NEW BOROUGH.
Parquet ("Parquet"?) floor, newly waxed, hot, no air conditioning, cannot afford it, green trees and brownstones in various states of disrepair and loved different amounts, presumably. This house creaks. It could have a poltergeist. Doors slam and the walls make noises and the neighbors listen to the most terrible kind of Terrible Music, loudly, often. Someone has a dog. The hallway up the stairs -- four flights of stairs -- is lined with lead paint, an almost nauseating kitschy sky blue with cloud trim and pink highlights. Red spattered everywhere: a pit bull in heat? Barbecue sauce? Poured paint? My room, Ikea bed assembled. Three blocks from a shuttle metro, eight from the 2345, Franklin Avenue: broker-speak "up and coming", Dominican hair salons, stoop people, already a few familiar wanderers, the kind with nothing to do and no visible home but somehow wearing a different shirt each day, four brave hip coffee houses catering to those of us who wear fake glasses to hide from the world somehow. Delis. A liquor store that doesn't card. Walking distance to Tom's Diner, and the Brooklyn Museum, and Prospect Park (each with equal weight). This is a different realization of something I always imagined, imagined wanting, wanted. I live in New York in a way I didn't entirely before, I care about cleaning this apartment and decorating it and making it my own. It is my own, as much as my parent's rent checks and boxes of stuff can make anywhere "my own". You always dreamed of doing something, anything, anything glamorous anything fun anything worthy of your thoughts here in New York and this is the reality of that desire. I wonder if it will always feel as strange, realizing you have what you wanted. Wish fulfillment has so far left me a little hollow. Grateful, pleased, happy in a not-pedestrian sense but also empty and frightened. When you get what you want, you're left not wanting, and wanting is a massive part of existence. Or, you begin to want something else, and the moment of realizing that you're changing course is unsettling because you begin to understand you will never be the kind of happy you cannot articulate in a wish because you will always and only be wishing. Then the whole thing begins to seem pretty morose for one and self-absorbed, for two.
The beginning of this year feels grave. Maybe 'consequential' is a better word. This is a year for wanting big things in a concrete way, and making plans and establishing means to actively pursue these wants. In a handful of months I will be out of college, so scarily free. Where did I hear that funny thing -- 'there comes a point in life when you realize that all the decisions that led you to adulthood were made by a teenager. A stoned teenager.' A little girl in a big apartment, learning how to do dishes, talking big in public for the benefit of "tourists", contemplating substance abuse like a piece of interesting architecture, eating, not eating, buying bus tickets home ALREADY, afraid to feel good on the parquet ("parquet!"), what is there left to say? Alive? A metaphor? A reflection? Something to laugh at later as soon as this evening or in thirty years? Catch your breath, amiga. It's not another time zone, just another time: name it, we've got it. Make.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Downside to Optimism
Somebody I used to know, like really KNOW, has de-friended me on Facebook.
The strangest thing to me about the whole "eliminate your excessive friends" rag is not the idea that people grow far, far apart. I've known that for a long time. Kids, and then teenagers, and I guess your extremely stunted adult will sometimes have fights with former loved ones that end in "I don't want to be your friend anymore," and people leave lovers all the time. I know from my own experience on the latter front that no matter how you plan to cushion the words, other feelings and circumstances usually make the choice for you: people either work to stay together because they want to stay together or they don't. The point is, I don't think I'm naive about most relationships. They don't work very often, and this is why I love Annie Hall.
But doesn't there seem to be something awfully petty about removing someone from your Facebook world? That's a medium that operates a lot differently than an address book, or any kind of even slightly realistic simulation of basic human interaction: even if we're "friends on Facebook", I never have to talk to you. The only thing this relationship entitles me to is a look at your pictures, should I really want to experience your trip to Hawaii or your latest failed keg stand. Friends in this universe can ignore each other totally and completely, can even with-hold most information that Friends-in-real-life get on the first day. The bottom-line, the point, is vague invitations to parties I MAY attend (will not), and stale birthday wishes that are only valuable as stacked commodities and not really meaningful at all, because it's not like I remembered your birthday on my own. I guess it might feel nice to have so many buddies inviting you to online virtual reality games and sending "pokes" that you feel compelled to hack some of them away, but people You Used to Know, like Really Know, is supposedly what Facebook was designed for. So now I'm forced to contend with the harrowing possibility that not everyone I used to know wants to keep knowing me. Not even this technology that is for people who feel they are alone, made to pad memory and engorge past acquaintances into people worth remembering, can protect us from the things we've done or left undone, face to face, in real life. Computers, I think, are the worst friends in the world.
