In the Venn Diagram of things that are both terrifying and true, the fact that I just meandered through my first post-graduate week is pretty firmly in the middle of the circle. And it wasn’t even like I had a boring, quiet week to help ease the transition–I managed to attend the (lovely, tasteful) wedding of a (lovely, tasteful) friend, pack the vast majority of my belongings, and haul my life across town.

So that’s been fun.

But in between assembling furniture and crowding six to a hotel room in south Georgia, a weird thing has happened. I’ve begun to gather glimpses of my looming adult life. The end of moving is in sight, and that means that soon enough I will have substantial free time in the mornings. I could take up running! Or sit in my local coffee shop and flirt with baristas before work! My tiny studio, which seems Parisian if you click your heels together three times and just believe, is within walking distance of Atlanta’s largest park, most famous art museum, and (to my knowledge) only botanical garden.

Y’all, I signed up for an improv class. On weekends. To expand my social circle. Truly, this is a brave new world.

I feel like I am on an excellent but still terrifying precipice. One in which I have to develop hobbies other than conning my friends into helping me move my belongings (followed by idly contemplating taking up minimalism because it turns out, things are heavy).

And I’m excited to do that away from the same little Atlanta neighborhood that I’ve called home for more or less 10 years. (Decatur, it’s been real, but I need to find new places to buy whimsical spoon rests and salt shakers shaped like owls.)

Tonight will be the first night I spend in my new apartment, complete with Ikea bedframe. If I write again next week, it will hopefully be about all the new and exciting things I have done in my time here. (If I don’t, assume that the Ikea bedframe didn’t hold, and check Twitter to make sure I’m still around.)

Image courtesy of Flickr user NatShots photography, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

By the time this post is published, I will be in the middle of the long, bagpipe-filled process of graduating from college. I am not particularly excited about the ceremony. I checked out from school a month ago, and even at the best of times I was never particularly connected to Emory College. And, of course, it’s been a difficult semester.

However, attending my younger sister’s graduation from Oxford College (my other alma mater) over the weekend reminded me that two years ago, I went into graduating with a very different frame of mind. I was excited to celebrate my time at Oxford. In the pictures taken during my graduation, I look happy (and slightly sunburnt from spending some day of the previous week drinking mint juleps on a beach).

Going back to Oxford reminded me of why. Walking around after their own long, bag-pipe-filled ceremony, I was greeted by professors and staff members and lookers-on who remembered me, and asked about what I was doing with myself. They were pleased to see me, and they remembered me well. Perhaps most startlingly, the way that they remembered me lined up with the way that I remembered me (with, of course, the polite gloss that someone else will give when describing someone to their face).

When I was at Oxford, I knew who I was. I don’t, now. For a long, long time, my primary identity has been Emily Chapman, Good Student. As I’ve mentioned before, I dont have hobbies. My friends–since many of them are pulled from my same scholarship program–are other people whose identities have mostly been built around being Good Students.

Over the last year, I quit being able to honestly identify myself that way. Schoolwork was unexciting to me, I didn’t finish my honors thesis, I wasn’t named for any of the school awards that I used to be good at winning. At the same time, I got hired at a job I like, and am good at, and where I am still massively insecure about projecting some version of myself that is still defined as being a Good Student.

I have never been defined first by being cool (or fun, or kind, or interesting), because I wind up being defined by being smart, and I am worried that that is going to carry forward forever.

(And, of course, I’m worried that this sounds incredibly conceited.)

Going back to Oxford made me realize how much I miss having that solid sense of self. Of course, reestablishing that is what one’s early 20s are for. And I’m sure that in six months I will be in such a better place to think about this. But for right now, I’m mostly ready to be done.

Image courtesy of Paul Graham Morris. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

My mother died this week. I have been trying to come up with an appropriate response to this that I might post on the blog, but of course there isn’t one. It’s awful. I will probably fail to feel the weight of its awfulness until a few months or years from now. That is–I am told–the course of these things. Thankfully I do not know from firsthand experience prior to this point.

