March 1, 2005

• A breif note before you read the following essay:
  My Xanga site was recently put on some poll on Not_Featured_Content. I am confused as to the motivation behind this poll, and to be perfectly honest, it puts me ill at ease. It reminds me of high school when everyone is trying so hard to be popular and no one is having any fun. I blog because it prompts me to write more, and writing is so very important to me. I also blog to receive the fun and insightful opinions on my writing from this neat Xanga community. I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy the community aspect of it as much as I do—the sites I subscribe to could easily be nominated above mine any day. But then, of course, you’d have to deal with the pressure of trying to be cool enough to win a poll.

  For readers who have happened upon my site from the polling, welcome—I am sincerely thankful for your readership. However, if you were looking for a cool entry to convince you to “vote for me,” you might be disappointed. But I hope you will read anyhow—your insightful comments are worth more to me than a vote any day. So spill it—let me know if you can relate to this essay, if you grow bored, if the pacing is tedious, if the prose is shortsighted–I really do appreciate it.

  I hate to put a disclaimer before my writing (only because it bugs me when other people do it), but I’m not too crazy about this peice. I emphasize the need for your comments not only because I love them, but because I need some input to make the next round of revisions sucessful.

  Slipping Into Something a Little More Comfortable
  &copy The Author, 2005

  My eyes flung themselves open in sync with the digital wail of my alarm. It had taken a curiously sinister tone ever since I began my official inauguration into the adult world. A month out of college and a few weeks into a job in office land, I was trying to adjust to adulthood by mimicking the characters of “career girls” in movies and the smart fashions of women who rode the subway into the Loop at 8:30am. I was cramming myself into an ill-fitting role and I wasn’t sure why, aside from the debt of student loans that would surely outlive me. I only hoped that I looked in control and nicely groomed as I did it.

  At this time in my life, I had developed a ritual of waking an hour earlier than necessary to go running. It was a time for my thoughts to occupy me, before my mind was swimming with office protocol and my was soul saddened by having ditched my dreams in order to spend a gorgeous day in an overly-air conditioned office.

  I leapt out of bed and changed hastily into my grungy running clothes. My muscles ached to race the hour away. With my hair in a messy ponytail and my contacts grating against my lids, I leapt out of my dark apartment and into the warming summer morning. My jog always begins with the first step I take out of my apartment. I worry that I will be mistaken for a dunk or a homeless person in my rumpled clothes and unwashed face, and I feel the immediate need to demonstrate that it is permissible for me to be out in such a state. “See? I’m exercising!”

  Soon I passed the Mexican man setting up his mango slice stand outside the bodega on Western and Grand. “Buenos Dias!” “Hola!” These are our morning exchanges. It is good I move fast because this is the extent of my Spanish speaking abilities, unless I wanted to randomly request, “la cuenta, por favor.”

  Language skills aside, I felt happy and good about myself this morning. My mind was clear. No thoughts of numbing data entry, no crippling anxiety over office introductions, no worries over trying to convince my bosses that they didn’t make the horrendous mistake of hiring someone to balance their budget that struggled in her remedial math courses in college, no disappointment in myself for abandoning my dreams of acting, directing, and scripting at 22. I was light and free and delighted by the sweet smell of mango and the friendly, familiar faces of my route. My breath was effortless and the city seemed suspended in my charm.

  The sun was orange and fully realized when I passed the homeless man who props himself up drunkenly against the park gates and lets his brown, dry legs sprawl all over the sidewalk. I jump over his legs, “Excuse me! Good Morning!”
  “Lookin’ Good, Good Lookin!” he calls after me.

  Although it might seem cheap to be sincerely flattered by a man who has been pickled in alcohol to the point of homelessness, during this time in my life, my morning run was the only time in my day I really felt good looking, despite my bedraggled and sweaty appearance. Beauty is a state of mind.

  I passed the digital bank clock at Damon and Division. According to the clock, I had only fifteen more minutes to feel alive for the rest of the day. I typically crack under pressure and this run was to be no different.

  My sweaty brow furrowed as my mind drifted, as a runners mind often does, from the immediate pleasures of the morning to dwell on a cloudy and indirect source of my insecurity; my loss of closeness to my best friend at university.

  My friend Derek and I had been each other’s muses since High School. We shamelessly created fabulous alter egos for one another. Instead of a tall, gangly, and acne-ridden teenager, I became a beautiful, radiant actress, writer, and filmmaker. Instead of a slightly feminine, slightly paunchy teenager, he was a dashing, handsome and undeniably gifted actor. The best part about our alter egos was that we actually came to believe in them for one another. And as we became young adults, we actually grew to become these things for a time.

