Category: THINKING

that unnoticed and that necessary

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When I was little, I used to listen to my parents sleeping at night. They didn't snore, but they were deep and slow breathers. I used to have terrible headaches and found it difficult to fall asleep over the painful pounding in my own ears, but if I could listen to my parents' regular inhale and exhale rhythms, match mine to that, I could usually get myself to sleep. The trick was to focus on it completely and be sure that I was inhaling with them, exhaling with them. Sometimes my tiny heart would be pounding so, to get more oxygen in faster, but if I could focus, I could sleep.

When I had my first regular boyfriend, his breathing was different from my parents, faster. After years of learning to slow myself down, it felt like hyperventilating. But I managed to retrain myself, to make myself fall asleep by breathing with him, focusing. When we finally broke up, sleeping alone felt untethered, like I would never find my own breath.

Over years, sleeping in different rooms with other people, listening to the various ways that people sleep and breathe. Trying to keep up or slow down. Trying to connect myself to the thread of their breath and let that carry me to sleep. Sometimes lying in a dark room alone and imagining the room itself breathing, not sleeping, waiting for the next morning. 

I was married for years and I remember at one point when I had internalized his breathing patterns, I thought: This is the last one I'll learn. I will never again shift the rhythm of my breath to match someone else's; this is the pattern I'll follow now. Which turned out not to be true: I have slept in more rooms, tents, hotels, with more people, each with their fingerprint breath, whorls of air, and I've followed the individual patterns each time. Sometimes I can feel myself falling asleep even before they've settled into their own dream rhythms. Sometimes I don't sleep, unable to follow their jagged breath. Sometimes I wear earplugs and try counting myself to sleep instead, make my own metronome. Sometimes I remember my parents' breathing at the end of the hall, the pounding headaches, the childhood fear of being the only one awake and the comfort of sliding under someone else's pattern, warm and steady. 

memory souls

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The heat came on yesterday. It's August. I have some opinions about that. One of which is: WTF. 
 
Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my life, or specifically that I'm wasting my summers, working and reading shit online, but then I think: What was I planning to do? Is it a shame that I didn't spend time reading a book under a tree? It is. But then how much of a shame? Not enough to make me prioritize that, clearly. I like my job most of the time. And I like being a person who does what she says she will. And thus I sometimes spend summertime indoors doing projects I should not have agreed to do, and the clouds shift and the cool air rolls in and the shadows lengthen under the tree. Shiver. Existential dread of winter in August. It's not my best look. 
 
But I didn't stay inside the whole summer! I spent six weeks in the US soaking in all the things I love: art, friendship, oysters, cocktails, hard laughter, road trips, the very specific pleasure of knowing someone for a long time. I cried (because I persist in being myself, including one day that I literally flung myself across a bed and howled into a pillow), but MOSTLY I was happy. 
 
And I went to Prague twice to perform, and once went well and once did not. Performance is interesting because you're often saying very personal things to a room full of people who then think they know you, that you've shared something with them individually, and it's intense. Well at my level of fame ("fame") it's totally fine, because there can be connections; I'm still just a person. But I see more famous people trying to continue with that "we are equals" narrative long after they have ceased to be equals with their audience, and it's just… it doesn't work. Back when there were blogs, some blogs got popular and then those writers were only reading other writers of a similar level of popularity, and yet they wanted the people they didn't read to keep reading them. It stopped being sharing and started being performing, competing. They wanted to be adored as equals (ah, we're all just friends!) but they also wanted the power ("power") that came with being popular. [This is also, I believe, the root of a lot of sexual harassment cases: One person wants the pretense of being equals; the other person is keenly aware that they're not really equals. So when the first one takes something or even asks for something from the second one, that's messy].
 
Having never been particularly "in group" OR "out group", please forgive me while I work through observations that possibly were old news to you in high school. 
 
I wouldn't want to be a mean girl. It seems like there's a lot of insecurity involved. It IS true that I didn't get invited to something recently that I felt that I absolutely should have been invited to and I 100% stomped around my living room for almost a week over it. I didn't write a burn book or anything though. I just did some stomping. 
 
