Writing – Page 5 – Out & About

Prompt Writing

This spring, I took a writing class offered through Write Around Portland. It was called “Prompt” because each week we would meet and write for a limited amount of time–usually 2-8 minutes–to a number of different prompts. As the school year grinds to a start and I have less time to write, I will be featuring excerpts from my writing class in lieu of the weekly essay. Here’s the first one. The prompt was, “Come on in.”

“Come on in,” my boyfriend called to me from the middle of the river. He’d gotten himself there by jumping off the bridge above him, the bridge that I sat on the edge of, my legs dangling above the water. My eyes narrowed. I knew his offer was a challenge more than an invitation. He didn’t think I would do it.

Of late, our relationship had changed. I sensed he was bored with me and I suspected his head had been turned by someone else. We were clearly headed toward “over” but the asshole hadn’t actually taken time to break up with me. Instead, he was mostly unavailable. This river outing was the first I’d seen of him in a week. When we did get together he found ways to imply I didn’t measure up to whatever I had been before. It was ridiculous that I didn’t end things myself, but his cowardice just made me more stubborn. I wasn’t going to break up with him if he wasn’t going to break up with me.

I looked down at the water. This was a stupid challenge, or not much of a challenge at all. I was a duck in the water, a seal, a sea otter. I felt more comfortable in rivers, lakes and pools than I did on land. And the jump itself wasn’t very high, no higher than the diving board I’d mastered by age twelve. The water was deep and calm below me.

“It’s no big deal.” he called, goading me on. He had jumped feet first, flailing a bit on the way down. I could do better than that. I stood up and turned, placing my back to him.

“If you aren’t going to jump, you can come in from the bank,” he called to me.

I rolled my eyes and launched myself backward, my feet flipping over my head as I spun in the air. I brought my body into a perfect line and slid into the water, barely making a ripple.

I could do better than this.

Of Sound Mind’s choices.

From an Ask Amy Column, July 23, 2013

DEAR AMY: I am a 17-year-old woman. I do not want children and cannot picture having any. I am a very bright student with a lot of drive and a full college scholarship waiting for me next year, so it is safe to say that I am taking my life and future career to a far higher level than the ordinary stay-at-home mother.

I have decided I want to have surgery in order to guarantee against ever becoming a parent, and yet family and friends scoff at me for making this decision.

I know that numerous men and women out there have found their children to be the light of their lives and have no regrets (even if the children were not planned), but parenthood is just something I do not want. A baby is not going to make me happy. I am going to be the one to make me happy.

How do I show to the people I know that, although I am young, I am not going to change my mind on the baby subject tomorrow, next month, next year or even when/if I am 35 and single?

If I ever really do want a kid of my own, he or she will be an older adoptee, and I will have lived a pretty fulfilled life; I’ll be financially and emotionally ready to give that child everything they need. How can I convince people I want to be surgically sterilized? — Of Sound Mind

Oh, Of Sound Mind, I’m going to skip Amy’s response, which I found so-so and a bit condescending, and tell you that I completely feel for you. When I was seventeen, I didn’t want children either. Like you, I had plans that didn’t involve children and I didn’t want them, not when I was seventeen, and not when I was thirty-five. When I told people this, they all said “you’ll change your mind.” It was infuriating, to have them dismiss one of my core beliefs. It drove me crazy.

In my twenties, I still didn’t want children. Not then, not even when I was thirty-five. When I told people this, the response was, “Well, I used to think I didn’t want any children. But then I turned X.” And funnily enough, X was always two years older than I was at that time. It became rather comical, hearing the same story over and over, with the age adjusting just a little bit later as each year went by. I had finally learned not to spit with rage at their doubt, so I just smiled my Cheshire Cat smile and moved on with my childless life.

By the time I hit my thirties, I still didn’t want children. Not then, and especially not when I was in my forties. And people, for the most part, had stopped telling me I was going to change my mind. Instead, they started conversations assuming I had children. I had to learn to navigate through the slight awkwardness, of the, “Oh no. No kids.” response. It was tough, letting them know that I myself was happily childless, and that I fully appreciated that they were over the moon with their wonderful children. But I figured out that conversation.

But here’s what I’m going to say to you, Of Sound Mind. I fully trust that your seventeen-year-old self knows yourself well enough to know that you have no desire to bring a child into this world. My own seventeen-year-old self did, and I’m guessing you aren’t so different. But I’m going to advise you to hold off on the sterilization. Here’s why. One of the best things about the stage of life you are in is the incredible amount of choices you have. You could decide to travel the world. You could decide to go ahead and get that advanced degree. Maybe you want to focus on Chemical Engineering and Mexican Pottery. You can do all of that. Your world is wide open right now.

However, this limitless existence most likely won’t last forever. Eventually, the choices you make will narrow your focus a bit, and then a bit more. Pretty soon, the decision to travel the world will be a lot more difficult to pull off. Not that you can’t, but maybe you would have to quit your awesome job, or maybe your very cool boyfriend you love doesn’t want to come along. Perhaps your parents will get sick and you will have to care for them. Or, you might have to choose between the Chemical Engineering and Mexican Pottery, making the pottery your sole focus and fitting the Chemical Engineering in here and there with some freelancing.

