The World According to Blerg

When I was about eight years old, my parents finally signed up for cable TV. Though there were 24 channels of programming - an embarrassment of riches at the time! - in my head, there was really only one: Nickelodeon. Suddenly, cartoons weren't just a mainstay of Saturday mornings.

Oddly, though, it wasn't a cartoon that captured my full attention. It was the show that came on every day at 4:00 p.m., sandwiched between Double Dare and Nick Rocks, which was a music video show (that, like MTV, I was discouraged from watching). I had very little interest in music beyond my piano lessons until I met these guys who mixed zany one-liners with musical interludes in a colorful, goofy sitcom about four crazy kids in a rock band.

Series creator Don Kirshner had had the idea for a show about a rock n' roll band since the early 60s, but he only got the go-ahead to make the show once the Beatles hit big. In the wake of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, the tone the show would have to take was clear. When it came time to cast the titular rock band, the original ad in the Hollywood Reporter went like this: "Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview."

They wound up with two musicians (a brainy Texan singer-songwriter and an up-and-coming folkie straight out of Greenwich Village) and two actors (a West End stage actor and a former child star with a unique singing voice). And the combination worked better than anybody had imagined. The show ran for two seasons and spawned albums and other product tie-ins to almost rival that of the real band that inspired them.

At age eight, I had a very hard time figuring out that the Pre-Fab Four's heyday had come and gone a full decade before I was even born. In my head they were actually all still 20 years old, living together on the beach, driving their red convertible around, and getting into zany adventures (with the odd break to sing a song). I always wanted to be like the generic pretty girls-of-the-week who inhabited their world. Their vivid go-go dresses and thick fake eyelashes seemed impossibly glamorous. Plus, they got to hang out with the boys. Maybe a song or two was about them. They probably got to ride in the Monkeemobile. I didn't have any lustful thoughts about the band - my fantasies always ran to getting to hang out in their kitchen eating cereal while they rehearsed, maybe getting a couple of keyboard lessons from Peter or tapping around on Micky's drum set when he wasn't looking.

It broke my heart when three of them showed up on Nickelodeon's music video show looking older than my parents (because they WERE older than my parents - that's about when my mom sheepishly confessed that at my age, she'd been a fan too...her favorite was Davy. Mine was Micky, though these days I'm more of a Mike kind of girl).

The real-life story of the band is actually even more interesting than the sitcom world. I've seen an episode or two of the series as an adult and regrettably, it really doesn't hold up that well. It comes off as what it is - a Hard Day's Night knockoff with about half the musical talent. But there is an element of heart to it that A Hard Day's Night sort of struggled with, because the Monkees were really trying.

Their first album, consisting mainly of the boys singing Boyce/Hart and Goffin/King pop tunes** over session musicians, was marketed as the work of a real band, much to the surprise of a quartet of guys who were mostly just playing one on TV. Over time, though, at the urging of Peter and Mike (the group's two ACTUAL musicians) they started to actually play as a band. Micky and Davy learned a couple of instruments, Mike and Peter pushed to have their own songs featured (Mike in particular wrote some of the group's best songs), and by the time the first season wrapped they could actually go on tour. They continued to record and play for years after the show was cancelled, experimenting across genres the same way their intellectual ancestors the Beatles did (but with very different - and probably more mixed - results). And these days they're as known for their songs as they are for their goofy TV series.

The Monkees went from being the stars of a sitcom about a rock band to an actual rock band. They are the ultimate "fake it til you make it" success story, and I always loved that about them.

(Is this cheating? I think this might be cheating.)

**Addendum - RIP Gerry Goffin.

Like most New York liberals, I'm not really a gun person. But unlike most New York liberals, I grew up with more than a few gun people. I have relatives in law enforcement, hunting enthusiasts on both sides of the family, took shooting lessons at summer camp, and there was a gun safe in our basement throughout my childhood (which I never, ever touched). I've even tagged along on a hunting trip or two, though we never so much as saw an animal whenever I went.

While we were in Montana last week, Kip expressed an interest in going to the shooting range, and my stepdad said he'd be more than happy to lead a group excursion. I hadn't fired a gun since I was a kid, but my stepdad was pretty excited about it, as was most of the rest of the family, so I rolled with it. At the range, we fired a .22, a 6mm rifle, a shotgun, and an assortment of handguns at some plywood-mounted targets.

Here's the thing you don't much hear about -- probably rightly so when you consider how frequently they're misused and how upsetting and unlistenable 99% of pro-gun rhetoric is, but more on that later -- guns can be fun.

There's something really gratifying about the heft of it, the noise of the report, the flying wood chips as you hit the target, taming the recoil as you get more familiar with the way a specific weapon moves. The idea of pointing one at anything other than an inanimate object, especially a person, is still totally abhorrent to me, but obliterating a piece of plywood or a couple of cans...well, you wouldn't think it, but you can sort of see the appeal, and you can even sometimes think about something other than the fact that you're holding something that was designed specifically to hurt people. It was fun enough, in fact, that we have already looked into local shooting ranges, though basically, if you want to rent/shoot a handgun at a firing range in New York, you have to either buy a permit for several hundred dollars or go to New Jersey. (Want to buy your own gun in NYC? hahahahahaNO. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. There is no reason someone like me should have a concealed carry permit in this city, let alone anyone who's MORE likely to use a gun than me.)

