Love Letter

Dear New York,

I like to think of you as having some Grand Design. Yesterday the moon was full and seemed so close to grazing the tops of downtown buildings; I was convinced the universe was made only for me.

I’m sure you get this all the time – in fact, I know it – but just for those days when you feel low and shrunken, when the poor and hungry seem the only constant in the thankless, rushing masses, I hope you understand you’re a loved thing. Symbols are important in a wide world, and people everywhere worship all five extensions of this island. And I’m not referring to your glowering, cryptic churches or the sweeping cemeteries of the outer boroughs. Neither do I sing of the Great White Way, or the myth of the mid-western transplant. Not the immigrant or the Historical Society. (You can see my priorities here.) It’s a je-ne-sais-quoi, to borrow a phrase. The sum of you, I mean, is more exquisite than any of your parts. I think it’s the way your skyline appears across water. Take credit. Thank you for bodegas and subways that stay open all night, thank you for bridges and pizza and beaches, thank you for neon signs and street-side prophets and Friday nights into mornings and so much boiling blood it has to be love.

With that said, I really need your help. True, I’m just one more scrunched commuter in an anonymous 9:00 am sea, I’m just another actress/writer/server/student, I’m a single broad, I’m likely a Brooklyn hipster (ugh, I could be seventy thousand, I am seventy thousand, how cold to confront), but not everyone takes the time to actually sit down and write you a letter, right? I would even shamelessly ritualize, I’d go pay homage on a ferry or the top of the Empire State building, only I’m definitively broke and not-a-friggin-tourist. Because you are pliable like all your flaky constituents, I think you’d appreciate that it’s a fall day and Washington Square Park looks like a movie set (it just might be!) and babies are being pushed around by ethnic nannies and students are furtively smoking and men in sweatshirts and gloves are driving massive trucks inexpertly down side streets and businessmen are frowning at their lunch checks. I am away from all that, in a computer lab. It’s 2011. Hey.

Get-to-the-point-awready-I-ain’t-got-all-freakin-day OKAY, geez, cool your jets. I’m consulting you – the ultimate individual – for advice on how to live my life. I am young and looking for answers, but I’m somehow just old enough for people to have stopped handing down ‘yes’s’ and ‘no’s’; lately it’s all about the shrug-smile or the bracing “Figure it out!” or the misguidedly excited “You’re free! I envy you!” Graduate school applications sent away for have been lost in the mail. Invitations to join groups and form coalitions or continue on current work trajectories resist response. People I want to kiss won’t be leaving for the summer anymore, they’ll stick around, they’ll remind me of things, we’ll all physically age. Money is actually real, not fake. In a symbolic tradition, people are beginning to treat this impending end of my formal education as THE NEXT STEP or THE BEGINNING OF. Simultaneously, adults tut-tut and offer up cautionary tales: you’ll never have it so good. It only gets worse. But I have somehow managed to forget the twenty-one years so far of experience and book-learnin’ that oughta make me at least superficially capable of responding to this brave new world. Instead, I’ve lately been drinking a lot of wine and crying on public transportation and feeling pretty down and out, pretty sad, if you want to know. It has become near impossible to discern a self-worth. I make a lot of lists and go over a lot of recent humiliations to situate myself in time; I cast around for strange friendly eyes or old friends who want to say hello again to make a Me in Many.

But what I do know, what I can remember about the world, is that egomania is never the answer. Moping and self-anesthetizing does no one no good. So, don’t worry, I’m also making art and trying to read newspapers. I go to the movies and I buy lots of books. The circular trouble here is the way I’ve come to comprehend all this input by personalizing it; I make everything about me rather than making me about everything. Do you have any thoughts on that difference? You seem able to give and give and give and also live exotically, live with flair and confidence. I can’t separate impulses to be a fantastic human from being fantastic or being human, so I don’t feel like either ever. Dear New York, you are where lost people go. Dear New York, they say everyone here is a freak. Dear New York, if I can make it here I’ll make it…well, you know.

I wondered, then, if you’d lend me some grace – Statue-of-Liberty style. I wondered if you and your empowered-single-woman-Carrie-Bradshaw trip could pump up my avenue strut and banish some of this weepy lonely girl nonsense, maybe the windows of your Tiffany’s and Cartier’s could remind me that I do adore my reflection in morning light and Christmastime by Radio City means love is possible, always! I’d appreciate any historic gumption you’d point me to, the memories of distant, vague relations swing-dancing in a twenties Harlem of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. Tell me stories of your wild history, the possibility of change and action in the minute, the month, the passing year. Please let me be reminded of the world outside via the frantic fluttering of newspapers or the sad-eyed beggars at train stations, give me the perspective and love to stop simmering in myself, to care, to drive out, rather. And an encouraging word from the theatres at Times Square, an ecstatic inspiration from the HighLine view, a discount or a loft party from chic Tribeca, brunch in Brooklyn, heroes Joan Didion, Woody Allen, E.B White, the winding Guggenheim stairs, Kandinsky paintings in the MOMA, rock n’ rollers, et.al, the whole shebang. Anything you got. Anything symbol! Send me a sign! I am selfish to ask, I know it, I know it. But doesn’t it take a particularly indulgent, unrealistic soul to live here? To live anywhere?

Dear love of my present life, would you couch me in your clichés? Can I begin to build here, would you hold me, do you think, or should I ease on down to some other urban center? In which case, I’d ask your recommendation unto Chicago. Or Paris. Or Nazareth. Or Atlantis. (Limits are important, they hold the city in.)

Sincerely. Just sincerely.

