May

12 Books

This month I read two books, and both of them were memoirs. The first was Wild by Cheryl Strayed. (It was recently made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.) Cheryl Strayed lost her mother to cancer, and in the subsequent years she got divorced, got addicted to drugs, and went through a number of other unsavory things. She decides to walk the Pacific Coast Trail to find herself again, and Wild is the story of her time on the trail. It was beautifully written. I loved it.

The second memoir was Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh. He’s a sociologist who spent several years studying life in the Chicago Projects. He was the first to spend time with the people living there and attempt to understand what life was like for them. As a book, it was not my favorite, but I am still glad I read it for the learning experience.

12 Recipes

Early in the month I made this quinoa salad to eat for lunch. It was very good and a nice change of pace. I actually made more of it just today!

12 Blog Posts

Click here to read a memory from each year during my decade in Chicago.

12 Ways to Meet People

In addition to my regular bimonthly husbandry shift, I volunteered for a Shedd event where teams of middle and high schoolers built UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and brought them to Lincoln Park. They tried out the UAVs on ecological missions. I met some different volunteers, so that was nice. I don’t know that I’ll ever see them again, but at least I spent the day with some new people.

 

12 Small Steps Forward in my Career

This month I traveled to Toronto to lead a session at the Ontario Association of Mathematics Educators (OAME) annual conference. This was my first time presenting on my own, so it was a really nice addition for my CV, even though I only had 6 attendees. 

 

12 Fun Events in Chicagoland

This month was one of my favorite events of all time: DASH! It stands for Different Area, Same Hunt. It’s a puzzle hunt that takes place in a bunch of cities around the world on the same day. This year’s theme was Harry Potter, so naturally I was extra excited. Here I am in my Ravenclaw garb. The weather was awful and the puzzles were hard, but we had a lot of fun anyway.

12 Crafts and Creations

This month I made this baby blanket for my friends Meg and Dave, who are expecting a baby any day now.

I also made another sleeping mat from plastic bags. I like this one.

  

12 Pretty Things for My Apartment

Two small things this month. First, I bought stands for my four most recent scrapbooks. I love seeing them out.

I also hung my painting from last month’s paint and pour. It helps ties the bedspread into the rest of the room.

12 Things that Help Me Feel Good about My Appearance

Over the last five years or so, I’ve been struggling to control issues with dandruff. Over-the-counter shampoo was doing next-to-nothing. I finally got up the courage to ask my dermatologist for prescription shampoo. (Why I was so afraid to do this before, I don’t know, but I was.) It hasn’t 100% eliminated the problem but it is vastly improved and I’m less self-conscious about it.

12 Grown-Up Things

Uber (a taxi-like ride service) sponsored a Goodwill Drive this month. Uber drivers came to pick up any bagged clothing donations for free. I took the opportunity to go carefully through my closet and drawers and get rid of anything that (1) I hadn’t worn for a year or (2) I had worn but didn’t really like. I’m really trying to get to a place where I have a wardrobe that consists exclusively of things I genuinely like and enjoy wearing. This purge had the added benefit of reducing the amount of stuff I have to a size that actually fits in the space I have. I had several drawers that were always bulging, which meant that my clothes were consistently smushed and wrinkled. Now my clothes fit in my drawers, like most grown-ups’ do.

Ten Memories for Ten Years in Chicago

Year 1: I was sitting at the computer desk in my bedroom in my first Chicago apartment, which was the bottom floor of a two-story house in Lakeview. Earlier that day I had stepped on three spring-loaded mousetraps—thankfully with my shoes on—that lined our laundry closet. The traps were the most recent in a long line of attempts by our landlord to handle a mouse infestation on his own, without calling an exterminator. I turned around to see a mouse calmly wandering around the floor of my bedroom. It was the middle of the day and broad daylight. The mouse stopped to look at me briefly, and then unabashedly continued his explorations with no evidence of fear or trepidation. I thought glumly that I was certain I’d be living with mice for the next few months, but at least they’d likely be less disruptive than my human roommates.

