The one who stayed and the one who left

During my teenage years, my hair was always dyed. Every three or four months, I would buy a box of permanent color from the Walgreens on the corner, and then at home I'd practice the subtle art of superficially changing my appearance without irreparably destroying our bath towels with stray gobs of phenylenediamine. Photos of me from the early-to-mid aughts feature my face framed by various mildly shifting hues, mostly rose-tinted browns to rust-bucket reds (red being the only color that was sufficiently exotic without violating my mom's "no unnatural colors" rule).

I stopped cold-turkey in 2006, mostly because I was too embarrassed to dye my hair in the common bathroom of my freshman dorm. Getting my hair dyed at a salon, meanwhile, seemed like an expense of Kardashian-level decadence. I was happy to rock my natural color again, a shade that my sister once affectionately called "dirt-like," and I've been rocking it ever since.

...That is, until six months ago, when I ventured back to the permanent dye aisle of CVS. In the fall, I'd impulsively asked my stylist to put highlights in my hair, and now I felt a pressing urge to cover them up (plus, I'd noticed a few sparkling gray strands worming their way through my scalp). Not looking to do anything crazy, I picked a sedate-looking shade called "mahogany brown."

As it turns out, dyeing your hair is like riding a bike. There have been zero advances in home hair-dye technology since 2006. As soon as I mixed the liquid color with the oxidizing agent, the fumigating chemical smell suffocated me like an old friend. When it was over, I discovered that my hair had come out more purplish than I'd anticipated -- sort of an eggplanty brown -- but the mild surprise I felt was also familiar. When you dye your hair at home you need to make peace with the fact that the result might be anywhere between one and one-billion shades away from what you meant to purchase. I immediately remembered the wisdom of waiting a few days for the initial shock of color to fade before drawing any conclusions.

It's a strange experience, returning to a habit you abandoned over ten years ago. Scrutinizing my auberginish head in the mirror, I felt a bit like teenage-me. At the same time, I was thinking about the class I'd be teaching the following day, idly wondering whether my present-day teenage students would notice my 'do and make assumptions about my vanity.

This also more or less reflects how I've been feeling about turning 30. My adult self is here, unambiguously and by default. Turning 30 feels as natural as finding the occasional gray hair or having opinions about the tax code; none of it is alarming. What I find more startling is how my younger selves are still capable of feeling emotionally present, too. They're immediately accessible when the right Jimmy Eat World song plays or when hair-dye ammonia burns my nostrils. By now, I kind of expected that I'd see only my adult self in the mirror, shiny and mature and smug with wisdom. But really, I still see them all.

Who's the winner? Who's the winner? Maybe winter. Maybe winter.

Several months ago, GR and I happened upon a documentary on Netflix called The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young. It focuses on the titular ultramarathon trail race, an agonizing 100-mile-over-60-hours course coordinated by a peculiar Tennessean named Gary. It was a thoroughly entertaining movie and you should watch it if you're in the mood for 90 minutes of sheer true-life eccentricity.

The entire hook of the documentary (and the marathon itself) is the quirk factor. The race is neither widely prestigious nor fastidiously organized. For example, the process for signing up is semi-secret. Also, the precise length of the course is unknown; it changes a bit every year. It's roughly 100 miles, but Gary doesn't map a clear path. Runners are given landmarks to find, and they prove their progress by ripping pages out of books that have been strategically placed along the route. Gary commissions a local trumpeter to play taps to honor each marathoner who admits defeat before finishing the race, which a majority do. All marathons are semi-arbitrary endurance tests, but the Barkley Marathons seem both extra unnecessary and unnecessarily extra. By the end of the documentary, you'll likely feel charmed by the weird little community Gary has assembled, but also bewildered by and mildly suspicious of those who choose to participate.

Early in the documentary, Gary talks to the documentarians about the athletes who sign up for the Barkley. Semi-offhandedly, he mentions that a high percentage of the race applicants are graduate students or people with advanced degrees. This makes perfect sense to Gary (who presents as a sort of Duck Dynasty-flavored intellectual): these are people, he says, who are driven by pressure, who set impossibly high bars and dare themselves to clear them. Strain your brain, strain your body.

