Extra: Centigrade Scale IV
An anniversary, a birthday, and running towards memories
Thanks for reading my newsletter! This is an extra edition which follows the 100s format, originally credited to the University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard, which I first encountered in an essay called Critical Poly 100s by Kim Tallbear in Shapes of Native Nonfiction edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. I have written 100s in past letters here, here and here. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
Find me on X, Instagram and TikTok. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend.
CENTIGRADE SCALE IV
(On September 27th, my partner and I were exactly five years married and visiting the University of Illinois campus where we first met in 2014.)
“There are two wolves in me,” I say to my partner. We are in a cheap hotel in Chicago. “One says you’re on vacation, eat the chips. The other says if you do that you will hate yourself later.” We flew in too late to buy snacks and beer anywhere more dignified than a nearby Walgreens. “You should listen to that first wolf more. That’s a good wolf,” he says, passing the chips. We watch the Food Network. Midnight passes, turning the night into our anniversary. He touches me with salt and vinegar hands, the sweetest person I’ve ever met.
On the train to Champaign, Illinois I eat a lukewarm, microwaved tamale, the only vegan option. My partner gets a bagel with cream cheese, a nod to our Saturday morning routine. I am always singing praises to our weekly New York bagels. This may annoy some original New Yorkers but they’ve never had a bagel in the student union of a large midwestern university, abhorrent in its soft sponginess, tainted with unnecessary sweetness. The Amtrak bagel is that and worse. “I should have gotten the tamale too,” my partner says. Before New York was our home, it was solely his.
On campus, where I spent years earning a PhD, its drizzling. I’m wearing a white button down that immediately betrays my unpreparedness for the weather. It’s an oversized shirt that I can tuck in and I button it all the way then add a gold bolo tie. My hair is freshly cut, sides tightly cropped, single curl resting on my forehead. “I like all of this,” a professor will later tell me vaguely gesturing in the direction of my upper body. Does he remember when I wore poodle skirts to seminars about many body localization? We talk about strange metals.
After my seminar, several students talk to me about their path through graduate school and for most of them it really has been through something. Changing advisors, unexpectedly losing funding from government agencies, burnout. These conversations are seamless because I’ve heard it all before. For many, these are the unofficial staples of the graduate experience, of what I often call my ‘academic training.’ One student tells me: “People don’t realize how physical the feeling of burnout is.” I want to tell them that some of that fatigue still lives in my body. And I never even ‘made it’ in academia.
“This is the place that made me,” I tell the head of graduate studies, a man who quietly maintains all that is good about this department. “This is the place that made me,” I tell my former advisor at her surprise birthday party. I am echoing a friend who was echoing a book. In all cases the place is the Midwest, but all I know of its plains is this college town. My partner and I walk the town’s streets and alert each other at everything that’s changed, or disappeared, since we fell for each other here, ten years ago.
There’s a local legend about Playboy Bunnies. It says that they were named after Bunny’s Tavern, a local bar that Hugh Hefner frequented as an undergraduate. We used to go there because it was cheap and dingy. We get our last drink of this memory-filled weekend there too. The lights inside are unbearably bright. It’s still cheap and dingy. At the bar, a man is talking at a woman about immigration. She speaks with an accent, wears perfect red lipstick, drinks through a straw. Later, I can’t explain to myself why I ever thought it was safe to go there.
At my former advisor’s surprise birthday party, she is overcome with the joy of seeing all her past students in one place, celebrating. Processing it in real time, she starts apologizing because she feels like she had not shown up in our advising relationship authentically. I feel the urge to comfort her, to say “you were just doing what was shown to you.” She is telling me nothing new, I always saw her. However, there is also a tenderness between us. I’m not here to offer anyone absolution, but I now also know that there is no virtue in bitterness.
One night, we come across a mutual aid benefit featuring local punk bands. There, we run into someone I organized with in a graduate workers labor union. Nostalgia kicks in. Finally, I remember how I loved the crunchiness of this place, its farmers market, the co-op with beige vegan soups and sandwiches, the yoga studio where everyone knew me. One of the bands covers both Alice In Chains and Big Thief and I tell my partner that time may be collapsing on itself but at least the kids are really alright. On our second date we saw a local band.
Before my seminar I eat three halves of a bagel, that spongy kind, studded with sesame seeds or blueberries or swirled with cinnamon. I used to eat similar bagel halves while listening to others lay out their career paths, equally worrying about my future and their calorie content. “Every graduate student jokes about quitting to open a bakery, but has anyone actually done it?” someone asks, jokingly. I recall selling slices of cake while surrounded by friends just a week ago. Begrudgingly, because it is always easier to wallow, I admit to myself that I did, in fact, get better.
“That little bridge over there always let me know I was getting close to you,” my partner says as we walk near my old apartment. We are rushing to board a bus that will take us to an airport in Chicago, something both of us have done countless times during the many years when we lived in different states. Now, our final destination is the same. “I have so much hope,” I wrote after we got married, dreaming of that. As we walk towards our seats, I feel that again, the bus suddenly so much less dreary than I remember.
Best,
Karmela