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.

I realized this week that part of being an adult is learning to say that you’re sorry and then stop talking. I don’t know why it seems to be an instinct to keep going, to say, "But in my own defense, you…" Or actually any sentence starting with "but". Or actually anything. I don’t mean defending yourself, which is reasonable, but this desire to, when caught doing something you know is wrong, to hit back at the person who caught you because you feel guilty. It’s a bad instinct, though, and not remotely winning or helpful. I’ve been thinking about this because I lost a lot of respect recently for someone who didn’t own the error and shut up (although to be fair, I gained a lot of respect for someone who did) and had a moment of sudden clarity that I’d hate to lose. If I broke the habit of scab picking, I can break the habit of punching myself in the face in self-defense.

We bought the cottage almost exactly a year ago. On Saturday we went for the first time this year, to prune the apple trees and play tarzan (Friar Tuck) and make plains out of molehills and play president (me) and complain about the cold (Squire Tuck). There is a bus now that goes to the nearest village, cutting our walking time down from an hour to more like 15 minutes, which makes it possible to go for one day, which is useful when it’s cold like this, still. It was good to be there, good to see that all hell hadn’t broken loose, good to breathe clean air and start again thinking about a project that is neither work nor self-improvement. Not that there isn’t room for lots of fun work projects and lots of self-improvement in my vast and vastly flawed brain. For example, I regret very much that I would still like to be thanked for being who I am and the best I can do with that is acknowledge it and try to move on and away. I can’t think of an analogous bad habit– grabbing other people’s arms and making them pat me on the back? We all did good work, even Squire Tuck once he got over the fact that I was right and he should have worn a coat. 

On Sunday I had what I would like to call "the toothache" because it sounds so 1800s, except I don’t understand how that particular tooth can hurt, since the nerves were all pulled out a year ago. My jaw is swollenly mumpish feeling and it makes me distraught and, yesterday at least, weepy. When I cannot eat it is as frustrating as when I cannot sleep, perhaps more so. And I picked fights with Friar Tuck regarding the sugar content of canned tomatoes and was generally unpleasant in my head, although mostly I kept it in my head. We watched a lot of videos, which is the only way I know to make me sit still for any period of time, and which I believe was necessary. Did you know that they went back and redubbed Aughra? What a disappointment. I have been particularly missing Frank Oz of late and did not get my fix yesterday, although I thought I was set. Friar Tuck planted ricin in little peat pots and Squire Tuck and I lolled, fighting over the popcorn and watching the first season of Smallville. I really must do something about this lusting after teenage boys, or I’ll have to go back and read Lolita again and see if maybe this time I don’t hate Humbert Humbert.

I started reading The Waste Land because I think it’s a good equinox-y thing to do and I feel very equinoxy, what with the trees bursting into bloom one minute and the threat of snow the next. Hovering between things. I got to "Hurry up please it’s time" and got all fraught so I decided to write this instead. Anyway I have until Tuesday to read it and still feel all timely and poetical.

1. i had to look up what dhmo was and then i laughed long and heartily.
i am not clever enough to actually get the joke on my own but i am geek
enough to look things up and then have a little snicker as if i had
been that smart all along. i suspect that my father, who got saline
solution
for me in japan by writing down NaCI (which was a lot more effective
than gaijin sign language), is disappointed that i still have to look
things like this up, much like using a calculator to add two and two.

2. we have moles all over the damn yard. dirty, nasty, stinking moleses, i hates them, precious. i’m
planning on growing my own ricin to eliminate them. i want to start
carrying a cane dipped in ricin; don’t you? but we’re in the store
arguing the values of ricin vs. regular toxins vs. some magical humming
thing that drives moles to madness and i grab a bottle of poison and
Friar Tuck goes, that’s rodent poison, and i’m like, right! i thought my joke
with the ricin and the cane makes me all brill but then i didn’t know a
mole was not a rodent so ha.

3. i am losing words at an alarming rate and do not seem to be gaining
any. i still need to spellcheck occasional every time i use it and
often just type over it with periodic, the same as my solution with
received/got, and i have recently added history and comprehend to the
list of words i now have to look up before i’m absolutely sure they’re
right. history. hisstory? hishtory? gobbledygook.

