Category Archives: personal history

someone else’s mom’s minivan

I’m on winter holiday break from work until Monday, so yesterday I went to look at dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum with an old friend who also lives in London. I realized as early as the Tube ride there that it was a mistake; the Piccadilly line was crawling with children and I spent the eight stops between Kings Cross/St Pancras and South Kensington watching a toddler in a princess dress, flannel leggings, and Keds methodically unwrap and eat every one of a tin of foil-wrapped chocolates. It was wild.

My friend and I waded through a waist-high sea of humanity to see the blue whale and the animatronic T-rex and then we made a beeline for the V&A to look at the Cast Courts — which you think is a room of famous sculpture until you realize it’s a room of plaster models of famous sculptures — and what must be every piece of silver service manufactured in the seventeenth century.

I had been to the V&A once before, when I saw an exhibit about underwear (I like history best through an extremely specific lens, and old bras are so weird!), but this was the first time I saw the breadth of its collection. As my friend described it, the V&A just has… a lot of stuff. A whole lot of stuff. The plaster models and the silver services, yes, but also entire rooms devoted to miniature portraits and gilded boxes and blingy tiaras from lesser royals.

We got to talking about field trips. I think occasionally about how I miss them. I can’t place why, since there’s nothing especially precious about riding in the back of someone else’s mom’s minivan or eating lunch at Port of Subs. I always wound up sick, anyway, either from the excitement or the warmed-over mayonnaise.

My friend posited that it’s that it was nice to have something fun and exciting to do that you didn’t have to plan yourself. That’s it, and as I think about it that’s mostly what I miss from childhood itself — the fact of not having to plan anything yourself.

I don’t think about childhood often, and I rarely wax nostalgic for it, but the turn of the year always brings me back to that little burst of pleasure I felt preparing the year’s first sheet of college-rule notebook paper, after I wrote my name in the upper right-hand corner (Cass-comma-Dana, last name first to make sorting easier for the overworked teachers of the Clark County School District), when I wrote the new year for the first time. 1/10/00, and in six months I’ll be done with the fifth grade and on the fast track to adulthood; 1/6/03, and in five months I’ll be free from the horrors of middle school; and so on.

As I approached the end of high school — 1/8/07; in eight months I’ll be able to go out drinking whenever I want — it occurred to me that I was beginning to run out of milestones. The year after the year I graduated college was the first year that I had nothing on my calendar. No “finish sixth grade” or “graduate college”; just “trudge inexorably toward oblivion.” I wrote “2012” for the first time, in the logbook at the store where I sold shoes for a dollar above minimum wage, and even though I was buying my own groceries and setting my own bedtime, I didn’t eat ice cream for dinner or sleep until noon. Six- and sixteen-year-old me would have been just horrified if they had been there. 

At thirty I’m in that awkward phase professionally where I have autonomy, but lack the latitude (or maybe the spine) to make decisions. I’m responsible for what I do but hamstrung in terms of doing it any better, so I mostly just walk around feeling guilty for everything that goes wrong and trying to figure out whether to theatrically proclaim it as a failure that I can trot out to demonstrate how reflective I am or pretend nothing happened (or Plan C, throw someone else under the bus).

It have been nice, when I wrote 2020 in my journal on Wednesday for the first time, if I could have followed it with a countdown: Five months until I can sign off on my own budget, three semesters until I can ignore your opinions, by this time in 2024 the Internet will have imploded and I won’t have to monitor Twitter anymore. But it’s another year of the inexorable march.

On the bright side, I got to leave the Natural History Museum of my own volition when I was tired of children flat-tiring my shoes, and I never have to take a math test again.

P.S. In light of the recent news from Iran, may I recommend one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I’ve read in recent years: the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First, about the Israeli government’s use of targeted assassinations. It’s a clear-eyed history of the practice that presents the strategic, moral, and psychological risks and benefits even-handedly. If you’re interested in understanding precedent for this practice and its ramifications in this region in particular, I highly recommend it — definitely a tome but it’s a page-turner. I even gave my dad a copy for Christmas last year. Is that weird?

 

roaring twenties

Ten years is a long time. Given that, it’s really shocking I made it through my twenties without being offered cocaine even once. Granted, I was invited to join several book clubs, and that’s a little more my speed (no pun intended) anyway, but still. Unless I crank (no pun intended) up my nightclub attendance in the three days left before I turn thirty, it seems that that ship has sailed. Pick up a coke habit in your thirties and the next thing you know Jay McInerney is writing your life story. Thanks, but no thanks.

I thought of this in reflecting on all that I accomplished in my twenties. The only things that came to mind were debauchery. Not because I’m especially wild — I wasn’t kidding about the book clubs — but because that’s what I thought my twenties were for. Landed a coveted job? Visited the world’s great cities? Contributed regularly to a retirement account? Sure, but what about the time I walked into the house I grew up in at eight in the morning and puked in the kitchen sink? It was the summer after I graduated from college; I was 22 and sleeping in my childhood bedroom in Las Vegas. I woke up every morning to the Moulin Rouge poster I bought in Paris when I was sixteen looming over me. The teenagers next door had a garage band that only knew “Seven Nation Army” and “Smoke on the Water.” They practiced every afternoon.

It was 2011. I had a degree in English and a part-time job selling shoes and sometimes I’d be invited to the Strip or to one of the old casinos downtown where the other patrons mostly looked like if they didn’t have skin cancer yet it was only because they hadn’t checked. We’d play penny slots and tip dollars on the watered-down vodka sodas the cocktail waitresses brought us and eventually we’d end up in the hotel suite someone’s friend’s friend had been comped or, once, in the living room in one of those chi-chi apartment lofts downtown. It was furnished in bachelor-chic with a record player and a cherry-red metal bookshelf or whatever you buy when you don’t actually like books but there were still meth deals going on in the street outside, so we slept on the couch until the sun rose and it was safe to creep to our cars.

I woke with cotton in my mouth and couldn’t stop myself staring at the man standing outside the parking garage where I’d left my Honda who looked uncannily like Santa Claus, had Santa Claus stopped off in Walter White’s trailer on his way back to the North Pole. Then I drove home and threw up in the kitchen sink before I spent eleven hours at the shoe store where I worked getting my fingers trampled by three-year-olds in tap shoes.

A year later I was making a salary and sipping champagne — okay, it was probably Prosecco, but the point is that it wasn’t Arbor Mist, and I wasn’t chugging — at the company holiday party. Sometimes I feel like I cut myself off too early. I loved being 22 and playing at being wild. I was bookish, had always been bookish, and I wanted not to be. I wanted to be carefree. I wanted to be fun. I wanted someone to offer me cocaine! (I have no real interest in doing cocaine. Last year I drank two cups of Swedish coffee before boarding a plane and I spent the whole flight wondering if I should call for the defibrillator. I just wanted someone to look at me and know that I was fun.)

I think I spent my twenties just as I should have: trying on the costumes of people I thought it might be fun to be. Most weren’t. Being thin meant I was moody and my hair fell out and I couldn’t drink at parties. Dating older men meant being criticized for my immaturity. (If I relate only one pearl of wisdom to my younger sisters, let it be that when your 33-year-old boyfriend tries to shame you, a 24-year-old, for being childish, instead of apologizing, consider suggesting that he not date someone nine years his junior. Honestly!) Auditioning for musicals meant… auditioning for musicals. That one lasted for about ten minutes before I realized that while the normal job hunt might be just as much an affront to my dignity, at least I only had to do it once. Going out drinking meant vomiting in the kitchen sink; going out dancing meant getting other people’s sweat in my hair.

I thought it might be fun to be thin and glamorous and to exist on champagne and air and to sleep in the afternoons and dance in the evenings, or maybe to be gritty and hustling, showing up in the casting room and building out my “book,” living in Astoria and hauling down to the Bell House on the G train (and thin. Every fantasy life I live out begins with being thin).

It turns out what I actually want is to sleep eight hours a night, preferably nine. Pretty much above all else. And what that requires is working a nine-to-five that pays enough to fund the occasional cab home from the Bell House because Lord help me if I’m going to lose out on sleep because I waited thirty minutes for the G train. It requires eating enough that I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with my heart beating out of my chest, which in turn requires that I can live without thigh gap. It requires reading quietly in the evenings, not dancing, and drinking tea, not booze. (It turns out that I was born to be bookish.)

I think I did enough this decade to be okay with this. I crammed a lot in. Mostly just scrolling through Twitter, yeah, but also, I rear-ended a cab driver, walked out on a Tinder date who chain-smoked three cigarettes in my face, played Val in “A Chorus Line,” visited New Zealand, saw the original cast of Hamilton, voted for a woman for president, partied at the Bellagio with Australian tourists, climbed an Alp, got harassed on Twitter, got harassed on the street, sort of learned to cook, rode a bicycle through a hailstorm, and did I mention I saw the original cast of Hamilton? I kept busy.

I don’t regret much. I regret rear-ending that cab driver (it was his second accident that week!). I regret not trying to clean the limescale off my shower floor before the week before we moved out. Sometimes I wish I’d pressed on with trying to be an actress. Mostly I’m excited for everything else I’m yet to do. Can you believe I’ve never visited the Grand Canyon? That I don’t know how to use Microsoft Excel? The list of books I haven’t read alone is enough to keep me occupied until I die, may that be far enough into the future that I don’t ascend to heaven without having read Mrs. Dalloway.

