year of interacting with fictional characters than I had ever had before or have had since.

On the other hand, there were the visions of Lewis & Clark west of the Mississippi, the quest for Musketeer leavings in the Loire valley, the prowling after spies in London, the discovery of political theater courtesy of my first and best loved social justice obsession.

There was the time I read Anthony Blunt's memoir. There was the time my parents and I went to the gay pride parade in Paris. There was time I wrote to Joan Aiken and she wrote back.

Those are the moments that got into my soul because something else had gotten in there first and made room. The other moments in my life that have been just as meaningful (often more powerful, more emotional), like returning from France, being backstage, graduating from high school, from college, my parents' moving away from Champaign, uproarious moments with my roommates, hot tub talks with Subcontinent, laughter with P, literary analysis with M or K, standing platonic dates with R, standing platonic dates with T (occasionally combined)...those moments hit me with significance from somewhere else. Anything arriving in or emerging from the depths of my soul comes pre-wrapped with its own significance, and I can enjoy it for what it is. Those associated moments stand out in my memory as unreservedly happy.

Yes, there is only room for so much in there. There were songs I listened to last year, driving to and from work on tough days, or driving up and down I-57, that really hurt from way down deep. I listen to them now and they're good songs and they'll always have associations, but they don't so much match who and where I am anymore.

Cloud Atlas is humanistic, realistically optimistic, and it contains multitudes. It's not squeaky clean, (and it's not simple), but I wonder whether it could have slipped so effortlessly into my soul last year. Maybe I would have read it differently, as one of its own characters does, albeit with far less drastic results. Maybe I would have liked it fine, put it down, and forgotten about it in a few days.

Maybe it was always meant to be.

Four More Years

Here's my suggestion. Whether you're happy--I'm thrilled--with Obama's victory or not, how about you take whatever you felt most passionate about in this election and pursue it, on any level. The world could always use more voices.

The Fault (Dear Brutus)

It's something I've talked about often, implicitly or explicitly, on this blog: the debt we owe to fictional characters. Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking about it more.

-----

Last week I went to see two films at the Chicago International Film Festival. Both movies were filmed on location in prison, both movies had at least a 90% incarcerated cast, and both movies concerned the life of Julius Caesar.

There the similarities ended. String Caesar was highly experimental, raw, and not at all Shakespearean. Seated in the fourth row, I had to keep my eyes closed for the last fifteen minutes of the movie because (for the first time ever) the extreme close-ups and motions of the camera were making me ill and I knew I wanted to stay for the director's Q&A afterwards. Filmed in three prisons internationally, String Caesar draws parallels between the early life of Julius Caesar in Rome and the lives led by inmates in prisons largely ruled by gangs. Some of the more successful moments of the movie came about when the line between Rome and the prison blurred. Julius Caesar is sent to talk with a powerful general and essentially warned not to "drop the soap." In another scene, (the best, in my opinion), Caesar stands on the sole working toilet and refuses to budge, deaf to Cicero's pleas to let others have a turn.

By contrast, Caesar Must Die, an Italian Golden Bear Winner at the Berlin Film Festival, did not make me want to vomit. Nor did it leave me with as many questions. Here, rather than real life bleeding over into the script, the script (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Italian) bled over into real life. Sprinkled throughout Brutus and Cassius' plotting, Caesar's worries, and Mark Anthony's verbal maneuvering, there were supposedly-authentic documentary moments with the cast. These moments were highly stylized and obviously far from impromptu. They were also, quite possibly, scripted, and felt far less genuine than the camaraderie and antipathy (demanded by the script but maybe also genuine) on display in String Caesar.

Julius Caesar is a favorite for prison theater instructors. They assume, possibly quite rightly, that inmates will identify with its themes and ambiguities. I like Julius Caesar for the same reason. Indeed, it is the only Shakespeare play that I feel I enjoy of my own free will. Why? Well, for one, it's a tragedy possessed of a truly tragic hero. Welcome to a new favorite quote from a new favorite author: "Stumbling heroes linger longer." Edmund Pevensie, to whom Mitchell refers, owes a lot to Brutus, and characters like him. Brutus, like String Caesar's young Caesar, stumbles on an incredible scale and is all the more relatable and--dare I say it?--likable because of it. Of course, a tragic hero takes his or her stumbling one step further in their inability to survive said stumble.

So far, the actors in String Caesar and Caesar Must Die are doing it right, unlike another of my favorite characters, Francis Crawford of Lymond, who at one point alludes to his inability to "suffer reversals." They've survived their stumbles and may prove hardier than Brutus, more discriminating than Caesar. Each actor is benefits from the bleed between fact and fiction in that they are being granted a chance to examine their own life through the lens of another's.

Hope and the Ugly Places

I had two tabs open in my browser the other day. One was a Chicago Tribune article ennumerating overnight shootings, several of which had taken place in Englewood. The other was a Wikipedia page on H. H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City himself, who built a murder castle in Englewood where he systematically killed and disposed of his victims. I have no solid explanation for how both tabs came to be open at 2 PM on a workday. Chalk it up to my daily Tribune perusal coupled with the impending arrival of Halloween. At any rate, a stray thought flitted across my mind, soon chased away by my dominant, rational side: if anywhere on this planet is haunted, Englewood is surely haunted, and maybe the awful things one man did over a decade ago are somehow echoing across time. Stop being ridiculous, I told myself. You know what's haunting Englewood: poverty, racism, and violence.

Still, I couldn't quite shake H. H. Holmes and his horrific crimes, and as I drove home a couple days later I came up with a tentative explanation as to why. You would assume that the world's ugliness would come as less of a shock to an adult. You'd think that the unintentional information-gathering that is anyone's life would provide you with a strong enough foundation for contextualization. Maybe there are some people for whom this is true, but I'm not one of them. I think the more people I meet--complex, not 100% sympathetic people who have had more than their fair share of misfortunes--the more shocked I become that anyone, anyone, would do what Holmes did. I know a lot of imperfect people. I may even know dangerous people. I don't know anyone who would do what he did.

Intellectually, I know that anyone is capable of anything. I'm constantly being sold this message by books, movies, the news, historians, logic. Nonetheless, knowing something is very different from believing it, and the more I come to know myself, the more I come to realize that I am only shockable when one of my beliefs has been overturned or called into question. I'm not a blind optimist--there is evil in the world--but I find it hard to conceive of a world without hope, and everything about H. H. Holmes is hopeless. There are no easy fixes for Englewood, either, but I can feel a little better about a story that is still playing out.