I have also been thinking, regarding performance, that I have the very softest space in my heart for things that are amateur, clunky, brave, vulnerable. And I also have a huge amount of available affection for things that are professional, thoroughly considered, perfectly executed. In between, it's a lot about what I ascribe your intent to be and I have found that I have much less patience for things that present as being professional and then fuck it up. And yet is it not at some point cloying to pretend to be less good at something, to play "whoops this guitar just fell into my hands here and I just did a little van Halen thing on it." And even if you're not that good, public self-deprecation requires too much assurance from the audience as a form of participation. Still, I prefer people to err on the side of underestimating themselves, just a bit. 
 
My mind wants to go into a little digression about differences between men and women but I'm pulling it back by the scruff of the neck.
 
Another thing I am thinking about, which probably ties back into performance but was actually related to art, was the difference between invitation to narrative and invitation to dialogue. Like, some art just raises so much thinking in me. Where does that path lead? Why is she sad? Some artists seem to invite you to think about it on your own, but some artists, for some people, it feels like an invitation to dialogue. And I wonder why that is. Like why people felt the need to hunt down J.D. Salinger but maybe not Harper Lee. I would say that both invite narrative (the reader wants to write or paint or think new thoughts after reading) but Salinger (despite, I think, his intentions) invites dialogue: people wanted to talk with him afterwards. Whereas I think people wrote to Harper Lee but not with the same need to be seen? I'm thinking on it. 
 
I ordered a new pair of shoes online, always so tricky to figure out how they'll look from a photo. They just came in the mail today. They have memory soles. Maybe fall won't be so bad. 

tears and an agitation of hands

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While I was in California I went shopping several times and found myself in a variety of dressing rooms with a range of mirror qualities. Harsh lighting, trick mirrors, rooms too small to turn around in, much less provide a good angle to look at yourself, or sometimes soft lighting, good mirrors, open spaces. My sister and I smuggled some cider into one store; I spent the most money there. I'm not saying that all the dressing rooms can afford the diffuse lighting and cocktails that would make everybody spend money, but I'm encouraged to want things when I feel like I don't look like hell. I may not be lovely but surely nobody looks their best in fluorescent lighting. 
 
This is the thing itself but it is also, of course, a metaphor. I feel that I have functioned for years as a mirror for people. Silver and exact, as young Sylvia wrote. I'm looking, I'm paying attention, and I can with little effort tell you what I see, which is usually what anybody looking would see, even if you might not see it yourself: that's a good color for you, that top is see-through, that dress goes perfectly with your boots, the skirt rides up in the back, whatever. I tell you what I see and I give you the opportunity to see some things yourself, and ideally to trust me in the things you can't see, what goes on just out of sight, behind your back. 
 
I think that's what friends are for, to an extent. I have been a noisy mirror, because if I see something I say something, though I'm getting better as I grow older at realizing that not everybody cares how they look, what version of themselves they present. So I look and I reflect and if I feel someone gazing at me with a question then I go ahead and say: I see this. I see you. I've spent so much time navigating how to be a good mirror that I haven't thought as much about the mirrors I'm looking in, and how accurate they might be. How odd to have come so far in my focus on how I reflect light for others and to have failed to notice whether I am standing in front of cruel lighting, a cracked surface, something tarnished. It's definitely true that a drop or two of alcohol makes the pain of even the ugliest reflection easier. Still, at this point, I'm ready to be done shopping in funhouse mirrors. I don't insist that the view be flattering, I just want a smooth and unmisted reflection. I want to walk away feeling human, or I'm not buying it. 

But Really Everything’s Always Delicious

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I don't know, I don't think it's something everybody needs. I don't think it's something everybody has daily. I'm not asserting ubiquity, though if I'm being honest I feel a little arrogant claiming what I consider to be such a staple. 

Because sometimes you want to punch it? Sometimes it just needs a good massage. It needs one, get it? Get it. Get it.

The simplicity of it. After it's done. The ease of it. 

