You know how sometimes you’ll say something like, “Thank you for making me this present! It’s perfect, and I love it” and the person who made it will respond by saying, “Oh, it was nothing” (even though they clearly put a lot of time and effort into it)?
Well, that’s how the Midwesterners I know respond to every compliment. The Midwesterners I know have elevated the art of deflecting compliments to an Olympic sport.
I’ve spent years trying to decipher whether giving compliments is good or bad because it seems like every time I do, the person being complimented feels obligated to put themselves down, and then I try to convince them to be proud of themselves, and they insist they’re not special, and on and on, until I think we both walk away from the interaction feeling a little dizzy.
When I realized that deflecting compliments is a SPORT, however, suddenly everything made sense. Here are the rules for winning: the quicker and more self-deprecating you can be in response to a compliment, the more points you get. To win, leave your opponent (the compliment-giver) speechless.
I know someone who will be a gold medalist as soon as this sport is ratified by the IOC. He is lightning fast and able to deflect any compliment, big or small, expected or unexpected, day or night.
Take this interaction for example…
Me: This lasagna is literally the best lasagna I’ve ever had. Future Gold Medalist: Well, I packed up the leftovers for you, so you’ll be sick of it soon enough.
Now, what are you supposed to say to that?
There’s really nothing you can say, and that’s why he’s the undisputed world champ (but don’t tell him that!).
If you started out knocking on doors in Iowa and ended up helping people in your pajamas from the living room…
If you put a Biden/Harris sign in your front yard even though you were afraid your neighbors would destroy it…
If it hurt to vote for Biden because you were hoping to elect a more progressive candidate, but you voted in solidarity with the people who are most vulnerable under the Trump regime…
If you got over your phone anxiety to call voters in a faraway land called Wisconsin…
If you learned to use Zoom, OpenVPB, or ThruTalk to phonebank…
If you volunteered to get out the vote even though our current system won’t even let you vote yourself…
If you started a Facebook community to empower people to organize within their communities, using their skills and their own platforms…
If you moved to Wisconsin to help organize a ragtag band of volunteers (including a couple who was kind of fanatical about composting) and kept organizing even when the pandemic made everything so, so, so much harder…
If you trusted me to translate election information and help lead phonebanks in Spanish…
If you dedicated your time to organizing Latinx voters (who are largely overlooked and increasingly targets of disinformation and suppression campaigns)…
If you learned to say “register to vote,” “absentee ballot,” and “early voting” en español…
If you phoned a friend, texted an ex, or otherwise reached out to voters in swing states…
If you shared your most personal stories to remind people about what was at stake in this election…
If you found the courage to talk politics with your co-workers, your grandma, or your aunt…
If you spent your time talking to people who have every reason to distrust the electoral system and convinced them to vote and keep fighting for justice…
If you called me, texted me, talked to me, listened to me, brought me Mexican candy, sent me care packages, and otherwise kept me going when I felt like I couldn’t…
If you volunteered to be a poll worker or an election observer (or supported other people so they could volunteer)…
If you led countless Zoom calls with confused volunteers and comforted us when we worried this election would be impossible to win…
If you remembered all the times Trump called us animals, criminals, and rapists and refused to let him get away with it again…
If you voted and organized with hope even when it was hard to feel hopeful…
This message is for you. I love and admire you. I am infinitely grateful for your work. If I asked you to volunteer, I will almost certainly ask you to volunteer again to keep fighting for justice and human rights…
But today I feel more hopeful about those fights than I have in a long, long time. And it’s all thanks to you!
We won this election together.
We won this election together.
Jolin Polasek draws a sign in chalk on a street in Harlem after former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was announced as the winner over Pres. Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan). Caption text and photo c/o Yahoo News.
Last year, when I was volunteering in school cafeterias dressed as a vegetable, I encountered a Wisconsin dish called the “Walking Taco” consisting of Fritos chips, ground beef, and yellow cheese. I’d seen this combination in Texas, where the dish is known as a Frito Pie, but its Midwestern moniker gave me pause. “The taco is an inherently portable food! I will prove it by making real tacos for all the children!,” I shouted in my head. “Provided you buy the ingredients,” I added because I’m trying to be better about budgeting, all the time, and that includes daydreams.
I was talking to someone about tacos recently, and they asked, “Do you mean the ones with the hard or soft shell?,” and my heart shattered, so I’ll pause to explain what a taco is. A taco consists of a fresh tortilla, which you top with meat and/or vegetables and Mexican salsa and lime, like so:
Photo via chef.mx
You can just pick one up and walk with it if you want.
But then I started thinking, what if Wisconsin is the type of person who puts too much meat and salsa in her taco y se le rompe la tortilla y su mamá le dice, “Ay, m’ijita ¿por qué eres tan batida?”
