When you’re prone to nerdish enthusiasms, intense klutziness, exuberant feelings about random things, and just enough social awkwardness to occasionally stun people into silence, you have to be fine with being the brunt of jokes… and more importantly, being the brunt of your own.

Here’s a quick list of talking points:

Doesn’t wear shoes/socks
Arms so short she can’t reach her hands
Overthinker
Verbal processor
Talks at the television (see above)
Reads the ends of books and plot spoilers
Doesn’t like talking on the phone
Lazy eye on the verge of narcolepsy
Potentially manic about Christmas
Built like snowperson
Never without handbag the size of an adolescent lamb
Is from Canada and says “aboot”
Is prone to self-injure in public
Cooks dinner until oddly late hours
Is snobby about groceries
Can’t drive
Prone to cry at commercials
Takes “from above” self-photos as though she were a Yeti and needed to be captured on film to prove her existence

… and really, there are many more. But I openly acknowledge these facets of the jewel I am. Huzzah!

If you want to watch me turn into a total spaz, however, get mad at me. Better yet, get mad and walk away. I’m not good at dealing with that.

Not in the sense that I need everyone to love me (I might, I might), but in the sense that I panic if I think I’ve offended someone and they’re not responding to me, or if they get overtly chilly in my direction, or they ramble passive aggressively about something that sounds like something I might have done. I rush in to try and make everything okay, or justify myself in some loopy way, or fuss about how I can compensate for whatever I did. Usually this pattern plays out in one of three ways:

1. They didn’t actually have a problem with me, and now I’m a lunatic
2. They did have a problem with me and I’M NOT MAKING IT BETTER
3. Silence

And silence upon silence? Chilly upon chilly? Well, nothing can go well from there. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Meg abhors unresolved tension.

I hate it, even if I’ve done something to earn it. And if I can’t figure out what the hell I did, I go berserk. Not at the person, mind you. Just at myself. Which makes me inevitably weird to the person. Which, again, makes it even worse.

Modern psychology has all sorts of advice about letting people feel their feelings and owning your choices and giving them the space to do what they have to do… but I’m a fixer. I want things to be fine. I want people to be fine. I used to think this was a good quality, when it’s more just… selfish.

My late Nonna used to say, “Shalom!” and make a little “CHILL OUT” gesture with her hands if a discussion in her house got too pointed or a debate got too lively. Sometimes it was a joke, but she really didn’t like conflict. And I’m different — I can deal with conflict in the midst of it. Sometimes I propel it, even. I’m a hell of a debater, and I’m never more articulate then when I’m royally pissed off.

I just don’t like to deal with the consequences.

After arguing with my husband the other night about something ridiculous — and doing my usual, “I’M SO SORRY I’M A HORRIBLE WIFE!” and asking him if he was fine about five minutes after I was ready to unscrew his head and throw it at him — it occurred to me that I was doing three (just three?) annoying things consistently:

1. Not trusting my family and friends to love me (mostly) unconditionally
2. Dodging the consequences of things I was responsible for by forcing “okay”
3. Putting people in the awkward position of reassuring me when I’d just annoyed the hell out of them

It took me until I was in a new city with a whole new group of friends, and a new husband who was going to have to put up with me… forever… to realize that my way of dealing with things was kind of kooky. It lacked patience, it lacked faith in my relationships, and it was making me squirrelly.

I’m still figuring it out.

I know that there ARE people who want to make you feel terrible if they’re angry at you, and put effort into it — I’ve had those friendships, and they’re exhausting. But they’re also a rare animal.

Most people want to feel how they feel, take a bit to get over it, and then move on. Or they’ll tell you what they need when they figure it out. Or they’ll yell, and then stop yelling. Or you’ll apologize, and they’ll accept or not. All you can really do is do better next time, and respect how they deal with their frustration.

But it doesn’t escape me that most of the big life lessons I’ve had since I became an adult amount to CALM DOWN or SHHHHHH.

Oh, and, I LOVE YOU, DOOFUS.

I’m not known for being practical about shoes. Not at all.

I wear ballet flats and flip flops, both notorious for their utter lack of support and protective abilities.

In fact, I’d be barefoot most of the time, if someone was willing to walk ahead of me with, say, a yoga mat and a Costco-size vat of Purel.

But, in a rare moment of practicality a couple years back, I got Uggs.

Yep. Uggs.

Go ahead, laugh. My dad bought them for me (HE WANTED ME TO BE WARM) so he will likely cry (OR PUNCH YOU), but mock all you want… my toes go to sleep each night (or if I sit down too long in a weird position) knowing I’ve made them a priority.

