The One Thing I Would Never Say to My Daughter...If I Had One

"Solve for E,"
Courtesy Aaron Parecki
Flickr.com

My dad died in 2010. Three years later, I wrote a song about him. Here is the refrain:

An absence greater than zero,
The square root of negative one,
An unimaginable number,
From this there is no sum.

You see, there is no zero greater than zero; the square root of negative one is an imaginary number, therefore, impossible to imagine...like life without someone who has always been there. And once that person is taken away, they cannot be added back.

As for my hero and stand-in dad Pythagoras, an amazing theorem, which actually makes rearranging furniture in my poky old house a lot easier, is named after him. Seriously, it's like the universe's gift to people who live in small spaces.

A² + B² = C².

Genius.

In some sort of myth I created for myself, Pythagoras was accused of hubris for demonstrating that the geometry of the universe was imperfect: if a² + b² = 2.16666 repeating...what the hell? There is no precision in that! Hence, "Pyth" and his school had to disperse, and he most likely died of starvation hiding in a cave. Except records of the time indicate he died of natural causes at the age of 75 in his hometown after having served as something akin to mayor. Still, it's a good story.

But back to imaginary numbers.

Multiply a positive real number by itself, and you get a positive result. Multiply a negative real number by itself, and you get...a positive result. So the square root of both positive and negative numbers is always positive. But electrical engineers and physicists need negative square roots. I could discuss the position of a particle in space...and snowplows...but I wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. I think the gist is imaginary numbers make solving equations more elegant in the way that the colon (as used in writing and not pooping...although...sometimes writing is pooping) replaces a whole lot of words.

I know a lot about math.

And if you are willing to look up my second-grade teacher and explain that to her...for me...I would gladly stand behind you, peer around your shoulder, and nod my head, with my lips pursed, in complete allegiance.

Because I still can't subtract. Twelve minus eight? I use my fingers because I can't remember.

I'd like to believe this has something to do with my philosophical embrace of optimism: it is simply against my nature to negate.

The truth is, it's because of a blue crayon.

Also, I'm not philosophically optimistic. I could theoretically subtract some people from this earth for their actions and/or ideology if it weren't illegal (and against my conscience...because I do have one), and that doesn't really indicate an optimistic bent.

But back to the blue crayon.

We learned to add in first grade, we learned to subtract in second grade, we learned to multiply in third grade, and we learned to divide in fourth grade...all the while "practicing" the skills we had previously learned via worksheets filled with numbers that became increasingly longer. We had calculators in the 70s; I can only guess my teachers thought they were a passing fad. But, even as young as I was, I completely understood the concept of "work smarter, not harder" and wondered, really, what the point of all the worksheets was. I'm an educator, and I still consider all that busy work a weak attempt at scaffolding.

My second grade teacher, let's call her Ms. Break-It (which is actually an awesome play on her real last name...but I'm protecting "the innocent"), decided to try something new.

A million bad ideas have been born out of a desire for novelty, so this was not the first of its kind: we would grade our own subtraction worksheets...with the crayon color of our choice. I will never see a pedagogical value in having 2nd graders score their own work, but maybe I missed something in one of my education courses. Whatever. Black has always been, will always be, my favorite color, but it was not an option...the little weasel, a chubby boy with a handsome face and dirty blond hair, who turned me in probably got to it first. Blue was the next best thing.

We all completed the same worksheet, so Ms. Break-It could call out the correct answers. We, using the crayon-color-of-not-my-choice, marked our incorrect answers. We had been instructed not to erase. On problem number 5,678, I noticed my numeral two looked like a "Z." Because my brain is so big, I was anticipating algebra before I even knew what it was; I could not let the "Z" stand because we were subtracting, not "solving for." I used my bla...I mean...blue crayon to make the "Z" more clearly into a two. Then I realized I had "corrected" a correct answer...Ms. Break-It would be confused...she would take points off a problem I had triumphantly and with great effort gotten right!

