Captain's Log, Day 34: Is It Too Late to be the Gleek of the Week?

Date: May 22, 2021

Time of post: 1:53PM

Quarantine Day: 423

Last Song I Listened To: "Not the Boy Next Door (Glee Cast Version)"

Last Person I Communicated With: The Taylor Swift group chat was freaking out about a "traitor" (by Olivia Rodrigo) & "Burn" (from Hamilton) mashup (this one: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeW1h21G/)

Last Thing I Ate: Mediterranean chicken patty on a pretzel bun with a caesar salad (because I'm adult who cooks sometimes now) 

Last Thing I Read: Stranger Than Fanfiction by Chris Colfer

Current Mood: nostalgic and content

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: Not today, but I've done a lot of summer teaching prep this week, so I'm relaxing today.

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: Take a shower and do some dishes

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: gotta do more summer teaching prep

One Reason I’m Happy Today: I'm really excited about starting a new book today (don't know which one yet)

Dear Apocalypsers,


There are 2 things you need to know before I start: 1) I graduated high school 7 years ago today and 2) Glee has changed my life.

I’ve watched all 6 seasons of Glee since February, so when I say it’s “changed my life,” I don’t mean that it was foundational to my high school career or that it inspired me to chase my Arts dreams or anything like that. (Full disclosure, I watched 20 episodes—S4E4 “The Break Up” to S5E1 “Love, Love, Love”—within 24 hours at one point because I was mad they broke Kurt and Blaine up and swore to watch until they got back together. Honestly, I think I watched Seasons 3-6 in a couple weeks.) I never got into the show in high school—which, in retrospect makes no sense—but I existed between 2009 and 2015, so I knew about the show, and I knew about every Taylor Swift cover, and I had definite opinions about them.

The number of times they broke Kurt &
Blaine up was unreasonable. If
you're gonna commit to teen marriage,
then commit to it.

Dylan, you should have known...

But, no. Something about quarantine and my Trashy Teen Show watch history on Netflix led me to watching Glee nearly 6 years after it ended and nearly 12 years after it premiered. Now, I could write an entire blog series on things that show did poorly; I honestly thought I was on an extended acid trip for seasons 1-3A (and then I think I just adjusted to it and stopped questioning it, like it was a form of Stockholm Syndrome). I sent furious texts to so many people seeking some kind of explanation for what I was seeing. Surely it was satire…right? They wouldn’t present this to tweens and teens…in all seriousness? Or would they? And, if they did, how were we supposed to distinguish between the satire and the sincerity? Like I said, this could be an entire series.

Pretty sure he never forced me to watch Glee with him in high school because he KNEW I'd react like this and wanted to save himself.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for Glee, but I certainly didn’t expect it to give me closure about my own high school experience.

Like I said in my opening, I graduated high school 7 years ago, and for the first time since then, I’ve been able to look at pictures of my friend group from that time and not feel like I’ve swallowed a razorblade and it’s just perforated my stomach. And that’s, strangely, thanks to Glee.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I’m an unfailing optimist, and I always have been. (I didn’t believe in love for four days my first semester of grad school, and it was, quite frankly, the most concerning time of my life.) I want every single moment to be straight out of a coming-of-age movie or a Disney fairytale. I want things to come full circle; I want signs from higher powers; sweepingly grand gestures, little miracles, and for my memories to all be coated in that warm, hazy, sunshine nostalgia that feels like a country song about your hometown. And as much as I’ve tried to force myself to “be more realistic” because I’m “getting older” and “can’t be this naïve,” but, dear readers, I’m writing this from a pillow fort I constructed in my living room a week ago. The point is, I don’t think my heart is ever going to “grow up” in the way that some people think it “should.”

But when your heart’s built like that, it gets broken more often than you think it will and you have to decide to keep believing that it will all work out like a YA movie.

That’s what I didn’t realize when I graduated high school.

My high school friend group were the first people to break my heart.

When we graduated, we were all going different places—as you do when you graduate high school. I was cut up about it literally all of Senior Year. I did the thing I do when I try to make every moment count; everything is heightened and important, and it matters. I started school in August holding on like it was May and they were leaving me the next day. And they laughed at me for it.

“There’s so much time.”

“Where are you even going to college?”

“We’ll always be friends.”

We’ll always be friends. That’s what I wanted, of course. That’s what I had planned. (I do love a good plan, you know.) And I would have done anything to make that happen.

This was Dylan's 18th birthday party. It was a decades themed murder mystery that I wrote.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

I see now why it didn’t work out. We all had growing to do. Most of those friendships were friendships or convenience, of having grow up together, of having a place in the social war zone that is the high school hallways. I still talk to all of them. We like each other’s Instagram posts and respond to Snapchat stories, but I’m only close to one of them, really. And that almost makes my heart break more, because nothing happened. There was no big implosion, so there’s no one to blame. We just…grew apart.