I would never attempt the Barkley -- my 10K last year is likely to be the apex of my racing ambitions -- but Gary's comment resonated with me nonetheless. The past two years, writing my dissertation, were the most intellectually demanding years of my life. Perhaps not coincidentally, over the past two years I also worked myself into my own personal peak physical fitness. I went from being a casual variety of gym goer -- one of those "less amped-up, routine-minded people who pretty much only use the ellipticals" -- to working out five to six days a week, toggling between four- to five-mile runs and various kinds of barre/yoga/HIIT routines. I shaved four full minutes off my 5K.

At the time (and now, still, mostly), I considered this to be a natural (even obvious?) byproduct of my work situation: while dissertating, I was working entirely from home and was able to dictate my own hours. Whenever I felt a lull coming on -- often when I was wrapping up my part-time job and switching over to my dissertation -- I could pause my workday for a gym break, and then resume work in the afternoon. What luxury! It's the dream! With that kind of freedom, who wouldn't take the opportunity to maximize their fitness goals? (Also, for real, the gym is dead on Tuesdays at 1pm. It's just me and an octogenarian man who walks serenely on the treadmill. Once, he told me I looked like a ballerina, presumably because I had my hair in a bun, which, in the category of "unsolicited comments about your appearance," falls into to the sub-category of "fine.")

My mom and I have been good-naturedly bickering for years about whether or not the label of perfectionist should be applied to me. She maintains that, at the very least, I have "perfectionist tendencies." I reject the label, insisting that I don't strive for perfection, but that I do have high standards for myself, and I tend to remain internally unsatisfied until I meet them. Often, this winds up being a difference in semantics rather than substance, since we're pretty much always on the same page at the end of the conversation.

(By the way, there's been some research and theorizing to suggest that "perfectionism" is a gendered phenomenon. In other words, the particular striving towards perfection -- as opposed to trusting that your efforts are sufficiently good or even excellent -- is frequently a product of women's fraught social and professional conditioning. I'm not sure where this factors into my own feelings about the term, but it probably does, somewhere.)

The most engrossing aspect of The Barkley Marathons, as I said before, is the undeniable arbitrariness of it all. Running a marathon -- let alone a 100-mile ultramarathon -- constitutes a trauma for your body, and it can be difficult to understand why anyone would subject themselves to such physiological abuse when the payoff is so minimal. (The documentary suggests that winning the Barkley will entitle you to personal satisfaction and notoriety within a very niche community, but other than that, you're probably just in for some rhabdo.) But that's just it: the Barkley is an extreme endurance test, and it is pursued by people who feel satisfied somehow by not only challenging themselves, but by setting up obstacles so imposing that success is basically a miracle.

I don't quite identify with that particular profile, just as I don't quite identify with perfectionism. But, still... I kind of get it.

It's where you live, but you don't know how it's built

All in all, I'd say the thing that surprised me the most about earning a PhD in English is that no one ever actually tells you how to earn a PhD in English. Academia seems to be lightly subscribing to Fight Club rules.

An illustrative anecdote: 

On Monday, September 15, 2014, I passed my major field exam, which focused on British Modernism (1890-1940). After you pass your qualifying exams (minor and major), you're at liberty to start working on your dissertation -- or at least the prospectus, which is the 10-20 page "pitch" for your dissertation idea that needs to be committee-approved before you dive in to The Thing itself. After the exam was over, my committee members congratulated me and gave me some feedback on what I'd done well and on what points I could improve. Before we wandered off to our respective scholar dens of solitude, I think my advisor said something to effect of, "Great, okay, so, let me know when you have a prospectus draft you want me to look over."

I had only the loosest idea of what a prospectus was. (Basically, I knew it was a 10-20 page "pitch" for your dissertation idea that needs to be committee-approved before you dive in to The Thing itself.) I went home and promptly googled "How to write a dissertation prospectus." Also, "How to come up with a dissertation topic."

