do you ever feel/like the kind of person who wears plastic bags on their head because they're crazy?

So maybe I will move to California and become a jazz singer, maybe I'll find my God on the way there. In the Mojave, probably. In a lime green convertible car. The top will be down, and I will drink mint lemonade and sing Joni Mitchell, and who knows? Maybe it will be 1969.

I've been thinking -- I've been not thinking -- about advice. Here I actually am on the planet, living in Brooklyn, working in "hospitality" (that's a generous blanket), working in Manhattan, struggling to be an artist somehow. I clamber and don't clamber to fill my days, and it all amounts to a very thin veneer of carefully-applied Cool tied over a bursting manic panic, because I am actually quite afraid of the future, now that it is bright and ungoverned and entirely my own. So they say. So I've been asking a lot of people for advice on how to proceed, and regretting the choice almost instantly, because here is what I have decided about advice: if one person is very impressionable and the other person feels foolishly wise for the right set of fifteen seconds in a conversation, no good can come. Because people will tell you things that worked for them, or they will offer vague platitudes, they will gesture towards your particular pain with the wide vocabulary of 'being young' or 'having faith' or 'following your heart' and other messy, upsetting terms, and it turns out these hollow words are not enough to plant a life garden on. Not even a little bit. You must forge your own way, my son. Go West!

Well now I sound like a bitch. It's not that I don't respect my elders, it's not that I don't believe I can learn from other people's mistakes. I like history. But when you are me in 2012 and the world is whirring like a sped-up clock and all you can decipher are the hundreds of wiser, better adjusted, happier, perfectly paired-off voices around your face sagely pressing your palm, kissing your forehead, smirking, suggesting, promising, things really just seem to get worse. The white noise leads in so many directions. Okay, I'll give a concrete example: I'm talking about my quest to figure out what I want. I always thought I knew -- see paragraph one -- but leaving school has functionally become a process of choosing what to follow, which of my nine bizarre, estranged goals I should throw myself into fully. Because this brave new world is not for the half-assed. Will I be an actor, a comedian, a writer, a singer, a hostess? They tell me if I see it in the sun, it's so. They tell me I don't have to choose. They tell me to kiss the ground I walk on, to buy magazine subscriptions. And I do. And of course, I should, but AAAAAH! If I am really going to commit to a flighty lifestyle and a flighty personality, where do I make the first leap into ownership? I want to make mistakes and connections and love that is all my own! I want to be just as stupid as is forgivably possible, and I want to do it in the dark. Sometimes people I know like to seal loose, unfocused rants like this one with a meaningful beat of eye contact and the words, 'Does that make any sense? Do you ever feel that, too?' But that would kill the point! Yikes, it is so scary to be on a ledge and know you're at least 35% idiot but believe so fiercely in your column of misguided emotion anyways! Suddenly, I GET cult psychology. Catholicism.

Okay. So I'm talking about the future and the bright blue beyond of my patchy resume, I'm also talking about Boys, as per usual. These days they are more like Men. The advice I've received lately on this subject has been all over the place: don't call him, act cool, do something better with your hair, just ask him out already!, at least stop waving maniacally whenever you walk by, you seem about fourteen. I have file cabinets filled with this advice, all given in good faith from friends in relationships, or friends who love me enough to idly fan my ego while I behave like Charlize Theron's character in 'Young Adult.' It would be entirely unfair to fault all these well-wishers for years of romantic hang-ups and failures, but I do think there's at least a correlation between these two worlds. When you allow yourself to always be in the subservient position of the advice-seeker, to very rarely venture into misfortune or failure without a safeguard (and I do mean VENTURE; I fall or trip into misfortune and failure regularly) -- well. Well. I think you betray a certain lack of faith in yourself. It's like 'the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves,' (Sparknotes). I must own my instinct, even as these alleged Men move around slowly like anesthetized pets and do not meet my expectations, do not make sense to me, hurt me. I must own my instinct! Even as I overhear people in coffee shops bandying 'trade secrets' to and fro, even as the one agent, manager, project, audition, life plan that can MAKE or BREAK waltzes back and forth beyond my reach. Whatever. This is Dunzo City. I'm getting too old to talk this way.