Year 2: I was paging through the thick packet of materials sent to me by the U.S. Peace Corps. I had been invited to teach for 27 months in a rural area in Kenya. I read all the information and testimonials. I looked at all the amazing photos. I told myself over and over and over again that I could do it. I could. I could. I could. But all the while I knew, deep down, that badly as I wanted to want to go, I did not really want to go, and ultimately I wouldn’t. And I hated myself for that.

Year 3: I was sitting at a large table in a conference-turned-lunch room at my first post-graduate-school job. I was eating hummus, crackers, and an apple. A colleague looked at me and said, “I stopped eating Triscuits when I saw how many calories are in them.” I tried to laugh the comment off, but she continued, “Seriously. Have you ever looked? You should look.” This conversation made me irrationally angry. I left the lunch table and went immediately to rant about the incident to another female coworker. She looked at me bewilderedly and nodded through the story, not sure how to react. Later she told me that was the first time I had ever spoken to her directly. Now she’s one of my closest friends. Somehow, through a calorie-shaming incident, a friendship was born. Will wonders never cease?

Year 4: I was reluctantly dialing my apartment building’s maintenance manager to tell him my toilet was clogged. AGAIN. I’d had many, many problems with the appliances and plumbing in my 18 months of living in the apartment. As if that wasn’t annoying enough, every call and visit from the maintenance guy felt like a nightmare. He was condescending and rude. He treated any request, no matter how legitimate, as a huge inconvenience. I steeled myself as the phone rang, wondering what his reaction would be this time. “Damnit,” he said. “I am on my way to Indiana.” I said I was sorry, hating myself for apologizing but not knowing what else to say. He stormed in 30 minutes later. “It’s always the girls,” he growled at me. “You’re always dropping your lotion caps in the damn toilet.” I narrowed my eyes. “I keep the lid closed when I’m not using it, actually,” I said. “My cat likes to sit there while I brush my teeth and get ready in the morning.” He rolled his eyes and tossed down the industrial plunger he was using. “Next time, fix it yourself,” he said, and left, slamming the door behind him.

Year 5: I had just moved in to my new downtown apartment, feeling outrageously happy to be living in such a nice building. A friend and I were kneeling on the living room floor, assembling an end table, when we heard a booming sound. I looked out the window and my eyes got as big as saucers. “Oh my gosh!” I said. “What? What is it?” my friend replied, slightly concerned. “I can see the fireworks from my window!” I exclaimed. She turned around to look out the window and smiled ruefully. She was a teacher at a Chicago public school at the time, and said, “Sad, really, how when we hear booming, you think of fireworks but I think of gunfire.”

Year 6: Three days after learning that my friend had been suddenly killed in a car accident, I arrived back at my apartment. It was December 27. My Christmas tree was still up, and I stared at it, wondering why it hadn’t fallen apart at the moment when Stephen died. “Eat,” I thought. “I should eat something.” I pulled an apple out of the refrigerator, but I just stared at that, too. Why hadn’t it instantly gone rotten when Stephen died? Why was everything so whole, so unaffected, so normal? Why wasn’t everything in the world collapsing in on itself the way that I was?

Year 7: I stood in the start corral for the Chicago Half Marathon, my first long-distance race after limping through my first marathon the year before. It was 9/11/11, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, and the field was awash with red, white, and blue. I was full of trepidation until the moment my corral started its slow shuffle to the start line. Then, it felt like I was in a scene in a movie where the superhero shows up just in time to defeat the villain. You know the scene, right? The slow-motion walk with some threatening-yet-inspiring music playing in the background? I was the superhero, and I was coming to kick that race’s ass.

Year 8: I was sitting in a first grade classroom, watching a 6-year-old use counters to figure out different combinations of 10 apples, some red and some green. She was placing the counters, which were red on one side and green on the other, onto a grid with 10 spaces on it. After she filled up the grid, she counted the number of counters with green facing up and the number of counters with red facing up, and quickly realized that she had already found that combination. She looked at her grid for a moment, and then grinned as she flipped one counter over, giving her a new combination. I was excited as I watched this, sure that she had just made a breakthrough and would quickly and systematically find all the possibilities by flipping over one counter at a time. However, her next move was to start removing all the counters from her grid. “Wait!” I said. “You know how you just flipped one over? Do you think you could do that again to find another combination?” She looked at me witheringly and shook her head. “No,” she said flatly, removing all the counters from her grid with one swipe of her hand.

