How are you today? I'm superfantastic.

You see my true colors, and that's why you love me

I read someone not too long ago writing about her inner cynical bitch.  Except she said it like it was a bad thing.

The thing about my inner cynical bitch is the extent to which she tends to take people by surprise when they first meet her.  Get the slightest glimpse of her, even.  Because, as I have already mentioned, when people first meet me, they tend to think I'm sweet.

I'm usually pretty quiet around new people, especially in new work situations.  It's a common misconception, assuming that quiet and sort of non-threatening-looking equals sweet.  I think we all know what happens when one assumes, don't we?

Apparently I also have one of those honest faces.  Which, frankly, can come in rather handy in certain "I would have been here on time, boss, but there was this train..." situations.  But it does make my first use of sarcasm in front of a new person perhaps overly convincing.  Like when I told my co-practice teacher (another wanna-be teacher from my program) that I thought the best way to teach the spirituals in our lesson would be for her to sing them.  She took me seriously, as proven by the look of horror on her face.

Then in class the other day, when told to work with some other people in a group, I answered my advisor very dryly that no, I didn't really care to work with those people.  And she was SHOCKED that I would say such a mean thing.  See, because she had thought I was sweet.  Can you even imagine what it is doing to me, keeping all of that stabbiness contained for three hours every day to the extent that anyone could doubt my capacity for meanness?  If I don't rupture something (or alternately, stab somebody in the eye) by the end of this thing, it will be a small miracle.

So I'm going to have to let the cynical bitch seep out a little, here and there, which is totally going to ruin my nice girl rep.  But who ever wanted a nice girl rep anyway?  Currently I believe I am becoming known as the girl who doesn't want to make a poster about this if we're allowed to just summarize it aloud.  There are three of us now.  We sit together in the back.  Then we smoke cigarettes in the bathroom at lunch and shove weaklings into lockers.  Not really.

The Space Between

There's always a strange sort of limbo feeling that comes in the weeks before a long-distance move.  I'm not gone yet but I start to sort of mentally check out of where I am.  There is the excitement about where I'm going but also sadness, knowing what I'll miss about the place I'm leaving.

The deciding to leave is usually a much longer process than it has been this time.  I knew without a doubt that I wanted to leave Wisconsin after graduating from college and knew it would be DC over a year before I left.  With every move since, there has been a feeling that a place was done for me, at least for a while.  Generally, I've had a strong sense that it was time to go.  I've had time to plan where to go and who, if anyone, would be moving with me.  Time to listen to everyone's opinions and then make my own decision, whether that involved taking anyone else's advice or not.

The whole Madison thing has been a bit of a different situation.  It did make perfect sense for me to leave Austin when I did.  Amy was leaving, my job was ending, and there was no real reason for me to stay.  But unlike previous moves, there was the matter of someone else having input into whether I moved here. 

It makes perfect sense for me to leave Madison now.  Unlike previous moves, the reason to leave is not of my choosing, but the result is that again there is no real reason for me to stay.

Three weeks from now, I'll be on my way to Texas.  In the meantime, I have twelve days of work left, friends to see, all of my worldly possessions to pack, and a mindset shift to undergo.  There are moving plans to finalize, a teaching exam to study for, and a massive book that arrived today and needs to be completely read before I start my program a few days after arriving in Texas. 

So I'll live another three weeks with one foot in life here and the other in what's to come.  The space between loss and anticipation, memories and possibilities, past and future, here and there.

Collection

It's like you collect broken people.

A book I was just reading said something about how everyone collects something.  Not me, I thought.  I'm sort of opposed to collecting, as a matter of fact.  I move a lot.  Accumulating a bunch of stuff doesn't make much sense.  I don't even have that many books, and I love books.  A lot.

Then I remembered being told that I collect broken people.  It seems apt.

When you get to know someone new, you wind up having to preface your stories with some idea of who the characters are.  I find that a lot of my descriptions start with something about how the person I'm talking about has nothing at all in common with me.  We couldn't be more different, I say more often than I had previously realized.

