The Best Kind of Bad Influence

“If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it, too?”

We’ve all heard that before, probably multiple times and with multiple landmarks. There were Very Good Reasons for people to protect you from yourself in your formative years even though, at the time, it probably royally pissed you off. However, if your guardians did at least the bare minimum in forming you into a functioning adult, you are now probably able to determine for yourself when free-falling from a point of architectural interest isn’t as dangerous as it seems. You have learned to identify slippery-slope arguments; you know that getting a tattoo will NOT grant you immediate membership to the Hells Angels and turn you into a smoking, swearing, leather-wearing, gun-toting, beard-growing, establishment-disowning maniac on a souped-up Harley. You know that there is no such thing as a special branch of law enforcement known as the ‘Seatbelt Police’, and they are not going to fall from the sky and arrest you for not having your seatbelt buckled before the car is started*. You know that if you keep making that face it won’t stick that way, if you swallow watermelon seeds you won’t grow a watermelon plant in your stomach, and that you really don’t have to wait a full hour to go swimming after you eat.

There was always someone you knew, though, who was a consummate daredevil. That kid who make four-foot bike ramps or jumped off their roof into the swimming pool. The one whose parents left them and their sibling(s) home alone for a whole weekend. The one who always had the best snacks in their lunch at school — the stuff your mom wouldn’t let you have because it was full of sugar and food coloring and lord-knows-what-else and would “rot your teeth out of your head.”

Face it, you were fascinated by that kid. You were fascinated, but you were either too chickenshit or too much of a goody-goody to even try to emulate their devil-may-care lifestyle. (Or your mother had you convinced that that kid was destined for failure/prison/an early death and you were aware that none of those things were pleasant so you steered clear of them.)

Okay, so Mom might have erred an eensy bit the right side of hyperbole. The point is, she was steering you away from a possible bad influence in an effort to shape you into a productive and positive contributor to society, and she probably succeeded…more or less.

But hello, what’s this? Adulthood? I’m free from the statutes of parental law? Oh, fuck yes!

There are people who go off the deep end, it’s true. However, based on the people I’ve met in my adult life, most of us don’t treat grownupdom as our personal bacchanal. I’ve seen some pretty mild rebellions between age eighteen and now — people in my college dorm saying, “I never got to have sugary breakfast cereals, I’m going to eat nothing but them from now on!” or “I’m going to stay up after midnight!” or “I’m going to buy name brand peanut butter!” The beauty of having been protected from the worst bad influences during our childhoods is evident here — cereal, late bedtimes, and slightly more expensive peanut butter aren’t going to do us any irreparable harm, and we know that.

There’s still the slightly more questionable things, though. I mentioned last week that in recent years I have gotten a couple of tattoos and done some weird stuff to my hair. These are things that would never have flown ten years ago, even though I was already out from under the parental wing. It took a little nudging to get me to stop thinking and start doing. I know that this isn’t the same for everyone — maybe for some of you it was trying a new hobby or joining a new club or finally starting that band you’ve always talked about or climbing Half Dome even though your mom always said, “Don’t do that, you’ll break your neck!” I bet most of the impetus for you to finally get off your ass and actually do these things came from you, yourself, but there were things that pushed you toward it without you knowing it. A YouTube video, maybe, or a friend’s friend’s vacation photos on Facebook. A song on the radio. A conversation with a blind date, but even though the date was terrible, the notion stayed with you.

Maybe it was a fortune cookie.

The best kind of bad influences are the ones that add up over time, whispering in your ear, “You know, you could do that if you tried.” They’re the free spirits you meet who you think are kind of cuckoo bananapants, but in the good way. They’re all the little things that make you believe in yourself — make you push yourself.

Or, you know, it’s your hairdresser saying, “Elizabeth, it’s just hair. It’ll grow back.”



*Yes, the Seatbelt Police figured in my childhood, though to be fair, I was the one who was adamant that seatbelts were done up before the car was started because I made up the Seatbelt Police and shut up, I was four.

