Monthly Archives: November 2014

squirrel!

I am a nervous Nellie. Always have been and since no matter how passionately I beg, my doctor refuses to write me a prescription for intravenous Xanax, always will be. I’ve outgrown a few of my fears: when I was a little girl (okay, until I was like, sixteen and driving myself), the bumpy span of U.S. 95 in Las Vegas that stretches between the Spaghetti Bowl and the Sunset Road exit used to send me into white-knuckled, armrest-clutching paroxysms of fear. I was sure that our minivan was about to fly off the overpass, much like how nowadays when I fly, I am convinced that my plane is going to fall out of the sky at any moment.

Most people are afraid of things that have some basis in reality. I, on the other hand, am afraid of things like airplane bathrooms. While it’s at least conceivable that my plane could fall out of the sky—especially now that rogue drones are apparently a thing that I need to worry about, JESUS CHRIST, PEOPLE, BIRDS WERE BAD ENOUGH—airplane bathrooms are pretty much completely harmless. For the first several years of my life, I coped with my fear of airplane bathrooms by dehydrating myself nearly to the point of collapse every time I boarded a plane. This included, notably, a ten-hour flight from Phoenix to London.

Only the steadily decreasing capacity of my bladder has forced me to confront this fear head-on. On a related note, I found myself in my own personal hell a couple weeks ago on the Acela from New York to Washington when the door to the train bathroom got stuck shut. With me on the toilet side. I have never felt less dignified than I did when I had to press the “CALL ATTENDANT” button next to the toilet. You know, the one that’s there for old people when they’ve fallen and they can’t get up? That one.

(Really, though, if it weren’t for the keen embarrassment of having to look the conductor in the eye after he wrestled the door open to discover a fully functional adult standing on the other side, I would have felt empowered. They should probably make an episode of “I Survived” featuring me, hungover and confused in the Acela bathroom, struggling mightily to wrest open the door, considering whether I should just climb out the train window instead, and ultimately emerging triumphant to face the world with newfound strength. And by “strength,” I mean “the lifelong burden of knowing that one time when I was 25 I had to press the CALL ATTENDANT button in the Acela bathroom because I got stuck.”)

In addition to bathrooms and certain highway overpasses in the Southwestern United States, I am also afraid of fire, injuring myself on a trampoline, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The trampoline thing isn’t much of an issue these days—except for the occasional 27th birthday party at the trampoline park, because as you’ve probably heard, the millennial generation refuses to grow up—but there is something a little demoralizing about being 25 years old and constitutionally incapable of striking a match. Or toasting a marshmallow. Or using an Aim-Flame to light candles on a birthday cake. (Carpal tunnel, the only real threat to my well-being given that I am a writer both by trade and by hobby, is naturally the one I take the least seriously.)

I’m also afraid of space. You’d assume that all this means is that I never had to trouble myself with being disappointed when NASA rejected my application, but instead, it means that I still have nightmares about the space-themed “choose your own adventure” that we used to play in Gifted and Talented class in third grade where if you chose the wrong adventure, your spacecraft blew up and you went cartwheeling into oblivion like George Clooney in Gravity. (Karmic retribution for making us think we were intellectually superior to the other third-graders. You’ll never win the Pulitzer if you’re always up all night worrying that you picked the wrong noble gas to fuel your jet propulsion engine!) Also, Gravity scared the shit out of me. I can barely handle navigating a vehicle with Google Maps talking to me, let alone fly myself across space in a pod with only Chinese directions for guidance. No wonder Sandra Bullock felt compelled to strip down to her sexy astronaut underwear the second she got back to Earth. That’s what happens when you let women drive!