The narrowing isn’t bad. You will give up a lot of “maybes” for some good actuals and that will be pretty cool. But there is no way to be 100% sure at seventeen that you won’t want to have a baby in the future. Maybe your thirty-one-year-old self will wake up one morning with a grand desire to procreate. And that older self is going to be very mad at you and your youthful action and then is going to have to do a big old expensive workaround in order to have that baby. Now for myself, I never did wake up with that feeling, but you, who knows? It’s good to keep your options open.

But here’s the best part about living in today’s world. In the realm of sex, you can have your cake and eat it too. Pretty much like the guys have historically done. Because you are completely sure you don’t want to have a child, research long-term birth control options and then pick something that works for you and works for a long time, but is still reversible. You’ve got a bevy of choices. And I would suggest doubling up on the birth control, (a.k.a. use condoms) just to be on the safe side. I’d also advise you to be very upfront with your sexual partners about your desire to not have children and be very clear that should the birth control percentages work against you and you do become pregnant, that pregnancy will end soon after it begins. It would also be a good idea to always have money stashed away in case you need an abortion and also to live in a state where you still can get an abortion. (I can’t believe I had to write the last part of that sentence, but it can be an issue.)

Sure, it would be easier to be able to skip the whole birth control stage, but look at it this way: you are taking care to support the choice you are making today while keeping the potential future choice (that I totally get you aren’t ever going to take) wide open. You also have the bonus of that if you always insist on condoms, you have a better chance of avoiding disease that sexual shenanigans can sometimes bring.

And if things never do change, if it’s been a few decades that you’ve been of childbearing age and you still don’t want to give birth to a child? Go ahead and take advantage of one of those permanent measures. That will feel good too.

Essay: On gleaning some good messages from a raunchy sex comedy.

Disclaimer the first: this essay is written from the belief that both men and women should have fully satisfying and rich sexual lives. While I don’t personally believe this is a controversial stance, I know that there are still a lot of people in the world that don’t believe this statement to be true.

Disclaimer the second: my viewpoint is that it’s normal (and, in most cases, healthy) for teenagers to explore their sexuality.

Disclaimer the third: please note that this essay contains spoilers.

Maggie Carey’s The To-Do List is a movie that should be seen, not because it’s a perfect movie, (I found it fun, and a bit uneven) but because it takes a huge step forward in depicting a woman’s emerging sexuality. We’ve been watching men come of age for decades on the silver screen, but rarely do we see a woman’s exploration and discovery. Mostly when we do catch a glimpse, it is framed from a man’s perspective. Often the female coming of age takes one of two forms: either the true love story, or something tragic happens. This movie not only gives us a woman’s perspective; it also adds a new story to the cannon.

The premise of the movie is this: Brandy Klark, having achieved all she could possibly achieve academically in high school, realizes that she is well behind the curve in the physical side of being a teenager. To remedy that, she makes a list of different activities to do before she leaves for college.

This is probably the time to mention that I attended the same high school as the writer/director, though we did not know each other. I also wrote a mostly “sour grapes” essay earlier this year when I found out someone from my high school had written and directed a real movie.

Here’s the thing about teenagers and sex. Though things have changed in the 20 years since I graduated high school, they haven’t changed very much. This is reflected in movies/television where we still see depictions of male loss of virginity as something to be done (and cheered) while female loss of virginity is still something to be agonized over. Or the alternate story: when women’s loss of virginity is done in a flippant manner it comes with dire results such as pregnancy, STDs or rape.

I’ve been watching the excellent TV series Friday Night Lights and the show reflects this dichotomy perfectly. In season three, Julie, the coach’s daughter, begins sleeping with her boyfriend and her parents find out. Julie and her mother Tami have a talk in which Tami checks in with her daughter about the relationship and birth control and expresses that she wanted Julie to wait. Julie comments that she didn’t want to disappoint her mother. They both cry. It’s a very well done scene (although I want Julie to be using more than just condoms for birth control) but there is a bittersweet nature to it. Contrast that with Landry, a male character the same age as Julie who (presumably) loses his virginity when a girl sneaks into his room and spends the night. Landry’s father catches sight of the girl leaving the next morning, but there is no father/son talk with Landry, (not even about birth control) no worry that he should wait, no check-in to see if becoming sexually active is what he wants. In fact, the sum total of the father’s reaction is to smirk and finish taking out the trash.

Brandy Klark goes in a different direction. In making her list of things to do that have to do with sex, she is taking control of her experience. Her list is vast and includes things I would consider a bit advanced, but the things Brandy Klark gets around to checking off are things I would place each of these acts within the realm of normal adolescent experimentation. They are: dry humping, fingering, hand job, blow job, masturbation, cunnilingus, intercourse and (female) orgasm. Although I’m guessing that female orgasm is still something that is deemphasized.

Most of the humor in the movie is driven by Brandy Klark’s rather clinical way of going about checking items off her list. The hand job in the movie theater was particularly hilarious in that uncomfortable humor way. But I would argue that figuring all this stuff out is pretty funny in general. Women, when they get to talking about early sexual fumbling, have some hilarious stories to tell and I think Brandy’s experiences will seem familiar to a lot of women, although they happen in a much more compressed timeline in the movie than most of us probably experienced.

