West Wishes 5: Why I Almost Left Vidcon

Why I Almost Left VidCon

(and why I’m glad I didn’t)

(For our YouTube video made at the YouTube conference, click here!)

(For a really great video talking about fans and especially teenage girl fans, go here: https://youtu.be/dcnwrqaBr4o)

An hour and a half after getting to the registration line and an hour after standing in a signing line and ten minutes in the exhibition hall, I was ready to leave VidCon. I’d had enough with all the people and the noise and the squeals and the rush. There were all these teenagers around me, talking in high voices and squeeing and rushing off to see someone I’d never heard of and all these vendors selling equipment that I could never afford much less justify purchasing. At that moment, there was absolutely no point for me to be there. This was a conference for someone who wasn’t me, someone who was either thirteen and a little obsessive and a lot loud or someone who was thirty and creating content. I didn’t want to be there.

So, of course, I sat down with my notebook and had a little pity party about how tired I was and how hungry I was and how this wasn’t what I wanted. I listened to guys next to me talk about how this was more calm than last year and how they liked how things were spread out and hearing about how much more overwhelming this experience could have been spiraled me down into depths of self-doubt not seen in… well, days, but I’ve been pretty doubty lately. 

I wore jeans, a fitted tank top, and a flannel to my first day at VidCon because we woke up late and because I assumed there’d be people like me. I saw dresses and dress shirts and snarky t-shirts, but no one who looked like me. My body does what it wants to do and the tank top kept slipping down and I felt like I looked like an old person trying to be young, except I probably just looked like a young person because my face doesn’t belong to my age. I decided that I needed to conform, just a little. I bought a green VidCon tank top. 

Now, I’m not saying that solved all of my problems. I left a signing line because I couldn’t deal with another line with a bunch of high school/first year college students meeting someone who I peripherally knew and also I was hungry. But hours later, after food and music and time away from people, we were sitting in the opening ceremony and wonderful person after wonderful person took the stage and I felt okay. Here was the community I had been missing.

And after that, it was just a battle of remembering that community. Joy was much better at I than I was- she took pictures with everyone she met, talked to everyone she wanted to talk to. I’m not an anti-social person, but this conference was not socially sound for me. There’s just a lot of stuff on youtube and so many different fan groups. There are nerds and nerdfighters and people who enjoy science content and those are the ones that I appreciate the most, but there are also all of the makeup people, the comedians, the people doing pranks and living their lives on the internet, and apparently people that preteens are really, really excited about. But there are people there, like the ones I met at Mental Floss trivia and took a tentacle picture with, and the ones who were in the Wheezy Waiter signing line, and all the scattered lovely interactions around the convention. 

Even without those people, all the panels I went to were beautiful and uplifting and encouraging. The Women on YouTube panel was full of brilliant women who were so empowering and so supportive of each other. The Race and Representation panel was a master class in awareness and boosting underprivileged voices. The Sexual Orientation panel was funny and heartfelt and gave me chills. The Vlogbrothers Q&A was like a little piece of home on a stage, shared with hundreds of other people and going to the Driftless Pony Club/Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers concert was a mosh pit of friendliness. 

The last night of VidCon, you have VidCon Prom, which was planned as the last flight of the blue dress. I wanted a picture in front of the VidCon sign, though, so we walked back around from the arena to the entrance we’d been using all week. I have never been told I was beautiful by so many people in a row.

And then, at the end of the night, walking back to our car, the heels switched out for flip flops, one of the girls walking back to the convention center said, and I quote, “Your dress slays me.” 

Well, damn. Thanks, kid. A perfect cap to a waveringly perfect three days.  

West Wishes Recommends

We have made so many good choices on this trip. I didn’t want to plug every place we went in a post because (1) it would be lost in the text of the post and (2) it would disturb the flow of the post. So here’s a (constantly being updated) list of places I’d recommend visiting if you’re ever in the Southwest US: 

Place: Slater’s 50/50 in Huntington Beach, CA

Website: https://slaters5050.com/

Reason for visiting: substantial draft beer list, burgers that are half beef/half bacon, fried mac and cheese balls, and general restaurant atmosphere. 

Place: Mi Patio in Phoenix, AZ

Website: http://www.mipatioaz.com/

Reason for visiting: the best Mexican food I’ve ever had, plus delicious $2 margaritas

Place: The Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ

Website: http://heard.org/

Reason for visiting: a well-curated collection of Native American artifacts and art along with really quality guided tours. If you’re like me and you missed the section on Native Americans of the southwest other than the Navajo, there’s so much good information presented so clearly here. Plus, and I can’t stress this enough, the Superheroes exhibit is fantastic (through August 23rd, 2015). It’s not free, for sure, but it’s awesome. Also, we met some really knowledgeable staff members who were more than happy to share tips and recommendations for visiting the Grand Canyon. 

