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(05/07/14 3:59pm)
Straight
This is what you go through, the thumbing through the hand of cards to see what you’ve got and what you can do with your hand. You’re gonna get sadness in spades. I’ve seen enough boys walking bulldogs on ropes and Global Health girl Facebook photos of unvaccinated children in Cambodia and New York Times notifications buzzing on my phone at 4 a.m. telling me about 200 abducted girls and trailers for movies about pretty people with cancer and heard enough rape jokes and hiccupy laughs from genuine alcoholics and read enough Buzzfeed lists and terrible poetry to know that the crumminess out there is endless.
Flush
The very first piece of advice my mother gave me when we were on the road towards Middlebury (with faint urgency and hysteria in her voice because she was realizing the length of the list of life lessons she had forgotten to teach me including how to shoot a gun and how to operate a chainsaw) was “don’t get involved with a professor.” Holds up, I hear. But you should get in with a professor. Find your mentor, your expert, your spirit guide. You can have more than one. I have developed almost irrational loyalty towards professors on this campus, probably unbeknownst to them. Screw course evaluations. Go into that person’s office hours and talk to them. Write them a thank you note at the end of the semester. Figure out a research project that they would be jazzed to advise. Learn how to navigate a professional collaboration. It’s cliche to cry in a professor’s office. Do it anyway if you feel like it. Some of them will blink at you calmly and think about how many more papers they have to grade before they get to go home to a six-pack of Longtrail. That’s what I’d do if I were a professor.
I sat in Timi Mayer’s office at the end of my sophomore spring and said, “I can’t do anything for anyone else in this world. Why do you keep doing this? What’s the point?” I was crying like a chump. I saw her whole face soften. “All I can do is teach,” she said. “All I can do is try to make students think. Critically think.” I knew this already. I knew why I was kicking my own ass, bending over backwards for seemingly little payoff and a pile of debt to get myself a liberal arts education. I know I am not worthless, that I have something to offer, that I am not yet a broken person. But I often need someone other than my paid therapist (who I absolutely do not believe for a second) to tell me to my face. Those moments of rhetorical validation, between you and the professor you respect? Irreplaceable. Don’t write that paper so that your professor gives you grade A. Write it so you can stretch your fingers and toes as far as they reach from your body, so that your professor can see that you are not just college student, you are a person who is trying, a person at work.
Three-of-a-Kind
Isn’t it funny how often this pricey (we/I love to talk about $$$) experience often feels just so cut-rate? Like at the end of a paper or a party, I feel post-coital but still unfulfilled? When my mother comes here she walks around campus, re-upholstered in new grass and spotless branding and sighs in jealousy. I am never going to have this place and time again, this bargain brand form of adult lite stocking a country club bathroom, these rooms of rampant, brambled, fumbling gecko children all squawking for attention or fetal positioning to disappear. I am trying to see the beauty in the final lo-fi montage of belly buttons and blinking cursors and coffee breath and dorm room bed flops and Proctor oatmeal. Somehow try to remember, even if this seems like a disappointing Woody Allen film times racism times rape culture divided by old-fashioned animal cruelty projected on the shiny carapace of the self you thought you were going to be (an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life) that it’s also the soft carousel of your friend taking all the dishes to the conveyor belt or solidarity in the basement of the film lab at 3 a.m. or the Gampitheater with a vase of lilacs and strawberries and OutKast playing from an iPhone for a birthday breakfast or an entire discussion class gaining fast on a desert mirage called cultural collective memory.
Full House
When it’s the first snow I sit in Johnson Memorial Building’s lounge, and stare up at the skylight in the honey-wood ceiling. Proctor Booth room is best before 9 a.m., soundtracked to VPR Classical and water with lemon. There is an ice cream machine on the sixth floor of Bi Hall as well as the greenhouse. Go there in the dead of winter for oxygen and chlorophyll and chipwiches. I was once told that you can get inside the organ chamber in Mead Chapel through a little door, though I have never tried it. You have to be in the library very early if you want to claim the SSR (Secret Study Room) in the back right corner on the ground floor. Sama’s has the cheapest coffee. Use the Bike Shop. Hillcrest air feels like the Fiji water of airs. Use the outhouse in the Organic Garden. Use the craft supplies in the Crest Room. Sleep on as many couches as possible. The first time I saw Facilities edging all the sidewalks, I just stared and stared. That is a crazy thing, to edge all these sidewalks! That is a beautiful, insane task! Admire the edged sidewalks. There are a lot of things happening “behind the scenes.” Figure out what they are.
Four-of-a-Kind
Here’s a good game to play: search your email inbox for instances of the word “stressed” or “panic attack.” You’ll realize you’ve been here before. Some selections from a four-year stint:
December 2013: And maybe I’m just writhe-ing and circular-stress-thinking more than usual because 40 assorted pages due by Thursday will not get done and definitely not ease the minds of people who I think I’ve let down and betrayed because they maybe saw potential in me and I am systematically failing them or “not enough sleep and too many drugs”
May 2013: My harddrive crashed! I am back from sea which was nice but I am dumped back into stressland again because today as I got in on the night bus, I came down with a miserable fever. Ideal. And everyone is gone on spring break except for my one roommate who was tripping balls all day in my house on LSD while I lay in bed and shivered to the tempo of Pink Floyd or whatever
December 2012: wildly frustrated on verge of tears and hyperventilation in the GIS lab, no can do.
September 2012: i almost had a mini panic attack and then on my way home i stopped off at weybridge to say hi to bekah and on the way there i saw a sad bro chasing after a very unrelenting and prim girl who was stalking away angrily and he was calling and calling “Louisa! Louisa!!!! WAIT PLEASE DON’T RUN AWAY FROM ME!” and it was quite tragic.
March 2011: i skipped class today to work on the three essays i have due tomorrow. IM SO STRESSED. I NEED THIS TO BE ENDING. nose to the grindstone until fri...here we go.
September 2010: I almost have a panic attack every day just thinking about how much amazing stuff is offered here and that it is not humanly possible to take advantage of it all in just four years.
Hang in there, lil’ buddy. You’re gonna be fine.
Straight Flush
My friend Bekah brought this term into my life: “Big Feelings.” She stole it from one of her friends in Seattle who works at a preschool with little kids, many of whom have been abused or neglected. When the kids are experiencing an overwhelming emotion-cloud of feelings they can’t process, understand or deal with in an effective or socially great way (good or bad)...they call that having Big Feelings. Your Big Feelings are valid, and you don’t have to answer to anyone. No one ever has to ruin everything, not even me. Some things you can just enjoy and let run through your hair like Moroccan oil and pour into your heart of Spring Breakerz embers and spread and fizz like a mimosa.
Royal Flush
I rediscovered my mother’s other classic piece of advice when I was playing that email inbox game earlier — in response to some minor crisis, she wrote back: “You should, as I still like to say, put your hair in a pony tail, splash cold water on your face and get real.”
