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We Reduce People

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In fiction, moral complexity is in. Today’s golden age of TV have brought characters who are difficult or whose intentions are ambiguous out of the realm of literary fiction and art house movies to popular shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and countless others. And we love it. When you consider a character, your opinion of that character is colored by many things other than “hero” or “villain.” On Mad Men, when nearly every main character has either cheated on a significant other or knowingly slept with someone who’s cheating, how do you measure which character you enjoy the most? On Breaking Bad, why do some people root for characters who’ve killed innocent people but hate other characters for smaller, personality-related reasons? I don’t watch Game of Thrones, so I can’t really comment on it, but I’ve picked up on some of the Snark Ladies’ interesting thoughts regarding the actions of some characters on that show.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing lately: this cultural embrace of moral ambiguity does not extend to actual human beings. With current events, there always has to be a villain, even in accidents where no one was really at fault. On the Internet, if anyone says anything regrettable, they’re never given the chance to backtrack or apologize—and even if they do, people will label them and discount anything they say from then on. There’s this ridiculous Tumblr, which I won’t link (if you’ve heard of it, you’ll know which one I mean) that catalogs everything that popular celebrities say that could be construed as “problematic”—even though some of those things are hardly problematic and some of them are things said or done while playing a character.

We reduce people.

We boil down every single thing about a human being—all experiences, all circumstances, all thoughts, all actions, all feelings—to one single thing we don’t like and slap a label on them.

We do it all the time, with everyone from celebrities to politicians to criminals to people we know personally or engage with online. It’s too much work to consider the bigger picture or to imagine that there’s anything more to a person than whatever we don’t like.

I say “we” because I’m guilty of this, too—too often. It’s easy to reduce. It’s harder to look closer and find the humanity in people we don’t like, or people who do things we don’t like.

I mentioned before that Schindler’s List, which I saw for the first time last year, is something I have a hard time talking about. The reason why is that what I took away from it was very personal, and I was afraid if I tried to explain it, it would come out sounding like I was making a movie about the biggest genocide in modern history all about me. But this was the revelation I had while watching it, a movie about a man who, despite doing an incredible thing that saved over a thousand lives, was not by any means a saint: if you lose your ability to see beyond whatever you don’t like about a person, if you can dehumanize people enough to boil them down to a single thing about their complex being—then that’s one thing you have in common with the Nazis.

When you don’t consider the humanity of every person, the inherent worth everyone has just by being alive, even people who do terrible things with their lives, it looks pretty ugly.

I’m often amazed by people who are more generous, compassionate, and forgiving than I am. When Fred Phelps died recently, I was surprised by the subdued reaction, which could be summed up as “let’s not stoop to his level.” My basic instinct is more often than not a desire for revenge, even if it always stays just a revenge fantasy, but thank God for the example of people whose hearts are bigger than mine.

Sometimes I’m not very good at forgiveness. But I’m trying to get better.

There’s no one thing that inspired this post. It’s a conglomeration of observations of things around me and in the world. But this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and something I always want to keep with me as I check my reactions when anything upsets me.

I don’t want to reduce people. And I don’t want anyone else to, either. People are all more than the sum of their complex, sometimes infuriating parts. I need to remember that while there is a great capacity for evil in humans, there is an even greater capacity for love, kindness, and compassion. And I need to recognize that greater capacity in all people as well as in myself.

I Sincerely Hope This Is Not the Last Post of Its Kind I Write

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I mentioned this back in this post, but last year, I had a short story accepted by The Sierra Nevada Review, a literary magazine out of Sierra Nevada College.

The day before Easter, my contributor’s copies came in the mail!

It’s a pretty short story—about 1100 words and only three pages. It’s called “Things You Don’t Know I Know About You.” In the story, the narrator, a nameless cubicle dweller, tells of everything she’s learned about her coworkers by Googling them. This is something that, I admit, I do all the time—with coworkers, dates, random people from the past, and sometimes my friends and family, just to see what I find. My friends think I’m weird for Googling people before dates—I think they’re weird for not doing it. (Of course, then on the date I have to act like I don’t know things like where the guy went to college or where he works.) But I’ve found out some interesting things by Googling people from the past I think of randomly—like, there was this obnoxious hipster guy I worked with at an internship in college, and I found out through Google that he wrote a fairly popular young adult book.

It’s not online, but you can buy a copy here or just ask me if you want to read it.

