There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?

I watched The Office for the first time with my old friend Heidi who told me she had started watching a show that made her think of me. This was right at the time the second season DVDs had been released and were on one of those really good sales at Target. She got the first two seasons and persuaded me to come over after lunch. We smoked a bit, out of a hookah with peach-flavored tobacco since we were 19 or so, and put on the first disc.

“It starts a little slow,” she said. “Give it a few episodes.”

She wasn’t wrong but it had me from the start and not just because I was a little bit stoned. We watched for the next day and a half, ordering pizza when we were hungry and climbing into bed and couch respectively when we were tired. We called another good friend of ours to join us and she jumped in where we were. I can’t tell you when it grabbed me, maybe it was something desperate that Michael said or the simple joy of seeing Dwight’s stapler in jello but I was in. I still have never laughed as hard as I did watching “The Injury” for the first time and I’m not sure I ever will. We watched the next two seasons together every Thursday and when I moved away, I introduced my BFF to the show and kept watching.

I haven’t watched The Office since the end of season 7, a season which was already testing my patience with a show that I loved so much. I cry about most things because I have all the feelings and because I went to therapy and dealt with the things that kept everything I felt inside. This show was one of the few things to make me cry before I could cry at the things going on in my actual life. I cared about these people, these fictional but regular people, in a way I couldn’t really let myself care about people in my life. It became a conduit for this while I continued to grow. I stopped watching after season 7 because things had changed, because I had changed, but it never made me mad that it had changed; it was a weird, forever home for me in a way.

I feel this way about Tumblr. It started off as a place for me to put writing from a workshop I was taking, an archive of sorts and it became this passage to the rest of my life. I put myself out there for the first time in a long time, in just a small way, but it was enough to start something. It made me start really writing, it made me be ok with people reading the things I write, it gave me the opportunity to write for places I never would have considered beforehand. It helped me deal with things until I couldn’t do it alone and then it helped me go to therapy. It led me to meet some of my dearest friends, including my best friend. It led me to my husband, for Christ’s sake. It led me to explore art and culture and feminism and so many things that have made me a better person, the person I am today. 

It wasn’t all great, of course. It also introduced me to awful people, rude people, clamoring people who made lots of things feel worse than they had to. Tumblr changed and fluctuated and we changed and fluctuated along with it. It has been a place that has documented the best parts and the worst parts and the most random, drawn from mindlessness parts of all of us. I don’t use it the way I did in the past and I have a different relationship to it now but I can’t deny that it’s a huge catalyst in how I grew into who I am now. It’s not really good or bad, it sort of just is. And this is how I feel about The Office, after all is said and done about its progress or lack thereof; it’s pretty consistently inconsistent because it’s primarily about people. It lives and breathes and fucks up and changes like we all do.

I watched the last few episodes of The Office because I had to. Of course, I had to! I fell in easily with the people I grew to know so well and caught up with them at the end of their documentary journey. I cried, more easily and with less conflicted feelings than I used to cry when watching TV and movies, and I watched as these characters, these people, that I’ve watched for years became whoever it is they were going to be; I cannot tell you how much I cried at finding out that Michael finally got the big family he always wanted, that Jim and Pam were going to take this big chance together. My heart felt so strangely full at seeing where these people are now: in better places for some, in the same cycles for others. It was so good to see all of it and I couldn’t feel anything but love for it despite the fact that it’s not the show it used to be. It changed but then so did I. 

I didn’t expect to react as strongly as I did to the finale because I’d been removed from The Office for a while. It wasn’t until I was presented with this evidence of not only how far this show has come that I could really fathom where I’ve been and gotten to in the past several years as well. I feel so much the same but I know that I’m not, that I’ve changed in ways that you can only look back and realize after the fact. It’s why Tumblr changing doesn’t matter or why The Office ending doesn’t feel like something being over; what counts, the time you’ve spent and the way you’ve grown as a result of something, never really ends in the ways that matter. 

Everything I have I owe to this job blog show…this stupid, wonderful, boring, amazing job blog show.

