‘Tween time

Tick. Tock.

Readers, welcome to May. Erm, almost-May. Almost-finals, almost-graduation, almost-summer. Almost life. Welcome to your almost-life, shining like a thousand diamonds just on the horizon. Trying to take your eyes away to tend to the task at hand? Good luck with that.

Here’s the issue with fantasies, plans, and the future: they loom there, teasing you, like a finger in your ear while you’re trying to sleep. It’s impossible. While the time ticks and ticks and ticks away, and whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, or were supposed to finish by last Tuesday, is sitting there gathering dust on your desktop, you are gazing off into the distance like a second-semester senior in American History. It’s bad. Life is happening without you.

Here’s the academic term: termination. Other names include senior slack, senioritis, slacking, lackadaisical sitting, time suckage, apathy.

Here’s what’s really happening: as a part of grieving, or processing the end (at least, perhaps we don’t really grieve things like the end of high school or leaving a job we hate…) of your current situation, you are carrying out iterations of The End in your head. This usually coincides with The Beginning of something else – possibly something more interesting, more exciting, more pleasing, or hopefully all three. So instead of thinking about all the things you might miss, you’re constructing, or dwelling on, things to look forward to.

We’ll take me for the moment. I could sit here, during my last 10.2 days of work, thinking about how much I’m going to miss my “Converts Rock” sign that hangs above my desk, or weeping over the pictures that the little girls at the mosque have drawn for me, or waving wistfully to Mr Bojangles (the mouse, shhhhh don’t tell the locals) every time he skitters by hoping to snatch a bit of my food. I could come teary-eyed to staff meetings and shed a single tear at every one of my remaining meetings and speaking engagements. I could bake for everyone. I could stay late soaking in the books at my desk. I mean, I could. In theory.

Here’s what I do instead: I Craigslist apartments in Washington, DC, and spend more time on gchat than any sane human should under normal circumstances. I drink too much coffee and probably don’t eat enough – or at least eat all of the wrong things. I don’t cook. I clean – perhaps out of a desire to have a somewhat ordered life to pack up – I let myself come into work at 11:30 and leave at 3. I daydream about tulips in DC, about the green, green summer, about having all the free time in the world, about all of the things that I want to do and have never done. I mentally catalog the people I want to spend my summer with and how I can make that happen, and the mellowest way of living at home at 27 and driving neither my parents nor myself insane. I try to calculate how many new shelves I will have to purchase in order to negotiate law school materials, and I wonder what proportion of my wardrobe can be carried over into the law classroom, the office, the court. I wonder about whether to keep my tiny, creaky bed or buy a newer, softer, bigger one. I try to put the novels I plan on reading this summer into some sort of order. I’m making a list of cities to visit, shows to see. I think of everything I could ever want a new city and a new life to provide; all the things I plan on leaving looooooooong behind in Boston; every work situation I will hope to avoid after leaving this desk. There is no end to these dreams. I dream them at work, in the car, walking, at night. Fantasy is creeping up on my reality, and slowly but surely, it is taking over.

This is what the inside of my mind looks like right now. I know, I wish I lived here too.

There are upsides. A lot of upsides. The chance to reinvent oneself – or at the very least, one’s life – doesn’t come every day. Life changes, these shifts – changes of job, location, a new school, a new path – these are precious things to be seized. How many people float through life never given a choice – never taking stock of what they have, and how it measures up against what they wanted, or what they want, what they dream about? There are a million chances to give up, to give in to stagnation, to let the tiny compromises of every single day eat up whatever it was we would have grabbed at instantly, at another time, another age, under slightly different circumstances.

Like, hmmm. Like what. Ok, like this shift that I’m negotiating for the next few months – that is, job-in-Boston-to-no-job-chilling-at-home-with-Mom&Dad-to-law-school-probably-but-not-definitely-in-DC. It’s all of a sudden real: I can cocoon myself in rural Massachusetts for the next few months and emerge the person I’ve wanted to be all along. Or I can squandor this time, oblivious to the future, throwing it to the wind, come what may. I can not think very hard about what I’m doing next and whether or not it will get me what I want in 5, 10, 15, 20 years – or I can remain very cognisant of the path ahead as I carve this smaller, more myopic one. I get to leave behind as much as I want – I get to completely reinvent myself, if I want to. It happens that I don’t want to. Not completely. But it’s nice to know that I could, and no one (well, maybe one person) in Washington would know that I haven’t been this way all along. I have what everyone in a mid-life crisis wants: Walk Away Insurance.