I’m happy about it—I feel like it’s rare that there’s something in my life I can be legitimately proud of. Even when I accomplish something professionally, like making my sales goal last year, it’s hard to take much pride in it because of extenuating circumstances—like, I think making that goal was due to luck more than anything else. But I can’t think of any reason The Sierra Nevada Review decided to publish this other than that they liked the story—and according to Duotrope, a site that gives information on different literary magazines, it has a pretty low acceptance rate, although I’m not sure how accurate the rate they give is.

But still, I hope this isn’t the last thing I ever publish. This is actually part of a group of linked short stories I want to have published as a book eventually, with some of them published in magazines first. I’m trying to get more stories published now.

Here’s hoping that someday I’ll have more publications to blog about.

You Know What’s Awesome?

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Getting stuff done is awesome.

I was looking at this post I wrote a year ago today. And then I looked at this one from a few months later.

It feels awesome to want to do something and then actually do it.

I need to remember that in other aspects of my life. Right now I’m working on a collection of linked short stories and trying to get some other stories published- after I had that one accepted last year to The Sierra Nevada Review (it will come out in May), I don’t want that to be my only success.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again, and the luck of the Irish to you, but getting stuff done has nothing to do with luck. Or even with skill. There’s not much I’m sure of, but I do know that I’m capable of and good at working hard. So I’m going to remember this feeling: how awesome it is to realize you did something you really, really wanted to do.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

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The first couple of weeks of 2014 have been kind of nuts. If things don’t change, it’s shaping up to be the year of other people losing my stuff.

New Year’s Eve was fun- I went with some friends to the Harpoon Beer Hall. However, the first couple of hours of 2014 sucked because the Harpoon’s coat check? Lost my coat. Someone else must have taken it by accident when they brought it back from the coat check, so they ended up sending me home in a Harpoon sweatshirt. Long walk back to the T on a freezing cold night- it was not fun. They did say they’d pay me back for a new coat, and I’ll take them up on that, but even though I know there are a lot of worse things than this, I’m pissed. I LIKED THAT COAT.

Then the following week I went to San Francisco for my company’s sales meeting. Getting out there was a bit of a mess. The airline delays that week were all over the news. We were supposed to fly out Monday morning, but after that flight was canceled, and the second flight we had booked resulted in us having go back into the terminal where we would have taken the first flight to get our canceled tickets and therefore waiting in a really long line and missing our flight (deep breath), we ended up having to take new flights Tuesday afternoon, arriving in San Francisco Tuesday night and missing a whole day of the conference. I didn’t want to check my bag, but I was in the last boarding group and they pulled the whole we’re-out-of-overhead-space thing (once I was on the plane, I could see that there was actually plenty of room) and made me check my bag, telling me it would be waiting for me at the gate when we landed.

It was not. I didn’t get my bag back until Thursday morning. I’m actually surprised I got it back that soon. I was not very happy during the period of time I didn’t have it.

The actual trip went well. I got to see Jenna and Mikey for the first time in almost a year! I also got an award for making my sales goal, and my flight back was great- I even had an empty seat next to me. (I’m weird and like long plane rides.)

Sooo, things have been busy and occasionally nuts, which is why I’m just getting around to writing this now.

2013! There were some really terrible things that happened this year. My uncle died suddenly in May. There was the marathon bombing and its aftermath in April.

But when 2012 ended, I said I felt like I’d spent a lot of the year in a state of blah. I definitely do not feel that way about 2013. I got shit done this year! As much as I would have liked to? No, definitely not. Dating was one disappointment after another (although I did put forth a lot of effort). I was really inconsistent with sleep, diet, and exercise and therefore am still fat. I never did that open-water swim. But here are some of the things I got done this year:

  • I did a lot more writing, completing several short stories and having one short story accepted for publication. My Grub Street class was a lot of fun.
  • I traveled to Europe for the first time ever and had a fantastic time. England and Ireland were just wonderful.
  • I also went to Marco Island and had another fantastic time lounging on the beach with my friends.
  • Work. This was not the weirdest year of my professional career, but it’s definitely in the top three, for reasons that it would not behoove me to get into on a public blog. Bottom line, though: the year ended with me making 132% of my sales goal and getting a nice bonus, so that was pretty awesome.
  • I did Run to Home Base and the Tufts 10K for Women.
  • And I did all the fun things I talked about here.

