Growing Up
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
There are more meaningful ways to compliment the people you admire
“She’s pretty, but only when you look at her closely.”
The year was 1988, the place was the school changing room, and the person speaking those words was Lisa, an indisputably pretty classmate.
Lisa was talking about me.
Strange as this may sound, she was actually trying to be nice. Her group of friends, the “in crowd,” so to speak, were standing in a giggling huddle, skinny and flawless in their grown-up satin underwear as the rest of us struggled with our towels, trying not to show too much of our bodies.
“Michelle’s quite pretty. Not stunning, but okay,” one…
My sixth-grade teacher brought me comfort and stability in ways she’ll never know
Everything I need to know about clouds I learned at 11 years old, lying on my back, gazing at the sky on a warm spring afternoon. My sixth grade teacher led our class to the field after lunch and instructed us to form a circle. Thick blades of grass tickled my back as I took my place among the dandelions, in a pinwheel of lanky bodies and tween angst.
Observing the nuances in the milky bursts of cumulus overhead, my teacher’s voice surrounded us like a protective blanket of reassuring facts. Her words provided universal truths we could rely on…
On group texts and growing up
You see each other on Thanksgiving, and maybe once in early summer. They don’t live in your city, but they don’t live too far away. A two-hour bus ride. A drive as long as an album. A few episodes. You text when you’re on your way.
These are the friends who greet you with an it’s-been-too-damn-long hug. The friends who know your parents by their first names. The friends who giggled backstage with you during the middle-school musical. The friends who knew you before you had sex, before you had a title and a desk and a commute. The friends…
Welcome to your voice cracking on its way down.
Welcome to anger, to fists that ball up before thoughts.
Welcome to your body as a fog with unclear edges that nevertheless hits things hard.
Welcome to your mind galloping faster, to making more things to gallop over.
Welcome to the edge of the endless content of desire.
Welcome to publicity, to shame, to the cruelty of others as they look for themselves.
Welcome to the collision of your life and the fully indexed, searchable, unforgetting expression of it.
Welcome to power, to strength and speed, to the ropes of muscle…
When I was 15 I drew the shiny pin of a protractor along the crook of my arm. By the time you are 15, can you have read enough books to discover all feelings? I mean, I don’t exactly know what I’m trying to say or what I was trying to do but maybe I’ve been experimenting with feelings since before words. I’ve always loved excavators of the mind. I see philosophers crawling through the abyss with their questions and hearing what?
I had long hair the colour of ash, long legs, and big quiet eyes. I had…
a long remembrance of a short-lived band
I started writing songs when I was five. At first I would take existing melodies from popular songs and write my own lyrics to them. I remember changing the lyrics of Neil Diamond’s “Love on the Rocks” to “Sarah Block,” about a girl I had a crush on. I have no idea what compelled me to start writing songs. There was no end game that I can recall. No plans to make a living, get famous or tour the world. I just loved music and felt a need to express myself with words and melody.
…
The passage of time isn’t remarkable just because you have kids. Regular, child-less folk are on the big time-passage journey too, only they don’t have to compulsively (and obnoxiously) post milestone photos on Facebook to remind us all that we’re getting older. But when you do have kids, time means something… different. It doesn’t mean something better or deeper, but different. It’s consistently profound. There is a constant reminder — second by second — that time is marching forward. As a parent, you have a front row seat to one of the most incredible time lapse videos of all…
Fiona Helmsley
The second person I ever had sex with was my best friend Marie’s boyfriend, Nate. Since junior high, we had been a tight threesome, in all ways, except for sex. I had been privy to all the little details of their relationship — that Nate ate Marie out in a movie theater, that Marie popped the zits on Nate’s back. Nate, who invented his own slang words for everything, had even invented words for their sex acts. Touchesit, he would say, and take Marie’s hand, and put it between his legs. …
1. Children notice literally everything.
Everything from their mother’s one nice dress to the smell of the heat in winter. Or at least that’s what Bruce Eric Kaplan remembers in I Was a Child, an illustrated memoir with boxy line drawings of Bruce’s childhood memories. The son of a stay-at-home mom and an editor of math textbooks, Bruce writes about the idiosyncrasies of 1970s suburbia: dusty candy stores, denture commercials, oak tag, and Barbara Streisand’s nose. It’s quiet humor; each illustration is a punchline. Think: sex, hamsters devouring their babies, and elementary school teachers who take smoke breaks.
2. Stories make people people. A person without a story is not a person.
Sometimes, I want to remember what it feels like to not feel.
I worry that I will never experience the kind of elation I experienced when I used to drink excessively, constantly between parties, healing hangovers by erasing them with another night out. I can still remember the feeling of the third whiskey/ginger warming up the bones in my body, turning my mind into an incandescent pool, all smiles and hope and radiance and charm.
I remember that moment of possibility, the heightened sense that something and anything and everything could happen and should happen and will happen. …
