The English Geek

on Normal, Successful, and the Meaning of Life. Maybe.

Yesterday, while cleaning my bathrooms, I was thinking about success, and normalcy, and The Meaning of Life. (I was also singing along, in a vague and thoughtless way, to my "play everything" MP3 list, but that hardly matters to the narrative unless you happen to be fourteen and find your mother generally annoying but excruciatingly annoying when she's singing.) Because here's the deal: this weekend is my twenty-year high school reunion. And somewhere between the last reunion and this one, the edict that declared Amy Sorensen as Uninviteable to Reunions was lifted.

Meaning they invited me.

Meaning I had to decide whether or not I would go.

You have to understand: I keep in touch with one person I went to high school with, Jenn. And by "keep in touch" I mean: I send her a Christmas card every year. And I'm her Facebook friend, which allows me occasional glimpses into her life. The relationships I had in high school were all complicated by stuff like boyfriend stealing, socioeconomic levels, jealousy, and insecurity. Normal adolescent angst, I know, but nothing you could build a life-long friendship upon. (My one life-long friendship from adolescence, with Chris, maybe was helped along by the fact that we didn't go to the same high school. Well, and the fact that she is fabulous and wonderful and always has my back---in the non-backstabbing sense.)

And also there's this: I am a completely different person than I was in high school. And yeah, I know. People change. Everyone is different, twenty years later. But they all started out as normal, and changed from there. Not me. When those people knew me---as much as you "know" anyone when you're a teenager---I was a black-wearing, bleached-blonde, drinking-coffee-at-three-in-the-morning, sluffs-weeks-and-weeks-of-school, disdainful and pissed off and depressed kind of girl. I got in loud arguments with principals and I sat in silent back corners of classrooms, glowering; I mocked cheerleaders and football players and student body presidents, band geeks and AV geeks and AP scholars. They all, it seemed, tried desperately to obtain normal, while I scorned it. I didn't want to be normal. I wasn't destined for normal. My package of wounds was proof that my life would bring me anything but normal.

Yet here I am, twenty years later. And fairly normal. How do I show up to a reunion with my normal self on? I would feel like anyone I talked to was thinking "wow, she was a freak, but she turned out normal." Especially because stepping into that milieu would overwhelm me with my memories of trying so hard to be abnormal. "All that rebellion and weirdness," I think they would think, "and she still ended up in the same place we did: married, with children, living in suburbia." Well, sort of. Not in exactly the same place. A smaller house and smaller income than most of them.

Normal, but less successful.

So I'm scrubbing toilets, and I'm feeling bitter that three clean bathrooms are giving me this overwhelming feeling of success. When did a scrubbed bathtub and the absence of that goo that gathers at the bottom of the toothbrush cup make me feel like I had accomplished something? All the angst and the heartache and the black velvet amulet full of wounds which were going to make me someone extraordinary didn't do much of anything for me. I still ended up with rubber gloves on, a toilet brush in my hand, singing along to the new Train song and wondering if anyone of the male persuasion ever learns how to aim. Which is, of course, where most people end up.

When I gave up my goth-girl ways, I thought that striving for normal would bring me, eventually, to normal. That being normal would mean being successful. Being happy. But now that I am here in normal---admittedly, somewhere on the fringe of it, barely clinging on, but here at least---I feel like somewhere I took the wrong path. Like I wasn't honest with myself; like "normal" is a sort of jacket I pulled over my naked and abnormal self while what I should have done was walked with a little bit of bravery in my own skin. 

And really, when it comes down to it, that is what the idea of a high school reunion does to me (and the reason I really didn't care that I wasn't invited before) :  it opens up this great big contradiction. I mocked normal because I thought it was a form of pretending, and then I turned around and chased it. I became the person pretending to be normal. The person who holds up a clean bathroom or two as proof: look, look, can you see how normal I am? Because I don't know what scares me more. High school alumni looking at me and thinking "after all that rebellion, she turned out so normal." Or if they thought "wow, something's still odd about that girl."