I haven’t made any special plans for my thirties. Keep on keeping on, I guess. Every so often I look up and marvel that I’m still working for the company that hired me when I was 22. Taking that job sent me spinning off my axis. I had always cringed at the idea of a desk job; I got lucky with one that has sent me to the corners of the Earth and taught me to be curious and skeptical. I thought I’d be itinerant for longer than I was and I feel faintly jealous of my friends who still are, but there’s more than one way to be itinerant. I expect to spend my thirties as I spent the back half of my twenties: as impetuously and spontaneously as a hyper-anxious stick-in-the-mud can manage. I’ll move again. I’ll travel more. I’ll forget to text my friends that I’m visiting from overseas until I show up and beg them to cancel their plans that evening so we can have dinner. I might start using eye cream, but it’s probably going to be another limescale-in-the-shower situation. I’ll read more books and maybe I’ll write one. I’ll get better at cooking, and I have this vague idea that I’m going to learn to play the piano. Who knows? I have plenty of time.

thirty, hurty, and dying

In two months I’ll turn thirty. On Instagram, my friends are celebrating their own thirtieths with oversized 3-0 balloons and bachelorette-style nights out with sashes, recording lash-batting, foot-popping Boomerangs, with cute hashtags to boot. Meanwhile, I’ve got one foot in the grave and the other in an ergonomic clog.

That’s an exaggeration. I haven’t bought clogs yet. Speaking frankly, though, there are six things very wrong with my life*:

  1. I haven’t been able to move my back properly since January.
  2. I regularly pull a muscle in my butt by walking wrong.
  3. I get a migraine if I so much as look at a third beer.
  4. I get heartburn when I eat anything but raw vegetables…
  5. …but when I eat raw vegetables my jaw gets stuck shut.
  6. There is a Grand Canyon-sized wrinkle in the middle of my forehead.

 

It’s enough to make a girl go full Gwyneth Paltrow. I scoffed for a long time at the concept of wellness, but you only have to stumble through so many days with a low-grade migraine before you’re ready to stuff precious stones wherever GOOP tells you to.

I jest. (Kind of. Has anyone tried the jade egg thing? Because seriously, Excedrin Migraine isn’t doing a thing for me anymore.) But thirty is weird. We decided recently to extend our stint in Europe and I keep catching myself thinking that by the time we return, we’ll have missed all the fun, as if when everyone has turned thirty-three they’ll have retreated into the suburbs with their babies, never to be seen again. Or that I only have so many glasses of wine left to drink before the migraines fully take over, or that my back is going to grow stiffer and stiffer until they have to carry me out of economy class on a stretcher.

Work doesn’t help. My colleagues who haven’t yet attended their five-year college reunions are always tagging me in Slack channels and Quip documents, channels so ephemeral that they might as well be sky-writing. “If you want me to do something for you,” I want to say, “you need to carve it for me on a stone tablet and hang it around the neck of a carrier pigeon.” But no, I just apologize for the delay, busy week, I have to do thirty minutes of yoga every night if I want to get out of bed the next morning and it’s really eating into the time I would otherwise spend learning how to organize my Quip notifications.

Once, the only time I worried about what my hair looked like was in the morning before I left the house, or when I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror. (Or when passing a building with reflective windows. Or when I had an especially large spoon. Or any reflective surface at all. Whatever.) Now I spend half my day in meetings saying things like “Not really in sync” or “Can we just table that for now?” or “Can we just table that for now until we’re more in sync?” And although you’d think I couldn’t look myself in the eye when I sound like such a raging douchebag, all I can do in a videoconference is stare at my little self-view in the corner and either admire my dewy visage or gawk in horror at how the gash-like wrinkle in my forehead is increasingly resembling a Harry Potter scar. During particularly contentious meetings, or when someone with a computer science degree starts to correct my grammar, I can literally watch it deepen.

I’m facing down the barrel of living in this body for the rest of my life. When I was nineteen and soft all I needed was a McDonald’s hash brown to buck me up after a night of drinking or twenty minutes with an ice pack to get me back at the barre, pulled muscle and all. I was preoccupied by the immediate concerns of the body: I needed a haircut. I needed to learn to apply foundation properly. My belly didn’t look like the bellies in Women’s Health. My calves were sore. My quads were sore. My clothes were hopeless. Things that I thought, dwelled on, and then immediately forgot; things that resolved themselves or that I resolved myself to. This wrinkle down my forehead? It’s not resolving.

As a dancer I bounced back from one injury after another. A summer of physical therapy here, a Nutcracker season with my shins sheathed in Ace bandages there; it was always traumatic for a day or two (as if a case of shin splints were the only thing that could keep me from a career in ballet) but a month later I’d have forgotten entirely. Now? Stick me in a hotel with a bad mattress for three days and three months later, I still can’t crack my back without a twinge to remind me that the Swiss don’t know how to build a bed properly. I used to think warming up before working out was just for those sad people who can’t touch their toes. That was before I spent eight weeks in physical therapy doing butt lifts! (“Glute bridges.” I’m sorry, Doctor Mike.)

I’ve long awaited the day when I could look back at the body I’ve fought against for so long and think of how grateful I should have been for its agility, its resilience, its lack of Moses-having-parted-the-Red-Sea-down-the-middle-of-my-forehead, blah blah, etc., etc. That day hasn’t come. I have some time yet.

That’s what terrifies me the most. “The rest of my life” is an awfully long time to live with knees that twinge when you jog, with an esophagus that will let you know when you’ve eaten one French fry too many, with blood vessels that slacken and send the alcohol straight to my brain to slosh around and throb for days on end. It’s an awfully long time to live regardless, in a world that’s getting steadily worse or at least whose worseness is getting steadily louder. I can’t say the phrase “self-care” aloud without cringing at myself but I can understand it. I do yoga; I drink tea; I take vitamins.

It’s easier to look at aging as a matter of the body. The body is not ephemeral. The body endures. Its component parts can live on after death; even scientists with scalpels will leave behind something that needs to be incinerated; even ashes need to be scattered. Last week I read a New Yorker article about a paleontologist shaving away silt in North Dakota to discover fish, frozen in amber with its jaws — gills — outstretched, gasping madly, at the moment it and the dinosaurs died:

“The block told the story of the impact in microcosm. ‘It was a very bad day,’ DePalma said. ‘Look at these two fish.’ He showed me where the sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony plates on its back—had been forced into the body of the paddlefish. One fish was impaled on the other. The mouth of the paddlefish was agape, and jammed into its gill rakers were microtektites—sucked in by the fish as it tried to breathe. DePalma said, ‘This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.’”

The body endures. That fish probably didn’t anticipate serving as the key to understanding the extinction of the dinosaurs. (That fish probably didn’t anticipate.) I don’t expect my body to be my legacy. I dream of writing novels so popular that the diaries I’ll have released upon my death will be my legacy. The idea that something so crude as my body could be the only thing I leave behind disturbs. But approaching thirty, all that will reliably survive me are my organs, and those only if I start remembering to swap my contact lenses out more often.

The thing about thirty is that I’m not sure whether to be horrified at how much time I’ve wasted or at how much I have yet to endure. For the first three decades of my life it was enough to live. I had only to wake up every day and stagger through it. Now I have to take vitamins and contribute to my 401k; now I have to plug away at the long-suffering draft of my novel. There is only so much time left, and I might spend all of it trying out anti-TMJ facial massage techniques from YouTube.

The noble thing, now that my youth is finally starting to fleet, would be to abandon the burderns of the body and turn fully to the mind. Now is the time to give up SoulCycle and the vain attempts to be a forty-year-old with six-pack abs — yes, this is exactly like how that one time I had shin splints sidelined my whole ballet career — and spend my time writing instead. The cretaceous fish is proof positive that the body will take care of itself. My oeuvre will not. Of course, in putting off trying to think of a conclusion to this piece, I opened the New Yorker and the third sentence I read was this: “I think anyone who spends his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool.”

This was Harold Brodkey, who I had never heard of before but who apparently spent his entire career publishing things that weren’t the book he won his first contract for in 1964. 24 years later he told New York magazine that he “[writes] like someone who intends to be posthumously discovered,” which is a good way to punt worrying about your legacy, if you ask me. I intend to be posthumously discovered; I intend to donate my estate; I intend to be buried in a carbon-neutral fashion; I intend to stagger through the rest of my days assuming my dreams will play out once I’m no longer around to get in their way. Until then, I’ll put on sunscreen every morning and Aquafor at night. I’ll take magnesium and a Tums with my wine. I’ll do my glute bridges before I jog. I’ll endure.

 

*If you caught that reference, I’ll buy you a drink.

blue period

When I was little, growing up in Las Vegas, I liked to name the colors I saw outside. I had the jumbo box of Crayolas, and I reacted almost synesthetically when they named the colors right. Cerulean made me tingle. It was blue like I’d never seen before, blue like they don’t have in the desert or even in the ocean off Mission Beach, and the name was like the fairytale kingdoms that I used to write stories about in my piles of spiral notebooks. Asparagus made me nauseous and so did its eponym (and anyway, jungle green was the only green that mattered). Robin’s-egg blue was pretty but predictable; razzmatazz was cheap and trashy.

When my aunt used to visit from Santa Barbara we’d walk slow through the Red Rock and name every color we saw. It was how I tolerated the Mars-red desert, so beautiful and alien from my fluorescent everyday that I could hardly stand it. This is still how I respond to beauty: I feel it overtake me and then I want to make it mine. Looking isn’t enough. I want to bottle the second act of Giselle and eat the vista of fir trees that blanket the German Alps and stash the gold foil of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep in my pocket for later.

