This is a Post about Baby Fat

My mom used to tell me that as a baby she had a hard time getting me to nap. When all else failed, she’d load me into the backseat of the car and drive around until I zonked out.

Driving home today I realized the same thing is still true, and it made me wonder whether things like that carry over a lifetime.

I’ve never been a napper, not even in college when I was supposed to have picked up a penchant for it. I only ever really nap when I’m really sick, but under the right circumstances I catch myself dozing off in the car (as a passenger!)

There’s a scar on the top of my right foot and nobody knows where it came from, even though I’ve had it as long as I remember. The same goes for the scar on the inside of my left pinky finger. I like the idea that mystery scars and birthmarks—I have the remnants of a raspberry on my left shoulder—are wounds from a past life. If there’s any truth to it, in my past life I got into the world’s strangest scuffles.

The older I get the more false memories I figure out, like the one where the bus crash in Simon Birch actually happened to me in the woods near my grandparents’ house.

As a kid I had a lot of imaginary friends, too, who I would walk home with from the bus stop and tell all about my family and my dogs and my school, where they were the new student. I wonder if imaginary friends and false memories and mystery scars and déjà vu all intersect on some plane where they come together meaningfully. Do kids still have imaginary friends? Is it a symptom of loneliness or a normal imaginative exercise?

Something anxious people joke about online is playing out “what ifs” in their heads at the worst possible times, like when we’re exhausted and trying desperately to fall asleep or we’re at work and have a deadline in an hour or something. Is this another iteration of imaginary friendships, this exercise in mental gymnastics of imagining if I said this clever or stupid thing to my friend or family member or colleague maybe things might be different or better or worse and oh god why didn’t I think of that superb comeback when someone said that shitty thing to me eight months ago? Anyone? Bueller?

I guess what I’m getting at is that I live in my head, like, a lot. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it’s an anxious thing. As a “writer”, when I decide I am one again after months and months of not bothering to try, sometimes I think if I write a short story or micro-fiction I can get it all out of my system, like maybe putting it in kind-of-nice words will get it out of my stupid brain and make it just some other story. Maybe those imaginary friendships I wish I had, even in adulthood, can exist and comfort me in fiction. Maybe not.

Was I just a super anxious baby and now I’m a super anxious adult baby? An anxious 23-year-old-infant who feels thirty? What could be worse?

Growing up—which, yes, I’m absolutely still doing—the concept of baby fat followed me around for years beyond the normal limits of what’s considered baby fat. I have a fast metabolism, I was a really active kid and teenager, and I have always been what doctors consider a “healthy” weight. Being tall helps. But eastern European women are built, as Lucy Dacus croons perfectly, “all soft shapes and lines / shape-shifting all the time.” I inevitably inherited the Polish baby-bearing hips and the broad, strong (lol) shoulders and the big feet and the tendency to carry weight in my trunk. Add onto that the luck of being tall and I look much like a goofy misshapen pear.

The women in my family have struggled my whole entire life with body image. Very openly. Very loudly. Very emotionally. The men in my family are lean and strong and unconcerned with how they look because, one, media doesn’t dictate that they should and, two, they get the job done. The powers that be cast me somewhere in between that lean and strong silhouette and the softer feminine one and so I have a whole host of body image issues where my upbringing and my feminist mentality are at odds.

Being a thin, white woman bitching about boy image is nothing new and not interesting or radical but in many ways, for me at least, it ties into my Midwestern identity and my issues with my family and with myself. It has always been a part of me. Watching my mom and grandma and aunt yo-yo diet my entire life was sure to lead to some kind of mental turmoil, given my cool genetics, right?

There was a summer in high school where I’d eat a shitload of ice cream everyday—not, like, a binge, I don’t think, but probably not a great idea for anyone—and obsessively weigh myself. I never purged or anything, and I don’t think I necessarily worked out any harder as a result of what showed up on the scale, but I knew as I did it something was wrong. I was a cheerleader in high school, so I burned off all the calories I ate and was strong and my body looked good and I had a mostly healthy relationship with my body, except that summer was probably after I was injured and couldn’t compete in the winter and felt terrible all the time.

My siblings were small when I was in high school and so I took them to the beach often—the one I wrote about in RIVRGRL—and when it was an especially hot weekend my mom and aunt might come along too. I have a visceral memory of sitting on beach towels with them, people watching, and listening them comment on which women were wearing swimsuits they “shouldn’t be wearing”. And it wasn’t really malicious, I think, not intentionally at least, but a defensive reflex that said, “I hate my body, but at least I know I should be ashamed of it and hide it even when it’s 90 degrees out.”

It broke my heart and pissed me off, like most things do.

By this point I was coming into my own as a young woman and a feminist and I remember asking, “Who cares? Who gives a shit? What are you doing?” And I think it made them feel bad, but the nasty comments stopped for that day, at least. A small victory.

So much of my experience of womanhood has been centered around my body and what it looks like and feels like and how it compares to others’ and a deep hatred for traditional exercise to complicate the whole thing. It has been defensively, at eleven or twelve years old, insisting the skin—not fat!—I could pinch around my middle was just “baby fat”. It has been, in high school, wondering seriously if I was experiencing my weight in a disordered way and whether it counted as body dysmorphia. It has been, in college, looking back on cheerleading pictures and gazing at what my legs once looked like, long and lean and strong.