Year 9: I was struggling through an 18-mile training run. I was all alone because I had a sinus infection that was bad enough for me to skip the group training run the day before. The infection was certainly still raging as of when I woke up that morning, but slightly better than the day before, so I had decided to give it a shot. The drainage from my sinuses was making me outrageously nauseated, and I was rationing the few tissues I had brought with me. It was abject misery. I don’t remember big sections of the run, or even the moment I finished. I only remember the misery, and the hour or two afterward when I confusedly tried to convince myself that I had actually completed the run. “I did that?” I thought. “Me? Who runs 18 miles with a sinus infection?” I was running the marathon that year in honor of Stephen. I wish I could tell you I felt him that day, but truthfully I didn’t. I wonder now if it was just that I was too was too focused on my own misery, or whether he bailed because it was stupid of me to even attempt it. Both seem equally likely.

Year 10: At 9pm on a Wednesday evening, I walked into a familiar bar. The hostess waved me back to the table where my friends sat. Just as I sat down, the waiter came to deliver a giant BLT that my friends had preordered for me. They cheered at my arrival, immediately enlisting my help to answer the trivia questions they were working on. Earlier that day, I had left a close friend’s house in Florida, having spent a few days helping her out after back surgery. She made no secret of how grateful she was that I came and how sad she was to see me go. As I sat at that table, I thought about how lucky I was to spend time with, in one day, a friend who was so sorry to see me leave and friends who were so happy to see me arrive.

April

12 Books

I read two books again this month. First was The Martian by Andy Weir. It is about an astronaut that accidentally is left behind on Mars when his team evacuates. The book is mostly written as his journals as he tries to find a way to survive until the next mission arrives. I loved this book. I couldn’t put it down!

Second was The Girl onthe Train by Paula Hawkins. This book is all the rage lately, and I did like it, but I was a bit underwhelmed given all the hype.

12 Recipes

This month I made potato curry! I liked it a lot. I wish I had a better photo.

12 Blog Posts

Click here to read all about the plight of the nearsighted – not of the glasses-wearer.

12 Ways to Meet People

I went to the Chicago Council on Science and Technology’s Speakeasy, which is a monthly talk they hold at a neighborhood bar. I really liked the atmosphere of it. I was running really late, so I came in at the last second, but I got the sense that people arrived early to chat. I think I’ll keep going to this each month and try to arrive a little early and talk to more people.

12 Small Steps Forward in my Career

I spent a few hours updating my profile on LinkedIn and generally trying to get a sense of how the site works. I am still not sure it’d be helpful if I was looking for a job, but I can see now how it might be a useful tool for staying current with what’s happening in my field.

12 Fun Events in Chicagoland

My friend Shannon and I went to Bottle and Bottega to drink wine and paint stuff. This is something I’ve wanted to try for ages. We had loads of fun.

12 Crafts and Creations

A new friend taught me how to make recycled cards! It’s super simple. We just cut out elements of old cards and mounted them onto new ones along with colored paper and stamps. I loved the way these turned out.

12 Pretty Things for My Apartment

After an exhaustive search (really, I’m pretty sure I looked at every bedspread on the Internet), I bought this lovely teal bedspread.

12 Things that Help Me Feel Good about My Appearance

As long as I can remember, I’ve had red spots and bumps on my upper arms. It never occurred to me that there was much I could do about this, but this month I found out it’s a common skin condition that is treatable. So, I started treating it. It’s not gone, but it’s better.