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(04/30/14 6:34pm)
Guess what? Advice columns are stupid, but Holy Guac, people of my ilk can’t seem to get enough of them. There are some decent ones of course — Dear Sugar, written by Cheryl Strayed had its prime in The Rumpus a couple years ago (but now Strayed is hella overplayed, like Dark Horse feat. Juicy J, R.I.P. Fall 2k13) and Ask Polly by Heather Havrilesky in The Awl, which has been on a roll recently, if you’re into long reads about abusive boyfriends which Polly usually responds with some variation of, “Dump that jockstrap and get yours, honey.” My actual-no-playin’ favorite recent advice venture is the revitalization of Molly McAleer’s Plz Advise. Sister to sister straight talk is a much beloved niche genre. Helpful/entertaining to a point. But with my rocky self-esteem and unimpressive amassed life experience, we all know this sister is Someone Who Has Absolutely No Business Doling Out Advice. So for Volume One of Advice Column, I’m going to just give you some recommendations of people who are hustlin’ and writing and making good things for you to absorb.
This is absolutely not “Books to Read Before You Zzzzzz Bored Air Jerk-off Gesture.” No one around here has time for that kind of pleasure reading! Go ask some undateable alt bro who thinks he’s Bukowski or some drama queen who thinks she’s Franny Glass (oh, swerve; that’s me, though) if you want a list with people like D.F. Wallace and Bolaño. These are people you have time for. (This is coming from the me who uses NYMag as her premier source of news.) These are mostly irreverent Internet writers. Punks and freelancers. Comedians who will make you laugh until you spit-take your green tea all over whoever is sitting across from you at the library second floor front tables (those were prime spots in their day; which one of you snooze-dogs made it such an uncool zone this year?). Entirely extracurricular and bold and refreshing voices that had some sort of impact on me in the last four years. And, gasp, they’re almost all ladies!
— Everything I’ve ever wanted to whisper in your ear as I push the sweaty baby hairs off your forehead was already tweeted by @middtwitt a couple years ago by Maya Goldberg-Safir ’12 and Patrick D’Arcy ’12.
— Kate Carraway’s Girl News, a column she wrote for Vice (ugh, I know) somewhere around 2011.
— Molly McAleer used to be the shizz on the Internet.
— The Awl/The Hairpin/etc. a good interconnected planetary system on the Internets.
— Molly Lambert, who writes for Grantland, is a dreamboat, I want to be her when I grow up.
— Sloane Crosley and her two books of essays, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” and “How Did You Get This Number.”
— Julianne Smolinski wrote a piece about getting hair extensions in Los Angeles that kills me.
— Mallory Ortberg, not entirely insufferable nerd at The Toast.
— Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, star comediennes and writers of the show Broad City, total treats.
— Cartoonists Julia Wertz and Esther Werdiger.
— Tech journalist Jenna Wortham and general cool tech lady Aminatou Sow.
— Jenny Slate, Morgan Murphy, Jessica Williams and Sasheer Zamata are funny as hell.
Nota bene: everything above is my specific taste. This is my column, so I get to say what’s cool and what’s not and “joke around.” However, the idea that you can only be a certain kind of cool if you keep up with certain realms of cultural production is stupid and fake science and perpetuated by those infuriating auras emitted by WRMC freaks, Lit Studies Majors and G.I.S. students. And newspaper editors, tailgaters, the “cool, off-campus” Febs, the secret society cokewhores. The improv kids. The tennis team. The entire Dance Department. You know what look I mean. The look that says, “You don’t even know.” It’s true! We don’t! Tell us! Don’t belittle us! It continues to amaze me that we can spend all day talking about how to be humanists, but fail to give someone our attention because they don’t wear interesting sweaters or don’t have any Pavement on their iPod or don’t play golf or don’t know how Haitians dance. Like, what? Fun fact: if you aren’t 16 years old and a Youtube sensation, you aren’t cool and missed your chance long ago. We’re all a bunch of losers. It’s ok. Here for you, babe.
(04/16/14 4:04pm)
Joanna Rothkopf ’12 wrote a dank column near the end of her time here, which I guess you could call a “feminist column” (squirm) called That Thing Down There. (I squirm not because I feel uncomfortable to call myself a feminist, but because of how many people abandon ship when they hear a bright-eyed white-skinned Middlebury girl say that. It’s like sliding up in your Birkenstocks, whispering “sustainability” and popping your liberal arts insured booty on the hood of your daddy’s Range. If your rants start to smell like pop feminism, if you’re tagged as an activism fetishist, if you cannot skillfully walk the line between stone cold revolutionary c-word and really active listener to all voices, your take-me-seriously card is revoked. Side note: I recently have taken ownership of the c-word and I have a lot of feelings about it. Email me if you want to discuss.) That Thing Down There used to be a great, steady feminist voice on our campus, and I wanted to do a mini-homage in my vague-cloud-column this week with a haphazard brush with the discussion of modern conceptions of modesty and immodesty.
So let’s talk about that hair down there. Ooooh, touchy subject? Bush seems to make people around here more uncomfortable than talking about masturbation (but maybe still more acceptable than discussing anal play?). For the record, to all you ladies tagging Insta’s of your flowing Garnier Fructis locks with “long hair don’t care,” that phrase isn’t about topside mane. That phrase refers to pubes and armpit hair. Just ask Lil’ Wayne. The ability to hold shame and shamelessness in tension is one of the most fun feminist pickles to put on the side of a slice of hot meat at the Girldom Deli. We evaluate our goods and decide what we are ok or not ok with presenting to the world, instructed by other ‘doms, especially Sexdom and Media-dom. Personally, when I get home at the end of the day, I’ll take off all of my clothes. Visitors, friends, strangers; I cannot count how many people have seen my Ts. I’m not about to join a nudist colony, but I am pretty cool with being naked. And since high school, I’ve eschewed hair and felt a part of the norm.
Even being cool with being naked makes things a lot more complicated and body-centric than it seems it should. How many thinkpieces about Lena Dunham and her show Girls could go for 800 words without mentioning how much she featured her naked body on screen. None of them, as many secondary thinkpieces pointed out (including the one you’re reading right now, sigh). Censorship of da ladie$ in public spaces and forums has become most evident to me in artistic venues. At Maisie Ogata ’14’s performance art piece during the Symposium last Friday outside of the Johnson Memorial Building, I learned that you aren’t allowed to be nude in public spaces on campus. A couple days later, while helping Lily Miao ’14 install some art in the foyer by McCullough Social Space, she was not allowed to post a painting with full frontal nudity.
Who is ok with what and why are we ok with that? In Istanbul I enjoyed keeping it hairless down there. Often for religious reasons, many women (and men) in Turkey wax off a lot of their body hair. Elif, my Turkish bikini waxer, once answered the phone mid-wax. It was her mother. I find it worth sorting through the juxtaposition of how near someone is allowed to my nether regions and for what reasons to figure out just what the deal is. In traditional Istanbul, sex resulted in a kind of invisible or internal blemish, a stigma, but to get a full Brazilian was part of a ritual maintenance of cleanliness.
Our constant body evaluation is coupled with a shifting relationship with how much of this we can see on a daily basis as well as its connotations to others. The fake math of body economics is relentless. If I take my top off on Battell Beach, I am technically at risk of getting a citation. If I grow my hair out, I wonder how many boys here at Middlebury would pump the brakes at the feel of OG-sin, Eve-style pubic zones mid-romantic-entanglement. If my name is now Google-associated with the word “bush,” how many job offers have I lost?