Things we need

“I'd gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That's how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.”
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

I

I’m standing below the under-hang of an outdoor Protestant pavilion on Martha’s Vineyard, in the township of Oak Bluffs, on a thoroughly local holiday called ‘Illumination Night.’ There’s a bowtie-covered band leading a Community Sing in a medley of rousing Americana tunes under a bright yellow moon. No,in case you wondered, Illumination night has no visible mythology or origination tale; it’s just a big, vaguely Christian event devoted to lighting up the old clapboards that surround Oak Bluffs (called ‘gingerbread houses’) with paper Chinese lanterns. The lanterns don't seem to symbolize anything. There was no creation here. It is very beautiful, very idyllic, and almost surreally un-sexy.

I go to Illumination Night with my mom, who sings along with ‘Johnny Comes Marching Home Again’ and ‘My Hat it has Three Corners,’ both ditties she remembers from Girl Scout summers at a one Camp Lachenwald. We go with my sister, my cousin and two aunts. I’m standing in a manicured green oval of a park unpolluted, sickeningly sincere, in a crowd of people bleating their way through ‘America the Beautiful’ without a shred of irony. And here I’m thinking as I stand, my mother egging me to sing with every fiber of her enthusiasm: I am too New York for this. I am too modern a lady. If I was ever from this place, I have grown away.

We pass gingerbread houses with names (real names!) like ‘Just R’s’ and ‘Two Badcats’
and ‘Summertime.’ I begin to get more selfish in my reflections, more interested in the aftermath when I’ll write all the ridiculous down. The aunts want to tour the houses around the Oval, wave to the owners in their rocking chairs basking beneath the assorted glowing globes – I want to go home. So too do my sister and cousin, but they're rational about it because the old houses are enchanting; maybe this night is in fact the stuff of fairy tale. The others play games and giggle while I feel myself spinning into circles of bratdom that only ever seem to appear in me on family vacations, rings of barely concealed temper un-glimpsed for ages: whining, shuffling, pouting. It occurs to me, here on our annual island fun family getaway, that all the world's personalities scarcely change but rather solidify, gel into the corners of acceptable behavior for certain age groups. Your family gets it out of you. We are all of us baby sisters, older sisters, only children, mostly children, emphasis on children.

Now here's the real riddle. How can you know something is so so beautiful and so so temporary and even so, so want to get away?
How can that be?
It is a sad thing, I learn.

II

My grandfather has brought his slides. Everyone FREAK.
My grandfather brings slides to every family gathering. He brings the Carousel slide projector minted in 1970 probably, he brings the accompanying screen. We have all seen all the slides ever made, my family – a century's worth of memory in amateur photo. We've seen the trip to Bruges, the Derby's lake, we've noted the broken bones, the sulks, those conspicuously absent, the inexplicable stranger or forgotten friend, we've seen the Japanese pagodas, the ten kinds of Cadillac, my Grandmother's coats, my Grandmother's hairpieces, Swiss mountain-tops and action ski shots, the whole downtown of a 1977 Wiesbaden, San Francisco stoops, Colorado skylines, clocks in London, and hot air balloons, everyone on different bicycles, very old people in Topeka restaurants, birthday cakes, Easter egg hunts, homemade pies, bodies of water, poor young couples and their fragile Christmas trees, my Aunt Sharon's various ballet tutus, we've seen weddings, we've seen age-arranged and height-arranged and gender-arranged photos year after year, we've seen squealing infants on a hundred (feels like a hundred) different Santa's laps, also snow, also quicksand, all the things a smile or not a smile can contain. We've seen all the lives. We're bored now. We just want to go swimming, or maybe watch Jaws for the fifteenth time instead.

Most of the adults are – testily – still humoring grandpa after all these years, all these shows. This summer the projector's old focus button isn't working, so each photo requires the attendance of a frail and shaky finger to become clear. This annoys my mother. She says so. My older cousin falls asleep, my grandmother tut-tuts in an only semi-related fury, and me? I try not to laugh or sigh, I try to stay quiet. This will be my protest while the auntie's call out their codas of 'Do you remember those pants? I remember those pants!'. My eldest aunt living, not in any of the photos tonight, is the best at this game.

There are supposed to be two shows this week (we caught him loading the projector again on Wednesday) but I think someone got to Grandpa. Someone must have pulled him aside and said, either gently or not so gently (he could deserve either, given all this time, all the different responsibilities loaded into the faces in those photos) that we're not up for it, we've already seen it, we don't want to. I spend some time thinking about how he must have reacted. I spend some time wondering if this broke his heart.

III

'Do not believe everything you think' – One of those cutesy wooden home placards for sale in Vineyard Haven

I read two books on vacation. The sacrifice I make for this task is:
1)Fishing with my brother, father, cousin
2)Learning to Sup-board off the pier with my sister and two girl cousins
3)Going to Edgartown to shop with Grandma and my eldest aunt
4)Going to Vineyard Haven with my mom, my youngest aunt, my cousin, my sister
5)Maddening my sister with a midnight flashlight while she sleeps

I read David Nicholls' One Day and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. I'd been looking for beach-reads, sort of. Both these books are about the impossibility of pure happiness and love's limits, sort of. No day is perfect, no week is perfect, no life is perfect.

My mother explains her Theory of the Children in the car on the way somewhere; we're psychoanalyzing (read:gossiping about) the relatives. She turns to me thoughtfully when I ask her if she always knew how I would turn out and says “I thought so. I was right until you turned thirteen. You went another way.” She pads this remark with love and compassion; she says I am the best possible now, a lovely, radiant thing, she is in awe of me (hehehe). But she also confirms one of my worst fears. I was stronger at some point when I was little, a bossy thing marshaling my young cousins into annual productions and leading the girl pack with not a twinge of neurosis or insecurity (or so it seemed). Now, I am quite neurotic. Now, they call me kind and thoughtful and possessive of a good moral compass. I never said anyone ever called me modest.

