Year 31two

Feeling Good, Feeling Great I just reread my first post in this blog, “The First Post of the Second Year,” which, as is my style, came a few days after the actual anniversary of moving to Chicago. I run behind, it’s true. Readers (if you’re out there?) may have noticed this, since I haven’t actually written anything since June. But I can explain! A year ago my life felt precarious and uncertain. I wasn’t certain if I would stay in Chicago. Thanks to some fortunate career developments, I now know that I will be here for at least a few more years. These fortunate career developments also meant that I had much less free time over the summer and wasn’t able to write as much. Meanwhile, I will be published in two projects that are coming out this fall, which is incredibly exciting! I think I’m ready to attach my name to more writing. Time to close this tumblr. Peace. bye

Tomorrow I will do something that scares me. I feel the heightened sense and tunnel vision that I used to get before performances when I still played piano. It’s like my focus on the big event crowds out all other stimuli. I haven’t felt this nervous in awhile, and I kind of hate it. It would be easy to back out, but I’d disappoint the people to whom I committed. I also believe in what we are doing together. Knowing that I will have them beside me makes it easier. Instead of backing out, I’m going to push through. That’s what my housemate Vivian used to say when I told her I was scared of making small talk with strangers at running club or giving a presentation for work. “Push through, lady. Push through.” After I pushed through, the sweet satisfaction of completion always cancelled out my nerves and antsy anticipation. Talk to me in 24 hours and I will be loving my life. Until then, I’m going to sit with the discomfort.

Last week I was making chicken when my pepper grinder fell off my baker’s rack, causing the top portion of the grinder to shatter into a million little plastic pieces. I looked at the remaining peppercorns and thought, “screw it, I like pepper,” then poured them onto the unsuspecting chicken. This was not a wise decision. I ate the chicken for lunch the next day at work, whereupon I discovered that, actually, no one likes pepper that much. Each of the many times I bit into a whole peppercorn, I was reminded that I can take “waste not, want not” too far. By lunch’s end I had filled a napkin with all the peppercorns I had picked out of my chicken and rice. To my coworkers, it probably looked like I was stockpiling rat pellets in a paper towel, but they were all too polite to say anything. Even after I started to feel a vague pain in my mouth from crunching three peppercorns in one bite, I still refused to cave and buy a lunch from one of the many nearby restaurants. This is partly because I have an entry-level salary and can’t afford those $7.75 “fast-casual” sandwiches, thank you very much. Yet even if money weren’t an issue, I still would have eaten every bite of that goddamn pepper chicken. It’s the principle of the thing. In my journey of learning how to cook, I’ve found that eating everything I make forces me to do better. After eating one disastrous red lentil and rice mush, I never made the same mistake again. The same can be said of my peppercorn chicken debacle – hell, I already bought a new peppercorn grinder. That’s what I thought as I alternately picked peppercorns out of and tentatively chewed at my peppercorn chicken – Never again! But I also thought, damn it, self, you’re not a quitter! You can finish this chicken! And I did, unfortunately. I was a much pickier eater as a child, and there is no way that I would have finished that chicken. I also quit many things as a child, not just eating certain things. From infancy to my 20s, here is a list of my desertions. Things I have quit • Preschool • Ballet • Orchestra • Viola • Catholic school • Medieval Renaissance Reenactments (my parents never actually let me start because they thought this was weird. Haters.) • Newspaper • College service fraternity • Ultimate Frisbee • Teeball/Softball/Whatever that thing I played as a child was called • My first high school • My last blog • My second-to-last blog A few weeks back I was talking to a friend about how I worry I am a flake because I quit so many things growing up. “Well, let’s talk about it.” She responded. “What did you quit?” “Field hockey,” I quickly answered. “I played my freshman year of high school, then missed tryouts sophomore year because I transferred to a new high school. I still did summer league and tried out my junior year, but I didn’t make it.” She hesitated, the way friends do when they don’t want to hurt you. “Well,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like you quit. It sounds like you tried something and it didn’t work out.” Then she continued. “I think sometimes you’re hard on yourself and don’t want to end things because you think you’re a quitter. But if it’s not working out, it’s not working! Like, you don’t like movies, and your last blog was all about movies. Of course you didn’t enjoy your last blog.” “Oh, yeah.” I murmured, thinking of senior year of high school, when my friend Phil and I were in class together. “Hey, what did you choose as your favorite quote for first period’s assignment?” I asked. “Quitters never win and winners never quit, but people who never win and never quit are idiots,” he quickly responded. Remind me of that the next time I mess up chicken. Sometimes, it’s better to quit.

