When I was little, I used to report on the quality of every public restroom I ever used. Cleanliness, size, and any special features (black soap!) were relayed in what I assume was the piping high voice of an only child, the voice that is sure it is conveying information of greatest interest to those gathered around food that has magically become less appetizing. My lucky family.

Eventually, I was given to understand that these bathroom reports were not as interesting to others as they were to me. Coincidentally around that time I started having a fear, and this is before those annoying Culkin movies, that I would be left in a bathroom someday. That I would walk out of the bathroom to find that everyone had gone on to prettier places and there I’d be, alone.

As I got older, and started increasingly thinking like an anthropologist, featuring the idea that all behavior has a cause, the fear took on new layers. Either everybody was thinking about me as much as I was thinking about them, and there would be a combined unanimous decision to leave that annoying girl behind, quick let’s sneak out while she’s in there, or there would be a combined inability to think about me at all, and people would just inadvertently wander off, no head count to ascertain that one of us had been left behind, and what do you mean by "one of us": who are you?

As a result, I have probably the fastest bladder in the world, and even though I wash my hands every time, I can be back from the bathroom before anybody has a chance to ask for the check or even start a new topic of conversation, a skill Sam Diamond would envy, but advantages born from fear are always tinged a bit with their ugly origins.

I was well into my thirties before I confessed to this fear. It was one of my more difficult confessions, and to be honest my throat gets a little tight even typing about it, because I do get what it says about me, and I understand that while my brain would greatly entertain a psychoanalyst, it is not always a whole lot of fun to live with.

And to my point: Imagine my delight and surprise last week, walking out of the bathroom of the diner where we had breakfast, to discover that while my purse and cards remained at the table, my entire family had vamoosed. Like a dream coming true! Nifty! Fortunately they hadn’t gone farther than the parking lot, so I rejoined them without incident (and my wallet was still in my purse, yay).

I don’t know what it means, whether I should take from this that things I dread will happen but not really matter that much, or that there is no way to reasonably to prevent what I know will happen, or what. I do know that I had recently talked to certain wise people about this very fear, and that means I had somebody with whom to share the punchline, and I think maybe that’s the important part: not that your fears come true, but that you have somebody to laugh with you after.

Photos of the Diner of Abandonment and the rest of the trip are up on flickr.

Posted today at Lost in Transit. It’s not remotely cheerful, but it is something I’m thinking about.

you are a forest of wonder but when somebody wanders through, you feel
hurt if they fail to see every single tree. you who have never bothered
to name things scream beech pine fir needles stump! and they say it is
nice to be in the forest, with the dappled light and the quiet, it is
so peaceful, and your fingers jab at their stupid ears that have missed
specific birdsong.

you make dinner and when they eat it they are thinking of your
fingers in their mouths, nurture and exploration, and your head
explodes because excuse me i have to do the dishes too. you would like
to be evaluated for who you are but you get upset if someone fails to notice what you do.

you are made of your actions, each action a playing card
carefully balanced to build a house that is structurally sound and
visually pleasing, and with your sense of humor you’ve balanced the
jack of hearts against the seven of cups but not everyone is such a
connoisseur. another word for connoisseur is snob. you alert them to your
pinch of cinnamon and they say mmm and you’re angry for the cinnamon
not being acknowledged, and they’re confounded because what do you
want, are they not eating, contentedly rubbing their bellies, catlike
stretched to bask in the wonder of being full of things you made that
they can’t be bothered to name. another word for can’t be bothered is lazy.

it is hard to understand that people can be happy without being
able to name their happiness but then you cried for three straight
hours and couldn’t say why so don’t get too high on the horse is all
i’m saying. it’s quite a fall from a horse. more than a tumble in the
hay. it is hard to not be pissed at the blind person who doesn’t see
what a good colorer you are. it is hard to remember that you decided to
color inside the lines because it pleases you; it is hard to remember
that they are your lines. there are people who draw freehand.

i
don’t mean you’re wrong. for the love of all things sweet don’t start
crying again. i mean that you don’t look at a picasso and say nice use
of blue. well, you might say
that. other people are saying words like form, fluid movement, abyss of
pain. naturally ideally one could say all those things. i mean: there
are things that are wrong and there are things that cannot be fixed and
you would do well to keep your forest lovely because it’s in your
nature, to balance the cards because it feels like success, to color
within the lines because it pleases you, and to maybe stop talking
about art and just look at it. you can spend enough energy keeping
control over the things you actually can, make your charts and lists
and rationales, stock up on tissues, live through this. but not if you
try to blame it on other people.

