What Broken Hearts Can Learn from Broken Noses

The pain of the initial impact is blinding: a baseball slams into your face and shatters the sensitive bones of your nose. Reeling and bleeding, you have two choices. You can either go to the emergency room, where you will likely have to endure the pain of having your nose re-broken by the doctor to ensure it is properly set for healing. Or, you can quickly mute the pain with ice, tell yourself it's not that bad, and stay in the game.

However, when a nose is first broken, it is, medically speaking, more efficient to right then and there reset to its original position and allow it to heal correctly the first time -- whereas if a broken nose goes untreated, deformity of the nose occurs, usually resulting in a crooked bridge, a bumpy bridge, or a combination of the two. When this is the case, at some later date, when you have trouble breathing, or just can't look at yourself in the mirror any longer, a doctor or cosmetic surgeon will need to reset it, which involves re-breaking the nose.

With the heart, there seems to be a parallel. After the initial blinding pain, the shattering of your heart, you have two choices. You can either spend some time immediately re-breaking your heart - resisting the urge to fall back into familiar arms, ignoring phone calls, doing the difficult work of dealing with yourself. Or, you can "stay in the game:" you can choose to sidestep that immediate re-breaking, understandably wanting to save yourself more simultaneous pain - and you "heal" by seeking immediate comfort in those familiar arms, that familiar voice. Though your heart was shattered, you quickly erase all memory of the injury

... and thus untreated, some deformity of the heart occurs... and later, when you finally realize that you are having difficulty breathing, or you can no longer look at yourself in the mirror... your heart must be re-broken, only then to have some hope of healing and restoring itself to full functionality.

There are some differences between broken hearts and broken noses, of course. For noses, there is anesthesia. For hearts, there is only time.

As Claire Danes' character, Mirabelle, said in Shopgirl: "Hurt now, or hurt later? .... Hurt now." Tears were in her eyes, as she slowly nodded her way through her wrenching choice. Biting her lip, she made the most difficult but most healthy call, and walked away from the person who might give her a few more good moments, but would undoubtedly hurt her again in the end.

The fictitious Mirabelle had the wisdom to know that delaying payment of pain owed is a finite layaway plan - the bill always comes due, and often the amount has compounded and increased while we pretended it wasn't there. In real life, most of us are not so wise. We have to keep breaking and breaking and breaking before we finally learn: pain later is often pain greater, and part of that pain lies in the knowledge that while the initial wound might be blamed on someone else, this pain ... we could have spared ourselves.

The truly tricky part? Knowing when our heart is broken, and when it is only bruised. When do we stay, and when do we walk away? Broken hearts can learn something from broken noses... but there is still so much unknown.

Channeling Lynne Truss

Do not bring unpaid merchandise into the bathroom.

The words leered down at me from a placard on a lavatory door in a major department store. It took me a moment to identify the funny feeling in my tummy. Why did the sign instantly irritate me? What was this odd sensation? Who or what exactly was this persona taking over my senses?

Then, in a moment full of secret identity-shedding, superhero-revealing glory, I became the Grammar Rodeo Queen.

Who, you ask, is the Grammar Rodeo Queen? Ha! Ha HA!

...all right, no need for dramatic buildup: it's me. "GRQ" was my high school boyfriend's nickname for me. (Romantic, no?) Friend and foe alike would ask me to edit their essays and school reports. Incorrectly spelled words, incorrectly used words, and incorrect grammar were unacceptable. In fits of syntactic rage, I would turn green and SMASH sentences into proper forms.

Eventually, I learned that this is a rather irritating trait. Though all too happy to utilize my editing skills when a grade was on the line, most friends found my obsession with words boring-- pretentious, even. I learned to rein in the rodeo queen and leave grammar alone. In fact, I submerged so much of GRQ that these days I would find diagramming a sentence to be quite a Herculean task. Transitive, intransitive... I rarely pick apart grammar these days. GRQ has been largely subdued.

She surfaces occasionally. When I first read "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves," there was copious snorting, and I blame it all on GRQ. Usually, though, her appearances are not so jovial. After months of near-invisibility, an unbidden trigger sets her off. It can be something small. In fact, it's usually something quite small, a subtle trigger such as the unexpected sign:


Do not bring unpaid merchandise into the bathroom.

This is a clear violation of the English language!

Pay attention to the noun, people! The first "person, place, or thing" in question here is the merchandise. Now look at the mangled member of the verb family limping along between "bring" and "merchandise." Pay? Really? Before I enter the bathroom, you want me to pay the merchandise?

No matter what you do, merchandise will rarely be paid. Workers can be paid or unpaid (though they are happier when paid). The distributor or manufacturer or retailer can be paid. Merchandise cannot. (Of course, if the worker and the merchandise are one and the same, perhaps the merchandise can be paid. Aside from prostitution, I can think of few examples where this is the case, and I highly doubt this was the sort of merchandise to which the bathroom sign was referring... although... it was the bathroom door...)

The sign, therefore, should have read something along the lines of:

Do not bring UN-PURCHASED merchandise into the bathroom.

The purchasing is what happens to and therefore directly modifies the merchandise, not the paying.

Am I wrong? Where is Lynne Truss when you need her? It's high time she and I had tea. Oh, Ms. Truss! I understand that "Call me, Ishmael" and "Call me Ishmael" are two completely different sentences. I love appropriately placed commas, and adore correctly-applied vocabulary. Thank you for serving as an international grammar role model.

(My apologies to everyone who found this blog boring and/or pretentious; I simply had to let fly the lasso of the Grammar Rodeo Queen. She's been eating me up all week.)

... And a Dollar Short

Due to yet another hectic weekend, this posting is tardy, and now appears on Tuesday, September 11, 2007.