This Sunday morning I was supposed to wake up at 8:45 a.m., snooze until 9 a.m., eat breakfast and then make my way to a 10 a.m. yoga class. Instead, I woke up at 10:27 a.m. and staggered into the kitchen at 10:46 a.m. “Good morning!” My roommate Eric said, laughing as I squinted my eyes against the light. He was fully dressed and in the middle of cooking. Meanwhile, I had some fierce bed head and was wearing pajamas covered with pictures of sheep drinking coffee. “Nnngh,” I grunted. “I overslept.” “Is something wrong? Did you have something to do?” He asked. “Nnngh, no, just yoga,” I responded, a sheep-covered mass moving toward the bathroom. There is no real penalty to me skipping yoga this morning, which I was reminded of when I saw my yoga teacher getting on the el after leaving the same class that I missed. “I’m sorry, I overslept and missed class this morning,” I said as I got off the car that he was boarding. “It’s okay,” he said with a laugh, removing his earbuds. “But now I’m going to brunch!” “Great!” He responded with a thumbs-up sign. This is the second time that my yoga teacher has recognized me on the el, and as one friend gently pointed out, it might be a sign that I am doing too much yoga. “You’re going to hurt your foot again,” she said. I know that she’s right, but I also know that going to yoga on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday is one of the few things in my life that I feel like I can control, and I need that sense of authority over my own life. If I had to rate my life on a scale of one to ten, I would put it at a solid nine. I have wonderful friends, I like the way my career is developing, and Chicago’s weather is finally changing for the better. At the same time, only one of my friends in Chicago has known me for more than a year and a half, my career is developing rather than established, and sometimes it feels everything is changing, not just the weather. My is full of moving parts, and I want them to stop moving. I want things to be solid and static, not shifting. I realize this is a lot to ask for, and I probably won’t get what I want in the next five years. Still, I’m trying to create some sense of reliability in life by establishing routine in the little things, like my yoga routine. Although I typically identify as more free-spirited than Type A, I’ve started to worry that my desire for control may be taking an unhealthy turn. Maybe I just need to accept that I’m in a transient time of life, rather than trying to control everything. When I start to worry about how I seek control, I take comfort in the unplanned days when I forget to set an alarm and go to brunch at a different restaurant than expected with a friend who gently points out that what I thought was a skirt is actually a dress. Our conversation went something like this: “You look very Duggar chic today.” “Thanks! I always have a hard time figuring out how to wear this skirt because the waistband is so big. I think I’m maybe supposed to wear it high-waisted and tuck a shirt into it? But I never do.” “That’s a dress.” “No, it’s a maxi skirt. My sister gave it to me and she said it’s a skirt.” “No, dude, that’s definitely a dress. Let’s go to the bathroom and figure it out.” [A few minutes later….] “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” Sometimes, I’m not in control, not even of what I’m wearing. I’m relieved I can still laugh at that.

Aside from my devotion to Diane Nash and Ronda Rousey, I try not to admire strangers. I worry that looking up to celebrities and historical figures can have a disempowering effect. If I view a 1960s civil rights activist with whom I have little in common as an activist model, I run the risk of viewing social change as something I myself can never do. This in turn removes my own sense of social responsibility, because if I can’t work to help create a better world, then no one can blame me for not even trying. However, if I look up to my friends as role models for social responsibility, then I remind myself that together we all have the potential to create a better world day by day, one choice at a time. One of my friend role models is Dara, who graduated from college a few years before me and initially worked in prison education. Dara did a lot of things that would be challenging in any environment, like running a workshop on race or facilitating weekly discussions on food justice. Meanwhile, she did all of this while working in a prison. Dara shows how lucky I am to be surrounded by people who are both good friends and excellent role models for social accountability. Dara and I stayed in touch all the ways that people our age do when living far apart, like skyping, texting and sending sporadic emails. During one skype session, I noticed that Dara had a quote written on a placard above her head, but it was partially obscured. “The best way out… the best way out… what does that say?” I asked. “The best way out is always through,” Dara answered as she munched on a salad that she had made after a long day at work. “It’s a Robert Frost quote.” I was struck by the simple wisdom of the quote that Dara was using to propel her through a difficult, demanding job. “The best way out is always through.” I had never used this approach to stressful times in my life. Instead, I went around, diagonal to and far, far away from what stressed me. I avoided difficult times in my life by surfing social media, listening to my headphones on maximum volume and always, always changing the topic. I never went through. I thought that I didn’t have the strength for that. I remember Dara’s quote last week when I got negative news on the personal, professional and physical fronts. “Well,” I weakly joked with a friend whom I had already confided in about the personal stress after I found out my bad professional news. “At least I have something to distract me from the personal stress!” But really, it didn’t feel like a pleasant distraction. Instead, it felt like everything was raining down on me at once and I didn’t know how to cope, other than taking the old tactic of trying to distract myself with consumption. I tried to remember Dara’s quote, “the best way out is always through,” and tell myself that’s what I was doing. I was going through shit, and to get through shit, sometimes you have to be in it. “I’m in it,” I told myself as I took deep breaths during the many yoga classes that I self-medicated with last week. “I’m in it,” I thought as I sipped coffee at a job where I suddenly found it much harder to concentrate. “I’m in it,” I thought as I told yet another friend what a shit-tastic week it had been. And now, I’m through.

