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[inquarterlifecrisis]

Lamp Study #2

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Walking Where I Used To It’s raining and I don’t feel like going outside, let alone working out, so I split the difference and walk the mile and a half to the library. After trying melatonin, meditation, herbal tea, and podcasts designed to lull one to sleep, the only thing that has been truly effective in breaking my nocturnal lifestyle is trashy thriller novels. I’m staying with my dad in my home town, in the first house I ever lived in. Frankly it’s not a homestead that has remained on my mind much, in the way that we can only discount those things that are so intrinsic to our identities. If you asked me to draw a picture of the veins in my forearms I’d be stymied— it’s not exactly a geography I’ve had to map. Of course it’s more complicated than that. My parents got divorced when I was seven, and my mother moved us into a new childhood home— all of half a mile away. For the record, I don’t resent my parents’ divorce in the slightest, and in no way is this a “woe is me” statement. But the fact remains that I can probably count my memories before the semi-relocation on one hand. From then on it was weekends with our father and the rest of the week with our mother. Mom went back to school and got her masters degree, while Dad took up furniture building and rock climbing. Late on Saturday nights, after my younger siblings had fallen asleep, Dad would train me on how to use a jigsaw by letting me carve out toys for my younger brother. By the time I was ten I had a hand in the execution of most of the furniture in our house, one weekend at a time. Mom’s house was equally special— she made use of the high ceiling in the room that my sister and I shared by having a loft built, which would eventually become my teenage refuge. I didn’t just learn to cook and bake there, but had the added pleasure of knowing that what I was making meant something. These weren’t just culinary experiments, it was literally dinner for our family. Not only was I at home, I was lucky enough to have two homes. Neither was perfunctory— I distinctly remember making excuses to walk from one to the other. Maybe because they were equally important. Maybe because I preferred the space between the two. Near the halfway point between my parents' respective houses was a pond. It wasn’t very big or very pretty, and it was definitely home to more than a few snapping turtles. But for some reason, it held an almost mystical attraction for me. Maybe because it seemed so cool that such a natural phenomenon existed so close to my respective suburban homes. Maybe because moody ten year-olds need a place to brood. I can’t remember who or when, but at some point an older kid showed me a hidden path from the road down to the wooded side of the pond. It lead to a fire pit, almost certainly littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts, though I was too young to notice these as signs of disrepute. Instead I just thought it was a secret place that I had the privilege of knowing about. This became my spot. I would “forget” a text book and need to walk over to my mom’s house. I would be meeting a friend to “skip stones”. Sometimes it was as simple as that age-old justification for all things shady— “going for a walk.” Inevitably this led to me spending at least ten minutes, crouched by the fire pit at the edge of the pond, hidden by branches, feeling inexplicably grateful for my stolen moments of solitude. When I first read my favorite book I was fifteen years old. I still prefer fiction, but two degrees and fifteen years later, this collection of essays continues to linger in the most influential recesses of my brain. In False Papers, author Andre Aciman explores his childhood in and subsequent return to Alexandria, life as an exile, falling in and out of love with vistas and women, Strauss Park in New York City, but above all, existence in a liminal state. Take “In Search of Blue”, the second essay in False Papers. Here Aciman recalls the train rides he took through Europe during his childhood. He describes the glimpses of the ocean constantly interrupted by the trees— the luxury of being transplanted to such a glamorous coastline, and the turmoil of being uprooted from his home country. As an adult he takes the same voyage with a lover, and has the opportunity to stay in a hotel room with a veranda harboring a fantastic and uninterrupted view of the very ocean he had so often caught sight of as the train sallied forward. “What do you do with so much blue once you’ve seen it?” Aciman asks. It’s too perfect. The things that we covet somehow become unfathomable set in relief to the ideal we held them up to. That’s not to say that they don’t meet our expectations— the crux of the matter is that we’d prefer to live with our expectations. I’m not trying to distill this to a “grass is always greener” analogy. It’s better described as the appeal of salted caramel. I guess this is where it would be appropriate to mine the confectionary vein and address Aciman’s Proustian roots. À la Recherche du Temps Perdu has controversially been translated as either A Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time. Aciman would seem to favor the latter, judging not just by the aforementioned “In Search of Blue”, but more obviously the fifth essay in False Papers— “Letters from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust.” It’s not as simple as the madeleine. Like the water framed by the trees, it’s the pastry tempered by the tisane. Fortunately the temptation to look back through previous entries in this blog for my self-applied label “nostalgia junkie” was cut short by my recognition of the the inherent irony that lies therein. Recently I’ve felt compelled to bastardize the translation of both titles into a more frankensteinian moniker: “Research of Things Past.” Obviously unoriginal and unsexy without context, but perhaps worth considering all the same. I think we’ve all done a little bit of research into this subject that most consider banal. What is it to return to the place that you come from with an attitude that is both distanced and biased? An all-too-close researcher? My years living in New York City have given birth to many intellectual questions about anonymity. To presume that someone is looking at you on the subway seems, well, presumptuous. Self-conscious about a blemish on your face? Yeah, probably nobody noticed. Somebody cut you off getting onto the subway? Sure, they’re a jerk, but chances are that you’ll never see them again, so they escape under the cloak of anonymity. It’s not the same in my home town. I’m walking the paltry mile and a half to the library (a very normal distance to walk in NYC, especially if you’re trying to get across town, or to a better train, or whatever) and a car stops. The driver is somewhere in his forties, alone in his new, eco-friendly SUV, and he leans out the window. If I said he’d had an elbow on the window sill, cowboy style, I’d be lying, but that’s what it felt like. “Do you need a ride into town?” he asked. “No thanks, I’m enjoying the walk.” “Stay dry!” For the record, “town” was about a quarter of a mile away at that point, which roughly translates to two and a half avenue blocks— about as far as I walk to buy cat food. I’m an actress. Theoretically I should crave attention. And there are certain areas in the city where I am guaranteed to run into at least three people. I don’t mind it. In my own neighborhood in Brooklyn, I’m familiar with the people who work at the bodegas I frequent for juice and the managers of the grocery stores. Heck, I’m known as the “bubble bath girl” at my local pharmacy, and the gentleman who works there even sometimes hands me a free bottle and sends me on my merry way. But that’s the right kind of attention. I don’t like feeling like a weirdo because I’m walking somewhere and seeming out of place just because I’m “walking”. Isn’t it better to be able to get somewhere under one’s own steam? I suppose I don’t love being under a microscope. The ability to switch between anonymous and identifiable is more difficult in the town that I grew up in than in my chosen place of residence. If I say hello to the purveyor of a local business, or a new friend, or even an “old friend” that I run into when I’m out on an errand, well, that’s a choice. I don’t want to be rude, but they also don’t know my mom and my dad and my sister and my sister’s friends and where I went to school and on and on and on. All they expect is a hello— even a wave will suffice. I’ve spent enough time here for a sense of nostalgia to set in. And it has. But I don’t feel beholden to it. I can still duck under the radar if I want to. No microscope. No “What do you you do with all that blue now that you’ve seen it?” At this point, I crave less blue. I have my own liminal space— at least, in Brooklyn. When I go back to my hometown I feel like a shadow of the trees I used to admire, and the pure blue is not even something I want anymore. More importantly, at my Brooklyn home I have no feeling of unadulterated conspicuity just for walking somewhere because I need to. I can even walk for miles without feeling like a weirdo. A wave is enough. If a friend pulls his bike over to say hi, it’s a choice made by a very good friend— not a concerned citizen. Sometimes I hate the crowded nature of the subway, but it can also be my best friend. I love where I come from. And I love where I live now. The ability to be recognized in both places is— well— a blessing that I recognize. But like the pond I so appreciated as a child, liminal spaces are inherently interrupted. Our own personal interruptions lead to the chance for a lack of clarity— for anonymity. In my hometown I feel like there is sometimes too much blue, and I prefer the interrupted landscape that my current location affords me. If only to appease my own nostalgia-addled mind.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

