Tag Archives: generational angst

A Moving Story

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On Labor Day, I was sitting on Boston Common reading, and I was getting a little claustrophobic. There were people everywhere. Whenever I got up, I felt like I was going to trip over people.

Labor Day is a mystifyingly popular weekend for tourists to visit Boston. Personally, I can’t think of a worse time to visit our fair city. There are something like fifty colleges in or right around Boston, and over Labor Day weekend, the students at all of them are moving their shower caddies and extra-long twin sheet sets into their dorm rooms. Not to mention all the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are just switching to new apartments with 9/1 move-in dates.

I challenge you to find one twenty-something who has lived in one place for the duration of his or her twenties. I’m certainly no exception. I turned twenty just before my junior year of college, when I lived on campus in a four-person apartment. Over the summer I moved home, and senior year I lived in a different, six-person apartment. The following summer, I worked an on-campus job and lived in a different dorm room. Then I moved home for a month, after which I moved into my first apartment. After two years there, I moved to Davis Square. And at the end of July, I moved again, still in the Davis area.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about this. Maybe because even after nearly two months, I’m not completely settled in yet. I still need a bookshelf, a dining room table, to get a few small boxes into my room, to give away some of the books I didn’t want, and to get rid of the boxspring that’s sitting in the dining room. Oh, yeah, did I mention? My new bedroom is up a flight of stairs, and I should have realized beforehand that my boxspring wouldn’t fit up those stairs. So I ended up having to sleep on just my mattress for a month, then figure out a time when Ikea could deliver a platform bed, then figure out a time when my dad could help me put it together.

Here’s the thing: even though I’ve moved twelve times, including in and out of dorm rooms, since I turned eighteen, I absolutely suck at moving. I can never figure out the most efficient way to pack. I always end up with random objects that don’t fit anywhere. I underestimate the amount of packing space I need, largely due to the hundreds of books I own (and my refusal to buy an e-Reader). If I’m using a moving van, I never get everything packed in time. If I’m using a car, it ends up so full that things fall out when I open the doors.

Is this a skill you can get better at? I like my new apartment, but I’m definitely not going to live here for the rest of my life. Am I always going to be moving-deficient, or is it possible that things could go better next time? (Actually, it would be hard for things not to go better—when I moved, due to sheer bad luck, it was literally the hottest day of the year.)

In the meantime, I love my new apartment. I’ve got a nice, quiet bedroom, Comcast cable with a DVR, a nice porch out back for reading the Globe on weekends, a very cool new roommate, and this lovely lady greeting me every day when I come home:

Yep, my new roommate has a dog! Juno is a three-year-old black furball (probably with a lot of flat-coated retriever in her) who loves everybody in the world almost as much as she loves attention. I love to pet cute dogs. She’s a cute dog who loves to be petted. It works out great.

CS&T

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When I was a kid, I never went to camp in the summer. I never visited relatives (they all lived near me in Massachusetts) and I never traveled outside of New England.

All I wanted to do was swim.

When I was six, my family joined a swim and tennis club in my town that was more like a community pool than a country club. C-Town Swim and Tennis Club (CS&T) had an L-shaped, 25-yard pool and a baby pool behind a clubhouse that had a lobby and two bathrooms. There were vending machines, lots of grass, and a four-square court. The tennis courts were located off the driveway.

In a game of word association, it’s the place I associate with both “summer” and “childhood.” I can’t remember what I used to do in the summer before we joined. From the time I was six, every summer was the same. I was at the club every day. I saw the same families every year and the same old friends. I started competitive swimming, the sport that consumed my life in high school, on CS&T’s swim team when I was seven years old and didn’t quit until I was too old to swim on the team anymore. And every year, the swim team was undefeated, like the basketball team in the movie Pleasantville. Actually, CS&T was like Pleasantville in a lot of ways: nothing ever changed, everyone was usually happy, and no one ever wanted to leave.