I’m not afraid of conceptual things like dying alone or failure. As a curmudgeon, the prospect of dying alone is not an unpleasant one. (I’m half-kidding, but doesn’t it sound nice to live out your last days nesting quietly in a pile of books with a mug of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal? It also sounds like my senior year of college, although I expect to throw fewer costume parties in my old age.) Failure is impossible when you don’t set goals for yourself, so I’m pretty much set on that front. Instead, I’m afraid of an arbitrary selection of things that have an incredibly low chance of affecting me during my lifetime. Why am I afraid of plane crashes, but not train crashes? Trampolines and not waterskis? Not that I’ve ever gone waterskiing, and if I were given the chance I’d probably spontaneously develop a fear of it, but the point is that my fears are not just irrational but kind of bizarre.

I admitted my newest fear publicly for the first time at Thanksgiving dinner the other day after we had opened the second bottle of wine (to be honest, we opened the second bottle of wine at the same time that we opened the first bottle of wine. Why wait?). “Guys,” I said, apropos of nothing, probably because the conversation had subsided for a moment and I’m about as afraid of silence as I am of drones flying into my plane engine, “I think I’m afraid of squirrels.”

They looked at me like I was crazy. Granted, my friends have mostly learned to keep this expression on their faces when I’m around, because a lot of what comes out of my mouth is, like the content of this blog, weird. Instead of changing the conversation to something more universally appropriate like Taylor Swift or the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, I pressed on. “I’ve noticed that I’ve started to, like, avoid squirrels when they’re in my path,” I explained. They continued to look at me like I was crazy, which is probably a reasonable response when your friend, who has a history of mostly harmless mental instability, is confessing to a fear of small and generally nonviolent mammals. “Like, if a squirrel and I are walking in the same direction, and it becomes clear that one of us needs to move before we end up running into each other, I move.”

I didn’t grow up with squirrels. I grew up with wildlife that actually poses a threat: rattlesnakes, and scorpions, and cockroaches that can both fly AND live without their heads for thirty days or some equally ungodly length of time. I encountered squirrels in the wild for the first time at Vassar, a college that, like many others, is infested with squirrels that are too damn big for their furry britches.

If you went to a college with squirrels, you know what I mean. Like freshman boys at the on-campus dance club, they are all up in your grill, no matter how hard you try to intimidate them from your ostensibly higher position on the food chain. I was walking down the sidewalk on the quad once when a squirrel came rocketing out of a nearby trash can. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life, including the time that I had to fly into Denver in a turboprop plane during a lightning storm. They are fearless.

Squirrels in Arlington aren’t quite as ballsy as the squirrels in Poughkeepsie were—maybe they’re not all tripping on molly—but they are certainly as comfortable around humans as I am. (Which is, to say, sort of. Depending on the day.) They’re on the grass and the sidewalks, and when you come near them, they don’t back down. They’re feisty. I was jogging down the Custis Trail in Arlington a few months back when I found myself in a showdown with a squirrel. It was scampering back and forth—a little rabidly, I thought, based on my comprehensive veterinary training and deep knowledge of the pathology of rabies that I developed as an English major at a liberal arts college—and it was clearly not bothered by the footfalls of the hulking human advancing rapidly. Or, rather, the featherweight huffing and puffing down the sidewalk at an embarrassingly leisurely pace.

I weighed my options. I could continue on my path and assume that the squirrel would eventually move out of the way. I could leap over the squirrel, putting my twelve years of ballet training to use for a reason other than puddles (I don’t get much out of all that money my parents spent on pointe shoes these days, but my feet stay dry!). Or, as I ultimately chose to do, I could dodge the squirrel by angling sharply to the left at the moment I passed it.

“Gotta watch out for those squirrels,” I heard from behind me as the dulcet tones of Demi Lovato faded just in time for me to remember that I had neglected to weigh the embarrassment factor of each choice. Two commuters on their bicycles rode past me, cackling like the K Street version of Miss Gulch, as if I hadn’t just come face-to-face—okay, face-to-feet—with a vicious creature and won. It was just like the conductor on Amtrak. People underestimate the potential threat posed by overconfident woodland creatures. Just imagine: one second, you’re trotting down the Custis Trail like a champ listening to “Let it Go” and imagining yourself outrunning Usain Bolt in the 500-meter dash, and the next, there is a squirrel CLAWING OUT YOUR EYEBALLS. And it all could have been avoided had you only thought to dodge it. Face your fears. Let woodland creatures have the right-of-way.

