The first time I ever got drunk was the second week of college. Jolene, Payal, Ashu, Alessandro and I went to a party where all the girls were misogynistically required to ingest Peppermint Schnapps shots off of an ice luge built by a group of frat boys. Looking back, I'm offended by both the sexism and the lack of hygiene involved in this undertaking. However, after one shot, I was the life of the party. Then a window fell on Payal as she was pointing out the boy she had a crush on, who was seemingly passed out, on the lawn of this enormously dumpy frat house with an excess of wooden and leather surfaces that were oddly both sticky and dusty all at once, and I was so afraid for her, I started crying. I had convinced myself she had a brain hemorrhage and would be dead by the next morning. And she was my friend and I loved her. And back then I didn't have that many friends. Hell, I still don't have that many friends. most of the people in this story are still the closest friends I have. That night I puked into a wastebasket as Jolene held my hair up. Payal was still alive the next morning. She lives in Chicago with her husband. We have slumber parties whenever I'm in Chicago. We order dessert-for-dinner room service and bill our respective companies. Jolene is in New York. I'll see her in two weeks and maybe we'll take a trip to Magnolia? Alessandro still hasn't emailed me the co-op letter about feces fling-a-thons that I requested a couple of weeks ago, but I still love him. In the end, it all turned out well. That was my last experience with ice luges.

"...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."
-Joan Didion

There are days of a perfect material harmony, a lone empty parking spot in front of the restaurant, some undefinable craving easily met by a special on the menu, sitting on a patio and closing down the bar, an orange sky, refraction, the memory of the word, learned in an 8th grade science class. Refraction, what I always think to an orange sky. But as I get older, I realize that even this, a material harmony, a bodily rhythm with the world isn't enough. Happiness is still simple, but displacement is infinitely more complicated.

Sometimes I wonder about the purpose of writing. Of seeking a narrative. When I was little, I liked the idea of a mobile home, a sanctuary that you take with you. But what I really wanted was to know why anyone should ever have to leave the comfort of the womb. On The Sopranos, Tony tells Dr. Melfi about his experience with Peyote. "Our mothers are like a bus. They drop us off and then go off in their own direction, on their own journey, but we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back on that bus," was what he realized. I should do Peyote. I should do a great many things.

This made me think that maybe the mere act of having a child is a kind of selfish cruelty. I know this stems from my innate fear of damaging things, or people. It takes a certain amount of confidence in yourself to have a child. Or a kind of basic ignorance or avoidance of who you are. I always wanted a preparedness in myself before I had a child. It's not that I doubt my ability to nurture; this I know I can do. Or to provide, or listen or play or protect or support. It's that I don't know what I'll do in those moments where I don't have answers for my children. It's that I worry for the moments that they'll sense those gaps in me, that I can't offer them the keys to be well-adjusted. It's that I won't be able to offer them any sort of solution to ambivalence. And what's the point of bringing something wide-eyed and hopeful into a world and then watching it face the various uncertainties of this life when I don't fully understand what purpose those uncertainties serve? And those who think this builds strength and character are deluding themselves. Perhaps it does, but so what? Enough about growth, about character, about moulding yourself about journey about evolution, about time and maturity and hardship and delayed rewards. I don't know what I believe, or I do, but it all seems irrelevant and so why would I pass it on, like a set of bad genes?

I don't know why people write. I don't know why people have kids. The world is overpopulated anyway. And sometimes I just want to be left alone.

Have been thinking about Havana and Grizzly Bear and the human need to connect, and beauty. Peacock feather earrings, clothes that don't fit. Stacks of books, succulents, Joan Didion and macrobiotic recipes. Dreams about a treehouse in my parents' backyard, teacups with blue rims, a summer in Boston and lemon ice cream at Herrell's. The sunset over the Charles, the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, sticky toffee pudding, a drum circle in Venice, a chocolate cafe in Havana, cold coffee with ice cream and pastries at the Ashoka after an afternoon of shopping with my Mama and sister, my parents' old wedding pictures, in an album with a red velvet cover, handmade cards that my grandfather sent me, Amar Chitra Katha comics that my other grandfather gave me, guavas on steel plates, Papa in the kitchen making an orange celery root and avocado salad, my mother's advice, a row of empty Limca bottles on a shelf in my Nani's house. Mornings where the sunlight wakes my toes first, June gloom, yoga at Runyon in the winter, things that break and can be super glued together, things that break and can't.

my magic eight ball is skewed in my favor

9 positive responses, 4 negative, 5 ambivalent, 2 I can't read because of excess toxic blue liquid.