So, thanks to a TV show and a blogging platform for helping me get to wherever it is I’ve gotten to; I like it (and me) a lot.

That’s what she said.

where do you go? who do you need to know?

Last Wednesday was my last day of work at my old day job. It started pouring rain about an hour before I left and I was glad I actually had my umbrella with me. 

“The sky’s crying because you’re leaving,” my coworker joked.

“More like tears of joy,” I replied.

It’s weird to leave something you’ve done for a few years, the first thing you’ve done out of college, even though it’s not what you want to do forever or even for another day. I put in my two weeks notice a little over two weeks before the last day and the week after, we had a regular meeting. I sat and stared out the window because I didn’t really need to listen to these things anymore. For the first time, I noticed a tall building, maybe 4 or 5 stories, in the lot next door to us, painted in warm art deco sort of colors. When I first started at my job, it was an empty lot I remember passing on the way to get tacos or falafel for lunch. Now, there was this whole building there and I couldn’t believe it was done already.

It sounds really sad to compare yourself to something that’s probably going to be a Holiday Inn Express or something but it was then that I realized it was time to go, that I was really as done as you could be with a place or a time of your life, that here was this physical marker of the time you spent somewhere and how you changed as much as, more than, this empty lot. I hated my job but it helped me figure out what I really wanted to do, what I couldn’t put up with 40 hours a week, it gave me time to take care of myself, to fall in love with not only Ian but my own life; I’m a completely different person than the one who started out anxious as hell and full of grief two years ago. 

I won’t lie to you and tell you I’m not nervous but I’m full of the good nervous energy, the kind where you know you’ve got to go even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going yet. I’m going to be a licensed hair stylist in about a month and living in Canada in about a year and everything else is details. Oh, and I got offered a job today so that nervous energy? I’ll just put it into whatever I’m doing and hope for the best. I’m 26 and I haven’t figured it all out but I’m willing to just go with what I have, do what I like, and try to be as happy as I can be every day; I don’t know much but I’m getting better at knowing how to be happy. Here we go.

I figured out that I needed glasses when I was ten. I was at the movies with various women in my family waiting for The Beautician and the Beast to begin and I couldn’t make out the trivia questions for the life of me. This is probably the time to tell you that I loved The Nanny so much at this point in my life that I owned the Fran Fine Barbie doll and now, almost fifteen years later, I am about to become a hair stylist. At ten though, I was very upset about this prospect of glasses until my grandma reminded me to think of them as an accessory, an accessory that I am legally required to wear to drive. I watched Fran Drescher in an Impressionist version of The Sound of Music. 

A week or so later, I had new glasses that I spent two hours to pick out. I remembe my fourth grade teacher trying to ease me into being ok with wearing them at school that first day but I had no issues with being a four eyes.

“No, you see,” I began. “I look really good in glasses.” I didn’t in those glasses but I do in the ones I wear now.

My vision was pretty bad even at ten so I wore those glasses all the time. The only exception was ballet when I’d tuck them into the snap case they came with after sewing my pointe shoe ribbons. This routine lasted a year until I began bumping into other people and walls while dancing. I got fitted for contacts and only resented my mom slightly for not letting me get colored ones. I put them on easily at the doctor’s office and took them home. I immediately ripped the right one the following morning while trying to put it in and had to go get a replacement from the eye doctor once I stopped complaining about ripping it. I put both that new contact and the intact left one in my eyes and basically didn’t take them out for a decade. 

This is an exaggeration. At first, I was good at taking them out every night and cleaning them; I’m a person who went to Catholic school, I enjoy ritual. Then one night, I fell asleep with them in and while they felt a bit dry the next morning, they were ok. I am not kidding when I say that I changed them once a month (or less often) and had them in all the time. I am also not kidding when I say these were not the kinds of contacts you can leave in for eight years or whatever. I guess it wasn’t really an exaggeration at all. In hindsight, it’s hilarious that I was really surprised when my eyes kept getting so, so dry by age 21 and that I had to give glasses a try. It’s been a try that’s stuck the majority of the time, not only because glasses really do look amazing on me but because they’ve gotten so cute! They would look incredible on a cockroach.