When we were 21, my friend Jamie and I decided to replace New Year’s resolutions with yearly catchphrases. Jamie got the idea from our mutual friend Paul, who helped her to choose the catchphrase, “2011: Run with it.” “We agreed that in 2010, I was too hesitant and unsure of myself. In 2011, I’m going to try to embrace things more,” Jamie explained. “We also considered 2011: Roll with it, but we thought that was too passive.” Jamie looked at me. “Do you have any ideas for a yearly catchphrase?” “2011: Balls to the wall is the only way to reach the wall,” I answered. A few years and catchphrases later, Jamie would recount the story to a small circle of friends. “I remember when we first chose catchphrases and you said, without even thinking about it, 2011: Balls to the wall is the only way to reach the wall.” Our friend Anahi laughed so loudly that strangers at the neighboring table turned, because Anahi has a laugh that draws stares and Jamie is the kind of friend who can get that laugh. Jamie makes a lot of people laugh, actually. She’s charming and smart, with the kind of humor that welcomes you in. That’s why Jamie’s 2014 catchphrase felt so memorable. “2014: I’m 24, not 14,” she said. “I realized that I still have a lot of the same social insecurities that I did when I was 14. When I ask people if they want to hang out I worry that they’ll say no, but they’re usually like, I’d love to! I want to stop second-guessing myself.” I’ve been thinking a lot about Jamie’s catchphrase lately, because on a whim I decided to revisit my favorite music from high school, like the Postal Service, Bloc Party, Lupe Fiasco and the Roots. When I was 15, I regularly laid awake in bed listening to the Postal Service, only to hastily turn off the music when I thought any family members walking by might hear me and yell at me for not going to bed at a more reasonable hour. Once, I accidentally punched myself in the breast while attempting to grab my CD player off my chest. I woke up the next day with some very unpleasant swelling. Because I was an insecure 15-year-old, I tried to at least appreciate the brief increase in cup size. When I exit a romantic entanglement, I can always tell if I am over someone by how I feel when I listen to a song that reminds me of them. If I listen to the song without feeling upset, then I know that I’m good. I developed this emotional barometer after an unfortunate college crush left me unable to listen to Jaymay’s “Grey or Blue” without descending into sniffles. I thought of this barometer last week while I revisited my old playlists. It was comforting to see how songs that once meant so much to me still felt important, even the ones I hadn’t listened to for years. At the same time, I didn’t find myself missing the sleep-deprived mornings when I listened to “On” by Bloc Party while driving to school, or the solitary nights that I memorized Postal Service lyrics about the freckles in our eyes. When I wasn’t lying awake listening to music, my 15-year-old self laid awake replaying the stupid things she said that day and wondering what would come next. Listening to my 15-year-old self’s favorite playlists showed me that I’ve over the old me, and I’m glad of that.

