Never Walked In High Heels

Last night I watched on a whim a film titled, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Which recreates the tale of a modern man who was forced to play it safe in the name of family. But still, given his preternatural instincts, wishes to go out and continue to steal chickens from the coup.

I see the entire movie as a badly needed commentary on masculinity in our current society. I remember once my father saying: “women marry men thinking that they’ll change, men marry women hoping that they never will.” And in truth, both expectations are unrealistic. People do change but maybe not in the areas that we desire to see that change. I remember being woken up by a newly engaged friend of mine one morning in college. She came to my room later than usual and when I enquired about this she explained that she was up all night cleaning her fiancé’s dorm room. I was a bit shocked. She was the most independent young woman that I had met up to that point. Her dream was to go live in huts in Africa, and yet here she was confessing she had lost sleep by doing something her able bodied fiancé could have accomplished entirely by himself.

“Don’t worry, when we get married things will change.” Why would she say that? Why would she insist this when there is evidence to the contrary, that all of a sudden with a wedding band on his finger and a double income in the bank account he would ever change? Right there, still lying in bed in my dorm at the age of twenty, I could see that my father was absolutely right. People will often marry others absolutely convinced that after the wedding, everything will change.

Mr. Fox was by nature a chicken hunter. Simple. People often have in their very nature habits that aren’t particularly pleasant. My friend’s fiancé was not particularly neat. That was a characteristic about him that as far as I see evidence right now, has yet to change. By saying “Oh, he’ll change”, wasn’t my friend ultimately saying, “I would like to change him”? And if you love someone, do you want to change them? Can those two philosophies ever come together? Can you love someone while still wanting to alter any aspect of their character?

Mrs. Fox said it best when later in the movie she admits: “I love you, but I never should have married you.” It is a plague on modern masculinity that we seek to change it in the name of safety and security. Taming the modern man to live under a mortgage and go to the same place of work day after day after day is ultimately conditioning men everywhere to be afraid of freedom. I look at the male friends I have in my area of London. A large percentage of them are single, substantially older, and of course they live on boats or carry out some other form of adventurous life.

I love my friends dearly, even though I have my scuffles with them. The point is I can’t imagine altering any of them a fraction. They are warm and friendly and they carry out there lives for the most part exactly as they intend to. That doesn’t mean not living in safety simply because that isn’t what they want. It means weeks on boats waking up in the wee morning hours because the boat next door is on fire. It means not having a plan and living comfortably with the idea that at any moment life can change. I think about them and all I wish is if their lives unexpectedly change, tragedy or great joy, they aren’t forced to change who they are for any reason. Unless of course, they become more like themselves.

My cable breaks down all the time. I’ve stopped buying magazines because, quite simply, they depress me and as you already know by the first of this year I made a conscious choice not to follow the news. These three things , combined with the fact that I don’t fit into the traditional mold of what a young woman ought to be, means that most days whenever I walk through the shopping center to get to work I feel like I am on the outside looking in at the world rather than the other way around. The funny thing is, people actually can’t stand those of us who are able to watch the world go by. They want everyone to be caught up in it and whisked away in some weird combination of lust and greed. The truth is, we live in a world which craves cultural homogeny. Everyone should want what we want.

This is the point in time when my political science creature would step up and make some sort of philosophical commentary about the state of the world. The truth is you could blame capitalism for this rat race fueled by advertising and big companies wanting to sell more, thereby making the rich richer. Or you could blame socialism, fueled by an unattainable ideal that everyone would not only be equal but also the same, have the same items, want the same things, and not lack any of the same necessities. Someone could probably find a way to blame every political philosophy in the world should they want to, but it doesn’t change the fact that every single one of us wants the world to operate our way. And every single one of us thinks deep down that our way of seeing the world is the best way to do so.

We are adept at filling the silences in our mind with the sound of things which we don’t have and the craving for those things that we want. Humanity, as a whole, excels in creating idols of ourselves and being prepared to seek whatever we desire at all possible costs. The cult of homogeny means that deep down we are unable to understand why we don’t have everything we want, but also why we want these items in the first place. Furthermore it means that we cannot begin to comprehend the idea that maybe not everyone wants items such as the strongest army in the world, more wealth, more land, or simply more food. But also it means that we can’t even begin to see why anyone would see the world any different than we see it. After all, when an individual sees himself as the center of the universe, there is only one way to look at each individual object in relation to him.

