Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

We started texting again during my second semester of law school. It was my winter break, and I was back home applying to summer jobs. My roommate and her cats were staying with me in San Diego after having to evacuate the historically severe LA fires. Having given her and the cats my room for the week, I camped out on my living room couch under a pile of blankets, listlessly scrolling LinkedIn under the guise of looking for job postings. My best friend had just moved away to work her dream job on Catalina Island, where she now had limited time and even more limited cell service. We'd gone from texting every day to barely texting at all, and though I was thrilled her dreams were coming true, I also felt more lost and alone than ever. At some point in my scrolling, I saw a post that made me think of my college friend --- the one I'd lost touch with yet again months ago. No matter how much time passed, she stayed in the back of my mind. It was annoying. What the hell do I have to...

Three years ago on this blog I wrote a post about the moral dilemma I faced when tasked with killing the invasive bullfrog population in Grand Teton National Park. My writing was sincere and heartwarming, and above all, it was funny. I wrote a lot of funny posts that first year of Teeth and Love. Somewhere along the way – I don’t know if it was from the trials of adjusting to the post-college life or writing for an audience bigger than the class of EN502 or because I let compliments on my writing style get to my head – I started taking myself too seriously and posted something only when I felt like I could tie everything back to a grand moral or lesson about Being Alive, and keep it all under 800 words while I’m at it. I haven’t posted anything in the past few months because a lot of Things have Happened and I keep waiting for it all to settle down so I can find a theme and thread everything together. A connects to B which then leads to big picture C, therefore we can all remind oursel...

  are humans supposed to live alone?  “Man is by nature a social animal,” Aristotle claimed.  What would he make out, I wonder, of our Loneliness Epidemic? Would he furrow his brow when we explain to him the authorities have deemed it a public health crisis, stemming from the burnout, social media, and physical isolation we’ve collectively normalized in our post-Covid era? What would he say when we tell him one in two adults feel lonely, and yet we continue to burrow into our screens – desperate for connection, of something we can’t put our finger on? Aristotle did not live alone. am I supposed to live alone? “Mom, what was I like as a baby?” I asked in the car one day. “You were mostly content, as long as you were being held,” she replied. “I think you just wanted to be in on the action rather than left in your crib.” I nodded my head, quietly reflecting on how it then took me years to fall asleep in my own bed. My parents – fatigued by bigger issues stir...

I am embarrassed by the curve of my shoulders. I have started to notice them more in photographs, how my neck is pushed forward and there is a bit of a hunch. My sister, in her fifth year of school for physical therapy, comments on it every time she sees me. There are ways to fix it, I have started to go to yoga, but for now, it is there, the evidence of my life as a reader.  I have never felt close to my body. I lack the innate awareness I’ve seen in my peers. When I turn corners, my hip usually hits the side of the wall. I have never been great at catching things. In college I started saying that I would prefer to be perceived as an amorphous blob. I am not naturally athletic, although I enjoy moving my body and being outside. Every team sport in elementary school felt like a lesson in dissociation. I could never figure out how my body connected to my brain, never mind trying to successfully coordinate plays with teammates.  Recently, I listened to an interview with an autho...

     I’ve spent my whole life on a quest for control—of my circumstances, my emotions, others’ perceptions of me. In college, with the obnoxiousness only a twenty-year-old could have, I thought I’d cracked the code: avoid uncertainty, act logically, and make others as happy as I could while tempering their expectations of me.  An ex once quoted the line from Persuasion , “I am half agony, half hope” to explain the depth of her feelings for me. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, read the novel. I didn’t understand how she could feel that way after only knowing me for a few months. Moreover, we’d agreed to only date short-term, exclusive but casual, just enjoying our few months together until we graduated college. What could she possibly be agonizing over? What was she hoping for? It feels horrible to admit my ignorance now, because it’s a concession I didn’t feel as deeply for her as she did for me. When she accused me of just that after we broke up, I took offense. In th...

The rest of March flew by in a whirlwind of exams, presentations, and projects. A brief spring break trip to Athens, a reprieve of architecture, history, and cats, then I came back to Finland and was once again in the thick of it. Writing my masters project proposal (MP2 for short), putting together my masters project proposal presentation (MP3, if you will), accumulating hours upon hours in the library. Redbulls sprout on desks near hands of students, ripe for plucking, the air tense with concentration, hundreds of hands typing, pencils scribbling, track pads clicking. Boredom feels to me as far away as the heat of summer, this northern country, these days in late April, trees just beginning to bud. Temperatures just on this side of freezing, I leave the house with mittens but leave my hat at home. Drooping piles of snow desperately clinging to solidity in shadowed building corners, ice on the lakes completely gone. Spring came early this year I’m told, a quick snowmelt, weeks o...

Alternative titles: school is kicking my ass, all my friends are punk rock guitar players, offseason life, the birds are singing -- Packed powder in winter turns to ice in the spring mummontappokeli – grandma-killing weather, I’m told as we gingerly pick our way down the sidewalk laugh so hard I slip this season does not discriminate by age. -- Mist lay thick in the trees under glowing grey sky I walk to school in this weather March entwines October ghosts of fall resurface in spring and versions of myself from past seasons come closer, I remember iterated and reiterated -- Woke up this morning to stiff muscles and popping joints Yesterday at the skate park learning how to drop in feet on board on lip of halfpipe Ose tells me falling forward is infinitely better than falling backward Take his hands, stomp down jumbled limbs and board and twisting and air and ground coming up behind me Ose towards me a moment of oh god infinite millisecond later we loo...