Me, Myself, and Now

I've been deceptively blessed.  You see, my parents have been living abroad off and on since I was in college.  Be it South America or Europe.  It has afforded me a beautiful chance to travel to see them.  Whenever I tell people that they live in London currently, there is a repetitive response: "Wow, that's so cool!  You are so lucky."  Yes, lucky to get to travel for holidays.  Lucky to see the world.  I don't deny this.  But what is the point of traveling?  Why do we love it so?

I recently returned from a belated Christmas sojourn to London and Barcelona.  A transformative visit, as I fell madly in love with the latter.  As I walked the gorgeous streets of Modernisma, I couldn't help but draw comparisons between Gaudi's romantic city of the past to Hannah's current city of the present.  Barcelona has a warf I liken to a less cloying version of Navy Pier.  A shopping district eerily similar to The Mag Mile.  A sense of being the latchkey kid city when far more popular vestiges reside so close.  It was Chicago with a different language, and a closer proximity to prawns.

Whenever I mark the end of these fantastic journeys I've had of late, there's an unmistakeable sense of inferiority upon my return.  I slip back into the motions.  I go back to work.  I eat my regular doldrum diet.  I wake up knowing exactly where I am without that moment of fear when my eyes open in an unrecognizable habitation.

But working in a Chicago tourist's wet dream of cuisine, I've realized something.  My city is just as exotic and fantastical as any other in the world.  So why do I feel empty when I return?

We have a problem.  As people.  We so very rarely allow ourselves to live in the moment.  Our lives are peppered with the unreal expectations of our future goals and plans, while simultaneously harping on the glory of our pasts.  For further proof, look at the abundance of nostalgic lists on websites devoted to the 90s.  A decade that when lived, felt like little more than the mundanity of getting from point A to point B.  But twenty years later, we look back with a fondness and an insatiable craving for yesteryear.  Yet it proved nothing more than life.

Why do we refuse to live in our present?  Because our present contains every waking moment.  We can't cut out the bull shit.  Where our past memories work as a filter, for the brain - regardless of its magnificence - can only hold so much.  And the future only contains the ideas we pray and hope for.  There are few people out there who look at their future goal of becoming famous and think about the days when work slows.  When the current love of their life starts growing distant.  When it's difficult to cook yourself the healthy alternative to ordering Chinese food off Grubhub and binge watching Breaking Bad because it's a little too difficult to manipulate yourself off the couch that Saturday.

The present can never be satisfying when we live so deeply in our past memories and our future hopes.  Even if there truly is beauty that surrounds the every day.  Because the present is only how it is because of the life we led.  And the future is only possible if we lay the building blocks in the now.  Just as I look at Barcelona as a future desirable inhabitance, it will one day become the norm.  And it will become boring.  Because the present is boring.  It contains every waking moment.  It doesn't have the allowance of editing.

Pretension is But a Pretense for the Ignorant

DAY WHATEVER: It Doesn't Matter, Because The Pauper is Dropping the Paup

As we go through life, the paths and goals we set out for ourselves ebb and flow as flippantly as the tides.  A year and some odd weeks ago, I set out to write a blog about the striking life decision I made to quit a job of unrest and pursue anew.  And as I venture further away from that decision, it becomes less a defining factor of my life, and just what it is.  A choice.

With that, I am making a choice about this blog.  It will no longer be a reflection of that change, but a space to put the proverbial pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as technology would have it.)

So instead of talking about some grand self discovery, I'm going to discuss a film.

Last night, after a not so long day at work, I came home to do some laundry at the non-peak hour of 11:00 p.m.  Instead of filling my time with sit-com reruns or inconsequential ambient television like Chopped, I decided to delve into the meat.  So I used the powers of the Internet to watch Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin.

The "plot" is simple (I used quotes because the plot would make a first year screenwriter's head spin.)  An alien seductress arrives in Glasgow with one mission: Harvest men.  For what?  It doesn't matter.  Because the film isn't about the alien's mission at all.  Only halfway through the film do we get a glimpse at any sort of plotted conflict.  The alien wants to know what it's like to be human.

Immediately after watching the film, my mouth hung open like a bass who had given its final breath.  Filled with scenes about the environment, focusing on moments where 2 + 2 = 5; it felt like an undertaking as a viewer.  An arduous task not meant for an Internet grown audience with the attention span of a gerbil on mescaline.

