In truth, I am a highly judgmental, sarcastic, and superior snarker. If you play “Angry Birds,” you will understand that I don’t ever go for the direct bombing and decimation of, say, Don Rickles. I am not cruel and I do not exploit weakness that a victim cannot help. I tend towards the sneaky missile lobbed at the base of the structure that causes it to topple as if by magic. I see ridiculousness, excess, phoniness, and stupidity and cannot resist the urge to come up with the perfect one-liner to illuminate my observations. Of course this is all highly subjective – my personal distaste for the cliché, the “keen grasp of the obvious,” the country duck in the yard and the Precious Moments in the curio cabinet (well, and also the curio cabinet) is just that: personal.

The thing about snark is that although I enjoy that moment when I make a snide comment and the other cool kids laugh, it is actually just as unkind as “The People of Walmart,” which makes me laugh involuntarily, but which I ultimately find to be both sad and unkind. (There I go again, trying to make myself sound like the Jeanne d’Arc of the downtrodden. It’s like a tic).

Recently I posted a Facebook status about suppressing snark because a tidbit of ridiculousness came my way that was so juicy, so clearly begging for an Ann Nichols Smack down that I could barely contain myself. I had to, for a variety of reasons, but none of them was the right reason: that drawing attention to the flaccid intellect of another human being is just plain nasty unless that person has chosen to be a public figure. Sure, I can spin that to allow myself to snark with impunity – it may be argued, plausibly, that a Facebook status is public, and that putting oneself “out there” in that form implies a certain idiot-snarker social contract. It’s also possible, plausibly, to argue that small children are chattle. Neither is really the right way to go in terms of creating utopia, reaching Nirvana, or simply not being an asshole.

In response to my Facebook status, my kind friends rushed to say “don’t suppress it, let your snark flag fly!” For which loyalty, I love them even more. The thing is, and it’s a Big Thing, it’s good for me to learn to suppress snark. There are things that need to be expressed, things about potential harm to other people, and feelings that need the cleansing light of utterance and aftershock. Those things, held in, create ulcers and destroy relationships. Snark, on the other hand, is a parlor trick, a way to make myself appear clever at the expense of another. I love it with all my heart, that masturbatory flexing of the “superior” intellect, but as a human endeavor it has the structural integrity of cotton candy. It’s just. Plain. Mean.

So know this about me: I’m really not all that nice. If you’re in a restaurant in a ball cap, or wearing a hoochie skirt, I am judging you. I will not, however, say a word. Not one.

“Who am I, anyway?

Am I my resume?”

-A Chorus Line

It has recently come to our attention that in 90 days my husband may, or may not have a job. As the House Writer, I began immediately to work on resumes, cover letters, and all manner of beguiling a lifetime of hard and varied work into an irresistible nugget of information. No spinning or glossing is necessary in this case; the man has worked hard from the time he was driving a tractor illegally through the fields of the family farm. The work, the hard, complicated part of the thing is distilling the best of him using “action verbs” (as opposed to those other, non-action verbs) and using terms and jargon expected by the business world.

As I write about his work, and think again about the many things he knows, I think about how very odd, incomplete and schizophrenic my own resume would appear at this time in my life. As of 7:30 or so last night, I might have said something like “well, I gave up law to be a cook, and I’m not trained professionally but I’m really good at it.” Having come directly from putting 25 pounds of flank steak to bed in sealed bags of fragrant marinade, knowing that I would get up this morning and make 100 impossibly fluffy biscuits for strawberry shortcake, I was feeling pretty cocky. Plus, although this is somewhat embarrassing, I now own the black and white checked pants that are worn by chefs everywhere; wearing them when I work makes me feel like part of a tribe, a lineage that includes Escoffier and (regrettably) Guy Fieri.

By 8:00 last night I had done my job, worked on the resume, paid the bills, done the laundry, and flung myself on the couch to watch “Master Chef.” There were two challenges for the contestants, purportedly the 38 best “home cooks” in the country. Nota bene: since this competition was for “home cooks,” I smugly told myself that I couldn’t have competed because I am a PROFESSIONAL. Or something. At any rate, the first challenge was to establish that one could peel, core and slice an apple into pith-less, peel-less and uniform slices. This task was to be performed using a paring knife only, no swivel peelers or unit-tasking “corer” thingies. I was pretty sure I could have held my own on that one.