12 Grown-Up Things

I have a really bad habit of hanging on to things that I know are falling apart. Shoes that have heels so warn I can’t stand straight in them, or example. I have a “This is not great, but it’s better than getting stuck with nothing at a moment when I need something,” is the general mentality I have about it. While there is some logic to this, the habit has enabled my to avoid replacing things and instead make do with things I know are shabby at best, only partially functional at worst.

This is something a college student does. It is not something a grown up does.

So, this month I made a list of the things I own that desperately need to be replaced. I can’t replace them all at once, but I can do it a little at a time, and hopefully start feeling more like a grown adult with her life together.

Glasses

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my glasses. It’s hard for me to remember when I didn’t have to wear them.

Sometime toward the end of second grade, it started to become difficult for me to see the chalkboard. This didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. Even from my desk in the back of the room, if I stood up and squinted a little, I could still make out the words. My teacher moved my desk closer to the front of the room, and that was remedy enough at the time.

Little did I know the chalkboard squinting was only the beginning. In the intervening 25 years, my vision has gotten gradually worse. Back then, if I squinted, I could see things that were about 20 feet away. Now, I have to squint to see things that are 5 inches away. Not 5 feet. 5 inches. If I don’t squint, it’s 4.

Obviously, moving to 4 inches away from everything I need to see is not a viable option. I needed a different solution. I got my first pair of glasses during the summer between second and third grade. I’ve had glasses ever since, and also have contacts. Both give me 20/20 vision.  Problem solved, right?

Well, mostly. Unfortunately, glasses are not a perfect solution. New struggles surface when prescription glasses become a permanent part of your life. Take, for example, the simple act of wearing sunglasses. Yes, there are prescription sunglasses. And yes, I can wear regular sunglasses with contacts. But both of those solutions take forethought when you are a regular wearer of glasses. I can’t just leave a pair of sunglasses in my bag and expect to be able to wear them if the sun happens to come out. My prescription glasses are pretty much an extension of my body; I don’t usually have conscious awareness that I am wearing them. More often than not, if bright sun comes out and I happen to have sunglasses on me, I absent-mindedly try to put them on over my prescription glasses, and then curse under my breath when I realize that my choice is between glaring sunlight with clear vision and muted sunlight with extremely blurry vision. In most cases, the latter is not a workable option.

Other struggles are related to times when I can’t wear my glasses at all. For example, hairstylists almost always ask me to remove my glasses before they start cutting my hair. At fancier places, they even take them off my face for me as they wet my hair at the shampoo bowl, leaving the location of my glasses and the state of my hair a complete mystery to me. I typically fumble from the shampoo bowl to the styling chair, and then sit listening to snipping sounds and watching a head-shaped blob in the mirror two feet away, hoping for the best. “What do you think so far?” the stylist will ask. “How do you like the length? Is that where your part usually is?”

“No idea,” I say. “I can’t see it.”

Then there is the matter of shaving my legs. This is a task I abhor in general, mostly because it doubles the time it takes me to shower, but my uncorrected nearsightedness makes it far worse. Wearing my glasses is not an option in the shower. Yes, I can see my legs even without my glasses on. But can I see the tiny, pretty-much-translucent-when-wet hairs on my legs? Nope. I can wear contacts, but honestly. I can’t wear contacts to work—looking at a screen all day dries them out—so on I work day I’d be putting in contacts just for the sake of showering, then removing them pretty much immediately when I get out of the shower. I’m not going to do that. So instead, I bumble through dragging the razor across my legs, attempting to use shaving cream to keep track of my progress, but inevitably finding patches of unshaven skin an hour or two later. You know, when I’m already dressed and out of the house and can’t do anything about it.

I have recently discovered a new thing to struggle with: applying eye makeup. Here’s the thing: When I am close enough to the mirror for my eye to be in focus, I am so close that there is not enough room between my face and the mirror for the hand that is applying the makeup. I can’t wear my glasses; they’d get in the way. I can’t wear contacts; I’d have to take them out before going to work, and the act of doing so would destroy the makeup I just put on. In order to wear eyeliner, I’ve had to devise an elaborate system wherein I open my medicine cabinet door, move the outer edge of the mirror super close to one eye while the hand that is doing the makeup application is next to the edge. Ergo, when applying makeup to my left eye, my right eye is super close to the mirror with my hand extending back behind it, and vice versa. The only problem is that I can’t quite turn my head far enough to the right to see the left edge of my left eye. If you notice that my eyeliner is smooth on the inner half of my eyes but a little smudgy around the outer edges, now you’ll know why.

