Author Archives: Dana Cass

Writer, retired amateur ballerina, reluctantly fluent in corporate jargon, often confused for a twelve-year-old.

boys don’t make passes…

I believe that the wearing of glasses should be exclusive to nerds. Let me tell you what sparked this audacious statement:

Of late, I have seen many a photo of my elementary and middle school classmates doing their creepy sorority cult poses* and noticed that many of these obnoxiously pretty girls are wearing GLASSES.

When I see Facebook photos of those long-haired, long-legged, perfectly proportionate beauties accessorizing their Herbal Essences commercial-grade locks with a big pair of plastic frames, I am filled with INORDINATE RAGE. If I were to speak my feelings aloud, it would be in a sort of guttural, Exorcist-style grunt: “YOU CAN’T WEAR THOSE.”

They have undergone none of my struggles! They were never caught picking their collective nose in front Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, never to live it down! Nobody ever accused them of reading the dictionary! They were never dubbed “Dorky Dana” during the unfortunate first-day-of-school icebreaker game when you’re supposed to think of an adjective with the same first letter as your first name, only that doesn’t always work because there are no good adjectives that start with D, and someone will inevitably think of an insulting one before you’re even called on to speak! They have never been unceremoniously dumped via text message, nor puked in a parking lot! (I can tell, because they have perfect hair.)

When I was a kid, I was convinced that all of my struggles could be blamed on my glasses. I wished on stars and eyelashes and birthday candles and yellow lights that I would wake up the next morning with perfect vision. I was painfully different from most of my classmates and it drove me insane; I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like them. Sometimes I read my old diaries from elementary school and that, for years, was the underlying theme of my existence: why, but why, am I not like everyone else? Why is my brain so noisy? Why don’t I like the same TV shows and games and magazines as everyone else? I could not relate and in my mind, it was because I wore glasses. They were the physical symbol of my geekdom, my nerdiness, my dweebery, and I was convinced that if I could only cast them aside, I would understand what was so fun about running around and shrieking on the playground, and “Rocko’s Modern Life,” and maybe I would be good at soccer, and everyone would like me and nobody would tell the class that I picked my nose.

I, and my fellow geek-nerd-dweebs, are uniquely qualified to enjoy the fashion benefits of glasses because we suffered the angst of wearing them when they were decidedly uncool.

I am 23 years old and it has been fourteen years since I, um, hypothetically could have been caught picking my nose in front of Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, but actually I just had this really atrocious itch somewhere on my sinus and maybe found some gold along the way, and I’m gonna quit while I’m behind, but suffice to say that I have not grown up to the point where I’m over my childhood. I’m still socially awkward; I still don’t find social interaction as comfortable as most people seem to; my brain is still so noisy that it regularly keeps me awake at night.

(I’m lucky here in Silicon Valley to be surrounded by many, many like-minded people. We are, generally, the meek inheriting the earth, and it feels great, especially since I don’t have to trip all over myself wearing heels and business casual. It’s oxymoronic, but here I feel I can be unabashedly socially awkward because everyone else is too. People here, like me, are earnest and curious and unconcerned with looking uncool. It’s a comfortable place to live.)

And so I still feel a residual bitterness towards people who seem to have always had it “easier” than I do. Their lives are hardly anything I desire; I have never wanted to be in a sorority and don’t have the energy to maintain Herbal Essences hair and I don’t want to work in fashion or PR or go to med school or do anything besides what I already do. Not to mention that my life is actually embarrassingly easy nowadays. I don’t even have to do my own laundry (thanks, Silicon Valley perks!). I can easily afford my rent and my car insurance and my cable and a couple new pairs of shoes every so often, and I have health insurance and voting rights and freedoms and privileges that many people lack. Frankly, nowadays, I only complain because it’s something to do.

But I remember being a little girl and wishing madly that I could spend a day in the body of one of the “popular” girls. They were pretty and easy and happy and sunny and I was bespectacled and moody and lonely and sensitive and nothing was easy. (I was unaware of the concept of “white privilege” at the time. Don’t worry, dear reader, I now know that everything is easy except trying to keep my uterus out of the hands of dastardly Republicans.) None of that is particularly true any longer; I work hard to be happy, and also I wear contact lenses, and I have a lot of really fantastic friends all over, and people generally like me.

But it’s hard to shake the nighttime thoughts that kept you awake when you were a little girl, especially if you thought them as hard and as often as I did, and for me, it’s still those damn glasses that kept me down, kept me from being happy and normal like the popular girls.

Perhaps these girls were once as geeky and shunned as I once was by classmates who watched Nickelodeon while they read Newsweek (RIP, print edition) in the corner. Perhaps they are actually nearsighted and need glasses, which is probably the most likely case, and I should maybe shut up and get over myself. But I maintain that the wearing of glasses should be a privilege held exclusively for the nerds of the world – for those who have suffered the shame of being outed as a non-consumer of Pokemon, of consistently missing the ball during four-square at recess, of knowing the capitals of every nation in the world but not the basic premise of “The Angry Beavers.” For if my Coke-bottle rims are suddenly going to give me an edge on everyone else, to set me apart in a way that makes me look special and glamorous instead of mousy and pitiable… I think that I deserve that one, don’t I?

