The Poet

Recently, I met a man--a poet. He captivated me from the first glance. He's a handsome man, but that can't be the only reason. There are plenty of people who are handsome, but who don't light you up.

It was only after I'd watched his delicate hands move while he talked that I learned he was a poet. And isn't that Romantic? Every poet has got to be, more or less, the Wanderer Above the Sea Fog. Do you think he carries a little notebook in his breast pocket to write down phrases that strike him? My breath just caught thinking of it. 

He is not mine to have. But the thought of him! The thought of him is mine. My heart hums down through my arms, and every page of a library book I touch is a portal to the primeval soul of the poet when I'm graced with the thought of him. The moments of vague rhapsody pile up on top of each other in the seconds that I live inside the thought of him.

Once, long ago, I wrote about whether it was moral to appreciate someone just for their outer beauty, since they did nothing to earn it. Now, though, I feel like the thought of him--that irrational romanticizing based on the extrapolation of the barest facts--sets me neatly inside the web of the human experience. We are all bound to one another in great jumbles of gossamer threads.

2018

2018 was the year of

getting my dream job at UVU Institutional Research

ordering Dominos

running & listening to The Greatest Showman soundtrack

becoming regulars at the karaoke place

watching Olympic figure skating

going to the movies

graduating from UVU

facetiming my parents every Sunday

getting my first "You up?" message on a dating app (I answered "No")

caring about the Oscars

going to Buffalo Wild Wings more than anyone should

getting into Hozier

living with Brooke again

perfecting my Julie Andrews impression

becoming even bester friends with Wes

playing a game I invented called "my team your team"

listening to podcasts

watching Lady Bird a million times

taking my first solo trip

watching Queer Eye

interviewing for jobs

peeing myself from overheating

being in a non-book club

trying my first acai bowl

reaching my 10,000th day of life

fangirling for the first time (for Sam Smith)

getting hit on at the Renaissance Faire

being flown out for an interview

sitting in a chair Obama once sat in

riding Amtrak for the first time

finally going to Mount Rushmore

moving to DC for good

living with Kaitlin again

reading the entire Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series

becoming good enough friends with my niece Zaley that she'll never again forget who I am

getting a gym membership

never shaving

buying a mattress

finally getting those Adidas all the cool girls wear

actually checking Twitter regularly

finally going to the Museum of African American History and Culture

ending the year with a stomach bug and not leaving the house for 5 days straight

Ghosts

Things haunt you differently than you think they will.

Sometimes I have this mental image of some large field or room full to single people trying to find each other. They walk around until they find someone they want to stand next to. But they’re not alone. Everyone is trailed by a line of ghosts. The ghosts are those we’ve dated, those we’ve liked, those we’ve hurt and who have hurt us. Ghosts of all the people we’ve loved before, chaperoning our new relationships.

How do the ghosts line up? Is it in chronological order, a timeline of who we are in the form of those we let close to us? Your first boyfriend always right behind you, reminding you that you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him?

Is it in reverse chronological order? With your most recent love standing behind you, casting his shadow on the way you feel about every interaction with the person you’ve found yourself standing next to?

What’s the most fascinating to me is when they line up in order of importance. With the one who haunts you to the greatest degree always right there like a devil on your shoulder.

It’s often surprising to turn and see who is standing there first. How did he cut in line in front of these others who have more right to be here? He smiles shyly and waves. Your boyfriends in positions 2 and 3 roll their eyes like, “What’s this guy doing here?”

You sometimes forget the trail of ghosts is there, of course. But often I realize who is first in line by the way I see flashes of his face in the faces of so many others. I swipe right on anyone on dating apps who has the specter of his face in theirs. That must mean something, for them to have a little bit of him in them.

It’s also strange to crane your neck and see who’s at the back of the line. They’re dim, and they’re trailing behind, like they almost forgot to line up. I squint to make out their faces. Oh! Him! I never think of him!

And—it’s so crazy—once I start to think of those cabooses, I remember that they were some of the worst. They said the things that were the most unintentionally harmful. They made the silliest choices. Why aren’t they at the front, mocking me?

In the middle of the pack, some of them have become chummy. They’re friends now. You like that, but mostly you ignore them.

It doesn’t make sense. But at least as the time drags on, I don’t have to stand there alone.

Everything's in the air, and you're frozen

I've never been one for podcasts, but that's always been something I wanted to change. Pretty sure I was made for podcasts.

Betsy suggested The RFK Tapes, and I found the one that hooked me. I love the 60s and politics and, also, as it turns out, conspiracy theories. Go give it a listen.

So then I thought, hey, why not listen to Serial?