I started taking ballet classes because I thought it would make me feel how I felt when I watched the Nevada Ballet dancers in their tutus on the stage at the university. (It did, and once every two years when I take class nowadays it still does, even when I catch sight of myself in the mirror and remember that like Jody Sawyer, I wasn’t born with turnout.) Dance gave me what I lost from music after a prodigiously talented sixth-grader swooped in and stole the first chair from me in the Becker Middle School orchestra. I was all set to be indignant, but then he started to practice Bach’s Cello Suites, and I forgot for a moment what anger even was. I don’t suppose there was much I could do to come back from the shame of being in the middle school orchestra but even so, I was unwilling to risk it by doing something so gauche as actually watching him, so instead I looked at my shoes and flicked my eyes leftward every so often to peek at him hunched over his cello, sawing and swaying like it was part of his body.

I wanted to play like that too and sometimes when I practiced, when no one was home, I would try to sway my body along with “La Cinquantaine.” But it didn’t work for me. The music didn’t live in my bones like it lived in his. I swallowed the desire and stared at my shoes and told my friends stories about “Weird Cello Boy” who moved his body in time with his bow like he was possessed. That was the same year I started ballet in earnest and in time, I began to feel the beauty I craved in my bones.

I see a lot of beautiful things these days. I live in Europe now, and one of my favorite things to do in a new city is to visit its museums. I grew up with a print of “Starry Night” on my bathroom wall, and I was nine when the Bellagio hotel opened in my hometown of Las Vegas and I saw Monets from Steve Wynn’s collection for the first time. Las Vegas is a grim place to learn about beauty, but the Bellagio was a game-changer. I had never seen simple rooms like the ones the Impressionists painted, wood floors and iron bedposts and windows that flung open onto vistas of endless corn.

I drank it in and then puberty hit and I forgot all about visual art, losing myself instead in the sweet release of dance. Then a decade later at Vassar, I steered clear of art history because it was the domain of the lank-haired girls with New York private school pedigrees and coke habits (also, I was afraid I’d fall asleep every day). Today I can’t get enough. Travel can be overwhelming and art compresses it into something I can understand.

I thought a lot about art and how I digest it when I was reading what turned out to be my favorite book from last year, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. The protagonist Selin is a college freshman and the book is mostly about her experiencing sublimity for the first time. Life becomes overwhelming, and art (and semiotics) compresses it into something she can understand.

I remember vividly how the raw emotion of young adulthood, the wringer of heartbreak, betrayal, watching the US bomb the shit out of the Middle East, etc., gave way to realizing other people felt those emotions too, and that art was what they did to make them manifest. I nearly lost my mind several times during AP English my senior year of high school. I tucked a printout of “Good Country People” into the back of a textbook to read during a lecture I found boring, and I was so overcome by the ending that I got up from my desk and walked down the hall to find my English teacher and flap my arms at her until she sent me back to class. This teacher also read us “The Hollow Men” out loud one day and I remember that she looked almost sly during the final lines, as if she knew already what she’d see when she looked up after the end (“not with a bang, but a whimper”). I guess she’d been teaching for long enough to expect twenty slack-jawed seventeen-year-olds looking at her like she’d just elucidated, I don’t know, string theory. It was 2006. We were bombing Iraq and life was very long besides. We were all too aware of the Shadow.

Years later, I learned the word “sublime.” I don’t know philosophy well and maybe I’m perverting the definition, but this is how I think of sublimity, as my urge to shake myself free of what “Good Country People” means about humanity or my fear that the silence following “The Hollow Men” would never end.

I had forgotten about the idea of the sublime until I read The Idiot. There’s a scene where Selin and her friend Svetlana, who are eighteen or nineteen, take up standing in front of paintings for thirty minutes at a stretch. It’s the kind of thing I used to do as a child — I recall distinctly sitting on the toilet for far longer than I needed to stare at that “Starry Night” print on the wall opposite — and the kind of thing I’ve forgotten to do now that I’m an adult, and busy, and living in a time when everything is ephemeral (the algorithmic timeline) but nothing disappears (the LiveJournal whose password I’ve forgotten). I think about my taste more than I act on it, and I’m ashamed by how I’ve gone to some fifteen European museums in the past year and yet all I want to do is beeline to the paintings that look most like Monet.

Last summer I went to a Picasso exhibit at the Louisiana Museum north of Copenhagen, next to the sea at Humlebæk. It was mostly his ceramics, and they were charming and I sent photos to my friend who likes when human faces appear on inanimate objects, but I was more interested in the tiny photos of his blue paintings on the timeline of his life pasted to the wall in one of the side rooms. If I had gone to the Picasso Museum when I visited Paris last year instead of spending 45 minutes in line for a galette across the street at Cafe Breizh, I might already have known about his “Blue Period.” In my defense, it was a really good galette, and I had already been through the emotional wringer of walking through Shakespeare & Co. to the sound of some hipster playing The Killers (the default soundtrack for every Las Vegas whose youth was a) misbegotten and b) in the early 2000s) on one of the bookstore pianos and then leaving only to see Notre Dame rising above the Seine through a strand of Edison-bulb Christmas lights, and I think maybe if I’d seen the Blue Period at that juncture I might have had to Javert myself straight off the Pont-Neuf.

Paris, Notre-Dame from outside Shakespeare & Co.
Not pictured: Me, feeling every feeling I’ve ever felt

The Blue Period paintings remind me of when I traveled to New Zealand for business in 2015. I was in a blue period of my own, and for two weeks I went jogging every morning along the Oriental Bay listening to Halsey and Sia. The water was the cerulean blue I only ever saw in crayons as a child, and that Halsey song “Colors” kept looping on my Spotify (“everything is blue, his pills, his hands, his jeans”). It was synchronistic, and poignant, and I felt grateful to have seen cerulean in real life but in utter disarray nonetheless.

Later I was ashamed to have been so sent by the synchrony between a teenager’s pop song and the ocean, which is probably the most pedestrian natural thing you can find to be moved by. I was ashamed again, in Humlebæk, to be ignoring Picasso’s little-seen, avant-garde ceramics so I could wax emotional over something so literal as blue standing in for sadness. And I’m ashamed every time I try and fail to make eye contact with a Basquiat or one of those wacky Pop Surrealist paintings that give me nightmares.

But lately, I’ve felt inclined to treat myself more generously. I feel so anxious to take in all the culture that Europe has to offer while I live here that I trot through museums staring at paintings that make me ill instead of standing like I want to in front of Woman with a Parasol until I will myself into a field in Argenteuil. Reading about Selin and Svetlana reminded me that I can still access the sublime, and that to do so requires giving myself over to it. There’s no point in giving myself over to something that doesn’t move me and no use in trying to be moved by something for the sake of performing sophistication.

I have also wanted lately to put away my camera and to feel sublimity in my bones again, not through a lens, to listen to what my body tells me about beauty rather than to try to measure it in likes. I put on my ballet slippers for the first time in a few years the other week and eased my way through a barre, and I remembered how it felt to be giving beauty back to the world.

I guess we’re all feeling this these days, in our collective awakening to the destructive forces of technology. I don’t think taking photos to satisfy the hunger that beauty evokes in me is any better or worse than naming the colors I see in the desert. It’s all just one means after another of negotiating my place in the world, and I’d argue that even looking at the world through my cracked iPhone lens I’m still better off than this French art thief who tried to cat burgle his way into taming his hunger for the sublime. Though Lord help me the next time I’m in Paris if I’m feeling as delicate as I was the last time. Give me another dose of acoustic piano, Camembert crepes, Gothic cathedrals, and my favorite Crayola crayon color that also reminds me of being 25 and heartsick and I might just have to grab the “Sleepy Drinker” and run.

queen of the road

Ten minutes into my first solo trip as a licensed driver, I got stuck in a parking lot. I had chosen a spot in the corner that was open only because everyone else knew better than to try it, a fact I discovered when I started to back out and realized that there were cars where mine needed to be. I hyperventilated for a couple minutes and then executed a sort of fifteen-point turn while the other suburbanites who needed to visit the Wells Fargo before it closed at five honked at me. The wind, needless to say, was not in my hair.

It was a rude but ultimately apt introduction to the reality of driving. Parking would prove to be my Achilles’ heel. My ‘98 Honda Accord, a hand-me-down from my father, bore the scars of my unusually bad depth perception. The scrape on my driver’s-side door is from the basement garage in my apartment building in Arlington, Virginia, where I lived — along with an army of GW postgrads in salmon shorts — for two years. I retired from driving shortly after I scraped my car against one of the dozens of poles that, I swear to God, popped up in the garage like Whack-a-Mole. You’d be backing your car out, certain of clearance on every side, when BAM! There goes your paint job.

One of the rites of passage at my urban high school was to sneak off campus for lunch. It was the height of glamour to throw out your Port of Subs wrapper as ostentatiously as possible in front of the suckers on the quad eating a peanut butter sandwich that had been flattened under a history textbook since six A.M. I was, as a rule, one of the suckers, except the one time that I let myself be convinced to drive three of us down Charleston and through the drive-thru at Los Tacos, where my classmate splayed herself across my lap to order for us in Spanish. It was seamless — and the tacos were delicious — until we arrived back at campus and realized the fly in the ointment, which was that the only place to surreptitiously re-park your car midday was on the street at the far edge of campus.