It’s not like I’m doing this, people:

I’ve never worn them with:

shorts
a skirt
sweatpants
a miniskirt (who are we kidding?)
a sundress
short shorts (again, IT’S NOT LIKE I HATE YOUR EYES)
a bikini (now you’re just being foolish)
a panda costume (though I would… I would)

Nope, I’m all Kate Winslet in MY Uggs (sans watermark):

(I’m well aware I don’t look anything like Kate Winslet but MAYBE IN MY UGGS?!?)

Check it: warm coat. Warm pants. A scarf. Casual family erranding. She’s not trying to look stylish, but I don’t think she looks bad, either. SHE’S KATE FRIGGIN’ WINSLET, PEOPLE.

And she wears Uggs.

The most important consideration here is that Uggs keep my feet happy in the cool temperatures of New England (when we actually have them, and no, I don’t wear them unless we do)… AND they make me look like a cozy Eskimo (Inuit!) girl. Fun!

From where I stand, the primary argument against Uggs rests on the proposition that they’re not “stylish.”

“Ugg — that’s short for ugly!” WOW, NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER MADE THAT JOKE BEFORE. GOOD ONE.

And I’m not saying they look fantastic. But I think function, in this case, trumps form.

Besides, Judgy McJudgington, I’d like to point out that y’all wear some pretty goofy stuff yourselves in your quest for cutting-edge style.

Like gladiator heels, my MOST HATED SHOE.

To me, it just looks like you’ve got some sort of physiotherapy issue or ankle ailment.

Can you tell which are which?

I’m just saying.

There are zillions of less functional, more ugly pairs of shoes than the ones I use to keep my toes from freezing off, and yet the worst of these are trumpeted by all manner of style-setters and fashionistas… as they tumble from their lofty torture heels into city gutters, and fill their handbag du jour with gum wrappers, rain water, and vermin.

Blech!

So I don’t worry too much about it.

Anyway, if I had to choose:

That guy wears Uggs.

This guy? Doesn’t:

I REST MY CASE.

MAY.

It’s not like I ceased to love things that day — I mean, the whole wedding thing would have been a bit of a wash if that were the case.

Nope, I still love lots of things… just as many as I did when I used to write these lists every Friday. And since this week has achieved new heights of awkward lameness (HAPPY 2012) I figured now was a good time to remember the GREAT in my life.

So here they are!

(As always, I welcome your lists in the comments or wherever you feel like putting them. Unless it’s in my eye. Don’t put your list in my eye.)

THINGS I LOVE

My family
Salty vinegar-y capers added to a good Marinara sauce
Lotions that smell like coconut
Sleeping in
New babies (Eli, Jackson, and Campbell, I’m looking at YOU!)
That I am excellently loud at finger-snapping
E’s long, winding, exhaustive recaps of playing video games
Salt spray for my weird hair
Pine-scented candles
Making people laugh
Making people think
Making people give me weird faces when I repeatedly attempt to buy my T pass with my Sephora Beauty Insider card
The multiple magical uses of bobby pins
Realizing how blessed we both are to be employed and in a warm home in a place we like every. single. night.
Pedicures (charcoal shimmer or shiny red, this time of year)
Our nightly cup of chamomile tea
Gaviscon. Truly.
Fresh-baked biscuits
Timex watches — the more old-school the better
FaceTime-ing with my parents
Driving with Gradon (well, I am passenging, but still…)
Loving Christmas, and not being even a bit cynical about it
Peanut butter M&Ms
My fluffy white down coat which is en route to me but taking an AGE because I ordered it during the holidays and didn’t expedite the shipping but I do like anticipation so that’s fun
Brussels sprouts
Freshly bought magazines
Not always looking 37
Seeing my friends *happy*
When people give great hugs — no “pat pat pat” or fragility
Ella Fitzgerald, always
Mr. Matthew Knell of Long Island City, NY, owner of many caps
Amazing and terrifying aerobics videos on YouTube
That my new husband and I did not kill one another during our Big Budget Chat
My reorganized iTunes (I created my own genre labels. In other news, I have insomnia)
The wee pug that hangs out in one of our neighborhood stores
My washing machine. And what’s more… my dryer
Addictive television: The Wire, Dexter, Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey, Top Gear, playoff anything…
Olives!
The possibility of bangs, as yet unrealized
The Cloud
You.

I have no problem deleting files, texts, emails, blog posts, tweets… anything.

I am a confident, swift, positively gleeful deleter if I don’t feel the need to keep something around, either because it has served its purpose… or failed to serve one in the first place.

