sarahhatterdotcom

The Land I Grew In

A girl I went to high school with is homeless. I know because I see her every morning when I step off the train and start walking to my office downtown. At the same time each day I pass by her, the heels of my shoes clicking against concrete in an unintentionally smug way while she sits against the doorway of a building or walks aimlessly through the morning crowd. In the moments before my stop I cringe at the thought of seeing her again, I’m strangely fearful. Perhaps I’m guilty, perhaps I think deep down inside that I’ve got some responsibility to this woman begging for money and food and shelter, just because we were in the same biology class 13 years ago.

I don't remember her name. My old yearbooks are packed far away and it's not worth it enough for me to pull them out and scan the pages for her face, I know it's her. She has the same hair cut, the same staggered walk, the same vacant look on her face, it's so obvious to me that it's her. And if we were ever to make eye contact I know she'd remember my face too, and the two of us 40 miles away from our high school would end up awkwardly judging each other 10 years later.

In the morning during my commute from the suburbs I watch people getting on and off the train, poor people and lazy people and people who'd rather spend an hour working than driving. I can't help but think that no one is born homeless. No one is born without a proper work ethic. No one is born a workaholic. We become who we are because of small reasons, all stacked atop each other like a Jenga set, our lives nothing but a little drunken cocktail party toy for fate to try and take apart without making the whole thing crumble.

And there’s nothing much we can do about it except tumble awkwardly through life, avoiding eye contact with as many people as possible.

Someday It Will Break Apart.

"After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I realized what a terrific person she was, and... and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I... I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."

Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs."

~Annie Hall.

Abandonment Complex.

This is why I am the way I am:

When I was 6 years old, I had two cats, Midnight and Lydia. We lived down a long curvy country road where oak trees dipped their branches down onto passing cars and the sun splayed itself out in blinding rays every morning. Our backyard sloped into acres and acres of undiscovered fallen trees and hideaways. It was a serene and idyllic place for a child to grow up with a wild imagination and two loving animals to care for.

One night, my mom was driving home through the dark and hit Lydia with her car. A few nights later, my dad ran over Midnight the same way. Both cats were suddenly dead. My parents, not wanting to crush their young daughter with their murderous ways, told me the cats had simply run away.

For nights and nights after that I would cry to my mother, "I don't understand what I ever did to make them not love me anymore!!" The realized quickly that they had to tell me the truth, because my immediate response is always to blame myself.

I Believe It's The Only Way For Me To Be.

I don't keep a journal, but I keep a website. Several, in fact, to commemorate and catalog the things that are important to me by way of a few words. Something happens to me and I am alive with words, feverish to publish them before I forget. What is it about a few small words that keeps us tethered to moments from our past, and hopeful for things that may not ever happen?

We remember the first time a lover whispered, "I love you" and we long for another to whisper it again. Random words trigger memories of affection that echo off our brains all day long, and we create these internal dialogs with made-up strangers telling us the things we always wanted to hear. We keep journals, websites, we write letters to ourselves, describing how and when something happened using whichever words best speak our heart from its very depths. We find the words, and then we keep them close as our very own.

On days when we lack inspiration we'll go out hunting for them, as if unearthing the spoiled minds of our once-creative selves, alive with angst and passion, so they can remind us what we're here for. We keep them buried under the floorboards, tucked away in boxes our proverbial attics, we dig holes in the backyard that we slip time capsules into. We treasure these words, deify them, memorize them, trace the steps of our life back to them so we can tell people, "This is what changed everything."

But you can't just have words. They mean nothing without the breath of life in them. Left unpropelled by wind a sail is nothing but a stretch of cloth and thread lying aimlessly still. All it takes is the slightest force of nature to give it shape, the very smallest touch of air to set it to flight. There has to be momentum for anything to mean anything to anyone.

Alone they're just letters, a jumble of indefinable strokes and dots placed here and there. But strung together they are transformed from simple methods of communication to a way of speaking to the soul, touching nerves with an open palm until sensation rises to the outermost layer of skin. They are words to be cherished, in the rhythm of print, the music of memory. Connected like a puzzle they mean so much, lined up in order they become the words I've been longing to hear my entire life.

