To lead into the life we want

Well over two months. I know, I know.
But there has been too much complaining, too many far away phone calls, stressing and planning for a commencement that has come and gone, prepping for a future that may or may not unfold – there has been too much life going on. (Let it be noted that while there has been life, this does not necessarily imply that there has been living.)

Still employed. Still half of a whole. Still a reluctant suburban dweller. Still dreaming of w-uh-der ice and cities mapped around square parks and streets named after nuts and numbers.
Back to missing people and places, wishing that the past six months had taken a few different turns to perhaps prevent the rut-like feeling that is now.

This past weekend unofficially heralded in the summer season. A summer season that, as of now, will not be filled with late night splashing in Millenium fountains, extended, purposeless naps on fresh or saltwater beaches, or impromptu anything. Because my second sort of home in this Second City is no longer an option. Because I am now fully trapped in the manicured clutches of the North Shore.

Although I’m not really. Because I can change this. I can leave. I should leave.
I will make plans to go. Conduct research. Line up my ducks. Put myself where I’d like need to be.

This is brief and vague, but time is short and fleeting. Change is necessary.

And there are not enough macadamia nuts in this mix.

What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?

All I wish for is a Baba Booey cupcake and nothing to do.
No office work, no office work at home, no dentist appointments or dinner plans or places where my attendance is required.
Just a pastry named for one of Howard Stern’s most loyal sidekicks and an empty twenty-four hour chunk.
I thought that, at 21, these wouldn’t be difficult things to desire and achieve.

I mean, it’s not like I have to shuttle my seven year-old ginger twins to Little League spring training or cook a meal for four 5 nights a week or attend that spin class that I registered in for $200.

Because I don’t.

But there’s still too much to do and too much to think about and they may or may not include:
-oral hygiene
-finding a place to live
-finding a place to live that’s safe
-finding a place to live that’s cheap
-finding a place to live that’s livable
-learning how to be content
-figuring out how to be calm
-chopping off this mop-top
-etc.

And it just all has my intestines and blood pressure and brain lobes riled up for longer portions of the day than should be allowed.

Big steps on big steps on big steps.

And did I mention that my distaste for hard liquor is solidified within one year of being legal? Wine it’ll be. Forever and a day, if it must. But at least I prefer red which makes me feel a little less pathetic (compared to the white-chugging Jason Schwartzman character on Bored to Death.)

Have I mentioned the things I want to do with my life that I’m currently not?

-Figure out what PR is/should be. Then apply it to food.
-Start blogging about something meaningful and consistent.
-Start writing things that are meaningful and profitable in not just monetary ways.
-Go thrifting again. A lot.
-Make more time. Even if it’s simply to do nothing.

Perhaps with the change of weather, items on both of the above lists will become more feasible. If anything, it’ll just be an excuse to take more walks, buy more dresses and eat more meals outside. All necessary things in life.

Tell me that you never have a clue

Ho’in and Hummin’ like it’s my job.

Oh wait…

I’m officially going on two months of physical removal from my old collegiate stomping grounds and all forms of reconnecting leave me feeling some form of peculiar. Phone calls and Skype sessions with recognizable voices and welcoming faces isn’t the problem – but watching the horrific basketball team, reading weekly newspaper articles and hearing about the sweaty debauchery of seniors-only events leaves nothing short of a sour taste in my mouth.

But not because I necessarily “miss” it. Who would want to be on campus when poor, innocent Wawa is being shot-up a mere mile away? Not me.

Reading one radiant review of the University-sponsored “100 Days ’til Graduation” at B******* Bar, and how “fun” it was to be packed amongst 600 classmates, being forced to make small talk and exchange greetings with “freshman year hook-ups,” all while surrounded by sub-par libations and a smorgasbord  of fried food has left me all sorts of appalled…for many reasons.

1. How could I ever count myself as one of them, “them” being people who would choose a night like that over cooking a meal with friends or drinking bottles of wine and having a buzzed movie-thon featuring gourmet pastries? How did I ever fit into that equation?