Now, it’s being very conscious about the way I speak to my siblings, who have both been coerced to diet. It’s looking at myself before I get in the shower and not cringing because, even if I want to, I know it’s not doing me any favors. It’s ignoring the imaginary notion that I should be ashamed of how I look because…what? Looking a certain way is good or bad depending on what the media says? Trying to look at my body and see a functional organism that lets me swim and ride a bike and cook and whatever else is a conscious effort constantly at odds with my reflex to pinch my “baby fat” and step on the scale and look at pictures of celebrities and wonder if maybe I ate more spinach I might look more like that. I fucking hate spinach! Whenever I get stupid enough to buy some, it always goes bad before I can eat it!

I look absurd in jumpsuits because I’m little-ish on top and weirdly wide on the bottom, and I need to learn to not give a shit. If I want to wear one—if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t, because imagine the potential for poop emergencies in one of those things—I can and I should. My body is my body and although I don’t necessarily have to be proud of it or whatever, I can’t punish myself for the way my bones and muscles, configured from my family members way way back in the old country and having to, like, squat and milk goats or whatever, look now in the 21^st century. It’s stupid. Who cares?

I suppose this is all to say that I started writing and things got buckwild again because all the weird shit I thought when I was a kid rooted itself deep in my brain and has bloomed in stupid, meaningless anxieties in adulthood. Fun! Your body is good. It’s doing its best. The lumps and bumps and stretch marks—or lack thereof—are good because they’re yours. You’re, like, super hot, if we’re being honest here. And I’m not being corny. It’s the truth.

It’s your body and it’s a good one. Go jump in a puddle or something.

Lexie

Recommended listening/ reading/watching for “This is a Post about Baby Fat”:

“Shrill” on Hulu (based on Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

“My Mother & I” by Lucy Dacus

“Juice” and “Tempo” by Lizzo

“Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon” by Patty Lovell

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

“Here’s the Thing: Body Dysmorphia is the Worst” by Sophia Benoit

This is a Post about Self-Sabotage

Every six months or so a list of the “20 Drunkest Cities in America” makes the rounds and every six months I am overcome by anger and sadness over it.

It’s posed as a joke, and shared as a source of pride. Most of the cities are in Wisconsin, and all but one is in the Midwest. The city I use to explain where I’m from is on the list. I don’t know how accurate it is, if it’s based on any evidence at all, or where it came from, but outlets like Barstool Sports love to share it over and over again among the other asinine content they post.

People from my high school—and plenty from college, too—love this stuff, wear it as a badge of honor.

Maybe it’s because I’m a curmudgeon or maybe it’s because I’ve been forced to get to know all the worst parts of myself, but I can’t help but wish for a little more self-awareness. When I think of the Midwest, I think of all the idiosyncrasies that make it special, but also the complicated bits that make it, like any other region, unique. And I think it’s the complicated stuff that bears mentioning here.

The Midwest has a lot of fun nicknames: the Bible Belt, the flyover states, America’s Heartland, the Breadbasket, the Grain Belt, Middle America. They all conjure imagery of charmingly dopey farmers, too nice and very simple and maybe even a little primitive in nature (and totally ignorant of the skill and knowledge it takes to farm successfully). Those nicknames gloss over the sociopolitical and metaphysical complexity that makes the Midwest just like any other region of the world, and I think that does us a great disservice.

In Watchmen, there’s a passage from Hollis Mason’s book about his childhood in Montana. And although Montana is more West than Middle, I think the observation applies.

One of the things that [my grandfather] took great pains to impress upon me was that country folk were morally healthier than city folk and that cities were just cesspools into which all the world’s dishonesty and greed and lust and godlessness drained and was left to fester unhindered. Obviously, as I got older and came to realize just how much drunkenness and domestic violence and child abuse was hidden behind the neighborly façade of some of those lonely Montana farmhouses, I understood that my grandfather’s appraisal had been a little one-sided.

I wanna talk about climate.

Everyone knows people who live near the North Pole suffer through stretches of time where there’s nothing but darkness, day and night, and that wreaks havoc on their mental health. The same is true, to an extent, for people who endure long, harsh winters. As far as I can tell, seasonal depression is as common an undiagnosed epidemic as anxiety. There were days last winter where my partner and I were physically confined to our home, either because it was dangerously cold outside or the snow was up to our waists. For nearly a full week school was cancelled and I was working very few hours, so we sat in the apartment and went stir crazy while plows tried to clean things up and the sun fought to warm us a little. It was miserable. It was easily the hardest winter of my life, and we didn’t even get the worst of it.

When the sun finally came out in the spring, even thirty degrees felt like a gift. When we got an April blizzard just like the one that crippled us the year before, I thought I might have a serious mental break. I couldn’t stand to look out at the gray skies and filthy snow anymore. I hated feeling like every time I got in my car I might skid out of control into oncoming traffic.

Then, when we were finally in the clear, all that snow and ice meant disastrous flooding, wiping away any relief some people had because they spent all spring bailing water out their basements and fighting with insurance companies and incurring debt over the whole thing.

To my mind, there’s no way people can go through this cycle year after year—and generation after generation, the weather becoming more extreme as time goes on—and not suffer some kind of blow to their mental health. Add onto that the financial stress of property damage—or even medical bills to treat depression!—and you’ve got yourself a solid eight months of misery. I’ve been on antidepressants for years, so I can’t imagine how shitty I’d have felt without that extra serotonin to help me out.