Cancer is an awful disease, and at my mother’s insistence I refuse to categorize her experience with it as a battle, though research and anecdata both tell me that this is the Done Thing. It was a bareknuckle fight with an asshole of a disease.

I try to avoid cursing on the blog in general, but really, fuck biliary cancer.

I was trying to describe my feelings about this to a friend this past week. My friends have been lovely through this whole ordeal, but particularly in the past week. But, as they visit, I feel like I should be Appropriately Mournful. Wearing black, stoically refusing to cry, staring into the distance blankly.

Certainly, sometimes I am like that. But generally speaking, I’m not. I have been going about my business. Today I went on a cemetery tour, and tried to go to a Shakespeare performance. I did not weep during either of these things. In the middle of them, I ate a catfish po’boy.

The best way that I can describe it is with an analogy from 8th grade earth science. It is as follows: there is a difference between climate and weather. Climate is the overall condition of a place, whereas weather is the immediate happenings. So, for example, Georgia is a temperate climate–this does not invalidate the fact that the weather was crummy today, and my Shakespeare in the Park performance was rained out. The weather can go against the general climate. Atlanta can have a rainy May.

And in this situation, my grief is the climate. It is there in the background, and will probably continue to be there for a few months, or a year, or the rest of my life. But the weather is pretty variable–and generally cheery. I can’t be overwhelmed with sadness all the time, because sometimes I have to keep it together and go grocery shopping. If my climate and my weather merged, I would lose my mind. And I don’t want to do that. Sometimes I just need to try to go see a play or decorate my new apartment or take a nap.

So, that’s where I am right now. No doubt it will vary greatly over the next few months–how, I can’t predict, since I was always awful at meteorology.

Image licensed under CC BY 2.0. Courtesy of erix!

As promised in last week’s post about not losing your time in a fog of Netflix and malaise*, I spent part of this weekend at the North Georgia Primitive Arts Festival/Knap In. As expected, it was fairly small and uniformly delightful. Y’all, it is a truth well established that festival folks in general are friendly, and rural southern festival folks even more so.

You want to feel loved? Haul out to the Georgia Apple Festival, ignore the warnings about chewing tobacco causing mouth cancer, and eat an apple fritter with someone who makes wreaths out of bullet casings.

So, I was just delighted to find myself with my two classmates and professor on a Saturday morning, heading out to Cartersville to hang with people who like to make their own arrowheads, and–in the case of the primitive bowhunter side of the festival–their own arrows and bows, and then shoot deer with them. We rolled up–one of the few cars that wasn’t a truck–around 11am, and headed on in. 

The festival seemed to be composed of a lovely little melange of friendly old dudes, Boy Scout leaders (and their corresponding boy scouts), and people selling hand crafted soap (because those people are at every festival ever). Early on, our professor left us in order to go track down some deer antler (you get to have a fun research budget when you’re in anthropology!) and set us to wander. We took a moment to watch an older man explain some particulars of pressure flaking to a very interested but also very clueless dude, and then wandered to the next tent, where a very friendly professorial man was teaching a scout leader how to make rope out of trees.

There was another educational tent, for artifact identification, but as we had no artifacts to identify we hit up the shopping booths instead. There was a fun mix of things for sale–polished stones, raw flint and chert (hard cores for the hardcore), and bobcat pelts were all hanging out in close proximity. I had a lovely chat with a woman selling stones, which went about like this:

Lady: Y’all up from Atlanta? We’re from Newnan.

Me: I have relatives up in Newnan!

Lady: There was a house fire up there today. Four kids died.

This is the kind of conversation that reminds you that you share a regional home with Flannery O’Conner.

Towards the end of our festival time, I was wandering around with one of the other two students–who is from some much more cosmopolitan place outside of the US–and she spotted the board describing the rest of the festival’s schedule. This led to my second favorite conversation of the weekend:

Her: Oh, brain tanning! That is… a metaphor? I don’t understand how that would work.

