You're an Adult (?)

Not too long ago, I was questioned about a professional decision I had made. I admit that I am human and therefore given to err, but in this case, I believe I did the correct thing. Whether this is the case or not isn't the point at the moment. Because the situation brought up some larger issues.

I remember discussing the events with my mother, and sometime during that conversation, I said to her, "I'm 27 years old [back when I was still 27!] and have my terminal degree, for crying out loud; I think I know what I'm doing by now." It was only later that I started wondering if I did, in fact, know what I'm doing.

Adulthood is a tricky thing. Most days, I feel I'm behind the curve. I haven't done any of the things adults do: get married, buy a house, succumb to the scourge of an early bedtime. And the people I know who are in my age group all seem so much more mature and put together than I am.

In a way, this is why I chose to study young adult literature in grad school. I want others to know that they aren't the only ones flailing--particularly teenagers, who probably suffer the most from confusion about their maturity level. And in another way, this is why I worked with college students so long as I did: because I remember what it was like to search for answers about my place in the world and my ability to function in it.

Maybe someday I'll feel like a grownup. In the meantime, I'll have to muddle my way through and help anyone I can on the long, arduous journey.

-Cate-

Ghosts, Part 3: Henry Ford Museum

I've never been anywhere I thought was seriously haunted, and I hate scary movies. But I have been to some notable historic locations, and I can't help wondering if maybe--just maybe--something of the people who made these places famous remains. 

For Part 1 of the series, click here. For Part 2 of the series, click here.

III. Greenfield Village

I have a deep and abiding fear of hearses. This is not a recent development. It's been going on since I was very young, and it started at Henry Ford Museum.

HFM is easily one of the strangest places in the country. With the exception of the Smithsonian Institution, few museums have such an eclectic collection. Where else are you going to find a Wienermobile, a Dymaxion house, and the actual Rosa Parks bus all in one building?

But they're also weird enough to have a collection of carriage-type hearses, which is how I acquired a dislike for them. These are towering, black, scary things. They look like something out of a nightmare. I can't go anywhere near them or I'll suffer a minor anxiety attack.

And yet, these aren't the most morbid pieces in the museum.

Exhibit A: the Lincoln chair.

Nice rocker.

If you're wondering what I mean, exactly, by "the Lincoln Chair," I don't mean some chair Abraham Lincoln used in the White House. I mean the chair he was sitting in when John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theater. For the record, I've been told by reliable sources at the museum that the dark spot at the top of the rocker is not the President's blood but, in fact, discoloration from hair oil. But the fact remains that they own a piece of presidential assassination memorabilia.

But wait! That's not all.

Exhibit B: the Kennedy limousine.

See this picture, taken in Dallas right before JFK was shot? He's sitting in a 1961 Lincoln Continental SS-100-X.

Looking happy. Poor guy.

Yeah. That car is also at Henry Ford Museum.

So apparently their thing is collecting bits of the past that are scary, violent, and depressing. It didn't occur to me until about five years ago that growing up seeing these things during family visits and field trips can really mess with your mind. I still haven't recovered.

And yet I wouldn't trade these experiences. Being able to examine such objects gives one a powerful sense of history and serves as a warning about what can happen--how quickly life can go from normal to horrifying. These are pieces of memento mori for people raised in an age when no one even knows what a memento mori is. And they certainly do remind us of our mortality.

-Cate-

Lincoln chair image via here, apparently.

Kennedy image via Wikipedia.

Ghosts, Part 2: Antietam

I've never been anywhere I thought was seriously haunted, and I hate scary movies. But I have been to some notable historic locations, and I can't help wondering if maybe--just maybe--something of the people who made these places famous remains. 

For Part 1 of the series, click here.

II. Antietam

When I was in elementary school, my brother was searching for the right college. My parents took him--us--all over for campus visits. We went to Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, other places I can't remember. On the way home from one of these trips, we took a detour in Maryland to visit Antietam.

Gettysburg gets a lot of play, and rightly so; it was the single bloodiest battle in American military history. But to this day, over 150 years later, the Battle of Antietam stands as the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 3,600 soldiers died outside of Sharpsburg that September morning, with a combined casualty count in excess of 22,000 (dead, wounded, captured, or missing).

A map showing the locations of Union and Confederate forces at Antietam.