What is my point? Well, I guess I have two of them. One is that I clearly have ridiculous first-world problems, and you should play me a song on the world’s tiniest violins.

What got me thinking about this, though, is was watching an episode of What Not to Wear—a show that I love—and saw the makeup artist encourage a woman to shed her glasses in favor of contacts. Don’t hide behind those glasses! Let the world see your beauty!

This year has included a number of efforts to help me feel better about myself, so after that What Not to Wear episode, I considered whether I should try harder to find contacts that I can wear at work. Do my glasses make me feel self conscious? Do I like wearing them?

As I thought about this, my above list of glasses-related annoyances came to mind. I can’t wear sunglasses! I can’t watch my hair being cut! I can’t see when I shave my legs! Putting on eyeliner is nearly impossible! Regularly wearing contacts would solve all these things. “Maybe I should get them,” I thought.

But then I realized that all of these issues have absolutely nothing to do with my appearance, how I think about myself, or how other people perceive me. My woes are not about wearing glasses. They are about being extremely nearsighted. Bad vision is the problem. Glasses are the solution. An imperfect one, as previously stated, but a solution and ergo not the problem.

For reasons I can’t understand, a stereotype continues to abound that says glasses make women look nerdy and unattractive. Makeover shows (even ones I like!) continue to push women to shed their glasses in favor of contacts on the implicit assumption that they will look more appealing without glasses. Movies continue to treat the act of a woman taking off her glasses as a huge reveal of the beauty underneath the beast.

Well, screw that. Glasses are awesome. Glasses are a wondrous invention that should be embraced. Believe me, you’d only need to experience my vision without glasses for a few minutes to realize how wondrous they are. Bonus: with all the beautiful, cute frames that are out there now, they are also fun accessories!

My second point, then, is simple. Sometimes it sucks to need vision correction. But it’s not the glasses that suck. It’s the nearsightedness. Get it straight, Hollywood. Glasses are awesome. Women who wear them are awesome. They might have smudgy eye makeup, slightly hairy legs, and perhaps a little bitterness about bright sunlight, but wearing glasses doesn’t make them less beautiful or amazing. Glasses are just a tool they use to help them be awesome when their eyes aren’t cutting it.

March

12 Books

In March I read two books: Still Alice by Lisa Genova and Serena by Ron Rash. I loved Still Alice. It’s the story of a woman with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. It was beautifully written; it’s touching and terrifying at the same time. Although I, of course, have never struggled with dementia, I still related to so many the issues of personal identity and how scary the loss of that would feel. I really recommend it. Serena is the story of a couple who runs a timber company in the early 20^th century in the U.S. I give Serena a 6 out of 10. It has some really interesting characters, but the story took a while to go anywhere.

12 Recipes

This month I made fish tacos, which were absolutely delicious! They were so easy and so quick. I think they will be one of my go-to dishes in the future.

12 Blog Posts

Click here for some musings about joy and loneliness. (So, you know, a super light post this month. I’ll try to go back to amusing in April.)

12 Ways to Meet People

This month I went to the Illinois Science Council’s Pi Day Pi K: a 3.14 mile run on March 14. It was a beautiful day, but otherwise kind of a disappointing event. They promised a much more social atmosphere than really happened, so beyond a few minutes of idle chat, I didn’t really get to meet anyone new. I’m still giving myself credit for trying, though. Here’s the shirt – typo and all.

12 Small Steps Forward in my Career

Work on the grant proposal and chapter I mentioned the last two months continue. I also took the time to update my resume, which I hadn’t done in a long time. I rewrote it from the perspective of someone looking for research funding, rather than a job, since that’s what I’ll probably use it for in the immediate future. I chose to be optimistic and also included my two pending grant proposals, one pending talk proposal, and as-yet-unaccepted book chapter. (Highlighted, of course, to be deleted if I send out the resume before those things come to pass.) It was actually pretty gratifying to spell out everything I’ve done over the past 9 years.