I suppose it’s a sign of gentrification that in 2014, the greatest threat to a single woman walking alone down the streets in Washington D.C. is a squirrel. Either that, or it’s a sign that I’m probably going to jump into the arms of a mugger someday when I’m trying to escape a rampaging squirrel.

I’m also afraid of llamas, but I’ll save that one for the third bottle of wine.

the hitchhiker’s guide to the holidays

I come from a long line of nomads. My mother’s mother raised her family in Washington State, far from the Minnesota farmlands where she grew up and where their Finnish mafia of a family still lives. My father was raised a military brat, the son of a Coast Guard captain, and my own parents decamped from where their families settled in Washington to new opportunities in the Southwestern desert. (It was like Manifest Destiny. With showgirls. And air conditioning.)

For the past several years, since seventeen-year-old me made the grand decision to go to college 2,500 miles away from home, I’ve spent much of the holiday season being personally victimized by the airline industry. (Ever been snowed in overnight in the bag claim of the Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York with only your backpack for a pillow and Skittles for a meal? I have. It was a low point in my contentious relationship with winter travel.)

Not to mention that the dregs of humanity come out to fly when the holidays roll around. By “the dregs of humanity,” of course, I mean people who wait until they’re at the front of the security line to take off their sixteen bracelets and empty their pockets of what must be a piggy bank’s worth of change and then have the audacity to request a pat-down rather than an X-ray when it’s clear that the radiation would probably do them some good. Also, babies. In the context of an airplane, babies qualify as the dregs of humanity.

I understand now why my parents never took us to visit Grandma for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I also understand that other families undertake these epic journeys every year as a matter of tradition, but the Cass family doesn’t do well with crowds. In fact, while this is probably truer of me than of the rest of our family, we don’t actually do that well with people other than ourselves. And so holidays for us have always been a rather sedate and insular affair: no genetically modified turkey large enough to feed thirty, no drunk relatives making inappropriate passes at the nephews’ girlfriends, no neighbors showing up empty-handed and eating all the cheesecake.

What is glaringly absent from our family celebrations, other than a bunch of interlopers trying to get in on whatever Epicurious dessert experiment I’ve embarked on this year, is just that: tradition. Or at least the slavish devotion to tradition present in pop culture and other people’s families. There is no ceremonial green bean casserole dressed in French’s French Fried Onions, nor do we sit around the table and share what we’re most thankful for before we dislodge our jaws in preparation for the feast.

Frankly, when it comes to Thanksgiving, we’ve pretty much given up. My sister and her husband spend the holiday with her in-laws (a fair trade-off, considering that the shiksa gets to bring her husband home for Christmas every year) and I alight wherever it makes sense to go that year: occasionally my parents’ house, sometimes I glom on to a friend’s family celebration. Last year, it was my then-boyfriend’s childhood home; this year, I’ll spend a motley “Friendsgiving” with a single girlfriend, a married couple, the husband’s mother, and an aging poodle.

Does this sound lonely to you? Au contraire, mon frere. Perhaps it’s my pathological addiction to change, but I feel like I get to play cultural anthropologist every Thanksgiving. Like Dian Fossey in the jungles of Africa among the gorillas—except, you know, in the dining rooms of New York and New Mexico among the upper middle class—I have eaten fried ravioli and fried cactus. I’ve played Trivial Pursuit and sung Bob Dylan songs at the piano. I’ve marathoned “Say Yes to the Dress” with my best friend and her dad and I’ve played Boggle with my sister’s in-laws.

