Illusions I Recall

“It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”
– Joni Mitchell

I’ve known this song my whole life. Well, at least since sixth grade. And it was the Judy Collins version, a favorite of my mom’s. I didn’t discover the Joni Mitchell original until I was much older, well into my single-girl-in-Philadelphia stint, coming out on the “maybe this isn’t so much fun after all” side of things.

I’d broken up with a perfectly fine boyfriend. Well, “fine” in that he was gorgeous and available – even if that last one was mostly due to his own inertia. We had a lot of fun together. Or so it seemed before I gave up weed in the hopes of getting a corporate job that might require a drug test. You know when you’re not stoned and suddenly an entire box of Entenmann's heavily frosted Valentine’s Day cupcakes doesn’t seem quite so delicious anymore? Yeah, that.

It was the right thing to do. I don’t even think he minded that much. I’d been a lot of work for him. We went our separate ways and that was that. But then came the loneliness of no longer having him on my couch, in my bed, across from me in our favorite restaurants or next to me in the video store…the knowledge that a better-matched partner surely existed for me somewhere, but how the hell do you find someone like that in the gritty Gen-X bars of Philadelphia or the sterilized cubicle world?

And that’s when I glommed onto Joni Mitchell’s version of “Both Sides Now.” It’s slower with more intensely felt regret and introspection than the Judy Collins one. It fit my mood perfectly. I’d tried love and life both ways, all possible ways, really, and here I was just as weary and flummoxed and alone as a sixth grade oddball just beginning to notice the world outside her imagination.

I strove to understand things, always. We didn’t have anti-bullying workshops or widespread use of terms like “sexual harassment” or “verbal abuse” until I was older. Feminism was still in its second wave glory which, in my young mind, pretty much translated to “Be good at sports” and “Boys are stupid.” Meanwhile, messages like “Fit into a pair of Jordache jeans” and, well, “Have a boyfriend” were much louder and more prevalent. And, of course, “Nerds like you are unfuckable and, in fact, barely human” was the loudest message of all.

So, while I waited for the 90’s to come and change all that, I strove to understand things. That’s where my power came from in those days. I wanted to know every angle, and I could usually analyze and outsmart to the point where I simply knew I wasn’t the inferior outsider I appeared to be.

Lucky for me, the 90’s did come and I grew into my nerdiness with a vengeance. I went to college and found my tribe. I began to navigate a social life outside my imagination. I could almost pass for normal, but I didn’t really want to anymore. Life was good. Life only got better, really, just like Dan Savage says it does. Still, in many ways I can’t help feeling just as weary and flummoxed as ever.

Striving to understand things only gets you so far. Because no matter how sharp and deep and nuanced your thoughts are…they’re only your thoughts. Your version of things is only one among many. You can put your absolute best out there and still get knocked on your ass. A lot. And the more you love and engage, the more you put yourself and your ideas out there, the more opportunities there will be to run up against ignorance and abject misunderstanding.

And the more you try to think over and around and through those misunderstandings, the more you realize that simply analyzing them isn’t enough. Each turn reveals complexities upon complexities until you just have to stand back and be amazed that human beings can even have conversations about the weather and somehow manage to understand each other. What are we all doing here?

At some point, I guess, you have to accept that you can’t control other people’s understanding. You just can’t. And instead of trying to out-think it, perhaps the better course of action is to immerse oneself in the imperfect flow of humanity and just go. Do. Make it about the process. Be in the moment. Get bruised and knocked around, have your assumptions challenged and maybe even proven wrong, let someone else’s philosophy inspire you even as it confounds and contradicts you.

Perhaps there’s no real harm in seeing something from both sides now and finding yourself more confused than ever. It doesn’t always have to make sense.

Right Through the Very Heart of It

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the Manhattan skyline, I actually whip out my camera and start snapping blurry shots of it from the passenger seat of my aunt’s car.

“I’ve lived in Seattle for so many years, now I get to act like a tourist,” I joke, but my aunt appreciates the enthusiasm. It’s fun to see your city through the bright eyes of a visitor.

And I have to say, it’s unexpectedly fun to be that visitor. Since graduating from college I’d come to regard New York City as something of a pain in the ass – a very beautiful, culturally rich, greatest-city-in-the-world kind of pain in the ass, but a pain in the ass nonetheless.

As a girl I had this very naïve and sort of adorable fascination with Manhattan, largely informed by my 3rd grade social studies class and from watching Rhoda with my mom. I believed the New York Life office across from Friendly’s must be some kind of AAA for people who were planning to move to New York City, and I’d stare at it dreamily over my grape sherbet cone, imagining the day when I’d be all grown up and moving there myself.

I took my first trip to New York the following year with the Girl Scouts, and my dad bought me a plastic souvenir folding fan with different New York City landmarks. I spent much of the next day just lying on the couch, gazing lovingly at that fan, ever-so-slowly folding and unfolding it as I plotted my return.

In high school came the Broadway musical fascination. During the long months in between family or school trips into the city to see the actual shows, I’d immerse myself in cassette tape soundtracks and pore over old programs and back issues of The New Yorker trying to learn all the names and basic plotlines of all the plays. And I loved New York like a crush.

I’m not sure when this unbridled enthusiasm for the city faded, or why. Given the naivety and intensity of my New York fascination, I guess it’s fair to compare it to a tween crush on a boy band or Twilight actor or some such. Eventually, you grow up and get over it…or redirect that energy to a slightly more sophisticated crush.

Driving in now, seeing the starkly altered skyline after all these years, it’s inevitable that we start talking about 9/11. At the height of my New York geekitude, I adored those towers. But my aunt explains that they really weren’t all that iconic for her, or for anyone else who was around when they were being built. Everyone hated the design. A whole neighborhood was uprooted and obscured under its looming shadows. I’d never thought of it that way before.

A brief family visit in Brooklyn and a subway ride later, and I’m sinking into a cozy chair on the immaculately tranquil deck of the Hope Lodge, waiting for one of my dearest, sweetest, those-were-the-days-iest friends from college who’s here recovering from his latest bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There’s a partial view of the Empire State Building from the deck. What the hell, I figure, and snap a few shots of that too.

“Are you tired of talking about it?” I ask him as we’re settling in together. He says he’s not. And over the course of the next few hours, he tells me all about these bizarre last few years.

Two more friends arrive, and just like that the band’s back together. We are unapologetically delighted to see each other. Hugs all around. Even with the graying hair and general older-ness, we all agree that each one of us looks exactly the same as we remember.

The last time the four of us were together was in 1997. Before that? All four of us? I’d have to say 1991, the fall after we’d graduated, convening in Princeton to say goodbye to the Austin-bound friend, and to say goodbye to each other one last time. We went to the good sub place and splashed around in a fountain, playing and laughing together like it was just another night with the deadbeat club.

In those days I loved all three of them with the same wide-eyed naivety, intensity and overall geekishness with which I’d once loved New York itself. I knew this was truly the end of the deadbeat club as we knew it, and I couldn’t bear to think of what lay beyond. I don’t think any of us could.