I first read William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say” when I was a senior in high school. The youngest of four, by then my house had emptied out as my older siblings moved on to lives and pantries of their own. Still, when my English teacher asked us what the poem made us think of, I remembered the pizza battles of 1997-2004. When we were little kids my brothers and I used to fight over who would get leftover Papa John’s for lunch the next day. As we grew older and my brothers morphed into teenagers who would sleep till noon, I took the battle to a new front by starting to eat pizza for breakfast. Then my brothers retaliated with a new tactic: midnight snack pizza. As I laid upstairs in my bed and heard the telltale beep of our microwave, I cursed them with the strongest words that my ten-year-old self knew. There isn’t much opportunity for food stealing in my life nowadays. My roommates and I buy our food separately, though occasionally I borrow a missing ingredient. I like this, I think. Before moving to Chicago, I lived in an intentional community that shared a simple food budget and cooked together. We didn’t write poems to each other about purloined food, but there was a poetry in the arch of my housemate’s eyebrows when she found I had been hiding the last mozzarella sticks, or the snort of another roommate when she saw that I had eaten the last cookie. I miss that. I considered living in a similar community in Chicago, but I chose a more typical roommate arrangement for a variety of reasons. One of them was my desire to control what I ate and purchased at the grocery store. I wanted to be able to pick out the hearty bread and bourgie snacks that I desired, rather than bending my will to a communal decision-making process. I’m extremely happy with my current living situation, and I don’t regret my decision. At the same time, there’s a sweet intimacy that emerges from stealing your loved ones’ snacks, especially when they’re family. My siblings now live too far away for me to hear their nighttime trips to the microwave, but I still miss the pizza battles of 1997-2004. (To read about Lam Thuy Vo's visual interpretation of "This is just to say," check out the Fusion post where I originally saw this video.)

My friend Dan, who is patient enough to both read this blog and exchange letters with me, recently wrote that he was disappointed I never befriended my favorite Art Institute guard, she of the rhine-stoned headband and infinite friendliness. “That story made me sad,” Dan wrote. Me too, friend. It’s sad when you pick someone out as a potential friend, then the crush never comes to fruition. This isn’t the first time it’s happened to me – I never talked enough to a cool guy in my Theology class, and I left Nashville wishing to better know my friend’s activist roommate. Still, it is the first time that I blogged about a friend crush and posted an ad on Craigslist’s Missed Connections. A few months ago I visited the Art Institute while wearing a shirt that says, “Reading Is Sexy.” As I picked up my coat at the coat check, the student working the coat check said, “Reading is sexy. I agree.” “Thanks!” I said. “I was an English major.” “Oh, I’m an English major. English major pride!” He shouted and thrust his fist in the air. I responded with my own English major power fist. I haven’t seen my English major buddy at the coat check since then, and I don’t know if we’ll ever exchange salutes again. However, I did see my favorite Art Institute guard the last time I visited the museum on a weekend. We nodded and smiled at each other, but that was it.

