Starter Packs: Knitting, Homemade Beer, and Not Making a Mess of Life
I’d venture to say Masha doesn’t admit her love for a meme particularly often. In face, I think it woudn’t be outrageous to suggest that Masha’s chances of professing love to a meme is up there with marrying one’s preschool boyfriend and you admitting that you love your favourite Netflix show a little too much - probably not gonna happen. And yet, I guess I’ll do my best to get into an atheistic Sunday spirit - it’s confession time. The last paper I submitted was fifteen words over the limit. Despite a very valiant effort (trust me), I couldn’t get myself to hate kombucha. I have an undying love for Nickelback. And, I find “Starter Pack” memes ridiculously entertaining. There. At least now my soul is a heck of a lot cleaner than my phone screen.
I’ve admittedly thought once or twice about what on earth a “Masha Starter Pack” would consist of. A few creative souls have sent me (slightly terrifyingly specific) potential ones, but Masha will no sooner venture into attempting meme making than she will audition for Sleepytime Tea commercials. Again -- not gonna happen.
But, I’m here to talk about a different kind of starter packs. All those who ran away at my reference to totally dank memes can emerge from hiding and come back now. Don’t worry - this is a Safe Space for those who would prefer to be in denial of whatever “age” you want to call the present. This girl is reading a paper newspaper and listening to a playlist from, gasp, 2016. We can be stuck in the past together. How romantic.
We’re going to get a tad theoretical here, but I’d venture to say that we all live with a rather unmeme-able “starter kit” of sorts. Some odd collection of odds and ends - people, places things, feelings (we’ve got a whole grammar textbook going on here!) that make up some base of familiarity, predispositions, and memories that our lives sit upon. Stay with me for a moment - I promise, we’re not about to dive so deep that we’ll see Adele rolling. I’m merely talking about the little facets of your life that, admittedly, follow you everywhere. Like the NSA.
Or perhaps your family. Your group of closest friends. That one friend that you’ve known since elementary school and who now possesses a terrifying amount of informational ammunition. Those songs that were in That Car CD. The brands of cereal that will forever, even at age twenty, make you panic, for a second, if you’re running late to catch the bus. Those streets that will forever make you either want to linger, or instead shove your hood down further over your eyes and pick up your pace. I’m referring to that “first” group of followers that for some bizarre reason have dealt with all of our shenanigans and embarrassing abuse of filters (oh HONEY) for what feels like ages, and that gaggle of websites that somehow keep sending us spam emails even though we swear to god that we’ve done bloody everything imaginable to “Unsubscribe.”
With me?
The Daily Life Starter Pack. Meme-Free and hard to put your finger on. Although you probably shouldn’t try - that’s how we get Sexual Harassment suits nowadays. At once comforting and embarrassing. Yet, as impossible to deny as a video footage from last Friday night, and as permanent as a tattoo. What? No, nothing Mom.
I’m sure we’ve all wondered occasionally if our Starter Kits were all wrong, and the reason we’re “like this.” I’ll be first to admit that it’s crossed my mind. My family has never been the type to have Game Nights or to send out Christmas cards with family portraits. I’ve never been to a “girls’ sleepover” and experienced all the magical, memorable, non-satanic rituals that come along with such gatherings. I’ve never seen a single episode of Spongebob. Middle-School-Masha spent too much time in the gym to experience any of those apparently “golden” preteen moments, and my time in high school had about a hundred times more homework and a hundred times less drama, cheerleaders, and hot star athletes than all the movies promised me. I’m a college student who’s never had Instant Ramen, and I don’t live in a dorm room - I have no roommates to passive-aggressively tweet about, and no socks to shove on my doorknob.
Maybe all that is all wrong. But, it’s not as if I can do much about it.
One aspect, however, of Fetus-Masha’s life that I’m ridiculously proud to admit was Very Normal was the presence of ACTUAL “Starter Kits,” that (until people realized that I could be satisfied for life with some books and some tea) I seemed to get as gifts oddly often. Knitting Starter Kit. Kite-Making Starter Kit. Bottle-Cap Bracelet Starter Kit. All You Need For Calligraphy. Shrinky-Dink Starter Kit (if I ever go through a breakup, someone PLEASE help me turn this into an immature insult.) Apparently, all the tools you need to become the best Pro-Pinterest Prepubescent beautifully laid out in a box that uses excessive packaging. Give a gift, and you give some child all they could possibly need to start their next favourite hobby. Or to cover the entirety goddamn carpet in black ink. Either goes. And they don’t stop with twelve year olds. Adult coworkers need birthday presents too. We just resort to “At-Home Microbreweries” and DIY project whose impracticality is directly proportional to how much said coworkers drive us up the wall.
I always loved receiving these “Starter Kits.” There’s something incredibly beautiful about them. The rainbow of poor-quality coloured pencils lined up perfectly. Little scraps of cloth folded perfectly, in a way that I’ll never be able to achieve again. And a promise of potential: you have everything you could possibly for perfection. I loved unwrapping these packages and turning them over in my hands, looking at them. But, I never actually used them. Their aesthetically-pleasing perfection was too intimidating, and absolutely terrifying. They promised too much and seemed to give me too much opportunity, either to fail or to succeed. What if I really, really suck at making Bottle-Cap Bracelets? What if my “Cool Quilt” comes out looking like a wrinkled, used tissue? Then, their packaged perfection would be all ruined, and I’d be stuck sitting on my floor, surrounded by freaking bottle caps and crying sad tears of a doomed DIY-er.
Putting crafting and birthday gifts aside for a second, we’ll return to those Life-Starter-Kits. We all have them, and they’re all far from perfect. But, they’re manageable enough. With some degree of success, we can shove them into a box and close the lid for a while, whenever we decide to “reinvent” ourselves for a date or lose ourselves to some pills and a party. I don’t know how to lead into this in a witty way. But, on this day, exactly two years ago, something happened that made Masha’s “Life Starter Kit” fall off the shelf and fall into pieces. A neatly-contained life’s collection of family, close friends, favourite books, beloved stupid blogs, and dreams of college scattered and were replaced by over a year of hospitals, wrinkle-inducing worrying, a lot of Big Bad Medical Words, and, honestly, a LOT of time alone. As I was stuck actually making use of an Intro-to-Crochet kit, I wanted nothing more than to return to my life and to see all the things, places, activities and people (back at it with the definition of noun!) I loved most in a beautiful laid-out Starter Kit of being alive again. But, (just like that time when my “Calligraphy” kit fell, spilling black ink everywhere and earning me a Time-Out,) it didn’t really work like that.
And that’s okay. Once again, I want to think of some hilarious way to phrase this, but the most important parts of my life are still with me. One of the unfortunately-unused birthday gifts of my past was a magic set - a twelve year old Masha who probably liked counting cards a little too much took the six decks out of it and was happy to part with the rest. So, to the Magical group of people that are somehow still around, thanks for being there to partake in risky behaviour and oodles of potentially bad decisions. I had a flush until you stole my heart ;) My Starter Kit is definitely far from perfect nowadays, but it has everything I need to be incredibly happy, and unlike avoiding making horrendous-looking crafty earrings and shitty homemade beer, I’m more determined to make as much use of it as possible.
With her pathetic meme-making skills as just one example out of MANY, Masha is absolutely horrific at a lot of things, and she’s well aware of it. She takes ages to respond to messages, her phone has been on silent since Britney Spears was still hot, and I’m awfully “always busy” for someone who spent an hour learning how to make steak of cauliflower today (as in, you don’t.) But, just like that mom who actually does send out family Christmas cards every year, she’s really, really trying. Just, thank you for everything.
