Saturdays are for the Bed

Today was remarkable for its sheer unremarkability.

That being said, you're about to hear some remarks.

I stayed home, essentially just in my room all day, which was not as bad as it initially sounds. I spent too much time on Instagram etc, but I did at least do some other things.

I called my mom and talked to her for almost two hours. We talked about a lot of things, but also sort of nothing. For the one hundredth time, I had to remind her what exams I'm taking this semester, and how long my PhD program is. I tell her over and over that six years is the standard time to degree, but she always says a lower number. I told her six and in her very next sentence she said five, like she's trying to negotiate me down. If I had to hazard a guess why that is, it would be because she wants there to be the smallest number of years possible that I am obligated to live in Berkeley.

After this it's just your dissertation though, right? You know, your aunt Amanda has a PhD, and she was working full-time at Coca Cola headquarters while writing her dissertation. (oneword aside: Can you think of a more Atlanta thing to be doing?) Couldn't you just do that? Well, I guess you have to teach, and you have to be on campus for that.

Short version is: I need to finish the PhD as soon as possible, but also, failing that, I need to find any way to complete it from anywhere else.

Since I've been an adult woman (to whatever extent either of those terms apply), I've had this experience where I'll speak to my mother and, out of nowhere, be hit with something heartbreaking that I'm just going to have to think about forever. And this doesn't seem to be the case with any of my brothers. My mom, in the middle of this conversation said

For twenty years, I never heard I was smart from your dad. He never treated me like I was smart. Now, in the past couple of years, I've had lots of my friends tell me I'm one of the smartest people they know, and I just think "You must not know a lot of smart people."

And there's this knot you get in your chest when you hear something that is simultaneously devastating and not at all surprising. I know he doesn't think she's smart. I know none of my brothers think she's smart. My dad has never given any indication that he thinks I'm smart either, though my mom and I are the only two in the family with masters degrees. But we're also the only two women, so I guess it cancels out.

And it's sort of maddening, isn't it? I love my dad, but there are plenty of times when he's been so dismissive and misogynistic, and I know that if my mom tried to tell any of my brothers about it, they wouldn't believe her. Because they can grow up in the same house I grew up in and not notice the things I noticed. And there's something tragic in it too, because as I've gotten older I see all the ways that my mom and I are so much alike, but I end up defensively preventing myself from showing it, because the rest of my family might love her, but they don't like her.

As I quietly recovered from that series of gut punches, the conversation drifted along to other topics -- her new house, the dogs, what's going on with her friends. She made me agree to let her know anything I hear about opportunities to go see Adam Lambert on Broadway, and then we hung up.

---

What is it about Grace Kelly?

The rest of the afternoon was taken up by my Grace Kelly double feature. As illustrated above, I tend to be a good, angry feminist, but boy, is there something about Grace Kelly that washes feminist rage away. 

During the pandemic, and a bit after, I spent unconscionable amounts of time in those Kibbe body typing Facebook groups. In the Kibbe system, Grace Kelly is the absolute standard of peak womanhood against whom we are all being measured. I'm only slightly exaggerating. On his proprietary kiki-to-bouba scale, the very center point is called "Classic." That used to be a body type you could have (you get banned from the FB group if you say "body type" though. They're "image identities,' which is clearly different, naturally). However, David Kibbe has since revised this, saying that actually nobody is purely classic; everyone has to lean at least a little bit to one side or the other. Everyone except Grace Kelly, that is. Nevermind the fact that "classic" means that you have "perfectly balanced" features, and that the definition of "balanced features" is something that can never be objective or neutral. Your classicness, in other words, could also be marked as your proximity to Grace Kelly.

You can understand that all of it is a load of garbage at best and a kidz bop version of phrenology at worst. You can understand all of that, but then you look at her in a movie like To Catch a Thief and you get it. She really is the blueprint. And the worst part is that she feels like an almost attainable aspiration. People used to tell my mom she looked like Grace Kelly. So I think Well if my mom looks like her, then I potentially could, too. 

And then once that thought has entered your head, you're cooked. I'm normally such a good feminist, avoiding makeup most of the time due to the lethal combo of lazygirl apathy and righteous feminist indignation. But then you watch her and you think, How is she doing her makeup? How does she get her hair like that? You know, it really wouldn't be that hard to just put in a little effort, to get the perfect arched eyebrow and the perfect hairstyle. Her haircut is pretty similar to yours, you know. Do you think you would look good with blonde highlights?

