Yellowtail; Love Thyself

Maintain that there are seconds assigned great importance in your life. That seems like how to proceed. Realize you’re lucky to have a few of these in a day. Isolate them, best you can, so they’re raindrops. That only fall on your face.

And now, pat yourself on the back! Today is a Thursday, and if you’re reading this, you survived. I’m being serious, you SUR-VIVED -- it’s a fight out there. There’s a red written notice on some ‘do not post’ space along Fourth Avenue: ‘Why do we just accept things?’ is what it says. It’s a little cheap-y cheap-y, but the red words remain on the 4 platform. Don’t you think you deserve better than this three and a half minute halt between Atlantic Avenue and Franklin? Aren’t you earning your own time, and thus not indebted to thank anyone? The world could be made for you. It’s not. What a bummer. What a challenge.

Too poor for charity, really. It feels good to give coins out on the subway and be blessed, but what do you have that can’t jangle down a drain? If we’re really here to hold each-other up and abide at the same time (can it be this hard to be a goat?) there’s obviously but one sensible solution, though it goes by many names: eHarmony. OKCupid. Match.com. You are here to serve.

Perhaps George Levinas would be disappointed with the conclusion I’ve drawn from his eminent texts; this bears no importance because he isn’t alive. It seems like no one is alive in New York City sometimes -- what, for instance, do people stare at when they’re on the train? Do they realize their eyes flick back and forth like erring robots when their gaze spills out the window of moving cars? I’m interested lately in the folds of DNA (or whatever) that claim to make us each more alike than different. Should it be so hard to communicate 95% of what I want to say to you, especially when I love language as much as I do believe I can love anything? George Levinas (distilled) claims that we exist for the other, we are created by being witnessed and our project is thus to witness the other. There’s also some altruism tossed in there somewhere. And I swear it’s not that clammy frog chorus of ‘I am a single woman, helpppp meeee’ that drives me out tonight, no siree -- this is my bona fide preoccupation of late. Evidence begins to suggest a sameness in you and I that frightens me mostly because it threatens the careful individuality I cling to. I’m finding, layers down, that it’s friggin difficult to be not for me, but for you. And I know you think it’s difficult too because you’ve stayed quiet as well.

So you see I wasn’t kidding, when I said ‘let’s have an orgy.’ That was not a post-post-modern remark. I want to see you, I want to make a life out of seeing you. Here I am. See me. I want you to see me, that’s what I meant.

I have made a profile (head bowed), on OkCupid.com. Let it be noted that this was at the insistence of a one good friend Jane, who is beautiful and smart and has apparently found true love from this unlikely, honest portal. He’s a thirty-year-old photographer in Park Slope who cooks for her and ‘might propose, hehehe’.
Of course, I’m just here for research. And this is what I learn:

1) Mediocrity is not the same thing as sameness (sheer terror, right?)
All the boys on Okcupid, for instance, can’t be mediocre just because they are alike -- and mind you, this is a kind of ‘alike’ stamped on souls charged with reducing their personality to very bite-sized text box descriptions and yes or no answers to very sane questions. Still, a significant majority seem to consider themselves ‘struggling writers’, Vonnegut aficionados, conversational French-speakers, ex-smokers. Lately the loose application of the brand ‘hipster’ (to just about every thing, person or place I have ever known in New York) has started making me almost physically nauseous but I find it creeping into my mind all stealthy-like once I really take in the DEARTH of profiles that proclaim the owners ‘vegetarians’, ‘bartenders by day, working for non-profits by night’, ‘free spirits’, and most importantly, ‘sarcastic and wry; I’m the ‘weird’ guy who loves to make people laugh.’

I know there is an almost cripplingly complicated irony afoot here: these patrons of Okcupid are statically and consistently emblems of my Generation, flailing in their favorite modus operandi, attempting to court connection with aloofness, simultaneously attempting to justify aloofness with the deep conviction that they are too special and too odd for real life interaction: 1) They are not too special or too odd, by definition of their mass alone. We all take the 4 train, unless we take L train. 2) It’s sort of essentially counterintuitive, in a way, to look for connection in an arena like the online-dating world by aiming to distinguish yourself so wholly from just about everything. The thing that’s lovable about this place -- and pitiful -- is how scary it is to really be serious about your desperation and loneliness. It is a reckoning with a cold breaking point that I think catalyzes people to make profiles in the first place, if it is also brave. But My Generation does not ever say ‘we are lonely’, because we never have to be. We made the world wide web, and consented to being caught in it. And that’s why online-dating in 2011 is a crazy, horrifying, hilarious and very sad glimpse into what many conservative talk-radio hosts could call our country’s eroding moral fiber.

If you saw The Social Network and decided to believe it was a movie with an opinion, maybe you’ve been thinking recently about how sites like Facebook have changed the way we interact with one another -- and I mean ‘thinking about’ as some serious ponder-age, not just a superficial retort to an older relative’s accusation that ‘you kids today never learned how to write proper thank-you notes’ (or something). Maybe you thought a little more carefully that evening, home from the movies, before you sent your assertive status update out into the world. And while I found The Social Network shockingly un-profound considering its timeliness and relevance (neither here nor there), I can’t say I haven’t been seriously thinking about the whole industry in a critical way since its heralding. Very few people my age seem concerned with the ramifications of Facebook as anything more than a function of what we are told is our Generation’s sense of entitlement and vanity. Okay I’ll rephrase that -- plenty of people seem concerned, but it’s through that lens of distance that we’re also told is a characteristic of our age group: sarcasm, irony, tongue-in-cheekness. (It’s worth pointing out that The Social Network struck me as so not of-our-age because it lacked those things; I had this weird sense while watching it that no matter how specific or even accurate this bio-pic was it still had nothing to do with me, and Facebook does.)