Me: Tanning is how you prepare hides to make leather.

Her: So… The brain part is a metaphor? Surely?

Me: No, I think it involves rubbing brains into the skin. I read about it as a child.

Her: … Oh.

She seemed not totally sold on the rural American south after that point.

Other than the primitive arts festival, I managed to totally fail in planning fun things to do with myself. It was a rainy, grey sort of weekend where I should have been many times more productive or social than I was. Instead I spent a lot of time thinking about how I ought to go to the Inman Park Festival and then–as has happened for the last three years or so–not getting it together enough to go. So, not a total success.

That being said, I am glad I managed to go to the one festival I did hit. Hopefully, soon enough the rain will let up and I will graduate, and I will be able to go to every festival between mid-May and Labor Day weekend.

* I’m going to list that as my hobby next time I reactivate my OKCupid profile.

Image courtesy of Jarapet. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I have come up with a fail-safe way to test whether you are ready to have children at This Moment in Your Life. Ready? Here it is:

1. Go to the zoo during the first nice-weather Saturday in the last two weeks.
2. Meander on over to the tamarin exhibit.
3. Decide whether you think that the five-year-old screaming, “AHHHHHH” every time the tamarins move for two minutes straight provokes an “awwww” response out of you or an “AHHHHH” of your very own. If the latter, maybe hold off on spawning!

I spend so little of my time around children, particularly children in groups. Hell, I spend very little of my time around adults that are not in the 18-22 range, or at least did before I got a job. (My coworkers have children! And hobbies that are not drinking and being sad! Truly it is a brave new world.) After being in Senegal last year, I thought my view towards them had softened. I had been around kids! They didn’t hate me!

I had forgotten what happens when the children clump together. Because then? All bets are off.

Children aside, the zoo was great fun. I spend so much of my class time learning about non-human primates via YouTube videos that I forget that you can, you know, go look at them for real. Which I did! Much to my excitement, our gorilla troupe had a newborn, and she was out, and it was phenomenally cute. Because if that infant was making noise? I couldn’t hear it!

A few weeks ago, I read my way through 168 Hours, which is just on the right side of the self-help/pop-science divide to be readable for me. The premise of the book is to think of your week as made up of 168 discrete hour-long units, and then decide how to spend your time based on what portion of your 168 hours you want to allot to different areas. It’s the basis for a lot of Jen Dziura‘s time management advice, which I pretty much quote constantly, because it consists of things like:

In Bullish: Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work MORE, I suggested that to live an optimal life, you should ruthlessly identify and cut from your life any activity that is not either extremely pleasurable or extremely productive. – How Many Minutes of Your Life Have Been Stolen by ScarJo’s Ass and Various Kardashians?

My favorite piece of the advice from the book, though, was Laura Vanderkam’s advice to actually plan things for the weekend. This helps for two reasons: one, it gives you something to look forward to when you’re not at work (thus helping with my tendency to, when I am not at work, either work more or sleep), and two, it allows you to actually increase your happiness over the weekend rather than screwing around for 48 hours in a way that is not memorable. 

So that’s what I’ve been doing. This week I did the zoo. Last week, I hosted a conference. The rest of the past month has consisted of going to Texas, sucking at using a trampoline, and seeing Watsky in concert. This is so much more activity in my life than I am used to.

And honestly? It has made me so much happier than I was in the previous several months, even though at the same time many of the other 168 hours of the past few weeks have been occupied by stress and fear and sadness. Rigidly scheduling fun activities into my life as an obligation (because I can’t be truste to do this kind of functional self-care on my own) has hands-down improved my quality of life.

In fact, I already have my next-weekend activities planned: I’m going to a field trip! To see flint knappers! And I am looking forward to it, and I am excited, and it’s good. Stay tuned for photos if I don’t die in a tragic flint accident.