I could go on for days about all my memories of that place. The day I started swim team and was so tired that I collapsed, exhausted, into bed at home, ready to quit. My first ribbon when I was eight, for twelfth place at championships, which I was incredibly proud of. Draping towels over picnic tables and playing house with my friend Caroline in between swim team and swim lessons when we were little. (We usually pretended we were orphans who would get rescued by a rich old lady—we must have been reading the Samantha books in the American Girl series too much.) Playing games with friends over on the grass—I can still hear everybody screaming, “Witchy Witchy, are you coming out tonight?” Staying up all night in a tent at the club sleepover. Going out for ice cream with Andrea, my favorite lifeguard, whom I worshipped. Celebrating my ninth birthday at the club on a cloudy day and having the whole pool to ourselves. Spending all season trying to learn how to dive with Andrea when I was nine only to get the hang of it on the day of championships. Winning my first medal, for fourth place, at championships when I was eleven. Watching my dad win the cannonball contest at the club’s annual Family Day. Running away from Caroline as she tried to wipe her egg-smeared hands off on me after the egg we were using in the egg toss on Family Day broke all over her. Participating in skits at the club pep rally before championships. Going on a cruise of the Boston Harbor Islands with older kids on the swim team. “Catching” the little kids in the six-and-under age group, who only swam to the halfway point of the pool in meets and needed older kids there to help them when they finished. Going to Canobie Lake Park on a club-sponsored trip. Taking pictures in the deep end with an underwater camera. Celebrating my fifteenth birthday with a surprise party my friends threw for me at the club. Baby-sitting for CS&T families. Winning my first “Most Improved” trophy when I was fifteen. Taking a lifeguarding course with a bunch of friends when I was sixteen. Working at the club for four years when I was in college and becoming one of those lifeguards I had idolized.

You get the idea. As Josh, who was the teacher in that first swim lesson of mine twenty years ago (wow…twenty years ago?), says, it’s a special place. And he should know. He was a member as a child and joined the maintenance staff when he was fourteen. He became a lifeguard, then head coach, and until last year, when he was promoted to dean at the high school where he was previously a teacher, the club’s manager.

This summer, there are all sorts of things I’ve wanted to do. I made a list of everything I wanted to do this summer and have made good progress on it. I’ve also made a “Bucket List” of things I want to accomplish in my life and a list of places I want to travel. I’m amazed at how different I am now from that kid who just wanted to swim. As a child, I didn’t care about seeing the world. I didn’t want to travel when I had all I wanted right in my hometown. Why, I thought, would I want to spend my summer doing anything other than what I already knew I loved?

I’m twenty-seven now and don’t know what my future holds. I am, as my blog title indicates, a struggling single twenty-something who doesn’t yet, and may never, have the husband, kids, and house in the Boston suburbs that I so want. But if I ever do have kids, what I had with CS&T is what I want for them. Not necessarily the specifics of the way I used to spend my summers, but I hope that my hypothetical future children will be so happy with what they have that they can’t imagine that anything else could be better.

As for me, I’m working on getting myself to that place in my current life. Stay tuned.

Graduate of Life

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You may grow a new skin every seven years, but it seems like every four years, you start a new life. Four years of high school, then four years of college.

As of today, it’s been four years since I graduated from college. I guess that means that I’m no longer a…senior in life, I guess. But there will be no big changes. I’m not moving, I’m not heading to school, I’m not starting a new job. Life will just go on as usual.

But four years ago, all I could see was my old life ending. I’d been up all night with my friends, drinking the leftover alcohol and feeling more sad than nostalgic—friendships and relationships had changed so much over the course of college, and things, I thought, were only going to get worse. In the car with my family after the graduation, I kept falling asleep and then waking up in tears.

Life after college was really hard for awhile, for reasons I’m still not comfortable writing about on a public blog. But it did get easier. If I could, this is what I’d go back in time and tell myself on May 22, 2006:

-The first year out of college will be the most difficult year of your life. There will be a lot of tears and worries and stress-induced illness. But it won’t last forever. When you look back on it, you won’t know how you ever got through it, but you did. Like Chumbawumba, you’ll get knocked down, but you’ll get up again.

-You will be amazingly lucky in your housing situations. No bipolar roommates who throw things at you like in college. Christina will save what’s left of your sanity during that awful first year. You won’t have sewage leaks or flooded basements like some of your friends, either—in fact, both of your apartments will be fantastic.

-Right now you have it in your head that friendships don’t happen after college. Maybe it’s because you never made close friends at any of your previous jobs or because you remember Koren Zailckas writing about how cliquey and mean the girls at her first job out of college were in her book Smashed, but you’ll be totally unprepared for the friends you’ll make once college ends. Colleagues, fellow chorus members, and friends of friends will all become parts of your life. And you won’t just make friends, you’ll make close friends, the kinds who are always fun to be around but also support you and help you through difficult times. Like the Beatles, you’ll get by with a little help from your friends.

-Drama and cliquey-ness never really end (hell, they even happen in retirement homes), but they do get considerably better once you’re out of college. You’ve managed to reconnect with some friends you drifted apart from in college. In college, there was a friend-of-a-friend who disliked you to the point where she wouldn’t say hi back if you said hi to her and left a seat between you and her when you went with a group of people to a movie theater. A few years later, you’ll see her at a party and not only will she say hi to you first and ask where you live and what you’re up to, but you’ll actually have some nice conversations with her through the night. In college, you sometimes felt like everyone would eventually desert you or stab you in the back, but in life, you’re becoming more and more convinced that most people are good.