Looking back, it does seem that I've amassed a collection of incredibly varied people over the years.  Some of them are still in my life, some not.  But they have all been fascinating in their own ways and I have learned so much from them.  Here I am, a girl from small-town Wisconsin, having had friends from all over the country and the world.  People who have lived through things I can't begin to fathom, whose opinions and beliefs and personalities differ wildly from my own.

I'm not sure how I've been lucky enough to befriend so many people who, on paper, make no sense as the type of people who would want to hang out with me.  But that ability has always been something I've liked about myself.  I've never been the most popular person in any group, but for whatever reason, I've always managed to hang around the edges and wind up talking with the really interesting people. 

Which is all the more extraordinary, when you consider that I tend to be intimidated by a lot of people at first, so the process of even getting into that first conversation can take quite some time and a lot of effort.  Even more so when the other person is also the quiet type.  I'm also not what you might call an open book, so becoming real, actual friends with me tends to be a lengthy process.  It took months of knowing some of the people I'm thinking of to get there, but each and every time, it was worth it.

I don't mean to suggest here that "unlike me" equals "broken".  Far from it.  But in a lot of cases, broken does equal fascinating.  I love hearing people's stories and it seems that when people get that sense from you, the sense that you really, honestly want to know, they'll tell you.  Broken people usually have good stories.  And they will listen to yours and maybe even say "really?" and "wow" at the right times.  And maybe you'll become friends and then you'll have good stories to tell new friends later about that crazy road-trip or masterful prank or really amazing conversation.

It has occurred to me while writing this that you, Internet, are most likely part of my collection, aren't you?  Well, then.  Welcome.  You're in very good company.

Every Now and Then I Fall Apart

Just not in front of anybody.

I've written here before about how I'm a repressed WASPy Midwesterner and don't generally acknowledge that I have feelings at all around very many people, much less what those feelings might be.  I come from a stoic people.  I've been told that I am "hard to read", "inscrutable", and "dead inside".

Plus, when you're pretty even-tempered most of the time, it's all the more shocking to people when you display strong emotion.  As a person who doesn't like to draw attention to herself, I learned early on that emotional outbursts were not in my best interest.

I'm also really neurotic about whether people are doing things for me because they want to or because they feel obligated.  One way of making sure that no one is feeling emotionally manipulated into anything is just to keep emotion out of it as much as possible.

But perhaps most significantly, there's my early religious education.  Wasn't Away in a Manger one the first Christmas carols that you Christian-type folks learned in Sunday school?  Let's consider these lyrics:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.

The message here?  "Yeah, the cows woke the baby Jesus up, but did he cry about it?  He did not.  And you, preschool Sunday schooler, are not even a baby.  What's all the blubbering about?  How about taking a cue from the little Lord Jesus and turning off the waterworks?  You're almost four now.  Get it together."

It's entirely possible that I wouldn't be emotionally stunted at all if not for the Christmas children's program.  Maybe I wouldn't have had to define effusive for my boss last summer after having told her that I'M NOT IT so she'd stop asking me wasn't I excited about whatever it was.  I might even have been able to cry in front of one of my closest friends last month without the benefit of an Irish car bomb and an indeterminate number of Lynchburg lemonades.

Yep, it's definitely all due to early Christmas carol exposure.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Life Lessons: Not for Sissies

I think with all experiences in life, and especially the bad or hard ones, you have a responsibility to do two things with them: learn something and (if you're me) find some blog material.  So I thought I'd go ahead and share what I've learned in the past week.  Well, you know, the more superficial things that I'm willing to share with the internet anyway.  Here we go.

Crying, if you do it regularly (and I mean if you really go to it - none of this pansy-ass softly weeping business) will:

• Provide a good ab workout.  Really saves time on doing sit-ups.  (See what I did there, making it sound like I normally do sit-ups?)
• Dehydrate you.  Although this could have something to do with reduced food intake too.  Food has a lot of water in it, doesn't it?  Some kinds of food?
• Clear your sinuses, for a little while.
• Dry the hell out of your face.  You've got to rinse, which frankly is not always convenient.  Like when you're at work and think you're going to throw up and instead immediately burst into tears upon entering a stall.  And you're not friends with your co-workers but if they see you washing your face in the bathroom or running around without make up they might ask what's going on and you do not need that.
• In the case of an anticipated or unanticipated work restroom cry, bring you closer to your co-workers, by proximity only.  Because it makes absolutely no difference which stall you choose, even if the whole place is empty, the very next person to come in will without fail choose the stall directly next to you.  WTF, ladies?