But I realized pretty quickly why we can't have nice things when the photos of our shooting range adventure hit social media. 24 hours later, there are a handful of comments to the effect of "you're not enough of a badass because you're doing X Y and Z with the gun." Where X Y and Z are either safety things like wearing earplugs, things designed to make the experience easier like using a scope, implications that the gun isn't big enough, or pontifications featuring many references to other guns so that we will recognize the commenter as someone who Knows More About Guns Than Us. (Note that these conversations all happened on the photos of ME, not Kip, and they were all started by dudes. How dare someone in a hot pink track jacket presume to try to do a man thing like fire a gun! I'll note that nobody could imply there was a better way to HOLD the gun, because I damn well wouldn't so much as put the thing in my hand without being 110% sure I was doing it perfectly.)

In this society, something about guns just forces the conversation to devolve into penis-measuring. (And yeah, I'm sure there are women who do this, but when it comes to this particular topic, it seems peculiarly male.) You can't mention that you've gone shooting, or even just say "the shooting range is fun" without it becoming some sort of manhood metric. To admit that putting a gun into the hands of someone else makes them more dangerous and powerful is apparently to imply that it makes them more dangerous than (rhetorical) YOU, which raises hackles. And if I temper the danger by being extra careful and deliberate with guns, rather than dashing straight for the biggest and baddest one I can find...well, that just means I don't have any balls, evidently. (I'm not disputing that. In point of fact, I don't.)

I think this kind of super-masculine posturing can be directly tied into why civilized discussions about firearms and the people who own them just plain don't happen anymore. There are plenty of responsible gun owners like my stepfather and my uncles. I'd even go so far as to say that people like them constitute the majority of gun owners. In places like Montana, owning a gun doesn't automatically make you someone to be feared. It's just something people do that people don't do very often in other places, like writing personal checks for everything or putting ranch dressing on your fries or waving at strangers you pass on a rural road. (But, you know, way more dangerous.) The gun-owners in my family have the proper permits, they purchase everything they own through proper legal channels, they are careful to keep their weapons unloaded and locked up when not in use, and they make sure that everyone who comes in contact with them does so with the right instruction and full cognizance of what exactly they're handling.

In fact, the standards tied to the guns and gun owners I grew up with are the same standards that even the NRA used to perpetuate thirty-odd years ago. But somewhere along the way the loudest message changed from "responsibly own and use the guns you have" to "get as many guns as you can, make them as powerful as you can get, and don't let people take them away." Somewhere in there, someone decided that any attempt to make people use their brains where this stuff was concerned constituted an insult to their manhood. So over time, it's increasingly true that the more vocal gun owners you hear from are the ones who've wholeheartedly bought into the idea that everyone's trying to take away their guns. They see defending their right to have them as more important than demonstrating a right to own them.

The issues surrounding the increase in mass shootings in the United States are very complicated, and certainly the fact that guns are readily available in much of the country is a major contributing factor. The stigma and lack of support for mental health issues is another piece of the puzzle, of course. I can't imagine it helps that Americans consume so much entertainment centered around maximum violence and none of the actual consequences of violence, either. But we also can't ignore the fact that we treat these weapons as one extreme or another: either the root of all evil or as totally benign, cavalier symbols of freedom (and/or pending emasculation). It's no secret that I'm far more sympathetic to one extreme than the other, but being unable to approach the issue with any semblance of balance keeps people on both sides of the issue from approaching it with a view to compromise.

Like anything that can cause harm, we owe it to ourselves to respect firepower and use it sparingly, with the utmost care and intelligence. Whenever a person chooses to own guns, they should be primarily utilitarian rather than some sort of demonstration of superiority, and they should take it upon themselves to use their guns as carefully and responsibly as possible.

Anybody who doesn't make it their first priority to abide by (and teach) that approach absolutely shouldn't have guns.

Dear new correspondent,

Please accept my sincerest apologies for not getting back to you until now; as we aren't Facebook friends, your message made its way into my "other" box alongside a couple of spambots, where it sat for a few weeks until I found it this morning.

And I know a response, or at least a reaction, was very important to you, because clearly you felt so strongly about your message that you had to take actual time out of your day to track me down on Facebook and compose a message to me. I'm not famous. I'm not important. I'm not particularly influential. You wouldn't even know who I was if I didn't work for a website you visit. And yet my work affects you so deeply that this is how you chose to spend the afternoon of May 12: composing a missive inquiring as to whether anybody has ever told me that I'm incredibly boring, and to inform me that you think Rob should find someone else to podcast with him.

You could be out writing to your congressman; or volunteering for Amnesty International; or serving food to the homeless; or hell, spending hours to research, record, and produce your OWN podcast that would be better and pit it against ours (because according to you anybody would be better than me at it), but no, your idea of the most productive use of your time is to compose insults for me.

