Post Grad Grays

Baltimore, I’m Too Old For This.

 

There are instances when I feel like I should reevaluate my life choices. Finding myself in a bar bathroom with my foot in a toilet would probably be one of them.

I didn’t really even know what was going on. I was dancing to some LMFAO, and the next thing I knew I was grasping my bleeding heel, hobbling towards the bathroom of a bar – a place I didn’t even want to use under normal, needing-to-pee circumstances. Upon my arrival I saw a familiar face, a co-worker who had also stepped on glass out on the dance floor. Her foot was swung up onto the sink. Naturally my first reaction was to dunk my foot in the toilet.

“Uh, you probably should take your foot out from there,” the girl who had taken me to the bathroom told me. Really? Someone had to tell me that?

Okay though. I really should remove it.

This was kind of how I pictured my life in Baltimore going: in the toilet. When I found out a few months ago that I had received a position in the city, all I could do was have mini panic attacks and lose my appetite. Also I seemed to find myself answering a lot of “Do you watch The Wire?” and “Have you ever eaten crabs?” questions (both answers being NO). Yet, as hard as it was to leave my previous job, my friends, and my family in Chicago, the transition to living and working in Maryland had been surprisingly smooth until this moment, when everything seemed to be metaphorically and literally going in the crapper.

I forgot how, when you’re starting a new phase of life (college, anyone?), it’s really exciting until, well, it isn’t. I arrived in Baltimore almost a month ago today. My mother and I “road-tripped” from Chicago to Baltimore in my charming, lacking-A/C, 15 year old Jeep. The drive wasn’t actually the part that sucked, it was arriving in Baltimore, realizing that instead of talking about moving like I had been doing for the past six weeks, I had actually moved and needed to start living here. I thought I’d never get used to the city, always needing to take my key chain pepper spray with me, on guard whenever I saw someone remotely threatening (read: anyone anywhere). But surprisingly, I did. It took only about a week to become sensitized to my surroundings and find it funny when people told me stories of checking if sleeping homeless people on the sidewalks were actually sleeping or if they were, you know, dead.

During my first month here everything seemed awesome: happy hour?? Running along the water?? GROCERY SHOPPING AT SAFEWAY?! I was pumped. I was “down for anything” in the least tool-ish way possible. Going out on the weekends was even more exciting. It felt as though anything could happen. I was living in a CITY now!

But a month in, things sort of came to a screeching halt. I got used to grocery shopping (surprise!), realizing that it’s sort of the same everywhere and you have to do it… all the time. Bars are also, not so surprisingly, relatively the same as bars in Chicago. And I wish I weren’t, but I’m getting tired of my same running path on the Promenade, though it is hands-down more awesome than any route I’ve taken before. I don’t at all mean to be a downer (though I realize that’s exactly what I’m doing). There are a ton of things I do love about being out here. I love being on the east coast. I love the proximity to DC and the availability of New York. I love that it’s a city I never thought I could live in, but one that feels manageable and that hopefully will become my own over time. When explaining that the novelty of moving to a new city can definitely wear off, I’m not trying to be negative, only realistic.

My advice for anyone relocating is this: when you inevitably get to the point when the city no longer feels new, you’re comfortable with the people, and you’re settled at your job, you should probably freak out. I mean, it’s what I know, because it’s what I did. After finding my foot in a toilet this past Friday, something I like to call “hitting rock bottom,” I spent the rest of the weekend in a haze of despair. I hardly left my house (let’s be real: my couch) due to my severe foot handicap, and I sustained myself exclusively on fro-yo and marathoning Millionaire Matchmaker. I seemed derailed by the question of what I was actually supposed to be doing in Baltimore for a singular year, what I wanted to accomplish at my job, what I wanted to get out of this opportunity.

But here I am, only days later and no longer with my fro-yo spoon permanently attached to my hand. As I spoke with other friends who have recently moved to new cities for jobs, it became clear that my feelings of disappointment at the apparent lack of excitement are normal. I think it was difficult to realize and be okay with the fact that my “purpose” for this year might be simply to enjoy myself. I figured that moving out and to a new city would automatically cure my restlessness and create some sort of a “life-path” on its own for me, but I should have known that this wasn’t going to happen. There will probably always be an ebb and flow of negative and positive feelings. Sometimes you’re going to feel alone, and sometimes you won’t. Sometimes you’ll feel like Baltimore is your favorite place in the world (hey! It could happen!), and other times you’ll jump on a piece of glass in a nasty bar and you’ll feel like you hate the city more than anywhere else you’ve ever been. As vague and probably unhelpful as this advice may be, I’ll give it: it’s how it is. You just have to ride it out. Things won’t always seem as bad as they may in the moment, and they will always get better. You have to fake it ‘til you make it. If you can believe it, you can achieve it. When in Rome. Curiosity killed the cat.

 Honestly, if you take nothing else from this story, just please do your personal hygiene a favor and keep your foot out of your local bar’s toilet. Oh and FYI, all of Baltimore isn’t like The Wire, everyone who asked me about the show. But thanks for that.

—Chelsea

When Was Writing Ever Your Profession?

 

You wrote down you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never.

—J.D. Salinger, “Seymour: An Introduction”

Blake is an old man with wispy white hair, a bulbous red nose, and the kindest smile I’ve ever seen on another human being. It’s my first day at the MacDowell Colony, and he’s showing me my studio, a bark-covered cabin in the New Hampshire woods, out of sight of the main road and the other cabins nearby – a novelist’s, a composer’s. Inside, a lofty room holds two desks, a bed, table, bookcase, rocking chair, and a fireplace I could lie down in, barely bending my knees. It is gorgeous. It is mine.