This was an exciting week. Not in the way that last week was trip-to-Texas exciting. And emotionally different than the previous weekend’s trampolining exciting. But exciting nonetheless!

Most of that derived from the fact that RespectCon, the conference on sexual assault prevention/response that I helped organize, happened this past Friday. Like, actually happened. People came! Presentations were made! Cameron and I got to have a wonderful discussion about armadillos and leprosy! There was a hashtag!

So that was very nice. I think it went well. If it didn’t, then I know a lot of very polite, very convincing liars, which is emotionally equivalent.

This conference–and my other work with the Respect Program–is hands-down the thing about which I am most proud when it comes to my time at Emory College. I got involved with the work when I was a Wee Tiny Idealist, a freshman that Emory covered to attend another organization’s sexual assault prevention conference.

I remember feeling excited, and angry, and excited again, and seeing a great presentation from these folks called Sexual Assault Peer Advocates. And I remember wanting Emory to have a program that did those things, and sent people to conferences in matching shirts, and generally Cared About These Issues.

Right as I moved to Emory, conveniently, they hired the woman who now runs the Respect Program. And she was (and is) great–both at her job, and at being a person in general. Truly a top-notch human being. I met her at the first ever public Emory Sexual Assault Peer Advocate training, which I attended because I remembered that first conference.

And at the end of that, I said hello, and I stuttered, and I gave her my business card and said that I wanted to do something.

Instead of shunning me for being the kind of weirdo who buys her own calling cards, as she might have, she kept in touch. And then, I wound up spending a summer working for her, reading books that I liked and writing outlines for programs that didn’t ever happen. (Which was, in and of itself, a wonderful way to learn that even in supportive environments, sometimes things just don’t come together.) I got my own business cards with the office’s logo on them.

So, when she proposed that we put on a conference, I said “sure.” At no point did it seem like it was really going to happen, because seriously, who listens to a student about that kind of thing?

But y’all? It totally did. And it was awesome. And I am totally, completely excited to attend RespectCon 2014. (Which will be organized by Someone The Hell Else, because good lord I am not sending that many emails ever again.)

Image courtesy of Shu Tu, licensed under CC 2.0 BY SA.

As happens every few years or so, I spent this past weekend in Austin, Texas. (Austin is, of course, the only part of Texas that anyone in my family will admit to going to. We spit at Houston.)

Rather than being down there to hone my South by South Best* skills, I was in town courtesy of my cousin, who–kindly–agreed to be bat mitzvahed*, so that I might eat many breakfast tacos and migas.

She, like her brother a few years ago, interpreted a portion of Leviticus in a way that made my heart swell. Leviticus, for those who are unaware, is mostly full of rules that most folks in the family flavor of Judaism don’t really follow, as mixed fibers are great and smiting is not so much. It takes some skill to really consider what that means for a modern reform Jew, and of course my cousin was great and at the end we got to pelt her with marshmallows. (Ritual pelting = my favorite quality in a faith.)

So that was great.

Equally wonderful was Austin itself, a city that–much like the entirety of Sweden–I know mostly from the tales of people who used to live there (combined with occasional snippets of television and atmospheric lifestyle blog posts).

Unlike Sweden, Austin does not have any sort of fish product weirdness going on. Instead, it is the land of migas*** (fried corn tortillas + egg + cheese + beans + happiness) and breakfast tacos (basically the same thing, but inside the tortilla) + the truly insane South Congress Cafe carrot cake French toast.

“Carrot cake French toast,” you might say, “But that just sounds like deep frying cake and calling it a breakfast food because Texas.”

And you, dear hypothetical reader, would be correct. For an added dose of insanity, it is served with coconut frosting as “syrup,” because you have already crossed that line by even looking at the French toast’s menu entry.

It is truly a thing of beauty. (And trans fats. But mostly? Beauty.)

So of course that was what I had for breakfast on my last day of a whirlwind little visit to the heart of America’s last great separatist nationstate.****

I regret nothing. (I regret pretty much all of it. Mmmm.)