2. This gives me all the more justification for not partaking in the Senior Week festivities that are bound to be nothing more than an extension of that seemingly drippy, forgettable evening.

3. The shining review I read appeared in the University’s student newspaper, the one I wrote for and edited during the entirety of my college experience, the one I took pride in even on the most abominable Tuesday production nights when the sound of Avril and “Runaround Sue” was contributing to an all-body ache. And to find this piece in the Arts & Entertainment section at that – it makes me wonder what’s left. It’s depressing, through and through. Is this what student journalism has been watered down to? Bar party reviews? Let alone positive ones?!

Maybe all I’m reinforcing here is my own crotchety mentality. Because, let’s be honest, I’ve never exactly been one to countdown to Dollar Drinks on Tuesday night or the Main Line establishments’ half-dance floor, half-bedroom scene on Saturdays. ‘Twas just never my thing (and I don’t plan on it becoming that way either…can’t say I’ll be sorry to miss out on upcoming Pub Crawls.)

But at 21, on the cusp of exiting the final “bubble” you’ll ever take shelter in, when you’re supposed to be prepping for the reality of life to come, is the best source of happiness really the line for the vomit-tinged ladies’ room? Is the best spot for repose the balcony table of X bar, overlooking the random sandwiching of boys and girls who won’t remember that their mouths (let along more southern regions) were connected for a solid thirty minutes of cover bands? Do you reap comfort from the conversation you had with the guy from freshman year who you haven’t spoken to for the past three years, despite the fact that you have no recollection of what was said, how it ended or if he was in fact ogling your unbuttoned third button?

Am I just envious of those that do?

…

Nope. (Although let’s be honest, depending on the person, you may be flattered to know that he was indeed ogling.)

Stockholm’s cold, but I’ve been told

Exhaustion. 2 days shy of the 1 month anniversary of full-time employment. I don’t believe this is a milestone deserving of cake or (in some people’s strange, Midwestern opinion) caramel or cheese popcorn.

It is, however, deserving of evaluation, no?

Let’s just say I did some lunch time, break room, sitting on a bar stool life comparison evaluations while eating tortilla chips. Mainly because I couldn’t bear the paranoid thoughts about how loud I must have been crunching in the main office. So I relocated and brought a notebook for reflection.

The two columns of said evaluation consisted of “What life is now” versus “What life should be.” Each followed by battles of location, occupation, status, attitude, on so on. It wasn’t the longest list. But it was enough.

Enough to change anything? No. At least not in the immediate future.
Enough to keep me in this perpetual state of doubt? Obviously.
Because everyone knows that change can’t be believed until it is seen and lived. I think the current political administration can attest to that, so you know it’s legitimate.

Yes, direct deposits and benefits are lovely things to call your own. And no, I’m not trying to sound like a wretched, ungrateful brat. But I’m learning the difference between what I need and what I want and that, in all honesty, the gap between them is rather narrow. So yes, in the midst of doing the daily grind and nightly monotony, I am trying to piece together a way to get what I want.

So in ways that is selfish. And in ways I need to start being selfish. I think that any mentally stable person is as such because they put themselves first, at least some of the time. As a little Indian girl told me many a time, “Do you.”

Then the age old question of “Who am I?” comes into the existential ether, but it’s one that you answer as you go. By trial and error. By trying on the pair of patent leather pumps that looked so seductive and satisfying from across the room, but leaving without them because you realize they are built to give you leg cramps to last a lifetime. No one needs leg cramps for life, no matter how glossy your toes look and how sexy that vamp is. Flats can be just as sexy. Sneakers can be lustier than you’d believe. Do you.

Now will I listen to myself? Will I take my off-the-cuff shoe metaphors into account and apply to my life, not just for my sake, but for the happiness of those around me?

I’ll try. I’ll make plans. I’ll look towards a future where my feet aren’t vertical all day long. I’ll be brightened by the prospect of fashionable arch support.