I wanna talk about vice.

So the mental health thing is a factor, for sure. And when it goes untreated, or even when treated, it very often leads to self-medication of some destructive kind or another. For a lot of people it’s drinking. It warms the bones when it’s cold out and it dulls the sharp edges of stress and it makes you just hazy enough to feel good or maybe not feel anything at all. It’s an escape from what’s shitty. And on top of that, it’s addictive, so it feeds into a cycle of financial and mental health and physical health and employment problems. Do you see where I’m going with this?

It’s not always drinking, of course. A lot of people gamble, especially since the Midwest is home to a ton of different indigenous groups whose main source of income comes through casinos. (I don’t even have the time or knowledge to touch on the ways indigenous peoples suffer here in the Midwest and all over the world.) So gambling feeds into those financial and mental health problems and the escapism that so quickly becomes destructive to people who don’t know how to or simply don’t want to address how they feel.

Then there’s the opioid crisis, which plagues people all over the place regardless of race or status or creed. Addiction doesn’t discriminate, but especially in places lacking in resources, it runs rampant.

I wanna talk about agribusiness.

The Breadbasket and America’s Dairyland have changed dramatically and in such a way that has left family farms decimated by corporate buyouts or the struggle to compete with huge agribusinesses. John Steinbeck wrote whole novels about how the corporatization of agriculture ruined the people and the land where he grew up in California, and the same is true here in the Midwest.

Similarly, the once booming automotive industry in Michigan is now just starting to recover from economic collapse, and paper mills across the Midwest and Canada are shuttering rapidly. Logging and mining in the Upper Peninsula, once driving the economy, have all but disappeared and left sad, lonely towns in their wake.

I’d be foolish to act like any of these industries could have gone on as they were into the 21^st century without any repercussions. We know now that clear-cutting entire forests is disastrous, and that mining is wildly dangerous and unsustainable, anyway. But where once generations lived and died and raised their families around these industries, they’re now left with nothing. The work has been shopped out overseas because it’s cheaper, or to South America where our government seems to think we have the right to exploit resources. What once sustained millions of families has both drained our region of resources and left families on their asses. Whether it’s the result of a lack of foresight or unchecked greed or both, it’s the reality here, and you can still see it in hundreds of ghost towns across the Midwest that were once bright and thriving.

I wanna talk about the sociopolitical divide.

It’s nothing new, although sometimes it feels like folks are more emboldened now than ever before. The Midwest is funny because it’s full of blue-collar, hard-working people who just want to be treated “fairly” and take ownership of what’s theirs, but who have been so brutalized by politicians that they’re left pointing fingers at each other. When once the democratic party was that of the working man, the idea of liberty and justice for all—yes, all—seems to have become too radical for a lot of Midwesterners.

And I hate it, but I get it on a level that I think comes from understanding the Midwest very deeply.

I wanna talk about resources.

By now you’ve seen the maps Turning Point USA has shared about the Electoral College. In an attempt to explain why the Electoral College is good, the maps actually do a terrific job of illustrating why it makes no fucking sense. Anyway, the idea is that boatloads of people live on the east and west coast in tiny little geographical sections of the US, while a similar number of people are spread over the Midwest and the plains and everywhere that’s not New York and LA. Because all the largest, most profitable industries are in those coastal cities, that’s where all the wealth and resources are amassed, leaving the majority of Americans with little to nothing.

Certainly, big metropolitan areas have their fair share of resource problems, but the idea is that the resources are there, just inequitably shared. That’s true for the country as a whole, except instead of a neighborhood plagued by poverty and teeming with gentrification, it’s whole enormous states full of people struggling to get by because their industries have been sold out for cheap labor and nobody wants to move to and invest in those places.

America has, like, shitloads of money. For the most part, all the top universities are on the coasts, Ivy Leagues full of people whose families have had shitloads of money for generations and generations, and have given shitloads of money to very wealthy Ivy League and companies schools for generations and generations, where those resources are needed least. And for generations and generations, Ivy League grads have started hedge funds and tech and online shopping companies that make shitloads of money off the backs of working people and redistribute next to none of the wealth to said working people. Then those hedge fund and tech company owners give their money to the political candidates who make it possible for them to keep paying pennies for the labor that made them exorbitantly wealthy while also not paying taxes to see that their laborers can, like, go to a doctor. See the problem here?

And the problem here, aside from all the exploitation, is that these working people can’t just leave and find a better job. They work these jobs because they pay the best, even if the best isn’t a livable wage. They have kids to feed and bills to pay and, for many, cannot risk going somewhere they’d be treated less shitty for lower pay. And it isn’t because they’re not smart or because they made bad decisions—it’s because some jackass born in Connecticut wants another boat and has zero fucking humanity. This business practice of employing desperate people and keeping them desperate ensures that those people’s families for generations and generations will never be able to challenge jackasses from Connecticut. It all but guarantees that a factory worker will not be able to afford to send her child to college, so that child will spend his life earning minimum wage doing jobs that are considered “unskilled” because he doesn’t have a degree, and the same will probably happen to his children. So, no, the promise of jobs, like the ones Foxconn was supposed to bring Wisconsin, is not enough.

I wanna talk about fear.