Bingeing these two podcasts has given me a lot to think about concerning the nature of truth and lies and memory. How can two people avow with all their hearts things which are opposites? Should we assume they are both telling the truth? Or both lying? And can we actually remember anything? Can we truly know anything that happened to us?

I was listening to Episode 7 of Serial, the one where Sarah Koenig is talking to Deirdre Enright, a lawyer who runs the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law. Koenig had Enright and her team look at the case to see what they thought of it--whether they could poke holes in it, or whether they thought there was enough evidence for a conviction.

Then Koenig asks Enright how common it is for her to have these flip flopping moments, which she, and we as the audience, constantly have. You hear one bit of testimony and you think, "Oh, he's guilty." And the next you think, "He has to be innocent. There's no way."

This is how Enright answers:

"I tell people all the time, you are juggling, and everything's in the air, and you're frozen. You have to stay there until you've eliminated all questions. Because if you come down or catch one and get attached to it, you're gonna make the same mistakes that law enforcement do."

Forgive me for the metaphor, but this felt so similar to how I feel about trying to be a Christian. If you start down the road of thinking, "Yes, Christianity is right and the Church is right," you're convinced. But if you start down the road thinking, "There are too many questions. This can't be right," then you can be equally convinced.

I think the secret is that you're juggling. I think we have the wrong idea of faith. That faith is to find the one ball that we need to hold on to, so we can let all the other ones drop. 

But in Hebrews we learn that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

I think that means faith is the juggling. We hope one of the balls is the right one, and that there is some evidence for that, so the substance of that hope is continuing to juggle.

She says frozen, but she means committed. She means skin in the game. She means wholehearted. "You have to stay there until you've eliminated all questions." The thing is, I don't think we can eliminate all questions. At least not until the afterlife when we get to meet God. So we're locked into the act of juggling--frozen, committed wholeheartedly to it.

When we take shortcuts, we think we've found the right ball, when we don't do the methodical work of juggling, we make mistakes. We put the wrong things in prison. We let the wrong things go free.

Faith is an action, we learn. Sarah Koenig's podcast is an act of faith. I haven't finished it, yet, so no spoilers. But if in the end, we don't know the answers, we've still done the faithing, with all that tireless asking and juggling.

Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television

Sometimes TV shows last for too long. The original premise no longer applies, and you have to take mental leaps to imagine what's keeping the characters together. Actors leave to pursue other projects, leaving gaping holes in the cast. After winding through season after season, ends must be tied up quickly at the last minute.

But I think there's a virtue in those later seasons. 

In real life, characters come and go. Sometimes they guest star but never make it to the regular cast. Sometimes they're absent for a few episodes and it leaves you wondering why. But life continues. The original premise has shifted, but at its heart, your life is still the same show.

Later seasons have a freedom. They're free from the formula of what they were. Even when that formula was for something amazing, the freedom to do something new and different is exciting. Kind of like how I get nostalgia for everything that's happened to me, but I keep doing new things I've never done.

TV shows are friends. You love them like people. You love all of them. 

Like Abed said in the series finale of Community:

"TV defeats its own purpose when it's pushing an agenda, or trying to defeat other TV, or being proud or ashamed of itself for existing. It's TV; it's comfort.

"It's a friend you've known so well, and for so long you just let it be with you. And it needs to be okay for it to have a bad day or phone in a day.

"And it needs to be okay for it to get on a boat with Levar Burton and never come back. Because eventually, it all will."

Actors I Will See Movies For

Males

1. Daniel Day-Lewis

My love for DDL stems from his portrayal of John Proctor in The Crucible. Instead of reading the play, we watched the movie in 11th grade English, and I was like, "Whoa, this is really good." Luckily, Katie already liked it, so my love for The Crucible was nurtured and grew.

Loving DDL in one role is one thing, but when you realize he's the most intense method actor on the planet, you have to love him even more. Did you know he almost became a cabinetmaker instead of an actor? Imagine how good his cabinets would be.

In 2012, he played the titular role in Lincoln. I was already predisposed to love that movie, and DDL's portrayal was amazing and earned him his third Academy Award for Best Actor.

Lately, I saw DDL in his final role, Phantom Thread. I loved every line on his face, his wry smile, his caustic manner. I wanted him to win Best Actor for that role because he is, in every situation, the BEST ACTOR. 

2. Leonardo DiCaprio

When I was a kid in the 90s, Katie had a middle grades biography of Leonardo DiCaprio. I was unimpressed by his feminine face back then, and scorned older girls that fawned over him. 