At 5’2″, one may argue that there’s a lot to reach for. But no one said you had to wear spikes to be taller.

The loose tie with the loose limp wrists

This is real life.
6:30 a.m. alarm clock settings. Showering before the sun comes up. 7:43 a.m. express trains. Lunch breaks. Time tracking systems. Conference calls coming out of your pores. Scrambling to get a seat, even if it’s next to an obesity-plagued individual, on the 5:35 p.m. express home. Checking your work gmail at 8:17 p.m.

That is real life.

Riding to the train station with your mother and being picked up from the same spot by your father? Fake life. Awkward, sometimes-comforting, sometimes-hellish limbo life.

Briefly, it’s an “I’m not even 21 and a half and I have a full-time job with benefits and paid vacation, but I’m living with my parents who still cook me dinner (when they’re not too angry at each other to forego meals) and ask me dumb questions and don’t take me seriously when I talk about moving out in six months” transitional period of life.

Painful. Like growing pains that occur not in your ankles and lower back or even in your wisdom teeth vicinities, but in your complete psychological and mental being. Neuro-pains. Aura pains. Blows to your energy and freedom.

But who’s to say how deserving I am of “adult” status?
After swimming in documents about co-pays and deductibles and HMOs versus PPOs and pre-tax withdrawals, all
I can find comfort in is sobbing my 12.5 hours-old Estée Lauder mascara and eye liner off onto my worn out  Tommy Hilfiger pillowcase…the one with the geometric print that I begged for in high school when I became way too grown up for the neon green Tommy Hilfiger flower print bed set that came before it.

There can be crying in baseball and bedrooms, but there can certainly be no virgins in football.

There can be 10:30 p.m. bedtimes and no more nights ’til 2 a.m. lounging on someone else’s couch watching sitcoms and eating consecutive bags of popcorn and feeling the most wonderful kind of bloated. Now the bloat comes from finishing dinner at 8 and laying down for a quasi-sound night’s sleep less than four hours later.

And forget the fact that the only open window for treadmill trysts occurs over the limited, cherished Saturday and Sunday. Not to mention a membership that expires in less than two weeks, after which all hope for maintaining upper arm muscle tone and some form of stomach solidity is tragically, hopelessly lost.

So goodnight bittersweet world, who wants me to have a steady paycheck in lieu of fluctuating weight, twelve hours out of the house and five hours under parental control and a nightly responsibility of packing a money-saving lunch.

 

 

What’s the matter? Take a number, Buttercup

It started out like every other Tuesday, and no other Tuesday.
No 10 am Jazz. No 2:30 PR. No lunch with Kaitlin. No newspaper production even.

Woke up to a cold, an English muffin with too much strawberry jam, and 2 finals to study for.
Passed up studying for a Chipotle date.
Passed up studying to help a friend buy her brother a David Yurman necklace.

In a black Jeep with California plates, on Montgomery Avenue on the way to the King of Prussia Mall, a drive I’ve done  87 times over the past four years, my phone rang with a job offer.

Months of hair-pulling, business casual interviewing, 24-hour online applying and emotion/stress/frustration dumping later, I (finally) have a definitive answer to that dreadful, dirty, vile question:

“What are you going to do after you graduate???”

Well, not that it’s any of your business, but I’m going to be a Media Relations Specialist. With benefits and travel expenses and other adult-like accessories. I’ll be in an office with bare brick interior walls in a building surrounded by skyscrapers, blocks from The Sears/Willis Tower, from the French Market, from I Dream of Falafel…

Blessed. Beyond fortunate. Good karma cashed in tenfold. Yeah yeah yeah.

What a transition it will be; from classroom to office. Not that I haven’t done it before, but this time there’s no going back. (Not really but it sounds so much more cinematic that way.)

Nervous? Yes.
Excited? Even more so.
Highly stressed out over my lack of business casual? Beyond belief.
Grateful? Infinitely.