I could speculate on the roots of this. Perhaps co-hosting a podcast, or being friends with Rob, is something you wish you were doing. Perhaps you are disappointed that I don't look like someone you want to fuck (or perhaps I DO look like someone who wouldn't fuck YOU). That you specifically mention that I must think I'm sooooooo great suggests that either is plausible.

Or perhaps you really and simply just hate the sound of my voice, which you are well within your rights to do, and I know for a fact you wouldn't be the only one. In fact, you wouldn't be the only one who's actually gone out of their way to tell me so. (You'd be one of two, actually. Three if you count the random person on a message board who asked if I was hot because my voice made me sound "butt ugly." But that person probably underestimated my solipsistic need to know what the Internet was saying about me.)

What was your end game here, new friend? What kind of outcome were you expecting? Should I quit the podcast so that Rob can find someone better (which you believe will probably be pretty easy)? Should I modulate my voice to make our podcast more pleasing to you, personally? Or would it mollify you sufficiently if I just threw myself on your mercy, apologized for sucking so much, and promised to do better in the future?

How about I just block you and report you to Facebook as a spammer? I know the allegation won't stick, but if they suspend your account for a day or two, I might feel secretly vindicated.

Love and other indoor sports,
Jess

(Never mind the thousands of folks - actual thousands! - who seem to have no problem with the podcast. And never mind that I know better, and am well aware I should grow a thicker skin if I'm to be any sort of public figure. Don't tell this dude, or the other dude I had to block on Facebook for "being real," but yeah, it does hurt my feelings.)

Even if you've been to the Magic Kingdom before - even if you've been more than once! - you may have missed one of my favorites. It's tucked in the back of Tomorrowland, on the other side of the pavilion from Space Mountain.

And I'm not gonna lie - if you have 20 minutes in Tomorrowland and you can do only one ride, this is not the one I'm going to recommend. (But Space Mountain isn't it either. Go on Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin. Trust me.) It IS a little lame. Even I can see that. Even the name - "Carousel of Progress" - sounds lame. It sounds like it should be at Epcot. And not in the cool part of Epcot.

The fact that it's going to suck up 20 minutes of your time probably also doesn't draw you to it, but hell, you're going to waste at least that much time standing on line to get a corn dog later. Might as well go someplace cool where you can sit and take a breather.

This was originally constructed by Walt Disney for the 1964 World's Fair, and it really looks it, though it has had some minor updates (most recently to replace the "present day" CRT TV with a flatscreen). It's not even a carousel in the sense that you usually imagine carousels, with fake horses on a spinning platform. It's a circular stage with rotating theater seats. You can see a quarter of the stage at each stop as you revolve around the stage.

At each stop on the tour, you meet an animatronic man and his dog in 1900, 1920, 1940, and "the present." The man tells you about all the amazing technology in his house. He'll banter with his wife a little bit (it's kind of quaintly misogynistic at moments, in the way that things that were made in 1964 often are) and make some hilariously bad predictions about the future. ("A flying machine? That'll never work!")

"Things just can't get any better!" he chirps in each scene, as the unfathomably catchy Sherman Brothers theme, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" reprises to transition you to the next tableau.

Each scene of progress seems better and better, and the main character is unflappably cheerful, even when the video game in the "present day" almost burns down the house. (It's ...hard to explain. You kind of have to see it.)

(A fun fact - the man in each scene is voiced by Jean Shepherd, whose voice you might recognize from "A Christmas Story.")

(Another fun fact - this is one of the only Walt Disney World attractions that was physically worked on by Walt himself.)

(A less fun fact - the west coast Carousel of Progress closed in 1974, and the theater was repurposed for another animatronic attraction called "America Sings." Shortly after it opened, an employee was crushed to death by the rotating stage.)

On the whole, I agree with the Carousel of Progress, and Walt's relentless optimism. Things are better now than they've ever been. Progress is amazing. But when it comes to Disney, I'm not totally on board. Truthfully, the Disney attractions that still retain an element of kitsch are the ones I love the most. I love the Hall of Presidents, the Enchanted Tiki Room, the Country Bear Jamboree...hell, I frickin' adore It's a Small World, which I know puts me in the minority.

There's a feeling of earnest optimism and love on these animatronic attractions that you just don't always get from all of the newer rides. Not that those aren't awesome, but they're not necessarily things you can't get elsewhere. More than that, though, sometimes the feeling around the newer rides is not, "isn't this amazing and wonderful," but "don't you feel like this was worth your hundred bucks? Don't you want a t-shirt of it?"

The most popular ride at Disney Hollywood Studios is currently "Toy Story Midway Mania," a ride in which spinning cars move through an interactive video shooting gallery featuring characters and objects from the Toy Story movies. The last time we were there, the Fast Passes for this ride ran out by 10 a.m. and by mid-afternoon the wait to get in approached 3 hours.