Maybe Wisconsin decided she was too messy to eat tacos, and she decided to pretend that a bag of Fritos and some canned ground meat could be a suitable substitute.
Pobre Wisconsin. A mí no me molesta si te manchas la ropa.
When I introduce Devin, I like to tell people that he’s from a hippie community. “No, like a real hippie community,” I clarify. I explain that his parents grow most of their own food, that people have names like Tree, Chamomile, and Forest––and oh yeah, Devin and his three best friends were all born at home and delivered by the same midwife.*
This year, the spouses of those four born-at-home hippies decided to surprise them with a birthday party. The midwife came. It was in the house where one of them was born. And––at the height of the party––the mothers did dramatic readings of their birth stories that bordered on performance art. (OK, the last one is a lie, but I wish I’d thought to suggest it.)
The four born-at-home hippies with Tree, their midwife
The party-planning spouses
At first, the surprise party seemed easy enough to orchestrate. All we had to do was get the guys to go home on the same weekend, have them show up at the same place at the same time, and keep it a secret until then. In the end, it was less “piece of cake” and more “learning experience.” I took some notes in case you’d like to learn from my mistakes!
1) Coordinating party plans from three different states can be really confusing. You’ll probably send a lot of text messages. If you don’t want your surprise target to get suspicious about said texting, change the names of your co-conspirators in your contact list. Otherwise, your partner may see your phone light up with a text from his best friend’s partner and say, “Hey! Look who sent you a text message!” thinking you’re going to tell him that they’re coming to visit or something, and instead you’ll get cagey and mumble that he shouldn’t look at your phone.
2) Related: figure out a plan so that your partner doesn’t talk to any of his best friends in the weeks leading up to their joint surprise party (and then report back because I still don’t know how to do this).
3) How do you explain coming home with 45 pounds of cheese? You can’t. Don’t do the party prep at your place––or figure out a workaround for party prep altogether. I recommend throwing your surprise party with people who don’t mind doing a potluck. Luckily, hippies are so down for potlucks (though really, “potluck” is an understatement. We had so many cakes that we hardly made a dent in the official birthday cake! It was like a cartoon banquet come to life.)
4) This might seem like backward advice, but trust me: you don’t want to be too good at hiding the surprise party. I was so focused on keeping the secret that Devin thought I wasn’t going to celebrate his birthday at all. And he planned his own party. Oops. Miraculously, he decided he wanted it to be a brunch at his parents’ house on the same day as the surprise party, which was a dinner, so we were able to do both (back-to-back!), but it was nerve-wracking for me and confusing for Devin. So confusing in fact that when everyone yelled, “Surprise!” Devin turned to me in a panic and said, “Do my parents know about this?” because he was worried they hadn’t been invited. (They had to wait until we left their house to drive to the party.)
Devin’s morning party with our Madison friends (photo by our friend Kate)
Devin’s evening party with his baby friends (and their babies!)
5) The saying “two can keep a secret if one of them is dead” definitely applies in this situation. Surprising four people is impossible! By the end of our party-planning sojourn, half of the birthday guys knew about the party, and you know what? They didn’t enjoy it any less than the dudes who didn’t know.
Happy birthday, Devin, Jackson, James, and Morgan!
I’m honestly not sure if the moral of this story is that a party doesn’t have to be a surprise to be fun OR that now I know how to do better next time. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!
*I told Tree, the midwife, that this is my favorite fun fact about Devin, and she asked me to note that she does not deliver babies. The way she sees it, the person giving birth does all the work. She’s just there to assist.
I went to Portland last week, and when I got back to Madison, I noticed that everyone was talking about gifts for their dead.
Devin was at his parents’ house, so I made a mental note to ask him later in the week. And I kept overhearing the phrase: “Gift for my dead” … “Gift for my dead” … “Gift for my dead.”
Wisconsin has a large Catholic population so I started to wonder if it was a tradition similar to Día de los Muertos.
I imagined little altars topped with cheese curds and Green Bay Packers memorabilia, rhubarb-scented veladoras, a polka band instead of mariachis, and calaveritas made of maple syrup instead of sugar cane. I’ve passed a few cemeteries in Madison, and I wondered if I’d get to see some of the celebrations.
It wasn’t until I overheard someone say “I’ve really got to get a gift for my dead. Father’s Day is on Sunday!” that I realized they weren’t preparing to accept the reality of death by participating in a collective mourning ritual commemorating loved ones lost. They were buying gifts for their dads!
And that’s when I had my big epiphany: the Upper Midwest accent is really just a game of musical chairs for short vowels.
The “a” in “dad” sounds like the “e” in “dead.”
