Thursday, December 30, 2010

Who You Won’t be Kissing at Midnight: Practical Applications of Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur (Not to mention Sex and the City)

WHAT New Year’s resolutions? It has worked!
I have become the person I always wanted to be. Days when my self-esteem feels critically low, I can tear through the virtual catalogue of activities, ideas, experiences, idiosyncrasies and interests that I’ve deemed the collective elements of My Life and smile a little because they look exactly how I’d like them to. I’m blowing up singular inside of a cliché: a fabulous single city girl, Brooklyn hipster on tiptoe, intellectually engaged inside a generation that is most devastating where it is least interested. I tell people I am an actor and a writer. I tell people I like Paul Thomas Anderson movies. I sometimes wear crazy clothes into the world and bask in the myriad reactions. I like recreational drugs. I like all the quotes I remembered intentionally for the purpose of putting them in my Facebook profile. Even having a therapist falls neatly and sweetly into the great tome of Who I want to be SLASH (by default) Who I want you to think I am. I am a synthesis of contradictions. I have done the synthesizing work. I own a synthesizer.

For reasons (I’m not sure exactly what they are, only that they exist), having a self that is basically PRODUCT is where the Western World begins. Other people must want you for things in order for you to succeed. Thus, having a self that seems unique in a constellation of billions is critical, especially for artists and thinkers and people who aspire to have their faces rendered in marble somewhere. That’s Darwinian. And having a self that’s constantly engaged with seeking out and reassuring other idiosyncratic, yet somewhat like-minded selves is how we communicate and how we find love, which is also pretty Darwinian, which is to say a habit and to do with Mark Zuckerberg. The idea that preoccupies this Thursday – while I try to avoid serial commas and listen to must-be Neil Young -- is the contradiction that is my synthesizing work, my neat catalogue: I have always thought I was such a loophole, such a success at being a freakish individual even in worlds and fields devised of other freakish individuals. I’ve always believed I was at least special, even when sixteen taught me about boys etc and twenty taught me to feel abundantly horrible on solo Friday nights. But to formula, succeeding at being unique in this world means only that I’ve made myself marketable (or more troublingly, I labor under the delusion that I’ve made myself marketable), and that must be a hollow thing, and limited. How can I really be this fabulous entity of sensible contradictions, this living thing inside a cliché, if I am 1) Made. Working at it, at least by even thinking these thoughts at all 2) clearly kowtowing, even if unconsciously, to some higher social order? Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m driving at the hollowness, stay with me on the hollowness. As of this Thursday, I no longer believe I am “successfully unique”, which is to say, a success. The idea of being “unique” is corrupted by the fact that the world I live in asks everyone to rise to oddity like excellence. The idea that I meditate on my own uniqueness and consciously praise myself for becoming an idea of uniqueness that I (or, someone like Rupert Murdoch) has engineered is also zany, and has very little to do with my real life. So. This leaves me with thesis questions: Why does my society (which I question only as an extension of myself) ask me to synthesize my contradictions? Why am I packaged? Who wants that? What is it to be unique, or special, without agenda – impossible? And, like, you know, what does it all MEAN?

BITE SIZING:

I’m spending New Year’s with my mom this year, for reasons. This will be the first year in at least seven when I will not spend the hours preceding January 1st drinking someone else’s alcohol and being cheerfully loud about things that are forty percent sad. Two New Years’ have passed, in When Harry Met Sally fashion, where I kissed a boy on or around that vital minute.

ASIDE: Now I don’t remember magnifying those midnight kisses to oracle, then predicting signs for how the year to follow might unfold. I sort of wish I had. I could at least chart my progress to present, sitting pretty with some distant age, and decide if the 525,600 minutes times nine (or whatever) indicated a God anywhere. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. But to reiterate, do you see how I catalogued just there? I’m imagining that these disparate events make a whole somehow, and that the whole has analyze-able meaning and the work of analyzing means something and says something and makes me. But why should it? This is why New Year’s is important to the self. New Year’s is random, just like the universe. ASIDE OVER.

I have just told my friends I won’t be attending the New Year’s party at my own apartment in New York that has been “in plans” for three weeks. I need to spend the time with my mama. I don’t need to spend the time with my mama, and the real reasons (alluded to earlier) are these: 1) I don’t want to drive to New York and back 2) I know exactly how this party will go. It will be awesome, and not anything else. These are my best friends in all their hoarde glory, and I know them and they’re safe and there is nothing unpredictable about them moving around in a big group, just like there is nothing unpredictable about your friends or Barack Obama's or Tim Gunn's friends moving around in a big group, and this is neither good nor bad.
And I will be upset to have missed this party. I am an asshole for how I handled backing out. I will be hanging out with my mama, and she will fall asleep at 11:13 and I will drink a bottle of wine alone. And what did I feel then…Ta-da!

If you were interested, I could accurately predict most other things. Such as the future.
The reason this is – or seems to be – is that I feel sometimes like I know my world too thoroughly, which is a complicated disaster and I will explain why. I feel like I know every avenue readily available to me, and I can imagine its fall-out in the short term and the crazy long-term. I am probably not right about any of it but that doesn’t matter at all, because this is my mind, I am a know-it-all, and I think [therefore] I am. I’ve come to a point where I am backing away from good things, things that belong in a catalogue to make me, because they’re too familiar. This is like they’re alien. This makes me a stranger to myself. What do I want? Kicker.

Here comes the hollowness again, and I think it’s involved with the unnameable pressure and unnameable guilt stitched into the previous paragraph. I want to take responsibility for my actions and feelings, but let’s say the only thing to measure an authentic kind of self is Want. I collapse further into the ashes of my synthesis. I have no imaginary ideal, dramatic drop-kick New Years. I don’t want anything, because I have become the person I wanted to be. This person, then, is not a person. I am dead or a robot. It has not worked.

TRAPPED IN A BOX OF TREMENDOUS SIZE

Sometimes people tell me I have high expectations and I have trouble understanding what they mean; it strikes me that one can only either have expectations or not have expectations, and I don’t comprehend at all what it would be to live like the latter. Following the twisted logic that not wanting to do anything for New Year’s is the second reason why I am not a person, it stands to reason that maybe my Want is just dull and missable. I feel like I mostly expect everything to improve, eventually or all the time. I expect that everything about this life has potential to be better. I spend time thinking about vague ways in which my life could be better: feelings, ideas. And in a vague ‘everything’ there is a specific ‘nothing.’ Now I have become the limits of my catalogue and my imagination has apparently gone on sabbatical: I am the starving artist, Brooklyn hipster, I am her, I am Carrie Bradshaw close-enough, I am, on paper, the person I always wanted to be and there is no other criteria to inhabit and no sensible next move inside the catalogue nexus, no directions. I am where I want(ed?) to be, but it does not feel like enough, and so I have no idea where to go from here.

Lie. I do have another want. What I don’t have in my life is romantic love, or any sex to speak of. Because I don’t have this, I have assigned the lack paramount importance. I am lonely, that’s the problem. No one will pick up the phone to hear me whining in a parking lot. Honestly, I look up to the sky and find this fact sort of cosmically amusing, even though either my emotions or my intellect (best guess this time) is upset. My friends are mad at me, and I have done and can do very little to dispel this for at least the next few days. But am I lonely? Am I really lonely? Do I want to be with another person, with other people? A fraction of my catalogue has made a choice not to be, on a holiday. Part of me feels tepid at best about that. Another part is warm and sure. This is a paradox. An un-synthe-fucking-sizable party paradox.

Okay, so, would I go to this party if I knew something outrageous could happen there? And by outrageous I mean wildly unusual, I mean a validation, which is to say reassurance that I will not always be lost, which is to say a fulfillment of lack, which is to say… sex? Yes. But maybe we can draw thin lines along the page to make that both emotional and intellectual, and not just shallow. This leaves only the glaring elephant in the room: what do I actually want to do. If we go deep enough into the lack and the quiet belief that conditions will improve in time, perhaps that’s all only un-phased sky, too. And maybe that all means I have no feelings, heart or sex drive and am, as feared, a bona fide zombie. It could also mean I’m very bright, by my own standards.
It could mean there is work to do, synthesizing. But that seems like a lesson unlearned.

