gettysburg

If I’ve just met someone and think they might be cool, I like to hit em with a one-two punch. I smile kindly, look them square in the eye, and ask with complete sincerity:

“When’s the last time you pooped your pants?”

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about a person from how they answer this question. You’d also be surprised at how relieved people are to drop social pretense, stop pretending to be cool, and actually get real and talk about the great, humbling unifier that is poopin’ your pants. Plus, the story is almost always interesting, involving either a) travel, b) drug/alcohol use, c) horrifying gastrointestinal distress, or d) all the above. The shields are down, the person is comfortable, and that’s when I ask the second question:

“What are you afraid of?”

It trips me out knowing that people act differently around different people. Without some uniformity to your actions, how can I tell who you are? Are some of the ways you perform your personality more authentic than others? And if so, how authentic is the version you show me? I can’t stand fake people… and of course I’m terrified that I’m one of them.

Because there are a million different variations of how I perform “Brooke.” In Malawi, I was a lovable goof named Masho; on the Appalachian Trail, I was an artsy nerd named Slim Rims. My family knows me as quiet, frumpy, and a little sullen, but everyone at McMurdo knows me as “that fashionable girl who’s always smiling.” So… which one is it?

I suppose the answer is, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.” Socially we are reflections of our environment; biologically, our cells are in a perpetual state of shedding and regeneration. The only immutability is change.

A brook flows through a forest. The water is never the same from one moment to the next; nor the rocks in its path, the earth it carves out. But the current has a direction; it’s predictable enough. So don’t try to define it; simply sit with it, here in the present moment. With the brook as with Brooke; the current and the current.

All that said, the least authentic thing I can think of is the abhorrent dance of “professionalism.” Just a bunch of stilted, arbitrary rules, a judgmental dance. Little kids in neckties, monkeys pretending to be robots, damming the brook, damning the Brooke. Believe it or not, When’s-the-Last-Time-You-Pooped-Your-Pants Girl isn’t super-great at pretending to be professional.

But I was doing my best at Gettysburg. I had my town dress on, writing in my notebook in my best handwriting, deftly using the parlance of international admissions… and the counselor was deflecting me at every turn with responses that could have come right off a website. All buzzwords and fluff and nothing of substance, and amidst it all, there was a moment when I realized what she was actually saying was, “I’m so sorry, but we don’t have enough money for what you’re asking.”

We stopped and looked at each other. We both knew this meeting was going nowhere. But it was 4 p.m. on a Friday, and she wasn’t going to get anything else done for the rest of the day, so she asked me about my tour. We both visibly relaxed, and ended up chit-chatting for a bit while she ran out the clock. I didn’t ask her when she’d last pooped her pants, but for a moment, at least, the kids took off their neckties, the monkeys stopped beeping, and the brook flowed freely.