Filter, Cont’d
Case in point: this post by Instaputz articulates the kind of thinking I do every day in a way I could never bring myself to write or express publicly. I’m sure it’s partly because I’m self-preserving (I’m always looking for ways to preventatively save face, so to speak, in case something happens in my future that depends on my past – ha!), and also pretty sure it’s because I try my darndest to be more like the classy role models I look up to (Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy, Michelle Obama), who I can’t imagine swearing like a sailor, let alone swear in a way that is so directly disrespectful to others (even if those “others” hardly deserve any respect in the first place…). But that’s what keeps a girl classy, I guess.
Sometimes I just want to lay it out there, as opinionated as I may be, just for the sake of relieving the some of the pressure I feel as a result of my own impatience. But I usually take the 3 seconds it requires to check myself, and I rarely end up spewing the kind of language Instaputz gives me great satisfaction in reading.
Music Memory
Songs have a funny way of triggering random memory recalls. Case in point: I was just typing away on a project when my iTunes decided to play Big Eyed Fish by the Dave Matthews Band and all of a sudden I’m sitting in my Yaris zooming up the Camarillo hill going southbound on the 101, cursing under my breath at the slow drivers in the fast lane who won’t punch it (and admiring the fancy sports car zig-zagging back and forth across the lanes around the slow drivers in all lanes) on my way to LA for the weekend to visit Doug.
Also – Tori Amos’s Concertina never fails to take me back to that night when I read Ken Follett’s The Man From St. Petersburg in one sitting because I was in high school and I thought Feliks was the kind of guy I wanted to transfer to my high school and notice me. New student transfers in Carpinteria were a big deal because it meant meeting someone who hasn’t been in all my classes since kindergarten (or preschool, even, at Kinderkirk.). It turns out, not long after I read The Man From St. Petersburg, there was a new transfer student, but he didn’t resemble Feliks in the least bit and didn’t notice me at all, anyway.
Filter
Every once in a while I watch a Bridget Jones movie just for the heck of it (usually playing in the background while I’m doing something else). Every once in a while I get the urge to write brutally honest entries in my blog, filter-free and without personal censors. Then I realize how quickly my life would be endangered, how so many of my acquaintances would cease to acknowledge my existence, and how much I’d live to regret more than half of what I wrote after writing it.
Self-censoring is, I think, a wonderful evolutionary development. It helps us foster new relationships so that we have time to build trust and sentiment before honestly indulging in all the terrible and awful things we really think but can’t say in front of people who don’t know us very well. Most of us achieve this without thinking about it – we have some internal meter that tells us what types of comments are admissible in a getting-to-know-you conversation. It’s only when we reach BFF status with another person that we put that meter to rest and say whatever the hell we like. Granted, this is how some BFFs experience a falling out, but true BFFs (those with the two halves of a heart on some necklace chain or bracelet, obviously) will bounce back from whatever initial shock/insult/disagreement arises from the uncensored comment(s).
So despite the occasional wish that I could somehow negate all the filtering that goes on in my own mind, on the whole I’m grateful that my censors are, most of the time, pretty reliable. Here’s my thanks to the many who face those unfortunate instances when my filters are nowhere to be seen and yet continue to tolerate me.
Looking Back to Look Forward
This recent article about childhood photos and their ability to predict a person’s future marital happiness (or not) prompted me to revisit some of my own photos growing up. I wasn’t really curious about whether or not I’m going to live happily married after, but more interested in what past photos of me say about how I was doing overall with this whole growing up/living life/coping with crap business. Fortunately, there weren’t many photographs taken of me during the coping-with-crap stage, since I (apparently subconsciously) shied away from any sort of documentation of that emotionally wretched period.
For the most part, I look like this in a lot of my kid pictures:
This photo, taken at the community pool during my elementary school years, is probably a reliable representation of a typically happy day. I was with my brother, grandmother, and best friend on some random afternoon, and the scribbled handwriting on the back indicates it was my first time hosting a sleepover (sticker trading, anyone?)
As far as growing up and living life goes, I like the fact that this photo is the one that stood out to me.
I had expected to see a majority of my teenaged photos to make up the section I’d categorize as coping-with-crap, but even most of those were relatively happy (my teenage years weren’t particularly angsty due to an overachiever complex I owe to genetic inheritance). However, the next photo shocked the hell out of me, especially since I hardly recognized myself when I first came across it:
My dad took this picture just before I had to catch a flight back to school after spending a long weekend at home. I was in the midst of applying to med school, unhappy with my social life, stressed out beyond belief, and the extra weight proves it. I was dreading my return to school because I didn’t want to face the incredible hole I had dug for myself. To tell the truth, I still don’t remember much about the year during which this photo was taken.