But maybe irrationally and certainly with more feeling than I care to explain or reckon with, I want to sob for this little girl swallowed. I am recognizable, mostly (“90% so!” says my mother) but in fractions have peeled, like an orange, like everyone, undoubtedly. Human now? A lady now?
I sacrificed something somewhere thoughtlessly, misplaced it like a book in the rain. It's a secret to me now. Cold aging rationale: 'Oh, well.'

IV

Your life is silly indeed if its central project is to discern itself (an idea lifted from Lorrie Moore). In this way, no love can really be useless. My baby dead cousin is in the air all over this year, her whispered name like the dragonflies in daytime and murmuring mosquitoes at night. Grandma pulls me and my sister aside to tell stories. She tells us about encountering racism in a 'Colored use back door' sign in Topeka. She explains the origination, the creation myth, of our island vacations.
To my sister she says: “I remember asking you, just a young thing, if you thought we should go back to New Hampshire again. You said no, Grandma, not without Lauren.”
My big little sister, usually as unknowable to me as a math equation, starts to cry. My grandma is upset and tries to comfort her. These wounds could be almost sealed up in the sea wind here, but no, no, they linger. My cousin gives my sister advice later in the week about writing a college essay. She tells her merely to be 'thoughtful and honest.' I think about what a fantastic older sister she would have continued to be, and jealously, sickly wonder if she'd be better at it by now than I.

Saturated melancholy, melancholy in technicolor, temporary and too-beautiful, too-precious, too-fragile, an Eden, a life. Standing in a group. Standing in a cluster on the steps. Our laughter carries over the ocean posing for a family picture that my dad keeps messing up by accident. Our tummies become swollen with good food and we continue laughing, the purest kind of laughing, stargazing, playing Whiffle ball, splashing off the dock, birdwatching, calling out ferry names. America crosses my mind (the Obamas are here!) but no, our play feels sincere and specific. I read The New York Times cover to cover and drink my aunt's famous lattes. I strut around in summer dresses but do not brush my hair.
We are free.

Too free? Should I even dare? I feel like I'm refusing a present. I feel like I'm clinging to what's become a familiar cynic's pose. I feel entirely myself and entirely not myself in the suspended disbelief and age and memory of my sprawling, nutty family. I recall what it feels like to stand on steps inside other families – my family that yells and curses and drinks and smokes, for instance, my family that keeps no secrets in language. Younger but not less wise, more breakable. Everywhere I look I'm sacrificing something.

Saying goodbye is hard. It has gotten harder and harder as it's grown more frequent. I ache for my silly, sweet pets with their painted genetic smiles. I ache for a feeling I know I won't ever have again – bored, too comfortable on a summer Saturday, endless movies with my family, no end in sight. My sister and brother have mentioned in passing that they feel they know each-other better than they know me because we “just didn't live together that long” (twelve years I spent dashing from friends' houses to rehearsal, it appears) and I ache for those ending childhoods I've missed. I do not want the guilt inherent to my apartment (which I show my parents, more pleased than they are, when they drop me off), so, today, I feel no relief. My heart whirs because it's homeless.

Mostly I wish for a long, long talk with my mother that ends in her understanding me enough to say it all back in sweet English, I need a sounding board strong enough to answer all the rhetoricals I'll ever need to send into space. It's not that it's not family. It's not being alone or being with others. It's not being anywhere or being nowhere. It is double negatives. I believe in happiness, bliss, love, worthy endings, maybe I even believe that death isn't such a tragedy and there could be a world beyond imagination, I believe in all these things. I've known it all in a present life, on a recent week.

Creation myths and comedies, firework finales to make your head spin and your eyes leak, sticky patches, lonesomeness and entire-ness, it doesn't END, it just gets MESSY... If I were more of an optimist (more of a twelve year old?) I'd take me by my shoulders. I'd shake me, gently clear away my tears and quiet my mind, I'd dance with me to a disco song and cure me of migraines and upset stomach forever, I'd show me the future on a golden dream's reel, I'd tell me it's over, get a new show, I'd lead me to a bug-less meadow, sit me down, tell me straight, tell me now – NOW – the Great Work Begins.

(Because vacations end.)

She sang you a song; you sat through it

A New York City summer! my New York City summer! the island is on fire! Everyone, underground, sugared over with sweat, glazed like so many donuts, tempers running high and trains running slow. I see whole days in 'opportunities for central air.' I taste beer in my mouth all the time, I taste the cool amber bottle and the flaking label. I smell lavender. I hear indie music everywhere I go, mostly Arcade Fire and lo-fi ice cream trucks and girls playing hand-games out on Franklin Avenue, out past their bedtime. My Sundays are real Sundays – no one calls, no one emails, the hours go slow, they follow the sun. I get high on Netflix and bookstores and Seamless.com; my outrageous joy in these things makes me feel nursing-home-old but also toddler-safe.

And if I ever feel empty in a day, PLANS are what fill me: if I'm drowning in my twisted bunches of wrinkly sheets (themselves sprinkled over with Nilla wafer crumbs and receipts and other things I just need around me, this my own island, could-be-crypt)... when I start days with goals like “try to understand what's so great about Radiohead” or “form opinion on the debt crisis”...when I eat and eat and eat and dream of things I will do some other day, when the sun goes down, maybe, when the leaves change, maybe... I must make a mental note to remember that this is peace. Or just as good, and nameless.