It’s different every year, and every year brings a new story to tell. I find it refreshing, because I feel about traditions how I feel about holidays like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. I like to dress like a slutty disco ball as much as the next girl (oh, and I love Halloween, too!), but I cower in the face of the expectation to Have a Fun and Crazy Night. The winter holidays take on a similar level of pressure: you must have fun and be thankful for your family and get in a fight with your crazy aunt and eat your sister’s weird mashed potato/Jello casserole and God forbid if one of those things doesn’t happen because if it doesn’t, you might as well just CANCEL DECEMBER.

When you uproot yourself, you give up a few things, and tradition is often one of them. So much can go wrong when getting home is a matter of planes, trains, and automobiles, especially during the time of year when you might as well end up snowed into the baggage claim at the smallest airport in the Hudson Valley as make it home unscathed. Hanging your happiness on the prospect of a holiday proceeding as it has every year prior is asking for disappointment.

To eschew tradition is not to reject the holiday season altogether. My family’s version of tradition is a collection of odd little rituals that don’t count so much as tradition as familial idiosyncrasies. I think it’s because we recognize that putting all your eggs in the tradition basket is a dangerous prospect. You never know when your father is going to up and detach his retina and find himself bedridden for two weeks just when you’re all supposed to be hopping on planes to come home for Christmas. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re a nomad. You have to roll with the punches, so to speak. Roll with the retinal detachments. Roll with the flight delays.

We adapt. My sister married a Jewish man whose family hosts a grand Thanksgiving; we lost Thanksgiving and gained latkes on Christmas Eve. (Fair trade, if you ask me. Give me greasy fried potatoes over dry turkey any day of the week.) I spent a few minutes considering whether or not to cry the year my father’s eyeball ruined Christmas. Instead, I bought a six-inch light-up Christmas tree that doubled as a USB port and made a reservation for three at our favorite Thai restaurant near the crack dens in central Las Vegas.

Barring ophthalmological disasters, there are a few constants in our holiday celebrations. A giant slab of red meat is the centerpiece of our table. Someone drops the phrase “meat sweats” (common side effect of having a giant slab of red meat as the centerpiece of your table. Sorry, Michael Pollan). We play several vicious games of Scrabble and we curse my sister’s aggressive tactics. My dad tries to get away with playing the Led Zeppelin live album with the 20-minute “Moby Dick” drum solo and two minutes in, my mother starts making faces. We take walks for the express purpose of making judgmental comments about the neighbors’ gaudy holiday lights.

But none of this is sacred (except the meat). I think it’s what motivates us that is sacred: our shared love of food and word games, how my father and I know that 20-minute Led Zeppelin solos are our thing and nobody else’s. Playing Scrabble every year because my grandmother, gone ten years now this October, was the grand dame of Scrabble and on the off-chance that there is a heaven, she is absolutely cheering on my sister’s asshole Scrabble strategy from the great smoking lounge in the sky. The fact that colored Christmas lights are really ugly and anyone who hangs them should be judged by a family who measures our Christmas by the severity of our meat sweats. It’s, y’know, togetherness. Unity. Umoja (okay, I learned that from “The Baby-Sitters’ Club”).

In my role as a holiday anthropologist, I get to explore and participate in the traditions that hold my friends’ families together. It’s bittersweet, because I’m always just passing through, but it aligns with how I view tradition: as a concept that tries to deny the transient and fleeting nature of happiness and comfort. I have never felt more strongly about this than I do this year, a year after I spent my first Thanksgiving with a significant other’s family (and we all know how well THAT one turned out, am I right?!), when I am questioning why I even have to celebrate the damn holiday just because everyone else does.

Happiness and comfort may indeed be transient and fleeting, but they exist, so I seek them out. They are unreliable sensations, but I expect to find them tomorrow at the kitchen table with my girlfriends and C_______’s husband and mother-in-law and aging poodle. And I’ll find them again in a month with my family together again for another Christmas of meat sweats and Scrabble rage. And in the days in between, I will find them at raucous parties and on quiet evenings and wherever I can dig them up. Wherever, that is, that nobody has dared to hang colored Christmas lights.

album rock

When I was thirteen, I brought along with me on a weeklong family vacation to Texas a single album: Avril Lavigne’s seminal Let Go, featuring cultural touchstones like “Sk8r Boi” and “Nobody’s Fool” (actual lyric: “I’m not the milk and Cheerios in your spoon”).