RECORD COMPANY PEOPLE ARE SHADY
This year I have learned a lot, and if I want to treat New Years like the grand marker of all things, now is the time to conclude neatly. Fuck the man (Rupert Murdoch, me, or whoever). The sheer amount of work required to keep making sense of all my contradictions (READ: THIS ESSAY) so they might become presentable and pleasant for all is stupid, and at last I can see, wasted energy, and what people are criticizing in me when they think I am quiet or spineless in a certain way. While the exercise has always felt smart and interesting, it’s time to cut losses and live in the space between choices that make no sense internally or externally when assembled together and compared. It’s time to get a little reptilian.

And speaking of work, I have lots. I’m driving out. This rambling missive is going out into space, where several people could ostensibly read it and get their feelings hurt. This is an attempt at fulfillment and honesty, and towards this end hopefully the last simmering, directly selfish act completed for a while. By driving out, I mean the internal idea-hopping-brilliance-energy will go towards writing and acting with competence and consideration. This should leave more room inside for caring about other people, which has been poor form for 2010. It will, in fact. I know this because I can predict the future and am learning to discern it from the past.

These are how New Years resolutions function: Tidy. Bright. Optimistic.
These are how great essays function: Idea, Mullage, Brilliant Bolt Conclusion, Shattering Last Line (note disparities above).
These are truths non-conforming to everything I’ve discussed here:
I will be better. I will be great. I will be loved. It will get better.
These are my fingers, typing: sdifufjenensmslfov

I am blind now, but here I am. Becoming something I can’t see and must stop looking for.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Made a soup today. From a recipe. From scratch.
AND THUS SPOKE GLORIA GAYNOR

Sunday, November 21, 2010

We were not asleep before we woke up

Copping Jay McInerney. Making myself universal, out here in what seems to be less than two-dimensional space:

NAUSEA, BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE:

Last week you fucked up a hard-boiled egg, and even at the time this seemed catastrophic in ways beyond the culinary. You failed at an empirically simple task, and that makes the egg itself a symptom of what you may now call a disease: the things happening in your mind suddenly have real life, tangible repercussions and they are serious, involving life and death matters, sustenance. You're not just "possibly emotionally starving," you're dying, physically, literally, mentally -- you no longer have the faculty to provide for yourself in any meaningful way. Proof.

In a small, irrational gesture of protest, you make several plans to go out to brunch this week, where you'll expect to spend money you don't have. In the strain of domino theory most recognizable in those 'Give a Mouse a Cookie,' books, it soon becomes clear that the lifestyle of a person who makes plans to go to brunch simply won't accommodate a tedious desk job, or homework or rehearsals. You prune events from your planner with the same discrimination as your average born-again ascetic might rid themselves of earthly possessions: all you want is time. Time at home. Time to kill. Time to simmer in your poverty, your divine decadence. Time to become this alternative -- a fabulous care-free brunch cadet, unfettered by the possibility of cooking solo, subsequently happy, subsequently not sick. You giggle a little at this terrific loophole, the active imagination. But when you run out of money two meals later and find yourself surrounded only by the loose promises you broke already and the smuggled hours you fought so hard for, it's pretty clear you don't HAVE anything to do.

This draws attention to the fact that you don't WANT to do anything.

Luckily, the Internet has various portals for watching movies not-yet-released on DVD, and you and your roommates have thrown so many parties this month that the house can always be scoured and the repetition of this task won't seem insane. Luckily, sleep is always a good option -- It's like a friendly shadow, a suggestion, a wink. Luckily, most other people around you, aside from those few who know you very well, are happy to talk in a Cockney that makes your sick pedestrian: "Yeah, this semester has been rough. I've been feeling blue, too. What's up this weekend for you?" Luckily, Sushi delivery comes straight to the door. Luckily, no place in the neighborhood seems interested in upholding America's liquor laws. Most luckily, the real embracing of cynicism -- and I mean snuggling up to the concept, becoming BOSOM BUDDIES -- enables a candor you've been wary of before; a self-referential, 'dangerous', chiefly obnoxious, self-pitying kind of gobbledegook that creeps into your writing like a thief, your voice like a bandit, your art in general like inkblots on a page. You're only a little surprised that the glibness slips into you so easy now, when previously you've always felt yourself modest and comparatively well-adjusted, at times hypersensitive to rudeness and hesitant-to-offend to the point of fault. Whatever, is what you say now, Luckily there is some instant macaroni and cheese in the cabinet. You make this, following all the instructions a to a tee, and it doesn't taste right. It just doesn't taste right.

The night stretches out like a yawn still, full moon tongue. It asks nothing of you. You have no response. Is this funny? you wonder. Perhaps this is the Infinite Jest. You can't ever muse this with any credibility though, because you haven't finished the book.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The Only Living Boy in New York

Here is what happened today. That’s the best way, so the only way, to begin:
I woke up at a friend’s house, early, with morning mouth and no toothbrush. The sun was rising with me when I tiptoed out the front door and down the block, eclipsed then underground while I waited for the first of two trains to take me home. I was sleepy. A little blind. Wearing the clothes from the night before, which is, as always, ‘another story’. The quotations there are glib and a little stupidly ironic. Don’t think too hard about them or the two sentences following.

I walked into my empty, chilly apartment and had some trouble breathing. Then I went to sleep. When it was time to wake up in an hour and a half, I was almost able to pretend that I’d been in my bed all night long and unusual things had happened during the previous night and day, unpredictable and unprecedented things. I set the water as hot as it could go in the shower and then, like most days, I jumped in the tub quickly and jumped right back out again because I’d burned my skin. By now the sun was high in the sky, hanging over Manhattan, but it still felt a bit like sunrise because the light was so cold and so colorful streaming down between the patches of autumn leaves in tall trees. I made breakfast, I put on some clothes, I put a few things in a bag and then made a big production of yelling ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ to no one.

I wish now, already, that I’d thought to write down what I was thinking when I was thinking it during the day -- I see now, already, how even old minutes are robbed of their sincerity viewed backwards from a present mood. Right now, I listen to bluegrass and yawn and think about ways I could make this all very profound very quickly. I think about eccentric, half-baked metaphors that might service. I think about itemized lists of objects and encounters and artwork, lists that might do the work for me of shedding light on the elusive subject (bewildered fragments?) crux of this…piece. At some point today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ because I have been assigned to read it for a class. I decided that if the book is as profound as it could be I like it and if it is not, I don’t. It registers that this is a stupid kind of opinion, one lacking panache and real drive, but I hold on to it anyways. I write it down now with an intention not so divorced from the ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ ploy this morning -- asserting my personality in case anyone’s watching who would really enjoy It and care to say something agreeable or laugh or wave frantically at me across a train platform in concurrent response.

Here I go. I’m psyching up for the word itself. You are possibly very confused, untrusting, wary that what comes next will be presumptuous, predictable, pseudo-intellectual bullshit at best, many bad things. It is an honest thing, at least. The word is lonely. I’m exploring it in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that ‘lonely’ sounds like a swallow? Not the bird, but the gesture. It also sounds like a single fork clinking against a porcelain dish, or a solo saxophone far away, or eavesdropping on two old friends talking about something easy and great. There are a lot of things it isn’t, too, just so we’re clear -- it isn’t explicitly the two trains to get home in the morning. It isn’t directly to do with the other story, the one about the party last night. I’ll shake my head and correct you if you try to bring in the bluegrass or the sunrise or the trouble breathing. Lonely doesn’t walk around and behave logically, it doesn’t flatten or crush or do anything active, which is something I realized today, perhaps. It doesn’t make sense. It seems like it should be much older and wiser than twenty and a little girl. Mostly, lonely sags and underperforms, lonely’s impotent. It wants nothing and it’s uses are few.

I know a lot of people who claim they are lonely -- and I respect them because it isn’t an easy or socially acceptable thing to admit. In my experience, that act of admitting loneliness falls into one of two camps: 1) jolly self-deprecation/defense mechanism for single people surrounded by couples OR 2) Very Serious, Melancholic, Emo, See A Therapist. In a way, these social constructions makes perfect sense. Who wants to talk about being lonely at the dinner table? Who wants to really allow that kind of vulnerability, especially when the merit of doing so is virtually impossible to see? I could tell you I’m lonely, inactively and lamely, and there is not even the allowed hope that anything will come of it. You will know a pathetic part of my soul you perhaps already knew or didn’t want to know, necessarily, suddenly. I will have said it aloud and it will be real. But loneliness is not patently ‘curable’ or even ‘pitiable’ like another kind of problem, though I guess the former could often engender or imply the latter. In and of itself, loneliness is not an illness. It’s a religion: “I guess we’re all of us, more or less lonely and there’s no help for it” (A Cited Source).