Pubic hair seems to have a recent comeback in trendiness, even mainstream-ness, judging by recent articles in New York Times Magazine and The New York Times itself by Amanda Hess (a dope sex columnist, read up on her) and Marisa Meltzer respectively, about a month apart in publication. But even if the Times is glacial in its recognition of alt trends (Surfer chick 70s bush is suuuuuuch a thing you guys, it was not just hippies. Our moms were woooorking it.), it does suggest some sort of mainstream interest. As Hess notes in her December article and Meltzer in her January piece, several celebrities have expressed their tendency to keep it natch, and American Apparel, in their window display in Lower Manhattan, manikins posed with full bush under their sheer negligé. When I was in Los Angeles, capital city of hair removal down to the follicles, a group of post-grad friends confirmed their preference for bush. Turns out that hair is erotic to plenty of people out there. Recent mid-act with a signif. other actually left me worried about how bare I was down there.
So now I’m growing my own hair out, maybe because I’m a trend-chaser. Or maybe, I don’t mind getting less action in my final months here because I’m outgrowing Middlebury and its teenagers who are still learning that bodies are cooler and more fun if they don’t look like blowup dolls. Or maybe because my body, specifically my c-word, is the only space over which I feel I have political power at this point in my life. No matter what I choose to do with my pubic hair or how many people have seen my areolas, I’d like to think I still have purity of heart. Haha just kidding, I’m a deviant who’s going to hell on a River Styx Wet n’ Wild water slide.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(03/19/14 3:44pm)
Automatic Problematic
This professor’s eyeballs are about to pop out of her head in front of this surly discussion section. She wants you to find what is problematic. Oh honey! What isn’t!? Moby Dick is problematic. The Help is problematic. Jezebel should be more problematic. Your polyester Navajo booty shorts. Your paper coffee cup. Your non-fair-trade coffee. The fair trade system. Mother Teresa. Beyoncé.
Compare your problematics to mine. Are we all on the same page? Former disenfranchisement will never let you go. Walk a mile in my shoes. Give me my shoes back; what do you know about Girldom anyways? You feeling oppressed today? You feeling a little vomit-y today? You feeling that wealth gap guilt? Non-disabled guilt? White guilt? Male guilt? Youth guilt? American guilt? Are you an ally? Are you a minority? How is that apple going down now that you know it was plucked by migrant farm workers? You better not choke on your words, there are innocents in jail. Was that politically correct? Tell your girlfriend that we are post-Feminism.
Stillettos=Barbie=empowerment=date rape? Does this follow the model? “Third World” is an outdated term. We live in a melting pot. Mosaic. Human stew of flailing parts. She has permission to use the N-word. He does not have permission to use the C-word. Squeeeeeze that boiling hot slime of the Automatic Problematic into my special tank, and we’ll rocket to the moon. On the moon, everyone does their readings, and no one uses buzzwords. We are critical listeners, not underinformed reactionaries. On the moon, we are still angry, and life is still unfair, but when we finally decide to speak, slowly and clearly and thoughtfully through the tiny transistor radio back to earth, we will say, “Let’s take a quick dance break.”
Grounded Wires Through Girl Rooms
Have you ever seen a person like me stomp around her room looking for something to wear? The number of kilowatts of horror that can be reflected off a mirror is enough to power a treadmill. Listen to the wasted energy of tugging shirt sleeves and pant zippers, full body twisting to see from behind, picking at holes, rubbing at stains, fluffing hair, kicking off shoes, hurling dresses to the floor. Extended roommate conferences on what looks Baldessari Right (yoga amphetamine chic) and what looks Baldessari Wrong (magenta, your hips in those jeans). Give me one girl who hates her arms and a couple ratty sweaters and I’ll have enough sickened electricity to toast a thousand pieces of bread. But no need, she’s skipping breakfast.
Collecting Pools of Crush Eyes
I fell in love with a girl last Thursday. Was completely smitten for at least fifteen minutes, and then it was gone and I felt okay again. The next day, I fell in love with the Co-op checkout boy for thirty-six seconds. I hardly ever sleep with the people I love, which is very sad, but very important. This isn’t your I-love-you love, this isn’t your mama’s love, but boy, is it no less potent, no less intimate. It’s an untapped gold mine, really, how rarely we use that energy from sources unknown and inexhaustible to actually keep someone close, how often it dies down, unspent, as you move out of each other’s path. Think of what we could gain from of all those unrequited passing shivers! We have a whole pool of trembling feels to dip into, a reserve of heat that floods through us despite all our politeness. Some sort of giant sponge might do the trick. Think of possibilities of irrigation, the innovations in light production, the greenhouses we could operate solely on the energy of our double-takes!
Harnessing Ambient Judgement
This comes from all of us, hanging low in the undersea rodeo, circling each other. I’m a coward, and these are the gross indulgences I ride. Is there a name for the stomach drop that comes with stumbling over a sentence, with saying something tactless or strange, something that makes everyone turn away from you and continue their conversation with anyone who isn’t you? And then the scramble, the excuse, the apology, the desperate attempt to brush it off, take it back, reassert your normalness. Three months ago, in the vitriolic heat sparked undoubtedly from miscommunication, my mother looked me dead in the face and asked me if I had Asperger’s. I wasn’t hurt or angry — I was taken aback. Maybe I do, I thought, pausing to consider if it felt right, if it felt thirst-quenching, nourishing. It didn’t. My psychiatrist thinks I have acute anxiety. My friends from home think I have a superiority complex. My ex-boyfriend thinks I’m trying too hard. My sister thinks it’s narcissism. I think I have ADD. My roommate thinks I’m a paranoid hypochondriac. Here’s what I suggest: whiplash your diagnoses together and tie them around your frame. Coil the symptoms into a helmet, pad your shins with the thinks. Now you’re twice your size wearing armor built from everyone’s book reports on “The Sad Story of Me.” You are neon and sparking and leaking battery fluid. Hoist yourself on a donkey, or some sort of trusty steed, maybe your bike, and point yourself towards the sunrise over the hill. Maybe stop to take a picture with your phone and while you’re at it, look up the definition of the word “quixotic.” We all look like fish out of water. Charge on regardless.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(03/05/14 5:10pm)
I’m sorry, I totally spaced out can you say that again? Something about your dying pet? Someone is having a birthday party? I wasn’t listening. What do you think the back of my head looks like to that boy by the soda machine?
I don’t think I can make it, but have fun! Why? Well. Ok, listen, buddy. Your a cappella concert or acoustic guitar jam or whatever is pretty far away from my bed and it is cold/icy/snowy/rainy and the Midd Rides dispatcher is AWOL and you’re just not worth the trek.
I literally would rather stand in line at the Mail Center for the rest of my life than attend this 8 a.m. Renaissance poetry lecture. So let’s call it sick. I’m sick. I’m deathly ill, but I am kind enough to shoot you an email from my deathbed. Gastro. It is gastro, I think.