My advisor wasn't being unsupportive or neglectful; it's really not her job to handhold me through these things. As a result, quixotic googling was a recurring theme in my graduate student career, and I know that others in my program have done the same. If you were to parse my Google search history, in addition to finding numerous variations of "What's the difference between foundation and concealer and what is contouring and also why do I never feel competent when it comes to makeup and is this the patriarchy???", you'll discover that I have at various times asked Google to tell me "How to publish an academic article," "Field exam reading list examples," "How to write an abstract," "How long are dissertations," and finally, "How to write a dissertation."

As of late the internet has been very enthusiastic about diagnosing and discussing imposter syndrome, but that's not the phenomenon I'm describing here. I didn't feel like I was unqualified or as if I'd cheated the system to get where I was. (Plus, once I bought enough sweaters and started relying more on my reading glasses, I was pretty much nailing the Google image result for "female English professor.") More accurately, I was experiencing Oh-Okay-I-Guess-I-Just-Need-To-Figure-It-Out-From-Here syndrome. At most stages of the game, I'd expected that there would be more guidance, more instruction about how to actually Be an Academic. But, of course, no one -- not even our Google Overlords -- can tell you how to write a dissertation, or how long it should be, or what your topic should be about, because the whole point of a PhD is figuring all that out for yourself. Doing things independently and on the strength of your own ideas is arguably the most essential part of Being an Academic, at least in the humanities, where collaborative research is nearly as rare as timely retirement. For the last three years, I've been researching and writing and crossing my fingers every time I submitted another fifty pages to my committee, doing my best to assemble something that passingly resembled a dissertation.

It reminds me a little of how my sister has described being a new mom. You're determined not to screw it up, and you take in all the guidance you can, but in the end you just muddle through, and nothing is quite like what your guidance prepared you to expect, and it's really only the muddling that, eventually, enables you to function competently.

Happily, the muddling paid off. Despite never being precisely sure of how to do it, a month and a half ago, I earned my PhD. My degree will be conferred in December. I'll have to wait until May to put on the Medieval robes and wear that majestic octagonal hat (because apparently not enough people graduate in December to justify mid-year pomp and circumstance). On that day, I will never be so pleased to look so ridiculous.

It stays in my spine

A few weeks ago, GR and I spent a long weekend in NYC. We're newbies to the city, so we visited the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Times Square, the Guggenheim, the Natural History Museum. There are a lot of people who disdain tourist hot spots and extol the virtues of experiencing, like, the authentic city, but those also tend to be the people who spend a quarter of their income on handlebar mustache wax and are thus not to be listened to. When it comes to your first or second visit to a metro, I'm a big proponent of taking in The Sights.

Walking around Lower Manhattan on our second day, we decided to swing by the 9/11 memorial plaza.

Prior to our visit, I was vaguely aware of the memorial's existence. From half-watched news reports of its construction throughout the '00s and footage of Obama's inaugurating visit, I knew the memorial "opened" on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and I knew the basic logistics. I knew it was some sort of pool or fountain located on the site of Ground Zero, covering the footprints of the old WTC towers. I knew the outer edges were comprised of a black stone material. I knew the victims' names were carved into the stone.

As GR and I stood at the periphery of each of the memorial pools, I had a strong, to the point of overwhelming, emotional reaction. After a few minutes, I realized I was about to cry. I am not a person who usually experiences strong emotional reactions to outdoor art installations. More often, I get a bit frustrated at my inability to feel things strongly.

When I'm teaching my students how to analyze literature, and they're struggling to think critically, one of the tactics I find useful is to ask them to put themselves in the position of the author. Let's say you have a plot and some characters in mind, and you're about to write a novel. You can write your novel literally any way you want. Why do you think the author chose these words, to use this recurring motif, to use this setting? Maybe he just liked the way the words sounded, but don't most authors want to convey some set of ideas (about life or love or communism or whatever), and to not be obvious about it? Everything in a work of art is a choice, and every choice changes the way the audience is going to respond to the work. Why choose this?

I thought about this as we stood in the plaza and I found myself needing to take some deep breaths. Each memorial pool (indeed sized and located according to the Twin Towers' two base footprints) is enormous, bigger than you'd anticipate. "Pool" is also a bit of a misnomer: the walls plummet into vast, tiered, internally-constructed waterfalls that appear to descend after two or three steps into a center of nothingness. As a holistic effect, it's aggressively, stunningly empty. You hear nothing but the woosh of water, and you see nothing but the sheer black interior of the pool. Your fingertips sink into the names of the dead as you rest your hands on the wall's edge. The faces of the visitors on the opposite side are too far away to see clearly. One pool is staggering to look at, but there are two of them. You visit the second, and the experience repeats.