Place: Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, AZ

Website: http://mim.org/

Reason for Visiting: Have you ever wanted to see musical instruments from the entire world and then hear what they sound like? Have you ever wanted to spend an entire day surrounded by music? Do you want to see a brass band made out of bamboo or an orchestra made out of recycled materials? Boy, do I have a place for you. It’s a little pricey, but worth it. 

Place: Cheba Hut sandwiches

Website: http://chebahut.com/

Reason for Visiting: Their beers are good, their atmosphere is stoner-chic, and I have never enjoyed sprouts on a sub so much. I don’t think there’s a poor choice on that menu. Also this Star Wars picture. 

Place: Navajo Point

Reason for visiting: There are plenty of viewpoints around the Grand Canyon, but this and the Watchtower were my favorite. Not very crowded but still beautiful views. If you want somewhere to just be near the Canyon, this is where I’d go. 

Place: Bryce Canyon Pines

Website: http://www.brycecanyonmotel.com/bryce-restaurant/

Reason for visiting: Homemade soup and homemade pie. I don’t recommend pie lightly, so know that this is quality, quality pie.

Place: The Hoover Dam

Website: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/

Reason for visiting: If you can appreciate good engineering, the Hoover Dam is the place for you. If not, you can stand in two states at once. There’s also a bunch of stars on the floor of the monument near the top of the dam. 

Place: Devilicious Food Truck (seen in Anaheim, CA)

Website: http://deviliciousfoodtruck.com/

Reason: Best BLT I’ve ever had in my entire life. 

Place: Tanor Fresh Mediterranean Grill in Anaheim, CA

Website: https://www.sites.google.com/site/tanorfreshmediterraneangrill/

Reason: Looking for a shawarma place within walking distance of the convention center? This is it. 

Place: California Science Center in Los Angeles, CA
Website: http://californiasciencecenter.org/
Reason: This is where the space shuttle Endeavor is housed and the exhibit staff is superbly knowledgeable and happy to answer endless questions about the shuttle. There's also a fantastic mini-aquarium and tons of well-done interactive exhibits. You can easily spend a day in here.

Place: The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA
Website: http://www.tarpits.org/la-brea-tar-pits
Reason: First off, this is a lovely park area right beside an art museum, so if you're looking for a picnic in this part of LA, I'd recommend it. It's right off Wilshire Boulevard, so it's easy to find. Plus, you have the added benefits of being right near paleontology happening right now. Also, these guys:

Do it for the Unconcerned Baby Elephant

West Wishes 4: Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon has one of the best night skies in North America, so of course it was cloudy for most of both nights we were there. Each evening we caught maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes of clear skies and stars and we saw the Milky Way as best as I’ve seen it in years. 

It’s the evenings at Bryce that I really want to talk about. The days gave us wonderful sights, like the natural bridge and Pirate Point and this really spooky tree and every sight from an overlook anywhere. 

Bryce has an obtainable beauty to me. The Grand Canyon is so huge and distant- it still looked painted to me, like someone had figured out a lovely backdrop and placed it by a cliff. It was a picture you can fall to your death into. Bryce still had that height factor, but at least my eyes could handle the realness of what I was seeing. The evenings at the camp site allowed me some time to reflect on that.

I don’t go camping. It’s not that I’m opposed to it, it’s that I don’t have any equipment (we borrowed a lot from Joy’s grandmother) and I don’t have anyone to go with. Plus I never really saw the appeal. But at our campground at Bryce, there was a family with guitars and other strings, guys playing frisbee, a Canadian making friends with a Korean couple, a pair of French friends, and several families with adorable children. You could sit by your picnic table and listen to all sorts of music and conversation, just bask in the general atmosphere. 

We had a campfire and made quesadillas, hot dogs, s’mores, and hashbrowns over our two days out there and let the sun set and the stars come out over the campfire smoke. It was… pleasant. I could see why people would want to do this. And of course it rained some our second day at Bryce and of course we missed some of the stars, but I’ll keep the campfire evenings as my memories of Bryce. 

West Wishes 3: The Grand Canyon

(Preparatory fact: If you’re tired enough, you’ll sleep anywhere.)

We have done a lot of early-leaving on this trip. We left early to catch the plan. We left earlier to start our drive out to Flagstaff. We left almost as early to get to the Grand Canyon and we left absurdly early to get to Bryce. Then, when we were going back, we left the earliest. Most of the leavings we did happened when the sun couldn’t even be bothered to accompany us. It had to catch us on the way. 