It's a video game. A cool video game, but it's still a video game. It utilizes the same basic technology as Duck Hunt. Who wants to wait 3 hours to play Duck Hunt when the Great Movie Ride, in all its cheesy animatronic Uncanny Valley glory, is 50 yards away?

"Soarin," at Epcot, (which also routinely has multi-hour wait times) is also pretty dang fun, but it also revolves pretty heavily around staring at a screen. I thought the whole point of going on vacation was so you didn't have to sit around staring at a screen.

(Incidentally, don't talk to me about the revamped "Spaceship Earth." I know the old version made the Carousel of Progress seem like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in terms of thrills and action, but it was charming!)

I hope that's not the be-all and end-all of progress. I do still occasionally see a true marriage of that utter heart that marks the best of Disney with the technology that Walt couldn't have even imagined, and I'm sure Disney's cooking something up that's going to eventually utterly blow my mind. It sure as hell isn't the cuisine that keeps me going back to Orlando year after year.

In the meantime, enjoy this YouTube trip to my sentimental favorite:

On any given day, I receive tweets to the effect of pretty much every item on the following list:

1. "Hey, did you hear about (piece of news I have already given my opinion on at least a dozen times)? What did you think about it?"
2. "Look, here is a piece of news I found before you did!" (It's the same piece of news I've already given my opinion on at least a dozen times.)
3. "I didn't understand what you were saying about that link you provided that I didn't click. Please explain it to me."
4. "Please explain to me this easily googleable thing that I am too lazy to google. The time it'd take you to figure out how to compress your explanation will probably take you at least as much time as it would take explaining it to me."
5. "Here is a very broad, general interest question that you've answered before, but which I demand you answer FOR ME."
6. "Here is a logical fallacy that I would like you to fall for and engage me about so that I can point out where you failed and feel superior to you."
7. "Here is a small error you made in a podcast six months ago that I wanted to point out so I can feel superior to you."
8. "Why didn't you answer my question? Didn't you see it? Here it is again."
9. "You didn't tweet for three days! Where are you? Where are all your opinions on the show that's currently not filming, airing, or issuing any press releases?"
10. "I will take this tweet, which you clearly intended as a general-purpose broadcast, as something intended specifically for me. My response is an irrelevant piece of personal information, such as the fact that I do not watch the television program you just mentioned."

I can't imagine how someone with actual social media clout handles this kind of idiocy.

Writing was something I always did. Something I always wanted to do. I tried on other things, but it always came back to the diaries I kept and the short stories I wrote and the stacks and stacks and stacks of books I read. It follows, then, that part of what appealed to me about boarding school was more opportunity to write.

Surely at this new school, with an actual student newspaper, AND a literary magazine, AND a humor magazine (seriously, the school had more clubs than Rushmore), I'd find a place to nurture what I thought might be an actual talent, or at least the talent I wish I had.

I tried the humor magazine first. If this place had nerds, these were them - a handful of spotty, awkward boys who quoted Monty Python and Douglas Adams incessantly. At the first informational meeting, they put me to work finishing a half-formed article the editor had started writing, and I began to mimic the satirical prose. At the end of the day they thanked me for working with them and said they'd read over what I'd written.

The next day, I opened the file on the magazine's group drive to find everything I'd written deleted, nobody willing to tell me what hadn't worked about it. It was just clear that they hadn't liked it.

"I could proofread for you," I offered. No, they said. They already had someone to do that. "Graphics?" No, that was covered too. It took me a few tries to realize that I was wasting my time with them, that it wasn't that they didn't NEED help, it was that they didn't want mine.

The fact that I was so forcefully rejected by the nerd clique ought to give you some idea of how cool I was at fifteen.

But I've talked about that sort of thing before. And I also know that every writer, no matter how talented or untalented, has a story of rejection that sticks with them.

Truth was, that wasn't a fit for me, and I DID need to improve. I HAVE improved. (This very site has been a tremendous boon in that department. 10,000 hours of practice, you know.) I've had a very small measure of success with writing since that day half my life ago - an article picked up here, a short story blowing away a writing group there. But it's only been in the last two years that I actually gained any traction with writing at any kind of professional level.

The project saved me, if I'm being totally honest. I wasn't in a good place. I needed something. I needed to know there was still a trace of that thing I thought would be my whole life. I have spent too much time being afraid I'm not actually any good, and that I've been continuing to waste my time with every word I put to screen. Thankfully, it's not true. I have been able to contribute to this project in a real and meaningful way. It's put my talents (such as they are) to use. And in a lot of ways, it's exceeded everybody's expectations. I found out this week that I have somewhere between 5 and 10 times the audience I thought I did.

But what I do is still a small, almost inconsequential slice of a very big pie. It's "gravy," according to the big boss. And I want to do more, specifically for this. It was always understood that I'd have a chance to branch out eventually. Things are growing by leaps and bounds, and they need all the help they can get, apparently.

A few months ago, I found the perfect arena. We discussed it and it was decided - it was something they definitely wanted to cover in some format and my experience and expertise made it a good fit. I'd be an occasional contributor, maybe in a rotation with a few others once they settled into a routine.

