Baring All on October 31

I had catch-up dinners with two different friends this week. Once we'd covered job, friends and love life, we got into what really matters: Halloween. Fodder for conversation. Costume decisions and bar-hopping routes are the just the tip of the Halloween iceberg, entry points into a more philosophical discussion. For twentysomethings still riding high on the coattails of college, Halloween is an institution—everyone’s favorite or least favorite holiday—rife with story, connotation and debate.  

Yesterday, I got an email from a college friend—subject line “Halloween”— saying only: “I’ve figured out a way to my wear my nude bodysuit again this year!”  Like your favorite black cardigan, a nude body suit is a useful transition piece—from Lady Godiva to the Coppertone Girl to a Never Nude to a streaker.  When you shell out for such an item at the Claremont, California sex shop, you expect it to deliver until it gets too snug.  For those who have made similar investments, rest easy: Slutty Halloween is here to stay.  Your tight-fitting nude bodysuit will always be en vogue on October 31. 

For whatever reason, the holiday formerly marked by Reeses Cups and friendly ghosts has become a nationwide slutfest starting around age 18. From unknown origins, Halloween has burgeoned into a yearly excuse to bare all under infinite guises. 

The first dinner was Brooklyn Thai with a friend who also experienced life as a women’s college undergraduate. As such, we share a similar set of jumbled feminist values that we can conveniently pull out or obscure at will. She expressed a general distaste for slutty Halloween, a tradition she forcefully defies every year.   Intellectually, I totally agree.  There’s a feminist disconnect inherent in Slutty Halloween that doesn’t sit well when I stop to think about it. How is it that empowered women spout gender theory in co-ed classes, best their male counterparts on exams and hold their own in every professional field, yet still relish the autumn opportunity to dress like a costumed slut and let booze drip down their insides for the benefit of barely-costumed men? More personally: How is it that I studied feminist literature with professors I admire and still dressed up as a slutty Pikachu one year? And, embarrassingly generic, a slutty firefighter the next?  Couldn’t I have just been Jane Austen?

The feminist in me objects to the objectification, the explicit provocation for men who spend little time on their own costumes.  But a new strand of feminism insists that we’re past all that—that the choice to dress provocatively is empowering in its own right. The stereotyped posterchild for this way of thinking is Samantha from “Sex and the City.”  As powerful women, we can do what we want with our bodies and our wardrobe. It shouldn’t affect who we are or where we stand.  In some ways, Halloween embodies this power of choice, but I do think the costumes would make Betty Friedan and co. blush for more than one reason.   It doesn’t quite add up, but the question is: Does the apparent disconnect really matter? Of all the feminist battles to fight, is Slutty Halloween really worth our time?

The second dinner was Manhattan Italian with a close male friend from college, someone whom I’d probably drunkenly encountered on four separate Halloweens.  Sipping red wine, we rehashed our college costumes.  When I got to “cowgirl,” he repeated twice, “oh yeah. I remember that one.”  While my friend is mostly an upstanding gentleman, I had a feeling his memory was more exposed pushup bra and denim mini skirt than the  historical accuracy of my Annie Oakley—handstiched boots and bolo tie imported directly from the Lone Star State.  But he can’t be blamed. I dressed up as a sexy cowgirl of my own free will, implicitly for the benefit of the men I was sure to encounter.

Southern California was the perfect backdrop for slutty Halloween.  Still warm well into October, we had little choice but to masquerade as glorified prostitutes once a year (one year, a group ironically dressed up as actual prostitutes, because why not?) Anything can be turned slutty—the hoochier the better.   At the time, I don’t think dressing up as a non-slutty nurse, lobster, cadaver, Pokemon, Sarah Palin, Steve Jobs even crossed my mind. Why bother going out? Slutty Halloween is institutionalized. Well into our twenties, we can’t shake the connotation, nor do most seem to want to.  The conservative among us get a chance to cut loose and the already loose among us are vindicated.  The formerly-wholesome holiday has officially been degraded, but only the slimmest minority seems to want to reverse the trend: http://takebackhalloween.org/.  

I asked a coworker for her thoughts on Slutty Halloween. “Well, it works,” she responded, and explained that she met a long-term boyfriend at a Halloween party.  I was reminded of my college roommate, who is now engaged to a man she started dating on Halloween.  I doubt either of these respectable women was fully clothed. These tales of Halloween love are definitely coincidence, right?

