Pickle Your Fancy

This month, I will attend 2 ½ weddings. The ½ is that of my cousin, which I will only be sending good thoughts and a present to, because she is marrying during my New York week.

Wedding #1 is for a 20-year-old who I watched grow up. For realz. This is the girl-- let’s call her Taylor Swift-- I wrote about 13 years ago on my first blog. That was back when she was 7, still spilling lemonade all over my papers and begging me to play Candy Island on my computer. That’s right, let’s just give that a moment to sink in.

Wedding #2 is for my friend Ali, with whom I went to college. We met at some type of university mixer. Both of us were wearing white t-shirts and denim overalls. We both had long brown hair at the time, too. Elle and Ali. No one could remember our names or who was whom. For the last decade, she has been my Holdout Single Friend. You know the one…super independent, doesn’t subscribe to traditional gender roles, kicks ass and takes names. And now Ali’s getting married, too.

It’s hard to say which of these weddings throw me the most off-kilter. Taylor Swift’s wedding clearly reminds me of my age. But Ali’s wedding marks the End of An Era. Also, my wedding invitation for Ali’s was sent to the wrong address; it just arrived and now I’m heading out of town and don’t have time to find a date. I will be the sole Truman University representative in a sea of Mizzou friends and family, watching my Holdout Single Friend tie the knot.

It’s at times like these when you take stock of your life. I was putting my classroom back together today with the help of my most reliable former student, Pickle. We were talking about why he broke up with another of my favorites, Rangly-Poo (I give all of my students nicknames, obvi). Pickle said that he and RP ran out of things to talk about, plus she didn’t like any of his friends or playing sports with him. He made a list of what he wants in a girlfriend, which, at 15 ½ is not a very long list. Then he made me make a list. I found that annoying, but Pickle insisted.

It turns out that you want the same things at 30 you do at 15… someone who will make you laugh, like your friends, challenge you mentally, and click with you chemically.

Pickle said, “Miss T, you're really down on yourself. So things haven’t gone the way you planned. You broke up with your boyfriend, you work for a district you hate, you don’t know how to play the drums. So what? You just have to think positive. Why, you’ve probably already met the guy you’re going to marry when you’re 45…”

“Excuse me. You think I’m getting married when I’m 45?”

“Well, it could be before then. But maybe not. Either way, we’ll be Facebook friends by that point because I will have graduated and I’ll come to your wedding…”

“The hell if I’m waiting until you graduate to get married!”

“Well, I just don’t see how it’s going to happen before then at the rate you’re going, but all right. And I’ll stand up there and give a toast and say—“

“Pickle, let me stop you right there. If you think you’re giving a toast at my wedding that starts with ‘I knew Miss T back when she was negative, and I told her that love was just around the corner and to be more positive,’ you are wrong.”

“No. I won’t call you Miss T by then because I’ll be old.”

Whenever I get a bit down about my life and the direction it’s heading, I’m glad the Pickles of the world pull me back from the ledge, even if it is just to laugh at me. I know at the heart of it, he’s right. There’s just no use in being negative. Eh, so I don’t know how to play the drums? Pickle said he’ll rally the troops and they’ll come by after soccer practice to teach me...

The Freedom To Screw Up: Ireland and Beyond

It's pretty hard living inside my head. Sometimes I wish I could turn my brain off.

Actually, tequila helps with that.

But when there is no tequila, my brain gets really, really crowded. There are times when I have to play Candy Crush just to use up all the extra energy in my head. I'm not kidding. I have to sit there for 20 or 30 minutes and move little pieces of candy around on a screen SO THAT THE REST OF MY BRAIN IS FREE TO CONCENTRATE ON THE THOUGHTS THAT I ACTUALLY WANT TO BE THINKING ABOUT BUT HAVE TOO MUCH NERVOUS ENERGY TO FOCUS ON!!!

This is what my brain looks like:

Moving candies into place makes me feel like I have control over the maverick thoughts and pieces of my life that refuse to fall into place.

Nick used to joke that having me for a girlfriend was akin to having a pet greyhound that must be  exercised at regular intervals to function properly. I think that was accurate. Look, here is a picture of my tracks in the dead of winter, when he had to take me out to run around on the beach because I was too cooped up to think straight:

Getting lost inside my own head means I ruminate a lot. I think back over what I did and how I should have done it differently and what the outcome would have been if I had done this instead of that.

I'm trying to learn to live with the uncertainty and to embrace the messiness of decision-making in which I don't know the end from the beginning. Candy Crush is easy. If I move this purple piece over to the left, I will have four purple pieces in a row and they will become a red-and-white striped piece. Tada! 

But life isn't like that. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd dated Paul, and certainly I regret not giving "Us" a chance. But from that experience, I learned to start taking risks. Maybe now I can do more things like drink Guiness at midnight and see strangers as potential friends. 

At the very least, I've come to a determination not to pass up something like that again. The next time I'm confronted by the unexpected, something that's risky and that doesn't have a guaranteed happy ending, I'm going to give it a go. 

I'm going to quit writing off people and places and things just because they don't fit into my predetermined boxes. Here's to the future. Slainte!!

Ireland

Last summer, on the heels of a bad breakup, I took off for Ireland. I was incredibly depressed, and then got even more depressed thinking about how much money I had spent flying to Ireland to be depressed.

