Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

  Greetings EN502! On a Saturday at 9:30 AM I saw Barbie in a packed AMC. I did not dress in pink (an accident), but the rest of the theater showed up in style. There was not a seat empty. Small children, elderly couples, and twenty-somethings like me all sat in collective anticipation. I have not felt such unity in the theater since the Hunger Games franchise.  Growing up, I was a Barbie Kid™. I owned pregnant Midge Hadley. I owned Allan. I knew all their lore. I read books on Barbie and went down Wikipedia rabbit holes to learn more about certain dolls. I had played with baby dolls and American Girl Dolls, but nothing stuck like Barbie. The dolls were the perfect size to build beds for out of packing puffs and extra fabric. I sewed clothes for them by hand and orchestrated epic, continuous plot lines. I was always a kid full of stories and Barbie was my favorite platform to enact them.  My fictional Barbie world was a tough one to leave — one that I am still trying to l...

Dear EN502,      I have been in Wyoming for two months, with two more to go, and I am back to applying for jobs. The two constants of volatile seasonal work are the never-ending job search and the practiced shrug of the shoulders when someone asks, “What are your plans after this summer?”      I don’t have a clear plan for once September rolls around, either. There are a lot of things I miss about living in an urban area, and I’ve thought about moving to Seattle for the past year. One of my friends lives in Seattle and has a roommate that’s looking to sublease for the rest of 2023, so when he offered me a place to stay, I said yes.      And what am I doing after my sublease ends in Seattle…?      I don’t know. (Thanks for asking.)      I’m spending the majority of my brain space staying alive, and making lists has been very helpful for me to feel less scattered. Most of my lists are for groceries, chores, and wha...

A few days ago, I got a bougainvillea tattoo that I had been wanting for a while. It was my fourth tattoo, and it's filled up most of the empty space on my left upper arm. I had been wanting to fill that gap for a while; my latest tattoo before that was a guava branch I had gotten last August, and while I loved it, I also thought the spacing looked awkward from a front angle. From the side, you could get a fuller sense of the artwork, but from the front, all you could see was a stem and a couple of leaves. It looked incomplete. I don't subscribe to the mentality that all tattoos must have meaning, but it's so much easier to justify them to myself if they do. So far, all the plants I've gotten tattooed are ones that are in my backyard at home -- the pomegranate trees I can see from my bedroom, the lilies lining our side yard, guavas ready to be eaten right off the tree, and bougainvilleas growing over white concrete walls. When I was in high school, I never imagined I wo...

When I told people that my new job involved working with infants, several adults joked that I would get "baby fever." A month into the job, the only disease I've gotten is perpetual "Tumblr quote compilation about motherhood and daughterhood" brain. I assume baby fever would have been less likely to bring me to the verge of tears thinking about my mother's career in the middle of data collection (thank God I was wearing a mask).  Friday was the last day for two of my coworkers at the Speech and Neurodevelopment Lab, including the one who was training me, so I am truly on my own now. It's strange to finally be interacting with the world like a real person. For so long, I have been expected to approach life subserviently, like a stupid kid, even though I've rarely felt stupid and never like a kid. Now, though, I am surrounded by people who treat me like a peer. I'm not sure when I'll get used to it. In terms of actual responsibilities, I do lik...

Dear EN502,   I write to you, now, from an abandoned motor-cross trail in South Western France. I set up my tent on the landing side of the dirt-mound that used to be a jump. A fellow pilgrim is fiddling with the camp stove in a dell created by tires that, no doubt, once drifted here. It's around 6 in the evening and wind is blowing, softly, through the ferns. Though we've stopped hiking for the day, there's still a long ways until dark. It's pretty funny. Since the middle ages, people have been walking across Europe to a placed called Santiago de Compostela. What's funnier is that, in the past 1,000 years, they haven't stopped! Every country has different routes associated with different Saints, Legends or local rituals, but they all wind their way to Santiago. You know, some people start their pilgrimages just a few hundred kilometers from Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain. Others start a few thousand kilometers away in Oslo, Budapest or Prague. To that...

Last night, I was lying in bed reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Shadows from the ivy draped outside my window sprawled across the blank walls of my room, and I could hear a car engine whirring along Harvard Street a few blocks away. I flipped the page and read the line: “Don’t let the wicked city get you down.” I paused, and read it again. Then I set down my book and looked up at the ivy shadows for a while. So far, I’ve been enjoying living in Boston this summer. June was a whirlwind (I know it was for all of us!) as I was moving into my sublet and starting my internship at a PR agency in Downtown Crossing. I felt as though my life were a snowglobe that some higher power had lifted and shaken, and I was counting down the seconds until the snowflakes would settle, until things would seem a little bit clearer and calmer again. I suppose that’s life: cycles of picking up a snowglobe and shaking it until you’re satisfied with the stir you’ve created before setting it back down again...

     Dear EN502,      Happy July! The skies have been hazy recently. Last week I looked out my dining room window and saw some sort of particulate matter billowing through the trees in giant clouds. I thought it was a dust storm. Or wildfire smoke. “WHAT IS THAT,” I shouted in the direction of my roommate.      In a tone of absolute unconcern, she replied, “just pollen.”      It’s pollen season in the Rockies. Every conifer tree and their mother are producing a fine, neon yellow powder that gets sent out in plumes from the gentlest breeze. Everything, inside or outside, is coated in a fine layer of pollen. I’m breathing and eating it (I try not to think about that). My snot is yellow.      The days are getting warmer now, too. It rained almost every day through June, which kept temperatures below 60F. The past few days have clawed their way into the 70s, which has prompted both humans and mosquitos to swarm every...