But they told me not to worry. They said we’d always be friends. And, like falling asleep—slowly, then all at once, as the 2014 Tumblr posts said—my worst fear came true, and we…weren’t.

By the end of my freshman year of college, we pretty much weren’t speaking, and we definitely weren’t hanging out. And I was jaded and resentful about that for years.

We were supposed to be in each other’s weddings where they married their high school sweethearts. But, instead, they all broke up. We were supposed to move to New York City and live in the same apartment building. Instead, all but 2 of us are still in Alabama. (Maybe 3; I honestly don’t know where one of the guys is.) And 4 out of the 8 are within 20 minutes of our hometown. We were supposed to live together and fall in love together and have all the quintessential young person sitcom struggles, and we were supposed to reminisce and laugh about it all when we were middle-aged and our children were all best friends. We were supposed to be each other’s go-tos, ride-or-dies forever. Instead, I find out about relationships from updated Facebook statuses instead of giddy midnight phone calls, and I know I’ll find out about engagements and pregnancies and births the same way.

Reading that back, it all sounds a little silly and unreasonable to expect us to stay locked into that high school mentality for the rest of our lives. But, in my defense, every book or movie I saw about high school had the main characters staying friends. So when I realized in undergrad that my friend group was unravelling/had unraveled, I was constantly trying to blame someone for taking away the fairytale that should have been.

One of the highlights of Senior Year was the Piedmont Band Competition where we won all these trophies! I was beyond proud!

I blamed myself for a while: “Maybe I shouldn’t post so much about my new friends. Maybe my old friends feel like I’m replacing them and pushing them away.” (But, if you know me, you know I’m “all in.” I fall in love fast and hard and loud.) Then, I blamed them: “They let it go. They gave up. They abandoned me. They didn’t want this as much as I did.” (The last statement is a sentiment that’s plagued my entire life, and it’s always the sentiment that, regardless of the truth of it, breaks my heart the most.)

And for a long, long time, I carried some cynicism and resentment with me. I realized recently that I didn’t have a single high school picture up in my apartment. The photos had been up in my college dorm room, but stayed packed away when I moved to Kansas. And it didn’t bother me until nearly 3 years later. Because, until I watched Glee, it hurt too much. Because when I looked at those pictures and my smiley, naïve face, all I saw were broken promises of forever. (Dramatic, I know, but very raw and honest and real for what I was feeling at that time of my life.)

So you’re wondering, “How on Earth did Glee give you closure?”

Great question.

The answer hit me like a Lady Gaga group number to the face.

The answer is that: because the Glee kids got what I had always wanted for me and my friends.

Giving myself whiplash the way my tone changed between 1AM and 6PM

In Season 4, Rachel and Kurt move to New York and live together while attending NYADA (fictional performing arts school a la Julliard). Artie is already in Brooklyn for film school. Eventually Santana (who leaves her cheerleading scholarship at the University of Louisville to pursue her dreams of being a star), Mercedes (who convinces her producers to move her to New York from LA to give her album a “more urban” sound), Sam (whose character motivation is to be a male model and see himself half naked on the side of a bus, but is there for the plot purpose of getting back together with Mercedes), and Blaine (who’s also attending NYADA but is also engaged to Kurt by this point) all join them, and they all basically share 2 apartments for Seasons 4-6.

So they got that dream of mine: running away to NYC, living together, and pursuing their dreams.

Screenshot from S5E14 "New York, New York" of Sam, Blaine, Artie, Rachel, and Kurt in the apartment in Bushwick.

They also get to marry their high school sweethearts—not without an unnecessary amount of heart palpitating drama, but still. In a move that I’ve learned is either loved or loathed by fans, there was a Brittany/Santana and Kurt/Blaine double wedding in Season 6. All their friends were there, and they were bridesmaids and groomsmen, and it was everything! And, yes, they’re only 20-21 at that point, and, yes Kurt and Blaine got engaged when they were 18-19, and, yes, I logically know that it’s ridiculous, but my romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart absolutely eats that kind of stuff up.

So they got another dream of mine.

Santana & Brittany and Kurt & Blaine's double wedding in S6E8 "A Wedding"

But what really solidified all of my feelings was the time jump in the series finale. It flashed forward 5 years, to 2020 (big yikes!) making the Class of 2012—Rachel, Kurt, Quinn, Santana, Brittany*, Mercedes, Artie, Mike, Finn**, and Puck—26-years-old, and the Class of 2013—Sam, Blaine, Tina—25-years-old; basically, they were supposed to be the age I am now.