I needed to decompress.  Without a companion to discuss the film's merits, I needed to seek solace in the comment boards of strangers.  And what did I find?  A mixture of people praising its audacity combined with people disparaging it for its pretentiousness.

I remember the early stages of my humble cinephile beginnings.  She's a girl who saw The Matrix at 12 years old but didn't understand it until she was forced to write a paper on it in college.  She's a girl who claimed Memento was her favorite movie, but couldn't describe the plot to her father at his behest.  She's a girl who fastforwarded through 2001: A Space Odyssey's "Starchild" sequence.  She's a girl who said things were great, but secretly thought they were bull shit.

Being someone who has spent the better part of her twenties trying to reverse this frame of thought, I can understand the gripes that Under the Skin is pretentious.  It spends half its running time showcasing the alien's prowess at bringing men back to her home.  It fetishizes the Scottish coastal landscapes.  It leaves blank spaces for our minds to fill.

But it also creates some of the most beautiful imagery and disturbing sequences I have ever seen.  The harvesting of the men, the couple lost at sea, the disfigured man.  These are scenes of beauty, imagination, and intent.

We dismiss things we don't understand as pretentious, because we don't want to be excluded.  No one wants to miss the point.  So it's easy to brush off a complicated film as "art house bull shit."  It gives us a feeling of superiority when, in fact, we feel anything but.

I'm not dismissing viewer's claims of pretension as unwarranted.  Perhaps it is.  But by all means, give yourself the service of justifying your perspective.  Don't live in a world on the defense.

However, as a former abuser of this defense mechanism, I can tell you that I've been listening to the music from this film this entire post.  I've been running through images in my head as I type.  I've been fighting back tears of revelatory beauty as I struggle to find the right way to express how I feel about this film.  If that sounds pretentious, then maybe that's the world I want to live in.  A world where art affects me.  Sends a jolt down my spine.  A world where I push myself to care.

Give Up or Get Out

DAY FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY: The Pauper Fights Her Demons... Or At Least Acknowledges Them

It's Halloween.  The time of year for spooky specters.  The bewitching hour.  The time where beloved childhood icons can be sexy.

But [whore]ific costumes aside, Halloween is a time to be scared.  So what better day to acknowledge the lurking demon inside me?  Self-doubt.

I've taken a hiatus from writing of late.  Not for lack of thought.  I've started numerous blog posts and have deleted them.  Why?  Because I've gotten lost.  Lost at sea.  Lost in terror.  Lost in a grocery store where my mom has to summon a security guard to blast my name over the same intercom they use to price check grapefruits.

I'm lost in self-doubt.

How do you overcome it?  In an Internet Age where literally every thing gets over-analyzed and criticized, creatives are becoming a target on the same page as Hitler or John Mulaney's disappointing new show.

When information is at our every fingertip, earbud, and sightline, every single person with some kind of gadget has free reign over their opinions echoing over space and time.  And it instills doubt.  Copious amounts of it.

How do you overcome it?

Every choice I seem to make in my writing endeavors comes fully equipped with an endless amount of uncertainty.  Sure, validation comes, but it never dulls the hot pain of that screaming incubus of self-doubt.

I don't know how to overcome it.

There are people who are talented and succeed tremendously.  And then there are talented people who languish.  There are untalented people who succeed.  And then there are untalented people who succumb to the drudgery of life.  Of course they do.  How else does the circle of life foster?

As time goes on, I find myself pulling away from society.  Pulling away from professing my feelings because they seem trite.  Pulling away from people I care about because disappointment lurks in every corridor.

I'm not sure this can be overcome easily.

So when you go to your parties and haunted houses this Hallow's Eve, maybe you shouldn't be so scared of goblins and vampires and visions of childhood innocence being grotesquely violated.  Because there's nothing scarier than the voice inside your head that tells you to stop.

Cool. Cool cool cool.

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX: The Pauper Gets David Caruso-Style Cool

Everybody wants to be cool.  Why not?  Even if you turn to gothic or punk rebellion, don't you do it to fit a new definition of the idea?  Nobody wants to reject the norm simply to have the ab-norm reject them.

But what is cool?  Obviously, there is no answer to this.  It's however you choose to perceive it.  But when information is limitlessly at your fingertips, eye sockets, and ear and nose holes, "what is cool" is constantly being blasted at you.