* True story: ran into this guy while at SXSW the year that I went. I, along with the rest of my star-struck coworkers, cornered him in a bar and he was very nice.

** Be the bat mitzvah? The fact that I do not know this is why I did not attempt to mumble along with the Hebrew this year.

*** For an Arkansan variant taught to me by my father, feel free to just toss some Fritos in with some scrambled eggs and melt some cheese on top. They say, incidentally, that this is what you taste right before you have a heart attack.

**** Actual conversation I had with a Texan friend: “Why do you fly Georgia’s state flag below America’s?” “Because that’s what you do?” “In Texas we fly our state flag level with it.” “Of course you do.”

I defy you to come up with something that is more out-of-character for me to do than a 9am Saturday trampoline workout class in the suburbs. And yet, Saturday morning, I found myself in Sky Zone Roswell*, which is essentially a gym floor made entirely of trampolines, with extra trampolines on the wall for parkour/safety.

This was, incidentally, not my idea. I came at the invitation of a friend of mine from nerd camp (lo these many years ago), about whom I feel roughly the same as Leslie Knope feels about Anne Perkins. She is beautiful and terrifyingly smart and has the legs and cardiovascular system of someone who enjoys running as much as I enjoy breakfast tacos.

But my friend had assured me that every time that she had gone before, the workout had consisted of basic cardio, done on your own little individual section of the trampoline mat. We (I) could suck quietly, in a corner, she reasoned, and that seemed fine to me. (It was in Roswell. This is the first time I’ve been there in the 10 years I’ve lived in Atlanta, so if I reasoned that if I was truly shamed by my failure, I didn’t have to go back ever.)

Unbeknownst to my friend, however, this week’s trampoline fitness extravaganza was led by a new trainer. This man had biceps like hams and the relentless cheer that comes from being a personal trainer for a class full of people making fools of themselves on trampolines. And he did not want for us to do cardio on our little trampolines. He wanted us to sprints across the entire trampoline floor.

Reader, it was bad.

I faceplanted–I swear to god I am not making this up–six times during my run down the length of the trampoline gym. I mean, no one was good at trampoline sprints, but my being new to this + being out of shape + lack of coordination meant that I was pretty clearly the worst in the class. So, once sprint time was over, I elected to go behave like an adult and hide in the bathroom while attempting not to vomit for the next 20 minutes.

My friend joined me about 10 minutes later. Part of this was to make sure I had not died, but from what she described it seemed like the workout was not exactly her speed, either. Apparently, after I left, it sounded like the trainer had decided that people needed to run on the trampoline walls. And y’all, there are many things in life that I am comfortable trying, but trampoline parkour is not on that list.

After I had reassured my friend that I would not die on her, we headed back out to the trampoline pit, where we got to (finally, thank god) settle back down on our individual trampolines. This part alternated between fun (trampoline jumping jacks!) and less-fun-but-comfortably-so (trampoline planks!). I woke up the next day with appropriately sore muscles and a skinned elbow.

If nothing else, the experience did show that I’ve gotten a little better about embarrassment-crying in public, apparently, so that was pretty great. A year ago, if I had fallen on my ass in such a gloriously literal manner, I probably a) would not have gone back to class b) would have started crying. So, the fact that I hid in the bathroom to go puke, rather than to cry? Progress!

(Final conclusion, for those who are interested: the class is $5 for beginners and is pretty fun, minus the sprints. Totally recommended if you want to feel productive and also ridiculous.)

* One of three Sky Zones in the Atlanta metro area.

There is something special about being in a room full of people screaming, in unison, “Fuck the burger–rerun it with just the cheesy fries!” And that was just where I found myself standing at about 8:45 on Saturday night.