  We chose to study theater at the same university and during that time, we became inseparable, giddy, and an incredible support system for one another. With our arms wrapped around each other’s waists, parading confidently about campus, we would comfort each other after a particularly frustrating lecture or a lackluster quiz, “Ha! We’ll never have to finish college anyhow—we’ll become famous before it comes to that!” And we actually believed it, which made things all the more disappointing when neither of us became famous and we both ended up graduating.

  As my sneakers pounded out the rhythm of my movements onto the sidewalk, I thought about the last time I had seen Derek, when we were both still in college and he stole the show at a performance of The Laramie Project. At this point, I had transferred schools and moved to Chicago and I had traveled back to Michigan to see him perform. Before I had made the decision to travel to see his show, I hadn’t realized the extent to which we had lost touch. Although we spoke seldom, I still felt close to him, and I couldn’t help but beam with pride when the audience gossiped about him during intermission.

  “The young guy with the black hair—now he is absolutely amazing.”
  “Yeah, he’s going places, you can tell.”

  After the show, I waited for him in the theater lobby, clutching my coat to my chest, watching cast members strut with pride from the back hallway door out to greet the proud friends and family who had come to see them. My eyes fixed to that doorway and I waited for him with a posed smile that began to sag as the minutes ticked by and the crowd dispersed. Soon, I was alone with a pimply coat check worker, closing up his booth. My breath slid heavy from my lips and I wondered outside into the gray, misting dusk. Standing outside of the theater, my smile was salvaged suddenly as I caught Derek laughing and walking arm and arm with a group of cast members to his car. I begged my face to not betray what my heart knew; I had been replaced.

  “Hey stranger!” I called to him.
  “Hey!”

  He threw his arms open theatrically as he walked over to me. We hugged and a new smell of nicotine clung to him. He was thinner. I began to tell him all about the rave reviews of the audience members, but he seemed to already know about all of that, as he kept looking over his shoulder at his friends waiting for him by his car.

  A year or so later, he moved to New York to pursue acting.

  As I ran steadily past a group of surely teenage girls dragging themselves to summer school, I recalled the one phone conversation that Derek and I had in the past year. We were both on our cell phones, outside, in our respective downtowns. We listened to the noise of each other’s city, letting these sounds stand as proof that we were separate and overlooked in a place too busy for the likes of two young aspirants. I got the impression that he had lost as much confidence as I had since our separation. No longer did we have the world by the ass; he was a host at a Planet Hollywood and I was hidden from the world completely by the stale, corkboard walls of my cubicle. He wasn’t a famous actor and I couldn’t seem to think of myself in a big enough way to even attempt a script, let alone have one performed. Miles between us, our friendship taken for granted then almost completely abandoned, we had lost our glamorous alter egos to the realistic demands of adulthood.

  Approaching the last stretch of my route, my breathing became fluid but heavy. Involuntarily, my body sprang into a mind-numbing second wind. All thought drained from my mind as my stride stretched to its limit and I flew past shops and groggy-eyed dog walkers. Derek slid away from me in a rivulet of sweat pouring from my chest.

  Panting and red faced, I sauntered into my apartment. Grabbing a glass of water and draining it, my heart steadied. With a deep stretch, my pulse slowed.

  As I stepped in the shower, the world came back to me. The prospect of the workday made my heart tick in a way I was not yet used to. Instead of a happy thump of a pulse, my heart seemed to twitter these past few weeks like an irritating itch. Trying to distract myself from my crazed heartbeat, I lathered my hair into a soapy sculpture.

  While I attempted to create liberty spikes using a mixture of moisturizing masque and regular conditioner, it dawned on me that I might be having trouble adjusting to adulthood because I had yet to create an alter ego that fit this role. In order to survive in the reality of my adulthood, I had to create a simplified version of myself that could be presented effortlessly to my colleagues. If creating an alter ego with Derek made me feel better about my pimpled high school and awkward college self, it might work out for me in the “Real World” as well. I would simply become an Adult.

  I remember this day as the first time I ironed a crease in my khakis. I had always been a neat dresser, but this was a starched, deliberate crease that I ironed in. My true self laughed in my face at that one, but my newly appointed Adult self persevered.

  I arrived to work early. Typically, I had dawdled away 8:50-9:00 at the bookstore across the street from my work, thumbing through the movie reviews in Entertainment Weekly or listening to a CD at the audio sampling stations. Today, I went directly to work in a swift and grown up way, even though my true self was tugging at my pant leg, begging like a whiney kid to go to the bookstore and sample the new Bjork album.