Very Likely
Prospect Good
You Can Count on It
Absolutely
Looks Like Yes
Yes
Indications Say Yes
No Doubt About It
So It Shall Be

Unlikely
Chances Aren't Good
The Stars Say No
No

Consult Me Later
Can't Say Now
Answer Unclear Ask Later
Focus and Ask Again
Cannot Foretell Now

All this time, Magic Eight Ball. You've just been leading me on.

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/guest-column-loves-me-loves-me-not-do-the-math/?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26douthat.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

-Henri Cartier Bresson, Seville

-Henri Cartier Bresson, Brasserie

"Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
-Joan Didion

Awww...I saw Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi at the Coffee Bean on Hillhurst several months ago. Young, hipster love is so cute.

Did you watch La Ballon Rouge in kindergarten? I did. But that's because I went to pretentious international school and Ms. Megai was probably a film studies major in college. Thanks Ms. Megai, for the early filmic education. Thanks, parents, for sending me to pretentious international school where we watched French 1950s films in kindergarten. I will probably do the same for my children and they will grow up pretentious and annyoying and call home crying over their routine pathos well into their 30s. Ick. Makes me not want to have kids. Or maybe I'll send them to Quaker school. Friends seem so happy and well-adjusted. Thanks Grizzly Bear. For this song that I am in love with. I am glad you talk about the malaise. Will you marry me, Grizzly Bear? Yes, your whole band, I mean.


BTW, I had forgotten how scary that closing scene is and how disturbed I felt watching it as a kid. I would not want to be flying over Paris precariously holding on to a bunch of balloon threads.

After watching the Youtube recap, I swear that movie is about the director's tumultuous relationship with a temperamental woman who broke his heart and left him incapable of commitment, and therefore philandering with other balloons. I mean women.

A Hollywood Dilemma

Why does your home have to be a fucking mess when Lisa Cholodenko calls and tells you she wants to shoot a movie in it?

Sightings

Kara Thrace and Number Six eating lunch together at M Cafe. It was like a Battlestar Reunion. They're both so fucking tall.

And THEN the dad from My So-Called Life at MILK. I see him a lot through. I think he lives in the area.

“That millions of people share in the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane...”
-Erich Fromm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/arts/20rece.html?em

