Common People Like You

Oh, baby. Here we go.
Five or so years ago I bet my kid brother that the world would not end in 2012, contrary to the predictions of an ancient civilization's ancient calendar and also maybe Nicholas Cage. I was giddy with the cheekiness of this – even though kid brother was only ten at the time – and the moment after we shook hands to seal the deal I broke down and told him the joke: best case scenario, the world continues and I make fifty dollars. Worst case scenario: the world ends, my corpse keeps the change.

This still is funny to me. When I am very poor, I think about the fifty bucks I stand to make. My brother (less 'kid' now) has of course since realized his error and now finds himself in the unusual position of defending the apocalypse, because being right is everything in our family. And yesterday it actually became 2012, and it struck me that this stupid bet has lingered into its prescient year while more important promises have eroded in time, and nowadays the President is black and the Middle East is altered and it's good, isn't it grand, isn't it great, isn't it swell, so yes, some things stay put and where you left them. Others move around, the way I still half-believe my toys must do when no one is watching.

To ring in the new year, I threw a familiar party with familiar faces. We drank too much champagne and did not watch the sun rise. In the morning, I made a casual list with two columns: practical resolutions (read the paper, consider this 'gym' everyone's always talking about) and milestones managed in 2011 (none of your business). In the way of these things, all I could think about were the inevitable, cowardly holes in my wishes, the consistencies, the repeats. I went on to not read the paper or exercise for the rest of the day. Instead, I continued a Mad Men marathon now into its grand and (probably) forty-fifth hour.

So come with me! Mad Men is an interesting place to go if you're feeling stationary and the same as usual, because Matthew Weiner has actually done an incredible thing. By all rights, the stories in this series are prescribed: people watch, in part, because they like to marvel at how everyone behaved in a mythic, American 'before.' Look at the cold housewives, the smokers, the philandering, high-functioning-alcoholic businessmen, the closeted gay men living lies. The show is naturally governed by a lot of historical milestones that I remember only from NSL in high school – yet completely not, at the same time. Inside of these very certain cliches are characters who defy reason and emotion alternately, and command my attention because I both can and cannot account for the things they choose, the things they do. What is Don Draper doing, going AWOL in California for a month without so much as calling work? Why is Betty attracted to that lugnut Henry Francis? Why, why, why it's about as unaccountable and ridiculous as my own life, at least when I contemplate It in the callous algebra of 'New Year's Resolutions' and 'Things I've Achieved On Schedule.'

Some more collecting: I went to see the 2010 Tony Award winning Memphis on one of my last days in New York last year (!), and though I got dolled up and put on my Brave Single Woman Seeing a Show Alone garb and attending come hither eyes, I did not experience the catharsis I paid for. And I love Broadway musicals, contrary to whatever I might have told you at a dinner party. Memphis riled me up because it did not defy or expand any cliches or covered ground, it was pure reiteration. Great dancing, great singing, but you saw it before. It was Hairspray. It was Grease. It was South Pacific, and West Side Story and fucking Showboat. If you don't see the sequential similarities I can't explain it, but there was a distinctly familiar feeling throughout the show – seventies kitsch, ballads about racial harmony, predictable plot twists down to the last dance break. But when I did finally get home to write my impassioned review, I looked at a Broadway canon that was in toto only a handful of plots with variably great, par or sub-par music and story. The 'greats' were those ones that transcended a cliché somehow – most often with that same flicker of humanity that only arrives in a paradox. In a minor key. In a love that does not conquer all. (I'm talking about Passing Strange and Rent, if you really want to get to know me.) It's all like Mad Men, it's all like New Year's, it's all like what you learn after your second theme party, it's all been done before, of course it has. Don't try to do it better, Memphis. Try to do it just a little more carefully, and then it will be different, and then the people will remember because they will have seen a new light on an unchanging thing.

This makes me believe in themes and the collective sub-conscious. This makes me want to apologize less for what I feel are the persistent personal cliches of my own ways of finding a new year, my own ways of living through an old one. And here comes the last collection: I wandered through Whole Foods today reading a copy of The Atlantic Monthly that I did not, in the end, pay for. I read an article about a discussion panel on Joan Didion in which two female writers I respect defended her work and her style while a male writer lampooned her for a narcissism in her writing amongst various other personal flaws. Some other facts: 1) the writer of the Atlantic article was a woman, and the article turned into an assertion that to really love Joan Didion one had to be a woman, in all likelihood an adolescent one who had nighttime dreams of becoming a writer. 2) I include no names because I only remember one. 3) It never occurred to me, before this article, that anyone, anywhere, had ever criticized Joan Didion's writing.

I am just such an adolescent woman who it now seems clear to me was designed with Joan Didion in mind. I am one for her details – which the two female panelists asserted as particularly feminine, I mean the way she describes a vapid Malibu evening, what people are wearing, how hotel rooms smell. I am bowled backwards by her essay, 'Goodbye to all That' every time I read it, and it is because I am a narccissist and I am a lot like who I think she was in 1970-something, I am in New York because I am young, that is why I am here. Her writing, to me, is all about catharsis and recognition and thus communion; the feeling that I am, in fact, not alone in the way I am. But Man Panelist – Manelist – was right in some of the things he said about her, and I knew that in a guttural way as soon as I saw it in print. He wrote that some things shouldn't be published because they're written out of habit. If writing is your means of processing your life, then it seems fair to say that some thoughts should stick to the shelf of your nebulous brainspace. Does Joan Didion journal? Does Joan Didion blog? Does Joan Didion perhaps not mean everything forever, is it possible that my as-to-God opinion of her could change, just as my as-to-God opinion of Greenwich Village very probably will? Are we afraid to examine our habits because their desecration might leave us with less soul?

The button being – as I stand online and sacrifice the rest of the Atlantic article to help my mother bag groceries – look at these little circles, spinning importantly over our heads. There is a noble aspect to them. I can trace with my finger what is successful inside this world of rhythms and structures; to me, the most interesting kind of person and the most interesting kind of art comes from that tension between the so familiar and entirely unknowable. It is 2012, and I am growing up and looking at a New Year that I begin to see will actually contain some of the same. The settling sediment of my personality is how I have faced challenges in the past, will continue to face challenges. Is there room for improvement, adventure, change? Absolutely. I believe so. But is there a continent of me, and Mad Men, and Memphis, and Ms. Didion (see what I did there?) that is old like the earth? Containing wisdom and resistance?

Yes. Yes, I think so. At least that's how I plan to proceed. In a world where I can answer some of my own questions. In a world where making the choice is sometimes more important than the path itself. In a world where old jokes and good music leave traces. In a world that feels like the home I love and the magic I always seem to be hunting so yes, this will be a good year, yes, I think so, not-so-kid-a-brother, even if it is our very last one.