I bought a new pair of glasses recently and when I wear them, I feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Analyze that, Freudette.

 

*I would like to take this moment to note that sometimes I can’t tell when my friends are posing facetiously. I have many friends from pre-college who are in, like, Delta Gamma Theta Phi or whatever, where you do the little broken wrist with the fingertips against the forehead with the jutting hip, and I guess it’s universal because I also have a bunch of Vassar friends who often pose like that as a joke. And the only way I can tell if they’re serious is if I look closely and see if they’re all wearing matching T-shirts that say something like “DELTA BETA KAPPA EPSILON BOYS VERSUS GIRLS FIJI ALPHA WET T-SHIRT FUNDRAISER PARTY.”

Also, we used to take pictures in dance company poses ALL THE TIME, so I probably shouldn’t make fun of sorority girls for doing it, but obviously we were pursuing the high art of Irish step dance/contemporary ballet/”walk eight counts and touch yourself” and can deservedly consider ourselves superior.

viva las incultas

I have a post in the pipeline about what it’s like to grow up in Las Vegas. I have been distracted by a more pressing topic: what it’s like to grow up in a public education system recently deemed the worst in the nation, so bad that parents are considering moving out of state to avoid the horrors of watching their child be instructed in algebra by a homicidal maniac. (In my Algebra II Honors teacher’s defense, he didn’t become a homicidal maniac until well after he left his position at LVA. That said, I did once witness him throw a roll of toilet paper at a student.)

I’m pretty forthright about the fact that the Clark County School District is a facsimile of a sham and that I learned next to nothing during the thirteen years I spent in school there. (Except how to build a bridge out of toothpicks, but I think I’ve mentioned the bridge-building song before.) I graduated first in my class at the second-best public high school in the district at the time and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any of the scientific disciplines… also, I drew pictures of the word problems on the A.P. Calculus exam instead of solving them because I lost hope after integrals came on the scene. I shouldn’t be the valedictorian of ANYTHING except the Class of Crossword Puzzle Solving and Making Up Legitimate-Sounding Words. Yet there I was, at the graduation of the class of 2007, speechifying like I had learned how to balance chemical equations or read Julius Caesar in its entirety. I guess I got an early start in learning how to bullshit.

I think it’s most effective for me to enumerate a few hard facts about what it’s like to grow up in the state with the worst public education in the country. And keep in mind while you read this that I went to schools in affluent areas from kindergarten through eighth grade and attended a selective performing arts magnet high school with a GPA requirement (not to mention an audition). I was a LOT better off than most kids in Las Vegas. Nevertheless…

I’ve never done a chemistry experiment. When I started my freshman year at Vassar, I had never written a “paper” or anything of note that was longer than a five-paragraph essay. I didn’t know what a direct object was until my French teacher taught me during sophomore year. We didn’t learn that in freshman French because our teacher couldn’t control the class long enough to teach us anything beyond “bonjour” and “je m’appelle.” There were 34 students in my A.P. English class senior year. We were allotted a single year to learn all of world history. It never occurred to me that people my age might study philosophy or economics or computer science; those were subjects reserved for Ph.D. candidates who had, in my mind, magicked their way into the upper echelons of academia. Meanwhile, I was taught every year until the eighth grade what the parts of speech were because invariably, half the class didn’t know what a noun was.

I remember, distinctly, reading A Separate Peace during summer vacation and wondering what it would be like to go to an elite high school in the same way that I wondered what it was like to ride in a rocketship.

To write this down makes me angry. It makes me furious! I have a sharp and agile mind and I feel like, despite my parents’ best efforts and their success in turning me into at least an avid reader and critical thinker, what could have been the cognitive equivalent of a cheese grater is instead the cognitive equivalent of… cottage cheese. No Child Left Behind, my ass. Nevada is too poor to pay for chemistry experiments and instead we’re left with hapless chemistry teachers trying desperately to ignite some spark of interest in their students by mass-printing black and white diagrams that explain Avogadro’s number through a convoluted geographic metaphor. And as a result, I’m 23 and last month I did a puzzle hunt with my coworkers at the software company where I work and I couldn’t contribute anything useful to the puzzle about gamma decay because guess what? I don’t fucking know anything about gamma decay. NOTHING.

Often, it’s a matter of funding. Many of my teachers were brilliant, kind, and interesting, but you can only do so much with 30 to 40 children or teenagers in a classroom and outdated textbooks and no money for science experiments and broken air conditioning in May and so few classrooms that every five weeks, you have to spend the day herding your 30 fifth-graders across the school instead of teaching. My high school library looked like a sad, picked-over used bookstore.