Like other battlefields, Antietam is now an open, green space occasionally interrupted by a memorial or fence. It's not much to look at. But once you've learned a little bit about the site and the battle, it becomes haunted.

These fields have seen so much blood. It's in the soil now, and in the grass. In the trees. In the water.

Modern warfare, being mechanized the way it is, seems almost civilized by comparison. Because when you look at Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner's photographs of the dead lined up at what is now called Bloody Lane, the horses fallen on the field, the shocked expressions of the survivors, you know that something extraordinarily violent happened there. These soldiers fought face-to-face, hand-to-hand, in such a proximity that they could smell each other's coppery blood leaking from wounds.

For me, Antietam crystallizes in my mind the price we pay when we take up arms against our fellow humans, and I hope that everyone can learn a lesson from the pages it occupies in our history textbooks.

-Cate-

Image via the Civil War Trust.

For Part 3: Henry Ford Museum, come back next Wednesday.

Ghosts, Part 1: Anne Frank

I've never been anywhere I thought was seriously haunted, and I hate scary movies. But I have been to some notable historic locations, and I can't help wondering if maybe--just maybe--something of the people who made these places famous remains. 

I. Anne Frank

The most well-known place I've visited is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. I went alone, late on a weekday afternoon. The crowd was thin, and I was about to walk through the bedroom of a girl long deceased.

Anne Frank

For those of you who have never been, the "Secret Annex" is accessed through the space that used to be a warehouse for Opekta, the company Otto Frank ran before his family went into hiding. The floor there is unevenly paved with brick. It's a large, empty space, and it instilled in me a sense of foreboding. This was nothing compared to what would come.

The entrance to the Secret Annex is behind a reproduction of the bookcase used to hide it during the war. Before you get to the bookcase, you must ascend a flight of stairs. Even by Dutch standards, this staircase is steep; I had to move sideways up them, like a crab. The danger the Franks and their compatriots faced became palpable to me at that point, because I started to wonder how they kept from tripping, falling, alerting others to their presence.

Upstairs, you must pass through the bedroom used by Mr. and Mrs. Frank and Anne's elder sister Margot before you can get to Anne's bedroom. In Anne's time, it was cramped and uncomfortable. Today, it is empty. Only the wallpaper and some of Anne's clippings of movie stars--painstakingly preserved--remain. This is the worst part of the Secret Annex, and the best, because it doesn't take much to realize how young Anne was and how much she lost; just look at these photos and illustrations and you'll realize that Anne, like you, was a teenager. She was a dreamer. She was a human.

As I waited outside for my ride after I finished my tour, I stared and stared at the bell tower on Westerkerk, which Anne mentioned in her diary. How many times did she hear those bells toll, and how many times did she wonder if they were signaling death?

I have a postcard from that trip with an image of the red plaid diary Anne used. It's part of my collection now, a reminder that no matter how bad things get, I have to keep writing and hoping. This, then, is the power of being a little bit haunted by Anne Frank.

-Cate-

Image via the Anne Frank Museum.

For Part 2: Antietam, come back next Wednesday.

For Part 3: Henry Ford Museum, come back in two weeks.

A Death in the Family

While I was on hiatus, my aunt passed away. She was my mother's eldest sister, and she was also my godmother. For the first time in my life, I will experience a birthday without her well wishes. When I try to act as godmother to my own niece, I won't be able to ask my aunt for advice. When I post links to my published poetry on Facebook, she won't be the first one liking it or commenting on it. 

My instinct to call her has not faded away. If I dialed the phone, though, I'd hear an automated operator telling me the number has been disconnected. Under different circumstances, I'd be speaking with her right now to work through my grief, but I can't, because this time, she's the one who's gone.

Intellectually, this situation makes sense. Emotionally, everything is a jumble. There have been several occasions when I refrained from texting my mother to ask if this is really happening, because I already know the answer. 

A few days after she died, my aunt came to me in a dream. I don't remember now what that dream was about, but I do know that she was her usual cheerful self, not some shuffling corpse. It was comforting, in a way, to wake up after that dream, but also disorienting, since I knew I couldn't tell her about it. 

All of my disjointed thoughts about her flash through my head from time to time. It's fortunate that I was able to go home to see her a week before she passed, because it gave me a chance to say goodbye. But the problem, ultimately, is that there never is a goodbye. She's always going to be with me, if only in dreams or memories. At the same time, I'm damn lucky to have that much, and to have known her at all, so I try to keep that in mind.