To exist in a system of binaries is entrapment. Always either one or another. Why can't it be neither. And then it isn't. And there she is again, that woman in a black Mercedes with the blonde hair - I see her everywhere now - in the parking lot of the Arclight smoking a cigarette, standing outside M Cafe, driving at the intersection of La Brea and Melrose. She has appeared and reappeared so many times now that I have come to expect it. Tell me something, I say to a bus parked on the side of the road. Anything, I tell the traffic light. Or just do this, I say to a lone bird pecking at something on the sidewalk outside of LA Mill, I'll ask for something and you make it appear. What says the bird. Something material? A person? No. I say. A sign, silly. If there is really no space between you and me, if we are both just one, then it is like asking my own hand for something. It is like asking myself. So I will tell you what I believe and you confirm it. Or don't I tell the tree. Don't confirm it, I say because it isn't about belief and unbelief. It isn't about you or me. It isn't about the spaces that exist between us. It isn't about the day to day, our sufferings, minor or major. Or even our euphoria. Because it goes it's own way, doesn't it? Ask says the bird, or don't. You are here for something, aren't you? asks the tree. Yes. I say. No. I don't know. I've never known and never will. I wanted confirmation. Certainty. I look into the wary face of the bird. You should have known better. YOU of all people should have known better, he says. I know, I sigh. We always know. It's like Salman Rushdie marrying Padma Lakshmi. Or Arthur Miller marrying Marilyn Monroe. Or...This isn't about people marrying other people says the tree. No, I say, it is about knowing the trajectory of a narrative. You and your trajectory says the traffic light. I love the idea of a trajectory, I say. So do I, says the bird. No, not that kind. I say. We know, they sigh. Your trajectories are different. So tell us, they say. Tell us what you came here to tell us. Ask us what you want to know. Our answers are timeless. And truer than the ones blurred by the limits of your ephemeral subjectivity. Not yet, I say...first I have to sit on this curb. First I have to watch a bad movie with Hillary Swank that just happens to be on TV. First I must wait for thirteen full moons and four whole seasons. And then I can say this: I was lucky in this life. I received many things and people called it karma. This I believed. Do you know how this feels, I ask the bird. No, but I understand other languages, he says and pecks at the pavement. Tell us more, says the pavement. I am obsessed with what I don't understand and I spend every minute trying to understand the dimensions I don't. But my efforts feel paltry. I can learn all I want, but it's no good. It feels like when I went through all the SRA cards in the second grade within the first month and then there was nothing to do. This must have made you feel smart, says the tree. No, I remember. It just made me sad, I tell the bird. I am aware of the limitations of my own mind so acutely that sometimes I cry. I am afraid that none of the answers this world is able to provide will ever be enough. I don't do that says the bird. Nor do I says the cat watching the bird. We do other things, says the cat. We live, we survive. We feel affection for our young. We feed, and we don't see time the way you do. We see the seasons. We feel the cold. We don't choose as many things as you do either, says the traffic light. We don't think, hmmm...sushi for lunch today, or shall I clean my desk drawer, or I like this new pair of shoes or I am getting fat, I need to go for a run, or shall I hike or do yoga. That must be nice, I think. We can hear you, they say. Tell us about your choices, asks the bird. I live in California I say. Why do you? they ask. Because it is warm. Because I am driven by nostalgia, the past. We remember the past, says the pavement, but we don't feel attached to it like that. No, says the bird. How can you feel affection for a time? it gets worse, I say. Sometimes I feel affection for a time that doesn't even exist. How do you do that? says the traffic light. I don't know, I say. I just do. When I am not thinking, I am dreaming and my dreams tell me things. They told me to stay. They told me who I would meet. They told me what I would feel. And they warned me of things that would occur. Do you know what will happen tomorrow? asks the tree. No. Do you? I say. Yes, but I am not driven by expectation or conditioned by disappointment like you are. What are you here to learn asks the woman in the Mercedes. Oh, you. I thought you'd never ask. I suppose I am here to learn to love. No, scratch that. That is the kind of thing Christian rock singers say. But perhaps they are right. I am not an angry person, though sometimes I have a temper. Mostly I am confused. Mostly I am piecing things together at my own pace, and don't like to be rushed. So this is about someone trying to rush you through life says the bird. Maybe. I think. Maybe I say. but it is all over now. Now I am in a different place, different than where I was before or the many times before even that before. I feel adrift. And you are the only things that anchor me. Us? asks the tree. Me? says the bird. Really asks the skeptical woman in the Mercedes as she checks messages on her cell phone. I don't know what anchors me now. All I know is I am not connected to the people I once knew. Not in the same way. All I know is, I am my own person and maybe that means I am connected to everything. In a way that I never before understood. Neptune, says the tree. You are dreaming. Neptune is illusions, I say. And maybe I have those, or had those once. But no. This isn't about dreams. I am not Pandora anymore, am I, I ask. You remember that, says the cat laughing. Of course I do. I wrote it three years ago. That I am Pandora. I wrote it because of the dream with no ending. I knew I would open the box, and I knew what I would find. You should have kept that box closed says the woman in the Mercedes. Why? I ask. Because of what you found! They yell. I found myself, I say. Are you sure? They all ask. And we all hold our breath.

this is how i feel right now

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/arts/television/17sont.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=in%20treatment%20young%20talent&st=cse

I got nothing.

IM. Today.

T: You haven't blogged in like two days. wtf is going on?

Me: it's like my brain is going down all the wrong alleyways the past couple of days.

T: ?

Me: Like remember freshman year, at orientation they did that sexual harassment presentation and a group of civic-minded sophomores did a skit on date rape? And the guy who played the date rapist tried to act all nonchalant in the play the next morning and we were all like eww? And then three months later we were comign home from that party

T: yeah yeah. and we got lost and ended up in that alley and all of a sudden we were face to face with the date rapist

Me: yeah, and we were drunk so instead of distinguishing him as the guy who played a date rapist in a skit for orientation - and he was probably a seriously progressive feminist for doing that

T: we pointed at him and we were like oh my god it's the date rapist

Me: yeah.

