Signs I'm An Adult

This summer, I made the move north to Minneapolis because I liked the city from the little I'd seen of it and I had a scattered few friends there, almost half of whom moved away within a few months of moving to town.  One has come back and brought another friend, but the mutating social network is a different story entirely.

I have my own place, a full-time job with no end date, insurance, a retirement fund, and this lingering sensation that I am at once older than I expected to be to be sitting in my pajamas at 10:00am on a Monday and too young to be an adult in charge of the care and keeping of myself and a small furry critter.  The job, while making me more financially comfortable and solvent than any job I've had before, has done less to make me fee like an adult that a few things I would like to share.

This year, I have become the proud owner of the following:

1. An iron*

2. An ironing board **

3. A vacuum***

And done these grown up things:

4. Had multiple dinner parties

5. Separated my darks from whites****







*I bought the smallest iron I could find.  The face is hardly larger than my hand.

**I almost justified putting a towel on the floor and calling it good enough, but then opted for the half-size ironing board.

***It's a hand-held battery powered vacuum.  But rechargeable!  And larger than the one you're thinking of, I am certain; it's not some lame handi-vac but it is certainly no Dyson.

****Really I just looked for things that probably wouldn't show indigo that I was terrified would bleed from my new jeans and I couldn't bring myself to wash them on their own.

I'm not much of a poetry writer, but I like it.  And I like the people that come together over it.  Just over a week ago, I had the opportunity to go to a poetry reading in Minneapolis and it just so happened to be curated by the Poet Laureate of Minnesota.  I later found a collaborative work of hers in the vault of the Special Collections department at the Central Branch of the Hennepin County Public Library.  Hand made paper and letterpress printing, it was in all senses of the idea a work of art.

Nothing I write much compares, but it is nonetheless fun to play with words and form in a way that prose doesn't have the flexibility for.  So here I'll share the little idea I had as I walked from my temporary work to my temporary home through a short-lived and amusing flurry more beautiful than I had seen in a while.  But with this I would like to declare that while I love winter, I am ready for it to be warm again.  Warm and free of coats.



There is a world where the quiet
Hush






Is loud and rushing
It falls briskly
Battered north and south
Left and right
While a boy stands watching
At the corner of
Here and there.



He stands, watches
There is no globe to keep him
But the wind deceives
Mimicking a curious hand
Shaking the rushing quiet
Until it sends the world spinning
Flake by flake.



But leaves no trace
The warm ground drinks hungrily
And takes in the quiet
Drop
Drop
Drop

Eating

I like to go out.  I like standing in a forest and feeling the space between trees; I like, on occasion, the oppressive crowd of a popular bar; I like to park in a coffee shop and share space with caffeinated clients and observing baristas.  Spaces, and the objects and people within them, have different personalities fueled by the community in which they are situated.  Every time I come back to Grand Rapids I think about who I am surrounded by where I live, not only in active friendships but also in the sort of off-gassed attitudes of everybody else out and about in town.  The personality of a group of disconnected people reinforce the personality of a city and may possibly be part of the reason a few disappointing things, people, or experiences can drive a wedge between a person and a place.

I was out last night with my dear friend Rachel and she pointed out all the young men entering the bar when it dawned on me.  Here in Grand Rapids, downtown on a Saturday night, there are young professionals out socializing.  They frequent bars and restaurants and coffee shops that have emerged in response to the young peoples' interest in reasonably-priced food and drink that exceeds their college budget but matches their slightly more generous income garnered at the start of their career.  Some food is more costly, some less so.  Many offerings are swanked-up comfort foods or entry-level unusual.  We shared a few small plates.  A delicious poutine with stick to your ribs gravy and cheese curds from a local farm; a tasty mac and cheese with gruyere because why not; and kale chips, light and crumbly.  Nothing particularly unusual, save that poutine has only recently begun appearing on American menus west of Pennsylvania.

Grand Rapids does food in a way that a young person wants to experience it.  A little adventure, and lot of quality, and a middling amount of money.  Champaign caters to the college, the cheap, the drunk, the disinterested in flavor.  I, of course, am wearing rose-colored glasses in reflection, but the difference still stands.  Champaign in many ways revels in the tradition of the college, the ability to buy alcohol young and drink it on the cheap, the draw of fried foods with the metabolism to keep the fattening effects at bay.  For undergraduate students, this is exciting and fun, part of the reason they have come to central Illinois.  In Grand Rapids, graduates stay and demand something else from the city.  These people begin to grow up and have asked the city to do so with them.  And I believe Grand Rapids has complied. 

The next place I live I hope to find something more similar to Grand Rapids in personality and perhaps I'll even stay put for more than twelve months in one place.

Snow

Stunning and arresting in its massive presence on a day like today, I am caught staring out the window realizing that snow makes itself known by filling and covering a landscape with a blanket that imitates negative space.

How a garden or field can look simultaneously stuffed to the gills and silently empty is strange and beautiful.

But hmm.  That is the nature of snow.

Conversion

One year ago, I stubbornly refused to acknowledge that the laptop, the stalwart white steed that bore be through my undergraduate years and was my companion to many a coffee shop here and abroad, was not really worth saving.