I erased.

Goddamit, I tried to erase the crayon without erasing my answer, which is physically impossible, but I irrationally held on to the belief it could be done.

And then the weasel pointed at me and shouted, "She's erasing! She's erasing!"

I remember being called to Ms. Break-It's desk and everything goes blank after that.

Flash forward and Ms. Break-It offers us this crumb of wisdom: "Little boys are better at math and science, and little girls are better at writing and art." I guess that was supposed to make me feel better. I don't know. I wasn't the only girl in the class; there were quite a few of us...I'm guessing we made up 54% of the students? So why Ms. Break-It felt the need to proffer her newly gleaned knowledge, I'm not exactly sure.

But I was a precocious child. I remember "teaching" my mom about socialism with a chalkboard and drawings in the dining room of our home...how hard it must have been for her to hold back the laughter every time I said, "the means of reproduction." But I got it: our work is our life. To value some work as worth more than other work seemed unfair to me. The ditch digger makes clean running water possible, without which there would be no surgeons and CEOs. (Full disclosure: these lectures were prepared with the aim of increasing my allowance.)

I also knew that I couldn't name a single famous woman author or artist sitting in that classroom on that day. Every artist and writer I knew about was a man (Michelangelo, Shakespeare, KISS). And I wanted to raise my hand and ask, "If that's true, if little girls are better at art and writing, where are all the women artists and authors? I want to know about them," but I didn't know how to ask that question.

At that time, the only famous women I knew were models and actresses, and I can't even remember who they were. There was no Sally Ride, no Hillary Clinton, no Alice Walker, no Tina Fey, no Madonna, no etc. There were only a few women, like Madame Curie (Mrs. Curie), who seemed to pop up in history and then fade away as some sort of anomalous event.

So, yes, my first brush with patriarchy came when I was seven or eight years old, and, while I didn't have a name for it, I understood its message: "Women have never accomplished very much." And I figured I wouldn't either...especially since I could not fucking subtract. (Sorry, Mom.)

"Can't subtract." I feel certain this was written on my 2nd-grade report card, and I have allowed it to characterize me for 40 years of my life.

"Can't subtract." I was revising a 50-page grant a few weeks ago and I ran into a table that basically showed we intended to increase the rate of X by 10% each year over five years. I looked at it and looked at and looked at it: "That's 50%." I did the math: "We're going to increase the rate of X from 57% to 93%? That's going to be challenging. Actually, I don't think that's possible." So I knocked it down by half, still challenging but at least do-able. As I finished revising the table it dawned on me: I recognized a statistical conundrum, and I solved it. With math.

"Can't subtract." The one thing I would never say to my daughter, the thing my dad would have told me wasn't true, the thing I've said to myself a million times, is the one thing I haven't said so far, and I'm not going to say it.

Instead, I'll say, "I'm good at math. I may need my fingers to subtract, but I know how to do it."

And to all the daughters out there I didn't have...don't ever let someone else define you or what you can do.

Lessons I Learned from Family and Friends #1: The Wedding Cake

Courtesy earth_photos on Flickr, 2003, some rights reserved.

My friend (actually one of the most eloquent, elegant women I know and one of my undergrad profs) and I were in stop and go mode in rush-hour traffic after the second day of a workshop on race and social-justice consciousness raising. We had left about the same time the day before and were sure our moment of departure was the perfect window for avoiding traffic. Alas, we were not aware it had been storming during the workshop. We walked out of the building...the rainfall visibly evaporating from the parking lot asphalt as we walked to her car.