The “o” in “Wisconsin” sounds like the “a” in “apple.”
“About” sounds like “a boat,” and round and round.
Now I know to run through all the vowels before I imagine another elaborate scenario (though I’m not ready to give up my daydream of a Midwestern Día de Muertos quite yet).
* The ceramic skull pictured above was a souvenir from Puerto Peñasco, where I guess they also know about Wisconsin’s Day of the Dead. ; )
This weekend I had my first birthday in Madison. My friend Makeba flew in from New York, like the life-size present she is! She is a seasoned traveler, and this was her first trip to the Midwest, so you know I had show off all the good spots.
We were also able to rescue some chairs that had been abandoned in the middle of the lake (but not before taking some cool pics).
Last year Anda sent me the most beautiful gold sparkler candles in the shape of the numbers “2” and “6” and I rushed to use them on my birthday eve, before turning 27. (Numerous people later told me I could have waited until I turned 62. I hadn’t thought of that; otherwise, I might have!) By coincidence, our friend Kate gave me two chocolate pastries that were a perfect match.
After the birthday eve blowing-out-of-candles (a new tradition I highly recommend), we went to Gib’s and saw almost everyone I know in Madison in one place. This might be the uncoolest thing to admit in writing, but I realized I have more friends here than I thought (when did that happen?), and it was super nice to see them all in one place! Then, we went to a ‘90s vs. ‘00s music video dance party, and I learned that I am the only person I know who prefers the noughties to the nineties, at least musically. This is shocking to me. Doesn’t anyone remember Hey Ya? Paper Planes? The genesis of Young Money? Without which there would be no Nicki Minaj or Drake, and then where would we be??? I don’t even want to think about it. One bright side of living far away from most people I know is that I got more phone calls, FaceTimes, and birthday packages than ever before. I just finished making a list of all the people I still need to thank or call back, and it is the nicest to-do list. In conclusion, I like my birthday and I like you.
I spent Christmas in a gingerbread house. For real. Devin’s parents’ house is a little wooden cabin in the middle of the snowy woods, and as soon as you walk in, you are absolutely surrounded by sugar. Would you like a Christmas cookie with sprinkles? Maybe chocolate chip is more your style. Or perhaps you prefer cookies dipped in chocolate. No matter, they have it all. Candy bars and candy canes galore. If you like cold sweets, there’s ice cream. And if you like warm sweets, there are cinnamon buns, pancakes, and blueberry muffins covered in sugar crystals. Maybe you’d rather have sugar in liquid form. For that there are dozens of jars of maple syrup (from the trees outside) and a jar of honey (from the neighbor’s bees). It’s like being a kid in a candy store, only all the candy is free.
A mitten made of mini cupcakes
This is my first Christmas away from my family, and I joke with Devin that it’s my first White Christmas because it’s the first* Christmas I spend in the States, with White Americans. Of course, “White American” is an ethnicity with many subcultures, just like “Mexican” is. Devin comes from a community that grows food, buys gifts at L.L. Bean, and has thoughtful discussions about politics and climate change. They also go out of their way to make me feel welcome. On Christmas Eve, the family friends who invited us over for dinner made lots of mini food because they heard I liked little things (seriously)! On Christmas morning we ate beans for breakfast (because Devin told his parents that beans are my favorite food). And Devin’s family has included me in their own traditions. We cut down a Christmas tree the day after I got here, and there’s a fire burning all day long. It’s been magical to sit by its glow and listen to carols. Once I was singing, “Frosted wiiiindow panes, candles gleaming inside, painted candy canes on the treeeeeeeee” and realized we were surrounded by all those things! Well, okay, replace “candles gleaming” with “LED’s glowing” (they are environmentalists, after all).
The town closest to this little farm reminds me of Casas Grandes, the town closest to my aunt Menry’s house, where my family usually spends Christmas, only all the restaurants here are sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer instead of Coca-Cola. (You could argue that Mexico sponsors Coca-Cola and not the other way around because Mexico drinks more soda per capita than any other country.)
Of course, nothing makes up for missing your family, especially when you’ve never had to be apart this time of year before. My cousin Vanessa knows this firsthand, and she sent me the best box ever to open on Christmas. It was called the “First Christmas Away From Your Family Survival Kit” and contained a funny book, the best Mexican candy (including mazapanes for those who prefer sweet to spicy) and chocolate Abuelita. She also sent me some earrings because she is the greatest.
By far the biggest difference between U.S. Christmas and Mexican Christmas is bedtime. When Devin’s parents were going to sleep on Christmas Eve, my family in Chihuahua was just sitting down to dinner. Devin and I managed to stay up to Skype with them, which was awesome. My niece Victoria rushed to the screen and said, “¡Estoy comiendo zanahorias como tú!” (I’m eating carrots like you!). I always worry that she’ll forget about me because I don’t get to see her as much as I wish, so it was really special to know that she thinks about her weird vegetarian aunt.
