Maturity Leave

To the 12 Year Old Girl Crying in the Middle School Bathroom

To the 12 year old girl crying in the middle school bathroom the other week,

I was in one of the stalls when I heard you and your friends come in. Your sobs derailed my train of thought—If I get a note from my mom saying I’ve got my period, can I sit out teaching my class?—which wasn’t really going anywhere anyway. The logistics were a nightmare—my mom’s on the other side of the country, she’d have to fax the note, and she doesn’t have a fax so she’d have to go to FedEx Kinko’s but she gets skittish around anything self-service and I didn’t even know the school’s fax number.

I saw your two friends huddle over you as I approached the sink. And I felt awkward, as I tend to whenever I’m around crying or 12 year olds, and also because I’m in my thirties using a middle school bathroom and just automatically feel like a creep. I don’t know if there’s a separate faculty bathroom I’m supposed to use, but even if there was a faculty bathroom I wasn’t supposed to use that I was in and faculty saw me they might mistake me for a student, due to both my youthful vigor and the fact that I dress like a 12 year old.

 

I washed my hands, fixing my stare on the sign reminding me to wash my hands with hot water and soap for AT LEAST ten seconds, and realized I hadn’t been counting it out but if I started from zero now that I’ve already been washing my hands for a couple seconds, wouldn’t that be wasting water? And aren’t we in the middle of a water shortage? Which is worse—swine flu, drought? Swine flu, drought?

 

I glanced up in the mirror to see if my bangs looked too greasy and I saw you behind me, your crumpled face streaked in melted mascara. “He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t give a fuck about me! He hasn’t talked to me in two weeks! I was just standing next to him in the hallway and he didn’t even say Hi!” And one of your friends cradled your head against her shoulder and said, “No no no, he still loves you! He still loves you!”

 

I yanked a paper towel from the dispenser, my heart ripping in half. It would’ve been creepy to turn around and tell you this then, but as the oldest girl in the bathroom it should’ve been my duty to welcome you, the newly initiated, to Your First Heartbreak.

 

Boys acting like they like you, then acting like they don’t is a universal phenomenon—just look it up on the internet. Google the phrase Why are boys so weird?—you’ll find Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers for it, not that they’re any help. We didn’t even have the internet when I was your age. All we had was rainbow-colored pens, purple notebook paper, and a Ouija board. And we’d write our friend, “I was so excited he asked me to go to his hockey game but then I was sad cuz he also invited that girl from your bus,” and we’d fold the paper up and slide it across the desk to our friend, and she would write back, “Maybe they’re just friends.” And we would write back, “But how come when his mom was driving us home and we dropped that girl from your bus off first he walked her to her door and kissed her?” And our friend writes back, “Maybe he’s just confused about how he feels about you.”

 

We would ask the Ouija board if he still likes us and even though we’d given up hope, the Ouija board answers “Maybe.” And then over the summer when he delivers the paper at our house every afternoon he stops his bike in our driveway under our bedroom window and calls our name and even though we knew he was coming because we’d already saw him down the street when we were looking out the window for him, we ducked out of the way before he could see us and waited until we heard our name before we popped back up in the window and waved, and our Mom starts calling him Romeo and we think, This is just like Romeo and Juliet, especially when he kisses us while hiding in pine trees or behind our dad’s van.

 

But then when school starts again he won’t sit with you on the bus.

 

What I’m saying is computers don’t have the answers. Ouija boards almost do and your friends are the only ones you can really trust, most of the time. The thing is though, as you and your friends get older, your friends will start to think that they’re wiser. They’ll start thinking that they “know better,” that they know what’s best. Like when you tell your friend about how you wrote an eight page letter to the boy who shared his cigarettes with you and kissed you on the hill by the football field then brought you back to his dorm room and you stayed with him, all night, in his bed, with him and even though you didn’t even do anything it felt like maybe you could’ve if you weren’t all freaked out about diseases and pregnancy and not really knowing this guy who kissed you on the hill and brought you back to his dorm room but ever since you slid that letter under his door—well, shoved, actually, since eight pages gets kind of thick once it’s all folded up, now he won’t share cigarettes with you anymore and he doesn’t answer when you come knocking in the evening when you know he isn’t at class, and your friend will say, “Maybe you’re making too much out of this. Maybe you’re thinking about this too much,” and you’ll clearly explain that you wouldn’t be thinking about it this much if it wasn’t so important, obviously there must be something to all of this.

