Category: TODAY

after the dream of falling and calling your name out

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people I talked to:

  • a group of Czechs who were returning from Rwanda where they were laying the groundwork to make a documentary about a children's circus
  • an air-traffic controller victorious from a golf tournament
  • sanitary napkin moguls with a precocious six-year-old motormouth, all shouting to be heard
  • a consultant for HP who mostly slept but also made great small talk
  • some French nuns who were baffled by the visa paperwork so I filled it out for them; with no language in common we merely smiled at each other with fine form-filling fellow feeling
 
stimulation:
  • an oddly Paul Simon-heavy soundtrack broadcast from inside my mind
  • the trees, exactly what I expected but more beautiful
  • a school of bright blue fish that I almost drowned following; so many, so lovely
 
things I thought about:
  • planes should be divided into sleeping and not-sleeping sections
  • Dubai is disturbingly like Vegas while also being its opposite
  • how listening is an act of love
  • why people think anger is an effective response when it usually isn't
  • friendship and its facets, the sparkle and the cut

she sells seashells by the seashore

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Without wishing to oversimplify, it does seem pretty simple to me– to be the person you want to be, start being that person. If you want to be different, change. If you can't change, then stop sitting around wishing you could. I don't mean unrealistic things, because it is true that I have not stopped wishing I could have wings and or a tail, but the things that are well within your range — if it bothers you that you aren't a certain way, why aren't you working towards being that way? Or working towards not being bothered?

I want to be a person who clears deadlines, and so… I clear deadlines. I thought that I would like to be a person who can strike up a conversation with a stranger and enjoy it, but after having given it a valiant effort for a few years I concede that I am not that kind of person and it doesn't bother me anymore because anyway they invented podcasts so I do that instead and it's lovely. I sometimes think that I would like to earn more money at my job but then I remember that I had a job that paid me ridiculous piles of money and I loved that job, but when I stopped loving it I had to quit so I know that money is not as important as I thought it was.

I decided a couple years ago that I want to be the kind of person who says YES unless there's a really good reason to say NO. Curiosity killed the cat, but only after she got a good look. Last week, I was asked to go on a trip and I'm going because there was no reason to say no. I cracked my tooth and it got infected and I won't have time to fix it properly before I go so I expect this little adventure will be like an intensive spa — all sunshine and no solid food. See you in 10 days, assuming I can't figure out how to post pictures while I'm gone.

a luscious mix of words and tricks

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“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ― Douglas Coupland

This quote has popped up on my feed a few times in the past week and it baffles me. I can only assume Mr. Coupland, or more accurately the character that Mr. Coupland has express this sentiment, has had an awfully easy life. I think there are lots of things more cruel that you can do. Leaving aside actual physical cruelty I can still think of things that are much worse than pretending to care. You could care and pretend you don't, for example, and isn't that also fairly awful? You can genuinely not care about someone who wants you to care about them even a little, and you could let them know you don't care. You can care and then abruptly stop caring, and not explain. You can explain. You can set the phone down gently on the counter and walk away for a little while instead of just hanging up, you can practice hanging up, you can practice lots of things that are more cruel than pretending you care. 

To be clear, I think genuine caring is a lot nicer, but sometimes you want to care but you have a deadline or you know you should care but there's a stone in front of your heart and it's hard to feel much of anything. Sometimes you are swirling in a vat of molasses and tears and the only way to keep yourself afloat is by pretending not only to yourself but to other people that you give a shit about anything at all, and the people who let you pretend to care about them are full life rafts, and sometimes in the middle of pretending to care you realize you can see the shoreline and you have a moment of real caring that you couldn't have gotten to otherwise and I don't think that's cruel to anybody. 

And anyway, there are very few places where the emotion behind an act is really all that important. What does caring look like? Cook a meal, change diapers, make tea, show up, listen. Caring is easy; it involves only slightly more effort than watching a television program or reading a book and wondering what happens next. I spent enough of my younger life agonizing because I feared that people didn't really care about me and trying to keep being cared about by the few people who I thought genuinely might, and I'll tell you what I know: caring about other people is a kerjillion times easier than worrying if they care about you. And it feels better; it just does. 

I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not ever care about anyone who posts this quote on facebook, just to be on the safe side, though. Because I care too much to be cruel. 

Flapper

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When I was in my early twenties and falling desperately in love for the second time, we were invited to a 1920s themed party. I went antique shopping and found this amazing flapper-style dress, from the 1960s-era obsession with the 20s. It was short, white, with a white sequined collar and layers of fringe that flew out impressively when I spun around. Oh, I loved that dress.I wore it to that party, I wore it at multiple Halloween parties, it was a lucky charm. I felt so incredibly stylish in it, like I became a more fun person when I put it on. 