Yet it doesn’t seem that everybody could be, especially since that vague holy grail for the lonely (okay, me) is being loved and in love and some people are those things. It’s supposedly possible to be lonely and loved and in love all at once, but this is a completely unsympathetic perspective to someone who is lonely alone, so I will speak for those I consider my people and not address these others, who we‘ll henceforth call ‘Greedy Bastards‘. If so many of Us, the Lonely Alone, shouting to empty apartments and telling no one useless stories of failed evenings, do feel folded folded folded folded up inside ourselves (this is what I feel), I guess I’m now tasked to ask, in a rallying cry, why no one’s mailing their orgy invitations or striking up heart-to-hearts with passersby. They tell me this life is an active exercise, it’s wanting, it’s having soul enough to show terror to someone else. You, if you’re like me, are so convinced you have a soul. It’s burying you, in fact. Is looking-for-love a scapegoat? A social pressure? What’s that honest hunt for a witness about, as ever, and why? So? Serious.

Not as far away, a nighttime S train rumbles up or down Franklin Avenue carrying people a short distance, some of them to a train I know for a fact isn‘t running right now. What will the poor believers in the C do when they realize they‘ve been adandoned? My roommates, returned from a weekend away, flutter papers or cough to prove they’re existing (just like me) in this big, drafty space. We must hear one another, surely. I’m listening for them, anyways.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Interview with a Celebrity

Prologue:
Why now? Why here? Why THE INTERNET? Why is your room a mess? Why Modest Mouse? Why Joan Didion? Why toothpaste, why cigarettes, scissors, the words 'yes' and 'no', why frayed ragamuffin 'chic', why snacks -- so many snacks, specifically -- why make-up? Round your lips and try to taste the flatness in the universe's most useless word: wuh-huh-ayyyyyy. Why don't you look up how to say 'why' in other languages, buddy? That might be more inclusive. Undoubtedly more poignant, somehow.

The movie Notting Hill and a Joan Didion essay on Hollywood and people wearing shoes bound up in plastic bags on the subway have got me thinking about every single one of you, which is to say, myself. What's everyone doing when they're zoning out or into something, regarding objects passing? I have never run into anyone subconsciously. I also don't read UsWeekly, but that's probably because I'm too poor to buy magazines. How many therapists per capita? I know we can't see the same things. There's no way. But if I am all of this, what might you be?

Where else would I live but inside of my head?

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Say Hello to Steve Perry for me if you ever get to heaven!!!

Why You Might Miss High-School:

You might miss high-school because somebody was always coming to pick you up there. You might miss high school because expectations were so low on Friday nights. You might miss high school because even the looming threats and things to look forward to were still all at heart kitschy attempts, dry runs, glib rehearsals. You might miss high school because once upon a time you had a bed that knew you, I mean your body across planes of time, better than anyone else ever has or will know you.
I don’t miss high school. It ended three years ago, and it wasn’t better than the years since. I have already begun to remember it in wide, un-specific swathes. Long hallways are contracting -- soon Montgomery Blair High will all have taken place along one fuzzy aisle with three motivational posters repeated every few paces, like a cartoon backdrop.
You don’t miss high school because it is way, way too late. That is not even an acceptable thing to think aloud at this point in your life. You like finding your own way home in the dark, and fucking up with panache and gravity. You like your independence, you love your independence, the things around you are evidence of choices you have made. If you don’t like what you see in a grand sense years out of high-school, the ball’s in your court. And that is so fabulous, right.

Why You Won’t Sleep With That Guy:

Because these are the only possible outcomes you predict:
a) Lying there, you will be so not a mystery. Just a person, making a person’s sounds, in a person’s skin. He will see this and you will lose something important.
b) Lying there, you’ll trip green and go, go go. This will be humiliating for everyone. Your friends will make the worst faces and you will feel powerless and small.
c) Lying there, you’ll know this was never going to be the answer. You have Lied, Lying there.
d) Lying there, you’ll get your answer: no.

But Actually, Why:

Recently, I have kind of started believing that I’m smarter than everyone else I know. I am, after all, reading Infinite Jest. I read Infinite Jest on the subway. Other people around me read those Stiegg Larrson books that dominate airport bookstores.
I know this is a toxic (and more importantly, wrong) worldview. I know with all of some sleeping part of my intellect, really, that there are many people in the world who are more intelligent than I will ever be. I even know some of these people. I presume the others are scientists and philosophers and political analysts. But lately I’m preoccupied with this duality of rational mind and ego; the chasm-ic difference between what I find logical and what I, fully knowing ‘what is logical’, believe nonetheless, is unsettling in a lot of ways. I think the simplest way to put it is that there’s a war going on in my mind and It is the root of every problem I have ever had.

I am selfish, to actually go around judging people for what they read on the daily commute. I am selfish also to spend time trying to convince some imagined audience that I’m actually a good person, and I didn’t really just think that mean thing about the little old lady and her copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here is my selfish theory about the selfishness: people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce who (I assume) have the kind of jet-propelled egos which are consistently opportunistic and usually able to get them whatever they want are not like me; I am not like them. I don’t have the clout to back up my insane self-involvement with action -- instead, the part of my mind that would be spending energy on living up to incredible standards is too busy berating the other for dreaming big (and ugly) in the first place. I have a rotisserie inner monologue going at all times that volleys between the bi-polar and non-productive extremes: ‘I am great’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that.’ This does not make me a good person. I don’t really believe it makes me a bad person either, but at best and honest assessment it makes me lazy, and when traced backwards through everything I whine about it makes me insufferably unsympathetic. People can only whine, tolerably, if they’re doing things. I am patently useless. Stop reading my BLOG!. Stop all the clocks! What I want, actually, is help: how does one ‘get out of one’s head’? A man on the street in Bedford the other day told me that the mind and the emotions were good servants but terrible masters. He smiled at me and called me lovely before making a pitch for his yoga studio. Why didn’t I ask him, ‘what else do I serve?!’?

In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College, he talks at length about My Problem (and I see the irony, don’t worry). It stems (he says) from the admittedly unverifiable but totally rational perspective that one’s problems can only ever be one’s own because one has no context besides one. I think, therefore I am, and therefore whatever I think about you is true. But DFW argues that a liberal arts college education is principally for the derailment of this mentality; that education is all about broadening the mind which is itself, really all about empathy. Acting is also all about empathy. Falling in love is all about empathy. I have lived many years thinking I was empathetic but it’s come to strike me that there’s no way my definition of the word (which is more like concern) is in line with the stuff of true-blue, wanna-get-to-know-you, can-draw-from-many-contexts, well-rounded-human interest. We train ourselves to think this way, he says. And it’s difficult. It’s exhausting, I say, and I’ve tried/I think I’ve tried/No, I’ve really tried/Are you mocking me? And now I’m worried that the extension of my inability to change is actually suicide; that if my definition of the word trying (which is more like teething) won’t take me anywhere, I will simply coil in on myself many times over like Uroburos and rot.
Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams: we use each other, and that’s what we think of as love.
And I think, there must be a way, surely, to explode outward. Even though David Foster Wallace killed himself two years ago, I think.

New Years’ Resolutions:

I want to be a friend, and thus in the world, and thus in the moment, and thus not alone.
I don’t want to want to have Already Lied There Without Actually Lying There.
I want to watch strangers pass and think nothing.

Because it’s easy to bitch about not being in love, and feeling unwanted. It’s easy to feel thrilled and chilled by one’s own capacity for darkness. What’s terrifying (and, I suspect, ultimately an antidote to negative love vibes and general malaise) is forcing deadweight into productivity and forcing self-pity and congratulation into real, absolute care. That is art. That is also how to become great.
I.
Think.