Theoretically, the memorial could have been anything. Brass labels affixed to ceremonially planted trees, after all, are memorials. There's Washington's obelisk in D.C. There's the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial park, they installed a series of benches. Why choose this?

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that the name of the NYC memorial is Reflecting Absence. My experience suggests that this is an appropriate title, and it's telling that the memorial is not named something like Never Forget. Beyond serving the literal purpose of memor-/reminding, the pools appear designed to convey the full and crushing weight of loss, to collapse you emotionally into the space in imaginative sympathy with the towers themselves. It's a memorial designed to devastate, not to console. The blackness, the emptiness, the scale, ask you to take the staggering loss of life into your heart and let it consume you for as long as you're willing to stare into the water.

It's as impressive as it is upsetting. I assume it's intentional. I have a lot of questions about how others feel about it. I'm not sure if it's a Sight I want to see again.

Just a thing that my mind do

In my family, I'm the youngest person in my generation: the youngest cousin, the youngest sibling, the youngest step-sibling. My oldest first cousin -- someone who from a generational standpoint is supposed to be "my age" -- turns 50 this year. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm likely the benchmark for making the family members in my peer group groan about their oldness. (e.g., "Little Linda's almost 30? I'm so oooooold.")

When you're The Young One, you're basically never the family trailblazer. For example, before I graduated college, I'd already been to half a dozen weddings of relatives "my age," as the older members of my cohort plodded into the marriageable age bracket before me. For a number of those weddings, I was not only an attendee but also part of the family, and so there are a lot of photos of me in various stages of pubescence and teenagerdom, smiling from the outskirts of large-group family wedding photos. (It's a visual cavalcade of personal fashion embarrassments. Looking at many of the dresses and skirt/blouse sets I wore, you'd think someone grabbed an Amish girl on her second day of rumspringa, set her in front of a Kohl's rack, and told her to pick out something fetching.)

I have a half-baked theory that if you're both self-aware and a Young One, you're likely to come to grips early with the reality that you're always walking in someone else's footsteps. Even if you deviate from the path set by your elders, you will be seen as deviating from a path. (In school, younger siblings are constantly encountering either knowing smiles of recognition or raised eyebrows of surprise from teachers who had their older siblings in class.) Canny Young Ones study the footsteps and reap the benefits. On a number of occasions, my sister and I have discussed how she functions as my own personal "dry run." She navigated high school, went to college, got married, had a baby. Meanwhile, I've skulked behind her, taking notes.

This dynamic lessens with time. Even if you're close with your siblings and cousins, once you're out of school, you splinter. You pursue different careers and get to know different people. You achieve life milestones that don't correspond with birth order. Basically, you become an adult. Birth order isn't destiny.

Still, I'm a person who likes learning by example. I like being presented with a structure, even if I'm then free to rip it apart. A happy Linda is a Linda with a frame of reference. 

Johnny built a rocket ship

Whenever I drive on highways with a posted speed limit of 65 mph, I set my cruise control to precisely 74 mph. This is a practice I picked up on the advice of my mom, who is the resident Professional Driver, Car Enthusiast, and Eerily Accurate Human GPS of the family. According to her, cops typically only pull you over if you're speeding by over ten miles per hour. I have no idea whether this received wisdom is accurate, but I've never been pulled over for speeding.

Occasionally, when I'm flying down the road at precisely 74 miles per hour, coasting along one of those mostly deserted interstates that connect the midsize towns in central Illinois, an odd phenomenon occurs where I start to feel like I'm moving at a snail's pace. When the landscape is flat and unchanging, your brain and body conspire to trick you as you drive. In reality, you're hurtling down asphalt at a speed that could easily result in grisly carnage if, say, you're startled by an errant spider crawling up your arm (my go-to nightmare in pretty much any situation) and tug the steering wheel in the wrong direction. But you get desensitized to the speed, and your eyes start focusing on landmarks further in the distance, and your pace begins to feel downright leisurely.