When basically nobody has a pot to piss in and everyone is working themselves to the bone and the majority of us are suffering from mental illness and addictions as a result, it’s no wonder we start feeling shitty about ourselves and others. When the problem is really with bosses paying low wages and offering terrible medical benefits to save money for themselves, people start to look at their peers and wonder why they’re doing a little better than themselves even though they’re in the same situation. Instead of asking, “Why is my boss allowed to pay me pennies?” people find themselves asking, “Why does my neighbor get food stamps but not me?”

It becomes a matter of pride. We come from generations of mostly eastern European farmers and peasants who probably came to America in hopes of a “better life” for their families. And coming from war-torn countries and backbreaking work, they passed along the ailments of hardship: depression, anxiety, addiction, pride, intergenerational trauma. The American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and working to make the life you desire is just that: a myth. And the inequity is not among our peers, but at the top. Somehow, many Midwesterners fail to see it. I think they would rather believe their neighbors are liars than cheaters than believe that they have been manipulated by people in power.

And so we’re left with this concoction of bitterness where we can’t say “I’m sorry” or “I need help” or “I was wrong.” This is where it’s gotten us, but still nobody seems willing to try something different. Something’s gotta give. We’re suffering by our own hand, while the shithead president gets to go on television or Twitter while he’s pulling the strings on our arms and ask, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

Because, as you may have noticed, my writing is often influenced by my reading, I’m going to start including some recommended reading with my posts. Take a peek at previous posts for my reading recommendations. For this week, check these out:

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Self-Sabotage”:

Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli

Watchmen by Alan Moore

“When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before’” by Clint Smith

“The Harvest Gypsies” by John Steinbeck

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

This is a Post about Identity

If you haven’t already heard, today is the first day of my new Big Girl Job. I wasn’t sure how to write about this because, aside from it being exciting news, I don’t have much to say yet. But then I had a tiny little epiphany and a blog post came to me.

In the midst of signing my formal acceptance and consenting to a background check and all the standard stuff, the hiring manager asked which first initial I wanted to use for my company email address, A for Alexis or L for Lexie. Professionally and academically, across the board, I’ve always gone by Alexis, although I grew up with everyone calling me Lexie. (Although I bristled in high school whenever anyone less than a best friend shortened “Lexie” to “Lex”.)

As an adult it seemed like it was time to shed my childhood nickname in favor of my legal name, which I guess I think sounds more professional. It always felt impersonal and foreign to hear people call me by my given name, but eventually most people got around to calling me Lexie anyway when we got to know each other well enough. Y’know…how nicknames work.

At my job in retail, I used Alexis as a defense mechanism, purposefully impersonal because I didn’t plan to stick around long. Go figure, the longer I was there, the more people started calling me Lexie. It kind of felt like that meant I’d been there too long, but really it just meant I was making friends. Not that serious, dummy. But that’s how I felt, and this job offer came at just the right time to get me out of a place I never planned to become familiar.

Even if I don’t stay at this job for my entire career, I feel so lucky to have found what feels like the perfect place to start. It’s a nonprofit, so the people working there are doing it for the love of the job, not to make big money. It’s reading and literacy focused work, which is the exact kind of thing I want to be doing. There are a dozen people on staff, including me, and they eat lunch together outside when the weather is nice. As far as I can tell, none of them are republicans. And they are as excited about me as I am about them. It’s an amazing feeling.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, except that I’m grateful this job found me when it did, because I was feeling ready to give up (again). The job hunt was hard on my ego, and especially so thanks to a brutal winter that ramped up my depression ten-fold. Like I did when I graduated high school and was anxiously preparing to go off to college, I feel like I should be blasting “Shake it Off” by Florence & the Machine and dancing around my bedroom.

This is a short post and I’m glad for it. It’s refreshing to share good news and leave it at that.

Tomorrow is my 23^rd birthday. I feel good.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Identity”:

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

This is a Post about Peter Pan

I feel inexplicably thirty, and I have for a long time. In reality I’m closer to twenty than I am to thirty, but years of certain comments will age you up mentally.

You’re an old soul.

You’re so mature for your age.

You’re wise beyond your years.

I guess, in a way, those things are kind of true. I had my brain stolen when I was sixteen, then my body at seventeen, and my family at eighteen. That sounds dramatic, I know, but grief wears you down.

Sylvia Plath wrote somewhere, “I feel old, but not very wise.” I concur.

(I can imagine my older readers rolling their eyes a little at this point. I know thirty is young, but when you’re barely breaching adulthood, it feels eons away. It feels like you can’t even imagine who you will be when you’re that age. It’s spooky!)

The prospect of getting older has always struck me dumb with terror. I call it Peter Pan Syndrome. While most of my peers were eager to seem older and be older, growing up has always felt like a punishment to me. Look close enough and you can find a photo of me on almost every birthday where I’m crying. My mom made a whole collage frame full of them for my high school graduation party. In hindsight, that’s undiagnosed anxiety triggered by too much attention on me, but also the great big fear of getting older.

Even from a young age my future always felt uncertain to me. I had a hard time making and keeping friends in grade school, and I worried a lot about how I was supposed to go through puberty and the whole gambit without at least one close pal by my side. But when I found my friend group in middle school, I was still afraid, which was made extra scary because I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

I remember very vividly the one time in my life I wanted desperately to be—or at least seem—older. I was twelve or thirteen years old, spending a lot of time on MySpace, and crushing aggressively on an eighth grader. I filled out a bulletin (remember those?) he posted called “Girlfriend Application” and after the blank for age I think I wrote 14 or 15. Like he couldn’t look in a yearbook and do a quick calculation if he really wanted. It would be my first job rejection. Who’d have thought!

