OF A GOLDEN AGE

For you, I baked a double batch of big, soft cookies with whole wheat, oatmeal, flax, apple sauce, liqueur-soaked raisins. I won’t say wholesome, because that word is adopted by the food industry to mean “Filling but bad for you” or “Parents, feed this nutritionally valueless food to your children without guilt.” What’s wrong with us that we can’t simply eat what we want and describe it the way it is? Pasta that’s secretly good for your kids. Cookbooks describing how to include a quarter cup of vegetables in each serving of macaroni and cheese.

These are healthful, but still cookies.

a recent this american life had a dan savage piece in which he described a promise he made to an ex-lover who was, at the time, dying of aids. the advent of a new drug cocktail extended the length of dan’s promise from a few months to the next several decades. this made me wonder, have i made (and broken) promises? i’m sure i have but the worst part is knowing that i don’t know what they are. the breakees probably remember, the way i remember girls who cruelly teased me in junior high. i wish i could remember.

the summer after his first year of college, my dad worked as a bricklayer. once he saw the most beautiful, popular girl from his high school class walk by while his white-trash coworkers blared country music and wolf-whistled at her. our society has turned against jobs that use the body instead of the high intellect, when a union plumber probably makes more than the average college professor. it’s never seemed fair that the people doing the grossest jobs — janitors, exterminators — make less money than everyone else. physical labor clears the mind and shapes the body, could be worse.

my latest experiment with my gastrointestinal system is peeling apples before i eat them to eliminate the part that’s hardest to digest. peeling apples is fun, anyway — using a serrated knife and trying to create one long ribbon of green. i can’t do it, but maybe that’s an acquirable skill. either way, i have a whole bag of golden delicious apples to work through, which means plenty of rehearsal. this is a low-pressure performance compared to everything else happening right now, finalizing schedules and starting classes in my second-to-last semester as an undergraduate. the times are flux.

a friend of our family, who has always inflated me with praises like “you’re my hero,” talked to my dad about my future. my dad said i’m considering law school and mike said, “it doesn’t matter where she goes to law school — she’s just going to end up working at the aclu anyway.” last night i talked to max about my future. graduate school in english or law school? he asked which i wanted more, and i had no idea. i am paving my future with as many options as possible to avoid ruling anything out. maybe it will work.

the flood of people rushing back into beloit is even more surreal than in years past — for the first time, there’s no one to point to who’s more experienced or learned about beloit, because our class is the oldest. i’ve also lost the impetus to meet first-years; there’s something inherently suspect in introducing yourself to people three years younger with whom you inevitably have very little in common. i’ll meet some through the newspaper, and maybe through a class, and that’s fine. the question is, what distinguishes seniors from underclassmen? maybe our calm confusion as we see our futures.

is it better to put up with people i don’t like, and make nice in social situations, than to be more frank about my feelings? i tend to believe that going along is harmless in some instances, and big public gatherings are among these. like most adults, i am skilled at the purposeful ignore. but there is also a whole group of people with whom i like talking when we’re in a crowd together, who are fun in certain contexts, who are entertaining whilst under the influence. the well-roundedness of the social scene is what really appeals to me.

max and i also talked about the way people change during their years at school. max said he remembers himself as a first-year and thinks he must have looked like a total idiot. the thing is, everyone looked like an idiot at one point, even sober squares like me. and the other day, when i saw a faculty member kick a runaway grape under a table to avoid having to pick it up, it was comforting to think that those idiot moments would continue indefinitely. comforting and embarrassing, maybe. i’m hopeful that they’ll become less frequent, but can’t promise.

this weekend at home, my dad introduced me to a concept that obviously exists in my life but that i’d never put a name to before.

c.y.a.: cover your ass.

he was using it in reference to my writing job, where my boss has been a little irresponsible and then tried to shift some blame to me. but really, this is my new motto. when i often get that feeling like i’m a six-foot-tall bull in a china shop, i know this philosophy is right — maybe being more conscious of my actions will help me learn to c.y.a.

the museum bustled today with seventy beloit faculty whose purpose was to shuffle around and meet the new and temporary staff members. on top of that were trays and trays of small elaborate hors d’oeuvres and a king’s ransom of wine, showing that faculty — like students — are most likely to attend events under the banner of free food. this isn’t surprising; i don’t know about you, but the older i get, the more i realize that “adults” are just children with better pedigrees and more complex coping mechanisms. they leave messes and make demands, filling larger shoes, but only physically.

at home this weekend i found a metal lunchbox (purchased at big lots) that i carried in high school as a pencil case. apparently i stuffed it full of mementos at some point because i opened it now to find a batch of my friends’ senior pictures with inscriptions on the back. there is middle ground for people like me, people who did not love high school but who didn’t hate it either, with pleasant memories that don’t make us long to relive those days. i smile but don’t wish for seventeen; i miss people but do not seek them.

anger is not an emotion with which i am intimately acquainted; generally i am as even-keel as they come and usually my temperament leans heavily toward the side of happy and nonchalant. lately, though, i am twisted to near-bipolarity by the goings on. having realized that two of the people i considered close friends are no longer, i am red-faced, teeth clenched, otherwise saddened. but this is not the whole story, because this is the year of the rediscovered friendship: already i am finding people i’d forgotten i loved seeing around, wondering whether we’ll spend time together.

this year is going to be hell. i am sure that it will also be great but it will definitely be hell. it’s funny that being busy does not have any inherently scary quality unless it relates to my future — i am nothing but excited about the newspaper this year, which is a commitment of twenty-five or thirty hours a week; but i am terrified of the gre and graduate school applications. and for the first time in my life, my grades are not good enough to guarantee me anything. high school seems so far away, such a sleighride.