The Talk

I spent Thursday morning hormonally angsting about how I thought Tinker, Tailor was coming out on the 9th (i.e. yesterday) when in fact it's coming out on the 16th (a week from yesterday). Throughout the whole drive to work I attempted to explain to myself that I was not really as upset as I felt, but sometimes the mind and the body are painfully difficult to separate. Arrival at work brought some relief, as I spent the first few hours chatting with M, the teacher I work with the most, and eating the extra garlic bread the kitchen had prepared. Then I went on walkover to get the kids at school, returned to the Center and then, mid-thawing out, was frogmarched along with the girls in the class into the next room.

It was in this state that I was prevailed upon to give a portion of The Talk.

No, thank God, not that portion of The Talk, but another more simply biological one about which, and in order to keep this blog as friendly as possible for my diverse audience members, I will insert a warning here:

YES, I AM ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT IT. IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH, LEAVE NOW AND COME BACK WHEN I ONCE AGAIN START TALKING GUNSHOTS AND SOCIETY. YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ IT, BUT THIS IS TRAGIC/HILARIOUS AND HAS TO BE RECORDED FOR ALL TIME.

All right. For those of you still with me, this is what happened: after the Wednesday discovery of a cleanliness problem in the women's bathroom during the evening Youth Program and subsequent lecture all the girls endured, it was proposed that the same thing could easily happen with our School Age classroom. Thus it came to pass that, once we were next door and safely cocooned from male ears, M said, "Does everyone know what a period is?"

I remember at that age hardly being able to think the words without blushing bright red and fighting an urge to flee the room. Yet, all these girls nodded calmly, and a few even raised their hands to comment. Okay, okay, I thought, so what if I have always had libertine ideals and a puritanical gut; the teacher version of myself is calm, cool, and collected and, indeed, tough. So at certain points in the subsequent conversation I chimed in. That's when the inner conflict really began.

I have told many people that every comment I make to the kids represents in varying portions actual me, ideal me, and teacher me. The example I always give when they ask me what I mean is this:

Student: Miss [my first name], you look so pretty and skinny!
Me, first reaction: Thank you!
Still me, only the teacher takes over: Not that you have to be skinny to be pretty.
Ideal me, finally kicking into gear: Or that appearance is the most important thing about you, because it's not.
And then, finally, while the student just stand there more and more confused: You look very nice today too!

It's hard to be a person and an adult and a role model all at the same time.

It's even harder when you're talking about sometime as personal as a menstrual cycle. I flatter myself that the teacher version of me carried the day, but it was touch and go for a few minutes there. For instance, balancing, "It's perfectly natural!" with, "But it's really, really gross, so clean up after yourself. Ew," and "It's nothing to be ashamed of," with, "But you probably shouldn't tell boys, or even girls you don't trust, because you're going to get mocked." Also, "It's going to be fine," and "Accidents happen," really kept the party going. At some point I think I said, "Some people break out, some people get cramps, some people get really angry, and some people are perfectly fine." (And some people, I suppose, fight back tears over not being able to see a movie that already exists of a book that it already perfect.) The reality of preteen existence never, ever resembles any kind of ideal world, but I think that M and I did help to clear a few things up.

Then M left the room, and some girl asked how you put a pad in your underpants. So I did what anyone would do. Not betraying my calm at all, I moseyed over to the DO NOT REMOVE box, opened it up, pulled out a pair of underpants and a pad and asked for an assistant. I asked my assistant to hold the underpants up with her arms and then commenced a monologue I probably should have recorded for posterity. (Halfway through I wondered, how is this my life?) I believe it went something like this:

"All right. So you're sitting on the toilet and your underpants are, you know, in front of you. So you take this and you pull it open and you throw these parts away because you're going to use the wrapper on the next one to roll it up and you put this up there and you smooth it down the rest of the way like this. And, oh look, this one has wings. So we'll detach this and fold these under like that and voila! [<--that part is verbatim; I have no idea what I look like to them] So when you take it off you pull right here and the wings should come too and you roll it from the top or I guess some people fold and you use the wrapper from the replacement to cover it all up. Only sometimes the edges are still peeking out and that's when the toilet paper comes in. And you throw it away in that metal box or, if there's no bag in it, the regular trash can. Got it?"