But I have to share it. Hung on the wall over the bed and fireplace are a dozen “tombstones,” wooden tablets with names and dates scratched into them. Everyone who has called this cabin theirs since it was built in 1913. Stephen Dunn and Thomas Lux are there, Malachi Black only a few months before me. The name above the empty space where mine will go is Eduardo C. Corral, who I learn has just won the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In the summer of 1931, the cabin was occupied by Thornton Wilder, MacDowell’s favorite son. The air smells wonderful but sharp, wood smoke tinged with the Ghosts of Writers Past.

“You’re very young to be here,” Blake says, watching me scour the faded ink for names I know. “You should be proud of yourself.”

 “I still can’t believe it,” I say, and he must hear the edge of nervousness in my voice.

“Don’t worry.” There it is, that beatific smile. “There are no expectations here.”

I shake my head, grateful but disbelieving. “I have my own expectations,” I assure him.

He laughs, understanding. And then he tells me a story.

A group of scholars were traveling in ancient lands. They kept stopping at certain moments, feeling something in the air, seeing something in the land or the sky. They asked their guides, members of the original tribes living there, “Is this a sacred site? Is this place special to your culture?” But the guides said no, no, you’re not yet feeling this place.

And Blake says to me what the guides said to them, those scholars desperate for meaning, desperate to step into magic: “You have to give your spirit time to catch up.”

 

*

MacDowell is the last of three artist colonies I’ve lived at; I spent January at the Vermont Studio Center, March at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. It is April now; I will be here until early June. The last two months of my half-year of writing, before my money runs out, before I have to go home and back to work. (I am fed and housed for free at MacDowell, but I’ve spent almost all of the money I made in the fall on gas and phone bills and student loans and car insurance, those awful, mundane footnotes to adulthood.) 

MacDowell is my last chance.

I’m happy enough with what I’ve done in Vermont and Nebraska. But I expect more from MacDowell, from this length of time, from this most hallowed of places. Our Town was written here, Middlesex was written here. Death Comes for the Archbishop. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

If I can’t write here, then I can’t write.

If I can’t write here, then I’m not the writer I’ve claimed to be since January. It’s absurd, after college, how suddenly my worth hangs on how I spend forty hours of my week. I managed to live twenty-two years without defining myself by a job, but now. Now I have to have an answer to that question, and I want mine to be writing. I want it so much it aches in my gut, catches in my chest, desperate as unrequited love.

“What do you do?” a handsome friend-of-a-friend asks at a party, and I nod at the bottle in my hand.

“This, mostly,” I grin, hoping he finds me rakish, carefree, pretty. I explain, “Writing, you know, it’s a job requirement. I’m on the clock.”

He laughs, and I want to believe what I’m saying as readily as he does, want to be as easily charmed.

But I know better. I know that these evenings are escapes, that the real work comes in the morning: desk, notebook, pen. The drive to write that is both ruin and salvation. The need to make the hangover worth it, to have something to say. To make something lasting of ephemeral days. To be a writer, I have to sit down, shut up, write. It is simple.

It is hard. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. This is not to say that it isn’t a dream. That it isn’t a sheer, wondrous, unadulterated blessing to be able to sit down every day and write, to be fed and housed and encouraged – but I think (I hope) it’s obvious how grateful I am. How aware I am of my luck. It doesn’t make it any less hard.

I know: you are thinking, “Hard? Please. Try being a doctor. Try being a social worker, shelter manager, nurse, laborer…”

I know. I know, okay? I can only say that writing – any art, I think – is hard in a different way. Your work is not necessary. No one cares if you do it or not. No one will die if you do not do your job, no one (but you) will go hungry. Your only incentive is a gnawing in your head and heart that knows you cannot live if you do not do this. When the words do not come, when the blank page wins your daily staring contest – it is crushing.

I take Blake’s advice, take the first few days easy, explore. But two weeks pass – my spirit has long ago caught up – and I still cling to excuses when the writing gets tough. At the first pause of the pen, the first blank moment in my mind, the temptation to run is incredible. It doesn’t matter if I’ve written for two hours or ten minutes: I convince myself it is enough. I concede the day. I close my notebook or laptop and take a nap, go for a run. I practice my pool game at the table in Colony Hall or drive to MacDowell Lake and swim. I spend hours at the library, home of the only Internet access on the grounds, and email friends while downloading “Community” episodes to watch later.

I’m a coward. I fold instead of sticking out the hand, afraid to go for it, to risk losing when I’d showed how badly I wanted to win. Instead, I feign ambivalence.

A third week goes by, and I haven’t got very much done.

*

 “Let me write,” I had whispered. “Let me write let me write letmewrite…”

It was past midnight on New Year’s, and I was smoking alone on a friend’s balcony, uttering fervent prayers to the Boston sky. Actually – my memory is a little hazy – I may have been directing them at the tree towering over the neighbor’s yard.

I may have been slightly smashed.

But those desperate, drunken wishes were as close as I got to resolutions. I lit one cigarette after another, small sacrifices to the writing gods, and continued whispering my mantra until a friend came outside to check on me.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yes!” I giggled, stumbled, pointed out how awesome the tree in his neighbor’s yard was. I was more than okay. A new year stretched ahead of me, unknown and (unlike me) not yet wasted. I was being given six months in which to write. Surely something would grow out of them, easy as weeds sprouting from soil. Surely the words would come.