That's a whole lot to pack into one dinner with some people I used to know. After all, that's what I do. I take a topic, and I think about it, and I unravel its edges, and I worry it some more, and then it's all a grungy, tangled mess in my brain. That tendency to sit in my (metaphorical) corner and overthink things is part of what fed my adolescent troubles, and twenty years later, I'm still doing it. Maybe in that sense, I haven't changed all that much. Maybe you can take the girl out of her black clothes (well, sort of), you can get her to grow out brunette and to exchange coffee for sleep---but you can't take the dark out of the girl.

However: my bathrooms are clean now.

Almost Long Enough To Be A Walk Down Memory Lane.

Saw this on Chris's blog and thought it would be fun. Steal if you want!

***20 YEARS AGO (1989)***
1) How old were you? almost 17
2) Who were you dating? In the eternal on/off relationship I had, I think we were OFF in March.
3) Where did you work? I didn't. Unless you count skipping school and hanging out at the park all day as work.
4) Where did you live? Springville, Utah
5) Where did you hang out? Kiwanas Park in Provo. A LOT. Also dance clubs, the basements of friends' houses. I did a lot of driving around by myself, drinking coffee and bawling.

6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? Yes, contacts. Since 3rd grade
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Jennifer, Heidi, Lani
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings did you have? 6---two on my left ear lobe, three on my right, and one on the top of my ear. That one HURT and I finally took it out six months later. I still have a scar there!
10) What kind of car did you drive? 1972 Ford Torino. Brown, with black plastic seats and an AM radio.
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Was in the process of it.
13) Were you Single/Dating/Taken/Married/Divorced? in love with someone who was never gonna love me back.
14) Any kids? No

***15 YEARS AGO (1994)***
1) How old were you? 22
2) Who were you dating? I was married!
3) Where did you work? WordPerfect
4) Where did you live? Orem, Utah
5) Where did you hang out? at home a lot---we'd just built our house the year before. Plus, I think we went to Los Hermanos at least once a week then, and twice a week very often.
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Frank and Jessica, Mark and Brooke, James and Lisa
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings di you have? Just down to 2 by now!
10) What kind of car did you drive? My favorite car we ever owned, a Honda Accord that was sort of a purple/taupe color. I loved that car and still wish we had it!
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Yes
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? No, but that was the year I got a cat for my birthday. Kendell still claims temporary insanity. (He detests cats)

***10 YEARS AGO (1999)***
1) How old were you? 27
2) Who were you dating? married to Kendell
3) Where did you work? I was a fulltime student
4) Where did you live? Orem
5) Where did you hang out? BYU library. I was in my last semester of college and needed to pile in another 18 credits.
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Brooke, Jessica, Becky
8) How many tattoos did you have? None
9) How many piercings did you have? 2
10) What kind of car did you drive? White Camry #3.
11) Had you been to a real party? Yes
12) Had you had your heart broken? Yes
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? Yes---two, and I was unknowingly pregnant with Nathan

***TODAY (2009)***
1) How old are you? almost 37
2) Who are you dating? Married to Kendell
3) Where do you work? the public library
4) Where do you live? Orem
5) Where do you hang out? At home whenever I can!
6) Did you wear contacts and/or glasses? yes
7) Who were your best friends? Chris, Becky, Jamie, Wendy, Candace, and some other great friends! I still keep in touch with Jessica and Brooke, too!
8) How many tattoos did you have? none
9) How many piercings did you have? 2
10) What kind of car did you drive? Toyota Sienna or the Corolla, depending on who's driving furthest that day
11) Had you been to a real party? yes, but not for a long time
12) Had you had your heart broken? Twenty years later, that's an interesting question. It's broken many times and in far different ways than I expected when I was almost 17. I thought only boys could break you---man was I wrong!
13) Were you Single/Taken/Married/Divorced? Married
14) Any kids? 4 kids. I'd have one more but Kendell is absolutely, completely, and utterly finished.