Driving through the California mountains and the Arizona desert at dawn and through the morning had a loveliness I didn’t expect. We saw the land change as the sky changed, watched the vegetation disperse and shrink as we got closer to the sunbaked lands. I’d talk about the desert, but I finished Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and the desert she sees is lovelier than the one you would hear through my description. One of my favorite quotes from the novel: 

“Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.” 

We did lunch in Phoenix, which was much more tenable to me than I expected. That whole “it’s a dry heat” thing? Exceedingly accurate. We ate at a great place for lunch, we went to the Heard Museum, and we went to the Musical Instrument Museum, which you gotta try, seriously. And then we drove on through Arizona, past cacti and hills that were probably mountains all the way up to Sedona, where we stopped by a bookstore as it was closing, got advice and postcards, and found our way to getting these lovely pictures.

Because who doesn't love a good javelina?

Eventually, we got up to Flagstaff and hit up a hotel and a sandwich shop. It was one of those days that feels like it must have been several smashed together into one. Space and time are relative and all of that, but the brain has a way of conflating the two, so that events that occurred hundreds of miles away must also have been separated from you by more than a few hours. The stay in Flagstaff was a wonderful reset button for my mental trip odometer. 

We hit the Grand Canyon on Saturday morning  and drove past most of the overlooks in order to get a campground. We got a spot, pitched our tent, and went back to the Watchtower near the east entrance of the park. There were, of course, people everywhere, from teenagers to families to old people traveling in groups, all of them taking pictures and staring and laughing and jumping and walking. We went up in the tower and looked out and took in our first real glimpse of the canyon as opposed to the over-the-shoulder glimpse I got while driving in, which by itself blew me away. 

Inside the Watchtower was also exciting

From there we hit each viewpoint and I let Joy get a lifetime of pictures, which I will put here whenever Joy uploads them to facebook and lets me steal some of them.  We did the blue dress picture at Navajo point and bought a necklace there as well, which I proceeded to wear for days on end for fear of losing it. We did a picnic lunch and got spooked by the thunder and went back to check on our tent, which didn’t have the rain cover on it yet. Then we napped in the wonderfully dry and warm tent and went back for more pictures and fun. 

Nature: Absurdly Beautiful

And then it rained.

And then it rained some more.

In fact, it didn’t stop raining until about midnight. I know because I was awake. Southern California shared the first rain it had in months with the Grand Canyon which would have been fine if our tent had been as waterproof as we had hoped. We came back to a puddle, which we thought we dried with a aplomb, and drank a bottle of wine and ate snacks, huddled around a propane lantern. Then, when the puddles made it clear that this was their tent and not ours, we retreated to the car, whose back seat was still covered with supplies and gear, and made ourselves as comfortable as possible in the front two seats. I turned the car on for about ten minutes every hour or so, whenever the shivering became untenable. During one of these sleep interruptions, I noticed the rain had stopped. During another, I saw a break in the clouds and stars.

Then, the next morning, when the rain had cleared out, we packed up all of our soaking belongings and wrung out of the soaking tent and went back to the watchtower for one more look at the canyon. I don't know if you've ever been able to look at the Grand Canyon in the morning, when no one else is around and lingering rainclouds hide and reveal the landscape as shift on the breeze, but I have, and I can tell you, it's worth it. 

Click on it. You won't be disappointed.

So, so worth it. 

West Wishes 2: A Start and An Ocean

There’s something about airports, isn’t there? Just that feeling of excitement and newness and anticipation. 

And there’s something about being in a new place, seeing sights you’ve never seen before, talking to people you’ve never met, getting the chance to lay your own eyes on things you’ve only ever seen pictures of. It brings colors to the world that you could never have found on your own. 

There’s a joy in traveling, a rush of exploring that pushes you to walk down that new trail, to go out instead of going home, to run up to your plans and breathe in the fresh air around them. 

Or I assume there’d be all of that still here, if I wasn’t too busy trying to be efficient. 

Listen, I’ve travelled a lot over the past four years or so. I backpacked through Europe, I went to a couple of NASA conferences up and down the east coast, I’ve been to weddings states away, I ran a traveling planetarium program, I drove a moving truck to New York City. I know the drill. I know what you do when you get to a new place, how to make the most of your hotel stay, how to get past all those tourists around you. I know how to get stuff done. 

It’s a useful skill set, but it leaves me frustrated. I wanted to stare out the window as the nation changed below me. I wanted to wander through an airport with the aimless purposelessness of the uninitiated, to want to be there instead of tolerating the time I spent there. I want the world to be brand new while I go to a place I’ve never been before. 

We left Hickory before the morning really got started, we had a delay in our flight out of Charlotte, which meant that our plane landed in Houston later than planned and they switched us to a different plane for the continuation of our flight to Dallas, which meant that we jogged to our gate to catch our connection to LA. Then, once we landed, there was the politeness of staying with relatives and the sleep of the travel-exhausted. And it’s not that any of that was bad, per se. It was just that I knew how this worked, how we had to make it work, and it felt like work. I have yet to figure out how to make work into anything resembling leisure. 