Just as often, it’s a matter of heinously poor teachers. Every student in Clark County, at least, has a war chest of horror stories about their terrible teachers. How about my junior year English teacher, who taught us a grammatically incorrect, bastardized form of MLA citation?* For that matter, how about my eighth grade English teacher, who taught us Animal Farm without mentioning that it was allegorical? I am dead serious. If I hadn’t been such a raging geek, I might still wonder why George Orwell wrote that bizarre little story about murderous pigs. How about my friends’ history teacher, who taught her students that dinosaurs roamed the earth until a few hundred years ago? (Actually, this might have been the anatomy teacher. Either way… rough. Rough times in public education.)

I had a handful of absolutely stellar teachers during my childhood and I would be remiss to leave them out of this diatribe. The venerable English teacher, whose A.P. classes were the stuff of legend at LVA, taught a writing philosophy that has become the backbone of my career. The passionate and slightly mad A.P. U.S. History teacher, who brought to life the connections between history and the current age. (Also, his motto was “Normal People Suck.” It’s valuable when you’re sixteen.) Together with his great compatriots in te social studies hallway, they kindled in me a deep interest in history, literature, and culture and a passion for social justice. There were others, but those four stand out because I continue to consider their lessons on a regular basis.

But seriously, guys, I’m 23 and I’ve never done a chemistry experiment. SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT.

I have no concrete suggestions to improve the state of education in Nevada. Read more. Make your kids read more. Discover money growing on trees. Fire all the teachers who aren’t the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph (by which I mean “fire all the teachers who aren’t Mr. D_____,” since the other three are retired, retired, and dead, respectively). Hire more teachers who don’t suck. Pay them decent wages. Enact a state income tax to fund our new, competent teachers. Reinvent the wheel. Discover an alternate universe. Prove Fermat’s last theorem. Cry. Do something, because I have so much faith in my beloved hometown and it will not succeed if we let all of our children’s brains turn to cottage cheese. Not everyone can be a stripper! Someone’s gotta be a software engineer!

*She told us that quotations ending with a non-period punctuation mark should be cited as follows:

“My English teacher was an idiot” (Cass 36)!

instead of the accurate:

“My English teacher was an idiot!” (Cass 36).

get on up, it’s bobsled time!

I am an Olympics FIEND. The Olympic theme song gives me chills. I get weepy when I see pictures of Kerri Strug in the arms of Bela Karolyi. The movie Cool Runnings… I mean, come on. Think about 2008: Michael Phelps eats 30,000 calories of pasta a day and swims to glory by a fingertip’s length in a Chinese pool! Misty May-Treanor redefines the limits of grunting and leg musculature on the sand! The marathon runners sweat more liquid in a matter of hours than I consume in a day’s worth of diet soda! During the Olympics, humans rewrite the boundaries that previously limited us: boundaries both physical and cultural. Yes, if we listen to NBC, the Olympics are the time that all nations set aside their grievances to join for sixteen days of friendly competition between amateur athletes. Except LeBron. (Side note: I still don’t understand why NBA players are allowed to play on Team USA. This has been explained to me more than once and I can never seem to wrap my head around it. I guess because it’s cool to have a bunch of dudes who wouldn’t normally sweat it out on the same side of the court doing it in the name of Amurrican exceptionalism? Whatever.)

I have spent enough hours of my life devouring articles about doping and Bela Karolyi beating up his Soviet gymnasts and that guy who rigged his pentathlon epee to record invalid hits to understand that the Olympics have a seedy underbelly, one that touches on a lot of the subjects about which I have A Lot of Feelings. (Eating disorders? Check! Nationalism? Check! Competitors from third-world countries being portrayed in the media like animals with special talents in YouTube videos rather than human beings with extraordinary abilities achieved without the help of intravenous Gatorade? Check!) I also firmly believe that the pursuit of glory and excellence through the honing of extraordinary abilities is the key to overcoming our insatiable hunger for power. (This is why I dance and write rather than, like, stage coups or babysit.) I don’t think that we’ll ever overcome said insatiable hunger for power, but I believe in the value of forgetting about it for awhile.

The Olympics are also an incredibly powerful forum for political protest. Think about the international tensions revealed by Olympics past: individual athletes all the way up to entire nations using the most public of stages to make known their objections to totalitarian regimes and nations who commit egregious human rights violations. The world pays attention to the Olympics and expects that nations will be on their best, most socially appropriate behavior. A nation is tarnished when their evil or cheating spirit is revealed or highlighted during the Olympics.

That said, a lot of evil is buried beneath the pomp and bluster of the Olympics. A lot of elite athletes only make it to that level because they’re basically beaten to a pulp and reshaped into an unnatural state of physiological excellence between early childhood and early adulthood. Then they’re usually dropped like a hot potato to wallow in their own depression. Athletes are frequently a bruised and bloodied conduit for a country’s selfish ambitions. Save a few big-name sports that get a lot of attention, Olympic athletes don’t really get the glory that comes to, say, NFL players. (When was the last time you heard about the silver medalist for shotput getting away with rape because “most girls would feel lucky to have sex with someone like him?” Okay, sorry, not the time or place.)