-Surprisingly, one of the things that will help convince you of that is work. While work will cause you some major headaches at times, the people you meet will by and large be fabulous. (Exceptions include that one girl who said, “Cancer!” in a cough after hearing you and another co-worker discuss your love for Diet Coke.) Pop culture has convinced you that cubicle jobs suck out your soul, that your boss will be a tyrant, and that coworkers will be the bane of your existence, but nothing could be further from the truth. Some of your happiest memories from the past four years have been work-related.

-You’ll always worry about money, but you’ll discover that however little you have, you’re pretty good at managing it.

-I wish I had better news for you regarding your love life, but I don’t. You’ve still never been in love or dated the same guy for more than a couple of months. You are out there dating, but not much luck so far. At least most of your friends are still single, too, and you’re mentally healthier than you were in college. Like Snow White, someday your prince will come. (Okay, feel free to roll your eyes at that one.)

-You still won’t quite feel like an adult in four years, and you still see “grown-ups” as a group separate from yourself. You don’t feel like that quite as much as you did right out of college, though. Also, college students annoy the hell out of you now.

-You’ve seen a lot more of Boston and its surrounding areas now that you don’t view it in collegiate terms. You mention Teele Square and the Fort Point Channel in conversation now when you didn’t even know what those areas were four years ago. You’ll spend the first couple of years out of school living within feet of your college, allowing yourself to retain some of the life you loved, but moving to Davis Square will prove to be a very good decision and a change of scenery that will suit you well.

-You’ll talk a lot about how much you miss college for the first couple of years. At a Christmas party that first year, you and your friends will be exhausted from work and will spend the whole night in your friends’ tiny basement apartment sounding like the Chris Farley Show from SNL: “Hey, remember when we did (fun thing) in college? That was great.” A year out of college, you’ll write this blog entry. But before you even realize it, you won’t say things like that anymore. You did love college and you do miss your friends, your classes, and the general college atmosphere, and you’ll buy a BC Snuggie to remind yourself of that, but after awhile you’ll start to realize how much you love your life right now. There are ways you’d like it to improve, but as you finish your fourth year of life, life looks pretty damn good.

Thoughts on Two Movies

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This isn’t a Katie Recommends or even a review, really—just thoughts on two movies I’ve seen recently: 500 Days of Summer and Julie and Julia. These thoughts don’t really have anything to do with each other…they’re just two movies I wanted to write about because they made me think about things beyond what I saw on the screen. So here we go. WARNING: This entry contains spoilers for both movies, plus The Way We Were.

500 Days of Summer
I didn’t want to see this movie at first, largely because of the moment they show on all the previews, where the guy decides he likes the girl after they discover they both like The Smiths. That just bugs me because I think music is a really shallow thing to base a relationship on—it’s like dating someone because you both like chocolate pudding—and yet, people do it. But it turns out that the moment where they bond over The Smiths isn’t really about the music—it’s more like the guy (Tom) realizing that, based on a short conversation, the girl (Summer) is someone he might be able to date instead of just admire from afar.

But, as we discover, he probably would have been better off doing just that. The book and movie He’s Just Not That Into You detail how women tend to ignore signs that guys aren’t interested, or at least aren’t as interested as the women want them to be. This movie proves that men can have that same tendency—it could easily have been called She’s Just Not That Into You. Summer tells Tom upfront that she doesn’t want a boyfriend and doesn’t believe in love, but Tom keeps pursuing her, and soon they’re quasi-dating. On day 290, Summer tells Tom she doesn’t want to see him anymore, and he plunges into a massive depression, vowing that he’s going to “get her back.” But instead, just as he thinks things might be ready to start up again with them, he learns that Summer is engaged to another man (whom we never meet and learn next to nothing about). He’s Just Not That Into You tells us that if he says he doesn’t want a girlfriend, he really just doesn’t want you to be his girlfriend. If he says he doesn’t want to get married, he really just doesn’t want to marry you. If he’s breaking up with you, he doesn’t want to be with you and you should leave it at that. If you replace the pronouns, that’s the lesson of this movie.

