Nancy Caroline: A Timeline 1979-1998

Here it is, either my ultimate narcissistic gesture, or something I had to do to be able to see what others see in me. I started writing my timeline on the eve of my birthday, last Tuesday. Birthdays always offer an opportunity to reflect. Funny how that is. How, before, it was a celebration of milestones, and now, it's a time to look back and let go, to remember and look forward. Great time to do mushrooms or something, so if anyone's selling, I'm looking to buy.

Once I started, and the years began to reveal themselves to me, I realized how much fun it was, to look back over my life and condense it to fit a timeline of events. Each bullet point could fill an entire chapter of a book, and each time period, a volume, and that is the gift I have been receiving since I wished for it years ago, to own my life.

We begin with the beginning, my formative years, as a little girl in the world, connected to the ground through roots that grew out of my velcro tennis shoes, sent shoots out from my fingertips, and bloomed at my lips.

• Birth, Hickory, NC to James Anthony Allen and Martha Lois Nevills. Cesarean section. Explains how ravishing I am.
• Moved to Memphis, TN in a really cool 70s car so that my dad could go to school for Theology. I ate ice cream for the first time, I hear.
• I make countless cassette tapes of myself hosting some sort of talk show. I never listened to the tapes because I always always always hated the sound of my own voice.
• I have vague memories of dirty knees, spider webs, Christmas lights, and kittens. Also countless hours digging holes in the back yard or on the playground and searching patches of clover for one with four leaves.

• I sprained my ankle on my tenth birthday when I jumped off this Hamburgler on a playground at McDonald’s that you climbed up into like a hamburger jail mouth thing. My parents regaled me with stories of the day I was born to help keep my mind off how bad my ankle hurt that night.
• Mom and Dad used to wake me on Saturday mornings by “sneaking” into my room on their hands and knees, but I always heard them coming because they couldn’t stop giggling.
• I kissed a boy for the first time in the back yard of a house in Memphis after we jumped on a trampoline and drank orange-tangerine Mystic Waters until we almost threw up. It felt rushed and close. I said, “Orange-Tangerine,” when it was over. That was pretty much it.
• I took piano lessons, sculpting classes, art classes, and drama classes because my parents were pretty intent on making me into a complete and interesting human being.
• I got my period!
• I played the flute, and I loved it. You might say, she was my first great love. In those moments I spent alone in a soundproof practice room, I learned how to be honest and open, how to think and how to feel, how to sit with myself. Then, I got scared that I would stop impressing people, and the more frightened I got, the less I wanted to play my flute, until I stopped altogether (but only after more than ten years).

  

  Prom '98

• I discovered the Theater, my second love. I’m not 100% sure who, my mother or father, gave me my keen distaste for dishonesty, but the only real gift you need to be able to enjoy theatre is the ability to look life in the face and not back down from what you see. We back down from life in a lot of ways, take the easy way out, wonder what that ache is, even though we know. I felt like I could be myself in the theatre crowd. And then, for some reason, probably anxiety, I felt like an outsider, but that was much later.
• I graduated from High School.

Words Are Important (or Merry Christmas Mr. Semore, Sorry This is Late)

I was driving home Christmas night after an attempt at going out that was thwarted by a fevered frenzy. As much as we try to fake fevers as children, when the real thing hits, it brings even the most headstrong adults to our knees. I was breathing heavily, shivering, and talking myself through each red light so that I could make it home to shiver and whimper under a mountain of blankets until the fever broke. And I was nauseated.

Rewind a bit and join me on an OkCupid date that was doomed from the start. I had already decided that this handsome, older, lucrative man wasn't quite right after he fully described to me the time he spent deciding what shoes to wear, but the deal was sealed when he found himself struggling to find the noun to match his repeated usage of the word, "nauseous."

What is the noun that goes with nauseous?

Those of us who speak English as a first language have an innate understanding of the structure of how we speak, but we often struggle, and usually give up, when it comes to actually succeeding in the process of proper sentence construction.

The noun that belongs in the canon for all things nauseous, is NAUSEA. The gentleman buying my drinks that evening settled on nauseousness. He was trying to explain that he felt nauseous, and was tired of all the "nauseousness."

I will never forget the correct forms and usage of the word for the feeling you get right before you boot just as I will never forget the day Michael Semore proudly displayed the Queen Elizabeth I Barbie that he had found ON THE CLEARANCE TABLE at a toy store. There are teachers that you remember because they tried too hard, and there are teachers you remember because they simply were. They were knowledge, language, sharing, teaching, faith, and, most importantly, vulnerable (I realize that, in order to make this sentence stylistically more pleasant, the last word SHOULD be "vulnerability," but that doesn't further my point..OKAY).

"If you come to me to ask for a hall pass and tell me you feel nauseous, I will respond by telling you that, yes, you are making me want to throw up too, but I don't see why that qualifies you for a hall pass."

Why? It is something that is NAUSEOUS, like a big ol' pile a' crap, that induces NAUSEA. If you experience something NAUSEOUS, you may become NAUSEATED.

I know, I know. I'm a sad grammar nazi,

the type of person that has to silently correct your grammar to make myself feel better about the future of civilization, when it probably doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things and if I could just chill out about it I wouldn't be so frustrated/might not be single/(insert some form of existence that you find suitable because your ideas about living are just as valid as mine, if not totally different).

It's true. It doesn't REALLY matter. Saying, "I feel nauseous" is acceptable (according to the sacred Oxford English Dictionary that Mr. Semore introduced to us in it's original tangible form that required a magnifying glass just a few short months before the internet would transform absolutely everything). It's accepted. No one will be confused if you tell them you feel nauseous. The only person that might be confused is you, when you are trying to explain to someone that you felt nauseous to excess, and you stumble upon the word/notword "nauseousness," when you could have simply used the term "nausea" and been done with it.

The beauty of language is that it evolves. It exists for the people. It is the only way that we can truly tell the difference between ourselves and the world around us, the only way we can describe our experiences to each other, the only way we can communicate. Language is not merely words; it is symbols. It is a collection of signs to represent the signified, and that is everything that is not us. Even those who cannot speak find a way to communicate, to form symbols that add up to thoughts and feelings and experiences.

I suppose that is why I find it so sacred, so beautiful. I can take words, and what I know about words, and I can use them to tell someone what it feels like to fall in love, or what it feels like when one falls out of love. I can describe what it feels like on a day when I spring out of bed full of excitement about the day ahead and what it feels like when a sudden bout of nausea leaves me huddled in the fetal position and unable to go about my day.

The depth and breadth of language knows no bounds just as humans are capable of more than we can imagine. It's almost nauseating to think of the fact that there are words for feelings in other languages that don't even exist in English. In English we have to find another way to describe that feeling you get when you're standing alone against the wall at a high school social, and that cute boy you've always liked asks you if you want to dance. Usually we resort to using other words, or similes and metaphors to describe that particular brand of nausea, but I'll bet it stands alone just fine in one of the love languages (and by that I mean Latin based languages).

It takes a big person to tell a room full of 16-18 year olds that he loves words and wants them to respect his love by respecting the words. Perhaps that is why Mr. Semore has stayed with me all these years. True passion requires vulnerability, and true vulnerability is daunting, nauseating at times. The only way to affect change in our own lives as well as the lives of others is to be vulnerable. When we open ourselves up to love something or someone or many, the more capable we find ourselves of opening even further, of finding new ways to express ourselves and our feelings. Thus, language evolves further to accommodate our changing needs.  More importantly, we find we are more capable of loving, fully and unabashedly, not just words or shoes, but living and life, and eventually...hopefully...ourselves.