Now, here we are, half a lifetime later. Grown up. And you know what else? Happy about it. There’s a sense of peace and resolution here that we simply didn’t have in those days. We speak more slowly and thoughtfully. We listen more attentively. The conversation just flows. I feel like I could sit here with them for days on end, just letting all our stories from the past 21 years pour out slowly and trickle over each other.

When it’s time to say goodbye, I stand in the elevator hitting the Door Open button again and again because our conversation is still in full swing. Finally I let it close.

This might really be the last time I see any of these friends. Or not. But the impulse to cling to it desperately is gone, along with the impulse to gaze backward lovingly out the bus window at the receding Manhattan skyline. I lean back in the seat and close my eyes, eager to be back at my parents’ place with my kids.

I don’t need to cling to any of this, because it’s already here. New York – my city that’s not my city anymore; never really was my city in the first place except in my imagination. My friends and the sweet mythology of our time together. For all our collective anxiety about growing up, we could never have predicted any of the challenges we’ve faced or are still facing. Each one of us is stronger and more capable than we’d ever given ourselves credit for. And so are the friendships.

Things are changing, always, and we’re each on our own very different and rarely intersecting paths. But we still matter to each other. And we know now that we can always find our way back to each other when we need to.

“You look like a city
But you feel like religion to me” – Laura Nyro

Beauty School

One recent rainy morning, I dragged my reluctant self to Rudy’s for a much-needed haircut. I was half-asleep in the chair when Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun” came on. And suddenly…it was 1979 and I was back in the old orange-and-brown, potted-plant-flocked hair salon where it all began.

After a dreadful experience in which my adorable little sister was given an unwanted and most unfortunate bowl chop, our mom was extremely selective about who cut our hair in our small town. We tried some locally famous guy’s salon at the strip mall, where I got my first-ever Dorothy Hamill. But then he got to be too much of a big shot to do kids’ hair. We found another place that worked for awhile, until our stylist moved to Texas. She referred us to a new place that was supposed to be great.

It wasn’t at all like the kiddie salons of today, with their pony-shaped chairs and smoke-free environment. This was a grown-up salon, and it was the late 70’s/early 80’s, baby! My new hairstylist was – from my childhood frame-of-reference – like Johnny Fever meets Sam Malone meets Vic Ferrari. He was proudly single, clever-ish, gregariously self-absorbed, maybe just slightly on the seedy side. My mom respected him, though, so I felt compelled to at least try to figure out what I was missing. What was there to like about this guy?

Maybe it was simply his talent. No bowl chops at that place. This guy knew what he was doing. When he got a job at another salon, we followed him there. (Goodbye orange and brown, hello royal blue and gold!) And then, in the late 80’s, he and his fellow stylists started their own place. (Hello mauve and white!)

I never felt entirely comfortable in any of the venues. I didn’t like feeling obligated to talk to him, trying to make the kind of conversation he wanted to have, trying to somehow pass as the hair salon version of “normal.” Meanwhile, your mom’s standing over your shoulder telling him to give you a haircut that’s easy to manage because of your obvious hygiene and basic-personal-care failings. Jokes at your expense, always, and the sense that you had to go along and somehow see the humor in it…or at least pretend that you did.

And the hair, more often than not, was some dreadful version of early Princess Di. I wanted long hair. “But what will you do with long hair?” my mom would ask. I never had an answer to that. So, Princess Di it was. Well, Princess Di with giant 80’s glasses.

As if the mother/daughter growing pains and introverted adolescent discomfort wasn’t enough, there were some real eyebrow-raising moments going on at that salon. There were jokes, probably intended to flatter, about our developing bodies and hypothetical boyfriends. There was the time our stylist showed up very late for a morning appointment, complaining about what could only have been a hangover and detailing how he’d finally managed to get the vomiting under control. (And then proceeded to do my hair. Ew.)

One time a teenage girl with Farah hair and a long, flowery dress showed up with her dowdy friend in tow and hovered around his chair for my whole haircut, flirting and begging him to join them on some adventure. Before they finally left, she actually kissed him on the lips. Twice. I saw it in the mirror. The stylist was clearly embarrassed, politely trying to deflect her and cut my hair at the same time. I was deadly embarrassed too – not for them, but for myself. At age ten, I felt so dwarfed by her; so ridiculously late-blooming. (What’s wrong with me? I should be dressed up and flirting with some old guy instead of stuck here with my mom. I’m so lame.) My mom, for the record, was mortified. But she blamed it entirely on the teenage girl, and we kept going back.

And then there was the stripper! Yes, there was an honest-to-Zod stripper there one time, right while I was sitting under the heat lamps letting that perm solution do its work. The other stylists had hired her for his birthday as a hilarious surprise. She was older, very heavily made-up, with hair like Gwen Verdon and a sparkly tux. She barely stripped. Just took off the jacket, hat, gloves, and boa; did a bawdy-ish dance to some poorly-recorded show tune on her boom box. Afterwards, unraveling the perm rods from my hair, the stylist told me how uncomfortable it made him, and how he found the whole stripper thing kind of sad. I couldn’t tell if it was sincere or not, but I appreciated the effort. My mom was off doing errands and missed that one. I’m pretty sure I never told her about it.

I have to say, though, the guy wasn’t so bad. He did tasteful perms (well, tasteful by 1980’s standards). He had some interesting stories to tell. He had his own version of “telephone,” making up ridiculous urban legends to his clients to see how long it would take the story to get back to his chair. He mellowed a lot over the years, eventually getting married and talking mostly about his step-kids and horses.

I changed, too. As I got older my mom stopped hovering behind the chair, relieving me of the awkward-daughter persona, freeing up a new version of self to explore. Grown-up conversations became a pleasant challenge instead of a cringe-fest. I was proud of myself as I worked to figure it out, learning how to fake interest in some totally uninteresting story, how to intuit a person’s sense of humor and make a joke that they’d like, how to sound happy and chatty when you’re actually bored assless and getting a headache from the smell of perm solution and cigarette smoke, how to playfully deflect teasing, how to act like you’re okay with it when a man stops the conversation to flirt with another woman in front of you, how to pretend you think Don Johnson’s sexy, how to guess what they want to hear and then say it…how to act like someone who enjoys getting her hair done.

For better or for worse, I came of age under those dryers and in front of those mirrors. My hair went from Princess Di, to tidy little perms, to lush huge perms, to a sleek early-90’s bob. It was my go-to salon all through college, all through grad school. I was well into my twenties before I finally cut the cord and went to a different place (although there was plenty of DIY henna and Clairol happening in various apartment bathrooms before that). And years later, for my first Christmas as a new mother myself, my mom’s gift to me was a cut and color at the old salon.

I don’t really do salons anymore, unless there’s a special occasion or a gift card to Habitude involved. But I love how they’ve evolved into these nurturing spaces with a peaceful, healthy vibe. And I’ve finally realized that you really don’t have to do the inane chatter thing with the stylist. Just let them know you’re there to relax and bliss-out, and they’ll let you.