But the next morning, there was the Pacific. 

And the next day, there was the Pacific.

I haven’t been in water that can pick me up in longer than I can remember. When I was a kid, it was easier to go jump in the waves, to run up against them, to imagine that you could hop over them, to think that there was nothing scary out there. Thinking about the news from this summer, maybe I should have seen Jaws at a younger age. But I remember the ocean and always wanting to go farther, never wanting to be called back. I remember (or imagine remembering) being the kid almost too impatient for sunscreen, sprinting off towards the waves as soon as an acceptable layer of sun protection was on top of my skin.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that. The adults stayed on the sand, so I started to, too. My friends were much more interested in the sun, so I hung out with them on the beach too. I forgot that feeling of running to the waves, forgot that there could be any reason for me to want to be out where the water came above my knees. 

The Pacific is… so cold. Just… so cold. Especially in comparison to the Atlantic, which, in shallow places in the peak of summer is almost a comfortable bath temperature. But once you get used to it, once the first surprisingly big wave drenches your hair, the cold is a non-issue. I spent half an hour swimming over and under and through waves in that cold water and it was a beautiful kind of freedom. For those couple of seconds when the waves pushed me higher than I could have jumped and supported me all the way back down to the sand, twenty years ticked off the clock. 

Now I’m not old enough to really long for the days of two decades ago, but I know what those years feel like. Twenty years of learning how to carry myself. Twenty years of picking myself back up. Twenty years of figuring out how to be out of the way and figuring out when to fight my way back in. Twenty years of growing doubt and frustration and big ideas and bigger dreams and effort and failure of a sort. Twenty years of weight piled and stuffed into that invisible sack that sits on my shoulders and changes how I see the world. A couple of seconds without that is something I’d go back for over and over and over again. 

So I did. 

Maybe the salt clears out your eyes or something. Maybe it’s just a clarity in the air. But I think I could see the world in a new-old way, with all that excitement breathes into your soul and all that practicality saves for your body. I could get good at this life thing if I just figured out that balance, the reckless abandon without a wreck. 

But this trip? It’s a start. 

West Wishes Itinerary

It's from the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

If you're like my mom, you want to know exactly where I am. If you're like my friends, you want to know where I've been and where all these pictures are coming from, like the one on the right:

Well, for friends and relatives alike, here's an itinerary for you!

July 14- Fly from Charlotte to LA
July 15-16- Hang out in Huntington Beach
July 17- Drive from Huntington Beach to Flagstaff, with stops in Phoenix and Sedona
July 18- Grand Canyon
July 19-20- Bryce Canyon
July 21- Drive from Bryce to Huntington Beach, with a stop at the Hoover Dam
July 22- recover in Huntington Beach and see an Angels game in Anaheim
July 23-25- Vidcon in Anaheim
July 26- Disneyland!
July 27-28-  LA/Huntington Beach
July 29- Fly from LA to Charlotte

I'll update with links to posts once I've got them up, but for now, enjoy the list and be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.

West Wishes 1: A Comic Book Aside

Okay, I promise I’ll tell you about travel and the Pacific Ocean and food and mountains and the Canyons, but before I do those posts, I need you to see this post. 

In Phoenix, we went to the Heard Museum, which I’m going to strongly recommend to anyone who can reasonably get to Phoenix, especially before the end of August. It’s an American Indian art and history museum. We tagged onto a guided tour through all the history, which was really well informative and fascinating, just really well done all around, and, having been in informal science education for four years, I have a pretty solid sense of what’s well done.

But the section I really want to talk to you about was the superheroes exhibit, which of course I bought a ticket to, because, come on. It’s me. Like most things involving superheroes, I bought it without any idea of what to expect. And I was blown away. 

Have you ever seen a picture of what Superman would look like if he were Cherokee? 

"(Su)perman," 2014, by Tom Ferris (Otoe-Missouria/Cherokee)

Did you ever expect, among the many reimaginings of famous characters, to see a Salish version of Rocket and Groot or Hulk and Wolverine? Are you like me and had no idea what Salish referred to? 

Left: "Untitled," Spring 2014, Jeffrey Veregge. Right: "As Nature Intended," February 2014, by Jeffrey Veregee (Port Gamble S'Klallam)

In this exhibit, there was Batman pottery, Thor pottery, Pueblo Powerpuff Girls. All of these native takes on heroes we’re familiar with, they're beautiful and unique and a not-so-subtle reminder of the whiteness of the dominant culture in America. Which is why I was ecstatic to see the native superheros of the exhibit. 