The Lamps Have Eyes

[inquarterlifecrisis]

I've been a goblin, but I’m visible again. Let me explain. Recently I resumed dinner shifts at the restaurant where I worked for several years. In the interim, I was working breakfast shifts at said restaurant while simultaneously interning at a casting agency. The casting director worked a lot with “real people”. Actors, for the record, are not real people. Some projects, as opposed to casting a professional with experience and training, would rather find someone off the street and give them the lead role in a feature film. My tone may sound glib but, for the record, I do see the merits of this technique. Particularly when it comes to casting teenagers— sometimes a “real” kid will bring more to a character than the shiny child-actor who grew up on a combination of Fame and Hannah Montana. As interns at this particular office, typically only one, maybe two of us was present on any given day. It was a two day a week gig, and the higher-ups needed to spread out our hours. A lot of our work was research, meticulously entered into various spreadsheets and chronicled through gmail threads and google docs. When you sent an email reaching out regarding a casting, or made a follow-up phone call, or entered new data into a shared document, your actions needed to be notated and initialed. This lead to hundreds of spreadsheet columns with ever expanding notes-sections marked with various initials: “Sent follow-up email to principal, 11/13, AF.” “Left message with secretary, 11/17, SC.” “Spoke with drama teacher, visit arranged, call to confirm— 11/21, EM.” Who was “SC”? I never met her. Did we use the same water glass from the communal kitchen? How about the mysterious “EM” who somehow had an actual conversation with the drama teacher from Citizens of the Future High School on November 21st? Did she also spend her lunch break wandering around SoHo woefully embarrassed by her scuffed TJ Maxx boots, dreading the rest of her afternoon and wondering if her eyesight would ever recover from so many hours spent staring at notes in a tiny font on a computer screen? And then there’s me, “AF.” Did “EM” ever hear the name Annika in passing around the office as I casually heard mention of some task completed by fellow-intern Evangeline? I never did meet these other women, despite the dream I had about an office holiday party where they laughed at me for prematurely opening the box containing the fancy cake and then offered me a makeover. What led each of us to not overlap in this hip office that probably didn’t miss us when our unpaid-tenures expired? And then there was my return to the restaurant at the hotel. After I left my position for another serving gig, I would occasionally drop by for snacks or perhaps drinks at the upstairs bar. I was always greeted with high-fives, hugs, and warm enthusiasm from the dedicated fellows who manage the front door. These gatekeepers to a quite-exclusive establishment always let me jump the line, closing a gap that I’m sure the strangers waiting for entrée felt acutely. Once inside, a young host who I’d never met would see me wave to the bartender and perhaps a manager, quickly rearranging stools to offer me a seat. At this point one of my friends behind the bar would pour me a drink I wouldn’t have to pay for, and label my order so that an unseen wizard in the kitchen would send me some delicious gift. Next my former-fellow servers would take time out of their rounds to stop by and catch up, a manager would pour me a glass of some wine they’d opened just to taste, and I would officially feel like I was holding court. Listen, I know where that VIP button lurks in the POS system, and I sure felt like one. When it came time for me to re-enter the service industry, I reached out to my former employers at the hotel. “It always feels like coming home to me,” I wrote in my email, “and trust me, the irony of a hotel feeling like home is not lost on me.” It turns out that the whole building was in a hiring-freeze, and the only shifts open were breakfast shifts— a position I’d never held, with a 6 a.m. in-time. The thing is, the hotel had recently switched over to being gratuity-free, so these previously thankless shifts now were economically equivalent to and significantly lower-stress than the formerly covetable dinner shifts. They reached out with the caveat of “You probably won’t want this, but…”. I said yes. My name went back on the schedule, and the list of user-numbers taped to every printer. I would finish my floor shift and re-stock the wine room before most people even thought of their p.m. shift, but they still felt the effects of my work, noticed my leftover presence. “Annika… yeah, I think I’ve heard of her.” I was a goblin. I ran around, making decisions that you had to contend with, shifting things that you noticed. You may not have known my name, but you felt the effects… AF was here. I was like a pro-active graffiti artist. I owned the wee hours, when you were up to whatever else you do. You didn’t see me, but I was there. And just like that, it’s over. I’m back above ground. I know and interact with the vast majority of my co-workers. Not only do I share my appointed tasks with other people, we actually get to do them together. More than three people who know my name see what I wear every day. I warm up my golem-esque morning voice on my own time, as opposed to my unfortunate first table or office phone call of the day. My hours are still unconventional, but at least I share them.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Max Age

Well it’s happened— I’m back to self-submitting for auditions. Don’t worry, my manager hasn’t dropped me, but my recent stint as unemployed has spurred me to action. I gave up applying for acting gigs myself when I started getting TV auditions through my manager and also realizing— thanks to all of the shitty scripts I read— that my free time would be better spent writing. This has yielded three feature film scripts (one of which has been optioned), several essays, over one hundred pages of a novel, and a regularly performing music project. That said, as the hours turn into days, it strikes me as irresponsible to not take more control over my own acting career. So I’m back on the websites, subscribing to databases I had previously eschewed. Applying to these various casting breakdowns, one thing has struck me: the stipulation of “max age.” I entered a graduate acting program immediately after earning my bachelor’s degree. I applied, not necessarily on a whim, but with the understanding that I would most definitely not get in my first year. I figured I would go on a few auditions, be rejected, then move to New York and get another year or two of experience under my belt. Maybe do some student films, some off-off-off-off-Broadway plays. Perhaps take some improv classes and work my butt off waiting tables. But I did get in. I had six weeks off between my graduation from Oberlin College and my first day at the American Repertory Theater/ Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. I once had a co-worker who advised me that, before naming your kids, practice writing their names out, because you’re going to do it over and over and over again for the next eighteen years. I would advise everyone to consider the same advice when choosing a school that will be forever emblazoned on your resume. The name of my master’s degree institution takes up literally half of my bio. I was the youngest person in my grad school class, as I had been in my high school graduating class, definitely among the youngest in my graduating class at Oberlin, and certainly the youngest first grader or kindergartener at ages five and four, respectively. Now, looking at these posts for various castings, I must accept the fact that I am old. Max age. Not to say that there aren’t castings out there for women in their late thirties, forties, fifties, etc. But as someone who has looked twenty six from the ages of nineteen to twenty-eight, I have a hard time swallowing the fact that I, at nearly thirty, have reached “max age” for the absurdly large age group of twenty to thirty. When I was twenty I was in college. When I was twenty-three I had a master’s degree. When I was twenty-five I was dating a man who was forty-two— definitely “max age” for me. For the record, when I was eighteen I was seeing a man who was thirty-five. That’s the exact same interval as twenty-five to forty-two, but somehow much more vast. I always prided myself on acting older than my age. But now, of course, I feel I should be recognized as younger. No gray hairs. No wrinkles. Hell, I still have the freckles that as a child I always assumed would disappear. I’m insanely lucky. As an oldest child I displayed the typical behavior of feeling more comfortable with adults than with other children. Staying up late at parties and mingling with the grown-ups was my eight-year-old jam! Babysitters be damned, nothing could keep me from the shrimp cocktail after all of the other wusses had gone to bed. I always wanted to be older. Now I’ve reached “max age.” I’m no longer eligible for roles that I still look age appropriate for. At least not officially. Because this is a fickle industry— get famous by twenty-five or perish. Recently I spoke with my manager about my renewed hire-ability— I’m finally eligible for all of those mature female roles. Attorney, Businesswoman, Detective… except that all of the actors who book those roles somehow had other lives building up credits as ingenues, and I was always too “wise,” too “smart,” too “mature” to land those parts. Back in grad school, we had a casting director in to “type” us. “I can’t really put my finger on you,” he said after my monologue. “No one will ever buy that you’re stupid. So you can only play smart. Also you can’t die. We’d feel too bad for you… it wouldn’t be good casting for you to play a character who dies. You’re just… so relatable. I think, honestly, you’re the mother of the child with leukemia.” Great, thank you so much. I’m twenty-three and my kid already has leukemia. So I’m twenty-eight now and definitely age-appropriate to play a mother. For the record, that’s not in the cards. My little sister is getting married, I’m the maid of honor, two of the bridesmaids are engaged, but definitely not me. Confronting me about some of my recent difficulties, my mother hugged me and said “Annika, you’re a creative type, you chose the hard path.” Yeah. I sure did. I’m worried that I missed my window. It’s no surprise to me that I aged out of the roles I needed to build up my resume before I was eligible for the ones I was meant for. That’s why I write for myself. But getting funding for passion projects is notoriously impossible. That’s why I’m back applying for low-paying acting gigs, back in the service industry, and taking much solace in my adorable cats. At least they won’t notice when I’ve officially reached “max age.”