And, in that flashback, we get the most perfect Katie Cline Ending: it all works out for them; their dreams come true. Rachel, now married to Jesse St. James (whom she dated in Season 1, so she also kind of gets to marry her high school sweetheart) wins her Tony while all of her friends watch. She’s also very pregnant, acting as a surrogate for Kurt and Blaine, who are still married and performing together (most recently in the first “LGBTQ version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? at Lincoln Center,” which I would pay so much to see, honestly). Mercedes has had a world tour of her own, and Tina starred in Artie’s film which got accepted to “Slamdance” film festival. (They’re also together, which is wrong, because it should have been Mike and Tina, but whatever. Also, Mike went to the Joffrey Ballet Academy of Dance in Chicago after graduating.)

All of those dreams that people laughed at them for for 6 seasons came true. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted for my friends.

(*Brittany was supposed to graduate in 2012 but had to repeat her Senior Year. **After actor Cory Monteith’s death in 2013, Finn was written off the show, so he isn’t featured in the Season 6 flashback.)

So, you’d think that seeing these fictional characters live out my dreams would make me sadder and angstier—but it didn’t. It strangely gave me a sense of closure. And I can’t explain why unless you also happen to be an unfailing optimist with a romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart colored with warm, hazy nostalgia and a hint of naivety. But, basically, I liked seeing that it was all possible—even if it was just fictional characters on long-finished TV show. Just seeing it made it feel more real and less like a pipe dream.

I honestly think that if I had watched Glee while it aired, I wouldn’t have viewed the finale the same way. It aired in March 2015, the middle of my second semester of my freshman year of college, right when I was realizing that my high school friends weren’t going to be the “forever friend group” I had hoped and begged and fought for. Seeing the finale at that point in my life would have been like rubbing salt in the wound. But enough time has passed that watching it in 2021 didn’t sting (as much; I definitely felt some twinges of jealousy). And I definitely still sobbed, but I was happy—for the characters, because I get ridiculously attached to fictional characters, and for me, because I still want those things to happen to me and my friends, and I still honestly believe we can have it in some way, shape, or form.

I don't think a day has passed in 7 years that I haven't thought about at least one of these weirdos. 

I recently told a friend that I go into every relationship expecting to be hurt. (Let’s not try to unpack that now.) That’s something that high school taught me, because I was blindsided when my fantasies didn’t become reality. Now, I still throw myself into friendships. I still come on strong and love too quickly and refuse to let it go until it’s pried forcibly from my hands. But now I do it with the expectation that it will end. Theoretically, that knowledge should make me more reserved and cautious, but I’m not in the habit of depriving myself of good things. I’d rather give everything for 2 years and make the most of that time than sequester myself off in an effort not to get hurt.

I have a soft heart; I’m going to get hurt regardless, so I might as well enjoy every moment that comes before the inevitable heartbreak.

So, to all my artist friends, this has been a very long-winded explanation as to why I’m also so aggressively supportive of your dreams: I want to have our Glee moment. I want to cheer you on when your book is published and wins awards and is made into a blockbuster movie; I want to be backstage at your Broadway debut and sit with you when you get your first (of many) Tony nominations and when you win it; I want to be the first follower on your indie film’s social media so that I can follow it all the way to its Oscar win. It’s why I jokingly ask for your autographs and tell Twitter how big you’re going to be—because I believe in the silliest and most far-fetched things, but because I believe in the most magical and wonderful things, too.

There’s a song in the Glee finale called “This Time.” Darren Criss (Blaine Anderson) wrote it and Lea Michele (Rachel Berry) sings it. And it’s such a me song that I can’t be embarrassed about loving it with every bit of my being. I mean, I dare you to listen to it and not think of me:

“These walls and all these picture frames

Every name they show

These halls I've walked a thousand times

Heartbreaks and valentines, friends of mine all know

I look at everything I was

And everything I ever loved

And I can see how much I've grown”

…

“I think of all the things I did and how I wish I knew what I know now

I see how far I've come and what I got right

When I was looking for that spotlight

I was looking for myself

Got over what I was afraid of

I showed 'em all that I was made of

More than trophies on a shelf

For all the battles that we lost or might have won

I never stopped believing in the words we sung, we sung”

…

And the chorus:

“This time no one's gonna say goodbye

I keep you in this heart of mine

This time I know it's never over

No matter who or what I am

I'll carry where we all began

This time that we had, I will hold forever”



This song is how I feel about every friendship I’ve ever been a part of, about every school I’ve left (with varying degrees of jaded cynicism and resentment—because I’m definitely not on good emotional terms with my undergrad yet).

“I never stopped believing in the words we sung” is an obvious reference to “Don’t Stop Believing,” which I think Glee was contractually obligated to perform once a season, but the line resonates with me because I have never stopped believing in these dreams and the possibility of reaching a “coming-of-age movie level of happiness.”