Looking at the world from the outside, being unable to run around in high heeled shoes, incapable of grabbing the latest mocha frappuccino in a Starbucks cup and refusing to have any contact with the popular hysteria brought on by the news means that I do have to see the world differently. There are moments where I catch myself standing in line at a checkout counter trying to decipher the headlines on a magazine cover and having no idea what the lingo is referring to. I have to say, I might not like it when I have no idea what’s going on around me, but I do enjoy it when I don’t feel obligated to sit with the entire pasteurized culture that I am surrounded by.

I am told by my friends that sometime soon, I will have to be sucked in to what they now call the “Two Percent Culture”. That is a place where only two percent of all real people actually honestly sit in. The rest of the people skim themselves off the top or try to be caught up in a whirlwind of frenzy. But based on cultural centrifuge which somehow acts as a great equalizer, so that they too can seem to belong. But the truth is I never think I will fit in there. Moreover, I don’t think that I want to.

Not long ago I sent out an email asking for help regarding a dilemma I was facing. Most people emailed me back offering suggestions or saying that they were stumped, except for one woman who was in my masters program last year. She wrote me the following:

“I can appreciate what you are going to do, but it’s only going to result in costing you more money. You’re better off quitting while you are ahead. After all, you can’t change the world, so why do damage to yourself while trying?”

I realize, of course, that no single person can change the world. Indeed it is arrogant to think otherwise. The economic philosopher F.A Hayek once wrote “Nothing has brought as much hell on earth as people trying to make it a paradise.” And indeed, my generation is particularly culpable of running around attempting to justify the action(s) of that behavior by persuading ourselves that if only this one thing was different the world would be exactly as it ought to be.

But I can save someone’s world, even if it is my own. By nature, I am not particularly a small-scale thinker. When most people in college were volunteering to teach a single school child how to read, I quickly found myself working in three different ESL classrooms. The truth is I was never very effective in any of them because I was spread out so thin

.

This, I suppose, is the deity of human interaction, because to change the world simply means to change the world of one individual. Simply teaching a child how to do long division radically changes his world. And when that individual’s world has changed, he is able to press on and teach someone else the same skills which you have taught him. Thus you have greatly altered not the child’s world, but those he taught as well.

Metaphysics talks about a problem which is briefly titled “Possible Worlds”. The idea, though somewhat strange, is rather simple. In this world, my nail polish is bright red, but there are a million possible worlds out there which we may or may not be aware of in which my polish is bright green, purple, orange, or even black. Simply because we are not aware of these possible worlds in our own world does not mean that a world where I have chosen to paint my nails black, does not exist. It just means that in this world, we are not aware of it. When we take the time to touch each other’s lives, and to improve the world that we are aware of, we give each other glimpses of what better worlds, that is what possible worlds, are out there.

The family of a girlfriend of mine decided over the course of about ten years to adopt eight Russian children, all of them related in various forms. When I tell this story, particularly to people in the UK, I often get a comment that my friend’s family “over-adopted” and thus most likely spread themselves so thin that they will never be able to take care of all of those children adequately. It’s true, those children will not have as much individualized attention from their parents as an only child living under the same conditions. I was appalled when someone said “What are they trying to do, adopt all of Russia? Change the entire problem? The entire orphan problem?” No family in their right mind is ever that arrogant.

What they did try to do was change the world for eight Russian children who would otherwise be facing a bleak existence separated from their siblings in orphanages spread out across a massive country. And the parents themselves say that as much they managed to changed the world for their children. But their children have enhanced their world. That’s the way that great ideas work. Someone who improves the world of someone else in need will surely become the recipient of a changed world. And, unlike my friend who insists otherwise, perhaps will so much easier say that worlds, when looked at on an individual level, are much easier to say than we might think.

My cousin is trying to help me walk through his sunken living room. I am tiny and still trying to get my legs under my hips. Most days that fight is a losing battle. He is a foot taller than me and attempts to wrap his arms around me so that I won’t fall. Of course this constriction is too much for my body to bear, and I end up on the floor. My aunt comes to the rescue.