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Ceci N’est Pas une Recipe: Domesticity at the Bottom of the Bag It’s nine o’clock on a Monday night and my hands are wrist deep in a brown mush that smells like the apples at the bottom of the twenty pound sack you hand picked nine weeks ago. Somehow I don’t think this will be the last time. Boyfriend has subscribed to a weekly CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) since before I met him. Indeed, this may have been some of the appeal. A New York City male in his mid-twenties who went out of his way to secure and cook sustainable produce every week? And not even something that he shared with his roommates, who as far as I could tell subsisted entirely on Seamless, sometimes going so far as to order delivery sandwiches from bodegas mere blocks away. This is the city we live in, making Boyfriend’s individual commitment to preparing his own meals, not to mention supporting farmers, all the more unicorn-esque. Once or twice a week we would make dinner together, sometimes at his place but more often toting certain elements of the weekly bundle down to my apartment, where I would supply some sort of protein. In the morning Boyfriend would pack the snack he had brought from the fruit supplement he added on to his basic weekly package. This was usually an apple or maybe a tangerine in the winter. Once he brought persimmons, which we decided to freeze in order to be able to eat them like popsicles. They are, for the record, still in the freezer. I would pack up the leftovers and encourage him to take them for lunch. This is how I lost all my tupperware. Thankfully, over the course of three or so Seamless orders, one can completely replenish one’s supply of re-usable containers. My experience in the food industry led me to experiment with various techniques to elevate our meals. The greek yogurt in the fridge was seasoned and swooshed under pork sirloins I purchased with my discount at the grocery component of the restaurant group I work for. Herb garnishes abounded. Everything went to the table “plated”. Even grilled cheese and tomato soup had to be fancy— pickled jalapeños on the sandwiches, truffle oil and oregano to finish the soup. Now I look back on this as the golden days of the CSA. I got to pick and choose the most desirable items, with Boyfriend left to find some way to work turnips into his lunch every day. I’ll never know how many of his solo dinners consisted of whatever was left at the bottom of that bag after I’d mined the upland cress, meyer lemons, and eggplant. Today I am paying for it. Medlars (Mespilus germanica) are an ancient fruit, indigenous to southwest Asia and southeastern Europe. Small and brown, they look like something between a crab apple and a rose hip. In France they are sometimes referred to as “cul de chien”— dog’s ass. The old English name, openærs, is not any more suitable for polite company. Three weeks ago, we received a sizable container of these charming nuggets in our CSA fruit package. A little research revealed that medlars must be bletted to consumed— a process that basically means letting them rot. When they smell like you should throw them out— and only then— can you begin to think about what to do with them. This association with decay made them ripe (ha) for literary symbolism. In The Reeve’s Tale, Chaucer invokes the medlar to lament the passing of time: We olde men, I drede, so fare we: Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype; Shakespeare references the medlar several times. In As You Like It, Rosalind makes a complicated pun mocking Orlando and his love poems, concluding “for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.” In Timon of Athens we see the medlar used as an allusion to rotten character, with a potential pun on “meddler”. Personally, I think I first became aware of the word as part of Mercutio’s barb to Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (II.i.34-48): Now will he sit under a medlar tree, And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone. O Romeo, that she were, O that she were An open-arse and thou a pop'rin pear! Here he jests about Romeo’s love for Rosaline. However, when we analyzed this passage in Shakespeare class in grad school, somehow the discussion turned immediately to the Elizabethan proclivity for anal sex, and the significance of ye olde fruit faded into the recesses of my consciousness. I now find myself with more medlars than literary allusions thereto, and they are definitely— ahem— bletted. So I have to do something with them before they go from good rotten to bad rotten. Do I want to eat them raw? Not particularly. They taste like uber-natural apple butter, and while I could spread them on toast, I’m not sure Boyfriend and I can eat quite that much medlar toast quite that quickly. The internet says to make them into jelly, jam, or something known as medlar cheese. Which, I guess, is not actually cheese, but another form or preserving fruit? All of these options require tools for making jam, which I don’t have. Additionally, most of the recipes I find seem to be for advanced makers of jam, mentioning by name techniques I have never even heard of, let alone mastered. I also find a recipe for medlar ginger cake, which sounds good, but again, I don’t have the necessary tools. Finally I come across something called a medlar loaf, which seems simple and, perhaps, even fun and Christmassy! I set to work. First, press the insides of the medlars through a sieve. Next, weigh the results and mix with an equal amount of sugar. I don’t have a sieve but I figure a colander will work, right? And yeah, we definitely don’t have a scale, let alone a culinary scale, but I’ll… eyeball it. I realize quickly that I don’t even need to slice the pods open— I squeeze and all of the goop oozes out in a brown paste. It feels like I’m popping alien eyeballs, and I try not to think too much about the scene in Blade Runner where Leon casually dangles the disembodied replicant eyes on their inventor. Once all the innards are extracted, I begin to push them through the colander, pulling out the large seeds as I find them. After a few minutes of this I examine what has slithered into the pot below: nothing. Just some protrusions that look like play dough spaghetti, and one alarming squiggle on the bottom of the pot that puts me in mind of a small dog’s intestinal distress. Combing through the goo for the seeds with my hands, the contents of the colander diminish rapidly as I discard the inedible elements. Just now Boyfriend pokes his head into the kitchen. I’m caught medlar-handed, and embarrassed at the obviously low yield of this crop we didn’t ask for: “I don’t think this is going to be much of a loaf.” I scoop all I can salvage into the pot, to which I add sugar, heat, and a lot of butter. Once combined and relatively uniform in texture, I pour this into a small container and freeze. “I just made it into butter,” I tell Boyfriend, slightly defeated. “That’s a great idea!” He’s ready to get cracking on the venison steak his dad brought us from a hunting expedition, and I have sauce to make out of the cranberries from last week’s CSA. In September, Boyfriend moved in with me in the apartment I’ve occupied for the last four years, my entire time in New York City. We moved the CSA pick-up location to my neighborhood— now our neighborhood. He brought his bed, his records, and all of the items at the bottom of the vegetable bag I never used to see. True, we’re cooking together more often, and our greater stability allows for more efficient meal planning, but late fall produce sure does keep us on our toes. Gone are the days of lush greens and tomatoes. I was thrilled that the radishes lasted as long as they did. But when squash arrived in November, I knew the sunchokes were just around the corner. While the cost of the CSA is probably about equivalent to, or even less than what we would spend at the grocery store (with the added bonus of making sure we eat our veggies), this only holds true if we actually use everything. With me working three nights a week, one or both of us having evening band practice, and the regular impulse to go to a concert or gallery opening, we don’t necessarily eat everything the week that we get it. So I do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of the bag. I’ve become an amateur pickler (the sunchoke pickles, in case you were wondering, are a work in progress). Surplus plums and tomatillos were turned into pan sauces. The next step is an immersion blender— sunchokes are less despicable in puree form. The result is that I feel terribly domestic. While I’ve always been interested in food and cooking, I didn’t exactly pickle for one. The planning is always somewhat spontaneous, because each week our produce selection is a surprise, but it’s still a habit. Like a mutual bed time, or watering our growing number of house plants (more effort than feeding our fish), or attending to a shared laundry hamper. Last time I tried to cohabitate with a significant other was five years ago. We had a roommate. I was in grad school full time, and somehow still wound up doing all the cooking. We got bored and felt prematurely old. I moved to New York and became extremely silly, very fun, and a little drunk. He… moved in with his new girlfriend. And hit the repeat button. I feel significantly better prepared for this second stab at living with a partner. Partially because Boyfriend is quite literally the most well-adjusted person I have ever met in my life. But also because, at twenty-seven (as opposed to twenty-two), while I don’t have the tools to make jam, I do have the tools to be in a mature relationship. Part of that is seeing the value in experimenting with the grab bag that is a weekly CSA, as opposed to a set grocery list that invariably becomes one person’s responsibility. Who’s individual skill set makes them the ideal candidate to dissect the four pound squash, while the other person researches quince crumble recipes? As it turns out, the bottom of the bag is where a lot of the fun is hiding. The creativity required makes cooking dinner together more of a date night activity, and less of an act pure sustenance. It’s also a training ground for our communication skills, which I never doubted, but they’re only getting stronger. Not to mention the intimacy and choreography fostered by our itty bitty kitchen. Today I tried the medlar butter on toast, and you know what? It’s pretty good!