Around the time I was sucked into the H. H. Holmes Wikipedia vortex, I started reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Although it contains a handy helping of tragedy and more than its share of villains, Cloud Atlas is a humanist novel with an optimistic ending. It carries us from the Industrial Revolution (albeit without much industry) to self-inflicted ruin and back again via six loosely connected narratives occurring in different times and places but eerily echoing each other. As the New York Times put it:

[The novel's central narrative is] a postapocalyptic future on an Earth where stories of our storied civilizations past are all that remain of works and days, and then only as fragments, like those we’ve been reading. This is where the human race and its predatory nature will lead us, the novella would seem to suggest, while at the same time the novel is arguing otherwise. For that postapocalyptic fate is not the end of “Cloud Atlas,” merely its middle. The second half of the novel is the mirror image of the first, offering, in reverse order, conclusions to each of the novellas that turn out not to be unfinished but interrupted. By the time we reach the novel’s final page, we have traveled back to the journey that began in 1850, that of a man following footsteps into the unknown, a future that might lead to our end but that, just as possibly, the novel’s fluid form suggests, could lead anywhere, even to that most unlikely destination: salvation from ourselves.

 The forces at work in the novel are all-powerful and all-consuming. It seems ludicrous the one man could influence an all but inevitable trajectory. Life, as (only) one of the novels six narrators concludes, could be hopeless after all. Or...

Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "[...] He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

You haven't heard the last of Cloud Atlas here. For one thing, I've been suffering from book-lag, unable to get it out of my head since finishing it three days ago. For another, I can already tell that this is going to be one of those books that I reflect on throughout my life. Like Dido Twite in Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles, or the characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or The Wire, or Tales of the City, or The History Boys, I feel that Cloud Atlas and its characters will be touchstones, and that through examining those fictional lives I will better understand my own.

At the very least, it's something to think about on a rainy day. And if a droplet is one day motivated by this book to take on a thing like Englewood, so much the better.

Feeling Your Age (And When Not To)

I just got back from the cool movie theater near my apartment, where I saw the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is a young adult novel that I read for the first time last fall at age 22. I got it out of the library in Lincoln Park and read it on the train downtown, finishing it on a riverside bench I found by chance that day. I loved it. It was worth the wait.

The bench became my go-to outdoor reading and relaxation bench; the book, although I didn't know it at the time, became one of the catalysts for the writing I'm doing now.

But forget the bench and forget my writing. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book many of my friends deeply connected with in their teenage years. I put off reading it because...well, the reasons have escaped me. Suffice it to say that I have never really read books at the age at which I was expected to read them.

I really, really liked the movie. Was it a Great Movie? Who knows? Who cares? This was not one of my childhood novels, so I was perhaps less invested than some. (Also, knowing the author adapted and directed the film left me with no worries about fidelity.) It left me giddy, mostly. I felt like I felt after reading the Hunger Games trilogy: like a teenager, like I was experiencing emotion like a teenager. At certain points during the movie I had contorted myself into shapes in my seat that I don't think I've found myself in since I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time. (I was thirteen or thereabouts when I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time.)

While I was watching the movie, I experienced two overwhelming emotions that had passed me by while reading the book: vivid, happy nostalgia and gut-churning discomfort. I really felt for Charlie, the main character, who struggles to "participate." Watching him struggle to give word to his feelings, watching him inch closer to the people he wants to befriend, watching him understand more than he can express: it all reminded me of moments in my own life--few and far between, but still present--when I feel uncomfortable and unable to connect. Those parts of the film were uncomfortable for the same reasons watching J. Edgar was so uncomfortable last year. I am far, far better off than Charlie (and light years better off than anyone in J. Edgar), but no one ever said that a character has to be overwhelmingly like you for you to identify with them, and when a film or a novel is successful and your connection with the character is strong, it can feel as if that character is forcing you to amplify your feelings to match theirs. (What is tragically hilarious about this phenomenon in the case of Charlie is that this is exactly his problem. He feels too much of what others are feeling and takes it all in, letting too little out in return.)

A beautiful this about identifying with Charlie: his high school friends. This part of the film was pure joy for me (and, if the noises the rest of the audience made were anything to go by, a sizable portion of the theater felt the same way). What a collection of crazy, imperfect people who talk over each other and know all the same stories and have all the same inside jokes. Their circumstances are very different, but they remind me of people I know very well. Watching the movie reminded me of spending time with my high school friends: how effortless it is, how when we're together it's as if we've simultaneously changed and stayed just as we were senior year. My high school was small, and leaving it made me realize which people exactly were worth keeping in touch with. Some people I could have predicted; other crept up on me. When you find a group of people like that, it's worth writing about, as Charlie discovers. It's worth writing about again and again, in different forms, in different genres, across age and time.

Charlie made me think of another boy, younger, and from a different country, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Little Bill Roach is stuck in a boarding school whose customs he doesn't fully understand, struggling to fit in to a culture that doesn't come naturally to him. In John Le Carré's book, and in the BBC miniseries adaptation, Bill Roach is buoyed along by his friendship with Jim Prideaux, a former spy now teaching French at the school. Jim draws Bill Roach out, making him aware of his natural talents--observation and empathy--and celebrating those talents. Bill Roach feels as if he has become part of something through this friendship, and he realizes for the first time that his character traits may in fact be abilities.

I love this relationship between Bill Roach and Jim Prideaux, natural "singles" and "watchers" both, so when, last winter, I saw the (otherwise great) film adaptation of the novel, I felt let down when Jim, overwhelmed with his own problems and tiring of the ever-hovering Bill Roach, lashes out with, "Go and join the others. Just bloody join in. Go and play, damn you.” This is their final interaction.

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie makes his own efforts to join in, but he makes it his aim to participate not because someone has told him he should, but because he knows what happiness it can bring him. His friends accept him because the  qualities that make him struggle to break away from the wall at a school dance are the same qualities that enable him to say to one of his friends, "I know who you are." Knowing that someone is watching--and watching out for--you is a powerful feeling. Charlie made the effort once, to participate, and it won him these wonderful friends. By the end of the novel, he knows he can do it again, and he can do it without trying to be someone else. It's easier to admit to your own good qualities when you surround yourself with people who can see those qualities in you, people who know that some things about you will change but that there are fixed points about you too.

Ultimately, I think what I like so much about The Perks of Being a Wallflower is that it's a celebration of all the things I like most: literature, conversation, observation, introspection, close friendships, loyalty. "Only connect," said E.M. Forster. Charlie connects, and he connects in his own way: "I know who you are." "And all the books you've read have been read by other people."

On going back and moving forward (or: THE PRIIIIIDE)

In my new job as a grant writer, I sit at a desk, in front of a computer. Next to me, I have a phone with my very own extension. The only people I talk to all day with any regularity are my two colleagues, L1 and L2, and our supervisor. Sometimes I run into other people in the hallway and say hello, or chat a little longer, especially in the case of the woman who I knew first as a mom in the classroom I worked in last year. It’s wonderful, glorious, quiet, and the only stressors are the ones that come with any due-date-centric job.

