Edition Six

Libraries, Embarrassment, Dichotomous Keys

Hello, good day, I am Jenna, and this is “What Good?” - a roundup of lessons I was lucky enough to interact with recently. A public exercise in yak mouthing my way to gratitude. Welcome to the show

I crave power. I see knowledge as power. So much so, I get a tingly feeling everytime I walk into a library because the potential sitting at my fingertips is electrifying. 

I am not maniacally plotting world domination. I just feel safe. I feel comfort. Whatever I could possibly dream of knowing is surrounding me in a cocoon of paper organized in one of the most sophisticated classification systems ever created. All you could ever need in one place, displayed as a mosaic in a dynamic puzzle you become a part of as soon as you walk in.

I grew up in libraries. Specifically, the Glendora Public Library. They had a summer reading program and I remember it being the best part of my week. I took my goddaughter a few months ago and the nostalgia washed over me. I showed her how to use the computer to find books she might like and how to use the Dewey Decimal System to find the physical copy of the books she found. Seeing her use the mouse and keyboard, with fiend authority, soaking up the opportunity to use technology so autonomously, mirrored my nostalgia with her discovery. It felt like time travel. 

She had a favorite series, just like I did at her age. The library had more editions of that series than she had ever seen before. She looked at me in that specific way kids do. When they’ve just discovered something amazing exists in the world for the first time and you’re the reason they know it exists. Conspiratorial and curious - how did you know about this and what else can you teach me? 

When I think about having kids this is what goes in the pro’s list. Giving them every piece of magic I had so it keeps living. Then it goes onto the con list because a life should have a bigger purpose than to relive my lost joy. 

I feel calm in libraries while also feeling a low frequency buzz of “what if”. There is no shortage. There is no running out. There is no question I can’t find an answer to. The infinite opportunities quiet my questioning mind. It is a challenge and a threat. I can’t possibly get through it all so why rush. Just enjoy the ride - it will all be waiting for me - and it will come at precisely the moment I need it most. 

Life is like a library - just not as comforting. The infinite opportunities can feel crippling instead of empowering and the postmodern threat of nothing matters so it all matters in the degree to which we want it to can quickly turn into if nothing matters then nothing matters. 

Just “enjoying the ride” is harder to do. Trusting that all the answers are within reach and it will all be waiting for you at the right time even harder. 

The incessant line of questioning in my brain; What does this do? What is it good for? How can we determine worth? In different categorical contexts? Who has the authority to confirm the worth once it’s been determined? What measures are in place to qualify that authority? How often is it questioned?

There’s also this line of questioning usually happening simultaneously, like two radio stations being on at the same time; Should I do something if I just feel obligated to do it? How much of what others do for me is simply out of obligation? Do they even like me? Does that change my gratitude for them if I still get the support I need? Is that just what relationships are - series of obligations that we keep up in order to survive as social beings? Is love a chemical adaptation to live in close quarters with one another? Will I ever love again? Is it even possible to be in a loving committed relationship when we have debasing animalistic programming in our brains? Does it even matter if I never find love again if the people I choose are usually idiots? Why is that man staring at that girl like he’s going to ask her if she wants to see the back of his van? She looks super uncomfortable and…he likes that? Should I say something? Am I a Karen? What if that was my sister? What is the acceptable amount of public perviness that needs to be demonstrated before intervention is seen as heroic and not problematic? What an interesting way to hang these lights. I wonder what kind of fabric the shades are made of that blocks the sunlight but allows us to look out into the street. 

My brain’s questions have a reasoning and I think it sounds like this; If I could just figure out what’s happening - I’ll know how to approach the situation and bend myself to it so I get out unscathed - possibly, even get something out of it.

Will I make the jump and say this is because my Dad was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and died three months later and now I’m always on the lookout waiting for another piano to fall from the sky? I wouldn’t have to jump very far. I would also say that sometimes, when a really traumatic thing happens, it’s easy to use it as a blanket that covers all the other shit that happens to us all the time, the patterns we form around the repetitive micro traumas we encounter during the absurdity of life. The stuff we brush off because we don’t have time to process it and it’s not like it’s as bad as that other thing that happened and we survived that so it must be time to move on. 