 

Your friend will say something about “space” and “boundaries” and “giving it time”—so you give it time and you don’t go to his room for a whole week and on the day your horoscope tells you that someone near you wants to connect you hear a rustling at your door. You’ll look down and see a little piece of paper caught under your rug, a watercolor painting of a kangaroo, he made you a piece of art!

 

But then he doesn’t talk to you in class and a couple weeks later at graduation you’re walking towards him in the parking lot, you’re walking alone and he’s walking alone and your families are off somewhere else and you stop and look up at him and he nods and says, “See you around,” and keeps on walking. You say to your friend, “What does it mean?” And she says, “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” but how can it not mean anything? He made you art—how can art be misleading?

 

You’ll get even older and your friends will get married. You’ll go to grad school and make new single friends. You’ll form a coalition of highly educated, creatively accomplished, boyfriendless women, and you’ll tip up your chins and confidently throw back your hair when you refer to yourselves as “women”. And you will meet men, who will shrug and kind of roll their eyes when they have to refer to themselves as “men”. You will meet men who open doors for you, who make you laugh, and who wait for you to get inside your apartment before they drive away. They’ll say to you that they like your shoes, or your shirt, or your blog. And they’ll also say things like, “I think you’re nice, but I just don’t feel a connection to you,” or  “I think you’re nice, but I’m looking for someone to dominate me.”

 

Your friends will send you messages on Facebook, reporting similar non-events. They will change their statuses from Single to It’s Complicated, then back to Single again. But when coffee dates don’t lead to lunch dates, when the follow up to a lunch date is downgraded to coffee, when you get a hug but no phone call, when you get refused even a hug—you’ll find yourself in the Chinese restaurant that serves Japanese food, tearing up over your tempura, and your friends will be sympathetic but they won’t come over to your side of the table. When you run to the bathroom to cry, they wait outside in the hall. Your friends don’t use the word “love” anymore. They use words like “not interested,” or “incompatible”. Just when they’re supposed to tell you not to give up, they tell you to “let it go”, “move on”, “get over it”. Even your Gypsy Fortune Telling cards will tell you He’s trying to forget.

 

Your friends might even say you’re being “weird”, as in, “Leaving cookies in his mailbox is kinda weird,” or that texting someone to tell them you sent them an email is “crazy”—they’ll even sing it to you, “Craaaaaa-zeeeeee,” and that’s when you look your friends in the eye and say you’re not crazy, they’re the ones that are crazy, just because they’ve traded in love for “boundaries” doesn’t mean you’re giving up and texting someone who hasn’t responded to your emails is doing that person a favor, because maybe his internet broke and he’d never know you emailed otherwise and baking cookies is not weird, it’s love, and maybe your love is too good, too selfless, too pure, your love shines like a beacon and it’s your love, not your craziness, that scares other people away in this heartless, mixed-up world and you’re going to insist on being sensitive, you’re going to be extra sensitive to make up for a world that’s gone numb and you’re going to cry in every public bathroom you can gain access to for every unrequited text and every email lost in a network of silence, every withdrawn attempt at affection and every abrupt end of contact deserves a generous, sobby mourning period, a loud cry at the mute void. You are a soldier of love and just because you claim very few victories in the battle for meaningful connection doesn’t mean you’re going to surrender.

 

That is what you’ll say to your friends twenty years from now, dear 12 year old. Those friends at your side in the middle school bathroom are cheering you on to love—to a love without abandon, a love with no condition, a love that requires no reciprocation, their words He still loves you the rallying cry your heart will follow.

Currently Admiring

 

Jane Lynch

I love Jane Lynch for this smile, fixed on her face before delivering the line, “He died.”