I don’t want to make it sound like this is a bad movie, because it’s really not. It’s entertaining and funny with some great lines, and the narrative is non-linear, which is an interesting, if a bit gimmicky, format. But I had two big problems with it. The first is that it’s a movie about a failed relationship. I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me on this, but I think that movies about relationships that don’t work out are usually pointless and rarely interesting. Breakups, to me, are like babies—if you have a baby, other people will be interested to a certain extent but don’t want to hear you go on and on about it, and the same is true for breakups. They’re just not that interesting to anyone except the people going through them. You wouldn’t make a whole movie about how cute a baby is, and you shouldn’t make a whole movie about how awful a breakup is.

In the Sex and the City quote at the top of my blog, “Katie” is Katie Morosky, Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were, another movie about a relationship that didn’t work out. When I saw that movie, I’d recently seen The Breakup with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn ( a movie that’s not only pointless but pretty depressing—if you haven’t seen it, don’t), and so The Way We Were kind of felt like The Breakup with Communism. It was a movie about two people who just weren’t right for each other, and so is 500 Days of Summer. Personally, I don’t find anything interesting about two people who aren’t right for each other. Most combinations of two people aren’t. It’s the relationships that defy the odds and work out, and the hard work as well as the romance that goes into them, that are really interesting to me.

The other problem that I had with is related to the She’s Just Not That Into You thing—that Tom keeps pursuing Summer despite the clear signs that she’s not interested. Granted, Summer does lead him on quite a bit, which is never cool, and Tom is guilty of misreading signals above all else. But since Summer did tell him outright that she didn’t want a boyfriend, then that she didn’t want to be with him, I found his line of thinking disturbing. It’s the same reasoning that date rapists use—she said no, but she meant yes. And I realize that it’s a big leap to go from misguided, hopeless romantic young man to date rapist, but the thinking is similar. Tom thinks he can “get Summer back,” as if it’s just a matter of him doing the right combination of things and not a decision of hers as well. He isn’t willing to let her make her choice and be done with it—he has to have things his way. Many women are guilty of thinking this way, too, that if they just say or do the right thing, the guy will change his mind, but somehow, it does seem a bit more disturbing from a guy, as if he thinks that dating her is his right.

In the case of this particular movie, it’s also more disturbing because of the card at the beginning: “Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely accidental … Especially Jenny Beckman … Bitch.” I laughed when I read it, thinking it was some kind of inside joke, but then I read this article. There’s no way of proving if “Jenny Beckman” is real or just a fabrication meant to draw more attention to the film, but if she is real, that brings another level to this movie, one that kind of scares me.

Julie and Julia

My thoughts on this movie are much more positive, and aside from the spoilers, I need to make another disclaimer: when I refer to Julie and Julia in this post, I’m referring to them as characters portrayed on screen, not the real Julia Child and Julie Powell. I know from reading that there is a lot about their lives that the movie left out—for instance, that Julia Child was a spy and some not-so-pleasant things I learned about Julie Powell as a person—but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

If you don’t know the plot, in a nutshell, it follows Julia Child (Meryl Streep) as she learns French cooking while living in Paris with her diplomat husband and eventually seeks publication for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Meanwhile, it also follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who in 2002 started a blog in which she spent a year cooking all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The movie was directed by Nora Ephron, who has written and/or directed several of my favorite movies, and the tone of the movie is familiar to anyone who’s watched one of her movies. Amy Adams is adorable and reminds me of a young Meg Ryan, and there’s a scene where Julie and her three friends are in a restaurant and all order Cobb salad minus one ingredient (a different ingredient for each of them) that’s reminiscent of Meg Ryan’s character in When Harry Met Sally taking too long to order in a restaurant. And as for Meryl Streep…well, your opinion of her will not change after seeing this movie. She’s as awesome as ever.

There turned out to be a lot more to this movie than I expected. First of all, it’s about two women who found success at unexpected times in unexpected places. Julia Child is in her late thirties when the events of this movie take place, and it wasn’t until then, after she’d spent a lot of time not quite knowing what to do with herself in France, that she began the work for which she’s known. Also, she didn’t meet her husband, whom she was married to until he died at age ninety-two, until her mid-thirties.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of this movies that say that the Julie parts aren’t as interesting as the Julia parts, but I strongly disagree. I actually think the Julie scenes might be a bit more interesting, partly because I found them easier to relate to. In 2002, Julie was twenty-nine, working in a dead-end job for Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (after 9/11, which had to be the worst job in the world), and living in a tiny apartment above a pizza shop in Queens. She’d written a novel that couldn’t find a publisher, and in the Cobb salad scene I mentioned, she’s out to lunch with a group of obnoxious friends who flaunt their success in her face, dramatically breaking out the Blackberries in the restaurant. One of them even makes her the focus of a pitying article in New York magazine (I don’t think that actually happened in real life, but it’s still a mortifying scene). But when she reads over the copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking she jacked from her parents’ house, she decides to take her life in a new direction by attempting to cook all 524 recipes in the book in a year and blogging about it. She not only meets her goal (not without a few challenges), but becomes the ultimate blogger success story: her blog became a book, the book became a movie. Essentially, while the Julia parts were enjoyable, the Julie parts were what really resonated with me. Julia Child is an icon, and while the movie humanizes her, it doesn’t take her off her pedestal. Julie, however, is one of us—a neurotic, angsty, struggling twenty-something (married, though) who will never be up on the pedestal herself, but reaches her own version of greatness by accomplishing what a great woman did before.