The next challenge was to make a chicken dish in 60 minutes. The time limit prevented any thought of braising or stewing, and the imperative of impressing three chef-judges by “respecting the chicken” made it pretty clear that, say, a rubber breast swimming in Campbell’s Cream of ___ with rice would not be a clutch play. I watched them scramble, the “amateurs,” and I became truly concerned about the fact that I would have failed spectacularly. I do not know 500 things to do with chicken in 60 minutes that would impress Gordon Ramsay. It would never have occurred to me to make a Chicken Etoufee using gizzards and livers, or to pound the chicken, roll it around Burratta and wrap it in Prosciutto. I might have done a passable curry, or something Italian, pounded thin and served with polenta or risotto, but I would never, ever have been able to do what those people did.

I worried it all night, my imaginary 60-Minute Chicken Failure. I would have been divested of my apron, sent home out the back door by way of the tomato crate props. And if I made a resume today, what would I say? Unlike my husband’s consistent, linear work history, my path is meandering. My tracks would lead mysteriously off the edges of various cliffs, only to reappear in yet another workplace. What would I say about what I do now? “Pretty good cook, capable of feeding lots of people at a time, doesn’t burn shit any more except for that uncooked ziti she dropped into the gas flame, totally untrained, no real knife skills, likely to be eliminated during ’60 Minute Chicken’ challenge. Lots of heart. Owns chef pants.”

Perhaps it’s a good thing that it’s my husband who is looking for a new job. I’d hire him, in a minute. He could probably even do something nifty with a chicken in an hour….

“Man it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.” -Neil Simon, Biloxi Blues

People like me are not supposed to live anyplace where it gets to be 90 degrees. I know people, lots of them, who are thrilled when they can live in tank tops and shorts, spend days at the pool and “soak up the sun.” I am getting better about summer, really I am; I am enamored with the abundance of produce, the lightweight clothes, the longer days, the profuse foliage and the relaxation of schedules. When the mercury pushes above 85ish, however, I feel like someone has drained my blood in my sleep. I feel the lethargy of moving through deep, heavy water that slows my body and fills my brain, and my skin seems to be made up entirely of sweat and mosquito bites. I would rather, frankly, be shivering in a parka near the Arctic Circle.

I have decided that this difficulty with the “Lazy, hazy days of summer” is probably mine by birthright. On one side I come from a solid Scot/Irish bloodline, and the other is Hungarian and Russian. No one who contributed to my DNA lived anywhere where it was 90 degrees at any time of year, at least not until they were driven away by the absence of potatoes or the presence of pogroms. I am, therefore, programmed for the cool, the foggy and the snowbound life, a creature meant by nature to eat Yorkshire Pudding and Pierogen in a sweater somewhere near a roaring fire. Years ago, based on this uninformed but sincere anthropological analysis, I made a plan. On the hottest days, the days like today when I wake up and it is already 80, I simply adopt a different set of cultural influences. I choose places where the natives deal particularly well with extreme heat, and transform my frizzy, pasty self into a hot-blooded creature, a Frida Kahlo lizard with bright azure toenails sitting in the brightest patch of sunlight. I have, for purposes of my fantasy, created a kind of composite nationality that is about half Italian and half Indian .(In case you are rolling your eyes about the influence of “Eat, Pray, Love,” I hasten to assure you that this particular cultural Frankenstein was created long before Elizabeth Gilbert ever started her pasta tour of Rome. It is all mine, all mine, and Julia Roberts is not interested in playing me in the movie version).

The way this thing works, and it does work, is that I slow everything down and become languid and graceful. Rushing around is the cause of sweat and frizz. Gliding slowly I can imagine myself in a sari, walking through a crowded, cardamom-scented open air market choosing the best cauliflower for my Aloo Gobi. I cook spicy things when it’s terribly hot, and while I am cooking them I play ragas and Satayajit Ray soundtracks in the kitchen. I put a tiny bit of Nag Champa oil in my hair, clip it up, off my neck, and wear dangly earrings. It is still hot, really too hot for me, but I find great succor in a gauzy blouse, a fresh mango and a fan that turns my earrings into wind chimes.

My Fauxtalian ancestry is more informed by actual fact; I have never set foot in India, but I have spent time in Italy during the summer. I am interested not in the high-heeled, sunny, horn-honking blitz of a busy day in Rome, but in the practice of shutting everything down for a couple of hours after lunch in order to take a nap. It makes perfect sense, particularly when it is really too hot to stay awake, to close the shutters, turn on the ceiling fan and put a “chiuso” sign in the window until the sun pulls in its claws. One misses the killing mid-day heat, and works into the early evening, trading the hottest hours of the day for those that are cooler, quieter, and possibly aligned with Campari on ice. There is also, of course, the cooking – there is nothing better than a Caprese salad when the tomatoes are fresh, or a quick Pasta Pomodoro.