A Lot of Significance for Just a Pair of Boots I Didn't Buy

On Saturday, Haley and I went to the mall. We had some returns and exchanges to do, and managed to find some excellent bargains—she swapped her too-small slippers for some that fit and she liked better anyway. She used the money from returning two shirts she didn't like (I’d bought them before I’d been informed that the Limited 2 is way too babyish for her now) to buy one pair of shoes she loves. She even had enough extra to pick up a few things at her new favorite store, Deb. Excellent bargains for me especially, because all of that exchanging meant I was out only about eleven bucks and came home with a happier daughter.

While she was trying on her perfect new shoes, I tried on a pair of boots. When I saw them on the shelf, I had a little heart flutter, and the palpitations weren't because of the giant 60% off sign. They were black, about mid-calf height, and laced up all the way, with a tough shape. "I don't have anything to wear with those," I kept telling myself, "why would I buy them?" But I tried them on anyway; I couldn't talk myself out of it. As I was tying them, I realized that I loved them immediately because my teenage self would have loved them. I would have worn them with black tights, and a short black skirt, and the black suede jacket with fringe I wish my pre-Kendell boyfriend would've let me keep. They’d’ve made me feel tough, like I could take on the world. Like no one could hurt me because, hello: look at my footwear. No one who wears these boots could be vulnerable. I would have loved those boots when I was 17.

At 36, though, I’d just look silly.

Plus they were too big for my calves.

I didn’t buy them, but the boots were a sort of answer to a question my psyche’s been picking at. About a month ago, Haley made a Facebook page for me. And then, a few days later, I started getting friend requests from people I knew in high school. When those names started popping up in my inbox, along with the innocuous title "friend request," a strange slurry of emotion rose up in my throat. There were requests from a few people I knew, and was sort-of friends with, in elementary school. Requests trickled in from people who were my friends in middle school and then, abruptly, simply weren’t. (I have a theory that the movie Cujo, which I rented for my 12^th birthday party, is to blame for the abruptness. It was a Beta copy, after all.) Some from people who wouldn’t have said hello to me in the halls at high school. Why were they putting me on their friends list? Was it some sort of trick? Would they think I was pathetic if I accepted their request?

I mentioned this to my sister on Christmas and she said something important. "You have to remember that people change, Amy." Have I changed? Not enough to trust them. I mean, I still accepted them as my Facebook friends. Curiosity over how people turned out trumps distrust. But even stranger were the friend requests that come from people I was friends with in high school, only things turned out badly. Accepting those people’s friend requests, and emailing with them a little bit, brought my question to mind: what part of me is still that high-school girl who desperately wants to belong somewhere but simply doesn’t? She is still in me, I’m certain, influencing things. I still probably make some decisions from that part of myself. I still wish I had that certain thing that most people have. Call it normalness, or social skills, or popularity even. Connecting with old high school acquaintances has reminded me that I’ve not ever been that person who is essential to things, the one that no one forgets. The one everyone wants to be friends with.

But I didn’t buy the boots.

And, leaving the mall, I felt a curious sort of happiness. I don’t have to buy the boots I loved when I was seventeen. I am more than that desperately-wanting-to-be-loved sixteen-year-old. I have changed, too. I’ve learned that people are going to hurt me, no matter what sort of armor I wear (be it all black clothes and tough boots or the more subtle toughening of my heart). I’m starting to learn how to deal with that fact, and what to do with the hurt, and even how to not let it make me bitter. Just starting. And maybe the changes haven’t drawn me any closer to being that person, the necessary person, but I have, somewhere in the years, made peace with the idea that I won’t ever be her. It is enough to be necessary to the handful of people I am necessary to. I can’t say that I don’t still have my dark and twisty teenage self still here, influencing me. In all honesty, I think that part of myself has a strength I need, despite the damage she also holds. I don’t want her to go away completely. The change, though, is that I’ve been able to become more than she was. Not in money, or worldly success, or even in the amount of friends I have—not in the way you desire to change when you’re a teenager. But there’s got to be some value in starting to make peace with who I am, stripped of everything worldly.