“Don’t help her too much, there is such a thing as helping someone to such an extreme degree that you wind up smothering them and doing more harm than good. Just hold her hand if she needs help walking sweetie, that’s enough.”

Fast forward twenty years and I am watching the very same words come out of a friend’s mouth. She is on TV speaking about the adoption of orphans worldwide. Programs set up by the government are failing these children right and left (it doesn’t matter which government: state government, federal government; Russian; Chinese; they all seem to not be providing for children in desperate need of homes). Individual action needs to be taken, she says this over and over. If half the churches in America would have one family that would adopt one child, we could give a home to each child in America this year. I am shocked. Just one family in half the churches in America? That’s all it would take? Really? I stare blankly at my computer screen doing the math, wondering what would happen if some churches would find three or four families that would want to adopt and fully support them. The calculations in my head are rolling and then I immediately make the leap: What if we started a government program that would take in all the orphans? There are so few of them, surely someone in Washington could come up with…

And now we’re back to the original problem that programs, it turns out, just don’t work and that children don’t need anymore programs, they need individuals willing to step up to the plate and be a family.

When there is a problem of any kind, why is it that our instinct moves immediately towards a programmatic solution, instead of individuals taking initiative? I don’t believe that most people are lazy. After all, many problems we face are so inconvenient to everybody that perceived laziness is sheer naivety. It’s that the lazy solution turns into a much more complicated problem.

Living here in the U.K, I am often struck by how many individuals consider money as a form of charity. Is that it? Is it simply that we feel we are doing something by throwing money at a problem? Government money, our money? But do we really think a simple check can solve all of our problems? In this way of course, writing a check or forming a large program which we support financially but take little direct action in sometimes doesn’t do a whole lot but line the pockets of bureaucrats.

It’s easy to talk about improving the world in comfortable leather armchairs when we have our noses behind thick books and talking about items such as programs in theory. But money, although it has a great deal of power, is also hugely impotent. If you literally were to just throw money at a problem nothing would happen except that there would be a pile of money on top of the problem. A problem with a large amount of financial pools never gets to the core of an issue, changing the hearts and minds of people. It always takes individuals doing something directly, whether it comes from using money appropriately or taking some sort of physical response in order to find a solution. And what are the chances that members of a government who meet behind closed doors and drive Mercedes actually know how to solve a problem when they have never faced it themselves? Not very likely. The fact is my aunt was right. Mothering a problem is not the same as solving it; it just suffocates those who have fallen underneath and are already suffering to begin with.

I was brought up with a relatively conservative background for a modern woman. At a young age, we were taught that we were to be careful about relationships we had, particularly amongst those of the opposite sex. We were to prize our bodies and under no circumstances were we to appear unnecessarily scandalous. Later, I revised the last point to add the word “unnecessary” as opposed to simply “scandalous” because after all, sometimes a little bit of scandal was fashionable. Therefore, when I called my mother late last night, I was expecting her to drop the phone on the floor. What I was not expecting was for her to commence laughing so hysterically that it took her a good fifteen minutes of me begging to finally bring her back to some sort of order.

It went like this: Last night my room mate was out of town for a single night and I was home alone. I had instructed a male neighbor of mine who happens to be one of my closest friends here to come over and plug in my electric chair at the end of the evening since I am unable to manipulate the cord by myself. He agreed that he would come by shortly after midnight and I left a key for him to get in. At approximately eleven o’clock, I decided that there is no point in waiting up for someone who is perfectly capable of plugging in an electric wheelchair on their own. So I began to get ready for bed. Shortly thereafter, I was attempting to undress myself and managed to get caught in my own white knit shirt.

Under normal situations, this never would have been a problem. Of course if my room mate were in town she would be helping me with my nightly duties. However, when I awoke that morning and carefully picked out my outfit for the day it came to me that I would be spending the evening alone and thus wanted my garments according to what I could get on and off with my own volition, or so I thought. By the time eleven thirty had rolled around, it was clear to me that because I was so warm from attempting in vain to remove my shirt, that I would never be able to get it off in such a state of panic which I had inevitably worked myself into.

In one last try, I attempted to pull the bottom of the shirt up over my head. This too was unsuccessful, and I had managed to loop the shirt around the back of my neck with my arms still completely in the sleeves. I had now reached a desperate measure and at eleven thirty-five, stuck in a shirt, late at night, I began to call all the female neighbors I could think of.