Today it is supposedly going to be 96 degrees, when all is said and done. I am off to work in my hot, hot kitchen with the fluidity of a Bollywood heroine and the philosophical acceptance of a Buddhist. At noon I will eat fruit and cheese and lie down on crisp, white linens until it’s time to head back to work. Call me Arundhati Funicello.

One of the shows I clung to until recently was “Glee.” I was an early adopter; I like shows that take chances, and I like music. It doesn’t hurt that I am also, secretly, fifteen years old. It was preposterous from the get-go that a small town in Ohio would have support three high schools with fabulous show choirs, one of which appears to be lifted directly out of one of Manhattan’s seedier boroughs, and another of which is a private boy’s school with blazer-sporting patricians. I suspended disbelief like crazy because I liked the musical numbers, the soap opera, and the awesomely evil Sue Sylvester, possibly one of the best characters in the history of television.

I also liked the fact that touchy issues were addressed head-on, and at first I cheered as Kurt dealt with the tough realities of being openly gay in high school. He fell in love with a straight friend, endured bullying, and worked on his relationship with his auto mechanic single father. There was some complexity, some suggestion that the world will not throw open its collective arms to embrace the “different” among us, but will require some persuasion and compassion. There was also a pregnant teen with an overbearing, Christian right-wing father who sent her packing, perpetual bullying of students who were not popular, show tunes, and generally enough to push all of my buttons and keep me coming back every Tuesday.

This season, I fell out of love. As a passionate straight ally and pacifist, I have grown weary of the amount of airtime devoted to lectures about homophobia and bullying. So shoot me. It is my firm belief that no one in America who really needs to be “schooled” in these areas is watching “Glee” on Tuesday nights, and that the rest of us are having our consciousnesses raised to the point where our heads may explode from the sheer force of being Woken Up every week.

Turn the show one way in your mind and it is all about whimsical possibilities – the overweight girl from the AV Club captures the heart of the oversexed jock, the ditzy dancing cheerleader is torn between the boy in the wheelchair and her recently “out” lesbian cheerleader lover. I should, by all rights, love this stuff; I was a plain, overweight girl in high school, and my fists should be pumping in the air when the studly guy chases the considerable tail of his unlikely obsession. Turn the show a different way and it is, at this point, nothing more than a soapbox for its creator to correct us, enlighten us, and make us better, week after week. If we’re already there it begins to feel like a reverse kind of bullying, a bludgeoning with the blunt weapon of political correctness. It is not creative, not subtle, and, for me, not worth an hour of my life any more.

I still love Sue Sylvester, whose acidity is almost sharp enough to balance the treacly self-righteousness of the rest of the show. I still enjoy the music, although not as much as I did during the first season. A recent arrangement of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” made me want to gouge out my own eyes. I get a kick out of the guest stars, particularly Neil Patrick Harris and Gwyneth Paltrow, but it’s still not enough. It was a daring, vastly entertaining experiment and for a time I would move heaven and earth to make sure I was home at 8:00 on Tuesday nights to see what happened next.

Last night, I ate Indian food with my family and visited with a neighbor. No Glee, but much more happiness.

“It’s a bird,” he said, bending to look as I quickly stood up to avoid looking. “A robin.”  He scooped up one of the cats; the other fled into the yard. I made myself look at the terrified creature on the sisal rug. It was twisted wrong, eyes open, rapid heart beat visible as it sat exposed and traumatized. He caught the other cat and put her in the house.

As a child, I would have insisted that we put the bird in a shoebox, feed it with an eyedropper and try to keep it alive. I don’t know whether I have become less hopeful or more realistic in my old age – probably some combination of the two. I knew that feeling of being trapped, stricken, heart racing, with a sickening wound. I could be saved with time, rest and love, but the robin would require medical attention that we could not afford. It seemed unlikely that there was any local organization that would rush out to rescue a common robin at 9:00 on a Sunday night.

“I don’t think it can fly,” I observed, looking away and blinking rapidly. “What’s going to happen to it?”

“I’ll catch it and move it,” he answered. “If it really can’t fly-“

“We have to kill it” I finished. I thought ridiculous, philosophical thoughts. I am not supposed to kill anything, and as a Buddhist I should probably just let it die or be eaten, as nature would have it. I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to be the one to kill it because I couldn’t. Rob would have to be the one to put it out of its misery while I avoided the whole thing. I knew it had to be killed; I could not forget its blank eye and the frantic beating of its tiny heart. The cats had been doing their job, we had interrupted, and I could not believe that there was any compassionate solution other than a swift, man-made death. I still wanted to save it.

Rob set it gently on the lawn and we watched it for a bit; I had made a half-assed plea for time based on my delusion that adrenaline would kick in and the broken creature would suddenly take flight. It sat, it hopped a bit; it clearly would have flown away had it been able. There was no miracle, St. Francis did not appear in his roughly woven robe to lift the broken thing and set it free from pain and danger. No one’s eye was on the sparrow that was the robin in our yard.

