Citizen Erin

About a month ago, severely angered by certain political events, I sat down at my computer and did something I'd never done before. I wrote letters to my senators.

While I wrote, my heart pounded and my hands got cold. Some of that was the result of trying to channel all that anger and adrenaline into a coherent and focused force. And some of it was just plain fear. Would I get in trouble for overstepping my bounds? Would I be dismissed as a nut job? For some reason, I had the unshakeable idea that the only people who were "allowed" to write letters to Congress were those who either wore Brooks Brothers suits or tinfoil hats. The rest of us in the middle just didn't have any need to do that sort of thing.

Let me just get this on the record: WRONG.

First of all, if the CEOs and the crazies are the only ones writing to Congress, then the only opinions Congress ever hears are those of CEOs and crazies. And we wonder why the government is in the mess it's in...

Second of all-- and this is a whole 'nother rant-- we've all forgotten how to be good stewards of our own lives. We don't take responsibility responsibly. Sometimes we don't take it at all. We pay other people to do it for us, then we assume it's been taken care of and promptly forget about it. This makes sense if, for instance, we're buying an airline ticket to Hawaii. We're not expected to get up in the middle of the flight and check on the pilot or take over if he's having trouble. But it makes less sense if we're paying a student's tuition to flight school and deliberately refuse to hear anything about his actual progress-- especially if we expect him to fly us to Hawaii at the end of the year.

That's the way most of us treat politics. We vote once every couple of years, if that, and pay our taxes, and promptly forget about it. Meanwhile, the object of our votes may be spending our tax money to send himself to Hawaii and lobby for higher tuition at the flight school. He's not obligated to warn us beforehand. It's our job to check. And if we don't like what we see, it's our job to let him know.

Of course, if we do like what we see, we might want to let him know that too. Even if we think that the only people who actually approve of Congress are either rich or crazy.

My Best Friends' Weddings

Years ago, when my good friends Tony and Angela got married, I learned that another good friend, Jonathan, did not like champagne. "That's okay," I assured him, "when my turn comes, I'll make sure you get to toast with a screwdriver!" We both could have used something a bit stronger than champagne by that point: I had tonsils the size of bowling balls, and he was recovering from a broken collarbone. And, as I told Denise later, "Because if I marry him, he can do whatever he wants at his own wedding, and if I marry someone else, he'll need the vodka!"

Ten years later, I find myself reconsidering those words with a sense of irony, because Jonathan is getting married-- and not to me. The same higher mental functions that let me be genuinely happy for him are also making me very, very grateful for my lifelong distaste for orange juice.

Interesting fact about me: most of my close friends are male, many of them are ex-boyfriends, and almost all of those are either married or engaged. By this point in my life, I've been to a fair number of weddings, and I have to say that watching an ex-boyfriend walk down the aisle with another woman is a whole different kind of bittersweet. Sometimes it's been a relief-- like when Aaron got married, and I was secretly grateful that I'd never have to deal with his advances again. Sometimes there's been a sense of rightness to it-- when Crane got married, I couldn't imagine anyone better for him than Anne (she and I have since become good friends). And sometimes, like when Andrew got married, I've wanted to bawl my eyes out-- despite the fact that he and I had broken up while still in high school, and had only recently rebuilt the friendship we should have had in the first place.

Another interesting fact about me: in high school, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet with a semi-secret superpower. I would date a guy for a few months or a year the way kids do in high school, then we would break up-- and then the guy would get the state's Honor Cadet of the Year award. I seriously went three-for-three in three years-- just ask Andrew. I used to sit around at the banquet tables at the awards ceremonies, joking quietly with the other female cadets about what a fortune I'd make if I could bottle that ability. Looking back at that from an adult perspective, I realize two things: one, I had an uncanny accuracy for choosing rising stars; and two, at that stage of my life, they really were better off without my drama. Growing up seems to have cured that second part quite nicely, thank God. But now that I've learned how to channel all that passion for something constructive, I really wish I still had access to that first part.

At sixteen, it's easy to see the fire in someone's heart, and to know that they'll love us and their dreams with equal ferocity. But somewhere around our mid-twenties, we make of that fire something harder, like steel or glass-- something that will hold polish and an edge. Dreams become ambitions. Love becomes sex with security. Desires become necessities. The ethereal quality goes out of our lives, and any attempt to bring it back makes us look hopelessly naive and juvenile, as though we still sleep with teddy bears and write letters to Santa. Even the internet dating sites, which sell the idea of everlasting love, temper it with the advice that potential matches will be scared away by the mere mention of the word. We learn that anything that blazes forth had better be sex, innovation, or diamonds, because anything else is just a waste of energy. We become so hard and glossy and grounded that we shower Bridezilla and dismiss "happily ever after" as a wedding planner's tactic to get further into our wallets.

That is, until the day we're actually confronted with the impossible. Someone gets engaged or married, someone we knew back when love and dreams underwent nuclear fusion and gave us unlimited, burning energy, and suddenly all the years of glass and steel melt away before a force so hot and bright that we can't look directly at it without tears. Something has called out the fire in us.

The question is not what I would do if I could bottle that ability. The question is why we ever keep it bottled in the first place.