I posted at Lost in Transit today.

This starts with some stuff I’ve been reading about recently (racism),
derails briefly with a book analogy, morphs into some stuff I’ve been
thinking about a lot (culture), and then gets sort of preachy. Like
most stuff I write, I guess.

It’s a hard and scary thought for most people: you’re going to die
alone. Even if someone is there holding your hand you’re still
generally the only one in the room dying, although probably the
hand-holding makes it seem somewhat less lonely.

What’s harder
and scarier is living alone. Growing old alone. For some people it is a
task of such terrifying magnitude that they’ll do anything to avoid it.
Live with people they nearly hate. Suffer awful treatment because at
least it’s treatment. Dash from one social engagement to the next like
they’re rungs on a hamster wheel. Some people have children because
they think children will keep them from feeling alone. Maybe all these
things help: the partners clutched like life rafts, the friends
selected from desperation, the children bred in preventive hope. I
don’t know.

The thing is: no matter how many people we surround ourselves
with, we are, as Rilke says, unutterably alone. I think that it’s good
to learn that, because then you can choose the company of people whose
presence does not function a light against the darkness, because you
make the light you need yourself.

Sooner or later, you come to an understanding that dying,
probably the most mysterious thing you’ll ever do, is something you’re
going to do alone. I think that this understanding makes the things you
do alone in the rest of your life seem less challenging. Go to the
movies alone, eat alone, wake up alone: this is nothing once you accept
that you’re going to die alone. But until you come to that
understanding, I think you live with something worse than knowing you
will die alone. You will live alone, too. You actually already do, but
you are more alone for imagining that you are not.

i have accumulated more gray hair in the last two months than i had
over the whole year. there are maybe 20 now, i think. it’s not like a million but it’s more than i can count anymore. i almost can’t
pull them out to get a closer look at them, so tricky are they
with the light. i think they are very pretty and sparkly and when i am
a few years older i imagine that crows will drop from nowhere to have a
look at my pretty shiny silvery business. if they made a nest there, i
think it would be a bit much, but maybe they will like, take some hair
home and make sparkle nests.

i want to take a hairbrush to the cottage and leave little
gifts of silver and copper for Friar Tuck’s birds. he wants to build a
birdbath for them which is very cute but it’s like: babysteps, my
friend. first we build the cottage. "we" meaning "Friar Tuck" since i would
have run down to the foreign employment office and hijacked myself some
hardworking ukranians about six months ago, if it were up to me. i am
good at planning and measuring and carrying and i will go where you
point me until your fingers fall off, but i am not a constructor. a boa
constructor, maybe. but not of buildings.

i have learned to pitch a tent faster than a hissy fit, though.

i’ve
been thinking a lot this past month about how i define love and how
really, really hard i am on people, how high i set the bar. it is one
thing to set the bar high for oneself but it is a bit messed up to
expect other people to feel like jumping over your standards. i tend to
need to learn the same lesson a few hundred times, as my czech teacher
will sadly confide to you, which is partly the fault of czechs
for saying cottage differently depending on whether it is a cottage or
whether you are going to a cottage or whether you went to a cottage.
but it is largely the fault of my brain. it’s probably because i used
to see the same movies 10 or 20 times and i’ve got the idea that like,
wow, i felt so good when i learned that lesson: let’s learn that lesson
again! which when it’s czech is bad enough, but when it’s like, life lessons, again and again is brain-gnashingly hard sometimes.

my father once told me that i like to punch myself in the face because it feels so good when i stop.

so
anyway about love, and it was friday night, and i was crying in a pub,
which is always so awkward. but i feel like i’m finally making the
things i learned five years ago actually stick, which things boil down to: i am going to
keep the bar right exactly where it is and i am going to keep trying
really hard to clear the bar of my own standards and i am going to keep trying
really, really hard to quit watching to see who jumps over the bar as well or better than i want to, and
eventually i hope to bits that i will stop wanting anybody to notice
what a good bar-jumper i am, because it’s that moment when you turn to
check your audience that you inevitably crash into something.

there was this book published here, it was written by a
lawyer, and the bio section had translated "he stopped going to bars in
1987" but they really meant he had passed the bar. i don’t mean either
of those kinds of bars, though. nor gold bars, which are also called
bullion, with which we make gold soup.