Good to know I don’t need the boots like I used to.

The Police: A Concert Review of Sorts

This summer marks the 20-year anniversary of my friend Chris and I meeting. Something far larger than me made sure we were in the same group at our telemarketing jobs, and we became instant friends—kindred spirits, you might say. She was one of my adolescent years’ biggest blessings; it is hard to explain what she means to me. Like no one else in my group of high-school friends, she had my back. She knew me and loved me and even took care of me when I was at my most unlovable phase. She is the keeper of all my past secrets. But we don’t get to see each other enough, now that we’re all grown up. So when the chance came up—even though I felt guilty about leaving my kids for the night—I went to The Police concert with her.

And I am so glad I did.

Because going to a concert like that reminds me of how it felt to be my old self. The scents of beer, cigarette smoke, bodies, warm grass, surrounded by pieces of conversation and laughter, and then the music: a sensory time-machine that made me remember things I forgot I had forgotten. I kept thinking that everyone else should be there, not just me and Chris, but all the friends I had sloughed off of me through processes of betrayal and back-stabbing. In between the opening act (Elvis Costello, who did a cool version of "Allison" with Sting himself) and the main event, we set off to find the bathrooms but instead actually did discover an old friend, Jennifer. If Chris is the keeper of my old secrets, then Jenn is the keeper of my hardest self. During our senior year Jenn and I were always together (Chris was working in Maryland as a nanny then), rebellious and angry and stupid. I made many life-changing decisions that year, and the Amy Jenn knew was almost nothing like the Amy I am now.

Jenn and I both nearly cried when we saw each other. Maybe we both felt the same way: that the other held memories that almost no one else does. What I wanted the reunion to feel like was equal, three old friends comparing life stories. A scene from a book. Instead I felt vaguely ashamed of my current existence, the smallness of a small-town librarian and mother. What happened to all that fiery ambition we both used to have? She’d done something with hers (ad-agency employee approving press passes and doing other glamorous things), but it was hard to confess I still haven’t managed to accomplish much. Plus, she’s still rail-thin (she always was) while I am...well, not.

After Chris and I said good-bye to Jenn (with promises of keeping in touch) and finally made it to the bathroom, I found myself thinking about that Amy I used to be, the one whose environment was founded in rebellion-as-religion. My greatest contempt was for people who seemed to be pretending. (Still is, really.) And yet, standing there surrounded by ghosts, dancing a bit to "Message in a Bottle," I wondered: when was I pretending? Was my down-with-church, vodka-drinking self who I really am? Or is it the person I am now, trying to live my religion and be a good mother, feeling guilty over not achieving housewifery-goddesshood? They are two nearly black-and-white different versions of myself, and I’m not sure which is the authentic one.

But what I did decide: I wasn’t ever pretending when it came to music. That is the truest face of my goth-girl incarnation, loving good music. How many concerts have Chris and I gone to together? Erasure and Boingo and Depeche Mode and INXS and Book of Love. Jenn and I, too: PIL, Peter Murphy, Ministry at the Speedway Café. I still listen to a ton of the same music I listened to at 17, or to musicians who were influenced by those bands. It wasn’t until the first encore, though, that I remembered just exactly what I loved most about The Police: their song "King of Pain." When they played it, another mini time-travel machine shoved me back to my despondent adolescent nights, when my soul really did feel like a black spot caught up there. It is good, despite my unsurity of authenticity, to no longer feel that black despair.

Twenty years ago, when Chris and I went to see Erasure together, going to a concert wasn’t just about the music. It was also about keeping an eye out for spottings of The Boy (the one you loved beyond reason or hope), or perhaps even sitting with him for a few minutes and feeling that never-to-be-repeated feeling of pure, hormone-edged adoration; about illegal substances snuck into the concert in the hidden inner pockets of leather jackets; about wild abandon. Now, of course, it’s about hanging out with old friends and telling yourself you deserve an evening away, worrying about traffic afterwards, checking the cell phone for missed calls from the kids. And about old friendships themselves, how they carry that unseen bundle of memory and old selves. How they matter as much because of the past as of the present. But it’s still about the music, how it weaves, somehow, around nearly every one of those old memories and old selves. Along with Chris, it was music I took with me from that Amy version, and I am glad to have both.