Another wonderful perk is that I get chances to go back to my old site and visit, as I round up quotes for the newsletter, take pictures for the annual report, or prowl the hallways for spelling errors in case the governor drops by. A couple times I’ve made special trips over there to do those things and also to make sure I saw certain kids who left an impression on me, in particular the girl who was so upset when I left that she could barely speak on my last day.

A necessary digression: In junior year, Roommate J and I went to see an Off Broadway play called The Pride. It starred Hugh Dancy (the reason I was there), Ben Whishaw (the reason Roommate J was there), and Andrea Riseborough (the reason I’m telling this story at all). Riseborough’s character didn’t have the most stage time, but what time she did have was endlessly appropriated by her friend (Whishaw’s character) and his problems. From the time that we saw the play, Roommate J took to exclaiming, “The Pride, The Pride!” in tones of doom, whenever I was about to devote a chunk of my time to anyone else’s personal problems. She did it when I called certain friends on the phone. She did it when I would read Facebook statuses that got me concerned. It was actually a pretty helpful formulation, when you think about it, because it refers to something concrete but it also warns of a waft of hubris in the room: as if I could be so proud as to think that I could singlehandedly fix another human being. Mostly, though, it was hilarious. It was a sight to behold: Roommate J grasping her face and intoning, “The Pride, The Pride!” while writhing around in her chair as I tried to carry on a normal phone conversation without laughing. I took her point, but I always laughed it off, too. I wasn’t trying to save anyone; I didn’t think I could, or should, or that there weren’t others, better-qualified others, with the same idea.

Well, dear readers, The Pride lives on. I think about it whenever I pass one of these gas stations, for instance.

I mean, seriously, what is that about?

Most recently, though, The Pride lived on when I e-mailed Roommate J to update her on my life and let slip that I worried about the kids I left behind and thought I should visit them more. Her reply went like this (excerpt from an actual e-mail):

Obligatory:

THE PRIIIIDE THE PRIIIIIDE

I cracked up when I opened it (at work, at my glorious desk, at lunch hour, where people treat you like an adult and acknowledge that you will be checking all your e-mails). This time, though, it actually put me in check. I had been tying myself in knots over a chat I had with M, who called me and, in the midst of a separate conversation, mentioned that this girl, the one who couldn’t say goodbye to me, had been really withdrawn and depressed recently. And had been grilling my coworker, the one with a kid in that classroom, about how often she saw me and what my office was like and whether I liked it there.

Getting Roommate J’s e-mail was a nice reality check. I was in that girl’s life for all of ten months. I’m not responsible for her happiness, and I don’t know all the factors leading to her depression (which was noticeable before I was even on the scene). I can drop by and cheer her up (and I did), but I can’t expect that to be the solution, and I can’t beat myself up about leaving when it was so clearly the right decision for me. Nor, layer #2 of The Pride reminds me, should I have such a high opinion of myself that I think I am the only solution.

I can, however, go back and volunteer once a week in the evening program. I did so last night, and it felt good: to be back, to be making a commitment to show my face regularly, and to know that, whenever I wanted, I could walk out the door.

Fresh from America! Madame brought them!

StoryCorps happened, to my delight. I went on over to the Mobile Booth they had stationed in Millenium Park and, to the sounds of the jazz fest two greens over and the families out enjoying Labor Day weekend, I sat and waited my turn. A couple people wandered up to me and asked me about StoryCorps, mistaking me for an employee. Others asked where the bathroom was, mistaking me for a park ranger. Finally, Lady #1 emerged and asked me what story I would be telling that day.

Until that moment, I hadn’t fully decided. I figured they would want whatever I said to be as fresh as possible, anyway. I told her that I would be telling the story of how my parents met. I gestured vaguely. “And some other stuff.”

None of that other stuff would be new to readers of this blog, or anyone who’s had a serious conversation with me over the past year. As to the story of how my parents met, and the story of my French godfathers, which I launched into as well…those are best heard in person. Or you could listen to the recording of the entire interview they handed me on CD once I was done. I went home and uploaded it to iTunes and from there to Dropbox to share with whoever wanted to hear it. I was figuring my parents would want to hear it, and maybe a handful of interested family members. I knew which of my friends actively wanted to listen. I sent the link to some people and left it at that, figuring they’d listen to it when they could (probably while stuck in traffic or folding laundry or something).

Instead, I started getting, alternately, barrages of people wanted to listen to the interview and barrages of notes from people who had already listened to and enjoyed it. These notes ran the gamut from, “Awesome!” (much appreciated; that’s what I strive for) to “I love your StoryCorps recording! The stories you told obviously mean so much to you and are so beautiful, and your voice sounds so good telling stories (I would say you got your father’s gift :D)! I’m so glad it’s preserved to inspire others: your parents and the quality of the relationships in your family truly are moving.”

This is me, now, curled up, feeling the love.

It wasn’t that I expected no one to listen—that would be veering away from humility and into denial—but the volume and quality of the responses I got really moved me. From the girl I hadn’t talked to in a while who materialized out of nowhere and asked to listen, to the very close friend who intended to listen while she was doing something else and found herself glued to her computer, listening: these friends of mine rock.

There were others who, in really well thought out e-mails, informed me of my maturity. This meant a lot. It’s unpopular for someone my age to rhapsodize about her parents. It’s not that closeness with your parents isn’t valued in America, it’s more that it’s seen as a dangerous quality; possibly those who possess this quality are about to crawl back home, possibly they already live there, possibly they have no lives of their own.

None of those things are true of me, or of my best friend, who is also very close to her parents, or of the other people I know in this situation. “You should call home more,” is the punch line of many a joke, but it’s always the parent who utters it who is the butt of the joke, not the grown child off doing their own (presumably fulfilling, fascinating) thing. The assumption is that, as time passes, it is the parent’s place to sit by the phone and the child’s to craft their own life at the expense of the life they left behind.

In Europe, in China, in certain American cultures (although not the WASPy mainstream), living with your parents, or allowing your parents to live with you, is the norm. It doesn’t mean that you rely on them overmuch, that you haven’t cut the cord, or that you’re incapable of adulthood. It just means that for financial or health or other reasons you have chosen to support each other. That, after all, is what families are expected to do.

Let me be clear: I don’t advocate leeching off your parents. I don’t think parents exist solely to cater to their children’s needs. Nor to I think your parents should factor in every decision you make. We’re all people, and we can all live our own lives. I’m just saying that those lives don’t necessarily have to be lived completely separately in the service of some weirdly developed notion of the American Dream. I have no plans to move to my parents’ house in Kansas, but I don’t think I have to feel ashamed about wanting to talk about or be with the people who mean the most to me. Once upon a time, after all, someone referred to me as “your filial piety daughter.” I don’t think I’ve ever been more honored in my life.