So how have we really changed? It is so hard to delve deep. It’s also impossible to answer what the effects of something might be until it’s over. There is no doubt that Facebook is designed by and for people who believe they deserve a pulpit, which is to say a piece of the world. It is designed by and for people who are not afraid to claim this right. It is designed by and for people who are a little bit to a lot voyeuristic, and care enough about friends and friends-of-friends to make commentary on their smallest move and scroll through pictures of their lives for hours upon hours upon hours. It is designed by and directly benefits those who may not fly so easily in face-to-face interaction as they can with the physical and literal distance of miles, of computer screens, of elapsed time between responses, of carefully worded witty responses that take time and energy to craft well. And this, again, is my generation before you -- these are the qualities that mark our similarities. I see the ramifications of Facebook in the fact that whether or not we were all these things to begin with has become irrelevant through the site’s utility; it is who we are now. Or at least what we do, which is just as good.

On my Facebook page I’m more interested in my friends than strangers, and more than anything my point for spending time there is to escape from something else. Okcupid is a dating website: there is a box one must check when creating a profile to detail what you’re looking for (casual encounters, activity partners, long-term/short-term dating) and the site is structured so that one can scroll through whole reams of potential partners, rate them or write to them, and deal with responses accordingly. It works like a big game and so becomes just as big an easy, fun, voyeuristic time-suck as Facebook, but its goal is to incite real-life, face-to-face contact. This is a website designed for lifting relationships off a screen and onto a page, which if you think about it is weird in all kinds of ways. It’s like backtracking -- I am being asked to use my safety barrier towards an end that is physical, emotional and personally fulfilling in real life (which is to say, an old-fashioned medium). It feels redundant and very wrong.

This goes a way towards explaining, then, the uniform cultivated eccentricities and the cool tones of everyone on this website. We have run into a world where the internet does not and cannot substitute for something face-to-face -- which it is designed to do -- and that’s awkward. More crucially, return to that admitting-your-crushing-loneliness motivation for taking your search for a like-minded soul to the internet in the first place. This must be doubly hard for those canyons of us who revile sincerity, do not trust it. All these floundering souls watching their trusty modifiers fall before romance and connection -- which are here proved to be genuine, un-fakeable things -- it’s hard not to pity us from a perspective. We have been given everything, okay, but mostly because you say we have been given everything. Even when you gave it to us. Even when it went away.

I guess that’s not revelatory. It’s certainly whiny. It’s sort of commonly conceded that Generation Me is the product of hippie parents bringing children into a world of acceptance ideals, political correctness and civil entitlement in contrast to a government and figurehead that consistently defaults on promises and expectations. It is very little wonder we seem jaded, though we’re young. This is worth disdaining, of course, obviously -- I‘m giving us an excuse to illustrate a point. It is a shame that we have inherited a shambles and greeted it with apathy. We have very few leaders. We have very many cruel comedians. As we age, we mostly continue a tradition of disappointment or find new ways to mock it or hate it. This makes us a certain kind of very unlikable wise. And there is no But that has not been said before -- there are reasons to care, ostensible courses of action, there are exceptions to the rule and there is deviation everywhere. There are parents to thank, and values to question. If anything, consistent change and instability and contradiction is the least surprising thing about AMERICA, which is the subtext of this conversation.

I don’t even have a good way to finish this paragraph. Mostly because I’m too interested in sounding unique, and making you think I am witty, and making you think yourselves are witty by invitation to this shared wink I’ll execute NOW. We are preoccupied. But I heard somewhere (though did not further investigate) that not having hope is the laziest course of action one can take, much lazier than constructing a hilarious missive or writing an entire personality into a 20,000 character limit box towards the end of finding love. Let’s not even mold it, because it’s so pure, delicate enough to break whispered aloud: let’s hope a little. To hope is to admit a little foolishness. To hope is to transcend self-interest, even if just a little. To hope is very, very human.

I am on OkCupid for you, though I don’t know you. I know I couldn’t -- and shouldn’t -- invite the comparison that my bravery here for an unknown is not so unlike that of a Peace Corps volunteer or benevolent mission-leader, but when I’m scared I know it’s not just about me. I’m going into outer space. I’m admitting something: I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me? No? I would try hard to make you happy. We would both be happy, and two more people on the planet would be happy, which must be in a way a hopeful, selfless kind of thing. It can’t be done alone. Or, I am a vain vain post post modernist modernist.

And anyway, I haven’t found any evidence in my readings to suggest that George Levinas ever had to foist himself out of love with two different potentially-homosexual men. He certainly was never a single woman in New York City in 2011 approaching Valentine's Day, which I believe with a complete straight face must place on the top forty-five list of ‘hardest humans to be’.

FOOTNOTE: Every instance I write 'George' in this THING, I might mean Emmanuel. We're on close terms.