So what do I do now? I feel like whining. I feel like baking up a batch of Tollhouse cookies and driving over to my Used-To-Know's house (not that I remember where it is). I'm pretty sure that I'm one of those people unable to accept the fact that not everyone will always like her (or should, for that matter). Being liked is like a drug, and it explains more or less all of my terrible behavior towards anyone, ever. I think the world tends to operate better when people are civil, but curiously almost everyone I respect has a Devil May Care kind of streak that gets them what they want, that enables them to rise above the fear that not everyone will understand. There's a reason for choosiness, because the world is a little too big to swallow whole. These people don't look backwards, so much. They tend to be less in touch with a lot of high-school friends. I wonder what that might have to do with having this power to preen your memories, or if its even at all related to my former friend, who may honestly be reacting to the pretty crappy way I treated him after a date and three five hour phone calls. Can you, should you, be able to select who shapes you? When people disappear from your life, is there a point when you should simply allow them to be gone forever? That just seems like death, to me. I don't always understand why certain things need to be said out loud, I don't always understand why it helps to slap on labels or love (which are in this case the same thing) or take them away.
Logically, don't I always have the potential to be everything, always, because I make very few choices? Couldn't we still go on a second date, even, and maybe this time we'd see a better movie and you'd have spent a brief but life-changing month in rehab and gotten a cap for that front tooth and I wouldn't be so worried about running into people we know? We might have gone to Asian Bistro instead of Noodles and Co, you might have driven me home, I might have let you kiss me because there wouldn't have been -- and wasn't then, but now I know better -- anything to lose?
The strangest thing to me about the whole "eliminate your excessive friends" rag is not the idea that people grow far, far apart. I've known that for a long time. Kids, and then teenagers, and I guess your extremely stunted adult will sometimes have fights with former loved ones that end in "I don't want to be your friend anymore," and people leave lovers all the time. I know from my own experience on the latter front that no matter how you plan to cushion the words, other feelings and circumstances usually make the choice for you: people either work to stay together because they want to stay together or they don't. The point is, I don't think I'm naive about most relationships. They don't work very often, and this is why I love Annie Hall.
But doesn't there seem to be something awfully petty about removing someone from your Facebook world? That's a medium that operates a lot differently than an address book, or any kind of even slightly realistic simulation of basic human interaction: even if we're "friends on Facebook", I never have to talk to you. The only thing this relationship entitles me to is a look at your pictures, should I really want to experience your trip to Hawaii or your latest failed keg stand. Friends in this universe can ignore each other totally and completely, can even with-hold most information that Friends-in-real-life get on the first day. The bottom-line, the point, is vague invitations to parties I MAY attend (will not), and stale birthday wishes that are only valuable as stacked commodities and not really meaningful at all, because it's not like I remembered your birthday on my own. I guess it might feel nice to have so many buddies inviting you to online virtual reality games and sending "pokes" that you feel compelled to hack some of them away, but people You Used to Know, like Really Know, is supposedly what Facebook was designed for. So now I'm forced to contend with the harrowing possibility that not everyone I used to know wants to keep knowing me. Not even this technology that is for people who feel they are alone, made to pad memory and engorge past acquaintances into people worth remembering, can protect us from the things we've done or left undone, face to face, in real life. Computers, I think, are the worst friends in the world.