With apologies to former UnshelvingBeth readers, I am reposting the reflection on 9/11 I wrote last year. Though innovation is important, there is something to be said for tradition as well, and it seems appropriate to share a second-annual post reflecting on the tragedy that occurred six years ago today, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Living Stories

My creative writing class. A table full of young writers, headed by a vibrant Southern author who tsk tsk tsks us when we use clichés like "her eyes are filled with tears." It’s a 9am class, and we are commenting on a classmates' story of new love -- a difficult topic to tackle without using any clichés. Almost immediately after the class begins, a cell phone rings. This elicits an instantaneous tsk as our professor's eyebrows hit her hairline. "Which one of y'all brought a cell phone to class?"

We all turn innocent faces back to her. We know the rule. In honor of our beloved professor, our cell phones are all off or absent. The phone keeps ringing.

She flushes crimson. “Oh good Lord, it’s mine,” she chuckles, reaching into her oversize knit bag. “It’s my husband – must be some sort of emergency. Please forgive me,” she says, taking the call. “Honey, I’m in class, so this better – what? Well that’s strange. How very odd. All right – bye.”

She places her cell phone back in her purse, and reports with a puzzled face, “My husband says that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

We are all mystified, all tripping over similar bemused questions: A small plane? Anyone hurt? Was it a navigational error, or some sort of mechanical failure? One student, saying her father works near there, excuses herself to see if she can reach him. The rest of us return to our stories, confused but not shaken.

The phone rings again.

Flinching slightly, our professor takes out her vibrating cell, looks at the caller ID. “It’s my husband again. I can’t think why he’d need to call back – I won’t be a minute – I’ll just – hold on. Hello? Hi, sweetheart… what? … What? I… That’s just … okay. Okay. I love you too.”

She ends her call and somehow seems to meet all of our eyes at once. Her voice wavers like the watery air above a blistering fire. “A second plane flew into the World Trade Center. They’re pretty sure we’re under some sort of terrorist attack.”

Too stunned to speak, we stare. It never crossed our minds. Our naïveté had shielded us from the first crash, but the second plane went right through us.

The professor speaks again: “I don’t believe there’s anything we can do just yet. Shall we stay in our stories a little while longer?” It is not yet 9:30am on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. We mutely nod: we want to live in our fiction just a little while longer.

But then our other classmate walks back into the classroom, and her eyes are filled with tears.

©Beth Kander (please do not reprint without permission of the author)

"P" -ness Envy

A few weeks ago, my good friend D was in town for a conference, and I was fortunate enough to get a few hours with her post-conference. We embarked on a mini-road trip to Grenada, Mississippi. Towards the end of our drive, D let out a small yelp, and said "Oh my God! I didn't tell you about discovering my p-ness."

I have known this woman long enough to know that if I just raised my eyebrows, she would likely clarify.

Seeing my brows and registering what she had just said, she burst out laughing and said "No no no, that came out wrong, I mean my inner p-ness."

"I think whatever you're trying to say is still coming out wrong," I said, suspecting she was probably not identifying herself as a hermaphrodite.

"Yeah yeah yeah, wait a minute, I just got so excited to tell you about this, I'll back up," she said quickly. "Have you ever taken a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test?"

I was, in fact, familiar with the MBTI, a personality test that gauges "preferences" across four categories, each of which has two possible letters/types. For example: "Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?" If you choose outer, you are Extroverted (E); if you choose inner, you are Introverted (I). Of course, the questions are asked far more comprehensively and far less obviously, but that's the basic gist. By the end of the test, you have your own specific letters across the four preferences; there are 16 different general "profiles" into which a person can fall.

"Well," said D, "For years I've tested as INFJ -- introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. But I recently re-tested, and I'm on the cusp of J (judging) and P (perceiving). And since Js are supposed to be more organized and decision-oriented and I'm just not like that, I'm so thrilled to consider exploring my P-ness--"

At that point I requested that she begin referring to her "P-quality."

"Anyway," she said, "It's very liberating. You're totally a J, right? Because you're so organized and decisive--"

It was my turn to burst out laughing. "Organized? Decisive? Are you kidding?"

"Well," she said, "If that's the case, you hide your P.... quality really well."

P's, you see, are process-rather-than product, ideas more than implementation, leaving doors open rather than confidently selecting ... and while in my professional life, I can be product-implementation-decision focused, the truth is it's difficult for me... and for how many others? Apparently, I am a P in J's clothing. (We shall refer to this phenomenon as my PJ's.) I can fake people out and have them think I am a solid J.

But I know the truth. The ENFP (extroverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving) label fits me well; it calls me out on several of my strengths and weaknesses:

ENFP
Warmly enthusiastic and imaginative. See life as full of possibilities. Make connections between events and information very quickly, and confidently proceed based on the patterns they see. Want a lot of affirmation from others, and readily give appreciation and support. Spontaneous and flexible, often rely on their ability to improvise and their verbal fluency.

What this brief cheery overview glosses over is the tendency of P's to have difficulty staying on track... and for all my alleged J-posturing, every once in awhile, I get so caught up on whatever else I have going on I get caught, for lack of a better phrase, with my "p"ants down. Like in this crazy time, when I've kept plates spinning at work, and taken on a few additional tasks - but neglected my blog. I "p"romise to re-engage in this site and apologize for the lapse.

(Due to the tardiness of this post, I briefly thought of titling it "Two Weeks Late Due to P-ness," and while I know that would have elicited a few chuckles, I just couldn't imagine that every reaction would be quite so jovial - and I myself would have turned bright red had someone else used that title - so it was quickly scrapped. Call it a well-played J decision.)