Well, this, too, has succeeded everyone's expectations, kind of wildly, actually. And now they don't want to do anything to upset the balance, because what they're doing (without me) is working really well, and I can't fault them for that.

So what do I do now? Do I keep digging for things to pitch? Do I find some other thing, outside of this, to branch out? Or do I just keep plugging away at what I'm doing and be happy with it?

I know it isn't the same thing. But there's a small, irrational part of me hearing that my offer of help is wasting everyone's time. It makes me afraid to offer to contribute anything else. I should just stick to my tiny domain and hope that I'm not uncovered for the time-wasting fraud of a "writer" the lizard brain keeps telling me I am and subsequently relieved of what few duties I actually have.

The lizard brain sounds an awful lot like a pimply little Monty Python obsessed runt at a prep school.

(I didn't mean to be all "me me me" yet again this week but man, that prompt hit me in a tender spot, Gary.)

For the past few weeks, I've been getting a lot of sparring work in with a girl who trains with another coach. She's got her first amateur fight coming up, and up until I started working with her, she had only been sparring guys (the reasons that isn't helpful would take up a whole separate blog post), so she really needed the work. Frankly, I need it as well, even though I don't have anything coming up in the near future. It's rare to find someone close to my height that I can work with. I think we have been very good for each other. Last night was evidently the last night she could do hard sparring before the fight, and I was happy to oblige.

Obviously I didn't know this when I was a beginner, but sparring a beginner is actually, in a lot of ways, harder than sparring an experienced fighter. For one thing, an experienced fighter knows that sparring is practice, and if you don't know each other well, she'll stay composed and be polite until she figures out how much you can take. For beginners, shortly after they get into a ring and get even lightly tapped for the first time, instinct takes over and they will try to kill you. Most of the time, you can see the punches coming a mile off, but that periodic lucky shot is brutal.

I very rarely get nosebleeds in sparring, but the few times it's happened, it's been at the hands of a total newbie. This girl hasn't managed that, though two weeks ago she gave me a pretty good puffy lip. (Contrary to what your imagination might be telling you, you won't see your boxer friends walking around with fresh bruises and black eyes all the time. It's actually pretty rare, since any boxer who's being properly trained will only spar with headgear and soft gloves. In fact, only pros and a few elite male amateurs will even compete without headgear. The worst boxing injuries I get with any regularity are on my forearms -- rope burns from the ring and scratches from the velcro on a sparring partner's glove.)

So it's actually kind of flattering that I'm advanced enough to work with a newbie. Anyway, I digress. She has a long way to go, technically speaking, but she is pretty aggressive and she has great instincts. I know the fight's going to go well for her. Even if she doesn't end up winning, she can handle herself.

I was discussing the whole situation with my coach this week. He agrees on all points, but he told me something pretty surprising: she has apparently declared that this upcoming fight will be her only one, and she has no plans to do it again.

He and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

The fact of the matter is, if you are deranged enough and obsessed enough to fight, some part of you is never going to leave the ring. Once you've put yourself through all of that, the only thing you'll be able to think of is not HOW you're going to put yourself through that again, but WHEN.

If you win your first fight, you'll have the high of winning, of hearing the crowd cheer as the ref raises your hand. You'll want that again and again. But it's even worse if you lose, because you will never, ever stop thinking about what you have to do differently next time to pull out the W. It will keep you up at night. Immediately, you'll think you know the one thing you have to work on, and as soon as you start working on it, something else will occur to you, and the entire time, you'll be absolutely obsessing over the fact that you need to at least even up your record.

Inside your head, the thoughts multiply, and they drive you to stay sharp, to improve, to be ready to do it all again as soon as you can find someone else to beat up.

You see this happening with fighters all the time. It's the reason so many of them take on fights well past the point at which every sane person thinks they should have retired. It's rare to find a fighter who's voluntarily resting on his laurels. Unless the fight reveals to you that you have absolutely no reason being in the ring (and that's rare, because getting to that point is pretty hard in and of itself), nobody just calmly walks away from it without a really, really good reason. Once you get to the point of competition, boxing has taken over enough of your brain that it's never going to totally leave your system, no matter what you do.

After getting robbed twice against the same opponent last year (and then, in the aftermath, having nobody willing to fight me except that girl, which is another whole other blog post in itself), I even said I was done. I had the speech all prepared in my head. I told my coach, "I'm going to keep working hard, and I'll even still be sparring whoever, whenever. You and I both know I need to train. I don't believe I need to fight. I don't like the person I am when I have to put competition into the mix."

He cocked an eyebrow at me and said, "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." (This is the difference between a coach and a trainer. A trainer, he says, is there to encourage and inspire. A coach can step up and be an asshole when the situation warrants.) If competition tells me things about myself that I don't like, he said, isn't it actually making me a better person to confront that?

Dammit. He was right. I'm not done and he knew it before I did. I'm not ready yet, thanks to being mentally checked-out for a few months while I planned my wedding, but that that doesn't mean that small piece of me way back behind the lizard-brain ever got the message that the fighting era is over. I don't know exactly when I'll feel ready, but I do know that point will come, and probably sooner than I think. Once a fighter, always a fighter.

