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Over Spring Break I went to visit my Grandma in Florida. Below is the first of a three-part piece titled, “The World at a Slow Pace,” about my time in her lovely condo.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Today my grandma wears dark blue sweatpants and a thin, light blue sweater flipped inside out. Her sweatpants rest slightly above her ankles and I can see that she has decided to wear one sock, on her left foot, and to keep the other bare. Both feet shuffle around the condo in white slippers designed for comfort rather than support.

Earlier today she walked the ten minutes to the beach with me, and I could see her legs from the knees down. Veins run down her shins like rivers on a map, blue and scattered and criss-crossing everywhere. The skin underneath her chin sits like the throat of a turkey, hanging curved and fleshy off her trachea. My grandma is surprisingly agile for her age; as we walk she sometimes notices that her pace is slowing, so she takes a breath and swings her arms and moves with a new determination.

“Nice that the beach is so close.” I say. “Frank’s place is so nice!”

“It’s fine.” She says resigned.

A few years ago, when she spent her winters with her second husband Murray, she lived in a million-dollar apartment in an extravagant high-rise north of Miami. Whitney Houston and Barry Bonds owned places in the same building.

She was married to Murray for eleven years; was married to my grandfather for forty before that. Now she lives with Frank, although they are not married, on the west side of Florida, in a small two-bedroom condo in a development of two-bedroom condos and old people. Frank is a widower and an old friend of the family’s. So when the two found themselves alone, they thought why not be together?

Around every corner of the development I can see tennis courts and shuffleboard games, unused and waiting like park benches in the winter.

I don’t ask my grandma if the pain of burying two husbands is too overwhelming to consider marriage for a third time. I don’t ask if the toll of surviving two separate loves has impacted her physical or emotional health. But I can see it in her actions, small steps she takes to see the middle and end of each day.

I have to hold onto my glass of water here, or else she will clear it away to the sink within five minutes. She is constantly cleaning, even though the apartment is as spotless as can be: white walls, white window curtains, white tile floors, and not a speck of dirt to be seen. There are potted plants and flowers around the condo, several in the living room and more out on the front patio. She waters them twice a day. Talks on the phone to friends or family at least six or seven times a day. She walks to and on and from the beach, each time remembering the route she takes to the sand path out loud.

I notice she takes long in the bathroom. Perhaps a sign of getting older.

After dessert, before sleep, she asks, “Frank, do you want to use the bathroom first or should I?”

Their days are a constant organizing of small matters: runs to the grocery store, deciding dinner menus and afternoon naps. She’s invited friends over for dinner tomorrow night, made plans to see a movie on Tuesday. The sun begins in the backyard, bright and eager over the shared, heated swimming pool, and ends in the front, sliding past the still palm trees and the slow-moving golf carts.

I have done nothing today and still feel tired. I sit with Frank on the white couches, under white lighting, as he finishes every word of the New York Times. I am absorbed in my book and we both sit in the quiet as my grandma finishes cleaning, and then joins us with her own book. Eventually, we decide it is time for sleep, and I wander to the twin bed in the guestroom, wondering how I could possibly feel exhausted from a day of eating and sitting, but fall quickly asleep to a soft breeze through the open doors.

I have come to realize now, how there is only a month left in this semester, and how after that, there will only be two years left of college left for me. I am halfway through college already? What the hell man. Unless some divine intervention occurs in the next two years I don’t think I will be at all ready for life outside of academia. I am not ready to be exposed to the unsheltered Americana that awaits me as soon as I get a piece of paper that certifies that my parents paid for my college experience. Even recently, I had to fill out tax forms, out of sheer formality, because I made the little income I did make this year. So much for putting off any semblance of adult hood, the fact that I was filling it out, no matter how trivial, or how little content those forms had, I still felt the nagging sensation at the back of my head, telling me that I am a fucking child still, and probably will be for the better part of my near future. I heard once that the word sophomore originated from the Greek words Sophos, meaning wise, and moros, meaning foolish. Yes, there are moments when I feel I am that fool who thinks he is wise. Sometimes I do attempt to give myself a little credit for something that would be universally acclaimed by the adult world as not that special at all. But I need to convince myself now and then that I am succeeding in certain avenues of my life. I need to stay sane don’t I? But even this trivial experience with taxes, and the epiphany that I am halfway through college already (epiphany might be an exaggeration for most people, but my sense of time is horrendous), is this maybe not a moment of moros? Who am I to think that that is proof of me nearing adulthood? Fucking bullshit I say. I crack myself up, far too often.