Take for instance the recent rise of The Ice Bucket Challenge.  It began as an idea to raise awareness for a disease that receives very little funding.  It gains speed on social media.  Begins popping up in your numerous feeds.  "Oh hey, what is that?  That's kind of interesting."

A once inoffensive idea in moderation, The Ice Bucket Challenge blew up astronomically.  My eye, ear, nose, and butt holes could hardly accomplish a thing without being inundated with a new video or article about The Challenge.

Suddenly, the meteoric rise to superstardom turned The Ice Bucket Challenge into something to rebel against.  It garnered too much popularity.  Regardless of the cause, it became a fad.  And fads - like the name Merv - aren't cool.

Enter backlash.  Too many people like something, which means I must dislike it.  It's a guttural instinct for many.  It's - admittedly - a guttural instinct for this author.  Like Katy Perry, velour tracksuits, Twitter, the "cinematic canon of Sir Michael Bay"; I choose to reject what's popular.

But where does backlash come from?  Why do we feel compelled to hate so many things simply because they are popular?  I once dated a guy who told me he started to dislike Arrested Development when it found its resurgence on DVD.  Because it wasn't "his own" and it was now popular.  The show didn't change (this is pre-Netflix era resurgence.)  But the show's constituents did.  Although the quality remains, the sheer fact that it becomes socially acceptable makes something revolting.

But the truth is, Katy Perry songs are catchy, velour tracksuits are comfy, Twitter can hone your wit like nothing else, and Michael Bay movies are...

Okay, so I can't defend everything.  I'm only one woman.

As for The Ice Bucket Challenge?  Its merits are obvious.  And after the backlash, the inevitable backlash to the backlash rears its face.  And suddenly (take a deep, satisfying breath of relief), it's cool to like The Ice Bucket Challenge again.  And we all start to remember why the whole thing started.

And now, just a few short weeks after its zenith, there are no more pictures.  No more videos.  No more backlash.  The fervor has settled, and the memory of it will fade.  Until Chad shows up at the Halloween party next month dressed in an ice bucket that he didn't fully think through.  But when you spot Chad across the room, cracking a joke about pumpkin spice lattes, what will you think? Is Chad's costume cool?  Or is it lame?

Connect Four!

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE: The Pauper Re-Evaluates the Essentials

If you died tomorrow, where would you define yourself?

It's a heavy thought, but as someone constantly floating through life searching for an answer to "why?", I think about this often.  Do we leave our mark on others?  Did others leave their mark on us?  Unless you were some kind of latchkey kid who never grew out of it, our lives are constantly echoed by the voices around us.

Relationships.  A bond between one individual and another.  Be it familial, friendship, romantic, or nemesis; our lives are constantly being molded by the people around us.

Last year, a friend posed the question to me; "If scoring the soundtrack of the movie of your first 25 years on the planet, what 4 to 5 songs capture the essence of your core periods?"  I opted for a full soundtrack in lieu of 4 to 5 songs.  My response was an amalgamation of intrepid battles with the opposite sex.  Songs ranging from an electro-pop declaration of loneliness to a meditation on unrequited love.  From a song dedicated to asking my crush to prom to a scene I've always wanted to write into a movie with a woman ridiculously bawling over a recently lost love.  There was a common link that my friend pointed out: Most of my songs revolved around the wounds bestowed upon me by the opposite sex.

It was a jolt.  The kind of jolt you always knew was lurking behind some lurid corner, but never noticed until someone pointed it out.  Like the smell of last night's booze on your breath as you walk into church.  So one question remained: Why did I place so much emphasis on spoiled goods?

As someone no longer self-conscious over the fact that she's never had a relationship, I have niente qualms about admitting all of my past loves have been unrequited.  And yet, I still defined myself by people who couldn't see the beauty I can see in myself.  Why?  Is it some kind of twisted low self-esteem logic buried deep within the teenager that never left?  Fabricated obsession?  A medieval torture device?

Because the thing is, I have had some amazing relationships in my life.  When I was ostracized for suicidal tendencies at age 14, one brave friend confided her personal travails so I didn't feel so alone.  I spent the past three and a half years living with a boy I befriended at age 15 when we both whole-heartedly believed we would be superstars by the age of 21.  I found my confidence in a girl I admired for years before we eventually studied abroad together.  I've had a mentor at work who taught me how to stand up for myself in the face of ugliness.  I've met partners who have nurtured my creativity.  And, oh yes, I met some guys who treated me like shit.  And yet, they are the ones whom I allowed to define my soundtrack.

