Story Recording - Premature Adventures in Dating

I told this story last Sunday at a house show. I squeezed my story in between sets by Von Strantz and Families, though there were also excellent songs coming out of Kevin Schlereth and Up the Chain. Check out all their music and also listen to this story for like five minutes. The sound quality is low, but the story quality is high.

On Being a Future Doctor's Future Spouse

Doctor, doctor give me the news,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
No pill's gonna cure my ill,
I've got a bad case of lovin' you!
—"Bad Case of Loving You," Robert Palmer

December was a harrowing month for me and my fiancée, Anna. We had the stresses of holiday travel and socializing to deal with, sure, but everyone has that. Layered on top of it though, like a thick frustration frosting on the cake of exhaustion, was Medical Residency Interview Season.

Let me start by saying that, however stressed I may have gotten during this time, it was much more difficult for my fiancée, which will become abundantly clear as soon as I start talking about it. (Forgive me, it's just that she reads this blog and I need to get out in front of whatever raised eyebrows may be coming my way if I imply that the burden was primarily mine. I love you, dear.)

Anyway, Anna is almost done with medical school, and that means it's time to find a residency program. To the uninitiated: residency means you're a doctor, but you're not cool enough yet to really do all the doctor stuff on your own, so you have to let other doctors be the boss of you until you're totally cool. Residents achieve total coolitude after three years. And those three years are pretty intense; you end up working on the order of 80 hours a week. On the plus side, you get paid, which is more than you can say for medical school!

Finding the right residency program means looking at the info for a ton of programs, picking ones that you like, asking nicely if you can get an interview at those programs, scheduling the interviews for the programs that are willing to have you, traveling to the programs you need to interview at, actually doing the interviews, meeting the residents and faculty, asking lots of questions so you sound interested and engaged, and then traveling home once you're done so you can get back to your school work the next day. It's just, super, super fun.

And that's just the beginning. It's what occupied Anna, and to a lesser extent me, throughout late November and most of December. We spent our weekends, and sometimes our weekdays, hauling ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. (Anna was the sole driver on these trips, as I cannot drive stick, and she has a manual-transmission automobile. So really, she hauled ourselves all over Indiana and a little over Chicago. But I digress.) Anna's job was interviewing, being charming, etc., while mine was to assess my willingness to live in the various places we visited and to not come off as a boob at the various dinners she and I attended with programs' residents. We met at said dinners our fair share of bros and lady-bros, but there were cool people, too. (Boom, bros! Boom. If you can't handle these sick burns, consider not being such a bro.)

So when we crawled back home after a month of that, and holiday travel to boot, we were relieved that the whole process was complete and we would never have to do anything else with regard to this matter again. Wrong-O! It was time for round two: the second looks! These are the more "fun" events that candidates like Anna are invited to come to, indicating that the program is interested in having them back to meet more people in the program and socialize with them and the faculty. "Fun" is in scare quotes because sometimes the "fun" is more theoretical than anything. What with all the bros. (BOOM.) But also, not all the activities are necessarily appealing,* and the additional travel and socialization weigh heavily—even when talking with people we like, we're introverts, so it takes its toll. But, it's a good opportunity to assess programs we're really interested in more thoroughly; not just the people, but also the locations they're situated in. So we picked our top three programs, and we've been going to those. Our last one is this weekend!

The next step will be ranking the programs. The way residency works is, all the candidates rank their programs, number one through however many they want to list, and all the programs rank the candidates who have applied. Then a computer sorts all the candidates into programs, in a way that favors the the candidates over the programs; if you rank a program at number one, you get it, unless it's already full (of candidates who also ranked it number one but were ranked higher than the program), and then you get your number two, unless it's already full, and so forth. If my explanation was confusing, then I'm sure you'll love the one on Wikipedia.

Successfully getting into a program is called "matching," and you find out which program you matched with on something called Match Day. In the case of Anna's school, it's a ceremony that seems designed for high potential for public humiliation: students and their friends and families are gathered into a large auditorium. The students are called up to the stage in small groups, handed envelopes with their matched programs, and encouraged to read the results into a microphone, regardless of whether the audience will hear joy or disappointment in their voice. The only saving grace is that those who haven't matched aren't invited at all, and so all are spared the possibility of opening an envelope with a rejection letter. Note, though, that all of this is also streamed live for the benefit of anyone with an internet connection.

I am not a huge fan of this process, but I am a huge fan of Anna and I respect and admire her choice of profession, so I am happy to be a part of deciding with her, with all that it entails. I'm especially excited for what will come when the process is done, and we can move on with our lives together.

---

* We were invited to one second look event which included a "hipster themed" party, at which, I kid you not, doctors and future doctors were expected to attend "dressed like hipsters," whatever that means. I am inclined to read it as "Hey, current and future members of the upper middle class, come dress up as poor people for a laugh," but that may be uncharitable of me. At all events, we did not go to that one.

Engaged

But you, you're a rock with a heart,
Like a socket I can plug into at will,
And will you guess when I come around next?
I hope your open sign is blinking still.
—"Marry Me," St. Vincent

My relationship with my fiancée, Anna, is characterized by a refusal to conform to social conventions we don't actually like. In fact, this is characteristic of us both individually; putting us together has simply allowed for mutual reinforcement on the matter. As a team, we can back each other up on, say, the decision to [gasp] not have wedding colors or [lolwut?] not change any names when we get married.

I know, I know, we're so hardcore. In a perfect world, of course, there would be no pressure to conform to such standards, but in our experience, there is no limit to people's ability to be offended about decisions that have no direct impact on them. C'est la vie.

~   ~   ~

From the very first, Anna was frank with me that she was not into (1) engagement rings or (2) elaborate public proposals at restaurants, basketball stadiums, monster truck rallies, etc. And I was frank with her that I was not into them either.

So when the time came to actually get engaged, it went like this instead:

First, understand that, in general, Anna and I are good about talking about our thoughts and feelings. But when it came time for some engaging, we had a sudden, unexpected, and unusual misunderstanding.

When had talked seriously about engagement for a while (like, we were circling around it and thinking about it and even starting to wonder aloud what a wedding might be like), but we had made no formal decision to get engaged, we had a conversation in which Anna was like "So we're practically engaged already," and I was like "Nuh-uh, we have to actually sit down in person and say we're engaged" and she was like "But that's just a formality, right?" and I was like "No, I'm pretty sure I want to think about it a little bit before we do it."

While this was a misunderstanding, most of the blame for it falls on me. It turns out, talking about a wedding with your significant other will, in fact, tend to lead them to believe that you are really interested in getting marriaged and that actual engagementing is just a formality. But how could I have known?! With my mind is how.