[inquarterlifecrisis]

On Football

“Babe, you wanna see how we get a first down, this is how we do it,” It’s a Sunday afternoon, and my boyfriend has begun speaking to me in a foreign language. Something happens on two of the ten giant screens that line the walls of the sports bar, and Boyfriend stands up as several others let out enthusiastic cheers or moans of disappointment. He high-fives someone that we have never met before.

I’m seeing top heavy figures with bulbous heads intentionally collide with each other in an effort to secure possession of a small object, with the intent of moving that object to a different location within their playing field. My attempt to join in the cheering goes something like “Go the man! Take from the other man the thing that you both want and put it in the place he doesn’t want it to go!”

Not to brag here, but it bears noting that I have degrees from two esteemed institutions of higher learning. I am able to analyze complex works of literature. I am competent in my use of maps and have decent navigational skills. I kept track of the myth arch through nine seasons of the X-Files. But I can’t understand football.

I thought I had the scoring system figured out. Like, a touchdown is worth six points, and then if they make the field goal, it’s seven. But sometimes random amounts will creep onto the screen, like three points, and I won’t even notice that anything happened!

When touchdowns occur, those I get. I even pay attention when they’re close to getting a touchdown, because one of the men will be running fast, and at that point people around me usually know his name somehow, and they’ll start saying it loudly. I find it equally impressive how the men will dive head first at this running person’s ankles, and the agility with which the running man is often able to jump over these obstacles.

The number of players on the team is confusing to me in relation to the number of men actually playing the game. For example, sometimes they start to do something and then it turns out that there are actually too many of them on the field? Who’s job is it to count? Did one of the players just sneak out there because he was making a funny joke? Or maybe he dropped something during the last round?

There is a lot of time when the men stand on the field, or off the field, not really doing anything. I think this is maybe because, while they are capable of great speed and exertion of energy, they need to re-charge, so to speak, so as to be better able to really spring into action when the moment arises. Like how cheetahs run in short bursts.

“Let’s toss that wide out streaks to Sammy. See— single coverage, look at that. How are you not targeting your number one wide receiver on a single coverage? Every single time.”

Personally, I’m concerned about grammar here. Wide out streaks should be plural, no? Perhaps “those wide out streaks”? Boyfriend assures me this is wrong.

“Really?,” our friends have joined us, one is yelling. “You’re gonna wave that off? Why not fair catch that?”

Several other bar patrons speak out into the air in response, as if an ether connects them all and they no longer need things like eye contact or official acquaintanceship to communicate.

I order another pitcher of beer, which I may or may not be willing to share, and begin to ply our football-versed-buds for information. I express my selfish concern about my inability to understand a game that comes as second nature to literally millions of individuals.

“Honestly, Annika, a good substitute for ‘football knowledge’ is ‘who has the most time on their hands’.”

“Yeah, like we’ve already had multiple calls come up that none of us agree on.”

“Seriously, this game is a test of rules.”

Just now there is a kerfuffle. I am alerted to this kerfuffle by a communal shout followed by a tension signified by groans and fists held to mouths. A man dropped a ball and then another man caught it and I guess held onto it for a second but then he dropped it too and then yet another caught it.

PANDEMONIUM ERUPTS. Everyone has at least one opinion. I’ve never seen people so spontaneously at odds. Even Boyfriend is raising his voice to someone, which I’ve literally never seen him do in over a year of dating. It’s kind of like when you say the wrong thing to your drunk friend and she starts sobbing and you think maybe someone in her family is gravely ill but it turns out she’s mad that no one complimented her shoes.

One of the buds is explaining: “See here the thing is that he made a clear football move. That would be the thing, is if he didn’t make a football move, you could argue they didn’t have possession.” If the game is football… aren’t they all ‘football moves’… you know what, never mind.

Much of the shouting subsides. Boyfriend and others sit down, cowed by the bleak call and their co-drinking opponents.

Half the pitcher of beer later came the part where I tried to ask one of the buddies if he thought terminal velocity could be the reason that a field goal from further away was unsuccessful whereas one from much closer worked. He assured me this was not the case. Apparently physics is also not my forte.

On Thanksgiving there was, of course, football. I figured I should humble myself and start at the level where I belong, with the beginners. I reached out to the children present, ages six to nine. “Well,” my cousin began, “each team basically has four downs to move the ball ten yards. If they don’t…” I literally can’t even repeat the rest of what he said, because while I’m sure it was an excellent primer on the sport, he soared over my head within two minutes of explanation. An eight year old.

Do my logical skills mean nothing? Do I have some sort of weird mental block? Is it because I didn’t play team sports as a child? I remember watching football with my dad… and being distinctly bored until we could go throw around a real football in the yard. Not that we were playing the game, I just liked being outside and playing catch.

At the end of the day, I like football. I like an excuse to be in a bar with Boyfriend and our friends, I like meeting new people, I like drinking beer. I think I perhaps just need to accept that it is not necessary to comprehend all of the exact intricacies of a sporting event, or a movie, or a song in order to enjoy it. I have been riveted by plays performed entirely in languages I don’t understand. And football, after all, is just one more gauge of measuring a particular intelligence— in this case, an intelligence that I don’t have.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Your Special Occasion Is My Shift

This is a public service announcement.

We’re so glad you’ve chosen to spend your birthday/anniversary/anniversary of your dog’s passing with us! It’s funny, the people who were sitting at this table before you were also celebrating a graduation. You want everything to be perfect? Sure, that’s a reasonable request, and something we can absolutely guarantee one hundred percent of the time.

Oh, the candle in that table’s dessert? Yes, they’re celebrating the fact that they met two weeks ago. Yes, that’s a very nice bottle of champagne they ordered. They want everything to be perfect too *wink*.

See, that’s the funny thing. Everybody wants everything to be perfect. All the time. Hell, I want everything to be perfect all the time!

Me, you ask? Oh, well, I got up this morning, did a million other things, showed up here at four, tried to transform a disaster area into this elegant room you’re now sitting in, put out eleven tiny fires so that the four birthdays, two graduations, three anniversaries, and two “special dinners in New York City” could have a perfect experience, and drank the equivalent of a bottle of wine in “tasting” sips. So I’m doing fine!

The fact is, I’m always fine! Because that's my job job. So if your experience isn’t perfect… well, I can’t let that ruin my night.