I had my first taste of coffee when I interviewed for a high school job at Starbucks. “Mmm,” I stammered as the hiring manager eagerly awaited my reaction. “Delicious.” “You can really taste the citrus in that blend,” he said. “Oh, yes,” I said, trying to ignore the bitter taste in my mouth. “Yes, you can.” I swore off coffee throughout high school, the exception at a competitive high school where sleep deprivation was the norm. My eighteen-year-old self had no interest in Starbucks’ employee discounts, but I needed a job and it was the first place that a friend recommended me. My coffee abstinence continued into college, when I instead relied on chocolate-covered peanuts and Mariah playlists to get me through late nights of studying. Junior year, though, I studied abroad in Central America and spent two days a week with the Guzman family, who drank cafecitos every afternoon. “Marie and I don’t drink coffee,” I explained to Olivia as she prepared our first afternoon snack. “But our classmate Frances can drink enough coffee for three.” “I’ll make you and Marie tea,” Olivia responded, then prepared two cups of tea and enough coffee for five people. “Oh my god, I can’t drink that much coffee,” Frances said, clutching her stomach, as we rode home in a microbus. “They know I’m joking when I say you can drink enough coffee for three people, right?” I asked Frances. “I think they know that you’re joking, but they’re still making way more coffee than I can drink,” Sarah responded. “Lo siento,” I said. A few weeks later Olivia walked out to our group balancing a tray with five mugs, then shook her hand in frustration. “Wakala,” she said in an accent that I could never perfect. “I forgot the tea and only made coffee.” “Oh, it’s okay,” I said. “We can drink coffee.” Marie agreed, and that was the beginning of my relationship with coffee. Every Monday and Wednesday I sipped a black cup of coffee, because milk was scarce and the accompanying cookies made sugar irrelevant. I didn’t put a lot of thought into the decision to drink black coffee. It just made sense. I got back into coffee this fall after my roommate Anna won a free Keurig. “I can’t believe I got this thing for free!” She marveled as we stood in Costco, glancing at the Keurig machine’s price tag while pricing different coffee brands. “Yeah, I know,” I said as we settled on a coffee brand to share. Anna brought flavored creamer, too, but I decided to drink my coffee black. This time, I thought about the decision. Since moving to a big city where I knew three people, I’ve learned to take pride in being tough. I like to think of myself this way because it makes me feel more secure. When I wake up and have a cup of black coffee, I feel like a badass who is not only tough enough to take some bitter coffee, but who can also beat any challenge the day brings. Greeting the day as a badass is how I survive. I thought a lot about my commitment to greeting each day as a badass when I read an Ask Polly column, “How Do I Stop Being So Obsessed With My Boyfriend?” Polly advises her reader, “Think like a beast, like a mountain, like a towering, essential, unimpeachable warrior. You are taking what you want, you are fulfilling your manifest destiny, you are at the center of the frame, you’re pulling in all of the focus, swallowing the landscape like an earthquake.” It sounds like Ask Polly is advising her reader to wake up and greet each day as a badass. I can get behind this advice, especially for someone who is struggling to define themselves outside of a relationship. If Ask Polly were advising her reader what to drink, she’d probably suggest a hot cup of black coffee. “I’m tough,” this reader could think as she sips the coffee. I would agree with that reader if I joined her for a morning cup, but I’d sit down with a cup of milky, cinnamon-spiked coffee. I’ve moved away from black coffee because I worry my insistence on thinking of myself as tough made me forget the kind of vulnerability and relationships that taught me to love coffee. When I studied abroad in Central America, I didn’t think of myself as tough. I saw myself as an outsider with a weak stomach and a lot to learn. Since I realized how much I had to learn, I was more willing to accept help from others. When life was a hot, bitter cup of coffee, I welcome milk. (Okay, I actually stopped consuming dairy products after ice cream led to some seriously unfortunate traveler’s diarrhea, but you get the metaphor.) Nowadays, I drink with milk with coffee because I want to start the day open to accepting help from others and thriving through mutual badassery. We are all still learning, and all of our goons have goons.

I’m sitting at my desk drinking a beer on Friday the 13th and thinking about how today is supposed to be cursed. I had forgotten the date until someone at a work meeting said, “Oh, yeah, today is Friday the 13th.” “And Galentine’s Day!” chimed in another coworker. The first coworker wrinkled their brow. “What is that?” In my family, we know Friday the 13th as my maternal grandpa’s birthday. He died when I was a baby, his tall body worn out by a life of smoking and caring for six children. My mom’s three brothers used to hide Grandpa’s cigarettes in his sock drawer, but that didn’t stop him from finding the poison that took him from us. We never actually called him Grandpa. I was unable to call him anything at all, lying in my crib and cooing at the man who would die before I could remember him. My siblings, though, called him Flying Penguin. He had given us a small stuffed penguin for Christmas one year, and after acting out a story in which the penguin flew to freedom, Grandpa was forever known as Flying Penguin. I don’t know where the penguin is now, or if we even have it anymore. Maybe it really did fly to freedom. But come Friday the 13th, I still smile a little and think of Flying Penguin. After Friday the 13th comes Valentine’s Day, a day that’s supposed to be all about love. My reaction to this: meh. As a single, twenty-something woman, I recognize the pop cultural expectation that I should be weeping into a bowl of ice cream or drinking with unattached ladyfriends as we celebrate “Galentine’s Day,” whatever that is. Really, I just feel indifferent. It’s a reminder of this January, when a boo pursuit failed and I remarked to a friend, “I feel like I should be more upset than I am.” It’s not that I don’t like companionship or affection; I do. But I don’t want one day of expectations to keep me from seeing the love and support that I have in my life right now. I have hope for future successful boo pursuits, but until then I am happy to drink beer on a Friday night while I listen to Roommate #1 cut Roommate #2’s hair in the bathroom. She lines him up every few weeks. It hasn’t always been this way. When I wobbled at the beginning of my twenties, Valentine’s Day was one of many things that messed with my emotions and made me feel, well, wobbly. I guarded against the feeling by celebrating the birthday of a man who died long before I was born: Frederick Douglass. Though slavery prevented Frederick Douglass from knowing his true birth date, he celebrated his birthday on Valentine’s Day because his mother called him “my little Valentine.” While others celebrated Valentine’s Day, I reminded roommates of apartments past that it was Frederick Douglass’s birthday, proclaimed it in college classes and posted the good news on social media: Frederick Douglass #OnlyManINeed. One of my favorite romantic movies, "Medicine for Melancholy," centers around two black San Franciscans, Jo and Micah, who spend a day together after having a one-night stand. At one point Jo remarks to Micah that February is Black History Month because it stems from Black History Week, which was the week including both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays. Learning this made me feel slightly less awkward about Black History Month being the shortest month. Slightly. Regardless of Black History Month’s length, I worry that the lack of a corresponding “White History Month” implies that to be white in the US is to be the norm. Black History Month makes me think of a news organization that employs all of its black journalists in a “Black Opinions” section, then staffs the rest of the newsroom with an overwhelmingly white staff. White voices become the default. I also worry that the shallow nature of Black History Month lessons taught me to overlook the rich differences between different black people’s experiences in the US. I was assigned Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of a Slave three times in high school, but I still needed a movie to teach me how his birthday led to Black History Month. One of the things I so appreciate about Medicine for Melancholy is how it shows two black people discussing and disagreeing about race’s role in their personal lives and their city’s development. My younger self’s Black History Month lessons, which lionized Martin Luther King Jr. but overlooked the conflict between SNCC and SCLC, didn’t teach me to expect such disagreement between people of a shared minority background. I’m not sure how Friday the 13th, Flying Penguin’s birtday, Galentine’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Frederick Douglass’s birthday and Black History Month all tie together. Honestly, I may currently be exhibiting my tendency for discursive thinking. In History class, I was always the kid who would go off on tangents and ask the teacher annoyingly specific questions. My weakness for tangents hurt my absorption of history, but I also suspect that in many cases, such as the teaching of black history, the lessons themselves were pretty lacking. I can’t undo what I’ve learned or misunderstood in the past. But this February, I’m trying to appreciate the present and future without letting expectations from history cloud my vision. It’s a start.