At all events, I did my last little bit of soul-searching, realized what I knew all along—that Anna totally ruled and that marrying her would seriously rule—and then I set to work crafting my combination apology/proposal.

The preparations were as follows:
Step 1: Set in motion a chain of events whereby, after the passage of a small amount of time, Anna would come to my apartment in Chicago.
Step 2: Sometime immediately before the arrival of said hopefully-soon-to-be-erstwhile-girlfriend, clean the apartment. This would, if done properly, cause her to experience feelings of happiness upon her arrival, both because cleanliness is a thing that she likes and because knowing that things have been cleaned in preparation of her arrival is a thing that she also likes.
Step 3: Acquire at the local Aldi a tub of Anna's favorite ice cream, mint chocolate chip, coincidentally also my favorite ice cream, but during said acquisition discover that they actually have mint chocolate chip moose tracks ice cream and purchase this superior ice cream variety instead.
Step 4: Return to the apartment and prepare a meal of pasta. Set the table.
Step 5: Wait.

When Anna arrived, she was indeed pleased at the cleanliness of my abode, and sat and ate with me the meal of pasta that I had provided. We moved to the couch, where I held her close, and asked if I could interest her in getting married sometime. She answered yes and started to cry happy, relieved tears.

I hugged her, and once she was ready, I went to the kitchen and returned with two bowls of mint chocolate chip moose tracks ice cream, which we ate together, newly fiancée and fiancé. We were both very happy together, and we remain so to this day.

This is our engagement photo, taken the next day by a friend.

Memory Is Weird

 My mind has a mind of its own.
—"The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" The Books  

I've never known anyone else who does this—no one who's admitted to it, anyway: occasionally, I'll be walking down the street, just people-watching on my way to wherever, and I'll catch sight of a particularly interesting face, and think to myself, "Wow, no matter how hard I try, sometime very soon, I am not going to be able to remember that person's face. It's weird that I have so little control over that."

Sometimes, I try anyway.

On these occasions, I spend the rest of my walk doing everything I can to commit the face to memory: re-running over and over in my head the shape of the jaw, the line of the nose, the color of the hair or the lack of hair, the placement of the eyes, the presence and physicality and nuance of the face as a whole. It never works. I can recall having done this dozens of times without being able to remember a single face, the way a father might remember having attended numerous middle school band performances without any idea what his kids played on a given night (though with a dead certainty that he's heard "Hot Cross Buns" enough for several lifetimes).

I find memory upsetting because of how little control I have over it. I don't get to choose what I remember and what I don't. There are other examples. If I try and reach back into my memories of childhood, I find that, rather than the important events of my life—the things I'd choose to remember if I could—the most accessible memories are of silly, piddly things without consequence: the time my sister told me she'd dreamt about Barney the Dinosaur spitting on plants to make them grow, me telling my mom that boogers tasted great, and so forth. Memory seems to choose at random what to keep and what to lose, like an underpaid secretary tossing out files willy-nilly to make room for new documents. I end up losing mental images of old friends and retaining addresses for houses I've long since moved out of.

My fiancée likens memory to an iceberg covered in penguins. Whenever you learn something new, you get a new penguin. Eventually the iceberg is full of penguins. For every new penguin after that, one of the penguins already on the iceberg has to jump off. And you don't get to choose which penguin that is.

But neither of these metaphors actually captures very well what memory really is, and what makes it truly unsettling. A memory, it turns out, is not a stable thing. It's not a file that you reach into the filing cabinet to pull out. It's not a penguin that you can tap on the shoulder that will squawk back at you what you once knew.

No, a memory is more like an old story, a folk tale, or a joke: each time you go back and think of it again, you recreate, or re-imagine, the memory. When you remember something, you are in essence retelling the story of that memory, and just like a folk story or a joke, memories change in the retelling.

In the first segment of this podcast episode on memory and forgetting, there's an example of this that bears repeating:

The act of remembering is an act of creation...Every time you remember something, you're changing the memory a little bit...You think you remember something that took place 30 years ago. Actually what you're remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now. The more you remember something, the less accurate it becomes...

Imagine a couple in love and it's their first kiss. He kisses her, and she kisses him. She remembers the kiss, of course, and he remembers the kiss. As they go through the rest of the romance and the next 36 years together, the kiss will essentially become replaced by two independently re-embroidered and increasingly dishonest kisses. Assuming they think about the kiss enough, that's what [this] implies...

Let's do it a different way. Let's suppose "Bob" and "Joan" kiss, and then they part...and they never think about it again...30 years later, Bob is in a railroad station, Joan comes out of the train, their eyes meet. Bob sees Joan, sees her eyes, and remembers, suddenly, that kiss. That memory is more honest than if he'd been thinking about the kiss every day of his life since. ("Memory and Forgetting," 17:30-20:00, emphasis added)

~  ~  ~

 

I really enjoyed college; it was full of fun experiences and activities and friends and outings. But when I was done, I was disturbed by how little I really remembered about it all. Knowing how hard it was to remember the details of my life, both the sublime and the mundane, with any certainty, I began journaling. My journals weren't about recording profound thoughts or cataloguing adventures for future retelling. They weren't even for cathartic or therapeutic purposes. My journals were nothing less than an attempt to stem the flow of memories constantly streaming out of my brain, to stuff them back in, or at least have a place to find them if I really wanted them. They were, if you will, extra icebergs for my memory penguins to stand on.

I wrote in Moleskines because I thought it was classy.

But writing in a journal doesn't make memory any more like penguins than anything else could. Even if I went back and read through my journals (I never do), I would still have to go through the process of re-creating, re-imagining the events in order to remember them, and in the process create a memory that is in some sense a fiction.

Having realized this, I've lost most of my drive for journaling. And that's okay, I think. I'm starting to come to terms with how different memory is from what I once assumed it was. I think it's okay that memory is a creative process. The fact that we are essentially making our memories up as best we can reflects the weird, unsettling, but ultimately beautiful fact that we're really making up our whole lives as we go, endlessly inventing and reinventing our stories, our understandings, even our very selves, on the fly.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/paulsedra/10968554014/
Photo 2: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pawlowski/7009609235/
Photo 3: Me

Nostalgia For Things That Are Not Gone

Part of a series of Live Story Recordings.

Art by my friend Alex

This is a story that I told at some friends' apartment in Chicago last week. They host a monthly arts showcase event there called The Workshop. If you'd like to know more about it, email them at theworkshopchicago@gmail.com and ask. They host all kinds of art, from movies, to poetry, to dance, to whatever you care to share with a group of friendly people. It's really cool!