T: I don't understand the metaphor

Me: nothing comes of accusing the guy who played the date rapist in a skit of being a date rapist. there's no point to that activity.

T: so that's the alley your mind is in.

Me: sigh. yes.

T: would you have dated that guy?

Me: probably not

T: but you knew he wasn't a date rapist for real

Me: i know, but i'm clearly not broadminded enough to take someone seriously after i see them playing a date rapist ina skit. i have too active an imagination.

T: but what if you fell in love with him

Me: i don't know. he had like blonde hair.

T: what do you have against people with blonde hair?

Me: I'm generally not attracted to blondes. but i guesss it could happen.

T: poor guy

Me: i know. it probably killed his love life

T: yeah. Date rape generally does. As it should.

Me: yeah.

T: would you date a real date rapist?

Me: wtf kind of question is that? umm...let me think about that one...

NO

T: What if he was a nice guy who just screwed up once? like long before he met you.

Me: are we really having this conversation?

T: Yeah, like we generally talk about the weather and work. I think a s a writer you're obligated to think about such distressing dilemmas. also i want to see this IM conversation on your blog.

Me: I don't think there's any dilemma here. I think that's kind of a serious red flag.

T: i haven't thought about date rape since i was like 19. it's so college.

Me: yeah, i guess it is.

T: well, thanks for refreshing my memory.

Me: thanks for trivializing the violation of someone's body.

T: you're welcome. you brought it up, girl who speaks in date rape metaphors.

Me: that's true. i did. ok. bye.

T: bye.

Thought

Every time I sleep in I feel guilty, like I should be doing something more constructive with my time, like math problems or something. And I missed yoga. But Runyon Canyon at this time of the year is such a nightmare.

Bleecker Street

It’s a lovely June afternoon
and I’m heading up Bleecker Street
for a hazelnut espresso latte,
the kind made out of real hazelnuts,
not syrup, hoping it will empty me
of all my bickering ideas about love
and fate and immortality
so I can hear the fertile songs of spring.
Miguel de Unamuno—whose name
is impossible to say without smiling—
believed “self-love widens into love of all that lives.”
Thank God for Unamuno! For hazelnut lattes!
But the infinite archeology of my stupidity
prefers the charms of self-pity
to the equilibrium of self-love.
Perhaps these three Chinese girls
giggling into cell phones, lavishly spending
each moment of their youth, truly believe
the mountain of self has no top
and each breath is a reckoning with fate?
Perhaps these shiny boutiques, each
so resolute, so eager to please, are weary
of decorating the illusions of another century,
prefer the runaway slaves they hid in their root cellars,
their dreams of slaughter and deliverance?
Perhaps this beautiful blond woman,
screeching to a stop in a lilac Mercedes,
pursued by wailing police cars, finally
understands that it is not only for the soul
but for the mind that happiness is a necessity?
“Is the rich bimbo stoned or just stupid?”
an old man, radiant with rage, screams.
Perhaps everyone secretly admires
something momentous about himself,
with the mass and “inner life” of a cathedral,
in the tradition of the Spanish saints and mystics
who cherished the bliss of infinite sacrifice?
Perhaps this street remembers the loneliness
of war widows, the roll calls of absent names,
its first kisses on the corner of West Tenth Street,
the swooning confetti heat of victory,
the scalding springs of defeat? Indeed,
this street is a wave of advocacy
and streaming window peonies and tulips,
a fierce glimpse of history, an echoing
of nightly gunshots, a flag of black pigeons
flowing east toward the end of a continent,
a hunger for immortality, a tiny brusque city,
a bickering idea, a useless boutique,
a fertile song widening into a love for all that lives.

-Philip Schultz

now i'm just obsessed with old typewriter ads

I like old things. My dad's old 1970s Ray bans and my mother's old dupattas turned to scarves and my grandmother's saris cut up into shawls and 1920s and 40s vintage dresses and old broken jewelry that no one else wants. I like old picture albums with black and white photos and tissue paper in between the black pages and old cars like the ones they have in Havana and used bookstores and old watches. I like things that have been handed down or lent out and I like lending things of mine to other people, or giving them away. I like the idea of things circulating through time, exchanging hands. I like the idea of things carrying their own energy, their own memories. I like the idea that things have their own DNA, their own history. I like flea markets and junk stores and old homes and old buildings. I like mending found things. I like old things.