I wondered why he had come to class. For rest, perhaps? To unwind from a difficult day? I went to yoga because I’ve started to sense the creeping approach of a mild depression. It’s been hard to sleep the last three months, and it’s tough to motivate myself to do anything. Whether this listlessness stems from the winter blues or something more personal than Chicago’s dreary winter, I can’t say. What I can say is that I want to break it. I want to get out of bed at the first alarm and fall into bed excited for rest, rather than dreading a ninety-minute wait for sleep. I want to sleep soundly, in my own bed with my own blankets. I promise I won’t snore.

I used to love Tiger Woods. My childhood devotion had nothing to do with sports and everything to do with our shared birthday: December 30. Five days after Christmas and one day before New Year’s Eve, it’s a hard day to love. In elementary school, I got used to friends missing birthday parties because they were out of town. Some years, our own trips to visit extended family meant that I didn’t have any birthday party. “Tiger understands,” I’d comfort myself on those trips. “He gets it.” When I was a nineteen-year-old, old enough to have graduated from class-wide invites to birthday parties and pin the tail on the donkey, it came out that Tiger Woods had spent serious amounts of time with women other than his wife in his birthday suit. Sure, two strangers’ marriage and struggles with monogamy are none of my business, but I just couldn’t maintain my birthday buddy loyalty to Tiger. It was time to move on. Since getting over Tiger, I’ve learned to love my birthday. Conveniently located one day before New Year’s Eve, the back-to-back festivities can’t be beat. Also, celebrating my birthday at the turn of the calendar year makes me appreciate the beginnings that come with every new age. But my favorite thing? My favorite thing about my birthday is that no one remembers it. Having a birthday that people forget has taught me to advocate for my own pleasure. If I want to have a party, I plan the party. If I want to visit my friend Michael in Missouri, I buy the Greyhound ticket. That’s what I did for this last birthday, and I found a sweet liberation celebrating in a city full of strangers. No one but Michael knew it was my birthday unless I told them, giving me the choice to share as much or as little as I wanted. When I did share, it was on my terms. “It’s my birthday,” I told the woman behind the counter at Natalie’s Cakes & More. “Happy birthday!” She said as I paid for my own birthday cupcakes. I thanked her, then took the receipt and left. My last time in St. Louis, it was 2013 and I was waiting for the Megabus that would take me to my new life in Chicago. I didn’t have a job or a lease, but I had a job interview and a friend who would let me sleep on her couch. Somehow, this was enough. That first year I memorized a list of responses for when people asked why I moved to Chicago – good public transportation, friends, reasonable cost of living, friends who would let me crash with them – and when pressed, I can even refer to the pro-con chart I made about the decision. Less frequently, I’d admit that I spent 23 years trying to impress and please other people, whether they were relatives who forgot my birthday or teachers who led the Spanish class in a chorus of “Cumpleaños Féliz” for the star student. For a change, I wanted to prioritize making myself happy. I wanted to buy my own cupcakes.