You know 'Daylight' by Matt and Kim? You remember the sun on your squinting face when you heard it live and too-fast? Baby-fist-sized art with meaning, not so much meaning, a little bit of meaning, enough to want to remember. Rattling coda: how often do other people think about the things you think about? That 'sex every seven seconds' thing, is that racket or real?

So PARTICULARLY in summer, I think. Particularly in midtown, where the humidity levels often make sidewalks feel like the inside of someone's mouth. Particularly on nighttime strolls, particularly with red lipstick on, particularly with no one demanding a product of you, particularly with time on your hands, particularly in packets of giggling and what can only be described as good, clean fun. It gets easy this way to trip down rabbit holes, to slip off horses' backs, to go ricocheting across sky or water like a flying thing or a flying thing's shadow in a lake (...what).

The season here stands in as metaphor or simile (whatever); I am using it as a cheap emotional prop. What I'm really thinking about, what I really want cyberspace to know, is just too scattered and flung to make tidy in coherent paragraphs and law-abiding sentences. So I'll just continue to spell it out: “summer” love is drunk brunch and movies with like-minded ladies, “summer” love is talking about grief and a mythic set of good-old- days with a best friend, summer love is all the things I liked and believed in during high school and elevate now, it's that music. Being in love -- in like -- in summer is thus aloft, ridiculous, devoted, nostalgic, sweet, even though it's only a boy, you're only a girl, it's only a collection of months.

Periods of time that evoke frames of mind and feeling = zany words, words like firework trails. Time is funny. Periods of rest and recuperation make me feel like life is a boomerang, with tides of going away and currents of coming home. I'm sailing away these days. I'm on a vacation from certain strains of me. I'm kidding, I'm a kid, I take the money and run, I'm under no obligation to make sense to you. And liking a distant, vague YOU in a lavender haze, on a pulpit probably better suited to revelation or review (being a pulpit and not a confessional) on that hot cloud of cause-less celebration and hours and hours and hours of nothing-something...tralalalala!, that's what I've got. That's what you've got too, I'm guessing.

COOL it, imaginary critics. Being in love (in like, in space) is only a problem, as everyone knows, when it continues into fall. Though I might fall from here. It's quite high up.

Restless-aunt Week

Remind yourself it's just a job, ad thus a sickly, doomed kid of friendship. To begin with.

There is Gabriel Long-Arms. He is a circus freak; he grazes doorways, he's spindly. He's an actor, too.
Jeanine calls you sweetie and snaps gum. You thought she was your age but she's not, she's just a very slinky 32.
Ed reminds you of a childhood friend who died in a freak boating accident. He has no 'other life' (neither of them do); he wears gold chains and judges your ability to do your job instead.
You're in love with Jerad, who lopes around like a hunched turtle and teases you, sometimes rescues you from a rogue tray or a spill. He's Eastern European, but his accent suggests he might be the kind of guy raised in a pack of blacks (like yourself), but the question is...will-that-mean-he-understands-you-less-or-more?
Every day at Wickham's is a train to Bowling Green, or a favorite song that's way too short – full of promise, ultimately disappointing.
People in the restaurant all ought to have other lives – some are painters, some are dancers. You look for their art in the way they spin silverware or talk shop. No – the biggest trick is to stop being such a chickenshit, to shake, rattle and roll like a working cog. People yell. They yell AT you. They yell at you with the surefire conviction that you mean business, you mean evil, your business is evil, you are a deep canker sore of a problem in the mouth of their happiness. You're the wait, you're the lull, you're the rush, you're how-come-I'm-nine-covers-behind, you're smudged windows, but you are paid to smile. It's not a sad lament story of woe – it's not like you mine coal. And hey, as for the money? No one anywhere is being paid enough so just cut that mess, teenager. Grow up, out, a pair.
A ma follows you from a 4 to a 6 train one night, peering at you like he's trying to communicate something across a language barrier or without a tongue. You're just sitting there, quietly considering jacking up your roommates' share of an electric bill (because two of them are quiet, shedding monsters and the other one, the real one, is flaunting an overly attentive boyfriend like sweet new jewelry lately). What a chump, you chump. But remember the miners and rejoice.
The man isn't a rapist (nor is he a future husband, a prophet or a policeman), he's not anything, he just gets lost on his own, he becomes an anecdote to you. At work. You tell it-him-the-the man- about him to people at work who aren't entirely your friends but know an awful lot of your secrets anyways, an awful lot of your worst jokes. Sounds you make. Faces you make. Sexual horror stories, repetitive worries, fears in canon. These are the things we repeat over and over and so the fabric of your personality, de facto, rhythmic, unchanging. And where have you heard?
Oh, right. No one can tell what's wrong with them but everyone else can see instantly. Mad Men. A true thing.
Work has become a place to mull over the miniutiae of human interaction, for instance – a white woman is mean to you and Shannick one day. When Ralph Goldberg-the-Boss arrives, the aggressor becomes a purring cat. Maybe this is about race. Maybe Jerad's distance is about race. It could be the age difference or the fact that you're at work, but a small soldier says it could also be the skin – and there's no certainty. You remember being shown a house with your whole family sometime in high school, a big rambler in the chic suburbs. The old lady realtor was mean and you swore you could taste it, then, only it didn't compute – if she only knew me... (remember to stop being such a chickenshit).
But that can't really be your preoccupation. It is trite and you are not, you have strong bones beneath a kind, sort of sentimental and in a weird way you assume very rational carcass. You believe in pieces of peace. You can understand flip sides, for the most part – flip sides sparing furious hate groups with silly names. But meeting people, it's easy to smile and nod, to accommodate, to say 'that makes sense', to say 'thank you', 'welcome', and worst of all, 'enjoy.'