Postcard

I am not on vacation. But I will be soon. I will be in NY. And I will visit my parents and see Jo. Yesterday I went to see this movie. Aside from a few lulls, it was quite charming. And sort of painfully relatable in a way. I love movie lots and later I walked around the Fox lot, which I've always liked. Then I met E for drinks and we spoke of writing and sabbaticals and the state of news and Southeast Asia and ambivalence and expectations and work and love. And he said, "Writers need to have things gnawing on their edges at all times." And I think this is true. We prolong the gnaw maybe. And according to the Happiness study, perhaps we are immature, for fantasizing, for inhabiting worlds that don't really exist. But at least we have a sense of humor about it. I woke up several times in the middle of the night almost irrationally angry at the movie. It had opened up old wounds that I thought were sealed and closed. And there was nothing left to say about this, no one left to speak to. Night is too quiet sometimes. I need an ambient sound machine. I need rain.

From the Atlantic's Happiness article

"Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness

http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

Completely awkward improv at Starbucks

I cannot believe this actually happened. We need to start our own improv troupe

V and I are getting coffee at Starbucks, talking. Two men approach us.

Guy 1: Excuse me, we were standing over there and we were wondering about your ethnicity. Where are you from?

V: I'm Chinese.

Guy 2: No not you, her (points to me).

(Awkward glance moment)

Me: Umm...I'm Indian.

Guy 1: Yeah that's what we thought. We thought either Puerto Rican or Indian or Pakistani. But you have that classy look. Indians are classier than Pakistanis or Puerto Ricans.

(Oh my God serious awkward glance moment)

V: Well, actually she was adopted by a Pakistani family when she was four. So her parents and sister are Pakistani.

Me: Yeah, they smuggled me across the border after the...war. It was harrowing.

V: You've been through so much.

Me: Yeah, but my Pakistani parents have been through worse. They're incredible people, raising me Hindu even though they were Muslim. So you think my family's classy, right?

V: (Thinks for a minute) Yeah. I think so. Except for that aunt of yours. She's a real whore.

(Polite smiles)

Me: Well, it was nice to meet you.

Guy 1: Yes, you too (makes a run for it).

I want one of these

It's just so cute it makes you want to scream. But I'm afraid I'd like roll over in bed and flatten it or something. I don't know why I start thinking about hypotheticals well before I need to, because chances are these won't be available in my local pet store anytime soon. Or rescue shelter for that matter. But I want one. To carry in my pocket and pull out every time I get the malaise. I swear looking at pictures of cute animals is the best cure for the malaise. Also, aren't miniatures so much better than real-life sized things? I think I would rather have one of these than my own child. I will teach it to speak in three different languages and dress it in a baseball cap and a mini-backpack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/nyregion/07cow.html?scp=2&sq=molly%20calf&st=cse

and his name is actually Mr. Gentles.

And then this update...

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/farm-living-is-the-life-for-molly-the-calf/?scp=1&sq=molly%20calf&st=cse

courtesy my mom!

I wonder if Molly's mom told her to make a run for it.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

The malaise, the malaise, everyone has the fucking malaise. I have the malaise. I caught it yesterday and it fucking sucks. Happy people grate on my nerves, but mostly everyone's down anyway, so that makes it easier. but people with the malaise aren't really fun to be around either. I just need to not be around people. I tend to isolate myself when I catch the malaise. An IM from this morning:

T: Maybe you're just depressed.

Me: I don't think so. Maybe you're just depressed.

T: yeah, I'm pretty sure I am. But I'm not losing weight.

Me: Really? I am. I've lost four pounds in like two weeks.

T: FOUR POUNDS? That's not normal.

Me: I think I'm just writing a lot and I don't have time to eat. It's such a compulsion.

T: How Joan Didion of you.

Me: I KNOW!! I always knew there was something to it, those people who were like I'm so into my work i can't even think of eating, and I was like, fuck you people, you're so full fo shit, but they're not. it's true.

remember that study about how groups of friends even if they're across the countrey from each other gain and lose weight together. it's like contagios, but not like an airborne contagion.

T: I don't read studies. That's you.

Me: I sent it to you. Nobody remembers anything. I don't know why I bother. Anyway, I think the malaise is the same way. Groups of friends have it together. Right now my mom has it, my sister, my mom's friend. You, me, Like five other people I know.

T: I love that you call it the malaise.