No, there’s not much to miss about the old smoke-and-Top-40-infused salons of my youth. But somehow, sitting there in Rudy’s hearing that old Fleetwood Mac song, it made me so happy to remember those awkward hours spent in that chair. I was peering into the adult world, gradually trying it on for myself, taking it more seriously than any actual adult ever would. It all seemed so dangerous and out-of-my-league at the time. So illicit. And now, somehow, it seems downright innocent.

Back to the Prairie

My summer reading list has been a strange combination of Aspergers this, special ed that, and…Little House on the Prairie? Not the books. Not the TV show. Books about the books and the TV show.

The best by far was The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure, in which the author and her boyfriend set out on a series of road trips to visit all things Little House. McClure delves into the beloved books of her youth, examining history and nostalgia; the books’ cultural impact and wide variety of fans; which parts were fictionalized; whether the books were mostly written by Laura Ingalls Wilder herself or by her daughter Rose; the books’ occasional cringe-worthy racism and politics; the sweetness and absurdity of Little House tourism; and the author’s own need to connect so deeply with the Little House world again in the first place. Loved it.

The other two books were more beach reads and Hollywoody than I usually prefer. But how could I resist Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson on the TV series? Delicious. I wish I’d stopped with that one instead of slogging through Melissa Gilbert’s Prairie Tale, which read like a Twilight book without the vampires. Likeable enough, moderately introspective, but in the end I didn’t much care about all the boyfriends and Lifetime movies that followed her Little House career. Sorry, Half Pint.

Rather than plunge into Melissa Anderson (Mary)’s poorly reviewed The Way I See It, I’m thinking I might go back and read the later books in the Little House series: Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years. I read them both during the summer between 5th and 6th grade – an awkward, searching, “crossroads” kind of time in my life for which I’ve recently, inexplicably, become rather nostalgic.

Then, as now, I was an anxious dreamer – yearning for adventures, but ultimately too freaked out by the whole business of dealing-with-other-humans to do much about it. So I wrapped myself in the comforts of bookworm solitude and the notion that things must be so much better on the prairie (or in Narnia, or Marilyn Sachs’ Brooklyn, et cetera).

The Little House books exemplified the very “simple country life” dream my family was striving for, with Emmylou Harris on our stereo and a brooder full of chicks in our living room. Reading those books was simultaneously escape and home…or escape to an idealized version of home. We already had the old stone farmhouse, the woods, the fields, the antique rocking chairs. All I had to do was glorify the mundane spaces with Laura’s wide-eyed narration; apply her pure sense of joy and wonder to my ordinary life.

That summer, as middle school drew nearer, I immersed myself even further in the Little House fantasy – imagining my shirts were long dresses, that our station wagon was a horse drawn wagon, describing my surroundings to myself in third person narrative prose. I’d read all the earlier Little House books about Laura’s girlhood. Now it was time to read about Laura as a teenager. It was the safest way to dip my toes in my own impending adolescence, wrapped in layers of braids and calico, buggy rides and sociables.

I remember holding on to the Little House fantasy well into 6th grade, willfully blurring the edges of my reality into a nice, gentle fictionalization. Maybe I was scared or overwhelmed, but I don’t remember feeling that way. I think I just really wanted life to be that joyful, instead of the raw mess of clanging lockers and flailing hormones and insecurities.

Looking at the covers of those later Little House books sends me right back there again, reading in my nightgown, yearning for my almost-teenage life to start but holding dearly to my summer. And – come to think of it – holding dearly to my childhood. Because, really, that was the last true summer of my childhood. The calm before the storm.

It’s nothing I’d ever want to relive. Yet I’m strangely, strongly compelled to revisit it now. Perhaps I’m just nostalgic for a time when I had the ability to escape and imagine. To delve into a jarring situation and soften it with idealizations and hope.

This isn’t the last summer of my children’s childhood. Not even close. But it feels like an end of sorts, at least with The Boy. I’m striving to see him, the real him, not my hopes and disappointments, not my advocacy for him at school, not the politics of Aspergers. Him.

And part of what I’m seeing is that even now, even at age seven, he’s miles beyond my grasp. I can’t impose peace and happiness on him any more than I could impose it on those noisy middle school hallways years ago. He is on his journey, not mine. I’ve always known that. But I’m only just now feeling the sharp truth of it.

Is it any wonder I find myself grasping prairie-ward again, seeking the comforts that got me through the first steps on my own path? Fasten your sunbonnets, pioneers. We’ll get through this one, too.
     

Deadbeat Club

Twenty years ago today, I bobby-pinned on that mortarboard with the little ’91 tassel and lined up with my fellow V’s and W’s in the back corner of campus by the dining hall. The day itself was sunny and green, but stark somehow. Removed. There were bagpipes. Archways of blue and green balloons. Our families in the audience, our dorm rooms packed up and nearly vacated. But not quite.

We’d pretty much spent that whole year saying goodbye. Fall began with fretting over GREs and What Will I Be When I Grow Up and “Holy shit now we have to grow up” and all the accompanying undergrad angst. The eighties were over. Bush the Elder’s kinder, gentler Gulf War was looming, which seemed like a much bigger deal at the time. (How were we to know?)


So we formed our own comedy troupe and performed in the campus coffee house. We wrote plays, or acted in them, or directed. We walked around campus with a giant inflatable dinosaur. We covered the living room floor with all the mattresses and slept there for a week. We made terrible, terrible puns. We rescued a broken plaster pizza guy from the trash and named him Luigi. We watched MTV and Saturday Night Live, idolizing Dennis Miller. (How were we to know?) We embraced all things ironic and absurd, all the while clinging to each other rather self-consciously with the distinct sense that this might be as good as it gets.



And what were we so afraid of? Growing up? Selling out? Losing each other to geography? Forfeiting an identity that had only just begun to emerge?

Here’s what it was for me: The feeling that you could be weird and fabulous; geeky and popular; absolutely 100% yourself and people would still find something to admire about you. That’s what I was afraid of losing. I think I really believed that if I lost the people who helped me learn that in the first place, I’d lose it for good.

And I guess in some ways, I really did. That time, those friendships – it truly did end. Whether we stayed in touch or not, whether we found each other on Facebook again or not, that level of idealism and sheer mad joy simply cannot be sustained over time. It just doesn’t go that way.

I remember going to a party my first year of graduate school where they played the entire B-52’s Cosmic Thing album and not one person got up to dance. Too busy name-dropping or canon-bashing, no doubt. Too busy undermining each other’s confidence. I had to learn, of course, how to be the first one to get up and dance. It wouldn’t be long before I’d lead a small band of rebels out of a stuffy English department function to splash in the fountain outside.

These days I rarely have the energy for such insurrections. Sometimes I think my grasp on irony and absurdity is slipping, giving way to earnestness with age – and a guarded earnestness, at that. Love used to pour right out. I guess that’s easy to do when you know it’s all going to end in a matter of months anyway. Now if I catch myself feeling anything with the old naïve open heart, I tend to keep it to myself.