So what’s up for 2014?

  • I can’t guarantee that I’ll meet someone, this year or ever. But I will certainly keep trying.
  • I have gotten more involved in my church, and I’d like to continue that.
  • I’m open on where, but I’d like to take another fun vacation.
  • I’m thinking about volunteering as a writing tutor.
  • Finishing a collection of linked short stories I’m working on.
  • Getting more short stories published (or at least trying hard).
  • Making my sales goal again.
  •  Possibly another half-marathon, finally getting to that open water swim, and maybe a triathlon.
  •  More cooking.
  •  More reading (unofficially aiming for a book a week).
  •  More making good use of the Roku.
  •  More fun times with friends.
  •  Hopefully get a cat!

I turn thirty this year, too. Seeing as I’m still single, I don’t really like to think about that, so I won’t. (Wow, I wrote that right after I wrote about getting a cat.)

I’m going to have to move in 2014—my landlady told us awhile ago that she’d be vacating the property to do renovations after our lease is up. So, I hope, by June I will be living alone for the first time.

We’ll see where I am a year from now. Things right now aren’t bad, but I’m still hoping they’ll end up a lot better.

Things I Loved This Year

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I’ll do another post about the events of last year, and I’m going to do some more substantial posts later on books, movies, and TV, at least, but I wanted to do this post on some of the things that I enjoyed the most this year. Without further ado:

Books

October was my book month. Two books I’d been anticipating for a long time were published that month—Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Halfbook and The Disaster Artist, a book about the making of The Room by Greg Sestero, who played Mark. I also attended the Boston Book Festival, where I had conversations with J. Courtney Sullivan, Tom Perrotta, and Hallie Ephron. I read many other wonderful books throughout the year, and I’ll blog about them more in a future entry, but some highlights include John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Movies

The best movie I saw for the first time this year actually came out twenty years ago—Schindler’s List. I don’t know how I made it to this year without ever having seen this movie. And…wow. I have such a hard time talking about this movie because I’m not sure I can in a way that does it justice. It completely deserves the reputation it has—I will say that. And the very end has me in tears every time. (I’ve seen it quite a few times since I first saw it in August, most recently last night at Erin’s. Yep, our super-fun movie night was with a three-hour movie about the Holocaust.) It also motivated me to learn more about the real story behind it, so I’ve now read several books about Oscar Schindler and the Jews on the list- so many that I could tell where writers got their sources from. And there’s so much more I want to say about this movie that I’m not sure how to say, but just know that it profoundly affected me.

Future entry coming about the movies that actually came out in 2013.

TV

The two TV shows I caught up with this year that I loved the most could not be more opposite. Parks and Recreation is this happy, upbeat show about nice people doing good things. Breaking Bad is a dark, tense show about an increasingly evil guy doing increasingly terrible things. They’re at opposite ends of this TV mood scale, but I loved them both so much- Parks and Rec because it’s funny and sweet and I enjoy all the characters, Breaking Bad because it’s incredibly well-written and acted and basically a masterpiece. (Yes, I’ve seen this clip.)

I also started watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report regularly for the first time. The week of the marathon bombing, I desperately needed something to make me laugh. Previously, I’d only watched these shows sporadically, but after that week I put them both on my DVR. They keep me sane.

Music

I didn’t listen to much new music this year. I did listen to a LOT of U2. I’ve always liked them, but over the summer I started listening to them kind of obsessively and discovered some songs I hadn’t heard before or re-discovered songs I hadn’t listened to enough. As for new music, I enjoyed Sara Bareilles’s The Blessed Unrest, especially her song “I Choose You.”

Theater

Aside from the very welcome news that Les Miserables is coming back to Broadway next year, there was a lot of good theater in my life this year. I traveled to New York to see Lucky Guy on Broadway, which was wonderful and moving and…there’s so much I could say about it and maybe I will in a future post. I saw Wicked for the second time. I saw a local production of Les Mis. I also saw a great play in the fall called The Power of Duff.

Technology

Two devices have massively improved my life this year. I bought a Roku, allowing me to stream Netflix and Hulu on my TV, and it’s been fantastic. (Future post about everything I’ve been watching via Roku.) I also finally caved and got my first smartphone, which was a good decision. I’d always been afraid I’d end up spending too much time online if I had the Internet on my phone, but that hasn’t really happened. Plus, now I know when the bus is coming.