When they don't know what to say, everybody seems to default to suggesting that you eat a lot of ice cream.  While this is certainly better than any mention of looking on the bright side, it is not so helpful to me.  I can't speak for anyone else, but a week later I am still not even finding food appealing, much less comforting.  I was unable as my entire dinner one night last week to finish an order of Culver's fries.  And we all know how I normally feel about those.

You shouldn't let the dishes pile up.  Let's say they've been stacking up all week and you think to yourself "I'll do them on Sunday."  Then your Saturday night goes horribly awry.  You don't really feel like eating all week, so you don't go near the sink full of dishes.  When you finally do them a week later, you may find some mold at the bottom of the pile.  And then you may tell the internet about your disgusting lack of basic housekeeping standards.

A week of not sleeping well + Woodchuck Cider + 2 Benadryl = one hell of a night's sleep.

My inner toddler is not so far from the surface as I might like to think.  Because not only is there the whole break up thing, but also the thing about whether to stay here or move somewhere and if I move where to move and when I get there/stay here, what do I want to do?  Which has caused me at times to all but throw myself on the floor and shout I DON'T WANT TO! and then hold my breath until I turned blue.  I don't want things to change.  I'd like everything to go back to how it was a little over a week ago, please, when all I had to think about was what I wanted to do.  That question alone was enough for me.  This is too much.  NO FAIR.  DO NOT WANT.

The random internet boys who stopped the "where do u live?" emails when you announced that you were dating someone do not, upon your announcement that you're no longer in a relationship, start up again immediately.  Thanks, boys.  Keep it up.

I even learned a couple of non-break-up-related things this week:

The Zune does exist.  Really, I saw one!  Now I fully expect to run into a unicorn or leprechaun at any moment.

You can get to my blog by googling this: i put liquid laxative in the milk today, if you want the cure go to the rock show next weekend.

One thing I'll tell you of actual importance that I learned is that having a really good friendship with the person I date is very important to me.  But when you have that and you lose it, suddenly you've lost your boyfriend and one of your best friends all at once and that, in a word, sucks.

I already knew that I had some incredibly supportive people in my life and thank God, because most of all I've learned that this is so much harder than I could ever have imagined.

Confessional

Some people are going to judge me harshly for what I'm about to write.  I understand this because time was I would have done the same.

Some of you are probably going to feel sad for me or concerned.  I appreciate that, I really do, and I'm sorry that I'm going to make you sad or worried.  I'm sorry too if this makes any of you feel like I'm not who you thought I was.  But I can't not write things because of how people might react.  Especially this.

I think it's time to talk about why I don't go to church anymore.

I think this in large part because I feel like I should help the people in my life understand it and I haven't done a very good job with that.  In order to do that, I need to get a better understanding of it myself and writing about things has always helped me work out what I think about them.

I've gone to church all my life.  Always.  I grew up in church.  I went in college.  Every place I moved I did the church shopping bit until I found one to go to every week.  When I was working seven days a week in DC, I went to church.  Tired and sick and even occasionally hung over, I went.

And not just church either.  I did youth group.  Small groups.  Singles group.  InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in college, where I was on the worship team, led Bible studies, and was the administrator.  I was a youth leader in Virginia and Texas.  At times my life has revolved around whatever church or religious group I was involved in.  It wasn't just my religious life, but my social life too.  It was my free time and my community service.

I won't say that I regret it.  For one thing, I try my very best not to let regret seep in.  I am where and who I am today because of the experiences I've had and I wouldn't change it.  Also, I have met some of the very best people I know through church and religious groups.  They have been and are dear friends of mine, people I respect and love.

But none of that explains why I left. 

It wasn't an abrupt decision.  It happened over time.  I just had a hard time listening to it after a while.  It all started to sound more and more ridiculous to me.  Unbelievable, preposterous nonsense.