"I have faith in you. I believe in your writing."

Nothing Comes From Nothing, Nothing Ever Could.

The scene in The Sound of Music that always makes me catch my breath is when Maria and Captain Von Trapp fall in love, and they sing that song about how baffled they are to have found each other. They stare wildly at each other, both in awe of the luck they've been allotted right then at that exact moment, and they say, "I must have done something good." This is something we all think anytime something good happens to us, and every time something horrible and bad happens our first reaction is "What did I do?"

It's because we believe in our flawed human hearts that by doing good we'll be treated with goodness in return, and if we do bad we deserve to be punished for it. It's almost as if we believe we can earn a good life, or something.

You do something nice, something nice happens to you. You pray to God for him to bless you, God blesses you, or at least lets you breathe for one more day. You love a person with all your might, they love you back with all theirs. That is how the universe works, quid pro quo, and we're all supposed to work together for everyone's greater good.

But that isn't how the world actually works. That isn't how things really turn out. We're surrounded every day by phenomenally selfish people who are viciously protecting their own good to the point that they don't care who they hurt or how. We have these relationships with people who are so incredibly difficult to love and they have no idea.

At the risk of sounding like I've fallen into some existentialist well, I suppose I probably have. For the past year I've been struggling to reconcile the things I think in my heart with the things I encounter in real life, and it's a battle I fear I'm losing. How can I continue to expect that people will do me no harm when all around me are people doing just that, slip-shod even, as if all humanity has their eyes closed and is swinging madly at some mythic pinata. We're all just so careless these days we'll do anything for that tiny piece of candy. We're so unaware of the needs of people around us, even those closest to us we claim to love suffer the brunt of our coldness and self-centered oblivion.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm wasting my goodness on people who don't deserve it or maybe I'm choosing the wrong people to love. But even that boils down to a very selfish mentality that it's up to me to pick and choose who's worthy of my time and effort and everyone else is just going to have to fend for themselves. That defeats the whole purpose of unconditional love, you can't claim to be benevolent and withhold goodness from people who don't deserve it just because they've hurt you in the past.

If the world actually worked like our inane human logic tells us it should, we would have a balanced universe of good and bad and there would be no battles of what was fair or not. It is not fair that when you hurt me you act as if I am to blame for having feelings. It is not fair that when I love you my care and concern is abused for your own good and you never return any of it to me. It is not fair that I try and try and try and have absolutely nothing to show for it. If the world actually worked like my heart tells me it should, I would never have to think such things about fairness or what we deserve or what we think we deserve for what we've done.

And when you start to think about it, you realize that the good things we're allotted may just be that we're alive right now still, we get a heartbeat and functioning brain and a soul. Maybe the good thing I get from whatever it is I've done is that I have a heart brimming with love for my friends and family, even if sometimes they don't reciprocate that love, however unfair that might feel. And I learned early on in my adulthood the power and importance of forgiveness, even when forgiving someone might hurt you more than they ever did.

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.

When I lived in Charleston, each roommate I had was younger than me by a number of years. This is pretty typical in a college town, but there was something different about  young Southern girls that was impossible to ignore. What I found shocking and amusing and probably a little terrifying was how completely obsessed every girl in Charleston seemed to be with getting married. Actually, it wasn't necessarily getting married that they were obsessed with, it was more like they each had some kind of uninhibited biological need to plan a wedding.

The sense of urgency toward this matter was irrepressible, and I found myself on way too many occasions subjected to a lunch or dinner with a few girls under the age of 20 who could literally spend the entire meal discussing possible color palates for a wedding they planned to have years and years and years in the future. This was so strange to me. Sure, I'd indulged in a bit of fantasy wedding planning myself, but these girls were *serious* about it, they weren't just playing around with ideas. These girls had plans.

"What about you, Sarah?" I was asked one day. "What do you want for your wedding?!"

"Oh, I'm not really seeing anyone right now," I said.

"Well that's OK!" one girl replied excitedly. "You don't need to be engaged or anything to plan your wedding!"

It's true, I thought, I very well could have planned the whole thing by now with all the free time on my hands from *not* being engaged. But that's kind of weird, at least I think so. For some reason I felt the need to share this thought with these young girls, so carefully, I began to express my disinterest in their preemptive wedding planning.