Five months later, I am halfway through my time at MacDowell.

“You are all incredibly brave,” Blake says to those of us taking his tour of the grounds. He has already spent an hour relating the history, myths, and gossip of the Colony, but I could listen for many more. His love of this place is infectious; he makes me want to be worthy of it.

“You have to face yourself, your inner demons,” he continues. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”

This is what I have learned. I have learned that my New Year’s prayer was all wrong, that I am always allowed. The writing gods aren’t Greek, meddlesome and playing favorites. No – they don’t give a damn. Let me write, I begged, and they replied: Who’s stopping you? The proper prayer is one word only, and directed inward. Write, I have learned to tell myself, every day, every hour. Write, I say, Write, you lazy, cowardly, half-assed, hackneyed, wannabe idiot. Write something. Write anything. Write.

I have one month left, then three weeks, then two. I am buckling down, the end in sight, trying to play a few hands fully before I have to leave the game. I am fighting back against the blank page, each small victory – a few more minutes, a few more lines – lessening the fear it inspires in me. I have finished two pieces of fiction for the first time in a year, and am working on a third, a story about the American west; the hard, far edges of love and hate; independence; choices; poker. It is very short, rather thin, and most of the dialogue is copied from “Firefly,” but I’m happy with it. I’m happy, period.

“If we will grow up as writers,” Donald Hall says, “we must learn to settle into daily labor.” I am still growing up, as a writer and otherwise, but at MacDowell I learned to settle into daily labor. I learned that delight lies on the other side of that terror in which no words come – I learned to stick it out, to get there. (I also learned to shoot a much improved game of pool and I finally finished “Parks & Rec.” Art is all well and good, kids, but a little Adam Scott never fails to make the world a better place.)

And I learned to say – without second-guessing, without shame – “I’m a writer.” I’d earned that answer. I’d made that haunted cabin mine.

—Mairead

Shoot for The Stars

You may be familiar with motivation posters. They are hung in the classrooms of middle schoolers, the offices of pediatricians, and the homes of the ironically depressed.  All motivational posters have some drawings on them, and they also have a catchy phrase. But the question is: do they actually inspire? Do children who have access to these posters during school time have more initiative than kids who stared at posters of Johnny Depp in a pirate costume? It’s the “paradox of the motivational poster” - they do not motivate. So why not replace the posters with math equations or Michael Jordan slam dunks? How does the motivational poster cottage industry continue to exist?

I would think about this often in my high school English classroom, which was bedazzled with motivation posters.  We had three standard “READ” posters sponsored by a library association that featured celebrities reading books. There was one with Sean Connery (“Read! Follow your heart!”), one with Denzel (“Read! Anything is possible!”), and one with Mel (“Read! The Holocaust is a Lie!” [ed. note - this is not true]).

There was also this poster, which had yellow bubble text superimposed over a cartoonish night sky: 

“Shoot for the Moon

Even if you miss

You’ll be among the stars”

This poster would bug me because, what’s the point? Who would look at this poster and heed the advice? It’s a nice saying, but the metaphor clouds the message (consider: if a space shuttle - let alone a human - missed the moon and “landed among the stars,” it would be an unmitigated disaster! Imagine the horror! ).

But, because I would so often think about the paradox of the motivational poster, I fell into what I have termed the “contradiction of the paradox of the motivational poster.” By just contemplating how unmotivating the poster was, I would inevitably repeat the catchphrase inside my head over and over again. And so eventually, I would be thinking of that phrase when I had to make a difficult choice. And because I didn’t have a concrete worldview or strong convictions, I wound up seriously considering the poster’s advice. Which meant that it was, in effect, almost motivating me. Almost.

Which is what brings me to a particular motivational poster that was so awful, I couldn’t help but become obsessed with it – obsessed to the extent that this poster eventually started to affect my behavior, leading to disastrous and hilariously embarrassing consequences.

 —

It all began my freshman year in High School, when I was the third best trombonist in the marching band.  Looking back, it’s clear to me that our band teacher must have been dealing with some intense and confusing emotions at the time. I’m not sure what caused this, because as a 14½ year old, I was oblivious to any and all elements of my surroundings (I didn’t know that ice cream was unhealthy until I was 20!). But I did know something was off with him. I know this because he arranged, scored, and choreographed a 15 minute marching band routine to a medley of Genesis songs. Genesis!  So while other young adults marched to Disney songs and the Lord of the Rings theme, we trudged around while blaring early form Prog Rock.

 

To say the least, our band director really took the marching band in an experimental direction that year. And by experimental, I mean terrible. And not subjectively terrible, we were terrible by any conceivable metric and measurement.  Did we sound good? Much worse than the actual Genesis. Did we march well? I recall participating in some rather oblong circles. Did we have fun? I think someone did a great impression of Napolean Dynamite one time.

Most emblematic of our year was the manner in which we entered the field to perform our piece. Where most bands march on to the field in a unison, step-by-step line before splitting into their initial formation, our band teacher made the artistic choice that we should walk onto the field intentionally out of step, and not in any particular shape. In theory, this was a deconstructionist take on the traditional structures marching band - an honest look at what it really means to be a “marching band”.  In practice, it was 50 people in stupid costumes wandering around an empty football field for a minute and a half. Why did we do this? I will never know.

