In Memory

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.

--Joseph Roux

The ways I’ve heard people describe Matt Arch - social butterfly, life of the party, unabashed activist – comprised a spirit so lively that I met the news of his death with incredulous devastation. There were times, being around Matt, when the world appeared to be lovely solely because Matt so thoroughly enjoyed loveliness, so how could one understand a world without Matt there to appreciate it? My disbelief left me unsure of what to do with myself, and when I saw my sister after the awful information had been confirmed, I told her about my emotional paralysis.

“I want to do something Matt would have done - like donate to a charity or sign up for a race. I know that would be the best tribute to his memory, but right now…” I broke off, unsure of how to finish.

Jess sighed sadly. “Yeah, I feel the same way, too. I thought for a minute about signing up for the marathon and running in Matt’s memory…”

I raised my eyebrows.

Jess looked solemnly thoughtful, “But I think Matt would understand.”

He would have, and that’s what I have come to accept about my trajectory of grief thus far: Matt understood we all bring what we can to a situation, he celebrated diversity and worked to safeguard our rights to be different. The people Matt valued come from all different walks of life and no matter who you were, he was always able to make you feel like the most special person in the room. He most memorably did that for me when he asked me to write and edit for his website, which worked to promote his own business prowess and bring individuals together.

I pitched my idea of a series connecting popular culture to the workplace to Matt with a certain amount of trepidation. Not only was I concerned the project would seem too pedestrian, I was also feeling doubtful, which was my natural response to another person investing in my intellect.

However Matt’s eyes lit up. Throughout our collaboration, he was endlessly generous and enthusiastic. The point of his website was to help people network their way to success, and he was insistent I set the blog up in a way to best promote myself (He was characteristically upfront about his view of networking, “Girl, if you succeed, I at least know someone at the top. We gotta get more gays up there.” “I’m bisexual,” I corrected. “Baby, even better.”).

I would meet with or email him to talk about pop culture trends I noticed, and we’d have conversations about our responses to the fads. I wonder, then, how Matt would feel about hundreds of his friends finding out about his death on Facebook. The ghosts of conversations I never had with him haunt my thoughts, and I imagine, had all of this been happening another way, I’d have approached him about the concept of grieving on social media.

“Angelcakes,” He would have doubtlessly utilized his favorite nickname at some point in this exchange, “This is brilliant, we have to blog about it.”

“But Matt,” I would have replied; I keep thinking as I write this, “there’s no way to make this funny.”

I haven’t yet been able to force my grief to manifest as fundraising, because the script I seem to be following is too absurdly predictable. I had passed through denial when quickly scrolling through Facebook after a cautionary phone call from my sister and searching through hundreds of posts until I was satisfied the news must contain some truth. And even after accepting the reality of his death, I still kept stumbling into the word suicide, an abyss instead of an erect obstacle. (Matt would have been thrilled to see the word “erect” in his elegiac blog entry.) I marched through anger, snapping at my partner and indulging in stony silence. In drunken nights, in emotional hypothesizing, I bargained, I ruminated and re-planned: If only…if only…if only.  But I have not reached a level of acceptance that has yet allowed me to participate in an activity to honor Matt, because his death is still a ridiculous impossibility.

My script is not only normative but also reductive. I’m incredulous because Matt was so happy and his cheerful spirit infective. Hundreds upon hundreds of people have expressed their despair at his passing: how could someone so loved ever feel alone? He was one of the most accomplished people I knew, and we had many editorial conversations about the best way to prune his resume in order to organize his many accolades. He was too young, too happy, too important. He loved life too much to die.

He loved Beyoncé too much to die, I imagine Matt would have wanted me to add.

But I know better. Not only have I watched an UpWorthy video or two in my day, but I’ve also coped with similar demons and can recognize the hue of this act thanks to the tar marring my own experiences. Nonetheless, I can’t let go of my incredulity because this shouldn’t have happened, and don’t we always want to rest in the safety of a logical universal order?

