Too Late the Phalarope

"Yet it comes to me that it is not the judgment of God but that of men which is a stranger to compassion; for the Lord said, go thou and sin no more." -Alan Paton, Too Late the Phalarope

The feeling of finishing a book that tips you into a better world and a better self and a greater heartbreak.

Valentine's, Tina Fey Style.

Some of us don’t really go in for Valentine’s Day. Because it’s annoying and cheap and the wait to check out at Walgreens is at least five minutes longer than usual. 

So this year, thanks to Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, I have decided to celebrate Anna Howard Shaw’s birthday!

To brush you up on women’s history: Anna Howard Shaw was a bold and courageous leader of the suffragette movement in the United States and a staunch defender of peaceful civil disobedience. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Obvi worth celebrating. So, on this the 166^th birthday of Shaw, I present to you: 10 Ways to Celebrate Anna Howard Shaw Day.

1.      Reconsider your current life goals. If you are a woman, and alive, you owe it to us all to win and keep on #winning. You should be the winningest broad you can possibly be. Think you like where you are right now? THINK AGAIN. Until you have started a movement of suffrage, got an MD, and become the first female to be ordained into the Methodist church, you are just not trying hard enough. I mean, seriously, look at yourself and ask yourself are you living up to the life Shaw died for you to have? (Technically she died of pneumonia, but the main thing here is that she is dead and she would want you to do some epic shit.)

2.       Play Famous Women of the World Trivia! Make face flash cards and play it with all your feminist friends! Or try THIS incredibly difficult Famous Firsts in Women’s History trivia. If you ace this, I hope you work for the government. It would make me feel better about our collective future.

3.       Call your mom/grandma/aunt/surrogate. Unless you’re Kyle XY, your family is largely responsible for who you are today. So I’m betting that – even if you don’t realize it – there is a woman in your family whose strength, tenacity, wit, charm, guts, overall badass factor brought you here today, O great feminist that you are. And yeah, housewives of the fifties were some strong-ass women. So thank her. And spend time with her.

4.        Go to TheMonastery.org. Get ordained.

5.         Refuse to acknowledge when people say “Happy Valentine’s Day!” to you. At most, give them a, “What? OH! You mean Anna Howard Shaw Day!? Yessss, dahhhling.” Then kiss them on both cheeks and walk away quickly.

6.       Dot your “i”s with hearts. THIS IS THE ONLY DAY that you, as a self-respecting feminist, can get away with such indescribably appealing behavior. Scribble those hearts with the full force of all your hatred towards the entrenched crises of everyday sexism and Kim Kardashian.

7.       Stop trying to sabotage that girl that you can’t stand just because she’s a teeny bit smarter, prettier, funnier, and has more friends than you. You know the one I’m talking about. The Venn diagram of this girl’s friends and your friends overlaps fairly significantly, but her circle tends to be slightly better dressed and more musical than yours. But on this glorious day of feminine self-actualization, seriously, you have to let this go. Because you know when you hate on her, you’re really just cock-blocking yourself. Stand by the sisterhood.

8.       Have a DIY “Consent” Panty Party! Everybody picks a consent-themed slogan (such as “Ask First, DUH" and adheres it onto their favorite pair of underwear! Because, ladies (and gents, because you guys can fight for rights too) – we all know the suffrage movement of our day is fighting rape culture. And that I am actually serious about.

9.         Write 1,000 love notes to Tina Fey thanking her for recognizing Anna Howard Shaw Day and setting all of us free from the chains of February 14.

10.      If you are over 18, BE SURE YOU ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE. Seriously, I’m ashamed of you. Everything she died fought really hard for.

Feel free to share your own ideas of how to celebrate in the comments!

Post-Grad Angst

When I was in high school, I was super responsible. Wanted to be more on top of stuff than the next person, seem put-together. I watched people, learned quickly, decided that I would do lots of hard things, was ambitious and idealistic, blah blah blah. So I have this self-image, right, that I'm like super mature and responsible and probably ahead of my peers in that arena.

Dude, as if!! Post-college life hits me and I seriously can't do anything right. That's not totally fair to myself, because I mean I have a good job and good friends and I even tithe and stuff. ALL THAT ASIDE, I have to say----it takes me weeks to get shit done.

Exhibit A: My sister's wedding/Christmas/now-birthday present. (Keep in mind she got married LAST June and Christmas was in December. It is now coming up on June again and her wedding/Christmas/birthday gift still sits on a box in my bedroom in Chattanooga. She doesn't live anywhere near Chattanooga.)

