Packing

I feel as though the past three years have been one exercise in packing after another: how to fit lamps, tables, books, and clothes into one van; how to make a list of everything I use in my daily life; how to discriminate between things I regularly use and things I own that just give me options. As if I didn’t already have enough decision-making to do in my life, I now have to sort through a lifetime of possessions in order to decide what I intend to use for the next nine months.

That skirt is cute, but will I have any reason to wear it? Maybe I should take another T-shirt, instead. I’d love to read that book, but will I have the time? Class readings need to take precedent, and if I take that book along, it might tempt me to neglect my work. How much stationary should I pack? I could always just use plain paper, but I really like writing letters on stationary. Will it get cold before Thanksgiving? Should I take a coat and forego the third pair of flip flops?

The stress of packing is the fear of forgetting that One Last Thing. You know you’ll be in the car, having already driven an hour or two from home, and suddenly realize that in order to swim every Thursday like you had planned, you are going to need a bathing suit. Or if you wear contacts, and you are about to pull out of the driveway when you suddenly realize that you probably cannot last for three months (until Thanksgiving) without your glasses, so your dad screeches to a halt and you go charging into the garage and up the stairs for that One Last Thing.

I am trying to pack my One Last Thing. But too much other stuff is getting in the way.

Nick naming

This summer, I played in a recreational volleyball league with a group of friends from high school. Every Thursday, Andy, Ryan, Jared, Mark, Bri (not from WH—Ryan met her at Pitt), and I met at a gym on Polish Hill and competed other volleyball teams in the league. Last year, we didn’t do very well, but this year our team made the second-seed ranking. Therefore, we made it to playoffs, which took place last night.

I was the first to arrive for the game, so I played with one of the random basketballs lying around the gym for a while and then started stretching. Gradually, everyone began to trickle in, marked by various degrees of excitement. Bri looked a little frazzled, having just come from moving into a new apartment. Jared strutted in with his usual, slightly-arrogant, easy-going confidence, followed by Mark, who was hunched forward in his purposeful loping style, game-ready, with his hair pulled back into a ponytail and strapped down by a sweatband, already looking overly intense. Last to arrive were Andy and Ryan. Andy was brimming with energy and being very much his “team captain” self: high-fiving everyone and asking if we were ready “to do this shit.” Ryan, on the other hand, had competing priorities in mind. He had brought along a spectator.

I got up from stretching, and he introduced me.

“Hey, Ali. This is Kat.”

The girl was of moderate height, with an athletic build. (My initial impression was that she might have been a soccer player.) She had straight yellowy-blond hair that fell to her shoulders and a lot of freckles, yet her skin was almost as tan as mine. Her smile was easy and kind-looking; she reminded me a lot of my childhood friend Leslie. I took her extended hand.

“Hi. Nice to meet you, Kat.”

“Hi . . . Ali?”

Ryan and I both began stuttering.

“Allison—” he started.

“It’s Allison,” I echoed, “but some of my friends call me Ali.”

“Oh, okay. Allison.”

“Ali, Allison; it doesn’t matter.”

It’s odd; I have never been introduced as “Ali” before. Granted, Ryan didn’t exactly introduce me as that; he just spoke without thinking. The fact that he did spontaneously call me “Ali” (and not “Allison”), however, and the fact that I did not even notice until someone else pointed it out made me consider who else calls me by that nickname.

My sister Amy, Ben, Emily, Andy, and Vicky are the ones who immediately come to mind when I try to envision (or “enhear”?) people saying my nickname, but Ryan obviously calls me “Ali,” too, and I would not have thought of him, had someone else not noticed. Just as odd is considering all of the people who do not call me “Ali”: both Kellys, Jared, Mark, my parents.

Nicknames are often considered terms of endearment, but if that were true, then shouldn’t my parents should have been the first to call me “Ali”? Moreover, if nicknames indicate some sort of emotional intimacy, someone such as Ryan—who, although we are friends, I doubt considers me near and dear to his heart—would not call me by that nickname. I have certainly never told anyone to call me “Ali.” Why, then, do certain people call me “Ali,” while others do not?

A certain level of friendly familiarity is definitely necessary to call someone by a nickname. My boss at Pitt, for example, would never call me “Ali.” She, however, explicitly told me to call her “Corrie” (her name is “Corrine”). Honestly, I still struggle with using that nickname when I address her. The first-name basis is not a problem, but writing “Dear Corrie,” in the line of an e-mail just feels too casual, too familiar, too much like writing “Dear Emmy” or “Dear Vicky.”

Being called by a nickname also has a lot to do with the person doing the naming, too. Ben and Emily and even my sister Amy are all affectionate, easy-going kinds of people. It goes well with their natures to use nicknames. Alternatively, Mark—as I mentioned before—is a rather intense kind of individual. It would actually strike me as bizarre if he were to call me anything other than my full name.

As I grow older, I wonder if my nickname will persevere. My guess is that it will only stay around as long as those who already call me by it are around. After all, say I meet the man of my dreams within the next ten years and get married at twenty-eight or thirty. Would I really want my husband to call me “Ali?”

Or wouldn’t I even notice?

The urge to write

It’s like a knot in your back: you twist and stretch and knead those parts that you can reach, but the ache persists.

It’s like feeling aimlessly hungry. “There’s nothing to eat,” you declare, staring at your full cupboards and stuffed refrigerator.

It’s a restlessness of the mind, an urge to create.

I was walking to work this morning through the streets of Oakland. The sky was whitish-gray, hovering just above the building tops. It smelled like rain. I instantly wanted to write about how fresh and thick that smell was, how it reminded me of damp leaves and the exhaust that comes out of a laundry room. I arrived at work and sat down at my computer, but now I cannot write.