In those moments, I like to remember what it was like back when I was first learning to drive. After a few days of practicing in the NVHS parking lot, creeping around tight corners, my driver's ed teacher instructed me to pull on to the semi-major road in front of the high school. Turning onto the road, I accelerated to what felt like an alarming, blistering, murderous speed. I was too nervous about my lane alignment to actually look at the speedometer, but after a few tense moments my teacher informed me that I was only going 31 mph and that I should really speed up so as not to bewilder and endanger fellow drivers. I remember thinking that it was incomprehensible that anyone ever drove above 45 mph. I internally marveled over all the times I sat in the passenger's seat of my parents' cars, blissfully unaware of how close I was to death.

What I'm describing is the basic and obvious process of habituation. Things seem shocking or unfamiliar or incredible or horrible, but then you get used to them. If you're exposed to anything for long enough, it'll eventually be folded into your personal realm of normalcy.

I'm finding that earning a PhD is somewhat similar to driving 74 miles per hour through rural Illinois. It's taken me six years to get to this point, and over the course of six years I've become habituated to the idea of having a PhD. Back when I was applying to grad programs, actually having a PhD seemed impressive to the point of implausibility, the ivory-tower equivalent of driving over 45 mph. Now that I'm almost there, it's shed some glamor. It's the final, predictable step in a long staircase that I've already mostly climbed. Habituation, as always, is a process of simultaneously losing and gaining perspective.

I might feel differently when I actually defend. I'd like to surprise myself.

He opens a window just to feel the chill

In the fall of 2014, I taught an elective course for English majors focusing on British modernism (my particular academic specialty). We read a selection of essays, novels, and poetry from the canon of "high modernist" literature -- Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Pound, Eliot, etc. Some obligatory Freud.

Modernism has the dubious distinction of being known as one of the more snobbish movements in English literature. Many of the lauded books of the period are deliberately, sometimes arrogantly difficult, with writers trying their damnedest to pursue lofty artistic goals without a ton of concern for paltry human readership. (Swirling some brandy and affixing a pince-nez, the modernist critic will note that being abstruse was part of the point for most of these authors, but that doesn't make it a more pleasant reading experience for those who like reading novels without needing a published companion text to explain what's going on.)

Also, as my students quickly discerned, modernist literature is, as an added bonus, pretty bleak and depressing. Modernism leans emo. Nearly all the books we read for my class prominently featured murder or suicide, insanity, wartime apocalypses, and/or stark nihilism. Even Virginia Woolf, she of the luminous prose, once described a garden of daffodils as "looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible," which is a terrifying way to describe a flower.

For the final, I tasked my students with an in-class writing assignment in which they had to write their own "modernist manifestos." (Fun fact: Zany, caftan-wearing ideologues that they were, a number of modernists wrote artistic manifestos.) Translated into pedagogical terms, I was basically asking my students to generate and defend a definition for modernism. I encouraged them to be creative. One of my students began her final with the following:

Last Tuesday, I walked back from our last class, came into my dorm room, and threw my bookbag on the common room floor. "We have to define modernism!" I groaned, "Modernism!" "What's modernism again?" asked one roommate, sleepily raising her head up from her textbook. "Oh, you know," said a second roommate, "It's those books Kate reads where it's always raining and everybody dies."

Clearly the bleakness stuck out to Kate more than the difficulty. Modernism isn't all like this, but "Always Raining; Everybody Dies" isn't an inaccurate tagline.

When I started grad school, I picked modernism as my specialty without much forethought, banking on the rationale that my favorite books from high school and college -- the books that, emotionally speaking, hit me squarely in the sternum -- were from the modern period. It's only later in my academic career that I've been prompted to put much thought into why I spiritually and professionally align myself with this difficult and dour field (as opposed to, say, Victorian literature and its organized tales of parlors and gossip, or Romanticism and its opium-fueled ramblings about pleasure-gardens).