I also keep coming back to the lines “When I was looking for that spotlight / I was looking for myself,” because, while I’ve never had hyper-specific, Rachel-Berry-level dreams of the spotlight, I do have a performer’s personality (but not really the talent), and I definitely see “spotlight” as translating to “being the best in your discipline” and publishing articles and writing books and winning awards and being liked wherever you go. And, to an extent, I think we all have our own definition of what that spotlight looks like—it’s whatever our dreams are—and while we’re getting there, we do have to find ourselves.

Okay, maybe  I was a little bit of a ham. (These are all the Senior cast and crew members of The Secret Garden--just the straight play, not the musical, unfortunately...or fortunately if you knew my high school's relationship with musicals.) 

I mean, what have I learned from this whole post? I want these neat endings all tied up with a bow because I crave certainty and reassurance and control. I want friendships to last forever because I hate conflict and want to be wanted. And I want to, need to, believe that remarkable and magical things can happen to kids from a small town in Ohio or Alabama or Kansas, because being a part of something special makes you special.

Or, as Rachel says in her Tony acceptance speech: “Being a part of something special does not make you special. Something is special because you are a part of that.”

That’s one lesson I’m still learning.

Talk to me 14 years after I’ve graduated high school, and we’ll see.



In the meantime, may the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie

Captain's Log, Day 31: Oh, 25 Years Old / Oh How Am I to Know? (A Quarantine Birthday)

Date: March 1, 2021

Time of post: 4:15 PM

Quarantine Day: 341

Last Song I Listened To: “We Are Young” –Little Mix’scover

Last Person I Communicated With: Mikayla Sharpless

Last Thing I Ate: a coconut pecan cookie

Last Thing I Read: fanfic last night

Current Mood: I’m itching to be productive

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: I spent all day yesterday redoing my dad’s CV because he’s applying for an award, and I wanted his CV to look better than everyone else’s

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: a ChLA abstract, because I’ve committed to that now lol

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: I need to write a letter of intent so I can keep my instructor job, and I really hate those

One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla organized a surprise Zoom party for me on Friday night! I thought it was going to be just us playing the Taylor Swift game I made her for her birthday, but then she surprised me with Jacque, Lexi, Dustin, Noelle, and Molly! It was so nice!

“Oh, 25 years old / Oh, how were you to know?”

 –Taylor Swift, “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”

Dear Apocalypsers,

I meant to post on my birthday, the 25^th, but I got caught up in the festivities and didn’t get a post written. And I wanted it to be good. I wanted to take the time to do it right.

I turned 25 on Thursday. In undergrad, my friend Baby Katie told me that the day that you turn the same age as the date is your “Super Birthday.” So, I guess it was my Super Birthday, which is pretty cool—and it wasn’t extravagant, but it was still pretty super.

My birthday is the one day a year when I don’t mind everything being about me. Don’t get me wrong; I love attention. I loved being a theatre kid in high school. I loved writing for a column for my church newsletter in high school and for my school newspaper in undergrad. I still love performing in my own little ways—it’s probably why I enjoy teaching. But there’s always a “buffer” with performing: I’m playing a character, or I’m a reporter relaying a story, or I’m “Ms. Cline.” If I’m just Katie, I feel a little weird getting attention (which is something we can unpack later). But I’m completely okay with it on my birthday. I even expect it.

I took some birthday pictures at Germania Springs (thanks Eric!),
so please enjoy them throughout this post

So this is a fun post about my birthday, but it’s also about being 25 and getting “older” and thinking about everything that comes with that. I’ve said before that Mom used to get onto me about “wishing my life away.” I have always been future-focused, so a lot of times I feel like I’m older than I am. But because I spent a lot of “my youth” (which is objectively not over yet) thinking ahead, I also still feel like I’m trying to live out my childhood in some ways. I am simultaneously 7 and 70, and I’m honestly not sure what 25 is even “supposed to” look like. Maybe that’s for the best. I’ve always done my best when people just assume I know what to do and leave me to my own devices—like my first newspaper article, for example—because I only have to rely on how I want to do something and not on someone else’s expectations of me.

So I’ve picked 3 songs that mention being 25 and how I feel like those lyrics resonate with me now. The first is, naturally, a Taylor Swift song. And, on one hand, I know that I’ve only been 25 for 4 days, but I kind of already like the idea of looking back on this time and saying, “Wow, I had no idea how my life would change.” I also like this lyric because Taylor’s giving the “you” (in the song, she’s referencing Joe Alwyn, who was 25 when they met, but it’s also me in this case) permission to not know because they’re only 25. As you’ll see, Past Katie really hoped she’d have her life together by 25, but I’m writing this as a full-time college instructor with 2 college degrees who is sitting in her bed at her parents’ house because there’s been a pandemic raging for a full year now. So, needless to say, I don’t have it all together in the way I thought I would.

And here’s every thought I have about that.