And that's the devil talking. You mustn't listen. But, after all, if you had to pick a celebrity style icon you really couldn't do much better. But then on the other hand, picking the peak 1950s movie star? Extremely trad move.

And, Reader, if you took a look inside my mind, as I'm sure you'd like to do, you would see this dialogue playing out like Gollum/Smeagol, while on the outside I am sitting calmly in my bed watching a movie.

Reading back over this, I'm moving between the first and second person with reckless abandon. I hope, Reader, that you don't find it too presumptuously intimate for me to be so facilely conflating "I" and "You."

---

Baroque Ensemble

It was quite an odyssey making it to campus this evening. If the Odyssey took about 40 minutes instead of 20 years. My bus was delayed 24 minutes, which is impressive, considering that bus line comes once every 30 minutes. Determined to make it to the Baroque Ensemble show, I tried ordering a Lyft. Twenty minutes and 3 drivers later, I'm finally on the way. I was very peeved about it, and anxious about making it to campus in time.

I was frustrated about the unreliable buses. I was frustrated that I physically couldn't have walked the 2 miles to get there on foot. I was frustrated that even after paying for a ride I was still going to be late because the app kept changing the wait time. 

I texted my cohort about it and Rodney reminded me that today is Cal day. Cal day is ostensibly the day that admitted students come and visit and everyone celebrates being good ol' Golden Bears. In reality, it is a day for undergrads to catastrophically day drink on frat row. Rodney, living next door to a couple of the biggest frats, said that he'd already seen 3 ambulances. That made me frustrated in advance, for how gnarly campus would be when I got there. Then I also remembered that Bootleg was tabling on Cal Day. I'd seen some other messages in the discord server about it, and about people "celebrating Cal Day." That reminded me once again how separated I have become from Bootleg, hardly being able to do anything with them the whole school year, and it also reminded me of the fact that I'm simply older than they are, and have probably aged out of an all-undergrad club. That was on my mind as I got to the theatre at 8:07 for the 8pm show. I got out of the car and started speedwalking to the best of my ability, a decision I immediately regretted as my foot started hurting again.

I was so worked up the whole way over, that the fact that everything was just fine when I got there felt like a sort of comic bathos. (Bathos, of course, is when you make appeals to pathos in the bathtub). I walked into Hertz Hall, and scrambled to the first open seat I could find. The lights were already dimmed, so I couldn't look for any of my friends in the audience to try to sit with them (another tally on the emilyjones Grievances board).  What I failed to take into account, though, is that the Baroque Ensemble always tune their instruments for a comically long time. When I'm lucky enough to sit with my cohort, we lean to each other and say Oh, I love this piece. I'm glad they're playing the tuning song again, as the harpsichordist plays through practically the entire circle of fifths while the other musicians very slowly and methodically tune up. To be perfectly honest, I might have gotten away with waiting for that very-delayed bus and being 20 minutes late.

The opera was fun, very cute. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even try to understand what anyone was saying, even though it was in English. I just let myself listen to the music. I knew eight people in the performance. The choral parts were definitely the best, and I wish I could've been part of it. Grace, from choir, sang the role of Cupid, and she was really good. I want to ask her how I can get involved and also sing for the Baroque Ensemble. There's no possibility of me playing keyboards there before Allison graduates.

It's a short opera, only about an hour long, split into a prologue and three acts. There was an intermission after act 1. Rodney and Cam found me, and I found Soren and Rubina, so we all moved to sit together for the second half. We were all next to James, bringing my James-sighting count up to 2 for this semester. After the opera finished, we all hung around outside for a little bit to congratulate all our friends, then I walked to the bus stop to head home.

My bus home was a bit delayed, too. Rodney walked past me on his way home, and stopped to talk to me.

I never told you this, but I have a very sensible nose, like to scent. I can smell when Tessa is in the room (Aside; File that one under "skills Ella Leeds should've had") And I can smell when my roommates are home, or when there's a woman in the apartment. In the United States, when people are drinking, I can smell it in their bloodstream. That never happens at home. But today, all these drunk undergrads? I can smell they're all drunk. Oh Emily I think that's your bus.

With that, I went home. Sitting on the bus full of undergrads, I thought I could smell alcohol in the air. But maybe I was just imagining it.