Beautiful

adjective
1. having beauty;  having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind: a beautiful dress; a beautiful speech.
2. excellent of its kind
3. wonderful; very pleasing or satisfying.
noun
4. the concept of beauty
5. beautiful things or people collectively (usually preceded by the ): the good and the beautiful.
6. the ideal of beauty
interjection
7. wonderful; fantastic
8. extraordinary; incredible: used ironically

I've been collecting childhood photographs to post to our wedding blog. I was a cute kid. Freckles, wavy light brown hair, big brown eyes, quirky little smile...and I have memories to go along with almost every age that has a picture.

I wasn't a girly-girl; I liked to do un-girly things like run around the house in my underwear with finger paint smeared on my face and an old turkey feather and pretend to be an Indian warrior. I wanted a bow and arrows so badly, and I definitely had an awesome sword and shield set worthy of the mightiest tom-girls. But I remember liking to wear one particular dress to church because that dress made me feel beautiful and special. It was very dark navy with teeny tiny little polka dots that looked like stars in the sky. I thought it fit me like a dancer, and I knew I liked dancing because of the ballet classes I took in preschool. I'm not even sure where I got that dress, but I loved it and wore it until it was much too small for me. I didn't have particularly good fashion-sense for a little girl (I also liked to wear a headband with long bouncy antennae with glittery stars on the ends which embarrassed my teenage sister Tracie terribly, because Tracie was born with fashion sense), but I liked the feeling of being pretty.

Sometime around the age of six, my mom gave me a short haircut which I remember completely, because it had a dramatic effect on how the rest of the world interacted with me, and how I saw myself. My hair has always been very thick and unruly, and so this haircut was likely a strategy to save us time getting out the door in the morning (mom was always telling me to "hurry" and I even have a childhood drawing labeled "my mother" with a little bubble coming out of the figure's face saying "hurry!").

The haircut coincided with a particularly chunky phase of my childhood development. My face didn't lose that baby-fat until just recently, actually. Combined with the fact that I rarely wore dresses or feminine-looking clothes during the normal week because I was such a "wild mohican child," my haircut made me look remarkably like a little boy. So remarkably that other little girls who didn't know me started freaking out when I walked into the little girls bathroom, and mean little boys started calling me ugly.

Now, I was an imaginative little girl who lived in her own private little enchanted world most of the time.  I had never been particularly interested in other little kids' opinions (though apparently I was interested in them romantically because my first two boyfriends were in preschool and kindergarten, and I definitely remember my first kiss under the covers at naptime with Danny, bless him). We didn't have other little kids my age living anywhere near us. The only time I really even saw other little kids was at school or daycare. Furthermore, because I was an advanced learner I had developed a habit of being a know-it-all, because knowing it all was required in order to interact with the adults and herds of teenagers who normally surrounded me. So little kids in turn had no particular reason to be nice to me. And, indeed, they weren't.

So the outcome was that I, too, decided that I was ugly. I remember confusing the little boys who called me ugly by shrugging and replying, "I know." I'm pretty sure this was around the time I decided that the planet would be better off without any people on it.

Being ugly didn't really hurt my tree-climbing skills, my snake-hunting skills, my bike-riding skills, or my horse-loving skills, so guess I decided that I didn't really notice it that much. I liked pretty things, had a growing aesthetic sense, and I was good at drawing, so I decided that all of my prettiness was stuck inside my head, and needed drawing to get outside of me. And horses were pretty enough to keep me busy drawing for years and years.

Being ugly made adolescence somewhat more traumatic than necessary. Adding braces and glasses to the chubby cheeks was an interesting aesthetic combination. I crushed out HARD on a few boys. They knew it, and they ignored me out of embarrassment because I had the good sense to like nice boys. So I focused my energy on my clarinet and English homework and avoiding math by drawing horses in the margins of my notebooks.

And horses... horses were, in the end, the replacements for the boyfriends I never had in high school and college. Horses were beautiful. And big, strong, sensitive, warm, huggable, and wonderful interesting intricate puzzles. Lucky was my first love, followed by Wimpy and then Jasmine and Sunshine and Pepper and Sparky. I was so infatuated with horses that I majored in them in college, despite having talent enough to have done almost anything else. It didn't matter... until the reality of finding a job came into focus.

