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.