Anything worth doing is worth doing well. I’m not one of those people who thinks that. Anything you do is worth doing. Thinking of tasks, and life, this way changes perspective. Breathing. Making breakfast. Tweaking the brakes on your bike. All these small things make up the whole, and all these small things remind you that you live. Of your humanness. That we are creatures.
If you stare at hexagonal floor tiles long enough they start to look like pixels. The day I realized this was the day I began working to willfully distance myself from the technology on which we all depend. There was also the mountain goat. The mountain goat, wary and chewing on grasses, doesn’t have a computer. It just knows the glaciers have retreated and that summers are getting warmer, but it doesn’t really worry about it. It adapts; follows the alpine meadow as it moves further up the mountain. Seeks out colder water and fresher air. The mountain goat doesn’t have an email address. It’s a creature, just like me.
I have to remind myself of that, of that creatureness, when I start to get wrapped up in the human world. Some might call it nihilism. I just think it’s realistic. When all is said and done, popular culture and the contemporary way we’ve structured society is pretty silly. It would be hilarious if we weren’t so brutal; so damaging. It’d be funnier if we were fruit flies instead of big, smart apes bumbling through the forest knocking down trees. But saying that doesn’t give apes enough credit. They, too, just adapt. Move further up the mountain. Find new things to eat. I don’t think they obsess about celebrities. But, then again, it’s not like we listen to them. There could, after all, be a Brangelina ape couple.
Too many people write about the majesty of apes.
When I was 8 years old, my mother and I visited my childhood best friend and her mom and sister. They’d moved to a small city north of us. A small city with a zoo. I remember touching the broad backs of tortoises and riding on an escalator somewhere. But mostly I remember the baboons, agitated, throwing poop at us. I remember screaming and laughing at the same time and running from the poop. Long hairy arms flinging it through the bars. I didn’t blame them. I just wanted to get away from the yellow fluorescent lights, the flying poop and the baboons’ big pink posteriors.
We all have those memories of our own individual histories that favor who we are today. The baboon poop story isn’t usually one of mine. Instead, I remember listening to Sepultura while sitting in a beat-up Oldsmobile parked near a dam at the end of a winding dirt road. To me, this experiences best defines what it was like growing up in a tiny cow town in rural northwestern Wisconsin. Escapism. Nature. Music. It fits the mythos I’ve created for myself as an adult – whether or not it’d seem true to others who remember me then doesn’t matter. What matters is telling this story at parties.
Others probably remember me as a nerd: a girl who liked school, got good grades, had a steady boyfriend. A girl who did what she was supposed to do. I was all those things, but I was also the things I favor in my memory. As well as cripplingly depressed, uncertain and really, really bored. But what teenager isn’t? No matter where you come from, you are all those things. The older I get the more convinced I am of our human similarity. Our creatureness doesn’t set us apart. We all go through that pupa stage.
I wonder sometimes if it’s modernity that lengthens the duration of that stage. I felt like a pupa until I was at least 27. Though I’ve been ostensibly on my own since I was 18 (college financed on my own, own apartment at 19, many jobs to make ends meet), attaining stability was challenging. It didn’t follow a white-picket-fence trajectory (my fence is untreated cedar). Or maybe it’s that some people take longer to believe in adulthood. It wasn’t until I found gray hairs at my temples that I realized it was true; that I was knew I was no longer invincible.