I think it's fair to say that I, like most critics, appreciate difficult books for being analytically meaty. "Difficult" is usually code for "written like a weirdo," and it gives someone like me a lot to think about. ("But... why?" is an implicit question addressed in 65% of modernist literary criticism, and 98% of criticism on Gertrude Stein.) It's a rational reason for choosing to write a dissertation about modernism. Opaque and pedantic books make for an expansive wall to bang your head against.

At the same time, having a lot to discuss and caring about the discussion are two different things. Even the meatiest topics will drive you to frustration unless you're genuinely interested. When it comes to getting a Literature PhD, if you don't passionately love the books and authors you're studying in a way that might alarm and alienate strangers, you'll never make it to the finish line.

And when it comes to my field, although I appreciate the difficulty, what I love is "Always Raining; Everybody Dies." I love the gooey black heart of modernism. I love the terrible eyeless daffodils. I love the fact that modern novels tease you into empathy only to blindside you with abject horror. (See Ford Madox Ford, whose novel The Good Soldier sensitively explores themes of lost friendship and infidelity before ending with the titular character slitting his own throat in front of his best friend, a plot twist that receives less commentary in the criticism than you might expect.) While I don't always enjoy poetry, I love T.S. Eliot, whose poems exemplify modernism at its most melodramatic. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is basically an ode to the malaise that comes with believing yourself to be timid and boring and the searing dejection that comes with being correct. "The Hollow Men," meanwhile, suggests that when life has been degraded to torpid inertia, you might as well already be dead. The Waste Land is arguably the cheeriest of the three, and it contains the soul-pulverizing line, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

So, ultimately, is my love of modernism merely a highfalutin' manifestation of the inner emo kid that I never really indulged in my teenage years? Maybe. As far as I'm concerned, the important thing is that I'm having fun.

A perfect sonnet, or one foolish line

Robert Frost is famous for many things. He was a Pulitzer-prize winning poet. He was an ardent chronicler of rural New England. He was a muse to both George R. R. Martin and Stephenie Meyers. He was a proudly hypocritical, farm-hating, fire-starting egomaniac. 

He also wrote poems that are prone to being misread and/or misremembered. The best-known and most-cited example of this is "The Road Not Taken," which many believe to be about the nobility of forging your own path, when it's more accurately characterized as a semi-sarcastic poem about the arbitrariness of choice and how we're all inclined to wrench our shoulders patting ourselves on the back as we retrospectively rationalize our choices. To the credit of the people confused by "The Road Not Taken," though, the message of the poem isn't at all obvious. Frost buried the irony of the poem so deep that even the friend he wrote the poem for didn't realize that Frost was "gently teasing" him.

A less famous example (at least to those not obsessed with The West Wing) is Frost's 1914 poem "Mending Wall." Unlike "The Road Not Taken," the meaning of "Mending Wall" is transparently clear, as obvious as a fire at an indoor poetry reading. For this reason, the case of "Mending Wall" is even more egregious: the poem originated the famous expression, "Good fences make good neighbors"; the problem is that the poem itself is explicitly about the wrongness of that expression.

This is "Mending Wall": 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

[Pause to recap: Nature hates walls. The very earth repels them, grinding them down in the winter while humans aren't looking.] 

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 

[Okay, so, ironically, the wall brings the speaker and his neighbor together, as they meet to rebuild the crumbling wall. That's a perk of walls, I guess, although there's probably a way for the neighbors to bond that doesn't involve destroying the flesh on their hands.]

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
 
[That's kind of a jerky thing to say. The speaker tries to tell his neighbor good-naturedly that the wall isn't needed, and how does the neighbor respond? Basically, "We'd probably hate each other if this wall weren't here."] 

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
 
[Yep, the speaker sounds a little offended. But now we've got an explanation for why the neighbor is so hot on walls: the neighbor is an unenlightened savage. Only unenlightened savages feel like walls are necessary even when there aren't any cows around.] 

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
 
[This is the end of the poem, and the plot thickens right at the close. The neighbor blindly believes in the value of fences because it's something his father said, despite all this objective evidence that fences are pointless. This is why it's important to think for yourself, children!]

So, in sum, "Good fences make good neighbors" is a phrase that Robert Frost puts in the mouth of a stubborn, willfully ignorant man entrenched in his misguided beliefs. If we want to honor the actual spirit of the poem, we should all get to work on popularizing "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." I'm not sure where we'll find applicability for that 100-year-old phrase here in 2017, but maybe something will present itself.
 