 

“Cigarette in my left hand / Whole world in my right hand / 25 and it’s all planned”

 –Louis Tomlinson, “Just Like You”

 

25 is a funny birthday. I don’t know why, but, years ago, I chose 25 as the age that I wanted to be married with kids by. I’ve never told anyone that (because I’m inherently afraid of failure). I don’t know where I got that idea from, if it was on TV or if I just assumed that 10-15 years in the future was plenty of time without having any context of what my 20s or the general the state of the world would be like. But that was the plan. My parents were 23 when they got married. Whenever I planned the weddings of my friends and their then-significant others, I always had them “getting married” in their early 20s (and I have the Word docs to prove it, because I don’t think I’ve ever deleted anything from my jump drive). Maybe it’s a product of growing up in the South. Maybe I’m just the most impatient person in existence. Maybe I was too doe-eyed and naïve (maybe I still am). Maybe, if you want to put a positive spin on it, I had/have a lot of faith in love and want people to find that happiness as soon as possible.

I’ve made a lot of plans in my life. I like to have plans. They make me feel prepared. Before I do anything new and adulty for the first time—like going to the pharmacy or going to the eye doctor by myself—I always ask my mom about the kinds of questions they’ll ask or the paperwork they’ll need. I don’t do true spontaneity, if I’m being honest; I do enjoy “planned spontaneity,” though.

Looking at my life now, I’m definitely not married with kids, so that plan didn’t play out. Sorry, Past Katie. She’d be disappointed, and I don’t mind saying that. Past Katie cared a lot about relationships. She really loved love (I still do); she was obsessed with her parents’ story (high school sweethearts who have been married since 1981), and I think she was really scared and confused and thought that getting married was the epitome of “making it” (and, to be fair, I still think it’s pretty incredible to find someone you’re willing to spend the rest of your life with, but I don’t think it’s the only marker of success). So, 13-year-old Katie would definitely be shocked to learn that 25-year-old Katie hasn’t even kissed a boy yet.

An aside: there was a time, not-so-long ago, that I would never have admitted to never kissing someone—I still feel a little shaky about it, to be honest. But I think there’s so much stigma about when you “should” be doing things like kissing and having sex and that that may have contributed to Past Katie’s fantasy plans. Being the one who doesn’t do something always gets them ridiculed, or the situation is played for comic effect—think movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin or characters like Emma Pillsbury in Glee. Whenever a character in a high school show/movie/book admits that they’ve never been kissed, it’s always with embarrassment and shame. And, yes, Past Katie would have been embarrassed and ashamed to admit that in high school, too, but that’s because we’re only ever told that that’s how we’re supposed to react.

Looking back on my life (from the ripe old age of 25 years and 4 days), I can see that I’ve done some things differently than my peers. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in dating in high school and even in college, but no one ever approached me about it (and, dammit, I still stand by the idea that I want to be pursued; I want someone to put the effort into me that I put into everything I do—and maybe that’s a strike against feminism, but, wow, do I want to feel wanted [and, yes, I do love that Hunter Hayes song]). The only dance I was ever asked to was my 5^th grade Sock Hop. I didn’t have the elaborate Promposal of my dreams (though I did help execute a couple). My best friend in high school did get me a corsage for Senior Prom, and it was such a great surprise, but his date did drop out a week or so before Prom, so I do feel like I was robbed of an “official” date.

So, long story short, I didn’t date in high school or undergrad, but I did so much, and I’m so proud of all I accomplished. And I did it all for me because I wanted it. I will never look back on my life and have regrets because “so and so” wanted me to do or not do something. My only regrets will be that I wasn’t bold enough to try something. But, in the words of Magnus Bane, “Regret is such a pointless emotion, don’t you agree?”

 

“So we talked all night about the rest of our lives / Where we’re gonna be when we turn 25”

 –Vitamin C, “Graduation (Friends Forever)”

 

Because of COVID, I celebrated my 25^th birthday in Jacksonville, which makes it seem like I never left. But I have. Leaving was an unspoken part of my life plans, even when I didn’t think about it specifically or know where I would be going. At one point, I was going to be an actress or a songwriter. I was going to move to New York with 2 separate friends at 2 separate points in my life. After 22 years of being told about “all my potential,” I was itching to leave. I know that doesn’t happen for everyone, and that’s fine, but it happened for me. I love my hometown; I cry to Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw” whenever I leave it (because I listen to Taylor’s entire discography whenever I drive to and from Kansas, so that’s the song that plays first).