I had passed my driving test only because I was the last candidate of the day and my examiner couldn’t be bothered to get out and check my parallel parking job. To be fair, parallel parking isn’t a skill you really need in Las Vegas, land of the warehouse-sized parking lots, unless you’re trying to pull off basically the only bad thing you’ve done in your high school career without side-swiping the choir teacher’s Honda in the process. We finally resorted to a sort of combination airport tarmac/life coach situation where one of my classmates got out and guided me into a spot while the other one sat in the passenger seat and talked me through it. It was only the woeful underfunding of Clark County School District — and its attendant lack of security around our campus — that saved us. But some twelve years later, I still haven’t successfully parallel parked a car.

And of course there was the gouge on the bumper, from a few years after high school ended, when I drove clear to the other side of town because my high school crush invited me over. I was twenty-one, and I knew better, but seventeen-year-old me couldn’t let the opportunity slide. We played a round of Scrabble and fooled around for a while and then I got in my car and made a U-turn that crossed into the path of an automatic gate’s sensor and then there was a terrible scraping noise and there went my bumper. All at once I realized how many mistakes I’d just made, and I whacked my hands on the steering wheel wondering: What kind of automatic gate opens inward? How sad of a sad sack do you have to be to go running clear across town just to prove, years on, that you could have made it with that guy from sixth period chemistry? Why, but why, did we play Scrabble?

I drove all the way from Henderson feeling like an utter fool, back to my parents’ house in Summerlin, where I made up a story about a shopping cart that went astray and swore that I’d take the whole episode to the grave. Since then, that high school crush has unfriended me on Facebook, had a baby, and gotten married — in that order — so the gouge on my bumper will have to do. (I resold the car to a friend who, had I consulted her, would surely have raised one eyebrow high enough that I’d have thought better, hung the keys back up, and stayed home alone on my couch. But then how would seventeen-year-old me have made her peace?)  

It was a relief to give up driving shortly before I moved to New York. I wasn’t very good at it, and I found owning a car stressful. But I had never felt control like I did after I got my driver’s license. I think often about how as a teenager, with adulthood in plain sight, the mountains that surround the Las Vegas valley began to close in on me. Behind the wheel, I felt for the first time that I had the agency to escape them.

That sensation was never keener than when I sat in traffic on my way home from school. On days when I had too much to feel, I liked to take the surface streets home so I could wallow in the belly of the mountains and imagine what it would be like to drive beyond them. The Postal Service was on rotation in my CD player (“I want so badly to believe / That there is truth and love is real”) and for as long as I could sit in traffic I could sit alone with my feelings, with no one there to judge me or mock me or, God forbid, try to comfort me.

Learning to drive was the freest I’d felt — but it wasn’t the first I’d felt free. That came the summer I turned thirteen, the summer I spent palling around with a group of friends who I didn’t jibe with as well as I wanted to. I was still a mouthy little Poindexter who couldn’t keep it together when there was an opportunity to correct someone’s pronunciation or offer up a fact. None of us were cool but the others had figured out chill while I bumbled, stuck on desperate.

It was a humbling summer. But it was the summer that I began to understand what it was to create a life of my own. I ran out the door at ten and the day was mine, all mine, to buy candy with my allowance or spray myself with strawberry-scented glitter in the Bath and Body Works sample aisle or make a fool of myself in front of a boy. I was home again at eight, sure, but it was enough to glimpse what it would be like to live as I pleased.

It was a summer on wheels. The boys rode skateboards, and I was struck recently by a clear memory of me, on a bicycle, grinding up a hill that felt like a mountain, then sailing back down it like I was unstoppable. (A few years later — the years between thirteen and sixteen, which might as well be a lifetime — I was astonished to realize in my car that the “Great Hill” was barely a grade.)

I half wonder if I’ve conjured this memory. It seems impossible now that we could stand gripping our black rubber-coated handlebars under the August sun, like we didn’t need the skin on our palms. And I was hopelessly clumsy, and my body was just beginning to give way to the softness that I would quickly learn to hate. I can picture myself tripping after the other girls in my gang while they rode their Razor scooters up and down the sidewalks. I knew better than to let myself be seen on one of those. (Those colleagues at the software company where I work who are reading this may note that they have never seen me on one of our ubiquitous Razor scooters. To which I say: It’s enough to get you all to take me seriously once you find out I was an English major. We don’t need to complicate things with a head-over-feet-through-a-glass-conference-room-door situation.)  

I can’t imagine myself, at thirteen, on a bicycle. Nor do I have a photo or even much of a memory, but what I do remember is the hill, how daunting it was on two wheels, and then how simple it felt on four. At thirteen, when it was the indignity of begging a ride from my mother or a walk in the hundred-and-ten degree Vegas heat, my bicycle felt like a pair of wings. At sixteen, when the mountains that surrounded the Las Vegas Valley closed in on me like prison walls, the wheel beneath my hands felt like power.

Fast-forward to 2018 and the jarring experience of moving abroad. I felt impotent: Simple tasks like visiting the dentist or buying pants hangers became insurmountable obstacles, and so instead I sat on the couch and wondered if pants hangers would appear in my closet if I wished hard enough. I felt trapped, keenly aware that my residence permit was tied to a job that I vacillated between loving and resenting. I felt, frankly, like a teenager. The world was at my feet but my feet wouldn’t move… until I bought a bicycle.

Buying a bicycle in Copenhagen is like getting a driver’s license in high school. You imagine that you’ll hop on the seat and all the sudden you’ll be willowy and blonde and wearing a maxidress that will flow behind you like a wave while you somehow don’t flash your unglamorous bike shorts at the whole King’s Garden as you pass, and you’ll put flowers in your basket to carry home to your monochrome apartment that isn’t full of dead succulents. I thought, similarly, that once I drove to high school, I’d roll out of my car looking like the girls who flounced down the hall every morning with car keys in one hand and a Frappuccino in the other. I’d know how to tease my hair. I’d pull off smoky eyes. (I have never pulled off smoky eyes.)

So, predictably, there I was on the sidewalk outside the bicycle shop, paddling along like a penguin. The prospect of picking both feet up off the ground and pedaling myself voluntarily into the sea of svelte blondes racing by in their monochrome best was unthinkable. I was flashing back to 1996 and the cul-de-sac where my dad pleaded with me to let him take off the training wheels. To 2005 and the empty parking lot where my dad pleaded with me to pull out into the street. To 2012, the rack of Razor scooters lining the halls of my startup-style office, and the security camera whose operators could be sweet-talked into giving up screenshots of anyone who biffed in front of them.

But what I found when I finally willed myself into the bike lane was a revelation. No, I still can’t tie a scarf around my neck so it will flow behind me in the breeze without it looking like it’s there to keep my head in place, but I can get anywhere. You can reach the hippest places in Copenhagen by bus, sure, if you want to wait for one to show up and then bump along through traffic while the rest of the city sails past på cykel. Or you can climb on your bicycle and sail along with them. In minutes you’re out of the cloying, candy-colored tourist center, laying in the grass outside a converted warehouse with a glass of natural wine in hand, or pulling off your shoes to wade into the sea. I rode up and down the coast and underneath the planes landing at Amager. I clanked along the cobblestones until my teeth rattled. I weaved around tourists and flicked my bell like a truck driver laying on the horn on the highway. I felt that the world was my oyster again.

On wheels I feel like a cyborg. I am myself, but more capable. I can go where I could before but faster, on my own terms, on my own timeline. I am no longer standing shoulder to shoulder with every other twentysomething in Astoria on an N train that stopped halfway to Queensboro Plaza twenty minutes ago, or pondering the physics of air travel in a fiberglass tube that’s hurtling through the sky like a speedboat. I control my own destiny. I’m not carsick or airsick or cursing my mother for setting the cruise control two miles below the speed limit. I’m not stuck behind a tourist taking photos with their iPad. I’m not waiting, perpetually, until the icebergs melt and the mountains erode, for the G train.

At thirteen, at sixteen, and at 29 all I wanted was freedom. A vehicle is not a panacea. I got my driver’s license and I still couldn’t get myself out of a parking lot. I can’t ride my Danish bicycle to Williamsburg to meet my girlfriends for karaoke on Friday night. I could write a letter as lovelorn as this one to the subway, and I could live happily without owning a car again in my lifetime, but it’s the principle of the thing and what it gave me at sixteen when the world was closing in around me. Freedom, to me, is to know that I can get up and go. Wheels are what I need to do it.

 

hej hej to all that

The Italian girls in my Danish class are beside themselves that I’ve left New York. “Jeg kommer fra New York,” I say, hacking up the “fra” like it’s 2003 and I’m in the front row of French I with Madame H________. Better to sound French than to sound American.

“Then why are you here?” asks the girl from Bologna, who twenty minutes into the first class accused me of being a ringer for having shown up already knowing the secret Danish vowels. I suspect we wouldn’t have been friends as children, and that we won’t be friends now, since I’m still the kind of Hermione Granger whose hand shoots up first to show off what I studied before class. (I cringe, because old habits die hard, but it’s not my fault that nobody else thought to look up “how to speak Danish” on YouTube before they showed up today.)

Why am I here? I laugh at this. My New York friends think it’s impossibly exotic that I’ve moved to Europe. I imagine for the Schengen Europeans in my class it’s as humdrum as moving from Los Angeles to New Orleans or Philadelphia to Seattle, enough to trigger some tax mistakes that will be expensive in a decade but not enough to trigger culture shock. Meanwhile, I still don’t know how to pronounce the name of the street I live on. Or schedule a dentist appointment. Or a haircut. Or find travel-size bottles of contact lens solution. Or pants hangers. Or tempeh. Or peanut butter that doesn’t get that weird slick of oil at the top. Or a top sheet. I guess it’s exotic, if your idea of “exotic” is “buying six bottles of travel-size contact lens solution every time you set foot in an American airport.”