No, I didn’t feel like going out. My roommate is out of town, so I’m going to try to have a “me” night? So I lit a bunch of candles and ran a bath and listened to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for like, 20 minutes? Then I got bored and I forgot my roommate’s dad’s HBOgo password, so I went to sleep.
No I didn’t make it to Viva Ross Vegas. I guess you can tell me about it. I mean, yes I know it looks like, I’m making a Zen sand garden out of my mashed potatoes with my fork while I latch on to your every word, but I’m not listening, not one bit. I am scheming. I am plotting my getaway. I am thinking about how I could pay my friend in laundry card swipes to take me to Burlington, and there’s a flight, leaving tonight, $300 one-way to Bermuda. Bermuda! What’s happening down there? I don’t even know! But I bet a wise mentor will take me under her wing and teach me to surf and sail, and I will become tan and rail thin and live off fish and Vitamin D.
I didn’t do the readings. I was attending a funeral reception for my friend’s dead pet. Or a birthday party. It was a combination funeral reception-birthday party.
I am so sorry I didn’t meet you for the improve show; I fell asleep in one of the blue chairs in the library. No, not the ones in Bi Hall; that atrium is too drafty. The chairs in the Davis Family Library. Yes, it was a reclining one. I don’t know; I got there early. If you get there early, you can snag one. Three hours. Yes, that long. That’s never happened to you? When I woke up the windows were dark and all my dreams came rushing back. My sister was a pirate, a cabal of merry Russian Satanists drank all of the wine, I got a tattoo on both the front and back of my wrist, both miniature scenes of birthday parties, and I was so wracked with regret in the dream that I had to wake up and double check that I didn’t actually have those tattoos in real life. I’m sorry I missed our meeting. Tomorrow?
I’m sorry I missed your Symposium presentation, but I would rather Oedipus my eyeballs than watch one more Powerpoint this week. Is that too dramatic, in light of the content on the front page of the New York Times? I’m grateful to be here, I am. I want to be here, I do. I want to hear your concerns about the word count of the assignment at breakfast and watch people play the Steinway in Wright and read 300 pages of feminist theory and attend that performance art lecture and always possess an impossible to-do list that flutters around in my backpack like a Yoko Ono Wish Tree wish. But sometimes I also I want to wander around and look at snow-covered trees and impressive icicles. I want to sit and stare into space and not think about anything at all. Just give me like 20 minutes. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.
I’m going out of town, so I’ll have to miss class next week. It’s my birthday?
(02/19/14 6:48pm)
Hey kidiots! Does that start us out on the wrong foot? These days I’ve been feeling like my social filter is made out of Swiss Cheese, holes punched through with the heavy artillery of being “totally over it.” I am frustrated with how seriously we take each other and bummed with how we casually we dismiss our own influence over each other. You are kidiots! And scummos! But also fragile Jenga towers of Babylon! And leavers of invisible legacies! And so am I. We are Taylor Swift-esque with the power to be a milli things at once. We are simultaneously gross and arrogant and insecure and great and isn’t that pretty cool?
I want to introduce you to this column about anything that loosely has to do with this ambiguous idea I’ve termed “fake science.” A boring example: I take my coffee with milk. The only reason I do it is because once my mother told me that I’d get an ulcer without a splash of milk to protect the lining of my stomach. Not true. I realize now that she said it because she takes milk and kind of liked the idea of us taking our coffee the same, or just because she likes correcting me, but since then, I have taken milk in my coffee. It isn’t out of some sort of familial loyalty, but because I half-secretly-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye believe that I’m actually engaging in a kind of ulcer-prevention. Often our decisions are not based on any generally accepted truths, but are tics and tendencies and coping mechanisms motivated by irrational reasons buried in our formative years or rootless whims.
Fake science is folklore, magical thinking, misrememberings, superstition and myth: the correct cadence of spelling a word aloud, the order of your morning routine, fear of certain animals, debatable pop trivia remembered as fact. It is small versions of what Danny Loehr articulated in his February Celebration address this past month: the stories we tell ourselves become our reality. We adopt them and drop them, not realizing their groundlessness until years later. Sometimes they stick and continue to manifest themselves in our preferences, actions and expressions in the long run.
Sometimes we are endearing. One of my friends used to insist on only wearing cute pajamas every night in case there was a fire and she would have to evacuate the house in the middle of the night and the cute neighbor boy would see her out in the street. Sometimes our fake science is sinister. A different friend used to obsessive compulsively knock on wood to ward off danger; another had convinced herself that her eating disorder was a vegan diet. Locating your irrationalities does not always end in exorcising them—the aim is simply to be more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is critical because, believe it or not, someone out there is learning how to live by observing you living out a fake science, through your words or emotions. It is a very frightening and exciting responsibility. Trust me when I say: You have an effect on other people.
I didn’t make up “kidiots.” It was the name of a blog active in 2010 run by some funny Middlebury students, one who is still a friend of mine. On the Kidiot blog, she wrote a short piece about turning 20. I recently saw her and she’s doing really well; she owns a pet hedgehog in Brooklyn and has really healthy chakras, which were somewhat shaken when I shyly mentioned how much that old piece meant to me and thanked her. She hadn’t expected anyone to be reading.
The site where we make a legacy that sticks to someone’s brain will not be where we expect it to be, and it is happening all the time. It won’t be what we wanted to have been remembered by, and it will not be by the people we care about the most. We won’t even notice all the micro-legacies we leave and collateral damage we cause for the most part, unless that person is moved to tell us about it. So that’s what I’m interested in here — the awareness of our own absurdities, the way they effect our community and the effort to reach out and make the stakes feel real for someone, even for a second.
This column isn’t Mythbusters. I’m not going to always talk about how we are dumb kids and what it is we’re getting wrong or right. I just want make some hazy observations and opinions on the intersection of “culture” (which is what exactly?), college students and the way we live. Most of these articles are inspired by nightmare notes I wrote to myself in the middle of the night or Gchat conversations or visions that come to me when I’m lying on the floor of my thesis carrel underneath my coat, reading Joan Didion. I’m just your neighborhood neurotic, popping an anti-anxiety Rx in Proctor and admiring your hair from the next table over. Humans! We’re so crazy! It’s so great, right? Lets talk about it until 4 a.m.
(01/23/14 12:51am)
Fun facts about my oral contraceptive use:
• The reminder to take my birth control pill (a chewable, generic brand that sounds like the scientific name of a flower that blossoms only at night) on my phone is scheduled for 9 a.m. every day and says “babies making babies!” because I think it is funny.
• I’ve been on and off birth control since I was 17. When I was 17, I asked my gynecologist some very good questions. I read all the instructions the first three times I got my prescription filled. I was a very smart 17-year-old.
• Whether I am on or off birth control usually has more to do with the state of my insurance than the frequency of my sexual activity. Last year my go-to brand switched from $30/month to $900/month after losing coverage without alerting me. Before I cancelled that order, the pharmacist at CVS definitely thought I was picking up for Skye Ferreira (it was 2012, she was blowin’ up).