And P.S (Because where would we be without a Peter Pan Complex?):


The Ultimate Guy from way-back-when, from whence sprang all drugs, most illicit nights in cars and aggravated hormones, political subversity, THAT GUY, was on the C train with me leaving the city just now. He was just out of appropriate yelling-range for a crowded car. The girl he was with saw me staring and I quietly begged her to nudge him so I could say something but she didn’t, he didn’t, they got off at Hoyt and I watched them go and I thought profound thoughts.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Gu-logy

The heat today, behind my sunglasses, looks like how I imagine the 1970s. It’s sort of sepia and mean. I’ve been trying to feel (or explain what it is I feel) for a few days now. Insides like a low tumble dry.
Somebody who always looked like he was going to die young did. I think. It’s hard to tell. It’s a rumor. I no longer know him and my only real contact is Facebook, but a google search of his name doesn’t produce any useful results.
He is a person I can remember a lot about, in some ways:
-a very distinct leathery smell, mixed with some kind of soap or unassuming cologne.
-the sound of the same leather, rubbing the way leather does against angular bodies
-rogue-isms. This person was a bona fide rogue. Gentle swaying fingers that knew a lot of things and moved together, long hugs, sleepy eyes, winks.
I grew out of this person. He was one of very few people I think of this way. I watched him (as much as ‘watched’ is ‘knew for a while, left for a while, came back and knew for a while again‘) shrink into jackets that weren’t actually getting bigger. The second time I knew him he was honest, and older, and vulnerable. He told me a lot of secrets I didn’t really want to know but liked hearing anyways. He had a chip in his tooth from a drinking accident, and textbook addictions. He was taking classes at a community college and getting jazzed about philosophy. We talked about the meaning of life like only very naïve people can once, on the phone, for hours into the night. Now I’m going to make up something that happened between us. I say ‘make up’ because I want it to be understood that I’m already warping what was, and it’s important you know this because my friend is dead and so can’t defend himself:
“How long are you going to be away for?” (Him)
“Well, a semester, probably.”
“But New York’s not that far away.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s not that hard to visit.”
“Yup, that’s true.”
“Aww, you sound so cute.”
“Whaaaaaat?”
“Oh no.”
‘Whaaaaaat?”
“Well I’m a little worried now. I really like you, and the last time I really liked someone I got really hurt.”
“Well, we’re friends!”
“Yeah.”
Something something, something something. And maybe I should feel even worse about that call. Maybe once I figure out just how he went I’ll comb memory again to look for ‘signs’. Every mistake is fatal, eventually.
We went on a date, that second time around. Saw a movie. Had a meal. I was hyperconscious of how we looked together (of that, I am ashamed) and he could tell. Leaving the theatre I can’t recall if he said he wanted to see me again or drive me home or what, but I remember what I said:
“Look [it began….] -- I’m in a really weird place right now, so we’re going to have to take this really, really slow. You know?” When I said this, I did not know what I meant. He did. He smiled a very wise smile, and said:
“Okay. I just like you. That’s all.”
And we hugged. And I didn’t watch him walk away, because I was too relieved.

The first time around.
I had the biggest crush.
And I was jealous.
I was high on suddenly being pretty and talented and ogled in the drama department. He was one of those bizarre aberrations in high school theatre, the Dude technically too cool for these shenanigans with the face and Friday Night History of someone ten years graduated. He was a legend, and a presumed whore, and a flirt. He used to give joke ‘butt massages’ to another friend of mine (with whom he also flirted) and all the freshmen and sophomore girls hovered around him like gnats. He liked me, and I loved that he liked me. There were a few cast parties in memory when he’d be near by during all the PG fun, and I’d smell his leather, and we’d make eyes. I sat on his lap for the entire duration of the movie “This is Spinal Tap” once, reclined kind of awkwardly. He gave me a rose that night but I left it on the hostess’ piano. By accident.
He was still sleazing around a lot after his own graduation, and though there were two years between us he still seemed to show up at all the drama functions when I was gone, too. But for all the time he seemed to be around, there was a lot people seemed not to know about him. Once I overheard him mention that he and his Dad had lived in this other girls’ basement for a while. I asked why. He shrugged.
“They had a basement,” he said.

Gu Khalsa was a good guy. He had heart and soul and genuine-seeming interest in other people.
I worry about taking responsibility for commemorating someone I feel I was cruel to, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long while. This was the friend who de-friended me on Facebook at some point in the recent past, and from that small thing I have read in fifty larger images. They are all deeply narcissistic so I won’t write them down.
I think what your memory elects to preserve intact is important by default; I think what we remember makes us metaphorically enormous. And I’d like to think that by nature of being so far detached but still so concerned this “eulogy” is proof that people don’t die when they’ve had friends, at least not immediately. Now you know, is the idea. Tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. High-school greasers.
It’s not that I would change the past, necessarily, given the opportunity. I’m not sure we were meant to sail out beyond a mediocre date and an odd-shaped love or neurotic freak-isms in common, I’m not sure we were. Let me try a little harder to articulate what I feel about this thing that was put down and deserted, this thing to which I cannot return to. Every day I walk around thinking I haven’t made choices, thinking my real life will start any minute and It will be better than even the pale, interesting goodness of the times before because It will explode like a star with opportunities to be strong, and honest, and loved, most of all.
But on earth, you were right, Gu. New York isn’t that far away.
And I did choose.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

MY WEEKEND:

I keep meeting strangers. It's very surreal. I think there might be something in the air these days that walks and talks like good karma. This revelation comes in tandem, of course, with a lot more time spent in transit between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a lot more time spent at parties thrown by students of the New School, and a lot more time spent gunning down fading summer afternoons in Union Square Park alone. Still, I find myself in the unusual position of having to convince The Rational Brain (Martha) that it's all a coincidence and there is really nothing holy at all about the man yelling hooey from the Bible's back-pages up and down Fourteenth Street on a Saturday. Nor is there anything profound about the man beside him (they seem to be friends?!) who's trying to convince every single woman in the park to sit on his face for 'big laughs'.

I went to see a friend's show this weekend, and it made me sad. It was supposed to, on the one hand, and on the other I was in that weirdly vulnerable mood that sometimes steals in on Saturdays -- the sun was shining, and beautiful couples seemed to be congregating on every corner, and I was awkwardly hemming and hawing through an intermission where I realized I didn't have enough conversation to string between fifteen friends and ten minutes. After the play I went to the park where I watched a man I'd once given my phone number to seduce and destroy some other hot young thing, and then the sun was setting straight into my eyes like a fire, like a brilliant cracked egg. I went underground, feeling morose, and someone complimented me on my shoes, which is to say, Wagner filled the air and small cherubs danced from between cracks in the mosaic and filled the world with fairy dust. And no, no one was ever lonely again. At Franklin Avenue, an art collective was putting up murals all along Eastern Parkway when I got off the train.

That night, I went with some friends to a patently Weird Party, and met a personal trainer and a Pilates teacher and a bunch of other people crouched under the insulation of an attic. Someones and Strangers. I tried halfheartedly to make sleepy eyes at a loud person, but the evening wanted to end in an overpriced cab around 4am, sleepy roommates drunching on glorified Easy Mac and smiling at the wood paneled walls that weren't bouncing with stupid comments or spilled tequila, were silent, belonging to us. We watch Dazed and Confused, and a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks, and I weep with jealousy over the memoirs of Pamela des Barres as I fall asleep reading. Before I really enter Lala Land I register feeling nostalgic for high school, when days were long and pointless but discernibly and objectively hilarious. Not always, but most of the time.

And on Sunday, Someone I already Knew agrees with me about Annie Hall being a terrifically optimistic movie, actually, and she articulates it loads better than I ever have: because the beautiful part about life is actually transience and if there is any kind of proof for true love it must be in the fact that perfectly happy, complicated, wonderful relationships fail where others with the exact same ingredients can succeed. We sit and talk about love and existential crises while rolling around on a studio floor, leaving something due Monday abandoned.

At a dinner meeting, I am asked 'what I want to do with my art', and somehow manage to concoct something. I realize only once I've said it aloud that the mission is so so so right, even if it's a little pretentiously worded: "I want everyone to find the hilarity and lovability in their neuroses, flaws and weirdness."

And that's the end. This has all finished happening. It's Monday now. Writing it down it doesn't read like God. Maybe that's the bizarre thing, actually.

Friday, September 3, 2010

On Love At First Sight, in Retrospect:

Here is a funny thing that happened that is not really a story:
Two days ago I met a friend in Union Square park at the benches across from Fuerza Bruta. It was hot, and I was wearing something silly as if in protest of this fact, and we sat side by side and had a nice conversation and at some point she left and I kept sitting. It struck me, killing time on this bench alone, how "people-watching in the park" is one of those things busy people claim to really dig about New York City but it's not something you ever actively plan for. I thought these thoughts and frosted over with that light, sweet, Southern-ladies-in-To-Kill-A-Mockingbird sweat and considered everyone who passed.