I think I’m doing it wrong.

Somehow, I’m living backwards — or at the very least out of order.

They say your twenties are when you’re supposed to get your crazies out. I know plenty of people who did just that. I, on the other hand, was far too busy concentrating on class in college to get up to much in the shenanigans arena. Seriously, I used to drive my roommates bananas — I was in bed by ten every night. Midnight if I was feeling like a rebel. I didn’t drink until I was legal, I never even so much as tried a cigarette, and I had no idea how to get drugs if I’d have wanted any, which I didn’t. I went to a handful of parties and hated them. I’m not emotionally suited to the one night stand, so I wasn’t one of the girls running to the drug store for the econo-packs of pregnancy tests. I did, however, develop a keen interest in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, specifically the Romanian Revolution of 1989.

Geezus. I really am So-and-So from Teen Girl Squad… “You’ll find me in the reference section!”

My post-college twenties (the latter half of 23 to age 29) were devoted to transitioning into being a ‘proper adult’, with mixed success. I did fine on the job front. I bought my condo two months before my 28th birthday. Unmitigated failure on the relationship side, and that trend continues, but we’ll get to that later. Basically I was hellbent on ‘getting my life in order’ — you know, job, place to live, get married, have a baby, et-white-picket-fence-cetera.

HAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD I WAS SO FUCKING PRECIOUS.

Then came 30. I managed to cling to the dream of achieving that last piece of getting my shit together for another year, and actually thought I was on track until A Thing happened and I broke off an engagement because Reasons.

“What thing?” I hear you ask. “What reasons?”

Okay, I’ll spell it out: I was in the grips of a major depressive episode which went on for nearly a year, and when I hit on something that was starting to help turn me in the right direction, my then-partner told me, point blank, that it was stupid. That set my gray matter in motion and I started adding up all of the things I had been willfully overlooking in our relationship and realized that if I continued down the road I was on I was headed for a disaster of epic proportions. So I said, “You know what? No,” and that was pretty much that. It was another several months before I was finally able to claw my way out of my deep, dark pit, but when I finally did I had a new perspective on oh, so many things, and a deep-rooted need to just be ME for a while. To make decisions without worrying about what other people would think. To finally fucking learn how to be comfortable, or at least more comfortable, in my own skin. To get back to my creative self because she had been shoved in the corner of a closet collecting dust for too long. To do some stupid, impulsive shit.

I got a couple of tattoos. I chopped my hair off and dyed some of it funky colors. I read more books. I wrote what I wanted to write. I drew. And I’ve seriously considered some major life changes.

There have been a number of articles circulating on the internet about 30 being the new 20, and how the thirty-something contingent is eschewing the traditional ‘Game of Life’ route for other more personal pursuits.

Hi. I’m a thirty-something. I have a Master’s degree. I am gainfully employed. I own my home. I am not married, nor do I have any intention to be so in the near — or even far — future. I don’t have any children — see previous statement re: marriage. With nothing to tie me down, I can do whatever the fuck I like. I’ve been seriously considering moving to Nashville, for no other reason than because it sounds like fun and I can. I have my finger on the pulse of the real estate market in Dillon Beach, California, in case something becomes available up there. There are a couple of lots I’m eyeing more and more seriously these days. I’m taking a for-real, grown-up, two-week vacation this year to visit friends in another country I haven’t seen in nine years because I woke up one morning and decided that was a thing I wanted to do.

Short of sowing my wild oats, getting blackout drunk on the reg, and doping myself up to my eyeballs, I’m pretty sure I’m doing all that shit I was supposed to do a decade ago now. And do you want to know something?

It’s sixteen kinds of awesome.

Love is...

Love is written about, sung about, drawn, painted, poeticized, and idealized.

Love is politicized, dragged through the gutter press, forced, given, and taken away.

Love is universal. Love is impossible to pin down.

Love is kinda weird.

