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.

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.