Sometimes I delete things too soon, which requires reproducing them — but they’re usually better the second time, even if I drive myself insane in the process. If I have to request them from someone else, however, I end up feeling like the kind of heedless, irritating person who throws out a birthday card with cash still tucked inside.

Sometimes I delete out of some combination of thoughtfulness and cowardice because of the reaction something fosters in others (or might foster in others — I don’t hedge my bets), or I delete because I am confident I shouldn’t have sent whatever into the ether in the first place.

I’d like to say my tendency to delete has kept me out of hot water… but while you can delete things, you can’t actually un-say them.

I’d like to believe all this deleting uncomplicates my life… but I just fill in more where I delete, and complication returns via a sort of queasy, inevitable osmosis.

But I think I delete because I like tiny control.

I like to wrest order from disorder in temporary, yet giddy ways… though I don’t recognize them as that at the time.

It isn’t lost on me that when things seem truly crucial — work email, client email, pictures of family and friends on my phone/camera/laptop, texts full of loving, ridiculously gushy words from my gift of a new husband — my delete-happy ways fall by the proverbial wayside.

And I can’t ignore the reality that I most often delete to alleviate discomfort or self-disdain: when I say something badly or offend someone without thinking (or with thought, but just stupid ones); when I blather on and don’t recognize it in time; when I recognize the need for an edit after the fact; when I am temporarily uncomfortable in my own skin and figure that tapping out words or images or ideas will give me a bit more room to breathe.

It’s chicken.

I mean, sometimes it’s organized and smart and together. But it can definitely be chicken.

I don’t like to be an ass, as much as I may show tremendous facility for it. So I try and clean things up the same sort of vigor with which I’d attack a client paragraph with my virtual red pen: let’s get life down to the best of what it should have been, and hope that I don’t yammer on quite so much the next time.

But I will.

And something tells me I need to live with that discomfort a little more than I’m willing to now, even if I want to run up a tree like a crazy squirrel, dodging the feral cat of my own lameness.

(See? That metaphor was terrible, and I didn’t even get rid of it.)

Because it radiates out into the rest of my life, this delete-happy way of approaching the world. Uncomfortable conversations don’t get… conversed. Stupid mistakes don’t get learned from because I don’t choose to truly walk through how I got there. I don’t like revisiting failures, even though I am a past-master at self-deprecation. But I only think about it if I can make fun of it.

And ask, if you dare, my domestic co-pilot how much I love staring into a Google spreadsheet and calculating costs down to the dollar to set our family budget. You’ll learn that I don’t really want to know just how much I overspent on that really lovely block of Parmesan for really lovely Carbonara and also? I would like to not know AND buy it again.

I delete what I should learn from. I delete what is worth looking in the eye. I even delete what I could accept about myself, instead of feeling like I dodged a bullet by not having to look in the mirror. I delete before I figure out it’s not so bad, or that there might be a solution… other than obliteration.

Does it really go away, anyway?

I’ve become this for what seemed like the right reasons, but perhaps it’s time to be a little less of it for the right reasons.

Deleting my deleting.

And dealing.

I am well acquainted with all things “fine.”

Fine hair? Yep, I have it. It frizzes out like cotton candy in humidity… and melts just as quickly, too.

Fine jewelry? Yep, I love it. Not that I have much of it, but I am sufficiently enamored of it to drool over auction catalogs full of baubles and sparklers (without actually going to the auction, naturally.)

Fines herbes? Yep, they are a good thing. Tarragon is a mainstay in my kitchen, although I always think people in cooking shows are saying “gerbil”, not “chervil.” “Just combine parsley, chives, tarragon, and gerbil…”

Fines? Yep, from the library, but not for many years. And not because I’ve fixed my ways — I just buy the books now so I can do the financial bloodletting up front.

Finite? I am. It’s true. Though truly it may seem like I go on and on verbally and textually without limits or stops a good portion of the time, my arms are VERY finite. So finite that they don’t reach the top shelf, requiring me to get my infinitely armed stepson to get things down for me.

But.

I’ve noticed lately that I’m using “fine” or “okay” to answer how I am, rather than “great!” or “good!” I’m not doing it in that PLEASE ASK ME HOW I AM kind of way, because I don’t really have a ton of interest in talking about it — though I’m writing a blog post about it right now, so that’s crap, clearly.

No, I’m saying it without realizing I’m saying it, but it’s honest, and now I’m trying to figure out where my “great!” and “good!” went.

If I look at my life objectively, I would say it’s pretty great. I have a snazzy husband, awesome kids hanging out, a fantastic family on this coast and another (or two!), terrific friends, a bunch more space in a bunch better neighborhood home-wise, and a job that challenges me. I experience obstacles like anyone else, but in the balance, I am safe, healthy, and loved by the folks who are “required” to feel that way (no one is, but you know what I mean.)