In Matt’s mind, the logical order of the universe was that we all come together and celebrate one another. I know few people with Matt’s capacity for love – he clearly served as the connectarian he aspired to be (buying rights to that connectarian domain name, of course, because, for Matt Arch, ideology need not be divorced from business opportunities). I don’t have answers exempt from anyone else struggling with this tragedy, but I do know a lesson I learned from Matt’s life and death is that connection matters. Matt would be thrilled if we took the risk of reaching out to one another at least once each day, practicing the kind of life he strove to live. If you knew Matt, then you knew what it was to be included, to be valued. What better tribute to pay to this man than to pass on that favor, and to try to live in such a way that the gift is ever passed forward?

I don’t always know, Matt, the best way to say my goodbyes. But, because I love you, here’s one last collaboration.

The Short Shelf-Life of the Realized Goal

In May I graduated from my MA program and ran a half-marathon.  Unused to such levels of accomplishment, I have apparently been resting ever since, hence the lack of updates.  I noticed, however, in my lull between Doing Things¹ that I never actually thought about what reaching either of these goals means.  There’s a scene on Parks and Recreation where Leslie Knope and her team reach a milestone in her long-running goal of park creation, and Leslie immediately starts rallying her troops with plans of what needs to happen next.  Ann (that beautiful, flawless mermaid)² interrupts her best friend and says, “Don’t you ever just stop and celebrate?”  

And she kind of doesn’t, which is one of the reasons we consistently say Yup to Knope³. But it’s also one of the reasons Leslie exists irretrievably in the realm of fiction: No one can consistently maintain that level of energetic optimism without taking a day or two to reflect and be a little self-congratulatory.

This revelation came to me and I thought, “Parks and Recreation rocks.”  Followed by, “Why don’t I reflect on reaching both of those goals with a blog post.  That way I’m multitasking!”⁴ 

Weirdly, a lot of the conversations I’ve had with people about finishing a half-marathon parallel conversations I’ve had about earning my MA.  And, while I like to think I smelled a lot better earning my Masters than I did running a half-marathon⁵, I still learned a few similar lessons.

People ask you why you want to accomplish this (and your answer really matters)

Sometimes “why” comes with incredulous support to buttress the speaker’s disbelief.  “Why would you want to run a half-marathon? That sounds hard and boring.”  The same, by the way, can be and has been said about attending graduate school.⁶ 

Often we have to search far back into our memory banks for an answer to “why.”  And there are times when the motivation is harder to remember than it should be, or maybe our reasoning sounds idealistic and naïve, or we know that our answer will do nothing to justify our desires to others. 

I decided to run a half-marathon because someone was talking about training for one, and I immediately thought, “I could never do that.”  After chasing the thought down I realized instantly declaring my own inability to complete a task was rather unproductive.  There was no real reason I couldn’t run 13.1 miles – I was certainly healthy enough and already enjoyed running.  I signed up for the Pittsburgh half-marathon the next day and started training, but I was really training myself to stop being a premature nay-sayer. 

Of course, sometimes when I was on my eighth mile while training, and it was snowy or rainy or, you know, Tuesday, and I was tired, then the “why” was buried a little deeper.  I realized in those moments that my knowing my motivation isn’t important because I need to justify myself to others⁷, but because I need to remember my goal to get me to the good days.  Knowing I was getting my MA because I believe education can change the world was helpful on late nights/early mornings in a library that always smells faintly of body odor and desperation.

To push through the pain or to take a nap?  The struggle is real.

Early on while training for the race, I got a stress fracture because trying to save money by running in three-year-old running shoes is actually as dumb as everyone says it is.  Push-through-the-pain culture and an impervious competitive streak left me unhappily lightly cross-training and resting, but I knew ultimately a break would probably spare me, well, a break⁸.  There were other times when the “To Rest or Endure” question was harder to answer.  Did I not want to run today because of a swollen knee or ennui? Knowing the difference between pain that should be tended to and pain that should be ignored was a vital part of training, especially in the first few months of preparing when I was still learning how my body responded to this level of physical activity.