I don’t think that the abuse that athletes go through and the lifelong psychological challenges that accompany their achievements are necessarily worth it. That said, I love the underlying spirit of the Olympics and I hope that one day we stop trying to reach superhuman greatness and can be happy with our own healthy, functional bodies. (Um, that’s a whole different topic I could go off on for like seven hundred more paragraphs, but let’s let that go for a second and keep talking about the embodiment of patriotism or whatever multisyllabic sociocultural bullshit I’m word-vomiting about right now.) I think that the Olympics are a symbol of what globalization could become, were the hunger for power to be quieted.

I have long been a proponent of faking it ’til one makes it. Whether this is an appropriate metaphor to deploy in the name of international politics is debatable, but the eternal optimist in me believes that any measure of international polypartisanship, however superficial, is a step in the right direction. World leaders pretending to be civil to one another and shaking hands as they fudge their underage gymnasts’ birth certificates so they can be the world champions in both math scores AND the uneven bars is better than world leaders threatening to blow up one another’s capital cities (I know, North Korea is never a good example, but this is what came up when I Googled “world leaders threaten each other” and I’m too lazy to find something that doesn’t source from a country whose latest exploits likely have Walt Disney rolling over in his grave).

We emulate what we see; when we see the arts–and at the elite level, I consider athleticism an art–taking precedence over politics, at least on a surface level, we leave with the sense that we are drawn together by a higher cause than power.* The Olympics are a celebration of our diversity and our mutual pursuit of excellence. To compete with one another is to demonstrate our respect for one another and to express our common cause: to push the boundaries of what the human body can achieve. The best way to learn from someone is to lose to them and the most productive way to lose is to learn from the victor. Competition, visceral and meaningful exposure to the abilities, techniques, and strengths of others, is the key to achieving greatness. (This is totally counter to what I believe about dance, but that’s because competitive dance is about who can do the most pirouettes in a fugly, hunched over imitation of a position or, like, whose crotch-baring tilt reaches the most aesthetically displeasing angle. Also, hair-flinging.)

I feel like the Olympics are about awe: the sensation experienced by athletes (and coaches and announcers who were once athletes) who recognize and admire the skill of their competitors. In the competitive arena, the level of expertise of your opponent is more important than the color of his jacket. Set politics aside; engage in a fierce and primal competition; learn from your opponent. At the level where these athletes compete, every participant has something to offer. The Olympics, at the heart, are about skill and the pursuit of excellence regardless of the federated nature of our world.

To act, at least, that we consider the pursuit of excellence a more respectable path than the destruction of our enemies is to reject, if only superficially and for a moment, the pursuit of absolute power at all costs. After all, if Kim Jong-un successfully obliterates all of the enemies of North Korea, that water polo match in Rio in 2016 is gonna be awfully boring.

I could write about this for hours! Maybe, in light of the Olympics, I’ll turn this into a summer series of ruminations on the philosophy of sport and the unifying spirit of competition. Or I’ll just rank each country’s uniform based on the glitter-to-spandex ratio. Whichever is more productive for the quest for world peace (considering the influence of beauty pageants on that topic, I’m leaning toward the latter).

P.S. “Polypartisanship” is an up-and-coming word and I am totally on the bandwagon.

P.P.S. I think that by this measure, I just called curling an art form. But who am I to judge?

P.P.P.S. I know I’m kind of abusing the royal “we” here, but I like to pretend I’m an Olympic athlete sometimes. Or maybe I have tapeworm. You decide.

dudes in a hurry (silicon valley culture clash #1)

If I die this summer, it will be on a staircase.*

So recently, my life became a giant sausagefest. For the past nine years, I’ve been surrounded by women, men who are mostly in touch with their feelings, and people who don’t subscribe to the gender binary. This is a direct consequence of attending performing arts high school followed by Vassar followed by working at a dance store and living and breathing dance and theatre. I was only exposed to large groups of men when they were visiting all-male a cappella groups sleeping on my living room floor (hey, Haverford Humtones!) or… nope. That’s actually the only significant large group of men I’ve been in close proximity with in the past nine years. (See? I TOLD you I didn’t fund my Vassar education by working as a high-class hooker!)

Anyway, I recently started working at a Silicon Valley tech company. Guys, let me tell you something: that whole thing about how the tech industry is overrun by dudes is not a joke. It is actually overrun by dudes. Kind, smart, well-mannered dudes, but dudes all the same. I started by first day with some twenty other interns. I was the ONLY lady. (I am also an English major and the only non-tech intern, so it was kind of like being an anthropomorphic enchilada at a pizza parlor.) I got over that in about five minutes and am now thoroughly enjoying my burgeoning friendships with all my new male computer genius buddies.