But I have managed to bring the spirit of my old tribe with me. That place, those people, those years – they made me see that it was possible at all. They inspired me to hold uninhibited joy as an ideal, and to seek it and appreciate it when it happens. And yes, even in Real Life Adulthood, it does happen. In cubicles and lunch hours with co-workers. In writing workshops. At Teacher Tom’s co-op preschool. On Offsprung, the parenting Web site that inspired me to start writing again. And at home, of course, with my dear Mr. Black.

As for the part that really is over…the risks I’d never take again, the dreams I’ve stopped chasing, the friends I’ve truly lost… How glad I am to have had even a glimpse of such love and excitement. That was our time, and it always will be. It can be over. It can be twenty years past.

Funny how the mere thought of being 40 someday was enough to make us all go fetal in those days. But now? Well, I’m sitting here forty-one and, honestly, a lot happier than I was 20 years ago. Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about my family and our mainstream pursuits, cutting the crusts off sandwiches and so forth. So what? Turns out it doesn’t actually rob you of all that’s unique and wonderful about you. It’s still there. And my kids will always, always get up and dance to Cosmic Thing.

Happy 20-year reunion, my Deadbeat Club.

More Than a Shark Jump

I’ve been into Happy Days lately. Like, really into Happy Days, far beyond typical Comfort TV indulgences. I skip The Daily Show so I can catch bad Season 9 reruns on The Hub. I seek out those cringe-inducing musical numbers on YouTube. I pore over the episode guide on Wikipedia, trying to get the series narrative straight. Somehow it’s become hugely important to learn things like: How many episodes featured Suzi Quatro’s Leather Tuscadero, and was I in 3rd or 4th grade when they aired?

What can I say? I’m a midlife-crisis-bound Gen X girl, and Happy Days is my Rosebud.



There wasn’t a lot of TV in our house when I was a kid. Maybe my sisters and I watched the occasional Mary Tyler Moore or Rhoda with our mom. But that ABC Tuesday night line-up was all ours – our first childhood foray into prime time “appointment television.” And when The Fonz jumped that shark, we were on the edge of our freakin’ seats. Cynicism would come later.

We loved Fonzie’s folk heroism, the delightfully predictable jokes and catchphrases, the comic mayhem. We loved the 70’s girl power of Pinky and Leather (and occasionally Joanie and Marion). We loved that the show let us identify with teenagers – they’re like grown-ups, but they’re still kids! They went on dates. They had wacky adventures. They helped their local restaurant owners out of jams. It was everything a child might wish for her teenage future: adventure within the safe status quo, all under the guidance of a nurturing-yet-hilarious support system.

Ironic, then, that the real “shark jump” of the show (not The Fonz’s literal water-ski jump over the shark, but when the quality went downhill) coincided with the onset of my actual adolescence. Just as I was realizing that tweenhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Happy Days’ representation of teenhood started flat out sucking. Recycled plots, or downright improbable ones. Everything seemed a little less full; a little more contrived. And Joanie’s 1980’s good-girl perm looked as awkward on her as it did on me. So disappointing.

Maybe by age 10 or 11 I was simply becoming a more sophisticated viewer. But I think the show was taking a pretty serious nosedive by anyone’s standards. I mean, come on…Richie leaves and his cousin Roger moves in? But Lori Beth keeps hanging around, eventually marrying Richie in by proxy? And then Joanie leaves and her cousin moves in? Really?

It was like the loss of childhood innocence itself. The stuff we used to take at face value now seemed absurd and suspect. The circus, Disney movies, even our beloved Jersey Shore – nothing amazed and delighted quite like it used to. Though I didn’t have the words for it at the time, I remember having a distinct sense that my life would never be quite as simple and joyful as it was when I was a little girl. And so it was with Happy Days.

The one bright light in all of this, of course, was our generation’s Bella and Edward:



Now there’s an area where I was still willing to suspend disbelief! So much was wrong for me in 7th grade. But the notion of Joanie and Chachi, with those intoxicating gazes into each other’s eyes…somehow it just lifted me up.

It wasn’t about Scott Baio. Maybe I’m the only one, but I never had a crush on the guy. (And you know I’d tell you if I did!) No, I was just deeply intrigued that such captivation with another person was possible…that one could adore that much and simply be adored back. It was a glimpse of intense romantic love, wrapped in the safe context of a prime time parent-approved family sitcom.

And that’s all fine for a 12-year-old girl in the early 80’s. I just wonder why I’ve been so intent on reconnecting with these shows now? Why all the late-season Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi? Why the nostalgia for the unhappy chapters in my girlhood and the lame TV shows that got me through it?

Maybe that’s the answer right there. 41 is the new 12. Once again, I’m facing a transition of sorts. Not only are the carefree 20’s long gone, but so are the 30’s – my years of early marriage, early parenthood, and the novelty of “Hey, I’m mainstream now! But I’m still cool. Check me out, blaring my Sleater-Kinney on the way to the pediatrician’s office.”

Sure, there’s still plenty of joy to be had. But none of this will ever be new again. The challenges just keep on coming, and they’re only going to get bigger. In the midst of this tough year we’re having, it’s downright comforting to remember how similarly stark my tweenhood was…and how I managed to hold it together and find little joys and comforts throughout.

My sudden fascination with Happy Days is more than just pop culture geekery. It’s about reacquainting myself with my childhood innocence, and how I stayed strong through the loss of it.

Remembrance of Chimichangas Past

I barely gave it a second thought when Chi-Chi’s restaurant chain went out of business a few years ago. What can you do when the favorite restaurant of your adolescence causes an outbreak of Hepatitis A with its filthy, filthy scallions? Not a whole lot you can do, really. Shrug and be cynical. It’s not like the restaurant was so great in the first place. I hadn’t been there in years, and when we did manage to go it was typically done with irony. One more facet of innocent youth falls from grace like Milli Vanilli. And so it goes.

If it hadn’t been so crowded at Gorditos today, old Chi-Chi’s would probably still be the furthest thing from my mind. But as I was waiting in line, my eyes wandered behind the counter to a stack of taco salad shells on a shelf. I gave them a fond smirk. Remember when those were such a big deal? No? Well, I do. I remember being positively enchanted the first time I was served a salad in one of those things. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970’s and 80’s, and such delicacies were not widely known about in our neck of the cornfield.



I first heard about Chi-Chi’s from the hairdressers at the salon where I got my perms. (Yes, yes, it was the 80’s. Shut up.) They were a fun-loving bunch of WTF-are-we-doing-being-single-in-Berks County, PA folks always in search of an adventure. Sometimes that quest took them to comparatively cosmopolitan Allentown, where Chi-Chi’s was a favorite hot spot. (You overhear a lot of conversations sitting around with that perm solution on your head.) So, my 15-year-old self was pretty excited to learn that our local strip mall was expanding into an adjacent field, adding a Chi-Chi’s of its own.

Mexican food! Our town didn’t even have a Taco Bell in those days, and our school cafeteria had only recently added “tacos” to its menu. This was a very big deal. Such a big deal, in fact, that our Spanish teacher arranged a field trip to Chi-Chi’s for all her honors classes. We were going to immerse ourselves in the rich, vibrant culture of authentic Mexican dining. Sort of.