I listen to my headphones real loud. The habit started in high school, when my mom once yelled at me, “You’re going to get hearing loss!” Mom is probably right, but what she didn’t realize is that I was looking for a different kind of loss. By silencing the outside world with a beating soundtrack, I wanted to lose track of a life where I said “really” instead of “real” and always tried to do the right thing. When expectations got too limiting, I tuned out. I was listening to my headphones at max volume and walking down the sidewalk during lunch the other day, when suddenly, I felt my feet locking together. “!!!!!!!” I screamed as I fell forward and took the brunt of the hit on my knees. My headphones kept me from hearing what I shouted, but I am pretty sure that if Mom had heard, she would have been upset. “?????????” The delivery man pushing a cart behind me asked something with a look of a concern, and I nodded yes, still unable to hear. The cart rolled on. I rolled from one side to the other, then turned off my music. Oh, god. I couldn’t feel my knees. “Are you all right?” yelled a man in a suit old enough to be my father. “Yes,” I said, hobbling away, “Thank you.” I limped all the way to the Art Institute, where I verified that, no, my knees weren’t seriously injured, but damn, was that concrete going to leave a bruise. Then I slowly made my way to the Modern section and enjoyed art that doesn’t let you turn up the volume. The Art Institute is where I spend my lunch breaks when I need a rest from the ringing phones and hold music of work. Sometimes I see other museum-goers listening to audio guides that give you information about the exhibits. They wear headphones, but theirs are meant to teach them more about their surroundings, rather than block them out. I envy that approach to the unknown. When I was a seventh-grader besieged with scary new feelings, like crushes on boys and fights with friends, I channeled it into poetry. Since then, I’ve tried to box out my feelings with eating, surfing the internet, intellectual arguments and headphones. Now, I’ve started to listen to headphones again after my last pair broke, leaving me without a soundtrack for a week. I missed the morning pump-up mix, and I still listen to music at a loud volume. Not as loud as before, though. The next time someone yells at me, I want to hear them.