Perhaps what is important is that you recognize the importance of remaining the fool, because if you are a fool for long enough, you eventually become wise – at least to a certain degree, for you may be no Da Vinci, but at least you aren’t mentally drooling over everything that isn’t immediately stimulating. Pretending to be wise is in and of itself a foolish act. So instead, I am going to spend the rest of my semester barely getting work done and acting like some blind probe in space, just try to find little tidbits of stimulation anywhere I can find it, then realizing it is already 1:00 in the morning, make the decision that I should go to sleep, but then be unable to go to sleep because I did nothing that day, then guilt trip myself for a bit, then wonder about the trivial things I talked about in this blog post already, then think about how I do like two of my classes this semester, realize a wonderful idea for a short story, I won’t write it down of course because I am already in bed, so I repeat it to myself over and over again and hope that I will remember it when I wake up from about 5 hours of sleep cause I spent all this time thinking in bed after getting in late in the first place, this rush of ideas will continue, ideas for various essays that I need to work on perhaps, and after all is thought of and not completed, I will tell myself, “fuck it, you are an idiot,” and then fall asleep.

Or I do something I have always done as a child: try to stay awake so that I can be consciously aware of the very moment I fall asleep at, so that I can specifically experience that elusive switch between awake and asleep. When that happens, I stay awake till I see the rising sun. Another day of foolishness, with a heavy sprinkle of sleepiness. A combination that everyone loves on a Monday.

My professor said something along the lines of:

We’re taught that love, at least “real love” is unconditional. If you really love someone, no matter how low they or you get, you are supposed to love them. We’re also taught that within that “unconditional love” is a clause that suggests when we really love them, we love them all of the time and there are never moments in which we do not love them. And that is simply just not true. Actually, that’s impossible.

I didn’t think much into this little lecture hall aphorism beyond nodding my head and thinking, “yeah people I love really piss me off.” The realization and perhaps the real implication of that lesson from my professor came this week.

Sometimes you fight with your family and sometimes you fight with your friends. Sometimes it’s you throwing a (in retrospect not-so) witty retort at your sister up the stairs only to receive an ample glare from your mother. Other times, it’s about something that matters.

You can swear they broke your trust. You can swear “that’s not what a real friend does.” You can swear “This is the last straw.” You can swear “We’re not talking again.” You can swear up and down and cross your heart and point your finger above your head and raise your palm flat before you. You can pound your fist on your desk when you tell your other friends and you can cry or you can be a stone-cold rock.

It is in these moments that my professor’s theory rang true. In those moments of fierce resentment and your roommate pretending not to notice the blood vessel demanding to pop through the skin on your forehead that you do not love that other person. And the thing is, that’s O.K.

The more important and implicit meaning (in my opinion) of my professor’s point–and maybe this is what those people who claim we always really actively love were getting at.

Those punctuated spans of loving are occasionally and abruptly ended with a misplaced period, a misplaced word, a misplaced action in the heat of the moment. But by loving the person at all in the first place, you open the door for the possibility of that moment being punctuated with a comma or a semicolon. Love allows you to finish your thought with the possibility of restarting it again.

Even in the times you stop loving for a brief moment, or three days, or a couple weeks, the cursor keeps blinking. You have time to finish your thought, to start a new thought, to remember what you forgot your train of thought was. You get to fall in love again.

We don’t love everyone all the time or even ever. But we are lucky enough to fall in love with our friends and family. Occasionally we fall out of love with our friends and family. But love means being able to talk, being able to grant space and be granted space. Most importantly, love means being able to forgive and be forgiven.