I don’t think I ever knew exactly where I’d be when I turned 25 until I was…24 ½…My 6^th grade gifted class actually performed a version of this song in a play that we wrote. We changed the lyrics to “talked all night about the rest of our lives / where we’re gonna be when we turn 16” and “keep on thinkin that it’s time to drive,” and we inserted our classmates’ names into the song: “Will little brainy [Robbie] be the stockbroker man? Can [Ashlon] find a job that won’t interfere with her tan?” Well, according to Facebook, Robbie got his industrial engineering degree with honors from Georgia Tech, and, as of last summer, Ashlon is still in the Jacksonville area. As far as other people from that gifted class go, Troy is a singer; John is working on movies and is married to one of my college roommates; Garrison is getting his master’s in business and just married his high school sweetheart; Courtney is applying for med school soon; Madison does art and travels like the free spirit she is; Alyce has a degree in criminal justice and is working as a police dispatcher in Florida—and I know I’m forgetting people; I’m writing this at 3AM after all—but my whole point is that I wonder if any of us had any inkling that we’d be where we are now when we rewrote those lyrics over a decade ago.

I feel like I’m doing really well for myself. I always want more, but, objectively, I’m doing well. I got a full scholarship to JSU where I double-majored in English and Digital Journalism; I was editor of the newspaper and vice president of the Honors Program; I presented at institutional symposiums and one regional conference. I got into grad school and moved halfway across the country. I taught for the first time; I got a school-wide teaching award; I presented at 2 major conferences (should have been 4, but COVID got in the way); I finished my Master’s Project, which I’m looking at published someday. I got a full-time teaching job. I. Published. My. First. Article. This. Year.

I’ve done so much that I couldn’t have predicted. And, in a lot of ways, I like it better than if my plans had gone, well, to plan. Because when I made those plans for my life, I was just assuming that my life would follow the archetypes that I had seen in the media—but what I’ve done has been surprising and new and exciting. It’s been scary and hard and exhausting, too, but, ultimately, I’m glad that life has taken all the turns that it has. Because Past Katie could never have dreamed up some of this.

I’m still going to make an excessive number of plans. Like I said, it gives me some peace of mind to be prepared.

Right now I’m thinking that 35 feels like a good age to be married with kids by.

I’ll let you know in 10 more years.

 

May the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie

Captain's Log, Day 18: What is Love?

Date: June 9, 2020

Time of post: 5:55 AM

Quarantine Day: 76

Last Song I Listened To: “Sit Still, Look Pretty" by Daya

Last Person I Communicated With: I sent a snapchat that no one has responded to yet, lol

Last Thing I Ate: sugar-free caramel candy

Last Thing I Read: fanfic…again

Current Mood: reflective

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: glued my “grow” wall hanging back together after it fell and broke

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: do my dishes

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: the world is a dumpster fire

One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla and Tyler are coming back from Dallas this week!

Dear Apocalypsers,

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. I know, who thinks about love when the world is full of so much pain right now?

I think it’s a coping mechanism. Right now, when there is so much fear and uncertainty and hate and violence and injustice, finding a few minutes of love and happiness in a day feels like a big middle finger to a cruel universe that seems to want us to be miserable.

And, I really hate being told what to do, so my survival mode is now “happy out of spite.” It’s not a perfect defense. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up. It’s sometimes exhausting. But I’d hate to think what I’d become if I didn’t have it.

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” –Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I agree with Sam, but I’m always willing to recognize that we, as Americans and human beings, tend to romanticize “the struggle.” The American Revolution is painted as this miraculous “David vs. Goliath” story that led to our freedom from an oppressive government, but we don’t want to think about what that was actually like. The weeks or months without bathing, sweating and marching in suffocating summer heat, covered in blood, mud, wounds, and God-knows-what else; dying from frostbite in the winter because the militias didn’t have proper clothing or equipment; starvation and dehydration. And the World Wars? We love to make those sound like a sepia-colored romance. Sure, the soldier protagonist might watch his buddies die, but he always makes it home. He always gets the girl. And the U.S. always wins—because that’s history. We don’t like to think about the families of our protagonist’s friends who died. We don’t like to think about the families of the people he killed—and they weren’t all monsters, you know.

One of my favorite poems is “Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen. He wrote it about his experience as a soldier in WWI. I’ll give you fair warning, it’s hard to read, but it ends with the lines “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” (Those Latin lines translate to “It is sweet and fitting / to die for one’s country.)

I think about this poem a lot. Owen understood 100 years ago that we glorify war. We romanticize a lot of things. Especially history. The pessimistic reading of all this would be that humans are foolish and selfish and that winners write history, so why would they care what it took to win? The more realist reading might be that nationalist victory stories sell, and a sad patriotic film or book won’t be as successful as something with some kind of at least hopeful ending. The optimistic reading is that we want to believe everything will be happy in the end; we want all of the suffering to be worth it. I realize that I’m privileged enough to see the world through the third lens. Not everyone has been able to take that approach.

And I always wonder what that “good” is that Sam talks about. What makes humans willing to undergo that suffering? What do we fight for?

I’m probably over-generalizing here, but I think it’s some kind of intersection between love, hope, and happiness. That’s what I would fight for, anyway.