We left the Central High National Historic Site's visitor's center exhilarated and exhausted. We had been surrounded by young people of many races, religions, creeds, and it was exciting to know they had volunteered to be part of this experience. But opening up, telling our truths, being put on the spot...even though we put ourselves there...was scary. My friend and I, representing a project about the desegregation of Central High by the Little Rock Nine, are pretty white. She confessed that growing up in SoCal was hard because she couldn't spend more than five minutes in the sun. I confessed that rather than trying to tan (i.e., getting a sunburn), I sat in the windows of my parents' Victorian house identifying birds with binoculars. Both our families hail from middle-class Indiana, where "corn rows" has never been used to refer to hair. Telling black people, Asian-Americans, Jewish people the story of my life seemed silly. While I may be a woman, which gives me some insight into the "savage inequalities" Jonathan Kozol discusses in his book of the same name, I'm still the color of privilege. Why should anyone "of color" care about me? Of course, that was the whole point of the exercise: be uncomfortable until you find a place of comfort with the group you will spend this time with, recognize each as a person and not as somehow a representative of a color or a belief or a generation or a place.

But when I'm tired, I can't help but grouse: I wanted my pajamas and my K-dramas, and some slow-moving moron, jerk who refused to learn merging etiquette, or inconsiderate speeder caught by a cop were keeping me from my routine.

So my friend told me a story.

When my friend's older sister became engaged, she decided to have the wedding on her fiancée's farm in the Hoosier state, and she enlisted my friend, who was in college studying *mumble something that will give her identity away* to bake the cake. My friend had never baked a wedding cake in her life...but I could have easily guessed this part of the story: she researched the subject like the scholar she is, studying piping, stacking, accoutrements, mixes, recipes in the months leading to the production of the masterpiece.

The morning of the special day turned out to be warmer than usual. So when my friend set out to bake the cake...in the kitchen of a farmhouse...with no air conditioning...it didn't take long to realize the "icing on the cake" would be problematic. Calls were made (I imagine, having grown up in that time and close to that same place myself, on rotary phones), and the baked parts of the cake were moved to the home of a relative who had air conditioning...in the living room only. I can imagine my friend running back and forth to the kitchen as she stacked and piped, her fresh sunny face full of optimism and confidence.

But then she had to transport the finished cake back to the un-airconditioned farmhouse over several miles of dirt road.

She told me how she drove five miles an hour, clutching the steering wheel, scouting for every pothole while checking the cake's safety in the rear-view mirror.

She and the cake made it, and that's a story of true sisterly love. But it isn't the moral.

That person in front of you? The one taking up all your time, annoying you, making you question the intelligence of humanity?

The saying goes, "Every one of us has a burden to bear." We nod and believe we understand. But when that "burden" becomes tangible...a cake, a bad tire one can't afford to replace, cancer treatments that cause dizziness...when the reason is real, only then does the saying become truly meaningful. The person's race, ethnicity, age...none of it matters...just the burden.

So from now on, I'm going to believe there's a teetering wedding cake, loving months in the making, in the backseat of that person's car. I don't want to think about the other possibilities, and being angry for trifling reasons never gets us anywhere.

Dead in D.C.

It's a little-known fact (or maybe a well-known one) that a lot of people die on the toilet, Elvis Presley being, possibly, one of the most famous examples. I know this because I am a dry cleaner's daughter and was intrigued by an article in the New Yorker or the Atlantic (can't remember which) about the real cleaners...the companies that specialize in taking care of the messes left by the dead. By the way, getting smashed by objects falling from high rises is also not that unusual in New York City, and I imagine that kind of cleaning takes a special sort of skill set I do not possess.

At any rate, I went to Washington, D.C. for a conference on Tuesday.

D.C. isn't really a high-rise sort of place, so I wasn't on the lookout for falling pianos. I also wasn't paying attention to possible airborne pathogens, but they're a lot harder to see. And I'd had my flu shot. So when I developed a cough Friday afternoon, I was sure it was from smoking a cigarette with a friend after dinner and a couple drinks (don't scold, I maybe smoke once a year). When I woke up Saturday morning to fever, chills, and muscle aches...well, you can't blame that on half a cigarette. My thought was I needed to get home ASAP. So I picked up my phone to call the Hubs regarding my condition when I noticed the tiny blue dot was blinking, indicating I had a pending message.