And it was strange: this sort of neo-cast-of 'HAIR!' crew came dancing across my path: a guy with a guitar and a guy in a kilt and two other girls, wearing funny accessories, sporting impractical haircuts. They put up a sign by a tree that said 'Flowers or Cigarettes Appreciated!' and then this guy started playing his guitar and singing. The friends orbited him, little moons all over the grass, and filmed this concert with tiny cameras.
It was really beautiful. The kid had a great voice. I caught myself realizing I wasn't directly thinking about anything as I listened to him, and that was nice. I stayed for two songs.

The next day, for strange and unpredictable reasons, I wandered through the exact same stretch of park at the exact same time and ran into the same friend on the same bench. We sat and had a nice conversation, then she had to leave for work. I still had more seconds to fill so I stayed to watch people. No music Thursday -- instead, across from me two friends filmed a third passed out on a bench in a drunken stupor. An old hippie in the corner called the guys out for being mean and then a sort of rumble broke out. At some point, Drunk Guy emerged from his stupor and staggered to his feet, and then the old hippie admitted he was wrong to criticize, said he "was out of line, didn't mean to step to anybody." From the looks of the aftermath everyone became friends, and then the park lights to say EVENING! turned on all around me.

And as I was about to leave, I "met" someone. I use quotations because I never meet people from the ether, and neither do you, probably: any stranger who sort of rolls up on your personal space in a public park is rarely to become Someone. But THIS person was funny and odd and languid, and we talked about the scene in front of us and then managed to cram a surprising amount of personal information into eight minutes of not-knowing-the-others'-name. But another thing written in my planner pulled me away, and I got up to go to where I had to be.

I have built what I call My Life on pieces of paper. Some of it has been lost over the years, and some of it has never been printed out, some is crumpled and some is fading with age. In My Life, I think about the probability of these two unrelated Park Days, and I think about my sad, scrawled phone number swirling around somewhere in outer space undialed, uninterested in forevers, likely. My planner: many pieces of paper, many lists, many ideas, many obligations and things to look forward to, weeksdayshours broken into digest-able chunks. And some remarkable, unplanned, un-lamentable events (but were they EVENTS, really?) slipped between meetings in black ink. And I think now, isn't that funny? Weren't you so so worried about the things you'd never understand fully and weren't interested in, the books you won't read before you die, the way your ass looks fat in a certain dress and the strange ribbons of backward logic that encase your latest stab at something like love? Weren't you so so convinced that you owned the universe the last time you smoked marijuana and saw the city skyline from a friend's room, from a train window, didn't you think you had it all figured out and there was nothing left anywhere on the planet, no thing that could change what you considered a charted course? Oh boy, oh girl, you were wrong. Not every airport is the same, you see. People aren't similar, not at all. You're not afraid, you're just a kid.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Spread Love, It's the Brooklyn Way

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.

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?

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.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

I am called...

Nathan Englander, who talks in tight little circles that unwind like tangled balls of yarn, told us on the first day of workshop something to the effect of "I don't believe in labels. I call myself a cosmonaut, because I think that's cool and I've always wanted to be a cosmonaut. I'm writing a play, so I guess I'm a playwright? I write, so I guess I'm a writer." Later (second workshop) he furthered this position by asserting a hyper-distaste for bookstore genre-sections like "African American Literature" and "Jewish Literature", saying that these labels were preposterous because everyone writes everything from their own universe and we don't only relate to Tolstoy because he's a Russian, or James Baldwin because he's gay and black. The universe is a point of view. And art is recognition. And all of it is an attempt to understand someone telling you something, emphasis, as always, on YOU.
I talked with a friend for a while the other day about defining yourself by what you do -- and not merely in terms of career or job or what you physically do with your hands, I mean what you are doing now, how you eat yogurt and prosciutto and ice cream and cheese (I am doing these things right now). It seemed perfectly logical to me that you can label yourself based on what you've made or what you want to make, but she pointed out that some people don't create anything, and some people don't really want to create anything. There are hedonists, and people who care only about the happiness of others, and this must make them defined by their traits or their perspectives that develop in accordance with the actions they take. I think that's interesting. What do you think makes a person what they are?

Nathan, not unlike any other artist I've ever met, believes that his art-form is the most important and the most pure thing in the world. Within the printed word is the ability for people to dream up and imagine and identify with a thousand personal visions and a thousand universal concepts -- he gave this example that a kitchen, on a page, is my kitchen, your kitchen, forty-five different kitchens, and even when sculpted with adjectives and context it's still always a different kitchen but we all always understand.

Some lingering thoughts:

1) New favorite short story:

A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE (David Foster Wallace)

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist on their faces.
The man who introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

2) So far in France, I have encountered two (2) men on the street who were so attractive that I almost fainted. This is problematic in tandem with 2b: while I never aspired to the romance of chugging juice straight from the jug, I am not quite over how delightful it is to have a container with the word "pamplemousse" running up the side.

And this is the first thing I have written for WRITERS IN PARIS, en France, avant edits:

They flew Air France. He surprised her with the tickets at breakfast, slipping them beneath her place mat while she stood up to make more coffee. “Let us make love beneath ze Tour Eiff-ell,” he’d affected in a vague European brogue, whirling her around the kitchen while the steaming mug she held threatened to evacuate its contents. She laughed. He laughed like an exhale. She could think of no good reason to say no.

It was being so close to him. It had been a while since they’d really been that close. In bed there were twisted bunches of nubby flannel sheets, the clickety click of a breaking ceiling fan pushing fetid air into the crevices their bodies made, there was sweat, pajamas, space to roll away into, a distant promise of a basement futon if they fought, it was dark. Nights when they wanted closeness weren’t comparable either -- he tended to make loud, distracting grunts, and then there was that perverse, heckling box-spring that creaked beneath their frenetic mutual shoves and jerks and un-remarkable stabs at an ecstasy that was at heart entirely self-concerned. On the airplane, though: dry. Quiet. Cold. Upright. Separated only by the cheap thin layer of polyester blend Madras shirt he had un-ironically covered his pot-belly with this morning, they were hemmed in so close she didn’t want to breathe, for fear of expanding slightly and rubbing against an elbow puckered with goose-bumps, an arm on fire with tangly clots of bristly black hair wandering anarchically up the coast of a wrist interrupted by exema patches that felt like lizard scales. She could feel his inflated body holding a cough and a fart simultaneously; with deep dread she prayed for his vigilance.
Sylvia had been the first to point out, in 1987, that Frank did look an awful lot like Andre the Giant about the face -- minus, of course, fifty pounds and ten inches. Before this invention of Madras shirts and international travel in coach, clicks on ceiling fans went unnoticed while the Physical Education major with hands like twin boiled hams tiptoed through a studio apartment to allow a woman to sleep through month-long depressions, leaving coffee or runny omelets or Beanie Babies as little sentinels for the woman he loved on days when he had to leave early for class. Claire (her name is Claire) would cry into the sweat-stained-but-still-sweet folds of his polo T-shirts and the laps of six particular beloved pairs of khaki shorts and even if Sylvia didn’t quite get it, there had been no question, none, of needing space. Frank took up a lot (even for a pygmy giant…could one still say pygmy?) but years had trickled down bathtub drains of crappy apartments with Claire coping and him, letting her. “Let us make love beneath ze Tour Eiff-ell,” appeared now an unmistakable fissure, from a hot and ugly tongue, those awful sideburns laughing like hyenas, unlovable, every particle, oh she didn’t feel like watching this ancient thing die quietly above sea-level somewhere, better to pray for the plane to go down instead…
The sandwich came in a plastic puckered pillow-case. After accepting it with a truly humiliating stab at French (Mercy, bo-cop!) and a wink that threatened to fracture the corners of the stewardess’ violin-string-taut smile, he tore it open with his teeth. When he’d finished, bits of iceberg lettuce and masticated American cheese clung like a dying rebel army to the bank of his scruffy chin. The sound he made eating was something between a baby’s spitting up and a swallowed belch. Before the second chomp was over he’d already begun to ask, “Do we get peanuts later, too?” Claire felt, surely, that the entire aircraft would be repulsed into silence forever. She shrunk low in her seat. Maybe people would think they were strangers to each other if she kept the same expression of forced, apologetic politeness on her face. Her eyes scanned rooftops of blue cushions but saw no gagging, no horrified.
“Yes, sir, you do get peanuts!” was the stewardess’ sing-song reply (could one still say stewardess?) . She moved her cart along the aisle. Frank grinned at Claire here, twiddled an imaginary French mustache between two hot-dog fingers, looking all the more stupid because she knew he couldn’t know anything had changed .
And surely, Claire thought then, there had been other sandwiches: Camembert on rainy days, Wonder Bread when poor, Tofu loaf during an ill-advised vegetarian phase, they’d swallowed each-other’s almost-everything (tempers, pride, sorrow, sex, secrets), but this could not, would not, did not stand. Once, there’d been attempts to remove food before wanting to look elegant saying ‘I love you’, in America, at home, in cotton, as kids.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Here you are