Rewind

The radio station I listened to for about 35% of my adolescent years (45% of the time was given to listening to tapes; do the math and that leaves about 15% of my life left over to silence), KJQ, would, early on Sunday mornings, play an album that was going to be released later that week. My friend Jennifer and I spent many nights up late, waiting to hear that week's album. Bauhaus, Depeche Mode, the Cure, the Pixies, REM, Love & Rockets, the Cult, Xymox, Peter Murphy---some of the albums that influenced my very way of thinking and feeling, I heard first at about two a.m. on a Sunday morning. Jenn's stereo was way better than mine, so she'd always tape the program while we listened, so we could hear the songs again, up until we could finally buy an official copy. (I still have most of those tapes in a box downstairs, which is silly since I don't even own a tape player anymore, but I can't bear to get rid of them---they really wouldn't mean anything to anyone but me.)

I found myself remembering those album previews tonight, while I was making dinner. (Crispy chicken, homemade mac 'n cheese, and mixed veggies if you were curious!) I had the radio on, and they were doing a review of the new REM CD, the one that is supposed to sound (finally!) like the old REM. That idea was something the DJ discussed quite often: whether or not the new songs sounded like the old REM, the band we all loved when we were young and the band was young. Even a few of the people who called in to comment on the CD discussed whether or not the band achieved their old sound.

In between making bread crumbs, cleaning up raw chicken, moderating arguments between kiddos, and fielding about ten phone calls from Kendell, I didn't get to hear much of the CD. What I did hear, I liked, and I even thought it did sound a bit like old REM. But what I found myself caring about more than the music was the idea of a band sounding like it used to. I think having that desire is less about the band itself and more about wanting to feel like you felt when you first heard their music. And I don't think that's something you can ever really achieve. In a way, we end up loving the music or albums out of pure coincidence; they enter our lives when we're experiencing something and then end up jiving with that emotion. We become attached to that band because they resonate with who we are at that moment.

Take Jenn and me, and our primitive 80's method of downloading songs (lol...those taped copies were always so scratchy). I don't think I'll ever feel the way I did when we first listened to Peter Murphy's Deep, when I was just on the cusp of my last big rebellion, and starting to maybe settle down a bit, and staring down the barrel of my life's biggest heartache so far. When I listen to that album now---and just for old time's sake, I've got "Cuts You Up" playing as I write---the way it felt to be that version of myself comes rushing back.

But I've stopped wanting old bands to sound like they used to. I don't want the emotions to get muddied, for one thing---every time I listen to, say, Music for the Masses, I want to remember how it felt during the summer I was 16 and I listened to it for the first time. If I were to buy a new Depeche Mode album, I want it to remind me why I love the band---but I don't want it to sound exactly the same. A new album from an old band needs to be about both memory and new experience, but not in equal doses, for me to want to listen to it. It needs to create some new emotional resonance. And it's also that I am not the same person, and neither are they; the band is obviously going to come to their creativity from a different mindset with each album. They are going to evolve, and sometimes I am going to resonate with that evolution. And sometimes not.

So, yeah: I'll confess to bemoaning the fact that the current U2 sounds nothing like the U2 I love. But then, I'm not the girl who listened to Lani Pickering's copy of The Unforgettable Fire until the tape quite literally broke, either. But I'm also able to separate the two bands: my U2 and someone else's. I'm starting to be able to let go of wanting to re-feel an emotion and to trust in the strength of memory. To not need a new REM CD to remember sitting in my bedroom and rewinding "Swan Swan H" over and over while waiting for a pebble to be flung against my window and wondering what happiness might be.