So it was nice to feel the love on Facebook, in text messages, and via e-mail. And it was nice, in true Nom de Plume fashion, to share the experience with my parents, even though I was in one place and they were in another. Now, and for the foreseeable future, we and all the characters in our stories will get to hang out together in the Library of Congress. I’ll bring dinner, my godfathers can bring the wine, and my mom can bring her, ahem, American cake. My dad can provide the entertainment and sit there and tell stories to remind us how we all got there in the first place.

A Brief P.S.

Today, I finally got around to finishing Quiet. I finished it in two installments. I read the majority on my favorite bench in Chicago.

It's a place perfectly suited to contemplation. Indeed, if I had been invited to contribute an essay to the hypothetical volume of essays I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, I would probably have written it sitting on that bench.

But enough about that.

In the end, I came around. Reality never quite measured up to expectation, but Cain did shift focus from society to the individual, and that certainly helped my enjoyment of the book. Like Cain (and I don't want to spoil anything here for those who haven't read Quiet and intend to, so I'm about to be vague), the theory I found most revelatory and most applicable to daily life was Professor Little's Free Trait Theory. You may sometimes act out of character and against type, but it's worth it in the service of something you really, really care about, even if it leaves you exhausted and hiding in the bathroom.

Which brings me to my next point! Only 10% sarcastic kudos to Cain for acknowledging the Universal Hiding in the Bathroom Principle. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay, it takes all kinds!)

Thanks, also, for:
1) The guy at Claremont McKenna who got up early "just to savor time alone with a steaming cup of coffee." Replace tea, and you've got my life now.
2) "...the life of the mind." My mother, once again vindicated in print for something she's been saying for as long as I can remember.
3) "'The stereotype of the university professor is accurate for so many people on campus. They like to read; for them there's nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up. If you spend a lot of time charging around, then you have less time for reading and learning. There's only so much time in your life.'" That last line is something both sides of the spectrum should be able to say, but you so rarely hear it applied in this context.
4) Introvert guilt, which I completely identified with and had always chalked up to Catholic Guilt.
5) "Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth."

However, there was one serious problem. In all that talk of fear of public speaking, not once did anyone mention nervous poo. Forgive me for being frank, but it's a phenomenon Roommate J (who I am sending this book immediately) and I discussed endlessly. Quelle oversight!

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

If you know my family, particularly specific members of my family, you know that we're storytellers. In order to explain how three voodoo dolls showed up unexpectedly on a nippy Colorado night in the early 2000s, we like to go all the way back to the 1950s in Baltimore and thoroughly lay the groundwork.

My conversational style in high school and college could reasonably be described as story on top of story on top of story. When I wasn't telling stories, the well was dry and I was listening attentively instead. That's why people think of me as a good listener. I think I am too, and I'll take the compliment, but I think the reason for it is slightly different from what people suppose: I do genuinely want to solve your problems, but I also want slice of life stories from other perspectives, and there's nothing like a particularly fraught or tearful rant to deliver those stories.

My conversations still run like that, although to a lesser extent now. These days, I like to have deep, introspective debates with those who know me best. Just last weekend, my friends P and M were staying with me in Chicago and we delved deep until two in the morning two nights running. I was in heaven...until I had to get up at seven to go to work on Monday.

The point is, I love telling to stories, and I love listening to other people's well-told stories as well. There's a reason I listened (and wept along with a good percentage of) StoryCorps segments in the mornings before I headed off to high school. In college, I made one unsuccessful attempt to sign up for an interview slot at the StoryCorps office in New York. Those slots go fast. I had wanted to get my parents to sit down and tell the story of how they met. I love it, and I've heard it a million times, and a corner of my brain is convinced that the whole world (or at least the NPR-listening public) needs to hear it too.

A year and a half later, and here I am in Chicago, still a fan of StoryCorps on Facebook and an occasional dabbler in their podcast. I'm heading out to work one morning when I notice that not only is the mobile recording booth coming to Chicago, but signups will be the following day at 10:00AM. I file it away and rush out the door. The next day I arrive at work at 8:50 as usual, turn on my computer, and wait. This, I thought, is one of the reasons why this job is better than my last job. Here I sit, with all of the modern world a few key strokes away (barring the eccentric web filter).

As ten o'clock approaches, I start to get anxious. My supervisor mentioned that she might push my weekly meeting with her forward a bit to accommodate another meeting. It's only my third week; I couldn't very well say, "Sorry: StoryCorps," and gesture at the screen with supreme confidence. I shouldn't have worried, though. At the stroke of ten, I log in, see the rapidly disappearing times, an nab an available slot in the first weekend of September. I feed them my information, agonize for a while over whether I should put a specific interviewee (name and phone number) to accompany me, and ultimately mark that I'll be coming alone. I click submit and, miracle of miracles, the next page tells me that my attendance is confirmed!

I do a little dance at my desk surreptitiously take out my phone to make a Facebook status. This is modern life, and I like it.

The question remains: out of a lifetime of my own and other people's stories, which one do I pick? These can be multi-part stories, of course, as all good stories told by members of my family are. I have some ideas, a couple two short and one probably too bloated. I have an hour slot all to myself, so it should take time, but not too much time. Or (always assuming I can change my reservation) should I grab someone from Chicago or Champaign and interview them? At first I assumed that's what I would do, but the more I think about it, the more I think I want the freedom to tell the story I want.

Suggestions are welcome, either here or via e-mail, with the caveat that I may not listen to any of them. Which of my stories (or the stories you know I know) do you think are particularly deserving of a spot in the Library of Congress? Do I tell my own story, or another's? It goes without saying that part of it will be funny, and part of it will be heartfelt. What do you think?

The mind churns / the heart yearns

There was a time in my life when I listened to nothing but musicals. This was before I discovered Oldies and would tune the car radio to 92.5, Champaign, Illinois’s last real oldies station. That in turn was before I discovered top 40 radio, some time between my first high school dance and my second.

           

The point is, for years it was Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and Man of La Mancha and Cats and Crazy for You. When, in second grade, I met the girl who would be one of my very closest friends, she was wearing a Damn Yankees shirt. (I knew it was a show, but I was still shocked.) Later I went to see her perform in Sunday in the Park With George, in Gypsy, in Fiddler on the Roof, in A Chorus Line. In high school I saw her in Bye Bye Birdie and The Pajama Game. We didn’t share any lines, but we acted alongside in Anything Goes. I don’t remember if she was in South Pacific, but I saw that too. She invited me over to her house and played me Cabaret for the first time (we were twelve). I invited her family to join mine at a performance of Sweeney Todd. At intermission she pointed out that I had neglected to mention the undercurrent of cannibalism.

