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.
Friday, September 3, 2010
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
-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.
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