12 Fun Events in Chicagoland

This month I went with my friend Carla to The Sing Off Live! We saw three acapella groups perform and had tons of fun. (I also really love this photo.)

12 Crafts and Creations

In March I finally put together a photo book for my trip to Harry Potter world last September. Sadly I have not received the physical book yet, so I can’t post a photo, but here’s a screenshot of one of my favorite spreads.

12 Pretty Things for My Apartment

After some frustrating attempts to find a bedspread or shadowbox frames to hang my mosaics this month, I finally gave up on both of those things and ordered this wall decal on a whim. I couldn’t be more pleased with how it came out! I love it. So pretty!

12 Things that Help Me Feel Good about My Appearance

Early in the month I went with a friend to a beauty event at Nordstrom, and ended up buying $250 worth of makeup. The first picture below is what it looked like when the professional did it. Spending that much money hurt, but it’s been worth it because I feel really good in the makeup. I’ve faithfully worn it every day, and several people have noted that I look nice without knowing exactly what’s different. That’s the sign of a good makeover, I think. I’m really going to try to stick to using it. I also got my haircut again. The second picture below is of the day I got it cut, when it looked especially awesome.

12 Grown-Up Things

For months – perhaps years – I have been pulling stuff out of my medicine cabinet only to have other things fall on me. There was a lot crammed in there, and I knew on some level that most of it was expired, but I never wanted to sort through it. This month I was a grown-up and cleaned out my medicine cabinet, pitching all the old, crusted bottles of nail polish that had separated, a good number of the zillion little sample lotions and shampoos that had built up, and all the expired over-the-counter medications. I don’t even want to tell you how old the oldest thing was… but I will give you a clue and say that the year started with 200 and the last digit rhymed with heaven. (And also tell you that in that year, I did not yet live in this apartment. So… I moved an expired product with me and it has been in my medicine cabinet ever since.) With all the riff-raff out, I was able to reorganize it so I can open the door without anything falling on my head. You know, like a grown up.

Gray area

I live in the gray area.

This is not a commentary on this gray, rainy spring day. It’s not a description of my apartment, which is actually quite colorful. I mean it in the metaphorical sense. Most of the time, no matter what context, there is a way to classify people or things clearly as black or white, or in a this-but-not-that manner. Then there is that one object or person that seems to defy categorization. It’s not black but not white. It sits solidly in the gray area.

That gray area? That’s where I live.

I first started thinking about this issue from a professional perspective. I’m kind of an oddball among my co-workers. Most of the women my age are former teachers. There are a few that haven’t taught, but they all have Ph.D.s, which makes them fall into a researcher category with some of the older members of the development team. I have no classroom experience and no doctoral degree. Instead I have an undergraduate math degree and a strong editorial background. So, while I believe I’m equally valuable to the projects I work on, I am sort of all by myself in the gray area between researcher and practitioner. It doesn’t bother me much on a day-to-day basis, but it does make me wonder where I would go if my current job ends. The teachers can go back teaching, and the researchers can apply for research or faculty positions at other universities. Where would I go?

Once I started thinking about this gray area issue, I realized it’s a good metaphor for a lot of other aspects of my life as well. I had a hard time knowing where to fit in during middle and high school in part because my interests had little overlap with my skills. I loved musical theater, but I don’t have great pitch and am definitely don’t have the athleticism or grace of a stage dancer. I’m really good at math and science has always made instant sense to me, but I’ve never had much interest in solving math problems just for fun or designing my own science experiments. I liked being in the band, but never had enough passion or interest in music as a discipline to put in the kind of practice time I needed to become great. I never really jumped in to any of the groups related to theses things. Instead, I roamed around the gray area between them, visiting many and making plenty of friends, but never really building that core group of friends who had the same passions and interests.