A night the moon is full an ex-boyfriend comes into your bar, and you are like a movie: of all the ______'s in all the ______, you had to ____________ into ________. He just smiles at you dopey and you look for places on his face you've affected; patches you can claim. You're looking for damage and remorse and regret. You think you find some. Twitching above a left eye like low-potassium.
The moon warps and twists across the glass window of a building opposite. It is not the moon, it is a street light. He did love you, but did-he-understand-you. Does it matter now. Does he want fries with that.

You pass some more tests. Shannick is loud about disliking gay marriage. You are mad, you let her know, but some people start hating her after this. You don't. You are a 50s housewife concerning sex, in a movie, on TV – you decide not to talk about it. This is the workplace.
Meanwhile, time is passing at the workplace.
You are growing roots and getting nicknames. People like you – that's it – and that feels good. Liking people feels good. You make a circle, you provide a surface, you provide a service, but no matter how hard you try you show but one side. You're the moon, dummy.
There's scarcely time for anything but caricature – people are busy eating, finishing eating, money's changing hands, you're just an ornament. It's not about you.
On the subway, look for eyes looking for eyes. Start that way. Then, start looking for eyes looking for your eyes. People reading the books you're reading or have read. Say hi OR – swallow timid coos. Think of Gerad, being easy and normal and Eastern European, sliding down a mountain on a snowboard (Gerad snowboards). A man across from you reads blatantly over someone's shoulder. Stop being such a chickenshit, you think – to, about, everyone.

The world is a frustrating place. All it ever is is the 4 train, and that means grating teenagers and other writers or other actors profaning what people must think of you by being loud. You have always, you will always, wear colorful clothes to stand out. These days you wear make-up. You've only listened to one very indie bad for weeks now, you can't pull yourself away, you're sucking on it.
And elsewhere, people who mean things to you and have meant things to you might be attempting to digest you, to reconcile your contradictions, to dig for bones below, people could be on their home couches, pondering the magnificent freakness of you – the parts you delight in, the sweet, the spicy.
I said, people could be. But they probably aren't. Eyes looking for your eyes – only the very, very lonely look back, and in the middle of the night. Big old Harvest Moon eyes, vacant, without questions. Have they not noticed, you wonder. Have they already seen, you speculate. Who are you digesting by candlelight, who is spinning like a basketball around and around in your mind.
Everyone who works at a restaurant, you're learning, has failed at something OR has a gap that was once a deep want and is now a deep pit, requiring something to fill it. You assess. You organize the dinner menus. You dream of snowboarding trips with Jerad, you dream of catching all the boy's eyes, you dream of catching all the world's eyes, you dream of dreaming.

BE THIS II

Pies and Thighs
Cafe Reggio
Midnight in Paris (Meditations on fauxstalgia!)
Blue Valentine (Meditations on bona fide endings)
Jim Shepard: Love and Hydrogen
Never Mind the Buzzcocks
Fort Greene (esp. Greenlight Books, BAM Rose Cinema, Biergarten, dainty brunch places)
Patti Smith's 'Horses'
The Rumpus www.therumpus.net
Bonnaroo!
The Lord of the Rings
The Moth storytelling series
Stax volt, Billie Holliday, Etta James
Stand-up comedy; Upright Citizens Brigade
NPR
salmon
Astoria
naked!
John Lennon's last interviews with Rolling Stone
Robert Christgau

this is a feeling vow

It's raining today on my borough (well, across my brief window in only a corner of the whole shebang) and I like the sound of cars below skating through ponds of wet debris because it's all quite to-the-point. Despite my protest, despite my thinking I deserve sunshine happy joy always, here's grey, I'm to reckon with grey today. The clouds are not a personal affront because weather isn't emotional – it's today just another surface to project upon. And water reflects, easy-peasy.

It's the end of the school year now. It's a Tuesday. This is a pink room with pictures on the walls and it's still almost clean from a recent scour. I am a lady sitting in bed, and here's today's motif: Language is a flawed net with which we're tasked to communicate, make meaning, live – but alas, it's the only one we have (A Cited Source).

I am a lady in a pink room with pictures on the walls who thinks in words; I think in long strands of them, I think in sentences, I think in looped, circular, theory, I think in verbs and adjectives. We took a test in high-school sophomore psychology called “What Kind of Thinker Are You?” and I remember lots of people around me saying they perceived the world in images and I'm still mystified by this idea – for some reason, their way seems so much more clear and applicable. But I have a love affair with language! He's my svelte dance partner, my solipsistic counter-part, my compound word mailbox, my deep, guttural, entrenched, kindergarten, winsome, this-is-a-list-of-things-that-crack-on-your-tongue...

At the Tisch Salute yesterday (which I “worked” with the Unsinkable Molly Gillis), Brian Grazer told the graduating class his success' biggest secret: he is a man who works constantly to push himself out of his comfort zone. He used the word 'disrupt' and handed this down as a task – in order to expand (soul-wise) as individual artists in the modern world, we ought to exist in a constant stretch and rub up against discomfort and terror actively, consistently. And now I begin to think about how disruption and displacement talks to capital-s-Self, meaning here the lady in the pink room that's still mildly clean, the lady who thinks in words. Given: she wants to be whole, she aspires to be grand and graceful and competent and satisfied, loved and loving, she also desires to be stretched and tested. So where to direct this sage wisdom?