And yes! I will smile when I deliver that dessert with a candle in it. I will bend over backwards to make sure your boyfriend/sister/uncle-in-law doesn’t know that the candle is coming. I will put the entire bill on whoever hands me their credit card first, extra points for stealth.

But no, it’s not my fault that your entrees were too salty, or that you didn’t realize you needed a reservation for the rooftop bar, or that the sunset is earlier than you thought it would be, or that New York City is a cold place that eats soft people alive. So if that ruins your perfect experience… I’m sorry. But this is just my shift.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Bad Feet/ Good Socks

*An alternate version of this essay appeared on XoJane on 10/2/15*

“And you’re probably going to want to wear heels… every day. Or at least to every audition.”

This was advice from a casting director we were doing a master class with in grad school. I nodded earnestly in agreement and compliance, while making a mental note: yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

My feet have always been weird. They’re long, bony, and slender. I have what many people refer to as “finger toes”. If I wear shoes that are especially pointy, I can go down a size, because my toes will actually fill up the part that is ornamental for most other people.

People look in horror at the bulges that protrude from the base of my insteps. “Oh my God, those bunions, it must be from working on your feet all the time…”. I’ve actually had them since I was nine or so, around the time I started wearing shoes in adult sizes. And I didn’t just hit a size eight at age ten and stay there— I’m now definitively a size nine and a half. Sometimes a nine will do. Ten in running shoes.

For the record, I’m five foot six. To put this in perspective, I have a close female friend who is five foot nine, and she wears a size seven. My friend who I would always borrow heels from when I needed them? She’s almost six feet tall. And we have the same size feet.

They first started hurting when I was kid— a stabbing pain in my heels running up and down the hill on our elementary school playground. The doctor said it was plantar fasciitis. The issue was that my feet were completely flat, and we were told that I should wear primarily Nikes or Birkenstocks (it was the nineties, this was OK) as well as arch supports when possible. I’ve basically had old person feet since I was in single digits.

As a teenager I became unbearably self conscious, thinking my feet were so ugly. I refused to wear sandals, and often opted for men’s Vans sneakers. One of my boyfriends and I could share shoes. My mother tried to comfort me by reminding me that my narrow feet were the complement to my long and well proportioned hands— indeed, my hands have often been called elegant, and I’m probably a bit prideful about them, which is of course to compensate for the deep shame I felt for my feet.

But I always loved socks. None were too weird. Striped knee socks, argyle, little frogs, glitter, you name it. And if you could see them, all the better. I’m embarrassed to admit that there is photo evidence of a habit I had of rolling up my pants in order to showcase my prized accessories (I was twelve, there was a lot of weird fashion stuff going on).

When I was fifteen I began working at a local department store, the kind of third-generation family owned storefront that anchors the main drag of a small town, and ironically enough, my talent lay in shoe sales. This was the go-to spot for Danskos, Clarks, Tevas, Keds, Merrells, a wide variety of athletic shoes, plus Rockports, Naot, even Mephistos. In short, not the kind of shoes teenage girls are interested in.

In the back room they taught me how to doctor a shoe to fit just right— heel slipping was corrected by a tongue pad, corduroy heels for blisters, moleskin anywhere that rubbed, plus if you were willing to leave them for a day or two, we could use stretchers to knock out pockets for bunions or make that one shoe just a little bit longer for your foot that’s bigger than the other. I learned the brands— which ran small, or were more durable. Plus their particularities, such as the New Balance models that had a wider toe-box, or the Clarks that were better suited for ladies with narrow feet. I could sell people three pairs of shoes, easily. Because I got it. At age fifteen I used our employee-purchase program to order a pair of classic Danskos (size 40, narrow) that I still wear today.

It was also at this department store that I got my first pair of navy blue Keds. These would see me off to Oberlin and through my first year. The subsequent pair served as my trusty companions during a month in Tokyo. Round three kicked around Europe with me, the fourth iteration saw me through grad school, and the fifth are now faded from too many trips to Far Rockaway and sweaty summers of biking in Brooklyn. I still have all of them— for some reason I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

I have little recollection of paying much attention to footware, or clothing in general, in college. We were all draped in various thrift store finds, and casual was cool. The same went for my time studying acting in Cambridge, where I spent most of my days in movement clothes anyway. In Moscow things changed. On my walk from our dorm to the studio, I’d notice that people’s eyes quickly flicked all the way to the ground, and then back up; everyone was judged by their shoes. This became an issue once the snow melted, as my preferred style was brightly colored and patterned socks with Tom’s slip-ons (movement clothes people, movement clothes). I incurred a lot of strange looks, but such is the pleasure of anonymity in a city— I didn’t give a damn.

When I arrived in New York I quickly realized that most of my wardrobe wasn’t going to cut it. My outfits that were an eight in Boston barely registered as a four here. For auditions I wore low-heeled boots I hoped would give me the poise and height I needed. My second summer I found myself working at the Cocktail Lounge, where heels were mandatory. That job didn’t last long.

It was also during this period of time that I was forced to retire my visible socks. Perhaps forced is too strong a word, but when the person you’re desperately trying to make love you continually makes derisive comments about part of your appearance, you tend to eighty-six that facet pretty quickly. He was of the opinion that it was “weird” and made me look “like a little kid”. My socks stayed crammed in the back of a drawer for the better part of two years.

Now I know that these attacks on my socks— as well as my ears, which apparently stick out, and my body, in the form of pinching any flesh that could be isolated between two fingers— was just a form of control. But what he didn’t know he’d taken away from me was a method of control I’d devised for myself. My socks were a way to celebrate a part of my body that I was otherwise uncomfortable with— metaphorically and physically. They helped me manage the pain that resulted from having almost no padding on the balls of my feet, they protected me from blisters that were quick to develop on all my boney angles, and goddammit, they were cute.

When we broke up, it took awhile. His comments and ways were still banging around in my brain. The first socks to re-emerge were black knee socks. It was fall and I figured why not. But the crazy colors, as well as the ankle high white socks I thought were so nice with loafers, stayed in the drawer.

It wasn’t until a year later that I was ready to take the next step. I had spent some serious time as a single person, which had allowed me to finally do a lot of the life examining and arranging I had put off by getting into another relationship right after the sock-shamer. Many things had changed— I was making art that I thought was pretty good, and other people agreed with me. I’d started performing music I was writing. I had a lot of terrific friends— two of whom were getting married to each other, and figuring out what to wear to their wedding was how I got my socks back.

After finding a great dress, I realized I already owned the perfect shoes— a pair of heels I’d bought during that early phase in my New York life where I was trying to pretend that beauty was more important than pain. Now I was dreading the deep red indentation I knew I would suffer when my bunions pushed my skinny toes through the peekaboo at the front, or the throbbing sensation I was likely to experience in the balls of my feet after standing for any measure of time, let alone dancing. It was too hot to wear tights, and I would surely shred a pair of pantyhose.

Then the answer came to me: socks. I could wear a white ankle sock with a ruffle. It would even match the trim on the dress. The only issue was that the socks would be, well, a statement. I mean people were going to notice them. If I was going to pull this off, I would have to own it.

I asked my new guy what he thought: “Would that be pretty cute or totally weird?” He kind of looked at me like he wasn’t sure why I was asking him in the first place— “I think it will be great.” This is the same person who, on our first weekend away together sharing a house with four of his friends, told me that he saw no reason why I couldn't wear boldly contrasting patterns, and did not bat an eyelash at my overalls even after his boss made a snide comment, so I should have suspected the sock thing wouldn’t be an issue.

My look was a hit. No one said anything but “You look amazing.” I managed to gracefully transition into my loafers for the after party, and I kept the little white ruffles.

It was on. The bright patterned wool socks came out for the cold weather— who doesn’t need a little color in the winter? Spring was all knee socks, all the time. The white anklets came in with the skirts and even stayed for the shorts. “Girl,” a coworker remarked to me, “your sock game is always so on point.” Another exclaimed when she saw my outfit one day— “So cute! But wait, let me see the socks.” I pointed out a foot so that she could see, and she closed her eyes and nodded, as if I’d just spouted an inspirational bit of philosophy.