So I don't believe for a second that my sparring partner will be able to hang up her gloves as soon as the fight is over. I think I'll be seeing her again at tournaments and club shows, and I know for sure we have not sparred for the last time.

For about a decade now, I have been haunted by Joe.

Joe was one of the IT guys at my office back in the summer of 2003. We'd had exactly three conversations, two of which had to do with an upcoming email migration and one of which lasted about 15 seconds and had to do with a semi-obscure martial arts DVD I had lying around on my desk. So when he called my work line one afternoon and nervously but directly asked me out, it caught me off guard.

It had never occurred to me to think of anybody at work as a romantic being, and Joe wasn't my type to begin with; plus, I was in the middle of a particularly self-destructive phase that didn't seem to want to accommodate wholesome, socially constructive things like, say, catching the latest Stephen Chow flick with the shy, unassuming IT guy. So I was pretty sure I didn't want to go out with him, though I guess my reasons shouldn't be all that important.

So did I say that to Joe? Did I let him down easy? Did I tell him, "you seem cool, and I'd love to hang out as friends, but I don't think we should go out"? Did I say, "I'm going through some stuff and I'm not in a dating headspace right now"? Or even just, "no thank you"?

No, of course I didn't.

Instead, I sort of stammered out an, "um, yeah, okay," and Joe said he'd email me to make some plans. An hour later, there was the email, perfectly polite and hopeful. I never responded. He tried once more a few days later, in case the email didn't go through. I didn't respond to that either.

Once he finished up the email migration, he never came back to our department unless all the other IT guys were out, and I can't be sure, but I think he actively avoided anything that had to do with my particular cubicle block.

Obviously I don't believe I broke Joe's heart. While it was awkward at the time, it is highly likely that ten years later, he doesn't even remember that I exist, let alone that he once asked me out. It's more likely he met some other girl and asked her out and she actually followed through on his invitation, and they're very happy.

But this does not stop me from continuing to feel like a total dick for being such a flake to him, eleven years on. I wish I could say he was the only one, but I passive-aggressively flaked away the advances of a few other perfectly nice young men in my early twenties (and ended up in brief but definite actual relationships with a couple of people I did not actually want to go out with in the first place) before I gained a little bit of maturity. But I don't think saying no is a skill that I've ever fully mastered.

And of course, my inability to dispense a flat "no" has not been limited to dating. It was how I spent one afternoon back in college in a professor's home with a screwdriver in one hand and a handful of cables in the other, surrounded by donated CPUs in various states of disrepair, over and above my repeated protests that hardware was really not in my wheelhouse and I probably could not fix his computers, no matter how sick the kids slated to receive them were. It was how I wound up leaving a job I adored for a job that felt like a mistake, because who gets offered the very first (and only) job she's applied for in years? It's how I invited more than a hundred people to what we initially envisioned as an intimate, close-family-and-besties-only wedding (or better yet, a trip to City Hall).

(The correct response to "just so you know, I'm expecting an invite" is probably not, "er, ok" but "slow your roll, Presumptuous McDemandypants." I know that now.)

I obviously can't blame society entirely for my pathological ambivalence, but I do think there's a general societal expectation that women be compliant and agreeable. In its more benign forms, you witness it in the way we tend to apologize when we're saying something someone isn't going to like, or when something happens that's not even our fault. Women more frequently hedge when asked a question to which the answer should be a simple "no." More problematically, you see it in the way women's control over their own bodies is continually questioned, the way women with strong opinions are labeled bitches, and the way issues of consent are still hotly debated.

In fact, thinking about the Joe incident, the first thought that popped into my head was, "why didn't I just sack up and tell him no?" Because what body part do you apparently need in order to be able to put out a firm rejection? A sack. Of testicles, presumably.

Saying no is something that I think many women have never established a formal vocabulary for, despite a sense that saying yes too often is also frowned upon. Rejecting an offer, if you absolutely have to, takes finessing so that you don't wind up damaging an ego or hurting feelings, but this delicate balance is something you're supposed to just know how to do innately. There are no instruction manuals.

In fact, a few years ago there was even a hot self-help trend around saying YES - accepting dates, going out and grabbing at every opportunity (even the ones you didn't think you wanted), saying yes to LIFE! Open yourself up to the universe and take in everything that comes, as if life is a giant improv game and all you must do is be receptive to what comes!

As if I wasn't already having trouble saying anything other than yes.

The problem with saying yes to everything, all the time, is that you don't ever stop to weight your yeses, or make your own decisions on the things that are best for you (or, really, for everyone, because a flaky yes just wastes everyone's time). By leaving all the doors open, you can get overwhelmed. And that's how you become a dilettante who's tried everything and never fallen headlong in love with any of it.

I've never had trouble bringing things into my life that I do want. It's rejecting the things I don't want that's trickier. It's being available and receptive to commit fully to the activities, the people, the projects I most want, without the fear that the activities, people, and projects whose doors I've closed will feel disappointed or angry. (Not that I'm saying they couldn't BE that on the slim chance that they wanted to, just that I need to stop fearing it.)