I am twenty now. I call myself 'becoming' and 'confused', I call myself 'literary' (my mind rotates on that English axis!), I call myself lots of things and call other things lots of things and begin to realize slowly the flaws in even this, my precious, sacred, capital-s-Self system of processing the entire universe around me. I know Brian Grazer wasn't directly suggesting “abandon all your norms and preconceived notions, go out and BE someone entirely different!” but at least in the capital I truck in, actions and existence ride a super similar wavelength. I think in language, I look at the world in language, and as a result I work and act and relate to others in language too, which means in a way that It is all of what I am. Follow? So if I am to really blow up Brittany and sacrifice her comfort to the altar of professional success and deep soul business, this MUST be where I start. In my library.

More proof:

I was with someone recently with whom I could never completely communicate. I felt like I never understood the things he said to me on this fundamental, tonal level – I never knew if he was joking or being serious, I never knew where we were standing on the planet. And predictably, I did the things I usually do when frightened and worried, fluttering around like a trapped bird – I spent minutes and hours and days attempting to boil my own feelings and my own opinions on our talks and the emotional undercurrent of all these talks (Follow?) into words, and because I hadn't yet understood this man I couldn't (didn't) do it. I flailed. Flailing reminded me of all my other stabs at something like love and the trappings of each journey, and I couldn't help but notice recurrent symptoms: being vulnerable with another person = discomfort = flakiness = inability to act in a human fashion. And ironically, my Brian-Grazer-disruption in all these instances led to a destruction of said sacred words (which are lonely things) and resultant complete terror, and ultimately bad juju all around. Bruised or broken hearts, bones, egos, mystified minds, long weeps on public transportation. The coda becomes that familiar why-haven't-I-learned-anything-in-all-my-life's-travels-YET...

There was a long period of not talking and not communicating (in the most psychiatric sense of the word) with this other person, all while I tried to foist feelings into adjectives and events into verbs. And to cut the crap, here's what happened: I hurt someone. And they hurt me. And I don't know why. And I remember this Holy mocking moment in our last phone call (which I conducted in the mist on St. Mark's place, shamefully away from the three page prepared speech I'd written earlier at Think Coffee...)
Him: So have you said everything, then? What else you got?
Me: (Long, long pause. Groping for....) No. I mean. I guess not.
The end of language. Conflation/ipso facto –The end of Brittany. Help me Brian Grazer, teach me how to pray!

The roads of my window/borough/universe are paved in lexicon (looking for synonyms here, bear with me) and as that's my most precious and problematic device, I understand, with a sinking dread, that I have been asked (as an extension of the graduating Tisch class of 2011) to abandon this. If even only for a little while. This is the scariest. I'm already aware of all these extra regions and the edges of things which can't be explained. I'm thinking back to all the spaces I've let widen between me and people I want (oh honestly I did want you, too, and I couldn't say it how dumb IS that you're dumb too I am so so hurt). And now I want to talk about how language and action meet and coexist and bleed into one another, and how my heart feels and wishes and how frightened I am of certain concrete milestones looming in my own personal next twelve months and the Alexander McQueen exhibit and dieting and my best friend's return from a faraway country and what it is to be crazy and and and –

Breathing. This is what top Hollywood producers mean by baby steps and we all know infants don't mince words.

PS ADDENDUM, ALSO SURPRISE -- There aren't words for some ways to feel. See?
Cold, sad, lonely, bright, hopeful, sheepish, ashamed, battered, cruel, objectified, mean, unfortunate, wishful, other parties, there will be other parties, other lovers, there will be other lovers, convincing, death, terror --
I mean, did you get any of that?

BE THIS

Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album)
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster, esp. "Authority and American Usage", note I mean TODAY)
Tea roses
Astral Weeks (Van Morrison)
Maggot Brain (Funkadelic...Pitchfork told me that George Clinton directed the lead guitarist to play 'as if his mother had just died'. Also, 'Can You Get To That')
Leonard Cohen (Songs of Love and Hate)
69 Love Songs (The Magnetic Fields)
Elle Magazine
Frozen raspberries
Wes Anderson movies
Jaime Wright's "my stuggle"
caught in a thunderstorm
twenty
Pablo Neruda
Badalona beach
dressed like a rock star
this list is degenerating
fun fun fun.

Small Relevant Fictions Until They Sink In

Pria Mara with razor-burn up and across her thighs. Pria Mara sighs. It's the only way to breathe deep. Pria Mara can't sleep. She's fake, though, so, no...worries.

And what had she wanted to say earlier in the shower (the shower was a perfect metaphor...it was only ever too hot or not quite hot enough)? Oh yes. The blinking bold cliche of Sunday night. Smoking a Parliament inside a Bank of America ATM portal, frantically waving down cabs in a weary city. Weary is key. She'd been sleepy. And he'd been kind. He hadn't known her last name. He'd actually uttered the words, "I'm not looking for anything serious" before not walking her to the door. People are complicated. She always assumed. But in that paradigm, who to resent -- the Tom Cruise-or-similar perps, the pioneers? The "culture, man" with its invisibility, it smells like burned bagels, rank. Or thinking wider PM and all the feelings she notes the conspicuous lack of, all the thoughts she hates to find coda. No. It isn't any different. Not with sweet kisses, not with big heavy sighs, not BEING TOUCHED at all. That wasn't the most fun part. And lo, she's lost the most fun part, anticipating this alleged most fun part. Let's settle on "culture, man." Track the bastard down, we'll have a trial.