Over time and kilos, I was unable to get into it any more. But I couldn't let it go. The thing was, even if I wasn't wearing it, just having it still made me feel happy, the memories I associated with times when I had worn it rushing to the surface every time my hand passed over that fringe. There was a twinge of nostalgia, pain from an old wound, the love had after all ended badly and I felt sometimes like the fun person who wore that dress was not still somewhere inside me, but as gone as dead. But mostly I remembered dancing at a Halloween party, brushing against other dancers when I twirled. Laughing.

Last weekend there was a costume ball and a friend of mine was looking for a dress, a flapper dress if she could find one. Heeeeyyyy I said. I could… you could… 

She looked great. It made me so happy to see her wearing it, being admired in it; it was almost better than wearing it myself, because when I danced beside her I could delight in the cool swish of fringe against my arm. I feel like I can let the dress go now, because it's found a place to be loved; I can keep the memories now without needing the dress. And this is always so, for me, that I don't have a problem with letting go when I'm sure that what I release will land somewhere better. Pulling that dress out of the cedar was one of the best things I've done so far this year. 

o lásce o zradě o světě

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In 1995, I was in a pub and the song Darmodej (The Malefactor, maybe, although it's translated as The Wastrel), by Jaromir Nohavica, came on the radio. It was… Leonard Cohen. Early Paul Simon. The strong quiet voice that you cannot ignore. I can't explain it, there's a fine chain between poetry and my heart and I felt the tug even though I didn't understand the words. I remember saying: I can stay in a country where this is what comes on the radio. 
 
My Czech friend and I set about trying to translate all his songs, for the meaning, for the meat, and while I never can seem to catch the poetry and put it into English, I slowly came to feel the rightness of it in Czech in a way that I don't begin to comprehend. He is absolutely a poet, because his words work on the page, but he is even more absolutely a musician, because his words turn to spells when he sings them. 
 
He is loved here, although little is known about him personally; in fact a movie was made about people trying to get at him, to understand his songs by getting close to him (and vice versa) and at the end of the movie we know nothing more than the disappointed fans in the film. (This is another reason I wanted to stay here, that the most beloved musician is loved for his art, rather than his tabloid activity.) 
 
I never expected I'd get to see Nohavica. The man is stadium-level popular, and I didn't want to see him being a tiny ant. I like him singing to me sweetly in my personal ear, and though I would swoon if it were in real life, it does pretty well via headphones. 
 
But on Sunday he played in a basketball gymnasium, a strange little unadvertised thing, and a friend of a friend had tickets and I went. I spent most of the time with tears streaming down my face; it's like I've decided to put all my feelings behind a wall but the art still pierces right through, and I have cried for Matisse and Miro and Monet and now Nohavica, and I'm not sorry (not least because at least we're moving along in the alphabet). 
 
It was amazing. It was perfect. I loved when he talked, I loved when he didn't, I loved when the audience sang along and when he moved us to awestruck silence. I didn't even put it on my "dream" list because I never thought it would be possible, and I am so beyond happy it was.  

5ive, 2

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How many V-neck or scoop-necked black T-shirts does Anne need?
a. One; it's a staple
b. One of each?
c. MORE! I NEED MORE!
–  From the cycle, "Conversations with myself while shopping to replace one lost thing and instead expanding my uniform"

 
How I can so enjoy the sensation of free-fall, carnival rides, that moment on the swingset hovering before swooping forward or back, and hate it in life. What it would take to embrace it and again feel the excitement of climbing the stairs, anticipation, and then falling, landing, getting up with a laugh and running around to do it again. 
 
Until I was, I think, in my late 20s I thought Joan Miro was a woman. I invented a sort of story about her hanging out with the surrealists and the Cubists, the way you fill in the details of a dream after you wake until it makes sense to you, I mean this was completely invented, her long cigarette holder, her paint-stained shirt, being treated as a peer while happily painting her clearly more feminine stars and swirls. Yeah. 
 
I am now at about 30% gray, meaning still 70% dishwater red. How do I feel about this? Is it time to stop dyeing (… and get busy living? shut up Andy) or do I hold out for 50% like I said I would. Curiosity vs sticking to intentions. Relatedly, a woman told me I looked really good for my age and I forgot to ask how old she thought I was, and this bothers me a great deal a week later. Good for fifty? or good for forty? 
 