Well, at least I still had a tan (sort of).
A few years later, after working at one of the best non-profits in Santa Barbara County and forcing myself to seek out a new direction, I began to look in new places to reinvent myself. In that time, I ditched my old path, moved to Chicago, and launched a new beginning. As much as I like to complain about how foreign the big city seems, I must admit that the complete removal has helped me in the soul-searching department. The inability to fall back into old habits and comfortable surroundings has produced amazing results with respect to redefining how I see myself and envision my future. Some great side effects include much improved relationships with my family members and a sense of true independence:
I hope more of my future pictures reflect the person captured during this family portrait session (Thanks, Dad!). Things are looking up and up right now, and I hope they continue that way. Of course I know this personal progress won’t continue at the same rate forever, but for now I’m riding the high for all it’s worth.
(Hey, is that a vampire tooth?)
Happy
The simplest things made my day today.
1. I’m ALMOST done with knitting a really soft and comfy bolero jacket in navy, and I’m so excited to see it taking shape – hopefully I can get it done tonight;
2. It was warm and sunny today. I had to stay inside for the most part because the wind threatened to explode my allergies/sinuses, but it was still super nice;
3. My brother now has three tickets to see a Lakers playoff game for his birthday! Happy 19th! GO LAKERS!
4. Thanks to Kitchen Vixen, I’m getting my butt out of the apartment tomorrow morning and heading over to the Green City Market for some sustenance.
Yay for accomplishing small things, yay for making memories, and yay for making new friends! (Can you tell I just had chocolate?)
*Rant
Just needed to get this off my chest today:
Terrorists are people, too. People have rights. Therefore, terrorists have rights. But especially because I don’t like the kinds of things they stand for and I’m appalled at the things they do, I think they should be apprehended and subjected to common laws and a justice system just like everyone else who does bad things, terror-related or not. Just because their actions are usually more calamitous and traumatic than others doesn’t mean they don’t get fair trials or fair sentences. It just means they will have more damning trials and more severe sentences.
I don’t understand the argument for stripping terrorists of their rights (or at least ignoring the rights of terrorists). If terrorists were treated unfairly, those conducting the mistreatment would be guilty of a kind of moral decrepitude – and isn’t the goal of eliminating terrorism a world with limited moral decrepitude?
Old And New
Yesterday, Doug and I celebrated tolerating each other’s flaws for six years. In that time, he was instrumental in helping me decide my major (English literature), led me to victory in a very prolonged pre-med battle (more on that later in this post), changed my mind about distant relationships (87.2 miles), and brought me to Chicago, where I still feel like a complete newcomer almost a year (!!!) after moving here (more on that later, too).
Our greatest insight of late regarding life together so far has been “breaking up would be a bitch – it would take forever to sort our crap.” Well, now that we’ve moved in together, that’s even more true.
Harry Burns: “Please, Jess, Marie. Do me a favor, for your own good, put your name in your books right now before they get mixed up and you won’t know whose is whose. ‘Cause someday, believe it or not, you’ll go 15 rounds over who’s gonna get this coffee table. This stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale coffee table!”
At least I’ll always know which books are mine (and yes, they all have my name in them anyway). It’s funny thinking about this relationship from different perspectives: I’ve spent 25% of my life with Doug, and the other 75% I spent with my parents because I was under 18. Basically, I don’t know what an adult life is apart from being with Doug. For one thing, it’s not like the movies. Being together is not all lovey-dovey all the time and we haven’t had any serious drama jeopardizing our relationship (knock on wood – and thank goodness for communication skills). I think this is what a nice life is supposed to be, and I feel extremely lucky. For some reason, he thinks it’s a good idea to stick with me, and all I have to say is I feel the same way.
Also yesterday, I indulged in another repeat of my Happy Dance by pulling out my Harris School acceptance letter and giving myself a pat on the back. (Thank goodness Doug tolerates all the stupid things I come up with.) I do this about once a week, which sounds incredibly dumb, but after five years of rejection, it feels so good to be recognized and wanted. I intend to celebrate this acceptance over and over again until graduation comes, then I’ll celebrate that. It’s hard to describe how important this feels. I don’t know how to convey how deeply invested I was in persuing a medical career – academically, emotionally, financially, and all the rest. Then I got a reality check and found out I had put all my eggs in the wrong basket. It wasn’t necessarily a bad basket, but it wasn’t mine, and when the Easter Hunt ended, I had nothing to show for. My Harris letter is physical representation of the fact that I’m no longer a lost cause, that I have something to continue working for, that I can be good at something, that I have a new direction and a new future to look forward to and, finally, someone else sees something in me that I may have had all along. Like Shaheen Jafargholi, who could knock your socks off if he only had the right song, I’ve got a new song myself.
I’m hoping that being grounded in Chicago via school will help me feel less of an outsider in this city. It’s taking me a really long time to warm up to this place, and I’m still looking for that breakthrough moment. If it never comes, then hopefully Chicago will grow on me so slowly I’ll never notice until it’s time to leave and I find myself unexpectedly sad…
Learning Curve
On Saturday, I learned that I don’t have any parental compassion whatsoever.
For most of the day, I was in the presence of two young families and I felt extremely awkward. Although I’ve always felt uneasy around children, I have never been more out of my element than on Saturday. I have this (unrealistic?) idea that children are just little people, and that they are capable of holding normal conversations and understanding concepts the way I do, even if it’s through a modified lens. Because I don’t really remember what I thought or how I thought as a kid, I take for granted that all kids are just smaller-sized adults when, in fact, they view and comprehend the world under very different terms. The only common ground I could find is our mutual love of”doggie”, who tried to stick his nose through the fence from the neighbor’s yard. Other than that, I couldn’t see the thrill in slamming bocce balls into the pavement (the scratches and dents made me wince), the joy of stomping on crocuses, or why sliced strawberries weren’t acceptable.
On the whole, I don’t have much of a problem letting kids be kids. As long as they’re not setting anything on fire or cracking each others’ skulls open, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be left to play on their own terms. What left me flabbergasted were their parents. Put a couple of moms together and all they talk about are their children (what did they talk about before they became parents?). Moms of young kids can spend hours and hours swapping stories. I don’t see what’s so fascinating about the weird and quirky habits of a particular child, and I can’t for the life of me see understand how a conversation like that finds the fuel to continue. It soon became apparent that, when new mothers congregate, they’re not really having a two-way conversation. Each mom is speaking about her own child, and has little true interest in what the other mothers have to say. What a new mother is looking for must be validation that her early parenting is up to snuff, and any potential evidence of other comparable mothers “not doing as good a job” as her is an added bonus. This is bogus – every child has a different personality, different learning style, and different likes and dislikes. A mother of multiple children is herself many different types of mothers in one because she needs to adapt to each of her children individually, so the comparisons mothers make amongst themselves is, in my point of view, a total waste of time and energy. But alas, comparing is human nature.
A few weeks ago, when I was visiting my family, my mom and I enjoyed a mellow afternoon knitting session with the tv on and an epsiode of Oprah aired, featuring mommy bloggers. The topics ranged from how mothers engage in “‘playground competition,” which is more of less what I’ve already described (maternal judgment fests, basically), and how a mother’s supposed to know whether or not she’s doing a good job. By the end of the show, these two issues were addressed with a single notion, that every mother does her best. Well, that’s a genius conclusion. So I turned to my mom and said, “If your kid grows up wanting to see you and lets you know know they love you every once in a while and thank you every now and then for doing your best, you’ve done a good job.” I happen to think my mom did a fantastic job. She was by no means a perfect mother by any conventional definition, but she was and continues to be precisely the kind of mother I needed as a kid and the kind of mother I need now.
Mother’s Day is still a little ways away, but I’m already looking forward to making it a particuarly special one this year. I think she deserves it.
Memo
To: Weather forecasters and reporters in the greater Chicago area
From: A Southern California native who knows her numbers
Re: Temperature Readings
Just because you say it’s going to be 70 degrees doesn’t mean it will be 70 degrees. Just because Chicago area websites report it’s currently 70 degrees doesn’t mean it’s actually 70 degrees. Just because the sun is out doesn’t mean it feels like 70 degrees. Don’t lie to me – my biological thermostat will know when it’s really 70 degrees.
For Future Reference
- If I ever get married, I don’t want a bachelorette party. I’d be getting married because I don’t care to be unmarried any more, and I definitely won’t care for all that being unmarried entails (even though unmarried behavior doesn’t necessarily differ that much from married behavior in some cases).
- If I ever get pregnant, I don’t want a baby shower (but if I end up having more than one at a time, I may reconsider depending on the outcome of a cost/benefit analysis).
- If I ever engage in any other rite of passage/monumental life event that requires a social event, ridiculous games and/or unnecessary gifts, those requirements will be void.
All my current best friends already know this. This is just in case I make any more best friends in the future and also in case I succumb to early signs of dementia before any of the above possibilities manifest.