Another plus is that Brandy doesn’t neglect her own needs. She does her research about how to give a blow job, she checks in with her sister for proper hand job techniques, but she also explores masturbation—which is not something her more sexually experienced friends are willing to admit they do—and cunnilingus. There was an astute commentary that might have slid by many viewers, but cunnilingus didn’t even make Brandy Klark’s original list. She only experienced it because a co-worker needed the practice. When her friend Fiona sees the term on the list, she asks Brandy what it means. Given the male-centered state of adolescent exploration, it’s not surprising that a female who has given oral sex would not have received it, or even know there is a term describing the act.

There is fallout from Klark’s fumbling. Both of her girl friends and her “study buddy” end up angry at her, but she repairs things in the end. She also has a huge realization, which for me was the most radical part of the movie. Brandy realizes that sometimes sex is something profound and special and sometimes it’s just sex. Brandy’s realization marks the first time that I have seen a woman in a film state so emphatically that it’s okay for a female to just have sex for the physical connection, rather than the emotional one.

Before the To Do List, women on film had only two stories to tell about how they learned how to become sexual: the tragic (rape/unintended pregnancy) and the “true love” story. Brandy Klark’s path to sexual maturity shows that there is another path to female sexuality: that when you take proper precautions both physically and emotionally, sexual exploration can be fun and rewarding. This is the same path men have been trotting happily along for years, and I’m glad women have finally joined them.

Essay: Why you don’t want a garden.

In the spring and the summer it’s hard to resist the siren sound of the home garden. For some people, this is not a quiet whisper, but a shout:

“With just a little bit of work, you could be harvesting your very own organic salad greens right from your back yard…”

“Kale is so expensive, but so easy to grow. Why are you paying so much at the store?”

“Fresh corn. You know you will want fresh corn in August.”

“It would be a shame if you didn’t grow your own tomatoes.”

If you can’t actually grow a garden, due to lack of land, or restrictive covenants on your property or your spouse’s aversion to dirt, those siren songs can be particularly painful. So this essay is for you, frustrated would-be gardeners. And for those of you contemplating your own harvest bounty, take heed. Sometimes, you really just don’t want a garden.

It’s not any cheaper to grow your own food.

There are economies of scale to agriculture that make the production of your own harvest bounty, but for less!, impossible for most of us. The reason? Labor. If you factor in your own labor, even at minimum wage prices, the cost of that perfect tomato skyrockets. And for most of us who are beginning gardeners and are just learning the art of raising food, there are many costly mistakes and many setbacks that make breaking even rather difficult. There is an inherent joy in pulling your own salad ingredients moments before you assemble the salad, but after you have totaled your supplies (seeds, starts, tools, fertilizer, compost, labor) that salad is no cheaper than the items you can purchase at the supermarket, or farmer’s market.

Got time?

Oh, in the spring—especially when the soil heats up and releases that intoxicating scent of last year’s rot and this year’s growth; when the sun shines on you as you dig and pull weeds; when you look with joy on all that you’ve planted; the spring is a wonderful time to be in the garden. But that time you spend in the spring must be matched, if not increased, throughout the summer and into the fall. Planting takes time, and really isn’t done all at once. Cultivating (weeding, watering, amending) takes time and never ends. Harvesting and processing take time and have the bonus of needing to be done right after you finish working in the garden. Can you find two to three hours per week (minimum) to cultivate your garden? Can you do this week after week? Because with your garden, that’s what you will get to do.

You’ve actually got to eat all those things you grow.

Before I gardened, my response to this statement would be, “I know! That’s the best part!” And indeed, it’s wonderful bringing things to maturity and then consuming them yourself. It’s fun to tell friends and family, “I grew this!” But sometimes all the lettuce—much too many heads because of poor planning—matures at once and you look at your bounty and think, “what in the hell am I going to do with twenty heads of lettuce.”* And sometimes it turns out you don’t really like radishes, or your maximum zucchini consumption per month is two. Or it turns out you hate, really abhor, corn on the cob. Or beets.** And yet there they are, staring you in the face, mocking all your hard work. What to do? This brings me to:

You’ve actually got to eat all those things you put up for the winter.

Canning the things you grow is a great way to preserve them for eating in the winter. It’s also fun, in that sweaty pioneer way, and you get shelves full of pretty things with remarkable names like “chow chow” and “brandied plums.” But guess what? Unless you already have an affinity for chow chow and brandied plums, most likely, those things are just going to stay on the shelves mocking all of your labor. I mean really, what does one do with chow chow? Eat it with pork? I’m guessing you’ve got better things to go on your pork, things you are already familiar with.

If you are thinking you will be giving them as gifts remember the golden rule of giving. If you yourself aren’t really interested in eating the food you preserved, most likely no one else will want to eat it either. I know there are people out there who love chow chow and even know what to do with it, but I also know those people make up a very small group, none of whom are my friends.

So those of you who aren’t able to garden, rejoice. You are free of the burden of growing your own. Go forth to the CSAs, the farmers markets and the grocery stores to fill your larder and appreciate the amazing miracle that is food production today. And then thank the lord you yourself are not involved in it.

*The answer is to pass off as many heads as you can to friends and deliver the rest to the food bank. All of which takes time.

**Not me, I love them and can’t get enough. But friends grew some really great specimens, roasted them and then said, “Eh.” It turns out they were not fans of beets.

Essay: On Smoking.