It was in the corporate world that I learned that being ugly had, in fact, protected me in many ways. Despite having majored in horses, I had minored in science and English, and gotten away with a pretty decent education. I had learned to find beauty in ideas, philosophies, cultures, religions, and I was beginning to see it more commonly in other peoples' insides. Better yet, I had avoided all of the distraction that often comes with being pretty.

And a few kind friends helped to teach me how to make myself pretty. But I had a lot to learn, in addition to that. Some of the lessons I should have learned in adolescence, I learned much later. They were counter-intuitive for someone who had always been so independent and oblivious.

And so I recognized in a very mechanical way exactly what modern women give up to be beautiful on the outside. It starts in childhood and progresses from there. Pop culture rarely says anything about it because it's so invested in getting you to fit the image. But it's true. Living in dorms full of teenage girls exposed me to it first-hand.

I can't wait to raise my daughter. She can wear dresses and climb trees and draw horses and choose her own haircuts. And she will be beautiful.

Commencement

— n
1.	the beginning; start
2.	a. a ceremony for the presentation of awards at secondary schools
	b. a ceremony for the conferment of academic degrees

Nearly a year since my last post, but not quite. Warp speed has slowed briefly to something bearable, and blogging for my wedding and considering the future make me want to post here again.

It's always been funny to me how the word "commencement" actually means "beginning," and yet psychologically it represents collapse in exhaustion and gratitude that some academic journey has finally ended.

Of course, if you're southern, you know that "commence" has a place in certain phrases like, "she commenced to hollerin' and cussin' and whoopin' on his sorry no-count cheatin' ass." Which is a whole other connotation, entirely. But anyway.

Speaking of southern, I am leaving the south, and red states I have always called home, hopefully forever. There are pieces of me that will be forever rooted here, but it is time to commence on a new path into western woods and coasts and insect-and-humidity-and-tornado-free life. I don't hate the south, but I am continually dismayed at how an entire region can be simultaneously so nice and polite and hospitable while also being hateful and hostile and ignorant. And hot!!

It is also the commencement of married life and new jobs and new... life. More on that later. I'm still processing it.

Of course, for Doug and for me and for thousands of other graduates everywhere, collapsing in exhaustion and gratitude for the end of our academic journeys is definitely warranted. I have 6 weeks to go.

It is the end, and the beginning, again.

Constraint

–noun

1. limitation or restriction.

2.repression of natural feelings and impulses: to practice constraint.

3. unnatural restraint in manner, conversation, etc.; embarrassment.

I am currently sitting in my economics class during the 11-hour-every-other-Saturday marathon that is my EMBA education. We're talking about government budget constraints and the various factors that contribute to government spending. Boredom sets in as the professor talks about monetary policy, and suddenly I realize that "constraint" is the word that's been eluding me over the past days of exhaustion and building need to express and harmonize my mental notes into a defined chord.

Just before this class, at lunch, I sat with a table full of young Accelerator Program students: undergrads and fresh college grads taking a 3-week every day for 12 hours a day business orientation boot camp here at Vanderbilt. They are relatively fresh-faced and full of energy even after pulling an all-nighter last night in preparation for their strategy presentations to actual businesses this morning. They are hungry to learn more about the opportunities that exist for them out in the "real world," and eager to network for job and internship opportunities with those of us who are out here doing "real jobs."

At first I was bemused once again, lost in thought about how similar my own immediate concerns are to theirs...and then I realized that like me (and the one I love) they are smart, eager, energetic, creative, and unsure of the road ahead of them...but unlike me they (and the one I love) are totally inexperienced with actually making serious decisions which will impact the course of their lives.

I was reminded of a distressing conversation with Doug just this Thursday. After two weeks I discovered that I felt as though he was falling into a pattern of inaction. A pattern I fear. These young accelerator students are, after all, taking tremendously uncomfortable action to fill the space of their own inexperience, which is exciting and inspiring, and which gives those of us with experience something specific to direct our advice towards. Our conversation was constructive, but since then I've sensed that he has so many thoughts he's not sharing with me...and it's making me sad. I can't tell if it's restraint, things that he doesn't want to say to me...or something else. I wish I had more time with him.

