I'm...not even on the right highway.

The other day, I was driving home from dinner with some friends and a funny thing happened.
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Here's a little context. For those of you who don't live here, Cincinnati has two main North-South interstates, I-71 and I-75. They shape a V around the inner part of the city--the two meet downtown at the Ohio River, and they spread out from one another as you go north into the suburbs.

Now that I live in Clifton, which is a couple miles north of downtown, I'm only a few minutes' drive from either interstate. But my apartment is slightly closer to I-75, and when I drive home from the East Side I like to take this short connector called "The Norwood Lateral" to 75 so I can get off at Exit 3, Hopple Street. Left onto Martin Luther King; left onto Dixmyth; left onto Whitfield. Cross Terrace, Howell, and Ludlow, and then it's the fourth house on the left. Easy Peasy.

Anyways, so there I was, driving south on I-71. I'm getting ready to get off on the Norwood Lateral, like normal, and I was thinking about the work I needed to get done.

I gotta try to read a good chunk of "Beloved."

And I need to do some more work on that stupid Writing Autobiography that's due Tuesday.

Oh shoot, and I should read some submissions for the Cincinnati Review.

I also need to start the reading for Teaching College Writing but that's totally not happen.

Suddenly I thought, "Wait, did I get on the Norwood Lateral??" I looked around and saw the lights of a strip mall up on a hill to the left and though, yeah, okay, that's the Target. It must be such a habit I didn't even notice taking the exit! So I continued driving. Ten minutes later, I started wondering why I hadn't hit I-75 yet and then realized I had never gotten off I-71 South in the first place. Um...oops! What I find funniest about this isn't that I missed my exit. It's that I thought I missed my exit, looked around, and completely and utterly misread everything. I didn't notice how everything looked different than it was supposed to. I didn't see the signs, the exits. I just blithely kept on driving.

This story isn't really that impressive, I know. I recently read something on the internet about a woman from Belgium who left her house intending to drive 50 miles west to pick her friend up from a train station, and accidentally drove east for two days. She ended up in Croatia.

But it got me thinking, and not just about faulty GPS systems or the dangers of absent-minded driving. And I'm not trying to make some cliche parallel to "not knowing what direction I'm going in" because I'm...fill in the blank: twenty-something, single, in grad school, the girl with the Dead Dad.

Instead, I was thinking about how sometimes it's all just so much. I feel like for every thing I do successfully--writing a paper, finishing a novel, teaching a good class or even having a drink with new friends--I drop three more things. The image that comes to mind is that guy at the circus who balances the spinning plates while riding a unicycle. Except that in this circus, he's shedding plates. The stage is littered with ceramic shards. The audience stares blankly at him; the wheel jerks unexpectedly as it rolls over the broken plates. This is the image I have of myself this semester.

Hermione, you lucky girl.

I saw a friend at a party recently who, when I told her I was "doing great!," just gave me that look. The yeah, right look.

But when the S hits the fan, my response is to deny, deny, deny. I think, if I just had that one thing! A boyfriend to make me feel special. Four more hours each day. A time-turner like Hermione Granger's. But this is never true. There is no magic wand you can wave to shorten your to-do list. You can't hire someone to do your reading. But you also can't stay chained to your desk.

(I'd end up like that lady in Kansas who had a phobia of not being able to get to the bathroom in time, so she sat on the toilet for two years. When they tried to help her out of there, she was stuck to the seat. Do not Google this.)

Sometimes I lose track of where I began. It's a symptom. Sorry.


Two years ago, I was in a similar place. My senior year of college sort of spun out of control. At one point, I tried to balance six classes (two of which happened at the same time), finish my 70-page honors thesis, work as a TA for the English department, be in the orchestra, do activities for the English Honors Organization, go to a conference, and spend time with my friends. C'est impossible!

I ended up quitting orchestra and taking time off after graduation--a great decision. After everything I have learned in the past year, though, I don't want to just start cutting things out. I don't want to simply shut down and retreat to my bedroom, like before. You have to bear up under what's really important. You have to keep moving forward, despite everything. You have to figure out a strategy, like Bradley Cooper's character in Silver Linings Playbook. (The acting was great, but the composition, weird, no?)