           

Then, for years, nothing. The theater bug bit me, and by theater bug I mean the straight play bug. I could never sing or dance or compose music and so I thought if I were going to act, if I were going to write, it better be without music. I stopped attending musicals if I had the chance to see a play instead. Plays were weightier, I felt. They would help me with my writing. They would help me understand the world.

           

Sure, a couple musicals slipped in under the radar. With my aunt and cousin I went to see Spring Awakening (awesome). With Roommate J I went to see Wicked (less than awesome, but more on that later). In London, I took time out of researching and checked out Billy Elliot (really, really great). I saw Hair (revelatory) with my parents twice. It provided a soundtrack to my junior year of college, but it didn’t change my life.

I hadn’t sworn off musicals entirely, obviously, but I was treating them like I treated romantic comedies (and I used to watch a lot of those too): every once and a while, one was fine, but there wasn’t enough substance there to engage me.

           

Through it all, there was one musical I would only touch with two ten foot poles. Sure, I watched the movie like everyone else did. I even downloaded a few of the more famous melancholy songs (original cast, bien sur) to my iPod, but if there was one thing I was not, it was a Rent head. Rent fans, I knew from my many theater festival experiences, were unspeakably annoying. They were prone to bursting into “Seasons of Love” or “La Vie Boheme” in public, talking as loudly as possible, and bad dye jobs. They thought they were incurably edgy; they were as edgy as you can be when your mom drives you to Theaterfest in her minivan and picks you up early for youth group. They had never been to New York, but if they did, I assumed, they would never find their way out of Midtown. They were very open-minded, which was great, but I couldn’t help but wish they’d be less open-mouthed. I couldn’t see Rent without also seeing its legion of awkward and loud middle and high school fans.

           

(In case it’s not abundantly clear already, I will pause here and say that, on occasion, I can be a raging snob.)

           

When I started work three weeks ago, I set up several stations on Pandora. For those of you unfamiliar with how Pandora works, all you have to know is that you pick an album, or a song, or an artist, and the website will then create a stream of songs for you that resemble that album, or song, or artist, in some way. On a whim, I picked the new cast recording of Hair, hoping that it would turn into some Hair/Spring Awakening/audacious oldies songs hybrid.

           

Instead, after playing a few Hair songs to get me started, it switched right over to Rent. Now, I wasn’t about to waste one of my precious thumbs-down-switch-the-song-now chances (they cut you off after a while) on a song I actually kind of liked, so I let “One Song Glory” play on while I typed away. I hadn’t heard it for a while and I had forgotten how much I liked it, so after I finished a sentence I actually paused to give it the thumbs up.

           

After a while I got sick of listening to Berger’s out of school songs while I was chained to my desk, so I started listening to my hip hop station instead. Then I switched to Vaughan Williams. I didn’t switch back to my Hair station again until yesterday, and then it was to find a million Rent songs laying in wait for me.

           

I loved it. It was great. They didn’t play “Seasons of Love.” They didn’t play “La Vie Boheme.” Even if they had, I don’t think I would have objected. Instead, I found myself, mouth open, gaping at my computer, listening to “Santa Fe” and “Without You,” getting all verklempt because those beautiful voices were singing those songs just for me. I almost broke my mouse hitting the thumbs up button. I typed with my fingers figuratively crossed for the rest of the day hoping those two songs would come back and when they did, I silently sang along, stopping only when the President and CEO walked by on her way home.

           

I haven’t known struggle, not really, although I’ve struggled plenty. Nor am I overly fond of hipsters, which those people in Rent most certainly are. I have actively chosen not to starve for my art. I really enjoy taking showers. And I still can’t quite shake the image of a busload of over-privileged, white, Central Illinois teenagers, who would die if they got upwind of a real junkie, butchering the emotion required to sing those songs. So I’m not exactly thrilled with my transformation, at age 23, from a self-assured young professional-ish woman who not two months ago was over identifying with “Do You Hear the People Sing?” (first, overlooked hint that the musical thing was back) into someone who is playing Rent songs on repeat and feeling it in the depths of their soul.

           

Yes, reader, I went right home last night and purchased “Santa Fe” and “Without You” (original cast, bien sur) and carried my computer around my apartment while I performed mundane tasks so that the music and I would not be separated.

           

Maybe the thing about musicals is that you can’t force the connection and that, if you let things happen naturally, one day a particular song or turn of phrase will sneak up and attack you from behind. I certainly believe that to be true of movies and books, and regular, non-plot-driven songs, so why not musicals as well? I think I have to give myself permission to find inspiration in unlikely, sometimes unwanted places.

I may have started already. After all, I wrote something like five pages of my current fiction project while listening to “For Good” from Wicked on repeat. I didn’t like the show, but that song just gets at something. The same could be said for “Santa Fe” and “Without You.” If I can forget all my preconceived notions, maybe I’ll become the ideal listener, or the ideal viewer, and I’ll be able to find something new and unique in a show everyone has done to death.

So am I a musical person again? Not yet. But my Hair station got a lot of play today, so we’ll see. I already bought tickets to The Book of Mormon in December (War Horse too, but that was to be expected). I don’t expect it to change my life, but when it comes to theater I should know by now to expect the unexpected.

I'll Be What I Am

You know that scene in (500) Days of Summer (or maybe you don't in which case, what are you doing?) where expectations and reality don't quite align? This happens all the time--it's practically the human condition in a nutshell--and usually it's cause neither for commotion nor comment. Nonetheless, I feel moved to tell you of an instance recently where expectations and reality did not align for me, and what I did about it.

Before my parents and I went to Colorado, I stopped by one of the several awesome independent bookstores in their new Kansas town and purchased Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Now, I rarely read nonfiction (although I seem to be dabbling more and more), but the subject is near and dear to my heart, in particular after a year spent in a very loud, boisterous workplace. An added bonus was the fact that the author, Susan Cain, went to Princeton as well.

I should pause and say that I've been thinking about what I'm about to say for about a week now, and that I only really started gathering my thoughts while on the phone with my friend M about three hours ago. This foray into articulation may spawn more blog posts or it may not. It's still a relatively recent thought although--and this might help me to express it--I've been trying to understand the questions surrounding this topic for my entire life.

I should also say that I'm not done with the book yet. Hence the already deep imperfection of this post. I started reading it, and then my mom stole it, read it, and returned it. By then I was already deep in something else. On the bright side: no spoilers! One possible problem: I will be making some pretty obvious snap judgements.

With all that being said, let me lay things out for the more visually inclined.

This is the book I started reading:

This is what it has been like so far:

This is what I wanted it to be like:

That last image is from the Inspector Lewis episode "The Indelible Stain." I love Lewis, not just because it's on the artist formerly known as Masterpiece Theater but because it's smart, well-written for the most part, and, well, quiet.