It's the difference between "yes, AND I can't wait" versus "yeah, I guess." More of the former, and less of the latter, add in a liberal helping of "no, thank you." The better I know myself, the more confidence I have in the things I want, the easier it is to at least pinpoint what's not for me, and occasionally even swallow hard and say it out loud.

Instead of yes and yes and yes, I try to say enthusiastic yeses AND gracious (but firm) nos. This is an art I've by no means perfected, but it's served me much better than the previous approach.

That's not negativity. That's agency.

Contrary to what my diploma says, I don't think I'm actually an alumna of the high school where I graduated, because I'm pretty sure they still wouldn't claim me as one of them.

My alma mater is a training ground for the country's elite, where they learn how to live in the world as adults of privilege. It can't boast a president yet, but there are plenty of senators, cabinet members, and diplomats who once roamed its hallowed halls. There, you learn the rules of how to mingle with the upper crust, how to subtly indicate to the world at large that you hit a triple, even if you were born on third base.

It's evident the first time you meet me that I was not from that world, and probably even more evident that I never quite mastered any aspect of it once I was immersed in it. And it's got very little to do with the purple hair and tattoos. It's a more intangible thing. I could never have hoped to follow all of the unwritten rules. I can't even say that there was a class issue in my way, because I certainly had classmates from similar backgrounds who managed to get along just fine. It just wasn't meant to be. I was no true preppie.

Some, but not all of the rules I broke on the path to discovering this, include:

* We're talking about one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country, so of course you are expected to excel academically. You need to get good grades, and you need to work hard to get them. You should also be able to relay the extent to which your insane study habits cut into things that a normal person would do, like eating and sleeping. But you are NOT supposed to ever act tired, or fall asleep in class, or faint after skipping dinner. Talk about your tireless fight for academic excellence (exaggerated or not) all you want, but it should never, ever look like you actually broke a sweat to achieve what you've worked for.

* Neither are you supposed to look like you've ever broken a sweat on the athletic field. You should have a natural inclination to wield a lacrosse stick, or an oar, or a bat, or what have you, and of course you should be in great physical shape. (There were absolutely no overweight girls at my high school, and only a few slightly hefty offensive lineman types among the boys.) A minor glow from a job well hustled, a slight sheen of sweat mingled with river water from your last power 10 at the regatta, the ribbon in school colors around your ponytail a little bit askew so as not to perfectly match your teammates' - all of that is fine. Face beet-red from exertion, disheveled hair, big sweat patches on your clothes, mud caking your jersey? Definitely not.

* Socially, this school's above such plebeian ventures like homecoming dances or proms. But every year they'll have a "Spring Fling" in the Dining Hall (emphatically NOT called the "cafeteria") featuring the Peter Duchin Orchestra. You'll wear a dress you already have, like maybe a little J. Crew sheath your parents made you wear to Dad's business associate's son's birthday party last summer. Don't have one? Borrow one. Or buy one if you must, but don't make a big deal out of it.

* You're not going to have a date to this dance, by the way. Dating isn't a thing people do here. Oh sure, they make out, they have sex even, but going on a date is never, ever how they get to that point. Couplings happen naturally and organically after a certain measure of casual hanging out in groups and one-on-one, without either party necessarily asking the other to "go out" or even spend time doing a specific activity. Don't do anything as vulgar as PDA, and definitely don't kiss and tell. Best case scenario, after some point, everyone just sort of tacitly understands that you and your boyfriend are a couple, including you and your boyfriend.

* Acceptable clothing brands for day-to-day wear are J. Crew, L.L. Bean, and Eddie Bauer. Have a couple of Ann Taylor dresses for seated dinners. Your winter coat should be North Face. There is one acceptable hairstyle: straight, neutral tone, minimal to no bangs, falling somewhere between the bottom of your earlobes and the top of your bra strap.

* Once you graduate, try for an Ivy, and failing that, try for any school at least 200 years old that closely resembles this one in architecture and social climate. Marry someone whose parents know your parents. Live in Greenwich, or Locust Valley, or Chestnut Hill, or Bucks County, or the Upper East Side. Send your kids to your school. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

My life does not in any way resemble that of most of my high school classmates. (Even if I did marry a guy named Kip, and I own one pastel Brooks Brothers shift dress. What? It was on sale.) But I think I turned out all right despite my failings at being this one particular thing. I may never manage to socially navigate the Hamptons or the Head of the Charles, but I do just fine where it matters most.

The "ABC Tour" is what the Australians called it whenever I'd talk to one in a hostel. There weren't always other Americans, but you could always count on there being a few Australians who were three months, six months, eight months into their backpacking trip. They always knew what kind of beer to order in every country you were about to visit, and most of them also had the inside scoop on the best tours and can't-miss landmarks, though as they made certain recommendations they would usually chuckle, "that one's a bit ABC Tour."