Frankly, Slutty Halloween is fun and harmless.  This year, I’m dressing up as Amelia Earhart.  My choice to dress up as an overly-clothed, independent woman is not meant to be a feminist statement.  At all. I just wanted to buy some aviator goggles and a cap.  When a male friend asked if I was going to be Amelia EarWHORE, I laughed. Because it’s funny.  And if Amelia does ends up wearing a push-up bra and shorts instead of pants: sue me.

Middle School 101

Fact: Middle schoolers have a bad reputation.  Arguably deserved. 

No one thinks too highly of these awkward in-between years. Kids have mostly shed their cute factor, but have yet to replace it with any other factor. They are loud and run in packs--leaning on the safety of blending in when individuality seems terrifying. There’s a common perception of middle school kid as volcano, a sweaty Vesuvius waiting to explode with the slightest provocation.   Middle schoolers are known for hormones, animal noises, bad smells.  Hence the reputation.  

When I tell anyone I teach middle school, the response is a clenched grin and one of these stock diplomatic phrases:

“Wow, that’s a rough age.”  (read: that sucks)

“God bless you!” (read: I know neither of us is religious, but I can’t think of anything better to say)

“I hated middle school.” (read: I had braces twice and boyfriends never)

“That’s a lot of hormones in one building.” (read: middle schoolers smell and get their periods. Don’t you want a desk job?)

Thanks for the support, friends.  Sometimes I try to defend the age group, but mostly I just change the subject.

“So, what do you do?”

Middle school is an undeniably awkward stage of life. The bad reputation is mostly deserved, but I’ve developed a soft spot for hormonal 7^th graders.  It’s not Devonte’s fault that his best friend is literally twice his size with twice as many girlfriends.  Nor is it Kevin’s fault that his mom calls his teachers every day to check up on his homework completion (maybe if he did his homework, she’d stop, but that’s beside the point). It is Alisha’s fault that she asked me for a “pad for her period” in front of half the class. Nice alliteration, Alisha, here's a pass to go to the office.

Middle schoolers are starting to come into their own, slowly developing budding senses of self. This is terrifyiningly exciting.  The road is obstacle-ridden like Downtown Brooklyn, and they need all the help they can get  navigating it.  As a middle school teacher, you get to help out 75 kids during their bleakest hour. All in a day's work.

Teaching middle school involves endurance.  You must endure millions of unwarranted eye rolls and buckets of sass worse than anything you remember dishing out. You must endure a classroom that smells like the amalgamated body odor of 25 pre-teens.  You must endure note-passing, teeth sucking, classroom flirting, constant lip-gloss application.  But as a middle school teacher, you are rewarded for your endurance.  You are rewarded by the student who uses every single vocabulary word you've taught her on her unit test--each accompanied by a smiley face.  By the thank you notes and cartoons dropped on your desk. By the priceless running document of quotes on your desktop.  The bad reputation middle schoolers have garnered is maybe deserved, but it masks a lot of the cute stuff about the age group.  The skeptics probably haven't spent a day in a middle school since they were learning the periodic table.  I'm not sure I blame them, but still.

A sense of humor and yoga help me keep calm and carry on. Mostly, though, I remind myself of one fact:  It is so much better to teach middle schoolers than it is to be a middle schooler.  So. Much. Better.   On particularly trying days (today, for example), this becomes a wise mantra.  Someday, each of my students will have a similar sense of perspective. For now, I repeat it in my head during choice interactions--moments of extreme endurance--and this job actually becomes pretty fun.

Traveling Pants

Women’s college instilled in me persistent ideas about sisterhood—a concept that’s related to but distinct from feminism.  Along with traveling pants, there are hallmarks of sisterhood; there are unwritten rules.  In the iteration I know best, sisterhood involves fierce loyalty, red wine and late-night voyages to either the frozen yogurt shop or a more grown-up shop. Both in one night for the ambitious.  As a graduate of a place where the water was metallic with the taste of sisterhood, I carry with me an outline of how I should treat other women and how they should treat me in return.  Then, how all this corresponds to the way we date. The outline can be titled, crassly, “Chicks Before Dicks,” but the sub-points are infinite and nuanced.