  Upon my arrival at work, I refused to stand quiet and embarrassed as the security guards mistakenly rifled through the intern ID badges for mine as they did every day. Instead, I said in a very adult voice, “I’m not an intern, I just happen to look like I’m 12.” I laughed in a trite way that I had heard somewhere before, perhaps from Mrs. Plum in the Clue movie. The security guard chuckled back at me as I told him, “You’ll find me in the Marketing stash. Thanks,” then a casual, “Have a good one!” My true self was gagging at these clichés, but I pushed onward and punched “in” to the day.

  As the weeks rolled by, I found that creating an alter ego was becoming easier and easier. Instead of giving the deplorable Aunt May in the new Spiderman movie a well-deserved tongue lashing while at lunch with my older co-workers, I now chose the more tasteful conversation piece of the opening of New York’s new MOMA. “Wow,” they said, “Fascinating.” Not really, but who was my alter ego to complain?

  By that winter I was a bonified creased-kaki-wearing Grown Up and the world knew it. The last fifteen minutes of my workout became as thought freeing as the first thirty. The twitter in my heart had stabilized to a soft rumbling and my true self no longer balked so openly at my displays of adult behavior. While it was a challenge for a time, my true self began to make the transition back into my body with greater ease once I was finished working for the day.

  Soon, it was time for our departmental holiday lunch. While my true self jumped with joy (“free food!”), my Adult self quoted lines from a recent review on our restaurant of choice. As we munched on delicious Indian food, we began a very Adult conversation about international travel. To my surprise, my true self chimed in. I relayed a tale about a Spanish kabob that I ate that was undoubtedly made of pigeon (“It’s not chicken,” the waitress warned us). To my great surprise, my colleagues found this very funny and this made my heart infinitely happy. My true self beamed like a child who has said something cleaver at a family gathering and then is asked to repeat it over and over to a crowd of adoring relatives. For the first time, I had successfully integrated my true self into the adult world.

  During Christmas weekend, I traveled back to Michigan to see my friends and family. While attending a holiday party in my hometown, I was surprised to have an elegantly wasted version of the Derek I once knew suddenly beside me, sipping stolis, smelling sweetly of nicotine—a cool and collected stranger.

  My interactions with Derek used to include piggy-back rides and screaming filthy lines from the Exorcist into the night; we were so comfortable in our belief that we would soon be whisked away from our campus to become famous stars that we acted as foolishly and strangely as we liked. Now, Derek seemed to me too stylish, too mature, too impenetrable. I sat, peering into his pale and perfect face for an answer until I realized he had worn his New York alter ego to the party. It was a smashing outfit, tailored and vogue and perfectly believable. But I missed the old one. I missed the warm of his plaid button up shirts thrown over t-shirts of his favorite bands. I missed his raunchy impressions of horror flicks. I missed the invincibility of our original alter egos.

  Soon enough, I was back in Chicago, waking up an hour before necessary to exercise before work. The impossibly cold and icy Midwest winters forced aerobics tapes to replace my beloved running route, but the effect of my increased heart rate’s ability to free my thoughts remained the same.

  As I punched and lunged, my thoughts wondered back to Derek. It hurt me so much to see him so lost in his New York alter ego that he was unable to be real with me at the Holiday party. I worried that the Adult alter ego that I had created had become suffused with my true self, just as the New York alter ego had consumed Derek.

  Later that morning, as I ironed the crease into my kakis, I wondered what Derek thought of me, if he mourned my changes as I did his. I wondered if I had given up the best of me, and if I would ever get it back.

  Walking to work from the El Stop, I shivered against a wall of wind barreling off the icy lake. As I passed a bustling Dunkin Doughnuts, my scarf whipped up in such a lively way, that I thought for a moment that it was a happy little kid rushing about the sidewalk. When I paused to let the kid by, I smiled to discover it was my mistake. I caught a glimpse of myself in the doughnut shop window—a confident, quietly glamorous adult, laughing.

  As much as my new Adult routine was a necessary evil to acquire my Adult need for a paycheck, I knew then that my personality would never fully dissolve into it. I just needed to see my potential mistakes materializing painfully in someone I deeply cared about—and to see my self smiling, off guard, and beautiful in a doughnut shop window—for me to realize that my identity deserves more respect than I was giving it. And after all that exercising, I needed a doughnut.

  • 11:58 pm
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