For seven days, I listened to Let Go on repeat. Nobody understood me like Avril did: the album was a journey through my thirteen-year-old brain. I doodled her lyrics in the margins of my diary (“He wanted her; she’d never tell—secretly she wanted him as well,” which conveniently ignored the reality of the situation wherein I told my crush that I wanted his spiky-haired, skateboarding bod and he went after my best friend instead). I glared at my father when he played the rental car radio loudly enough that it interrupted my seventeenth ceremonial listening of “Anything but Ordinary.” I glared at the rest of my family because I was thirteen and that was the only facial expression I was capable of.

I like to tell that story whenever we talk about how hilariously tragic it was to be a teenager. And it’s the kind of story you tell with the implicit suggestion that you would never do something that ridiculous again, especially in this age of shuffle and Songza: listen to one album and nothing else, no matter how loud your dad blasts Click and Clack (RIP), for a solid week?

Yeah, we all know where this is going.

Want to know what I’ve been listening to since last Friday when I finally bit the bubblegum-flavored bullet and dropped thirteen of my hard-earned dollars to buy Taylor Swift’s 1989? That’s right. Taylor Swift’s 1989. On repeat. Every time I leave the house. Or when I don’t.

Like every twentysomething who recognizes that the therapeutic effect of Taylor Swift on a breakup is worth the indignity of acknowledging that Taylor Swift is, in fact, a musical genius, I was excited to listen to 1989. (Also, I was born in 1989, and I’ve been waiting since 1995 for the Smashing Pumpkins to pay tribute to a year that I was around to experience. That obviously hasn’t paid off, so this was the next best thing. Despite all my rage, I am still just a white girl wearing red lipstick in a cage.)

I did not expect, however, that doing so would catapult me back to the summer of 2002. I can blame it on any constellation of factors: my recent breakup and the fact that I, like Taylor, used it to propel myself to artistic fame (okay, whatever, she has a few more fans than I do and I don’t have backup dancers yet but I bet I could bribe my fellow retired amateur ballet dancers enough to follow me around for, like, an afternoon); the fact that it’s getting cold and taking off my gloves to change the music on my touch-screen phone means inviting certain frostbite; the fact that it’s just so goddamn catchy.

Regardless, what I know is that being forced to buy 1989 meant that I did something that I almost never do anymore: I listened to it from beginning to end. (87 times. In a row.)

I had forgotten what a unique experience it is to listen to an album that an artist designed specifically to evoke a defined sequence of emotions. I’m a sucker for shuffle and Pandora and Songza, tools that supply me with a steady stream of interesting music by artists I wouldn’t have discovered on my own. The wheat is separated from the musical chaff for you: none of those flimsy little B-sides that never should have made it into the recording studio, let alone out of it, none of that bizarre filler that seems to serve only as a means to string together disparate tracks.

I wasn’t raised to listen to music like that, though. I am the daughter of a man who saw Led Zeppelin and Queen in their heyday. The golden period of my musical education was in ninth and tenth grade, before I got my own driver’s license, when my father and I listened to his album collection, from “the Mighty Zep” to Dark Side of the Moon to Highway 61 Revisited over the course of our daily thirty-minute drive to my high school. I learned to look beyond “Stairway to Heaven” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” and to appreciate how the psychedelic strains that opened “Tie Your Mother Down” brought “Teo Torriate” to a satisfying close. I could write a novel about all of the wonderful things that my father gave me by forcing me to listen to Leonard Cohen and Pink Floyd at 6 AM when I was fifteen, but chief among those is the appreciation of the album as an art form.