Really though, glasses have become a part of my aesthetic that make total sense with who I was and have also helped to shape who I am, how I choose to identify myself in the image industry, in the world at large. It’s weird. I feel like this is where I’m supposed to bring this together neatly and tie it up with something about being able to literally see who you are thanks to glasses and contacts but also see who you are in a more symbolic sense. All I’ve really got for you is don’t wear your contacts for years. Also, I watched a marathon of The Nanny in a hotel a few years ago and you know, there really are worse women than Fran Fine on TV to look up to as a kid.

Sometimes I make myself sick because I worry too much. Other things contribute like what seemed to be movie theater popcorn but I am convinced my brain is the likely culprit of all my bodily illness. When I felt better, we wrapped ourselves in layers of flannel and walked to do errands. I didn’t brush my hair but I did put on lipstick.

I’m glad the 90s are coming back, I said. I thought of the glimpses I got of it when MTV was still a network, when I had saved my allowance to buy my first cd: The Bends by Radiohead. It’s still in my car.

I’m not ready for the 90s to come back around, you said.

It doesn’t matter, they’re coming.

You got something with whipped cream, I got coffee that was rough on my fragile stomach. I made a list on my receipt of all the things I had to do for school and teared up right there in public. You reached a hand under the table to place it on my knee.

Are you okay, you asked.

I don’t know. I just have so much to do, it’s gotten all backed up.

You’ll get it done, you said with a squeeze of my knee.

I wish I were a better adult. I wish I wasn’t feeling all the things that have fallen apart lately so much.

That wouldn’t make you an adult, it would make you a robot.

Well, I want to be a robot who isn’t falling behind in one class.

Retake it next semester.

There’s no time.

There’s always time.

Not in some cases, I said and you knew what I referred to.

I dropped the one class I had failed to keep up with amidst a whole sea of other classes, glittering with their A’s. You still looked at me.

You’re too hard on yourself, you said. You’re human, if you weren’t distracted by the things that hurt you, I don’t think you’d be who you are. There’s no schedule, relax.

I looked down with wet eyes and read for class. You wrote an article and I listened to the noises in the shop. The Internet told me it was the tenth anniversary of the release of Kid A and I felt old. I scrolled to it on my iPhone and thought about physically buying the cd and playing it over and over in my room. Ten years since Everything In Its Right Place; ten years and little in its right place.

I thought about the kinds of posters in elementary school classrooms, things that said, you can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react to it. That’s kind of bullshit. You can’t always control that. It’s not that it’s a bad thing, it just makes you like everyone else. Time does teach you that you’re not the special snowflake your parents claimed you are. You’re a snowflake alright but sometimes you’ll melt, too. My insides hurt and relaxed all at once at this realization.

We left and bought groceries for dinner, Halloween candy for every meal. I squished a small gummi skull in between my thumb and index finger.

Brains, I said as red goo oozed out.

We picked out a pumpkin at an Asian market. I ran my hand over each smooth orange surface, finally settling on one with a very lovely handle. I picked up a carving kit so we wouldn’t almost chop off our fingers like last year. I insisted on carrying it on one hip like a baby.

My aunt was the first person who ever carved a pumpkin with me, I said as we walked. My mom always thought I’d hurt myself or make a mess so she did it herself.

You didn’t say anything.

She let me get dirty and we carved a zombie on it, i continued with smile. You have a lot to live up to.

I’ll give you an army of zombies, you grinned.

We walked home quietly on what finally felt like a fall evening in New York City. I felt my lungs burn with cool air and bubble with possibility. A family passed in this big city and I took comfort in the fact that I was no more somebody than anyone else. No pressure but time with its whistle and its leaves reminding me there was much to see and all the world to do it in.

—

This was almost three years ago and most things have changed, especially me, but I still worry; I’m just slightly better at knowing what to worry about.