This is not the low point of her life. This is exactly what it sounds like. Travel like Goldilocks, seek and steal and care enough. So much work to jerk. Static, lazy little sentences. Blurts. This is what I got:

You’re an alien to basics, motherfucker. You’re a shrimp. Don’t be a wump chump, put pen to paper and slide I mean let-it-all-slide down. I’m talking to you, look hard at my face. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Are you experienced? Hop to it, dope.
Here’s the gimmick. Here’s the secret. No one will ever really ask too much of you. No one will ever know how to ask you for something you can’t give. Maybe I should rephrase: no one can be crueler to you than your own personal self, genius. No one else will know your weak points. No one else’s mind can throw you around like your own. There’s a lot of songs -- a LOT of songs -- people sing about ‘my own worst enemy’, realized in their own personal self, of course, you know what that means without friggity frack frack Black Tar or Ice, I know you do. You’re smart. I can see it in your cool beans. That will hurt, kid. It hurts to be smart. Being smart will always alert you to what you don’t know, and eventually to what you can’t know. Us dummies live in the shadows. We have more fun in the dark. You ever read that Plato short story? It’s like that. We like the dark. It’s all like chess, it’s all like a sacrifice, you decide what to get turned on to, you get turned on. Obvious oblivion or sharp, flinty tumors. Yeah. You know. I’m repeating myself, you know.
If you’re using any of this, I want a Mercedes Benz from your first million doll-hairs. Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz! Ha!

Colin was writing the graduation speech. He’d been hand-selected by a board of student council members and teachers to do it. That was how it worked at his school, you didn’t even apply -- a secret, somewhat anonymous board got together after hours and just yanked some hapless senior out of the yearbook. Well, he figured there was more to it than that, but it was still a strange choice -- Colin didn’t get especially good grades. He was well-liked but not the best-liked. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t an athlete, he didn’t have a lot of hot mamas following him around all the time. He drove a Trans Am.

Fat lot of good it did the kid, the girl, sitting on piles of unwashed laundry (do your laundry add LAUNDRY to your grand poobah to do-list) waiting for the Joe to call, the Caroline to call, the Art Garfunkel to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone. A lot of life was waiting. Pria met Uncle Jethro on line at the gas station buying his weekly cocktail of Crest toothpaste, two-count-em-two Lotto tickets one bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos and a Corona 40 for the left hand, a tall boy Bud for the right. “I’m balanced, like the law.” Sometimes he also bought a wad of skunky chewing tobacco but she’d never seen him swallow.

Pria Mara lived down the road from Uncle Jethro and Colin, on the crest of the hill where the block visibly started to improve. She lived by a Neighborhood Watch sign and around a mailbox coalition -- little ladies with mailboxes, they had a coalition, who knew? Pria Mara was the solo endeavor and single fruit of the loins of Paola and Gussie Mara. Her parents were quiet people. They listened to Edith Piaf on a quiet turntable, quietly cutting vegetables as the season permitted. They were good at silently exerting a will that often left Pria guilty. She could feel, for instance, their hollow disappointment waft through the kitchen (guised as garlic) the afternoon she told them “The Grad Board picked Colin Culkey to deliver the speech, not me.”
“Aren’t your grades quite a bit better than his?” her mother asked.
“It’s not just about grades.”
And: “Mmm.”
It was like sex. You just got used to it.

Did they know each other? Did they know know each other? Pria and Colin had ridden the same bus to school for the better part of ten big years. Their little points of eye contact could be counted on one hand, the words exchanged eight digits tops. He and Uncle Jethro had moved in down the block at some untraceable, unmemorable moment -- she couldn’t remember. Colin Culkey not a threat. Colin Culkey flew low below the radar. Pria Mara was a schooled soul, she cared about grades and extracurriculars. They’d carpooled on a school trip to a reconstructed eighteenth century village in the tenth grade. They’d played the license plate game and gossiped harmlessly and it had meant very little, quite little. They smiled in greeting.

Did she think he was a thick wedge of man cheese? Couldn’t say. She didn’t keep a diary.
On Graduation day, Pria Mara wore a white dress because that’s what all the girls had been asked to put on beneath their robes. Her parents kissed her perfunctorily getting into the car, getting out of the car and just as soon as they got a hold of her with diploma in hand. It had been a boring ceremony. For the Principal’s Talk and the dreaded Choral Segment she’d been picking gunk out from beneath her fingernails. When Colin Culkey stood to deliver the student address, she’d run out of fingers.
“I owe my Uncle Jethro my first million dollars for what I’m about to say,” he’d begun. This had gotten a laugh. Pria thought the timing was weird, that the laugh was preemptive and planted and perhaps tonally inappropriate. “It’s very hard to live inside mistakes. It’s so hard that most people on this planet labor in service of ignoring or obliterating them. Mistakes.” Colin Culkey wiped some nervous sweat from the rim of his mortar cap. It was very sweet to Pria. He looked at home in the words he’d chosen, like someone in their Saturday lounge pants.
After the ceremony was over, Pria looked for Colin, to tell him something about what she’d thought. She hovered behind Uncle Jethro for a moment before her parents swooped in, but realized just as space before Colin cleared that she had nothing to say really, they weren’t friends.