MySpace bulletins also served as public forums to fill out quizzes or answer questions about yourself so that your friends could get to know you better. I remember one quiz I filled out asked whether I was more preppy or punk, and I wrote something like, “punk b*#%h!!!” and my big sister called me out for swearing. (This is a big deal at twelve years old.) I think I told her it was a typo, which, in hindsight, makes me laugh out loud. Later on, my aunt would join MySpace and ask why my profile said I was sixteen, and I’d tell her it was a “glitch”.

All this posturing to appear older, and for what? I think it was equal parts preteen identity crisis and wild, pubescent desire for male attention. I failed miserably at both, which was probably embarrassingly apparent to my close friends watching it all unfold from a distance, although we were all doing the same dumb shit then.

But then my hormones eventually mellowed out and I settled into a standard of existential dread, and here we are today.

Later on, when it came time for me to apply to colleges I had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression for about a year, so the fear kind of made sense. But between financial aid and trying to choose a major and even settling on a campus, I remember weeping to my mom regularly, “I don’t know what to do.”

I picked my university basically at random. In fact, I never even got to take a campus tour because a blizzard stood between home and the tour we were scheduled to go on, and we never rescheduled. The first time I saw my campus was on orientation day, a couple months before move-in. (Pro tip: If you’re someone crippled by anxiety, don’t take this route. It’s dumb and shortsighted and will make you feel like the sky is falling.)

After a couple weeks of debilitating homesickness, I got comfortable enough, and ultimately stayed there through graduation. Even dating in college was a headache at best. I used dating apps like Tinder to meet people, but when it came down to actually meeting in person for a date I backed out, too anxious to actually pursue anything real. The attention was nice, but the prospect of actually engaging in an adult relationship? Nightmarish. The line I got regularly, which had already lost any power it may have had when I was in high school, was, “You’re so mature for your age.” I don’t even know what that means, except that I think it makes older guys feel better about hitting on barely-legal girls.

When I dated a guy I met in my dorm, I liked to imagine what life would be like for us after we graduated and we miraculously settled into our careers. Our relationship was deeply boring—mostly we just made out and watched The Office and sometimes went to parties where he expertly led me away, his hand on the small of my back, when the cops came—and imagining us as Grown-Ups was much more fun. We could move out west and he would be a park ranger! I could write novels in our little cabin in the mountains! We could have a billion dogs! Probably not kids, because he wasn’t really interested in that, but wouldn’t they be so cute if they inherited his curly hair?

The other shoe dropped when my mom and grandma came to pick me up for a weekend at home and, when I asked if he wanted to meet them, he said no. Very un-thirty-ish. So that relationship didn’t last long.

Even my current partner told me once, when we were sitting at a picnic table outside my dorm after class, that I seemed so mature for nineteen. I think he could see something in my eyes because he added quickly, cautiously, “Is that weird to say?” In hindsight, I could kick him for saying that to me, but knowing who he is and who we are together, I understand his meaning was, basically, “Thank god she’s not going to ask me to go to house parties.” We are the same that way, which is why it’s been working out so well. I can imagine us, realistically, in our thirties, because it looks a lot like how we are now, but maybe with some rugrats and a stable job on my end.

I think the best year of my life, so far, was my last year at my university, and so I’m grateful I was able to stick it out, bad dates and clichés and all. That community, once chosen at random, now means the world to me. I hope when I’m really thirty I’m back there starting my family.

The other side of the coin is that I am, really and truly, not your typical early-twenty-something. Sometimes I wish I were thirty so, when my coworkers ask me to go to the bars after work, I could say, “The kids have soccer tonight!” instead of fumbling for some excuse that sounds better than, “No, thanks. I don’t…want to.” My ideal Saturday is spent ping-ponging between antique stores with my partner and maybe grabbing dinner somewhere before we go home and sit on the couch to watch a beloved movie for the fifth time.

I guess this means my brain is thirty—that is, settled into an extremely comfortable, mundane routine—but my body is still twenty-two and appears as though I should be having raucous fun. I don’t want the responsibilities and pressures of thirty, but the illusion of adjusted-ness is appealing. (I don’t think thirty is a magic number where everyone figures their lives out. In fact, I see a trend of people not “figuring things out” until they’re much older, and thirty looks much like eighteen or twenty-five, in the grand scheme of things. Thirty, here, is mostly a symbol. Sub in forty if it makes you more comfortable. Stick with me, here.)

I am a June baby, which means when I graduated high school I was still seventeen and I was the last of my friends who could legally drink in college. In reality, it’s a few months’ difference in age between you and your peers, but being the baby of the group for so long maybe contributed to my fear of growing up.

At the same time, though, I have always been the “Mom Friend”. This means I get tipsy after a single beer and I’ll hold your hair when you puke and tell you to text me when you get home safe and, if we’re lucky and you listen, steer you away from some dumb guy who’s cosmically destined to waste your time and break your heart. I guess this is why I feel like a thirty-year-old baby.