Playlists provide the constant entertainment that the millennial generation craves: the sonic equivalent of empty calories that leave you satisfied but, ultimately, emotionally unfulfilled. Albums are the medicine that remind you that what the world throws at you is not an unceasing string of flawlessly crafted hit singles, but rather a roller coaster of emotions wherein sandwiched between masterpieces like “Oh! Darling” and “She’s So Heavy” is, of all things, “Octopus’s Garden.” (While I don’t share my father’s utter disregard for everything the Beatles let Ringo slip onto an album, you have to admit that in this slightly painful extended metaphor, that’s like when you leave for work hungover on a Thursday and realize halfway through your commute that your laptop is still sitting on your couch from when you tried to work on a marketing document after three margaritas the night before. I think the word I’m looking for here is “undignified.”)

Even after the great state of Nevada made the grave error of allowing me to operate a motor vehicle alone and my dad and I lost our precious morning ritual, I continued to devour albums as they were meant to be devoured. I can play back the memories of my most wretched teenage moments to the soundtrack of Damien Rice’s O and 9 and the Postal Service’s Give Up. It gave me great pleasure to sit in silence waiting for the hidden track at the end of O to begin, like Lisa Hannigan singing “Silent Night” was a reward for my patience.

Albums are funny that way: as a rule, they start out with energy and with hooks, the kind of music that makes you want to run outside and engage with the world and fall in love and dump your boyfriend and start a riot. And then they lapse into the tracks that don’t make it on the radio, the songs that more accurately reflect the banality of human existence (okay, whatever, I am trying REALLY HARD to excuse how shitty “Recycled Air” is compared to “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” but bear with me here). And the best albums close not with inspirational bullshit but with meditations, choosing instead to intersperse the more powerful songs at choice moments along the journey.

Consider Rumours: there’s a reason that “Go Your Own Way” isn’t the closing track, and it’s because you need that to survive listening to “Songbird.” And then you take “Gold Dust Woman” with you into the universe to help you grit your teeth and keep moving after you divorce the bassist (guys, don’t date your coworkers). I believe that considerable effort is expended in determining the structure of every album, no matter how lightweight or artistically unimpressive the responsible party. At a young and impressionable age, I was devoted to this tenet.

Then Steve Jobs ruined everything.

My family were early adopters to collecting music digitally. We had Napster back before anyone noticed it was illegal (and then KaZaA and Limewire and everything else that I probably shouldn’t admit here lest I ever apply for a security clearance). I burned a LOT of mix CDs featuring artists who weren’t quite tolerable in album length: Something Corporate, Oasis, Taking Back Sunday, etc., etc., angst angst scream scream. But when I got an iPod, I turned into a shuffling monster. I flagrantly disregarded everything I held sacred about the art of the album and, in the process, lost something precious. (My attention span, that is. Look! Something shiny!)

Because I’ve already acknowledged that I am hopelessly basic, I am only moderately ashamed of the fact that it took Taylor freaking Swift and an album that contains the lyric “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes” to remind me of the power of the album. And though like any good recent college grad, I really like free stuff, I have to admit that I support her decision to pull her music from Spotify. Because I had to buy her album to listen to it, I did, and I suddenly remember what music is supposed to be. It’s like books: you don’t pick up a book and read a single chapter because you like it better than the other ones (right? People don’t do that, right? I would judge you). You read the whole damn thing and it’s a journey and some of it is Harry and Hermione farting around in the woods for like four hundred pages, but that’s what life is and you can’t subsist only on peaks and valleys or “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights in White Satin.” You have to take the weird shit in between, even if it’s only there because the Moody Blues were doing A LOT of drugs.

So anyway, in conclusion, the point of this exercise is to convey my deeply held belief that Taylor Swift can do no wrong and to make it clear that although I may have burned the song “Konstantine” to approximately every single mix CD I made when I was fifteen, at least I never bought an entire album by Something Corporate. Which is probably not enough of a declaration to discount the number of times I’ve referenced Taylor Swift in this essay, but, like, it could be worse.

By the by, are we out of the woods yet? It’s unclear.