Rolled into balls, squeezed into something and rolled towards an overwhelming question.

I once traveled four hours for a particular kind, then traveled home, and I don't regret a minute. Sometimes it's easy to love that much.

Some people can't tolerate it. Some people can totally tolerate it and say that they can't because that kind of purity makes them feel better.

It's not bad for you in moderation and if you can't be moderate that's not its fault.

I say it meaning me.

The sorrow in the feeling of not enough butter. As if the butter were the sugar making the medicine go down. No I'm not saying butter isn't delicious. I just don't think it's the point. 

Nor is melted cheese the point, nor cold cheese of varying thickness. Nor fruit in any incarnation. Those things exist separately deliciously; it's a complement, not a necessity. They can feel like a necessity but they are not. It is the thing itself, even though almost everything else makes it even better.

I'm identifying with my subject. Or, as identifying was the point: overidentifying.

The genius who said "It's done! Let's put fire on it and make it… more done!" and how that parallels with constantly striving.

Well it's not a staple everywhere, calm down, it's not that I think I'm indispensible or something. 

There's probably something interesting to say about how what one historically thought of as refined is now seen as less healthy but I don't know how that parallels (although on second thought I kind of do).

 
First thought best thought, she said, and the toast popped up. 

beneath the waves

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I don't really have a lot of fixed boundaries. It's a struggle for me to understand that other people do, and to respect them, though of course I think it's important to at least try to do so. I hear people talking about physical boundaries and I think: okay. Like there are a few people who I really don't want to touch me, ever. So I can imagine that these people who say they don't like to be touched, that's how they feel when anybody touches them. I try really hard to keep straight which people have which boundaries. But personally, with the exception of those few people who I know and don't want touching me and I have reasons for that, pretty much anybody can touch me (as a greeting, for example) pretty much any way and I'm like: cool. The part of me that would feel violated is not on my skin, it's on the other side of my skin, and nobody can touch it anyway. Similarly with emotional boundaries, personal boundaries — the part of me that would be affected is both very far inside me and nebulous; very few people get close enough in to even approach those boundaries.

I tried for a long time to explain this and then one day I watched an octopus swimming beneath me and I understood myself. How we stretch ourselves out beyond our own imaginations to reach what we want. The constant thumping desires of our three hearts, so complex. How our brains are not contained in one place, but stretch across our bodies so that the right touch can provide information that our whole bodies process. The octopus is a master of mimicry as am I, which means when we are not sure how to behave, we behave like someone else but when it's safe we go back to dancing in the sand, touching what we want to, shining our own clear colors. If you put me in a box, in a tiny treasure chest, if you lock me inside, I will find a way to be comfortable in it or I will find a way to get out of it. A boundary is meaningless to me because it cannot hold me; I am not easily held. It is true that I can be pierced although this is more difficult. If I see you coming, sharp and pointy, I will first release a cloud of ink, a torrent of words, and see if I can't escape while you are blinded, choking. I'm sorry but I warned you. 

If you do catch us, we are delicious.

inventory

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It makes me happy to do something I'm good at. There's a way it feels inside me, like glowing, to be doing something well. Something I've noticed is that I used to feel that if I observed my happiness it might disappear; now I feel like observing it makes it more likely to recur. Hence. It makes me happy to be seen doing something I'm good at — literally seen or as more often happens, if someone says like "good editing job" or something, appreciates my work even if I'm not doing it.

I think I'm good at my job, I'm good at making the crooked straight and crushing down uneven places. I think I'm good at keeping my word maybe not always but pretty often, when I say I'll do something it takes a lot for me to not do it. I'm a decent storyteller and I'm also usually a pretty good listener though I remember a bit less than I used to. I still remember a lot. 

It makes me happy to read a good book, though I have read a lot of bad books and so I don't read as often as I used to or as often as I want to. Similarly I also like watching good television and movies (though movies I watch less, which is weird for a person who used to prioritize time for movies over time for almost anything else). I used to like audiobooks and podcasts but now they just put me to sleep within about 5 minutes; I still remember them fondly though. But a good book or show, the kind where I believe the characters, the story, no matter how improbable; the kind where I inhabit the story as an observer and am carried in the current of it, where I can be pulled up by a perfect sentence without losing the plot, these are a path to happiness. 