Most of the quiet is due to the fact the Inspector Lewis' sergeant and sidekick is James Hathaway (played by Laurence Fox, pictured above). Hathaway used to be an Episcopalian seminary student. He left for reasons unraveled (or not) over the course of the show's long run. Hathaway was also a student at Cambridge of some academic repute. Hathaway likes chamber music, walking around Oxford, having pints with friends, and good literature. The screenshot I've selected above came from the beginning of last week's episode. While Lewis stood in a crowded pub and watched a match, Hathaway sat in his flat, had a drink, and contemplated a stack of books. I'm sure many people watching found it a somewhat depressing juxtaposition. I thought it was the most calming image I'd seen all week.

By the end of the episode, Hathaway had gently declined Lewis' offer to join him at the pub for another game in favor of returning home and finishing his book. It's not that Lewis and Hathaway don't socialize, it's just that Hathaway doesn't want to this one time. Lewis, to his credit, accepts this, one of the many reasons their friendship is one of my favorites on television.

I wish Quiet had some of the meditative qualities Hathaway brings to Inspector Lewis. That's what I wanted, even though I'm not sure I had the right to expect it. Quiet is very upfront about what kind of book it is. It is concerned with the cultural impact of the extrovert/introvert divide and the ways both introverts and extroverts can use their innate skills in every professional realm. Introverts, Cain says, may be swimming against the current of the Extrovert Ideal, but they don't have to be. It's time for a paradigm shift, she says. All that is fine, and I knew to expect it, but I think by the time I settled down with the book at the cabin in Colorado (a place, by the way, designed, intentionally or unintentionally, as a paradise for both introverts and extroverts) the book I needed and wanted and the book I had were no longer the same.

Cain and I agree on at least one thing: people learn by example. Her use of specific anecdotes is the best thing I've encountered in the book so far, and not just because this entire topic is grounded in such personal things as genetics (more on the science in a second), identity, and, vaguest and most important, how people feel (more on that now).

I am on page thirty one of Quiet, and already Cain has told me that I'm all right something like five times. Yes, Ms. Cain, I know I'm all right. In fact, I'm pretty damn fabulous. The day they print a pamphlet for my general brand of introversion, I'm going to be on the cover. I think everyone has moments of doubt and moments where they compare themselves to others, but I have never thought of the way I charge and recharge my batteries as anything less than a blessing. So I'm good, thanks.

I don't want to learn by being told; I want to learn by seeing. What I want now, in my hands, is a book of essays. These essays would be written by introverts, but that wouldn't necessarily come up. These essays would be meditations on quiet and noise and the intersections of the two. Maybe one piece would be written by a Hathaway type, who has friends and a job and who doesn't have everything figured out but who nonetheless does pretty well for himself. Maybe this person values those things, but occasionally just wants to retreat to his flat (calm, IKEA interiors, soft chairs, cool air, tea kettle) and read. I want to read quiet people's observations on a range of things, not just the workplace, the ivory tower, and the public sphere. I want to see these people carving out their niches in, on, around, and outside of the swim; wherever they want to be, that's where I want to see them succeeding.

My mom occasionally talks about the life of the mind. She mentioned it once--I don't remember the context--to our neighbor, a meditative guy, and he was very struck by the image. It wasn't until then that I realized there was a word for the way I felt on the playground in elementary school: I'll play with you if you want, but there's going to have to be at least one day a week where I play alone, thank you very much.

Not everyone has had this revelation. Not everyone has stopped beating themselves up when they can't hop from social event to social event to social event to social event without pausing in between to take stock. To those people I would say, check out Quiet. It seems like a pretty good book, all told. It's got a lot of people talking; even The Atlantic has started telling people to hire more introverts. I'll definitely pick it up again and finish it. I'll probably like it, even though I might start tearing out my hair when she tries to buck me up yet again.

And oh, right, I was going to talk about science. This one goes out to Roommate J, who was always the first (well, second or third if certain other roommates were there) to question the logic of things. I want to know more about this. I think it's awesome that Cain is basing her definitions of introvert and extrovert in Jung, because I kind of like the guy, but I would also like some scientific grounding (if applicable, but you don't even say if it is or not) right off the bat. I don't want to live in suspense and wonder whether Rosa Parks called herself an introvert, whether someone developed some Kinsey-esque scale and placed her on it, or whether Cain is making her own assumptions. If there is no mind-blowing science, I would rather just read Jung. I would rather contemplate identity, not read about what I can do to shine in board meetings, because that kind of thing stresses me out. (And, yes, I know that's because I'm an introvert, but I also know how to humorously rock the house right off the board meeting, so that's taken care of.)

Susan Cain may be a role model. Her book may be full of good ideas. There may be a person out there who needs repeated reassurance and that's fine. For my part, even though I hope to live a life as full as Cain's, for now I look to Hathaway and his tea-drinking, book-reading peace.

Open Letter To the Person Who Stole My Wallet Yesterday

Dear Sir or Madam,

Most of all, I really hope you enjoyed reading all those fortune cookie fortunes I collected over the years, perhaps while you were waiting in line at Target with my credit card in hand and maybe two dozen sheet sets and a bunch of DVDs on the conveyor belt. You seem like the type to hunt without a license, but just in case, I stuck a blank jackalope hunting license in there just for you! It's been signed by the mayor of Douglas, Wyoming, so just fill in your name and you should be good to go! I also hope that you take the opportunity to drive down to Urbana and eat four more meals at Basil Thai. Your fifth will be free.

Then, while you're lying in front of the fire on your jackalope skin rug, eating fried rice and watching the complete Friends, consider taking a moment to look at the wallet itself. It might not be your style--pink with red poppies on it--and at first I wasn't even sure it was my style, but I bought it in one of my favorite cities in the world and it held everything. It became my style, because it was my wallet and I liked it better than all the other wallets people gave me over the years, the ones that languished in my top drawer (well, aside from the replacement I whipped out yesterday) untouched.

You're mostly welcome to the cash in there, even though I was planning on spending the forty bucks at the grocery store today. Perhaps your need is greater than mine and you have children or nieces and nephews who could use a good meal. That part is fine. What isn't okay is the rest of the money in there, which my mother handed me when I left Kansas on Thursday. She told me to buy myself a nice outfit I could feel good wearing on my first day of work, which is tomorrow.

Now, I don't have the world's largest bank account, but I have enough that, if I wanted, I could go out and buy an outfit today anyway. After all, I left my debit card in my apartment for the first time this year out of some strange, premonitory luck and I have it with me now (in my new, perfectly nice, substandard wallet). It's not the money. Money is money. I have a job and my mom has a job and my dad gets retirement checks. What really bothers me to the point that it makes my skin crawl and my tear ducts fire up is that my mother, who loves me and wanted me to have a good first day at work because I've had a not-bad-but-not-easy year, handed it to me and I took it out of her hands and put it in my wallet and the next hands to take it out were...not mine. I wasn't standing in Express, and my mother's idea was temporarily hijacked by someone she would probably call "sad," "unfortunate," "an interesting adult."