I bought a journal, parked myself in a bar in Dublin, and sat there coming up with 100 things I was thankful for. It took 3 days (Stop judging. I went sightseeing when I needed a break, so it wasn't 3 straight days in a bar).

By the end of the 3 days, I felt a lot happier. I don't know if that was because of the 100 Things List, or because of the cute bartender.

Everyone says that vacations are a great time to blow off steam, let loose, go crazy. I had never experienced that before. My vacations were always much like my university career: boring. Wake up at 5:30. Exercise. Complete items on schedule. Go to bed at 10. What can I say? I'm a creature of habit.

Ireland was the first time in my life that I actually let loose and lived like everyone else lived in college. It was exhilarating! Paul and I went out every night and walked around Dublin or drank Guiness or talked to strangers until 4 a.m.

I felt really alive, and I understood what I'd been missing all the years of being responsible and worrying about paying my rent and college tuition and buying a car. With Paul, I learned a different way of being. I felt free.

He wanted to try a long-distance relationship when I left to go home to the States. He reasoned that with my 11 cumulative weeks of vacation and his 6, we could feasibly see each other several times a year and FaceTime in between. I wasn't just an American tourist to him. Hmmmmm... None of the travel blogs I'd read prepared me for that.

I had gone back to being Responsible Elle, the girl who thinks through every possible outcome to any situation and never does anything without knowing exactly how it will end. I could see no happy ending to this. Paul was young. He was 4,000 miles away. He was surrounded by beautiful, drunken women all the time. And he was angry with the cards life had dealt him. I knew if I got involved with him, it would just end badly.

Even though I went back to being Responsible Elle, something in me fundamentally changed by meeting Paul. I got to find out all the things I had missed out on. My friends are all grown and married with children now, having sown their wild oats some 15 years ago. I never sowed any wild oats. Going to Ireland and staying out til 4 a.m. was turning over a new leaf for me and, in a sense, I've been aging backwards ever since I returned.

I don't want to be Responsible anymore. I don't want to have to know the end from the beginning...things haven't ever worked the way I expected anyway. I'm tired of going to bed at 9:30 and watching TV on the weekends with my cat. I miss Ireland Elle. And I wonder if I let something good go when I said goodbye to Paul. He was all wrong for me, I know. But all the "right" guys have been wrong for me too.

Vintage

Nikki and I went to our favorite craft supply store on Wednesday. To our dismay, it had closed. But three doors down, we stumbled upon a vintage shop. Let me preface this by saying that I think it's a miracle of marketing that everything vintage is adorable. If you break it down to brass tacks, it's like this:

old crap = retro = vintage = priceless and adorable!!!!

I've noticed that antiques dealers curate their crap by using key product placements. To wit, people are more drawn to your display if you feature one or more of the following prominently:

1.) Luggage - I don't know why, but nothing says "priceless heirloom" like some beat up suitcases. They're even better if they're stacked on top of each other like a pyramid.

2.) Electric Fans - It is a mystery why an appliance from 90 years ago immediately communicates glamor and nostalgia, although possibly Gatsby was to blame. It's not true of other appliances, though. A mixer would not have the same effect at all.

3.) Old Sheet Music - Whoever figured this one out was a genius. Oh hey, I've been trying to sell this hideous glass bowl for months... I know! I'll stick some pages of old piano music in little bundles inside of it! Boom, Sold.

4.) Books (or their pages) - These have the same effect as the music. If you think I'm wrong, check out this picture of an end table I glued old pages all over.

I rest my case.

When I first began visiting flea markets and antique malls, I was indiscriminate in my purchasing. An ivory and gold telephone that still works!! Who cares if I don't have a landline? And multiple framed pictures of anonymous women in hats!! These would go perfectly....somewhere! Around the time I realized I had six vintage copies of books I'd never read, I learned to assess my finds with a more discriminate eye.

I had been doing quite well for a number of months when Nikki lured me into Parsimonia, the store near us. All I can say is that they must have had an electric fan blowing sheet music all over suitcases full of books because everything looked amazing. And they had mannequins, which led to a whole new problem...

I discovered vintage clothing!

It's like real clothing, only smellier. Also, it mostly doesn't fit quite right, so you find yourself saying, "I'll just buy this piece and have it altered when I have time [never]." I tried on almost everything in the store, but I limited myself to two purchases:

1.) a navy blue skirt with big strawberries on it ($28)

2.) a rainbow-colored button down shirt ($24)

Nikki assured me that these were ludicrous prices to pay for someone else's castoffs. I agreed with her wholeheartedly but secretly returned the next day to buy a dress, away from her critical eyes.

A central problem with me discovering overpriced vintage clothing is that I have "obsessive tendencies" (thanks, Dr. Wong) and now I have a new outlet for them. But really what was I supposed to do, wear my new-old clothes barefoot? That would obviously be ridiculous. So in the next week, I went to seven other antique stores searching for plastic jewelry, maryjane heels, and ridiculous Bakelite purses.

That is when it really came home to me that I need a hobby and also when I realized that I will never save enough money for a downpayment on a house. I guess it's for the best though. I'd just fill it up with other people's crap.