Subsequently, I have wired my neuro pathways so that they are so entrenched in my identity that it becomes difficult to see that the things I need to let go - that I want to let go off, are wrapped up and packaged in productive habits that hide the truth. 

The socially acceptable thing to say is - I want power. So I’m a big reader and a curious soul constantly searching for truth and justice. The reality sometimes is, I crave control because sometimes I feel powerless. And if I can least have all the information I can prepare myself - position myself to have control over some part of the outcome. If I don’t have all the information - I become more vulnerable - I lose my vantage point - I am exposed - I get hurt. 

I wrote this trying to understand why I responded to a person I told myself I wasn’t going to have contact with anymore. They dangled a carrot over my head. Information I didn’t have (albeit information they themselves probably didn’t even have). I felt vulnerable. I felt like I lost my vantage point. I felt exposed. I was waiting to be hurt. There was no dewey decimal system to help me access what I coveted. There was only a reliance on a system I inherently didn’t trust. And I thought if I had this information I would regain the control I felt I lost. And I went against my own well being in order to try and retrieve this information - that again - probably didn’t even exist - and even if it did, it wasn’t meant for me at this time - anything that could actually hurt me would need to be discovered by me when I needed to deal with it. 

I guess the good that came out of this lesson I’ve faced a thousand times comes a new perspective. Don’t trust information that can’t be easily and publicly found. Don’t trust a system that intentionally hides things from you in order to control your perception of them. Control is an illusion to power and conspiratorial information is an illusion to control. 

On that note, I’ll see you at the poles in November. 

Moving on…

I was a clumsy out of body kid prone to accidents which lent itself to a litany of embarrassing moments. Embarrassment as a child is not unique and yet in the throes of mortification it can feel so poignant and isolating.

I remember the first time I was so embarrassed it transformed into shame. My dad needed to get something done at the DMV and I was along for the ride. I was feeling like a L-A-D-Y because I could finally sit in the front seat.

We pulled into the parking lot and two boys - at least old enough to drive - were standing outside of their car. One had blond spikey hair and the other a shaggy brown mop. They had similar skater boy styles. My approximately eight year old eyes locked on them immediately as my father pulled into the parking spot parallel to them. They had their doors wide open so we couldn’t park right next to them but we were as close as possible. 

My father was of course annoyed by their untactful loitering. Taking up more spaces than necessary, unapologetically inconveniencing everyone trying to do the same thing they were. Still wanting to bond with him, I give a “pffttt” in support to his comment about how ugly baggy jeans are while imprinting the plaid pattern of their boxers into my brain. 

Within five seconds of spotting these dapper fellows, the fantasy ‘of me grabbing their attention with a sultry walk and them inviting me to hang out for the rest of the day and my father surprising letting me go because I was mature for my age and that that night would be my first real party’ was taking up so much space in my head it was hard to breathe. 

It was time to get out of the car. I had three seconds to figure out how to catch these boys' attention and solidify fate. 

So, I pictured how a movie star would get out of a limo on the red carpet. Something I had been rehearsing for a while actually. I open my door, extend my right foot out so only my ankle and white keds can be seen from the other side. I’m nailing it. I know after the little tease I need to push open the car door and come out in one graceful movement.

I grab the handle, brace my left foot for the big push, and in a gust of motion I open the door and spring up. I misjudged the height of the car and ran my forehead into the ceiling so hard that I ricocheted back down to the seat. I was still holding onto the door handle and the backwards motions closed the door on my tiny seductive ankle. 

The look my dad gave me -  this was his 13th reason. I looked out the window and the boys were laughing in my direction.  

My head was pounding. It was the first cranial injury I endured of that magnitude and I was not used to the ringing. My ankle was also not feeling so hot after being crushed. Although my equilibrium was off and the pain was beginning to thicken, it could not compare to the harrowing feat of opening the door once more, getting out of the car, and recovering the fantasy. 

Again I cannot be older than eight, but I wholeheartedly believe I will have these boys of at least driving age eating out of the palms of my hands by the time I’m through with them. 