The other thing I enjoyed about this movie is how both women achieve success while their husbands wait supportively in the background. This is something that has always bugged me—it seems like in any movie about a woman accomplishing something, her significant other either leaves her or doesn’t exist. On the other hand, in any movie about a man accomplishing something, there’s always a supportive wife, and it seems like in any given year, half the Best Supporting Actress nominees are “wife-of” characters. In most movies, it seems like men can have it all but women can either have a loving partner or personal success. Not in this one.

I’ve written before about how lately I’ve found myself fearing things staying the same, a fear that’s probably shared by a lot of people my age. I’ve felt this way even more lately because this summer, I spent a good deal of time and energy applying for a job that I really wanted but ultimately didn’t get, and I’m not sure what the next step will be for me. So it’s gratifying to watch a movie about two women who found success in unexpected places at times when they weren’t sure what their next step was, either.

Some Things Gold Can Stay

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Bea Arthur passed away this weekend, and the reaction to it has been kind of amazing. She was eighty-six, old enough to be a grandmother to people my age. The Golden Girls went off the air when I was seven and still watching PBS. And yet my Facebook newsfeed is flooded with status updates and posted links in her memory—all by people close to my age.

I only started watching The Golden Girls reruns recently, but I loved it immediately. Twenty years ago, I suspect people loved it for the witty dialogue, likeable characters, and great acting. People still do, but it’s kind of taken on a deeper meaning years later. For one thing, it was surprisingly ahead of its time. Watching it now, I notice the lack of cell phones and the Internet (on one I just saw, a character was going to call the airline to change her flight, and I was just thinking, “Oh, yeah…I guess that’s what people did before you could book flights online.”), but I also notice how little has changed since the 80s. They did a fair number of Very Special Episodes, but the issues don’t come off as annoyingly preachy as they do on a lot of other shows—partly because they don’t end with a sappy parent-child scene, but also because they’re things we’re still talking about today: homelessness, illegal immigration, gay marriage.

Weirdly, I don’t think this show would be picked up if it were introduced today, even though people are living longer, healthier lives than ever and you’d think there’d be a large market for shows about AARP members. But TV today is more Gossip Girl than Golden Girls. Teenagers are the ones who are buying things made by the companies paying for the shows, and advertisers won’t pay a lot to market products to people who’ve already made up their minds about what they like.

I think one reason this show resonates with people my age is that the women on the show are actually in a position similar to a lot of us: single, dating, living with roommates. We see these grandmothers in their fifties and sixties (and, in Sophia’s case, eighties) dating and having relationships that don’t usually last, or having some argument with a family member, or getting into some crazy situation like being mistaken for prostitutes, then going home to their best friends and talking about it over cheesecake. And the thing is, it doesn’t look so bad. The Golden Girls never beat its audience over the head with the message that you don’t have to fade into obscurity and become boring and irrelevant once you have gray hair and your children have grown up, but it still got that point across. The girls all had interesting lives. They had jobs, took classes, did charity work, and dated—and we never questioned that men would still be attracted to them at their ages. Sure, we’d laugh at Blanche pretending to be younger than she was, or at the numerous jokes about how many men she’d slept with, but not at the fact that she was sleeping with men at all.

The other reason, I think, is that we enjoy watching shows about groups of female friends no matter how old they are. How many books, movies and TV shows are there about groups of four girls? Now and Then, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City and its knockoffs Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle…I could go on and on. The Golden Girls showed us that those types of friendships exist at any age. Come to think of it, if Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte from Sex and the City had married and had children young and then become single in middle age, they might have ended up something like Blanche, Dorothy, and Rose, respectively.

We’ll miss you, Bea. At least we have moments like this one to remember you by:

Waiting For My Real Life to Begin

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I’ve been in a weird mood lately.

For the most part, I’m very happy with my life right now. I love my job. I love my apartment. As much as I bitch about the T, I love not having a car most of the time. And while I can’t deny that I’d love to have a boyfriend, I enjoy the freedom that comes with being single.

