Solipsism and the City

It occurred to me to wait to post this until I actually saw the premiere of Lena Dunham's 'Girls' on HBO. Then I remembered that a) I'm not exactly an authority, here in the blogosphere; people don't actively queue for my opinions and b) this winning combination of nonchalant defeatism and navel-gazing makes me the exact target audience for this show and de facto a voice to be heard. I've seen Tiny Furniture anyways.

Preface: I love my life. I really do. Its problems are really much closer to TV pratfalls than the actual pain or despair I skirt daily when I'm not giving money to subway panhandlers; in fact this pathological middle-class guilt is probably the circuitous source of any big depressions or lacks I've ever known.
(I already don't like this – everyone knows you don't get to quantify your life's pain. But Lena Dunham is under my skin, and in a weird way I feel I owe her an explanation.) I like to think I kiss the ground I walk on daily, give thanks in my pithy way to not God exactly but something closer to the Force in Star Wars...I give thanks for a fabulous band of witty malcontented friends, and funny, wildly supportive and uniquely amazing family members, my city, this structure-less almost-career plan I'm forging ahead with – we'll call it art, for clarity purposes. I am happy and very, very lucky. That said, buckle up for this here rage against the modern self-referential comedy machine. I feel I get to see colors, reflections, abstractions and aspirations of my entirely pleasant and scarcely dull existence hoisted upon the big and small screen almost every day. And I do have feelings about that.

Lena Dunham's apparently making an HBO series about us, you guys. My guys. My favorites: the listless, lonely, hyper-quick, pretty poor, art brut underemployed Funny Girls in all their meandering, cynical glory. The Me's, the You's, the Everyone We Know.

At first I was excited. The world needs to know! We have a voice, we make a generation! Love us, preach our humor to Middle America, did you know the dream is still alive, only different? It's also occurred to me and some like-minded fellows to be a little repulsed by Lena, for a) the fact that she is getting famous on a reality so tangible to us we didn't think of it first b) we didn't think of it first c) she comes from wild privilege and d) navel-gazing: the aspect of my lifestyle which I simmer in so wretchedly; that useless self-awareness from which I categorically draw most dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The thing about we funny girls in New York's art world is there's an element to US that I'm not sure I want to celebrate yet. That of course could just be the hetero-normative patriarchy striking me where I stand, but I don't really want the terms of my success (which, if you look carefully, I have entirely tied to Lena Dunham's) to be a capitalization on a little of what makes me gross...to myself. And then I have to face the real Ugly in the mirror and wonder...why not?

I'm talking about Lena Dunham's bravery: Lena Dunham is not afraid to be really ugly in super public. A New York magazine writer said it well: she herself can be very lovely, yet seems to actually go out of her way to challenge her viewers with images of a less than perfect body in less than flattering clothes or hair or make-up, often having far less than perfect (and fairly graphic) sex. Of course on one hand this is really laudable (THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW!) but it draws attention to what even we in the club have buried and really ought never to worry aloud: this is no longer escapism at all. This is no longer fiction. Take 'Sex and the City,' my preferred example of “art” (to be sort of generous) as escapism, married to a little bit of female empowerment in the abstract. This show is decidedly not MY LIFE, but me and Carrie share enough similar talismans (love of clothes, feisty girlfriends) to have some sort of aspirational empathy take place: I can feel for her, with her, recognize bits of my self in her, but she's certainly not real. Lena's real. She has terrible sex, and she struggles with money, and she feels purposeless and foolish, and ridiculous, un-glamorous things happen to her. I do a lot of these things in a week. How do I actually like them apples? AND THEN I WONDERED...what's the lesson I should be learning if I am both target audience and source material for this show? Not that TV's some kind of instructional messiah, but, okay, okay, I'm asking, why would I – anyone – really want to watch a show about themselves?