So what do I do now? I feel like whining. I feel like baking up a batch of Tollhouse cookies and driving over to my Used-To-Know's house (not that I remember where it is). I'm pretty sure that I'm one of those people unable to accept the fact that not everyone will always like her (or should, for that matter). Being liked is like a drug, and it explains more or less all of my terrible behavior towards anyone, ever. I think the world tends to operate better when people are civil, but curiously almost everyone I respect has a Devil May Care kind of streak that gets them what they want, that enables them to rise above the fear that not everyone will understand. There's a reason for choosiness, because the world is a little too big to swallow whole. These people don't look backwards, so much. They tend to be less in touch with a lot of high-school friends. I wonder what that might have to do with having this power to preen your memories, or if its even at all related to my former friend, who may honestly be reacting to the pretty crappy way I treated him after a date and three five hour phone calls. Can you, should you, be able to select who shapes you? When people disappear from your life, is there a point when you should simply allow them to be gone forever? That just seems like death, to me. I don't always understand why certain things need to be said out loud, I don't always understand why it helps to slap on labels or love (which are in this case the same thing) or take them away.
Logically, don't I always have the potential to be everything, always, because I make very few choices? Couldn't we still go on a second date, even, and maybe this time we'd see a better movie and you'd have spent a brief but life-changing month in rehab and gotten a cap for that front tooth and I wouldn't be so worried about running into people we know? We might have gone to Asian Bistro instead of Noodles and Co, you might have driven me home, I might have let you kiss me because there wouldn't have been -- and wasn't then, but now I know better -- anything to lose?
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Almost the SECOND Eminem reference, absolutely the fifty-thosandth rant about my Peter Pan complex
Back from Europe, where I thought a lot and drank a lot and got a Spanish tan. I've been thinking a lot lately about the REAL WORLD.
And I always thought it was a "so-called", post-modern fabrication kind-of-thing, a fairy place for boring people, a fall back for the uninspired and the uninspiring. Artists don't live in the Real World, which could mean they don't believe in it, which means it doesn't have to exist for at least one sub-genre of human. Mad people don't live in the Real World. Neither do the addicted, the stunted, the shy. I have done a lot of very serious and veritable research on the subject and come to the conclusion that actually maybe only half of the world is patently Real, and thus the entire concept doesn't make any sense.
It's complicated, in my mind. It's not that I automatically begin to glaze over when anyone talks about taxes or internships or ERRANDS, it's not that I don't respect certain government institutions, it's not that I don't read syndicated newspapers (although I don't read syndicated newspapers very OFTEN) -- the toxicity of the Real World lies in its lameness, and lameness really only abounds when people aren't committed or interested in the things they do. My dad is an actuary but actually gets turned on by math, and most of the time I think bully for him and leave it at that. Pampered students at expensive private universities studying impractical subjects more often want to hate on the person who doesn't love his day job, because corporate slavery is un-romantic, it is lame. It seems real because it's projected like something that happens en masse but considering all the people I've ever met I find this harder and harder to believe: it seems to me that mostly, people at least have pretty good reasons for doing the things they do, or else they don't do anything. So by this "logic", I now POSTULATE that the entire world is real, and only people really in love with being lame throw around the term "Real World" as a way to scare these aforementioned pampered college kids. Where does this leave my dad? Let's keep thinking.
I'm getting an apartment with a few friends, so some of this recent fretting has become about that -- the money involved, and the slightly gritty neighborhood factor, and the surprisingly scary prospect of moving far away from the fifteen blocks of New York I've cultivated in my mind as OWNED. Then, one of my best friends in the world recently suffered a really disgusting, ugly, scary, random act of violence. I witnessed a random act of kindness last weekend in New York (something lame, like someone helping someone else bring a suitcase up a set of stairs) and then I thought about this awful injury my friend is coping with, and it struck me that the repercussions of random acts of hate have the power to linger a lot longer than random acts of love. Well writing it down that doesn't really look like it's true (after all, Picasso followed his Blue Period with his Rose Period...) but how does one respond to something really hateful and unprovoked, like that? It must absolutely be harder than accepting good feelings, which aren't always easy to accept by themselves. People tell me (or, I assume) that violence and money and real estate are each aspects of this fabled RW, dirty realities one comes to accept with age and wisdom and devised personal formula. I'm finding, even as a bystander to the most awful event in this paragraph, that mounting these challenges has asked me to return to a lot of old habits and tactics, as if outside forces are trying to test all the new growth I think I've sustained since college started. It's hard and unpleasant, it makes me feel like I haven't really grown, like I haven't really changed. The world changes faster. Can you ever keep up? What to do?