I’ve love love in all its forms. I say “in all its forms,” because I’ve never been in romantic love. Still, when I can’t fall asleep at night, I plan weddings to calm myself down. My Pinterest account is 80% themed weddings, 10% quotes, and 5% nurseries. If I had a do-over in life, I’d be a wedding planner or open a bridal shop. And I’ve always loved love. I still remember the first couple I ever “shipped” (long before Tumblr coined the phrase.) They were two 6^th grade classmates who nervously held hands for a couple weeks and “broke up.” They’re now both married to other people, but at the time, I fully believed they would marry each other. I didn’t really understand love then.

Please enjoy my themed wedding boards. From L: engagement rings, a Broadway-themed wedding, a zoo wedding, a hipster wedding, a LOTR nursery, a Harry Potter Wedding, a Doctor Who wedding, and a LOTR wedding.

I guess you could say that I don’t really understand love now, either, if my notebooks full of crossed out “Mr. and Mrs. ____”/ “Mr. and Mr. _____” / “Mrs. and Mrs. _____” are any indication. I’d say that love disappoints me about 98% of the time, seeing as only two real-life couples that I’ve shipped have gotten married. (Shout out to Katelyn & Griffin and Hollie & Daniel!) And, as someone who hates unnecessary risk, I really should look at those numbers and accept that I shouldn’t be as invested in love as I am.

Me with the new Katelyn & Griffin McDaniels at their wedding on
October 27, 2018. (I was the Maid of Honor!!)

Me with the new Hollie and Daniel Mayes at their
wedding on October 12, 2019. #PowerCOMple

I’ve witnessed a lot of heartbreak between the ages of 12 and 24, and I’ve lost weeks’ worth of sleep staying up consoling friends. (I wouldn’t have it any other way, so don’t try to stop me.) I’ve perfected every way of saying, “You deserve better,” and “You have so much worth even if you don’t have them.” When I was first introduced to true heartbreak, I was in 8^th grade. My best friend had just been dumped by her sophomore boyfriend the week of their 2-month anniversary. She cried in the cafeteria. At first, when faced with breakups, I’d ask my parents to drive me and my friend to the mall for ice cream and window shopping. By high school, we were old enough to drive ourselves. In undergrad, sometimes a text or phone call was all we could manage because of distance; or, if it was one of my friends from undergrad, we’d stay up late into the night, watching movies and crying and hashing it all out in my dorm. With every breakup, though, my heart broke a little, too. I always want my friends to be happy; I don’t want to see them heartbroken; I want them to have that “happily ever after” (even though I took a fairytales class last fall, and I know that the original fairytales didn’t have the happy ending connotations that we think of today). But despite all of the pain I’ve witnessed first-hand, I still shrieked when one of my friends told me that she was seeing a guy and she wanted me to meet him. I’m still planning the housewarming gifts for my other two friends who moving in with their boyfriends this summer. I can’t seem to give up on love. I have too much hope.

That isn’t to say that I don’t have my moments of cynicism. There was a period of four days during my first semester of grad school where I didn’t believe in love. It was a rough four days, ask anyone. I can’t even tell you what sparked that episode, but it honestly felt like a core part of my personality was taken away. All I remember is that we were reading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) in class, and our professor asked us what we thought about the preteen protagonists’ declarations of love at the end of the book. And I said something to the effect of, “We might think it’s dramatic reading it as adults, but for a middle school audience, I think it’s fine. They’re still young and believe in love and that it can last.” Now, I don’t what it was—my words or my tone or my delivery—but the entire class laughed, and my professor (whom I have so so so much respect for as a person and a scholar) just blanched. Thankfully, a couple mornings later, I saw a couple holding hands on the sidewalk as I was driving to class, and I didn’t want to run them over with my car, so I knew I was “recovering.”

(Ignore the time stamp) This is me and some friends at my Sophomore Elite Night (Spring semi-formal) on May 12, 2012.

That was probably the worst I’ve ever been. I had periods in high school and undergrad when I felt down on myself for being single. (For instance, I’m still a little bitter that I was never asked to any high school dance. That really got to me. I always went with a group, and I had so much fun, but I was 14/15/16/17/18; I wanted to feel wanted. Then in undergrad, I kid you not, that, for three of my four years, there were 3 couples in our core group of 8 friends. I was 

literally always with at least one couple. [None of them are together anymore, by the way.]

Me with some very good friends at my Junior Elite Night on February 16, 2013.

(My dad used to tell me that boys were “intimidated by me.” Good. If they’re intimidated by me because I’m smart and opinionated and great at talking about my feelings, then they wouldn’t last a week with me anyway. I try not to think about how he and my mom stated dating my mom’s junior year of high school and how they were married by the time they were my age.)

Most of my core group of high school friends at my Senior Elite Night on February 22, 2014.