Recently I opted to re-don the heel/sock combo from the wedding, and on the street I got hollered at: “Lookin’ good girl, but you gotta lose the socks!”

Never again, I thought.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Looking At Strangers Sometimes I think about whether or not other people think about other people as much as I think about other people. Not in the, hey, I’m so considerate, way— but rather in the over-analyzing stalker way. There’s a girl sitting across from me on the subway. Her eye-liner is painted into a cute cat-eye but it’s only 10:30 in the morning and I wonder if she’s going to work or if she’s just the kind of person who never leaves the house without being one hundred percent put together. One of her three bags is a soft leather and looks distressed in the way that suggests it’s expensive— I think about how much money she earns at her job that she may or may not be on her way to, and if so, what kind of job she has that she didn’t already need to be there before 10:30, or if she has a job at all. Then I realize with all those bags she might be leaving on a trip, but I’m not sure why she’d be riding the southbound G train, oh, unless she’s going to transfer to the A at Hoyt Schermerhorn so that she can get to JFK. Her face is pretty and I notice some faded acne scars that make it hard to discern her age— I wonder what it was like for her in high school and if that’s why she’s wearing bold eye-liner so early in the day, maybe a habit she got into to draw attention to her eyes or just part of the ritual of make-up as a mask. I often feel that I look like a crazy person. It’s actually become a joke between my friend Emma and myself— “Do I look like a crazy person?” “No, do I?” “No.” Some sort of basic check point we have to pass through on most days. Running late for work, I’ll feel a rush of embarrassment about some mark on my face that I neglected to cover, or the weird way my bangs dried. After about ten minutes it will hit me: Nobody’s looking. Nobody cares. I am a stranger in a city of strangers. This fact comforts me as I plod down the stairs into the subway, snug in my blanket of anonymity, until I get distracted by the guy leaning on the pole half-way down the car. I wonder if he is made uncomfortable by how close that tiny elderly woman is standing to him, and whether or not his wedding day was the happiest of his life, and how aware is he of the subtle bald spot on the back of his head, and if he really broke those jeans in himself, or did he buy them like that, and also is he reading Ayn Rand ironically or sincerely? So maybe someone is looking. I catch strangers staring at me all the time— do they care that I didn’t put on mascara today? Can they tell that I’m self-conscious about my bra strap repeatedly sliding off my shoulder? Do they think my freckles are a tragedy? They’re probably not staring that hard. My uncle said something to me once about an actor, I think it was maybe Dustin Hoffman, and the idea of someone coming off as a little unhinged because they’ve just “played too many parts”. As if a little bit of your identity gets muddied each time you get too close to someone else— in the case of the actor, close enough to embody them. I’m thinking again about the girl from the subway, the one with the nice eye-liner and the expensive bag, and I’m wondering if I could kiss her, or someone like her. I’m thinking about how pretty she was and what it would feel like to be close to someone smaller than I am. Then I think about what it would be like to have a conversation with my boyfriend about being attracted to women sometimes, and how that makes me feel, and how does that make him feel. Then I remember that I’m not actually attracted to women all that often, and my mind goes to the audition I had yesterday for the character who was struggling to come out. I think maybe my head and my heart still belonged to her a little bit. The narcissism of the actor is a particular one, often characterized by the ability to completely transpose one’s self-absorption onto someone else. Personally, I’m just obsessed with people: why we want the things we want, and how we go about getting them. How all of the things that people want and the ways they go about getting them bang up against or march in accord with all of the things that other people want. It’s fascinating. Those who work in the psychiatric profession are encouraged to maintain their own treatment or therapy, and I think most actors have a compulsion to self-analyze in the interest of being able to analyze (and therefore synthesize) other individuals. And it goes both ways— anyone who has studied a foreign language will know the sensation of coming to better understand one’s mother tongue through the process of learning a new one. I think that someone is looking because I am. If I’m paying attention, doesn’t that mean that other people are as well? Or am I just weird that way? Either way you slice it, the reflection is pretty egotistical. It’s my feeling that the absorption thing— the muddied corners of identity— this happens in relationships as well. Actors may be particularly prone to it; after all, we’re mimics. As we are the obnoxious people who can’t help but pick up certain characteristics of an accent that we’re exposed to, so too are we prone to affecting phrases that our partners use frequently. We might start to laugh more like them. Last night as some particularly inspiring and specific music played, I turned to one of my co-workers: “This song makes me want to dance like this.” As I kept doing the little dance move I had been compelled to create, it dawned on me: this isn’t how I would dance to this music, this is how my boyfriend would dance to this music. But I guess now it’s how I would dance, too. After all, I was doing it. The same thing happened in one of my previous relationships— I was cognizant of it at the time, and after we broke up, came to despise the jerky samba-sway that lingered in my movement impulses. I had to let it work its way out of my system like a protracted hangover. At what point does observation lead to empathy? Just because I notice details about the girl on the train, does that mean I care what it would be like to be her? Does it mean I care about her? Is it because I care about my partner that I’m open to osmosing certain details of his identity? I’ve done this before— thought that I could appreciate experimental jazz solos, for example, or that I liked wearing the same henley tee and boring shoes ever day, because clothing should be treated as a uniform. How many times have we said “And fuck you, I always HATED taking selfies in public!”, or “Guess what, I DON’T think Dane Cook is funny— like, at all,” once things have truly begun to unravel. Some things we keep, though. I still regularly prepare Mexican-style fare (albeit on my own, decidedly American, terms). It turns out that I actually do like (some) folk music. I’m not sure what this newish fellow and I will come to borrow from and lend to each other. I was sort of surprised, though— on I think our second date, we were wearing basically the same thing. His taste in music is so vast that I could never begin to diagram any parallels, but the other day I did notice that he knows the words to my favorite song now. And we certainly share a few guilty pleasure albums from the early 2000’s. There are a lot of things that we both already liked. I’m pretty sure that when I was really busy soaking up everything around me, trying to be the girl my partners wanted me to be, and genuinely potentially interested in pretty much anything, I was on shakier footing in terms of my own identity. There was a part of me that wanted to be instructed, to be influenced, to be shown. There was a vulnerability there that, as a human and an actor, I really wanted to preserve. The concern that other people are looking, which I developed most acutely in NYC, also may have been a product of that almost adolescent vulnerability. Did people like what they saw? If I wanted my boyfriends to like what they saw in me, I should probably reflect them more, right? That catch here is that this line of reasoning assumes that the other person likes himself, which, for these men, was not the case. I suppose what it really is, at least now— I’m curious about whether or not other people are looking. It’s not because I’m particularly concerned with their opinion of what they see in me (usually), but more that I just want to know if they’re the kind of person who looks. I want to know if they’re like me. And, therefore, whether or not I’m “normal”.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