By the time I attempted to reach the sixth woman on my list, I heard my door unlocking and at that realized that my worst nightmare had indeed come true. I made my way downstairs tangled up in my white collared shirt.

Despite my embarrassment, my friend was more than happy to rescue me from my clothing malfunction. Finally reporting that he actually enjoyed “Rescuing damsels in such deep and disturbing distress.” At which point I raised my hand, forever clenched in that stereotypical quadriplegic fist, and I said “Guess which finger I would like to show you.”

On the one hand it was without a doubt one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. That having been said, there is something that, despite my conservative upbringing and my vain attempts to follow Jesus, I have managed to avoid, a much needed lesson which I needed to learn long before now.

Your best friends are the ones which you will doubtlessly be willing to break all the rules, even the rules of propriety for. Fortunately for me, my neighbor is one of those people who I will not only allow to see me vulnerable, but also see me completely humiliated, sweaty, frustrated, entangled in a shirt which is usually a simple on/off. Despite my embarrassment and the fact that I was on the verge of tears, he looked at me dead in the eye and said, “It’s no big deal. I have helped loads of girls take their shirts off before.”

Thank God for that.

Recently it was my birthday and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted on our hearts. These are the goals we are meant to reach for. These are the goals made for no one else but us. When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then racing for our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

A while back I lost a friend who informed under no uncertain terms that my aims in life were “unrealistic” and “It’s time for you to grow up anyway.” And it’s true, any dream you have as a young woman with a disability today is still highly unrealistic. There is no job field I can enter at this point with no typing skills and manual labor being next to impossible, where my lifetime career would be simple, straightforward, and predictable. Add to the fact that I work in the arts and the entertainment industry, which, according to him, is one of the most shallow industries in existence and you have a road map for someone trying to reach the moon without a rocket ship. He didn’t know it at the time I don’t think, but what my friend was asking me to do was to deny my dreams simply because the world wasn’t ready for them. Is unpreparedness ever a good reason to move on, particularly when it’s unpreparedness not on your behalf but on the behalf of the rest of the world? Would it be appropriate for an African-American fifty years ago to say that wanting to get a graduate school education at an institution like Vanderbilt was not a worthwhile dream simply because the school was located in an area that was still full of racial tension? Are we morally obligated to change our ambitions just because they might be difficult to reach or impossible given the current state of our society?

I can appreciate if someone has a child that is dependent on them or other obligations the strategy changes. Certain sacrifices must be made, particularly when it comes to earning a supporting those who are reliant on you.. But those of us who are able to get by and still repeatedly try to break down the walls we choose to leave standing might not necessarily have the sociological standard course of action. After all, if no one breaks down the walls that are obstacles in our own culture, they will never come down on their own accord. Rather, they will stay as imposing obstacles waiting for someone in the next generation to tear them down. And so, walls are made until someone is determined to make a ruckus and carry through with the demolition process fully.

Dreams are by nature just out of reach, and if they were easy to grasp and lasso down to the floor, would they be worthwhile dreams or just perpetuating the status quo. It is never acceptable to pass on your dreams simply because they are too difficult to accomplish. Difficulty is never a strong enough reason to quit anything.

There was a time when I was very very small, and I did not realize the limitations plastered on the wall. What I did realize was what my dreams were. At about the same age, I would go to sleep and not understand that the things I did after I went to bed and the images that came across my mind were not reality. The next morning I would ask my mom if she remembered flying over the moon with me or dancing with flowers on fairy dust patches. She would look at me and say “That didn’t happen, you dreamed it. It was a dream.” But it all felt so real to me, even after I woke up safely in my bed.

It’s the most vivid dreams, which no one else can see, that inevitably forces you to reach further than anyone without that dream would ever recommend.

Recently I’ve taken up baking every Saturday morning with my neighbors. They file in with their dishes and types of specialty tea, one of them bringing eggs, another flour, sugar, recipe book. We catch up on the news of the week as we mix and enjoy one another’s company. I am always slightly ashamed when I bring up my “baking club” to people. I’m even more ashamed when I think of the stereotypes of the craft. I do love this time when we bake together. To me it brings up images of 1950s housewives and the pastel icing that is so perfect it screams never to be eaten. I worry now that I appear like one of those domesticated goddesses who seem to know everything about the kitchen and nothing about the real world. I worry that people think that I take my shoes off when I enter my own house.