This sentence: 
[Matisse was not callous.] It's just that he had only one answer to everything, which was to persist in art that could be justified solely by joy.
– from the New Yorker review of the Matisse Cut-Out show

travel and other meanderings

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Dear airports (and airlines), you dole out basic amenities like the Czechs used to dole out toilet paper. Small servings of a thing that I think you could easily include in your overhead costs and are making us pay for as a means of reminding us who is in control. A Czech acquaintance of mine wrote her thesis on gay lifestyle as recorded by one of the toilet guards, as public toilets were one of the places for gays to meet under Communism. Picture some middle-aged woman, tearing off individual squares and recording the various antics she saw in public bathrooms in the eighties; I expect she got more out of it than whatever is being collected while we sit in suspended animation buying four dollar water, ten dollar wine, trading our grandmother's maiden names for five minutes of connection to people we already like in an attempt to avoid conversation with people we won't.

Overheard, while waiting for the plane to Madrid:

Young man: So… are you going to Madrid, too?
Young woman: Yes.
YM: For vacation or…?
YW: I'm going to study there for a semester.
YM: Wow! So… you speak Italian?
 
Once while I was disembarking from a plane with young Squire a business suit came to me and said that he had never seen a finer job of parenting than me on a plane. It probably made my year, totally taking credit for what was in fact an incredibly easy kid to travel with. I regret that I was unable to say the exact same thing to the woman seated a row ahead of us yesterday. I was saving it for when we got off the plane, but when I turned she was gone. She was amazing. Not that the kid didn't cry, though he cried very little, but that the parent seemed to so completely enjoy him while not presuming that the rest of the plane shared her feelings and used her enjoyment of him as a means of entertaining him. Anyway, dear lady in 10C, thank you for making my flight better in more ways than one. 
 
Band names that didn't make the "stuff on our table" list of bands: The Plastic Knives. The Gravy Boats. The Sporks. 
Acknowledgement of but failure to actually go into the article about band names and which ones use definite articles and what that conveys, because I'm too jet-lagged to look into it. 
 
You guys, I am so tired. But happy to be home. Didja miss me?

Pride and Sensibility

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Anne Tuckington had been single for so long that she had despaired of ever finding a match that would be her equal in overthinking and brooding, and had resigned herself to merely hope that perhaps some day she could find a place to put her cold feet at night, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of cold extremities  must be in need of a partner. 
 
And thus she did merrily go far and around the region, visiting L– for the baths and K– for the cheeses and V– for the condescending attitude and confusion that only the birthplace of psychotherapy could have.
 
And yet it was in her own small town of B– that the most recent occurrence drove our heroine to put fingers to keys and type the story of a time when she found herself almost smitten with a man whose affections were frankly engaged elsewhere, and she found herself flirting outrageously largely on the basis of his upper body strength, which was prodigious. Imagine him lifting heavy things, she sighed to herself, her breath heavy with longing.
 
One evening, they perambulated the small hall to which they had retreated, having gone there to escape the bitter outdoor chill, not quite arm in (strong!) arm but very close, and he touched her cheek with the back of his warm hand, and she nearly swooned, whereupon he suggested that they might perhaps seat themselves in the smoking room for a time, as he had something he needed to say.
 
It bears mentioning at this point that our young heroine, while constantly desirous of declarations of affection, has received them so rarely in her life that she has been known to fall in love upon hearing of someone's love for her, and she is wiser now but still she felt her cheeks flush with anticipation. Perhaps his affections were not as engaged elsewhere as she had thought; perhaps there was yet hope. A confession of ardent admiration, maybe, if not love. With shaking fingers she lit a cigarette for something to do, averting her eyes from his steady gaze, trying to figure out how to inhale the smoke and hold her breath at the same time, waiting.
 
Finally it spilled forth, this story he needed to convey to her. What was the story? I sense that you, too, gentle reader, are on the edge of your seat. I shall therefore proceed apace: dear reader, it was quite possibly the most boring story ever told. It had nothing to do with an unburdening of the heart, no nothing to do with feelings at all, not even feelings of a baser, animal nature. Once before on a tram our lady Anne had overheard a man tell of an encounter in a restaurant, the tale took longer than the encounter, and she thought that that, surely, was the most boring story ever, but this story surpassed it in all aspects except that at least the teller was better looking.
 
But there she sat, no words of passion were his, nor even of mild interest, and as he spoke she realized that with every word she found him less desirable, until finally at the end of 20 minutes she no longer desired him at all. Well maybe still his arms a little. But otherwise, the small but persistent flame she had cupped in her heart was fully extinguished, blown out not by the winds of reality but the undeniable puff of boredom. And how did this feel? Was it sad? Not at all: it was the kindest, most incredibly wonderful thing that could have happened. So ended her affection; now she was free again. The cold feet are still a problem, but dying of cold feet is a fate much, much less awful than dying of boredom.

my spousal ambitions

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Well, since Benedict Cumberbatch is marrying someone else and Emily Nussbaum doesn't want to leave New York (I STILL LOVE YOU EMILY but I concede that it must remain love from afar) I think it's only reasonable that I join every feminist over 25 and set my cap for Mallory Ortberg. Mallory Mallory Mallory. Every time I see her name in print I fall a little more in love. So sweet and so fucking smart. I know she's too young for me, but she's so clever and insightful that she seems older so it's not creepy. And I don't actually know if she's single but since all my imaginary love is entirely pure it doesn't matter. 