Love is an enormous can of worms, and I have a can opener. I remember reading an interview with Colin Firth once where he talked about how love is a spectral concept; you could use the word ‘love’ to describe anything from your piece of pizza to your first-born child. For some reason that idea has stuck with me for years — probably because ‘love’, ‘pizza’, and ‘babies’ are easily grasped concepts — but also because it struck me at the time as something of a staggering truth. There are so many levels and varieties of love it’s almost overwhelming. Let’s make a list, shall we?

• Metaphorical love — the kind you have for food, media, and products. (“I love sushi!”, “I love that new album by Alison Krauss/The Golden Girls/Umberto Eco novels/the collection at Sir John Soane’s museum in London!”, “I love that new line of nail polish Fergie just released!”)
• Familial love — please tell me I don’t need to spell this one out…
• 'Biblical’, ‘carnal’, or… I don’t know, ‘passionate’ love — the kind you have for your romantic interests.
• That ‘in love’ kind of love, which works in tandem to the variety outlined above.
• What I’m going to call ‘friendly love’, for lack of a better term — the kind of love you have for the people in your life who don’t classify as family or your partner(s). (Some people have more than one. I don’t judge. You do you.)
• That sort of general love you have in varying degrees for anyone you are acquainted with who doesn’t fit into any of the above categories.
• Basic human love — the kind you have for people in general unless you’re some kind of monster, you asshole.
• That special love reserved for non-human beings like your pets.

These are just my personal categories*. I think everyone has their own, really, and the lines between them aren’t necessarily as clear as I’ve made them out to be above. It’s a spectrum, remember? One can bleed into another into another at any time for any reason. Love is unique to every individual insofar as expression, depth of feeling, and categorization. Famous portrayals of love run the gamut from the clichéd — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — to the poetic:

“...Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken...”

First of all, always say you’re sorry. Don’t be a dick. Second, my old pal Billy Shakes had a turn of phrase that could make necrophilia seem beautiful, so take him with a grain of salt, too.

If you haven’t cottoned on just yet, I’ve been thinking a lot about love recently. Love has inspired wars, pushed people to acts of desperation, and created unbridgeable divides. On the flip side, love has inspired peace, pushed people to acts of compassion, and mended rifts no one thought could be healed.

Each of us has a different relationship with love. Maybe you’re in one of the three bears’ boats: “This love is too much! It’s smothering me!” “This love is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.” “This love is juuuuuuuuuuuust right!” In a perfect world, everyone would be in that ‘just right’ place, but the world isn’t perfect. Human beings aren’t perfect. Love isn’t perfect. We might love someone who doesn’t love us back, or the other way around. Someone might think that they are loving us by behaving in a certain way towards us, when in fact they’re doing more harm than good. Love can be the veil over a completely different desire — say, you think you’re in love with someone, but one day you wake up and realize that you’re really just trying to make them fit a space in your life that can’t actually be filled; it’s kind of a ‘square peg, round hole’ thing. Two people can love each other and be completely unable to stand each other at the same time.

I wonder, in our vastly different levels and definitions of love, if it all gets so muddied up that we can’t work out which end is up? Or maybe it’s how we have experienced love throughout our lives which shapes how we love and allow ourselves to be loved? Some people love one-sided — they either exclusively give love, or exclusively take it. The first is unhealthy, the second is the sign of a narcissist. Some people hit the love-jackpot and have a knack for giving and receiving in a thoroughly wholesome way, and the rest of us stand back and watch jealously.

And don’t even get me started on the media construct of ‘love’, which isn’t love at all, it’s hogwash and it exists purely to make us all feel inadequate.

The problem is, life is certainly less fulfilling without at least a modicum of some description of love…and I don’t think that loving your piece of pizza really counts.

As for me — most days anyway — love is like Communism; it only works in theory.



*Apparently the Greeks had a very similar list: https://lonerwolf.com/different-types-of-love/ Either I knew about it and repressed it, or I’m psychic now so ew stop thinking about that! Gross!

“Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

I was once accused by my high school drama teacher of being a Neo-Luddite. This probably sounds like a strange thing to accuse a seventeen year old of being, but it was bang on the nose, believe me. At the risk of dating myself, by my senior year of high school, cell phones had just become mainstream. Most of my friends had them, and their usage had just been upgraded from ‘for emergencies only by parental mandate’ to “Just don’t go over your minutes, we only get so many per month. And none of this texting malarky — it costs extra!”

Back to the original accusation. I was dead-set against having a cell phone, ever. I thought they were a pointless extravagance. “Why should I carry a phone around with me? What could possibly be so important that I need to have a phone with me all the time? I have a phone at home. There’s a phone in the school office if I need it. There are these things called payphones and call boxes on the side of the road for emergencies. Cell phones are dumb.” So, yes, the observation was accurate. I simply didn’t see the point, and that was that.

Fast-forward to high school graduation. My aunt and uncle very graciously added me to their family wireless plan for the duration of my undergraduate years, and suddenly I had one of those things I so detested. (Seriously, what eighteen year old actually does the “Oh, wow, you really shouldn’t have,” to a techno-toy?!) But it was there, and it was mine, and it meant I didn’t have to have a landline wired into my dorm room. It was a few generations into the Nokia plastic rectangle phones, and it was blue. It went everywhere with me because it was small and fit nicely into a pocket in my backpack. I turned it off every night. After a while I got used to it. It was convenient. It called home reliably, and helped me meet up with friends and study-buddies. “Okay, this isn’t so bad, and it is better than a landline in the dorm.”

I wasn’t a texter until the first year I spent abroad in England, where no one liked to call because it was more expensive than texting. My Nokia didn’t go with me — I had a phone with a special SIM card over there, and my aunt and uncle paid me back for the expense. (They really are delightful.) In any case, I was a year abroad, a year back stateside, and then another year abroad for my MA, all of those years on some version of Ye Olde Plastic Rectangle Phone. When I came home after my MA I was on a prepaid flip-phone for about a year while I figured out exactly what I wanted to do in the cell phone department, and that was when those slide-out keyboards were a new, cool thing, so I transitioned to one of those.

Now, the iPhone had been out for a couple of years by this time, and I was at a new level of Neo-Ludditity. “Who the fuck needs the internet on their phone?! That’s ridiculous! Apps? WTF are apps? It’s a phone. I need it to call and text. GEEZUS.” So I had something new to rail about for a while, and that made the crabby old bag in me very, very happy. At least, until the phone I was using started to crap out on me and I couldn’t find anything to replace it that wasn’t a smartphone.

Yes, in September of 2014 I finally succumbed to the wiles of the touchscreen. It was an adjustment, absolutely, and it took all of a month for me to renege on my promise to myself that I wouldn’t become one of those people who spent every waking moment on their phones and had all the things they used on their computers in duplicate in their pocket at all times. The last bastion of my Ludidity crumbled to the ground. I had apps. I had Google at my beck and call. I could tell the world exactly what I was doing and where at any moment and provide photographic evidence.

Recently, my first-ever smartphone started to go south on me, and I knew it was time for a replacement. Last weekend, I upgraded to the newest, shiniest version in the Samsung Galaxy line (I’ve been a Samsung devotee since Nokia ceased to be a frontrunner in cellular technology) and I feel like kind of a putz. When did I become this person? How? That’s life in the field of progress, I suppose. This new phone is huge, the storage capacity is through the roof, the rat bastards at my provider made me change my plan, and I miss the days of getting a phone for free or cheap at upgrade time because this ‘leasing’ malarky is bullshit. However, my options for super cute cases have increased a hundredfold and I’m enough of a sucker for aesthetically pleasing utility that I’m excited about that — and anyway, it’s so shiny.

But really? If I had it my way, we’d all still be going through Ernestine.