Another Bloody Castle. Or, sometimes, Another Bloody Church. Because church and castle always occupied slots 1 and 2, respectively, of the guidebook's list of recommended attractions for pretty much any city in Europe. More generally, it pertained to the idea of a trip spent doing nothing but visiting tourist attractions out of a guidebook.

(And no, I don't know why or how it was the Aussies who picked up this bit of very British-sounding slang.)

Looking back on it from the perspective of someone who has spent the past 13 years living in America's second most-visited city, it seems self-evident to me that the ABC Tour isn't the be-all and end-all of travel. Haven't I spent most of my years as a New Yorker throwing shade at the tourists who never get past Times Square? I'm not as bad as some of my friends, but I definitely have days when I want to throw rocks at the nearest tour bus, especially if my route to work takes me past the Empire State Building.

But back then, I'd never lived anywhere that most people would go out of their way to see. I didn't know any better. Besides, I felt like I owed it to the countries I was visiting, to the college where I was supposed to be majoring in History, to the grant money terms that had stipulated the travel didn't have to be strictly educational (but surely they couldn't have meant it). I had to hit the churches and the castles first.

And they were important. And they were spectacular. Certainly I learned plenty about religion, and history, and architecture, and art, that summer. Climbing to the top of the Duomo in Florence; photographing the spires of York Minster; the long, steep treks up to Burg Eltz and Edinburgh castle - all once in a lifetime experiences.

Dutifully, contentedly, I spent the first month of my trip marching from city to city, checking off castle, then church (or sometimes church, then castle) from the list. In Koln, in fact, I hopped off the train, crossed the street to the cathedral, took a couple of pictures, and hopped back on the next train 30 minutes later. I'm sure there are other great things to see and do in Koln. I couldn't tell you what any of them are.

I didn't know it then, but the Aussies were right: it was not sustainable to live and die by the ABC Tour. Not long term, anyway.

The first signs of ABC burnout started to hit me in mid-June, roughly a month into the trip. Maybe around the time I did my 20-minute Koln visit. They really do start to all blur together after a while, so I can't be sure. What I was sure of was that I could no longer rattle off the nearby churches and castles from any given point on my itinerary, and I just shuffled past one fresco after another, not really taking any of them in. By Hamburg, I wasn't even looking at the art so much as just sort of being there, but I felt intense guilt whenever I wanted to do something that wasn't on the itinerary I'd so carefully planned.

On my second day in Hamburg, when a major holiday rendered all the hostels full and all the shops and museums closed for the rest of the weekend, I was completely lost. If I couldn't hit a museum and stare past some frescoes, what was the point of being there? Without straying too far from my itinerary, what were my options?

Instead of heading to some other country where it wasn't a national holiday, I elected to stay put. The information desk at the train station was able to find me a room in a nearby bed and breakfast for the next three nights - nothing fancy, but clean and comfortable, and it even had cable TV in the room (something hostels definitely did not have). At 22 marks a night it wasn't going to bankrupt me, either, though it was a little more than I'd budgeted. It turned out to be well worth the extra cost. The owners sent me away from breakfast each morning with extra food for the day, and I spent the afternoons wandering through parks and visiting regular-people neighborhoods that featured very little of note to Lonely Planet.

In the evenings I brought fast food back to the room and watched hours of German TV - dubbed episodes of the Simpsons, talk shows, MTV Europe, Big Brother. BBC News and Conan O'Brien were the only programs reliably in English, but I was absorbing enough German to supplement my two years of college courses that it was starting to not matter. One night I went to a movie, not realizing it was dubbed, not subtitled, and I followed along just fine.

I learned at least as much about Germany from that quiet weekend as I did in all the days before it. And for the rest of the trip I was able to slow down and catch my breath every now and then without guilt. Certainly I continued to see my fair share of churches and museums as well, but I finally understood that a balanced travel experience is as much about experiencing everyday sights and sounds as it is about taking in the major landmarks.

This could well be one of the reasons I settled on New York City once I graduated. Living in New York is like being on a year-round cultural enrichment tour (albeit one where you spend 40 hours a week in a cubicle earning your keep). I'm still checking off landmarks in Lonely Planet: New York every now and then, but every day is also a lesson in how different people live and function and find everyday enjoyments in this insane melting pot.

A decade after my summer European tour, I found myself heading back to Europe. While wandering through downtown Budapest on the first day of the trip, Kip and I found a local wine festival tucked away on a side street somewhere between our hotel and the major landmarks. We could have booked it over to St. Stephen's Cathedral to catch the last tour of the day, or caught a cab up to the top of the Buda Castle hill to watch the sun set. Sure we could have. But the people at the festival looked like they were having a pretty good time, too.

So that's how we spent our first evening in Budapest sipping a variety of sweet Hungarian reds out of souvenir glasses while locals milled around us and five middle-aged men butchered American pop tunes from a nearby bandshell. Maybe we didn't catch every crucial sight in Budapest in the limited time we had there, but neither one of us considers that first day the least bit wasted.

The castle would still be there the next day. The festival, however, might not.