4. i spent probably an hour today reviewing the columbus mythology.
after a while you start wondering if you know anything; if you ever
knew anything. if there’s any space in your brain at all for actual
knowledge, because the facts all slide out like water. whether all the
time you spent arguing for truth, defending the importance of truth,
placing the value of truth over that of the story, wouldn’t have been
better off arguing in favor of the narrative, which has tentacles and a
spine.

5. last night i was trying to figure out why so many of my otherwise terribly smart friends seem
so darned indecisive. why so much of my inner conversation involves me
nearly screeching, JUST DO IT. i think that the reason is that when
less bright people take tests and don’t know the answer, they’re happy
to apply an "eenie-meenie" strategy to picking the answer. they don’t
know; they’re not going to know; they’ll make a guess and go on to the
next question. when playing at buridan’s ass, they will flip a coin and
start eating. but rational people feel sure one answer is right, or
more right. they’re not so much indecisive as they are waiting for the
decision to reveal itself; they’re waiting for appropriate information
so that they can make an appropriate choice. and i get angry, because
it seems to me that they are making a choice, and that choice is
"starving", but i have to remember that i have aced many tests in my
life not by using the superior intellect that i do not have, but by
thinking like a lucky monkey. smart like a paper cut.

6. i got some really good ice cream sauce for christmas but ice cream
seems very special occasion event to me, definitely not something we stock,
so we’re totally doling out the sauce in little doses. except today
because i am sad i am eating the sauce straight from the jar in giant
globbing spoonfuls.

I didn’t find Ann Coulter’s joke funny, but I really don’t understand the reaction, a lot of which seems to be along the lines of  "How dare she, that ugly blah blah blah." If we are offended that she called him a faggot to insult him, then turning around and calling her ugly lessens the value of our offense. If we are offended that she implied that he was homosexual, as if that in itself were insulting, this speaks more to our own homophobia than to hers. If we are offended by the use of the word "faggot" which is considered to be a deragatory term for homosexuals (much like "nigger" is a deragatory term for African-Americans) then we have some grounds for offense, I think, except that doesn’t seem to be where people are directing their offense. They say, "What if she had called Obama a nigger?" but that’s not a good comparison: better would be "What if she had called Kucinich a chink?" in which case I have to imagine our response would be… bemusement. And the response should have been, "Kucinich is offended on behalf of his Chinese friends that Ann Coulter would use such a word to describe them; were Kucinich himself Chinese, he would probably also be personally offended by this appellation but as it is he is simply baffled." If we are offended that people can say "faggot" in public and not be burned alive, then we have forgotten that we like the first amendment when it works in our favor and we should remind ourselves of that. If we are offended that somebody (several somebodies) thought that it was funny, to say the word faggot out loud, then we need to get tougher skins, because some people liked junior high so much that they never grew out of it, and that is a sad fact but a fact nonetheless.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot because of a recurring conversation with Squire Tuck, which conversation it titled How To Deal with Teasing and Name-calling. I don’t understand why it is that adulthood conveys a perspective on this that youth cannot believe, but there it is. Squire Tuck has been teased because he likes Star Trek. I tell him: Well, you do like Star Trek, so what do you care? Too bad for them if they aren’t cool enough to get it. Squire Tuck has been alternately teased for liking things he does not actually like. I tell him: Well, they’re wrong, so what do you care? Too bad for them if they’re ignorant. Because I feel like it comes down to being teased for having blue eyes, which he has, so what; or being teased for having brown eyes, which he hasn’t, so what. In either case getting all fired up over people’s ignorance only seems to get them more aggressive and no less ignorant.

I do understand that there is a difference between being picked on for things that you cannot change about yourself (eye color) vs. your taste (Star Trek). People who are singled out for bullying on the basis of physical characteristics undoubtedly have it harder than people who choose their oddities. But– as long as neither of those things is causing pain to anyone, I think it can be defended in the same way. This is who I am. Who I am is not hurting you. Your desire to hurt me is not even worthy of my notice. I’m not saying words don’t hurt, but I have noticed that revealing the success of the hit doesn’t seem to discourage further attack.