During our coffee break, the Italian girls rhapsodize about the machinelike Danish healthcare apparatus. In Italy, they tell me, if you want to see the doctor, you show up at seven A.M. and wait with all the nonnas until the doctor deigns to see you. I shudder. I suppose beyond the miracle of appointment scheduling they find the city drab.

I studied Italian in college, and I imagine Danish must horrify the Italian girls. What I love about Italian is its languor – every consonant gets its due, even when there are two in a row, and syllables are tacked onto words for seemingly no reason other than to make them longer. It’s a full-bodied language with hand gestures to match, so musical that opera seems its natural extension.

Danish, on the other hand, sounds like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Reduction,” the practice of eliding words used in combination, means that several common phrases actually just sound like when you’re trying to talk to the dentist. (“Jeg er amerikaner” – I am American – comes out “Jaaahh amerikaaaaaaahhh.” It’s an apt description of being American in 2018, but undignified nonetheless.)

This doesn’t matter, of course, since every Dane speaks English and probably a few other languages on top of that. In fact, the second lesson in my Danish coursebook teaches languages, nationalities, and numbers through an exercise where you describe the number of languages the book’s characters speak. Marco and Barbara and Helle and King Jones (a real character, who is allegedly from England, and who now works at Novo Nordisk, which feels like subtle Danish commentary on monarchy in the modern era) all of course speak English, but they also speak fransk and spansk and japansk and some of then even speak tysk. I am grateful to have practiced my Danish vowels before I showed up for day one, even if it means that the Italian girls all hate me, because otherwise I might have to slink out in shame on behalf of my people.

In fact, I frequently feel shame on behalf of my people. Every night when I wake up sweating because there are no air conditioners in Northern Europe, I feel shame, and then I roll over and Google “why are there no air conditioners in europe” (answer: because we are one industrializing-nation-gets-access-to-air-conditioning away from The Day After Tomorrow, get a fan, you whiny American piece of shit). Every holiday when I go out to find a coffee shop that will let me pay an exorbitant amount of money for a spoonful of yogurt with two bites of granola and they’re all closed because Europeans like to give everyone a day off, not just people whose parents paid for them to get a useless degree that they parlayed into a 9-5 job only because they know someone who’s four degrees removed from the deep state, I feel shame. Every time I finish my spoonful of yogurt and two bites of granola and start looking around for the bacon, I feel shame. We are fat hedonists who speak no spansk or fransk or dansk, and we are destroying the world with our chlorofluorocarbons. I know that now.

When the Italian girls ask me why I left New York, I want to tell them about the Holland Tunnel, or how walking into my boyfriend’s apartment building meant elbowing through the crowd of tourists lined up for pizza on Bleecker Street. I want to tell them that it’s no longer listening to men complain in little bars near Grand Central, it’s listening to men complain in little cafes in Brooklyn, and it’s not their wives who are unable to cope but their roommates or bandmates or, God forbid, their DJ partners. I want to tell them about how the weekend before I left New York it was below zero and I walked down to the L train platform after midnight, when you might expect to wait twenty minutes for a train, but definitely not THIRTY-FIVE, which is a time I’ve never seen displayed on a transit platform before or since.

It was at that moment that I knew I’d stayed too long at the Fair, or more specifically, at the Alligator Lounge, since maybe if I’d left before midnight I’d have seen an L train again before I perished.

Copenhagen is an exquisite and fantastically functional city. What the Southern Europeans find dismal – the assiduous following of bike lane etiquette, the unforgiving metro doors that are uninterested in letting you hold them open so your slowpoke friends can dive onto the train after you – I find comforting. No, let me be honest; I find it thrilling. I have been telling everyone who will listen that I can get home from the airport in fifteen minutes on a train that runs every six minutes, 24 hours a day. I don’t know how I’ll live with the Holland Tunnel again knowing this exists. Every restaurant takes reservations. The buildings are candy-colored with cupolas the color of the Statue of Liberty on top. I have never elbowed my way into my own home or stepped in someone else’s gum (or, God help me, their vomit). The city sends me email, and you can drink a beer in the park. It’s what I hoped for when we moved: a calmer, more beautiful world, where I can try to enjoy my life instead of ducking my head and battling my way through it.

But.

I feel the loss of America. I miss air conditioning and giant portions, and I also feel like a traitor for leaving America in its time of crisis. We didn’t leave because of the election, though we started talking about leaving because of the election. I would rather have left knowing my country was in the hands of someone capable. (I prefer to leave writing about politics to people with more than an elementary knowledge of politics, but if you really want to hear my feelings, let’s grab a beer someday.) I feel torn between brushing my past as an American off my shoulders and defending my country for its faults. And to be sure, there are many, including but not limited to the election of white nationalists to public office, the Bloomin’ Onion, and Natty Light.

In my six months in Denmark I’ve observed several opportunities for Europeans to take a page out of America’s book. For example, pillows here are terrible. I feel grateful that in addition to most of the condiments from our kitchens, all of my shoes, and an ice cube tray that was probably supposed to stay in his apartment’s freezer, my boyfriend shipped over our American pillows. And don’t get me started on the flies. I’m sure it has something to do with the structure of all these charming double-glazed windows that keep our apartments hyggeligt in the winter, but it seems that the continent has yet to discover that disruptive technology known as the window screen. I woke up last week on a trip to Prague with bug bites on – wait for it – my face. Also, why doesn’t anyone sell travel-size contact lens solution? When I get sick of taking meetings with my California colleagues every night until ten P.M., I’m going to quit and open a store that sells pillows that aren’t terrible and contact lens solution and then I will be a millionaire.

Every week in Danish class, with my classmates who all speak English on top of their native languages and grew up traveling Europe the way I grew up traveling to Kennewick, Washington, I feel like a pasty, precious fish out of water. Why am I leaking sweat onto my plastic chair while everyone else looks like they could sit in this sweatbox of a classroom for another four hours and barely glisten? Why doesn’t anyone else have bug bites on their face? Why are all of our exercises about how everyone in Europe learned to speak German before I even knew how to tie my shoes? Marco speaks five languages. (Marco tale fem sprog.) Well, fuck you, Marco! I have screens on my windows!

I flew home to New York the other week for a wedding. Fifteen minutes out from Newark, just when I’d be stepping off the metro onto the cobbled streets (brosten) for a short walk to my apartment, our Uber inched its way toward the Holland Tunnel. On Canal Street, the honking trucks drowned out the radio and the air conditioner. I looked out at buildings that are grimy with the soot of all these trucks and the cars that we take when the wait for the subway is 35 minutes on a subzero evening in January.

Later, I took the F train into Manhattan to pick up a dress at Rent the Runway and hit CVS for some – you guessed it – travel-size contact lens solution. The platform was dank on a cool, humid summer afternoon, and the train car was too cold. The people around me were too loud, and I glared at them before I turned up the volume on my headphones. Outside, on an avenue that smelled like trash, I walked by the Home Depot and the Lowe’s and the Container Store where you can buy anything you need in any size you can imagine and they’ll bring it to your house for you, walk it up five flights of stairs, take it out of the box so you can put the cardboard in your back alley and wait for it to disappear.

We took an overnight flight back to Copenhagen, and on the way home from the airport the next day I could see buildings that are freshly painted every year and smelled – well, I don’t really know what, but it wasn’t trash. I thought briefly that there was no longer any point in keeping the storage unit I still keep in New York, but three days later I woke up with bug bites on my face. I think it may be some time yet before I stop calling Europe “the Continent.”

putting away childish things

It occurred to me the other week that I’m rapidly running out of time to play the ingenue. This is true, but it’s also irrelevant, given that not only did I never manage to pursue that career in theatre that I’d vaguely dreamed of but that I don’t even do the Waiting for Guffman thing these days, busy as I am selling out. I guess I’d just always harbored the illusion that someday I was going to play Eponine and it was kind of jarring to realize that even though I’m carded on a semi-monthly basis, that doesn’t make me a passable sixteen-year-old street urchin.

I quietly retired from theatre and ballet as I was going through my eating disorder a few years back. Mirrors, as you might expect, were an obvious trigger, as were costumes; simply having my measurements taken is a surefire way to make me skimp on eating. All that aside, I’d also been considering quitting for several months. Ballet class had become increasingly hard to make as I rose the ranks at work and I couldn’t imagine myself existing in some kind of in-between state where I took class as my schedule allowed, feeling less and less capable as the weeks went by. It had to be all or nothing.

For a long time I was content. My decision to give up a time-consuming hobby paid off at work, and I felt at greater peace with my body than if I had had to stare at it in a mirror for hours every week. Eventually, though, I started to dream about dancing. Every so often in my dreams I am wearing ballet slippers or even pointe shoes and sashaying across the floor or spinning like a top. I wake with a start and my legs feel heavy and clumsy, and for a few days I mourn my lost agility.

One of the things I’ve been most disappointed to discover as I grow older is that moving beyond an urgent emotion is not the same thing as getting over it. As it turns out, “getting over” something — closure — is a myth. I always thought that I was simply bad at it. I tend to harbor feelings for far longer than seems acceptable. Old flames will appear in my dreams, or their names will drift into mind at the oddest of moments. I think sometimes about both the men and the roles I’ve lost to other women and I feel bitterness stir within me, as though it hadn’t been twelve years since the time someone else’s name appeared on the cast list where I expected mine to be, as though I can even think of my fling with H____ without cringing at how ill-suited we were for one another. You’re supposed to be past this, I used to think to myself, feeling betrayed by a gut that won’t obey my brain.