Trained and observed by a capable few

A couple years ago, in a blog post about Thanksgiving, I wrote about a weird paradox associated with being thankful. On the one hand, I noted, being thankful is an Obvious Good Thing, for Obvious Reasons. It's important to reflect on the parts of life, both little and big, for which you may not normally express gratitude: the people who worked to give you the liberties you have today, the sacrifices those people made, the better life you enjoy as a result. But on the other hand, I reasoned, taking things for granted is part of the delicious reward of the legacy of sacrifice. My ancestors toiled so that I won't have to be worried about having my suffrage rights denied. The point of struggle and sacrifice is to push future generations forward, not so that they will get to live lives free of struggle, but so that they will get to spend their lives focusing on new struggles, with the old struggles happily behind them.

In other words, I concluded, being thankful is an Obvious Good, but being unconcerned is a Non-Negligible Perk.

This paradox has been on my mind recently, as everyone on my Do-Gooder-Liberal social media feed has been in a state of near-apoplectic anxiety since Election Day. It's DEFCON-1, all the time. The good of heart cannot afford to be complacent. And truly, practically every headline I encounter reads like a dispatch from a dystopian alternate reality. The sheer volume of bad news is overwhelming. It's like getting swarmed by an entire hive of angry bees, when what you've been trained to do is focus on one bee at a time, and then take a full week to research how to most effectively deal with that bee. Or like playing Whack-a-Mole, except the mole field is the size of a city block, and all the moles have popped out at once, and 12% of the moles are wearing Klan hoods.

What I'm being told now, on my social media feed and elsewhere, is that you can never stop being vigilant about any struggle. That's what the election has taught us. Being unconcerned is a liability, not a perk. If you've ever been unconcerned, you're part of the problem. The country is regressing because you, personally, did not get involved. If the ACA gets repealed, if a Muslim registry gets created, if Planned Parenthood gets defunded, if a pointless and budget-destroying wall gets built, if Roe v. Wade gets overturned, if voting rights get restricted, if welfare and Social Security and protections for vulnerable populations are gutted, and if you and I do not actively work to prevent each and every one of these things from happening, then we must consider ourselves partially responsible. Oh God, and then there's climate change. And do we really need to be concerned about Russia? So many bees.

It's dire. Let's dial back the "everything is on fire!" feeling for a moment. What exactly do I need to be doing, personally, if I am to be a baseline-effective citizen? 

My standard answer to this question, the one that I've internalized over the course of my life, is: Be informed about issues and candidates, vote in elections both big and small, and serve on jury duty when you're called, even if you're grumpy about it.

Is this sufficient?

President Obama, whom I admire and respect, suggests that the answer is no. Nooooo. In his farewell address, he asserted that democracy "depends on our participation" and that every citizen is duty-bound to "continually try to improve this great nation of ours." Specifically, he instructed us to, at the very least, talk to strangers about what we value and why. Even better: engage in community organizing. Contribute to causes that you support in a real, tangible, "lace up your shoes" kind of way. Run for office yourself.

That Obama said this is not at all surprising. His rhetoric leans Leslie Knope. It sounds right, and it's hopeful, and it's stirring. It's consistent with what my social media feed is telling me. It also sets a bar for citizenship that I am currently failing to clear. What he's describing is certainly not what the average citizen does (i.e., ignore everything). What he's describing is also not what the average politically conscious citizen does (i.e., study the issues and vote). What he's describing is Suzie, from my post-election post: the kind of person that most of us generally view as almost suspiciously politically engaged. Obama (and my social media feed) want me to understand that I'm currently dropping the ball at citizenship, and that I need to adjust my life accordingly. In this new mode of citizenship, there is no being unconcerned, and there is no feeling content. It's the only way to manage the bees.

It sounds correct, and logical, and noble, because being aggressively engaged in citizenship is an Obvious Good. It also sounds wrong, and exhausting, and unfair, because not having to constantly worry about democracy is a Non-Negligible Perk. It's a paradox of citizenship, I guess. I'm still trying to figure out what to do.