The goal of a marching band is to do fun-looking things while making nice-sounding music. We, of course, did neither. We never marched into entertaining shapes and we always had trouble with our right angles. Our drum major looked like a guy that would still be working at Blockbuster in 2009. Not that I am without blame - I would get myself super psyched before performances and wind up playing my trombone as loud as possible. Really just blowing all of worries, troubles, and phlegm through 10 feet of brass.  What can I say – our marching show was my Super Bowl (or, my Puppy Bowl, really). I’m not sure if you’ve heard a trombonist play like that, but it takes all of the farty aspects of the trombone, magnifies them, and combines that with the pitch and tone of an actual fart, albeit one from a classically trained fartist. But I digress.

Unsurprisingly, between our terrible marching, stoned drum major, and flatulent sound, morale was low that year. A few people quit. A few parents complained. Now, if reading leadership books has taught me anything, it’s that a true leader responds to a crisis with resolve, conviction, and environmental deregulation. But, remember, our leader was a band teacher who enjoyed Genesis to the extent that he created a 15 minute medially of their DEEP CUTS and forced a group of high schoolers to perform it.

So, naturally, he did not respond to our resistance with a cool head and calm heart. No. He went batshit crazy. Over one weekend, he retooled our routines and restructured the bandroom. We returned to find that we would be practicing longer hours at a more intense pace. He removed chairs from the band room because we were no longer allowed to sit down during our indoor practices.

And, most consequentially, he also put up the motivational poster that would become the whale to my Ahab; the Nader to my Gore; the internet to my regional newspaper:

What does not kill you

Only makes you stronger

This was awful for three reasons. First, it is an extremely negative message. It’s the least positive way of saying, “if you learn from your experiences, you’ll probably succeed!” Second, upon reading it, all I could think about were exceptions to the rule. This was true then, and it was true now. I remember staring at this poster, and thinking, “Well, AIDS. No, that kills you. Really bad acne? Well, if it gets infected, certainly. Non-lethal bullet wound? Loss of limb? Stage IV Concussion? Obesity? Male pattern baldness?”

The third reason was that our band teacher repeated this all the time. Which meant people were thinking about non-lethal but non-strengthening things all the time. So what we had on our hands was a situation in which the band teacher would get angry at us for not playing Peter Gabriel’s songs well enough, and so he would make us work harder. Then we would complain. Then he would repeat his mantra. Then someone would shout out something that would not kill us. If this was, in fact, something that would kill you, the band teacher would say so. If not, he would say nothing. Then he would get angrier, and the vicious cycle continued.

As a consequence of this experience, I constantly thought that What does not kill me, only makes me stronger. And pretty soon, I started to come around to believing it. Yes, I knew it was stupid…but it was also somewhat true. Which I found fascinating. And so, combined with the “shoot for the stars” saying and this new one, I began to cobble together a worldview I could use as a decision making engine (apologies to Bing).

In the years that followed, that quote stayed up in the band room, and the band got progressively worse. After my Junior year, my mom let me quit the band, but on the condition I do something else with my time. I joined the cross country team. As a 6ft tall18 year old, I was fast enough that I once almost placed in the top 5 of our underclass(wo)men.

Of course, a constant motivator for me at the time was thinking that running would not kill me, and then it would make me stronger.  So I ran a little bit faster in practice, and then a little bit faster in the meets. The beautiful thing about cross country is that if you run as fast as possible without suffering heat stroke, you might actually become a little bit stronger. Dehydrated and cranky, yes, but also stronger.

 

I was thinking about that phrase as I was about to finish one of the races in the middle of the season. I was trailing a fellow slow kid from a big high school as we came into sight of the finish line. I decided that pushing it would not kill me. So I ran a little bit faster, and then a little bit faster than that. Pretty soon I was at a near sprint (have you ever seen an emu sprint? It was not unlike this). I came in 30th out of 35th place, just edging out the asthmatic behind me. Relatively triumphant, I was also pretty exhausted. I started to feel like I someone punched me in the stomach as soon as I stopped running. I took a step towards a nice older couple who were there to watch a grandchild.

 “Good job!” the man said to me.

 I doubled over on my knees, panting, and beginning to feel light headed.

 “Really great!” the woman added.

 “Bleeaaaaauuugh” I said to them, as I emphatically barfed on their feet.

And so, as I stared at the bits of apple and Gatorade strewn about all of our shoes, I thought that perhaps pragmatism was better than absolutism. Perhaps, instead of following motivational posters, I should just have a slightly positive outlook, and then figure out the rest on the fly. And so, I realized the Fallacy of the Contradiction of the Paradox of the Motivational Poster – that at first glance, these posters may appear to be worthless, but upon further reflection later, they are in fact still worthless.

In short: what does not kill me, could still make me puke.

—Ben

 

 

My Latest Flirtation

I’m doing that thing with my iPhone again, where I put it on silent - without vibrate, even - and place it face down on my desk, so I can’t see if someone’s calling me or texting me.  And then I proceed to look at it every five minutes, hoping that I’ve missed a call, or received a text.

This is what I do at the beginning of any love affair.