Thank you, and you will know who you are, for enduring my abominable, inexcusable behavior over the past four months of grueling, unbecoming, unladylike actions. I cannot promise that the presence of a yob (intentional misspelling) will make that riot grrrl act go away forever, but I can promise that, if you stick with me, I will always strive to err on the side of being too poised, too sweet and too loving. That won’t even be as much as you deserve, but it will be close.

 

Shaking while I’m breaking

Into it/Over it. I like that combination of words and repetition. I don’t like the band.

The final lap:
-1 presentation
-1 research paper to edit
-1 newspaper to produce
-1 press release to finish
-2 actual factual finals
-1 Secret Santa gift to procure
-750 actual gifts to find/buy

Too much. Too little. Kind of starting to realize that there are less than three weeks of standing outside in the freezing cold in the name of music and/or prostate cancer research with good people. No more trips to Campus Corner, even if they have already significantly declined in past years. No more dining hall square tables or fake money for fro-yo or communal showers and toilets. Pros and cons and confusion.

1 phone interview. 3rd in succession. 150 ish applications. 30something rejections? 70something automatic receipts? Random paychecks coming (or not coming) from random places. Stability is at its minimum. Not looking forward to that awkward limbo between a campus and a parent’s house and the “?” that follows. Life is always a “?.” Until it’s not.

Maybe I want to fix people’s semicolon usage forever and suggest ways to swap the passive voice for a more active one, since I only just figured it out (for real) – after years of faking it mediocrely. I’ll learn to fake press releases and media pitches too until I sincerely get it. I’ll fake what I have to until I’m convincing enough or truly knowledgable. Whichever happens first.

Out of ideas for newness. Out of ways to fix things. Out of energy to write full subject-predicate sentences. Ready and waiting to check out. Of so many rooms.

“There are times, and this is one of them, where even being right feels wrong…” and all that Dr. Thompson truth from bygone eras that still, if manipulated properly, can be relevant. Haven’t read something for pleasure in a couple months and it makes me feel rotten and lost. Have barely written something for pleasure in even longer and feels even worse. Haven’t done much in awhile for purely selfish reasons (at least in the positive sense of ‘selfish,’ negatively I’ve probably been completely selfish and unwilling to confront that). Sometimes I wish I was the only one I had to worry about. But that would be wrongly selfish…right?

Put a little something in our lemonade

Traveling and composing simultaneously. As is the wonder of free WiFi within the Megabus.
Sometimes technology is marginally useful, but only in the sense that it can pass the time when there’s worthy
stranger in close enough proximity to strike up stimulating, rejuvenating conversation with.

So instead I’m kind of/not really/half-heartedly eavesdropping on such conversation between two other collegiates,
of the opposite sex, who, only after an hour of sitting, facing each other (these double decker buses are bizarre that way), have finally decided to stop being zombies and start being social.

Their future seems promising.

But I’m judging by his facial gestures alone; I can’t see her and I’m supposed to be listening to the hodgepodge of jazz songs that I must be able to identify by ear in two days.

Music midterms seem irrelevant when I have networking interviews tomorrow afternoon and a phone interview on Tuesday and a couple hundred more resumes to send out into the great Internet abyss. School? What is that. Nine more weeks of waste, for me.

Except I’m totally going to regret this fast-forward attitude by the time Christmas rolls around…or maybe I’ll put off the bad spirits ’til New Years. But for real. Life is calling. The history of jazz? Not so much.

Perhaps my uncle said it most accurately the other night when he remarked, “It’s kind of interesting that, this time next year, you could be in one of a thousand different places doing one of a thousand different things.”

Yes and no. I really only have my eyes set on two potential places. Windy or Brotherly Love. Pros and cons to both. Applications being sent to both. Local food specialties in both. Specialty people in both. Either way, it’s too soon to know…another bane of my impatient existence.

I’m certainly not the worst though. People my age are putting rings on each other’s fingers already. Rush much? Yes. I’m all for it though if invites are being sent my way. Any excuse to wear the pair of black heels I bought almost a month ago and still have yet to wear is  valid enough for me. Get planning people.