What could it be?

Yeah, flights cancelled.

Thanks, Obama.

So I went downstairs and extended my stay by one day, telling the front desk person I was sick and preferred just not to be disturbed.

At the Sofitel (where they answer the phone, "Bonjour, you have reached le Sofitel"), "Do not disturb" means something quite different than at the Super 8. At the Sofitel, it means call Ms. Le Nom to make sure she doesn't need towels, tea, orange juice, sparkling water, oatmeal. And ring her door bell (yeah, the rooms have door bells) to see if her mini-bar needs restocked. (Seriously, Nikita [names changed to protect the innocent] and I are on a first-named basis now; I have half the hotel management's business cards.)

That was extended day one. Flash forward to extended day number three (EXD#3)...that's six cancelled flights...and I don't know whom to thank ironically because the weather problems were in Dallas and Little Rock, not D.C.

I know the good people of Sofitel were truly concerned for my welfare, and I appreciated the complimentary trays that kept coming to my room. But I was starting to feel like I was in the hospital...a super pleasant-smelling hospital where all the food (if you actually feel like eating) is along the lines of steak tartare and escargot and no one sticks you with needles...and you feel like you are never going to get better despite how lovely the place is (some of you will get that allusion).

Begin TMI Statement::

At 3:00 a.m. on EXD#3, I awoke hacking so hard I nearly coughed up a lung. That lasted about 10 minutes, and then I decided I needed to pee. It's no surprise, really, after all the tea, coffee, orange juice, grapefruit juice, San Pellegrino, and Perrier that served as the hotel equivalent of an IV drip...and the obvious pressure coughing would put on my bladder...nature would naturally call. So I got up, went to the bathroom, sat down, finished. And then I kind of looked at my reflection in the glass shower door and thought, "I think I'm going to throw up."

I haven't thrown up in a long time, so I had kind of forgotten the feeling...I reflected on this looking at my reflection. But then when the water came to my mouth, I was like, "Yep, flush, pull up the jammies now: this thing is happening."

I barfed twice.

End TMI Statement::

And then I sat back on the cool marble floor (the hotel is next door to the White House, what do you expect?), sweaty and exhausted and waiting to see if I should expect another round.

That was when I realized I had run out of toothpaste the day before.

You would think life couldn't get any worse at that point.

Wait for it.

So I flossed and rubbed my teeth with my finger and went back to bed.

And then I had a little bit of a dream. Because I read so widely and variously.

I dreamt that I died in "le Sofitel" sitting on the toilet.

My body was hauled onto a gurney by a bunch of people I didn't know dressed in white who threw around words and phrases like "stat" and "Valsalva maneuver" (another good reason not to use Wikipedia as a reference), while the hotel staff...Nikita, Raj, Abdul, Djeynaba**...cried over me because I was such a wonderful guest. As everyone looked on, I worried I had never completely pulled up my jammies.

My body went off to wherever bodies go in D.C., but my soul stayed on at "le Sofitel."

And I had to wrestle with every new occupant over my rightful place in the king-sized bed (right side, next to the windows) over and over again. Sometimes I had to give in to couples and lie at the foot of the bed on the scratchy carpet with the extra blanket and no pillow. Other times I shoved the two chairs together to make a bed and used the cotton robe for cover.

I would make a great ghost.

This went on and on until I woke up in a sweat at 5:00 a.m.

I checked my phone.

And then I checked the bathroom to make sure I wasn't dead on the toilet.

Thankfully, I was not.

But when I came back around the corner, the clothes I had stripped off earlier when I went to bed looked shockingly like a dead body. I got down on my hands and knees and nervously went about feeling around for myself.

My hands felt nothing but cloth.

And the only reason I'm telling this story is because I'm sitting on the divan in my own damned house watching my two cats fight over who gets to sit next to my stinky feet.