His name is Raymond.  We met online, as most millennials do these days.  I was instantly drawn to his characteristics - Pergo wood floors, two full bathrooms, dedicated parking, a patio, laundry onsite.  I called immediately.  He played hard to get; his schedule was pretty booked.  Eventually, I sent my sister to check him out for me.  She said he was a keeper.  She said he was spacious and bright even though he was on the first floor.  Yeah, his kitchen was galley style and kind of small, but he had excellent storage options and his neighbors seemed really cool.  Go for it, she said.  You haven’t seen him, she said, but I know you’re gonna love him.

I pulled up his profile on Westside Rentals again and stared at the “No Picture Available” sign.  He was mysterious, kept things close to the vest.  I liked that.  I called and left a voicemail.  I like you, I said.  I like you a lot.  Let’s get this thing going.  I’m not 22 anymore, after all.  I can’t couch surf til I find the one.  I need you.  Now.  Let’s sign a one year lease.

And then I waited.  I put my phone on silent and I checked it every five minutes and felt the lovestruck feeling drain from my heart, even as I fantasized about the barbecues we’d throw and where  I’d hang my framed prints from the New Yorker on his walls.  And I waited some more.  I thought about calling him again, or driving by, but refrained.  I didn’t want to become “that crazy girl.”  Not yet.  So I just called his house line (I’d left a voicemail on his cell) and when his answering machine picked up, I hung up.

The next morning, I decided to follow the adage, “If you want something, go for it,” instead of, “If you love something, let it go.  If it doesn’t come back to you, it was never yours in the first place,” because come on, that’s bullshit and only meant for people in long distance relationships who should really just break up anyway.  So, I called again.  ”I love you, Raymond,” I said.  ”I knew I loved you before I met you.  Because I haven’t met you yet.”  Then I sang some more Savage Garden, whispered, “Call me,” in a sexy voice that I hope didn’t sound too desperate, promised to show up tomorrow with a cashier’s check for the full deposit as well as first month’s rent, and hung up the phone.

So here I sit, just a girl, standing in front of an apartment, asking it to love me.  I’ve been through this too many times to think that the absence of missed calls on my iPhone screen means anything other than he’s not interested.  There have been ones who have almost been right - who had hard wood floors but no parking and really, the floors were laminate.  Those who were in a great location but barely had room for a full bed.  And then the ones who promised the world in their online profiles, and when I showed up, discovered ugly shag carpet, poor lighting, and black mold.  Even though we haven’t met face to face, I know that Raymond is different.  There’s just something about Raymond.  I stay hopefully that this time maybe Raymond will come through.  I have made myself vulnerable, laid myself bare to Raymond, and so my heart remains open to the possibility of his love and, his walk-in closets, and his hardwood floors.

—bronwyn

Girls Who #CanGetIt

 A few weeks ago, I was sitting on a bus that had that carried the essence of Chicago in the summertime. That is to say, it was “moist.” As I sat listening to some indie band from Brooklyn and thinking about what hipstery and ironic thing I could say about them when they got really famous, I noticed that the girl sitting next to me was reading an obscure text by Kurt Vonnegut. I did what I usually did when a girl on the bus (or anywhere) is doing something like reading an obscure text by Kurt Vonnegut. I tweeted about it.

 “Girls reading obscure Kurt Vonnegut on the bus #cangetit,” I quickly sent off into the twitterverse, as has become my habit.  I know you’re probably thinking “Jose, did you not gain any maturity in college?” and “Jose, which Vonnegut was it?” and “Wait, Jose, did you get her number?” In response I say: “It was 6PM on a Friday and I wasn’t drunk, so yes, I’d say I’ve matured,” “Fortitude,” and “She saw me tweeting it, so no. No, I did not.”

It was a pretty awkward situation, her having seen me tweet such a thing. Suddenly, I was in the position of having to explain something I’d never had to explain before. I found myself having to justify my use of a hashtag that had become so routine to me that I wasn’t even sure what it really meant. To my surprise, I kind of figured it out.

Cutie McVonnegut was hardly the first girl to be featured in my #cangetit tweets. The origins of #cangetit predate this fateful bus ride. The hashtag in question is the brainchild of my current hero Donald Glover. Just a couple of weeks ago Donald dropped this gem: “Girls that make fun of you for something, then when someone else does they get really upset and defend you #cangetit.” I rest my case. (If you don’t know Donald Glover is, stop reading this and watch every video by the comedy group Derrick Comedy, then watch every episode of Community. Then listen to this. Then thank me via your preferred method of communication.) But if I had to really explain to this girl why the heck I had just tweeted that about her, and what those words really meant for me, I would have to go deeper. I’d have to go back to 2003 when  DMX released his hit single Get it on the Floor.

Something great happened to me the first time I heard Swizz Beatz yell “We don’t give a what what!! We don’t give a what what!!” before he and DMX demanded I get in on the floor. I was 16. I was a sophomore in high school, and I had finally figured out that shaving your head was not the right look for someone with ears the size of mine.  And - perhaps most importantly - on my 16^th birthday, which fell just three days after the DMX album containing GIOTF was released, a girl in the cafeteria looked at me and smiled. I was convinced it had to do with the combination of my new found hairstyle and Ecko Unltd t-shirt.

Believe it or not, GIOTF is not about the objectification of women. Like, not at all. It’s a hip hop song, called Get it on the Floor, that’s not about the bitches and or hos. Think about it, Nelly took the idea of the A/C needing to be turned on and made it disgusting. Meanwhile, DMX takes the phrase “get it on the floor” and demeans no one. Instead, it’s an ode to self improvement. In it, DMX raps about how he got to the be best, what he will do to stay the best and what will happen to you if you keep him from being the best. In my own way, at 16, that’s what I was trying to do, too.