But in actuality I’m not baking in order to become this feminine ideal or even make beautiful cakes which everyone will love. I don’t bake to become the heroine of the kitchen. I bake because I am learning so much from the experience.

I bake so I can enjoy my neighbors. It’s actually becoming the equivalent of the Saturday morning cartoon watching ritual when I was a kid. The ladies pile in full of ideas and laughter and I am reminded how much I miss them throughout the busy week. We are forced to watch each other and give opinions about the meringue or marriage. Most of the women are older than I, and so hearing them speak and listening to their responses regarding issues that I am currently struggling with is a good comfort. With our Saturday morning ritual comes a dedicated time when we all come together and escape the busy world to get to know each other and what we need in our lives, better. Today in London I don’t know many other opportunities to do exactly that.

I bake because it forces me to make the best of a situation where there is no script. Inevitably something will go wrong; we run out of flour or someone puts in too much milk, the egg yolk won’t separate and it’s our last egg. All of a sudden five women have to put their heads together and figure out what can be done in an effort to counteract impending culinary doom. For once in life the problems are small and we are able to laugh about them. The cake may not rise, despite our best efforts, but we are able to fail in that limited way. While the cake may not look the way it did in the photograph, it still tastes good. Problem solving skills therefore become like a clever game rather than seeming like a rendition of a modern day Sisyphus.

I bake because it truly opens up a world of skills that I was never exposed to growing up. In England, not only do they measure things in grams, but we actually use a balance scale to tell just how many pistachios to put in the macaroons. For the first time in my life I feel exactly what bread dough needs to feel like before it is placed into an oven. In the past, women taught each other these skills in exactly the same way I am learning them now. They would come over and have the community cook a meal; allowing the younger generation to experience all the details required to perfect the meals well before they reached the helm of the kitchen. Most days we choose recipes by Nigella Lawson who is in a matter of speaking, insanely old fashioned; making everyone whip eggs by hand or blanche almonds themselves. But from this crazy insistence on ritual comes clear traditions passed on within the community from woman to young woman so that she is never isolated even when she is stuck in the domestic realm of plainly perfect housewife.

I love Saturday mornings. It’s my favorite part of the week now. Some mornings I can here the laughter from down the road as the women meet up with each other before entering my flat. Ease and perfection isn’t always considered standard, and simple things are really exciting. I will never fit the perfected housewife mode, I don’t want to. I have other dreams and goals for my life so it’s ok when we make lousy mistakes and burn the pavlova. Real people sometimes get to talking so much about life that they forget that the pudding is still in the oven.

When I opened my back door at the sound of his knocking, it was obvious that he came bearing gifts. The presents, sloppily wrapped in brown paper, came as a sort of surprise,  I wasn’t expecting anything from him at all. Instantly the selfish side of my mind takes over.  All I want to know is what he could have brought me? What he could have seen that made him think of me?  So I open the package.  At first I think it’s a joke because it’s a paper cup that has vegetables painted on it with a plastic top. The entire thing weighed no more than a cup of noodles, which I ate back in university. I look at him.

“You bought me a cup of vegetable soup?” He rolls his eyes and tells me to pay better attention. I look again, it’s seeds for a chili plant. The paper cup is full of dirt.

Why even bother to get me anything if you are just going to get me a cup of dirt?  Nothing wrong with the gift, I say, but the fact is I can’t plant seeds. I can barely take care of myself let alone making me responsible for another object, it’s not my idea of a good time. He starts talking excitedly of the chili plants he’s been growing and I am still stuck on receiving a cup of dirt for my birthday.  Doesn’t he know me at all?  Doesn’t he know my limitations of what I can and cannot do? What does he think, after feeding me hundreds of meals, cleaning my flat, fixing broken wheelchairs, and unlocking doors which I didn’t have the physical capability to open, he would know that this present would be more trouble than anything else.

“So are we gonna sit here and keep talking or are we gonna plant these things?” All of a sudden, with massive amounts of dexterity he jumps up and flies over to the kitchen sink, opening the paper cup and the package of seeds, adding water as necessary, and then dumping the seeds out onto the table.