Maybe thirty feels like an anchor. My life, at the moment, is a little tumultuous and uncertain, and so the mysticism of being thirty is that it means maybe things will be more stable. My brain and my spirit are ready for some stability, but the rest of me needs to catch up, because she’s probably secretly afraid of being a real-life grown up. Of having a mortgage. Of having a 401K. Of being stuck in a job she hates. Of finding herself in a job she loves, maybe. Of having a kid! Or two or three!

I suppose when you consider this conflict in me, the desire to make like Peter Pan and fly off to Never Never Land at odds with the desire to Be a Stable Adult, a lot of other stuff makes sense. My penchant for describing policy with Spongebob gifs, serious but still playful, comes back to all this. But certainly I’m not the only one.

Thank goodness I turn 23 this year. Seven years to go!

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Peter Pan”:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson

The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad by Adam Gnade

This is a Post about RIVRGRL

By my estimation, ninety percent of vanity plates are corny and lame, but recently in my city I saw the license plate RIVRGRL and it made me smile. I guess that’s because I’m a river girl myself, although I never really thought about it much before.

I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin along the Oconto River—called “The Pond” in the town where I was raised—which gives way to the Machickanee Flowage before it slims out again and makes its way to Lake Michigan. Near my grandparents’ home I explored the Pensaukee, a scrawny little river that splits off in every direction and winds all around the county.

In my hometown my friends and I rode bikes to spend summers at the east side beach. The west side beach was more secluded, but was a much longer bike ride, had less beach, and was better suited as a boat landing. We heard stories about how high schoolers around my big sister’s age used to jump from tree swings into the shallow water over there on the west side and shuddered at the rumored resulting injuries. Allegedly the rope had been taken down to avoid further injury, but if you took a boat out onto the river you could spot at least one along the shore, hanging from a tall tree.

When I was in high school, we’d clamber into the river with inner tubes and float along, baking in the sun, a time-honored tradition among both teenagers and adults.

People from surrounding towns came to the east side beach frequently, which elicited a territorial response from us locals, although we never did anything to make our discomfort known. I think it was mostly a performance among ourselves, the notion that our beach was something of a local attraction, which was about as exciting as things got in a town of two thousand.

On Labor Day weekend the docks at the beach were pulled up onto shore to signal the end of summer. Then when the river froze, it was dotted with ice fishing shanties way before the ice was thick enough and, into the spring, long after fisherman were advised to remove their gear.

I grew up in a paper mill town, which meant the mill’s history was inextricably linked with the river. I heard a story once about a (presumably southern) semi-truck driver picking up or dropping off at the mill who saw all the ice shanties on the frozen river and said, “It’s so sad about all those homeless people!” Of course, we thought it was hilarious. Looking back, I can’t list on one hand all the things that assumption and our response reveals about cultural divide. But that’s a story for another time.

In middle school, on Earth Day, my class visited the hydroelectric dam to learn about renewable energy. We wore hard hats as one of the workers shouted over the machinery to tell us how there was once a waterfall in the middle of our river but now it was a dam and provided energy for the city. I guess I have always been mystified by dams, and seeing one up close only made me more dumbfounded.

At the top of the dam was a boat landing and a few fishing docks set apart from a flat-rock and gravel walkway that led to the framework at the top of the dam. My friends and I liked to sit on those big rocks when the beach was too crowded or in the spring and fall when we couldn’t swim. We’d skip rocks and ignore the smell of dead fish and bristle whenever someone came near to fish. I sometimes stopped there with my dog to take a rest on our walks. It was maybe the best spot in town to catch the sunset.

As you’d expect, sometimes the dam was open fully and the water rushed through with a roar that seemed completely mismatched to the river we swam in just a mile to the west. Other days, it merely trickled.

In the winter, great gushes of river water froze at the top of the dam, impossibly, and stood suspended in motion. Knowing what little I know about dams and hydroelectric power, this phenomenon seems…wrong? But I saw it every winter and was and still am flabbergasted by its beauty and surrealism.

I live in the St. Croix River Valley now, which creates the border between western Wisconsin and Minnesota. From my side of the river I can see clear across to Minnesota, Sarah Palin style. The St. Croix is gorgeous, so much so that it’s protected by the National Park Service.

On the day my partner and I moved into our apartment here, I had taken a detour to our college town to meet with a professor about a project, adding an hour and a half to what is ordinarily a three and a half hour trip. By the time I got into town, I was exhausted. It was a hot day, and when I went to my meeting with my professor it was raining and took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot because the roads on campus were being patched.

But the first thing I saw when I got into town, just off Wisconsin exit 1, was the St. Croix sparkling beyond the off ramp in the early evening sun. I felt myself relax, and I smiled with the relief of having finally arrived.

Our city is a sort-of suburb of the Twin Cities, and as such, is home to a fair few wealthy businesspeople who commute to work in the Cities while enjoying residences in a quieter area. There are marinas along the river full of these business peoples’ sailboats and yachts. It reminds me of the touristy, wealthy communities along Lake Michigan where the endless watery horizon can trick the brain into thinking you’re on the ocean.

Currently, the St. Croix has flooded so significantly so as to submerge about 60% of our riverside park and much of First Street. About ten miles south of our city the St. Croix feeds into the mighty Mississippi, which has also risen menacingly this spring.