Exhibit B: My dad asked me to transfer the title of my car to myself three weeks ago. This wasn't a surprise. He has been gently nudging me to get my own car insurance for a few months and then we got to the point where he just has to transfer the title. So he literally puts EVERYTHING together for me and mails it to me with a wonderful print-up explaining to me literally everything I need to do.

And yet I still manage to screw it up. I go to the wrong place first and offer up my file full of personal information. The nice little lady behind the divider looks at me with some alarm and sympathy and says, "Now, sweetie, who told you you were supposed to come here?" Come to think of it, no one. I just came to the place where I assumed I had to come.

Three locations and thousands of forms later, I have my own car title. (Some of this was not my fault and was simply the beauty of bureaucracy at work.)

For now those are my exhibits. But they make me wonder what seventeen-year-old me would think. She'd probably laugh and be relieved I turned out to not be too uptight.

It's a Wonderful Life

I have a little house.  It is kind of a box.  It has six rooms with a kitchen and bathroom attached.  The floor in the front rooms slants away from the floor in the back rooms.  When I sit with my back against the couch, my legs go downhill.  I think the house was once filled with water and faced with the problem of how to drain itself.  The walls are all unsure about which way they are supposed to tilt, so they do as they choose and try not to match the angle of their windows too closely.

Three girls live in this house with me.  And, together, we have undertaken to make this house a home.

I am Mary Bailey in my mind.  I can hear the deep celestial voice narrating my life, and see her athletically wallpapering as I brush paint onto my own walls.  It fits, since she is my inspiration for everything.

I think I may have reached a manic state of homemaking.  Every morning, I brief the cadets (ie, Hutton and Oatis, my roommates) on the day's activities.

"Did you see the grass outside?! The Round Up worked! Today we are planting the garden! And we need to finish painting and buy mulch and get curtain rods and light bulbs! and oh I almost forgot! the kitchen smells funny so we need candles! and can we get some furniture for the dining room because I hate it right now! and we need to do the dishes also and clean out our windows and do we have a hammer?!?"

Of course, only one or two items from the morning's list actually get accomplished by evening. But each day, a bright change is felt and seen.  My room painted.  A curtain up with twinkle lights.  The windows cleaned outside the kitchen.  Wall hangings going up.  Blankets appearing.  A piece of furniture rearranged.  Added.  Each change is a beacon raised for beauty, a buffer against chaos and dirt and darkness and, of course, ants.

As any good thing, it takes time and I want to jump ahead of myself.  But as the time slowly creeps along, the house not only transforms visibly, but begins to take on that unmistakable, though invisible, mark.  THIS IS THE WORK OF MY HANDS, it says.

This is my 320 Sycamore.

I did NOT take this picture crooked.
Yes, the door is THAT crooked.

Today I decided it would be a great day to get a tan. If I had made a For and Against list to "Getting a Tan," it would've looked like this:

Yes, these are the conditions
in which I decided to get a tan.

For:

-I am not tan.

Against:

-"Extreme Drought Conditions"

-"Heat Advisory"

-99 Degrees Fahrenheit
-Humidity: 50%

Foolishly, I did not make this list.

Instead, I made today's decision much like I make most of life's important decisions: I judged by my feelings on the matter.

I stepped outside the back door to "test the temperature." Though I admit I was at first unable to breathe, my ultimate conclusion was that it didn't feel as hot as yesterday. True: yesterday was 105 degrees. "It's cooler than 105 degrees" is like saying "She's prettier than Alice Cooper." No shit.

But I didn't think about that. I just took one look at my fading tan lines and thought how fun it would be to get some sun. I got my bathing suit, towel, and Communion with the Triune God.

(Yeah, that's right. Reading John Owen while tanning takes the edge off first-world guilt. Though at the time I just grabbed it because it's what I'm reading.)

Guys, it was so hot I legitimately thought my nail polish was melting. But I got a nice base.

In the meantime, I also discovered a new casualty to drought conditions: Playing in the hose. Like this. No more of that if you care at all about your greater farming community. This realization, punctuated by a moaning cow over the fence, marked the low moment of my day.

I eventually trooped back inside. I say "trooped" because I felt like a Calvin and Hobbes strip. You know, the one where he's complaining about being bored, so his mom sends him outside and he begins screaming about heat stroke or something. It took me about an hour to return to room temperature.

Lesson for all you kids out there: Being bored does not mean it's a good idea to ignore all parental and governmental warnings and think you can just go outside when the whole world is under a heat advisory.

