Meditations on PSYCHOPSYCHOPSYCHO

I wonder why people think Woody Allen is so harmlessly funny. In some ways, I find him frightening--it seems to me that there is no place scarier than the inside of someone else's head and no act more vulnerable than spilling out self-aggrandizing personal neuroses in public, and having people just kind of chuckle at your tongue-in-cheek wit while you lay yourself naked before them on the silver screen feels like such a heavy write-off. Not saying we should all revisit Annie Hall and watch it with a furrowed brow and unpleasant glints of personal recognition in that examination of HOW LOVE FAILS, I just want to drop that thought into the void--people laugh at things that are fearful all the time. That scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker stabs a pencil straight into some guy's head sent movie theatres rollicking, and I was so horrified! I wonder if we laugh because we're so uncomfortable, or if we laugh because we miss the point. Aren't those the two objective things that make up standard American humor anyways? Someone else being uncomfortable, or someone else missing the point? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS???

I am uncomfortable. And as a response, I am going to directly spill self-aggrandizing neuroses out into the void. I don't think they're very funny, personally, but maybe I have no perspective, maybe I'm missing the point. BRILLIANT SEGUE!

I accidentally have a crush on a boy. I say accident because it was not premeditated or analyzed in the way that some crushes can be, it was like one single concentrated event at some point--like a hair toss, or some split second of eye contact. And it's uncomfortable because I have a bad juju feeling that this is going to make me crazier, and it is going to hurt me, and I am going to hurt and annoy other people over some indefinite period of neurotic time while I waver between plunging into and dodging this inevitability, I know it so well, I recognize it. It's happening anyways. Help! It's a mess of mixed signals and weirdness and awkward inadvertent messages and smallness amplified. Help! And I thought this was all going to end, so magically and cleanly, the day I got my high-school diploma. Is this really the world? Forever? I am thoroughly fucked, then, in every sense but the good one.

The odd thing about this whole encounter, seen through a larger context, is that idea of tinyness. How tiny can a relationship ever really be? Some moments are so small that you think you're the only one who noticed them pass by. Some are too small to tell your friends about. Some are too small to admit to, yourself. A crush, for instance, is a small small thing--it is not defined in the gravity of mutuality, or spoken words, or touching, it's just electric air and daydreams. It's silly. It's FUNNY, to be an adult and to be so vulnerable to moments of scary small strangeness. Now I'm back to this arch of vulnerability as humor, and it feels even less amusing in the second paragraph. In two years, hours, or weeks I will look back on these moments huddling next to my cell phone as idiotic wastes of time spent giggling and looking for kid-like glee, but right now I am in the midst of it. And why so serious?

Annie Hall is a movie about people being in love and then, quite suddenly, not. I love Annie Hall. I love living inside another neurotic brain, and I love how childish two adults feel in their world, and there are moments where it really is very funny. But I have a hard time laughing at it, even though it is so silly, having a kitchen to clean and a paper to write and a checkbook to balance, to believe in the hot/cold hilarity/harshness of electric air and daydreams. It's so delicate in the middle-ground, suspended between wanting and not knowing. I like this guy, and we watched a romantic comedy the other day, and suddenly that latter term feels like a very cruel oxymoron when the air is swirling with hushes and muted do I do do I's?. So maybe...think about what you laugh at this week. Maybe it won't be so funny tomorrow.