In recent years I’ve come to be more forgiving of how I engage with my memories. A few months back, I took my first ballet class in three years. I felt immediately at home again in the studio, where my muscles remembered just how to lift my leg into an elegant developpe. Of course, just because my muscles remember how to do it doesn’t mean they actually can, and I looked in the mirror to discover that I looked like a hunchback since I can’t lift my leg higher than my waist without my back bending in half anymore. (It was rough.) But I was thrilled to discover that even though I kept falling out of my pirouettes, the joy I felt in my dreams was now manifest in real life. I didn’t need to find closure with dance; I could create a differently shaped space than the one that it used to occupy within me, and I wondered whether I might do the same with my other memories.

I thought about this again when I finally got around to reading Turtles All the Way Down the other day, on a plane. I think the Venn diagram of “people who have read Turtles All the Way Down” and “people who read my blog” is basically a circle, but for the uninitiated, it’s John Green’s latest gut-wrencher about teenagers who are just a little too articulate to be real navigating trauma. I am almost over John Green at this point, which is probably for the best as although I still get carded at the airport bar I am borderline elderly. Turtles All the Way Down still got at me, though, partly because I was drunk on a plane and listening to Paul Simon but mostly because John Green articulates universal truths about the human experience downright uncannily.

The funny thing about the plane I was on is that it wasn’t the plane I was supposed to be on. I was supposed to meet my boyfriend at the airport in Denver after he flew in from San Francisco so we could fly together to Spokane for Christmas. It wasn’t the first time I’ve met a boyfriend halfway through a trip so we could fly together on the final leg to a family holiday. Bizarrely, it wasn’t even the first time I’ve done so in the United terminal in Denver (which is a bleak place for an emotionally significant memory. Although there’s a great Mexican food place in the middle of the B concourse if you’re ever stuck there and hungry, which, if you fly United often, you probably will be someday).

For days I, being me, had been expending altogether too much energy contending with the prospect of replacing a memory that I reluctantly hold precious. I wanted to blow it to pieces and create a new one to take its place, knowing that what followed that afternoon in 2013 was a disaster, but I couldn’t fathom relinquishing it. Of course, United, being United, delayed my flight from New York to Denver long enough that I’d miss the flight from Denver to Spokane, and so I was torn from my reverie by the more immediate task of figuring out how to get to Spokane at the same time as my boyfriend — who was traveling from San Francisco — so that he wouldn’t have to meet my parents for the first time without me there. (Are you cringing? I’m cringing. It didn’t even happen and I’m still cringing. Bless Tina at the Premier desk for getting my butt into a seat on an alternate flight.)

And so I was on this flight, from Chicago instead of Denver, having dodged something of a bullet but ashamed to be hung up enough on a four-year-old memory that it was a relief to not have to confront it. It felt ridiculous to me that I could be as thrilled as I was to be bringing someone I love home to meet other people I love and still harbor — regret? Bitterness? It wasn’t even clear to me what emotion I was experiencing, let alone why, but whatever it was, it was exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been struggling to negotiate with the contradictions of that earlier relationship.

Lately, memories long dormant have cropped up again and others have appeared to me in a different light. I can’t say I repressed these memories so much as I filed them away under “something that made me uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time,” but the zeitgeist is pulling them out of the filing cabinet and into sharp relief. Suddenly, I’m able to articulate what made me uncomfortable seventeen years ago in sixth grade typing class, thirteen years ago in the text messages a friend’s boyfriend kept sending to me unbidden, six years ago in the Downtown Cocktail Room off Fremont Street. Four years ago, in a relationship founded on a power imbalance.

I feel vindicated. I struggle with that word because it evokes celebration. Nothing about these memories is to be celebrated. I think many of us feel vindicated. That was wrong, we can say now, and we can’t do much about it but we can look at the men who wronged us knowingly, and assume that karma will get them someday, or it already has, and refile those memories under “something that made me uncomfortable because someone was reaping the benefits of patriarchy.”

But what of the memories themselves, which are hardly so black and white as to be definitively wrong? There are incidents that I’ve recast in my mind as wild, or flattering, or pleasantly unexpected, events that were as thrilling as they were discomfiting and I don’t know what to do now that I can locate them in the moral grey area. I thought I was past these memories and all that they represent and suddenly I must negotiate with them again, and consider whether they invalidate the precious things that followed.

It feels untoward to conflate my relationship with ballet and theatre or even my memories of being treated poorly or like an object with the horror show coming out in the media and my Facebook feed of late. My stories may not be black and white, but they bothered me, and they changed me, and that’s where I see the thread emerge. I had to acknowledge that the hobbies I loved so innocently as a teenager were destroying me as an adult. I decided to remember each of these incidents as positive in some way, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to say that they weren’t, and being forced to acknowledge the ways in which they were wrong is disorienting.

In everything, I’m learning to rearrange the ways in which I hold my passions and my memories. I brought up Turtles All the Way Down because there was a line that really struck me on a day when I was feeling overwhelmed by a memory that was cropping up when I didn’t want it to of a moment that was part of a pattern I now recognize as damaging. I’m sure you’ll see some version of it tattooed on today’s fifteen-year-olds in three years when they’re old enough to do that, but for now:

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”

Love is how you become a person. It’s hardly novel to say that each of us is who we are because of what we’ve experienced, but it feels untoward to acknowledge the role that those experiences — long past — continue to play in our adult lives. But adulthood, I think, is a matter of learning how to hold truths that contradict one another, because each truth was at one point valid. Every truth, in its own time and its own context, is how you become yourself.

I was a dancer and I remember how it felt for my body to be an instrument, how it felt to be beholden to that instrument, how it felt to retire it. I loved someone who damaged me and I remember how it felt, at first, to be treasured. I love someone now who won’t damage me and we can create new memories that don’t obliterate or invalidate the older ones. I can hold old memories sacred and they can coexist with memories that are so, for lack of a better word, fucked that they only come out in those rare moments where I feel raw enough that I can share them. Love is how you become a person but so is ambition, and so is trauma, and so often all three of those are intertwined in ways that only become apparent long after you’ve negotiated with each of them.

I don’t have to get over anything. I only have to tuck it away in the back of my closet where I store my first pair of pointe shoes and my correspondence and my college dance company sweatpants that I cannot bring myself to throw away even though they’re a really heinous shade of purple (sorry, B____ H___). Knowing my catalog of memory by heart doesn’t mean I’m crazy — not being able to have my measurements taken without quitting bread for a week makes me crazy, but still being mildly annoyed that the guy I went on my first date with broke up with me via text message doesn’t! — or obsessive. Allowing memories to retain the significance they once held doesn’t preclude me from ascribing a new layer of significance to them. I’m a storyteller and I know the story of my own life intimately. It doesn’t unfold as neatly as a novel. It’s endless and multifaceted and illogical. I hold it sacred, since it’s how I became a person.

teenage dream

Every so often, I give up on pretending that I have sophisticated taste in music and turn on the kind of thing I used to wallow to in high school. It’s a sure ticket to the past, which has been especially welcome lately—nothing like escaping to the good old days when the president was just a war criminal and Chandler’s mom was still a punch line on Friends, am I right?!—and easier than ever now that everything’s on Spotify. (Just remember to turn off sharing, unless you’re proud that it’s 2017 and you’re still listening to Something Corporate. You shouldn’t be, in case that wasn’t obvious.)

So the other day, in between wondering if I should quit my job and counting the number of dystopian novels that I didn’t think to take as cautionary tales, it occurred to me to turn on Jason Mraz. While he’s arguably a better musician than most of his contemporaries on my high school playlists, it’s still difficult to justify the existence of a lyric like “it takes a crane to build a crane,” and let’s not even broach the subject of his newer albums. Like Alanis in the Jagged Little Pill era versus Alanis now, it would be for everybody’s benefit if he’d just get dumped already. Success in love does not a good singer-songwriter make.

To step back into my teenage shoes, though, is to set aside the issue of quality. More precisely, it’s to set aside nuance. On many counts, I was inarguably a better person when I was a teenager. For example, when I was seventeen, I submitted an essay proposing that Congress vote anonymously to authorize military actions overseas to “allow politicians greater freedom to vote the way they feel is correct rather than be pressured by the party line.” This is probably not even the most preposterous thing that I thought was practical when I was a teenager, but it’s the only one I still have in my Dropbox, so it’ll have to do. Later in this essay, I also suggest that the United States would be able to end the genocide in Darfur—it was 2007—“if only we were willing to commit the troops to do so.” (Those troops, of course, would be committed through anonymous vote. Like YikYak, but for war!)

“Better” probably isn’t the right word: I was, if anything, purer. I thought that Congress was made up of good people who were simply at the mercy of their uneducated constituents. I thought that “it takes a crane to build a crane” was a genius observation that had never been articulated better. (I sort of still do. Congress, on the other hand, is obviously a lost cause.) Today, I can argue myself in circles; where I once nearly stormed out of the classroom in a heated debate with my World Affairs teacher over the best way to end the practice of female genital mutilation, I now hear myself using the dreaded phrase “I see where you’re coming from.” And I don’t even follow it up with “…and it proves my hypothesis that you’re a goddamn sociopath who wouldn’t recognize nuance if it punched you in the face.”

I miss the comfort of certainty. Writing cringingly naive social studies essays, blasting something like “Coin-Operated Boy” on my way through the Del Taco drive-through… nowadays it takes me a solid thirty minutes to decide what to order from Seamless, and even then I only pick because I know that if I don’t have something more than stale pretzels in my apartment within the next 45 minutes, I will chew off my own arm. (This is also in part why I don’t cook. I cannot handle grocery stores. I would say it’s an eating disorder thing, but it’s the same reaction I have to the New York Public Library eBooks catalog.) I’m too aware at any given juncture that whatever route I take will inevitably be the wrong one. What I wouldn’t give to be seventeen again and know that I am, without question, right!