i’m older. i feel okay about it. i have a better family than i
deserve, a better job than i ever hoped to get, a better life than i
planned back when i thought you could make everything happen by
planning it. and i am not myself perfect but i still feel young enough
that striving for perfection seems like a worthwhile pursuit, like not
in sight of the finish line but well enough clear of the starting line
that it seems worthwhile to keep running.

so you’re nine, and you’re visiting your friend, and you’re both
kissing the picture of david cassidy on her sister’s record, which you
have borrowed for the purpose of kissing this picture. to be honest you
don’t get it, but it seems expected, and since she’s nice enough to play
with you, despite being popular (which you are not), kissing a picture
seems a small price.

or age thirteen with another friend after you both have finished singing all
your favorite songs into your tickle deodorant, you talk about how much
you both love whichever star, which in this memory is paul stanley, the
guy from KISS with the star on his right eye. you do not actually know much
about paul stanley but having a crush on him seems, again, important.
his favorite color, you sigh, is purple, which is also your favorite
color, and you love him so much, you were made for loving him, baby.

and this goes on, through junior high and high school, these obsessive
crushes that you do not get and yet become increasingly adept at
faking, since you are an outstanding liar. the whole thing seems really
pointless: what possible purpose does liking someone who does not like
you back, who possibly does not know you exist, serve? and then there
are practicalities, like they’re already married or they’re about a
thousand years old or whatever.

except now you are thinking about it, that what these crushes did was
train girls for the experience of unrequited love. it seems a
stretch but you just learned that tickling trains you for combat so
that crush on judson scott might have been helpful, if you hadn’t been
faking it.

if, for example, you had been trained for unrequited love in
high school, it might not have messed you up so badly when that one man
came to visit later, asked you to marry him, and then called you a week
later (when he’d gotten back home) to discuss what to do on his upcoming date with a girl
who he said was not as smart as you are but was there, which you were
not. again you are fortunately good at faking your feelings, so you
gave him
some advice. a movie and a sunset, it was, a movie that required some
hand-holding and a hill from which you had watched the sunset yourself: it was a great view. you generally try
not to think about that phone call. it was, you imagine, what the ninth gate must
be for people who had crushes on johnny depp.

and so anyway now you are older and your training in unrequited love
has been basically like bloody mel gibson style slaughter when what you
have ever wanted is some tickling. and you’re noticing that you do
better when you don’t care what happens. when you like someone without
thinking for a minute whether it is practical or feasible or reasonable
or even right. and so what you are
practicing now, you realize, is crushes. you still can’t handle stars,
because it’s too much like artwork, which you love to admire but do not
love to love. but it’s the same feeling you observed in your friends
those years ago: the desire to know everything. the feeling that every
small thing is a window on further fascination. the near-complete
detachment from caring whether the object reciprocates. the total disregard for practicality.

this is working pretty well for you. you had some questions this
weekend over whether maybe it wasn’t a little…skeevy… to objectify
people like this. whether perhaps it wouldn’t be healthier for you to
want a return on your investments. whether it serves any purpose, since
it’s not like you can retroactively protect your damaged heart. but
then you shoved some more wood in the chipper and thought about long
fingers and puns and in jokes and how it’s not really about you at all,
these crushes, but about being a mirror for people who might otherwise
be afraid to look at themselves and are therefore missing out on what you can see. it perhaps serves no purpose and it is certainly not practical, but it is, you have to admit, terribly fun.

I’ve been carrying around a ball of angry frustration for over a week now, and it’s not exactly causing writer’s block but more like writer’s inarticulation. It is unlike me to take a direct route to the point, but it is equally unlike me to be unable to get there after some 3000 words. Which is what I clocked when I tried to write down what exactly was bothering me. And so I set it aside and decided to let it marinate a while.

So I’m trying again, here, because I need to set this down. It’s this huge thing, and has to do with conversational shorthand; the making over of oneself into a simple, palatable person. Bitten off with a smile and squeezed into a ball. It’s to do with how while I realize there are situations in which this is necessary, I find it … I don’t know, insulting when it is done amongst friends. It’s maybe to do with the desire to be accepted, and I understand this desire, but I don’t get this solution.

The older I get, the more specific I am, and the more I want to distance myself from anything that isn’t exactly precise in myself and others. I recognize that the task of defining oneself precisely can be exhausting to the point of boredom, and I don’t suggest that we all run around explaining every damn thing, but I think that pretending to be simple for the sake of avoiding complexity is a cheap trick.