I found Party Down via an AV Club Random Roles interview with Jane Lynch last month, which had followed a personally insightful interview she had done on The Sound Of Young America, both of which made me realize how much I love Jane Lynch’s portrayal of bizarre female characters. She’s found this niche inhabiting wonderfully deranged roles atypical for women—it’s rare to see a woman as a “loveable lech” or delightful creep like Constance, who’s both charming and likeable while being smarmy and delusional. Jane Lynch nails this quality of a character firmly grounded in a reality that is completely of her own invention, and given to a twisted empathy for those around her that is equal parts earnest and inappropriate.

Super Bonus: Jennifer Coolidge as Constance's roommate Bobbie

 

Brian Dewan

I saw Brian Dewan perform at Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre earlier this month, curious about his presentation of hand-drawn, self-narrated, pseudo-educational filmstrips. Brian Dewan appeared on stage, a middle-aged man in white dress shirt and tie and charmingly anachronistic short-pants, and cordially introduced us to his program. He then took his place at the back of the theater, and after a brief lightbulb malfunction for which he was entirely prepared, began to wind us through his work. The strips each begin with the handwritten word FOCUS filling the screen, and a voice channeled from the 1950’s directing us to “Focus… focus… focus…” A mimicked chime, and Brian Dewan cranks one frame forward, leading us down into the rabbit hole of authoritatively documented derangement.

While watching the filmstrips, I caught myself thinking, Wouldn’t it be easier if he just digitized this and presented it on DVD? A thought which was simultaneously missing the points of both the charm of the hand-cranked filmstrip and the films themselves, which spun around the ideas of Modernity and Progress as they were conceived in a time period dedicated to social fear and technological optimism. (A thought also unaware of the fact that these films do already exist on DVD.)

 After a few filmstrips, Brian Dewan returned to the stage, strapped on an accordion, and performed a nearly operatic re-enactment of a patient undergoing brain surgery without sedation. It was one of the most manic, engrossing, psychotic musical performances I’ve ever witnessed live—mesmerizing enough in and of itself, but even more jarring to watch the instantaneous switch of a buttoned down, 1950s authoritarian to complete raging maniac. (The topic of brain surgery has also been a personal freak-out trigger for me, ever since I saw that episode of ER where Dr. Mark Green discovers he has a brain tumor and has to undergo surgery where they poke him in the brain and make him recite nursery rhymes.)

Researching him later, I discovered that Brian Dewan is something of a mild-mannered mad genius. In addition to creating filmstrips and performing music (after the accordion brain surgery freak-out, he also shredded on an autoharp, making it sound like an electric guitar), he invents and constructs electronic instruments and custom cabinetry—a craftsman and tinkerer simultaneously inhabiting the 19th century and the science fiction future as envisioned fifty years ago.

Top 5 Girlhood Crushes (Celebrity Edition)

Magnum P.I.

I remember drawing a picture of Tom Selleck/Magnum P.I. from the cover of TVGuide (and luckily enough, that same issue of TV Guide is currently available on Ebay). I remember the pattern on Magnum’s shirt giving me trouble, and adding in details on the trees in the background because I didn’t like the out-of-focus blob, and editing out the boring British guy. According to the date on this issue (Jan 2-8, 1982), I must’ve been five years old and on Christmas break. I can picture sitting alone at the kitchen table, it's dark out and probably past my normal bedtime, my Crayolas arranged by color and Tom Selleck staring back up at me.

I’m not sure if I even liked watching Magnum P.I. or if it was just something that my parents watched, but I was inexplicably drawn to this image of Tom Selleck. I don’t know what it was—the rugged moustache? The rugged eyebrows? The untamed forest of chest hair bursting between the two unbuttoned halves of the palm frond and parrot shirt? Or was it the impish grin, the dimples? The twinkle in his perceptive, understanding eyes? It’s weird that as a five year old girl I’d be innately pulled into an act of adoration for such a prototypical “masculine stud”. As I was taping the picture up over my bed my mom asked me why I liked Tom Selleck, the worry in her voice making me instantly embarrassed. I couldn’t explain why, I was simply answering an impulse I didn’t have words for.