But here is a fact about dudes in the Silicon Valley: DUDES ARE IN A HURRY. Dudes do not walk. Dudes RUN, and they run everywhere. I turn corners with trepidation because three times out of ten (not nine. We have like half of Palo Alto’s real estate; there are not enough employees to cover all those corners), there is a dude RUNNING around the corner, off to input some groundbreaking code or play some really important rounds of Halo or grab the last size XL T-shirt. Sometimes I wonder if I should wear my bike helmet around the office, lest I lose my brain cells in a tragic accident with one of the many Davids or Matts.

The most dangerous time is mealtimes. My company is one of those awesome tech companies that feeds its employees three meals a day. And unlike certain dining halls in certain liberal arts colleges where I’ve spent time in recent years, that food is not just edible but REALLY, REALLY good. But particularly at lunchtime, there is a MAD DASH to the kitchen… especially the kitchen in my building, because we have the best chef.

Let me bring this back to stairs: I have to go up a staircase to get to the kitchen, as well as the bathroom. (This is a good thing, because I’m trying really hard not to gain the freshman fifteen again… difficult when you could actually eat your body weight in Cheez-Its at any hour of the day. For free.) When I walk up the stairs to get my lunch, I am invariably met by a dude or a platoon of dudes SPRINTING down the stairs, often with lunch in hand. I have seen lettuce abandoned on the staircase after it flew off a Sprinting Dude’s plate. It is NO JOKE. It’s like taking a leisurely stroll directly into the last mile of the Boston Marathon, if the Boston Marathon were full of people who hadn’t been running for 25.2 miles and tended to subsist on Mountain Dew and cupcakes. And also if only two to three people ran the Boston Marathon at a time. Regardless, it’s dangerous. More dangerous than the malfunctioning remote-control helicopter the man in sequined pants was testing in the atrium last Fancy Pants Thursday.

Contrast this with the general snail’s pace of men at Vassar. Vassar boys (I can’t believe I used the word “men” first. There are no men at Vassar, except for the hale and hearty James H. Merrell, chief manitou in charge of American history and fellow 7 A.M. gym-goer) are, comparatively, slugs. They are too busy pondering the meaning of life and working out new guitar chords and trying to think of new ways to seduce girls into their rooms besides “Hey, wanna watch this sweet foreign black-and-white postmodern epic set in a postapocalyptic Sweden with no subtitles?” Compounding this constant state of self-improvement is the fact that half of them are high all the damn time. Clearly, it is too much to ask that one wrest philosophical meaning from the vagaries of life while maintaining a steady footfall.

This brings me to my more meaningful point: how vastly the attitude of Silicon Valley tech dudes differs from that of Vassar boys. I’m generalizing here, but for the most part, Vassar boys think slowly and speak slowly. I often feel that the reason that Vassar girls trip all over themselves in class to make their opinions heard as fast as possible as that we’re trying to show that we’re as smart as the “wise” boys. I could go on at length here about the “valley girl” stereotype and the way female speech patterns have evolved, but that’s another topic for another time. I resent that we are inherently perceived to be dumb or flighty or “valley girls” because we speak quickly and trip on our words. Here in the Silicon Valley, men do the same! They, too, are in a hurry to make their thoughts known! And in a similar and less metaphorical hurry to get back to their office with their crab cakes before they get cold!

I just like that the dudes here are is as much of a rush to get their words and work out as I am. They code like I write: fast and furious and with a lot of angst and strife but also a lot of what one might dare call “skillz.” And if this manifests itself in the overwhelming urge to sprint down stairs and around corners all the damn time, so be it. I might just pull a Hermione Granger and start looking around corners with a mirror like there’s a fast-moving software developer basilisk on the loose.

*I rode my bike for two blocks in the wrong direction on a one-way street today, so take this with a grain of salt.

I’M HAVING A LOT OF FEELINGS, or why I love YA

Allow me to regress to a younger age for a few minutes.

I have a deep and abiding passion for young adult literature. The vast majority of the crap glutting the shelves in the YA section at Barnes and Noble isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Nobody needs to read “The In-Crowd” or “Gossipy Bitches” or whatever the hell else is selling thousands of copies in mass-market paperback. (Nobody needs to read “50 Shades of Grey,” either, but let’s not go there because I don’t want to talk about handcuffs on the Internet.)

There’s a reason that I majored in English in college, and it wasn’t a deep-seated wish to be totally unqualified for every job ever. Books were my salvation when I was a kid, and children’s literature is a downright majestic genre filled with all kinds of gems. (Mr. Popper’s Penguins! The Ramona books! Everything by Roald Dahl, except maybe Fantastic Mr. Fox, because that was kind of weird and unnecessary, but you win some, you lose some!) Children who read books learn to be adventurous and sassy and to question authority. We know all this.

But when you get to a certain age, you start to realize the inevitability of reality. “Spunky detective” is not a viable career path. You KNOW what will happen if you squeeze out a whole tube of toothpaste. There are more interesting things: boys, and science projects, and boys, and mean girls, and boys. I was once a teenage girl and if it hadn’t been for my obsessive consumption of books, I think I would have forgotten about everything except for… boys. I was no longer interested in the madcap adventures of Sally J. Freedman or Ralph S. Mouse. In fact, I was no longer interested in anything except gazing at my own navel. Such is the life of the American teenager. (Totally not referencing that ABC Family show because I’ve never seen it.)