But during the past two weeks Doug and I have enjoyed sharing more space, time, meals, exercise, sleep, and conversations than ever, and new constraints have arisen. For nine months we saw each other at most for a couple of hours a night and a few weekends, but our days were similarly filled with action and exhaustion and so our hours together were consistent. Now I leave him asleep at 6:30 or 7 to go to work, come home as soon as I can, get to sleep by midnight, and start all over again the next day. While I'm driving and at work, he's sleeping and at home, and I am exhausted while he's quickly regained energy. My time and energy have become major constraints. I can't even consistently run the trails which were at one point just a warm-up.

Above all things, I know that I need to leave this place, literally, for a climate and a life pace that fit more naturally my personal rhythms and strengths. During the last two weeks I began weekly professional mentoring sessions with resources at Vanderbilt. I am exploring the possible options for my next career move. "Just because I can doesn't mean I should," I repeat to myself, determined that this next step will be the optimal step which maximizes my progress taking consideration of my known and potential constraints.

I was very excited by Wednesday's meeting; it gave me much new information to process. But Thursday's conversation really began to concern me. I want to factor this relationship into my future, but I can't become the one who initiates action around every constraint.

Every way I look, there are limitations, restrictions, repressions. But I am confident that I will find my way. Because I have to. The only other option is to stagnate and die. Like my father. Like Webb. Like the South.

The answer in horsemanship, when a horse can't find the right answer and starts resisting, is always "move your feet." Anything that gets the horse moving and flowing again - any step, any direction, just MOVE - will get him back into progress.

I also remember a truth that I learned long ago: experience and inexperience are both constraints. It's how we respond to our unique constraints that makes the real difference in how we will proceed. If we let our constraints discourage us, if we let them persuade us on every occasion that inaction from uncertainty or resistance because of arrogance is the best course; if we fail to act like water (says the I Ching) and flow humbly over, under, around, and through our constraints, we will stagnate and die.

Forward! Onward! Move!

And through it all, thy will be done.

Direct(ion)

–noun (see root word "direct")
1. the act of directing or the state of being directed
2. management, control, or guidance
3. the work of a stage or film director
4. the course or line along which a person or thing moves, points, or lies
5. the course along which a ship, aircraft, etc, is travelling, expressed as the angle between true or magnetic north and an imaginary line through the main fore-and-aft axis of the vessel
6. the place towards which a person or thing is directed
7. a line of action; course
8. the name and address on a letter, parcel, etc
9. music the process of conducting an orchestra, choir, etc
10. music an instruction in the form of a word or symbol heading or occurring in the body of a passage, movement, or piece to indicate tempo, dynamics, mood, etc
11. ( modifier ) maths a. (of an angle) being any one of the three angles that a line in space makes with the three positive directions of the coordinate axes. Usually given as α, β, and γ with respect to the x-, y-, and z- axes b. (of a cosine) being the cosine of any of the direction angles

The school year that tested the deepest fibers of my strength and sanity is over. The father of one of the Chinese seniors who graduated told his son, "If you can't make your life longer, make it wider."

It's apt, but after this year my questions are, 1) how wide is too freakin' wide and 2) is it possible for a life to be three-or-more-dimensional? Cause I'm trying reeeally hard, and I'm already a third of the way thru my expected lifespan (my female relatives seem to live thru most of their 90's).

Last Friday I watched the class of 2011 complete their first step in the journey, like so many other young men and women all over the country are doing this month. This year I was strangely unmoved, and I wondered why until I remembered that I'm closer to their place in life than I was two, even ten, and certainly fifteen years ago. We are all finding our direction. I can't help but wonder (again) why it's taken me so long to get here.

My niece Lauren graduated last weekend. She was born when I was a junior in high school. During my visit to Tracie's, we were talking about Lauren's college prospects. She got focused and pulled her GPA up at the end of high school, along with stepping up into leadership roles in her church and becoming passionate about agriculture and international development. She looked at Cornell for the first time when I suggested it (I would never have remembered Cornell's Ag program without Doug's influence), and she fell in love. They have exactly the focus that she senses is right for her. In some ways I sense direction is finding her, at the right time.