Before my first interview properly in the Twin Cities, I got to sit by the Mississippi and feel small. It was fall, and I got to St. Paul an hour early in an overabundance of caution, and I found Harriet Island Park nearly empty. I was underdressed for the breeze in my interview outfit, but sitting on a bench and watching the Mississippi flow with downtown St. Paul set just behind it was surreal. River boats along the banks made it look strange, like I was on a movie set before any of the cast or crew appeared. It was the first moment in my new surroundings that I felt small-town-me easing into what may eventually become big-city-me. And it reminded me of the passage about rivers that, in many ways, brought me to the Twin Cities in the first place.

As a senior at UW – Stevens Point (Stevens Point is on the Wisconsin River) I took one of the classes that set me on course to be a big book nerd forever. In that class I was elected copy editor, which meant I got to spend hours poring over the manuscript of the very first book I would ever edit. The abstract idea of it was as intoxicating as the physical act of it. The book, The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis, was and is my baby. If I haven’t bullied you into buying a copy yet, consider it done now.

The passage goes like this:

“In the southeast corner of Connecticut, three rivers flow and meet. First, the Shetucket makes a semicircular sweep and receives the Quinebaug and then together they join the Thames, flushing water into this once wild tract of land nine miles square. Of the three, I love the Quinebaug River most, coming as it does with a rapid current through a hilly country, channeling its way around ledges, spraying foam and diving headlong over the parapet of rock, free for a moment, then caught, a reminder to me that even nature faces encumbrances.”

Perfect.

It may be hard to believe, but Netflix was new at one point, and I remember my first experiences with it like I do my first experiences with the internet. (Hang in there—I promise I’ll get back to the river stuff.) Like most people, we just had the DVD-in-the-mail service at first, but eventually added the streaming service as well. In those early days, Netflix’s streaming options were 30% obscure indie films nobody has ever heard of, 50% Korean dramas, and 20% anime. It was slim pickings as far as my interests were concerned, but giving all those strange indie movies a try is cemented in my memory. The first movie I remember watching was called Dandelion, and years later, when Orange is the New Black came out, I’d see one of the main actresses from Dandelion in a much bigger production. Wild!

Anyway, another of the first movies I streamed was called Sixteen to Life, about a teenage girl living on the Mississippi River, reading about Mao and working at an ice cream stand inundated by tourists. The plot deals as much with her teenager-hood—it takes place on her sixteenth birthday, and everyone is giving her shit about being “sweet sixteen and never been kissed”—as it does with the transient nature of tourist towns. The wealthy kids who spend summers at their river houses are rude to her when she serves them at the ice cream stand, and the eventual love-interest is a tourist she may never see again. And so on.

What I’m saying is that, for me, Sixteen to Life was the original RIVRGRL! Here was a girl around my age, kind of weird but well-meaning and trying to figure it all out, who was growing up influenced by the existence of a river. She was fictional, but surely me and all the other RIVRGRLS in the world were having much the same experience and looking longingly to our rivers expectantly. But typically only the ocean gets the grand ennui representation in movies and songs and poems. So here was this movie about something less grand and, I guess, more universal.

I loved that movie. I found it again recently to watch it again—it’s on Amazon, and you should watch it, too—and I still love it. It still means everything to me it did when I was twelve or whatever and combing through mostly crappy options for wasting my time. Maybe it’s cringe-inducingly-millennial that a freaking Netflix movie helped my identity take shape, but that’s where we’re at in the grand scheme of things, so get over it. What Sixteen to Life gave me was assurance that my very ordinary life in a little river town could be special even if it wasn’t terribly interesting to anyone else.

When I think of the rivers that have raised me and nudged me along into the defining moments of my life so far I wonder what it is that makes them special to me. If I wanted to write something beautiful I’d say it has something to do with how they carry on despite those encumbrances. But I want to write something true, and if it’s beautiful that’s just incidental.

I think I love rivers because they are old and sometimes smelly and they are landmarks in my memory. They don’t care if you’re a local or slightly less local from a neighboring town and they don’t care if you pee in them. Rivers are like the oceans without all the mystical majesty. They are humble and accessible and were there long before you or me and will be there long after we die. They dictate how cities are built because they can’t be moved, and when you drive on the windy streets of a river city you can’t help but notice the way humans have catered in a small way to their existence. I suppose they’re poetic in a kind of dirty, diamond-in-the-rough way. They are the working class of bodies of water, maybe.

Then again, the Great Lakes have informed much of my character and Midwestern-ness, but that’s a post for another time.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about RIVRGRL”:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis

The Flatness and Other Landscapes by Michael Martone

This is a Post about How I Love the World

I got the most wonderful phone call at work recently.

This is a rarity, not because we get rude phone calls but because it’s a store, so the job usually just involves answering mundane questions. For example, the call I got immediately after the Wonderful Phone Call was from a man inquiring whether we carry salt and vinegar pork rinds. (We don’t.)

Anyway, I avoid answering the phone as much as possible because I have always hated talking on the phone to anyone less familiar than my mom. But I’m glad I was on phone duty when this call came in, because when I answered with, “Thank you for calling [store], this is the operator. How can I help you?” the response came from a teenager asking if, for National Poetry Day, she and a few other students could read me some poems.

Instantly, I said, “Sure!” and in the little cubby behind the fitting room I tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder and listened while I hung up clothes.

The phone on the other end was very efficiently passed around a group of four kids who were each introduced before they read an original poem or one by a poet they like. Their original poems were about driving cars really fast down country roads on weekend nights and the friend who got too drunk at the party. I was enamored, but I kept thinking, I hope someone else doesn’t call in the middle of this. To have to cut them off to answer a call about swim trunks or Dot’s pretzels would break my heart.