I was absolutely charmed. The faux adobe exterior! Painted tiles on the tables! Non-alcoholic blender drinks that looked just like real blender drinks! Appetizers! In retrospect, Chi-Chi’s was to Mexican food what The Olive Garden is to Italian food. But at the time, when “nice restaurant” meant “steak house,” the menu seemed exotic and authentic. I was so naïve, I didn’t realize that the entrees were named after Mexican resort towns. I thought “Cancun” really was the Spanish name for seafood enchiladas. Oh dear.

I described every detail to my mom that afternoon with all the girlish enthusiasm of an 18th century epistolary novel. A few weeks later, she took my sisters and me to Chi-Chi’s to celebrate the last day of school. I remember feeling so sophisticated, all pastel-eyeshadowed up, sipping that Nada Colada.

And thus, a cultural bridge to adulthood of sorts was formed. Chi-Chi’s was our place; the fancy restaurant we kids had discovered for ourselves. That’s where we went for Big Serious Dates with our love interests or Big Serious Talks with our best friends; that’s where we went with a group of friends before a formal dance or after a day at the downtown library working on our term papers. We weren’t full-fledged adults yet, but we were trying it on.

By the time I was in college, Chi-Chi’s was already becoming a joke. Nevertheless, it was our favorite spot for our Sisters Nights Out when we were all back at our parents’ place for school breaks. We weren’t so wildly impressed with it anymore, but somehow it still carried an air of the old sophistication that blended nicely with nostalgia for a time when adulthood seemed shiny and carefree. I got a taste of the real “adult” Chi-Chi’s experience during that year I spent living with my parents between graduate school and Real Life, joining my fellow WTF-are-we-still-doing-in-Berks-County friends for happy hours.

I even had my bachelorette party at Chi-Chi’s. That’s right. It wasn’t one of those wild, swinging bachelorette parties you’ve seen on TV. It was the kind of bachelorette party you have when it’s one month after 9/11, you’re 32 and already own a house with the guy, just flew back to PA from Seattle to get married in the few vacation days you were able to scrape up, and spent the last two days running around getting your marriage certificate and finalizing wedding arrangements. In other words, it was something of an afterthought. But it was perfect. Between the last-minute wedding-planning madness and actually walking down the aisle, it was so wonderful to just sit in Chi-Chi’s – the place where, in many ways, I’d found my adult self – with my fiancé and the sisters who’d been there for me through thick and thin. Pass the chili con queso.



I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I ever went to Chi-Chi’s. I’d visit home as often as I could, but there were other restaurants now. My parents favored a fancy new Italian place where the waitresses couldn’t pronounce the dishes, but the tiramisu was incredible. Visiting Friendly’s became a bigger priority, as good Mexican food is plentiful in Seattle but classic ice cream sundaes are practically non-existent.

Two years after my bachelorette party came the Hepatitis A incident at a Pittsburgh-area Chi-Chi’s. It was horrifying, actually. Hundreds of people were sick. One man underwent a liver transplant. A few people died. I was anxiously pregnant with The Boy at the time and trying to avoid obsessing over news stories like that one, so I put it out of my mind as best I could. (Although I remember avoiding scallions with near-religious fervor.)

Just a few months ago, I drove past the old Chi-Chi’s while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping. I felt just the littlest bit sad to see the once-glorious faux adobe building standing empty like that . . . such a cultural epicenter in its day. Now the whole strip mall is bit of a ghost town, anchored by a gutted Circuit City and an Old Country Buffet. But it’s flanked by newer strip malls everywhere in the former cornfields, featuring the stores we used to travel to Allentown and even Philadelphia for – Borders, Pier 1 Imports, Old Navy.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see the comforts of suburbia in my old home town. I’m glad that my parents don’t have to lug themselves to the next county every time they want to visit a big bookstore or enjoy a Starbucks latte. But at the same time, there’s something very bittersweet about the loss of those fields and that one-time “fancy” Mexican restaurant. Just like the late teen years themselves, I don’t miss it. But I miss it. Hasta luego, old friend.

Love, Light and Dark

Death ripped something open in me when I was 15 years old, and about 85% of my adult personality bloomed right out of it like a freaking Greek myth or something. I could feel it actually happening. Really.

Yes, it was my grandmother’s death, which may seem ordinary enough. But let me tell you, this wasn’t your typical central-casting grandmother. She was a painter, a spiritual poet, a humanitarian, and a big flaming liberal of a grandmother before “liberal” was an insult. She taught racial tolerance to school children in pre-MLK Philadelphia. She traveled through pre-war Europe on an art scholarship. She and my grandfather got a visit from the FBI during the McCarthy years. I don’t ever remember her baking cookies, but I do remember going to see Ralph Nader with her when I was about three or so. (Well, mostly I remember being bored beyond human comprehension. Still pretty cool, though, in retrospect.)



For most of my life, I just knew her as this wonderful grandma who made us paper dolls out of matte board and took us to the beach. She had this incredible capacity for joy and saw beauty everywhere. She used to stop us in our tracks to point it out: see how the light reflects on the insect’s wings? She was full of laughter and taught us to take joy in our mistakes. She lavished praise on us, just like the parenting books tell you you’re not supposed to do. But I loved it. I don’t ever remember anyone else but her calling me “beautiful” and “stunning” until years later when I started having boyfriends.

At 15, I was only just beginning to recognize what an exceptional woman she really was. One night, right before Christmas and at the height of our PBS station’s pledge drive, my mom and I were watching motivational speaker Leo Buscaglia give one of his talks. (Remember Leo Buscaglia?) That’s just like Grandma, I remember thinking. It was amazing. Here was this venerable, bearded fellow speaking so eloquently about love to a packed, adoring audience – popular enough to be run during pledge week, for goodness sakes – but to me, it sounded just like my grandmother.

“She would love this. I’m going to buy his book for her for Christmas,” I told my mom, and she thought it was a great idea. So we went to Waldenbooks at the mall that week and picked out a copy of Living, Loving, and Learning. And I felt so proud, realizing that my grandmother and I were on the brink of an adult relationship with each other.

There’s no writing workshop in the world that would let me get away with this next part. It’s cruel and formulaic to the point of being trite. But I swear, it really happened this way: Four days after I gave her that book for Christmas, she died. Heart attack. It was completely unexpected. Words fail.

The grown-ups were crying. I remember it was unseasonably warm for December, and the rain poured down. (Foreshadowing of Seattle, perhaps?) I remember feeling stunned and dark the whole time, drinking it all in but keeping my thoughts to myself. A plain casket, closed. That was her in there. How could that be?

We weren’t religious, but it’s amazing what you can come up with on your own when faced with death for the first time. I decided, first of all, that someday I would have a daughter and name her after my grandmother (which – remarkably – did actually happen 22 years later, almost to the day). And I decided that I would keep her spirit alive by trying to be like her. I would seek beauty and joy everywhere; I would keep fighting for justice in my own quiet way. The Leo Buscaglia book would be my guide.