I am in a foreign country, in a foreign bed, on a foreign Internet connection. People speak English in one billion different incarnations. It's chilly. There are widely used coin dollars (or, rather, pounds). I imagine I'm Hemingway or Henry Miller or a more feminist presence than either (J.K Rowling, maybe, scrawling on napkins), typing away in cafes and drinking wine before noon. It is everything I imagined it would be, in one sense. I am alone a lot. My friend has fallen in love. I'm here for a week but I think time stretches when you're alone and traveling; there is something elastic and infinite about crafting a day around one or two "sights to see" or adventures to take, lifted from carefully concealed cheesy guidebooks. I like being invisible. I also don't like it. I have pretended, in my mind, that I have come here with any of ten different people; imagined this trip like people in love would do it. Or people with money. People with different life-priorities.
My favorite place so far is this tree in St. James Park, where Liz and I fell asleep for two hours eating chocolates and smoking and not saying very much together. I feel old, for some reason, though over all this is a pretty youthful thing to spend time doing. I wonder, were I to go back today, if the shadow of that old oak could cover me and my ten imaginary friends. It probably shouldn't have to.
I really do like wandering! This is already starting to sound like I'm trying to replicate Henry Miller (who I'm reading, go figure) and/or Carrie Bradshaw at the end of the Sex And the City series when she whines back home to her friends that Big needs to save her. This is time carved out in space to and for myself, I think. I'm taking it like a challenge, or a brace of strong and slightly acidic medicine. I'm going to start writing something here.
It does make you think, though, watching people you love find connections in unlikely ways. People really in love, if you're ever lucky enough to really watch it happening to someone, take on this QUALITY. It's like they always look safe, and they're sustained by this glow. For some reason, since it's been a long time since I remember feeling that way, I can't always trace it in people's faces. I can't imagine how they can still look that way after days and weeks and years pass, how time won't ebb at their patience or kill their desire. But if I've learned anything this summer it's that time doesn't work that way (which makes me think of The Flaming Lips and Bonnaroo, tralalalala). People change all the time, and in this way, everything is static.
I also had this thought walking home this morning about how MUCH it takes to build a city -- and not just in terms of architecture or history. Cities are drenched in these personalities, personalities being composite of absolutely everything -- demographics, public transportation, languages, advertisements, street markings, famous foods. They are really like living, breathing organisms with thoughts and assertions and favorites. This makes it easy to judge them. Or, judge yourself against them. Here you are. By comparison.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

My Advice

I am trying to enjoy pleasure, like Italians. This kind of lifestyle involves:
-reading the entire newspaper with a cappucino, every morning
-reading books about other people who are trying to enjoy pleasure. Sometimes outside. Sometimes with an inventive new cocktail.
-half an hour of yoga every day set to the A and B side of an old record
-two double-header 1960s foreign films (Godard, Fellini, etc.) or two double-header 1940s American splashy show-biz musical rom-coms per day. Alternately tasteful and kitschy.
-walking the dog
-a healthy, mildly Mediteranean interest in food.
-exotic plans

I was never really the kind of person who could enjoy JUST BEING, but I think I've discovered the secret. You can keep the rigid tendencies of itemized to-do lists and frenetic day plans even while you live la dolce vita; it just becomes dilletante as opposed to diligent. I do have a schedule. I have things I think about and plan for. I'm organizing family photos, I'm practicing guitar, I'm planning clothes for Paris. I had these thoughts today:

1) Most science fiction movies simply personify a country (with one government, one race, one set of basic customs, etc) into a planet. There's no real difference, often, between space wars and world wars in this way. I wonder what that says about the human ethnocentricity complex. The universe is unfathomable!
2) The ironic, post-modern sense of white guilt etched into shows like 30 Rock is doubly ironic because while it acknowledges latent kinds of racism, it often hammers you over the head with it.
3) I think Israel might be in the wrong about Gaza today!

I'm writing a short story in paragraphs. Trying not to worry about money. But with Elizabeth Gilbert and Auntie Mame as your life teachers, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to sink gently and pleasantly into a solid, selfish love haze. I think it takes two weeks, patience, a full stocked kitchen, access to books and a television with Turner Classic Movies in the cable package. I suggest Funny Girl, It Happened One Night and Auntie Mame with a splash of fruit for breakfast and copies of Eat, Pray, Love, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and various uplifting fiction you have always meant to read. This is how I choose not to look for love -- I think at last, I am beginning to realize that I already have it in spades.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Carrie on, carrie on...because it doesn't REALLY matter, Ann Hornaday.

Dedicated critics of the Sex and the City series kind of counter-intuitively throw around the term “old slut” when trying to prove their point. Their point, in my opinion, is more often than not backed by the kind of idiotic rhetoric typically employed by Bible-thumping parents who want Mark Twain books eradicated from local libraries. “The show is supposed to be about female empowerment, but they’re just total whores,” I’ve heard acquaintances screech. Diehard fans know to counteract this approach with one of two attacks. One -- by definition, female empowerment is a movement designed to be about EMPOWERING FEMALE CHOICES, whatever form they might take. The only part of the SATC series in direct counterpoint to this idea is only embodied in those critics who use derogatory female slang to describe women at all. Two -- if you were a diehard fan (having given the series its’ due) you would know that the whole premise of the show is about navigating relationships -- commitment, marriage, love, the humiliations involved in pursuing any of these. It’s not about sex per se, it’s about life; perhaps more accurately, a specific lifestyle. The really raunchy bits in the show are usually just character fodder for Samantha, or (more cynically) just victorious assertions of power from the Big Guys at HBO flaunting their lack of censorship. I only like to accept criticisms about “Sex and the City” from people willing to concede the above paragraph’s two points, or people who have actually spent a lot of time digesting sample episodes from various seasons of the show. More than any other program I’ve willingly enslaved myself to over the past ten years, it seems to be this one that elicits unparalleled, ferocious controversy.

So women have a right to sex. As much as they can get, as old as they are. These women are often jaded and live in New York. They like fashion. The jig is up: I watch “Sex and the City” because I am the woman who moved to New York (in one sense at least) for Labels and Love, who likes fashion and da boyz. I am the kind of fan who was always going to follow and defend even the most despicable version of the spin-off movies imaginable, because practically each episode over the six year run has prompted a question (a voice over, rhetorical, pun-filled Carrie Bradshaw question) that I’ve likely asked myself in some form or other throughout my city life. Do we need drama to make relationships work? Is honesty really the best policy? Are we sluts? I like brunch. I like Smith Jerrod and Steve and Harry Goldenblatt. Thus take your PILLAR of salt.

Bearing my existing love in mind, I figured that “Sex and the City 2” would be the kind of oddly likable disaster that its advertising seemed to swear. Objectively, there were a lot of cards stacked against this film. Sequel to a romantic comedy? Yikes. See “Bridget Jones 2: The Edge of Reason” (or rather, DON’T see it). Same clothes plus six years? Erkgsh, okay. Light-hearted vacation romp sub-plot…in the Middle East? Touche. I’m almost surprised there wasn’t more trepidation from the most manic within the fan club about the potential this recipe might have held for “abomination”. There was always the light threaded fear that characters would become caricatures and Carrie would take Big back, but it was easy to trust the ever-present hands of Michael Patrick King, and SJP, and Patricia Field. Besides, everyone knows those light-threaded-fear ships sailed somewhere before the end of season six. (I still don’t know what people are complaining about whenever they suggest the Girls have become fops. They were always fops. They were always only slightly complicated archetypes with a lot of opinions. You can call that a caricature if you like, but if that’s an onerous definition I question why people like you go to the movies at all.)
Perhaps because I did go in with such low expectations, I liked “SATC2” because it was nowhere near as awful as it may have been. Like a lithe ballerina in a dodge ball match, the film was able to artfully dance around what could have been its horrific, condemning obstacles. The foray into the Middle East always tiptoed just a little to the left of politically incorrect and culturally insensitive: each almost-blunder (How does the girl in the birka eat a French fry?!) was tempered with some fun cultural tidbit (The beautiful souk, the beautiful desert…). More disturbing than the general portrayal of the Middle East (Marrakech as Abu Dhabi) was just the jarring-ness of seeing the Girls there. But it wasn’t the jarring-ness of Blackface poorly handled, it was the jarring-ness of your Southern aunt attempting to order food in Spanish from a legitimate Tex-Mex restaurant. Slightly uncomfortable, but -- if you dig deep within your soul -- not necessarily offensive.