Important Scientific Research

Fatalism. I have a lot to say about dating, I have words to yell and punch and absorb. And I have to tell you about it. This isn’t a diary because I have to tell you about it, I need you to breathe this same air and be as confused.
I just finished Muriel Barbery’s book The Elegance of the Hedgehog this morning; this is a book about small beauty and people looking for connection and loneliness. It’s really lovely and I recommend you read it. That’s one.
But mostly, this weekend starting Thursday, I’ve been running a kind of experiment -- its genesis comes from watching way too much Sex and the City and spending time looking for truth in that fiction. I tried to blitzkrieg my skin, certain habits, postures and attitudes, facial expressions and quirks. I went out on three different nights imitating another kind of girl (the kind on Sex and the City) because there is a limited amount of external locus rationale that can satisfy an intelligent single woman. I wore a red dress, and later a hickey, and later a green dress, and I nodded and smiled and let myself float on tides and act real un-classy in a few different places I can probably never return to again.
Did no one ever tell you that dating is bizarre? That hooking up in bars is bizarre? There is nothing natural at all about either experience. Let's switch, you'll see. Go.

You’re on a date. You’re trying to hold on to your person, I mean your purse, it’s an uphill battle. You think you know what the other brain-attached-to-mouth is thinking but are far too afraid to suggest this with your own face. People hand you things in cans and bottles and slowly the walls erode and the worl blurs, becomes a painting of rain. And here you stand on an opened continent with what could be an open heart -- do you remember from before? Did it feel like this?
He doesn’t touch you until all the cliché cornerstones have been covered (do you want to come back to my place for a while? Do you want to hang out in my room?). The points of contact are not quite electric, contain no seismic charge, but they’re nice. It’s a surprise that being with someone else can just be nice. It seems like it ought to be both more and less amazing at the same time; the gentle mediocrity is a bracing reminder that you’re a) no angel and b) no prototype.
Sleeping is the best. Never mind what you tell the girls later. He’s a good sleeper, and he seems to like exploring you gently even if he says nothing and you very rarely find your eyes touching. It’s another surprise that this part, the timid tiptoe towards dawn, is unwelcome in a way. It’s not so awkward to be watched putting underwear on, it’s not so vile to kiss someone else with morning mouth, it’s best to be asked “are you sure you have to leave right now?” And nice, nice, nice, like sweet white silk, like little old ladies, like smiles across space -- this has been nice. No one’s earth is shattered, maybe gently rocked. It’s easy to be brave.
Of course it’s also easy to start wishing, even as early as Chambers Street, that this had been more than nice. This is no epiphany and it’s not a loss, but there’s work ahead, you see. Love is rare. And it must be real, if only because the word ‘nice’ exists.
But how fine to simmer in a magnificent You, a WOMAN capable of self-preservation and contact and very low-stakes smalltalk. Walk that walk of shame, sashay that walk of shame, giggle and titter at You, misunderstand You, marvel at You. Bat away small longing for an idea of a mother you’ve never known -- not because the real thing isn’t fabulous, but because you’re up to imagining. Fight off impulses to braid your hair in pigtails and rewind whole reams of years like the Willy Wonka VHS we needed to replace twice. Brush your teeth instead. Live instead. If you don’t live like this, you’ll die like that, and while that’s not OBJECTIVELY the worst case scenario no one wants to do the subtraction.
And in bed, now, you, me, sit with a cell phone very close because you never know who you’ll have reeled in for keeps. Maybe the GUY FROM THE BAR (and yet, how laughable. People don't MEET people in BARS, do they??) who left a mark on your neck but called you to make sure you were home safe, said he liked you, said he ‘had a good feeling about you’, even told you he loved you (drunk) and walked you all the way up to the train doors closing. Maybe the smiley gentleman who bought you a fine dinner and made for fine conversation but bid you goodbye in the rain anyways, an hour later, anyways. Archetypes. Maybe the boy who’s arms you woke up in, who seemed sort of humorless but liked all the same books, who kissed you very gently.
To demonstrate a metaphor, please understand me: we can be close and cold, we can be brave and foolish, it can all be hilariously easy or wildly complicated. Try to tell your own stories to your own friends. Nod at one another so it’s clear you understand. But no one understands (I mean, people rarely understand) because there is air between even the cells in your own body. And I begin to wonder if understanding is the point, if fulfillment of a supposed want is the point, if there is a point, what is the point. You looking for skin? Can be done. You want dinner, you want Rolodex names? Cake. You looking for an earth shaker? Seems you could wait and fare just the same, that is if ‘settling’ for you is one of the first two. And of course ‘settling’ becomes compounded by stakes. Could you die alone? Would you? It won’t be your choice in an obvious way, but…you know.
And it takes a very specific kind of person to even consider the prospect of dying alone before they turn twenty-six, it does, John Cusack, I hear ya. It takes a very specific kind of person to consider why we think this prospect is so scary. It takes specific people to believe in love and enjoy blind dates and read certain authors and drink certain drinks -- there’s your argument for the six billion. We’re not the same, none of us, we don't even want the same things. That's a grapple. That's a bitch. So what am I doing with you? What do I want from you? Why should I wait for you?

Yellowtail; Love Thyself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not My Diary!

Copping Helen Fielding:

Three weeks worth of sedentary soul-searching and personally-crafted 'rehab from college' course (i.e snacks, Scott Pilgrim...) leads to all-encompassing, horrendously obvious, back-to-square-one-type relevation. Am sexually frustrated. This is not a reiteration per se; I don't mean deeply and metaphysically lonely or impotent-in-face-of-world kind of frustration, I mean purely, elementally physically, horny. Why is world so bleak. Everyone should be having sex, as seems like most peaceful and logical state to exist in at all times. Point of this missive is to rally world into frenzied, orgy-like state.

In a certain lens, this might seem pathetic.
Transparent.

But upon further scrutiny, it is actually very socially advanced and honest.

Go forth, my friends! Fornicate! AND TELL ALL YOUR NOT-CURRENTLY-ENTWINED FRIENDS.