As a mostly single woman, I attempt to navigate hetero-dating terrain while staying true to the sisterhood.  This can be tricky.   At school, whenever I started to date someone, I felt a pang of guilt for spending my Friday nights with a boy rather than with the sisterhood.  Intellectually, I knew this was crazy, but it always felt like I’d broken a rule, betrayed my sisters for a co-ed who may or may not turn out to be important. No matter who I chose—the sisterhood or a boy—guilt was unavoidable.   It was a near-impossible balancing act: admitting to yourself that you did, indeed, want to date, but that you also wanted to be a genuine part of the sisterhood. Not the flakey sister who came and went with the unpredictable tides of relationships.  When a friend left the flock for a boy, we’d be excited, but there were undertones of less enthusiastic emotions from the sisters left behind.   The seedy underbelly of sisterhood. 

This weekend, I messed with the rules of sisterhood by putting a dating desire over the feelings of another woman.   This isn’t really my style.  There’s not much space in sisterhood for that type of girl, but suddenly I was strutting in her ill-fitting shoes.  I felt guilty about the minor betrayal, but mostly I started to think about contemporary sisterhood more broadly.   How should sisterhood play out as we date and try to keep balance?

In the past, I have strained relationships by being too distant.  When I isolated sisterhood at the peak of the priority mountain, I realize looking back that I wasn’t much of a girlfriend.   On the flipside, I have made irresponsible, embarrassing dating decisions—blatantly going against the advice of my girlfriends and knocking over others on my way.  Being a member in good-standing is no easy feat.  You practice and learn from your mistakes, but there are always more to be made. Hurt feelings, confused boys, offended girls.  I have been on both sides.  Sisterhood is important, but so too is functional dating in your twenties. Isolating one too dramatically can lead to an imbalance from which it might be hard to recover.  Maybe the answer is to wear your traveling pants on a date and your sexiest underwear out with your girlfriends. Subtle reminders to stay conscious while pursuing what feels right.

Bouncy

A happy life is the product of many components.  For those people of whom you are jealous, the components fit together like a mildewed jigsaw puzzle found at a Seventies beach house.  But who really spends time re-piecing together cut-up cardboard?  Some of these components you create for yourself and others are dictated by the higher-ups: your parents, the media, your college, your friends.  Most of the happiness components are as obvious as they are elusive—the hardest and most essential to-do list we’ve got.

You should have a job that is fulfilling, meaningful and lucrative enough. You should have a diverse group of friends, a handsome significant other and a functional family to fulfill you socially, sexually, romantically. You should have hobbies and interests—well-developed and unique.  Intellectually, we mostly know what it takes to feel happy, but the laundry list rarely lines up like you dream it might. When you have a great job, you are hopelessly single, and when you have a great boyfriend, you’re more than likely unemployed.  Unfortunately, for the mortals among us, it sometimes seems this is how happiness works.

Like many 24-year-old upper-middle-class white girls, I’ve bought into the idea that exercise is a small but crucial happiness factor.  Exercise has many obvious benefits that can be summed up under “hard-bodied.”  But magazines are constantly spewing statistics about how exercise is more than physical. In addition to toning your bod, exercise makes you happy and smart and beautiful, or so says Cosmpolitan (a dubious source of information as there can’t possibly be 101 new sex tricks every month).  Nonetheless, I’ve read this stuff enough that I’m bought in.  In college, I had myself convinced that I was happier and more productive when I was getting regular exercise.  This was a handy conclusion to bring forth when I’d rather be at yoga than working on my thesis (read: always).  

My commitment to exercise has waned over the years. I’ve been into kickboxing and yoga; I’ve convinced myself walking is equivalent to running; I’ve also been into a strict beer and Swedish fish regime.  If good teaching hinges on consistency, so too does a rocking bod. This is a mindset I've yet to master.

Last summer, I was fed up with exercise and essentially stopped doing it. The gym had become mind-numbingly boring, and even the fleeting thought of going was excruciating.  A couple motionless months passed, and I started thinking about happiness factors—reevaluating my placement of exercise in this amorphous blob of contentment.  When you’ve made a decision to stop doing something, it’s easy to convince yourself that it’s stupid, anyway.  But after a while I was feeling a little funky, and I wondered if my swearing off of a good thing was partially to blame.

What I realized is that if I’m to believe Cosmo’s credo that exercise makes you happy, I should pursue it in ways that are enjoyable.  This realization brings me to my new favorite form of exercise and the point of all this: Urban Rebounding.  