I like vinegar and salt and anything that tastes better with vinegar and salt. I like dark and bitter chocolate. I like wine outside in the summer with a cigarette and inside in the winter with cheese, either way better with friends. 

I feel most myself when I am alone and able to think through something and reach a conclusion that pleases me. I also feel this way when I am with people who help me get through to conclusions that are at least as resonant or more than what I would have reached alone. I like laughing with people much more than laughing alone. I have suffered more than the average supply of fools to reach the people whose love feels real to me and for the most part my love for them increases and deepens in ways that feel important. That brings me a lot of happiness.

I like and have always liked dancing; have often liked singing though most often alone, with the solitary smug pleasure of knowing the words; have liked writing to people I miss and pulling them closer in my mind through that communication. 

I have been, in life and of late, so incredibly unbearably sad. But that's not to say that I have not been happy, because I very much have been. I have so much.

play the way you feel it

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In the early stages of some neurodegenerative diseases, the brain starts firing more than usual. Normally as we age parts of our brains start to close down. As if the brain were a grand manor and some of the rooms, rarely if ever used, were gently draped in white sheets, with the brain's butlers locking the doors of the rooms to which we will not be returning. But with these diseases, these unused rooms are thrown wide open, as if for some tremendous party, some great revival, a revelation. The truth is that the brain realizes that the more frequently used rooms are about to be burned down and it's trying to make space for the thoughts that once inhabited those rooms, before they are lost forever. It will not succeed, but I like that it tries.

Similarly, or it seems similar to me now, the rush of happiness experienced by people who have decided to commit suicide. The serenity that looks like they've cheered up just before you find out that they did not.

I've noticed that many people in my life seem to be one or the other: those who do not seem to enjoy my whirling busyness, for whatever their reasons may be (liking me better when more reflective? viewing all this flurry as vainglorious on some level?); and those who don't like when I try to talk about the flip side of it, that my noisy busy brain is also filled with petty spite, self-doubt, overwhelming sorrow ("Chin up!" or "You're always so negative!" or "You have to stop focusing on those things"). I don't have any solutions. Most of the time I think that my acquired fluency in extroversion is interesting at best, and that I want to go back to my mother tongue now, the language of books and silence, waking alone in a sunbeam; no more feedback from anything beyond the dustmotes I stir with my breath. 

I like smoking on the balcony and watching a storm come in, the blue sky swallowed by clouds, the mix of tobacco and petrichor and the birds going crazy, a girl in a rainsoaked dress running barefoot, her shoes in her hand. I like when the SMS code to check my bank balance spells out a word. My favorite word is still bed because it looks like one. I like walking home in the middle of the street. The small and large kindnesses we do for each other. Postcards. Listening. The idea of being your own cheerleader but not letting it go to your head; how would that work. I still can't play the ukulele.

getting to the point

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Sometimes you will not be the best, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you will not be the most lovable.

Sometimes you will not be acknowledged as being the best, even if you were the best. Sometimes people will not tell you they love you, even if they do. Sometimes people just won't love you. Sometimes it is impossible to tell whether they don't feel it or they don't say it. 

Sometimes you will do your best and it will not be good enough. Sometimes people will tell you this and their honesty will set you free. Sometimes people will tell you this and they will not mean to hurt you but they will. Sometimes they will mean to hurt you. 

These are things that I know but sometimes have trouble remembering. Days when we all raise our hands and mine isn't picked. Even if my hand went up first, or fastest; even if I know the answer best. The moment when my eyes are met, held for a moment, dismissed. The moment when the eyes pass over me as if I'm not there. As if I'm not here. The right answer in my mouth, tears in my throat, all swallowed. Salt and vinegar.

