The Rotation

Keya: well, I have to go exercise my feminist right to get an overpriced haircut.
Keya: maybe I’ll write a blog post about it.

I’m nearing the end of my last semester of classes as a doctoral student.  Only one day of class left!  One more afternoon of participating in the rituals of a campus:  of taking notes, of criss-crossing the quad, of asking stupid questions, of glancing at the clock, of debating classmates, of biting my tongue when someone emphasizes the wrong syllable in “hegemony,” of having Foucault come up at some point in every class…  Of course, some of these things will continue to happen over the next couple years as I finish my degree.  But it won’t be in a classroom setting, and it won’t be with regularity.  It won’t be in communion with other laptop-toting, backpack-wearing, earnest-looking nerds.

I’m taking this ending better than I took the end of college.  I saw Dana’s sister last weekend, who just celebrated her last Blowout (also known as the last day of classes for you non-W&M people) and will graduate from the Alma Mater of a Nation in two weeks.  In front of her mom, I told her to DRINK EVERY NIGHT because in the last weeks of your senior year there are NO HOLDS BARRED.  I’m pretty sure I grabbed her by the shoulders and it was all I could do not to shake her for emphasis.  I gave her an example of some major life-living I did in my final weeks of undergrad as inspiration, and then I tried to drill my point home by telling her that I still have dreams where I panic because I realize it’s senior year at William & Mary and it’s all going to end.  Nightmares, really.  Recurring.  Still.

So this ending is going slightly better.  I’m holding it together.  I think it’s evidence that I’ve matured.  Let me give you an exhibit B.  To most of you this will be meaningless, but to some of you this will blow your mind.  For the purposes of driving to UMD from the train station during this, my last semester in classes, I was assigned a parking space on the opposite side of campus from where my classes are.  And I park there.  Legally.  In my designated garage.  And it’s a huge campus!  But I park there and I walk, like, twenty minutes to class.  IT’S TRUE.  

This is shocking because during undergrad, I parked wherever I damn well pleased.  I had a super special silver sticker that I’d ganked from my mom and I blatantly parked in Fac/Staff, right in front of whatever building I had business in.  I drove to class, I drove to meals, I drove to friends’ dorms.  All of these things were in close proximity to each other, but I drove anyway.  The school caught on to my ill-won parking god status and stripped me of the sticker, but the habit was formed.  As Sarah M. has described, I pretty much would “pull up to a building and just park as close as I could.”  I made friends with parking services because I was there every week paying tickets.  

But no more.  I’m an adult!  I park where UMD tells me and I walk about seventeen miles to class.  Up hill.  Both ways.  Because that’s what mature grad students do.  I’m going to try and remember when I’m home in Brooklyn to act more like a mature grad student and less like the punk who pulls up and parks like an entitled prick.  Maybe I can avoid being towed twice in one day again, like I was last month.

So how did this happen?  How am I semi-gracefully accepting change as it occurs?  C’mon, that doesn’t sound like me.  It’s taken me a year to admit that I moved to New York, and there are several local and state governments to which I still haven’t come clean.  How am I following the rules even though it inconveniences me?  Also not a strength.  I don’t know.  I think it has to do with things that have changed, things that I miss.  When you graduate from college, your fun-per-waking-hour quotient is reduced drastically.  The same can be said for when you have a kid, though the reduction is (mostly) temporary.  But what I’ve gained in spite of these fun reductions, and what ultimately I really value, is a heightened appreciation for the luxuries in my life, and school is a luxury.  Even if it ends.  Even if my commute is four-and-a-half hours each way.  Even if I have to walk all the way across campus when I get there.  Because it’s not that I have to, it’s that I GET to.  At least one more time.

One of the classes I’m taking at the moment required some reading about female friendships in the Victorian era.  The piece theorizes that while interactions between women and men in much of the nineteenth-century were stiff and formalized, relationships between women were sentimental, effusive, and intense in a way that fulfilled the spectrum of women’s emotional needs.  Now, given what I’ve told you about my degree, it’s not surprising that a class I’m taking would spend a good amount of time devoted to something most people find quite ordinary and not worthy of academic scrutiny, such as the subject of friendship. 

But even this seemed mundane to me.  Men segregated from women throughout most aspects of daily life?  Women fulfilling all the emotional needs of other women?  This is a revelation?  Sounds like college to me!  Where men were frat boys who pretended to ignore you when you came over to drink their beer, and women… well, they were who I lived life with!  After all, I didn’t refer to Annie D. as my life partner in the toast I gave at her wedding for nothin’!

I’d like to offer a few nuggets from Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s book, Disorderly Conduct, just to see whether that much has changed in the intervening century.

Smith-Rosenberg found that letters between women in the Victorian era “possess[ed] an emotional intensity and a sensual and physical explicitness that are difficult to dismiss.” (59)

Hmm.  Emotional intensity?  Exhibit A:  my friends and I end every email or IM conversation with “LOVE!!!!!!!!!”  Exhibit B:  We have nicknames for each other that are too weird even for the internet.  Sensual and physical explicitness?  Exhibit C:  When Jen S. met Annie D. and me, she made a poster declaring that we made her “wet herself.”  And then she carried this poster around campus. 

The Victorian age offered a “female world in which hostility and criticism of other women were discouraged, and thus a milieu in which women could develop a sense of inner security and self-esteem.” (64)

I have to say my friends and I spend an inordinate amount of time telling each other we’re sweet ass.  And we’re pretty unapologetic about it.  We’ve been known to spend entire evenings congratulating ourselves for being the spectacular people we are, and patting each other on the back for being so smart as to be friends with each other, thus compounding our amazingness.  Wine helps with this exercise.

We are also at times supportive to a fault.  Do you have friends who would touch dead animals in order to defend your honor?  I know – that statement doesn’t make sense – but you’ll just have to trust me.  They did, and I do.

“Quite a few young women kept diaries, and it was a sign of special friendship to show their diaries to one another.” (69)

Ooooh.  How special!  Diary-sharing.  I’ve copied and pasted entire IM convos with third parties (mostly emotionally-unavailable boys) into emails to other friends.  I’ve BCCed at times.  I have a BLOG where I divulge things.  Feelings.  Cryptic statements about dead animals.  How’s that for sharing?  How’s that for TRUSTING?  Any of that shizz could be forwarded with the press of a button!  What was the worst that could happen with diary sharing?  The Victorians didn’t even have Xerox machines!

“How, then, can we ultimately interpret these long-lived intimate female relationships and integrate them into our understanding of Victorian sexuality?  Their ambivalent and romantic rhetoric presents us with an ultimate puzzle:  the relationship along the spectrum of human emotions between love, sensuality, and sexuality.” (74)

Really?  Is this a puzzle?  This sounds like run-of-the-mill friendship to me.  What do my friends know about my sexuality, you ask?  I’ll tell you they’re more likely to comment on the wonders breastfeeding did for my boobs than anyone else – hubs included.  They’re also more likely to gyrate inappropriately with me on any dance floor, any city, any night.

I think it’s fitting at this moment that B*Witched just popped up on iTunes.

If we were near a dance floor right now, no doubt a call would rise up for an “Amanda Sandwich!”  Because sometimes sexuality – and friendship – comes in the form of a sandwich.  With House dressing.  How’s that for a subject worthy of academic scrutiny?  Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, come write a book about me and my peeps!!  I promise it’ll be a best-seller.

And theeere’s the B*Witched key change.  Everything is right in the world.