I started smoking when I was 20. I read somewhere once that this makes me a statistical anomaly—that people who smoke have almost all started by the age of 18 and if you are past that age and have never smoked; the statistics say you won’t ever smoke. But not me. I just had to be different.

I started smoking because I needed a vice and I didn’t favor the loss of inhibition that drinking and drugs promised. Plus, unlike alcohol, I was of age to buy cigarettes, so smoking it was. I needed a vice because at the time I felt too goody-goody. I was in college, that college was a women’s college, I was getting very good grades, I was on the straight and narrow as far as the substances were concerned. I was even a resident assistant in my dorm, which meant that I “got” to write up people for drinking and other infractions. I hated feeling like I was all good—and the people I wrote up made comments along those lines—so I started smoking. Just to show them, and the world, that I wasn’t quite the goody two-shoes they thought I was.

I bought my first pack (Camel Ultra Lights) during Christmas break my sophomore year and smoked a few cigarettes on my own before heading back to college. In my anal type-A way, I planned to smoke for five years and then quit, figuring I would have gotten what I needed from cigarettes by then, and the health damage wouldn’t be too profound. I did not at all realize at the time that this is perhaps the greatest of goody two-shoes plans for a vice. At any rate, it didn’t work. My twenty-fifth birthday came and I smoked my last cigarette. But that lasted a few days and I bought myself another lighter and another pack. I quit several times, but it didn’t take for a long time. In all, I smoked for seven years, until a combination of worry about those fine lines developing around my lips, a regimen of the Nicoderm patch as well as moving across the country and not setting foot in bars for many years finally did the trick.

When I first started, cigarettes were a treat. On Friday nights, my friend and I would meet up behind our dorm and have a cigarette to celebrate the end of the week. Saturday was a work and study day for us, and so we met up Saturday night for a smoke too. It was our time to rebel, and chat, and only one person ever came across us during our smoking time. I didn’t need all the people who saw me as a goody two-shoes to know that I smoked, I just needed to know that I smoked.

I transferred colleges and cigarettes went from a treat to a crutch. I still kept my intake to more-or-less to once per day, but I started to slip now and then and one turned into two. Then, the summer after junior year I lived alone and cigarettes broke the monotony of time spent by myself. That was the summer I learned to roll my own, buying first a packet, then a can of Drum Tobacco. After a time I switched back to filters, (American Spirits, blue or yellow box depending on how virtuous I was) but I’m still glad I have that rolling-your-own skill to fall back on, although I have no idea when I would use it. Perhaps the Zombie Apocalypse will call upon that particular skill set?

After college was when the smoking really took off, especially after I went to work at Whole Foods. We got two fifteen minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch and I could fit at least one cigarette in all those breaks. Plus, I moved into a house where my roommates all smoked and we could smoke inside, though we tended to go through stages of quitting so the numbers varied from five smokers to one stalwart firmly gripping the lighter and ash tray. I also discovered just how much fun smoking in bars could be. There were times when I went through three or more packs per week.

There are so many reasons I’m glad I don’t smoke. Health, of course, and money. Those packs of cigarettes add up after not too much time. And my clothes don’t smell and I don’t have to find places and times to smoke. Someone once remarked that their favorite thing about quitting was that they never had to manage their cigarettes anymore. Gone was the pressure to make sure they had enough to last, gone was the search for matches. And of course, location is a major factor. Let’s face it, for 10 months of the year Portland, Oregon is a horrible place to smoke. There are few indoor places and outdoors is miserably cold and wet.

I haven’t smoked for over eleven years now and I’d love to say that I’m completely free of the addiction, but I’m not. There are times when I would still love to have a cigarette. There was something about smoking that was just so damn comforting. I loved the ritual of it. The chair, the ashtray, the smell of the struck match. I loved that initial first inhale, watching the flame catch on the smooth edges of the papers, taking in the smoke. I loved managing the ash—either letting it grow long, seeing how long I could keep it all together, or tapping the ash off the cherry, rolling the cigarette a bit in the ash tray, keeping everything neat. I loved holding an unlit cigarette in my mouth, I loved blowing the smoke of a lit cigarette in different directions to make a point. I loved lighting two cigarettes at once and passing one over to a guy. I loved when my friends and I would share one. I loved that sometimes when I didn’t want to figure out what to eat for dinner, I could just smoke for a while and call it good.

But mostly what I loved about smoking was that I could do nothing for a set period of time. I consumed a lot of cigarettes while chatting with friends, but a good portion of the smoking I did marked the transitions in my day. I could come home from work, collapse into my chair on the porch, light up and watch the smoke dissipate as I thought about my day. It was a break. I didn’t have to start right in on the dishes or figuring out when I would get my laundry done, it was just me and the cigarette and time passing. Since I quit, I’ve never had those breaks again and I miss them still. Sure, I could come home and set the timer for 10 minutes and just sit, but it isn’t the same. My hands aren’t occupied, my mouth isn’t occupied, and the cigarette itself served as a kind of timer. When I finished one, I had to make the decision, “one more?” or move on with my day. A timer doesn’t do that.