Celebrities

My two biggest celebrity crushes this year are both guys on AMC shows- Jon Hamm and Aaron Paul. It’s kind of interesting- with guys in real life, I’ve never been attracted to good-looking jerks, and I realized this year that even with celebrities, there’s a personality element present with everyone I like. Jon Hamm, I am convinced, is a perfect human being. I could look at him all day, and I think it’s a travesty that he doesn’t have an Emmy yet. But even if, for some strange reason, you’re not into his looks or his acting, you have to love him after this. And this. And this.

Aaron Paul (who does have two well-deserved Emmys), is possibly the most adorable person on the planet. I love him on Breaking Bad, where he played one of my favorite TV characters of all time, but he seems like such a sweet person, too. Read this. And this. And watch this clip of him on The Price Is Right before he was famous, because it’s hilarious. And look at his Twitter and his Instagram, from which I have learned that he really loves his wife and he really loves pizza.

Food
When Pigs Fly bread is the best kind of bread, and it’s awesome when you toast it and spread avocado on it.

Remember that if you take nothing else away from this post.

Happy New Year, all!

Post-Christmas Musings

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I love Christmas so much, and I just had a very nice one with my family.

Even so, I have to be honest- this was the most difficult Christmas season in recent memory.

When I wrote this, I was in the midst of four straight months of happiness. From my trip to Europe until about the beginning of November, almost everything seemed to be going right. My friends were great. Work was great. My writing was great. I’d even lost a bit of weight. (Uh, did not intend for that to sound like Dr. Seuss.) The one thing I didn’t have was a relationship, but I was feeling so terrific that I was like, “Hey, age twenty-nine is awesome! Maybe this is the period where I’m happy and comfortable and love will finally find me!”

But instead, what found me was the most frustrating two months of dating I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve been actively dating for over six years, so I do not say that lightly. That’s what I was feeling when I wrote this…and since then, it’s gotten worse and worse.

And it sounds so dumb, but despite all those great things still being great, and despite knowing that I don’t need a relationship to be happy (since I’ve never been in one, I’d be in trouble if that wasn’t true), being single suddenly seemed like the only thing that mattered.

And as things with dating kept getting worse, so did what I thought of myself. I started remembering every dumb thing I’ve said and done, every friend I’ve ever lost, every unkind thought and deed of mine, every physical flaw on my body—and I started to wonder why anyone would ever want to be with me.

Yeah, I know, that’s just digging myself further into the sadness hole. Pretty much every bit of advice they give you on finding love starts with, “Love yourself.” But you know what? When you’re twenty-nine and not only does no one love you, but no one has ever loved you, loving yourself becomes kind of hard.

When I wrote this, I was realizing it was hard to write about being happy. I didn’t want to sound obnoxious and braggy. But I’m realizing now that it’s hard writing about being sad as well. It’s one thing if you’re grieving someone who died, or if you’re going through a breakup or infertility or something legitimately devastating. And if you’re suffering from depression, people are familiar with that—and I think sometimes, people tend to pathologize sadness and tell you that you should see someone if you’re feeling down, even when you don’t meet the criteria for clinical depression.

But plain old sadness is harder to write about without seeming overdramatic or self-indulgent. I’m not going through anything like grief, and I’m not diagnosably depressed—there’s no anhedonia or feelings of hopelessness, just temporary sadness. Nothing’s changed to make me sad—the problem is that NOTHING has changed. And years of going through the holidays being single when you don’t want to be actually makes it harder, not easier, to go through it again.

I hesitated about writing about something this personal. But here it is, out there for everyone. I’ve been sad. I know it won’t last forever, but it’s still what I’m feeling now, and for those of you who have forgotten what being single feels like, just know that while there might be some people who are perfectly fine with being single around the holidays, even with all the couple-y ness it’s full of—there are also many people who aren’t.

On Love and Deserving

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Warning: herein lie spoilers for the movie The Town, Season 4 of Gilmore Girls, and the novel Driver’s Ed.

I started thinking of all my associations with the words “love” and “deserving” when used together.