-Cate-

PS My aunt died of complications from ovarian cancer. To reflect this, I have changed the text of today's post to teal, which is the awareness color for this type of cancer. For more information about ovarian cancer, visit the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, the Mayo Clinic, the American Cancer Society, or the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

What to Read

Way back in 2012, one of my early blog posts on this site was about what I read. I subsequently added a post about the poets whose work I reference most often. Maybe I was prepping myself, however subconsciously, for today's discussion.

What should you read? There are two basic schools of thought: the canonical purists and the laissez-faire experimenters. Guess which kind I am.

Yes, I'm a do-what-you-want kind of girl. To tell you the truth, I think the idea of an academically-defined canon is bullshit. What I consider essential, required reading differs greatly from the next person's idea of necessary novels. For example, I believe every fiction writer should read Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Meanwhile, when I was in grad school, I had a professor who was one of the dreaded Raymond Carver devotees, and I found Carver to be a waste of time. (Yeah, that's right; I said it. Come at me, bro.)

The American Revolution was fought over the canon; forces employed cannons. Or something.

Ray Bradbury wrote that we should read anything and everything. I happen to concur with that advice, since "anything and everything" can be interpreted to mean "anything and everything that will meet YOUR needs, rather than those of some fusty old scholars." (No disrespect to scholars in general; I'm a reluctant member of your ranks, but we all know that there are those rude people who scoff at anything other than what they deem essential.)

So get out there. Read some books. Or magazines. Or cereal boxes. Whatever piques your interest and makes you think! I'll be doing the same on my end, of course, and I can guarantee you the books on my list are ones that work for me.

-Cate-

Image via some defunct website. I had to search Yahoo Images for "firing cannon" instead of "cannon" because "cannon" takes you to an endless stream of pictures of Canon cameras. Someone needs to learn how to spell, and it's not me.

Terrible Things People Say

As a child, I was bullied on a regular basis. This is a sad reality for far too many adolescents, as you may have noticed over the past two or three years. Coming of age as the Internet started to gain ground, I experienced cyberbullying on two occasions I can recall, but thanks to the limited access afforded by dial-up, I was not plugged in constantly, which no doubt reduced my risk of attacks.

In more idealistic days, I assumed that people became more civilized as they grew up, and that bullying peters out as a result. Now I realize that this rare bit of optimism on my part was misguided. I'm almost 28 years old, and I've learned that bullying never goes away. It may get even more vicious.

You may recall my post from last November about the woman who referred to me as "the weird girl." This was a passive sort of bullying, since she didn't say it to my face; instead, it trickled down to me. I've also been torn apart via e-mail by people who were unable to mask their identities yet managed to keep the shield of the screen between us, which is somewhere between passive and aggressive. These occurrences, while bothersome, allow for at least some control on my part: all I have to do is cut off communication, or keep things professional if I must interact with the people in question.

However, one of the more prominent forms of bullying today is anonymous cyberbullying, taking place in online forums, on social networks, or in comment sections below articles/blog posts. I don't know that I've ever experienced this myself, since for various reasons I don't engage in online discourse to a large extent.

This is not the case for everyone. Popular bloggers might get a thousand comments in a single day. Authors of articles for online news magazines are subject to both editorial scrutiny and public response. Or, in the case of Andrea Wrobel, a person may be promoting his or her work on the Internet. Wrobel recently recounted her experience over at SheWrites, saying that anonymous commenters were the worst of the group, sometimes making rape jokes or otherwise disparaging her. 

This undisguised misogyny is not uncommon. If any thread on a forum continues long enough, eventually one of two things will happen: someone will compare another person to Hitler (Godwin's Law)/accuse a person of Nazi-like thought (Reductio ad Hitlerum), or someone will tell a woman she deserves to be raped. This is what happened to Wrobel, along with, I'm sure, tens of thousands of other women who haven't shared their stories. It even happens when discussions appear about someone having been raped, as in the Texas gang rape case or the Steubenville allegations.

I have to wonder what happens to people that makes them lose their humanity and social graces, particularly when they log on. Since I'm not a psychologist or sociologist, I may never know the answer. But I do know that this kind of bullying has to end. It's backward and dangerous to continue encouraging both verbal abuse and rape culture via this kind of "discourse." It is time for us all to grow up and start supporting instead of threatening each other, don't you think?

-Cate-