This story is about this feeling that I don't really know if anybody else really has, but basically, it's when you really miss something that you could have if you really wanted it, but it's pretty much not worth the effort required to track it down again. I'm calling this feeling "nostalgia for things that are not gone." When I shared the story on Friday, I hadn't come up with a title, but I think that works well enough.
 

Death, Grief, and Facebook

This lion is sad, and so are parts of this post.

"Well, what is this that I can't see,
With ice-cold hands takin' hold of me?"
 
"Well I am Death, none can excel;
I'll open the door to heaven or hell."
 
"Whoa, Death," someone would pray,
"Could you wait to call me another day?"
—"O Death," Ralph Stanley

A year ago today, I got a surprise phone call from my uncle. I was pleased to see his name come up on my phone, as I don't often get to talk to him and I think he's a cool guy. I picked up the phone and said hello. "James," he said, "Grandma Jackie was out on a bike ride this afternoon and she collapsed. She passed away. I'm trying to get a hold of your dad; will you tell your sisters while I try and call him again?" I agreed, and after asking him how he was handling the death of his (and my father's) mother—he hadn't really processed it yet; neither had I—I hung up and called my sisters to let them know the bad news.

Grandma Jackie was gone out of the world; she had been the lynchpin of my family since before I was born, the foundational dispenser of grace, wisdom, and love to two generations of Davisson children, and suddenly she was no more. I was sad she was gone; I was sad I hadn't been able to say goodbye. I was sad because I hadn't called on her birthday the week before, and now I would never get the chance tell her happy birthday or anything else, ever again.

I took a day off work just to sit in my room and cry, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the floor.

A few days passed; the family gathered in Indiana. There was a wake, a funeral, and a graveside service. We grieved together and started to move on with our lives.

These death rites were undeniably helpful for me and my family. I've written a little before about growing up without a lot of religious ritual in my life. While the ritual of the wake, funeral, and graveside service were extremely helpful in moving on from the feeling of total loss and absolute grief, there were times I wished I had a more individual, public, and performative method for dealing with my grief. I didn't necessarily want to wait until the funeral to start to process my feelings, for one thing, but more than that, I wanted something more concrete and personal than passively viewing the grave or saying a few words to those gathered at the service. Like Jacob grieving for Joseph, part of me wanted to tear my clothes and walk around in special mourning garments.

But I'm not Jacob, nor am I a member of any other culture with individualized mourning traditions. If I put ashes on my head or shave off my beard or hair, I'm more likely to confuse people than to appropriately and successfully convey my state of grief and bereavement to those around me. Instead, I turned to Facebook. In fact, most of my family did.

Our reactions on Facebook varied; some posted memories of Grandma's life, while others simply expressed sadness and loss. There were pictures of Grandma posted on walls; many changed their profile pictures to pictures of Grandma, or pictures with Grandma. People asked for prayer and thanked others for their support. A few went directly to Grandma's wall and wrote something there, addressing their words directly to her. I, meanwhile, attempted to fulfill my desire to connect to a ritualistic past by blacking out my profile picture and posting KJV Bible passages that I felt reflected my anguish. To each their own. 

Cousins with grandparent(s). I'm the bowl-cut kid glowering in the middle left of the first picture.

It is popular and very possibly quite valid to claim that social media in general and Facebook in particular are not primarily about forming genuine connections with others, but instead are about feeding our egos. I often feel this way myself: when I'm being rational, I can see that my motivation for posting a link or writing a joke is always at least partially driven by how good it feels to get "likes." And even as I was putting up my blacked out pictures and quoting ancient Near Eastern meditations on mortality ad nauseam, I started asking myself: where does this "Facebook grief" fit into this notion, that participating in social media equals narcissism?

Actually, Facebook isn't all about me or you; it's all about this guy.

While there's certainly an argument to be made for Facebook grief being just another example of social media feeding the ego (those old pictures of Jackie as a teenager and Grandma and the grandkids in the 1990s got a lot of likes, after all!), I really think there's more to it than that. In fact, I'd like to argue that Facebook grief is a compelling substitute for the kind of individualized grief rituals I spoke about earlier.

Here's the argument: there are lots of different rituals people use to mourn publicly, but they all tend to include people altering both their outward appearance and behavior, with the combined goal of (1) expressing the feeling of extreme sadness at the loss of a loved one through concrete means and (2) informing others of the reason for this behavior without having to go through the painful process of telling everyone in conversation.

Facebook grief also fulfills these functions: (1) Through posting pictures and creating apprpriate statuses, Facebook users can (semi-)publicly express and work through their feelings in an open and concrete way, instead of bottling up emotions and trying to process them internally. What's more, this Facebook grief allows people to grieve in their own way, which a more formalized public ritual might not. (2) Unless they are expressing their grief very cryptically (...like me, sigh), the bereaved can quickly inform their Facebook friends of what has happened and they will not have to engage their friends in conversation in order to explain their behavior and emotional state.

We all gotta die. And that's weird.

I didn't have a time-honored way to publicly and personally mourn my grandmother's death. But I did have social media, which served as an outlet for my emotions and as a way (eventually) to inform others of why I was feeling bad. It was a really good thing for me, and I believe that it can be good for others, too.

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Photo sources: 
Photo 1 (modified)
Photo 2
Photo 4
Photo 5

Why So Emcerious?: On Emceeing A Wedding Reception

I see in this picture a man nervous about speaking in public. Or maybe it's just a crooning Elvis and I'm weird.

Don't take any lip, stay in line, 
Everybody's talking at the same time. 
—"Everybody's Talking at the Same Time," Tom Waits

A couple months back, I went to a friend's wedding. The wedding itself was a slightly loopy affair, taking place in two languages (English and Spanish), with original content in both and little translation from one to the other. My favorite part: the Spanish-only duet from the bride's aunt and mother, sung entirely in unison and with earth-shaking intensity. Seriously, it was nuts. Also: two separate wedding sermons and two sets of vows. Whoa.^*

The real spectacle, though, was the reception. It was a many-tabled affair, a vast and frenetic smorgasbord, packed with hungry and talkative people, and Jarritos and bags of coffee on every table.** Yet it was all being run like a well-oiled machine by one man: the bride's brother, who served as the reception's emcee.^† This man was not only keeping the ceremonies moving, but he was also doing it with style, tossing off little jokes and comments at appropriate moments and with just the right tone, engaging people's interest but still staying out of the way of their good time. "Wow," I thought at one point that evening, "I never gave it much thought before, but being an emcee at a big wedding reception seems really tough. I would probably suck at that."

This guy looks pretty capable. He's got suspenders.

So a few weeks later, when a friend struck up a conversation with me by saying, "Hey James, would you be the emcee at my wedding?" my natural response was "Of course I will, man! I'd love to do that. I'm sure I would do a great job. WAIT, I'm sorry, are you being serious?" I had such a boundlessly low opinion of my ability to perform this critical wedding function that I naturally assumed my friend was joking when he suggested I perform it. But technically I had already said yes, so when I found out he was serious, I agreed to do it anyway. 

Flash forward to the week of the wedding: I'd largely forgotten about my impending emceeing responsibilities, and suddenly I got a Facebook message listing them out, complete with numbers and sub-headings. It started with the following:

1. Dress to impress.
    a. Duh!
    b. You got that under control 
2. You will do a welcome
3. Lead in table games
    a. mad lib
    b. activity...

Regarding "dress to impress:" I have it under control sometimes. And sometimes I look like a sloppy goof.

It got more involved after that, but you get the idea. Lighthearted in tone but not exactly brief. I was a little intimidated, as well as annoyed at myself for not having done some mental prep before now.

Even though I am an acknowledged introvert, I've done some public speaking, and have even occasionally gone out of my way to do so. The trouble is, when I go out of my way to talk to an audience, it's typically because I want to tell them a story, a story I've thought long and hard about, and they're usually there to listen to me. Being the emcee at a wedding is pretty much the opposite: it's not a story—it's who's going to the buffet line next and announcing that the cake is getting cut—and you need to make up what you're going to say on the spot, and no one really wants to listen to you all that much. You need to speak slowly and clearly, or people won't know what's going on and they will be annoyed. But you can’t take too long about it, or people will stop paying attention, and then they won't know what's going and they will be annoyed. It's a tough gig. "Good luck making it funny or entertaining on top of it all," I thought.

Dude will probably be more prepared than I was for the reception. He might be taking it a bit far.

Fortunately, things turned out to be much easier than my worries allowed for. When I got to the wedding, I was handed a piece of paper with a list of things I needed to announce, and told who to talk to if I wasn't sure what to do next. This eased my burden from "MAKE IT ALL UP ON THE SPOT" to "make up what you're going to say about these thing in this order," which was a considerable relief. Then the wedding happened, it was lovely, and we moved into the reception hall, which was a huge gymnasium full of tables and food and party favors and activities, with hundreds of people to corral.


I got on the mic and told people what they needed to do to get started. And then they did those things. I started to feel less nervous as I realized folks were actually going to listen to me. Maybe it was just because I was loud (super good sound system in that gym), but it took surprisingly little effort to get people to pay attention.

 At all events, when the wedding party arrived, I announced them in my biggest most sports stadium announcer-like voice and got the crowd to give the bride and groom a standing ovation. I started feeling comfortable with my role; I dismissed tables, announced found cell phones, and introduced toasts, all with greater ease and enjoyment than I'd expected. I even got in a few jokes, like this one:

"And now it's time for the couple's first dance! Folks, this is, in fact, the first time these two have ever danced with each other."
[look of panic from the couple]
"No, not really, I just made that up."
[look of relief from the couple and laughter from the guests]  

At the end of the wedding, my newlywed friends came and thanked me. "You were definitely the right man for the job," I was told, which made my heart glow. I think I'm ready to try it again sometime.
 

---

* I mentioned to a friend that I'd been at this wedding and he remarked that hadn't made it, but that he'd heard it was super traditional. "There were ... traditions," I replied, unable to articulate in any way how unusual the thoroughly bilingual experience had seemed at the time.
** These were from the bride’s family farm in Guatemala. They just might be my favorite party favor ever—in concept if not in reality, as I don’t drink coffee for similar but not exactly the same reasons as Hank Venture (i.e., it will make me jittery and unable to sleep but it won't make me stay up all night building Murphy beds, nor, alas, will it turn me into Jungle Batman).
† I don't think we need to go into detail about my internal debate over whether to spell this word "MC" or "emcee." Suffice it to say my choice was made based on how easy it would be to make the spelling fit into a pun for the title of this post, which is both a reference to a The Dark Knight and a tribute to the emcee in question, who I remember being obsessed with the movie before it came out.


Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/4464019859/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhopephotography/6684080461/
Photo 4: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alejandroerickson/7377866212/

New York, New York: We Wanted to be a Part of It

These vagabond shoes,
They are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it:
New York, New York.
—"New York, New York," Frank Sinatra

For a long time, my only context for the song "New York, New York" was a Get Fuzzy comic strip. In the strip, the beleaguered human Rob, the cruel and self-centered cat Bucky, and the nice but clueless dog Satchel are riding in the car, when "Somewhere, Over the Rainbow" comes on over the radio. Satchel tries to sing along, but he gets the song wrong and blurts "I wanna be a part of it, New York! New York! Wait...is that right? That's not right." Bucky calls him a nerd, Rob tells Bucky to be nice, and—scene: a classic three-panel comic strip.

I read this strip in high school, and without knowing what "New York, New York" actually sounded like, I was free to imagine it as I would. My mind created a sort of classic rock song with an uptempo guitar riff and a lead singer belting out "I wanna be a part of it!" with some back-up singers quickly chirping "New York! New York!" behind him. Needless to say, this is nothing like the original downbeat, groovy big-band lounge act that Frank Sinatra actually put on when he famously sang the song, and my mind was slightly blown when I heard it for the first time and discovered how wrong I was.

New York itself was the same for me. The city is depicted frequently in movies, TV, and other media that I frequently consumed as a child, so growing up I had a vague idea of what it was probably like: tall shiny buildings and bustling streets full of taxis and wise guys and cops and movie stars. Seeing it in person was radically different. Here's how it happened.

In college, my friend Daniel planned a trip to New York. I'm unsure what originally gave him the idea to do this; perhaps it was simply the new freedom of semi-adulthood combined with the realization that he'd never explored the nation's most well-known metropolis. At all events, he planned the trip and invited some relatively new friends of his: myself and our mutual acquaintance, Maxwell, as well as someone neither Maxwell or I knew, a fellow undergrad I'll call Allen. More about Allen in a moment.

The cool thing about this trip for me was that it was put together by someone else. I have never excelled at figuring out what I want in life, and trips to faraway places are no exception. Before going to New York, my biggest trip had been a family vacation to Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta. If my folks had come to me for advice, we all would have spent it inside with the blessed air conditioning and a good book. Thankfully, just as on our trip to Mexico my family and friends planned excursions to pyramids and restaurants and markets, on the New York trip, Daniel had put together an itinerary that included visits to The Museum of the Moving Image, Strand Book Store, MoMA, and a variety of other places I'd never heard of, as well as a plan to hit Broadway and meet a friend who lived in the city.

We got to New York, and I found that the key difference between my mental image of the city and the real thing is the utter, utter vastness of the real thing. I live in Chicago and work downtown; Chicago is the City that Works, and its downtown is busy, large, and full of people and big buildings. New York, though, is larger than Chicago in terms of both population and size by what must be at least an order of magnitude, right? It's excessive. If you head to the busier parts of the Loop in Chicago during rush hour, you can get a little uncomfortable walking because of the crowds; you might, say, brush past someone or even bump into them if you're not careful. In New York, there are parts of downtown where there are so many people on the sidewalk that breathing, not bumping, is the issue of concern. Put it another way: just compare the CTA rail map and the MTA rail map. The former is extensive but comprehensible; the latter is mind-shatteringly huge and complex:

In addition to all this, I had this notion that the city was full of crudity and rudeness in contrast to the more polite and refined Midwest of my youth. But while I occasionally saw such rudeness, there was nothing out of the way of what I would see in a given day in downtown Chicago; on the contrary, I noticed that people held doors for each other, chatted up strangers at the bus stop, and generally seemed human and normal. 

But I digress; what, you ask, actually happened when we got there?

To start, we traveled as cheaply as we could, which meant staying in a hostel rather than a hotel. The main difference, we discovered, is that in a hotel, your main problems are things like nothing good being on TV, broken ice machines, and tiny hotel soap, but in a hostel, your main problem is that you are suddenly roommates with other people who can also only afford to stay in a hostel, and that may literally be the only thing you have in common.

Our first night, we arrived and set up camp in our room together. It was getting late, and we didn't necessarily feel like exploring, so we started a card game on the floor of our room. When another occupant arrived, Maxwell greeted him and invited him to join our game. Instead of responding in any way whatsoever, the man ignored Maxwell and the rest of us in favor of hanging his sheets around his bottom-bunk bed to create a little fort and then blasting Latin music through his headphones, in an apparent effort to keep both the sight and sound of our quiet game of cards from intruding on whatever it was he had going on that night. Needless to say, we were surprised. 

Worse, perhaps, was the roommate we met the next night, an older man who chatted us up before we went to bed in a relatively friendly, if slightly off-putting, fashion. I don't remember much about him anymore, except that he claimed to be a professional movie extra and to have just returned from a shoot in Cameroon, which I suppose is enough to give you a sense of what he might have been like. At all events, he surprised us the next morning by waking up at the crack of dawn, putting a his credit card company on speakerphone, reading off his credit card and social security [sic] numbers aloud to the helpdesk employee, and then proceeding to curse the poor fellow out repeatedly for not telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. Again: imagine our surprise! We had never contemplated the existence of such a person, much less the possibility that he would keep us from sleeping one day in far-off New York.

Daniel, posing with a Magritte and referencing one of his works

When we actually got out and about in the city, things were better. We did see some truly incredible and fascinating stuff, thanks to Daniel's creative itinerary. I still occasionally long for the grand sea of used books that is Strand Book Store, and to once again plumb the depths of entertainment history at The Museum of the Moving Image. There was a remaining obstacle in all this sightseeing and exploring, it turned out, which was our companion, Allen.

Allen was from New York, or at least from much nearer to it than Daniel, who is a Californian, and me and Maxwell, who are Chicagoans. As such, he seemed to feel license to dictate the terms of the trip to us, in particular letting us know what he did and did not deem worthy of a visit as an expert New Yorker. Presented in a certain way, I can see how this would be acceptable, and even helpful: after all, it doesn't feel great to be an obvious tourist, and it could be nice to know what the locals deem interesting and valuable and what they leave for folks from out of town. Allen pushed it a bit far, alas; the breaking point came when planning a visit to Katz's Deli, a famous kosher-style delicatessen that specializes in sandwiches that are friggin' huge and delicious. If its reputation for great food isn't enough to attract interest, it can be noted that the deli is famous enough to have appeared in movies like When Harry Met Sally and Across the Universe, among others. These details were enough to convince the rest of us, but Allen insisted that it was just a deli like any other in the city, and that it was practically a crime to go out of our way to get there, when we could "just walk five feet" and find one just like it anywhere in the city. We were stymied.

Thankfully, Allen left our group for home soon after, leaving Maxwell, Daniel, and I to our own devices, including repeated jokes about how you could "just walk five feet" to find any number of things in the city, an inside joke which still serves us to this day when we want to lampoon someone with an inflated sense of self-worth or a general propensity for grating obnoxiousness.

With Allen gone, we felt freer to explore and enjoy, partaking of such delights as the American Museum of Natural History, where we looked at tons of fossils and got a couple amusing photos, getting some cheap same-day tickets for Avenue Q and Spamalot, and even heading to a comedy club on a whim for some late-night comedy in front of an actual brick wall, just like in Seinfeld or Louie. It was quite cool.

That skeleton is attacking Maxwell kind of! My photography skills are still this bad.

We had a great time, in other words. I like to think that our small troubles along the way helped bring me, Maxwell, and Daniel together and enjoy ourselves more. Certainly, these troubles are what we remember to each other when reminiscing about the experience. At all events, after the trip, we remained friends and grew to be better ones, eventually all ending up as roommates. Maxwell and I still room together, actually, and Daniel visits from time to time. So not only did we "get to be a part of it" for a little while in New York, New York: we also got a lasting friendship out of it to boot.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/imjustsayin/4080984817/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pahudson/2069182494/
Photo 3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzzcat/99674745/ 
Photo 4: http://www.transitchicago.com/maps/
Photo 5: www.mta.info/maps/submap.html
Photos 6 & 7: me

The High Highs and Low Lows of Giving Gifts

We all want something else.
—"Burn Thru," Abigail Washburn

(Note: as promised [among other promises] in my last post, I've moved my weekly blog post to Mondays, for reasons explained there.)

I really like the practice of giving gifts. I know that there are a lot of complaints abroad about the long dark road of consumerism, materialism, and over-commercialization of holidays in our culture, Christmas in particular, but, while I subscribe to those ideas in theory, in practice I will totally just barrel down the consumeristic excess express if I believe a friend or family member's happiness is at the end of the highway.

Giving a great gift is a wonderful feeling. Not only do you have the pleasure of seeing someone genuinely happy, and knowing that you caused that feeling, but when done right, a great gift indicates the measure of respect and love you have for a person. And even if you utterly fail and give someone something they don't want at all, there is a strong possibility you've just given them something to laugh about a little ways down the road. I have seen someone weep tears of frustration upon opening what turned out to be a pair of purple Chuck Taylors with black velvet bunnies on them, only to later wear them regularly and even occasionally offer a hearty chuckle at their initial disappointment.

For sheer heights of gift receiving, no gift I can recall outweighs the excellence of my big Christmas present in 1999: an N64. It was the culmination of years of longing, hope, and anticipation; after several years of going over to friends' houses in elementary school and reveling in the pure joy of imagined worlds and virtual competition and problem solving, only to have to wrench myself away at the end of each visit, I grew slowly to hope and to dream that one day I, too, could experience the unparalleled ecstasy that was having an N64 in my own home. When I saw a large, N64-sized box under the tree the Christmas of my twelfth year, I could scarcely breathe with the fear that it might not be what I hoped it was, and when I opened it and discovered that it was what I had yearned for so deeply for so many months and years, my joy and relief were intense and lasting. I did have a moment of moderate disappointment when my parents decided to take away the copy of Goldeneye 007 provided by my grandparents, deeming a game where adults shoot other adults with guns to be inappropriate for my preteen self. It did little to diminish my profound happiness, though, as I was well immersed in the deep bliss that is Mario 64 by the end of the morning.

Not that it kept me from eventually re-acquiring Goldeneye.

Undoubtedly the worst gift I have ever received also came to me in preadolescence. It was around Christmas, when people like me, children of Salvation Army officers, were all invited to a party where there were games, happiness, and of course, presents. When it came time for the kids to open their presents, all the boys around me were opening sweet-action Lego sets, with cool undersea divers and large, fantastical submarines, complete with neon green propellers and viewing windows. I loved Legos as a kid; they allowed for nearly endless creative play by myself (an important aspect of growing up as an introvert) and a chance to get another set and build my collection was quite exciting. After eagerly watching others open their presents, I turned to my own. They were disappointingly small in size, I thought; perhaps I was getting several smaller Lego sets instead of the big submarine? That could be cool, I supposed, providing they were still something sweet, like pirates or ice explorers.

Legos: still among the first things you will see when you come to my house.

The first gift I opened was something called a Jupiter Ball. It was a little spherical mold that you would pour different colored rubber cements into that would then harden into a ball that looked sort of like the planet Jupiter, if for some reason you cared enough to do that. It was not Legos, so I was disappoint.

The other present was, I kid you not, a box of fake snot. Needless to say, this was also not Legos.

I tried to be reasonable about my disappointment. I expressed it to my parents, who chalked it up to "I guess so-and-so" (person in charge of buying the presents) "just thinks you're a really weird kid." Heaven knows where they got that impression (heh) but all the same, even weird kids love Legos, so I still had a beef with that person up until I eventually forgot who it was.

Enough about receiving, though; we all know that giving is where it's truly at. I like to pride myself on being a good gift giver. I am often the person who organizes friends into getting an excellent present for a third party with our combined buying power, which is an especially good feeling. But the fact of the matter is that, mainly, being a good gift giver often comes down to simply paying attention to a person and writing down what they say at key moments, such as, for example, when you are in a store together and your friend goes "Man, I would really love X, but I'm totally not going to buy it right now." Then you go buy that thing and sit on it for a few months until their birthday or Christmas or Hanukkah*, badda-bing, badda-boom. Even if they buy it for themselves, you still get hecka brownie points for having paid attention. (Hopefully you kept the receipt, just in case.)

Most gifts I have given in this fashion have turned out well. The best gift, I think, that I have ever given involved not attentiveness so much as extreme creativity and limited resources. I participate in an annual holiday gathering of friends from my time in AmeriCorps, where we do a white elephant gift exchange with an almost unbearably low cost limit of $5. One year, I put together a coloring book featuring pictures of all of the participants; I used an official AmeriCorps application as a cover, altering it so it read "Give a Year, Color the SCMs" (SCMs being our shared job title and "Give a Year, Change the World" being the organizational motto). I bundled it with crayons and wrapped it in used paper with Excel spreadsheets on the back. (Total cost: whatever a box of Crayolas was at Walgreens, so like $3 maybe?) The sheer explosive excitement generated upon the opening of this gift was satisfying enough, but anyone knows that the true marker of the value of a white elephant gift is how much the participants steal it from each other, and my gift was almost immediately stolen the maximum number of times.

Thus, getting gifts and giving gifts are both excellent processes, and even if you find yourself initially disappointed, the process is almost always worth it in one way or another.

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*Note: I have never given a Kwanzaa present. This does not mean I wouldn't love to. 
 
Photo Sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/72153088@N08/6510934443/
Photos 2 & 3: my house!

My Introversion and What I'm Doing About It

So just leave me alone,
Leave me alone,
Leave me alone—stop it!
Just stop doggin' me around.
—"Leave Me Alone," Michael Jackson*

Ever since I have known what an introvert was, I have identified as one. As a child, my preferred methods of interacting with the world were (1) reading books about it and (2) taking solitary walks through it. I tended to content myself with one or two good friends as a kid, and was generally quiet and mildly anti-social around others. Learning to interact with strangers was an ordeal: such tasks as ordering at a restaurant, calling a company help desk, and being pleasant to people on the street or in an elevator were all things I couldn't do comfortably until college or later. Heck, I still struggle with calling strangers, come to think of it. Just a week or two ago, I spent days psyching myself up to call Timberland, and not even about anything that stressful: they owed me some money, which is great! Thankfully, before I managed to convince myself to call them, they gave me my money. Few things are as sweet to an introvert as a problem involving telephones that solves itself.

The funny thing about this picture: I took it myself.

When I was in middle school, my dad took me on a weekend hiking trip where he spent much of the time trying to get me to talk about the fact that I never really talked much. I had nothing to say on the subject, and I didn't say so, nor did I say much of anything else. It was profoundly awkward at the time, but in retrospect I'm glad that it happened, because it was the first time I grasped that being completely solitary and turned inward might be a problem that needed dealing with, rather than an alternative lifestyle that the world just needed to accept. I remain eternally grateful to my father for undertaking this task, which must have seemed totally futile at the time.

Today, partly as a result of my father's early efforts, I consider myself an assimilated introvert in an extroverted society. I can interact at length with friends, talk to strangers, and even speak to a large group, all while feeling relatively calm and even having a good time. Occasionally, though, I'll have a moment of clarity about my true nature (e.g., the aforementioned Timberland telephone incident), in which I'll be reminded that I am just not that comfortable when speaking with new people, and that that is considered extraordinary by some. The most frequent of such moments are when I'm walking around downtown Chicago and pass the clipboard/binder/Greenpeace people, who are always super friendly and engaging and smiley in their attempt so talk to people about whatever cause they're supporting, and who are constantly, constantly, being rejected, implicitly or explicitly, by semi- or fully hostile people who pass them on the street. And because fear of rejection is one of the big things that drives my introversion, I always shudder slightly when I pass these people, and feel super thankful that I don't have to do that in order to get by, because it would be the pits. That and telemarketing. (Shudder.)

These facts make it somewhat surprising that I would agree to go out canvassing for a political cause, i.e., knocking on peoples' doors and asking them to please reject me. People really do not like talking to people who knock on their doors. As a person, this is a basic part of my knowledge about the world. Yet I chose to ignore that fact and knock on people's doors anyway, because I genuinely thought people needed to hear what I and my fellow canvassers had to say.

I live in Illinois, where a state budget crisis has prompted the government to slash funding for schools, healthcare, and any number of other important public programs especially important to the poor. Meanwhile also in Illinois, two thirds of corporations pay no state taxes, failing to support the infrastructure and services that they and their employees use on a regular basis. (This strikes me as both stupid and wrong.) A bill recently went through the state legislature that would have closed corporate tax loopholes and forced corporations to pay their fair share. This bill was killed in committee by a couple of Democrats in the state House. My friend invited me to canvass in the district of one of these Representatives (this guy, if you're interested—and especially if you live in the 23rd Ward!), asking folks to call him and tell him that, should the opportunity arise again, they would like him to not kill a bill that would end this stupid and wrong state of affairs.

I said yes, not because it sounded fun, but because it seemed like the right thing to do. I went to a meeting where we talked about strategy and the basics of what we were doing, and I bluffed my way through it with jokes and smiles, all the while feeling pretty terrified about what was about to happen. And then we left the meeting place and drove to our respective streets in the 23rd Ward, and it hit me: I was now the clipboard person, the Greenpeace volunteer, the telemarketer. I was going to be very uncomfortable for the next few hours.

Gunderson Street in Chicago's 23rd Ward.

The worst part about canvassing is not the conversations you have with people. While these can be awkward, frustrating, or painful, they are nothing compared to the intense fear, sometimes akin to panic, that comes over you when you're about to knock on a complete stranger's door. I would stand in front of someone's steps, sometimes for several minutes at a time, working myself up, calming myself down, so that I could walk up the stairs and ring the doorbell. Occasionally, I would find myself seeking some excuse not to do it at all, just for the moment's relief of walking to the next house, excuses like "this person is too old to bother about this" or "this person's house doesn't have a doorbell." And when I managed to knock or ring, and no one answered the door, the relief was indeed intense, if extremely fleeting: there went one more house I didn't have to face rejection at.

There were a fair number of houses where no one was home, but there were also plenty where people were there. People had a range of responses, from dismissive to skeptical to enthusiastic. Only two of the doors I knocked on lived up to my worst fears. At one, a man with a Hulk Hogan mustache answered the door, and when I told him about the problem in our state, he asked me if I knew the only way to solve the political problems in Illinois. I said I knew how I thought we should go about it, but then made the mistake of asking his opinion. "Kill 'em," he said. The government and corporations are so corrupt, that you have to just literally murder the people in charge to change anything. I let him talk for longer than I should have, given that I lacked any leverage or tools to change his mind, and then left, saying that I didn't share his cynicism (which was true) but that I appreciated his honesty (which was a lie). "You will," he said, referring to me sharing his cynicism (which I won't).

The other bad conversation was with an old man who was very, very racist.

Those two conversations aside, the experience was positive. I got to talk to people about an issue I care about, and many of them listened and were sympathetic; a few agreed to call their Representative, and one person made the call right in front of me! My hope is that experiences like this will help me to experience the richness and goodness of life more fully, to help me move beyond my introversion and become better engaged with the world, even though it's a frightening and messy place. So I plan to do this kind of thing again. And I think next time it will be less frightening, less uncomfortable, and I will have a better idea of what I'm getting into!

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*Note that most weeks I do not explicitly recommend watching the video that accompanies the music quoted at the top of my post, but that this week is an exception, as the video is among the most beautifully weird things I've ever seen. It includes a dancing elephant/human hybrid skeleton, dogs in suits, and a theme park built into a giant Michael Jackson.

Photo Sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jucanils/391068304
Photo 2: Me!
Photo 3: http://www.flickr.com/photos/butlercorey/3755421673/
Photo 4: Google Maps

Sleep and I

While you were sleeping
You tossed, you turned,
You rolled your eyes as the world burned.
The heavens fell, the earth quaked,
I thought you must be, but you weren't awake.
—"While You Were Sleeping," Elvis Perkins

I have long had a somewhat troubled relationship with sleep. It's not that I have difficulty sleeping; far from it. You might call me a "somniac"—one who sleeps joyfully, drinking deeply of sleep's pleasures and rarely having much difficulty achieving it under the right circumstances. If there's a deadly sin I can be regularly said to be guilty of, it's sloth.

The trouble in my love affair with sleep originates not with myself nor with sleep, but from third parties. They just don't seem to understand our love, or don't care about it.

This first became apparent when I started going to sleepaway camp at age eight. Up until this time, when bedtime rolled around, I generally headed to bed, turned out the lights, and went to sleep. Happily, without a struggle, because sleep was awesome. For most of my peers at camp, though, lights out time in the cabin was inexplicably this time to ... talk about ... stuff. Like anything. It was so weird to me; they would just lie in their beds and chatter mindlessly about the stupidest things, as if the wholesome, beautiful, excellent, promising, joyous world of sleep that lay just around the corner were invisible to them, or worse: seen, but viewed as worthless. Worse than my confusion at my peers' rejection of sleep in all its great goodness was the fact that I could not sleep when they talked to each other. Or threw things around the cabin, or burped, or farted, or (everyone's favorite) mooned each other. I was despondent.

I tried various strategies to overcome this sleep obstacle down through the years, but the central one remained constant for the next decade or so: any time I knew I would be forced to sleep in a room full of other humans, I would invariably make it my goal to be fast asleep before anyone made it back to the room at night.

I had pretty limited success with this strategy. That first year at camp, the counselor would find me sleeping (or, more often, pretending to sleep in the hopes that my sleep would soon become real) and wake me up so I could participate in "devotions," the Christian sleepaway camp equivalent of an end-of-day debriefing meeting...with Jesus. For this, I earned my fair share of ridicule. In high school, I once shared a hotel room with an acquaintance, which we had booked so we could attend a weekend conference together. I successfully hit the hay before he returned to the room in the evening, only for him to [1] wake me up and ask if he could turn off the radio (why!?) and [2] invite his friends to come hang out in our room and then (because they had come to the conference without booking a room for themselves) to sleep with us in our beds. In college, I generally went to bed well before my roommates, but occasionally I would wake up to the sounds of the aftermath of "too much party" in the bathroom a few feet from my head. 

Eventually, though, I gained a measure of control over this kind of situation: I became a camp counselor. As a counselor, I considered myself second to none in convincing kids to go to sleep. True, I had an occasional kid who stayed awake out of fear rather than rambunctiousness, and in those cases I was at a loss. However, when it came to general cabin-fever restlessness (a universal problem for camp counselors, in my experience), I had the perfect method for settling kids down. The method is as follows: you sit in the room with the kids, lights off, everyone in bed. And every time someone talks, you call them by name, and tell them to be quiet and go to sleep. After about 30 minutes, no one is talking, and after about 60 minutes, no one is awake.

(Unfortunately, this method does not work if you are good friends with the people in the cabin, which happened to me once. In this case, my friends chatted away while I sat in the room with the campers, and when I told them to be quiet they chuckled and kept talking. Perhaps they thought I was joking, or that because I was their friend I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. I ended up smacking the loudest friend a few times with a broom to emphasize that I was seriously tired and needed to sleep. This got the message across.)

The best strategy, I finally realized (just a couple years ago, alas) is drugs. Specifically, over-the-counter sleeping pills; essentially the sleeping ingredient in NyQuil or Tylenol PM. Now with the magic of drugs, sleep and I can meet whenever and wherever, no matter who is there to throw things, moon people, or simply talk about nothing. 

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Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roweeena/237818236/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinfoilraccoon/7768923828/

Good Fences Make Good Fences

Good fences make good neighbors.
—17th century proverb

                                    ...I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offense. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down.'
 —"Mending Wall," Robert Frost

I've lived in cities most of my life. I enjoy city life very much: the diversity of human experience on display, the range of entertainments and intellectual engagements available, having many friends a short train ride away—I find these and other advantages endlessly appealing. There are disadvantages, too: dealing with strangers whose behavior can be unpredictable, a deep separation from nature, difficulty seeing the stars at night. Normally, though, I take these in stride, and I rarely think about them, apart from occasions when I meet with an unreasonable person on a bus or suddenly miss the sound and smell of wind in the trees.

Lately, the big drawback to city living on my mind is the lack of connection I feel to my neighbors. I don't know their names, I see them very rarely, and when I do, I feel guilty for not taking the time to try to get to know them. Trouble is, when you live in a city, there are too many people: not enough time to get to know everyone, not to mention the feeling that people who are too friendly, too familiar, out in public, may be after something more mercenary than simple friendship.

I could get to know my neighbors if I really tried, no doubt. My shyness and laziness are the main obstacles. Occasionally, though, there have been bigger barriers to my knowing a neighbor.

I once lived on the second floor of an apartment building in Hyde Park, Chicago, with three roommates. Our red brick building was old and a bit shabby, but because our apartment was roomy and not un-conveniently located, we generally enjoyed living there. Throughout the years I lived there, various folk came and went in the neighboring apartments, and while at times they could be noisy or otherwise slightly bothersome, as a building we typically got along fine.

One year, though, a family moved into the apartment below us, who we found harder to understand and live with. It consisted of a middle-aged woman and her teenaged son, with regular visits from what I assumed to be the woman's boyfriend. They kicked things off poorly by installing a camera at the front of the house to monitor who was at the door; this made us uncomfortable (who wants to be recorded at home by their neighbor?) and we questioned what sort of person needed such a camera in our relatively safe area. They later added such annoyances as smoking weed in the room beneath my friend's bedroom—forcing him to deal with the smell, which he loathed—and blasting loud music at odd hours, in addition to, interestingly, horror movies turned way, way up. Needless to say, we grew to resent these people.

Which led to an interesting time one night when the woman downstairs came to our door and knocked on it vigorously. It was very rare for residents of the building to knock on each other's doors, so it was always with a bit of trepidation that such a knock was answered. Occasionally, we'd just wait quietly and hope the knocker would go away, as it was rarely anyone with good news. In this case, we could not do so. She knew we were there: she hollered as much through the door before any of us answered.

The woman's complaint was that we had been stomping around our apartment and we needed to stop, because she had to sleep. A less gracious group of people might have replied that her family had been smoking weed and playing loud music and they needed to stop, because we had to live above them. Instead, we insisted, truthfully, that no one had been stomping around and that the floors creaked a lot when we walked because the building was old. She accused us of lying and insisted she was right.

This established a pattern for the coming months. We would live our lives relatively quietly apart from, yes, walking around in our apartment. And our neighbor would come up to our house, bang on the door, and tell us off. Later, she added the charge that we were throwing water on the bathroom floor and it was coming through her ceiling, and when we insisted we were doing no such thing, but that there was likely a problem with the pipes that she should call the landlord about, she accused us of lying and insisted she was right.

In retrospect, I have always wished that I could have solved—or at least addressed—this problem with a little courage, inviting this woman to sit down with me and get to know me, to understand that I was a kind person who had no wish to make her unhappy, that she was simply mistaking me and my roommates for callous, unthinking people. I still sometimes mentally run through the conversation we could have had, never really able to imagine her response, but always a little afraid that talking would have helped nothing. I'm more afraid, though, that it would have helped a great deal, and that I missed a chance to reach out to someone different from me, to establish a connection with a neighbor.

One night, we overheard a loud, sustained argument between the woman and her boyfriend, which, from the sound of things, not only involved vehement accusation, shouting, and bickering, but but also throwing things crashingly around the apartment, and perhaps worse. We called the police, who came and settled things down, we assume, though we didn't know any details. What we did know was that our neighbor stopped complaining to us.

I like to think that she understood, eventually, that we were just people trying to live, and that her family's activity was just as audible and bothersome to us as ours was to her. I suspect, though, that she just saw us as people who could not be reasoned with, who would rather call the police than involve themselves with their neighbor's life in any way. I think that, to her, we were not neighbors, but enemies.

The saying quoted at the top of the page is supposed to mean something like, "to keep on good terms with your neighbors, keep your life from interfering with theirs in unwanted ways." Robert Frost questions this idea in his poem; I wonder with him if our impulse to "mend fences" in this way may keep us from knowing each other at all, may make us miss opportunities for deeper connections with people. Indeed, I've often found that the fences are the only neighbors I have.

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Photo sources:
Phtoto 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailyinvention/17912223/
Photo 2: Google Maps