I’ll never smoke again. At least I hope I won’t. I fear that if I have one, I’ll be back up to a multi-pack week in no time. But there are still echoes of smoking in my life. Sometimes I inhale when walking by a smoker. Sometimes, I toss a pencil in my mouth to hold it while my hands are occupied with some other task, and the sense memory overtakes me. I still dream of smoking now and then, and when I get very tired and very overwhelmed there that craving is again. But I just can’t put my toe back in, so those ghost cigarettes are all that’s left. It’s for the best, really, but a part of me hates it.

Essay: Thoughts on High School Reunions.

Telling people I was planning to attend my 20-year high school reunion elicited a range of responses. They ranged from the general query, “Oh?” to the incredulous, “Why would you want to do that?” It also was an easy way to find out if the person I was talking to had any plans to attend any high school reunion, because they all volunteered that information to me. It seems that feelings about reunions, much like feelings about high school, are not a middle-of-the-road type of thing.

Here’s my advice on high school reunions: If you attended your high school for any length of time, you should go. Not so much for you, but for the people who want to see you. And believe me, there are people who want to see you. We had a guy transfer in second quarter of senior year, poor thing. I can guarantee that he will never attend any reunion, probably because his loyalties are with his other school, but also I’m betting he thinks no one remembers him. But I still wonder how he’s doing, and he was only there for a semester.

I’ve realized, though, that a person’s reaction to the thought of attending a high school reunion says a lot about who a person is. For me, there was no way I wasn’t going. This despite the fact that I hated high school itself. I always felt that geography had trapped me in the wrong school and that I was made to go to the smaller more artsy school where they could wear hats indoors and it didn’t seem to be so goddamn focused on male sporting achievements. But I lived over on the other side of town where football (and boys’ basketball) was king and so that was the school I attended. So high school was no fun at all, in some respects. However, I loved (and also hated a bit) the throngs of people I attended school with and there was no way I wasn’t going to catch up with as many of them as possible. For me, the human connections were the important part of high school and I value, and regularly think about, how those connections shape me today.

My boyfriend has never attended any reunion and does not spend time thinking about the past. In fact, when I ask him specific things about his high school experience, he pieces together a vague story which always ends with him shuddering; happy to be far away from that place and person he was. I’m betting there are schoolmates who would love to catch up with him, and I’m sure he wouldn’t be opposed to that if it happened organically. But to travel across the country to visit a place he can’t really remember isn’t something he wants to do.

Another friend insists that no one will remember her. She did graduate early and move on to college at sixteen, but I question if she is truly forgotten. She went through school from elementary to high school with the same people, she was in band, and she herself will tell me stories, using first and last names, about people in her class. If she can remember them so clearly, I’m betting her name comes up in the “where the heck is she?” conversations at reunions. I think her high school story is that high school wasn’t relevant to her life—that she faded into the background and didn’t really emerge until she got out and went to college. It’s her story and I can’t change it, but I don’t believe it for a minute.

I’ve had other people tell me that they have no desire to see anyone, that they had no connection, that they hated everyone they went to school with. I can’t know their high school experience, but I question the sweeping generalities. There was not a single person to connect to? There was not the person who sat behind you in French class and passed notes back and forth? There was not someone you only sort of liked that you rolled your eyes with as to the general ludicrousness of the situation? I’m betting there were connections somewhere and it’s worth it go back and revisit those connections.

My reunion was incredibly fun, even though I had the same conversation repeatedly. Here, I’ll summarize: “I’m married and have X children, my job’s okay, life is good.” There were variations (not married, divorced, no kids, job not good, etc.) but that was the gist. Over and over again we told our stories and they weren’t that different. But the fact that we were telling them to people who had known us before any of those things came about made the conversations different, connected in a way you can’t achieve with friends you’ve made since that time.

Go.

Essay: 20 year.

Summer of 1991, I was working the register at my first job. It was afternoon and my shift almost over when I rang up the guy. He was older, had a mustache and a full head of hair and looked very tired, but he had a certain glow about him.

“How are you?” I asked the universal opening customer service question, reaching for his check.

His face brightened and he broke into a smile. “I’m great!” he exclaimed. Even at that early stage in my career, I knew that this level of enthusiasm is rather unusual answer in the customer service world, so I made further inquiries. “I went to my 20 year high school reunion last night and it was so much fun.” he told me.

“Really?” I asked. I hadn’t given much thought to reunions, being mid-high school career at that point, and also not really loving my school. At the time, high school was just something to get through.

“Oh yeah.” the guy continued, “the ten year reunion was okay, but this was great. Everyone had dropped the pretension of pretending that they were doing anything amazing and we all just caught up. It was fun.”

I smiled at him, half wrapped up in the past and half wrapped in the present.

“So you should go to your twenty year.” He told me again. “Don’t miss it.”

I told him I would, and we parted, but honestly, that particular reunion was more years away than I had yet lived, so who really knew? I made a mental note though.

About a year ago, thinking about the reunion that would happen next summer, I realized with a start that I was almost as old as that glowing guy with the beard. And I knew there was no doubt I was going to the reunion.

So I went. And it was incredibly fun. After a tour of my school—perhaps my favorite event—my friend and I stopped by the pool across the street from my high school so she could have a mini-reunion with people in choir. It was hot—the temperature hovered in the high 90s—and I was happy to see the snow cone shack from my childhood was still in existence, though now it was tricked out with air conditioning and higher prices. I stepped up to order, because in that heat, ice and flavored sugar water is exactly what hits the spot.