While I was in college, I still did this sort of thing to a certain extent. I did eventually find a core group that I am still close to even now (ten years later, ack), but I still felt like I was flitting around the gray area instead of committing to anything. I was a math major, but I didn’t really meet anyone in my department until I was a senior. It never occurred to me to try to get a TA position or anything specifically math related before that. I had picked math as a specialty, but it wasn’t an interest of mine, per se. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew it wasn’t a research mathematician. So I hung out with English majors and education majors and music majors and theater majors. They were all good friends to me, but because they shared more experiences with each other through classes and events, I ended up out on the periphery. I felt this at the time, even if I couldn’t articulate it. I was not in that core group. I was out in the gray area. Not unwelcome, but not exactly belonging.

Then I ended up in Chicago and tried out a lot of different ways to meet people. At first I tried the bar scene, but quickly found out I wasn’t a big fan. Then I spent a lot of time at home watching movies and the like, but I got bored with that quickly. I wanted to go out, but only for two hours or so. Then I wanted to be able to leave, without guilt or awkwardness, and go home and gossip on my couch before going to bed. But people tended to be at one extreme or the other. They either stayed at bars until 2:00 in the morning, or stayed home. I preferred the gray area in between.

Later on, figuring out that it wasn’t the two hours at the bar I wanted so much as just two hours out of the house, I looked into clubs for various things I was interested in. I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, so I tried out some of the fan club stuff. I found out I was not such a huge fan, when considering the full scale. I loved the books and movies, but had no interest in writing fan fiction or going to wizard rock concerts. I was only a medium fan, in the middle. It was the same for Scrabble. I like to play, but really don’t care about the triple word score. I find it more interesting to play the cool word for 10 points than the boring 2-letter word no one knows for 50 points. I wasn’t a real Scrabble player. And it’s again the same for running. I liked to run, and even to do races, but run a marathon every year? Forget it! I’ll stick to my 3-to-10 milers, thanks. I’m cool here in the gray area, halfway between occasional 5K-er and serial marathoner.

So, anyway. Lately I am finding the gray area to be a nice metaphor for understanding why, despite being involved in many things, I still ended up as a loner. People often (usually?) connect through shared passions. But the truth is, I don’t have any passions. Or, maybe I do, but they are for things I can’t do very well, like sing show tunes or acapella music. I either don’t care enough to have that shared passion, or I’m not good enough at something to really participate. That’s why I can’t get out of the gray area.

Ever since I found a way to articulate this, I’ve been sorting out how I feel about it. I know it makes me a little sad, but I couldn’t really describe why. It means I spend more time by myself than the average person, but I’m ok with that. That doesn’t make me sad just on its own. So what does?

I had a bit of an epiphany last weekend as I stood listening to an acapella group rock out so some song or another. I was happy, bubbly, having a great time, and as I watched them perform, I thought to myself that they were very clearly having a good time too. I felt their joy. And that’s when it hit me.

I experience a lot of my joy vicariously.

I am sincere when I say that I felt joyful at that moment. I really did. But I came to the realization that I was simply sharing their joy. That kind of thing can be wonderful, but it is not the same as feeling your own joy. This will sound like a bit of a pity party, and I don’t mean for it to be, but at that moment, I realized that I feel very little of my own, personal joy.

For years I’ve been watching my friends and colleagues start relationships, get married, buy houses, have children, and a host of other momentous life-changing things. I have been happy for them. I mean it. I have. I’ve never been in a super resentful place. But there has always been a sadness underneath. I always thought it was because I felt like they were moving on without me, but even that didn’t entirely make sense because so many of them remained in my life even after they got married or had children or moved. There was something else.

Now I think I understand what it is. When something amazing happens to a friend, I feel joy for them. I really do. But it’s vicarious joy, and at some point I come to terms with the fact that it’s not my own personal joy that I can carry with me. I feel it, which is wonderful. And then I lose it, which is lonely. I’m not really in the circle where the joy is happening. I am watching from the gray area.

