Why the Most Important Things I Have Learned In England Are Actually Things I Could Have Learned In Pittsburgh ... N'at

My father’s side of the family has always been famous for a certain amount of good-natured troublemaking. Those readers who know me personally but who do not know my family may be somewhat skeptical of this claim. After all, unless there is karaoke, I tend to be reserved and well behaved to the point of being a little boring. I have heard this from people who should, theoretically, be telling me to have a little less fun at the age of nineteen, including but not limited to my parents, my grandparents, older cousins who appear to the rest of the world to be responsible adults with mortgages and children, high school teachers, and college professors.  I may be the only college junior in the United States with a chorus of authority figures and role models telling her to lighten up.

Other members of the F family haven’t exactly gotten this kind of encouragement, mostly because they haven’t needed it.

For instance, my father and his older brother were both sent to a pre-seminary preparatory school by my grandmother, who desperately wanted one of her sons to become a Catholic priest. However, at least one of their classmates saw that this probably wasn’t the best idea, as evidenced by the following yearbook inscription, which I found in my father’s yearbook from his last year at the school: “Deliver us from the F-s”.  Neither brother made it through pre-seminary. Both returned to Pittsburgh, married, and converted to Protestantism, gravely disappointing their mother, at least until the arrival of grandchildren. My uncle had two sons who, while managing to be responsible adults, loving husbands, and good parents, continue the family tradition of having fun and not sweating the proverbial small stuff. I, my father's only child, have never been quite as good at those things.

My high school yearbook inscriptions conveyed a somewhat different message than my father's. Most of them can be summed up in one word: Relax. Regardless of my other accomplishments, I, SLF, was not living up to the family legacy.

So last night, on the way home from my study abroad program’s holiday party, as I sat on a public bus wearing a novelty moustache, carrying a picture of a local church, laughing freely, and cradling my present from the gift exchange – three bottles of microbrewed local beer – I realized that, among all the experiences I have had during my time abroad so far, perhaps the most important was not adjusting to English culture or writing brilliant literary essays but coming into my own as a member of the F family. 

Though I’ve always displayed my monogram proudly on anything that I could, I have finally earned that last letter.

Turning Off Radio Station KFKD

As a junior in college, I have been giving some thought to my future. So far, I have not really encountered any answers to the questions, “What should I do with my life?” or “What am I good at?” but in the process, I have realized something important: I must turn off Radio Station KFKD.

What, you might ask, is Radio Station KFKD? To preserve my employability and my parents’ pride in my writing, I will not spell it out, but the upcoming explanation of its function and a simple phonetic reading should illuminate it fairly well.  I first encountered the concept of Radio Station KFKD in Anne Lamott’s insightful and inspiring book Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing And Life, which I have begun to reread in my spare time because, with the encouragement of some friends, I have begun to consider writing fiction. This is something that I have not done since my early teenage years, largely due to Radio Station KFKD, which Lamott describes on page as “the single greatest obstacle” a writer faces in listening to his or her intuition.

“If you are not careful,” Lamott writes, “Station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo”. Made up of “self-aggrandizement” and “self-loathing” in equal measure, feeding on each other in a twisted cycle of unrealistic expectations, distraction, and paralyzing negativity, Radio Station KFKD, I realized, has been playing in my mind for years.

Rosy visions of my future as a brilliant, well-liked professor at the center of an English department at a generic, small liberal arts college and giving interviews for major television and radio programs about the insightful novel I have not begun to write contrast with a constant stream of unconstructive self-doubt and criticism: “What sort of graduate program could you ever get into? Well, maybe you might be able to get into a decent program, but you’d certainly be the silliest person there. And even if you weren’t, what contributions could you even make to the field? And don’t even think about a novel! Who would want to read something you wrote?” This is only the professional, academic, and artistic side of KFKD. I won’t even go into the personal programming.

KFKD needs to go. The first voice distracts me from doing what I need to do and simply sets me up for disappointment, and the second voice has the capability to turn me into a complete wreck. When KFKD was at its loudest last year, it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and go to class at all – it was a miracle I got all of my work done.

Lamott recommends prayer, a small personal ritual, deep breathing – anything to relax and tune out the negative self-talk. Now that I have identified KFKD as a major (and detrimental) influence in my life, I can start using these strategies, and maybe inventing some of my own, to turn it off, or at least to lower the volume enough that I can hear my own thoughts and start to shape them into something worth sharing, in the form of an academic paper, this blog, a simple conversation, or even that book I’d like to start to work on when I’ve finished my essays.

How do you deal with Radio Station KFKD?

(All quotes taken from Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. 116-121.)

A Hell of My Own Making (The Gratuitously Illustrated Food Post)

I have been bothering my mother intermittently on Skype all afternoon and evening, basically rewriting her shopping lists for the next few weeks. Now, this was not unexpected, since, like many of my peers, I am homesick and am especially hungry for food I can only get in the US.