I just wanted to get it, on the floor as it were. I was figuring out my style and I was honing my interests: I wrote a story that wasn’t good, but the feeling I got while writing it was one I knew I wanted to feel for the rest of my life. I was learning that becoming more comfortable with myself had made me visible to the objects of my affection. Sixteen was my first-verse-of-When-I-was-Seventeen year.[1] It wasn’t that I wanted to be a rap star or emulate DMX; rather, I wanted to transform into something better than what I was, and at 16, I was doing just that.

 Then I forgot all about DMX and GIOTF and went to college.

 What I didn’t realize at first is that college is four years of gettin’ it as told by DMX. It is four years of having no choice but to change, to continue the process of becoming our best selves. Although, truth be told, there’s no denying that a few jerks just got jerkier by the end of college. But I digress, Leslie.[2]

For me, college was four years of overcoming my fear of being away from my family and overcoming the self-consciousness that comes with growing up poor then going to a private college with a billion dollar endowment. My freshman year of college I refused to sleep outside the dorms and had anxiety attacks before reading my poetry during workshop. My senior year I slept under the stars in central California and demanded that I get to read two pieces at the senior poetry reading, because I wanted them to be heard. Had DMX been anywhere on campus he would have undoubtedly made that weird growling noise and said “There’s somebody who’s gettin’ it.” Then made that sweet barking noise.

This brings me to the past year of my life and the conflagration of the terms “gettin’ it” and the hashtag “#cangetit” in my everyday life. Now I’m a post grad who takes the bus to a fifty hour a week desk job that takes the thrill of artistic expression and mashes it against the thrill of the sentence “Yeah, I would watch that, but would our audience?” I mean that in a good way (FYI, if you hate putting yourself in other people’s shoes, you’re doing it wrong.) It’s a year I’ve spent struggling to make student loan payments and telling my boss that we have have havvveeee to do an interview with Donald Glover and wishing I was in a state of constantly gettin’ it and being surrounded by others who are likewise out on the floor. But sometimes, when and where I least expect to find them—like say on a moist Chicago public bus – I see people gettin’ it in this post-grad life.  Even if I don’t say it out loud when I see it, I can’t help but micro-blog about it.  

This past weekend a friend told me that he thinks the way I tweet that girls #cangetit is great. He cited the case of Kurty VonLichtencute as an example. He said it’s so weird and quirky the way I (mostly) never talk about the physical characteristics of a girl who #cangetit. I now realize that girls who #cangetit embody the message of GIOTF.  It’s not about objectification or even the pursuit of romance although it might seem like so at first - it’s about an effort to be better. It’s about girls who DJs, my little brother’s teacher who did Teach for America, , The Tiger Mother’s daughter and my personal favorite, girls who start original tumblr blogs.

And yes, I realize I am only talking about girls who #cangetit. But give me a break, I’m a single 23 year old living at his parent’s place because I have a bajillion dollars in student loans to pay off, can you please just let me use my love of personal improvement as a flirting tool?

When Cuttegut McVonnie saw me tweet that she #cangetit, she would have had no idea the personal growth and emotional struggle behind those 140 characters. In fact, the girl on the bus (I’m out of variations on Kurt Vonnegut’s name) was clearly completely unmoved by what I had just tweeted. Had she said anything at the time, I would have apologized and seized the opportunity to throw a Hail Mary for the win in the form of the question “now that our first fight is out of the way, I guess we should just start dating.”

But if she asked me today, I would tell her that tweeting she #cangetit is not the vulgar, objectifying thing she thinks it is. I’d tell her that since graduating college I’ve been looking for someone who wants to grow even though they’re not being forced to. I’d say that I admire her. Then I would ask her out to coffee to talk about the works of Vonnegut. Then I would pray that we don’t stay on the topic long because I’ve only read Slaughterhouse V.

—Jose

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[1] I realize that I shouldn’t introduce another song metaphor in a story about a tweet that’s a metaphor for a song that’s a metaphor, but to be honest, I like that line to much to lose it.

[2] Just kidding there I didn’t know a Leslie in college. Christine on the other hand…

Fruit Flies Take the Cake, the Happiness, and the Fruit

Last I  had an intimate experience with a fruit fly, I was in the second grade. We were investigating their breeding habits. And we were doing so with the curious minds of children who can’t imagine that these pests might one day cause serious emotional trauma.

This weekend should have been one like any other—a morning jog on the beach, followed by smoothies, and brunch with great friends, followed by an afternoon at some hip Silver Lake festival, followed by more smoothies, followed by a house-warming party where you don’t know anyone, but you go because you’re trying to meet new people, followed by a movie or a street performance of experimental theater, followed by drinks that don’t make you nauseated, you may have finally figured out how to tolerate the taste of whiskey, wait nevermind,  followed by some unpleasantness, followed by some laughs and a clove ciggarette…

Okay, okay. So that’s not how most weekends go. And honestly, smoothies notwithstanding, I’m not so sure I could maintain my good health with weekends like that. But. Still. This weekend should not have gone the way it did:

Waking up Saturday morning, I realized that I had a lot of errands to do. Things I had been putting off for quite some time: laundry, cleaning, bills, library books, home made smoothies in that smoothie machine I bought a month ago when I had a different vision of what my life could be like. But before I could go about getting all productive and smiley, I got into a horrible fight with a few of my cohabitants.