My dad tells me to stop lollygagging and meet him inside. Perfect, I’m alone, without the paternal figure I’ll look older. I slowly get out of the car, painfully aware of my height. I begin my seductive walk. It’s a little off because I’m limping from my ankle injury. 

I get to the entrance of the DMV. It was a simple black push/pull door. I had a chance to redeem myself. There’s no way they aren’t staring at me. All I had to do was put on my most seductive look (picture what your face would look like looking directly at the sun) and look back, chin over my right shoulder and push the door open after making eye contact, mysteriously disappearing into the DMV. 

I grab the handle and look back to the car. They are not looking at me. I push the door and step forward. Once again, my head collides with a stationary object. I should have pulled. I hear a laugh from behind me and quickly pull the door open to run inside. 

This was the moment of shame. The moment I gave up the fantasy. There was no recovering from the situation. Unluckily for me, this was not a quick errand and I could not flee from the scene. We were at the DMV. It was about an hour of waiting. I was dreading the boys coming in and seeing me and laughing. Everytime that door opened my heart skipped a beat. I didn’t want them to see me cause they would never let me live it down. I would forever be seen as the goof of the friend group, never the sexy one. 

Yes, I had re-committed to the fantasy that these boys were going to be a part of my life. 

Shamefully I blamed myself for my lack of success. I wasn’t a movie star, I was an eight year old girl with a bump on her head. What was wrong with me? They weren’t even that cute (they were so cute). I commiserate with my dad “those boys are so stupid. Why can’t they just pull up their pants. I would never be with a guy like that”. 

My father was presumably oblivious to the fact I had injured myself three times trying to get these boys' attention because he presumably could not see the facade of my indignation and thought I was just that clumsy. 

As we exit, I’m resolute to walk out with my head held high and not even look in their direction. I righteously march to the right side of the car and open the door to gracefully plop down in my seat. I fixate my vision in front of me. If those boys were worth a damn they’d have helped me not laughed at me. Good riddance. My dad backs out of the parking spot. We are perpendicular to the trunk of their car. I can feel them staring at me. 

I’ve regained control. I can’t help myself. I put on a “you wish” face on (again imagine starting into the sun) and jerk my head in their direction. An elderly man is putting something in his back seat. We drive away. 

There is a pattern in this story that has repeated itself over and over again in my life. Fantasy > performance > failure > recommitment to fantasy > another failure > shame > self loathing > indignation > righteousness > pride > false sense of control > various degrees of disappointment > unfulfillment > repeat or move on to the next fantasy

Yes this is the pattern of my recently failed marriage but also eerily similar to the time I thought I was going to go to grad school for business, then teaching, then law. Or when I pick up a hobby off social media because I’ve romanticized the person performing the hobby and actually have zero interest in knitting or puzzles. Throw in a friend or two who you’ve lost to addiction but are holding on to hope that things will eventually be okay. 

We all fill our lives with fantasies. I’m not bashing it. I just tend to get carried away. It’s hard to trust myself - is this what I really want, what’s really happening or is this just an escape or an avoidance, a mimic of what I truly want? What I dream of having.

I have achieved a dream and the cycle is similar to living out a fantasy. Which is why maybe it is easy to conflate the two. Mistake one for the other. 

I've realized that the difference between a dream and a fantasy is it can end in fulfillment before we move on to the next one whereas fantasies will always leave you unfulfilled. And that instead of shame there is only embarrassment.

If there is shame - it is usually because we think we should be doing something. I should have been able to get those boy’s attention and seduce them. That was the dream of any eight year old girl right? Go home with two baggy-panted messy-car rude laugh-at-little-girls boys? No. But the dream thrust upon us was to be the woke or whatever it means to you version of Barbie. And no matter if that was being a Nobel Peace prize scientist or an easy going surfer chic - having older boys fall in love with you was a sign that you achieved that status. And if I couldn't get them to like me then I could never save the world or learn to surf. 

Shame is the tool we can use to realize we aren’t living our dreams - we’re in a fantasy, thinking something will bring us fulfillment if we can just bargain ourselves there. Knowing that in each phase of recommitment to the fantasy, we are recommitting to not allowing ourselves to be fulfilled.  