But do I want my life to stay like this forever? Can I imagine myself in twenty years, living in an apartment in Somerville, still trying to get a date, childless, dependent on public transportation, working for the same low salary? Could you tell the answer to that question before you got halfway through the previous sentence?

I have moments when I wonder if I’m stuck here—if anything in my life is ever going to change. The funny thing is that I’ve never been good with change. When I was a kid, my mom would always be asking me if I wanted a new comforter or a new jacket or something, and my answer was always, “No, I like the one I have.” And I’ve always dreaded changes like starting college or graduating from college or friends moving away. I guess that’s a good thing—it must mean I’m fairly content with my life.

But now, I find myself fearing things staying the same. I’ve written enough about wanting a relationship, so I won’t go into it again. But one reason I haven’t discussed is that even though I have great roommates and a great apartment, I’d also like to live alone for a little while, and I don’t think that I could live alone if I wasn’t in a relationship. It relates back to this—I think I’d feel cut off from the world otherwise. So I guess I simultaneously crave aloneness and companionship. Man, am I that hard to please?

I’ve mentioned before how hard I find it to imagine owning a house. I’m still years and years away from that goal. But I’ve been finding myself thinking lately about where I want to live when I am ready to buy…which towns are fairly close to Boston? Have a commuter rail station in town? Have a good public school system for my nonexistent children? Recently, I bought the issue of Boston magazine about the best places to live, and then I wondered why. It’s not as if I’m about to get married and buy a house in the suburbs with my husband. But I still like to think about the possibilities for where I might live.

I’ve written extensively about my love-hate relationship with the T, but the truth is that I usually enjoy saving a lot of money by not paying for gas or parking or insurance or repairs if anything goes wrong. Still, there are a lot of times that I just wish I could get in the damn car and drive somewhere. Market Basket, the blissfully cheap local supermarket, is two miles away from me, which is close enough that I can walk…but far enough away that I can’t carry more than a couple of bags back with me. I wish I didn’t always have to ask my dad to come pick me up if I’m visiting my parents, and that I didn’t have to take the commuter rail to visit Christina.

If I eventually take a certain job, though, I’d get a company car, which would be awesome, but scary in its own way. The thing is, I love what I’m doing for work, and I know that I definitely want to stay in publishing, but there’s a large part of me that wants to move on to the next step, scary and unfamiliar as it may be. I’ve been trying to do as much as I can to prepare myself for it, and I’m lucky to have an incredibly supportive boss who’s been helping me a lot with career development. It would be a challenge for me if it does happen, but I also feel like if I prove that I can do it, I can do anything.

And then there’s my stalled writing career, which is no one’s fault but my own. I just need to glue my butt to the chair and get the writing done. I don’t even want to think about how much I could have accomplished if I spent as much time writing as I do sitting around watching reruns of 1990s sitcoms.

So…I don’t have any answers. All I know is that where I am isn’t bad, but where I could be looks even better. I’ll be twenty-five in July, and I think a lot of people feel this way as they near the quarter-century mark. At least I know what I want, I guess. Stay tuned.

Between the Lines and Behind the Doors

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I will eventually post about the election. In fact, I’ll probably post about it three times because I have multiple thoughts on it. But this is something that’s been on my mind that I need to get out, even though I’m tired and need to be getting to bed.

I’ve written about the book The Song Reader before. It’s something I think about a lot, whenever the lyrics of a song keep echoing in my mind. And, as anyone who’s Facebook friends with me knows, lately, the song I’ve been listening to over and over is “Between the Lines” by Sara Bareilles. It’s a song I’d heard before but hadn’t listened to closely until last week. There was a specific situation I applied it to, but then I thought about another situation that was very different but equally applicable.

But then I started thinking about the song in a more universal sense. How many things do we attempt to gain knowledge of by reading between the lines?

I remember reading this article in New York magazine, about how the Internet has caused a generation gap (young people are willing to bear their souls online; their parents aren’t). And after reading it, all I could think was…no one reveals everything online, even to their friends. No one.

Excuse my very cheesy analogy, but the Internet, if you will, is like an extremely large collection of doors. There are the doors that are open to everyone. There are the doors that are locked. There are doors that are locked to most people, but that someone has given you the keys to. And there are doors that are open, but that you probably wouldn’t have found if someone hadn’t led you there.

You could all probably figure out what I meant. We’ve all searched for our own open doors—what people can find out about us by Googling us. We Google ourselves, the people we date, the people we crush on. I sometimes Google my friends just for the hell of it. And we make the most of what we have when we run into a locked door—we see if we have mutual friends with someone whose Facebook profile is private, or check if someone’s posted on someone else’s wall. When someone gives us the key to a door, we read whatever we can into his or her goofy poses in photographs or cryptic Livejournal posts. And if we find our way to an open door we weren’t led to, we feel the need to justify it: “Oh, uh…I found your blog after so-and-so linked to it.”