"Doesn't it seem kind of scary to think of a girl cutting out pictures of wedding dresses and deciding on flower arrangements before she even knows who or when she'll ever get married? I mean, isn't that kind of a fruitless effort?"

The silence was as frightening as the looks on these girl's faces. It was as if each of them had just come to a brutal realization about me, about this person they had befriended who they thought was interesting and unusual and fun to be around. They had taken candy from a stranger and now the gravity of this dangerous situation was pressing on them with unbearable force. They were eating their deli sandwiches face to face with the Anti-Christ and she was asking for their pickle.

Now, it's true that when I was a little girl I used to scour the pages of the JC Penny catalog picking out dresses that looked like taffeta hot air balloons for my legions of bridesmaids to prance toward the altar in. And in high school, the big thing was picking what song was going to play when I walked down the aisle, and there's a good chance that in my sophomore year in high school I wanted "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles or possibly a Dave Matthew's song, possibly but I don't remember. My point is that people grow up and their tastes change, and there's a good chance that after attending 17 identical weddings and having her friend's engagements crammed down her throat for five years that a girl's gonna take a step back from the wedding fantasy. Just for a few years.

Compounded with the suffocating wedding plans of what seemed like every teenage girl in the tiny city of Charleston, my already frustrated feelings towards matrimony were acutely magnified. I had become a younger version of Miss Hannigan in the musical Annie, and each time I saw a bopping blonde pony tail attached to the empty head of some sophomore sorority pledge, I'd let out a disgusted sigh and fantasize of locking them up in an orphanage and forcing them to scrub the bathroom floor til it shined like the top of the Chrysler building! Thinking back on it now, I'm quite surprised I didn't end up mixing my own batch of bathtub gin after each of these wedding-laden outings and drinking it from a high heel shoe.

Over the past year, frankly since I've been away from Charleston and all those marriage-minded girls, I've started to warm up to the idea of having a wedding again. Maybe it's because my life has changed so drastically since then, and while my biggest fear was once getting pregnant and having a child I can now imagine the slightest sliver of the possibility of motherhood. And even marriage - the archaic institution I had all but lost any kind of reverence for - is now revealing its sheen to me again, and I'm thinking maybe, JUST MAYBE, I won't swear off marriage for good.

The tipping point for me has been realizing that I have no one to support these days. It seemed like I used to, perhaps close friends or whichever boyfriend was around at the time. Now I suppose I'm the most disconnected from people as I could be, and therefore I've got no one depending on me. While it may not seem critical to our human existence, I think the very simple fact of someone needing us make us better, more reliable people.

Being single and childless has made me far more selfish than I think I ever expected myself to be, and I enjoy that a little too much. What it makes me crave, though, is someone else to pay attention to. Is that what those sorority girls crave too? Is the window shopping for satin heels and diamond drop earrings just a brief segue to a comfortable future of sharing the joys and burdens of life with someone else? Wait a minute, is that the whole point of the little bubble wand favors?!

So maybe those little Charleston girls have a one-up on me after all. They're the ones who've figured out what it takes to make a life worthwhile, even if it means diluting it with 18 months worth of party planning and dress fittings. And maybe before I know it someone will come along who makes me want to dream of reception table centerpieces again.

What was that we said about bathtub gin?

What Happens When The Natives Fight Back.

Every book I pick up, every newspaper article I come across recently all seem to focus on some insightful look at the emotional differences between people. For months I haven't been able to escape the references to the different types of emotional classes by which human beings can be categorized, and I'm beginning to think someone is trying to tell me something. According to most philosophers (and apparently some modern philosophical bandwagon), people fall into two distinct classes: those who seek out a deeper understanding of their emotions, and those who allow emotion to manifest itself naturally. In one corner we have people who aren't afraid to acknowledge what they feel and analyze those feelings to the bone. In the opposing corner we have people who freely accept whichever emotion they happen to encounter and who move along swiftly without giving those emotion much thought. It's the age old war between seekers and purists, the natives and the settlers.