So think of me in line at the DMV tomorrow morning, while I hope against hope that they can get me a new driver's license as quickly as possible so I don't have to call in late on my first day. And think of me the next time you access any of the services available to you as someone who has gotten to the point that you feel you must steal for a living, because somewhere someone is writing grants to keep those services available to you, and they might be doing it with a new (substandard) wallet in their purse.

Enjoy those CVS and Dominick's discounts!
Sincerely,
Nom de Plume

In Which I Am Claire Fisher

When I left work on June 29th and drove to my hometown (now finally revealed as Champaign, Illinois), I left work for the last time. On my last day, the kids threw a party. They wrote cards and hung streamers and made little protest signs out of Popsicle sticks urging me not to go. They girls created a stepping routine and performed a poem they had written to go with it. M, my coworker, ordered pizza and cake.

It's been a tough year, and one I would not care to repeat, but it has changed me in ways I wouldn't trade for anything and on my last day I felt very loved. To repay some of the kindness that was done to me by welcoming me to the Center, I gave each of the kids one of my books, carefully selected to match their personalities and needs from among the stack of books deaccessioned from my childhood library. FP, who is a quiet, deep-thinking writer, got a hardcover book of poetry. FJ, who I wouldn't be surprised to find myself working for one day, got Julie of the Wolves. Two of the boys, best friends and artists, got Dinotopia and The World Beneath. AP got Harriet the Spy. Her brother got Captain Underpants. And on and on and on. Since my precocity had limits, I went ahead and bought two Anna Deavere Smith books for the girls in the evening program who worked with me to write the play.

I think I may do more for literacy at the Center by my absence than by my presence, as I'm given to understand that letters may already be on their way to me in the mail.

I'm not going far. After taking July to help my parents move, I will be returning to the Center (different site, same organization) as a grant-writer. I'm happy because I'm not leaving entirely; I'll still have to opportunity to see the kids and coworkers I'll miss the most. It'll be very different, though. I'll have a desk, a computer, a filing cabinet, a phone extension, and a boss who checks in with me regularly. I'll have working adult hours. It'll be stressful, but not in the way this year has been. It'll be challenging, but on a professional and not a basic, personal level. I will miss those deep-digging revelations about the world and myself that I had on an almost weekly basis, but I won't miss the time I snatched scissors out of a girl's hand, or the time I had to break up a rapidly escalating fight, or the time there were shots fired outside the school where we did pickup, or those times I kept it together at work only to burst into tears on Lake Shore Drive on the way home.

But, wait, how am I Claire Fisher, youngest Fisher child and red-haired heroine of HBO's Six Feet Under? I have blogged before about my passing resemblance to Roland Pryzbylewski. Now, and not for the first time, I feel myself identifying with Claire, who is semi-catapulted into adulthood as she drives away from the place that has been her house for years while "Breathe Me" by Sia plays in the background.

Claire and I have very little in common in the grand scheme of things, but while I was driving away from Chicago to Champaign where I would spend one night with my best friend's family before embarking on my parents' big move the next day, "Breathe Me" shuffled its way onto my iPod. I found myself thinking of Claire, whose creative struggles I took to heart at the beginning of my time at the Center. "Maybe you're not an artist," her aunt says to her, and she gets really offended, because she knows fundamentally that she is but with every passing day she has less proof. She tries a job that isn't her before finding one that is, but going for it requires a big leap of faith. She leaves her home, and she's uncertain but she's hopeful.

I've found that dealing with uncertainty in one area of your life narrows your focus in others. You start to think of what's really important to you. You may not act on it immediately, but at least you know. Working with the kids at the Center changed my setting just as saying goodbye to "home" changed my setting, but these things also made me more myself. More experiences. More growth. More challenges. More people to identify with.

"You have to complete your body of work" (Writing to Solve Problems)

Readers of this blog may or may not be aware (and if this is obvious or if I have worn out your patience on this topic, forgive me) that I have been trying to get my writing groove back for almost exactly two years now. ("I'm sorry, but you've thrown off the emperor's groove." Anyone?) In recent months, I've begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For the first time in a long time, I've started to have new ideas. I have a tentative outline for a project that is both timely and fulfills a requisite I wasn't even aware I had until I thought it over: when I write, I like to solve problems.

In September 2009, I attended a Women in Theater conference at Princeton where I heard one playwright panelist offer this advice: "You have to complete your body of work." She was responding to another panelist's fear that her latest play would be too real and too inflammatory and would bar her from returning to her home country.

"You have to complete your body of work," really moved me. I wrote a lot through middle school and high school, and I churned out some pretty good things in the first two years of college, but if I had to throw it all away and delete it I would, if it meant I got to keep two pieces. These pieces--my play about the Vatican investigations of U.S. seminaries and my novella about my French godfathers--both arose from a need to work something out. I was upset in 2005 when I read this article, and I wanted to use a play to express my point of view. At that time, fiction was my primary means of engaging with the world. I had only recently become interested in politics, thanks to The West Wing, and I had been granted a glimpse of what theater was capable of in Angels in America. I set out to create a nuanced but also hopefully persuasive play. As I wrote it, as I traveled to Nebraska to stage it, as I talked about it later, and, finally, as I wrote a college admissions essay about the experience, I became more outspoken. Prior to writing the play, I had never taken a strong position on anything. Writing it helped me see things clearly and find my voice.

The novella about my godfathers was not sparked by controversy, a water-cooler discussion, or a piece in a national newspaper. I became curious about people who had once been a part of my life, but whom (for different, equally upsetting, reasons) I would likely never see again. I felt somehow cheated of a wealth of stories when I lost my connection to these storytellers, and so I decided to take the stories I knew and make up new ones to fill in the gaps. When you are fictionalizing the lives of people you knew well but incompletely, it almost helps to know that they will never read what you write. I was at liberty to extrapolate on what I knew, and in doing so, I later found out, I came painfully close to the truth. Later, I would talk more about what truths can be found in fiction in my senior thesis, but this was my first experience of it first hand.

Now I am working on something and I'm not quite sure how to proceed. As in the novella, it is about people I know well but incompletely. In this case, however, I don't have the permission granted by distance or death. I will be filling in the gaps, and I will be doing so to work out my own feelings about what I actually know to be true. Like the play, what I am writing about is complicated, and timely, and could make a certain segment uncomfortable. It's making me a little uncomfortable, to be honest, but not because of its content. I wonder, do I have to right to write about this? It isn't my story, not really. If I appear at all it will be as a character even more peripheral than "Lizzie" in the novella. But then I remind myself, this is how you felt when you started the play. You thought you couldn't talk about it because you weren't a priest, you weren't gay, you'd never been in a seminary. You were Catholic, at least, and you were angry, and that had to become enough to buoy you on.