I think that loneliness is what I fear most about still being single. Not the loneliness of being by myself on a Saturday night. That part honestly bothers me very little. It’s the fear of being in the gray area forever, and never having my own joy that I get to keep. I’m not lonely when I’m alone. I’m lonely when I am with other people, watching from the gray area.

There’s one thing that gives me some hope, though. Once in my life, I was in love. (That’s not the thing that gives me hope. I’m not that girl. Keep reading.) And I told that guy once that I was sad that I didn’t have a passion. He told me I was wrong. He said I was passionate about honesty and friendship – two of the best passions anyone could have. He was right, and later, it occurred to me that I was also passionate about him. I think I could also be passionate about someone else.

I’m not miserable. Truly I am not. But I do hope that someone, someday, comes along that is patient enough to stick around and see that kind of passion come out in me. It’s not like music or technology or education. It’s not something you discuss on a first date. It’s something to be understood and discovered over time. Maybe if someone is patient enough, he’ll see that passion and pull my out of my gray area into his inner circle, where the joy is something we get to keep.

Maybe, and maybe not. In the meantime, to whoever reads this: thank you for sharing your joy with me.

February

12 Books

February’s book was House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. It’s the story of an Iranian man living in the U.S. who buys a house at an auction, only later to find out that the house was wrongly seized from its original owner. The book chronicles the interactions between the Iranian man, the original owner of the house, and her married lover. Overall, I give this book a 7. I was interested to see what happened to the characters, and I rather enjoyed the narrative style of the writing. But the story felt slightly exaggerated, as if the author was trying to make sure there was enough to discuss at a book club. Plus, like January’s book, the ending was wretchedly depressing.

12 Recipes

This month I made southwestern meatloaf. It didn’t look all that appetizing when it first came out of the oven, but looked nice on a sandwich. I’ve eaten it without bread with a little lettuce, tomato, and sour cream too.  It gets a 6 out of 10 for flavor, but a 10 out of 10 for easiness. It’s definitely something I’d make again as an alternative to my usual lineup of quick dinners of pasta, pot roast, and baked chicken.

12 Blog Posts

Click here to read about my weekly trivia escapades.

12 Ways to Meet People

This month I went to the 5-year anniversary party for an organization called New Life for Old Bags. They flatten, cut, and loop old plastic bags into “plarn” that is then crocheted into sleeping mats for the homeless. I made an effort to talk to some new people there. The crowd was, unsurprisingly, made up of mostly middle-aged to older women, but I still enjoyed talking to them all. And I very much enjoy making the mats! Here is a picture of my latest one.

12 Small Steps Forward in my Career

This month I agreed to act as the lead author on an article my team is submitting to an annual publication by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. There is no guarantee it will be accepted, of course, but if it is selected for the book, it will be great to have my name on a published work.

12 Fun Events in Chicagoland

My sister and I went to Medieval Times in Schaumberg. This is a bit of a cheat because we went on January 30, but I’m counting it for February anyway, since it’s a short month. We had the BEST time. Our green knight did not win, but he did slap the red knight right off his horse using a gauntlet, so he’s a winner in my book.

12 Crafts and Creations

For six weeks in January into February, I took a glass mosaics class at the Chicago Mosaic School. We did one stained glass project and one smalti project. Mine are shown here. I particularly like the stained glass birdie, though I am happy with how they both turned out.

12 Pretty Things for My Apartment

I bought this super pretty butterfly LED light for my window.

12 Things that Help Me Feel Good about My Appearance

Despite the fact that my eyebrows are super light and not noticeable by anyone but me, I’ve wanted for a while to get them waxed. I just felt like they looked messy. So, with the help of a friend, I got that done this month. Unsurprisingly, no one noticed. Even I can’t really tell the difference between the before and after photos below. But the point is, I did it, and it made me feel better to have done so. Plus, I also got a no-chip pedicure.

12 Grown-Up Things

My grown-up thing for this month was filing my taxes. Granted, this is something I’ve been doing for many years now, but I am counting it anyway. It’s an annoying, soul-sucking experience worthy of recognition of some sort.