Academia was a little tougher.  As someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, I am accustomed to weighing internal turmoil against external obligations, and I had never, until graduate school, learned how to accept that there would be some moments it would be healthier for me to just stay home.  Maybe being totally isolated in the dim, aforementioned smelly library would not be the best thing for me today.  Or, perhaps being in a space where a room full of people share and critique complex ideas with one another would legitimately be too overwhelming for me at this moment.  Of course I also became aware that academia has an unfortunate habit of cultivating feelings of inferiority and isolation, and there were ways I could maintain an awareness of and combat this tendency. Learning it was responsible to sometimes say “Not today, but maybe tomorrow” was a big deal for me.  I also now wholeheartedly believe in the healing power of the hour-long nap.  Because, friend, 2pm is going to happen whether you’re awake for it or not.

Methods that worked for everyone else in the universe will not work for you.

You aren’t going to believe this, but a lot of people get up at 4am to go running.  It’s true.  Other people totally cease academic work by 7 or 8pm (I strongly suspect these people are also early risers).  Before embarking on my journey as a graduate student or runner, I did a lot of research on how people were successful in both endeavors.  I tried getting up early to work out or write, but realized that harboring a fatigued hatred of absolutely everyone and everything by 11am was not worth the Early Bird title.  I found that certain types of cross-training didn’t work for me – I have always found the elliptical mind-numbingly boring⁹ for whatever reason, and so despite the many advocates for that particular machine, I avoided it religiously.  Some of my peers would write their own responses to texts beside corresponding paragraphs, but whenever I did this I couldn’t remember what I was responding to, or how “hegemony” related to anything.  I ended up realizing I needed to write general summaries beside work to jog my memory, even though other methods seemed more advanced.  I cultivated a heightened skepticism for foolproof, universal routines, since I’ve yet to find a fool-proof plan that I cannot upend.

Someone will ask what you want to do now that you’ve reached your goal, and “drink and sleep” are actually totally acceptable short-term answers.

I think that speaks for itself. 

Please take some time today to reflect on cool stuff you’ve done and prematurely dismissed.  We are sometimes more impressive than we acknowledge.  Happy reading.

1. Well, I was working ten hours a day at a daycare this summer, but no one gives you a medal or a diploma for that…Just room temperature applesauce.

 2. Sorry to the two people left on the planet who don’t watch Parks and Rec and therefore have no idea what I’m talking about

 3. Sorry

4. Multitasking: The Only Relaxation a Type A Person Forgives

5.  It’s the little things

 6. Mostly by graduate students

7. Although, it was fun to occasionally answer the “Why would you want to run a half-marathon” with, “You don’t want to run a half-marathon?” and act totally baffled.

8. A little stress-fracture humor for you there.

9. Plus, “Pedal Faster” scrolls across the screen when you start slowing down to end your workout, and I find that very uncalled for and discouraging.

July Pop Culture Update

Hey folks,
A new installment of the Your Life through Pop Culture series is up! Check it out here.
Also, though I've been focusing on the guest blog the past few months, I'm hoping to start to more regularly update this blog again soon, so...I'll keep you posted.  Happy reading.

April Pop Culture Update

In the spirit of graduation, Matt and I are happy to share the latest Your Life through Pop Culture post.  We added some Buffy in there for the hell of it.

Pop Culture Update

We have a new post on toxic work environments up - take a gander here if you have the time!

New Update

Another Your Life through Pop Culture post is up!  If you have a few minutes and would enjoy deconstructing some failed celebrity apologies with me, take a gander!

Professionalism and Pop Culture Update (The titles just keep getting more exciting)

Hi, folks!  For anyone who has ever watched Beyoncé perform and thought, "Awesome, but how can I apply this to my professional life?"  I have a post for you!  If you're so inclined, check out my most recent post on my guest series for Matt Arch's website.  Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see next.  Not that I don't have any ideas and would appropriate yours.  

 

Shameless Self-Promotion

Hi folks.  For the past few weeks I've been working with the wonderful Matt Arch to help enhance his (already very cool) website.  Matt's asked me to be a guest blogger for a series entitled Your Life through Pop Culture, where I'll examine the spheres of popular culture and the life of young professionals to see where there's overlap.  You can check out the first installment here.

Happy reading!

The Princess Diaries (Without Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, and Everything Else You Loved about The Princess Diaries)

This past New Year’s Eve my parents’ friends brought their children Liam and Kaitlyn (ages five and four respectively) to our house.  I can’t help but be stereotypically nostalgic when talking with little kids.  They have the best goals.  They want to fly, save the world, battle dragons, and other mythical and impossible but still metaphorically poignant things.  By the time you become an adult, your goals shift from “I bet I could be the fastest person in the world” to “I bet I could eat that whole doughnut in one bite.” 

But one thing for which I felt absolutely no nostalgia was playing princess – mostly because I legitimately never had.  I mean, Jess had certainly played princess, and I definitely played with her, but I would generally opt to be Batman.  We Rush girls played fast and loose with our genres.  It’s not that, from the ages of three to ten, I was ideologically opposed to princesses, it’s that I was plagued by one, all-consuming question:

“OK, but what do princesses do?” 

Kaitlyn gave me a look of rapidly depleting patience.  I had briefly won her favor by pitching the idea of Princess Club. (This after Kaitlyn had gravely approached me, saying, “You can’t be in the Princess Club.”  Not incredibly surprised by this pronouncement, I still felt compelled to ask why.  “Because there is no club.”  Unable to argue with that logic, I nodded.  “Ah.  I see.  I wonder, though, if we could make a Princess Club?”)  But it would seem that I could not ride on the coattails of that moment of brilliance forever, especially not if I kept asking impertinent questions.

From a young age, though, I had no interest in being a princess, simply because the functionality of those young girls eluded me.  If I were to be a princess, did I have to pretend to be in an enchanted sleep or helplessly circle around my “tower” for a half an hour until I was saved by someone doing something more exciting?  The appeal escaped me, as did plenty of normative consumer opportunities.  Many pink dresses were received as gifts and then distastefully handed over to my sister.

Kaitlyn assembled the members of the Princess Club.  Aside from me, other reigning members included Jess and my friend Shaina.  Criteria for membership included: a) being a girl (“This feels a little essentialist,” I mumbled to Jess, who elbowed me in the side) b) having at least one, if not more princess stickers, distributed by Kaitlyn (I had three.  One was given freely, another was begged for, and the third was stolen so if these stickers were declared currency in our new club, I would have a chance to be the richest in the land – a rare opportunity for a graduate student). 

As we gathered for our first meeting, Liam formed the rival Car Club which consisted of all the boys in the house.  Liam had already shown infinite patience with me when, earlier that night, I asked if I could color with him.  He was a meticulous colorer, a fact I pointed out admiringly when I promised to be careful with our joint-picture.  A minute later he sighed and said, “Um.  That’s supposed to be grass?  You’re coloring it black.”  And, yup.  Sure enough.  So I scribbled over it in green, and he grinningly declared that I had made “dead grass,” which was certainly a utilization of poetic license on his part, but cool.  To be honest, there was a dark period of the night when my shenanigans meant I was allowed in neither the Princess Club nor the Car Club.  Story of my life. Nonetheless, I was immediately suspicious of this gender divide between the groups, and necessarily had to focus my attention on subverting the norms of the Princess Club.

To do this I obviously had to become President Princess.  You may think, “Uh, Queen?” but you’d be wrong.  Everyone knows queens are old, evil, and vain, teetering on the ever-present edge of losing their beauty and their sanity.  So, inspired by the youthful ambition all around me – Liam wanted to be a car, for God’s sake - President Princess was my goal.  My multitude of stickers did not seem to be convincing Kaitlyn of my propensity to rule, so I took Shaina downstairs to my mother’s office.  My mother is an independent beauty consultant, and her office is covered with material befitting for princesses – pink, silver, and lots of sparkles surrounded us, and, out of place as I was in this color scheme, I grabbed a pink scarf from a dressing table, placed a tiara on my head, and fumbled with some dangly jewelry.