Otherwise, Christmas here is pretty similar to Christmas there. A big part of that is due to globalization and how effectively U.S. corporations export American cultural traditions, but another big reason is that I’ve always been surrounded by a loving family at Christmastime, and this year was no different.
*It’s not my first Christmas in the U.S.A. if you count the very first Christmas of my life, which was spent in the States, but I don’t because I was nine months old and had to fact-check where I spent it before writing this.
On Saturday one of Devin’s very best friends got married. His name is Morgan, and he married Jena, who is as fun-loving and adventurous as he is. Their wedding reflected this in every way.
It was the kind of wedding where the couple planted a tree to symbolize their marriage, and the bride wasn’t afraid to shovel dirt in her white dress.
It was the kind of wedding where the groom’s dad composed an original song for the couple.
It was the kind of wedding where the bride’s mom gave a toast describing the couple as people who are more likely to climb Machu Picchu than go to an amusement park.
It was the kind of wedding where the couple didn’t bother getting a wedding cake because they knew their friends would bring dessert, and one of their friends casually brought a beautiful wedding cake decorated with flowers. Other friends brought a cake topper decorated to look like Jena and Morgan.
It was the kind of wedding where some people got tears in their eyes and everyone else sobbed.
It was the kind of wedding where everyone danced as long as they possibly could.
It was the kind of wedding where the festivities concluded the next day with brunch…and a gigantic homemade slip-and-slide.
Devin comes from an incredible community where everyone rolls up their sleeves and works together to make things happen, where some people grow flowers for weddings while others haul rocks, mow trails, put up tents, and bake enough bread to feed hundreds of guests just because they love the couple.
Thank you, Morgan and Jena, for bringing everyone together to celebrate the next phase of your life together. I’m so grateful I got to be there.
P.S. A few people at the wedding told me that they read my blog, and I want to tell them something. I really didn’t think being in love with Devin could get any better. And then I met all of you! All week I kept wondering, “How am I possibly cool enough to know these people?” and then remembering, “Oh yeah…Devin!” Thanks for making me feel welcome. I can hardly be described as a woodsy “back-to-the-lander,” but you make me feel like I belong just fine.
‘The Midwest’ is such a broad geographic region that when someone says they went there, you have to ask where exactly they went. A cornfield in Nebraska? A football game in Indiana? Somewhere in Kansas? I always describe the part of this broad region that Devin is from as ‘practically Canada.’ (He’s from Wisconsin.)
We spent Easter on Devin’s family farm, and it was so wonderful. Every time I go, I learn more about life in almost-Canada and marvel at how different it is from anywhere I’ve ever lived. There’s no major airport near there, so we also had a one-night layover with our good friends Jackson and Caye in Chicago. There we made a new friend, Mila. She happens to be their baby, but I think we would have hit it off regardless!
Here are Devin and his family in front of their house. I’m always inspired by their work ethic and thoughtfulness. They had so much on their plate this spring, but they still gave me a grand welcome. Devin’s dad remembered how much I love his pad Thai and made it for me the first night I was there. Devin’s mom made pancakes with the blueberries we picked together last year and put together the best Easter basket–complete with Cadbury mini eggs. All the while the four of them were tapping trees for maple syrup, chopping firewood, and collecting eggs from their productive hens.
Here are Devin and his dad tapping their trees for maple syrup (technically, it’s box elder syrup, but my city-folk palate doth not detect a difference).
One of my favorite parts of the weekend was taking out the garbage. You have to drive it to the dump. Fortunately, they collect recycling there, too. This is the metal recycling section. To me it looks like an exhibit at MoMA PS1. I was mesmerized.
Speaking of re-purposing, here is a house made entirely of salvaged materials. It belongs to one of their family friends.
Doesn’t it seem like the perfect place to write a poem?
Clearly, I am not a family photographer, but I like this picture of Mila and Jackson anyway.
This one of Mila and her mami turned out a little better. I call it ‘Sleepy Zebra, Happy Zebra.’
We had so few hours there, but they happen to live down the block from one of the oldest feminist bookstores in the country. (What are the chances?!) This picture sums up my feelings. Every spare space in our suitcases was taken up with new, wonderful books!
They also made sure we saw some sights. Serendipitously, Caye’s sister was also in town from Quito. She studied architecture in Chicago and taught us all about the cool buildings, but I didn’t get any good pictures. I did take this one of Lake Michigan, and I can attest that it’s really this blue, and you can just jump in and swim! So cool!
smoothliminal 