“So, what are you going to do?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m going to have to hit it with a shovel. It’ll be fast. Then I’ll put it in a bag in the trash so the cats can’t get at it.” I nodded. I went into the house, taking a last look through the darkening air at the small shape that now huddled near the sidewalk. Inside, I sat at my computer, looking at things and not seeing them, until he came in. “It’s done” he said. “You know that wasn’t easy for me to do. It felt good that I could put it out of its misery so it wouldn’t suffer any more, but it still wasn’t easy.” I nodded, still staring at Facebook updates that might as well have been in Cyrillics.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

No one had his eye on that robin.

 ”Depression is anger without enthusiasm.”

-Anon

I have always envied people capable of real, honest anger. By “anger” I do not mean the persistent wormholes of bitterness that lead to a grim worldview and the auxiliary need to puncture balloons and rain on parades. What I admire is the capacity to look steadily into the eyes of anger, shake its hand, share a drink and a dance and bid it adieu while the band is still playing. I imagine that people capable of expressing anger have some skill or supernatural power that allows them to turn the initial burn into a bright blue flame, apply heat to the appropriate parties, and extinguish it before moving on to the next thing. My mother can do it, as can my brother, and my only child has clearly inherited the DNA that permits him to hurl a shoe and return almost immediately to his sunny set point. I envy them that.

Too much anger is a terrible thing; expressed or suppressed it is the foundation for abuse, depression, violence, ulcers and the kind of killing cynicism that paints all red doors a dull black. I have, only recently, had the experience of bumping my shopping cart accidentally into the cart of a fellow shopper. Looking up to smile and apologize, I was met with a roll of her terrible eyes and a gnashing of her terrible teeth. She “tched” in my general direction and muttered something to her companion about people needing to look where they were going. Something was eating her alive and imprinting a kind of lividity on every human contact.

My own tendency is to swallow the flame and try to maintain my composure as my tender innards are consumed. Like Whack-A-Mole, the swallowed fury pops up as headaches, depression, tears, tics, hives, and (on one memorable occasion) the perceived inability to swallow.  Consciously, I believe that if my Chi is all balanced and I am Living Right, I will be able to rise above anything so destructive and petty as blazing fury and all that comes with it. I was also raised to have lovely manners, a proposition that makes no allowance for any expression of anger more discernible than the icy hauteur of “the cut direct.” In laymens’ terms, as far as the healthy expression of anger is concerned, I am screwed.

It can’t be bad to have some anger, though; in the same way that the heat from a burner warns that the hand should go no closer, anger is some kind of vestigial warning that something is wrong. If I were capable of sorting anger into tidy piles, “Justified” and “Get Over Yourself,” I might do better. If someone is threatening my child, cutting down my prized Lilac or treating me in some objectively cruel way, it seems reasonably healthy to feel the burn, dismiss it as a primal motivator, and take care of the presenting problem. If the offense is subtler, say, the failure to conform to my unspoken wishes or to read my mind correctly, it should properly be dismissed. It’s kind of a moot issue, though; whether jack-booted thugs were confiscating my library or I had to wait in line behind a coupon champion, I would be utterly incapable of speaking up.

The closest I can get to actual anger is to be spectacularly passive-aggressive. If there were Academy Awards for the strangled and distorted attempt to say everything while saying nothing, my shelves would be a glittering mass of golden statuary.  “Go ahead, jack-booted thugs,” I might say, “Enjoy your destruction of my first edition of The Red Pony.” I believe, really and truly, that these muffled cries will send a message, smite wrongdoers, and do it all in pearls and cashmere. I swallow the scalding soup of rage, unwilling to part my lips to admit the cooling air that might offer some relief, and then I congratulate myself, still seething, on my discipline. I have also been known to drive around listening to my “Angry” mix, singing along to “Hollaback Girl,” “You Oughtta Know,” and “Fuck you.” That’ll teach them.

I don’t know if this is a curable issue, and if it is, whether the cure is found in a therapist’s office, a brisk walk, a prescription bottle, a Primal Scream retreat in some flaky California enclave, or a firmer resolve to follow the Buddhist principals that make of anger nothing more than a passing thing to be observed and released. Is some anger normal, and if so how much, and is so when, and how, and does it ever make anything clearer, stronger or better?

My tic and I are going to scream in the shower.

