Since I Can't Go To Tiffany's...

I woke up with a small case of the Mean Reds and decided to dress accordingly. Some people dress down when they don't feel entirely themselves. I dress up.

Skirt: J. Crew Outlet, Shoes: Clarks, Shirt: Polo Ralph Lauren,  Sunglasses: Ray-Ban, Jewelry: From A Relative, of Otherwise Mysterious Origin

Please excuse the mirror picture, the sloppiness of my room, and my slightly rumpled appearance. On some days it's all one can do to make oneself presentable - taking a good picture would have been entirely too much to ask today. In fact, making myself presentable seemed almost too much today - I briefly considered the jeans-and-tee shirt route. If I had, though, I wouldn't have gotten one of the best and most surprising compliments I've gotten since coming back to school.

As I sat down with my roommate in a popular campus gathering place to soak up some sunshine and soothe my frazzled post-botched-pop-quiz nerves, she said, "I know you won't believe me, but when I was sort of scanning the crowd, not looking for you, I thought, 'WHO is that person? She looks perfect.'"

I was tickled pink. My roommate is one of the most stylish people I know, and not an empty flatterer by any means. (Translation: When I look dumb, she tells me, lovingly but bluntly.) And after all, I had fairly modest expectations for my day, and being told that my attempt to emulate even the most casual of the most iconic film star's onscreen looks was "perfect" was a lovely surprise.

Image courtesy of moviedearest.blogspot.com

I was surprised, but I suppose it goes to show that taking cues from Audrey in anything, especially Breakfast at Tiffany's, is always a good idea - even when one feels more like one is swinging wildly between Patricia Neal's character in the same film and Bridget Jones in other area's of one's life. It's a start.

I'd Say No One Cares, But That Would Be A Lie

Ariel from Apathetic Chipmunk and I are on one of our frequent Starbucks trips, ostensibly made for the purposes of working on the independent study papers for our study abroad program but usually spent discussing the merits of various online magazines and nutritional strategies. Early on in the visit, a deeply inconsiderate person settled into a chair near ours and began braying into her cell phone. (Ariel writes about this incident and reminds us of good coffeeshop manners here.)

My imagined response to such a person is usually along these lines: “No one cares.” The problem is that my imagined withering response is a lie. I do care what loud talkers are saying. I listen. Intently. And it makes me detest them. If I didn’t care, I would tune them out. That isn’t what I do. I listen and I dislike them irrationally. The same conversation that, overheard at a reasonable volume, would amuse me, elicit my sympathy or make me silently happy for someone makes me intensely malicious when it’s being screamed, especially in a confined space.

A sampling of what I heard and the silent responses it prompted follows.

“I’m just in Starbucks in town, all alone.”

Because no one likes you.

“Well, yeah, I just got a frap.”

I hope it keeps you awake all night, even though it isn’t even noon yet.

“Well, yeah, we went out…” and about ten minutes straight of conversation about some young man.

 It's because his eardrums haven’t healed from your last encounter. I hope you never hear from him again. Wait, no, I hope you end up together and he’s just as loud and annoying as you are, and you live in a very echoey house.

Just as being a horrible person was getting fun, she was joined by an equally loud friend a few moments later and excused herself from the call by saying that this friend’s arrival made the call rude. Her friend's arrival. Right. They proceeded to detail their grooming habits, and the new arrival was even louder.

“Yeah, the blonde  - the blonde who works downstairs – complimented me on it. The perm, I mean.”

The blonde lied.

Her friend settled her legs on the table in front of her and began to squawk: “Yeah, I haven’t shaved them in three days.” (My feminist body positivity and my deep vein of inner meanness came into conflict here – guess which won. A hint: I did not congratulate her for questioning patriarchal beauty standards.)

May every razor you use in the future be dull.  May every table you eat from be similarly contaminated.

Thankfully, the pair left before my ill wishing escalated. Ariel’s response to the situation was to remind her readers to be polite in coffeeshops. Mine is to explain why: some day, I will snap and these little unkindnesses will be unmuted. Pray it is not in response to you.