This is the most extreme, most expensive liability coverage one can purchase for a rental car. I have a lawyer-friend who made this up. It’s for extreme situations. Extreme needing-to-change-things situations. Basically you can leave the rental care behind you in an enormous ball of flames, walk away, and pay zero. You can walk away from everything and not look back. It’s cushy, that Walk Away Insurance. And I have it. And I’m trying to decide what to do with it.

Instead of working. Of course, it is 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, and it’s by far the most beautiful day of 2009 Boston has seen to date. So you know. Big thoughts. I can’t be confined to this office.

A good day to walk away.

So here’s to new beginnings, peeps. They’re worth a good toast and a daydream besides.

RIP Kurt Cobain

Hmmm, this is interesting. I am now the same age that Kurt Cobain was when he died, meaning, to my seventh-grade self, that I am now A Grown Up. He was married and had a kid called Frances and a wildly successful band and a talent for grunge and hanging from chandeliers, so, you know, he was way ahead of me in a lot of ways. I remember thinking that he was young and charming in that depressive, angsty, poetical way (so I have a thing). But I also remember thinking that he had an adult life and an adult existence – however muddled by riches, fame, a rockstar lifestyle and an ample supply of intoxicants. Still.

I am also the same age that Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin were when they died. Janis had, like, a gravelly voice. A grown-up voice. A weathered voice. Again, I don’t think of either of them as old – these tragedies are particulary poignant because it seems that all of these people bid the world farewell at the height of their beauty, creativity, youth, and potential. But they were at the beginning of something, and that something was a proper adult life, a career, a long string of a story.

This is the beginning of my story: in our nation’s capital, the tulips and magnolias are blooming. I’m a few blocks from Capitol Hill, stealing Kevin’s seat next to Jane in Crim Law. I’m walking through a throng of Grateful Dead fans in Chinatown and watching my most favorite president drive by Jane’s apartment building with his entourage of guards. I’m drinking coffee in a cushy armchair at Tryst and learning where the good farmer’s markets are. I’m meeting Con Law professors who say things like, “You should come. We’ll, like, hang out and stuff.” I’m getting my drinks paid for and being stared at like a woman (instead of a zoo specimen). I’m being told that students interested in research and writing are sought after by their professors. And I can make it to Friday prayers at Capitol Hill.

But adults don’t make decisions based on stuff like that. They are rational. Whatever that means.

This is the first thing that happened: I walked into the building that houses the admissions office to go say hello and get the pitch (only fair to get all the pitches; a girl has to compare apples with apples). So I walk into the atrium and I’m looking for the elevator and my eyes happen – just happen – to fall upon a boy in skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, and pretty magnificent chops. And all I think is: I belong here.

But that is not how adults make decisions.

So I go up to admissions and meet the director and blah blah she’s telling me about the curriculum. She has a surprisingly weak pitch for someone supposed to woo, but no matter. I have already been wooed by Biker Boy downstairs. I call Jane.

[Jane and I lived roughly five doors apart our freshman year of college. We came to DC together to protest Bush's inauguration (last time I was here, actually...). We did a lot of theater together, and worked on building the college's chapter of Students for Tibet. I drank my first mojito with Jane.]

She walks over to where I’m sitting. Her hair is slightly longer; there is a handful of grey strands I can spot when I hug her. She is thinner than she was freshman year (aren’t we all). She’s in a grey sweater dress, black stockings, and exactly the kind of slouchy black boots i like. A colorful scarf is wound around her neck. Other than the five grey hairs and her sveltitude, she looks exactly the same. I’m amazed. I can’t help but wonder: will my reaction be the same if I see her in another ten years?

She is warm, totally open, as though I’m not wearing a scarf over my hair. Or I was wearing one the last time she saw me, instead of short hair and two piercings on my face. Or like there’s no difference. It doesn’t really matter – in any case, it’s nice to meet an old friend who doesn’t look, just for a second, like I’ve caught Plague. Her friends are similarly unwary and unphased, at least apparently. I feel like I can breathe, like I am taken for granted – or it is taken for granted that I belong here just as much as everyone else. I don’t feel like I need to defend myself at all. I don’t feel prickly. People feed me candy and eat my cake without asking. It’s fantastic, like finding childhood friends you never knew you had.

