Year One

Last night, I went to an outdoor concert in Millennium Park. Meteorologists warned of strong storms all day, but when evening came around, the weather was absolutely perfect. I excitedly stopped at Jewel for some snacks, then hopped a train into the loop. I was thinking to myself that despite the fact that I’ve been in Chicago for six years, this would be my first Millennium Park concert experience.

But as I picked out a spot, spread out my blanket, and unpacked my food, I had a strange sense of déjà vu. I realized that I had been to one of these concerts before—just once. During my first summer in Chicago, I came to an orchestral performance of Romeo and Juliet. I had spread out a blanket and food, just like I did last night. I was alone, and before the concert started, I pulled out a book and read. At some point, a chunk of potato salad came out of nowhere and landed on my blanket. It was quickly followed by the apologetic mother of the child who had thrown it. She cleaned off the potato salad and offered me some food (which I politely turned down). It made me smile to remember that night.

As I thought more about my first year in Chicago, I recalled a lot of other little episodes like that. I didn’t know a single soul in Chicago when I moved here, and so I spent a lot of time alone during the first year, especially that first summer. I used to go to Navy Pier after work, walk out to the end of it, look across the water, and pretend that I could see home. (At the time, Chicago did not feel like home—and I didn’t think it ever would.) I went to Navy Pier, voluntarily and often. Can you believe it? Navy Pier! I can’t stand that place now.

On the weekends, I spent a lot of time at the beach. One Saturday, I went up to Loyola Beach to watch the annual painting of the stone benches up there. When this proved to be less interesting than it sounded, I walked out on the pier to gaze at the skyline. A little girl walked up to me, looked at me for a moment, then seemed to decide that I was worthy of a conversation. Her opening line was, “I’m wearing a dress!” The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “It’s a very pretty dress.”

Little girl (about 4 years old): “Is that Chicago?”

Me: “Yes, that’s downtown.”

Little girl: “My dad works there.”

Me: “I work there, too.”

Little girl: “Do you work the same place as my dad?”

Me: “I don’t think so. There are a lot of places to work downtown.”

Little girl: “You’re right. That’s a lot of buildings.”

At this point, whomever she was with came and shooed her away from me. I can remember thinking that it might be the only conversation I would have all day.

I also went to a lot of plays and movies alone. For a while, I declared Friday to be obscure play night, and I bought tickets to tiny shows in tiny theaters. I saw a series of truly bizarre plays. One started at the end and ended at the beginning (but I did not realize this until about intermission). One seemed pretty normal and easy to follow until two random, inexplicable goats showed up on stage. Obscure play night was a parade of absurdity, and consequently a lot of fun.

I also saw as much large-scale theater as I could. Every day after work for at least two months, I went to the Oriental Theater to enter the drawing for front row Wicked tickets. (It wasn’t until over a year later that I finally won.) Sometime around Christmas, I bought myself a front row ticket to see Chicago. It was kind of liberating to walk all the way down the theater aisle to the front row all by myself. Paige Davis of TLC’s Trading Spaces fame played Roxie, and she threw some fake flowers into the audience at the end. One landed in front of the man sitting next to me, and he handed it to me. I felt silly for being so grateful, but I accepted the flower with as much grace as I could manage. After leaving that show, I went to Daley Plaza and walked a lap around the giant Chicago Christmas tree. The night was clear and beautiful, and I felt so full of peace. When I got home, I put the flower on display. To this day, the flower remains part of my centerpiece. It makes me smile to look at it now.

Looking back on all of this now feels like remembering a different life. I was so alone then. I was working my way through two separate and equally terrible cases of heartbreak, as well as dealing with the full force of my social anxiety issues. It was a terrifying time for me, really. But all those issues really pushed me to fill my time with activities that did not allow me to wallow in my apartment. A “Get Up, Get Out” movement, I called it. And it left me with a series of really interesting experiences, and you can tell by the stories above.

It bothers me a little that I have not thought about these things in so long. I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that I have no one to talk about them with. No one else was there. The experiences live in my memory only.