The girl working the shack was beautiful in that way that teenagers never really realize they are. She had black curly hair and big blue eyes and was incredibly tiny. She inquired about my day and I mentioned I was in town for a reunion and had just taken a school tour of my high school.

“I go to Borah!” she told me after she established that the school across the street was the school I just toured. “I love Borah.”

As she packed the “snow” into a Styrofoam cup, we chatted about her life. I asked what sorts of things she did at Borah and she smiled shyly and said that she had run for junior class president and so she would be doing that next year. She also had plans for college and had done some college tours.

We talked about my college years as she poured the flavor onto the ice and she handed me my grape flavored snow cone. I wished her luck at Borah and in college and wandered back to my friends to eat my snow cone.

A few days later it hit me that I had recreated my own 16-year-old experience, but with me on the “old person” side of things. I wonder if she will remember our encounter 22 years later when it’s time to attend her reunion and I wished I had the presence of mind to tell her how fun it was to catch up with everyone and how grounding to see people I spent so many years with.

Essay: Senior Year Journals.

Whereas last week I discussed the exquisite painful pleasure of reading journals written in high school, this week’s topic is how fun they can be. There are two journals covering the period of my senior year in high school (and a bit after graduation) and they are much lighter in tone. I think getting the boyfriend #3 question settled freed up a lot of mental and emotional space which means my musings are not as depressing to read. And, at the same time, I can also see parts of my personality developing that very much make up the core of who I am today.

My senior year was a hard one. Not academically, as I think I got the best grades senior year. It wasn’t hard in the realm of boyfriends because I didn’t have one, though that did not stop me from spending 50-65% of my time musing about this boy over there or this other one over here. Senior year was hard because I was fully conscious that this was the last year everything that was familiar to me would remain the same. Led Zeppelin is right that the song remains the same, but everything else in my life was less than a year away from becoming totally different.

The way this manifested in my life was that I began pulling away from all of my friends. I was working, so I worked more hours. My work schedule often scheduled me on Friday and Saturday nights, so that took care of socializing most weekends. I still had band, and I still talked to my friends at school, but–without realizing it–I began to break away. Then I spent a lot of time complaining in my journal that I didn’t have any friends. This feeling persisted, despite the fact that they surrounded me both at work and at school. This habit of mine, to feel alone and lonely despite the number of people around me that clearly care for me, is something I still have to push against today.

But I also see delightful things about myself emerging. In these journals, I’m funnier, for one thing. The 18-year-old me has developed some pretty good descriptive powers and some wry observations that caused the current me to snort with laughter in some places. At one point, I go to a show boyfriend #1’s band is playing at the Crazy Horse and I observe that said boyfriend’s, “Neanderthal brother was there, and he really messed up the mosh.” I was never a fan of that guy, and his long, lanky flailing, plus his inebriated and testosterone-fueled state, made the pleasant thrashing about of a good mosh rather dangerous. Also, now and then, Boyfriend #3 would bring the new girlfriend to eat at Pizza Hut while I was working (despite the fact there were seven Pizza Huts in Boise at the time) and at one point I expand several sentences about how this pisses me of and then conclude my musings with an astute snark: “I bet she paid though.” I was definitely the sadder but wiser girl at that point.

I’m also suddenly doing stuff that I still do to this day. I began turning my energies away from torturing ex-boyfriends and started channeling it into more productive pursuits. I planned and executed a dinner party for 15 people (held in our garage) and I was the driving force behind the planning of the trip four friends took after graduation to the Oregon Coast. My journals have pages here and there devoted to food costs, campground reservations and, as we got closer to the trip, complaining about how difficult it is to work out all the details. We went though, and it was a highlight of my senior year.

My parents gave me a word processor in February of my senior year and I started writing again. I had hit a dry spell during much of high school, but having this cool personal publishing system (with five built-in fonts) freed me from horrible handwriting and threw me back on the path of creative writing, including a completely awful poem I pasted into my journal, which I will never let anyone read. But a piece of the writing I did that year won first prize in our school’s literary magazine and not only did I receive a cash prize of ten dollars, but also recorded that a teacher said after reading my piece, “You’re a little young to have that kind of maturity.” I then continued the entry by saying, “which I remember exactly because I didn’t understand what she meant by it.” I still have that literary journal and it recently took me three weeks to screw up the courage to read that piece. I have no idea if it’s good, but I know it’s incredibly embarrassing.

And I was suddenly all about the movies. My friends and I had always seen movies (it was one of the few alcohol-free things to do in Boise after the sun went down) but senior year I started watching movies in a much more methodical fashion and, for the first time, free of companions. In May I write,

“I saw two movies tonight. I called Aaron to ask if he wanted to go, but he was really tired so he said he couldn’t. It was a relief, actually. I understand what Ponyboy [a character in the book the Outsiders] means when he says, ‘I usually lone it anyway, for no reason except that I like to watch movies undisturbed so I can get into them and live them with the actors.’ I have such vivid recollections of [boyfriend #3] always sighing and shifting around in his seat, doing his best to destroy the movie.”

Being able to see movies on my own meant that I never missed a movie I really wanted to watch. To this day, I’m happy to see a movie with people—having exorcised all the sighing shifters from my life—but the majority of movies I see, I experience by myself, which works well for me both from a scheduling perspective and from a quiet remunerating perspective.