More like twenty or forty of them, actually.  Upon entering my kitchen, I saw a horde of little fruit flies, or as they’re commonly called Drosophila melanogaster. These little biddies were having quite the time swarming about my sink and cabinets and hovering over some flowers I had apparently forgotten to throw out.

My first thought was to call my mother. My second impulse was to cry. That wasn’t necessarily related to the bugs in my kitchen, it’s just something I feel like doing sometimes. But the next thing I did was unleash a whole lot of murderous rage on these things that dared invade my living space.

For me murderous rage means putting on some Van Morrison and taking a spray bottle of Lysol and going to town. This really presented an opportunity. I could blame these tiny insects for much more than was truly owed to them. Whose to say these little dudes weren’t to blame for my inability to finish a single piece of writing? For my dissatisfaction with my gas mileage? For my unpaid bills? For my legal trouble? I mean, my imaginary legal trouble? For my lack of a dog? Or a boyfriend? For the humidity? For my broken air conditioner? For my complete lack of an air conditioner? Nevermind, it’s not like we should really be using air conditioners.

As I sprayed and swatted, I pictured all my enemies, both personal and political. In the beady little eyes of the fruit fly I saw John Boehner and Richie Sambora. I saw my Elementary School art teacher Mrs. Frye who had unfairly accused me of pilfering from the feather supply. I saw my high school math teacher who had fairly accused me of not studying for a test and gave me a zero out of a hundred on it. I saw the California Highway Patrolman with a chip on his shoulder about the law, and all the admissions officers from the colleges I did not get into. I saw every letter of rejection I’ve received from quirky websites who tell me that my stuff isn’t quite right for them, from every person whose cut me off in traffic, or insulted my bangs.

The danger of doing this is that when you inevitably fail to rid your apartment of all the fruit flies, it feels much more like you’ve failed to rid the world of all your enemies and demons. Your failure feels much larger and more consuming than it should be. You start to feel weak and stupid in the bigger picture. You end up packing up all your stuff into a few grocery tote bags and heading out to your friend’s vacant apartment late at night, hoping that it will peaceful and clean and completely devoid of the monstrous creatures that are Drosophila melanogaster.

—Ilana

How I Got Rejected in a Parking Garage

I had one of those weekends where the cake didn’t rise, the breaks on my car were moaning, and a gay man made me reconsider my self worth.  I also changed my bra in a very busy underground parking garage.  The silver lining in all of this shitty melancholia was that I knew I would have something interesting to write about on Monday.

The problem with living on one end of the city is that you frequently get invited to events after work at the other end of the city.  And I’m not one of those girls who can, with the flick of her scarf, turn it into a cute wrap dress, going from work wear to weekend attire in a second.  After rolling calls and picking at split ends in my work clothes all day, the last thing I want to do is go anywhere in my sensible yet trendy flats and the most comfortable and forgiving pair of skinny jeans (or jeggings) that I own, especially considering I’ve probably worn them three or four days out of the week.  Which means that this particular Friday morning, I stuffed a pair of heels and some random pieces of clothing into a tote bag as options for Friday evening, fully aware that I would probably leave work and head over to the mall in search of something exciting, on sale, and perfect for a night out eating gourmet sausages downown.

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Ilana Ross is too hot to handle

Smurf Happens: My Run-in With the Law

I almost posted bail yesterday morning. I wasn’t in any serious trouble. I really was only considering doing it for the outlaw thrill of it and because if I didn’t, the court might issue a warrant for my arrest. And while I have a real academic interest in our criminal justice system, I just don’t think I could deal with the bathroom situation.

You might chalk up my troubles with the law to a little bit of post-grad rebellion. Sick of being the good girl all throughout my childhood and higher education, I was finally ready to stick it to the man, or in my case California Highway Patrol.

When I got pulled over a few months ago under the dubious charge of driving too closely to the car in front of me, I vowed to fight these ridiculous charges. I felt like an unsuspecting victim of the great California Budget Crisis. Also, Jews don’t respond well to officers filling quotas.

But I’m a believer in peaceful resistance, so I knew my only recourse with the stoic officer who pulled me over was to cry pitiful tears of ignorance. When he remained unmoved by my honest show of emotion, I told him that maybe this ticket was a sign that California didn’t want me—a sometime taxpayer—here. He told me that police officers in other states write tickets too, and that he hated seeing a woman cry because it reminded him of his wife leaving him. Which put things in perspective, because I know affairs of the heart are a lot more serious than minor traffic infractions. I gave him a reassuring pat on the back, and headed back home to figure out how I was going to pay for my legal defense.

Then, I thought, why not represent myself in court? Only I could give a passionate defense of myself. Plus, my mom was a lawyer so it must run in the family. I started planning my opening statement:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary…

It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a single girl…

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two seperate but equally important groups…

Scratch that.

This was more difficult than I thought. I needed help. There was a free legal clinic nearby, but I heard the lines were astronomical, and it was in a part of town that was practically devoid of Starbucks, so I’d have no way to satisfy my bi-hourly chai fix.

As my court date approached, I was nowhere closer to streamlining my argument. I decided, the best thing to do was to get up there and plead the fifth. And then somebody told me that the Fifth Amendment was about not incriminating yourself, and to do so would be a wholly inappropriate and misguided move. Fine I said, I’ll plead the sixth. And this know-it-all kept talking about how that didn’t quite make sense either in the circumstances, but I blocked him out.