The other day, I was at Vicky’s house with a whole host of friends. I did my part to socialize, but mostly I was watching everyone else interact. Amy would curl up to Dee or Ben the way a cat winds its way through your legs; she has that same soft, deliberate touch. Vicky competed at Trouble like an eight-year-old, convinced that ones are the hardest numbers to roll, punching the air with excitement whenever one of her red pegs sent someone “home.” Everyone smoked their cigarettes differently. Andy was the most professional-looking, jutting out his lower lip so that the smoke streamed up in a vertical column beside his head and made a sort of “thought halo” above him. Brooke would turn her head to exhale, pursing her lips to that side so that the smoke ended up nearly behind her. Ben blew his smoke out sloppily, engulfing his conversation partner in a big amorphous cloud. I wanted to write about all of these observations, to link them together and imbue them with meaning. But by the time I arrived home, my purpose was gone. All I had were a lot of mental snapshots and a dull pencil.

I have so much to write about and yet so little to say.

Love: a metamorphosis through literary quotations

Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. Ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?—Alice Walker, The Color Purple

‘Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.—Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

And why am I so necessary to you, my friend? What good have I done you? I am only devoted to you with my whole soul, I love you warmly, intensely, with my whole heart.—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk

I keep thinking about this river somewhere with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, to drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Do you think that people can just come into our lives for a moment and love us, and we love them back, and they change our whole lives, and then they just disappear?”
“That’s all that ever happens.”—Nancy Whiteley, “Orbiting Izzy”

Impatience: more from the Family Weekend

“Are you really going to drink that?” My sister stared at the full mug of tea in my hands.

“Um, yeah.” I squeezed out a teaspoonful of honey and started stirring it into the tea.

“Al-ieeee.” She widened her eyes meaningfully. The look was half-pleading, half-annoyed.

“Chill out.” I looked across the table. “Look, mom isn’t even done with her cereal yet.”

We were talking under our breaths, sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table. My mom, grandma, and grandpa sat around the other side. My dad was in the bathroom, “readying” himself for the five-hour drive home. With enough “preparation,” we would hopefully not have to stop for more than one bathroom break.

Meanwhile, it was taking all of Amy’s self-control not to run out the door, jump into the car, and drive away without the rest of us.

I had to give my sister credit—she had been awfully patient all weekend. We had arrived Thursday afternoon, just in time to help my aunt and uncle clean out my grandparents’ garage, make lunch, dissemble furniture, cook dinner, and wrestle mattresses into our various sleeping arrangements. (Amy and I slept on the living room floor, my parents slept in the guest room on the mattress left over from a disassembled bed, and my aunt slept on some chair cushions on the kitchen floor.)

The next day, Friday, was Moving Day: we all woke up at seven o’clock, ate breakfast, and started moving things onto the auctioneer’s truck. I was suffering from a massively sore throat, so my morning mood was petulant, at best. My sister had to bear the brunt of my groanings, since we were doing most of the household activities (i.e. dish duty, cleaning out the attic, etc.) in order to avoid the rest of our testy family. Moving alone is stressful enough; moving involving your extended family is enough to make a person crazy.

Friday night, I came down with a fever. It was bad enough that Amy and I had been consigned to sleeping in the stuffy attic—my grandmother and mother both agreed that the air conditioner in the living room had contributed to my sore throat and, therefore, I should no longer sleep there—but I was so disoriented by the fever that every time I woke up and tried to go downstairs to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, I stumbled about, knocking over furniture and boxes (what little was left up there), and frankly making quite a racket, thanks to the attic’s hardwood floors. Amy was tremendously considerate that night, offering to find me Aspirin downstairs, getting me a blanket from my parents’ room, not complaining at all every time I woke her up. Still, the next morning I woke up feeling like death.

Saturday was our family reunion. Considering the night I had just had, I didn’t know whether I wanted to try to attend at all. However, I knew I was expected to be there and that my mother—in particular—would be extremely disappointed if I didn’t go. She, Amy, and I were supposed to play a flute trio, so I agreed to come late, after I took a nap. This meant that poor Amy had to go to the reunion and contend with our crazy extended family all by herself for the first two hours of the picnic—as if her patience hadn’t already been exercised enough.

Everything considered—my illness, our crazy stressed-out family (including my often-overbearing aunt, persnickety grandfather, depressed grandmother, and frustrated cousin)—Amy had dealt with the weekend awfully well. However, every good thing comes to an end, and Sunday morning at 9:05 a.m., she had reached the end of her patience. We were supposed to have left by 9 a.m.

“Come on, Ali,” she muttered as I sipped my tea. “Mom’s done.”
“She still has to go to the bathroom, blow her nose, clear her dishes, all that stuff. Calm down. Fifteen extra minutes is not going to kill you.”

I knew she knew this, and yet it didn’t make her any less frustrated. The funny part was, I knew exactly how she was feeling. It makes me feel old to say “when I was her age,” but I remember being eighteen and stuck somewhere with our family while absolutely itching to be somewhere else. As each minute passed, you become more and more desperate to leave. I could see Amy’s desperation increasing exponentially with every passing minute. The faster we could get home, the faster Amy could go see Dan.

Obviously, a fifteen-minute delay would not kill her. In fact, those fifteen minutes would probably be spent doing nothing more significant than just sitting there at Dan’s house, maybe watching TV. And yet, when you are eighteen, every minute you are not getting closer to your destination, you seem to be getting farther away.

I dumped out the rest of my tea.