Yes. Mere days after giving it to her for Christmas, I got the book back. So I read, read, and re-read until I somehow displaced all my jumbled existential despair and raw teen passion onto its author. It’s strange, thinking of it now, but I actually kept this writer in my thoughts more consciously than the grandmother I was grieving for. Walking in the fields near my parents’ house, feeling simultaneously empty and full, I yearned for him. Actual him. Not sexually, I don’t think. But not like a family member, either. There was an intensity to it that felt like love.

Had I made him into a guru of sorts? Did I want to sit at his feet and walk in his wise, benevolent shadow; a spoke in love with its wheel? I wondered: Was this the way religious people felt about their deities? Not the ideal sacred way you’re supposed to feel, but maybe something closer to Godspell’s “Day By Day”: that intangible yet total love that is so complete, joyful, and even fierce at times but can’t ever be attained or held. It’s not reverence, it’s not lust, it’s not apprenticeship, it’s not even love, really. It’s a bit of a mix of all those things and not quite any of those things.

I wrote to him once. He’d been the guest on some morning talk show and I scribbled his address down on a scrap of wrapping paper. After sitting on it anxiously for a few weeks, I finally sat down and wrote him the most banal little straight-margined letter that barely scratched the surface of my real feelings. I don’t think I even mentioned my grandmother. He or his office wrote me back, a warm and polite little response.

Eventually the whole thing started to feel embarrassing. I let go of my conscious attachment to the guy. But it was still there, inspiring me to pursue whatever unconventional, charismatic person happened to cross my path. I could carry the spirit of my grandmother, but I didn’t want to have to do it alone. I thought I needed someone to show me the way. Or maybe just someone to share it with who would understand.

Of course, unconventionality and charisma don’t always come from a heart of pure love and self-actualization, as I’d naively believed. Turns out there’s a whole lot of insecurity flying around there, too. They were either impossible to hold onto or they clung too tight. Most of them, to their credit, didn’t want to be followed. Their charisma was something of a coping device; they were just as uncertain as anybody else. But there were a few who absolutely craved an audience. They needed to be followed, but one special little follower like me would never truly be enough.

It was fun while it lasted, but gradually I gave up my pursuit of The Charismatic. Faced with a string of failed relationships and feeling out of step with the mainstream, I came to see myself as the Carrie Fisher to everyone else’s Meg Ryan. Something in me got tamed. The wild impulse to devote myself to The Charismatic simply turned into the desire to occasionally sleep with them. And not even that, really. Somewhere along the line, my attention shifted to The Aloof; the moon to The Charismatic’s sun; the vampire to their werewolf. (Yes, yes, a Twilight reference. We’re talking about female coming-of-age, aren’t we?)

In fact, I married the vampire. Or, at least, I married the geeky Gen-X version of him. He is cool and pale, almost supernaturally smart, barely eats, stays out of the sun. And when we met, he was a college instructor / rock critic getting ready to move to Seattle. Not sure how a wiggle-puppy like me even dates someone like that, let alone marries him, but it happened. (In all fairness, the guy’s got a warm side, too.)

Looking back on it all, I’m left feeling a little confused. Am I light or dark? Sun or moon? I’ve regarded myself as dark/bitter/cynical for so long, but there’s no denying my roots, my very spirit, soaked in innocent hug-seeking sun. Every once in a while I’ll come across someone who viscerally reminds me of the old Buscaglia days and it’s like a freaking magnet or something. I want to just . . . run to them. But I don’t.

And what about my grandmother? Am I keeping her spirit alive? Well . . . yes, I think. Not perfectly. Not always. But I do still stop and notice beauty in unexpected places. I do take joy in small moments and try to pass it along to anyone who might be willing to listen. And there’s my Little Girl, of course. Her namesake.

Those kids. That’s where my real sunshine is these days. They’re authentically charismatic and effusive and just so . . . present. They have no agenda; they simply love more than anyone could humanly possibly love. It’s what they do. And I can shine that love right back at them with reckless abandon. At least for now. I’m sure we’ll reach a point when they’ll be embarrassed by it, setting down paths of their own. All the more reason to enjoy it while I can, I suppose.

There's Something About Bella

Warning: Lots of spoilers!

That’s right, I read Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. And you know what else? The darn thing was actually pretty entertaining. I can’t hold it up as “literature.” I can’t say I wouldn’t be concerned if my daughter gets swept away by it when she’s older. I can’t defend its overt anti-feminism and don’t even want to, really. But I am intrigued. There’s something here that got me absorbed in each book, truly enjoying them in spite of some obvious and problematic shortcomings. I wonder what it was?

I’m sure part of my enjoyment came from the exceedingly low expectations I brought to the series in the first place. I’d read plenty of acidic and mostly spot-on criticism beforehand, both published and ranted online. But then I started noticing that many smart women whose opinions I respect really love the series. And some aspects of the story sounded intriguing (Quirky, introverted heroine?! Star-crossed, passionate yearning?! Set in Forks, Washington?!). So I put the books on hold at the library and delved in, bracing myself for the worst.

Indeed, a feminist critique of this series is like shooting fish in a barrel and has already been well-established by greater minds than mine, but just to recap: Edward, the male vampire hero, basically stalks Girl Everyteen heroine Bella. The very thing that initially attracts him to her is her viability as uniquely irresistible prey. He’s in a constant state of rescuing her from her self-destructive choices, bad luck, and clumsiness. He showers her with a mix of patronizing fondness and anger at her risk-taking. She reciprocates with undying devotion and is utterly empty without him.

Meyer is a Mormon, and her beliefs and ideals are barely concealed in the series. Aside from some fast cars and the occasional allusion to wild marital sex, it’s pretty clean living in Meyer’s vampire-land. (Bella meeting Edward’s coven for the first time was eerily reminiscent of that “South Park” episode where Stan becomes friends with the Mormon family. Bella learns all about vampire history and they invite her to their family game of baseball. Seriously.)

In fact, the series reads like a parable of sorts. Bella comes to the story with a certain post-Steinem cynicism about marriage, but is won over easily enough. By Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the series, she’s married at 18, living with her in-laws, deciding not to attend college, pregnant after having sex once, and blithely insisting on seeing that pregnancy through even though the half-vampire fetus is killing her (“health of the mother,” anyone?). In fact, during Bella’s pregnancy the novel completely surrenders her first person narrative voice to one of the male characters.

Ugh. Doesn’t seem to leave much to like, does it? You don’t just suspend your disbelief; you cram it into the closet and try to ignore it pounding on the door. Nevertheless . . . I can’t deny that I really enjoyed these books in spite of the problematic not-too-subtle message it sends to younger readers. Why? That's very unlike me. I'm usually a very personal-is-political kind of reader and don't tend to take these things lightly. I can't help but wonder how this series won me over?