I wouldn’t go back to that time for anything. It was a time before a really knew myself, and a time characterized by bouts of extreme unhappiness and extreme fear. Still, I think it’s good for me to remember the things I experienced that year, good, bad, funny, sad, bizarre, and hilarious.

I don’t know how to end this except to say thanks for reading, and for giving me a way to remember.

Rain jacket

I’m taking a break from the book quotes this week. The quote-as-inspiration format worked well for quite some time. However, the system has started to break down. Since I didn’t always find a quote that spoke to me once a week, I wrote quite a few posts that were about things I didn’t really care about. Consequently, I put off writing the post until the last second, and the writing wasn’t very good. Plus, I felt really pressured to finish a new book every week. And I don’t need to be stressing myself out over my pleasure reading.

I admit that I considered taking a break from blogging altogether. Over the past couple of weeks, it has felt like an extra burden with very little payoff. It was just another thing on my to-do list, and the writing I was producing was not something I was proud of. So why bother?

However, I think I’ve changed my mind on that part. Because yesterday was Father’s Day, I was reminded of a post I wrote a couple of years ago about the fix-it genes I got from my dad. I looked back in my archives to find it, and I realized that some of my best posts were written back in 2009. At that time, I wasn’t super regular about posting. I just wrote a post whenever an idea occurred to me. The results were usually good. But the problem with that was I would go for long periods of time without writing.

So, I’m trying to find a middle ground. I’m not going to try to make a quote fit every week, but I’m still going to try to post something every Monday. The quote method ended up stressing me out, so I’m going to have to look elsewhere for inspiration.

After looking through the old blog posts that I like, I think I’ve decided that my best writing tends to be about specific experiences. I’m pretty good at telling a story. I’m not so good at talking about the general state of the world. My blogs about general issues tend to come off preachy, which is rather fake since I don’t have strong convictions about much. So, instead of preaching about what I think of quotes from books, I’m going to tell my own stories. And who knows? Maybe one day I will have a book of my own.

So what story shall I tell you tonight? I once heard someone say that a surefire way to make people laugh is to tell an embarrassing story about yourself. I’ve just remembered such a story, so here goes.

Last spring, I started bike commuting a couple of days each week as a part of my marathon training plan. I am a big stickler about… well, sticking with my plan, so I was always reluctant to skip a bike commute because of rain. One morning last summer, I looked outside to see dark gray skies. However, I didn’t see any rain hitting the ground, so I decided to try biking to work. I’d wear a rain jacket. It would be fine!

When I walked outside, I discovered that it was lightly misting. But it’s not really raining, I thought to myself. And I’m wearing a rain jacket! So foolishly, I set out on my 8-mile commute, which usually takes me about 45 minutes.

I think you know what is coming. About three miles into the ride, it started to sprinkle. What do I care of sprinkling? I thought. I’m wearing a rain jacket! About three and a half miles in, it started to pour.

Needless to say, I arrived at work a half hour later completely soaked. I walked into our suite of offices and saw that one coworker had arrived before me. It seemed useless to try to hide my state from her, so I said, “It had to happen sometime, Ellen.” Her voice came out from her office. “What happened? Did you fall?”

I wish, I thought. “No. It rained.”

It’s a testament to what a genuinely nice person Ellen is that she did not laugh at me. Hair was slicked to my head in some spots and molded to the shape of my helmet in others. Mascara was smeared on my face. And I was, quite literally, dripping. All I could think was, That stupid rain jacket failed me.

Ellen asked me if I had a change of clothes. Of course, I didn’t. All I had was a ratty old zip-up sweatshirt that I wore when the air conditioning got too cold. I was determined to make it through the day somehow, though. If I didn’t, it would mean admitting that But I have a rain jacket! was a stupid reason to ride through the rain.

I spent the whole day in my wet shorts. I made the mistake of sitting on my upholstered chair for the first hour, soaking it, and I therefore spent the rest of the day sitting on the absolute front end of it. At some point I could not take the wet shirt any more, and swapped it for the ratty sweatshirt. I felt better for a bit, until I looked down and realized that my wet bra had soaked through the sweatshirt, leaving two giant wet patches on my chest. Stellar. Stupid rain jacket.