I’ve always been thankful I wrote in journals. There have been many periods when the act of writing saved me from making horrible choices, although there are also many times when the act of writing shines the harsh light of day on the horrible choices I was making. I like having a physical representation of my life. All those notebooks sitting on a shelf give my life a permanence I don’t think it would have if the journals didn’t exist. They are chock full of me, of course, but also stuffed with newspaper articles I found interesting, comics I found funny, entire songs written out in longhand. They are an archive of my life, just waiting for me to dip back into them and it’s fun to see myself emerging.

ps. I think writing an personal essay for a personal blog about my past personal journals is perhaps a perfect loop of navel gazing. Thank you for indulging me.

Essay: Boyfriend #3

(the actual journal)

I recently had the exquisitely painful pleasure of reliving my relationship with boyfriend #3 in high school. This is due to the fact that I kept a journal all though my adolescent years and into my twenties. The journals had been stored off site, but I recently retrieved them and had been dipping in here and there. Much like Anne Frank’s “diary” spanned several volumes and pages, so have my journals. In those years, I was partial to wireless “neatbooks” which were a new invention: spiral-free notebook paper bound into journals with the paper scored so it was easy to remove and turn in assignments if you were using it for class. I had no intention of losing any of my pages, so I reinforced the current notebook I was writing in with duct tape and took it with me everywhere, sometimes writing at school during boring parts of class, sometimes writing at home, tucked into my bed before sleep. There are four or five for my three years of high school and more for my junior high years.

Dipping into the journals was interesting; here was the pages-long record of my first concert, there was an exhaustive account of a completely forgotten event: a friend’s birthday. It was also fairly excruciating. There’s something about visiting a younger version of one’s self that is embarrassing. My language for one thing, was atrocious, and I say this as someone whose language is fairly salty still today. Also, I was dumb. And I had no idea.

The journal I chose to read all the way through was the time period from March of my junior year in high school to the very first days of my senior year. Or, to properly code it in the epochs I was apparently using at the time, it covered the period from the tail end of boyfriend #2 and the genesis, climax (though not that kind) and slow moving implosion of boyfriend #3.

Because those journals are all about boys. Thinking back on my life, especially my adolescent years, I’ve known that I was very interested in the male species, but these journals more than confirmed that. If I told you the short story of my high school experience I would say that I had a core of very good friends that were girls, some periphery friends that were boys, a lot of time spent in band–an activity which I loved–and also three boyfriends. However, if you were to read my journals from high school you would think I was completely and totally focused on boys. Will this one be my boyfriend? Will this one stay my boyfriend? Will this one still be in my life if he’s not my boyfriend? Will that one be my boyfriend? Repeat endlessly.

The era of boyfriend #3 was particularly painful to read because despite myself being an out-and-proud feminist, I was so swept away by the glamour of this boy that I let him treat me like a doormat for an extended period of time. Because the only subject I talked about was boys, it’s all there in black ink on white page.

Boyfriend #3 was an experiment in dating outside my zone and I gathered a lot of useful data. Though the Venn diagram of our lives overlapped with band, his circle encompassed the type of adolescence most often depicted in the movies: focused on parties and getting drunk. Whereas mine focused on slumber parties with my girlfriends where we ate a delightful candy bar that is no longer available to purchase (P.B.Max) and we talked late into the night. I was not a drinker and parties made me uncomfortable. This guy lived for parties, so we were doomed from the start.

I knew this, even as the relationship got started—it’s clearly written there in the journal—but I persisted. Though it’s hard to quantify the look of yesterday to today, (I’m not posting a picture because you will not see past the mullet) he was pretty hot. He had long eyelashes, the kind of cut body teenage boys are able to achieve with only moderate activity, and he was darn good looking. He was also a drummer, a subspecies of teenage boy which I was partial to.

I was pretty excited when I figured out that he was interested in me. This took quite awhile as I was fairly obtuse in such matters. The adult me can see the interest growing—more long talks as friends, him manipulating our schedules so we spend more time together, and then the sudden frisson of “Holy crap, I think he likes me.”

We had an amazing first month—the last few weeks of my junior year and his senior year—and after that everything fell apart. I was incredibly needy in a way that was off putting even to my most sympathetic grown-up self and he was pretty good at setting boundaries. Neither one of us comes off looking very good. Whereas I, at the time, would have appreciated him acknowledging that the girls (there were two over the course of the summer) he was spending time with were not completely platonic, I think he would have been happy if I—as someone so unhappy with him—had broken up with him and gone away. The relationship was a train wreck and I lost an entire summer pining for him.

What’s amazing about this journey back in time is how incredibly unformed I was. In my remembrance of my teenage self, I was a staunch feminist. And I did have parts of the feminist thing down. I talked the talk, which was not always easy to do in my conservative, male-dominated small city. I also didn’t shave my legs, which was a bigger deal, as aesthetics are more important than orthodoxy in the adolescent mind. So I had a verbal and aesthetic commitment, but I clearly hadn’t internalized some important messages of feminism: that you didn’t need a man to define yourself; that when I was being treated badly I needed to stand up for myself; and that though males are amazing and exotic creatures, it is perhaps not a good idea to orient your life around them.