So there was this faith that I had, that I had almost always had, and now I couldn't listen to anyone talk about it.   They weren't saying anything that I hadn't been hearing for years, but now something was different.  Something in me.  And I felt like if I didn't get away from the voices, I'd lose it all together.  What faith I had, I mean.  I didn't really know how or when it started, but I knew some things were going to have to change.

I realized that I had spent so many years trying to live up to something impossible and beating myself up for not ever being good enough.  I don't think that's a good thing.  I don't think anything positive ever came out of living that way.  There's being aware of your shortcomings so you can improve yourself and then there is berating yourself and allowing yourself to be berated by others about the extent of your own inadequacy.  It's not constructive and it's no way to live.

I don't think it's the intent of faith or church, but it has been what I let it become.  I have listened to good people explaining how they, how all of us are human scum and I have nodded along with everyone else in the room.  I have written very earnestly about my endless failings as a Christian.  Never patient enough, trusting enough, content enough.  On and on it goes in those spiral notebooks full of my handwriting.

I don't want to do it anymore.  I want to live my life.  To try my best to be a good person, love my neighbor, give as I am able to help those in need, make responsible choices in how I live and who I choose to run my community, state, and nation.  To be a good daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and girlfriend.  To work hard at something that matters.   I want to do what I can do, be the most loving and generous person I can, and let myself off the hook for the rest of it.

And I want and need some time to figure out what I believe.  I can't do that by throwing myself back into an environment of being told what is and isn't true.  I want to take a break from all of it to catch my breath and clear my mind.  Then I want to do some thinking and studying for myself.  What happens from there, I'm not sure.  But I know I can't go back to some of where I have been.  I won't let myself.

Because it wasn't easy to get here.  It would be easy to say that getting to this point is something that happened to me, but it wasn't.  It was a choice that I made.  A series of choices, really.  And each time I chose to let go of some certainty that I had held, I was giving up a part of who I had become.  None of it was done lightly.

It's far easier, I find, to give yourself over to absolutes and stick your fingers in your ears and shout LA LA LA than to acknowledge the questions and shades of gray.  But I started to see the gray and there's no unseeing it now.  It seems to me that if God had wanted faith to be in terms of black and white, we wouldn't have scripture in poetry and parables.  We can't remove the mystery from it by declaring that we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what each bit and piece means.  Why would we want to?

I'm not saying that I won't ever go back to church.  Just that right now and for the immediate future, this is what I need.  Some quiet.  Some time away from all of the voices to just spend alone with the questions and the possibilities.

I don't think I can explain it any better than that.  That's about as far as I understand it myself.  It's a strange place to be, after a whole lifetime of being so certain that I had all of the answers.  But as disorienting as it can be, it also feels right.  For now, anyway.  Where it leads, we'll have to wait and see.

Miss Congeniality

I was in the colorguard for seven years in high school and college.  Colorguard is one of the cattiest environments you can imagine.  Don't get me wrong, I met some great people that way and made some good friends.  But the thing about colorguards is, in my experience, there is always one girl who is singled out each year to be universally despised.  And if you don't know who it is, then it's you.

I always knew who it was.  Sometimes she had it coming and sometimes I didn't understand how she got picked, but always I was just glad it wasn't me.  Not that I was popular or anything, but the people who I cared about hanging around with always liked me and no one really disliked me as far as I knew. 

That was really important to me, not being disliked.  It still is.  I honestly don't know why I care so much.

A woman at my temp job today was giving off some serious dislike vibes as she explained to me, first thing in the morning, what I had done wrong and why it was so very bad.  And it really bothered me.  Not the part about me having screwed up, because given my roughly one hour of training in this area, obviously I was going to make some mistakes.  It was the feeling that she didn't like me. 

This despite having been told by my predecessor to ask one of this woman's colleagues for any help I needed because "she's the nice one".  Which pretty clearly communicated her opinion on the other two.  So a not nice person doesn't like me.  I don't particularly care for people who snippily correct me early in the morning.  We should be even.

It's just, I've never been particularly polarizing. 