At this point, I had lost all desire to look presentable. I now had a soaking wet desk chair that I could not sit in, a soaking wet shirt over my visitor chair, and a bra hanging off the corner of my desk. (Yes, I look it off. Yes, I felt creepy doing so, but it was my best option. Shut up.) I closed my door, thanking the greater powers that I did not work in a formal office, that I had a door to close, and that no one ever, ever came to my office to talk to me.

That was the moment that someone knocked on the door. I kept myself from beating my head on my desk only by reasoning that I better hide my bra before opening the door.

Thankfully, the knocker turned out to be a very nice coworker of mine that pretended not to notice my pathetic state.

So, anyway, lesson learned. No riding to work when it is clearly going to rain. My rain jacket will not keep me dry.

I started a new training plan yesterday, and it says that I’m supposed to ride to work tomorrow. The forecast says a chance for thunderstorms, and I will admit that despite the fact that I just told this story, I’m still telling myself that it might be okay to ride.

If I’m still feeling that way in the morning, I’ll try to remember what it felt like to ride back home wearing still-wet shorts and underwear. If that doesn’t stop me, I don’t know what will.

For the Food

“Mary Poppins thought of the raspberry-jam-cakes they always had on her Day Out, and she was just going to sigh, when she saw the Match-Man’s face. So, very cleverly, she turned the sigh into a smile—a good one with both ends turned up—and said: ‘That’s all right, Bert. Don’t you mind. I’d much rather not go to tea. A stodgy meal, I call it—really.’ And that, when you think how very much she liked raspberry-jam-cakes, was rather nice of Mary Poppins.”

--from Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

I have a confession to make: If you have ever invited me somewhere, and I accepted, chances are good that I came for the food.

Try not to be too offended. Notice that I was careful not to say that I only came for the food. However, I’d be lying if I told you that food was not a major component in my decision making process.

Want to go running on Saturday, Katie? Sure, great, we can go to brunch after! Hey, Katie, let’s go to this street fair! Okay, maybe they’ll have one of those sangria stands! Remember when we used to do that walk on St. Patrick’s Day? Oh, yeah, and my mom made that awesome crème de menthe cake. Good times.

I love food. I’m the least picky eater I know. I eat poultry, fish, and red meat. I like every kind of starch and vegetable I’ve ever tried. I have a taste for sweet things and salty things. I love going out for gourmet meals but will also happily eat fake mashed potatoes and pretty much anything that comes out of a box. There’s only one thing I can think of that I don’t like, and that is grapefruit.

I think my lack of pickiness is both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it allows me to shop with the sales and eat cheaply. It also helps me to eat a reasonably healthy diet; I like celery and hummus just as much (maybe more) than potato chips and French onion dip. But on the other hand, it also means that I will eat pretty much whatever ends up in front of me.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately, because… well… let’s just say my clothes have been fitting differently in the past month or two. I’m sure part of the reason is that for the past few summers, I’ve been in the thick of a training plan by now. This year, I have been purposely taking a break from a structured running plan. And as my eating has not changed, there have been some consequences.

Because I am not quite ready to go back to structured training, if I want to curb my weight gain, I need to change my eating habits.

I’m not talking about dieting in the uber-restrictive sense. I’ve just been thinking to myself that maybe I need to start bypassing one or two of the things that end up in front of me. Like the piece of chocolate cake handed to me at my office’s celebration of June birthdays. Or the 400 pieces of candy I’m supposed to be saving to give to volunteers as I plan a service project. Or the stale, dried-out cheese cubes they are offering as free samples at the grocery store.

I hate it when I find myself in this place, because giving up food goes against my general life philosophy that food should not be something that is eschewed. (Chewed, yes. But not eschewed.) (Ba dum bum!) Moderate portions, yes. Stop eating when you are no longer hungry, yes. But don’t refuse food or be ashamed of eating it.

So, I don’t like the idea of restricting what I eat. I want to eat some candy if I feel like it, and not feel bad about it. However, it just seems that lately, my opportunities to eat food, and bad-for-me food especially, have abounded. Eating everything that is presented to me would mean violating some of my other food principles, like don’t eat when you’re not hungry. And my common argument of “I can do this because I don’t eat like this every day” is failing me, because I actual am eating badly almost every day.