As a child, I had very curly hair. Although the ringlets disappeared into memory some time around my fourth birthday, the curl returned when it rained, when it was humid, and after I swam in the ocean. I speak not of some beach goddess wave, but of actual ringlets, small, perfect spirals appearing at the nape of my neck and colonizing the rest of my head. That uncontrolled, disorganized tangle of curls has disgusted me since I was old enough to express an opinion about my appearance. It was wild, alien, and messy. Even as a child, I sensed that I was not a person who could carry off hair that attracted attention. I preferred to be invisible, thinking that if no one was arrested by the sight of wide, frizzy curls, no one would look closer and see the fat cheeks, tummy pooch and obdurate plainness.

The hair required constant vigilance. It was first twisted into tight braids, and later blown dry in exhaustive sessions involving approximately 32 products with “smooth” in the name. I once attended an August wedding in Cleveland, during which I went into the bathroom eight times in two hours trying frantically to beat my curls into submission. It really didn’t matter what I looked like; my date was gay and the only straight man I knew at the ceremony was the groom, but I was obsessed. By the end of the evening my hair contained as much lacquer as a Chinese screen, and had assumed the shape of a rather unattractive lampshade: straight-ish to a point just below my ears and then bursting into a row of curls resembling that bobbly kind of fringe.

On a recent Saturday grocery run, I noticed that I was fixating on the cascading ringlets of a woman in the Self-Serve checkout line. In that sort of subjective, subconscious assessment we all make a hundred times a day, I classified her as “sexy.” She was not particularly beautiful, but her hair spoke of an unfussy life spent savoring sensual pleasures. I knew by looking at her that she could get up, take a shower and get dressed with barely a glance in the mirror. Her light was not hidden under a bushel of styling product, and she was comfortable in her skin, in her hair, and in her being.

This was a woman who slept naked in the heat of summer, and would never give up a chance to swim in the Atlantic because of the way her thighs looked in a bathing suit. She would never order a plate of field greens when she wanted a steak, and she would be able to dance without the pathetic White Girl Rigor that has always afflicted me. If she ate a juicy peach she would let the juice run down her cheek, and it was likely that some very lucky person might get to kiss some of it from her lips and chin. She looked un-careful, un-controlled, and un-inhibited.

Surfacing a bit to place my groceries on the belt (as always, grouped by food type and in straight lines down one side of the belt) I considered my own hair. It is, at that moment, blown straight with tiny ringlets popping up at the nape of my neck. It rains often, lately and the air is heavy with the spring humidity that makes the green of buds extra vivid and carries a whiff of damp earth. I thought about letting go, surrendering to nature and giving the curls a season of living large and out of control. It would be hard for me, a control freak who could, until recently, have taught a class called Tightly Wrapped at the local community center to young women in danger of surrendering to a life of musky perfume, excessively loud laughter and saying “yes” to things just because they might be fun. I have always lived with an invisible monitor watching me from the near distance, shaking her head at any action that tends to draw attention. “Do not,” she says, “sway your hips to the music at the concert. You look ridiculous. Do not leave the house without your face on, don’t make trouble for anyone, don’t draw attention to yourself.” In the past couple of years I have been fighting back, one toe ring, expletive and mid-week beer at a time, flirting with the checkout guy, and leaving the odd thing to chance. It’s time, I think, high time to let my hair out and see whether I can bury her, frown line and all, in a mass of soft, crazy curls.

I wink at my oppressive monitor as I burn rubber and drive away, ringlets tangling in the moist, fragrant air, and middle finger raised in her general direction. Music blasts from my stereo, I sing out loud with my mouth open wide, letting the warm sun relax me so that I can move fluidly to the beat. I am alive, I am floating to the surface like a cork, and I’m on my way to buy peaches.

I am something wild.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

-Joan Didion

Nearly twenty years ago, I followed my dreams to a better life. Not the pasty pink, bedazzled “dreams” that are aspirations, but the gritty movies that play on the screen of the sleeping brain. Living far from my family in a city where I could afford to do nothing more than pay for rent and food, working for a rapidly decompensating crazy person, and finally aware that The One was not, I was miserable. One April night I dreamed that my father had died, a dream so vivid that I spent the following workday somber and shaken. Two nights later, I dreamed that my brother died in an accident. Half awake, struggling up from sleep, away from the dream that seemed to be pulling me deeper into despair and isolation, I heard a voice. “Go home,” it said. Go home. Whatever it was, my subconscious, a glass of red wine, or some supernatural force, it pointed its finger like the ghost of Christmas Present to the place where I belonged. I did go home, where I opened like a flower kept too long in the cooler; I prospered and bloomed.