All of my friends on our study abroad program who are going to be home for Christmas have dictated their first few meals at home. However, most of my friends’ lists are slightly more normal than mine. Taco Bell at the airport, foods that we can’t afford on our stipend, a proper hot dog or slice of pizza, and American peanut butter are all the sort of requests they anticipated making, and the sort of foods that it’s normal to miss with a passion.

Photo Credit: lovingdubai.com

I, however, found myself insisting that my mother buy Diet Mountain Dew, Chocolate Brownie, White Chocolate Macadamia Nut, and Iced Gingerbread Clif Bars, pancake mix, Wheat Thins, cinnamon roll and red velvet cake flavored yogurt, pink lady apples, Ritz crackers, Wasa bread, and Three Musketeers bars. And I’m absolutely sure the list will grow – tomorrow I’m emailing to ask that she add Klondike bars and pretzel sticks to the list. This is in addition to the slightly less strange meals I have already requested be part of the menu while I am home: pot roast, spaghetti, steak when I have recovered from jet lag enough to enjoy it, a bowl of her mashed potatoes to myself at Christmas dinner (that’s only half a joke – these mashed potatoes are so perfect that I will probably end up dedicating an entire post to them in the future).

Why, I have begun to wonder, am I so excited about such weird food? I tried to pick this list apart to find some rhyme or reason, and came to the conclusion that there are three main reasons:

First, cultural or sub-cultural nostalgia. This one is the driving force behind the Ritz crackers, the Wheat Thins, and the pretzel sticks on the first list and the pot roast on the second. While I identify as an American and can’t wait for a slice of pizza from my favorite place, it is not the food of my country but the food of my subculture (the food that made my time in England such familiar territory, gastronomically speaking) that I long for most. Yes, I am talking about WASP food, and no, I make no apologies for missing Wheat Thins and pot roast as much as I do.

Photo Credit: caydigestsny.wordpress.com

Secondly, weird food preferences and obsessions. These are the things that I like but that are not popular or iconic enough to have made their way across the pond yet. Clif Bars and dessert flavored nonfat yogurt, I’m looking at you. Things from this group are usually the hardest to find a suitable substitute for. Crunchy Granola Bars and vanilla flavored yogurt may be nice, but they just aren’t doing it for me any more. Furthermore, since I have no particular reason to be emotionally attached to these foods, when I start wailing to someone they just think I’m weird, because really, who actually misses red velvet flavored yogurt that much?

Photo Credit: caloriecount.about.com

Third, food with real reason to reduce me to an emotional mess. These are the foods and drinks that quite literally haunt my dreams, and for good reason. Diet Mountain Dew, in addition to making me a sleepless nut, takes me back to my high school, now in the process of being demolished. Pancakes, which I have avoided looking for a mix for, remind me of my childhood, when my father would spell out names and initials in the batter, often for a crowd of my impressed friends who had spent the night. (A warning to him, if he is reading this: My first breakfast is going to have to be a stack of SLF initial pancakes.) Klondikes bring my late grandfather to mind.

Photo Credit: karahoag.blogspot.com

With all these foods back in my life, one might assume that I will be perfectly content at home. I thought I might, until I concluded my list, when I realized that I needed to warn my mother about the baking we would need to do when I returned. I informed her that I would be making shortbread, scones, bread and butter pudding, and sticky toffee pudding over the course of our Christmas celebration, and that if we were going to be able to enjoy proper cream teas, we should probably start looking into where to buy or how to make clotted cream. Patient woman that she is, she said she would start investigating. (This does not exactly make her a martyr; she's getting a cream tea out of this if all goes well.)

Photo Credit: cornwallcommunitynews.co.uk

Then the panic set in. If I’m this miserable about not having Wheat Thins for a semester, how bleak will the rest of my life be with inferior fish and chips, expensive imported Digestive biscuits, and really awful cheap chocolate? I thought more about this prospect, and it only became gloomier. Indian food in the States is apparently almost inedible, and I’m halfway through a year in a country that is famed for the quality of its take on food from the subcontinent. When one asks for tea in the vast majority of American restaurants, even quite good ones, the result is usually a mug of lukewarm Lipton rather than the pot of steaming Darjeeling, English Breakfast, or Assam to which I have become accustomed here. And I still can’t figure out how to get my greedy little paws on clotted cream.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

I realized, at this moment, that while studying abroad has been one of the best experiences of my life, it also probably means that, with my love of food and tendency to long for what I can’t have, I have condemned myself to a life of gastronomic hell. No matter where I am, I will always long for food I can’t get. While I may have been miserable without Wheat Thins, going for most of the rest of my life without Cadbury Flakes, good chicken tikka masala, and fish and chips seems even bleaker. The only appropriate reaction to this is a good sulk and a Crunchie bar.