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.

Learning from Laryngitis

I have been without the use of my voice for three full days now. In the middle of the fourth day, I can't help but think this is the universe's way of telling me I should rest my voice a bit more. 

Photo Credit: janeitesonthejames.blogspot.com

The universe is clearly about as subtle as Emma Woodhouse on Box Hill.

            

Many of my friends, however, have been far too kind to me while I have been unable to speak. This should not surprise me, as this probably makes me somewhat easier to deal with than when I do not have laryngitis. However, they are making a mistake. I deserve no sympathy. This predicament is all my own fault, and I deserve all the misery and frustration it entails. I can only hope I will learn a valuable lesson from it.

See, I have a problem with singing. Reading this, you may assume that this means I sometimes push my voice a bit too far in the shower or occasionally join in with my friends in a verse or two of something toward the end of a night out. You’re completely wrong. That doesn’t even begin to cover it. My problem is different – namely, that after about three quarters of a vodka tonic, I become absolutely convinced that I am Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, or Frederica von Stade, depending on my mood and what I have been listening to earlier in the day. It isn't even a drinking thing. It's just that now I have an excuse.

Photo Credit: musicals101.com

It is Not Attractive Behavior, partly because I am not Ethel, Mary, or Frederica, and partly because I am not on stage. Saturday, for instance, when I strained my voice, I was in a friend’s kitchen. See? Not a stage.

Normally, I am content to pretend I possess a modicum of dignity and self respect, and possibly a basic understanding of good behavior. Sure, I may want to sing, but I realize that it is a bad idea, so instead I sit and make relatively normal, if excruciatingly nerdy, conversation.

However, it is all over the moment some poor dumb soul says, “Sara, why don’t you sing something?” On a conscious level, I know they are probably either drunk, deluded, humoring me, or messing with me. Still, I can’t help but be flattered. I have not only been given permission to do what I know good manners and good sense dictate I should not. I have actually been asked! I may protest, but at this point, I am probably already doing discreet breathing exercises and analyzing repertoire choices.

Photo Credit: breadcrumbreads.blogspot.com

I am quietly preparing to embarrass the hell out of myself, with the excuse that it’s harmless fantasy. (“What would I sing if…") In short, I have no shame. This process of preparation is easy to justify as a silent, indulgent game, but it primes me to make a fool of myself and make everyone else uncomfortable the moment someone suggests I sing a second time, a karaoke book is passed around, or something reminds me of a song.

It would be cruel to say no no, I tell myself, just before I launch into an off key Baroque aria, a poorly planned Cole Porter medley, or a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic I once sang in high school. After all, I have been asked to sing! Multiple times! Or it's karaoke. Aren't we supposed to sing at karaoke? And of course it can't go as badly as last time. 

What I should be telling myself at this point is that I am not appeasing an adoring public. I am embarrassing myself.

Photo Credit: professionalmother.blogspot.com

I am really embarrassing myself, and everyone who is pretending not to know me. It is not becoming. It is not ladylike. It needs to stop.  The universe, it seems, agrees. I realized this on Sunday morning when I woke up, attempted to speak, and heard only a squeak.

           

In response, I am making a new rule for myself:

            

I will not sing outside of choir, or the privacy of my own shower. It is never a good idea, no matter what “encouragement” I may receive. I will no longer subject myself or anyone else to my unfortunate squawking and the awkwardness it creates.  Not in a friend’s flat, not while walking to or from a social event, not in an echoey stairwell, and certainly not at karaoke.

Should you be present at a social event at which I seem ready to break this rule, please, please stop me. Squirt me with a water gun like a cat that’s gotten onto a kitchen counter. Swat me on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. Do whatever you have to do to get my attention. Duly chastened, I will resume my pretension of normalcy.

You will be spared the discomfort of listening to me sing in an inappropriate situation with no warm up and no rehearsal, and I will certainly thank you later. Possibly with food.

Photo Credit: asliceofcherrypie.com