• When I was living in Istanbul last year, I was not on the pill. Some generic version of two-step Plan B, however, was available for $16 over the counter. When I was popping it on the corner outside of the pharmacy, I dropped one in the street. I did not read the instructions, primarily because they were in Turkish. I did not realize you were supposed to take both pills, 12 hours apart; I thought they just provided an extra. My roommate said, “Well, 50 percent effectiveness is still pretty decent.” I was a very stupid 20-year-old.
• I’m 21-years-old and I am not a women’s health professional. I Google frequently, expecting forums to have 60 percent less misspellings than they usually end up having. I have a modicum of common sense.
Fake science that women between the ages of 18 and 25 have claimed as fact in my presence, and my retorts:
• The Pill makes you gain weight. This has been myth-busted by my gyno — most versions have shown no effect on weight. Don’t pull that on me, girl.
• Birth control makes you ______. Do not make any more blanket statements about birth control. It is probably not accurate for every single contraceptive option out there.
• If I miss a Pill, I just skip it, I don’t double up the next day. Nope, read the information in your Rx packet. It breaks down what to do in essentially every scenario of Pill malarkey, and probably in four different languages, because God Bless America.
• I took Plan B today even though I’m on the Pill because I just don’t remember to take it everyday so … Girl, Plan B provides dosage info too and does not recommend.
• There is a Pill for dudes? Coming hot and heavy towards all you secret sexists in the very near future. You guys ready for some Jezebel think pieces? Pass.
• My birth control was making me feel depressed/anxious/suicidal. Real science seems still inconclusive on this because different drugs have different effects on the gorgeous, unique chemical soup of you. If you feel like you are responding poorly to a new prescription, talk to your doctor. Maybe a brand or system of BC isn’t for you. Don’t be lazy or scared; figure out what works best for your bag of skin and organs that you want to keep un-impregnated.
The takeaway? Your gal pals and I are not informed about all aspects of reproductive health. So what I do think you should do is talk to an expert. We are surrounded by experts. I’m glad you’ve mastered the art of name-dropping Sparknoted Foucault and giving Atwater bathroom blowjobs, but you are not a true expert in almost anything except for being a 19-year-old. For the love of Elizabeth Warren, if you have lady parts and especially if you are “getting some” and you do not yet have a gynecologist with whom you make regular appointments, make all of that happen now. I love my gynecologist. She has the positive, whistle-pitch voice of a dog trainer, which is soothing to me. If you need a rec, I can totally hook you up. If you live anywhere on Planet Earth, I can “Yelp” it for you, baby. If you are at Middlebury, I have heard great things about Laurel. Laurel Kelliher is an FNP at Parton Health Center and she can give you the lowdown on contraceptives of all kinds and probably any FAQs or un-FAQs you might possibly have about body stuff.
Most importantly of all, do you all know that there are free condoms in the Health Center? Is that common knowledge? It should be. If you are throwing down 60 G’s for this universidad and you are not taking advantage of the free condom bowl in the Health Center, take a seat. Are you embarrassed? Honey, I bought 35 individually wrapped Twizzlers at Sama’s today in front of half the hockey team. I will personally retrieve you a handful of assorted condoms from the really nice nurses at Parton.
Artwork by SAMANTHA WOOD
(11/20/13 11:22pm)
I’ve been following Alpenglow since I saw their first concert in January 2011 – before they even had their name – in the artfully decorated M Gallery of the Old Stone Mill. It is not an Alpenglow show without some white string lights snaking along the floor or through the roof beams. I suppose I cannot claim that anymore, though, since they have been playing in real concert venues with presumably pretty advanced lighting systems for a couple years now. Their most recent appearance in Middlebury followed less than two weeks after the end of an international fall tour with the band Lucius.
Opened by Burlington band Quiet Line, Alpenglow played last Saturday night, Nov. 17, to a crowd of student fans and old friends in the Johnson Gallery. The band often chooses underutilized or unusual spaces on campus for their concerts. Singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Peter Coccoma ’12 of Alpenglow spoke of their return to Middlebury and their use of the gallery’s space.
“I always look forward to these shows,” he said. “I like that we can control the number of people who come to them.”
I think Alpenglow requires this intimacy for the best experience, along with the white string lights and the groups of friends all leaning on each other’s shoulders as they watch, passing around Citizen Cider and singing the chorus of “Solitude” – an Alpenglow classic.
Everyone expects this atmosphere at every Alpenglow concert, whether it be their sixth or seventeenth.
“Last year it seemed like [an Alpenglow show] was every other weekend,” Josh Swartz ’14.5 said.
But despite the number of times they have played, a huge crowd still shows up, because despite their familiarity, as Alex Jackman ’14 said, “their shows are always different in terms of their set up, and they manage to keep it interesting.”
During this set, for example, we were treated with “Fields,” a song from their recent EP that they do not usually perform live.
Another distinctive element of this particular concert was the installation art from Sanford Mirling’s Studio Art Independent Study (ART 700). Nick Smaller ’14 created a video-audio installation that involved the band.
“I wanted to use a video infinity loop … making an oscilloscopic representation of the sound they’re playing,” Smaller said.
The projection was pixelated and jumpy, like a video game, and pulsated in aquamarine and pink behind their heads. Smaller explained that the band had approached the artists and were interested in collaborating, so he created a piece for the class and the show.
Sally Caruso ’15.5 and Ali Silberkleit ’13.5, who have an exhibition opening at the M Gallery today, had pieces of work up as well. Caruso made soap paintings of dancing, melting people, made visible with black lights. A large pink tree hanging from the ceiling was a remnant of Silberkleit’s piece, which originally included hanging pink balloons that read “Daddy Issues” and a film of the naked artist chopping down the tree playing behind it.
“The piece had to do with the death of my father and trying to fill that missing masculine roll in my life in a dumb and girly way,” Silberkleit said.
Graeme Daubert ’12.5, often lead vocals for Alpenglow, pointed out the weird split formation of the audience between songs.
“I feel like we have the partiers over here and the listeners over here,” he said, gesturing to the standers and the sitters respectively.
Despite their indecision, the audience was attentive, including the Dissipated Eight a capella crew who showed up to support their former member, Daubert. When asked why she had attended, Anna Jacobsen ’16 looked at me with an expression both solemn and defiant and said, “Because I love art and hate hockey.”
Their opening act, Quiet Line, was a very sweet, if sleepy kind of Weybridge kitchen music. Alpenglow sounded clean and jangly as ever, with Daubert’s voice ringing like a seraphim beating on a hollowed-out log of a giant sequoia tree. As audience member Sophie Quay-de la Vallee ’16.5 said, “It’s all in that voice.”
“This is the peak of Alpenglow,” Paul Quackenbush ’14 said. “They’re just on their game.”
(11/14/13 1:23am)
If I could write a devotional power ballad to the WRMC Concert Committee, I would. Aaron Slater ’16 and Arnav Adhikari ’16 are a dynamic, if skinny-legged little duo, and they are not messing around on the concert agenda this year. The annual Grooveyard concert is coming at you this Saturday, Nov. 16, a beat cornucopia (Thanksgiving metaphors!) featuring Com Truise and Twin Sister, right on the heels of last Saturday’s Chrome Sparks concert. What have we done to deserve this November weekend bounty? I was thrilled to see this double-header come up on the events calendar, with WRMC successfully responding to the student body desire for more small concerts expressed via an MCAB survey circa Fall 2011 regarding music event preferences on campus.