It’s like: drawing a caricature of yourself in order to make yourself more easily identified by strangers that you’re only encountering briefly is one thing, but holding up this caricature for your friends seems more like either you think your friends are stupid or you think they’re not paying attention. I understand that this "nobody pays attention to me" thing is all part of the joy of self-deprecation but it’s insulting to me because believe me: I’m paying full price attention and I do not like finding myself in the cheap seats.

It’s not like this hasn’t bothered me before. I don’t know why I can’t even get close to where I want to say. Maybe some concrete examples. Okay: I’m tired of the idea that your kids are a burden. First because it is not remotely novelty: kids are a lot of work. Second because if you did not want them you should not have had them. Or: I am tired of the nudgey joking that your spouse is unbearable. Either you love the person, warts and all, or you married a giant wart, in which case you are a terrible judge of character, and complaining about the person you chose makes you look stupid. Or: I am tired of hearing how much you hate your boss because it is not that hard to format a resume and lick stamps. They even have peel off stamps now. Or, and this is maybe where I’m heading: the recurring announcement that you belong to whatever group you belong to, of  parents or spouses or employees or women or whatever, and whatever your feelings about the fact that it’s part of who you are, when you start making it bigger than you are, you’re making a caricature of yourself when you could be making art.

I don’t mean it’s not okay to complain (or brag) sometimes, as long as you balance it. Sometimes your nose feels like it’s bigger than your whole face and it’s reasonable to talk about that feeling, as long as talking about it doesn’t make you start thinking it’s true. This is what we do, we talk it out or write it down and it becomes a little further away. We Erma Bombeck the hell out of what happened until we can laugh at the moment and at ourselves. I understand that articulating a problem is sometimes 50% to solving it; please, have you not heard me whine louder than an unoiled gate? The complaining is not the problem, Rodney Dangerfield. It’s the failure to go one inch beyond the caricature you’ve drawn around yourself. 

I actually never really found Rodney Dangerfield funny. Gar, come on. Or okay wait, maybe I can work with this. The reason that Rodney Dangerfield wasn’t funny is that I knew it wasn’t true. I knew that he had kids, that he was married and probably genuinely loved his wife. He was complaining about them in order to be liked, and caricaturing parts of what might have been real to the detriment of things that were also equally real. This is why, when you start to define yourself in one way, as having one particular problem, as having one specific feeling, as belonging to one special group —if that one thing is less than the whole story, and especially if that one interpretation is less than real—it feels wrong to me. Because we’re not stand-up comedians and we’re not caricatures. And this isn’t funny. And it doesn’t look like you.

it is no harder to walk across the highwire without a safety net. it is
no harder to fix in your mind the opposite pole, the goal; to powder your
hands and feet in preparation; to hold the bar that maintains your balance;
to tighten your muscles just so; to walk to the opposite side. it does not
become more challenging to do this without the safety net. the audience
may be impressed, may gasp, although more likely you are the only one
in the whole circus really impressed, because you’re maybe the only
one aware that you are going to have just as hard a time with the net
or without. your job is to get across, not to fall, and so the safety
net in fact is not a part of your equation. it is not, as you told your
friend the other night, a character in your book.

so the safety net really isn’t important. what’s important is getting
across. what’s important to you is getting across with style, elegance,
charm — any adjective that would describe a film star from the
forties.
you do know a lot of it is in the presentation, though: cary grant’s
whole thing was a facade, but that’s not the same thing as fake. you
drop the chalk bag over the edge of the platform.
everyone watches it fall, as quickly slow motion as a car crash. you did
this on purpose. that is style, and you’ve got it. and you powdered
your hands as you fumbled for the bag, which is going to help you hold the bar on the way across.

"elegance" you think to yourself as you slide a confident arch off the
ledge of the platform and onto the wire. you picture your body, your
center of gravity balanced over the wire, take the next step, smile.
the balance is important. people think the bar makes things harder for
you but in fact sometimes it’s zooey’s cigar, the only thing that’s
keeping you from flying straight off. it gives you something to concentrate on.