It’s not about Edward. No, really. Edward is usually presumed to be the blind spot for women in my demographic. He’s written to be a dreamy character and played by an even dreamier actor in the film version, Robert Pattinson:



But that’s never been my type. I can recognize he’s gorgeous in the same way I recognize someone like Megan Fox is gorgeous, but truly, he doesn’t do it for me. And that “protective”/controlling thing doesn’t work for me either. My personal middle-aged-housewife-escape fantasy would involve some Jemaine Clement /Jason Schwartzman-type, with zany pop culture references and awkward irony. (Which, I suppose, is why Stephanie Meyer is Stephanie Meyer and I blog for my own amusement. But I digress.)

The storytelling in the Twilight series is good. Lots of suspense and excitement with a colorful supporting cast of vampires and townsfolk. And I wasn’t kidding about the Forks, Washington, setting being part of the appeal. In the early days of our long-distance relationship, Mr. Black and I took a wildly romantic trip to the Olympic Peninsula. (We even spent a night in pre-Twilight Forks.) Those lush, misty rainforests and rocky beaches still tap into my strongest feelings for him . . . the thrill of being reunited and swept away to the edge of the continent. It’s the perfect setting.

But more than anything else, I think the Twilight appeal for me is simply this: Adolescent nostalgia. As Jenny Turner describes in her excellent essay “The Beautiful Undead”: “Awful memories were dislodged, of being young and full of longing – a really horrible feeling, a sickening excess of emotion with nowhere, quite, to put it.” Horrible, yes. But deliciously horrible, too. Love was so intense, so raw, so fraught with superlatives and bad poetry. For us older, wiser types, the Twilight series reads like a love letter to one’s inner adolescent, hearkening a time when we were introspective misfits with vague fantasies of being counter-culturally powerful in the very way these vampires are: they can read minds, change others’ emotions, see the future, literally shield their loved ones from harm. There’s something oddly endearing about that fantasy.

I actually really like Bella. I like that from the very beginning, she’s already got one foot in the monster world. She’s awkward and self-deprecating, practically shivering with a vague sense of doom before a vampire even crosses her path. She’s introverted, dark, lonely, and a little on the masochistic side. Maybe to some people this reads like a “moody teen” caricature, but I can’t deny that it speaks to my experience. And Bella’s devotion to her boyfriend? Um . . . well . . . yes. The boyfriend himself might not do it for me, but Bella’s experience of all-consuming love is something that, unfortunately or not, rings true for me as well.

Sometimes I wonder if we violently recoil from all this teen-angst romance because we might just recognize a tiny bit of ourselves in it. A lot of readers lose patience with Bella in the second book, New Moon, in which she falls into a wounded haze after Edward abandons her (in an effort to save her from vampire-related danger, of course). But I savored it, remembering my past near-supernatural attraction to other people; that desperation to be near them every moment because somehow it seemed to set the world in motion. Whole months of my young life were defined by all-consuming infatuations, and I’ve got the mix tapes to prove it. There, I said it.

It’s nothing to be proud of. But maybe it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either. I came by it honestly. I spent much of my youth lurking somewhat nerdishly at the corners of other people’s action, fantasizing away with my books and pop culture and rich imagination, dreaming about the day when I’d have a turn to live these dreams for real. Turn that loose on a college campus and see what you get. All that erratic, untamed emotion set free. It wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t about needing a boyfriend. It was about needing a context. I didn’t want to be in a corner anymore, but I felt positively naked out there on my own. We introverts are social creatures too, you know. But being around big groups of people can be exhausting for us. The amount of energy it takes just to show up, smile, and contribute to a conversation can be phenomenal, even when we’re having fun. You can see how, for some of us, it becomes appealing to have a smaller circle. Maybe even a circle of just two. And if you’re only going to have one other person in that circle, it might as well be someone who can meet your romantic needs as well as your social needs. Makes sense, right? One special person to connect you to an exciting, tumultuous world. That was all I wanted; all I believed I could handle.

And there were times when it actually happened. It can. Sometimes you meet your introvert-match and you find yourself swept into that sickeningly sweet whirlwind of mutual bliss. It can be gorgeous. But it doesn’t typically last. It’s an unrealistic model that can’t sustain itself. And at some point, we have to find a way to participate in the world a little more healthily. Having put ourselves back together after something like that, it’s easy to see why readers find Bella’s tenacious devotion to Edward so annoying.

But as I said, I find it endearing, too. As an older reader who's been there, you want to take Bella under your wing a little bit. But instead she’s taking you under hers, sweeping you into this bizarre fantasy world in which you actually get to have the “Edward” of your youth; all that angst, all that yearning not in vain. And even though no one ever gets her Edward, isn’t it a little interesting to imagine if you had? There’s something very superficially gratifying there.

Not only that, but giving herself over to Edward’s vampire world actually empowers Bella. How’s that for fantasy? But I do like that she finally gets to kick some ass at the end. She gets to be fierce, standing up to fight beside the others. She blows all the other vampires away with her unique vampire awesomeness, but in a very Baby-from-Dirty-Dancing way. Her power comes from her sense of love and protectiveness, and from her stubbornly unflagging devotion. In the end, she compromises nothing and gets it all. Nobody puts Bella in a corner.

I know. It’s cheesy. But it’s like this:

I was 24 when Reality Bites came out, and the movie annoyed the hell out of me at the time. It felt like a cheap, watered-down version of what I was actually living. I thought it merely skimmed the surface, threw in a few pop-culture signifiers, crammed an unrealistic ending down our throats, and slacked off into the sunset.

Fast-forward to 2006. Home alone with my newborn second baby, I flipped to Reality Bites on TV and couldn’t stop watching it. And not just because I was breastfeeding and healing from a C-section and didn’t feel like reaching for the remote. I was loving that movie! I even loved that silly wish-fulfillment ending in which Winona Ryder ends up happily coupled with the same distant, too-cool-for-this-Earth, living embodiment of male angst bullshit that most of us spent our 20’s trying to get over.

Maybe it was the postpartum hormones talking. But I don’t know. I think that somehow, from the safety of my rocking chair, in my happily stable relationship, it was a lot easier to swallow the fantasy. And so it is with the Twilight series. It works because it’s relatable, yet completely, thankfully, unrelatable. We can vicariously indulge in the exciting parts of all-consuming teen infatuation because the dangers of it can’t touch us anymore.

Now, if I can just find a way to explain that to my daughter when the time comes. . .

Stand and Reconsider

“I really think I was born to teach.” – Homer Simpson

You’ve heard the old saying “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” But what about those who can sort of teach but didn’t find a full-time job after two years, gave up on it, and never looked back? I guess they become over-educated corporate worker bees before making a brief detour into SAHM territory, blogging the night away to keep their old spark from dying of malnourishment. Oh, by the way, I’m talking about myself.

That’s right. I was an aspiring high school English teacher. And I was reasonably good at it. Um, I think. I mean . . . I was no Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver. I wasn’t Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds or even Jack Black in School of Rock. As a student teacher (and later a substitute teacher and tutor), there wasn’t much opportunity to develop my own curriculum. It was all about the textbooks, vocabulary words, and spelling tests. But I was still able to spin some creative lesson plans out of some lackluster material, helping the kids memorize what they were supposed to memorize. It was great fun.

