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.
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