"charm" is important too, a certain interaction with the audience but
not too aggressive; you want to be liked, you would like to be loved,
but above all you need to get across the wire. you don’t have to spend
time in the middle juggling or dancing unless you think it will be fun.
this is your choice. however there is a certain charm in propping up,
cooking an omelet, taking your time. you have worked hard, you’re
strong, and you’re not afraid.
you can look straight down at the ground where there is no safety net;
a few elephants milling about; some kids with open mouths.

some decisions are in your hands. some are not. whether to use tools,
whether to juggle, whether you want a slackline or a taut are all up to
you. you will have to step off the platform. you’ve done this before
and you can do it again. remember that you have to make it across.
remember too, though, that if you make it across without having fun,
it’s worse than falling. if you fall there are worse things at stake
than whether there’s a safety net.

On Wednesday
night, I lay down on the bathroom floor because the tile was cold and it was
all I could think to do. That’s about as pathetic as I ever want to be, curled
fetal on the bathroom floor. I’d
like to point out that the toilet is in a different room than the bathroom, so I
was pathetic but not filthy. A girl’s gotta have her standards.

I used to think that I wouldn’t be able to really trust
somebody who didn’t understand me exactly. I don’t mean I felt like I could
only trust other women, or other Americans.
I thought I needed somebody who knew what I was saying if I claimed to weep for the future or referred obliquely to my great-grandfather; someone who
understood in excruciatingly precise detail why I thought and felt the way I
did. I thought that if someone understood those things, then they would
understand me, and then I could trust them. 

You may wonder why a person who thought this way has spent
most of her adult life in foreign countries. Get my movie quotes? Not even
close. Half of my friends have never been to the country where I was born; only
a few have ever met my family. Although most of them speak English, my friends
could not be much further from where I came from, metaphorically or literally. As
I have gotten older and less capable of explaining why I think and feel the way
I do to anybody who doesn’t already have that knowledge, the more I have drifted
away from my original cherished idea of being explicable, or ever being understood,
or trusting anybody.

Now I think about it and I think, phew. I don’t believe
anybody needs to know every WHAT that I think and feel, completely, much less
WHY. I think what I wanted was to see myself reflected in someone else’s eyes, because then I would
see myself clearly. That’s a load of crap. A reflection is never, can never, be
completely accurate. The further I get from this idea of being completely
known, the more I realize it’s more than sufficient that I have some idea of
what I think for myself, without having it understood by anyone else, ever. I
am over needing to see myself reflected. And I know that means I’ll never trust anybody completely, and realizing
that is realizing that it doesn’t really matter. 

I’ve been thinking about this
because of some recent conversations about culture and the importance of
defining it. My idea of myself was never of myself as a race or sex or
nationality or language* or anything so… vague. My idea of myself is such a
composite of amazingly general and painfully specific things. And maybe because
my deep-down impression of my culture has always been so extraordinarily
limited, the culture of Anne, I
have not understood the importance of culture to others. I wanted people to
understand me as me. I wanted them to know where I am now and to understand the
complicated trails that I took to get here. It was not so much important to me
as a woman or an American or a
person with freckles or a girl who grew up eating oysters whole and fresh from
the Chesapeake or anything. It was important to me as Anne,
a combination of all the external and internal forces. and the realization that
this was first impossible and second silly has left me absolutely baffled to
find that other people, people less self-obsessed and insane than I am, still think
that it’s important; and more that they think the broadest definitions are more
important than the narrow ones, and that the ones you’re born with are more
important than the ones you grow into. Really?

*yes, I am mighty attached to English, but I believe this is
because I am mighty attached to talking. I don’t feel better in English because
it’s a better language for expressing myself, but because I am better at
expressing myself in it.

 Sometimes I’m
telling someone something, like telling Friar Tuck
how the superhero housewives of the seventies influenced my
understanding of what was expected of women, and I’ll get most of the way through and it’s like:
who am I kidding, he doesn’t know and he cannot possibly. Just like I don’t
know what it was like to grow up buying one banana at a time. But I see now
that the listener’s personal understanding of how it felt doesn’t matter; what
matters is that I have stories and other people have stories and we tell them and come to
a better understanding of who we are now, and what’s important to the people
we’ve become. 

What matters is not that anyone totally understands exactly
who I am and how I got here. What matters is that we have enough respect for
each other to consider our stories worth telling; worth hearing. That we
consider them, maybe, more important than if we could take them for granted. That
I can say, I lay on the floor because the tile was cold, and it’s not to do
with some externally defined idea of who I am, but to do with the idea that my
tooth really fucking hurts, and that this week, I am defining myself in terms
of my toothache. That someone listens to that and brings me ibuprofen and room
temperature water to wash it down.