The Fall Guy

 It wasn’t until I googled it that I realized Lee Majors played The Fall Guy. I have no memory of the show itself, but the opening credit sequence is burned into my brain—partly because of all the superfluous fire but mainly it’s the hauntingly melancholic theme song (I die for a livin’ in the movies and TV/But the hardest thing I ever do/Is watch my leadin’ ladies/kiss some other guy while I’m bandagin’ my knee). That song evoked a deep empathy in me, and made me feel genuinely sorry for The Fall Guy. Here’s a man who earns his living dangling from railway trestles, being dragged by teams of horses, defying all principles of physics in his personal jetpack—his body can withstand any and all physical punishment, but somehow it’s always his heart that ends up bruised.

Michael Palin

Although I think every member of Monty Python ranks equally as a Comedy Genius, I always thought of Michael Palin as the Cutest Python. He has “kind eyes”, and the nicest legs of all the Pythons.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was an integral part of my morning block of television-watching my quasi-depressive summer between 10^th and 11^th grade. I would wake up, shower, and get dressed as if preparing to have a regular day doing regular teen stuff, then go down to the livingroom and flatten myself onto the couch for three hours of Comedy Central. I don’t remember what the other shows were, but everything was basically a pre-game for the episode of Monty Python that capped off this morning ritual, after which I’d return to my room and take a nap. It was during an episode of Monty Python on one of these otherwise wasted mornings when my brother suddenly freaked out at me and yelled that I was pathetic because I didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t in a position to argue with him, but I was secure in my knowledge that watching Monty Python was making me smarter, and with that sort of sophistication I didn’t need any friends.

Besides, I had Michael Palin for a make pretend boyfriend. Although I remember while watching Monty Python having this distinct yearning to have been born 30 years earlier, and in London, and to have had some involvement with television, so I could’ve been around to have maybe said Hi to an age appropriate Michael Palin. But just when I thought I’d exhausted the entire Monty Python canon, every episode, every movie, every album, along comes Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole, with contemporary Michael Palin! And it’s Michael Palin as his congenial, inquisitive, super-polite Michael Palin self, and even though he’s older than my parents he’s still adorable! In the first episode of Around the World Michael Palin is in his bedroom packing a suitcase, and his wife makes a point of reminding him to pack his diarrhea medicine. And even though it’s kind of staged and his wife is clearly playing to the camera, it’s still adorable and it made me want to be the smart-assy wife of a chirrupy, influential comedian-turned-world explorer. My favorite episodes of those series were the first and last—the ones where he’s packing, and the ones where he’s returning home to his family and friends.

 

Joel Robinson/Hodgson 

Thoughtful, beleaguered, world-weary, sleepy… yet ingenious, mechanically gifted, and pop culture savvy. Joel always seemed kind of sad or in need of a hug, but not necessarily depressed—he wasn’t the kind of guy you needed to worry about, but he looked like the years in space with only sarcastic robots to keep him company were taking its toll. I always got the feeling that the character of “Joel” was probably not too far removed from the “actor” Joel, and eventually discovered that it was in fact the real life Joel who constructed the robots and inventions and was instrumental in fabricating this quirky, DIY TV show. My fantasies alternated between being the “girl character” on Mystery Science Theater 3000, wherein I got to hang out with Joel Hodgson and show him how funny I am and be on TV and show everyone watching me on TV how funny I am, and actually living on the Satellite Of Love with Joel Robinson and the bots and being trapped in space with a man who would have no choice but to be my boyfriend and we’d watch movies all day and make things together. Although I guess these two alternate fantasies are kind of the same thing, just in one the robots are real and not puppets and we are actually being held hostage by mad scientists, which seems like a weird premise for a romantic fantasy, and in the other I have greater media exposure.