Early Tuesday morning, I woke up ready to make the long drive to my hearing. Ironic, isn’t it, that the state had a problem with how I drove on the interstates, and yet required me to do so for a few hours in order to get to the Newport Beach Superior Courthouse.

On my way down, I played mock crossexamination with myself.

“Ilana Miriam Ross,” the Judge might say.

“That’s what my mother calls me when I forget to feed the dog,” I would quip.

“I don’t think that humor is appropriate in my courtroom,” the Judge would reply back. “And besides, that’s a tired joke.”

“Sorry, just trying to break the ice,” I would respond and put my head down, sufficiently shamed.

“You are accused of driving at an unsafe distance to the Chevy Camero in front of you, on your way back from a weekend in San Diego.”

“Actually, I was on the tiny island of Coronado…”

“Whatever. What say you?”

“I say ‘not guilty.’

“Why should we believe you,” the judge would lower his eyeglasses dubiously. “You don’t have the most perfect record out here. Wasn’t it just last month that you rear-ended the man who wrote the revisions on the most recent draft of the long awaited feature film ‘The Smurfs’?”

“Smurf happens,” I laugh, hoping the judge has seen those billboards around town.

“And wasn’t it just a few months before that, that you backed into that nice lady’s car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot?”

“I was boxed in!” I say.

“And did you or did you not eat your roommates cheese without telling her? When you know she uses that Pepperjack for her packed lunches?”

Then I start to sweat, and motion for the bailiff to bring me water.

“Look,” the judge says. “Amy Winehouse just died. So I’m in a sympathetic mood toward wayward youth.”

“Thank you,” I say. “You won’t regret giving me a second chance. I’m going to figure everything out. I’m going to discover myself! I’m going to eat really well, and pay my electrical bills on time from here on out.”

The judge chuckles, probably recalling his own youth, and I leave the courtroom vindicated.

But the real Newport Beach Superior Courthouse was a much less forgiving and more flourescent place. After going through the metal detectors and waiting as twenty other traffic offenders entered their pleas, the judicial “referee” called me to the podium. He told me that if I pleaded guilty I could pay the fine, or if I wanted to plead not-guilty, I could post bail and set a future date to argue my case.

I looked up at His Honor, imagining how glorious it might be to seek justice. And then I remembered that it had taken me almost two hours to get down to the courthouse this morning, and that I’d had to contend with the notoriously awful traffic on the 405. And the thought of really posting bail was slightly terrifying.

I paid the fine because it felt like the responsible thing to do.

—Ilana

A Breakdown of My Lunches Throughout the Week

Monday: Leftovers from Sunday’s epic feast, neatly packed into freshly cleaned tupperware containers; probably some type of chicken, roasted vegetables.  A piece of fruit (this time of year, nectarine) purchased during the weekly Trader Joe’s raid.  Fruit is slightly younger than ripe.  Full bar of dark chocolate with sea salt and almonds (only plan to eat 1/4).  Probably whole grain pita chips or baby carrots as a snack.

Tuesday: More of the same leftovers.  The success of waking up 10 minutes before my alarm went off on Monday exhausted me, so I overslept today.  There might be some gnawed-on chicken bones in my tupperware container, remnants of Monday’s lunch feast and the subsequent evening apathy when it came to actually cleaning out said tupperware, putting things where they should (refrigerator, trash can, etc).  Another piece of fruit, still not ripe.  Forgot to bring breakfast so I ate my baby carrots at around 11am, instead of a post-lunch snack.  1/4 of the chocolate bar from Monday is left.  Demolish the rest of it.

Wednesday: The roasted veggie bounty from Sunday is gone; all that’s left is half a chicken breast.  It’s thrown  into the bag of wilted lettuce that’s been sitting in the fridge for 3 days (Trader Joe’s, why does your produce always let me down??). Salad dressing has been forgotten.  Stand in the office kitchen and consider just sprinkling salt over the entire thing and call it a day.  Stare longingly at the coke cans in the fridge, go for the apple juice instead which probably has just as much cane sugar in it as the cola.  The fruit purchased at Trader Joe’s has gone from not ripe enough to overripe in twenty four hours.  Consider cutting out the mushy spots (I can’t stand the mushy spots) with a knife.  Realize that that would involve cutting out everything but the pit.  Spend the second half of the work day dreaming about chocolate bars with almonds and sea salt.  Also, Taylor Kitsch.

Thursday:  1/3 a tupperware container full of Kogi beef mixed with broccoli and brown rice, the result of an impulsive stop at Trader Joe’s last night.  The meat tastes like the defeat of not being able to adequately ration all of the food purchased on Sunday to last the entire week. But it also tastes really fucking good, because I’m so sick of eating chicken (this will be gone by the weekend, when I’ll stare hungrily at the bird roasting away in the oven).  Consider licking the crumbs of Monday and Tuesday’s pita chip snacks off the carpet, where they still lie.  It’s like the studio cleaning ladies are working very hard to remind me of what a fucking slob I am by only vacuuming my cubicle once a week.  

Friday: Thank God it’s Bagel & Fruit Friday.  Steal all of the grapes off the fruit platter and eat them at my desk while dreaming about the feast I’m going to prepare tonight, in celebration of making it through another week without choking on a chicken bone at my desk.  Probably something with brussels sprouts.  Because that’s the exciting life I lead.

-bronwyn