Now I’m all too aware of nuance, and it means that I’m incapable of going in anywhere with guns blazing. That’s not entirely true, as just about all of my coworkers and the senior leadership of my company can attest to, but that blaze flames out so quickly, the second I open my eyes and realize that there’s another perspective to be considered. My intractable stubbornness has given way to… waffling. I’ve been catching myself lately vacillating wildly between different positions depending on how well they’re being argued to me. Protests are useless! “But they’re the only way to get the public read onto a cause! Look at how the attorneys mobilized via social media to help out travelers being detained at JFK!” Okay, protests are great! “They’re political theatre!” Those pink hats are still ugly! Okay, I’m done now. That one is an incontrovertible fact.

I guess the tradeoff is that while I might no longer be bullheaded enough to get myself sent to the dean’s office rather than submit myself to standing during the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m also no longer dumb enough to, say, get myself sent to juvenile court with a summons for drinking underage (in full “seventies roller disco regalia.” With tube socks. After trying to hide under a car). Or leave a Burger King soft drink cup full of Dr. Pepper in my cupholder for hours in the Las Vegas sun and not expect the cup to give way, sending Dr. Pepper leaking… everywhere. Or forget to look behind me before I make a U-turn and send my car straight into the path of an automated gate, practically knocking my bumper off (Dad, if you’re reading this, that’s the genesis of that massive scrape on my back bumper. Not a shopping cart. Just in case you happened to have bought that airtight excuse).

That isn’t to say that I’m not still incompetent—have I mentioned yet on the blog the time last year that I managed to miss a transatlantic flight by a full 24 hours?—but that nothing seems as consequential as it did when I had no concept of nuance. The photos of me wearing tube socks haven’t yet sunk my political campaign. I cleaned up the Dr. Pepper. (And United didn’t charge me for that mishap, which is probably because I have already sold them my soul.) It got better, as they say.

But that, too, is why the music I listened to when I was sixteen doesn’t resonate the way it used to. Everything felt so final, or so urgent: I needed Jason Mraz strumming his stupid guitar and singing to me that “it takes a night to make it dawn,” because just as I was sure in my World Affairs essay that using “media infiltration” to “alert the citizens [of the Middle East… no, literally, the whole thing] that a freer world does, in fact, exist” would bring about peace, so, too, was I sure that getting a B on a trigonometry test was to live the rest of my life behind the cash register at Capezio. I live now in a constant state of awareness that everything evens out to… well, mediocrity, I guess, since that’s what you get when you can’t forget that the highs are as temporary as the lows.

It was nice the other day to walk down Seventh Avenue with my headphones on, listening to music that is only sort of good, remembering what it was like to be confident that everything I said was right and everything I knew was true. It’s not a state that I’d return to—for one thing, I’d take going toe-to-toe with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss any day over my eminent social studies teachers, and Lord help me if I ever see a look on my mother’s face like the night I got caught drinking Smirnoff Ice in tube socks!—but it’s good to remember that I have, in the past, been capable of taking a position, of making a decision. And, for what it’s worth, of listening to a second-tier singer-songwriter because it makes me feel better about the world, without concerning myself with what the world might feel about me.

NB: My final argument in that World Affairs essay was that the U.S. should remove troops from the Middle East “because at this point, all that that is accomplishing is proving the theory that Americans are evil.” While this is unquestionably true, and I congratulate my younger self for having had the foresight to recognize that this would be an issue in the future, I recognize now that at least epistemologically, I was a little confused.

city mouse, suburb mouse

“Master-planned community”: a euphemism for “white people and expensive trees, arranged along streets that are cleverly named so that a typical set of directions sounds like ‘make a right on Timber Rose, then a left on Heirloom Rose, and then another right on Scarlet Rose.’”* This is where I was raised, on a parcel of land in the heart of the Mojave Desert that Howard Hughes bought and named after his grandmother sometime before he started pissing into jars that he kept in his suite at the Desert Inn.

In general, growing up in the suburbs has ruined me for the life I live today. For example, in Summerlin, there was never any danger of being unable to find a last-minute ingredient for a recipe in progress, what with our walk-in pantries. In the event of a true emergency, the supermarket five minutes away was roughly the size of Grand Central Station and stocked like fifty different brands of yogurt. This is less true in New York. For one, I store my pots in my oven and my shoes in my kitchen cabinets, so it’s kind of moot regardless. More to the point, while there are several bodegas within a four-block radius, not one of them sells both flour and eggs. (Let’s be real, though. They know I store my pots in my oven. I don’t actually need them to sell me anything except for hummus.)

For another, living in a newly constructed house meant that we often saw cockroaches inside. You’d think that this would prepare me well for the moment last year when I spotted a cockroach the size of a small animal moseying through my kitchen, but whereas in Summerlin I could escape to any of the palatially sized rooms that made up our house—the kitchen! The dining room! The living room! The den, which is not the same thing as the living room! The bathroom! The other bathroom! The other other bathroom!—my apartment in New York is a single room that is only marginally larger than the other other bathroom in my childhood home. So instead I put on my snow boots, abandoned all of my feminist principles, and texted the guy I’d been casually seeing for a month or so to come save me. Two great mysteries linger from this incident: one, why that guy is still dating me, and two, where that giant cockroach went, because we never did find it.

Cities, as it is often rumored, are noisy. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that I have heard outside my apartment window in the past twelve months:

  • Bargoers screaming for taxis, then screaming for Ubers, which is an ineffective way to achieve either goal but particularly the latter
  • “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” being played on a stereo mounted on the back of a pedicab
  • A man screaming the lyrics to “Beauty and the Beast” along something that vaguely resembled the melody if you squinted at eleven A.M. on a Saturday
  • The dulcet tones of restaurant equipment being pressure-washed, continuously, between the hours of six and seven A.M. on a Monday**
  • The NYPD threatening protesters with arrest over a bullhorn (a great motivation to donate to the ACLU!)
  • Honking. Always honking. (Did you know that traffic moves faster if you honk? No, you didn’t, because it doesn’t.)

By comparison, here is an exhaustive list of things I heard outside my house between the ages of twelve and 22:

  • The next-door neighbors’ children’s garage band practicing the first 30 seconds of “Smoke on the Water” for a solid two hours every Tuesday afternoon

I suspect that children who grow up elsewhere than a neighborhood where debarking is considered not animal abuse but mandatory may be less sensitive to noise than I am. I lost the ability to sleep through the night long ago—tiny bladder, crippling anxiety, yada yada yada—but living on the very block that Jane Jacobs herself characterized as the epitome of an active community is not conducive to a good night’s sleep. The noise, the light that seeps in despite blinds and curtains, the humming and clanking of the gremlins that live in my refrigerator and radiators; they all conspire to wake me. They have no patience for a girl who grew up believing that there was nothing worse than her father grinding coffee beans at five A.M.

In the suburbs, nobody encroaches on your space. There is no opportunity for anyone to do so, not unless you count the Prius behind your Honda getting closer to your precious bumper than you’d prefer. That hardly prepares you for the inevitable straphanger who, when it’s not even rush hour, decides that not only are they going to hold the same pole as you but they’re going to hold it a quarter-inch above where you’re holding it, and they’re not really going to commit to keeping their hand a respectable distance from yours, and before you know it, you have Ebola. This never happens in the suburbs, although I guess not using the divider in the supermarket checkout is an appropriate analogue.

I guess when it comes down to it, all of this really is about space, and whether or not you can learn to live without it. Everything that I dislike about New York has to do with space: how I can’t buy more boots because I don’t have any room left in my kitchen cabinets and storing boots in my oven feels like a line that even I can’t cross, how you can walk up and down Hudson Street on a cold-as-hell Saturday night in February when nobody in their right mind should be out of their apartment and still not be able to find a bar with two open seats, how… cockroaches. Exist. In your apartment.

In Summerlin, no commodity was more infinite than space, except for maybe brands of yogurt at the supermarket. I grew up riding around in minivans and SUVs purchased for families of four on ten-lane roadways past endless strip malls, vast seas of parking lots, megastores selling televisions wider than my kitchen counters. I get a great deal of pleasure out of going to giant suburban Targets and Costcos: I want to run around every aisle and pile my cart high with enough toilet paper to last me a year because you know that goddamn four-pack that’s all I can cram into my closet is going to run out when I’m couchbound with the hangover runs. And I want to put that toilet paper in the trunk of my unnecessarily large car and drive it home, not wrestle it down into the subway only to discover that the 1 is delayed because our trains are actually propelled not by electricity but by a small army of rats, fortified by pizza, whose regular rest periods are characterized by the MTA as “signal malfunctions,” then decide whether to wait it out or clamber back up and try to get a cab whose driver is going to smite you for asking him to drive you ten blocks because your arms are too short to comfortably carry a thirteen-gallon trash can without whacking yourself in the shins every time you take a step. I mean toilet paper. This has never happened to me. I’m a graceful swan.

