I love humor. I live for it. If I meet someone who doesn’t understand my humor, or God forbid, has no sense of their own humor, we probably can’t be friends. If I have to deal with anyone or anything for a lengthy period of time, the injection of humor is an absolute necessity for the survival of all. Following the last update I posted, I started to feel like I had fallen into some kind of life-sucking black hole, which stemmed, I think, from the fact that I didn’t find myself, or anything, or anyone funny anymore (look at all those commas – I’ve also got a thing for commas). When I would sit down to spin more east coast tales for all of you at home, the page would generally end up full of comments like “I think I might die from this” or “What in God’s name have I done?” which I ended up erasing, followed by much rumination on the fact that a good portion of my ability to recognize and create humor was flowing from some hitherto unrecognized place inside myself that was happy. Who knew?
I was expecting to be homesick in Delaware. I was expecting to feel lonely, dazed, and out of place for a while. I had lived in the same place, with the same people, doing the same thing for my entire life. Suddenly being 2400 miles away from that was going to have some repercussions, I get it. I was ready for that battle and I armed myself with a few tools straight from behavioral science. What is depression? It’s a lack of reinforcement. I just needed to seek out sources of reinforcement and bask in their warmth. How do you find sources of reinforcement? You observe where you allocate the majority of your free time. Easy, peasy. Except it wasn’t easy, especially considering that I was allocating the majority of my free time to assuming the fetal position in bed and pretending that I was at home; not my first choice for a fun Friday evening, but it was what it was. These simple scientific principles that had never failed me at home were left powerless in a world where my insides had become an emotionless, barren landscape (another thing I have a thing for: melodrama). I like to imagine that Scarlett O’Hara, whom I love, would describe it as such: bitterness was my only companion and gloom my only currency (good stuff, am I right?). The only things I was inspired to write in those desperate months were passive aggressive Facebook posts about all my first-world problems that I would later regret posting. The following exchange between me and a Haitian child I saw on a sad commercial (I considered adopting him for a small monthly fee) was generally what prevented me from such disgusting use of an online social platform:
Me: “Oh! Woe is me! This PhD program requires so much of my time and effort. I’m tired and overwhelmed! Ooooohh, my family and friends are SO far away! I feel lonely and isolated!”
Haitian child: “I ate a dirt cookie for breakfast and I slept on a leaf with my pet cricket, who is all I have in the world.”
Me: sob “I miss my family! Everyone is going to forget about me!”
Haitian child: “My cricket was gone when I woke up this morning.Oh well, more leaf for me, I guess.”
Me: “Everyone else gets to see their family for Christmas. I will spend my Christmas alone in my warm apartment with only canned food to eat because I am not comfortable with the idea of making a whole turkey!”
Haitian child: “I’m not sure what Christmas is. Maybe I would spend that day making real cookies with my mom, if I had a mom, or an oven, but I don’t, which is why me and my ribcage on this television screen are making you seriously consider adoption.”
The dirt cookie thing is true, by the way. I read a news article on it, which I regrettably shared with Taylor, who started responding to my voicing of all complaints with, “Dirt cookies, Tiffany”. Left with no retort, I was forced for the moment to adopt a more thankful attitude. That was annoying.
Sometimes, Taylor would bring me down a peg or two beyond the dirt cookie comments, usually just when things started to get particularly unmanageable…meaning when I started to get unmanageable. For instance, I was chin deep in a bowl of Lipton soup one day in an attempt to soothe a mixture of sadness and cat allergies (I’ve become quite the cat-sitter around the department now since I’m the only person left in Newark, Delaware during the holidays. At least that sad state of affairs is benefiting someone), and was extremely upset to find that TBS was airing some ridiculous crime show instead of another episode of The Big Bang Theory (one of the few sources of reinforcement I had in the beginning of this mess, FYI). I uttered a loud cry of distress around my noodles and looked at Taylor with my crisis-face. He responded by pointing out to me, while laughing uproariously, that I was laying on the couch with a bowl of soup propped up on my chest, only moving my chin around it enough to see what button I was pushing on the remote. “Your problems are SO awful!” he said, enacting a ridiculous impression of my predicament that had him rolling around the couch like a barking seal. Ass. (I hope he reads this! Also, I really do love him.)
Regardless of the fact that my first-world problems were very first-world, the point is that feeling dead inside for any reason doesn’t make for good writing. Fortunately, things have been on the upswing lately. This improvement has been coming in baby steps, and began with some travelling that ignited the little spark of fury in me that requires the assistance of humor to keep me on this side of the insane asylum walls. I had hoped that a little time at the airport, surrounded by filthy, inconsiderate beasts, would provide just such a cure for my lackluster, and thought at first that these hopes would be dashed. I arrived at the airport, where the woman checking bags treated me quite rudely. This had no effect on me. I just stood there while she bitched about the strap on my bag and snarked at me for not using the self-service terminal correctly. I stood there and took it, I think I may have even apologized before walking away, wondering who this person was that I had become. Not even a little fury surfaced for the guy in security that kept screaming at us about removing our belts. No small impulse to hang him with it, I just took off my belt and tossed it morosely into the bin. This lack of emotion continued as I boarded the plane, which usually sends me into an emotional typhoon because I feel like I’m walking the Green Mile or something. I am generally teeming with emotions during a plane ride, scribbling out last notes to my loved ones when a little turbulence hits, and making the sign of the cross whenever it lands, but not this time. I just bounced around with the turbulence, wondering when the peanuts would arrive, absently wishing they were handing out Valium instead.