That is the only way to be 100% sure I did not die on the toilet at "le Sofitel."

*Photo courtesy of Earthworm via Flickr's Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.
**While I did change the names of the staff I came to know at the Sofitel, I tried to retain their cultural identities. Before I got sick, we had some fabulous discussions about life in D.C., coming to the U.S. for new opportunities, and learning to embrace difference. I wish they had a position for a tech writer.

Shiny Happy People

Confession...

I use the Internet.

I use it a lot.

In fact, I don't think my current job would actually exist without it.

So this post is about a trend I see happening on the Information Superhighway, specifically the street that makes up social media. (I'd like to explore which part of the Internet is not on Social Media Street these days, but that's a blog for another day.)

The trend has already been the subject of at least one research study, so I'm not alone in seeing this pattern of behavior.

The trend?

Everyone out there is so damned happy, it makes me want to open an artery...several arteries, in fact. (I promise that's hyperbole.)

On a daily basis friends and strangers alike (it depends on the particular social medium) post articles, memes, motivational "posters," suggesting that the key to happiness is being in the present, being mindful, slowing down. They brag about their five-hour meditation sessions or the retreat they took in the Rockies.

I don't mean any disrespect. I know it's well intentioned.

I also know that much of this is the curation of life that social media inspires ("Look, World, here are pictures of me with all my skinny, smart, beautiful friends!"). I started curating my own when we (and, by "we," I mean people few of us actually know) called it the ARPANET (yes, in all caps). That is, back in the 70s when I moved from my tiny girl bedroom into my much larger teenager bedroom and made all my own choices in furniture and decor straight out of the pages of Vogue, which was an excellent source of photos I could cut out and tape to my closet wall, photos of couture Lady Gaga wishes she could wear and major works of art I could only dream of one day seeing in person.

Yes, I am the original Pinterest (as were most of us...I won't tell who fell asleep at night gazing at Twisted Sister...I was totally into the Pet Shop Boys...so we're even).

But all this damned, curated happiness, this museum of bliss, is depressing me.

Okay, that's not what's depressing me.

My thyroid is out of whack. That's what's depressing me.

The doctor who originally diagnosed me (and for that I am thankful...the major symptom...the absolute lack of saliva production...isn't the one used as the "go-to" for suspecting hypothyroidism) stopped practicing medicine and sent me a polite letter two months after refusing to refill my prescription for the drug that treats it, levothyroxine. The pharmacist's guess was that the doctor felt I needed to be tested again, but I knew better: the final letter was the sixth time I had received communication about a reduction in the care being offered, and I had been tested the previous year with no changes to my TSH levels. (Yeah, I should have been more proactive.) I went on a search for a new doctor, and six months later, I now have an appointment. And I'm being treated in the meantime by my university's health service.

Unfortunately, it's still too little and too late, and I'm smack-dab in the middle of a thyroid-induced depression. The other symptoms (lack of saliva, weight gain for no reason, and complete exhaustion) just exacerbate the irrational sadness, the hollowness of everything, the "certain slant of light" that doesn't go away after winter solstice.

I've been through this once before. Two months before my diagnosis, the Hubs and I moved our bed into the living room so I could be close to the furnace (intolerance to cold is another symptom) and so the sounds of his getting ready for work could gently wake me up. Be still he had to bring me tea and pull me by the arms up away from the pillow. I didn't have the energy to do it myself. After treatment, I realized just how sick I had been to have made those kinds of adjustments to my life and routine. So I know this road.

But that knowledge cannot change what I feel. When people say, "Be present in the moment," I want to respond, "You be present in my moment for one minute and get back to me on that." When I hear, "Be mindful," I want to ask, "Of what? I know all about Buddha's 'right mindfulness.' How do I achieve that when my body is doing everything it can to conspire against me?" And when I'm advised to slow down, I want to yell, "That is the most unrealistic thing I have ever fucking heard; you've got to be kidding me right now. What life do you lead that makes slowing down possible?"