I was kind of fussed by the Big Gay Wedding in the opening scene of the movie. Stanford Blatch and Anthony Marentino have felt like a sour couple since SATC1, where the rest of the gay world seemed to vanish from New York’s background and leave these two enemies alone to duke it out…and then get married…because they’re the two gay characters. But even amidst the opulent wash of Liza Minelli singing a version of “All the Single Ladies”, that same comfortable, goofy feeling of your Aunt stumbling through Spanish verb tense kicks in -- Anthony, at the altar, breaks down and confesses that he really does love Stanford. I want to give the gang kudos at this point for putting one of the first mainstream gay weddings put on the Silver Screen into such a fabulous, glittery context -- even if it is that term (hushhushhush) un-politically correct. Moreover, it’s splashy, fun, it’s a romp, and it’s still truthful to the context. It’s harmless.

Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte are who they always were. This is the most comforting. If you are a true fan (the kind who likes brunch, the kind who likes these women for what they represent, the kind who respects this lifestyle even if they can’t fully condone every particle of it) this will guide you through the brackish water of opulent, outrageous dress-up clothes, tepid puns and half-baked subplots that leaves you questioning your own moral codes and standards of “political correctness”. I probably sound like someone defending a pretty bad movie with a pretty uppity set of personal values, but I’m certain this film can be appreciated even by those who can’t tell you where Carrie’s ficticious apartment address is. As always, the greatest thing about the series is that everything from the dialogue to the situations is lifted straight from the comfort of a Girls’ Night sleepover, where we tend to handle the issues of our lives with humor, tongue-in-cheek self deprecation, shopping and cocktails. And what should a movie about women being empowered have but these qualities, and fuck all the conventional rest? It never was conventional or proper to be a single city girl in the first place. It’s almost odd now that conventions -- be they civic, social or cinematic -- were ever expected of a piece like this in the first place.
And if I were a political person meant to comment on Abu Dhabi, and the gay wedding, and the vague thread of international sisterhood that follows everyone around, I might say to the world…lighten up. We did not always look to Hollywood to guide our moral compass. Political correctness is irrelevant and dull.
I like the old sluts.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Thursday, May 20, 2010

You are getting older. Don't do anything about it.

It has begun.
The ennui.
It settles and looks like fine dust and a very dull headache and sunlight, the ugly kind. I keep "forgetting" to take showers. I eat a meal at one in the morning. I sleep till one in the afternoon. I budget, and plan, and do things halfheartedly and haphazardly. The light and the heat make me think of sex.
It might be even harder with Lovely Things on the horizon. They're taunting in their far-awayness. More pressing is the Money, for this is the artist's first encounter with the weight of paper. Meaning, I need 400 euro for my travel plans. SOS.
I just finished these two surprisingly similar (theme-wise, anyways) non-fiction memoirs. One was "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", by Joan Didion. Pause for a minute and say her name a few times. It's a very good name. The second book was Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast". Pertinently, "Slouching..." is a kind of massive metaphor for the end of the Hippie Movement, in tandem with Joan's own disillusionment with a lot of things. It's also happy, and about where and how she comes to find peace in her native California. The ending essay, though, (called GOODBYE TO ALL THAT) is horribly striking as its about her outgrowing New York. After I read it, I watched some Sex and the City episodes. Wondered if I would ever outgrow New York. Then, I thought about beauty. You see, I'm also reading "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".
New York, I think, is very beautiful.
Ernest (we're on a first-name basis) was maybe even more immediately pertinent, because "A Moveable Feast" is an account of his early years in Paris with Hadley. And Gertrude Stein. And F. Scott. The whole memoir is so drenched in nostalgia. My favorite essay ended with this beautiful beautiful beautiful line about him and Hadley planning their day, and realizing that despite their poverty they were very happy anyways, very very happy. PARAPHRAZZED: "We ought to have knocked on wood. The whole apartment was full of it, but we didn't knock on wood for luck." And just...isn't that sad? Here goes the world, whizzing past your ears. Like a gnat. Like a summer afternoon.
And then I spoke to a woman who had just had a baby, who maybe wanted to hire me to take care of it. She offered to drive me home after the interview even though I'd taken the Metro. When we were in the car she confided, "I never thought I'd see the day when going to the grocery store or leaving the house for twenty minutes was like...freedom." I can see it. I could see it in their piles of books and their bold, modern color scheme and that silly, laughable way he held his baby, a way I'm certain Dr. Spock might have corrected had he been present. She's writing her dissertation, this particular Mom. And I pictured it! I pictured writing an opus and I knew for certain I could do it. I pictured always regretting never going to a singing audition. I pictured young months, years, in Paris, in California, I pictured being in love, and could not even worry about its imminent, impending closeness (which implies its imminent, impending end). I raise fret-blistered fingers upwards to try to snatch at things that look like tools.

You see, I think a year ago I would have just read "A Moveable Feast" or "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and thought they were very sad and depressing and just left it at that. I might also have thought they were romantic, but so incredibly distant in their romance. The whole thought sequence would likely have ended ultimately with me feeling sorry for myself, and my lame life and my lame habit. This woman writing her dissertation, and this husband unsure how to carry a squirming baby, they would have seemed far far away as well.

I listen to that song "Time" by Pink Floyd, and cannot explain to anyone else why I think it's actually kind of optimistic (it isn't. I am wrong).

No, no, here it is.
I never used to read non-fiction.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Back in the Days When I was-a-teen-aga

The most memorable part of high school (which is in fact not a pretentious or sweeping statement to make, because I am now far enough away from high school that whatever comes to mind first is by default the most memorable, oui?) may have been anticipating "Stadium Arcadium."

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were, for me, The Thing. They were basically the only band I elected to let myself like that produced good music at any point over the fifteen or sixteen years I'd been alive by then, as opposed to...before that. Courtney Burtraw and I used to sit in the Silver Chips computer lab and spend time preparing for this album to come out. We made charts and lists and exotic plans to follow the band over the summer, and abroad, and to Albany when it seemed as if they weren't planning a pitstop in Washington. I watched the "Can't Stop" video (By the way...) and the "Dani California" video every day, unironically. I was wide eyed and faithful and there was absolutely nothing as exciting as holding my breath in anticipation for this album to come out. And it was the last CD I consciously bought, before I started cheating and using iTunes and what have you to get music.

This isn't serving a greater point. It's not particularly well-written or insightful, which is kind of a bummer because the whole need to impart this two paragraph memory came from a Chuck Klosterman essay I just read and decided to recreate in personal terms. But I'm kind of content to bask in this very warm, snuggly memory and leave you to do the same. Make your own intellectual leap, I'm going to listen to the Zephyr Song.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Like shouting at the wind or shining from the inside-out?