Chrome Sparks, a moniker of Jeremy Malvin, a tall, sensitive, impressively side-burned child of electronica out of U. Michigan, Ann Arbor, played a free late-night show in Coltrane Lounge to an exuberant crowd of sweaty 19-year-old boys and dry-mouthed girls on controlled substances and everyone in between. WRMC’s Creative Director Alan Sanders ’13.5 was appreciative of “the wide variety of scenes from the student body represented in the audience.”
When my friends and I rolled up around 11 p.m., Malvin had just begun his set and the room was already well filled-out, with lots of folks pressing together at the front to let the synths or Moogs or whatevers wash over them. Someone was passing around a silver vase full of purple fluid and people were head-snaking a little to figure out how to dance to Chrome Sparks’s quasi-challenging-for-dancing-purposes adagietto rhythms.
I knew I was going to like Chrome Sparks in concert because I appreciate his music and his Twitter presence. He posted a photo of himself and his bandmates in Montreal and you can tell they would be some fun liberal-artsy punks to hang out with, but they’ve also been blessed with some serious talent — each song hits with clean, percussive insistence and chill vibes. He’s got a couple EPs and singles out on his Bandcamp, and was exactly the right size outfit for a musical “mini event.”
Coltrane was a brilliant venue choice for this show — a space that kept the crowd intimate with the band, with lots of windowsills and radiators for stashing coats (a crucial feature). The porch stair entrance to Coltrane let the revelers spill out into the night for cigarettes, chilly air and conversations in between bops around the dance floor.
Vivian Cowan ’14 described it as “super dance-y” but noted that Chrome Sparks did not get started until an hour after the advertised time. But she thought the “background projection was awesome.”
Sanders also praised the cool multimedia dimension of the show.
“I loved their projected graphics, and thought they went very well with their music,” he said, in reference to the swirling images that mesmerized as the band played their sort of chillwavy electronic jams and Jeremy tossed his New Wave curls around. Reactions were overwhelmingly positive from the exit polls I conducted at the door.
“Great to see the Concerts Committee supporting live electronic music,” student band frontman Evan Allis ’15.5 said of the show. “I had a good dance.”
In case you missed it and you want to catch Chrome Sparks at some other point this month, they are in Cambridge, MA tomorrow night and at the prominent Williamsburg warehouse venue, 285 Kent, next week for the final stop on their tour. If concerts like this one and impending Grooveyard are the kinds of acts WRMC brought us this fall, then I cannot wait to attend the events that the Concert Committee Prom Kings plan for the rest of the academic year.
(02/20/13 5:19pm)
Was my last article a little too Eat Pray Love-y? I feel like my last article was a little too Eat Pray Love-y. I hope you can bear with me if any more sentimental-study-abroad-blog, gag-if-I-see-one-more-Instagram-of-your-cultural-experience moments arise. This time I hope I can kick that association by taking spiritual guidance from a former porn star.
It’s about 12:30 p.m. in Istanbul and the sound of ezan – the Islamic call to prayer – is rising from about 3,000 mosques across the city. The chant begins with “Allahu Akbar” or “God is greatest.” In this Turkish metropolis, however, the words echoing beautifully across the hills are not sung in Turkish. They are Arabic. Under Atatürk, leader of the Turkish national movement, which involved sweeping reform and secularization of the country in the early 20s, the government mandated that all mosques call the ezan in Turkish. As both an anchor in the city’s soundtrack and the predominant religious group’s spiritual timetable, the tongue of one’s country or the tongue of one’s holy scriptures becomes embedded in daily life. The chosen language for the ezan has deep cultural implications. Arabic was reinstalled after a change of leadership in 1950.
I love hearing the ezan. I am thrilled if I can hear the full song when out on the balcony eating breakfast or walking through some alleyway at dusk. My Turkish flatmate, a Muslim and self-professed Kemalist, a strong supporter of the principles behind Atatürk’s secular republic, doesn’t like the sound of the ezan. He doesn’t want to hear Arabic thickening the air five times a day — he wants to hear Turkish, the tongue of his country and his father. Islam is his religion but Arabic is not his language. For Turkish Muslims, the particular language of the magnified call has the power to alternately effect a kind of linguistic imperialism, inspire proud nationalism or not even make it into the iPod-plugged ears of the new generation of “global citizens” and their growing indifference to their heritage.
Another Turkish friend told me about a time his Palestinian friends came to visit Istanbul. They attended a mosque for Friday worship. The Turkish people present began to cry upon listening to the imam’s Arabic teachings, overcome by the holy moment. At the end of the worship, the visiting Palestinians, the only people present beside the imam who spoke Arabic, asked, “What did those people think he was saying?”
“Perhaps the sacred words of God,” said my friend. The Palestinians looked bewildered and shook their heads.
“The imam was discussing the part of the Qur’an that enumerates very boring property laws.” The assembly was trying to participate in their worship that was not presented in their own language.
You guys remember Mad Libs, right? Those simple short stories with fill-in-the-blanks for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. chosen at random? The words that the players write in sometimes eerily work in context, but more often render the story nonsensical and funny. Maybe it was really late at night and maybe I’d spent too much time reading the archived blog posts of a recovering addict and porn star, but I started to think of how human interpretation of religion is very often like a game of Mad Libs. If Arabic means as much as Gobbledygook to a devout Turkish-speaking Muslim, but he is still moved to tears in the moment, he is replacing those unintelligible words, those mystifying blanks, with what whatever words he needs to hear or whatever words he thinks might fit.
I would be inclined to encourage belief in whatever magic storm has the power to move you. Even feelings brought on by imagined contexts are valid. However, it brings me pause. If more than just one’s internal spiritual life is built on such penciled-in foundations, I think that the misunderstandings, the garbled messages, the self-told truths are often reasons for irreparable schisms between people.
But the Mad Libs concept is not only a wreaker of havoc – it is also the multivariate way we can stay honest and defiant. God bless fill-in-the-blanks. Recovering porn star and addict of many substances Jennie Ketcham was all over reality TV shows and book deals and keeps a blog with a large following. In 2009, in her early AA days, she wrote in response to interrogation of her beliefs in light of another porn star’s sudden religious extremism:
“What bothers me even more is the fact that I’m trippin’ off what other people think … I can’t even say God in the serenity prayer in AA. I replace it with the word gravity. Gravity is my higher power. It is stronger than me and certainly more consistent. Occasionally I mix it in with Buddha. Buddha, grant me the Serenity. Even Love. Love is my higher power. But the G word has always wigged me out, especially the fundamentalist nonsense that Shelly spews. The revelations I am experiencing have nothing to do with God, or crazy Shelly, they have to do with ME. And only ME. And maybe gravity.”
In AA they make you choose a higher power like a fill-in-the-blank question until you actually land on something you sincerely believe in. May we all be as self-possessed as Jennie Ketcham when faced with that blank space – open to the moments that move us, unafraid to expose our confusion and vulnerability, and accepting the absurdity and misinterpretation that is all part of the game.