The cicadas are in full, deafening pulse after 13 years, more years than most of these high schoolers can remember. I am technically old enough to remember three "broods," though I was in Texas when the 1985 "brood" emerged. Doug teases me about having survived the entire decade of the 80's; sadly (?) I didn't simply survive, I remember the entire decade, too. One of my first vivid, entire memories is crying desperately when my Daddy left one night. It had to be 1979 or so.

I started talking when I was 8 months old, according to my sisters and mom. Before I could crawl I was not just babbling, but making astute observations like "Richard is aggravating me," "I want some more beans please" and insisting that the primate in a specific picture was an "orangutan" and not just a monkey. All before the age of 1. They say it was bizarre to hear the talking baby. My sisters were nine and eleven years older than me; they were my extra parents, my teachers, and my best friends. It was a good thing, too, for all of us: for a while I was apparently the inspiration that gave a collapsing supernova family some sense of direction.

My sister Tracie remembered some of this last week during my visit. She also remembers that I was rarely around other children until pre-school age of four or so. By that time I was reading and writing, which probably alienated me further from my potential friends. So at the earliest possible age, I got used to being alone, to finding my own sense of direction. And in many ways, because I rejected (or didn't sense) the time-lines that others my age did, time slowed down for me. In my high school yearbook I said "It seemed like I'd never grow up, and who knows? Maybe I never will!"

Little did I know the promise in those words.

And now I find myself finding that my direction seems to be congruent with someone else who's finding his. It feels wonderful.

It is beginning to come together. To coalesce. All of it.

Maybe we'll never grow up, together.

The Journey

- Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice -
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
"Mend my Life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
At the very foundations,
Though their melancholy
Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice
Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper
Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do -
Determined to save
The only life you could save.

Education

ed•u•ca•tion

–noun

1. the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

2. the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.

3. a degree, level, or kind of schooling: a university education.

4. the result produced by instruction, training, or study: to show one's education.

5. the science or art of teaching; pedagogics.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/degrees-of-influence/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Our head of school sent this link yesterday. I typed out my knee-jerk reaction in about 5 minutes, and in re-reading it, thought I'd post it for a keepsake.

Cohan’s opinion is simply inflammatory and leads the ignorant “skimmer” of these kinds of blogs (probably the majority of readers) to reach entirely the wrong conclusion – that college isn’t worth it. The same message can be gotten at a low-end public school full of future factory workers, so why blog about it in the NYT?

The argument that pursuing an education isn’t “worth it” is always frustrating to me. Cohan’s not just talking about elite colleges, he’s talking about all of higher education (2nd to last paragraph).

William D. Cohan graduated from Duke University, and his own skill at justifying an opinion like this, not to mention his very employment by Fortune, the NYT, and Wall Street, is doubtless the product of a decent education.

So many “opinions” today cite statistical outliers like Gates, Zuckerburg, Ellison, Jobs, etc (all of whom dropped out of elite colleges, and therefore had to be smart and educated enough to get in, in the first place) as why college isn’t worth it, not to mention “elite” colleges. “See? You can succeed without it” they say. Statistically, not so likely for the average American.

If you look at the salaries earned by graduates of “elite” colleges, college degrees at “elite” colleges pay themselves back – positive ROI. Not so easy at the for-profit schools and those which don’t make the cut as “elite” schools.

Cohan also refers to how Wall Street was changed by the influx of “calculating MBA’s” that started in the 70s, but is there perhaps also a correlation of Wall Street’s ethics problems with the number of smart, ethical people who pursued service-oriented social work (at the lowest possible pay-scales) rather than college starting in the 1970’s? Or even with those who went to college, but studied and then taught the humanities and sciences (again, at the lowest pay-scales), never even learning the fundamentals of business because of a “values conflict” with the people they knew who wanted to study business?

“Could it be possible that higher education these days is not only a poor investment but also is leading to major fissures in the social compact between those who run Wall Street and the rest of us?”

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would happen if smart, ethical, socially-motivated people also invest pieces of their educations into contributing to economic stability? Might we in the past have experienced balanced, ethically monitored growth instead of bubble after bubble? Might we in the future see the “right” decisions being made instead of just the immediately “profitable” ones?