 

Neil Finn

In 1991 Neil Finn burst into my livingroom in the middle of the night singing a brassy song about Americans being fat, Tammy Faye Baker being ridiculous, and bowling being an inane thing to do after delivering a child. As a moody, disenfranchised 13 year old full of unvoiced opinions about the hypocrisy of American patriotism, the corrupting effects of organized religion, and the inanity of bowling, he had clearly composed this song for me, personally. I was smitten.

 I was either on break from school or preparing for a sick day, because I was watching 120 Minutes on MTV which I remember as only being on at 2am Sunday nights. I also remember being alone in the livingroom, which would’ve been extremely rare—I’d either managed to stay awake longer than my insomniac brother, or had somehow convinced him to not only watch 120 Minutes but also remain quiet for at least four minutes.

 Through this anomaly in program scheduling and TV viewing habits, I managed to catch the Chocolate Cake video during one of the probably four or five times it aired in the US, and thus Neil Finn and Crowded House navigated the broadcasting wormhole into my life—although I’d soon find out that Crowded House was a That Band That Did That Song (Don’t Dream It’s Over) and That Other Song (Something So Strong), two radio favorites that in the United States were relegated to Easy Listening stations and dentists’ waiting rooms. (I would seethe with rage years later when Crowded House was featured on a One Hit Wonders special on VH1.)

I ran upstairs to my bedroom to scribble down the info that flashed in the video credits. I can’t remember if Woodface was purchased at the mall or ordered through Columbia House, or how many weeks passed before I got my hands on the album.  When I finally placed the cassette into my Walkman, my heart swelled with the familiar chords of Chocolate Cake. But then! The songs that followed were completely different in tone, and had nothing to do with American obesity trends or questionable definitions of sporting activity—they were songs about love! And sex!

Politely-worded songs about sex (Read me like a book/that’s fallen down between your knees/please, let me have my way with you)—he said please! Neil Finn’s not going to coerce you, he may beg a little bit but only because he adores you so. And how about this: The finger of blame has turned upon itself/And I'm more than willing to offer myself/Do you want my presence or need my help/Who knows where that might lead. If you’re feeling sad or lonely, Neil (and his brother Tim) Finn have offered to come by and hang out. Neil Finn’s willing to sit by you and listen to you cry about your unhappy childhood or whatever’s bothering you and if you just want to snuggle, he’ll snuggle with you but if you want to put out he’s totally up for that too. He totally likes you but like, no pressure.

Neil Finn wrote and sang about sex in a way that didn’t make it seem scary, dangerous, or in any way foreboding—he made it sound like something I might actually want to do someday. Like Barry White for the hypersensitive, artistic, Monty Python-quoting white teenage girl. But the Crowded House canon is also steeped in melancholy, the kind of melancholy that a brooding adolescent can wrap around themself like a fleece blanket. Except in Neil Finn’s case, his songs express a melancholy earned through experience, exploring the ways love, lust, longing and loneliness weave together. His lyrics and his voice are imbued with wisdom, maturity, and tenderness that other performers popular at the time—for instance, Vanilla Ice, or C + C Music Factory—failed to capture in the same way.

Of course I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, and am surprised I’m even able to articulate it now. At the time all I could do was sit in my bedroom, gazing at the inner photo of my cassette tape insert, hoping that someday I would experience the type of enduring, beautifully painful romance that Neil Finn sang about.

It wasn’t until 10^th grade that I decided to draw a portrait of Neil Finn from the Woodface band photo for my Advanced Drawing and Painting class. I felt weird about it, maybe because I was openly admitting to admiring this musician but also maybe because no one else in my class had any idea who he was. I was working on it at home one day when my mom came into my room. She looked over my shoulder, studied the drawing and said, “Downturned eyes are a symptom of depression.” I wasn’t sure where she was getting her phrenology from, and I especially bristled since it was those smoldering, downturned eyes that I found most attractive in Neil Finn (along with his floppy hair and the general shape of his head). His eyes didn’t look sad to me, they looked “knowing”. Like someone wise and patient, like someone who’d experienced both the greatest highs and the greatest lows possible in love, and now was going to sing you a song about it.