Because, believe it, I do. I think lots of people do. I always want to see theatre made by my friends, all full of winks and mutual references. Movies set in New York, movies that mention my hometown, stories that shed light on my particularities do feel like treats. Only they're fraught treats for the specific kind of fiercely funky cliché I feel I traffic with in public: when my individuality is acknowledged (as an extension of a whole thriving community of individuals living a life that looks like mine) I can somehow feel threatened, even unhappy. Think about how many girls you know with cat's eye glasses who claim to hate Zooey Deschanel, or the number of friends you have from outer boroughs who will look around a bar full of people dressed exactly like them and say, “I hate hipsters.” This is a Cold War, gang. We're in it to win it and oust the challenger: who can be the most unique in this brave New York?

Okay, another disclaimer. I'm not entirely delusional; I don't actually think me and my roommates banter like Zooey Deschanel and her motley dude crew on New Girl. I'm not always mid hi-jinks like the goofy gang in Happy Endings and I didn't come from New York privilege (and I don't have a million dollar contract with Judd Apatow) like Lena Dunham and the supporting cast of her new show. Obviously. But perhaps because I'm a bright young New York twentysomething and becoming hypersensitive to the accurate portrayals of my supposedly coveted existence (thank undergrad English for that last “thought” and insistent vanity) it's struck me recently that TV today seems more interested in self-consciously reflecting its people than, say, Taxi or Mash ever did. Nebulous archetypes still prevail – no one's really friends with a Carrie, Samantha or Charlotte (face it guys, you are all Near Mirandas at best). No one's really got a team of stunted pranksters in their social crew, like Troy and Abed from Community – but doesn't at least the humor of the modern show make a case for a TV Life a whole lot closer to Real Life than the one Ethel and Lucy seemed to know? Some more pennies for your thoughts: reality television, the way Chris Lilley's scathing mockumentary about bottom-feeders makes you feel (somehow sick, not in on the joke), the success of shows like Mad Men that purport to tell a truth, expose a fiction. Cinema verite documentary style television. Growing lack of laugh tracks. If we're no longer watching TV for pure escapism, perhaps there's a little bit of lusty validation mixed in – maybe TV is becoming the new novel, the new anti-lonely. I do get massive kicks from the vaguely mirrored elements of my not-as-glamorous single girls braving the big city day to day, but it also shakes me to my core. I am implicated, somehow.

Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay about privacy in 1998 positing that in one sense the victims of the 'share everything' culture are the people made to unwillingly partake: I don't want to see your presidential penis, hear your graphic conversation about sexual liberation on the subway. To be reductive, he was interested in the loss of reticence as a function of the changing culture, something about politeness, consideration for the other, subtlety. To see yourself in not so much as a gloss of glory is the kicker, I suppose. To see yourself unswaddled, implicated, unglamorous and un-attached (but funny! Quirky! Real!) is, despite my aspirations to self love and deep peace, a surefire B these days.

So thanks for the diagnosis, Lena and ilk. I know from here it's like, 'oh but look! The world's reception! You're not sick at all!' but here's my guilty confession, my intimation, my baby-sized cross to bear: every now and then, I want to keep the unappealing tamped down, the ugly in the bathroom mirror before breakfast. I get ashamed. And maybe I don't like it on television, maybe it will take some time. The irony's not lost on me that my first reaction is jealousy; I would love to make Lena Dunham's kind of theatre if I could – but I'm not sure I would be able to, if I honestly want it done. But hats, jacket, pants off to you, lady. You win this round. Bring in the cheap beer, the dud nights at Union Pool or Ninth Ward, bring in the incidents, the near-misses, the many days that tick by when you're not in love and you haven't finished your novel. Bring in the drunk best friend and the rainy day, the un-enviable shoes, the ringing horror of knowing my own life can look this unremarkable, unkind, so wildly, disturbingly self-involved. Funny business. Getting kicks, kicking, this is how we kids can be; I'll have to reckon with the monster, resurrect, find a new fiction somewhere.

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.

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.

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.