smooth like butta

there is a nickname i have. it is, and has been for over 8 years, "butta." indeed, upon arriving at the university of michigan, i was given the unfortunate email address of bhatt + a, yielding bhatta. it was sad.

i did not like bhatta. it wasn't my last name. it certainly wasn't my first. it might have been okay if it'd been abhatt, but no. i had no choice in the matter - the university had spoken.

from the very beginning, the difficulty of having a strange email address permeated my social life. when meeting other attractive, sporting, 18-year-old males, perfectly normal conversations would become awkward or fizzle into oblivion:

hot male: great to meet you. let's get together some time. what's your email?
me: oh, it's b-h-a-t-t-a
hot male: hm... that's hard to remember... maybe we should write it down
me: i don't have a pen...
hot male: oh i'll go get one... [exits, never to return]

while it's true that most of these boys simply walked away because they just wanted to get laid, it still proves my point: boys suck... i mean, my email address was frustratingly difficult to remember. hence was born the phrase, "butta."

it was easy. when asked, "what's your email address?" i simply responded, "it's bhatta. you know, smooth like butta." oh my god i was so funny. and catchy. and people liked it, gosh darn it. and it stuck for years and years, so much so that many of my friends continue to call me "butta" to this very day.

so, it is with great sadness that i say goodbye to bhatta and say hello to gmail. i'm okay. at least, i think i will be. but if you feel like sending me flowers to help me cope, that'd be nice. thanks in advance.

<3,
butta

never no more

wednesday, april 16, 2008:

last day of law school.
last day of socratic method.
possibly my last day of being formally educated.

wow.

i'm all done, coming undone, and feeling... accomplished.

i
am
a
LAWYER!

dude.

quarter-life crisis

i've been having these strange dreams lately where i go to visit my parents in my hometown and nothing is the same as it ever was. i can't remember how to get places, and my favorite park is replaced with an office building. i get home and i find myself pacing the floors of an abandoned house. my parents are gone and i'm really frustrated to learn that my hometown is no longer my home. that the small town where i grew up has grown up too, and in some way, has outgrown me. wants nothing to do with me.

the last time i had these dreams was this summer in d.c. before that, i had them first semester at chapel hill. evidently, leaving michigan, my family, everything i have ever known my whole life, had an effect on me. occasionally, i'd see michigan alumni plates on a car while driving in chapel hill, and at first, i wouldn't think much of it. and then it'd hit me: they're not from here. this is how people probably reacted to seeing my car's plates during my first few months there. she's not from here. she's from michigan. and it's true. i will always be from the midwest. a snow-loving, cherry-picking, suburban girl from michigan. i bake with soda & drink a pop. i know how to pronounce mackinac. even a thumb has geographical, rather than anatomical significance. and yeah, i picked corn in the summers with the farmer behind my house.

but i came back. my parents got sick, my sister met someone great, and i had an open invitation to come back. now, more than a year later, i'm still having these dreams despite my being here. still trying to figure out how to make michigan... how to make any place feel like home. and i realized this: i am looking for something that doesn't really exist anymore.

it's unnerving. i've feel as though i've become the antithesis of my usual idealistic self. i'm tired of the law. i'm tired of trying to help everyone else. i miss the stage. i wanna go back to endless dancing and singing, and i desperately need to start playing my guitar again. i just miss losing myself in something wonderful. it's making everything else lack purpose.

i suppose all people go through this at some point. life happens and it makes people wary of what's to come. you wonder if you lost your footing once you've lost your youth. but while i'm definitely at the quarter mark of my life, i don't want what i'm going through to be a crisis anymore.

New faces. New places.

You know the point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone. You'll see one day when you move out. Just sorta happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know? You won't ever have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. You know, for... your kids. For the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know? Maybe that's all family really is - a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

it's very simple.

as you grow, you learn more. if you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. aging is not just decay, you know. it's growth. it's more than the negative that you're going to die. it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

yes, i said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, oh if i were young again. you never hear people say, i wish i were sixty-five.

he smiled. you know what that reflects? unsatisfied lives. unfulfilled lives. lives that haven't found meaning. because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. you want to go forward. you want to see more, do more. you can't wait until sixty-five... you have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. looking back makes you competitive. and, age is not a competitive issue... the truth is, part of me is every age. i'm a three-year-old, i'm a five-year-old, i'm a thirty-seven-year-old, i'm a fifty-year-old. i've been through all of them, and i know what it's like. i delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. i delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man. think of all i can be! i am every age, up to my own. do you understand?

i nodded.

how can i be envious of where you are - when i've been there myself?
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it's been awhile, i know. happy belated (and future) birthdays.