The death dreams have been with me all my life, and I have learned to be attentive, to give a gentle shove to the images and emotions that hang dense around me as I awaken and look for the real message. Almost always there is an Error Message somewhere in my life, and although I continually reboot and develop work-arounds, the problem really requires serious attention. I am a rational person who believes in objective evidence kinds of things, but I also believe in the awesome powers of the spiritual world to move, unbidden and elusive, through our lives. Dreams may be nothing more than the repurposed scraps of our busy brains, they may be coded Freudian signs of pathology or Jungian clues to what we have suppressed during waking hours. They may, as the Chinese believed for centuries, be spirit guides.

I have other recurring dreams, one in which I am taking a test and know none of the subject matter, one where I am about to go on stage to perform in a play and do not know my lines, and one in which I am in a serious setting and discover, suddenly, that I am missing my clothes. Classic anxiety dreams, these have changed from my childhood dream of being left alone in a car that slid into the river near our house. I also dreamed that a vampire was trying to get to my neck, after which I slept for years with a large teddy bear (named Edward) between my neck and my pillow as a safety measure. These all seem ordinary to me, dreams that I think most of us have in one form or another. They are common as dirt, those dreams, and seem to require little in the way of analysis.

The dreams that perplex, that defy easy interpretation, are dreams of longing. The miraculous reunion with the long-dead friend, the birth of a baby long after such a thing is biologically impossible, these are the dreams that color our waking hours with melancholy and a sense of loss that can’t be conquered easily by brisk activity or a mental promise to address the issue with a twelve-point plan. Standing on the beach beneath the scorching, cleansing sun of Rational Thought, we hurl something into the darkest, coldest depths of the ocean. Days, months, years later it washes up on the sand at our feet, a small, perfect shell filled with loss, regret and a searing tantalizing hint of sweetness. I cannot believe that some spirit guide is pointing us back to a place impossible to reach; it must just be some sort of psychic flotsam that lies hidden beneath the gently waving seaweed until it’s released by some shift in the current.

In dreams, all guards lowered, all channels open, nothing is ever really gone.

Upstairs in my childhood room, suffering from the agony that comes with the return home after a year of living in a dormitory among soul mates, I sulked. I would go downstairs and be pleasant, but it was not my party. I lay on my bed staring at the whorls of white paint as familiar as the feeling of a breath filling my lungs. It was not my first time at the rodeo; I had spent more hours sulking in that bed than I had ever committed to any productive activity. I was prototypical Emo, a creature of thin skin, my heart beating bloody on my sleeve.

The phone rang, and from the thick tangle of laughter, chatter and ice in glasses downstairs came my father’s voice. “Annie?” I rose and went to the top of the stairs. It couldn’t be the phone for me; my local friends were all gone, and my Conservatory friends were more likely to write letters in those days of landlines and long distance charges.

“Yes?” I hollered back. I knew he hated it when I did that, shouted instead of taking the time to go where an actual conversation was possible. I knew he would hate it even more in front of a house filled with guests. He came to the foot of the stairs, a vision in his Graham plaid kilt, a bonnet on his silvering hair.

“You have a phone call,” he said, loud enough for me to hear him over the madding crowd. “A boy. Ruben something-or-other.” I was suddenly hot and then cold, and required the solidity of the wall. “Can you take it up there?” My father asked, oblivious to the fact that my internal organs were melting and I was thrumming with anxiety.

“Can you tell him I’m not here?”

“I already told him you were here.” Oh. I was going to have to talk to Ruben Rosenberg unless I chose, at that precise moment, to throw myself down the stairs, or run into the bathroom, break a glass and eat all of the pieces.

“Hang up when I pick up?” I asked weakly. I might get sick, I thought, in fact, I felt sick, like I might throw up, or fall over, or have one of those atypical heart attacks 19-year-olds occasionally had. I walked into my parents’ bedroom and looked at the ivory plastic phone, wondering why, if someone was really mad at you, really hated you, they would call you from New Jersey on the day of the Royal Wedding. Or at all. Why would there be any need for further connection, more cuts and abrasions to the psyche, further entanglement? I picked up the phone, heard the noise of the party downstairs. “I’m on, Dad,” I said. There was a click, and the noise stopped. I heard only breathing.

“I just wanted to tell you that you’re a bitch.” He said. “I spent a lot of money on that dance, and you could have told me you didn’t want to go with me. I spent a lot of money on that necklace, too.” I breathed, raggedly. There are girls who, at 19, know things about boys. They know how to attract them, how to please them, and the art of the gentle rebuff. They are comfortable in their roles as vixens, charmers, and holders of power. I was not among them.

“I’m sorry,” I said on an exhale. I was sorry. I had met Ruben when I was invited to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. I had gone to New Jersey with Pat, an oboe player from Oregon who I was in love with in ways juvenile and excessive. He and I were too far from home to justify plane tickets for a four-day trip, and his roommate’s parents had invited us to eat turkey with them in Cherry Hill. Later I would know that Pat was gay, he would tell me in the eighth floor laundry room one night, and I would slap him, and cry for weeks.