Then I got to grad school and I surrounded myself with more single people. They were my age and older, and they are some of the smartest, most talented and incredible people with incredible dreams and the work ethic to achieve them. I’ve gotten really comfortable being single these last two years, thanks to them. Because we took all the energy we would have put into a romantic relationship and we put it into each other, our schoolwork, and our friendship. We loved each other through the two most difficult years of my life to date. And, okay, we didn’t get a marriage out of our time together, but we got something that’s just as strong and will arguably last longer: friendship.

Dustin (one of the aforementioned smart, talented, hardworking, incredible, and single grad students) and I were talking about this the other day, how we, as a society, put so much pressure on romantic love. When you say, “I’m dating so-and-so,” everyone knows that there are only two ways that can end: marriage or a breakup. I’ve always thought of a romantic relationship as the beginning of something new and exciting, but, when you break it down like that, spending literally the rest of your life with someone or giving them the best of you and getting heartbroken are equally terrifying in different ways. I can see how thinking too much about that could mess with any relationship. When you make a new friend, though, there feel like so many more places that relationship could go. I guess if you get technical, it’s the same two possible endings: you’ll either be friends for the rest of your life, or you won’t be. But there feels like more ways that a friendship can end that aren’t as painful as most breakups. So many times, friends just grow apart because of time or distance, but that doesn’t even guarantee a definite end like a breakup implies. For instance, just recently, I reached out to a friend from high school who I had been really close to. I said something about Niall Horan’s Heartbreak Weather album, because I knew he was her favorite member of One Direction back in the day. And we started talking more than we have in years. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that we drifted apart—we went to different schools and moved to different cities and only saw each other in passing at church functions on holidays—but I wouldn’t say that we ever stopped being friends. Not like I would stop being someone’s girlfriend.

When you take pics like this, you'll probably be friends for a long time.

And I just want to know why.

Why do we expect so much out of romantic love?

I can’t lie. I want to fall in love so badly. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to fall in love and have a big winter wedding. (Remember all those Pinterest boards? Well, I also keep a running list of who I’d want my bridesmaids to be—you know, just in case that comes up.) I want to have 2-4 kids, whose names I’ve been thinking of since I was 12 and was convinced I’d be marrying Nick Jonas. (Cringey Katie moment: I was going to name our daughter Nicole Denise—Denise after his mom. A sweet sentiment, but such a boring name.) So, yes, “falling in love” is at the top of my bucket list. But, like I told a newly-single friend the other day, I’m not going to put my whole life on pause to wait for a boy to catch up with me. I have a lot of other things on my bucket list, too: get published in The Lion and the Unicorn and ChLA Quarterly, write a book, visit Europe, get a PhD, see a show on Broadway, go to a Taylor Swift concert (and probably more). When a man comes along who wants to do all that, too, then he’ll be welcomed into my life with open arms. To put it another way, I like YA fantasy, and in one of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books, Magnus Bane—the immortal warlock—comments about how mortals are like stars, burning bright for a short period of time. Whoever ends up with me better like sunshine, because I want to burn so bright.

Get you a group of friends who will form a Harry Potter trivia
team with you. (I love them even though we came in 2nd)

Clearly, I put just as much pressure on love as society tells me to. (I called it a "rebellion earlier; that's a pretty big deal.) I mean, as a teenager, I had “goals” of being married with kids by 25. At 15, those 10 years felt like plenty of time to “get my life together.” Now, writing this at 24, I’m laughing. Married with kids is not in the cards for me in the next 8 months. Sorry, Teenage Katie…but I think you’ll be pretty happy with what else you’ve accomplished.

Like I said, I’ve gotten comfortable with being single. If you asked me right now if I was happy, I’d say, “Yes. Very.” (Okay, maybe not right now, but, like, pre-quarantine. I was really happy the end of February/beginning of March.) I don’t want a relationship just to be in a relationship, and I don’t want a relationship with just anyone. When I do something, I put all my energy into it, and that, I’m sure, will include romantic love. (Just ask my friends how “extra” I am in our friendships.) And I want that reciprocated. I want to feel desired and wanted and loved and appreciated.

And I’ll get it. I know it. Because I see much love in all its forms every day. Sure, maybe only ~2% of couples I’ve known have gotten married, but the love I see in those 2% show me that I shouldn’t settle for anything less than that. I see love in my mom, who makes sure to call me at least once a day. I see it in my friends who are willing to move our weekly Zoom chat a day because I’m feeling shitty and depressed. I see it in the way my friend lights up when she’s just talking about her new boyfriend. I see the hope that the idea of love brings to everyone.

At the very beginning of this post, I asked what kind of person obsesses over love when there was so much pain and injustice in the world right now.

To answer my own question, a person who refuses to give up.

Maybe I’m naïve or unrealistic, but hope—and, specifically, a hope for more love—is what’s getting me to each tomorrow.

Hey, we all need something, don’t we?

May the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie