Thoughtful

I won’t put on tomorrow’s bra before I get in bed tonight.

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Highly Notable Events in August 2008

  • Browsed wedding dress possibilities with my dearest friend Jill (her dress, not mine)
  • Tuned in to coverage of the Democratic National Convention
  • Tried a new Thai restaurant in Park Slope before my roommate did
  • Acknowledged my compulsive need to be “the favorite”
  • Visited Camp Jewell for the first time in almost five years

I started this blog five years ago today by summarizing the highly notable events of Summer 2003.  For two weeks, I coded every entry in Notepad and loaded them page by page to my web space on the school server.  Then my HP laptop crashed (surprise.) and I started posting to Blogger.  Google had just acquired Blogger, and as an early-ish adopter, I was one of the first ‘citizens’ from outside the Googlesphere to receive a Gmail invitation.  I’ll keep boasting about that even though I switched to WordPress in February 2006; and, nobody cares when I was invited to Gmail.

September.  It was the time of year when new pens still smelled new and I had all kinds of plans for a school year more productive, accomplished, and fulfilling than the last.  Before my notebooks got dogeared and my penmanship got sloppy.  Before a leaky highlighter in the bottom of my bag bled through half of Tuesday, and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday on every single page of my planner.

I used to resent this time of year in this sort of subterranean way, veiled by typical complaints about the end of the summer and by the goody-two-shoes excitement to go Back to School.  In my unseen heart, I considered it a mean trick. I wondered if the summer off was worth the consequence.  It was a false start—a new year in September?  It promised all these new chances and beginnings, but nothing seemed to change.

I remember staying up later than I’d ever stayed up on a school night before my first day of fourth grade.  I was organizing my closet.  Sorting troll dolls and amateur pottery.  I cleaned my room like it had never been cleaned before.  I thought if it looked like a Pottery Barn catalog (or like the set of Full House) when I woke up on The First Day of School, it would stay that way all year.

In the days right before the seventh grade, I dropped hints to my mom that I wanted my first real bra because the narrow straps on my First Day of School dress would expose the sports bras I usually wore.  I also refused to kneel on the carpet, which is how I usually watched TV or worked on craft projects, because The Dress revealed my knees and I didn’t want them to look chafed.

Every night for three weeks before my senior year in college, I sneaked out of the house and drove into town to walk the length of Main Street and loops around the Middle School for an hour or more, sometimes into the next morning.  Ever since, I’m tempted to go for a long walk when I can’t sleep.  I’ve tried to think of a safe place to go in the middle of the night.  At home, my biggest concerns were distrustful cops and groups of stoned teenagers.  In New York, I have to wait until the gym opens at five if I need to outrun insomnia.  I’ve done it before.

Outrunning—that’s what it’s always been.  And when I tried to dodge bad habits, quick fix damage, or elude depression, they always caught up with me.  They’ve chased me down.  I decided to expunge ten years of slobbery on the night before fourth grade?  Perfect timing.  I had really started to believe that life worked that way; that time was defined either from one day to the next or over the span of three seasons, and never in between.  Time dropped paperweights and bookends in the same spots every year until graduation.

Since my days of First Days of School, I’ve been more free to take each day as it comes.  To take.  Each day, individually.  For what it is.  As it comes.  Not before.  Nor after.  One at a time.  In chronological order.  I know it sounds indifferent, like how you live when you’re just getting by.  But, honestly?  I would rather get through every day without walking all night just to get to it.

Compromise is the divide between adaptation and resistance

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If I travel in the morning and arrive home mid-afternoon, and if I lie down on the couch in the living room with a book and use either the air conditioner or two strategically arranged fleece blankets, depending on the season, to keep my body at just the right temperature, I can pretty much guarantee that I will be sound asleep by the time my mom gets home from the grocery store with the instant oatmeal and the flavored carbonated water that she is stocking just for me. I don’t usually come to until all the groceries are unloaded and she’s already putting them away.

If I travel for longer than forty minutes in the family mini-van, if I listen only to the white noise of the highway beneath the wheels, and I let the cold-blooded creature inside my mammalian body succumb to the hyper-controlled environment, I can pretty much guarantee that, as determinedly as I resist, I will fall asleep in such a position that I wake up with a drool splotch in a highly unlikely spot, such as mid-calf on the back of my jeans. I will be unresponsive for half an hour at a time, then I will stun other passengers by bursting straight into a conversation through most of which I slept.

For the three years I attended Mount Holyoke College, I could pretty much guarantee that I would start my period within six hours of moving into my dorm room at the beginning of each semester. As far as I know, my cycle never coincided with the other women with whom I lived in such close proximity.

If I express distaste for a new pop song the first time I hear it, if I comment on weak metaphors and lazy rhyming, if I sulk in protest when I hear it, I can pretty much guarantee that within two weeks, I will know all the words to that song and have a favorite line and press ‘forward’ on my iPod with the secret hope of shuffling to it. I keep an untitled playlist that I think of as “Songs I Love to Hate,” and in the same moment as I denounce a song, I make a mental note to download it.

I lay awake wondering what I looked like when I fell asleep

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For years after my parents stopped tucking me in, my mom or my dad continued to look in on me after my lights were out. I think a lot of parents do that, take that moment to make sure all is safe and sound, that their child isn’t staying up too late to read under the covers, to say a silent goodnight, to see peacefulness on a sleeping face.

I got caught reading under the covers. I was also known to sit up until all hours, unable to put down a crafty project, trying on all my dress-up clothes, or sifting reverently through shoe boxes of toys and trinkets, taking inventory of treasures the way children do.

While I played in the dim light from my closet, I listened for a parent’s footsteps. I learned the warning groan of the floorboards a few steps shy of my bedroom door, and I learned to leap into bed and feign sleep with minimal mattress creaking. Oh I got caught, but sometimes I fooled the watchdogs.

And yet, there were nights when I took comfort in knowing that I’d have company for just a moment in the night. As I got even older, I would remind my mom to “come check on me” every now then. When something upset me and I felt vulnerable, I wanted someone else to stand watch. I guess I’d be the type of cowgirl to sleep with one eye open unless I could count on someone else to look out for trouble on the prairie.

There were nights when I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. My mom would crack open the door and I would say, “Mom,” because I’d been expecting her but she wouldn’t expect to find me lying awake in the dark.

“Why are you still up?” she’d ask.

“I don’t know. I can’t sleep.” She would tuck the covers tighter or press both thumbs in circles against my forehead or kiss my cheek right up next to my ear and tell me goodnight again, hoping it would take. I remember one night when I called out to her before she closed the door again.

“I’m craving something. But I don’t know what.” Her silhouette braced itself in the doorway and she sighed. “I think it might be coffee.” I was maybe nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember what she said; I don’t even know what I would say to a child who told me she was having indefinable cravings in the middle of the night.

I’d probably tell her, “Nice try, but you’ve had your last glass of water, your last bedtime story, and your last goodnight kiss. Go. To. Sleep.”

But I maintain to this day that I wasn’t just stalling that night. I really craved something—something—whatever it was.

I felt what New Yorker writer Judith Thurman expressed when she wrote, “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for a familiar ground.” Or Frank O’Hara, who wrote, “When do you want to go / I’m not sure I want to go there / where do you want to go / any place / I think I’d fall apart any place else” in ‘Metaphysical Poem.’

I was maybe nine. Maybe ten.  My first restless night of metaphysical angst.

Tilt your head this way ’cause I’m deaf in one ear

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When our friend Amy invites Caitlin and me out one Saturday night, she describes our destination as “Meatpacking.” Just like that. A proper noun all by itself. As though it’s the local supermarket or a small coastal town.

“She’s on a first-name basis with The District.”

“We’re going to need something more specific.”

Caitlin sends her a text message: ok! where? Amy texts her back with an address and approximate time. We’re already getting dressed and then we find ourselves with some time to kill.

I agree to trim Caitlin’s hair on the condition that we do it before we start drinking, which is not how she proposed the project. We open the bottle of wine that I’ve had in the fridge since before Thanksgiving. Saving it for something, for nothing. For when I felt like it. I definitely feel like it as we sit together on the futon, watching Arrested Development on DVD and making up rules to our own drinking game as we go along.

Once, in college, a friend of a friend of a friend set me up with one of his friends on the basis that, “He’s kind of shy. You’re kind of shy. It’s perfect.” In the car on the way home, just the girls, we agreed emphatically that the logic was faulty, but this particular guy was a lost cause. “He turned and faced the brick wall every time I tried to include him in the conversation.” “Is that seriously the type of guy people see me with? Seriously?”

After we turned out the lights, though, I relived the encounter and reconsidered the set-up. Across the blue-black room, I asked my roommate if she thought the fact that I’m deaf in one ear could possibly be an issue for guys. Not that it would be a turn off, but that it could make certain people nervous in certain situations.

“No.” She paused and I waited. “I mean, I really don’t think so.”

I was right though; it does make certain people nervous. It makes me nervous. Turns out, the fact that I’m deaf in one ear is mostly just an issue for me.

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The greatest leap of all is the one you almost didn’t make

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Last Leap Day, I was in Puente Hornopiren in southern Chile, about to launch a sea kayak down the Pacific coast. Hornopiren was the official starting point—notable only because it’s the village that was named in the Outward Bound course catalog, which I read nightly for the month leading up to my trip.

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I remember posing for this picture. I hesitated before I asked German, one of two Chileans among us, to stop with me next to the sign. I didn’t want to be the one to hold up the group on our way out to sea. We were about to leave the landmark behind when a thought occurred to me, one that tickled on a phantom limb throughout my time in Patagonia.

After barely a moment, I would depart from that spot for good. The signpost would stand there beside the dirt road, beneath rolling clouds of mist on some days and endlessly blue skies on others. The mossy hot springs and the frigid cascadas in the Fiordo Cahuelmó, the keenly lit market in Chaitén, and every crest of pebbled beach somewhere in between would forget my footprints. With time, my memory would weaken and Chile would once more seem too remote to comprehend.

I wanted a photo that would remind me of that day and of that rare patch of the planet and its very existence. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder just before the next bend in the road and miss what I had already left behind.

We tramped on toward the harbor. At the very last second, almost impulsively, I stopped short and handed my camera to German.

While he framed the shot, I bounced on my toes, feeling sheepish. Such a tourist. But I thought, “this is your only chance, and you’ll regret it if you pass it up.” I coach myself with that phrase and I rarely look back to see if it’s true. Of course, I can’t know how much I would have missed this photo if I hadn’t taken that pause; I only know that I’m glad I did.