Luckily, they got through all their poems and we thanked one another and hung up.

I had been having a pretty average day—fine, but not particularly great—but it had been brightened instantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky it was that I had been the one to answer the call, not because my other coworkers would have been rude to these kids, but because the call so richly fed my soul. The thought crossed my mind that I love the world for moments like those.

It’s hard to be an even remotely aware person these days and find pockets of joy like this. There are times when you are happy, to be sure, but usually because something has made you laugh or you’re high off an impulse purchase or you won a scratch-off game. That happiness is valid and nourishing but it’s fleeting. Happiness like the poetry phone call brought me, however, tapped into the part of my brain that reminded me that there are sweet, thoughtful people in the world who do things because they spread joy. What a wonder.

Maybe those kids hate poetry but their English teacher wanted them to do it. That’s fine, because the English teacher knew whoever answered would probably feel better after talking to her students. Maybe the kids love poetry and love sharing it, or hate sharing it but find it easier to share with a stranger they may never meet. In any event, the students I spoke to were pleasant and polite and very talented, and since I’m still thinking about weeks later, I am so glad they happened to dial my store’s number.

The phrase “how I love the world” in the title of this post is one I’ve stolen from my aunt and godmother, who, the older I get, the more I admire and seek to please. My godmother read my post about feeling estranged from my family and wrote a long, thoughtful comment, sharing a funny anecdote from when I was too young to remember and, referring to trying to be good in a world full of bad, using the phrase “this is how I love the world.” Clearly, like the phone call, it has stuck with me.

I love the world for the classrooms of students, bored and enthusiastic, who do projects which amount to a net positive. It doesn’t matter if they care at all, because the result is the same. I love the world for flowers in the spring and the tiny biodegradable container of cherry tomatoes on my patio which has miraculously germinated a single seed. It probably won’t last or produce any tomatoes, but seeing that sprout made me gasp in earnest at my luck.

I love the world for turns of phrase which stick with you and make you think about how they apply to you. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned as an English major is that unnecessarily elevated language is phooey, and using words most everyone can understand to share important and complicated ideas is a much more effective way of communicating. Being eloquent is appropriate at times, but speaking to each other on level ground rather than waxing poetic is an expression of love. It says, “I see you and I love you and so I am going to talk to you in a way that makes us both comfortable. I want to share with you.”

I love the world for public transit and for people who come into the store with reusable bags, for Greta Thunberg choosing valiantly to carry the world on her shoulders so that the rest of us and our children and grandchildren may live to see a healthy planet.

I love the world for books and movies and songs that make me cry. I love to cry because it feels good to get all that pressure out of your body, even if it makes my nose swell to twice its normal size.

I love the world for ALDI, where you put a quarter in a little red box to release the cart from the corral so everyone does their part to keep the store and the parking lot clean, and if you want to use plastic bags you have to pay for them. I love jogging to catch someone’s attention over the roar of the cart’s wheels on the pavement to say, “I’ll take your cart,” and handing them my quarter. I love that when we get in the car after getting groceries, my partner checks the quarter we got to see which state is on the back.

I love French toast on Sundays while we watch CBS Sunday Morning. I love seeing the different birds come to our feeder throughout the seasons, and the chubby squirrels who once ate every vegetable scrap I threw out and now are spoiled and finicky. I loved watching our electricity bill drop forty dollars from February to March because we finally broke free of subzero days. I love that our apartment is built slightly into a hill and we never have to use the air conditioner, even on the hottest days of the summer.

I love that there are times in my life, like after the poetry phone call, which remind me just how much I love the world and its small, simple gifts. Reading the news is hard. Watching your city’s downtown flood after record-breaking snowfalls melt in the spring is hard. Looking outside the window for four months at record-breaking snow and gray skies is hard. It all clings to you like leeches and saps your energy and joy.

When I need perspective or to ingest media that doesn’t make my brain hurt, I like to watch cooking shows or nature documentaries. Every episode of “Our Planet” and “Planet Earth” has made my jaw drop, astonished by the beauty and strangeness in the world that is almost always so interesting it seems like it can’t be real. Of course, there are the sad parts to remind us that the planet is dying and it’s all our fault, but the rest is an incentive to be better. Look at what we can save if we each just work a little harder at being good. It doesn’t even take much energy or commitment or investment; it’s just a choice to shift your behaviors a little. Not to mention that doing good stuff feels good!

I love that even the toughest things for me to write or say render responses that make it feel worth saying, that getting the hurt out makes it easier for other people to get theirs out, too.

I love that love is an overflowing, renewable resource and that it’s free and easy to give even if it can be hard to receive. For a long time I was afraid to say “I love you” or to say that I loved anything for fear that it would make me vulnerable. But I’ve learned that I’m very good at being vulnerable, and very good at loving. I think most of us probably are, if we just relax our shoulders a little and say, “To hell with it!” Your “I love you” stores are like a natural spring still untouched by greedy human hands; it will remain full no matter how many times you drink from it.

Anyway, I love you, reader, and kids who read me poetry, and every butthead and angel in between. Thanks for existing.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about How I Love the World”:

My Antonia by Willa Cather

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

“Giraffe” by Bryony Littlefair