Other things I need to shop for? Business casual and underwear. I wonder if they make business underwear. They probably sell that at Ann Taylor. Gross.

High strung black girls have been pissing off this Samuel L. of a bus driver since the minute we embarked. Even at the tail end of your senior year in college, there is no escaping your high school.

Through the city I maneuver slow

Things I want at 4:02 pm on the Wednesday after my twenty-first birthday:

-a fancy grilled cheese sandwich
-red wine
-berries
-to be in a larger than twin-sized bed
-male attention
-autumnal weather

Is that so much to ask? I wouldn’t think so.
Besides, I’m the epitome of legal now, I can procure the reddest of wines for my own
enjoyment. I don’t posses a kitchen, however, which means leaving the cheese and the berries
to someone else (…like the devil/goddess behing Grilled Cheese Social, the biggest tease–and aphrodisiac–of a food blog I’ve ever laid eyes on.)

Male attention and autumnal weather will be in by tomorrow. This is more exciting than you know.
So exciting that I’ve been planning what to wear for the occasion (err, both occasions) since this morning. My mind will inevitably change no less than seventeen more times regarding the decision at hand.

But, I’m a first/last semester senior who should be dedicating more of her efforts to securing a job by December and an eventual home or new home or non-university affiliated home and a five year plan. It’s just so much easier to digress to sandwiches and shoes.

Speaking of shoes- you wouldn’t think it would be difficult to find a pair of black, patent leather round toe, non-stiletto pumps? Right? Unless you’re 5’2″ with slim-to-none heel trotting experience and, thus, very specific requirements when it comes to fancy footwear. Although I bet women in the 50s didn’t have this problem. I’m sorry that me and the internet don’t jive when it comes to retail therapy. Only after buttoning, zipping, belting, walking around in and mirror-judging myself in any article of clothing, will I (only maybe) decide it’s fit for purchase. Zappos can shove it. And so can women that are the same size at every store.

See? So much easier to talk about the tangible, material walks of life than the “I plan on doing _____ when I graduate early” path. So I stick to what I know.

—— The longest possible pause between halves of a post ——

It’s now the following Monday. I got my wine, my berries, my autumnal weather and (most importantly) my male attention. Still lacking that gourmet grilled queso though. That can wait. Based on my eating habits of the past few days, I should probably lay off cheese for awhile.

There isn’t too much to add at this point. It’s 9:28 on a weeknight. I’m in my room surrounded by a vase of comatose flowers, an over half-full bottle of Maker’s Mark, a portable, electric typewriter and various books/papers I should be paying attention to but just can’t.

It’s too warm for clothes and homework (despite the fall temperature three stories below me).

And yet I’m still content. Go figure.

Now everything’s a little upside down

Yes, yes it is Bob.

Completely and utterly upside down in the wrong spot sitting in the corner by itself totally and obviously singled out as being wrong side up.

Things build up.

I let them build up.

Things go to far.

I go to far.

There are these things that I, me, I hold to be worthwhile. To be necessary. To be important.

There are ways that I deal with things. Ways that are too logical and too analytical and too worrisome.

But they have worked for me in the past. And that’s why I keep them up. As taxing as they may be in the moment. If careful consideration is tiresome but successful, I’m going to employ it each and every time.

So I am judgmental.
What is life, really, but a series of judgment calls?
Some people say life is a string of “moments.”
No, they’re not moments. They’re choices. Choices that – whether you like it or not – are based on the type of person you are, the things you believe in, and the ways you handle those things.

So how do we relate?
Do the types and the things and the ways have to be parallel? Identical? Or just complementary?
And who can say what complements and what exasperates?

So what do I do now.
Knock a good thing to see if a new way can yield the same or better results?
Be the one to change?
Or worse,
settle.

Stubborn. Blunt. Old-fashioned.
I yam what I yam.
And it has worked for me in the past.