The problem with most young adult fiction is that it caters to the mentality of teenage girls who only want to think about boys and popularity. (And it’s as heteronormative as I’m making it sound. There are as few books about teenage lesbians as there are about, like, teenage computer geniuses. I actually own a book about teenage lesbians, even though I wasn’t one, just because I was so committed to the cause of supporting counterculture teen lit. It wasn’t even that good, but HELLO, IT WASN’T ABOUT BOYS.)

The best young adult authors are still writing about love and sex and popularity and the social strata of high school. (I, personally, could never relate to this, which is why I want to write a young adult book about a high school like mine one day. The most popular kids are the most popular because they get the most stage time!) But they take it to a higher level, exploring the intensity of teenagers’ feelings, transforming the flights of their imagination into art, and leaving us with some kind of realistic moral, some reminder of how teenagers can become better people.

Gossip Girl and all that crap is designed to give teenagers who are unhappy with their lives a glimpse into the lifestyle they think they want. Quality young adult literature teaches teenagers who are unhappy with their lives (which is, let’s be real, all of them) that they are surrounded by beauty and adventure, even at, like, the lunch table in the corner or wherever it is that the uncool kids sit in real high schools. (At LVA, we had dance-offs on the quad and people wore cat ears. I’m not kidding when I say that I don’t understand the “popularity” thing.) John Green, Sarah Dessen, and Meg Cabot, etc., etc., write about teenagers changing their OWN perspectives on their lives.

I think it’s so valuable to teach teenagers that their feelings have merit and how to deal with them healthily. I’ve kept a journal since I was young and it is the ONLY reason that I’m still here and kicking today — not being facetious. (I probably could have also taken up boxing, but nobody presented that as an option…) It’s so easy when you’re young and hormonal and miserable to convince yourself that you’re drowning in your own emotion and that there is no way out and that there WILL be no way out. To read a book where someone else is feeling THE SAME THING and then DOESN’T COLLAPSE IN A PILE OF DESPAIR is to know that you, too, will be okay.

Escapism is valuable, but learning to extract the beauty and joy and meaning from your own life is priceless.

Also, none of those escapist teen authors can write worth a damn. Go escape into something like Artemis Fowl wherein the author is actually capable of crafting an elegant sentence. Learn about prose while rotting your brain!

This originally started out as a post about how bummed out I was about the trailer for “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Emma Watson’s horrible American accent! (I LOVE Emma Watson. She is a phenomenal British pixie-cut diva and I totally would not have taken covert cell phone pictures of her had I gone to Brown.) The indiscriminate changing of verb tenses! (We ARE infinite? We WERE infinite. Nobody thinks about being infinite while feeling infinite.) So stay tuned in the future for a diatribe about how much I hate it when books that aren’t “The Devil Wears Prada” are turned into movies. (It was okay with “The Devil Wears Prada” because that book is an insult to the written word, and Meryl Streep is a goddess.)

Also, I’d like to take this moment to thank my high school dance teacher, Jeneane Gallo Huggins, for teaching me that teenagers are valuable contributors to society when you let them speak.

why I love technology…

…or how a simple girl from suburban Las Vegas became a championship stalker

The other day, I was reading my Twitter feed on my iPhone and discovered that it was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Naturally, my first thought was of my friend Julianna, who is a cookie enthusiast (this is an understatement). (Side note: when I told her on my last day in New York that I had had the greatest cookie in the world that morning, she asked if it was from Levain Bakery. Obviously, it was.) I texted Jules to make sure that she knew it was National Chocolate Chip Cookie day. Not that she ever needs an excuse to eat a chocolate chip cookie, but I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a prime opportunity to do so.

In the days of yore, I would have had to consult my Farmer’s Almanac to know that it was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Then I would have had to send Jules a message via the Pony Express or carrier pigeon, and by the time it got there, it wouldn’t have been National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day anymore.

I like to let people know when I’m thinking of them. Like, “Caitlyn! I read this fluff piece about the quality of this season’s maple syrup batch on Jezebel!” or “Amanda, I just washed a dish towel! Remember when we almost had to have a sumo wrestling match over the bag of dirty dish towels in our kitchen senior year?” or “Jon, I just saw a cookbook written by Sheryl Crow called ‘If It Makes You Healthy.’” At any given moment, I’m thousands of miles away from the people I love (this is because they all insist on living in places like Spokane and Morocco and Paris and New York and I can’t handle that much snow, air travel, or humanity in a certain number of square feet). Technology makes me feel closer to them. Mostly because I can harass them on as regular a basis as I did when I lived near them.