At the time I was living all of the above, I had no idea I was so naive. While the adult me clucked and sighed at nearly every page’s description of my thoughts and actions, my teenage self thought I was making very good decisions. Or at least rational and well thought-out decisions. And I was not.

So that’s the pain of recording my adolescence for later consumption. The pleasure is that I can see that with every relationship I learned a little more about relationships. From the first one I learned what to do with the anger that is left when a relationship is done before you are ready for it to end, from the second one I learned that sometimes it’s easier to go back to being friends and from boyfriend #3 I learned to be careful who I give my heart to, and to listen to that small voice that is chiming in with important information.

Boyfriend #3 was the last of my high school experience. I wisely chose not to attach myself to anyone my senior year. Or perhaps that’s my enhanced memory of what happened. It may also be that there really wasn’t anyone left to whom I could attach myself. At any rate, I learned enough in high school about relationships that my two college boyfriends were a step up from the high school ones. And I’d like think that my many choices along the way taught me enough to help me find my way into my current relationship, which is quite good and has the bonus of not needing daily sessions with the pen and paper to parse and understand. Instead, the two of us just talk to each other and find solutions, something I was entirely incapable of doing in my younger years.

So here’s to the unformed me, for making so many good and bad decisions. And here’s to the current me, who is hopefully making more good decisions than bad. And here’s to the future me, who will probably look back on the current me and cluck her tongue and sigh. But perhaps not as much.

Kickstarter and Habit RPG: How living with someone influences your habits.

When the people who invented Kickstarter launched their project I’m sure they envisioned a happy future when random people all over the world would find, love and fund various projects, creating a new method for people to raise capital to launch them into a world where they were paid to produce things they had dreamed about. I’m not sure they pictured the cult of Kickstarter projects that would form, nor, I’m guessing, did they plan for the level of excitement evidenced by the fans of Kickstarter projects. I’m guessing they could not have dreamed up my boyfriend’s level of interest, but I’m guessing they are quite happy to have it.

This is because while I become fixated on rather beefy movie stars of possibly questionable acting talent, my boyfriend falls in love with Kickstarter projects. And just as my peccadillo results in hours of consumption, thinking, research and discussion about said movie stars, my boyfriend feels a similar intensity of feelings towards projects he finds on Kickstarter. This means I hear a lot about his various Kickstarter obsessions. That’s one of the secrets no one tells you about adult life. If you find a partner in life, you get to learn a lot about the things they are excited about. I’m sure my boyfriend never dreamed he would have this level of knowledge about Channing Tatum, just as I never dreamed I would be so familiar with the intricacies of the fundraising goals for the Order of the Stick, the Veronica Mars Movie project, and Habit RPG.

But good things can come from the boyfriend’s obsessions. For instance, thanks to his contributing to the Order of the Stick campaign, I got to complete the special OOTS Coloring Book. And thanks to his haranguing about the Veronica Mars Project, I too became a backer and will eventually get some cool stickers, as well as the satisfaction that I gave ten dollars to fund a movie. As you can see, just as the boyfriend’s consumption of movies with beefy movie stars has increased by knowing me, so do I get involved in his Kickstarter projects.

Let’s talk about his most recent Kickstarter interest: Habit RPG. This is an online program that helps you build habits. It’s based on roll playing games (RPG) like Dungeons and Dragons where your character moves through levels, gaining things (experience points, gold, new stuff) as you go. I have been using Habit for a few months now, thanks to the fact that one of the features is that you can have a “party” of people also using HabitRPG and I’m the only other person the boyfriend knows who could be a potential user of HabitRPG. Note: If you know me and are on Habit, you should join our “party.” It would make the boyfriend very happy.

So I started using HabitRPG reluctantly, and only to get him to stop bugging me, but once I started using it, I found it fun and kept using it. Here’s how it works. You start as a basic character, pick some habits and then start checking them off as you achieve them. You can pick basic habits, which are things you want to do more (or less) of. There are also dailies, habits you want to do on specific days of the week, and then one-time things which is sort of like a to-do list that never goes away.

Each time you check off one of your habits you get experience points, which help move you to the next level, and you get gold, which let you buy things. Habits can have a positive or negative element, or both. So for instance, if you want to track your money, you could set that up as both a positive (I did write down the money I spent today) or a negative (I did not write down what I spent today.) If you click on the positive, you gain XP and gold. If you click on the negative, you lose health points.

As you move though the levels, you can buy more and different armor, which is fun and also helps you in some nerdy way I’m not really clear about. You can also set your own rewards and spend your gold on them.

Habit also uses random reinforcement. Once you hit a certain level, you will start to get random “drops” (the sudden appearance of something cool) of either potions or eggs. You can then use a potion to “hatch” an egg which turns into a pet. There are 90 pets, which live in your stable and can be displayed at any time. There are also badges to be earned for completing 21 consecutive daily habits.

None of this matters in the real world, but it’s quite fun to have a virtual reward for the daily to-do list. The site is still pretty new and fairly buggy. For example, in clicking around the site while capturing images for this essay I got kicked off once and the load time overall was quite slow. Eventually there will be a phone app, but in the meantime, you have to log in on your computer to check things off. Sometimes your random drops include 12 shade potions, or you get more XP taken away than you should. But overall, it mostly works and the positive reinforcement nature is quite fun. After all, wouldn’t you like to look like the boyfriend and I currently do?

If so, join HabitRPG today.