"My cousin says there's another thing you can use..." began one of the younger girls.

Oh Lord. Ideal me ran for the hills. "Ask your mom."

And Not Just Today

Today I'm thankful for: purpose; perspective; the complicated siren call to service; the return of my artistic muse; those corner guys who called me beautiful lady; those girls who talked with me about the economy; my great apartment in my amazing neighborhood, where I can go and be as sane and quiet as possible; my insane, loud job, without which I would be lacking in several life skills and this great city experience; my coworkers for embracing my sudden, inexplicable arrival with the promise of swag; my three closest friends, not a single one of whom lives closer than 700 miles but whom I've already gone to for humor and support via the internet; the internet; the fact that my mother just gave me her library password so that I will not be deprived of ProQuest, Project Muse, and JSTOR for the first time in nine years; the friends I'm with in Chicago, and our mighty adventures with wine cupcakes, and song; my German posse at home, the best dysfunctional double date ever; Five Guys, Dippin' Dots, Art Mart, Amy's Bread, Witherspoon Bread Company, Ann Sather's, and the Four Winds Pizzeria; coming full circle with service and with Tales of the City; Dido Twite, George Smiley, Mary Ann Singleton, and Jane Eyre; Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, and Donald Maclean; roommates who carried me through every emotion known to man and made everything hilarious, life-changing, and suggestive; Princeton; John Banville; the British Library; "plans to give you hope and a future"; chocolate chip cookies; Paris and Breil, the gay pride parade, and perfect moments of harmony; introspection, supervised and unsupervised; using a machete to carve out my place in the world.

My parents. I knew I was lucky before--I would compare them to almost everybody, and almost everybody would come up short--but what I've noticed recently is that my parents know me better than anyone else on this planet. They are interested in 95% of what comes out of my mouth, or they at least fake it with reassuring ease. In the words of my senior thesis acknowledgements, the writing of which led me to burst into tears in Small World Coffee, "I was encouraged to pursue my interests. I was never scolded for making fiction my primary means of understanding the world. I was never pushed to be something I am not. They dragged me through museums. They played me Frank Sinatra. Through a long process of editing and revision they made me who I am today."
I've seen good parents and I've seen bad parents. I've seen parents who care about their kid(s) just as much as my parents do, who also have the resources to back it up, who care about education, who care about what their kid wants to do. Somehow, though, my parents are the best. I'm pretty sure it has to do with a high-wire combination of emotional honesty and shot-from-the-hip, weird jokes. I don't know how I got dealt this hand, but I am so thankful I that was. I like who I am and every day I like who I am a little more, and a lot of it comes down to this.

It Works Here, Too

Palling Around

If I wasn't on an FBI list before...
(See? Even when I'm not writing about spies, I'm writing about spies.)

The point is, once upon a time in high school I read this book called A Hope in the Unseen. Perhaps you've read it. It's been on my mind a lot this year, for obvious reasons, but most recently because there was a college friend of the main character whose parents were former members of the Weather Underground. I had never heard of the Weather Underground; my mother had to explain it to me. Now, I didn't think much about this character or his parents until the notification for this week's seminar got sent out and I learned that the Fellows would be hearing from Bill Ayers. The penny dropped. The college friend in A Hope in the Unseen? His kid.

Princeton has been responsible for the tightening of so many of my degrees of separation. (But, I have to say, I'd come as close to Obama as I will likely ever get before I palled around on Wednesday morning. Iowa City is a magical place.)

Ayers was with us to talk about education, and he did so in terms that I've come to understand over my three months in Chicago: 90 minutes more, charter, magnet, CPS, private, south side, west side, north side, New Trier, Head Start, tenure, unions... He held, obviously, very strong viewpoints. I found myself blindly agreeing with 60% of what he said, only to be brought up short by the man himself. We should question everything, and that's what's missing from under-performing schools: curiosity and dialogue. The status quo, even when it's serving you well, should be constantly reexamined. The opinions you agree with are the ones you should scrutinize the most.

Milk, he announced, was his favorite movie of the decade. Also everyone should go see J. Edgar.