I guess I advocate fighting back if you enjoy it, but the Victorian in my heart thinks that a nice, icy snub is more ultimately satisfying. I would have been happier, I think, if the response to Coulter had been more, "Oh, well, that woman, what can you expect?" You know? A tired eye roll, a brief exhalation of impatience would be better than to appear to be more horrified by her use of a word than by the sum total of her writing. I mean, people should avoid Ann Coulter because she is not particularly witty, insightful, or even interesting, & I think these are things we look for in a political commentator. But I don’t think she needs to be censored for saying stupid things, because whatever, let her say what she wants and then don’t buy her books. I don’t think we should get so upset over a word. Sticks and stones, man. Water off a duck’s back. Rubber and glue. Live long and prosper.

so, how long are you planning on being pissed? i’m just asking because,
you know, you make all these rare pronouncements about how long it’s
okay to be pissed and how it’s in your hands to change it or get out of
it and yet you’ve made no changes and here you are, still mad, still all frothy and outraged. the
exception proves the rule, sure, but when it’s your rule i don’t think
you also get to be the exception.

and it’s not like your anger is baseless so much, because i’m not
saying that, but that the base is so well established it seems like
you could be moving into some more complex emotions by now. or moving
on altogether, as this base of yours is already rich with the basics
and their over-dramatic adjectives: your hopeless despair, your fierce
indignation, your unwarranted fear; your overarching, salt-stained sorrow; and of course your unchained anger. really, get a look at yourself. if you can’t stop
running your own emotional gantlet could you at least introduce some
subtlety here and there for the other players? something like, oh, i
don’t know, speechless gratitude? see: you wouldn’t have to SAY anything,
you’d just have to, for variety, have a feeling that is not always about how
bad it is for you. or is that too much?

last week you said you’d lost interest in her because she was in the
habit of witty complaint, and now has nothing of substance to complain
about and yet somehow continues complaining, just in the absence of
wit. a valid judgement, i’m not saying it’s not. i’m saying: you were
never even witty. you are, to be frank, more than a little boring at
your best, when this is your game, the "woe is my middle name" game.

you can change it, you can change how you think about it, or you can
change your proximity to it. but really, shake yourself out of this.
somewhere inside you is a nice person: a good friend, a fun parent,
a solid partner. somewhere inside of you that person is choking. do
you like being this way? then please, if not for yourself, then for the
sake of my slagging patience, knock it off.

to quote another famous czech, "you americans are so naive!" oh, i’m
kidding. it’s just been running through my head since i tried to explain the whole "oh the horrors of parents who drink" thing to Friar Tuck.

the beer garden, as i’m sure i’ve mentioned, is an outdoor pub with
tables that border a playground. parents sit and talk and drink and
smoke and relax. kids play and climb and run. it is understood that
parents are not there to play with their kids, but are immediately
available should a child need help. it is understood that most of the
people sitting at the tables are adults capable of taking care of
children and, one likes to hope, themselves.

there are different beer gardens, just as there are different
playgrounds, and one garden (gated, no dogs allowed, smoking sometimes
frowned on when seated at tables nearest the play area) caters to
younger children. we upgraded to the big kid garden year before last,
where the tables are slightly farther from the play area, where there’s
more room to run around and where there are even more people who aren’t
parents there. the kids sometimes have to divert games around adults
playing petanque. some adults are rowdy. we call this "living in a
city" and i recommend that people who can’t handle adult rowdiness in a
public area avoid public areas.

in the 10 years i’ve been going to beer gardens, and it has been a
near-daily summer thing, i have seen actively bad parenting three
times. two of those times, the parent was corrected by another patron.
one of them, the family was asked to leave. so there is a collective
kind of behavior here, there is a willingness to judge, there is social
criticism and even public shaming for bad behavior.

it’s just that there’s not this pre-emptive strike, this someone might
be stupid someday so we’ll assume you’re all stupid right now. there’s
a willingness to assume you know how to take care of yourself. which,
given the option, i’d prefer to have the assumption be that i am, in
fact, not an idiot. i have all the czech grandmas taking care of that
for me, what with the way i let Squire Tuck run around nearly naked (coat with
liner, pants, boots, hat… but no gloves! he’ll FREEZE!) and the
horrific fact that i don’t bake cookies. but in a group of people my
approximate age, the idea of defending my right to be an adult and have a child at
the same time? no. thank you.