My love blossomed for Leo when I saw him in Catch Me If You Can. His face and body had filled out, and he was smart and sly and broken. His wikipedia bio lists his trademarks as "often plays conflicted, tortured-by-their-own-demons characters, who need to deal with their past." Does he actually play anything else?

I love that he uses his fame to further environmental causes. I love that I used to hate that about him when I was younger and more conservative. I love that I like him more the older he gets.

3. Jason Segel

I started loving Jason Segel when I watched Freaks & Geeks. His character Nick is a babe. Between his floppy hair and his dopey crush on Lindsay, he was definitely the one my inner teenager had a crush on. (Not to mention the time he gets into disco dancing!)

Since that show is only a season, I started watching How I Met Your Mother, mostly for Jason Segel. I love him for being the everyman. For being huge and having a dad bod and bringing that adorable eager nerdiness into all his characters. And for being hi-larious. In real life, no question, Jason Segel is the one you want to be with.

Females

1. Winona Ryder

No surprise, I also love Winona because of The Crucible. It probably didn't hurt that we also watched The Age of Innocence in that same English class, which somehow ALSO starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.

I love Winona for being versatile. I think she can do freaking anything. She can be sickly sweet or evil to the core. She did the over-the-top hysterics of Joyce in Stranger Things with so sympathetically. 

Seriously, when I turned on Stranger Things for the first time, like a year after it came out, I was like, "Why did no one tell me Winona Ryder was in this? I would have watched it a lot sooner!"

2. Saoirse Ronan

Maybe this isn't fair, because Saoirse's only been on the scene for a little while, but I love her so much. Again, my love for her stems a lot from her role in Lady Bird, which I've watched 3 times in the last month. #sorrynotsorry

Saoirse is crazy talented, though. She has the maturity to play someone who is young, but complex. I think of her as the anti-Jennifer Lawrence, who is cast in roles that are too old for her on account of her complexity and maturity. I see Saoirse as having the maturity to play young characters with a lot of dignity.

Plus, she's someone I want to hang out with in real life. I feel like she's my friend. I feel like she'd like me if she knew me.

Honorable Mention:

Domnhall Gleeson

Tom Hanks

Elizabeth Banks

Rachel McAdams

Come Alive.

I've recently had to come to grips with the fact that I actually really do like musical theater. I feel like hating musical theater was always an, if not integral, very well-defined part of the Rachel Persona. 

But I like the idea of singing songs when you feel an emotion. I mean, like, I do that. At least, I listen to songs when I feel an emotion. Maybe if we all sang out whatever we felt, we'd all be more mentally healthy.

So anyway. Kristen got me to see The Greatest Showman. It's not the best movie in the world, but it is very enjoyable to watch.

And the music. It's so good.

Ever since, I've had the soundtrack as my running playlist. It's 40 minutes long, which is a good length for a run. "The Other Side" is a good pacer. The rhythm of "From Now On" is so infectious that I have actually skipped/danced to this down the running path, in full sight of other runners and groups of kids riding their bikes. One windy day when I was feeling a lot of emotions, I ran straight into the wind while listening to "Never Enough" and I cried.

I'm always pretty excited when "Come Alive" comes on. It's the part in the movie where P. T. Barnum has recruited all his circus freaks and he's trying to inspire them to put themselves out there for their first show.

I recently listened to a podcast about confronting stigma. A journalist named Johann Hari was on the show, who writes about drug addiction and the failure of the war on drugs. According to his research, besides the chemical aspect, we fall into addiction because we have a lack of connection in our lives. Those with strong support systems are better able to fight drug addiction.

He tells this story of going to this devastated neighborhood in Cleveland, "and it was one of those streets where a third of the houses had been demolished, a third had been abandoned, and a third still have people living in them-- huge addiction problems, as you could just see walking around."

At one of the inhabited houses he met this woman. "She was talking about what the area used to be like, how everything that made the area make sense--the work, the sense of regularity, the sense of the future--was all gone. And she's trying to describe what the area used to be like, and she meant to say, when I was young. What she actually said is, when I was alive."

That anecdote has lingered with me, and changed what that song means to me.

I wouldn't have put it that way myself, but I feel that way sometimes. I know that I used to be alive, when I wasn't so afraid and I didn't wonder about so many things. I know exactly when I died that deathless death. I can count the number of years I've lived as a zombie.

But in the song, he says that "the world becomes a fantasy and you're more than you could ever be 'cause you're dreaming with your eyes wide open."

When he says that, I stand up a little straighter. I let my legs carry me forward without having to strain to make them go. And I feel like the run I'm on is the waking dream I'm dreaming. The dream I'm making come true with every time my feet pound the earth below.