What do we really want out of life? What cycles will we spend the most time on? What can we move on from? What can we allow ourselves to move on to? 

Failure might be inevitable but fulfillment is a choice. 

Moving on…

I have been a queerido (queer weirdo) since I can remember - which as we now know is at least eight years old. I have always firmly taken a stance against the status quo because most of the time the status quo was batshit crazy. I had the last of traditional conservative mindset growing up. I saw it change it my last two years of high school. I was operating in a binary structure, rebelling against the Friday Night Lights, therefore becoming a hater.  Such a hater in middle school and high school - against things that made no sense for me to hate. Like pop music, even though Katy Perry’s song Fireworks moved me to tears every time I heard it. I was in show choir for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t punk I was just queer. 

There was so much - I wouldn’t allow myself to like or force myself to like because it fit into this annoyingly pretentious persona I built in my head. 

To get an accurate picture of who I was - I got a lot of “duuuude. You know who you remind me of?? That girl from that one movie…uggh what’s her name…”

I knew the name. 

“Juno! That girl Junno!” 

Me: “Why does everyone compare me to a pregnant teen?!” 

them : “no no no, hahahah not like that. You’ve got the same vibe. Kinda different, weird music, same sense of humor” 

Me: “oh haha thanks I guess?”

I pretended I didn’t like getting compared to Elliot Page’s character when in reality it was the highest form of flattery that existed at the time. A movie with an insightful alt girl living in a slightly perverse and adult reality because she’s pregnant and bored by the immaturity of boys her own age and the politics of a small town who even ends up with Micheal Cera. Come on! 

That was until of course, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist came out and people started comparing me to Kat Dennings’ character. A pale virgin with dark hair and big boobs who is obsessed with music and again, ends up with Micheal Cera. Yes. Please.

As other queer characters emerged through the post 00’s blockbuster narrative, and queerish girls got a shot to be hot and desirable like fat funny men, I fell further down a dichotomous key of what I should and should not like. Who I should and should not be. 

What is a dichotomous key? Here is a story within a story to illustrate the metaphor I’ll try to pull together:

One of the most challenging school related projects I have ever done is having to identify two random bacteria via unlabeled test tubes and determine the species of each. 

It took sixteen weeks to learn, then memorize how to perform the twenty five tests I would need to execute, gather the results of those tests, and put them in a dichotomous key to identify them. 

What is the shape? Circle, rod or spiral? Okay under the scope at 100x when we’ve identified one, alone on the outskirts of our sample, we see that it has a rod shape. Great. 

Now, we’ve also just conducted a stain that required a series of dying and rinsing the bacteria slide with four different dyes. Based on the lipid structure of their cell membrane, it will either be a purple or pink color. It’s purple, great, that means it’s gram positive. So we know that we have gram positive bacilli bacteria. Now we can go to a key and start following the path to identification. 

Following the chart, we now need to know if it is Aerobic or Anaerobic. If you are listening to this and not reading, then you don’t know I’ve inserted an example of the key. You’re also about to miss out the MoMa sheet I’m going to include that has the list of tests, what it’s testing, what’s needed to perform the test, and what the different outcomes mean. I think that’s fine. I’m really just grandstanding because I can. On that note.

I was one of the few people in the three labs that identified both species of the mystery bacteria. 

This was one of the proudest moments of my entire life. That is one of the few moments I return to when I’m annoyed at having to take speech again to fulfill my requirements to even apply to nursing school even after I got an A in microbiology. I return to it when I’m feeling overwhelmed with juggling work, school, and trying to maintain an optimized physique and lifestyle. I think back on how if I can do that - I can do anything. More importantly, if I loved it that much - all of this is worth it. 

I love dichotomous keys because the answer, whatever it is, it’s waiting for you. Even as a queer kid, who went against the status quo, had a key. Go to school in New York. Life would be predictably hard until I completed my psychiatry degree. Then it would be predictably comfortable, filled predictably with elegant but low maintenance dinner parties in whose attendance would be predictably eccentric people. It was different from the ‘go to school for four years, find a husband, and move back home to live and die in the same town I grew up in’ many of my peers had at the time.  