Fake it till you make it kind of thing?
It was, of course, always silly to romanticize events or possibilities or certain qualities of life (see: poverty; self-destruction) when everyone but the untrained aspiring actor seems to realize that tragedy is actually very sad and rough, that hunting for dinner every night is only bohemian-interesting through a retrospective kind of lens. It's like in 500 Days of Summer when he willfully misinterpreted The Graduate at a young age, or Ernest Hemingway writing "A Moveable Feast" (it's not really like that last one, I just felt that reference should be thrown in). Still, there's romance in these things for some reason, and I'm determined to suss it all out because like these aforementioned pampered students we don't like very much, I believe in reasons.
People do things, for the most part, for REASONS. We look for reason. Is that why there is a Real World, for the safety implicit in a life that has already been proven sustainable my allegedly hoards of folks? But to be a drone is to lack reason. But no one is really a drone.
The uninitiated and the initiated alike can't truly justify anything they do, which is probably why Sartre wrote all those books. Love (kindness) and hate (cruelty) can coexist then, because both have zilch logic, and at least my brain can rest. I can continue my Sisyphean approach to intellectual puzzles and personal relationships and arrested development with the same flighty panache as I always have, and the world will soldier on, and all of us can just pretend that the iPad or the Kindle or the President (just...bear with me) will be the It, the catalyst, that which changes everything. We're all always rotating. That is comforting and inane at the same time.
If this had gone a little more smoothly I might have really fluidly integrated my latest relationship trauma without anyone realizing I was treating the Internet like a diary or a best friend. But I think if you crane your metaphoric neck just a little it's plausible that self-sabotage, and needing to categorize things, and your basic fear, possibly fear of happiness, vanity, high standards, are all essentially related to the idea that the world is...a place (which is I guess what I just concluded....). I'm still hung up on this Fireworks thing, which I probably wrote about here months and months ago: are you supposed to give people chances if you don't instantly click with them? I guess I just tried the whole love-acquired-slowly rag with all the cities I visited across Europe, and had I been as judgmental with London and Paris as I've been on all the boys of my past I might not have had any fun. Is it fear or high standards, is it settling or opening up, is it wishful thinking or where you actually live what you actually look like, is it a benevolent God or the O-zone, is it the critical adoration or the internal self-motivation, is it your individuality or your greatest flaw, is the house red or blue, is it love or just sex, is it gay or straight, is everyone innately good or innately bad, is it fair at all, is it high time I had a day job and a husband and a mortgage and a golden retriever named "Sparky" and answers to every question anyone had ever asked
PS
It is not much of a "dedication" to offer up your every masturbatory, unformed thought to someone, but just for the world's record and for mine, thinking about Annie Ropeik, who objectively rules by all standards.
And I always thought it was a "so-called", post-modern fabrication kind-of-thing, a fairy place for boring people, a fall back for the uninspired and the uninspiring. Artists don't live in the Real World, which could mean they don't believe in it, which means it doesn't have to exist for at least one sub-genre of human. Mad people don't live in the Real World. Neither do the addicted, the stunted, the shy. I have done a lot of very serious and veritable research on the subject and come to the conclusion that actually maybe only half of the world is patently Real, and thus the entire concept doesn't make any sense.
It's complicated, in my mind. It's not that I automatically begin to glaze over when anyone talks about taxes or internships or ERRANDS, it's not that I don't respect certain government institutions, it's not that I don't read syndicated newspapers (although I don't read syndicated newspapers very OFTEN) -- the toxicity of the Real World lies in its lameness, and lameness really only abounds when people aren't committed or interested in the things they do. My dad is an actuary but actually gets turned on by math, and most of the time I think bully for him and leave it at that. Pampered students at expensive private universities studying impractical subjects more often want to hate on the person who doesn't love his day job, because corporate slavery is un-romantic, it is lame. It seems real because it's projected like something that happens en masse but considering all the people I've ever met I find this harder and harder to believe: it seems to me that mostly, people at least have pretty good reasons for doing the things they do, or else they don't do anything. So by this "logic", I now POSTULATE that the entire world is real, and only people really in love with being lame throw around the term "Real World" as a way to scare these aforementioned pampered college kids. Where does this leave my dad? Let's keep thinking.