Urban Rebounding is a chic name for trampoline-ing.  It’s offered at your local YMCA, and I highly recommend it.  It involves bouncing on a mini-trampoline that is slightly updated, but mostly similar, to the one you had in your basement growing up. While bouncing along to remixed pop music, you attempt a series of complex punches, kicks and other assorted rebounding moves. I’m not sure exactly what makes it so urban, except that I'm doing it in Brooklyn.  Point is: it’s really fun, I spend most of the hour laughing with my new rebounding gang, and still end up sweaty and sore the next day.  

So there you have it.  The link between exercise and happiness is pretty legit, but if exercising itself makes you want to kick a puppy, the link gets tenuous.  The happiness components are only viable if they actually make you happy.  That should be obvious, but it's not. 

The solution, then, is apparent: Urban Rebounding. The cure for what ails us.  

Profiling

During two college summers, I spurned the boring suggestion of an internship and worked instead at a summer camp on Orcas Island. Rather than building up important professional skills I could later leverage toward a JOB, I opted to flirt with outdoorsy boys and make friendship bracelets. My foresight was and remains impeccable.

This was not the type of East Coast camp where kids stay the whole summer and get tutored for their Bat Mitzvahs in between digital photography class and soccer games. It was a YMCA camp where the favorite activities were the “Dork Dance” and “Get Wet, Get Dirty.” The “Dork Dance” is self-explanatory and uncomfortably similar to my middle school experience.  Surprisingly, the latter activity was entirely PG and involved running into the Puget Sound, rolling around in the dirt and gallivanting around camp screaming in totally appropriate ecstasy (or if you are me, screaming because you’re freezing and miserable).  Everyone (but me) loved it.

This was the type of camp where kids stayed for a week and then left.  By the end of each summer, I’d had something like eight different cabins of ten adolescent girls.  For the first couple of cabins, I felt a close sense of connection to each child.  I knew their interests, their quirks, their habits.  By the end of the summer, though, my memory could manage no such distinction. The kids started to blend into types: homesick girl, skanky girl, shy girl, brown-nosing girl, sneaky girl.  And so on.  There was one of each in every cabin—the flavor of the week—and the group dynamic never changed too dramatically once I got the hang of it.  This profiling of children during their coming-of-age may be insensitive, but I wasn’t a worse counselor for it.  I remembered their names during the week and then forget them as soon as they boarded the bus, sobbing because camp was over.  My memory can only hold so much information; after all, there were outdoorsy boys to think about.    

My third year into it, I find teaching follows a similar pattern.  I love my students, and I love my students from last year and the year before. But with 75 personalities per year, things inevitably start to blend like a watercolor painting. Lines become a little blurry.  As I get to know more and more students, their behaviors, habits and quirks have mostly (mostly) ceased to amaze me. Last night, my roommate told me that one of her students had earned a demerit for doing chest compressions on his backpack. Weird, yes, but simply one kid oddity among so many. Not so original, buddy. There are reoccurring classroom characters, and I can’t help but profile some of the major players:  

The Hot Mess: The Hot Mess is in a perpetual state of disarray for no apparent reason. His shirt is untucked, his shoes are untied and his tie is only halfway around his neck. When leaving the bathroom, he is still buckling his belt.  Despite the air-conditioned classroom, The Hot Mess is always sweating profusely, forcing teachers to discuss who’s best fit for the deodorant conversation.  When asked to pack up his things, half of them wind up on the ground and the sweat just keeps pouring out. The Hot Mess is usually endearing, but also disruptive as his body is never quite still. 

The Lip Glosser:  Or as Tiny Fey coined her:  the Mean Girl.  The Lip Glosser is usually sharp and inquisitive, but is choosy about where to focus the antennae of her brain power.  It may be in class or it may be in the creation of subtly exclusive social groups. The Lip Glosser can be found surreptitiously glossing her lips at the end of class (because it’s worth the consequence) or hanging out with popular boys after school.  The Lip Glosser is precocious, and you can’t help but worry about her.  Although you recognize that you would have been her wannabe prey in middle school, you still kind of love her because she brings up feminism in class.

The Ladies Man: The Ladies Man is usually a good-looking short kid.  While he may be able to leverage his killer looks post-growth spurt, the Ladies Man is incorrect in his assumption that he can do so at barely five feet.  Every single thing he does throughout the day is motivated by a desire for female attention. Behaviors include nods and raised eyebrows in class, slightly-off compliments and a signature strut that needs more practice. At times, the Ladies Man attempts flirtation  on his female teachers; a harsh look reminds the Ladies Man that this is totally inappropriate.  