I don’t need to enumerate the reasons that I prefer city living. They are myriad. I subscribe to the theory that being forced to interact with your fellow humans teaches you to be more empathetic. (The future that liberals want, and all.) I’m not the person to extrapolate on this. Talk to someone who’s studied sociology, who will address this question with the nuance it deserves, and I’ll keep talking about things that aren’t current affairs because we all deserve thirty minutes a day when we don’t actively hope for the apocalypse to just start and end already. In fact, that’s a good segue to what I believe to be the best selling point of a city versus the suburbs… when the nuclear war inevitably begins, I’m pretty sure that those of us in urban centers are going to be the first to go. I don’t know about you, but I’ve read enough dystopian fiction to know that I’m not the kind of delicate flower who discovers her inner strength in the face of a crisis. I’m the kind of delicate flower who gets left behind because she doesn’t know how to feed herself when she can’t buy hummus at the bodega. These are the kinds of things I’m thinking about as I evaluate my living situation here in 2017. (Sorry. I’m in a dark place.)

I don’t begrudge my childhood in the suburbs. This will sound glib, but I don’t intend it to be: growing up in Summerlin imbued me with a desire to get out that has propelled me to take chances through my adult life (not to mention the privilege that allowed me to do so). Thoreau didn’t know it in the nineteenth century, but the suburbs are the best place to go to witness the phenomenon of “lives of quiet desperation.” I wonder sometimes what it’s like to never have left or to never have wanted to leave—to have purchased a starter McMansion at the nadir of the recession, five minutes from your parents’ house, walking your dogs down the concrete “trails” that wend through artfully laid rock gardens with succulent accents and drive your SUV to the supermarket.

It has been a great pleasure to me to watch my family over the past several years now that we’ve all left Summerlin. My dad’s bus commute from their condo in the city where they live now to his office in a skyscraper that overlooks a bustling downtown is a great novelty to him. (I don’t think anyone else was joyfully texting their family that they had to walk home after the traffic jam that snarled roadways last week. See? Spending decades in the suburbs inures you to the indignity of city life!) I, of course, walk every day through the West Village, around construction and packs of dogs on leashes and, worst, children on scooters. We were never suited for the suburbs, I don’t think, incapable of the kind of socializing that life in a master-planned community demands. I was awkward with the children in my neighborhood, my mother was awkward with their mothers, our neighbors were constantly complaining that our cats were in their yard. I feel confident that all of us are better suited for the lives we live now and that we know and appreciate it because we know what else might have been… which is, to say, not debating whether Kleenex or a pile of Just Salad napkins in the cupboard will flush better when going out to get toilet paper isn’t a viable option.

* These were literally the directions to get to my house.

** I called 311. 311 is polite, it turns out, but ineffective.

thicker than water

“An introverted Finn looks at his shoes when talking to you; an extroverted Finn looks at your shoes.”

I traveled recently to Finland, the country that my mother’s family left several generations ago. I’ve never been particularly in tune with my cultural heritage, mostly because I’m not just a mutt but a generic, whiter-than-white-bread mutt: “Half Finnish, a quarter Italian, the rest English, Irish, and Scottish,” I would say in elementary school when the topic came up, which it did strangely often given that I went to school in the whitest neighborhood in Las Vegas. (In third grade, we had a potluck where you were supposed to bring a food from your heritage to share with the class. The one Filipino kid brought adobo and the rest of us brought… mostly variations on coleslaw, if I remember rightly.)

Las Vegas—at least the part of Las Vegas where I grew up—isn’t much for rich cultural traditions. It’s more a place for reinvention, somewhere that you land by some accident of circumstance rather than of heritage. We all lived there with our parents but we went to visit our grandparents and cousins out of state during summers, to California and New Jersey and Illinois, in neighborhoods where every kid on the block had a Bar Mitzvah or went for meatballs at Grandma’s house on Sunday. I knew about Bar Mitzvahs from reading Judy Blume, I knew about Kwanzaa from reading The Baby-Sitters Club, but I thought maybe that the authors were taking artistic license because the closest thing I knew to any of that was going to Achievement Days at my Mormon friends’ houses, where we glued cotton balls and googly eyes to empty Cool-Whip containers and stuck cards that read “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” on top of the whole mess. I had a couple of friends whose grandmothers were “Yiayia,” but it wasn’t until many years later that I connected that with being Greek.

In college I met kids from places that weren’t my white suburban neighborhood in Las Vegas. I was well-read enough by that point that it was hardly mindblowing to learn that there are Americans in the millennial generation who are connected to their cultural heritage. It was more disappointing to realize that having grown up as I did—in a satellite family that had split off from the whole, where the most I had to go off was the occasional story about how it smelled when Grandma Joyce made lutefisk or a bag of pizzelle that my Italian great-aunt sent over from California—I was missing something that other people considered fundamental to their narrative.

This doesn’t really bother me. For one thing, I recognize that in return I get to benefit from centuries of white privilege, which seems like a reasonable tradeoff. For another, growing up in Las Vegas is a formative experience that is unique enough to supplant the absence of a longer cultural tradition: my identity is rooted heavily in the bizarre combination of alien desert and gaudy neon and the idea that when you’re done with a building you can blow it up and all-you-can-eat buffets. I don’t need stories about how my family celebrates the winter holidays when I have stories about how I used to dance The Nutcracker in the same theatre where Penn and Teller used to perform. I glom onto others’ traditions: I show up at my best friend’s family’s gut-busting Italian Thanksgiving table, I follow along in the Haggadah at my sister’s in-laws’ Seder.

And so in the absence of cultural stereotypes to point to, I have always believed that my family and me are our own special brand of weird. Buttoned-up, introverted, antisocial, uncomfortable in crowds, happiest without sunlight, suspicious of strangers: that’s us, I thought, and nobody else.

Then I went to Finland.

Okay, that’s a little dramatic. We are not dyed-in-the-wool Finns, although I’m pretty sure I could have stayed in the sauna for way longer than my boyfriend wanted to. But I have never felt more at home than I did walking down a street where nobody tried to make eye contact with me or, God forbid, small talk. Nobody swore at me—at least not to my face, although I assume that any American blundering her way through a foreign country where the only phrase she knows is “kiss my bellybutton, you pancake-head” (thanks, Grandma Joyce, for that valuable childhood lesson) is getting a few words tossed after her on the street—but it’s a great relief to discover that I can blame my sailor mouth on my heritage, not the fact that I’m too vulgar to be allowed on playgrounds. And it’s socially acceptable there to drink coffee all day long, just like it is in Silicon Valley, only I still didn’t discover some long-dormant genetic trait that lets me drink coffee after noon without finding myself still awake in bed fourteen hours later. (I trust that after enough months with only a few hours of sunlight each day, I would adapt. I may explore this hypothesis one day.)

Before I traveled to Helsinki—which, for the record, is actually kind of boring, although I maintain that I don’t need much more than a beer bar with library shelves and old typewriters and coffee shops on every block, both of which Helsinki has—the only Finnish trope I knew was also my favorite. It’s called sisu: a sort of inborn stoicism that imbues Finns with the wherewithal to keep going in the face of things like months-long winters and Viking invasions.

I’ve taken sort of a WebMD approach to this inner strength: if the Internet tells me that according to the symptoms of my origins I have it, then I have it, even if the quarter-Italian-the-rest-English-Irish-and-Scottish half of me is urging me to give up and eat some pasta. I think it’s probably also supposed to imbue me with the strength I need to do things like actually kill the cockroach in my apartment myself instead of running away for six hours and pretending it was never there, or put on my big-girl pants and board the freaking turboprop, but I use it mostly to help me get through my versions of Viking invasions. I have sisu, I tell myself when I am feeling particularly vulnerable to the image of my weight-restored stomach in the mirror, I will eat this burrito and I will enjoy it. (I think perhaps my Finnish ancestors would roll in their graves to hear that I invoke sisu to get me through the hardship of eating a burrito, but in the absence of Vikings to combat, I have to make do with the dramas I can find.)

“You rejuvenate like Wolverine,” my coworker said to me once, maybe a week or two after my life fell apart at the seams, when I was sitting at my desk and gritting my teeth through some assignment that I probably could have turned down if I had mentioned that my boyfriend dumped me in Palo Alto (PALO ALTO!!!) and also I had been starving myself for several months. I declined. I declined at any point over the course of that year to mention to anyone at work that I was anything less than full speed ahead, ready to roll, not malnourished and miserable and the emotional equivalent of your iPhone when the battery icon turns red. Possibly, that was the Silicon Valley ethos whereby you don’t quit until you’re dead or you’re out of Pellegrino in the kitchenette; I like to argue that it was sisu. I am a Finn, or at least part of me is. I don’t need anybody to yank me back up the canyon. I can claw my way back from the brink.

Finland was serene. Nobody is walking down the streets of Helsinki gritting their teeth or growling at their demons under their breath. Everyone is going silently about their business, speaking when spoken to, drinking their coffee. I like to think it’s because we have to save the mental strength we’d otherwise expend on small talk so that we don’t have to cry uncle when we could otherwise call up our sisu. I found it very comforting to be in a place where everyone spoke at a volume that my ears could handle, where the loudest thing I heard all week was a guy playing Neil Young covers on a guitar in the doorway to a bar on Roobertinkatu. It was the first time that I’ve been to a place where I felt like people operated at the speed and volume that I wanted to, except for when we used to visit Grandma in assisted living. (This was better mostly because there was more beer, although arguably the food was as mushy.) I did not feel compelled to make jokes with the barista about renaming coffee “bean juice,” unlike the last time I went to Rebel Coffee on Eighth, which will probably be the last time I go to Rebel Coffee on Eighth, because it hurt my soul. Nobody dared play their music without headphones on the train, nobody elbowed their way in front of me to board the plane before I did, nobody stuck a clipboard in my face trying to get me to donate to Greenpeace on my way to yoga.

And best of all, everyone is always on time.