Later, in my grief and panic I would welcome the letters from Ruben, who was the roommate’s best friend from high school. He had had joined us on our post-turkey excursion into Philadelphia, and decided that he liked me. He was smart, and funny, he was male, he paid attention to me. He drew cartoons for me, and he sent me a gold “A” on a chain, the first real present I had ever received from a boy. I swelled with the attention, buckets of water for a plant that had, only recently, been near death from drought. I had no feelings for him at all; he was Not Pat, not the face I wanted to see, not the right fit, but breathing. It seemed, as it often does when one is swimming in the solipsistic sea of adolescence, that it was a fair trade offered by the cosmos: I had lost Pat, who returned to the dorm every morning with a toothbrush in his pocket, but I would get the devotion of Ruben, who made up in eagerness for what he lacked in desirability.

“You’re sorry?!” his voice rose. I hated his voice. He was, in my mind, vaguely reptilian. He had a kind of a beard, which I didn’t like, and I remembered him putting his hand on the small of my back to steer me through a doorway, and the meeting of lips that had made me recoil and sent everything racing downhill. Pat had told me that kissing a girl was “like kissing white bread;” he could do it, but he felt nothing. Kissing Ruben Rosenberg, all I could think of was that he was Not Pat, Not Pat, Not my Pat. “You’re sorry. Well, here’s the thing. I have a girlfriend now, and I’m really happy.” I waited. He said nothing; he had clearly expected some kind of reaction. Downstairs, there was a roar of laughter, a clinking of glasses.

“That’s good. Ruben, I have to-“

“She’s pretty. She’s really pretty. I didn’t want to tell you this before, but you look like Miss Piggy. Especially in that stupid dress. How does that make you feel?” I had invited him to The Strauss Ball, the end of the year formal at the Conservatory. My friends were going, I had never been on a real date, and if I couldn’t go with Pat, waltz with him, listen to him breathing as he pulled me close on the dance floor, it made no difference who took me. I made plans with Ruben, he took time from school, rented a tuxedo, and made reservations at the Top of the Hub, the revolving restaurant in the Prudential Tower. He appeared on a Friday, corsage in a box, looking to see that I was wearing the golden “A” along with my Gunne Saxe dress. I knew as soon as I met him in the lobby of the dorm that it was wrong, all wrong, terribly wrong. I became progressively quieter until, by the third revolution of the restaurant, I was mute. I cried while I put on my long dress and pinned up my hair. I met him at the end of my hall, we sat down on a bench before walking across the street to the Ball, and he tried to kiss me. I pulled my head away and told him, tears destroying my inexpert makeup, that I couldn’t go. I was sorry, I was so sorry, but it was a physical impossibility for me to go down in the elevator, walk across Huntington Avenue and dance to Strauss waltzes. “Well?” he demanded. “How does the truth feel? I did all that stuff because I felt sorry for you, Miss Piggy. I want that necklace back, by the way, it was expensive. My mom says you should send it back to me.”

“I don’t – I guess I-“

“How does it feel, Miss Piggy?!” He was getting louder, the party was escalating as more corks were popped, I had no words for anyone. “Miss Piiiii-geeeeee,” he made a sort of hog call, “I want that necklace back you bitch. I had to miss a final to go to Boston, I had to go ask my professor if I could take it on a different day because of you, Miss Piggy.” My father appeared in the doorway, looked at my blanched face and wet eyes, and looked at the receiver in my hand with a raised eyebrow. I nodded. I needed him, my dad the highland host, I needed him to save me. Ruben continued to speak as I put my hand over the mouthpiece.

“It’s a guy from school. He’s being really mean, I can’t get him off the phone.” My father extended a hand, took the receiver, and spoke in his most awesomely terrifying voice.

“No gentleman harasses a lady, young man. This conversation is over, and you had best not call here again.” He returned the phone to its plastic cradle and looked at me. “Get cleaned up and come down,” he said gently, “people are asking to see you.” I walked to my room, stuffing in trailing bits of guilt, humiliation and a swelling of love for my father. On my dresser was the “A” in its velvet box; I had liked it there, because it was the only present I ever got from a boy. I snapped the box shut with a resounding thwack, opened the top drawer and shoved it in, far behind the balled socks and “No Nonsense” packages. I looked in the mirror, saw more than I could yet understand, and got ready for the Royal Wedding party.