And it was exhausting. The hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. The hours are relentless; up before dawn, grading papers late into the night, on your feet all day trying to keep teenagers interested in material that sometimes bores you to tears yourself. I am incredibly shy by nature, but I’ve worked hard to overcome it as an adult. The stage fright I’d have before each class was intense, peaking at shrill anxiety and nose-diving into deep worried sadness. I couldn’t eat, so I’d just drink cup after cup of weak tea in the faculty room.

But then the kids would show up to class and it would just work somehow. I’d ride that anxiety like a toboggan, keep my shoulders back, breathe, and use its power for good. It was about acting, really. You’re a personality. For the most part, the kids tolerated my quirkiness with begrudging, eye-rolling fondness. Some of them even adored me. Some of them suspected I was full of shit. (And they were probably right. But the amazing thing was how I was actually able to filter out the negativity and truly not care. I have never been able to do that in any other context.)

As the weeks went by and my confidence increased, I started to believe I loved teaching! And maybe I really did. Or maybe it was just the sleep deprivation talking. But despite all the exhausting work involved, I felt so lucky to be avoiding “the office,” so glad to be doing something hands-on and meaningful. I remember attending my aspiring yuppie friends’ wine tasting party, listening to them all talk about their office jobs and feeling so thankful that I got to spend my days with teenagers instead, flying by the seat of my hippie skirt.

But really – and this is a hard thing to admit, but here we go – I think I just loved the second chance at high school. I was 24, which isn’t that much older than a high schooler when you think about it. I was young enough to share their pop culture, but old enough to be just slightly more impressive than a peer. I had a little fan club of cool kids in my 11th grade classes. They’d give me their short stories to read. They’d tell me when a show was coming up that I might want to see. I maintained professional boundaries, but I have to admit I was way more excited to be accepted by their little group than I should have been. Ugh. How embarrassing.

When my student teaching assignment ended at that school, I went on to subbing. Nobody’s going to tell you that they loved being a substitute high school teacher, and I won’t either. But still, there was something exhilarating about the job. The pure challenge of it. Facing a room full of hostile boredom or hormone-fueled chaos, and somehow turning it around. Actually getting the little darlings engaged in their vocabulary lesson with some creative spontaneity. Out-smart-assing the smart-asses. I truly hated all the ramped-up performance anxiety I’d feel beforehand, but I could always beat it once class began. And beating it was such an incredible high.

Tutoring was even better. I spent the summer working with kids who needed to retake their English classes, providing a one-on-one summer school of sorts. One family even paid me extra to drive out to their son’s summer camp and tutor him there. That fall, I tutored for Philadelphia Futures, helping kids get inspired to write well about subjects they cared about. That’s where I had my proudest professional moment, defending one of my students against a bitter teacher who gave her a D simply for writing about racism she experienced on a family vacation. (“This doesn’t follow the assignment! It was supposed to be a narrative essay!” Um, yes. It is a narrative essay about her experience with racism! *smacks forehead*). So, I went through the assignment line-by-line and proved to the teacher how the paper did, in fact, follow the instructions. She changed the grade and didn’t give us any trouble after that.

Meanwhile, I was patching together an income with temping and teaching an occasional writing class at a local junior college, still looking for a full-time teaching job. I filled out dozens of applications a week, went to job fairs, clumsily tried to network my way into something. But it just wasn’t happening for me. The job market was saturated with high school English teachers at the time (which became frighteningly clear at the job fairs). It seemed the way to get a job was to pick one school and just sub there faithfully until somebody died. No thank you.

I’ve always wondered, too, if maybe I was just too wacky for anyone to seriously consider hiring me. I was so offbeat-looking in those days, growing out my dyed-black hair, trying to tame my quirky-postmodern-librarian look into a conservative little suit. I could never quite pull it off. And, of course, there was my ever-present social anxiety. I’d been able to work off its energy in the classroom, but you can’t really parlay anxiety into delightful wackiness when there’s a row of school administrators frowning across a table at you. And without an outlet, that anxiety just sort of sizzles around your neck and shakes your voice a little. They can smell it on you. Combine that with no full-time classroom experience, and it doesn’t add up to success. At least, it didn’t for me.

It was a sad relief to finally decide not to pursue a teaching career after all. No more stage fright. No more working around the clock to the point of exhaustion. No more surfing a classroom’s volatile energy or watching students get so bored they start drawing on themselves. Time to find a plain old office job where I could hang up some “Life in Hell” cartoons, sit at a desk and work in peace, come home and watch TV at the end of the day. Nothing wrong with that. Right?

During this time, I had a recurring dream in which I’d been selected to be an astronaut. But at the last minute, the space expedition gets cancelled. In the dream I’m always relieved to have avoided going up in space after all, glad to be among the safe and familiar. But at the same time, in the dream I find myself wondering what it would have been like, knowing I could have met the challenge, feeling a little ashamed not to have that chance to prove myself.

Offsprung Archives

Hello! Welcome to Floor Pie 2.0 on blogspot. I'll be writing some new material soon. In the meantime, please enjoy some delicious backstory from my old blog on Offsprung.com:


OCTOBER 2008

Me, My Health, and Joe
Thus, I found some unexpected common ground with a fundamentalist Christian co-worker of mine. Let’s call him "Joe the Marketing Communications Writer."

SEPTEMBER 2008

Elitist, My Ass
Earlier this year, my state was dismissed by a political surrogate as a bunch of “latte-sipping elitists.” And while I was tempted to just scoff it off, I had to think about it. I do drink lattes, after all. Maybe they were onto something.

AUGUST 2008

Writing Blows
...I truly love my vida loca with Impy and Chimpy, and I’m so grateful to women like Anne Lamott and Ayun Halliday for taking the stigma out of it. But I still can’t sit down to write without feeling a little like Peggy Hill going to work on her “Musings.”

The Groove Myth
Sex may have been more plentiful and energetic in those days, but when I was single it wasn’t exactly flawless either.

JULY 2008

The Pennsylvania We Never Found
She just looked at me with such a sad, loving, “no such thing as Santa Claus” face. She didn’t need to say anything more. Farm Day was a myth. We all knew it.

Red, White...Blue
Some people have ironically melancholy Valentines Days. I have ironically melancholy Fourths of July.

JUNE 2008

Crush
It took me a while to understand that a crush is not necessarily a call to action. It’s not your soul’s way of telling you it’s found its mate. No, it’s just some baser part of the mind saying “mmm, donuts...”

Mr. Kavorka Came Back
And then I wake up...he’s still the same old elusive non-mystery.

Ken's Class
Clearly it was fake, but not in the sleazy way it probably sounds. No. I believe it was fake with the best of intentions...He wanted to be that important in his students’ lives. Jaime Escalante of the disillusioned yuppies.

how did I get here?
This incredibly mainstream lifestyle I'm living was never inevitable in my mind. I never assumed this future or aspired towards it. Didn't quite believe I was...worthy of it somehow.