Super Indian. 

Created, drawn, and written by Arigon Starr (Kickappoo)

Captain Paiute. 

Created by Theo Tso (Las Vegas Paiute)

Kagagi.

Drawn and written by Jay Odjick (Anishinabe/Kitigan Zibi Algonquins)

Pueblo Girl (Wonder Woman’s cousin). 

Autumn Borts and Susan Folwell (painter) (Santa Clara Pueblo)

These are new stories, new takes on old stories, stories we’ve never heard before, but stories that fit perfectly into the genre. They’re beautifully drawn and pull from tried and true storytelling traditions. It’s exciting and I’m so glad to know that these books exist in the world, so I had to share this with all of you. 

If you want to read a couple of the Super Indian comics, the books are available online. If you’re in the area, or if you’re planning a trip, head over to Phoenix while the exhibit’s going on- it's open until August 23rd. If nothing else, take a second when you’re planning your next book to look for stories told by people you haven’t heard from before. You’ll find wonderful things that way, I promise.

West Wishes 0.5- A Summary

I know, I know, it’s absurd that I’m halfway through my trip to the western US without having posted any kind of update. It does not bode well for the discipline I’d like to have this year. But I’ve been busy, as one should be when one is seeing a new part of the world, and so, while you’re waiting for a real blog post, may I offer you these verbal snapshots, occasionally accompanied by actual snapshots? 

• Sitting with our backs against the terminal wall, just below the window, we hear the announcement that our plane’s delayed by half an hour. There are the expected groans from the gathered crowd but I rush to the bathroom to put on my blue dress because the blue dress is for Big Moments and you cannot deny that sparkling my way back to my gate past all the tired gathered people that airports hold was a Big Moment. 

• Because our connections were tight and we never got to stop between either of our multi-hour flights, for practicality’s sake we picked aisle seats on the flight from Dallas to Los Angeles, which we jogged through the terminal to catch. There was absolutely no way I’d have made it nine hours cumulative hours of travel without visiting at least one restroom. But when the seatbelt sign was turned back on as we approached LA, the girls beside me raised their window shade and I could see large, jagged mountains on one side of the plane and the ocean on the other and that, I thought, was something very new.

• Hanging out with someone else’s family always has the potential to be a tightrope walk, but when someone else’s family lives ten minutes from the beach with the sea breeze pouring in and they welcome you with open arms, friendly dogs, and generous food, the rope turns into a wide platform, the fear of the fall a mile away to either side. 

• There’s this gigantic metal statue of a nude surfer riding a wave on Huntington Beach. We walked a couple blocks out of our way to see it. For exercise. Gotta work off that wine somehow. #adulthood

• For the first time in my life, someone told me to put my phone away, that my friends could wait until dinner was over, and I was left feeling the need to explain that these relationships, my friendships, are enriched by the thirty seconds I take to pull my friends into this moment in my life, to immediately share the raccoon taxidermy holding a kitten or the recipe for the most American burger I will ever consume, and that this sharing isn’t something that takes me away from the table, it’s something that brings others to it. Instead, I hit send and slid my phone into my pocket, because that’s the polite thing to do. LOOK AT THIS RACCOON, THOUGH:

The internet needs to know.

• LOOK AT ALL THESE WIND TURBINES. 

• LOOK AT ALL THESE CACTI. 

• The first time I caught a glimpse of the Grand Canyon, I gasped.

• We decided to do our blue dress pictures for the Grand Canyon at Navajo Point and after getting most of them, we found a ledge. I intended to sit down on the edge and dangle a foot off into the empty space, but all I could make myself do was sit with my legs crossed a solid sixteen inches from the edge. From there, I could see so far forward and left and right and up and down that I knew I should be in awe, but all I felt was afraid. 

More positives and quasi-positives to come, my friends! 

A Prayer for the Recently Uncontrolled

Don’t let these shackles hold you down. 

You already broke them. 

Hold on to that, if you need to hold on to anything. 

But I’m here to tell you, to remind you,

that you don’t. 

This is freedom, kid, this is how we get away.

Plan if you need to, and keep that in your mind, 

but don’t ask how high when the plan says jump. 

It was your plan in the first place. 

No one said you ever had to belong to it.

Remember, 

know, 

that you’re good enough as you are. 

You always have been. 

So don’t let that fear ruin what you’re doing,

who you are, 

who you want to be, 

where you want to be. 

You can stand on your own. 

You can. 

You’re prepared. 

If you have to, 

if you need to, 

if you can’t strut (because there are days when we can’t), 

you can lean back, let it happen around you while you tie your own hands,

so that you remember, you can remind yourself

that the world turns without you, my friend. 

And that’s the best thing. 

