No, He's Not My Boyfriend

The first time I was assigned a romantic partner based on hair color, I was five. His name was Cody, and we were both blonde. Obviously, it was meant to be. I retaliated by declaring my intention to marry another boy, one with brown hair, and spent the next several years fiercely defending a crush based more on spite than attraction.

The second time I was assigned a romantic partner based on hair color, I was fifteen. His name was Devin, a church friend, and it wasn’t the first time I’d had to convince someone that was all he was. It took me a week to reassure a friend with a crush that she wasn’t getting between anything, and I nearly hated him, I think, by the time she believed I wasn’t in love.

The hair color incident, though, took place several months later, after his romance with my friend had flourished, then immediately crashed and burned, the way long distance relationships between high schoolers, based on a single meeting, tend to do. It was New Year’s Eve, and our church was holding an all-night event with two others. Devin and I were on nursery duty, with a dozen small children, loud and far too energetic at midnight, none of whom we’d met before.

The culprit was a little boy, four or five, very cute.

Not cute enough to pull a stunt like that.

Of course, when he realized that I was fifteen, and Devin still only fourteen, he came to his senses and saw that it would never work—apparently you have to be compatible in age as well as hair color. A narrow escape, but Devin, I nearly kissed you then and there—spite, again. I don’t like being told who I’m allowed to be with, even by preschoolers.

I don’t like to be told what to do in general (a source of great conflict between me and precocious young cousins), but about my love life, happily nonexistent, I get particularly testy.

I recently went with a male friend to Scandinavia, and I cannot count the number of times the following conversation occurred.

“So you’re here with your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Oh. Your sister, then.”

“No.”

At this point the questioner stares at us with an expression of blank confusion, and I take a casual step behind Jamie. When men begin this interrogation, I always get the impression there’s one more question they’re dancing around: “Hey, dude, are we gonna have a problem if I bang this chick against a train station wall and have my way with her?”

It’s not that I’m scared of these men—I have a one inch blade in my pocket, and can use it to kill someone in three different ways. Not that I’ve ever tried. But they’re a nuisance, with all of their assumptions. I am travelling with Jamie, therefore I must in some way belong to him. It is not a problem I expected to encounter outside a work of historical fiction.

So, a note to all those who have ever suggested I am or ought to be dating my friends, whether you are other friends, small children, or creepy Norwegian men: No, he is not my boyfriend. I don’t care how old he is, and I do not care about the color of his hair. No, he is not my brother, or my boyfriend, and no, you cannot be my boyfriend instead.   

No, I do not have a boyfriend. No, I do not want one.

Maybe if I dyed my hair purple, there would be no one left to set me up with.

Adventures in Accidental Tourism

(I wrote this ages ago and I'm too lazy to adjust it to reflect that. Sorry.)

My favorite thing to do in London is get lost in it. I have been here for three days, and have managed to get lost on every one of them.

London is a big place, full of many big things, most of which I have not seen. Big Ben and the London Eye were noticed in passing. Buckingham Palace remains a mystery. Rumors about the historical nature of that large building down the street persist, but as I have passed it only alone in the dark, I cannot quite bring myself to care. It is a landmark that points toward home; that is enough for me.

I recently walked past a man dressed as a woman, complete with wigs in multiple locations. I entered four bookshops on my first day, and came across some excellent gelato. Having spent long hours squinting at street signs and praying to survive the crossing, I have come to the conclusion that both maps and traffic laws here are based more on hope than fact. I have passed six Southampton Rows now. One of them, I’m told, leads to my hotel.

Completely by accident, I have found the home of Charles Dickens. Also by accident, I have found myself at Parliament, the Tate Modern Art Museum, and five more bookstores. It is true that I have been provided with a map, but even if I was good with maps, I doubt I would use it. The lives of those who are not chronically lost must be very boring indeed.

There is a street called the Strand. It is also called about six other things, but the Strand was the most interesting and memorable of them. I’ve walked up and down it several times—straight lines are important for the easily lost, although I’ve still managed, somehow, to get turned around a few times.