As part of my apparent quest to see every Masquerade-featured white boy internet-famous rap act of 2013, I went to Watsky‘s show this past weekend. By myself! Which was very exciting for about 30 seconds, until I realized that it was an all ages show and so I probably just looked like someone’s chaperoning older sister, since I was standing in the back next to the put-upon parents. (Even better was the part where I realized that the 21+ show above us was actually a Rocky Horror Picture Show-themed burlesque event. I love my weirdo city.)

(I go feel superior for approximately two minutes while I drank my overpriced PBR at the 8th-graders, until I remembered my dad very kindly attending a Decemberists show with me when I was in 7th grade, and then realized that that Not That Long Ago that I was the irritating wee concert-goer. I am young! But older than the average audience member! Cognitive dissonance!)

The show was a great deal of fun. Unexpectedly for me, Watsky was traveling with a live band–backing vocalist, keyboardist, what sounded like a bassist (I couldn’t see him, because I am short and 14-year-old boys are tall), and a truly fantastic drummer. And–perhaps thanks to the young skew of the audience–the level of drunk dumbassery in the crows was limited. I didn’t have to use my combat boots once!

For a show that–during the encore–included the audience screaming along with “I don’t give a fuck!” as part of a chorus, it was weirdly emotional. Part of that might be my usual oversensitivity combined with recent events, but I think there’s a chunk of that which comes from Watsky being not that far off from my age.

When he’s rapping about depression, or disillusionment with resume-building*, or the terror of a parent’s mortality**, he’s talking about the aspects of my life that very much the flipside of the Taylor Swift end of my experience of 22. And that was weird. I mean, I love the Decemberists dearly, but the experiences of an 18th-century Spanish prostitute are less explicitly connected to my life experiences At The Moment.

So that was pretty great. I am glad I went, and delighted that because of the youngins I was able to leave with none of my clothes stained by other folks’ beer or cigarettes. Huzzah, youths!

* If you have never felt the urge to flee from a networking humblebrag fest on a ceiling-ladder, then truly you have not had the full liberal arts college experience.

** I mean, some of them were a little more on-the-nose about my life situation than others.

There is nothing that Atlantans love quite so much as walking their dogs in public (except, perhaps, drinking beer at festivals or patios, as a concept). And so it was not surprising that on the near-enough-to-room-temperature-so-we’ll-take-it Saint Patrick’s Day that we had this year, everyone and their mother’s great Dane was out walking the Chattahoochee trails with my friend and me.

The dogs came in all shapes in sizes. There were little terriers which were trotting along, and a few robust rottweilers, and 800 labby labs (“Are you a person? I love you!”) walking along with us.

But my favorite dogs were probably the paired set that I saw rounding the back of a muddy trail. As my friend and I were walking this side trail, we saw a couple with two dogs–one, a Great Pyrenees, and the other, a Bernese Mountain Dog.

For those of you who do not creep on dog breeds as a stress-reducing hobby, that’s basically 200 pounds of giant, fluffy dog. That’s a sofa’s worth of dog. They were completely great to see out and about.

Some weird part of me is, I think, fond of big dogs because I enjoy the fact that we as a species of ape have trained another species to walk on strings that we hold and be totally into it. I mean, really now: if those dogs had decided to peace out, they could have with ease. They are basically black bears, on leashes.

But they didn’t, because they’re excellent dogs. (I mean, look at this video of a Great Pyrenees letting goats walk on it. Or this one of a Great Pyrenees being friends with a horse.) We have bred giant, mellow, leash-bears to live in our homes and act as goat furniture and horse friends (horses, of course, being animals that we bred to carry us like moving couches). Really thinking about animal domestication blows my mind, a little bit, because seriously: leash bears.

So that is how I spent my final undergraduate spring break: hanging out with leash-bears. (I mean, that’s not all. I also got an Indian milk shake, which was excellent, and bought an orchid. Because it is a non stop party up in here.) Part of me feels like I should have gone whole hog and really done up the Cancun trip, for once in my life. But that feeling passes as soon as I realize that I hate beaches, and most crowds of my peers, and the sun.

Two more months until graduation. Then: the future!