“Your turn”, he says. After a second I look at him blankly. What is he talking about?  What is he doing? He continues to look at me in expectation. “Go on then, I’ll hold the cup, you put the seeds in. They need to be planted about two inches apart….Its not going to spill, I have hold of the cup right here.” I look at him, he has absolutely lost his mind.  Even if I do manage to get these tiny little pepper seeds into a pile of dirt and bury it, the thing is just going to die. I really don’t have the capability of managing any more house plants. When you depend on someone else to get you a drink of water, the plant seemed like a good excuse to start a group called “Planned Planting” to look for alternative homes for the houseplant you’ve been given. The chili seeds are impossible for me to hold on to until I get them on the tip of my finger and I am slowly able to make the seeds stick to my just long enough to be placed on top of the dirt. He poked behind the back of the seeds, pushing them in

“That should do it nicely, I’ll come by in a few days to water and, when it’s time, you and I can repot them. There’s loads of new pots at Tescos. Though, you should get a set now for when they grow bigger. I even have some compost in the back of my boat.”

It wasn’t until he said that that I finally realized what my birthday from him actually was.  All of a sudden I had my very own gardener to help me plant chili plants. He comes back every few days to check up on them and give them water when needed. And, just as I promised, I bought three  pots on sale from Tescos for one pound fifty. This morning when I woke up, I found eight tiny seedlings in a paper cup. Their heads just beginning to raise towards the sun, and immediately I texted him to see if he would come by and have a look. Whenever he comes to give them more water, the value of his birthday present grows exponentially.  He is one of those people who gives up his time freely, making you feel like you are the most important person in the world. And with that comes the astounding ability to give a precious gift that no one else can replicate, regardless of how much money may be thrown or the size of the celebration.

Every morning when I come downstairs, I look at the tiny plants in the paper cup, wondering if they need to be watered for that day. Whenever I start to think that they do, he inevitably comes by with the watering can, ready to make sure that everything in our little paper cup garden is properly cared for. I’ve even started to figure out additional uses for chili’s to see what will come during harvest time. One morning he came in with a new challenge, sunflowers. He wants to see how high he can make one grow inside my two story windows. This time, I didn’t turn my nose up so quickly at his present. I realized that he gave me himself.

Living with a disability is the equivalent of being trapped inside the riddle about a dog, a duck, and a bag of grain. Which all need to cross the river? You can’t leave the duck alone with the grain because the duck will eat the grain. You can’t leave the dog with the duck because the dog will eat the duck. Yet somehow you have to manage to take a rowboat and get all three across.

It was on a day when my life was turning out to be the epitome of this riddle when my mother exploded at me “You need to learn to avoid problems at all possible costs! Why can’t you keep things as simple as humanly possible?” The irony of it was I actually do my best to accomplish just that, but I am somehow extremely unsuccessful at it. When you are trying to navigate through a world which is built for people on two functioning legs and with two functioning hands, the idea of avoiding problems leads you little further than coming out your front door. If you want to avoid the challenges of the world, that is staying inside where it’s safe. If you want to live life to the fullest, you better be prepared for some sort of “choose your own adventure” story with lots of opportunities to see the “Game Over” screen.

I used to think that life was actually about avoiding problems at all possible costs, making the right decisions that would lead to the path of least resistance and easy sailing. But you can’t avoid problems. There is no fairy godmother that can swoop in and make everything OK. Living was only in the confines of a highly accessible house and being certain that all the problems in the world will not come to get you will lead to a highly boring life. It’s the old dilemma of Siddartha, the Buddhist prince who had everything he wanted and yet lacked fulfillment in the world. I’m not sure when my mother said I needed to avoid problems, she meant it to its fullest extent possible. Because avoiding problems means on some level that there are real solutions to every dilemma we face, which can be attained. Some issues are so complicated that they are, on a certain level, unsolvable. The best thing we can do is simply work our way through them.