There is so much beauty to be found in every single relationship we happen upon.  It's such a shame that the pop culture machine breeds [women] to believe the romantic relationships should dictate their lives.  I've spent countless nights sitting on a friends' porches, bearing my soul.  My dreams, my fears, my regrets, my shames, my past, my hopes, my embarrassing bowel movements.  My everythings.  Why do we not cherish these relationships the same way we do with the ones that turn so sour?

I pose this thought because I wonder if it's how the populous feels.  Because the media would lead us to believe so.  I spent some time watching trailers for upcoming cinematic features.  Anything with a female lead inevitably featured a woman toiling over her romantic woes.  Do women genuinely obsess about romance this much?  Or do we obsess about it because we've been programmed to believe it's our lot in life?

You know what I want to see?  More than anything.  I want to see a world where femme-centric films no longer center around the fallacy that women's relationships need to be defined by whom they are fucking.  Because as a woman who spent too much unsatisfying time doing said activity, I can tell the young girls of today the truth.

Relationship: The way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.

Relationships will always define who we are.  Because the interactions we have in life will invariably affect the actions we take next.  But make no mistake; romantic relationships will define about 5% of the person you become (Scientific fact... Ish.)  As a woman who has very limited experience in relationships of the romantic persuasion, I can promise you that life continues to astound me.  The people I encounter and share my life with, well, those are the people who remind me to wake up in the morning.  That life can still amaze me.  And when two people meet and connect on a level that defies odds, well, that's what I live for.

Blackout

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR: The Pauper's Back Porch

What are earmarks of our lives?  Birthdays, New Years, and anniversaries.  These are randomly selected dates based on a calendar that dictate the passing of time.  But as days blur into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years; time becomes less visible in our memories.  It's harder to remember what year events occurred in my adult life without the demarkation of school years.  I became an adult at 18 - in 2005.  But I became an independent adult while living in this apartment.  This apartment I say goodbye to tomorrow.

As you get older, life becomes less about monumental dates and more about moments.  Like the moment you cut yourself off from your parents financially.  Or the moment you decided to fuck a life not worth living and start one that was.  Or the moments you spent on your back porch figuring out who you are.

Tonight, my last night in my apartment, I decided to have one final GrubHub food delivery to 3050 N Greenview.  Some fabulous (read: decent) Thai food.  I popped open my Netflix and put on a documentary.  Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (a carryover from my recent 30 Rock re-binge).  After an hour and twenty minutes spent watching a woman contemplate her impending mortality (made all the more poignant after her recent death) by shuffling on with what she loves to do in sassy, brassy fashion; it made my forced reflection on this apartment much more imperative.

So onto the dirty work.  There was still some packing to be done.  I've spent the past couple of weeks slowly taking things from my shelves and cupboards and shoving them into boxes that I'll have to reopen like Christmas presents after you already peeked in the basement.  My kitchen has looked just a little barer.  My bathroom a wee bit more sparse.  Even the lack of furniture in our shared living room didn't seem to bother me.

But as I consolidated the bulk of my furniture into our dining room to make the moving process easier, I turned and looked at the nakedness of my bedroom and burst into tears.  A room that has shelved my memories, my personality, and my life for the past three and a half years was now just another blank slate for a new life to infiltrate.  It's not mine anymore.  The most stability I've had in my life in years is now gone.

I had to get out.  I grabbed my beer, my ipod, and my tears, and I headed outside.  To my back porch.

There it was.  Unchanged by packing.  Never big enough to furnish, I've always chosen to sit on the bare wood while sipping on my wine and staring off at the large tree whose outline looks like a cross between an Edgar Allen Poe and a Shel Silverstein poem.  I searched my ipod for the perfect song to calm me down, as I've done a thousand times before.  And there I sat.  Looking inside myself, trying to get a hold of my emotion.  Not to get rid of it.  Never to get rid of it.  Because it's on that porch, where all the tears and fears and anger were welcomed.  Where I learned to stop pushing my emotions out.  Where I finally understood that each and everything I feel can and will be used for good.  To spread to others like a promiscuous 15 year old with mono.  (Or maybe she's just someone who really likes to share her water bottle.  Who am I to judge?)

I spent years of my life trying to rid myself of my inner demons.  Therapy gone bad years ago made me believe that they were ridiculous.  My moodiness pushed people away.  It became a burden.  And I had to quash them.