Unconditional love is not real. We fall in love. We fall out of love. But the funny nature of love is, it plants a comma in our hearts, allowing us to fall in love again. Love is not a continuous stream of doting and fairytale friendship. Love, thank goodness, isn’t a run-on sentence. Love is often underlined in green. Love is written in fragments with awkward punctuation interrupting a thought that was interrupted by something that got in your way. Love is full of dashes and semicolons and commas. Love is a fragmented and claused and a broken up language with half-realized thoughts ended unexpectedly.

But the important thing is that you can always pick up your sentence where it left off.

The important thing is that you can still read.

Love you, G.

I always describe myself as an arts/science person. This is not because I cannot decide which one is more important to me. Rather, it is because both equally fascinate me and one side helps me appreciate and understand the other so much better. I love the science behind why Jesus is positioned the way he is in “The Last Supper” or why Adele’s vocal give us chills during “Set Fire to the Rain”. Conversely, I am a science major because I see the beautiful art that underlies most scientific functions. They are simple and random, but also complex and perfectly orchestrated.

Let’s take a look at the craft of beer making. I truly consider this to be an art form and both my appreciation of science and art make me appreciate this type of art immensely. Let me first start off by saying that I am not much of a drinker. I just personally get a lot of pleasure out of it. While that may be true, I am absolutely fascinated by the art of alcohol production and bartending. I want to focus on just beer for right now, though. All forms of it starts out with the same four basic ingredients: water, a grain, hops (or other flavoring), and yeast. Through different levels of each and addition of other ingredients, beer turns into the thousands of varieties that we can find today. I personally find this stunning and beautiful in its own right. It’s the same reason why I find the brain so beautiful, it is complexity from simplicity. Others may disagree with me, but this is how I find beauty and this is how I define art.

Art and Science comingle in my mind so easily that I can’t really see the boundary that others draw between the two. Science is beautiful and art has reasoning behind it. The two are siblings that exist peacefully and are the ones who force them to be separate. I think we should all take some time to appreciate the beauty of both.

I was recently at a party where the subject of man-cuddling was brought up and became a point of debate. A friend of mine made it clear that he was afraid, for allegedly unknown reasons, of cuddling with another dude, and everyone else (most of whom were girls), naturally tried to pick apart why he felt this way. What could cause a fear so limiting as that of man-cuddling?

There is the obvious gut assumption made by many a Women’s Studies students that his masculinity must be so precariously balanced as part of his self-identity that he cannot indulge in the finer things in life. Buddy cuddles are such an integral part of any deep relationship that I cannot imagine what it must be like to deprive oneself of that. It became clear rather quickly that this did not explain his apparent phobia of the cuddles, however. The “fragile masculinity” explanation seems pretty extreme (I’m a Women’s Studies minor and even I think it sounds a little radical) and doesn’t usually translate well to the average Joe who doesn’t want to snuggle up with his best bro. So what is it? Why does my friend have real fears about hitting the cuddle couch with his friends?

Has he never experienced the glory of laying back and relaxing with his best dudes? Nope. He has in fact had perfectly fine cuddle sessions in his past, always with some dude named Ben, and never with any traumatizing side-effects. We can cross aversion off the list, along with any worries about finding out a deeply buried sexual preference, which he explained rather eloquently using a very specific and very vivid stand-up bit performed by Louis C.K. (if you want to watch it you should probably go seek it out yourself, and maybe turn on safe search while you’re at it). We were able to conclude that his fear was in no way the result of any past experience or prospective future experience.

At this point we were at a loss. None of us could see any reason why my friend should be afraid of being a cuddle bug, and neither could he. Perhaps some of it is rooted in his idea of what it means to be a man of his specific point of identity – his ideas of man-cuddling from the perspective of a straight male could differ from those who identify as LGBTQ. Or perhaps his views on cuddling are truly unique and dudes everywhere are settling down with a nice blanket and their best guy friend as we speak. We may never know, because we don’t really talk about dudes cuddling. We don’t really talk about cuddling in general, as if it’s not the most spectacularly comfy experience in the world (even when your arm is falling asleep and your neck is forming a kink from being at a weird angle). Maybe the solution is to bring cuddly conversation into our daily lives. When did physical contact become such a taboo talking point?

I have no idea why or if this is important, but I do know one thing. I am about to go cuddle with my roommate, and you all probably should, too.