Shaina meekly fiddled with a bracelet, not wanting to disturb my mother’s office.  This attitude is exactly why she will never truly be President Princess. 

“Uh, should I…dress up?”  Shaina asked, as I [princess] motioned for her to follow me upstairs. 

I looked around the room and grabbed a travel pillow that fits around one’s neck.  Thrusting it on Shaina’s shoulders, I barked, “There.  You’re beautiful.  Let’s go – I have a throne to usurp!”

This had all started out as an exercise in reflection.  I wanted to ask my young friends why only girls could be in the Princess Club.  Why couldn’t I wear a car sticker on my hand next to the princess stickers?  But since these opportunities to explode gender norms had not been embraced by the youths, I decided I would rule the Princess Club and then let (or forcefully make) everyone a part of it.  So, essentially, I started out hoping to teach the children about social justice, and then I ended up teaching them about benevolent dictatorships. 

Despite the fact I was clearly the most princess-looking of all of us – I had a tiara!  I have never worn a tiara in my life and still don’t understand why people want to, but isn’t that supposed to be mean something dammit – Kaitlyn never once declared me President Princess.  Even after, joints cracking, I pseudo-sat in the tiny princess chair my mother had purchased for Kaitlyn’s visits (then she only looked at me with irritation and honest to God told on me to my mother, who exasperatedly scolded me for not sharing), I was still not considered fit to rule.

“You can be President Princess,” she said, walking over to Shaina and sitting in her lap.

“What?  But she’s wearing a pillow on her neck!”  I said, choking slightly as I inhaled some glitter from my scarf.  “She looks ridiculous,” I coughed into my arm.

Kaitlyn shrugged as Jess guffawed.  Liam approached the scene shyly. 

“Could I be in the Princess Club?”  The number of boys at the party was slim, and while Liam had quietly been amusing himself, he clearly wanted some companionship. 

I anticipated having another patient conversation about embracing gender deviance with Kaitlyn, but she surprised me.

“Yeah. C’mon.”  Looking at us she said simply, “Liam can be in the club because he’s my friend.”

Well, then. 

So, yeah, I’m unsurprisingly bad at playing princess, but not just for all of the reasons one would suspect.  To be fair, I am 23 years old and still have vivid memories of looking for girls in the media who were being active in a way I could appreciate, finding none, and having to turn to role models outside of the normative framework.  But I also see more nuances now than I did then.  I see how as a princess you have the power to make friends with, like, singing animals and magical fairies.  You also have the power to let your friend into a club they maybe aren’t socially ideal for.  Action and power do not always manifest themselves in the stereotypically masculine manner of sword fights and dragon slayings.  Therefore, while my question of functionality is apt, we must acknowledge the social biases that codify our ideas of strength in order to honestly answer my question of “What do princess do?” 

*My friend also blogged about princesses, and you should totally check it out. 

** I have recently taken up the role as editor of another friend’s website, where I will be guest-blogging a few times a month about being young and negotiating the challenges and opportunities that can arise from your career.  So please keep an eye out for those posts, which I’ll link you to from here.  Definitely check out Matt Arch’s blog, as it will certainly teach you more about being a young professional than I can teach you about being a princess.

Overcoming the Space of "Meh"

I don’t really write/talk a lot about body image, and the reasons for that are fairly boring.  First of all, I don’t think I have much to add to the discussion: I feel like we should all love our bodies, but I understand why we often can’t, and I’m reluctant to contribute to the guilt people feel for failing to cultivate a healthy body image.  This array of feelings makes me the world’s most indecisive cheerleader, “Love your body!  Unless you can’t, which is understandable because of the oppressive onslaught of images the media throws at us and the way we all judge and punish one another for failing to fit into unrealistic confines of ‘beauty.’ So if you can’t, that’s OK!  I wish you would, but…What?  Oh.  Sorry.” And someone then would take away my pom-poms and megaphone, and rightly so.  I don’t really know, in this hypothetical, who was foolish enough to give me a megaphone in the first place. 