I wish I were a writer.

I just discovered one of those old drafts of blog posts that, in writer's block or creative despair, are consigned by their authors to lie forever dormant and dusty in a draft folder in a private account in a gigantic impersonal blogging site. The kind of draft that gets tapped out in straggling enthusiasm only to be left with a huff of tears and a "I'll never be good at this, why do I try??!!"

This particular draft only had two words.

"Ugh, writing."

Writing is like dredging up from the closet the skeletal structure that you suspect could be all of yourself and holding it up to the light of day. It looks different every time - sometimes gruesome, sometimes almost pleasant, humanlike - but your fear each time you stare at the closet door, wondering if you should unearth the monster within, is not at all, "I wonder what it will look like? I hope it will be one of the good times!" (Of course, that's definitely a concern that might flit across the "Less Important" list in your mind. The one that's okay with fooling people.) But no. Your fear is to see again the hollow spaces between the ribs, between the chest cage and spine, inside the gaping mouth. My fear, as a wanna-be writer, pulling the writing out of myself, is that it will prove to be empty, a grinning specter, posing as a human being and only more grotesque in its likeness.

I mean, come on, I'm using skeletons as a metaphor for writing. How tepid is that? Gross, gross, gross. It's a good thing I don't take anything seriously.

"Being a writer" is such a fad.

Ugh, writing.

How to Be Good at Being Grown Up: Ep. 2

Yesterday an insurance salesman came to our house. Because I am a recent college grad and despite my vigorous attempts to insist that I understand finances, Mom said, "It would be a good idea for you to sit at the table with us and try to learn something."

(I also had to clean my bathroom.)

So, at about 2:15 exactly, in strides our insurance salesman, young, grinning -- sporting his class ring, well-coiffed, highlighted hair, and the boyish look of a high-school football champ. (He also turned out to be a jovial family guy who actually encouraged us to do what was best for us financially. A+, sir.) He dialogued comfortably with my parents, cracked jokes, apparently made lots of sense to them, and left us with generally happy feelings.

But the table-talk was an enormous personal disaster for Yours Truly.

Look. I've taken economics classes. I got A's in math. I graduated with a killer GPA and I understood Inception after only one viewing. But apart from a couple grade-school analogies that Mr. Insurance threw out for me in desperation, I understood about zero percent of what was said around that table that day. If you are a recent college grad, this may happen to you one day, too. And you, like me, will probably feel like this.

So, recent college grad, I've collected some ideas for what to do when the dreadful day of life insurance-purchasing comes. Fear not, here are eight failsafe ways of preventing yourself from looking like a complete dingo. You may learn nothing about life insurance, but you will look intelligent and that's all that matters in the real world.

1. Make cookies. This only works if you are a girl. But if you have cookies and lemonade prepared (and a pleasing presentation), most people won't notice much of anything.

2. Smile a lot with eye contact. It makes you seem charming which makes you seem engaged which makes you seem smart. This also may work better if you're a girl.

3. Nod regularly.

4. Ask lots of really generic questions that don't really apply but make you seem engaged, like, "So if I died tomorrow . . . . [significant trail off] . . . ?"

5. Write stuff down. A short year of journalism has taught me the invaluable lesson that if you have a notebook and are scribbling frantically in it, people think you know what you're doing. And they are intimidated. (Good.) Feel free to simply doodle whimsically across the page. Just guard and hide it carefully like it's your family's financial statement or something. (Do people hide those? Whatever.) Combine this with #4 for maximum effect, as follows: "Right, so could you explain the ROTH IRA one more time? I'm definitely interested in pursuing that and I want to write it down."

6. Use words like "pursuing," "researched," "funds," "analysis," "crunch," "numbers," etc.

7. Mention your accountant friends if you have any. Example: "Yesterday I was having wine with an accountant friend of mine and he said...." (At this point, you should be thinking about getting one.)

8. Above all never, never, never, never, never ever let on that you are as clueless as you are. God forbid they think they have something to teach you.

As I did NOT follow any of these tips very faithfully and as my parents RATTED ME OUT ("Oh, Hannah's going to just sit here because she wants to learn how all this works!"), I was forced to learn about life insurance. I also learned, through a deft word-picture by Mr. Life Insurance, the difference between stocks and mutual funds. A stock is like one broken pencil. Mutual funds are like one broken pencil in the middle of a bundle of unbroken pencils. Life-enriching stuff there.

Till next time.