I so admit that I need to think a bit harder about what I eat. I can’t eat like I’m training for the marathon when I’m not training for the marathon. So I’m choosing to give up some random food opportunities that don’t have a big effect on other aspects of my life. I can skip getting biscotti out of the tub in the conference room every time I walk by. I can actually leave that candy for the volunteers.

What I still refuse to do, though, is not attend any social events to avoid the food. No matter how many times I go out to dinner in a week, I won’t turn down another invitation because I had big meals for several nights before. I won’t let food restriction affect my social life.

Sometimes, I only come for the food. I admit that. But I refuse to ever not come because of the food. (There’s a double negative for you.) My jeans might be fitting tighter. But I don’t care. Life’s just too short.

Identity

“The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were—or who the Oankali thought they were.”

--from Dawn by Octavia Butler

I find the concept of identity fascinating. What is it that makes us who we are? Is my identity something that I choose, or am I just born with it? My thoughts on this have wavered over the years.

When I was in graduate school, I co-wrote a paper about how the experience of studying abroad changes identity. Somehow, using one researcher’s definition of identity, my group and I operationalized the concept. We coded student responses on evaluation forms according to how the students claimed their identities had changed as a result of the study abroad experience.

I can’t remember the exact result of our little study, but I do know that we made some claim about how study abroad changed the way students defined themselves. The conclusion made sense to me at the time. My study abroad experience certainly changed the way I thought of myself. Before I left, I was a homebody. When I got back, I was a world traveler.

It wasn’t the only experience that changed my definition of myself, though. In a sense, I think of my identity as a fluid list of titles. I store that list someplace in my head, and it changes all the time. Today, I think the list would go something like this: Katie. Chicagoan. Runner. Math educator. Potterhead. Reader. Editor. Musical theater aficionado. Cat owner. Shark chef. Gleek. Wannabe singer.

Next week or next year, the list would probably be different. What’s even more interesting to me is that if I asked someone else to write such a list for me, they would probably say different things. Yet this ever-changing list of titles is how I tend to define myself.

Maybe the changeability of these titles is the basis of their appeal. I know that I find it a little scary to think that there are things about my identity that I can’t change. Still, such things exist. I can remember several moments in my life when I came to accept certain things about myself that are unchangeable.

When I was in Sweden, I went to the first of a series of co-ed soccer games. I failed miserably at it—and that was when I knew that I would never be a team-sport athlete. During one particularly stressful moment at work within the last few years, I realized I was trying to rearrange my tasks and responsibilities in a way that would optimize my time—and that was when I knew that, at my core, I was a mathematician. After the umpteenth time I was asked to teach or do a volunteer project with kids, and I still felt the same sense of anxiety and dread—that was when I knew I was just never going to be as comfortable with kids in large groups as I wish I was.

There are a great number of aspects of my identity that I can and do change, but also a smaller number of things that I can’t. So which ones matter? Which ones are my true identity? Do I get to decide who I am, or is my list of titles just a blanket I use to cover up the deepest parts of my nature?

I know, I know. The answer is that they both matter. I know. Yet it was not easy for me to convince myself of that. I still go back and forth sometimes. One side of the argument says that I should pay attention to my deep-down natures, and not randomly decide to try to be a soccer player when I know I cannot be one. The other side of the argument says that to claim that I simply am what I am is cowardly. Just stating that I’ll never be good with kids is a cop-out for avoiding situations that make me uncomfortable. Which is the right thing? Do I strive to choose my own identity and make it the truth? Or to I try to identify the unchangeables and accept them?

For the answer, I turned to the ever-reliable source of pop culture. It just so happens that there is something I love on either side of the argument.

The spirit of Glee would say that I should accept and embrace the things I cannot change. (“I was born this way, hey!”) Yet one of the most famous lines in the Harry Potter series says, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

I am who I was born to be, and I am also who I choose to be. For years, the two have felt contradictory. But perhaps they are not. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.