Life only works when its constantly expanding in every direction. This doesn’t simply mean finding creative solutions to the problems that we encounter, or incorporating some sort of community spirit through living. t means that the problems, the sorrows, the bruises, these too are a part of life and worth working through and worth living for. Even this sorrow, which none of us want to encounter, must be faced fully in order for a life to even begin to have the depth possible and necessary to be rich and full of vibrancy. In return, these problems we encounter and sorrows we must mourn present us with a new challenge. We can either close our hearts and become callous, refusing to go anywhere that hasn’t been protected by some emotional health and safety policy. Or we can take it, all of us that is, for what it ,d recognize that to love it all and to live it all is to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, risking failure heartbreak and the entire boat tipping over losing the entire dock and the bag of grain. But in the end, we live in a world where trading vulnerability and safety inevitably stops not only problems, but living, dead in it’s tracks.

For some time now, my friends have been begging me to join one of those internet dating sites. “You are a busy woman, you can’t waste time going to bars and looking for the ideal match.” “Things aren’t like how they used to be, everybody is super busy and that’s OK. We need more direction in looking for romance. It’s completely normal to have a profile on one of those sites.” It seemed for a while that no matter where I was there was a Match.com advertisement promising a match in six months or my money back. This of course, I thought, meant that my money would at some point have to end up in their bank account rather than stay in my own. How wrong I was.

So finally, on a cold evening when I wasn’t feeling in the best moods about myself, I decided to give the advice of my friends a go and signed up for a service which will as always when I have to use proper nouns, remain nameless. I signed up, filled in my birthday, my gender, my age, my email address and hit “OK”. Only to be faced with a form of over two hundred absurd questions. What did I think about Smoking (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Religion (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Performing arts? Financial planning? Dogs? Cats? Small rodents?

And to be honest, some of these questions I had no idea how to answer. After all, how can any woman in my position ever tell if her dislike of, lets say, naked sacrifices of chickens is something I am “moderately” opposed to or “strongly” opposed to? What constitutes a moderate support as opposed to simple support? I was about to give up when I finally reached the holy grail of dating sites, that is, the end screen. I waited for the little rainbow pinwheel to stop spinning on my computer in eager expectation as they calculated my matches and results. My credit card was ready for the six month money-back guarantee. I had it all planned out, I would go into a coffee shop to meet with the guy and my girlfriend would be in disguise at the next table. That way, if he wound up trying to kidnap me she could take action in her little five foot two inch, 110-pound sort of way.

“We’re sorry, we feel that it would be inappropriate to use our services given that your results fall outside of the standard deviation of a majority of men who register with us. Thank you for trying our dating site.”

So, apparently there are standard deviations in online dating. I immediately went back to my junior year stats class where we talked about standard deviations and Z factors for a review of what this could possibly mean. Take your typical Bell curve: Ninety-nine point nine percent of the individuals must fit within the bell. The other point one percent are just out of luck when it comes to looking to romance it turns out. I, with my answers of strong likes and moderate dislikes, am a member of that point one percent where it is apparently so statistically impossible to find me a match that they won’t even bother to take my credit card number.

Beyond the entire absurdity of the whole situation (I am apparently unmatchable) begs the question, can human emotions ever be broken down into standard deviations and mathematical equations? At the risk of sounding too much like an excerpt from Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City”, I don’t think there is a standard deviation when it comes to romance.

I have had friends who are absolutely driven to pure militancy when it comes to finding a boyfriend. Why? There is one individual I met who told me that she was determined through one of these online dating sites to be married within the year. Her strategy was simple, she would go out and meet a guy at Starbucks, and if in ten minutes they didn’t click she would immediately say “I don’t think this is working out”, offer to pay for his coffee and then leave. Within nine months she was engaged, and I guess her clear-cut organization and decisiveness coupled with on the spot thinking worked to her advantage.

But it always seemed to me that half the fun of dating is not knowing what will happen next, like any adventure in life. If a guy walked into where I was sitting with a big neon sign above his head that said “I am the one”, then I might be giddy for a moment but then that excitement would completely disappear and I suspect I would feel completely shackled.

Scientists have struggled and eventually discovered a massive amount of hormones and chemical reactions that go into establishing a good relationship, but there are some aspects of human interaction that science is anywhere near explaining such as true self-sacrificial love. Where is the evolutionary self-preservation in that? If there is any, I’m not sure I would want to find it. There are some wonderful things out there that have been going on for centuries which scientists can’t even begin to explain. These are omens, interactions, and emotions that should be celebrated because they all help create the adventure inherent in the unexpected. After all, as Dr. House indeed said “If the wonder disappears when the answer is gone, there is never any wonder to begin with.”