What I wanted to tell you is that I remember when this was how I felt all the time. When I thought that dismissal was about me every time. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is not. There are days now, even months, when I just do whatever I want to do and I don't think about how other people see it. I'm here now, most of the time, though it's work. Filling my mouth with the milk and honey of not worrying about making anybody other than myself happy.

That's not what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to tell you was harder. But this is a start. 

 

ten times removed

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I've been thinking about forgiveness lately, partly because someone recently told me that I am not a very forgiving person. Well, nope. I can carry a grudge further than you can imagine; it's practically a point of pride. I understand that there's a school of thought out there that forgiving others is a way of setting ourselves free and I will say to disciples of that school that they are welcome to feel that way and I celebrate whatever sets you free from pain but I personally would prefer to be stung just the once, just one time with the shock and the rush of tears and the ridiculous ages spent mulling it over and trying to play it different ways to reach different potential endings. "If I had not put my heart out, perhaps it would not have been sliced open," you think, these three a.m. thoughts that can take hours from your sleep, the thoughts in which you try blaming yourself as that's easier than imagining that anybody else could be that cruel. They can be, my sweet, they can be. Sleep with one eye open. 

My feeling is: once I've been hurt, I don't forgive, because I don't want to be hurt that way again. And I tell you what: people get in the habit of hurting other people in the same way over and over if they aren't careful. I of course never make mistakes but if I did, as sorry as I might be I would probably keep fucking up that way unless I really really really paid attention because I have been practicing that, whatever it is, for a long time. I am a person who strives on the daily to be better, specifically to be better to others, and I know I have blind spots, so it's no surprise that other people who maybe aren't trying as hard to tread gently around the emotional landmines of others will set things off time and again. So: Yes, people have hurt me. Why won't I forgive them? It's nothing personal, or almost nothing; I have seen that this is how they hurt people or at least how they hurt me and I'd prefer not to feel hurt so depending on the caliber of the hurt I will either avoid that person in certain circumstances or avoid them altogether and that's how it is.

It does not go without saying that one reason I am thinking about this so particularly is that I have just been hurt in the fucking exact identical way as I was before and the child I was more than half a lifetime ago has two faces: one grieving, tearstained, broken; the other haughty with all the righteous impatience of the young with the elderly and the sentimental: are you serious? no: seriously? again? you chose to do this again? Adult me rocks the child as she cries herself to sleep, which is to say I put my arms around my knees and try to pull myself together. I could have known better. And I hope I don't forgive myself. 

times, tables

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She asked what it would feel like to me to be stable, and perhaps because of the word itself I saw a table in my head, in fact the table we had just moved back into the room, careful so as not to scuff the new floor. We lowered the four walnut legs carefully into the space where they will live now, with small pieces of felt under each one to keep it from damaging the floor. The table wobbled a bit and I found another piece of felt to put under one leg, to steady the whole. Felt is a considerably better brace than a beer coaster in that it can be cut to fit exactly, plus it comes with adhesive that keeps it stuck in place.  I tried to lift the table by myself, bracing my shoulder against the underside of the table and thinking of Allen Ginsburg putting his queer shoulder to the wheel. I couldn't quite reach the bottom of the leg at that angle, though; I needed help. But with four hands, four shoulders, the work was easy enough. We leaned against the different parts of the table, but nothing wobbled, checked it with the level and it was perfect. Now it's where it belongs and it's steady and reliable, a stable table. I guess that some people think of themselves being stable and think of mountains, or anyway of things that cannot be moved. I had imagined for years that I would be stable when I could get my feelings under control, like how a rock feels no pain, but now I know that even a rock can crumble under pressure. Still, why didn't I think of something more sturdy than a wobbly table? I immediately thought of something with potential to be stable, if I was ready to put in a bit of work, rather than something that already was. Later I remembered the house I used to dream that was built on a broken foundation, creaking in the night. I understand very well that stable is not something that comes easy to me, definitely not through nature and maybe not even through a combination of chemicals, but it doesn't feel impossible most days, so that's progress. And I thought: I would feel stable if I had under me things that were felt. And then I thought my metaphor-hungry brain is probably the happiest little brain in the world today.