The three months I’ve spent in Europe have been strange, stressful, and utterly overwhelming. There are a lot of things, I’m sure, that I could have learned in London. I could have paid some attention to Parliament. I could have actually entered the Tate. At the very least, I could have taken a photo of the plaque informing me that I was at Dickens’ house. But I didn’t. And in the four days I have left in London, I probably won’t.

I’ve learned a lot about the places I’ve seen—who lived there, who died there, what they wrote, who they worshipped, how they worshipped, who they loved. I have cried for dead men I never knew, I have walked on the graves of my ancestors, and I am tired. For three months I have known where I’m going. Today I don’t.

The sky is overcast, the light breaking through it soft and dull. The streets are dirty. People ignore me, which is a blessing. They don’t explain the history of the architecture I pass, they don’t rake their eyes slowly up and down my body, and they don’t whistle. I make up my own histories for each interesting building as I walk by, and I don’t ask for directions.

In a bookstore on a dirty, quiet corner, a woman from Topeka tells me about the weekend she just spent in the Lake District, and the week she spent in Minneapolis ten years ago. In another, three or six or twelve blocks down, depending on how many wrong turns it takes to get there, the cashier and I fangirl gleefully over the new book I’m buying, recently written by an amazing and underappreciated author.

There are a lot of ways to be lost, and I’ve experienced most of them. This endless tour of Europe has been constant structured chaos, and in the midst of it I’ve lost a lot of things, like peace, faith in humanity, and my sense of self. Sometimes when you get lost enough physically, you end up finding yourself emotionally, or spiritually, or however you lost yourself. That’s what I’m trying to do.

So I didn’t learn a lot in London. But I’ve had an even more valuable experience. Here is a city full of normal people living normal lives, surrounded by history but not yet a part of it. I don’t like to go looking for things; I only feel like a failure when they constantly elude me. Beauty is better when you stumble upon it by accident.

I’m sure there are a lot of great things for a tourist to do in London, but I can’t give you much information about any of them. For three months I’ve watched the lives of people who died a long, long time ago. This week I chose to close all the books, turn in all the audio guides, and sit on the outskirts of lives still being lived. I took a few wrong turns, I missed a few great sites, and I found some peace.

Not all who wander are lost. But I am, and that’s the way I like it.

Selfies with Dead People

It’s been a few days now since the latest bombing in France, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t usually think about things like that.

I remember 9/11 vividly, walking down the stairs on a morning in second grade to mushroom clouds on TV. I remember the moment of silence in a school assembly, and I remember the whispers and giggles I heard all around me in that moment. My classmates and I have been asked, nearly annually since then, to remember that day, and to write those memories down in various classes. So here is what I do not remember: the state of shock in which we apparently spent the rest of the day. Little girls crying for a thousand people they’d never met, dead in a situation they didn’t understand. The horrified five year old gasps as our principal explained. The moment when we all joined together in a perfectly silent moment of silence, united by our sorrow and fear. I think the people I know who say these things believe them. But I know they made them up, quietly and by accident, over the course of a dozen years. It’s a pretty story—as pretty as it gets went you’re talking about terrorists.

We were eight. It didn’t exactly touch us. The aftermath has, of course, for every moment of the last thirteen years. But that tragedy was not my tragedy, and in the years since then I have not spent much time paying attention to the real world. Fairy tales are happening, you know. So this, watching Paris live on an Irish television, Paris where I was staying a month ago, is the first time that terrorism has ever been quite real to me. And after a few minutes discussing the attack, the newscasters switched seamlessly to local sports and the question of whether or not the Northern Lights will be visible in Ireland.

And, okay. Paris is far away, and Ireland has its own stuff going on. But sports? Really?

I’m not actually mad at the Irish news station or anything. It’s not a big deal, probably, in the long run. They switched back to Paris as soon as there was something new to report. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about, and being bothered by, a lot lately.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I went on a class trip to Italy and Greece. And it was quite a trip. I have a lot of stories, some of which I’ve promised never to tell. But the one thing that has really stuck with me, in a quiet, insidious way, is the day we spent in Pompeii. The city itself was fantastic. But we ended our tour at the plaster casts of the people killed by the ash from Mt. Vesuvius. And people were still laughing, joking, having a good time. They took selfies with the casts.