(01/24/13 12:58am)
Some things I did over winter break: yoga, Catholic mass with my grandmother, an ex-dudefriend. My New Year’s resolution for last year was “be not afraid.” For me, “be not afraid,” meant to shake off my tendency to over-plan and overthink, to take risks and to accept when things don’t go according to plan. So maybe it was more like “be less neurotic.”
But I followed through, sort of. As I did an internal year-in-review on the eve of 2013, I recalled some key moments in the past year when I successfully spoon-fed my Type A personality some spontaneity. One day last summer, while I was sitting in a cupcake shop to escape a rainstorm/eat two cupcakes, I decided to spend the following spring in Istanbul. It was the 11th hour in the study abroad application process. I knew next to nothing about this Eurasian city of 13 million. It happened a couple more times — I took more risks, I made fewer to-do lists. It’s like 2012 was the cultivation of my soul’s secret SoCal-stoner-philosophy and 2013 will see the payoff in the form of 60 percent fewer anxiety attacks during exam week.
Even though this go-with-the-flow state of mind isn’t something that comes naturally to me, it has some powerful results. The most joyful moments of my year coalesced in space and time and always caught me off guard.
On space: At Catholic mass on Christmas Day, I listened to Father Matt giving a homily about “thin places.” A “thin place” is a concept from old Celtic Christian traditions and refers to a holy place on earth that is especially close to God — a place where the veil between heaven and earth is very thin. But thin places, it seems, can appear just about anywhere. It’s more in the feeling than in the name.
On time: Spontaneous encounters with joy were the subject of Zadie Smith’s recent article in the New York Review of Books, a discussion later picked up by Gary Gutting in the New York Times. Aside from the main discussion of the human experience of joy, I noticed the circumstances of Smith’s stories. From her account of a night of wild abandon in a club, to the moment of sheer joy she felt jumping over a wall with her companion, those rare moments shared the breathless, slippery element of surprise. They were all wholly serendipitous.
Which brings me to ex-dudefriend and my impending international flight — two recent exceptions that I met with my old Type A ways. Before I met for coffee with long-time-no-see ex-dudefriend, I bought a new dress. I did girl magic with my hair. I didn’t turn the heat on in the car on the way to the coffee shop so I wouldn’t sweat all over my dress. I played out 15 different scenarios of the afternoon in my head. I thought of interesting things to say. I had fond memories of this person. I carefully crafted plans on how to either preserve or revive the joy I remembered. The reality was much like Zadie Smith’s morning-after reaction to a character from one of her most joyful nights: “There, on your mother’s sofa — in the place of that jester spirit-animal savior person you thought you’d met last night — someone had left a crushingly boring skinny pill head.”
For all my efforts, it wasn’t going to be the beginning of my romantic comedy. The magic didn’t hang around, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fully present the night before. It was a matter of history; it was a time-sensitive kind of joy. I waved goodbye to ex-dudefriend and didn’t look back.
Today, I have a backpack full of 15-digit reservation codes, Ziploc-bagged TSA-approved liquids and an extra pair of underwear in case my checked bags get lost in Switzerland (there is a real probability of this happening). I am apocalyptically prepared. Something will probably go wrong. I will have to take it in stride. As I tiptoe through my list of mosques and churches in one of the oldest cities in the world, maybe I’ll brush cheeks with the divine. Maybe I won’t feel a thing. Thin places cannot be scheduled into an itinerary, and the best-laid plans are usually the least likely to spark joy in your heart. So let go. Be not afraid. I have to go now and learn how to say “I’m lost” in Turkish.
(12/05/12 4:18pm)
Religious vocations used to be a big deal at this school. At the beginning of the 1800s, the majority of Middlebury graduates became ministers, who were required to read the Greeks and probably had to wash their own dinner dishes. I don’t blame us for forgetting these origins — we were a little caught up creating gender, racial and socioeconomic diversity, figuring out how to accommodate the ice-skaters, the oboe-players and the aspiring architecture-neuroscience majors. These are all good things. I am fully for combating bigotry and fostering equal opportunity. But I want to know where the clergy went. When did Midd say goodbye to all its chaste, God-fearing, Latin-learned dudes?
To most of us here today, a religious vocation sounds like the last absolute call on earth we would hear. But education, at its earliest, was not about figuring out what color your parachute was. It was largely about the cultivation of self-discipline.
My friend Ian said something a couple weeks ago that is still rocking my brain — that essentially, our educations at Middlebury are defined by how we choose to spend our time. The liberal arts system enables and complicates this simple sort of characterization, as it creates the space and opportunity for myriad different choices and establishes systems to make the process and consequences of those decisions act as another kind of educational experience. Now we have more vocations than doctor, lawyer or minister to choose from, but we also have to cooperate with the negotiations of a community based on more than one canon and learn the bureaucratic intricacies that continue post-grad. But the theory is eye-glaze-inducing until you apply it to your personal situation.
Ian’s example was the recent episodes of “activism” on campus. One way to distill those students’ activities — or the way they choose to spend their time — is to reframe their self-proclaimed protest as their “education in activism.” We could envision the same for people who engage in all kinds of extracurriculars, formal and deliberately informal. The members of WRMC are educated in audio production and sexy radio voices. The yoga-practitioners are educated in flexibility and energetic harmony. The guy who crafts the most insightful advice for a pair of feuding housemates? An education in peer mediation. All these different, unofficial disciplines are part of the project of learning how to be a human being. It’s an education in the field of self.
We have to respect the fact that everyone is straining to hear a vocational call. We can disagree on what is a useful way to spend our time, but we can’t go condemning anyone for getting it wrong. In college, the activists may throw a tasteless protest. The girl who wants to be a publicity agent may throw a terrible party. But it’s generally okay, because the chemistry kids over there are definitely screwing up that experiment, and I definitely failed an English paper this semester. We are 20 years old and we are just trying to get it right. (Though “generally okay” doesn’t validate an educational program that alienates the community, breaks laws that protect human dignity, etc. You may wonder — will she ever stop using parentheses to avoid taking a stand?!)
In a zoomed-out world, as we take an honest look at the history of the human race, it is just era after era of people making the wrong decisions about how to spend their time. We run around trying not only to do the right thing, but to do our right thing, to find our calling. It’s funny, though, how hard we try and how repeatedly we miss the opportunity to be humble. I feel like I would be more impressed by a student who chose to make his or her point by scrubbing the stones on the Proctor Terrace rather than the one who drew graffiti on a wall. Somehow, when you zoom in on the day-to-day, you start to see that the choice to do something classically “good for you” — often code for gross and boring — actually results in good things. Your mother doesn’t tell you to eat broccoli for no reason, just like they didn’t make Middlebury students read Aristotle for no reason. People wouldn’t keep making sacrifices, big or small, if they were just empty promises. The people who make their way towards Mecca on their knees are answering a call, and doing so with a lot more passion and sincerity than I will ever know.