I didn't scrutinize those opinions too closely.

One of my fellow Fellows brought up the idea of returning to history for good ideas in education. The example he used was Jane Addams' Hull House: working where you learned and/or lived. Ayers got very excited, and suggested that the best thing our generation could do was look forward and back simultaneously. This was obviously my favorite notion to come out of the morning: the unfortunately not universally obvious idea that progressiveness does not have to divorce itself from the past. And that, furthermore, it shouldn't. It's one thing to say "history repeats itself" and to attempt to avoid the mistakes made by our forebears, but it's another to actively reach back and salvage good ideas that, for one reason or another, never really took hold.

Holding Back and Being Alone (or: The Tragic Allure of Uptight Men)

 I'm too busy trying not to get shot. This was the answer I finally arrived at, to my satisfaction, in the bathtub, a week and a half after my best friend asked me about romantic prospects. (Never mind that my answer since second grade has been the same, people still double-check and I love them for it.) It felt good to finally come up with an answer--the truth, even--after a week of itchiness about the question. I have never been less concerned with finding someone, which is unexpected considering that with every passing week the list of friends who have been single as long as I have dwindles rapidly.

After I came up with my answer, and delivered it at rant volume to Roommate J when we Skyped (one friend is as good as another for clarification purposes), I felt better.

Then, today, I saw J. Edgar.

Unsurprisingly, I've always been drawn to characters who can't quite spit it out. There's a reason my spirit animal is Cyrano de Bergerac. The bravery required for grand declarations of love, or interest, or desire for a phone number strikes me as so immense so as to be almost unattainable. It is so much more compelling, on an entertainment level, to watch someone want to say something and fail than just say what they mean and go on with their life. There has to be conflict, and internal conflict is the best there is, on any scale.

We've established that characters unwilling to put themselves on the line are my drug. You would think, therefore, that J. Edgar would leave me with a 24-hour high. You would be wrong.

Sidebar: Once upon a time, when I was still in high school, I went to see Capote in theaters with my parents and grandparents. I walked out of the theater drained, shocked, convinced I had seen one of the most amazing, brilliant, disturbing, dark movies ever. I couldn't believe I had brought my grandparents to see it. I was shaken to the core. My grandfather's response was, "That was great! What's for dinner?" Since then I've had quite a bit more exposure to the whole In Cold Blood saga and today I would probably not be so thoroughly rocked off my hinges. Still, the fact remains that Capote was the first movie to bring to my attention that different people can have drastically different reactions to the same material depending on what they bring with them to the table.

My reaction to J. Edgar was less extreme. For one thing, it is a pretty conventional biopic. It takes a biographical outline and plugs the holes with poetic license. It's perfectly solid, and not particularly cinematically innovative. I knew more about J. Edgar Hoover going into this movie than I knew about Truman Capote in high school, and Leonardo DiCaprio is Leonardo DiCaprio. He doesn't dissolve like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I knew what I was getting into. What I couldn't anticipate was how sad the movie would make me.

Part of it came down to Armie Hammer's facial expressions. This is an actor who already took me by surprise once in The Social Network; I wandered out of the theater on that occasion dazed, my extremely latent Aryan jock frat boy attraction receptors fully activated. This time his was like one big audience teleprompter: this is the emotion this scene is supposed to evoke in you, this is the exact expression you would have on your own face in this situation. It doesn't hurt that he's an incredibly good looking actor, but at least 25% of the time he's coated in truly impressive old age makeup and it still happens.

Unrequited love rocks my socks. It usually resolves itself favorably, but even when it doesn't there's usually some kind of closure. What left me upset and fidgeting on the bus today was the same genre of thing that had me crying for a solid hour after I watched the Homicide movie: missed opportunity, missed communication, unfinished business, lack of action, requited feelings that never intersect. The wrong people. The wrong era.