Here’s one—this lovely song by Lori McKenna (possibly the subject of a future Katie Recommends):

[spotify id=”spotify:track:0p5x6zmXBjXdQ0bVcvMPhm” width=”300″ height=”380″ /]

Here’s another—the cheesy book and self-help tape Luke listens to on Gilmore Girls (which, laughable as it is, does help him realize that he’s in love with Lorelai). I can’t find the clip where the tape says, “You deserve love,” but here’s another one that includes the tape.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlkGPr5oMR0]

But here’s another, the one I think of most often. A few years ago, I’d just seen the movie The Town and hadn’t really liked it. My biggest issue with it was that when the female lead discovers that the guy she’s been seeing is the same guy who traumatized her by kidnapping her at gunpoint during a bank robbery, she still wants to be with him. I did not buy that for a minute, and shared that thought with some co-workers at lunch one day. One co-worker, who’d seen the movie and liked it, was surprised. “But she loved him!” she said.

“Some people don’t deserve love,” I countered.

And I’ll never forget the look on her face. She looked like I’d slapped her—as if, with an offhand comment about a character in a movie, I’d hurt her personally.

But I meant it when I said it. I really did believe that not everyone deserved love. Everyone deserves to be loved by their parents and families, but does everyone deserve romantic love?

I have a lot of friends who have fallen for lousy guys when they deserve much better. It’s frustrating to see your friends continue to see and to respond to jerks, and my response, more than once, has been that guys like that don’t deserve love. Not that they don’t deserve the love of my awesome friends—that they don’t deserve love, period.

But how far does that theory go? If a fictional bank robber/kidnapper doesn’t deserve love, what about real people? Do murderers deserve love? Rapists? Domestic abusers? Cheaters? Do genocidal dictators deserve love? If you do a terrible thing, should your karmic punishment be the permanent loss of romantic love?

This almost seems like a set-up to a discussion of religion, but my thoughts here aren’t quite so high-minded. Honestly, I’m thinking about myself—someone who has never received romantic love from anyone. Someone who has no firsthand experience with the emotion they sing about in so many songs, that drives the plot of so many of my favorite movies. Someone who, most of the time, tries very hard not to talk too much, in this blog and in real life, about how frustrating my lack of success at dating has been—but someone whose psychic real estate is largely occupied by thoughts on that subject. It’s been getting worse and worse now that I’m twenty-nine and have spent the entirety of my life single and without romantic love. I worry every single day that I will never have the things I want the most—despite trying as hard as I can to meet someone who will help me get those things.

It’s very hard not to wonder what is so wrong with me and to come up with things that are wrong. I am by far the least attractive girl in my group of friends. When I was on vacation in Florida back in August, I had a hard time looking at myself when I was on the beach with three much thinner friends. I’m not getting any younger. And I am, as I’ve mentioned before, not a very nice person, and my success at disguising that fact varies. I’ve always wished I could be one of those people whom EVERYONE likes, but I’ve already failed at that—there are more than a few people who actively dislike me, maybe even hate me, and I have to take responsibility for that. I’m not even sure why I still have any friends at all.

And I guess this has all been a roundabout way to this realization: I’m not always sure that I deserve love. I know nothing productive can come from this way of thinking, but there it is. When trying to find someone has been this discouraging, I find myself thinking—what do I really have to offer a potential boyfriend that no other girl can? With so many awesome single girls out there, why would anyone ever want to be with me? Do I really deserve that kind of love?

Maybe I don’t. But maybe no one does. Because this brings me to my final association with the words “love” and “deserving” –a quote from the young adult novel Driver’s Ed by Caroline B. Cooney. In the book, two teenagers have confessed to stealing a stop sign, which resulted in a fatal accident. At the very end, one of them says to his father that he doesn’t think he deserves love. His father says that he’s right—he doesn’t deserve love:

“That’s the thing about love,” said his father, wrapping a Christmas arm around his son. “Nobody deserves it. Love just is.”

 

I think that might be closer to the truth about love and deserving than anything else.

Some Good Things

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It’s been a bit since my last post, and I’ll write about something more interesting pretty soon. Sometimes it’s hard to find things to write about when life is good. Which it is right now, I’m happy to report. Not because of one huge reason (I’m still single, sadly), but lots of things are going right lately. And it can be obnoxious to talk about how great your life is (see this article!), but on a blog about my life, I do want to share what’s going on with me.

So here are some reasons I’ve been happy lately:

-One of my goals for the year was to write more fiction, and I have. A long time ago, I used to try submitting short stories to magazines, but after awhile I just…stopped. Until this year, when I started submitting a couple of stories around. Recently, I found out that one of them was accepted! My short story “Things You Don’t Know I Know about You” is forthcoming in The Sierra Nevada Review, and it will be out in May. Yea!