The “46 years between 1930 and 1976” Cohan refers to as some kind of “golden age” (“Goldmann’s age?”), there was so much social corruption that the entire field of sociology (which wasn’t even invented until the 1870’s at Yale University) exploded with studies of social stratification, socio-economic oppression, etc. And yet, even though these scholars were uncovering truths, they had no power to affect decisions because they didn’t have the business education to put their findings into the proper context for the people with power or for the ignorant masses who mindlessly drove the economic bubbles.

All of this is related to my personal justification for being at Vanderbilt right now, so I could be a bit biased.

Definition

–noun

1. the act of defining or making definite, distinct, or clear.

2. the formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc.

3. the condition of being definite, distinct, or clearly outlined.

4. sharpness of the image formed by an optical system.

5. the accuracy of sound or picture reproduction.

Synonyms: analogue, annotation, answer, characterization, clarification, clue, comment, commentary, cue, delimitation, delineation, demarcation, denotation, determination, diagnosis, drift, elucidation, exemplification, explanation, explication, exposition, expounding, fixing, formalization, gloss, individuation, interpretation, key, outlining, rationale, rendering, rendition, representation, settling, signification, solution, statement of meaning, terminology, translation

To painfully state the obvious, I decided to use the definitions of words to begin my blog posts because finding the "right" single word can help me to crystallize my own feeling-swirls into more grasp-able thoughts, so that I can communicate the swirls with some semblance of clarity. The definition(s) of the right word can also remind me of the myriad possible interpretations, and express multiple themes simultaneously, and lead me off on goose-chases of meaning in my own head. Who cares about what any reader might think, this is all about me and my own personal goose-chases are fun.

At least I thought it was all about me.

The last few weeks have been different. Defining. Clarifying. Characterizing. Explaining. Translating. Determining.

As usual, when I let go a little in several areas of my life, and ask a few of the right questions, then poof! the definitions began to appear.

When I entered Group Room number 9, Doug had a delightful diagram to visualize how our spiritual belief systems are complementary, how they probably magnetize us to one another, and how our own spiritual needs and desires relate to/orient around those of others. It was delightfully simple and complicated in all of the ways we love each other best.

[Aside -- This was a week after the Thanksgiving-o' laser-beam-conversations-weekend. (Laser: Short for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. A device that produces a nearly parallel, nearly monochromatic, and coherent beam of light by exciting atoms to a higher energy level and causing them to radiate their energy in phase.) In this case, Doug and I were the atoms. The device was the conversation, and the radiation, I suppose, was the combined pressure on each of us from many sources. The light was emitted via the clarity we each gained about the other. Another painfully obvious explanation but lately I delight in pain.]

Back to Group Room number 9. I'd already felt an increased sense of at-home-ness in this already comfy relationship, having survived both the refining pressures of this hellish semester and the laser beam conversations. But talking with Doug about this topic, in this manner, in this location, and in this tone, and watching him get so excited about his (very accurate) insights into "us," made me appreciate down to my very toes how incredibly much I love and value his need to dissect and understand everything to its core components in a way that can be diagrammed on a whiteboard in a group room in a business school library. Especially when it comes to me. Because, remember, it's all about me, and I am complicated. Which is apparently very lovable for someone who likes solving puzzles.

More importantly, I had asked Doug, during a laser-beam conversation the previous weekend, for what my heart told me I needed most in order to feel loved and respected: I need to know that he's trying to understand, and not making fast assumptions. And he did it!

[Aside #2 -- I didn't fully realize just how complicated my thinking pattern is until I attempted to tell Doug about a thought I'd had about some future scenario. The time to think the thought took however long it took me to walk about 100 yards from the parking garage to the crosswalk. Maybe a minute. It turns out that my simple thought required several chapters and a significant appendix in order to fully describe what I was thinking about. My description became increasingly incoherent. By the time I realized this, Doug was staring off into space, probably thinking about Kimchi or cheese or biscuits or noodles. So I just gave up and snuzzled him, and stared into his eyes a lot. I guess I do need someone to solve me.]

It is a time of definition. And there is so much more to learn that is not about me.