Me: it's so much more descriptive than anything.

T: I was telling my therapist about you.

Me: What were you saying?

T: That you describe states of being better than anyone. I was telling him about your messy/complicated versus neat and easy personal mythology metaphor.

Me: I need to write a blog post about that.

Oddly, the only time I went to see a therapist, that one time? He told me to stop talking in metaphors. He told me I used too many metaphors and I should stop.

T: That's mean. what an a-hole.

Me: I know! it was like someone asking me to speak in Russian on command. I was like 'umm...i am sad.' wtf? i never went back.

T: I don't think you need therapy. But then I think everyone needs therapy. It wouldn't hurt you, but you kind of know what's up and what you need to figure out.

Me: I don't know. it doesn't make it easier. You still have to do the work and figure shit out and go through periods of malaise. I want to get past life regression

T: Can I hear about it if you do?

Me: of course. I am an open book.

T: Maybe you're socially bipolar.

Me: ?

T: Not like really biploar, but I always think its interesting how one minute you love people and you're social and gregarious and hostess and throwing parties and people around you genuinely feel loved and you're making canapes for them and you'll pick them up from the airport and it's all hugs and kisses and then the next minute it's like you have this disdain for humanity.

Me: ok. That was harsh. When have i said i have a disdain for humanity?

T: you don't say it, but i can see it on your face. it's like what you wrote that people are sandpaper on your soul

Me: they are sometimes. Doiesn't everyone feel that way?

T: yeah, but not to the extent that you do. You have these scary extremes.

Are you still there.

Me: no I'm just thinking. maybe. i get disappointed a lot. or not a lot. i just get disappointed badly and i don't always express it. but it's like i see really good people who do these asshole things, or not even asshole things, just doing the bare minimum or being strategic and then i feel compelled to act by their set of rules towards them. and so i do, but then they werent' my set of rules to begin with and then i just end up feeling really really bad. also, i feel really disillusioned when i feel like someone iesn't being truly auhetically emotionally generous. they're just pretending to be, in order to manipulate you.

T: that was about a specific situation.

Me: yes.

T: is it the situation i think you're talking about?

Me: yes.

T: that was a long time ago.

Me: I know. I don't know why I'm like permanently damaged by everythignthat happens. I'm like that guy who has glass bones or something.

T: I'm callin you right now.

Me: okay.

One of those days where nothing I am seeking seems to be available - in the petty sense - at the grocery store, no creme fraiche or red lentils, at the bookstore, couldn't find the Athill book I was looking for. Plus everyone around me is suffering from the malaise again. It must be Mercury retrograde because the connection between seeking and finding feels utterly broken right now. And my plants are spontaneously dying. No matter how much I water them or talk to them, they're not taking to the summer weather well. My ficas is sprouting yellow leaves for the first time, and no amount of cajoling or fertilizer will pull it out of it's depression. And I'm tired of things. I am seeking that novelty that always temporarily feeds me and then leaves me terribly ambivalent about more than one aspect of my life.

Anyway, the bookstore thing was annoying because I wanted to pick up Diana Athill's memoir because she's old and led this amazing life and was friends with Simone de Beauvoir and is okay about death and dying. I had put off getting it since I have like 50 other things on my book list right now, but then I came across this passage that intrigued me, and that relates to the ongoing dialogue I've been having with my mother and friends about heternormativity and finding some sort of solution to it. Athill does have an answer: getting old. Thanks, Diana. I was hoping 30 was going to put a full stop on all my angst, but it turns out 70 is more like it.

“An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex. I have tried to believe that most of this difference comes from conditioning, but can’t do so. Conditioning reinforces it, but essentially it is a matter of biological function. There is no physical reason why a man shouldn’t turn and walk away from any act of sex he performs, whereas every act of sex performed by a woman has the potential of changing her mode of being for the rest of her life. He simply triggers the existence of another human being; she has to build it out of her own physical substance, carry it inside her, bond with it whether she likes it or not — and to say that she has been freed from this by the pill is nonsense. She can prevent it, but only by drastic chemical intervention which throws her body’s natural behaviour out of gear. Having bodies designed to bear children means that many generations will have to pass before women are freed from the psychic patterns dictated by their physique, however easy it is for them to swallow a pill; and it is possible that they will never be able to achieve such psychic freedom. [ …] Because of all this, when they are at the peak of their physical activity women often disappear into it, many of them discovering what kind of people they are apart from it only in middle age, some of them never. I had started to have glimpses of myself earlier than most, as a result of being deprived of marriage and child-bearing, but not with the clarity I discovered once sex had fallen right away. My atheism is an example: it became much more firmly established.”