Repeat, they took selfies with the remains of innocent people killed in a horrific tragedy two thousand years ago. And I was seventeen, and I was really shaken up about it. I’m still really shaken up about it, actually, but there were a few years there where I didn’t have much reason to think about it. And then I came to spend a semester travelling around Europe.

It started in France. We were studying poetry from World War I. Absolutely beautiful, absolutely heartbreaking. So we visited a few battlefields, a few war memorials. I walked through trenches, and I climbed down into craters left by bombs, and I thought about the poems we’d read, and how stupid and pointless the whole war had been. And people took pictures. So many pictures. Trenches, monuments, bunkers, gravestones. I didn’t. It felt weird. It felt wrong. We were walking on the ground where men had died, and we were talking and laughing like it was any other tour on any other day.

I did take one picture. The landscape around the trenches was fascinating, and I thought I might use the image as reference for a writing project or something later. But it didn’t really turn out, and I’m kind of glad. It was beautiful, but they still find bombs on that ground. I’m not sure it’s right to make it the backdrop of some fantasy.

About a week ago we were at the Titanic Museum in Belfast. And the actual museum was tasteful, tactful, and generally well done. But it shared a building with two Titanic restaurants and a Titanic gift shop. They were selling Titanic teddy bears. Hats with the name of the captain. Cheap plastic replicas of that one piece of jewelry from that movie.

“My Parents Went to the Titanic, and All They Got Me Was This T-Shirt.” Kid, be glad they got themselves back to you. There’s a Titanic studio across the street. Titanic cafes, Titanic nightclubs, guys. Everyone was freaking out, I guess because of the movie, and it was just weird.

We were in a gigantic monument to death and failure. I’m not sure the gift shop was sending an appropriate message.

So forget about the Irish newscasters. That doesn’t matter. It’s just what got me writing. Imagine people pausing, a week after 9/11, to take a selfie in the rubble. Imagine the outrage. The fact that a tragedy took place a hundred or a thousand years ago doesn’t mean that you can just stop regarding it a something worth dignity and respect. Dead bodies are not good selfie partners. A war memorial is not the place to have a photo shoot. The sinking of the Titanic does not need to be commemorated with teddy bears and bobble heads. People died here. People died. And you just photographed the gravestone because you thought the last name was spelled funny. Just stop, okay? Just stop.

Leave Them Kids Alone

As many of you know, I am spending this fall and winter studying in Europe. Obviously, my car couldn’t come abroad with me. This means that my little brother has a car to drive for his senior year of high school. Which is great, of course, but I went with my mom to pick up the forms from his school, and it honestly made me feel a little sick.

First of all, forms? You have a license. You have a car. You drive the car into the parking lot and park it. A few hours later you drive it home again. It’s not that complicated. Why would you need paperwork?

But you know, whatever. He had to pay for a parking pass, so maybe it’s just receipts or something.

Nope. You put your parking sticker on your car. You can only drive that car. No one but you can drive that car. If your car is broken down one day so you drive your dad’s, bam. No more parking. If you’re home sick but you let a friend or a sibling take your car to school, bam. No more parking.

No picking people up or dropping them off at the door, never mind that parents and school buses do that every day. No loitering in the parking lot. No leaving in your car, under any circumstances, during school hours. You got a dentist appointment? Your parents are at work and your little brother needs to go home sick? You just finished literally puking your guts out, your parents are at a retreat up north for the weekend, and you need to go home sick? Too bad. Say goodbye to that parking spot, kid. And say bye to your locker and your friends while you’re at it—you just might get expelled.

This is what I hate—what I have always hated—about schools. When I was in fifth grade, one of the boys decided to decorate the bathroom. For the rest of the year, any time a kid wanted to pee, he had to bring along a teacher to supervise. When I was in eighth grade, all the teachers defaulted to considering us bad kids, because eighth grade had been a rough year for the class above us. When I was in ninth grade, you could get expelled, and possibly arrested, for bringing in a plastic butter knife. My high school used to have microwaves, but we all lost them because a couple kids left messes in them.