I'm getting an apartment with a few friends, so some of this recent fretting has become about that -- the money involved, and the slightly gritty neighborhood factor, and the surprisingly scary prospect of moving far away from the fifteen blocks of New York I've cultivated in my mind as OWNED. Then, one of my best friends in the world recently suffered a really disgusting, ugly, scary, random act of violence. I witnessed a random act of kindness last weekend in New York (something lame, like someone helping someone else bring a suitcase up a set of stairs) and then I thought about this awful injury my friend is coping with, and it struck me that the repercussions of random acts of hate have the power to linger a lot longer than random acts of love. Well writing it down that doesn't really look like it's true (after all, Picasso followed his Blue Period with his Rose Period...) but how does one respond to something really hateful and unprovoked, like that? It must absolutely be harder than accepting good feelings, which aren't always easy to accept by themselves. People tell me (or, I assume) that violence and money and real estate are each aspects of this fabled RW, dirty realities one comes to accept with age and wisdom and devised personal formula. I'm finding, even as a bystander to the most awful event in this paragraph, that mounting these challenges has asked me to return to a lot of old habits and tactics, as if outside forces are trying to test all the new growth I think I've sustained since college started. It's hard and unpleasant, it makes me feel like I haven't really grown, like I haven't really changed. The world changes faster. Can you ever keep up? What to do?
Fake it till you make it kind of thing?
It was, of course, always silly to romanticize events or possibilities or certain qualities of life (see: poverty; self-destruction) when everyone but the untrained aspiring actor seems to realize that tragedy is actually very sad and rough, that hunting for dinner every night is only bohemian-interesting through a retrospective kind of lens. It's like in 500 Days of Summer when he willfully misinterpreted The Graduate at a young age, or Ernest Hemingway writing "A Moveable Feast" (it's not really like that last one, I just felt that reference should be thrown in). Still, there's romance in these things for some reason, and I'm determined to suss it all out because like these aforementioned pampered students we don't like very much, I believe in reasons.
People do things, for the most part, for REASONS. We look for reason. Is that why there is a Real World, for the safety implicit in a life that has already been proven sustainable my allegedly hoards of folks? But to be a drone is to lack reason. But no one is really a drone.
The uninitiated and the initiated alike can't truly justify anything they do, which is probably why Sartre wrote all those books. Love (kindness) and hate (cruelty) can coexist then, because both have zilch logic, and at least my brain can rest. I can continue my Sisyphean approach to intellectual puzzles and personal relationships and arrested development with the same flighty panache as I always have, and the world will soldier on, and all of us can just pretend that the iPad or the Kindle or the President (just...bear with me) will be the It, the catalyst, that which changes everything. We're all always rotating. That is comforting and inane at the same time.
If this had gone a little more smoothly I might have really fluidly integrated my latest relationship trauma without anyone realizing I was treating the Internet like a diary or a best friend. But I think if you crane your metaphoric neck just a little it's plausible that self-sabotage, and needing to categorize things, and your basic fear, possibly fear of happiness, vanity, high standards, are all essentially related to the idea that the world is...a place (which is I guess what I just concluded....). I'm still hung up on this Fireworks thing, which I probably wrote about here months and months ago: are you supposed to give people chances if you don't instantly click with them? I guess I just tried the whole love-acquired-slowly rag with all the cities I visited across Europe, and had I been as judgmental with London and Paris as I've been on all the boys of my past I might not have had any fun. Is it fear or high standards, is it settling or opening up, is it wishful thinking or where you actually live what you actually look like, is it a benevolent God or the O-zone, is it the critical adoration or the internal self-motivation, is it your individuality or your greatest flaw, is the house red or blue, is it love or just sex, is it gay or straight, is everyone innately good or innately bad, is it fair at all, is it high time I had a day job and a husband and a mortgage and a golden retriever named "Sparky" and answers to every question anyone had ever asked
PS
It is not much of a "dedication" to offer up your every masturbatory, unformed thought to someone, but just for the world's record and for mine, thinking about Annie Ropeik, who objectively rules by all standards.
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