The thing is, though, you could have access to every bit of information available online about a person and still not know anything important about him. While sometimes in this blog I’m just rambling about TV or whining about the T, sometimes it’s my attempt to be honest and just say what I’m thinking without having to say it out loud—and sometimes hoping that someone will read it and say, “OMG, I know EXACTLY what you mean!!!” (in a less annoying way, of course). But there are so many things I can’t put out there, even in writing, even knowing that this is a door that someone would have to be led to. If years from now, I were to look back on this blog as a record of what I was thinking and feeling at the time, I wouldn’t know the half of what was going on with me. The Internet makes it easier to tell some stories and harder to tell others, and there are some that I would love to be able to tell but know that I never will.

I wonder what people will read between the lines of this entry—or between the lines of my recent obsession with “Between the Lines.” Posting that little Facebook status update reminded me of the days in college when we’d post song lyrics on our AIM away messages, leaving people to read between those lines. The funny thing was that sometimes they read them completely wrong. I remember once, I had the lyrics to “Drive” by Incubus up, and I meant it as a kind of expression of independence and individuality. But my friend Jon saw it and immediately IMed me saying, “What’s wrong?” One person’s anthem of living fearlessly is another’s angry rant.

And to bring this post full-circle, that’s one interesting thing about song reading—the same song can’t mean the same thing to two different people. I recently found this from the author of The Song Reader, which helps you figure out how to read between the lines of your songs. It’s something that might help you figure yourself out when you know that the people reading your vague status updates and cryptic blog posts never will.

This Is Where I Used to Live

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A few weeks ago, I moved to Davis Square, and I’m absolutely loving it. I have a great new apartment, very cool new roommates (going to see Cirque du Soleil with them next month!), an absolutely fantastic new neighborhood with everything I could want (all kinds of restaurants and stores, a movie theater, some cool bars, a cupcake place, a library, a park, everything!), and a commute to work that’s less than half what it used to be when I lived on the Green Line. My co-workers are probably very relieved that I no longer come in bitching about the T, and the move is probably going to cut down majorly on my “the-T-sucks” posts.

My lease started August 1, but my lease on my old place didn’t end until August 31. I moved into this new place on August 18, but this week is the first time in two years that I don’t officially live in my first apartment.
And this is where I talk about it a little. As much as I love my new place, that first apartment is always going to hold a special place in my heart. For one thing, it was far from the crappy first apartment that most people have. I lucked into a great place that was very reasonably priced and HUGE. And I had some terrific times there—watching movies with friends, decorating for the holidays, sitting on the balcony reading the Sunday Globe, and having some amazing late-night conversations with Christina, the best person in the world to talk to at three o’clock in the morning.
I started this blog from my old apartment. I watched the fourth season of The O.C. there. I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows there. I watched the Sox win the World Series from there. I had some great roommates there—Christina and Chris, and then Stephanie after Christina moved out. I also went through some very difficult times that were too personal to write about here, and as tough as those times were, I’m glad that while they were going on, I had a great place to come home to.
So, here are some pictures to remember my wonderful old apartment by:




Work Anniversary Post

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Weirdly, I’m not at work during a week where I’m writing about it. I’m on vacation this week, but Wednesday was my one-year anniversary with the company I work for.

I’ve said it before, but even at its most stressful, I really love my job, weird as it may sound to some people. I’ve gotten strange looks when I tell people I enjoy making textbooks, but I really do. A big part of enjoying it so much, though, is the people. Publishing doesn’t pay well, but it’s an industry that attracts a lot of nice, smart, interesting people. I can have a good conversation with just about anyone in my office. Interestingly enough, a lot of them are bloggers and/or writers—I recently described my office to a friend as being full of “the English majors that are sane.”

There are a lot of things about my life I wish would change (such as the first two words of my blog title), but work isn’t one of them. So many people my age change jobs constantly, and I can certainly see why—it can be hard to find a job that’s a good fit for you, and often something you think you’ll like turns out not to be so great. And for a lot of people, changing your mind about your career path means shelling out money for grad school…and if you change your mind again, shelling out more money for yet another degree.

I feel very lucky for the combination of circumstances that led me here. There was a time when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue this career path, but now I think I do. I’m twenty-four and I love what I do for a living, and I can’t tell you what an amazing thing that is.