It’s not your necessity or your preparation that gives you value. 

You had that already. 

Had it all along. 

Sparkly Blue Dress

(Editor's note: I have a habit of writing pieces about objects that aren't really about the objects. One time, I wrote about black dresses. This post, though, is mostly actually about the blue dress.) 

So on Friday, I tried on my high school prom dress which I also wore for a formal in college. 

This beauty right here.

Now, for the uninitiated, trying on old clothes is the most direct measure of how far you’ve progressed as a female. Can’t fit into your high school stuff? Don’t worry, happens to the best of us. Can’t fit into your college stuff? Man, who can, am I right? None of us are the sizes we were. 

Did you catch the implications in those responses?  

There's an internal and external judgement, an idea that we were better when we could fit into these smaller clothes. "Don't worry" assumes that you should have been worrying. "None of us" is comfort by association, thinking that one needs to be comforted. Those sentences are the lines of middle-aged mothers admiring their daughters’ appearance, remembering with bitter nostalgia the days when they looked like that. It’s the toothy smile of trophy wives who believe that each pound is another step towards divorce. It’s the byline of the overarching society that puts the teenage female body on a pedestal while mocking the teenage girl mind and spirit.

High School Prom- the last time I had my nails done at a salon.

Now, I never much bought into physical appearance, especially in high school. The female heroes in my books were only told they were beautiful by the men who loved them and that was the only affirmation that mattered to them. Loving someone’s appearance to me was a part of the whole true love package- loving someone’s appearance without loving their personality, their mind, their abilities, was to love incompletely. Y’all, that’s the guiding principle Teenage Me went by. She also thought that love stories dropped fully formed from the heavens and into our lives and that’s why she was perpetually single. Well, that and the fact that she turned down two boys over the phone in half an hour one Christmas break, thereby offending the universe and confirming her spinsterdom. Thanks, Teenage Me. 

But I also didn’t have anything to complain about in high school. I probably have one of the lowest pimple counts of any teenager to exist, especially one who didn’t actually care for her skin in any way. I never had braces. I have nice hair. I was busy enough with enough physical activities that, while never skinny, I was never chubby. And I couldn’t have cared less about any of this. Nobody ever told me that I was pretty and nobody ever told me that I was ugly. Other than myself. I just assumed that I was a little bit ugly, like the rest of humanity. So my appearance moved to a tertiary concern at best.

College- when untagging pictures is a Sisyphean task

I don’t really have anything to complain about now. Sure, I spend more time on the couch than I used to and my muscles and joints are slowly betraying me and my diet is, just, extraordinarily questionable, but I’m not disgustingly displeased with the way I look. I like my style. I still like my hair. I don’t have an occasion to wear anything more strenuous than sweatpants most of the time, so the topic doesn’t really come up too frequently. 

The occasion does come around, though, and Friday’s occasion was pre-West Coast Adventure planning. There’s a VidCon prom and I really wanted to wear my blue sparkly dress. It’s not… dignified, so I don’t think I’ll have much call to wear it again. But I love it. I love being in it. It’s strapless and floor-length and it’s got that stiff mesh stuff that makes dress poof out in the skirt so you rustle everywhere you go. Petticoat? I don’t think it’s a petticoat. Whatever. And the dress leaves a trail of blue sparkles wherever it goes and if that’s not a life goal, I don’t know what is. I have it in my mind that I want to leave a trail of sparkles wherever I go, including the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, and ending at VidCon Prom. The last flight of the blue dress. 

Well, with such expectations, you can understand how disappointed I was when I couldn’t get the dress to zip up yesterday afternoon. Now, it was warm and the end of the day and I had substantial Chinese food and beer digesting in my stomach, so I was still left with hope despite the failure of my usual trick of zipping up the dress backwards and then twisting it around and pulling it up over any problematically large areas. It was just sweat and water weight. Only things between me and my dreams.

So this late-afternoon setback wasn’t all that bad and I definitely got over it- I went to the NC Blackberry Festival Friday Night beer garden with Joy and then we got pizza and went to a bar and it was, all in all, a good night. But I didn’t go back to the tank top and skirt I had been wearing that day. I settled for my comfy jeans and my green shirt, which I know I look stunning in without trying. I knew that I wasn’t excited to try to fit into anything else. 

Because for those ten seconds when I had to admit failure against the dress, all the ways I had learned to hate my body since high school came crashing down on me. Maybe it’s the backfat that I never had back when I was active and healthy. Maybe it's the surprise inches that have popped up across my measurements that came around for the same reason. All this is happening because you’re useless, you know, my spirit said. If you’d just exercised more or got your calories in some form other than liquid, you’d look much better. Look at you now. Your stomach is stretching your skin and your arms are chubby and have you looked at your cheeks recently? They’re like chipmunk cheeks, they’re so large. There’s no way your hair can make up for that, or for your double-chin. And let’s be honest, you don’t even know how to apply makeup to distract from what’s going on with the rest of the blob that is your body. And this damn dress still. won’t. zip. 