Of course I am not saying here that there aren't people with strong feelings about me.  But in general, people don't love me or hate me.  They like me ok or they don't have much of an opinion on me.  And given the choice between that and being popular with most people yet reviled by a few, I think I'd still stick with just being tolerated.  Why is that?

And is this why I try so hard to blend in a lot of the time?  Because I'd rather have people just not think about me than take the chance that they would think something negative?

If you were expecting me to draw some conclusions here, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.  It's just something I've been wondering about.  I wish other people's opinions didn't matter so much to me, but they do.  I don't know if there's any getting past that or if it's an innate personality flaw and I'm doomed to be like this forever.

Some of you don't seem to care if people like you.  How do you do that?  No really, how?  Because if I could even get to the point where it didn't matter if mean people didn't like me, that would at least be something.  Help a blogger out.  Unless you don't want to, and then that's ok too.  (Please like me.)

About the twin thing

I have a twin sister.  I know I've mentioned that here before, but I don't generally make a big deal of it.  This is because a lot of people will make a VERY BIG DEAL about it if you tell them, and I'm not into that.

They think it's so neat.  They wish they had a twin.  They hope they have twins.  Do I like being a twin?  Are we identical?  Are we superclose?  Are we exactly alike in every way?  Do we play tricks on people?  Did we have a secret language?  Do we read each other's thoughts/feel each other's pain?  So my sister could come in to work for me some day and no one would even know?

Allow me to address these in order:

The Beaver called - he wants his word back. 
How would you know? 
I believe you'd have to be insane to want to have two infants at once. 
I've never not been a twin, so I have no basis for comparison. 
We look alike, but we haven't had any DNA testing done, so I can't say for sure.   (Allow me to clear up here that boy-girl twins are never identical.  One would think this would be really obvious, but I had a co-worker who got asked about her and her twin brother.  I never met Leslie's brother, but I feel confident assuming that there are some major anatomical differences between them.)
Not freaky twin close, but we like each other ok. 
Ha! 
Just once in second grade. 
No. 
You are an idiot.
Seeing as how I don't live in a sitcom, no.

I'd like to quote an eight year-old here who gave an excellent response to a teacher who was going into full on THAT'S SO NEAT mode about him being a twin.  "I'm not a twin, I'm a brother."  Preach it, eight year-old.

Why bring this up now?  Well, I learned courtesy of Holly and her Secret Bachelor Tuesday Lite that this season's Bachelor has a twin brother, who (completely predictably) impersonated him at a party with the bachelorettes to see if any of them were bright enough to notice.  Which was enough to elicit my ire on the subject.  Because another inane twin question I have repeatedly gotten concerned my ability to send my sister out with a guy I was dating.  I have never understood why anyone would think that a person would ever do that.  If I like a guy, I want to go out with him myself.  If I don't like him, why would I foist him on my sister?  It makes no sense.  Except now The Bachelor has given people a reason to believe that someone would do such a thing.  So allow me to clarify for the Internet that no person who would not pimp himself out on ABC would ever do such a thing.

Have we gotten that cleared up?  Let us continue on to more pet peeves, as long as I've got you here.

#1. Announcing to me that you have no intention of attempting to learn my name and/or tell me apart from my sister.  This takes many forms.  Guessing a name and then telling me "hey, I had a 50/50 chance!"  Using some combination of our names.  Saying "hey, twin!"  Etcetera, etcetera.  You have no idea how insulting that is.  I have yet to meet the twins who can't be told apart given a little bit of mental effort.  If you're not willing to expend that small amount of effort, please keep your mouth shut.

#2. Assuming that I have no identity of my own, separate from my sister and being a twin.  I'll grant you, some twins are like that.  Some twins dress alike all their lives and live next door to each other and marry other freaky twins.  For the record, we are not like that.  I am a person.  She is a totally separate person.  We're crazy like that.  You might think that would be obvious, but you haven't been asked, in reference to your sister, where your other half is.  You didn't have to explain to people in high school that no, you didn't play soccer even though your sister did, because you were uncoordinated and not capable of running and kicking a ball at the same time.  Plus you don't like soccer.  Mindblowing, I know.