Fire Place

*This is a short story I wrote that no one was ever going to read but then I figured, what the hey. Enjoy!* -------------------------------------------------------------------- That was the night that we decided to make a fire. I got the sense that Marca wanted me to prove my masculinity in a public setting even though they were my friends to begin with, but everyone loves s’mores, so it was fine. "Guess I'm gonna go over here into the dark by myself," I said, more to the lazy bums in the kitchen than anything, but Marca looked up from her cigarette and her eyes were shiny and brown— "I'll go." I shrugged and said I was going to find some paper first. When I came back out loaded with funnies, Marca was stubbing out her rollie, absent-mindedly disentangling a firefly from her hair. She looked like a drunk alien in a white human sweater. I handed her a dim maglite and we stepped off the flagstone together into the grass that was already dull with impending autumn. My hashish pipe rubbed against the welt on my thigh, and I wondered if a little smoke wouldn't make it feel better. Behind the shed I tried to sort out the dry wood from the rotten. Marca held a whisky in her right hand, and the dim maglite in her left, up and underhanded from the base, like the cops she had seen on TV. This meant she didn't have a free hand to carry any wood-- Marca usually had a whisky in one hand, or some tequila, which always prevented her from carrying other things. She never seemed to mind, though, and I wondered if it had bothered anyone else in her past. She had that one boyfriend, the one I used to know pretty well, and he seemed like the kind of guy who was bothered by a lot of things, so I imagined that she'd heard it before. I didn't want to sound like a broken record I'd never actually heard. Even with the whisky in her hand or her blood, Marca did a pretty good job of following my movements with the bad flashlight, which I appreciated. That's probably what made her a good lover, like in the shower a couple of hours ago in that rental house, while my friends traipsed up and down the stairs above, trying to figure out where all the hot water had gone. Two things about Marca... One: She had taken a bunch of pain killers that someone else (one of the stranger-friends) had given her earlier in the day, because she had sliced her hand open, but she had only admitted how bad it hurt to me. Two: Everyone loved talking to her and listening to her even though she was a shitty guitar player. Three: She had a bunch of bruises on her leg from some fucked up accident, and was also having her period for the first time in almost four months. But she was cool about it. Maybe because she was drunk, or maybe that's why she was drunk, but somehow I doubt it. I guess that's three things. Maybe four. So I picked up the pile of firewood that Marca had helped me pick out with her mis-held flashlight, and the coyotes were calling but I wasn't worried because she was worried so I just had to hold it down. The funny thing is that I had a slingshot in my pocket, I don't know why, maybe because I wanted to have fun even though it never makes sense just to fuck around, and I said to my own self, "Hey man, you're the guy who brought the slingshot, and your hot, drunk, sort-of-girlfriend, out here into the woods, so just like, don't be freaked out about the coyotes." And the funny thing is that we went to make dinner that one night, before all my friends who are actually grown-ups got there, and she said "Woah, we're playing house." Then she asked me what music I wanted to listen to while we cooked dinner, and I said Harry... and before I could even say Nilsson, she had already hit play on a Harry Nilsson record. And I don't believe in fate. But that was a really sweet thing. So we’re up by the fire pit and she’s still holding the flashlight pretty well. I didn't wanna feel too much for this girl so I was trying to seriously just make the fire, not for her, but for our friends who seriously just wanted s'mores. I assembled the kindling and then the drier of the logs and then started to tuck in the kindling. "Wait," she reached out, "Maybe save the crossword." The thing is, it was a crappy crossword puzzle. I mean it was lumped in with the funnies and it was not from a reputable newspaper... but still, she thought that those hypothetical letters in boxes were entertaining, and I recognized that she dug that. I still crumpled up those pages and put them in the fire, though, because I knew that Marca with a drink in her perpetual hand was not actually going to do the crossword. Or if she chose to, it was not going to be from a crappy paper where the crossword was lumped in with the funnies. So I made the kindling tee-pee because that's what my asshole brother who actually got to be a boy-scout pretended he knew how to do all those summers that we spent on Lake Ontario, even though fuck-you-man, we-all-know-how-to-make-a-fire-because-it's-a-basic-life-skill... whatever, that's what he, or I, or whatever version of me who was trying to be whoever Marca wanted her "man" to be... would have done. And I did it. And I put the fucking best logs around it too, because fuck-you-bra, I know how to figure that shit out on my own. And the sad fact is, anybody would. The thing about my brother is that he really is an asshole-- I mean more than just my-asshole-brother-- he's actually an asshole who can't sing, even though people back home pay money to see his concerts, and people in New York City pay a pretty penny more just to hear him sing shitty in venues big and small, Brooklyn and Manhattan, but really, seriously, that dude can't sing. I remember-- I mean actually I think about this all the time-- the time I beat my brother up once, it was just the one time, and I had gotten it right for once in my fucking life, gotten onto the travel soccer team, and I wanted to be the one to tell Mom, but Michael, my-asshole-brother, spilled the beans. And so I grabbed him under his little-kid-white-hairless-armpits, and I dragged him up the slate stone steps. I could hear his baby calves thunking on each step, like Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! and also his tiny shell heels banging on the sharp slate steps as I pulled him over crack after crack in the inlaid stone, all those grooves making new bruises in his little-kid legs. I was bigger. I shoulda known better. We never talked about whether or not he remembered that day. He has songs about a lot of things, but not that. I don't actually know what any of his songs are about. Maybe some of them are about our mom. None of them are about Marca. They only met the one time, and he was able to keep himself from writing a song about her. I can write songs too, you know. You probably didn't know that, or about how I'm a better singer than Michael-my-asshole-brother, but he's the one who people pay money to see, not just back home, but also in New York City, which is a place where lights burn even when you don't need them. So I was making this fire and I knew the thing to do was to blow on the lit kindling, so that even the logs at the back would catch. "Don't blow it out," Marca cried. "It's not a fucking birthday cake," I reminded her. Marca took a few steps back and watched me blow harder and harder on the fledgling flame. "You're like a dragon." Now she was chewing her cuticles and I hoped she wouldn't re-open the cut on her hand, because I pay attention to those things. She said, "Just don't set your beard on fire." This was a fair point. "That would suck," I said. I was right. Her finger was bleeding again. She noticed like a kid notices that they dropped the crust from their sandwich on the ground, and just put the wound back in her mouth, as if somehow I wouldn't notice that she was failing to heal and falling apart. And she was right. I was a dragon. I wasn't the prince that was going to slay a misunderstood magical beast, I was the dragon that someone needed to defend someone else from. It was only me that knew that. Everyone else thought I was a pretty nice guy. The kind of guy who would offer to do the dishes and who could play all the right chords in the right order and who would hold your hand when you thought the mushrooms were starting to take hold and you couldn’t climb down from the tree-house. But I was a beast in my own right. The tops of the trees were diffusing by now... they had all gotten set on fire by the sunset and were smoldering like embers through a kaleidoscope. We shoulda made this fire hours ago, but there were too many raindrops to catch on our tongues, as if the mushrooms had kicked in like they were supposed to. I let my eyes go wherever they wanted and wound up tracing Marca's expressions like the strands of her hair that she left every place I touched. Her hair was some sort of nebulous arrangement of shades, I guess you would call it auburn, but some parts were so so dark. Marca joked that it wouldn't matter what color hair she found in my bed. If there was some other red-head or some brunette, finding their hair wouldn't bug her, because she could always just pretend it was hers. She was't a simple kinda girl. It was around this time that my phone rang in my pocket. I didn't answer it because I was busy playing with fire, and that woulda just been dangerous, not that I've ever cared about danger in my life. But it rang again and then it rang another time and then it rang once more, so I said “Can you watch the fire for a sec, babe…” (Marca called me babe so I figured I should call her babe, even though babe was just what she called everyone... she was no good with names). Anyway on the phone was my brother. "Mom," he said. "No," I said. "You mis-dialed. This is not Mom." "No, Mom," he said. "It's Mom." "Well I know you're not Mom, Mike. I know it's not Mom." "No, it's Mom," he said. "She's dead." "Hm," I could feel myself chewing the inside of my cheek where Marca had run her novocaine tongue before, because her teeth had also gotten kinda fucked up in the accident. And just the same as I could feel Marca's imparted numbness, I could feel her ears on my conversation even while her eyes scanned the patio for light and signs that our friends were headed outside, and while her brain scanned the kitchen for the rest of the whiskey so that she could hold her heart at bay for another twenty minutes or so. "Dad's already dead," I said to Michael. "What?" he didn't understand what that had to do with anything, I could tell. "No, just like, how many parents can you lose before you're thirty?" "Two, apparently." I didn't say anything. Marca tried to blow on the fire, her hair drifting close, so close. It occurred to me that she was less of a princess, and more of a fellow dragon. I imagined her multi-colored head shining glorious in a ball of flame. "What happened?" That was what I was supposed to ask. Instead I said, "Is she better now?" "Better, man? She's dead.” I should tell you that our mother had been sick for some time, with the same cancer that had killed our father two years and four months ago. It wasn't a hard cancer to catch, but it wasn't contagious either. I think they were just really in love, even the whole time. I should also tell you that that wasn't how my mother died. The fact is that she fell down the stairs in our house. The stairs my Dad had built. The stairs that Michael used to run up and down like a maniac and my father would yell "Careful on those stairs!" Michael was gonna die too, but that was somehow less important than the fact that he was making money off of his weird singing in New York City, and the fact that Marca had now switched to vodka, which I knew she hated. Her problems must have been deeper than mine. This was the part where Michael told me about the stairs and where he told me I should probably come home and where I felt the residue of the mushrooms shaking my eyes and still there was no crying, just Marca blowing her dry red lips towards a fire that wasn't gonna start. The phones were hung up before the plans were made. I wasn't ready to leave the patio and the friends and the promise of s'mores and the girl with the not-simple hair. I wasn't ready to go back to a small city where everyone was gonna understand my universal pain. "What's up?" Marca asked, her lips getting redder and drier as she blew through the crisped funnies and the aborted crossword puzzle. "It's my Mom. She's dead.” "But your dad's already dead." I could see my reflection in her eyes even with the dim maglite, which was still somehow brighter than the fire that wouldn't ignite. My beard looked wilted with humidity. "Yeah, guess I'm an orphan today." The thing about Marca, is that we were supposed to fall in love that weekend. But sometimes it's hard when one of you has to switch to vodka and the mushrooms don't kick in like they’re supposed to and your friends' tiny dog is always in danger of getting eaten by hawks or coyotes and you both get that it's a little too much that your heart is too distracted to get properly full. Maybe when the light diffuses, you can't really see, even if you want to.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