But I started to think last night about how little time I’d spent acknowledging the stress of the huge changes I’ve seen in my life over the last couple of years.

Sure, I’ve written about it from time to time, but I tend to want to (and so I do!) tie up the endings of those posts (and my feelings!) with a nice bow — partly because that’s the way I am and have always been, and partly because I don’t want anyone to fuss about me from a thousand miles away or from a sofa cushion away. I don’t want anyone to worry that I’m going to sit down in the middle of making dinner some night and cry into my bunch of chervil-gerbil. I don’t want to be ungrateful or melodramatic, because those things tend to get on my nerves in myself and others.

Seriously. People go to sleep at night listening to gunfire. I get a snorer and the dishwasher (I love falling asleep to the dishwasher. HELLO OCD!)

That said, if I take a look at the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, my score is 625 for the last 3 years of my life. BAM! I don’t even know how valid the whole thing is, but someone mentioned it once, so I looked myself up, and ended up a bit boggle-eyed at just how many changes I’d experienced. The lowest score I could calculate per year was 410, so even if I didn’t aggregate my life events, I’d still be stacking them up every 365 days or so.

Not all of the stuff on that list is BAD, mind you — in fact, much of it is AWESOME and THINGS I WANTED TO DO. But it was interesting to think about the fact that even positive change can be stressful and “impactful.” (I just used that NON-WORD to add some additional stress to my life.)

Interesting to think of how often I ignore the negative or challenging changes, as though they were eliminated by some sort of Pollyanna Venn diagram.

While much around me is both great and good, and while the vast majority of the time, I am smiling (unless I’m making my typing face, which makes me look alternately comatose or crazed), I have to own it:

I’m really, really tired. Fairly often. Sometimes to the point of frustration. I unleashed a good deal of that on my husband last night, and likely deserved soap in my mouth or a kick in the ass for it.

I’m a bit overwhelmed, too (or a lot, depending on the day.) I’m also nervous, pensive, concerned, and other words that could occur in a character description for myself, were I on Broadway. This last holiday season made me aware of it, somehow, even as I was gazing contentedly at our sparkly tree. Something was a bit off, and it wasn’t just the bendy trunk on our Frazier fir.

A LOT has changed. A LOT.

There is nothing about my life that is similar to what it was two years or three years ago (save for my tendency to buy a lot of different salts and trip on air.) I have had to adjust everything from my expectations to my pantry contents to accommodate a new life. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s fine, but a weird kind of fine at times that is a bit hard for me.

And it’s been hard for people in my life, too, my “fine”-ishness. My subtle avoidance of “whoa.”

I know Gradon is going to poke me in the eye the next time I make fun of him for being forgetful or mentioning a cool car we just passed (he does this like a Detroit-bred or Autobahn-tested savant), because that seems to be my charming way of letting off a bit of steam, or shifting the focus off my own behavior.

I know my parents wish I’d call more, along with many of my West coast AND East coast friends, who are a little bit over my “I’m sorry!” reply to complaints about my lack of availability or intentionality, along with professions about my commute or obligations or whatever else. Add on the guilt for that, and you’ve got a recipe for stupid (spending the time you should spend with people feeling badly that you’re not spending that time with people.) And because I know I’m not “getting it right”, I tend to stress that my relationships are not as unconditional as I seem to assume they are — though I never really assume they are. I just act like it. I know how tenuous new friendships can be, and what my established relationships deserve: more.

I know I forget details and let things slide that I should make a priority, partly because I’m overwhelmed, and partly because what lurks behind those details is the spectre of getting something big very, very wrong. Performance anxiety isn’t my thing on a stage (I love a microphone!) Just in planning important things.

I know I spend a lot of time doing things I think will de-stress me (cooking!) without spending time on things that might actually de-stress me (ordering in pizza with my husband and laughing at stupid television, or making something that, say, doesn’t take 30 ingredients and 4 hours.)

I know all my frazzle has made me things I don’t wish to be somewhat often, including inefficient, ungrateful, snarky, and ignorant.

Anyway, I’m not sure where all of these thoughts need to end up or how I’ll process them properly, though I know I needed to put them down somewhere where I’d have to acknowledge they were true.

Right now, I’m fine. Which is better and luckier than most, I am CERTAIN (see what I did there?)

But not as good as I could be, given the resources and opportunities and people I have in my rapidly evolving life. Which is something to think about.

And then do something about. Though I don’t know what. I just know it’s time.

Because you can only blame the roller coaster for making you dizzy for so long before it’s time to shut up and eat a hot dog.