30 Questions

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In November I asked a question on facebook every day. The goal was to get to know some of my friends better, and that was a lot of fun. A few people asked for my answers; here they are.
 

What's the best thing about you?
My friends. They are diverse and funny and kind and awesome and I'm a better person for having them in my life.

What's something you know by heart?
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The lyrics to every 80s song. 

What's the last song you sang along to?

Heroes, by David Bowie. I'm learning to play it, so I sang along with myself, but that counts, right?

What's the last really nice thing someone did for you?
My sister visited me and helped me clean out my closet. That's two nice things.

When you were a teenager, who was one of your biggest idols? Bonus: How do you feel about that person now?
Annie Lennox. I wanted to be just like her, the voice and the clothes, the self-assurance, the gender blurring, the poetry. Now I admire her more for her activism than her fashion, and I'm sorry she doesn't seem to write her own songs any more, but I still think she's pretty cool.

What's your favorite book? (or the first book to spring to mind in response to the question)
It's a tie: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander.

What's something you haven't done that you'd like to try?

Editing fiction. REAL fiction, not delusional fantasies by the uncommitted insane and creative statistics by academics with deadlines.

What is something that made you laugh really hard recently?
Reading my 1994 diary. Talking about interspecies romance novels.

What's something that you're good at that not many people know you're good at?
Listening. I cleverly disguise it by talking most of the time. 

If you could have a superpower, which one would you want?
Teleportation.

What do you like best about the work you do?
That I think it matters. That I get to learn stuff while I work. That I don't have to interact with people. 

If you could live inside a book, which one would you want to live in?
Infinite Jest, maybe? Because I could live there for a really long time without getting bored. 

What would you like to change about yourself?
I'd like to be more open and simultaneously less vulnerable. 

What's your favorite cover version of a song? Why do you like it?
Cat Power's Satisfaction, because it gives a completely new interpretation to the song (one of hopelessness rather than frustration), and Alanis Morissette's My Humps for the same reason, though I don't know how many times I could listen to it.

What motivates you to read a book — a friend's recommendation, familiar author, prize winner, pretty cover….?
I have annual resolutions to read a particular kind of book, so that's a primary motivator, or a friend's recommendation.

What's a great movie you'd like every teenager to see?
Besides the Breakfast Club, which seems obvious, maybe Harold and Maude.

What's the last book that made you feel excited?
The Goldfinch, because I got my love of Donna Tartt back. I was also excited about the Bone Clocks, but that ended badly so I'd prefer not to think about it.

What is the story of your most interesting scar?

I put my hand through a glass door and got a smile on my wrist and lost some of the movement of my left hand.

Is your greater regret something you have done, or something you haven't done? 
I regret not realizing my time was limited with some people and places, and not squeezing in more experiences in that limited time.
I regret tequila 95% of the time.

How do you make a difficult decision?
I make pros and cons lists, I pretend I've made a decision and see how it feels, and I trust my instincts.

What's a fun thing you do when you're alone? Is it more fun when you're alone or with others?
I play solitaire by myself to relax and would never do so with other people around. I like binge watching TV alone and with others if they watch it the same way I do, which is hard to find.

Do you have art in your house? How would you describe it (mostly posters of famous art, mostly fingerpaints by your children, something in between)? How do you feel about it?
I have a fair bit of art in the house, mostly graphic art. It's predominantly things made by people I know and love, and so when I look at it I feel delighted to know such people and also pleased by the beauty of the work itself. 

What's your ideal climate?
Sunny and hot and a little humid, near a beach. This is not the ideal climate for my skin, unfortunately.

What do you do to make yourself feel better when you're having a rough day?
Forgive myself. Indulge in something. 

What are you thankful for?
My friends. Technology and specifically what it enables me to do — work from home, and stay in touch with friends and family. 

What do you love about winter holidays?
I don't love much about winter, period. Probably staying cozy indoors. I like watching Die Hard at Christmas with Squire because it's a tradition that is just ours. 

What's your default meal (the reliable thing you cook when you're not inspired)?
Peanut butter on toast. Chicken and zucchini. 

 
What would you like to ask me?