-I made my sales goal at work, which means I’m getting a bonus in a couple of months.

-I completed a 10K yesterday and got a good time for me! I finished in 53:29, which is a 8:37 pace, faster than I usually run.

-I’ve been better lately about exercising and not eating crap.

-My roommate and I got a better Internet connection. I then joined Netflix, and then I bought a Roku. The Roku has massively improved my life. I’m now catching up with TV shows I should have been watching. Parks and Recreation is now one of my new favorites—I’ll do a post in the near future about everything I’ve been catching up with. Breaking Bad is probably next.

-But I’m not starting Breaking Bad until baseball is over because RED SOX IN THE ALCS WOO!

-It’s fall and the weather is lovely and I recently went apple picking because YEA NEW ENGLAND.

-I’ve picked up a little side project editing college essays for high school kids, and I’m enjoying it.

-The Boston Book Festival is coming up this weekend- I’ve meant to go every other year, but have always been busy. This is the first year I’m making it.

-BC’s football team still isn’t great, but they’re at least better than they were last year.

-I saw a great play called The Power of Duff last weekend. After I see a good play, it makes me want to see [Allie Brosh] ALL the theater! [/Allie Brosh] So maybe there’s more theater for me in the near future.

-Speaking of Allie Brosh, her book is coming out at the end of the month!

-My friends are awesome, although that’s not new.

-My furry friend is also awesome.

My England and Ireland Trip

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I turned twenty-nine on July 20, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Turning a year older when you’re single is never fun, but this year I didn’t care.  I was still on a high from the best vacation of my life—my first, and DEFINITELY not last, trip to Europe.

Rather than take you through the specifics of each day, I’ll share with you the highlights:

-Our hotel in London was right near King’s Cross Station. There was a long line to take pictures at Platform 9 ¾, so I didn’t do it, but I got a picture of some random girl there:

-We went to Harrod’s, a department store so fancy you can only dream of buying anything there. Like, there’s-an-opera-singer-in-the-stairwell kind of fancy.

-I kind of surprised myself with my reaction to Westminster Abbey. Erin, the history major among us, was getting excited over all the kings and queens buried there, and I was like, Oh, monarchs, that’s cool. But then we got toward the end of the tour, and I realized that Geoffrey Chaucer and Georg Frederick Handel are buried there as well. And THAT excited the English major and choral singer in me—I love The Canterbury Tales to the point where I voluntarily took a class on Chaucer in college and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sung Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus—I think I’ve memorized the soprano part.

-We wanted to see the changing of the guard but couldn’t get there in time. Next time, I guess—and there WILL be a next time! But we did swing by Buckingham Palace. We kept wondering through the whole trip if the royal baby would show up while we were there, but little Prince George was waiting for us to leave, I guess.

-The Tower of London was kind of morbidly fascinating. Here’s a picture of where Anne Boleyn was beheaded:

-Julie had suggested having tea at Fortnum and Mason, so we did. I think this was my favorite part of London. The food was so good- scones, little cakes, little sandwiches (ones I didn’t think I would like but really did), and, of course, tea. The waitress asked us if we wanted a slice of cake afterwards, and we were too full!

-File under “you make it too easy, England.” Also under “I’m twelve”

-I was glad we got to take a double-decker bus on this trip! We took it to the train station and then took a train out to Windsor Castle. No pictures from inside because they weren’t allowed, but it was really cool to see. And the queen was there when we were!

-If you waved a wand and turned Boston into a European city, I think it might look something like Dublin.

-At the pub where we had lunch the first day in Dublin, they had a Boston Strong sticker hanging up, which was nice.

-My last name is super easy to spell, but you would not believe how many people think it’s spelled “Haze.” Which is a word, not a name. As it turns out, people even do that in Ireland—you know, the country my ancestors came from.

-My favorite part of the whole vacation was the day tour we took to the Cliffs of Moher. There was a walking tour in Galway first, which was interesting. I think I’d spend more time in Galway if—WHEN—I go back to Ireland. Among the interesting things I learned on this tour was that Jane Eyre may have been named after a real person commemorated in a Galway church—although that Jane Eyre, ironically, is described as an “obedient wife.”