I feel very young, writing this. I know my older readers are either A) annoyed with my complaints or B) smiling and thinking, adorable. Either way. Have mercy on my young, misdirected soul. To bring back the navigation metaphor at the end of the piece: I'm doing my best to just stay on the damn highway. Wish me luck.

Equal Rights

sunrise from McMicken Hall

According to my page view statistics, there's at least one person who checks regularly to see if I've posted anything new. And to that one person, sorry for not writing often. It's just that--

"“The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.”
--Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

I'm happy to say that most of the time, my present life occupies my mind, rather than the past. I still miss Dad like crazy. I'm still occasionally caught off guard by moments of piercing grief. In late November, I was walking home after one of the most encouraging teaching moments of my life. I'd given a teaching demonstration in front of my Practicum class, my professor had used the phrase "the mark of a good teacher" to describe something I'd done instinctively, and I was just soaring down Clifton Ave afterwards. Then, all of the sudden, I felt such an ache because I wanted to call Dad. I wanted to call him and gush about finding a way that I can actually help people, I can connect to them and influence their lives--that I've looked up from the books and I can make the world a little better place. I know he'd say, "Well, honey, I'm not surprised." And I'd be so gratified. It's like, it's not an actual success until Dad tells me he's proud.

That's a hard thing.

But this isn't going to be a sad post. Because I'm not in a sad place; I'm in such a good place now. School is challenging and exciting, teaching is challenging and sometimes rewarding. The people here are wonderful. I love my neighborhood. In fact, I've been thinking lately about how passing the one year mark has given me a lot of perspective.

The first thing I see more clearly now is just how lost I was a year ago. Maybe everyone saw it except me. I used to think I was good at hiding how I really felt about stuff. But I've come to understand that I have the most obvious face, ever. Every single thought or emotion I have is telegraphed on my face; I can't help it! To everyone I've ever met: sorry I looked so annoyed that one time. I probably didn't mean for you to know.

Over the Christmas holiday this year, I decided to go back to Walmart to make a little extra money. While I was there, I ran into my favorite, favorite old lady named Marion. She's at least 83 and we were totally Walmart Besties. We were talking about school and she said something that really struck me: "You look so much happier!" At first I thought...Um, I look happy to be wearing these awful khaki pants, while I'm answering the phone at Walmart one day after finishing a 20 page paper? I didn't exactly feel spectacular, but then I realized she had known me during a very dark, very difficult time in my life. When--even as I laughed at a stupid customer or gleefully gossiped about some cashier we didn't like--the sadness was always right there, below the surface.

I really was adrift in my grief. But: working at Walmart is not one of the signs of how lost I was. Oddly enough, it was what kept me going. In the early days, the work was just enough to keep my mind occupied, so I wouldn't dwell on my Dad all day. It filled my time and wore me out, so I could actually sleep at night. And there are actually some incredibly wonderful people stuck working at places at Walmart. At first I got sympathy, and then afterwards, they left it alone unless I mentioned it. And I'm surprisingly grateful. It's hard to bear those looks of pity for very long.

And Walmart was exactly the right thing because I could clock out and not think about work until I walked in the next day. I know now I could not have managed school. I'm one of those students who becomes my classes. I eat, sleep, and breathe the assignments, my responsibilities, my work. Writing papers, even when they're just scholarly and not creative, requires a huge emotional and energetic commitment from me. I could not have focused last year. I struggled to simply fill out my grad school applications. One day when I thought my GRE scores hadn't gotten to Ohio State (ugh) in time, I broke down sobbing hysterically, out of the blue, because it was all just SO hard. I wonder now if my personal statements were exceptionally terrible. All I remember about that process was each time, I would write some thing about how Dad just died three weeks before and then I'd cut it out. My biggest goal was to not mention my dead Dad, so I couldn't really focus on my personal branding as a potential scholar and teacher. I was simply trying to survive. I see this now.

Everyone says, it's never okay, but it gets easier. And I think I finally know that to be true. I am grateful for everything that has happened in the past year. I'm grateful for understanding managers, for loving friends. I'm grateful that misery loves company, rather than isolation. I'm grateful for my siblings. I'm grateful that life provides the kind of relationships where you can sit crying on the kitchen floor with someone, as sad as it may seem. I'm grateful for kind words from students.

I'm grateful that life keeps on fighting for equal rights, despite everything.