The lowest point, though, was when I thought about the girl that I had inherited the dress from. She went to my church and was graduating and was getting rid of old prom dresses and even though I was a couple years younger, we were about the same size. The blue dress had been a little loose in high school, but it was so pretty, I didn’t care. Of course, I wouldn’t let anyone take it in. But now, years in the future, as I struggled back out of the dress, I actually thought, “Well, now you’re fat like her.” 

Maybe I learned to judge bodies earlier than I thought. Other’s bodies. Not my own. 

I’m wearing the dress right now as I type this because I was just so damn proud of getting it on this morning. The trick worked and though the dress is snug, the zipper isn’t particularly strained. That little dumb hook thing at the top is never getting done, though. That’s silly. But I can’t shake the feeling that I feel better because now I feel prettier and more successful. I could get this dress back on. My prom dress from my junior year of high school. My formal dress from sophomore year of college. Yeah, I can still fit in it. Comfortably, ladies. Comfortably. 

And I know that’s wrong. I want to be excited because I get to wear my blue dress in all the places I wanted to wear it. It’s a plan fulfilled. But I can’t help feeling that the plan is dirty now because it’s tied into this body competition. Do I look as good in this dress as I did in high school? In college? As another girl would in this dress? 

Answer: hell yeah. 

You know what? Screw it. I’m going to choose to not participate in that. I’m a little exhausted by the fact that I’m going to have to choose to not participate in a daily mental body competition for the rest of my life, but hey, if it’s what it takes to be a good adult in this world, then that’s what I’ll do. And to the girl I got the dress from, I’m so sorry I even remotely thought disparagingly of your body. You have beautiful taste in clothes and are perfect the way you are. Thanks for making this moment possible. 

So yeah. 

Grand Canyon, here we come.

(Wanna know how this story ends? Find a "Best of the Blue Dress" post here.) 

The Questions

Can I be allowed to be angry? 

Can I be upset when people don’t listen to me, don’t take me seriously, don’t trust my judgement? Because I’m tired of it. I’ve got a plan, I am informed, I am competent, I’m smart. I don’t see a reason for your doubt. And I know I’m not as tired of it as other people, I know it’s rough for a lot of us, but I’ve been especially sensitive to it lately.

Am I allowed to be sensitive? 

I spent a long, long time thinking that emotions were for pansies and women on TV were simply irrational. It took me longer than most to realize that emotions have a pull that is genuine, something that’s hard to fight, something that doesn’t always need to be fought. And I know that transitions are hard and that leaving is hard and that this purgatory limbo I’m in right now isn’t the ideal state for emotional stability. But it's still hard, you know, to tell yourself that it's okay to say when someone else's words or lack of words or tone of words hurt you. It's hard when you hear your voice shaking as you express hurt. It's easy when you say you're just being sensitive. 

Can I be less than polite? 'Cause I'm telling ya, I just want to throw some people against a wall sometimes and it's only politeness that stops me. And I just want to give someone a piece of my mind, a well-phrased and socially-conscious piece of my mind that is maybe shouted towards them because they just don't see the reality all around them, but I know that there's no way to maintain politeness outside of that. I want to flip off drivers who cut me off and endanger cars around me on the highway. I want to wipe the salt on my hands from my fries on my pants without worry. And I want to use the f-word. Because it makes me feel better. And because it makes me feel like a badass. Who also has an adorable pout. 

Is laziness allowed?

I ran a marathon recently. Not an actual marathon. That would be silly, given my current state of training and complete lack of desire to jog for more than twenty minutes or so. But I ran a life-marathon recently, where I stuffed 24 more schools than usual into my program's calendar and closed out a position and moved out of a place I lived for three years and went on a 10-day trip with 50 teenagers and then moved more stuff and applied for a visa and then said goodbye. So is it okay that I just want to finish Gilmore Girls? I've got, like, 20 episodes left. And is it okay that I start Daredevil right after that? Because the Netflix is paid for and I'm going to spend less money here than I would if I went out and did something in the world and I've done so many things. Can I just nap? A calm before the storm? A vacation? For once? 

Can I be allowed to be comfortable?

There are so many things that we shouldn't be comfortable about. We shouldn't be comfortable with systems built on racism and sexism and homophobia and every other kind of discriminatory impulse we humans have and have had in the past. We shouldn't be comfortable with income gaps and apathy and unfair business practices. We shouldn't be happy with our eyes closed; they have to be open to the injustices around us. And our feet can't be still and our hands can't be folded when we do see things that need to be fixed. But... Actually, I can't find a counter that rings true here. I don't know if I can allow myself to be comfortable without questioning that comfort. 