A Story That Might Not Mean Anything

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Warning: I try not to write about anything too personal here, but this is going to be more personal than most. I really hope that I don’t come off sounding like a moody drama queen, but it may be unavoidable.

A couple of years ago, I read a wonderful book by Lisa Tucker called The Song Reader. It’s about a woman who analyzes what’s going on in people’s lives based on the songs they listen to or that have been stuck in their heads, especially specific lines that stick out for them. Sometimes a song is a manifestation of your subconscious.

I won’t say too much more about the book, but it’s amazing how true it is. On my coworker’s last day of work, she said she had “Goodbye to You” by Michelle Branch, a song she doesn’t even like, stuck in her head. When I was going through a difficult time awhile ago, the song I kept listening to on repeat was Beth Hart’s “Leave the Light On,” which might have been my way of telling myself not to give up.

And then there’s the song that’s been stuck in my head lately: “The Story” by Brandi Carlile. And this is the line I can’t get rid of: “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to.”

In the context of the song, it’s a happy line—the next one is “It’s true, I was made for you.” But my subconscious never gets there.

Here’s a story I wish I had someone to tell. Last Friday, after getting out of work early for a summer Friday, I didn’t know what to do. Then I thought, why don’t I go walk along the beach in South Boston? I’ve never been there, and it might be a cool place to explore. So, by myself, I took the bus, and to get to the beach, I had to walk across a field. On the other side of the field was a man with a dog, which he had taken off the leash. It was a fairly small dog, and I’m not sure what kind—probably mixed breed. But anyway, the dog saw me walking across the field, ran over to me, jumped on me, and slightly bit me. (Before you worry, it was a superficial wound, and I’ve since gone to the doctor, gotten a tetanus shot, and put on a rabies vaccine, so I’m fine.) The dog’s owner was apologizing and saying that the dog never does this. I was too in shock to ask for the owner’s name and phone number, which I probably should have done.

But then, when I did get over the shock, I just thought, No one is here. I just got bitten by a dog, and no one is here.

This happened after a few weeks of me feeling increasingly lonely. There are times when it hits me that I’ve been single my entire life, and this is one of those times. I mean, forget having someone to grow old with, have kids with, celebrate Valentine’s Day with, split the cost of a one-bedroom apartment with (seriously, I found myself wanting to be in a relationship for that specific reason while I was looking for a new apartment), etc. Sometimes, I just want to be in a relationship for the companionship. It would be really nice to have someone to whom I mattered enough that I could just call him and say, “Hey! Some random dog just bit me!” Or someone who would make the time to go to the beach with me. Or, for that matter, go to Restaurant Week or a bar I’ve been meaning to try or the BC-Notre Dame game with me. And someone whom I’d accompany to whatever he wanted to do, and whom I’d listen to if he called me after getting bitten by a dog. Someone who would always be there for me, whether I want to go out and do something fun or stay in and watch Friends reruns, whether I want to share a funny story or vent about the annoying people on the T.

It’s not that I don’t have friends—I do—but they all have their own lives, and I can’t bother them with all the good and bad things going on with me. I think one problem I have, and one that I’ve struggled with in the past, is that I don’t feel that I’m necessary in many people’s lives. I mean, there are certainly people who like me, but not too many who would notice my absence and say, “Wow, too bad Katie’s not here!” And when you’re in your twenties, so many people’s lives are in flux—people are moving away, changing jobs, going back to school—that it’s nice to have a constant presence in your life, someone you can depend on to care about you. I really just want someone who makes me feel necessary—not in a needy, codependent way, and not in a cheesy, Jerry Maguire, “You complete me,” way, but in a way that makes me feel confident that he’ll always enjoy my company, always listen to what I have to say, and know that I’ll always feel the same way about him.

Like I said, I don’t want to come off sounding whiny and dramatic, because realistically, I don’t think I’m doomed to a lifetime of singlehood. I’m only twenty-four, and plenty of people my age are still single. And it’s not like I hate being alone—I’ve always been good at enjoying the pleasure of my own company. But there was something I saw on the T last week that made me pause: a girl and a guy who I think were BU students and who were cute in the way of couples who are friends as well as romantic partners. They were affectionate, but not in a really obvious, disgusting way, and they were having a good time making fun of each other as they talked. At one point, the guy started telling the girl something, and she said, “I’m sorry—but you’ve already told me this story about ten times, and it’s not that interesting.” Then they both laughed, and kissed a little bit. I loved that they were comfortable enough with each other that they could say that.

That’s what I want. At the end of the day, I think that’s what most of us want—someone whom we can tell our stories to. Even if he’s already heard them ten times and they’re not that interesting.