I like to stalk people. Let me rephrase that so it sounds less incriminating: I like to know what’s going on in people’s lives. I LOVE other people’s lives. I think it’s because I’m such a voracious reader: I consume the details of other people’s lives like other people consume breakfast cereal. (Actually, I consume the details over other people’s lives like I consume breakfast cereal. Nobody eats as much cereal as me.) I keep up on EVERYONE’S lives on Facebook: people I talk to every week, people I haven’t talked to in years, people I like, people I hate. I like it even better when people have blogs because then I can pretend I’m reading a book, only it’s about characters that are real, which is even better than books because seriously, I’m still a little bitter that I can never hang out with Ron Weasley or the BFG.

I feel more comfortable keeping in touch with people when I’ve been in superficial touch with them via Facebook. The gap seems less insurmountable somehow.

Don’t get me wrong, though. There’s a reason I work carrier pigeons into conversation as often as possible… and once I’ve come up with a snappy business name involving carrier pigeons, you’ll know why.

ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2012…

Wear sunscreen.

Just kidding. If you haven’t learned that after four Founder’s Days, then you’re basically doomed to spend the rest of your formative years (which you will surely find a way to extend into your thirties) rolling around in Brooklyn wearing flannel and being offended by things.

I write this because I want to comfort my 2012 friends who are having a collective social media freakout over their impending graduation. Short version, courtesy of my dear friend Amanda’s omnipresent wall art: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.

Long version:

But really. The real world is ridiculously fun and exciting and dynamic, and it is a place that is infinitely more painful, pleasurable, and rewarding than college. I look back on my college experience with great fondness and nostalgia, as well as a somewhat jaundiced eye that recognizes now that most people graduate from Vassar with at least one of the following:

a) eating disorder

b) conviction that there is no such thing as good sex

c) prescription for antidepressants

d) addiction (empanadas count)

e) self-esteem hovering somewhere above “worthless pond scum” (girls)

f) self-esteem hovering somewhere below “Adonis and God’s gift to flannel-wearing biddies everywhere” (boys)

In the real world, you will recognize that none of these conditions are particularly healthy (the prescription for antidepressants notwithstanding, but were it not for Obamacare or the elusive health insurance, that shit can be a liability). You will begin to rid yourself of these conditions. You will no longer skip dinner and spend the evening taking shots chased with diet soda to minimize your calorie intake. You will not pull all-nighters. You will go on dates with people who ask you questions about yourself instead of telling you about the essay they plan to write one day combining the fundamental elements Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and T.I.’s “Whatever You Like!”

I was lucky in that I lived in the house that hosted some of the rockinest sockinest ragers on the Vassar College theatre/a cappella/dance scene (and let me tell you, the ability to harmonize does not negate one’s propensity to spill their beergarita on the floor and then track a bunch of rain-soaked grass all over it). I was thusly prepared to live in an apartment where the bathroom was lit by a desk lamp balanced precariously on a towel rack.

I moved home to Las Vegas from college in Poughkeepsie immediately after graduation. I moved to New York from Las Vegas six months after graduation. I moved from New York back to the West, where I will eventually settle in Palo Alto, eleven months after graduation. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of useless belongings, spent a lot of money on moving and associated fees, carried a lot of heavy shit up and down stairs, cursed myself for having no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and found security in the knowledge that I belong out West. I needed to move to New York to know that. It’s okay. If something you do turns out to be a grave error, try as desperately as you can to pull meaning from it. Let no action you undertake be in vain.

(Example: you may discover, too late, that red wine-red wine-Tequila Sunrise-mojito is a terrible pattern to follow. Learn from this experience that you should always store an extra pair of underwear in your purse, lest you… misplace yours.)

The real world is a better place than college. Here is a list of reasons why:

1) You aren’t constantly surrounded by people you actively and/or passively hate

2) You don’t have to pretend you always want to go out on Friday night lest your peers discover that you are actually a grandma

3) You are actually doing something productive. If you’re employed, you’re working, and they pay you. Probably not enough and you’re probably overqualified for your job and you probably would rather chew off your own arm than continue working there for the rest of your life, but I find the business of going to work and getting paid infinitely more satisfying than writing a boring paper and getting a good grade for it. (Best of both worlds: getting paid for writing a boring paper. Being a professional writer is AWESOME.) If you’re unemployed, well, you’re probably BEASTING job interviews.

4) YOU NEVER HAVE TO DRINK CRYSTAL PALACE VODKA AGAIN!

Friends, I could continue. I could write a book about the ways in which the past year, in which I got rejected from about ten million jobs, left New York after four months because it made me nauseous and claustrophobic, and got unceremoniously dumped on my ass by a dude who once concluded a text message to me with the phrase “much love,” was better than my four years of college. If I could sum it up, I would just say this: I’m a REAL PERSON now. I can’t afford to pay my cell phone bill yet and my next employment venture might only be three months long, but I’m a grown-up and the world is at my feet. The WORLD, kids, not just Poughkeepsie.

And seriously, did I mention that you never have to drink Crystal Palace vodka again?