It’s best when they work together, of course, when they dovetail so seamlessly that the words could not have been set to any other music and the music cannot be imagined with any other words. The Magnetic Field’s “Busby Berkley Dreams” with its dreamy, tongue-in-cheek retro lyrics and the purposely untuned and ancient piano. R.E.M’s “Nightswimming” with music that warms and encourages the wistfulness of the lyrics to make an atmosphere all hot, “quiet night,” with the photograph stuck to the dashboard of the car moving through the dark, moist heat.

If you had to choose, though, sifting through the universe of songs that compose the musical warp and woof of your spirit, would you choose the songs that made you move unconsciously to the beat or the ones that spoke to your soul with words that you could have written, if only you could write like that?

Although I am annoyed by a stupid lyric, there is an ease, a primal sort of connection to certain kinds of beats; we all feel the pull of “Money, Money,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Tutti Frutti.” Consider, if you will, the lure of the late, great “Mmmm Bop” or the “Do Ron Ron,“ or that Swedish song called “Cobrastyle” that had lyrics to the effect of “gdang gdang diggy diggy.“ We feel our hips loosen and sway, find ourselves snapping, tapping, humming and bobbing our heads. It isn’t about lyrics; the lyrics are utterly ridiculous. It’s about music as a drug, the kind that catches you the first time even if you are only half paying attention, and makes you want it again.

There are Ramones songs that are lyrically uninteresting but I will listen to them back to back because of the way they make me feel tough and fast and alive. There is a song called “Beat The Devil’s Tattoo” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club that had me at “hello,” although I can make neither heads nor tails of the lyrics. It’s slow, deliberate, but persuasive in a way that won’t let me go until it’s finished. It’s kind of a dirge, but a very naughty, sexy dirge that makes me think I could really just put on my studded boots and try a little heroin if I didn’t have to drive the kid to school. You would not quote these songs, or write the words out and tape them to your notebook, but they get to you.

Then there are those other songs, those that are poetry set to music. The ones that give you mantras and take-away stories to hold close during storms. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, The Beatles, Ani Di Franco, and The Smiths have all given me words, literally, to live by. Joni Mitchell gave me this:

You’ve had lots of lovely women
Now you turn your gaze to me
Weighing the beauty and the imperfection
To see if I’m worthy
Like the church
Like a cop
Like a mother
You want me to be truthful
Sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though
And I need your approval

I feel the pain in Cohen’s “love is not a victory march/it‘s a cold and it‘s a broken hallelujah,” the matter-of-fact resiliency of Di Franco’s “what doesn’t bend, breaks,” and The Smith’s “for once in my life let me, let me, let me get what I want this time.” The words “Let It Be” are my most basic directive in life. They are mantras, those words, they are worthy of attention, and thought, repetition and analysis.

But every one of those songs with the lyrics that I hold close, read like poetry and secretly believe to be written just for me, have beautiful music. They all have music that fits them, not perhaps the brazen, addictive riffs of “Mmmm Bop,” but a quieter charm that seems at first like a supporting player but becomes as essential as the words to a patient listener. You may start out listening to Tom Waits’ “Martha” and becoming entranced in the story of old lovers reconnecting, but soon you will find that the music itself, simple, acoustic and repetitive, spinning out into a chorus warmed by strings, is perfect. Perfect and necessary.

As it turns out, I can get what I think is a syllogism out of this: all great songs have great music, and some great songs have great lyrics, but not all great songs have great lyrics. That means, I think that a) I should not give up my day job and become a scientist, and b) music is more important than lyrics. They were right. Even my brother.

There is, in the final analysis, no need to choose. I will turn up “Superfreak” and bang the steering wheel, or I will get lost in Roberta Flack and (if no one’s looking) I’ll get all misty eyed. I will love songs that perfectly marry music and lyrics, a category which includes most of The Pretenders, Tom Petty, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, The Magnetic Fields, Talking Heads, and hundreds more that I’m forgetting. I will love songs that have ridiculous lyrics but make me want to move, like those of The Bee Gees, Herman’s Hermits, and Abba. I will unconditionally love Van Morrison, whose lyrics are sometimes incomprehensible but which make me believe that I am in receipt of a communication from a soul that is yearning to connect with my own.

I’m not done with this, quite yet. I don’t know where to put logocentric genres like rap and hip hop, or dance and club music that seems to be all about the beat, but what about “I Will Survive” which has some of the best getting-through-a-breakup lyrics ever written? What about country songs and folk ballads that are really all about the story, the John Deere green, the lost maiden with the raven locks? This analysis may be the work of a lifetime. Next year at this time I will write off all of my iTunes purchases as “work-related expenses.” After my death, a massive tome will be published outlining my theory on thousands of tissue-thin pages with multiple glossaries and indexes.

A girl can dream.