#3. Thinking that I find twin jokes funny.  I don't.  They piss me off.  I'm serious.

I think it has something to do with my lifelong aversion to cuteness.  People think that being a twin is just so damn cute.  God forbid my sister and I do anything alike such as, I don't know, breathe oxygen, someone will say "Awwww...that's so cute!  They both like air!"  And then I will punch that person in the throat.

I could go on and on, but I'll stop here.  Except to say that I know, despite everything that I have written here, that some of you are formulating cutesy twin jokes for the comments section (I'm looking at you, Gary.)  Please know that if you're not within throat-punching distance, deleting you is a close second.

This is the post I was telling you about last week, which I cannot quite believe I have just posted.

What you are seeing here is my first bikini.  Ever.

It has been worn one time, in my backyard.  It is not likely to make its public debut anytime soon.  I did also buy the matching tankini top and I feel pretty good about how I look in that.  Which may be the first time since I was too young to think about such things that I've been able to say that I felt good about how I looked in any sort of swimwear.  So perhaps the bikini's time has not yet come, but progress has happened.

I weigh, right now, about what I weighed when I was fifteen.  I only know this because, for some reason, I remember how much I weighed when applying for my first driver's license and how much I lied about my weight to make it less since they used to actually print this information on your license.  The funny thing is that my current goal is the weight that was on that first license.  It's my goal because I think I have about that much fat left to lose, not because it is what my fifteen year-old self wanted to weigh.  But there would be some satisfaction in that as well, since it feels like, in a lot of ways, I still carry that fifteen year-old self around with me.

It's about ten pounds that I'd like to still lose to feel bikini-ready.  If these ten pounds were just equally distributed, that would not be a big prohibitive thing.  But they are all clinging tightly together in one spot right around my middle.  These are the Spartan Warriors of fat cells.  They are Indigo Montoya.  They will not be moved.

On the other hand, I weigh, right now, about twenty pounds less than I have weighed for most of my adult life.  Probably about thirty pounds less than I have weighed at a couple of points.  I don't know exactly since I used to think that it would be really bad for me to own a scale.  This was a mistake on my part.  Yes, it is bad to be all about numbers and I would be perfectly happy to weigh more if more of my weight were in muscle.  But it has been deeply satisfying in the past year to see that number go down.  And I have to think that I would never have hit that thirty over point if I had realized at the time that I was gaining that much.  It was always later, seeing pictures of myself that I realized it had happened.  Since most of my clothes come from Old Navy, it always seemed perfectly valid to think that they were probably just shrinking.

I don't think my mental picture of how I look has caught up with reality yet.  In fact, it was not that long ago that I saw something on MSN about how to dress for a plus size figure and I almost clicked on it.  I have never worn a plus size, but my thinking was that I'd get some tips on how to hide things.  What a former co-worker called "pockets of nastiness".  I had to remind myself that I don't have to think that way anymore.  But I really believe that no matter how much weight I lose or how long I keep it off, there will always be a part of me that thinks of myself as a fat girl.  You live with it long enough, it becomes a part of your identity.  Which is really sad, I think.

I wonder whether, on some level, staying a little bit overweight wasn't subconsciously part of what has been, at times, my all-consuming need to just blend.  After all, the average American woman is either a size 12 or 14, depending on your source.  I'm not average anymore.  When a table of guys at Chipotle stops eating to watch me walk by, I know I should be flattered but I still don't really know what to do with that.  Maybe people looked at me before and I didn't notice.  Maybe I didn't want to notice because I assumed that they were thinking bad things.  I honestly don't know.

I watched The Holiday this weekend, and I know you're not supposed to take profound things away from romantic comedies, but there was one part that really struck me.  Kate Winslet is having dinner with an elderly former screenwriter who tells her, "in the movies, we have leading ladies and we have the best friend.  You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you are behaving like the best friend."  And Kate Winslet replies, "You are so right!  You're supposed to be the leading lady in your own life, for God's sake!"

I think I'd like to try that.  I'd like to stop letting my insecurities rule me and stop playing the best friend and be ok with people looking directly at me.  I have no idea how I will do this.  But I think I owe it to myself - fifteen year-old self included - to try.