But as I grew lonelier and lonelier, less reliant on friendships who found solace in significant others and lovers who found little solace in me, those demons became all I had.  So if they were there to stay, I might as well learn to live with them.  And once I grabbed ahold of them, I became more able to twist them and use them for my own gain.  To release them on the world.

My lonely nights on my back porch.  They made me who I am.  Time we spend with others can be magical.  But the time we spend with ourselves is essential.

So as I sat there, stumbling upon an old Muse song, I couldn't help but smile.  My tears evaporated on my cheeks as the cool Chicago wind blew them so only the salt remained.  "Don't grow up too fast / And don't embrace the past."  And on my back porch, I bid my apartment a humble good bye.  Not embracing the past, but simply utilizing it in the way it's - by nature - intended.  To be remembered.

This Must Be the Place

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE: The Pauper Says Goodbye

And now, I say to you all, "Good bye."

I'm kidding.  I'm not going anywhere.  I'm just going to keep on waxing poetic regardless of whether you read or not.

Two parallel milestones are currently occurring in my life.  Friday, my parents closed on our house.  The house I grew up in.  The house I spent my adolescence.  The only place I've called home.

Until I found my home.

This Saturday, I will be leaving the apartment I have called home for three and a half years.  The home I moved into at the malleable age of 23.  The home I found my adult family in.

Selling my childhood home has been a series of crying wolf.  After moving to Maryland in 1999, my family finally decided to dig its roots.  I had lived in five houses and two apartments for the first 11 years of my life.  So it was a relief to stay grounded during grades 6 through 12.  And as I left for college, my home was constantly on the precipice of leaving me.  My dad's job was ever-changing.  And many times I remember receiving the devastating phone call that they would be moving.

Though it never came to fruition, the nostalgic in me feared losing touch with the only constant I had known for years.  Regardless of finding new life in Chicago.  It was always comforting to know I could go home.

I moved into my first non-Chicago dorm residence in 2008.  Between 2008 and 2011, I moved into three apartments and one house.  I was a nomad who never grew attached to the place she called "home", because I knew I still had one back in Frederick, Maryland.

Until I moved with my best friend into my Greenview apartment.  It was the only place I scoped out myself.  And we signed a criminally cheap lease in Lakeview thanks to signing a 16 month guarantee.

As my family moved to a new country, and my brother and I grew more and more distant, evolution forced me to find a new home and family.  My roommate became my brother, my touchstone.  Someone I wasn't afraid to hop into bed with and watch videos of Beyonce ad nauseam.

Earlier this year, we decided to end our living arrangement for him to move in with his boyfriend.  I felt ready to begin a new, but apprehensive of leaving behind this life I had cultivated over three plus years.

It was only fitting that around that same time, my parents announced they were finally putting our Maryland house up for sale.  And a funny thing happened on the way to a real estate agent... I didn't care.

I wasn't taking moody walks to the beach pondering what life would be like without my Maryland home.  I wasn't going through old pictures of the good times shared with friends and family in that home.  I wasn't buying jugs of frosting in bulk to reminisce over the multiple tubs I sucked down of them after school when no one was home.

I just said, "Okay."

But now, as I read the news that the closing went through, I sit here staring at the boxes in my apartment that I have packed.  I'm staring at the empty bookshelf where Cody kept his DVDs.  I'm rummaging through my cabinets jonesing for a jar of peanut butter to lick off a spoon.  But there is none to be found, because ain't nobody got the room to buy new groceries before moving out.

A house is an object.  It's a place you stay so you aren't on the street.  You pay rent.  You spend ridiculous amounts of money on heat when it's forty below.  You hang your Moulin Rouge poster on the fifth wall of a residence.  But a home?  A home is where you cry.  Where you laugh.  Where you grow.  And shape.  It's where you look back on the hole in the wall where you jammed a knife out of frustration.  Where you can joke about your slanted shanty floors.  Where you still find the imperfection in the bathroom door that looks like a moorish face.  A home is where memories are cultivated.  Fresh and raw.  

And sooner or later, every home you have reverts back to a house.  Because you find a home to replace it.  You find new memories that feel so important they take precedence in your mind.

So as I look around at the blank walls in my home, the boxes that I grabbed years ago at a Dominick's to shovel my things around; I know that there is only one home I have to say goodbye to this month.  There is one place that I will be thinking of for the next few months with nostalgic longing.  And that home is no longer on the east coast.