The other related reason I don’t really discuss this very important issue is that I have no wisdom to pass on to those suffering from a bad body image.  If I can shamelessly generalize for a moment, people who talk effectively about body images are often people who either really hate or really love their bodies.  I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of body love/hate, in an area that, in my psychological and sociological expertise, I will label “meh.” I don’t experience the perpetual self-loathing that becomes disease which so many people have bravely fought through, but I also spend exactly no time celebrating how I look.  I spend a lot of time actively not thinking about my appearance, but I don’t do this out of an evolved sense of humility, I do this because I want to avoid that perpetual dissatisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong, my body is a good companion.  It doesn’t get sick very often, and when it does it knows we still have to get things done, so it very seldom requires a lot of doting.  It has worked despite quite a few sprains, torn ligaments, and out of place joints, and only emits muffled complaints on rainy days and cold mornings.  It has learned that coffee is amazing, and, whatever “experts” say, this magical beverage actually has its own level on the food pyramid, and we should revere that.  So I appreciate my body on a functional level.  I’m healthy, and that’s fantastic.  I could totally teach a class on “Listening to Your Body Except When You Don’t Want To Because You Have Papers to Write Or Other Things That Need Done,” but I did not think I could write a blog post about “Loving Your Body.”

And yet here we are, so what happened (you may rightly ask, as you wait for me to get to a point)?  Well, this happened, and that happened, and it’s almost summer, so I keep running across articles telling me how to get a bikini-ready body, when all it takes to have a bikini-ready body is buying a bikini you like and putting it on your body.  In other words, my people, shit is going down, and I am not amused.

I’m not here to warn you about the scary, nefarious Media.  We know the media doesn’t particularly care if a size ten girl is sadly perusing a magazine where the models are so thin it’s like an inadvertent game of Where’s Waldo.  I think the people who point out the flaws in advertising do very important, necessary work, and I also think that we as individuals need to acknowledge that there’s more work to be done that only we can do for ourselves.  There have been many times where I have doggedly deconstructed a commercial’s harmful portrayals of the female or male body, and then spent the rest of my afternoon dodging mirrors because I was having a fat day.  Really, “meh” is not an empowering place to be, and as fun as tearing down the media is, we need to do more.

I’m going to sound like Oprah or maybe the Dalai Lama for a second, so bear with me: The work we need to do starts inside, and I believe it starts from a place of gratitude.  Maybe we do start by being grateful that our bodies actually work for us, that they fight off disease, and that if we ask them to run a marathon for us, they might be like, “Seriously? Why? Will this cut into our Game of Thrones time?” but ultimately agree as long as we provide cupcakes afterwards.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever live in a world where appearances don’t matter, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  There are a lot of beautiful people out there, waiting to be appreciated.  But, that’s sort of my point here: we are the beautiful people, and we need to stop waiting to be appreciated.  We can’t afford to wait any longer for the media to change or for standards of beauty to be adjusted.  We need to find a place for ourselves in the world we have now.

If we can be happy with the things our bodies do (maybe you have great eyesight, maybe you have horrible eyesight but that allowed you to get kickass glasses, maybe one time in second grade you were the only person to make it across the monkey bars without falling the humiliating four feet into the dirt), that could be the secret to cultivating a thoroughly positive body image.  For example, I trip very seldom for a person who is often thinking of potential revisions to papers while walking instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  Perhaps gratitude for this will help me eventually garner appreciation for my legs. 

But on a more sincere note, a few days ago I was playing Space Monster with my five-year-old friend Liam. At one point, Liam enthusiastically tackled me, and I was able to catch him and purposefully crumble to the ground with a surprising amount of grace and dramatic flair.  I’m really grateful to have a body that allows me to do that. 

I guess I’m just asking that we approach this really complicated issue from a simple, pragmatic standpoint.  Let’s not start from “How do I look?  How do I not look?”  Let’s instead start from “What can I do?” I think that’s a more powerful place to begin, and I believe that will make our journey to healthy body images more meaningful.