The Helper:  The helper is motivated by an intense, never-ending desire to be of assistance.  Though this will probably die off by high school, it’s best taken advantage of while it lasts.  For The Helper, there is no greater pleasure than alphabetizing hundreds of papers or running to the front office to get more tissues for his sniffling classmates. The mundane tasks that annoy normal people give The Helper a wonderful sense of accomplishment. The Helper’s hand shoots up when he hears the phrase, “I need a volunteer…”  With no knowledge of the task at hand, the Helper wants to be that volunteer. So. Freaking. Badly. 

Dealing with Post

There’s a glass-half-empty fact that most relationships end.  Unless he’s the one—and with sky-high divorce rates, there may well be a two or three—your relationship will expire.  Of course, you put this reality out of your mind during the genesis of any relationship. The crash-and-burn nature of dating is hardly start-up fodder unless you aim to be the cynic whose relationships collapse before they accelerate. So relationships end, and many brunches are spent with girlfriends analyzing the minutiae of the post-relationship. In some instances, there was a significant pre-relationship preceding the real deal. The last in the trilogy—the post-relationship—is also relevant to the series.   

In particular, fountains of ink are spilled on the topic of remaining friends with your ex.  Should we or should we not?  Rather than accepting finality, we contemplate mutation—from lover to pal, Saturday dinner to occasional coffee date.  Why not, right?   We draw firm conclusions from our experiences, then debate them with friends when, of course, the conclusions are individual, pulled from the wreckage of our own growing collections of post-relationships.  A weighty collection it becomes—heavier than stickers, stamps or Beanie Babies—perhaps better kept in mint condition than taken out to play.    

I initiated the end of my college relationship.  I was the plug-puller and, with the wisdom of a few more busted fuses, the smooth pull I planned was more akin to a harsh tug. Driven by the notion that our post-relationship would be beautifully marked by friendship, I broke up with him rather brutally and then insisted on regular communication.  I squeezed lemon juice into fresh wounds—his and mine—and made sharp pain more shooting.  He eventually told me to stop calling, the ironic result being that our post-relationship was instead marked by a sad year of almost no communication.  Probably smart, but it was inconceivable at the time that I could no longer speak to someone I’d loved—not when things were good and not when things were bad.  But, when you are the plug-puller, the rules of the post-relationship are not yours to make.  I could yap all I wanted with my friends about what to do, but he’d made up his mind. 

After that mess, I drew the firm conclusion that being friends with your ex is unnecessary and impossible.  I was quick to share my cliché thesis with friends as if it were hard fact. Like any English major worth her weight in gold, I felt my supporting details were more powerful than any of theirs.  Do not confuse your post-relationship for friendship; you’ll wind up rotting in purgatory.   

A guy I dated in Boston stayed with me in New York about a month ago.  Based on my slippery conclusion about post-relationship friendship, I viewed this as potentially disastrous. In stark contrast, the weekend was pleasantly platonic. Maybe because there was less emotion attached to this one, but the post-relationship hang-out went off without a hitch.  I’ve enjoyed dinners and baseball games with ex-whatevers—something I’d heretofore thought impossible—working under the assumption that there was some reason other than animal instinct we were kissing in the first place.  And so I’ve been made to rework prior notions.   

I removed a boy’s number from my phone earlier this year because my post-relationship antics were unhealthy and embarrassing.  I’m told this digital erasure is a helpful thing people do, and so I followed suit. With this particular post-relationship, the aforementioned “friend date” was out of the question; my temper had flared, and that ain’t pretty.  The best thing to do was tie my wrists behind my back and find someone else to kiss until he became more memory than flesh.          

I have mixed relationship with post-relationship, a bitter cocktail that results in a brutal hangover.  Once a relationship is over, it should really be over, but we’re addicted to recycling, reusing the familiar and then reusing it once more. Like my hometown, maybe it's time to consider composting.

Finality is hard to accept. There are myriad ways to handle the post-relationship, none of which is universally correct. No one rule is unanimously applicable.  Still, the idea that there may be some magic formula is comforting when thinking how to pull yourself up from a crash.  If it helps in the aftermath to trade stories and theories at brunches nationwide, bring on the bloody maries.