In the midst of a Crim Law lecture I receive an email from my dream, my first choice, my long shot: denied. Ah well. It still hurts a little, of course, some register somewhere that I am not, after all, a person who commands the admissions process; I am a person at its mercy. It could mean that I’m not as together or as smart or as accomplished as I’d like or as other people are, or it could mean none of these things. It just sucks not to be wanted – even when I’m not wanting back.

But adults take this in stride. They take a deep breath and listen to the fallout of Miranda, because they are here to learn, not to nurse a bruised ego.

And like an adult, like the older student I will be, God willing, I venture out from campus and seek out the cooler places in the city. In one of these I meet a man one of my best friends once wanted to set me up with, only to realize that he would, in fact, be a total disaster. Not because he’s bad. Just because he’s an F-sharp to my G. We don’t sound good together, we’re awkward to touch at the same time, it’s just bad all over. This too rolls off my back like so many drops of water, which feels good; it’s not some reawakened-and-lost dream, it’s just guy #3,287,394 I’m not that into. Who could be a friend.

All in all, it feels like I’m stepping out of a cage I didn’t even know I was in. Thank God.

I get back on a plane to a life that barely still exists. Destiny awaits, taking hold of my heart, pointing it south. I want to ask Kurt if this is a legitimate way of choosing a life: observing my heart’s compass, and setting out.

Black swan

You know that you are a black swan and not an ugly duckling for a few reasons:

1. You’re older than most of the other ducklings, so it’s unlikely that your feathers are still downy.

2. You don’t look like anybody else.

3. You are looked at, but not necessarily with disdain. Interest, primarily.

4. Nobody talks to you.

The lovely, graceful, original misfit.

It’s an old-new feeling. This is a new kind of minority, or you are experiencing your otherness to a greater degree. You are a minority with an explanation point. It’s not a bad thing, really. Just different.

Everyone else seems to have made friends with each other and made a final decision, but you are not so bold – or maybe you forgot to drink the kool-aid. Or maybe they didn’t give it to you because you are, after all, too ridiculously out of place. A sore thumb is only one of ten; you’re one of hundreds. Even the admissions office didn’t realize you were actually coming until you stood before them, in flesh and hijab, hoping for a t-shirt like the rest of the pre-Ls.

It’s not so bad. More than ever, you realize that you are school-bound to study, and you will need to study more than you ever have before. If you continue to be The Visible Invisible Woman to your classmates, it’ll only be that much easier to spend you life in the library – which looks like Hogwarts, so that shouldn’t be so bad. You envision yourself the Hermione of the incoming class – nerdy, ambitious, a little over-eager – the only difference will be that instead of a frizzy mop of hair, yours is ensconced neatly under a pretty scarf. Either way, you’ve missed an important social cue.

You try. During a faculty panel, you raise your hand and call yourself an “aspiring con law superdork,” and they all laugh. That’s a good start. If you’re going to be strange, you might as well be strange and funny; they may still hold you at arm’s length, but at least they’ll be tepidly fond of your presence. You’re good at this, you tell yourself. A year of public speaking experience won’t go to waste. This is what you do: you win people over despite themselves. You’ve just never had to live-work-breathe-study with your audience before.

Two potential classmates introduce themselves. One needs to look at your schedule; the other has spent two years living in the Middle East, so you’re a familiar sight. Around you, they take each other to coffee and compare grades from junior year, or maybe biceps. They have matching jeans and shoes and probably the same hairdryer. Many of them have that Midwest accent you’re starting to hear: their a’s have more i in them. This is not to say that they are cookie-cutters of each other. They are individuals too; they just have identifiable things that can be shared over the course of a weekend. They feel familiar to each other. You’re a purple peacock in comparison: something that is not found in their natural habitat, though not inconceivable given the subtleties of postmodern identity. You miss the East Coast.

(Where are the men in beards? The girls with skinny jeans and messenger bags? Is there a divey cafe anywhere? Bueller? Bueller?)

So you finish your novel, you chat with the faculty, and long neverendingly for a cigarette. It’s the beginning of a new beginning, one you have longed for, one from which you cannot, will not, be dissuaded. Maybe you’re just different. Maybe you’re blowing everything out of proportion. Maybe you’re even special. Maybe in 20 years there will be a hundred future yous parading through your office, drinking in the solace of the path you’ve trailblazed for them…that would be a nice ending to this story.

In any case, you’re sitting alone in an airport in Philly with a dead phone and nothing but your black swan blog to shore you up for the long days that lay between you and the promising future. Curtain up…