The Anti-Crisis

I’m getting squeamish in my old age. When I was a kid, I reveled in showing off loose teeth, completely unable to understand my mother’s revulsion, her hands raised in an admonishing “don’t bring that over here”. Blood and pain were normal elements of childhood— scraped knees, broken bones. Even in college, when my friend told me the story of how he had lost portions of two of his fingers to a table saw, I didn’t flinch. It seemed dramatic and fascinating. Now, gathered around the table for family meal at the restaurant where I work, if the topic even inches towards someone’s stitched finger, I’m the first to chime in with my mother’s ever-ready reproach: “Not dinner table conversation”. I found my heart racing when my boyfriend told me the story of the time he broke his wrist snowboarding. I watch kids fail to stick the landing at the park, and wonder if I could ever bring myself to give a child a skate-board, while my inner vision becomes a mirrored-hallway of broken ankles and bleeding palms. And yet, if the need arose, there is no doubt in my mind that I would be able to act. Years ago my mom cut her finger— pretty badly, she thought— but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it, so she ran across the street to a neighbor’s house to have the damage assessed. Recently my sister sliced her hand open cutting an avocado. Would I have been able to help, I wondered, or would I have been paralyzed, like the time Jamie Brown fainted when someone got a nose-bleed at that slumber party? Listening to my sister tell the story of her paring-knife-nightmare, gripped with terror at the imagery my over-active imagination was conjuring, I tried to step inside the situation as a participant. And I realized that actually, it would have been fine. I would have looked at her hand, like our neighbor looked at my mom’s all those years ago, and like my mom did in this particular case with my sister. I would have said, yes, it’s deep, but you’re going to be fine, and let’s drive to the hospital so they can get you stitched up. No big deal. What I’m finding is, a lot of my mountains are shrinking into mole hills. Yeah, I’m squeamish, probably because the reality of my own mortality, as well as that of those I love, is a bit sharper than it used to be. Plus, you know, general anxiety. But these mountains— these crises, if you will— they haven’t turned out to be as devastating as a dramatically-inclined former me would have imagined. Actually, that’s wrong: some things have been devastating. I think what I miscalculated was my own ability— and the abilities of those around me— to cope with devastation. It turns out that we can, in fact, look under the blood-soaked paper-towel and figure out what needs to be done. I haven’t been compelled to write in this forum very often in the past few months. I think part of that is because I’m not exactly in quarter life crisis anymore. First things first: I’m not really at “quarter life”. At twenty-seven, even to say this is “one-third life” is somewhere between reasonable and optimistic. But more importantly, I wouldn’t really say that I’m in crisis anymore. Am I completely satisfied? No. Do I know where my life is going? No. Am I making lots of money and on my way to lots of babies? Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. But are these things Code Red Level “Crises”? No, they’re not. I’m not even sure what a Code Red Level Crisis would look like for me, today. Even the recent bouts of drama that have entered both my professional and personal lives, a level of drama that I’m not exactly accustomed to, have failed to elicit any sort of crisis-level-reaction. The only sensation these situations leave me with is a desire to cut and run. Part of me wants to say: “I don’t have time. I’m too old for this shit.” But I also wonder if this isn’t some mode of self-preservation that I’ve honed, a fight-or-flight response to people or scenarios that touch me in the deep place somewhere between my heart and my gut that I would rather never be prodded. That feeling of “I don’t know how to fix this” has come to be met by an almost disturbingly accessible “and I’m not going to.” Caveat: this does not apply to, say, broken lunch dates, or spats like, “Babe, why are you crying, I didn’t realize that your nostalgic connection to the Goo Goo Dolls ran so deep, I’ll never say anything negative about Johnny Rzeznik’s hair ever again,” (Just kidding, my fella would never badmouth the Goo Goo Dolls). It’s only the disputes that leave you nauseous, like you got punched in the stomach and suddenly realize you have the flu, and in spite of your best efforts, cannot for the life of you think of a way to rectify the perceived slight, aside from forgiving yourself and walking away. This is not to say that such a response is correct— though it is, in some ways, helpful. But I think it’s rooted in the knowledge that there are plenty of things— deeply messy, painful things— that can be overcome. They simply must be. And if those didn’t become Code Red Level Crises, well then, the mountain-makers of everyday drivel (with whom every waitress is familiar— “I’m so sorry that the limitations of our menu have absolutely ruined your entire life”) inch slightly closer to the chopping block. When I was twenty-four I was discussing the concept of (less-than-anticipated) pregnancy with a co-worker who was twenty-nine or thirty. She told me the story of the time she thought she was pregnant, and how she had taken pregnancy test after pregnancy test. “Wow,” I said, “and they were all negative!” She cracked up. “No! They were all positive.” “Oh….” “But, you know, then you do what you’ve gotta do. And in my case that was making the appointment… God the clinic was awful, just all these girls in smocks and socks… I didn’t even tell the guy, because I knew he was gonna read into it somehow. The night before, I fucked my best friend for hours, and then he drove me in the morning. If it ever happens to you, don’t let anyone make you feel like you should feel bad. I’ve never regretted anything less in my life.” I was shocked by how unscathed this woman was. Unplanned pregnancy! Abortion! She had survived a Code Red Level Crisis, and was able to laugh about it! At a certain point, everyone has faced a thing, or some things. Admittedly, none of my things are as major as the crises I’ve seen around me. But what I do know is that everyone close to me has borne their crisis with grace, aplomb, and probably a vast amount of private grief and solitude that I will never be privy to. I’m also pretty sure that no one is keeping score— that, after all, is a juvenile game. We might call this absence of crisis the process of becoming “jaded”. And I might be just that— jaded. That said, I still get excited about fireflies, and Christmas, and the Goo Goo Dolls. I even still get googly-eyed. So I would say that I am not too jaded. Just better equipped to handle the everyday crises that would leave a younger woman too afraid to look under the paper towel and know she has to apply pressure.

[inquarterlifecrisis]

[inquarterlifecrisis]

People You May Know

[inquarterlifecrisis]

[inquarterlifecrisis]

April Fool