In his fantastically enthralling novel The Romantic Movement, Alain de Botton refers to these two classes of people as The Intellectualist and The Naturalist. For the sake of argument, let's not get into associating certainly qualities to one or the other, let's just identify what exactly keeps their emotional selves from intersecting. These similar beings run helplessly parallel to each other on common ground, but any attempts to join the two results in an equally helpless collision of misunderstanding.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that I am Intellectualist, I simply had to reference the many times I'd opted out of spontaneity and had been told by one person or another, "You think too much." It's true, not only do I think too much but I think about thinking too much to the point where my own reason can drive me to completely irrational thoughts. If an email I send goes unanswered, it is possibly because the person who got it saw my name in their inbox and sighed knowingly, then put off reading the email for days and days until they had exhausted all their other distractions, and once they read the email they found themselves further disinterested in what I had to say that they couldn't bear responding to it so they pretended like they never read it and like it had never been delivered. Or, according to the Naturalist that is screaming inside me to take control, they've been busy this week, and they'll get back to me shortly.

I'm not like this about everything, or everyone for that matter. I'm only like this about those things that are supposed to be most contenting to our souls. Intimate, emotional relationships are supposed to grant us respite from the perils of everyday life, and yet they tend to become fodder for egotistical emotional hypochondria. Where our everyday encounters with strangers and acquaintances rarely leave us questioning our attractiveness or appeal, a short conversation with a person we "love" turns us into a human thesaurus as we dissect the meaning of every word used. He said, 'Hey' instead of 'Hi,' or used some term of endearment he's never uttered before, or he muttered, 'Love ya' and not 'I love you.' What did he mean by 'Love ya'? Who else does he say 'Love ya' to? Does he reserve 'I love you' for his other girlfriend?!

The Naturalist would never think such things. I know this because I know someone who fits this profile so accurately it absolutely infuriates me that I can't be that way too. The most annoying and irritating thing about having any kind of neurosis is the personal recognition of that neurosis and the inability to do anything about it. I have a full understanding that this person I know is a certain way about his emotions, a way that is completely opposite than how I am with mine, and yet I continue to ignore those facts and lament the continual scrimmages we have when expressing ourselves. In fact, I am so aware of how dissimilar our emotional selves are that when asked about this person by anyone else, I routinely say, "He and I are very, very different people."

Being different people and approaching our thoughts and emotions differently is entirely okay, but I'm only just now beginning to actually believe this. I finally believe there is no superior mental or emotional state after years of beating myself up over my way of analyzing and interpreting situations. Sure, I can chill out a bit and I'm sure in time I probably will (just ask me when the last time I made a spread sheet was) but does it mean I'm completely psychotic just because I think things over a bit more than normal? Probably not, but then again I don't think I'm going to open that up for public debate.

I don't think it's fair for anyone to expect another person to change. Telling a person, "The way you are isn't how I am and it's hard for me to understand you, so please be this way instead," is completely absurd. And yet we do say things like that all the time in not so many words, and we leave it up to someone else to change so we don't have to. We've all bought into this notion of pop psychology that our feelings are "valid" and legitimate and that no one can blame us for having them, but that doesn't mean that our feelings should lie dormant in their validated state.

Instead, I think it's only fair that we attempt to change ourselves. I know that I analyze things too much, and I know that being so analytical makes me worrisome to an unnecessary extent. If I can't make a person understand what I'm feeling and why I'm feeling it, the most I can possibly do is accept it myself and get over it. If a person doesn't approach their emotions - or my emotions for that matter - the way I do, I can't possibly blame them for that or expect that they'll change for the sake of validating me. I think one of the biggest struggles modern people have to overcome is this idea that valid feelings are more important than cognizant, rational truth.

Intellectualists and Naturalists can more easily be described, I think, as being emotional warriors or emotional peacemakers. I am an emotional warrior, I'm a fighter and a nitpicker because I want so badly for things to work out. Peacemakers are soothers and calmers, and they don't feel the need to fight because they seem to have an idea that things are going to work out after all. Each side survives on the existence of the other, and without each other they'd have nothing to invest in or defend or care for. Somewhere in between the two sides there's a balance, a plateau each party can rest on and assure themselves that everything is going to be ok.