-London and Dublin are great, but it’s easy to imagine that big cities are ANY big city. When we went out to the countryside to see the Cliffs of Moher, that was when I really felt like I was in a place different from anywhere I’d ever been. It was so beautiful—I was just standing at the cliffs thinking, “This view? THIS is why I wanted to go to Ireland.”

-Our third day in Ireland, we went to Christ Church Cathedral and Dublin Castle and did a bit of a literary walking tour. We also found a pub whose name was Erin’s last name, so of course we had to drop everything and get a drink there!

-Also on that last day, we were at a café called Queen of Tarts and the actor Andrew McCarthy, whom I know as Blane from Pretty in Pink (he’s also been in St. Elmo’s Fire, Weekend at Bernie’s, and the TV show Lipstick Jungle), was sitting across from us. I remembered how once at a meeting at work, we did an icebreaker where we went around the room and talked about if we’d ever met someone famous. I thought that if we ever did that again, I could say, “This one time when I was in Dublin, the guy from Pretty in Pink was sitting across from me at a cafe.”

–And then it occurred to me that now I can start stories with, “This one time when I was in Dublin…”

-Did I mention that we did not see a drop of rain in either country the whole time we were there? It was amazing! London was having what it called a heat wave- uh, I’ll take low-to-mid-eighties with no humidity over the actual heat waves we’ve gotten this summer in Boston any day, thanks. And in Ireland, on the day we went to the cliffs, even the tour guide was like, “It’s never this nice out here.” Sometimes, apparently, there’s so much fog you can’t see very well at the Cliffs of Moher, but we had an absolutely gorgeous day.

-Now that I’m back, one kind of weird reaction I’m having is that I want to watch every British movie ever. I’ve already seen Mary Poppins and Notting Hill since returning.

I want to go back so much! I’m already thinking of all the other things I want to do in both England and Ireland. But I also want to see ALL the places, as Allie Brosh would say. If only I had unlimited time and money!

In any case, I have now been to Europe, and it was as much fun as I always dreamed. I was lucky to have two awesome friends to share it with. If I had to have a birthday at the end of the week, I took comfort in thinking that age twenty-nine might be even a fraction as fun as the last week of being twenty-eight was.

Happiness Is…

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Something I do that I know I shouldn’t do: I judge the severity of your problems by whether or not you’re in a happy relationship.

There are some problems that are universally terrible- death, destruction, and serious illness or injury, and of course I sympathize with people suffering from these problems regardless of their relationship status.

But then there are normal generational angst problems. You lost your job, or you hate your job, or you didn’t get into the school you wanted to, or you don’t know what you’re doing with your life. You don’t like where you live, you’re living at home and hating it, or you’re having trouble finding an apartment or buying a house. You had a falling out with a friend, or you miss your friends, or someone else’s wedding is stressing you out, or you’re fighting with a relative.

If you have any of those problems and you’re also single (or even in a bad relationship), I sympathize with you. But if you’re happily in a relationship or engaged or married? I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I just can’t take your problems seriously. At the end of the day, you have someone to come home to whom you can talk to about it, who will comfort you and make you feel better. My problems might be the same as yours, but I don’t have anyone to come home to. If I ever lost my job, I wouldn’t have a significant other’s income to fall back on. I don’t have anyone with whom to buy a house or split the cost of a one-bedroom apartment. I don’t have someone who’s committed to being with me.

So there’s my ugly confession, and reading over it, it makes me sound really bitter. I’m not, I promise you. Like anyone, I have moments where I’m down, but the majority of the time, I choose to be happy. And happiness is, indeed, a choice and not a destination like some people make it out to be. You can’t spend too much time thinking about the future or, to paraphrase John Lennon, you miss the life that’s happening while you’re busy making other plans.

But recently, I took a step back and thought about my life and everything in it. I realized that the one unequivocally great thing in my life right now is my friends, who are amazing and fun and keep me sane.

With the rest of my life, though? There’s not really anything else in my life with which I’m completely satisfied. Nothing is really that bad (I guess things could always be worse as long as I’m not starving to death in an impoverished country), but nothing is at the place I hoped it would be by now. I still don’t have any of the three things I want the most. I’m writing more, but still not nearly as much as I want to. I’ve gained an insane amount of weight in the last year. I have trouble getting enough sleep. And my career goals are still in progress.

Life is short, and it’s time to start working harder to change things. When this year comes to a close, maybe things will be better. For now, I’m choosing to be happy, but I’m also choosing to move forward.