My reasons for this line of thinking are numerous.

First, I include myself among a line of thinkers from Nietzsche to Derrida (and probably well before...if one reads Plato ironically) who believe there is no possibility of being completely in the present. They would argue that the developments of language first and writing long after add two filters to our experience. Human thought is shaped by language (for example, many languages have words for phenomena English speakers are unfamiliar with and must, therefore, borrow...,and I'm not talking about the debunked myth regarding Inuit words for "snow," but words like "hominy," which is Powhatan for a particular type of processed corn you love, hate, have never experienced, or have never heard of). For Derrida's money, any thought possesses the potential for being written down and, therefore, must be maintained in the mind (a good reason for memory remaining one of the canons of rhetoric despite Plato's frequent admonitions...hence my ironic reading). In other words, we are in the constant process of interpreting our experiences rather than actually experiencing them. Maybe animals have a being-in-the-presentness, but given my cats' complete nightly freak out at 6:40...exactly 20 minutes before supper time, I suspect they can see into the future and think of it with craving...and without thought about being in the present. I've queried them, they've yet to comment. The Hubs says he has come close: climbing 14ers in Colorado, where every step in high altitude required utmost concentration. But he won't go so far as to say "always present." And before anyone jumps in with an explanation in the comments, I'm very familiar with Thich Nhat Hanh's "telephone meditation," an exercise in acknowledging the thought but letting it go as a state of being in the present. Still, I wonder, what's the difference between my not thinking about it and answering the phone immediately and my trying not to think about it and delaying answering the phone? Which action is more "present"? Honestly, if you know me, you're in my contacts list: I know who you are and, most likely, what you're calling about when you ring me. So again, which is more present? The ring tone? Or the actual conversation?

Second, why are unhappiness, sadness, anger, frustration...all the "negative" emotions...why are they now wrong? And understand I'm just interpreting what I get from media headlines and the posts I see on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram...all the social media I visit frequently. I'm not saying this seems to be the new wave of psychological understanding. In fact, some of my friends over in the psychology department at my university (as well as our friends in biology) are dumbfounded by the pseudoscience people are betting their health and well being on. Emotions serve a purpose. Case in point: I am working really hard to fund a project that will tell the story of an important moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Without anger, conscientiously directed anger, that event would never have occurred. In fact, the whole movement would not exist. And, hey, sometimes sadness leads us to do things to forget our sadness...like writing blog posts. I think happiness as some sort of desired constant is a bit overrated...and unrealistic.

Third, if you're feeling blue because someone close to you died or you didn't get a job you really wanted or someone took you to task over something that seemed unimportant to you, meditation may very well help you feel better. But if you have thyroid disease, insomnia, are taking certain types of medications, or are truly suffering from "clinical" depression, it probably isn't going to help you...it might, but "might" is the key word. Yet I get the feeling, especially after a day-long drive down the Superhighway yesterday, that if it doesn't work, it's because I'm not doing it right...because, if I do it right, it will ALWAYS work. Y'all, if you're doing something to improve yourself in some way, and it doesn't seem to help, please try something else. And I'm not saying this because I hate yoga pants (only when they're worn as outerwear and not actually for yoga). I'm saying this because I often feel pressured by well-meaning people to participate in activities that work for them: "Jazzercize saved my life!" That is so awesome, but I'm still imagining Olivia Newton-John's video "Let's Get Physical," and I'm actually just creeped out right now. It may work for you, and I don't mind the suggestion, but when you extol its benefits with hyperbole (the usefulness of which is limited to extraordinary circumstances, like my own) and ad nauseam in that sing-songy way people do, my mind (which suddenly becomes very much oriented to the present) is taking inventory of my arsenal for getting away from people. It's the reason I paid for the premium version of the Fake Call Me app I installed on my phone.  

So this is my manifesto: I do not owe it to anyone to be happy.

Period.