That alone should make you excited to graduate.

creativity is dying/why I don’t “reblog”

I had a Pinterest account for a hot second and spent the entire time I was on it feverishly searching the Internet for images to post. I didn’t read other people’s pinboards or repin their images because I wanted to create my own original collection of images and recipes and, like, decorating ideas or whatever else you’re supposed to put on Pinterest. But even that wasn’t original enough for me; I felt guilty using the images that other people had produced, as if I were somehow unjustly appropriating their work to create some semblance of an “original collection” under my own name. And considering that Pinterest’s legality has come under fire of late, maybe I was right to drop that like a hot potato.

See, I’m unhealthily obsessed with being original and constantly producing original thoughts/work/dance moves (the Distant Hamburger didn’t invent itself, kids). I don’t reblog on Tumblr for the same reason that I stopped posting song lyrics as my Facebook status some years ago: because those words, those images, those kitschy little animated GIFs have already been invented by someone else and it is not my life goal to find fame as a professional reblogger. (Okay, so occasionally I do still post a song lyric or two on Twitter, but, like, for real, “Nobody said it was easy. Nobody said it would be this hard” and I’M STILL FOURTEEN ON THE INSIDE.)

I have friends who apparently have a bajillion Tumblr followers even though they create NO original work. Their Internet personas are constructed entirely on their ability to find and promote other people’s creativity with little more than a byline at the bottom. What is the point of this? From whence comes the satisfaction? And, I know, who am I to criticize someone for enjoying the process of collecting images and quotations and kitschy little animated GIFs for their own purpose?

It’s all part of a larger and more problematic issue that I see in the world of art today. I would hardly call myself an artist; I’m a writer, but I aspire to be more of a wit than a creator of “high art.” (Whether or not that’s the same thing is up for debate.) Nevertheless, I’m in the world of the arts and most of my friends are artists and I keep my judgey glasses in my back pocket for moments like these, when I realize that there are very few creative spirits left in the world and modern technology is turning us all into succubi.

I have been in dance pieces where large chunks of choreography were taken directly from YouTube. I have seen dance pieces that were — purposefully or unconsciously — the theme, costumes, lighting, and choreographic style were appropriated from pieces that the choreographers had been exposed to in the past. The theatre companies at my college are constantly doing the same shows that they did five years ago, directors are ripping off themes and images and stylistic choices from one another. People are producing massive amounts of creative work, but in order to maintain such a high level of output, they are throwing originality out the window.

I often worry that It’s All Been Done. (In fact, that’s my main problem with New York: I feel like I can’t do anything original because every word has been written, every song composed, every dance choreographed, every goal achieved. Someone has beaten you to every last punch, young New Yorker.) Is it the state of our artistic world now that all we have left is to rearrange and reinterpret what has already been created? Are we just recasting and rechoreographing pieces with new, younger dancers? Is it enough to forcibly take up a pedestal left by a departing predecessor? Is that the kind of fame we’ll settle for? Is there anything original left to say? Are you an artist if you all do is copy other people’s work, rearrange it into your own formation? Is that all art is?

Please note that I had to edit this because I realized that I used the phrase “problematic problem.” #vassarproblems

and hopin’ and plannin’ and dreamin’

I still wish on spare eyelashes and when I catch the clock at 11:11, but I wish for the fortitude to accept what life throws at me instead of wishing for life to throw me really awesome things.

This is less because I no longer believe in the power of eyelashes and digital readouts and more because I’ve convinced myself that the gods of wishing on ambiguous everyday objects are pleased more by spiritually fulfilling, self-actualizing wishes than by, you know, buy me a pony and I wanna be a fairy princess.

Hence the following conversation I had with myself in my head on the train tonight:

“11:11, make a wish!”

“I wish… that I’ll get the once-in-a-lifetime dream job that I interviewed for last week!”

“NO. NO. STOP. SHUT UP BEFORE THE GODS OF WISHING ON AMBIGUOUS OBJECTS HEAR YOU BECAUSE THEY WANT YOU TO FIND YOUR DESTINY OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL.”

“Balls. Okay, I wish, um, for the fortitude to accept the fact that there is a zero percent chance that I’m gonna get that job, and maybe for a few margaritas to magically appear when I get the gentle yet impersonal email rejecting me.”

“You don’t really want that, though, do you?”

“No. No, you’re right; I would prefer a whiskey and ginger.”

“Oh, just suck it up and wish for the job. You know you want it.”

“NO. NO. I WANT INNER STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE.”

“And that job, though, right?”

“I mean… yeah.”

“Balls.”

“Balls is right, kid.”

slacks do not a grownup make

I have been feeling very adult lately, what with all the slacks I’ve been wearing to interviews and rent checks I’ve been writing and glasses of craft beer I’ve been drinking in respectable establishments. I just wanted to take a moment to make sure that nobody thinks that I actually turned into a big girl while they weren’t looking by noting the following facts:

1. I haven’t washed my sheets in two months.

2. I frequently drop my iPhone on my face while texting in bed.

3. I still have to plug my ears when I flush the toilet in airplane bathrooms because I find the sound quite alarming.