If I knew how to produce the answers that would lead me down the path I wanted I could get to the outcome I desired. I just had to pick the outcome. You can’t be Velma and Daphne. So if I had to choose I was going to be Velma. Was it because of events like the previously mentioned DMV incident? It begs the question, what comes first - rejection or a pair of glasses. 

Here is where I’m gonna attempt to tie the aforementioned metaphor together: 

Sometimes I picture myself swinging on the arches of the dichotomous key I’ve created in my life. Like a monkey on a vine. I’m swinging to see if I can grab onto the brackets of the other side. I don’t want to move backward but maybe there is a lateral move I can make that keeps moving down but lands in me in an outcome that I'm not already bored to death of. I’m swinging from spectrum to spectrum, sometimes getting high from the utterly empty space in between the columns of brackets. There is air blowing up. Like a hawk I gracefully soar over the paths beneath me not always needing to white knuckle a chosen path. Observant and simply contemplating where I want to land. Other times the wind is so viscous and turbulent in that empty space beneath me it’s just enough to hang on to the vine while I whip around. Hair lashing my face, unable to see anything, struggling to keep myself composed, all directions looking the same, progress, regression, stagnancy, and I only crave a return to some sense of security. 

In one of those fortuitous moments - when life seems to be giving me information right when I need it - in the week that I wrote this - in searching for poems for my thirteen year old student who prefers macabre poems over Harry Potter support of the author redacted - is that a cop out? - can we love the author’s work and not be complicit in consumption? - I found a poem in a Walt Whitman’s anthology that I’ve had for seven years, titled A NOISELESS, PATIENT Spider - that describes this feeling a bit more succinctly - and an added layer of connection - of knowing it was a sign and not some random collision of nothingness - one of my early short stories that almost got published by the Guardian (lol) was about a patient black widow titled - The Economics of Spiders - so I know Walt and I were really on the same page. 

Whitman’s poem reads: 

A NOISELSS, PATIENT spider. 

I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; 

Ever unreeling them - ever tirelessy speeding them. 

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessy musing, venturing, throwing, - seeking the spheres,

to connect them; 

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d - till the ductile 

anchor hold; 

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, 

O my Soul. 

It’s ironic that I so vehemently desire order and binary structures when I have been nonbinary since before it was cool. A spider’s web is not a dichotomous key but a circle of intersecting spectrums creating a dream catcher that sustains any storm of wind or rain. 

I remember driving around Syracuse one summer and my Grandma Anne pointed to a burned down building saying that a candle factory used to be there until it caught fire.

I thought that was the funniest thing I had heard in all my life (granted I was twelve). The economic devastation is not funny. The loss of jobs isn’t funny. If there were any injuries that is not funny. What is funny is in all the effort we run around creating we are often taken out by the most obvious contradiction to our success. I think about that factory every time I light a candle.

Irony is what makes Shakespeare’s comedies clever and his tragedies comical. The causal cruelty of fate, and thinking you can somehow get away from it but can’t - that ‘gotcha’ moment- is what’s funny. In an existential, we’re all just bits of dust, kind of way. As my first tattoo reads Memento Mori. 

Not everyone has the capability to weave a web of spectrums. Some people are afraid of even traveling from one end of just one spectrum to the next. It is my superpower to be able to move back and forth, up and down, touch my knees and my toes. The space in between the columns of the key is me flinging my filament in measureless oceans of space. The free fall, the cast, is nature’s balance. Everyone’s gifts comes at a cost. Reframing the turbulence as a necessary equilibrium makes it feel sustainable and not like an unlikely survival. When it feels ragged it’s just a growing pain casting my soul and hoping for it to catch. Reaching beyond the binary of this or that. 

Our potential does not lie at the bottom of a key it is in the unwritten - in releasing ourselves to the chaos even if it is the most terrifying option on the table because fluidity and adaptability are what Charlotte's Web shine. Letting go of the need for control is what gives us true power to weather the storm and live authentically. 

Until next time, cast your filament.