Listen, I just wanna know where I stand, what I need to work on. Angry, but not hateful. Sensitive without lashing out. Polite as needed for kindness, not for its own sake. Momentary laziness for health. Comfort when there's no one left who needs it more. 

Am I allowed to figure out if I'm right? 

The Plan

So, just very quickly, I want to catch everyone up on my life because times, they have been a-changin'. This summer from here on out looks like this:

Now-July 13: Hanging out at the family home because my lease in Chapel Hill is up before my next trip and I need some time to situate my life and chill and also get my visa in order.

July 14-29: I'm going on a West Coast Adventure with my friend, Joy. We're going to go to the beach and visit the Canyons Grand and Bryce and go to the beach and visit LA and go to the beach and go to Vidcon and Disneyland and go to the beach. I may be over-emphasizing the beach bit.

July 30-early September: I'll be back at the family home, prepping for the fall and watching Netflix.
September Date TBD: I'll fly to New York then Edinburgh or possibly London then Edinburgh and move in and start a new phase. My car will go away during this time period. Potentially, so will some of my hair.

September 21, 2015-early September 2016: I'll be studying at the University of Edinburgh's School of Divinity, earning a MSc in Science and Religion. You can read more about the program here.

And that's as far as I have planned. There are options post-September 2016, of course, but nothing's set in stone. Well, I plan on being tenacious in seeking employment or further study, but that's the only thing I've got. I plan to do weekly blog posts here, but we'll see how that schedule shakes out once I have a normal, you know, schedule.

If you want to keep up with me beyond this, you can check out the video blog project Joy and I are doing, called Flight of the Vlogyries, and follow me on Twitter. I promise only amusement, profundity, and snark, not complete sobriety or overwhelming insight (yet). 

The Resolve

I, uh, have a big summer planned. Had a bigger one planned, but in many ways, I'm glad that it didn't pan out- I'd be ten kinds of exhausted right now instead of just one and a half. Plus, I'll have more opportunities to digest this summer than I would have that one. Then I have a big year planned (I assume that's what most of you are here for) and I will be telling you all about the castles I'll be haunting and the degree I'll be earning in Edinburgh when that time comes, but for now, I come to you with a different purpose.

I went to a 4th of July party last week. It was a house party. There was a waiver. I knew one person there. And it was surprisingly... awesome. I'm working on the whole story because there's a lot to process there, but I think I can pinpoint the 4th of July party as the genesis of this particular blog with this particular focus.

I knew that I wanted to start a new blog because my old blog contains a lot of heart and a lot of thought and a lot of someone who's not me anymore. I did a lot of growing the past eight years, but I don't need to carry that around as luggage. It's backstory. It can stay archived at my parents' house until the inevitable day that life makes me deal with it again and maybe I'll find that it'll sell really well on eBay like I daydream that my porcelain dolls will. I need something shiny. I need something new.

But I didn't want it to be a, "Hey, look at me, I'm in another country having a blast!" kind of deal. I did that already. I want to be more intentional with my future, more focused. I just didn't know what to focus on.

The 4th of July was something that by all rights shouldn't have been as good as it was. It was a heavily social situation when I honestly wasn't jazzed about being sociable, it was not what I expected (I was thinking bands and fireworks; there was a slip 'n slide and a man with a purple hat and an American flag cape and also beer), and again, I cannot emphasize how few people I knew walking into this situation. I am not the kind of person who goes to events like this. I'm not allowed to do a thing like that.

But I did go. I was allowed. I listened and watched and participated in beautiful back-and-forth exchanges, entire groups tossing jokes and stories around while other groups splashed in myriad inflatable pools or caught each other slipping in the mud or participated in increasingly insane activities. Only one stopping me from being there was me.

Well, me and years of a certain type of socialization and ingrained behavioral standards, but still, mostly me. It hit me when I was in the shower that I stop myself all the time. We all do. But I don't think I want to limit myself for any reason. I know there's going to be enough of that going around anyway if I become a woman in academia or a woman in ministry or... really, just as a woman in general. I wanted to focus on what could be done, not my idea of what can be done. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, right? And I want to get to that pipe.

So this is me not getting in my own way. This is me allowing myself to do or not do as needed as I hammer out my place in this big old world. I hear that's kinda a lifetime thing, so maybe this blog will go the distance like the last one did. I'm going to do, I'm going to observe, and I'm going to think about the places where we stop ourselves when maybe we don't need to. I'm going to see how I can be better and I'm going to watch how that definition changes. I'm giving myself that permission.

You can have it too.

I don't want to be an allowance hog here.