However, shit started turning around on the trip home. It started with an extreme case of bed head. Not my own, thankfully, but the bed head of a woman who appeared convinced that the only way she was going to get a seat on the plane was to claw her way onto it over the top of the rest of us. These people are the worst. We are ALL getting on the plane, so put your panties back on and get in the back of the line. These people are generally gunning for a window seat, which they don’t need anyway because they are usually the ones that feel the need to get up and pee several times over the course of a 5-hour flight, stepping on toes, mashing knees, and spilling the thimble of diet coke just poured for us middle and aisle seaters by the flight attendant. My favorites are the ones who come stand next to you in the long line of people waiting to board, and while refusing to make eye contact with you, get closer and closer as the line moves up, eventually edging right in front of you like they were there the whole time. So tricky.
I realized that I was feeling a little nervous before takeoff, a good sign. The flight attendant was, I believe, in league with the devil. She glared out at us with her chin lowered and her black hair curtaining her narrow-eyed face while she warned us in dire tones that we were not allowed to form a line to use the front lavatory. I assume this rule was in place to avoid an audience while she surfed the Internet in her little attendant seat, but what do I know about airplane safety. Later on, she stuck to her guns when an elderly woman walked up to the front and stood by the occupied bathroom door. Devil-eyes ordered her back to her seat, and when the elderly woman said she really had to go and was afraid someone would get to the bathroom next before she could, devil-eyes responded that she had no control over who used the bathroom and if the old lady couldn’t hold it, she could go wait at the back of the plane. I felt that the presence of such evil had dire implications for the fate of our flight, and feared the turbulence all the more because of it.
If I was sensing some color returning to my inner landscape in the beginning stages of this flight, I was certainly seeing colors by the middle of it. Hey, window-seat person, as much as I love having you in my lap every time you need to make your way to the lavatory, how about you reconsider that second beer. And hey, guy on my other side, I’m not writing over here for your entertainment. Find something else to stare at so I can start writing about how annoyed you were when the plane was full and you had to let someone sit in the seat you were saving for your briefcase. Also, get the hell off my armrest. And now back to you, window seat person: When you sneezed a moment ago and I said, “bless you”, the fact that you completely ignored me makes me want to snatch back my blessing and wish the plague upon you. I don’t dole out bless-yous very often, and I’m extremely annoyed that I gave into the ever-present social expectation to do so for the sake of an ungrateful brute like yourself.
After surviving those five, long hours and then nearly being trampled by the people who seemed to feel that throwing elbows and mowing down the elderly was the only acceptable way to exit the plane, I was once again faced with bed head lady, whose hair situation had not been improved by five hours of window seat headrest. I was standing patiently in the baggage claim area when she came charging up like Moses parting the Red Sea, apparently convinced that if she missed her bag on the first go-round, it wasn’t coming back.
For once, I am grateful for my tendency to be annoyed by pretty much everything because for a while that day, I felt a little bit normal. Unfortunately, peace is a fickle mistress, and there were several times after that where I re-assumed the fetal position, or cried in the middle of my statistics class, or spent several hours in a row sitting on the couch while fixing the wall with a blank stare and wondering if I would ever feel joy again. If you find this annoyingly dramatic, join the club. Adding to my state of misery, I was completely disgusted with myself for making such a scene when everyone else who has ever moved away from home seems to have handled it like an adult.
In short, the past four-ish months have felt like a really long roller coaster ride. Sometimes I was on the part of the rollercoaster where the cart was climbing and I was able to look around at what was going on here and appreciate it, or really enjoy the moment when other graduate students were trapped in my car while I showcased my sweet ability to sing every word to “Whoomp, There it Is”. Then sometimes I was on the part where the cart reached the top and teetered around for a minute, with Kings of Leon singing in the background “I just wanted to knooooww if I could goooo hoooommee”, before it plunged straight downward as I desperately tried to claw my way up the back of it. But the fact that I am finally able to share all of this with you with a little bit of a smile on my face means that I might be getting close to the end of the ride and maybe, just maybe, I can get the hell out of this infernal cart of a million emotions. So, I’m pretty happy about that.
P.S. There were some bright spots during those months of despair, like some of the excellent people I met in Philadelphia. Two of these individuals earned their title of excellence for saying things like “hot dwag” instead of hot dog, and “I pahked the cah in Hahvad Yahd” instead of “I parked the car in Harvard Yard”. I love them, particularly after they’ve had a couple beers and will say anything I ask them to.
But since this is already four pages long, I’ll share the rest of the bright spots another time should you care to read them. ;)
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