RSVP

For the past month, I've gotten Evite after Evite for some kind of social evening that consists primarily of doing things that annoy me. Most of these Evites are for people's birthdays, so it really shouldn't matter what *I* think about the activities, but when these events require any kind of travel for me to participate, I tend to get pretty picky about whether or not to attend.

I also tend to be somewhat moody and self centered, so.

It's not the people, it's just the things and it's that there are few things I like to do with a large group of people, or with any people at all ever. I like bowling, I don't like circuit bowling with a group of 90. I like going to bars, I don't like bar hopping and spending only 4 minutes in each bar in the course of two hours. I like getting some friends together for a delightful evening of Scrabble and snacks, I don't like sing-alongs. Who likes sing-alongs? How, wha? WHO invites someone over for a sing-along? Who besides Dobie Gillis?

You'd think it wouldn't really matter what I did with people so long as I was enjoying myself with good friends. You'd think my decision to attend any of these events would be based on whether or not I've got the time to attend and not on whether I think I'm going to be bored at the end of the night. You'd think it'd be a quick decision. You'd think.

To make finalizing decisions easier, I'm just going to start relaying my future interest or disinterest in certain activities by referring to the qualifiers in a personality quiz I took recently. For instance, if I'm invited to a raucous night of clubbing or hoedown-ing, I'm going to refer to my answer to the statement, "My ideal night on the town is..." I answered D, that my ideal night on the town would be drinking beer in a cozy pub with my friends, and therefore clubbing and hoedown-ing are not activities I would enjoy. The answer is no, I will not go to the club with you or attend your singalong due to my own predetermined opinion of whether or not I will enjoy the evening, but I hope you have a great time.

I already use this kind of formula to weed out my interest in potential mates, consequently preventing any real interaction with them based on what may seem like superficial means. I realize that statement may sound shocking, but the truth is we all do it. We all harbor our own little prejudices towards toothy guys or fat chicks or that phenylketonuric kid who's house you never wanted to go to because he wasn't allowed to eat sugar. It's the same process that I do, except my qualifiers are a little more presumptuous and maybe have nothing to do with whether or not I would actually like a person, but I use them anyway.

For instance, I won't date a guy who eats fast food regularly. This has kind of been a rule of mine for a long long time, and was just recently reinforced when I saw Super Size me and gagged for the rest of the night. I see a cute guy, we make eye contact, he wields to his mouth a double quarter pounder dripping with cheese and processed lard, and I turn my head and gag. Fast food is in very rare instances a necessary evil, but there is no way to justify dating or sleeping with a fast food "heavy user" unless you just simply don't care about things like heart disease or cholesterol or the smell of fry oil on their skin. When I've had a long day and want to lie my head on the shoulder of the one I love, the last thing I want is to be reminded of is the onion rings he had for lunch. The day before.

I also have some weird issues with the types of sitcoms people watch, issues that might impede furthering a relationship with them. If you don't own a television and instead spend your evenings listening to NPR while flipping casually through the newest issue of New Republic, go applaud yourself and pretend that people aren't judging you too. One day you'll be honest with yourself and admit that you wish you could get the jokes people are repeating from Best Week Ever and that you're sick of missing all the fun. Television, especially comedy, is a very important thing to me that I honestly cannot separate from my attempts at relational harmony.

If a person watches Everybody Loves Raymond and actually cared that it went off the air, it will make me consider our apparently varying beliefs in modern gender roles and the emasculating of men in American society. If a person watches Will and Grace religiously, I'm going to wonder if it's their gay brother, cousin or co-worker they're trying to identify with, or if they're just into emaciated redheads. If a person watches and can quote Yes Dear, King of Queens or According to Jim, gosh I just realized something I forgot about that makes me have to go now, so thanks for the drink but I just can't stay any longer, so sorry, bye.

On the other hand, If you're a loyal viewer of Curb Your Enthusiasm and even own the DVDs, there's a good possibility I'll be having your babies. If you're willing to sit through a marathon of LOST and/or Law and Order: Criminal Intent, we're going to be BFF for E and E and E. And if you know who Ricky Gervais is and can attempt to recreate The Dance for me, I may just reconsider that hoedown thing.