I saved it anyway.  At the time, I had killed the battery through neglect.  In contrast to my shiny new desktop, the now lumbering laptop, incapable of running Chrome, was far less compelling.  After returning from a coffee shop, the stalwart steed would remain in my bag and I would switch to working on my more ergonomic desktop (though my chair is nothing if not un-ergonomic).  With all that time running but not off, I drained the battery of any residual charge and turned my laptop into a portable desktop, functional but always in need of being plugged in.  I replaced the battery for much less than the cost of a new device of any kind and trudged through a year and a half of grad school without an easily tote-able device beside my Nook, which only worked to load some types of documents.

Things seemed generally fine until I started a new job this fall that requires me to work from anywhere between 1 and 4 different locations.  Without an easily movable device, much of my work became extremely segmented and I could not functionally work without packing 20 pounds of notebooks and electronics into a backpack.  When I discovered my faithful laptop had become too old to use Skype as anything other than a chat service, I realized it was time.

I had researched netbooks, chromebooks, tablets, and low-end laptops and found nothing in an acceptable price range than offered the portability and utility that I wanted.  A year ago I had heard whispers about Microsoft's Surface device, I had even seen a few in the wild, but the reviews were bad and I was discouraged.  But, while watching Doctor Who with a friend, I saw a commercial for this year's iteration.  I was intrigued.  In a moment of confusion, we decided to venture over to Best Buy and ask an actual human some questions and discovered that it was in fact as shiny as the commercial made it sound.

I hate to admit it, but I was loath to leave the Apple family.  My desktop, laptop, and phone all share genetic material, but Apple simply did not offer what I wanted in any format at any affordable price.  So I thought.  I researched; I asked friends questions and came to Christmas morning knowing precisely what I hoped my mother would help me acquire.

Sometimes I feel outrageous in my gadgetry, but I do not acquire new technology lightly.  I would have dragged out the life of my phone far longer if I hadn't smashed the screen and will likely still use my laptop for file storage/backup purposes.  But, for portability and travel/work/fun, I am delighted to have a new shiny toy. 

So here's to you, Microsoft, for making something of great utility at a very reasonable price point and endearing yourself to an Mac-lover.  Cheers.  Let's hope this is the beginning of a good relationship.

Cross Roads

In response to peer pressure from one of my coworkers, I have begun revisiting my undergrad thesis.  How that thing got the grade it did, I do not know.  I am deriving far too much pleasure from ripping it up and putting it back together again to be dissuaded from her suggestion to stay in town and apply for more school.

There is a compelling argument to be made for applying for a funded masters program.  To sit around all day reading and writing and to be paid to do it?  Sign me up!

But, if this comes at the cost of staying somewhere that makes me unhappy about the changes in my person that have resulted from living here?  I don't know that that justifies the offer.

I have once again been reminded that it is my not very secret passion to get a masters in English literature, possibly a PhD, and teach.  Happily train young brains how to write research papers and pull apart Shakespeare and appreciate the unstable authors who have written meandering works of genius that the casual reader often is ill-prepared to enjoy.

But to stay in Champaign to do that?

It may be financially free, but the cost to my soul and happiness would likely be too great.


Where to?

Where to?



And what to do while there, too?

Pocket-Sized

There are many distinct advantages to living in a world awash in technology.  Friends scattered around the globe are easier to reach, calling friends states and countries away costs pennies or nothing.  But in many ways our culture of correspondence has changed and makes that easy contact sometimes more difficult to maintain.

I used to write many actual letters but have stopped or slowed as a result of many factors.  People move, I have moved, I've lived close to and far from people in constant rotation.  The Post Office has now long since instituted price locking so that any stamp you purchase will suffice forever even if the price-per-stamp rises one or a few steps.  Why this doesn't inspire me to buy stamps by the hundreds, I do not know.

When my older sister, and many of my friends her age, first left for college, I kept in contact with them by letters.  Emailing wasn't as big; I myself was still using an archaic comcast.net account.  Facebook was still limited to college students, and texting was unbelievably expensive.  Letters made sense as the most cost effective means of transmitting more content in a fun and gratifying means.  Three years later, I left for college with the habit of putting pen to paper but with the introduction of Facebook and the distraction of studying, my letter writing dropped off to a much smaller roster.

Two summers between college I worked at a camp with little internet and even less cell reception and that roster swelled again.  Those summers were filled with late nights talking and looking at the star-filled sky sipping terrible hot chocolate that tasted wonderful in the way that winter beverages on cold summer nights can.  Our staff house was heated with a wood-burning stove (that we were supposed to use in the summer), and our costume closet stuffed with dresses from the seventies and eighties.

I miss those days.  And not only because the people were a delight to my soul and every day I got to play with pound upon pound of flour, pan upon pan of chicken, and smile upon smile of volunteers and campers.  Those days, outside the grasp of technology, making food from scratch, were as close as stepping into yesterday as I have gotten.

Recently my reading list has included the sentiments of many locovores and other types of food lovers who try to appreciate the convenience of low cost food but can't quite recover from the long-term debt we incur with our current agricultural systems.  They express sadness at the loss of the art of the butcher, the diminishing ability to find summer, fall, winter, and spring eggs that each have their own protein contents and work best or worst for souffles or pie crusts.

When eighty percent of the state of Illinois is covered in the same two plants, the world changes.

When American is distracted by the next new shiny toy, the newest phone, the best internet deal, we don't notice these changes because the technological shift doesn't fit in our pocket.

Our interests have become pocket-sized.  And I'm guilty of it too.