So here’s a helpful tip for all you educators out there: Students, kids? We are human beings. We are smaller and less experienced than you, but we are all complex individuals with our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and if you think you can invalidate that by treating us like one collective mass of mindless mess-makers, honey, you are in the wrong business. Go work at a zoo or something.

Two forms of discipline that have never once been actually successful: 1) Punishing an entire group for the crimes of a few. 2) Rewarding one person for doing something that everyone else is expected to do every day.

These are both things that schools thrive on. Three kids don’t do their homework? Whole class has extra reading tonight. Once I had a teacher who told us we didn’t have to turn any homework in until the end of the semester. The one time I actually put my work off, having been told it was okay, everyone else had the same idea for that assignment, and suddenly it wasn’t okay anymore. She singled me out, and she made me cry. One kid never does his homework? Offer him a nice dinner or something from the vending machine, and he might come through for once. But the people who always do their homework? We get nothing, except maybe yelled at for one little failure. I missed one assignment between sixth and twelfth grade. The guy across from me finished one. So where’s my free ice cream, huh?

Schools don’t treat students like people. Not usually. They only notice us if we do something spectacular, whether it’s good or bad. And if it’s good you get singled out, maybe, but if it’s bad you’re all lumped together, and everyone suffers. So you know what? Run through the hallways. Scream at the top of your lungs. Homework? Forget about it. Go ahead and decorate the bathroom however you like, and leave all your food in the running microwave until it explodes. I mean, why not? If you’re getting punished either way, you might as well have some fun first.

Okay, don’t do that. But seriously. If you’re an adult in a position of authority, especially over children, let them commit the crime before you make them do the time. If people are going to get blamed for something no matter what, they’re gonna be a lot more inclined to actually do the thing. And we’re children, not terrorists. Just chill, okay? If you don’t treat me like a monkey, I won’t throw poop in the bathrooms. If you stop rewarding kids for rare displays of homework, I’ll stop doing mine so rarely. I’m not going to slit your throat with plastic cutlery, and who on earth is going to suffer if I drive my mom’s car to school one morning?

I’m a person. My needs are just as important as yours, and my thoughts are just as valid. But if you want to treat me like some kind of chaos demon, you can bet I’m going to retaliate by acting like one. Sometimes I think teachers get so caught up in things that they forget they’re dealing with fellow human beings. Don’t forget that, okay? Because I’m really sick of seeing kids treated like prisoners instead of students. Don’t treat us like that. Please.

Moneylenders in the Temple

I’ve never understood the thing where big ancient churches hang signs on the door demanding silence. Or the ones that kick you out if you’re not wearing the right kind of clothes.

Seriously, guys, the Vatican was cool, but after they check your passport and your purse, they check your skirt length.

Church has always been loud for me. Faith is loud, just slightly discordant singing, kids shrieking and laughing in the background. The fights you get into with your friends between Sunday school and service, the boys who throw balls that get stuck on the roof. It’s arguments about set lists and your dad downstairs rehearsing his sermon. It’s puppet shows in the morning, a teenage girl trying to be a middle-aged cowboy. Little kids sticking Bible stories on flannel boards, the littler ones crying in the background. Church has been a lot of things. It’s never been silent.

Notre Dame is beautiful. You can light a candle for five euro. For one or two, you can have a penny stamped to look like the pope. Maybe it’s exactly what some people need. I saw them praying there.

And Canterbury, well, that was an amazing place. All those artifacts, all that history. The restaurant and the gift shop right between the front door and the back pew.

They’re incredible. But I can’t find God beneath those high ceilings.

Faith is dying in Europe. That’s what they say. I guess I wouldn’t have much faith either, if my church was mostly a museum. And it’s not fair, maybe, to be so judgmental about it. People worship in different ways. But I don’t like to walk out of a church feeling empty, and if they spent less money on maintaining their stained glass, they could spend more on helping people in need.

It’s pretty, sure. But the first church I remember was held in a Jazzercise, and windows or not, it was just as good as Notre Dame.

Faith is dying in college. They say that too. Or high school. Well, as a college student, I can tell you one of the reasons why.