I treat pretty much every biopic I see as fiction. That doesn't make it better. There is no situation or emotion that exists in fiction that hasn't happened in real life first. To quote Sherlock Holmes and the Bible simultaneously, "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

I don't think this is something I've done. I don't think I've held myself back at the key moment when someone else was trying to reach out. I think my romantic desert can be chalked up to garden variety laziness and lack of opportunity. Since this is the case, most of the time I'm fine with it. Like I said, and as should be apparent if you've read even one other blog entry, these days I've got bigger fish to fry. I've never been someone who can't handle being alone. I've always enjoyed time to myself. Still, sometimes, like that woman at the end of Paris, je t'aime, sometimes it would be nice to be able to turn to someone and say, "That's nice, isn't it?"

Knowing that you have someone to turn to and speak with and nevertheless holding yourself back from it? That's tragic, and that will leave me introspecting for hours on a Saturday. What can you do but pray that you never find yourself in a position where you're at your loneliest sitting next to someone you love and who you know loves you.

But he
retreats and, fleeing, shouts: "Do not touch me!
Don't cling to me! I'd sooner die than say
I'm yours!"; and Echo answered him. "I'm yours."
--Ovid, Metamorphoses

No Acoustic Guitars, Ever

I have always had a complicated relationship with religion. I was, and am, the kind of Catholic who would never dream of sitting forward of the third row, who can't sing, who inwardly critiques 50% of every homily and who cringes every time a parish member does anything remotely resembling a testimonial.

And if an acoustic guitar comes out, forget it.

I come by it honestly. My mother breaks out in hives when our church back home breaks the fourth wall and parades around the quad during Lent. She is also the one who described church to me as "a good time to think." To think about what? Anything on your mind. Anything else? I had to come up with that on my own. I would, however, as I have mentioned before, be forced attend years of Sunday school. In hindsight this was, I suspect, partly to get me on the communion-reconciliation-confirmation highway, which became a lot more difficult when you weren't enrolled in some kind of Catholic school, even if it was just one day a week.

Imagine my surprise, then, in high school, to find myself writing a play about priests. A play about priests that tried (and succeeded, I think) to sidestep clichés and present a multifaceted take on Catholicism. Part of this had to do with several interesting articles I had recently read, but part of it was down to the awesome priest at the church we had recently switched to who spoke in something other than a rhythmic monotone and who showed more than flashes of humor and creativity and public speaking skills and who seemed like a genuinely nice and charismatic person.

So church was very much on. And then it was off again in Princeton, where I tried a couple times to attend and failed dramatically as work piled up and as homilies failed to latch on. I also stopped writing, for similar reasons, and then was surprised when the creative writing program rejected me outright. In hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. Among other things, I had given up on "time to think."

Last night I was talking to a friend of mine about how religion is so weird, about how it's practically the last taboo subject of conversation among the people we spend time with. Or, not really. Religion in general is fine. Personal religion is out of the question. I definitely see that. One of the strangest things about my job this year is that practically everyone--if not everyone--belongs to some Christian denomination. Talking about church at work is far from uncommon. When the kids were asked to enter a holiday card design contest, they had to be reminded multiple times not to include the words "Merry Chirstmas," and even then they didn't fully understand why, or succeed in following directions.

Last night I explained to my friend that I have a Get Out of Jail Free card on both sides of the fence. To church-going people, I explain that I also go to church. To nonbelievers, I can confidently say, "But I'm really liberal." (What would I say to conservative atheists? I've never met any.) Why do I feel like I need to play such a card? The Awkwardness, the societal version and my own.

Is "time to think" prayer? Some Sundays it definitely is. Other times it really is just a running catalog of introspection. Most of the time, I'm not sure that the line between the two can be all that firmly drawn. Either way, since I started going to church again here in Chicago, I've also started to come out of my two-year writing slump (the one that plagued my existence and sort of brought on an identity crisis).

Have I reached any conclusions? No, it's just interesting. I'm not asking too many questions; I'm just writing for my life.

Paris Weighs In

My mom's been in France, doing research and madly uploading photos to Facebook for the past few weeks. She comes back to the States tomorrow, and today she went on her last walk and put up her last batch of photos. This one, she said, made her think of me. I've been getting such great compliments, recently, ones that touch me on a profound level.

And here I thought that art nouveau e-card she sent me, "Sassy, classy, and still kicking assy," was good. Either way, my mother gets me, sometimes better than I get myself. And it might be her mother-colored glasses talking, but I like what she sees. It's something to aim for, either to attain or sustain.