I took on the project of visiting one church of every faith during my remaining time here at Middlebury. Believe it or not, church is not always a fun session of enlightenment for me. It can be a dry, tedious, meaningless discomfort. I will be thrust into new discomfort when I leave for Turkey next semester and have to patiently learn a new set of unspoken cultural laws. But I think if we are unafraid of adding calculated effort to our educations, if we challenge ourselves to listen closely to all the little lessons in the ways we spend our time — the good, the bad, the spectacularly boring — something miraculous just might happen.
(11/14/12 5:36pm)
For many students of the liberal arts elite, undergraduate existence is an era of unchecked decadence. You can eat a packet of peanut M&M’s and a cigarette for lunch and get nothing worse than a few judge-y looks from the girl headed towards the gym in Lululemon. You can saturate your bloodstream with controlled substances, sleep until 2 p.m., not shower for three days, bury your bed in dirty clothes. Most of us don’t have a kid or a dog or even a houseplant. The only responsibility you have for four years is you, and yet, if you’re anything like me, you can’t even be trusted with that. Let’s assume that we already attend to our chronic self-absorption and readily engage in the daily battle against solipsism, and consider the state of our internal worlds for one indulgent moment more.
Why are we so self-destructive during our years of prime vitality? It’s beyond “College, no parents, no bedtimes!” We aren’t even very good at hedonism at Middlebury, a little too lazy to really get wild. We seem to halfheartedly zombie through our days, become the worst versions of ourselves and fall into truly ugly cycles. After a night and half a morning of unwashed, nicotine and caffeine-fueled library blitzing, we crawl into bed for a four-hour nap while a beautiful day blazes outside. We live in strange extremes, like Siddhartha pre-Middle Path or St. Augustine pre-middle age. I’m not saying we’re living in sin — I don’t think I can make any kind of judgment call when I refuse to stop drinking straight from a bottle of Charles Shaw on a Tuesday night or to stop taking heroically long naps. But I do think that our default is pretty obnoxious and doesn’t make us happy. We are fast, young things in the lap of luxury and opportunity, and we are not living very well. That’s not a Middlebury problem. That’s a me/you/us problem.
Making space for happiness is a process of getting clean, in whatever small or large gesture that requires. I think we could start with intentional loveliness. “Intentional loveliness” is something I just made up because I like the word “lovely,” so much so that several different people have recently informed me that I overuse the adjective. Reworking some little part in your life to make it “lovely” isn’t necessarily an aesthetic change, but it can be as simple as that. I’d like to argue that letting a friend pull your tangle-y hair off your sticky-with-stress-tears face, brushing and braiding it and changing out of your sweatpants into your prettiest crushed velvet dress simply for a trip to Proctor dinner is almost better than an hour of therapy. Pulling ourselves together doesn’t mean that we need to start training for a marathon, eating quinoa and setting 9 p.m. bedtimes, though if you can successfully overhaul your life like that, holler at me, you role model human beings.
Luckily for this columnist, this week coincides with a religious festival that complements this idea of getting clean in order to make room for good things. According to the Hindu Student Association (HSA) and Wikipedia, Diwali, also called Deepavali, is the festival of lights for Hindus and Sikhs and began last Sunday and ends Thursday. It is a time of fresh starts and involves cleaning your living space, sharing good food with friends and lighting candles and lamps to celebrate the good that overcomes the dark. The spiritual aims of the festival remind me somewhat of the Christian Lenten season, though it boasts a more lighthearted atmosphere that I think is more appealing than the abstinence of its Western parallel. I think this wish or greeting to be shared during the festival of lights, again provided by the HSA, better articulates this idea of finding loveliness within us: “The sun does not shine there, nor do the moon and the stars, nor do lightning shine? All the lights of the world cannot be compared even to a ray of the inner light of the Self. Merge yourself in this light of lights and enjoy the supreme Deepavali.”
Be kind to yourselves this week by scrubbing some part of your grimy existence. Wake up early and wash your face. Put on your power outfit. Do your laundry. Be lovely and light.
(10/31/12 7:05pm)
This summer, I went a little Bible-crazy. It’s fine, you guys. I’m fine. I had no conversion experiences, no brush-with-death leaps of faith, no immaculate conceptions.
I was neither saved nor born-again. The last time I went to church was once this summer, and I spent most of the time like I usually do in a church — looking around at the parishioners instead of the pulpit and wondering about what they are thinking when they bow their heads in prayer.
I have always had a general interest in how different religions operate, a curiosity-killed-the-atheist-cat kind of situation that I was actually born into as an unbaptized daughter of liberal atheist scientists who took me to a different house of worship every weekend to “see what’s out there.” I developed a tolerance for other people’s beliefs, so I guess their parenting mission was a success, but I also ended up with a very amorphous understanding of what it means to belong to a faith community and to subscribe to a historically and socially recognized belief system. Despite spending nine summers with overly patriotic Evangelicals at a Bible camp masquerading as an outdoor adventure camp, attending a Tibetan mandala ceremony with a moved-to-tears crowd of ex-hippies and sitting through four years of Catholic high school masses, I had yet to feel anything resembling conviction or devotion — not to mention inner peace. So somewhere around pre-teenage-hood, a time of incomparable wisdom, I decided that religion stuff was all pretty inconsequential and relished my status as a little lost punk. If you don’t understand it, write it off as stupid — American youths’ most charming credence.
But at some point in the last six months, for a conflagration of reasons, I started to connect to Biblical text with a quiet clarity and certainty that I had never formerly experienced. (Note that this is a text that has been sacred to a good deal of humanity for much of recorded history, so I should probably stop feeling so visionary). These verses were starting to meet my little coming-of-age worldview. Our worldview is that personal philosophy we develop sometime during the drama of our twenties, when we can be our most self-centered and tragic and searching.
Despite their newfound, inexplicable importance, the biblical epitaphs weren’t enough to convince me to join the group. I see tiny, beautiful, universal connections and they move me, but I still balk at the idea of believing, with equal conviction, in the whole enchilada of anyone’s organized religion. Most of the whole messy, human-construed playbook seems unappealing — the orders to attend church or to not eat meat on Fridays or to condemn other people and culture’s ideas about love and life. I still grimace when I see Facebook statuses spouting bible verses or presidential candidates invoking the heavens. I still don’t believe that I’d actually be praying to any entity.
So how on earth does a godless, flighty girl flirt with religion? Is it, as my mother also likes to call my obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog “just a phase?” I’d like to think my “spiritual journey” has more gravitas than my cultural sensibilities, but then again, I read Vanity Fair more than I read scripture, so let’s agree to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism in my authorial qualifications.
I’m hoping this column will be a biweekly concern with this problem, and in part, an investigation of the different opportunities of religious life offered in Middlebury. I hope to engage with some manifestations of spirituality in our daily lives — a sphere that is sometimes disregarded because of our usual preoccupation with our physical/mental/emotional ones. I will be attending masses, Shabbat, a gathering of the Intervarsity Christian group, a Hindu Association event and a Quaker Friends meeting. I will be hunting down the sacred spaces available for student use on and off campus and interviewing the spiritual leaders on campus. Ideally, I’d like to raise those feelings of curiosity and discomfort that are important to encounter once in a while — like trying out bikram yoga for the first time or going to Catholic confession, but maybe without the excessive sweat or paralyzing guilt.