We’re passionate, in our teens and twenties. Full of hope and anger and righteous indignation. We want to change the world. We want to save it. And all through our childhoods we’ve talked about the church, and how it does that. When you’re twenty one, you just want everything to be fair. You want to help people. So you walk in on Sunday morning ready to give to the poor, feed the hungry, defend the defenseless. And then you find out all they want to do with the money you’re giving is install a new bell tower?

No wonder we’re leaving in droves.

And there have been books written—so many books, and I’ve read them all—about how to keep young people in the church. Well, here’s how you do it, guys: Stop selling overpriced crepes and pope dolls in the foyer, and start actually living like Jesus did.  

I’ll post all my pictures of the cathedral on Facebook, but give me a church in a closed down factory, any day.  

Hecuba

Hecuba. Hecuba. Hecuba. Mother, captive, queen. I don’t know what to say about her, but I know that something must be said. So we interrupt our scheduled programming to talk about last night, when I saw Euripides performed in Stratford-upon-Avon. There will be time for Sexual Abuse in Folk Traditions another day. And tomorrow, of course, we see Shakespeare, but how, even here, could it possibly compare to the beauty of Hecuba?

Don’t get me wrong; Shakespeare is great. But Euripides, guys. I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to see a Greek tragedy on stage. And technically, I guess I didn’t. It was all rewritten, perspectives shifted, a new and different story. But Euripides was there. And Hecuba. Hecuba. I have no words for her, or none I can think of now. Fortunately, there’s an entire blog to be spent searching for them.

I have always had a soft spot for the women of Greek tragedy. I have risen to their defense, every time, no matter how little there was to be said, since the first time I read Sophocles.

Medea, well, there’s not much wiggle room there. She did what she did, and it was an awful thing to do. But oh, how she must have paid for it after, when she saw what she’d done in her madness. Medea, sacrificing everything she had for Jason, Medea, rejected and abandoned, Medea, alone with the blood of her sons on her hands. Medea.  Antigone, poor Antigone, always in the right, and always doomed to fail.

And how I fought for Clytemnestra. Her daughter dead, her husband gone for ten years, fighting for another woman, returning with another and the two children she’d born him. I would have killed him too. Agamemnon, that monster, so many words to describe him that I dare not type—I know my grandparents will be reading this post. I have seen a thousand-thousand portrayals of Agamemnon, that killer of daughters, that killer of nations, that monster disguised as a man. A thousand-thousand portrayals, and never once have I felt an ounce of sympathy.

In Hecuba I did. In Hecuba I saw him slaughter children, and for his sake—for his sake as well as theirs—I nearly cried. Agamemnon, a man in an impossible situation, the blood of his daughter still wet on his hands, Agamemnon, fighting only to survive the war, Agamemnon fighting harder for the trust of his troops than the gold of the Trojans. Agamemnon, eternally alone, the ghosts of little girls and boys to haunt his nights, and nothing but death awaits him in his longed-for home. For this monster I could have wept.

Cassandra, the girl who bore him those two children, the un-believed prophetess, the Trojan princess who foresaw the end, Cassandra was perhaps the greatest feat of the show. Bitter and angry in modern dress, a beautiful anachronism on the Grecian stage. I had never imagined her portrayed like this, but the classical character, always set apart from the world by her gift and her curse—of course she was bitter, un-trusted, unloved. She could never belong with the rest of them, never fit in with anyone of her world. Her presence on the stage was jarring, disconcerting, utterly perfect.

And Hecuba, Hecuba, the woman herself, her husband and her sons all dead, sitting on his throne with weeping girls around her, holding his head in her hands. There were few props in the performance, but that head, oh, I could see it, though she held only air.

You may have read the original play by Euripides—I have not, though I was given a detailed summary. That is a story of the Greeks, the victors. This was a story of Troy. In the original Hecuba goes mad after the death of her last and youngest son, blinds a man, kills his sons in turn.

This Hecuba did not. She was anger and agony and mercy, fighting fiercely for her children’s lives, failing, yielding, ultimately, with dignity and grace. She died still a queen.

I have another two months now to spend traveling across Europe. We leave the day after tomorrow. But if it were up to me, I think I would just stay here, watching every performance of Hecuba until it ended.

(Also, it was my birthday, and oh my goodness, what an amazing way to spend it. Twenty-three, you have a tough act to follow.)