I work in a place with a lot of confidentiality. If I want to write about what I'm thinking of writing about, I'll have to fictionalize like never before. Even then, I may not feel entirely comfortable about it, but I guess if I felt comfortable I wouldn't be much of a problem-solver. To write to solve problems, you have to have access to feelings you try to repress the rest of the time. You have to be willing to let your characters look bad. You have to be open to the possibility that there may be no answers. You have to be open to the possibility of failure, and you have to be ready to stand up for what you've written.

I've been having a lot of trouble "leaving it at work" recently. I'm only three weeks away from my end date, and that helps, but I strongly suspect that at least some of what I'm feeling stems from the idea that in three weeks I can walk away and the situations that bother me will continue in my absence. I've done a lot of good at the Center. It hasn't always been my favorite place, and I haven't always felt that I was doing the job I was hired to do, or even that I was doing anything remotely resembling my qualifications or interests, and, yes, it has been the toughest year of my life, but I think without the chance to step outside myself and my experiences I would still be floundering. Now I have something to write about, and if it works out, writing about this in particular might be the greatest accomplishment of the job. If I want to help kids and help myself, this has to be the way I do it. Otherwise, I'm not doing anyone any good.

So I won't be doing a writing MFA. At least not yet. I need to be challenged, but I need to be challenged on a personal level, on a gut level. I need to be challenged as a person, not as a writer. In the age-old question of writing what you know or writing what you don't know, I've decided not to choose. They're pretty much a hairsbreadth apart, anyway. It doesn't bother me. It's how I change.

The Sister and the Heterolifemate (April, Part III)

On the People Who Are Important to Me list, these two are way up there.

One of them is my best friend, Subcontinent, the person I've known almost as long as I've known my parents. We've never gone to the same school and we went to college on opposite coasts. We've also never had a fight (I've never fought anyone, actually, which is something my coworkers find improbable) or a disagreement, if you don't count the Sippee Cup Incident when we were two, and I don't, because I bottled it up passive-aggressively as is my wont. She knows me, I know her. We're like Montaigne and that dude; "Because it was him: because it was me." Or, in her words freshman year:

I have decided you are far more entertaining than econ quant analysis
but I already knew that 

The other is my college roommate, one of five, the illustrious Roommate J. If we get to sixty-five (allows room for an eleventh hour husband) and neither of us is married, we'll marry each other. (I'm pushing for Iowa. She likes Vermont. Hopefully by then there will be several options.) I already know we can live together. She makes unexpected noises and I like my space, but for some reason it never became a problem. We bonded over Whose Line Is It Anyway and nail polish and it accelerated from there. It got to the point where it became difficult to say goodbye. That's when you know a person is important to you.

Subcontinent and Roommate J are very different from me, and they are very different from each other, but they were the ones I used my hard-won vacation days to visit. This was the weekend after Easter, and my East Coast visit had been on the books long before any of April's other delights began to pick up steam. For a while I was worried I wouldn't get to go after all, but I could and I did and I have never been more relaxed over a hectic five day period in my life.

New York was food, walking, and feeling vaguely like an adult. Baltimore was food, walking, and revisiting old sources of entertainment. Both felt so incredibly right.

And Here Was I (April, Part II)

When I was in middle school, my grandparents came to visit and my parents went out to dinner. After picking me up at school and navigating the unpaved parking lot, my grandparents and I went to the world's best video rental store (losing intermittent access to this may actually be what I dislike most about my parents' impending move) and picked up The Four Feathers (this was before the Heath Ledger version) and The Man in the White Suit. We watched The Four Feathers first and whenever I saw my grandfather after that, I took to reciting what my imperfect memory could dredge up of the above clip.

Here were the Russians: Guns, guns, guns!
And here were the British: The thin, red line.
And here was the commander in chief.
And here. Was I.

It started sounding like poetry.

Movies were our thing. Movies and stories and Paris, France. It was kind of the perfect grandparent-grandchild relationship, because those were the things I loved most anyway. Then I moved to Princeton, New Jersey and all of a sudden I was inundated with recommendations of restaurants that had been closed forty years or more. We had even more to talk about, which I guess was partially adulthood on my part.

Whether we were in California or Illinois or France, Grandpa was always trying to foist alcohol on me. It's kind of a thing in our family; it's an Irish family, so it's not weird. (I was the weird one, since I didn't drink at all until I turned 21; freakishly well-behaved, that's been me all along.) I turned down wine in California, I turned down wine in Illinois, and, most shockingly, I turned down wine in France at age 18. I was also offered beer, champagne, and bourbon, and all my family members looked on in amusement as I declined every single time. I did dip my finger in my mom's wine and act out the Four Feathers scene, though. That's just what we did.

My grandfather passed away on April 6th and on April 7th I was sitting in my parents favorite bar with my father (Mom was in California), drinking bourbon. It seemed appropriate, which didn't prevent me from making every novice mistake in the book. In my attempt to water it down, I released the flavor. All the ice I added melted and it lasted forever. We arrived back home, tipsy, and cried all over the pizza dough. We wetly discussed Kansas, adulthood, and my closeness with my parents. Dad revealed that he had no regrets. We blew our noses, made the pizza, and watched the first two episodes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The next day was Easter. We hosted some friends, did our (last) traditional Easter Egg Hunt in the backyard, and I took over Mom's role and cranked out some really amazing (if I say so myself) profiteroles.

The friends left and I packed my stuff to drive back to Chicago. I couldn't carry everything myself, so Dad helped me out to the car. I shut the trunk and he glanced through the window. "If you wanted," he said, "I could ride up with you and help you carry everything up to your apartment, and then you could put me on a Greyhound back." At the time I thought he was only 70% kidding. Now, looking back at the emotional roller coaster that weekend was, I'm sure it was only 30%. (If you called him and asked him, he might admit to 20%.)

I don't have many regrets, either. I certainly don't have any big ones and even if I did, my closeness with my parents would never be one of them. We've always been a very close family, and I don't think distance is going to change that. It didn't when I was in college and I don't think Kansas, even if I don't get those nice long breaks every six weeks, will do much to hurt it either.

So it's been an interesting spring, but I'm still quoting The Four Feathers, and I'm still trying to plan out my life with as many trips to France as possible, and I kind of like wine now, and I'm turning into a professional storyteller, so if that's my contribution to my grandfather's legacy I'm happy.

And if I'm tempted to turn around and stare at April like a charging buffalo and yell, "AND HERE WAS I!" then I think I would be entirely justified.