I wonder about the significance of witnesses.
Yesterday my directing teacher highlighted something we all must have assumed was true but never really allowed ourselves to believe: the first few years out of college, you will mostly be making work exclusively for an audience of your friends. The imagination fills in the grubby Brooklyn warehouse spaces, the lovable archaic reno-tenements and peoples' living rooms with dimmed kitchen chandelier lighting design (may have just made up that last one). There are a few things sort of funny about this:
Friends have a civic duty (bypassable in the art world, presumably) to applaud you for whatever you do. As honest and direct as they could possibly be, it's like 67% likely that they'll still cushion whatever truthful feedback they might give your work with a "but I love you!" or not even want to enter criticism at all with a demeaning and dismissive: "that was so great!". You'll feel as if you've done something fine. Everyone could be lying to you. Now the question arises: are you actually making work FOR your friends (for them to dislike, or pretend to like, or love, whatever) or are you making work for the entire world but have only managed to round up acquaintances for whatever reason? Two caveats: limited audience, limited interpretation. Secondly, no criticism, no improvement or perspective. And one other thing, depressing and dangerous to suggest -- why would you ever want to make theater just FOR YOUR FRIENDS? Shouldn't the goal always be to transcend space and time and populace with your missive? If all this is so, how does one take these "first few years out of college" with the seriousness required for creating amazing art?
On a physical note, my caffeine headache is rolling over the hill and it feels like someone is squeezing my brain between two palms.
What is this thing to which we want to dedicate our lives?
Maybe it's a need. I think it's compulsion, honestly. I don't think anyone could answer really well for why they have to do theater and not...correspondence journalism, in terms of even those artists with grand delusions of helping heal the world with their art. I've thought a lot this year about how theater is a language just like dance or mathematics or Swahili, and if you feel the need to speak at all you want to do it in your own vibrant, native tongue, the tongue that thrills you to your core.
And I guess discussions (peace talks, relationship dramas, those kinds of things) are usually most productive when everyone speaks the same language. Anything, anywhere, is most productive when everyone speaks the same language. Use your English, no, I don't mean Language language.
Pfuh.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

This year I realized that life was long and wide and most of all unfinished.
I realized that knowing something is wrong with you and loudly talking about it does not make it go away, or somehow discount it.
Karma may be real.
Talent and inclination is not enough. You have to work for what you love. You have to fight, every day, for what you love, for what you want.
I learned that being a good friend is complicated, and a sacrifice, and worth living through.
I learned that people loving you is not something to take lightly, ever.
I learned that I really must get over fear of hurting people's feelings, shocking them, being unlovable or doing something wrong.
I learned that I, too, judge people.
I am not always in love. Love is not always the same.
I am changing, as I type.
I can be angry and sullen. I should let myself be angry and sullen.
Complaining is a useless exercise.
I learned that it's time to start figuring out what I want to do and make and think and be.
I want my next relationship to interrupt me. I really do want that. And I want instant spark over muted accumulated fondness.
I want everyone I love and respect to know I love and respect them. Vice versa.
I love validation. Learned I don't need it externally all the time, but it's hard to live without.
I made a list of the kind of work I want to make.
I worried about money.
I acted like a baby with you. I assumed with you. I did not work as hard as I could have for you. I did not always know what to say to you.
I did not, as planned, go to yoga every day.
I did drugs I thought I would never do.
I listened to new music.
I played guitar.
I sang.
I had a few sparkling adventures.
I made a few good stories. Told them again, later, exaggerated.
I wrote.
I watched Arrested Development and Skins, all the way through, each.
I made new friends.
I was in shows!
I was busy.
I walked like a zombie through some things.
I talked a lot. I learned to be more articulate.
I wished for things to change and erupt.
I realized I actually got a lot of what I wanted before. What's changed is what I want now.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Have you heard "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes?

Things I've Learned Today/in 2010:

Home, let me come home
Home is where I'm alone with you
Home, let me come home

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

45 Minutes Left in Existentialism

Typing quietly so as not to attract attttteennnnntttttioooonnnn
Sometimes I am distraught by how useless this whole subject is. In one way (excuse me while I kiss the sky), this is religion: elevating opinions to fact, and revering fiction with the austere severity called to mind by men in tassel-toed shoes. Curious that Sartre and De Beauvoir could discuss for hundreds of pages man's universal blight, curious that it should be studied in lecture halls, curious it could me a "major" a "discipline" a "subject" to be considered expert in. Philosophy is more conjecture than even the most theoretical science: there is no proof, and no potential for proof, anywhere. That shouldn't really mean the whole subject is useless (obviously Heidegger was smarter than me, so I should respect him, right?) but when discussions are conducted not as forums for volleying questions around but rather lectures devoted to committing vocab to memory, I step outside myself and let the thought fly by that we are all silly to be studying this inside. A real application of these theories (THEORIES THEORIES THEORIES) would better be served eating ice cream, while we talk. In the park. Living.

Loads of excuses this week for why I refuse to plunge unquestioningly into fields. I like to ask questions. Am I becoming sassy, am I cutting myself slack, or is my personal bullshit barometer gaining street cred?

Kid-I-once-thought-was-foreign who frequently sits cuddled over a laptop is dominating today's discussion (inane. About the value of explaining heady philosophy in layman's terms). That's kinda funny. I like him. He just pulled off the word 'presuppose' very elegantly.

As the future approaches, as I seem to become more hostile and defensive regarding life choices,I keep thinking about irreversible mistakes. Wrote this for spectrum:

Brittany Allen
Scene II: A Spectrum of Essays

I try to keep track of the things that make me cry these days. The actor in me wants to distill little tragedies, dissect them chemically and perfunctorily, follow droplets of moisture from where they sometimes well in the corner of my eyes up through their emotional nougat center and back through their microscopic physical properties with the unsentimental scrutiny of a scientist separated as much as BI-focally from a distant subject. On stage, it is to be seen as a skill, crying. It is a thing to strive towards being able to replicate on command, and with convincing, authentic ease.
Things that make me cry: Lost Pet signs, especially those with desperate monetary rewards promised in runny felt marker. A cold smattering of 70s power ballads. An embarrassing smattering of large-scale show-biz 90s musicals. These two documentaries: Imagine: The John Lennon Story and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. My best friends being sad. Lonely nights. Wakes. One particular 70s power ballad is Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”. Often, Lonely nights involve a certain rotation of predictable laments, some coulda-woulda-shoulda’s, some whiny wishing that either myself or the recent past had somehow unfolded dramatically differently. Both gestures are impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things. Come to think of it, “impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things” are tears. Themselves.
Gene Weingarten is typically a humor writer for The Washington Post. He also wrote an article that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing I think this morning: “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is it a crime?”. How could I call it ‘HORROR’ and not somehow be cheapening the adjectives, the verbs…Big men shaking. Sad-faced women, who will never be able to procreate or clear adoption records again, testifying that the day they left a baby in a sweltering car seat for hours (by MISTAKE) was really the most mundane, the most innocent of days. People who loved being parents, were good at being parents, but forgot one task one day. In the scheme of a life, the singular-ness, the mere seconds of omission involved in a massive error are so…dissolvable. Unsolvable. Mystic and terrible, not unlike a first tear, really, poetically-speaking.
Crying, read the article: Gene Weingarten will argue that a fatal distraction is not a crime at all. It is rather that which few among us would ever willingly concede to: it’s defeat, failure, unabashed human error of the worst kind. “Humans,” a source of his notes in the article, “have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible”. Not so, if these case studies (HORROR) of devastated parents can be considered. Despite any potential higher power. Despite the best efforts by the best people. There is such a thing as Luck, and it would seem that it lives across the street from Blunder but appears manically and intermittently and inconveniently as a neighbor, like an oft-away businessman or a wealthy family with other properties in other states. In this way, there is no justice with a ‘mistake’, just a lack of blessing. I listen to my music, I try to remember what in specific first made me cry.
Some of the parents have been judged before juries and judges, but most just by the heaviness of existing legally “innocent” of the kind of implacable crime that can only be paid for in debts of unfathomable, unending, unimaginable guilt. How do you move on from there, I wonder? What does the world become when ‘mistake’ is HORROR is unfair is forever unresolved? These terrible things that happen to nice people at random, the blinking time it takes for these events to be put in motion. I put them next to Lonely nights and Elvis Costello. I read. I leak a little and try to forget to study the chemical composition of my oozing tears. I want to believe that the next time I cry on stage it will be a conducted kind-of accident. A surprise. Unpredicted.
Petty. Pittances, in comparison, all the mistakes I have ever made. Will ever make? On a Lonely night, I make flow charts. On a Lonely night (reading a humor writer’s tragedy, lamenting the recent past, a Lost Dog sign, a day in class worrying that I am wasting my life) I knock on wood for Luck. For more Luck.
I listen to Elvis Costello, I look for rhyme. Reason. In the words I put on paper. In many different trajectories at once.

A divine ending: 35 minutes of this dismal pink and grey Martha Stewart in the 90s vomit space. There's no time, in life, to bounce back from horrific mistakes. I suppose attempt to make as few dramatic ones as possible? but it's becoming, melancholily enough, rather "Sartreian": say you do it all right. Say you mess up, miss some time. Say you're sitting in the back and are afraid and are not the sort of person who would walk out of a recitation straight into a love affair or maritime adventure.
What -- or more optimistically, WHERE -- is the point?