there is absolutely nothing seriously wrong. there is nothing wrong, in
fact, at least not as far as i know. actually there is nothing
that i know. it’s just the hint of something and i am all over the
place with worry. a hat on the table, we all know what that means. and
worse, certain words that cannot sound good no matter what. even benign
has in it a note of evil, an assonant hint of the evil it does not
(ostensibly) possess.

we smile, we joke, he admires my socks, they are splendid socks. that’s
something i know, see, is that i have a splendid pair of socks. they
are lucky socks, i washed them last night so i could wear them on the
plane, so i could give the poor security guards something splendid to
look at when i have to take off my shoes. so he admires my socks and we
talk
about where we were ten years ago: he had more hair and i had fewer
wrinkles. but we are the same, i am nervous and he is reassuring and we
talk about his typewriter, which i tell him we would find maybe in an
antique store in america, and about his funky little television, which
you don’t see a lot of televisions this fancy in offices. what politics and money hath wrought. i am almost comfortable,
see, between the socks and the jokes about technology.

look, i’m okay, it’s nothing, i’m fine. people have awful things
happen to them all the time and this is not awful. some people don’t
have time for the luxury of dread, the hours of wondering and the
overplayed scenarios, the eyes peeled open in the dark. what if what if. and that is all this is, the
luxury of overthought. except that: this is nothing. you lose your
rabbit’s foot and you walk across the street with more caution but you
should have been cautious in the first place. or maybe caution itself
is what gets you into trouble. maybe you’re looking for the wrong
thing. six percent of americans they say, maybe even twenty-five
percent, and they don’t even know; and what i do not know could fill a
vaccum.

and afterwards i step into the street and cross at the green and walk
downtown and buy some new CDs, new to me. my ideas of what is unlucky
are ridiculous cliches that even i don’t take quite seriously, but my
ideas of luck have always been personal and it’s easy to turn it
around. in the evening i make spinach and pasta and Squire Tuck eats the
spinach and even doesn’t flinch, it’s good because it’s good for me, he
says, and this is surely a sign of good things to come, of right
decisions made. right? of course it is. 

Squire Tuck and i have been talking about brains lately. this is because he
drew a probe that he would like to design that would help him to access
and understand the brains of others. half of this probe is very
grid-like, the other half is all squiggledy. i imagine that you will
be, as i was, interested to learn that the grid portion of the probe is
for decoding the emotions of others, and the squiggle part is for
thoughts. because thoughts come in different sizes and shapes, you see,
whereas emotions have a limited number of causes and expressions and
always make sense.

the number of times that i can say "ah" in a day continues to amaze me.
i’m clocking "ah" at the speed formerly observed for the
expressionless "yeah" on the west wing.

so i asked Squire Tuck to draw me the inside of his brain, which he did, and it
was really interesting because my picture of the inside of my brain is
radically different. whole people can get in and out of my brain, they
can poke about and learn things, tell me about themselves all day long, settle into the armchair that’s just
behind my forehead and see things from my point of view, should they
choose to do so. people can wander in unannounced and set up their own
little cozy area, decide to stay for a while, and i play really loud
music and ask them to leave but they’re like, gripping tightly to a
dendrite and they shall not be moved. my skull is basically like a
bucky fuller house, it’s my house and it’s where i live and all my thoughts have their own rooms,
and that’s how it is.

it is consistently strange to me to realize that i have a completely
different concept of something than someone else has; that my concept
is based on absolutely nothing other than my imagination and possibly
some vaguely remembered sci-fi films; that this concept is no more or
less valid than anyone else’s. that there may be nobody
wandering around inside my brain except me, or that in fact
wandering does not take place at all.

Squire Tuck has a high and impenetrable wall at the edge of his brain, by the
way. i should have gotten one of those, but i seem to have these rather
permeable walls and they’re right at the property line. so. come on in.
i will make you some coffee and i have these delicious dark-chocolate-covered gingerbread things, they’re taking up an awful lot of space in
here right now and i’m happy to share.

*edited to add a requested link to a picture of the probe. the brain pictures are private, but Squire Tuck okay’ed the picture of the probe.