Sometimes I fall into thinking of my past and current selves as neat little binaries: college and post-college. teetotaling and tippling. catholic and atheist. child and grown. against legal abortion and for legal abortion. skinny and fuller. It’s weird to act like I was a different person when I believed differently, because I can still find traces of those past beliefs in present me. When I went to mass every Sunday, I used to get frustrated with people who would sit on the aisle rather than scooting into the middle. I saw church as a place of togetherness, where we shouldn’t be afraid to rub thighs with strangers or trip over our teenage neighbor’s growing feet. Wherever there is cramped contact between you, I am with you, God says. But it was hard to get this message across to a chapel of college students staring at their feet as they crouched in prayer. I don’t go to church anymore, but I still find myself thirsting for institutions where we can connect with others. Unfortunately, church is not the only community gathering place where we’re afraid to touch one another. For example, I attend a weekly community meeting where I am often among the last to arrive. I’m still not sure if that’s because I tend to run late, or because everyone else realizes that the free pizza runs out early. A few weeks ago I arrived to find all the seats in the back were taken, likely because people were too shy to sit by the organizers at the front. Frustrated, I rammed through the full back row to a seat in between two strangers on the far side of the room. This was a risky decision, because I whacked someone with my bag and almost upended their delicious free pizza. Crowded contact, indeed! The above example makes me sound like a cranky latecomer, which I am. But what of the beauty that comes from taking a seat at the front with a fellow newcomer? What about the stranger who sat next to me today at the same event, only for us to discover that we attended the same middle and high school? She’s the first person I’ve met in Chicago from my hometown. If we hadn’t sat next to a stranger tonight, neither of us would have left knowing a fellow hometown girl. I went to church yesterday. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and I wanted to spend the day doing something that mattered. Dr. King deserves more than a three-day weekend and three questions on a standardized test, but that’s what I got of him as a child. Grown woman me tries not to let that past thinking slip into present me. My friend, Flynn, invited me to an event at a church in Bronzeville where King preached during his time in Chicago. “Dress normal,” he told me in a text message response to my inquiry about dress code. Flynn didn’t realize that it’s hard to dress normal when you’re going to a place that makes you feel naked. “I didn’t come with a congregation. Where should I sit?” I asked an organizer after walking into the sanctuary and seeing all of the seats reserved for different churches. I rubbed my shoe against one blue jeaned leg, then the other. My pants weren’t even clean. “What church do you belong to?” “I don’t.” She directed me to the overflow seating in the balcony, where I found Flynn in a t-shirt with the logo of his community organization. At least his casual clothing made sense. “It’s all congregation seating,” he told me, then directed me to sit with his church. I sat in between an elderly woman who Committed to her hymn singing and an older deacon. “Remember,” the deacon said, placing his hand on my shoulder as I sat down. “We don’t bite. Just remember that, and you’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure who the “we” was – Catholics? Black Catholics, like at Flynn’s church in a 92% Black neighborhood, or Black people, period? Religious people, who do sometimes trigger a fear of judgment and misunderstanding in me? Or strangers in general? One of the most important things that I’ve realized in contact with people who differ from me is that I over think everything ever, and my attempts to be sensitive can consequently lapse into strained social gymnastics. Rather than asking him who “we” was, I settled back into my seat and enjoyed the crowded contact. Oh, what crowded contact it was. Besides singing numerous hymns, we also heard organizers ask invited elected officials if they would support the organization’s political stances. When the questions came to politicians who did not attend, we stood as a group, extended our hands in prayer, and prayed that God would “change their hearts and bend their minds toward justice.” If someone asked, I could legitimately say that I spent Martin Luther King Day praying for absentee aldermen. Sometimes when I extended my hand in prayer I bumped the older woman next to me, and sometimes she jostled me while waving her arms to a hymn. There were other times when I had to crane my neck toward the deacon as he whispered explanations of the different politicians’ backgrounds. Once, Flynn dropped a program on my head and I thought he was trying to get fresh with a scalp massage. There was a lot of cramped contact, and none of it was planned. But we were all there in that contact, and though I don’t believe in God, I can believe in that presence.

My friend Michael thinks I am working right now. He’s busy making monkey bread for tonight’s New Year’s Eve party while I sit at the kitchen table “doing homework.” I am sure that I will finish my homework before resuming party set-up duties. First, though, I simply had to read an interview with a favorite writer, scan her twitter feed, skim two linked articles and refill my water bottle. As we speak, I am fighting off the urge to look up nae nae dance videos on vine. Now, I’m squelching the desire to look up the proper spelling and capitalization of nae nae. I used to feel guilty about procrastinating. I thought that delaying projects meant I was lazy, weak-willed or just way, way too into twitter. Though I remain concerned about how the internet affects my brain, I no longer shame myself for putting off what I could do tomorrow. My viewpoint changed after I realized that I often delay projects because I am afraid that I won’t do a good enough job. I worry that I’ll write a cruddy opening for my birthday blog post, or I won’t memorize enough phrases for homework, or I’ll accidentally decorate the living room so that it looks like Melrose Place and my roommates will both regret ever responding to my Craigslist housing ad. Meanwhile, watching vine videos feels safe and non-confrontational. I can’t disappoint anyone, including myself, if all I’m doing is clicking the “refresh” button. Michael just finished the monkey bread and put it in to bake. All of the dishes are done, but he left a mess of brown sugar and pecans on the countertop. He wasn’t sure what type of dough to buy for the recipe (buttermilk or butter-tasting?) and we also waffled on how much food to serve. I messed up the cheese plate at first, but I fixed it once he told me that, actually, “setting up the cheese plate” is a little more complicated than “unwrapping three blocks of cheese and placing them on a plate.” I cut everything into slices, don’t worry. None of the slices are the exact same size, and I’m a little concerned about what we’ll say to our lactose-intolerant guests. Still, it will be a good party. As I watch my friend wipe up the mess that he made, I’m reminded that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I can’t be the perfect roommate, friend or employee, but I can at least have a good time trying and messing up with people I care about. Now it’s time for me to be a good friend and help with party set-up. After all, that monkey bread isn’t going to taste itself.