I don't know if her matter-of-fact confidence in her ideas comes from being old, or having chosen and lived an unconventional life, or because you really have to reach this age to know what kind of woman you are.

But beyond this, it makes me realize that engaging in the discussion of biological determinism is still like walking a tightrope. Which is sort of annoying because it's perfectly acceptable if it's discussed within the scope of pop culture (He's Just Not That Into You, Sex and the City) but any sort of serious discussion of it leaves people pissed off and/or just dissatisfied. I've never been able to have a discussion about this topic with a man that leaves me satisfied, and when I have it with women, we're generally all in agreement, but feeling dissatisfied still, because it's clear that the male component, or the male challenge, I should say, is a necessary element to the discussion. And Athill fails to offer up any sort of solution to the issue aside from "Wait till you're old." And maybe it's not entirely surprising despite her accomplishments, that someone of her generation would think of gender determinism in slightly stultifying terms, but shit, I feel stultified sometimes, and I have to believe that all my obsession with energy and the psychic element of something as important as gender plays a role in the way I see the world.

The emphasis of the whole gender discussion in liberal communities and schools and even my home, growing up, was so much on equality - the whole - "You can do anything you want and blah blah blah" was so prevalent that the idea of difference was eschewed altogether. It was as though the mere mention of it could pierce this precariously held-together notion of post-feminist equality and so no one could even speak of inherent embodied differences without being accused of being sexist. And to be truthful, that line is a sticky one and I get irritated when men assume I am bad at certain things (like understanding how my car works) because I am a woman (hence the inability to have this discussion with even very intelligent and open men because it somehow manages to venture into the petty minutae of some pop-cultural cliffs-notes guide to gender). This is maybe a really easy and petty example of how men pigeon-hole women but there have been other more nuanced ones that I can't remember at the moment.

In college, gender studies classes and reading all that Foucault did make me reflect on ideas of embodiment and the sexual/psychic link, but I couldn't really integrate all these ideas into my own personal experience till recently because it's only in the past couple of years that I feel like I've exited some sort of emotional puberty and am officially *drum roll* a woman. No turning back now.

Perhaps finding yourself afloat in the midst of your child-bearing years, without truly having thought about the biological experience of having a child before, forces you to really reflect on these issues. But truthfully, I'm more concerned about how this unconscious lens affects me as a writer than someone capable of bearing children. There seems to be some sort of critical pruning process that takes place at this stage and it's like I'm trying to figure out how intrinsically connected "writer" and "woman" are as far as my own personal identity. To be honest, I don't know if this is really a productive activity; I say this because a friend who is constantly assessing all activities on the basis of their merit asked me about that the other day, and I'm not sure what's productive or what isn't. But I have to believe that any kind of reflection on the self is more than a mere act of narcissism. And I have to add that I can clearly see now that the way I am embodied affects the way I write (and think and connect with people - both women and men), and even if I did see this before, I feel like I am better able to integrate it into my being and make sense of it. And hopefully it makes me a better writer. Perhaps this is why I am less bothered by the acknoweledgement of difference than than the years-long denial of it while I was growing up.

It clearly served a purpose during those years - the community I was a part of, the schools I went to carried the primary function of breeding overachivers, with the presumption that achievement was the path to opportunity and therefore happiness - whether this assumption was an accurate one could be left to debate -but in order to effectively maintain it's mandate, the message served up to young women by this particular world that I was a part of, was that they didn't have an excuse not to succeed. That's all good and well, but then you enter the real world, and realize within minutes that there is very little you have a real roadmap for, and this is a critical issue where any sort of basic instruction on how to interact with the world has been omitted from your course syllabus all your life.

And instead of being able to sort that out, you develop all kids of coping mechanisms as a young woman in order to deal with the world. Like always bringing a guy with you to the mechanic because he talks to you like a retard, or flirting to get out of speeding tickets. Anyway, there are varying degrees of using your gender/sexuality as a tool in your arsenal to get what you want/need, but I don't know too many self-aware women who enjoy using these tactics. Even if they are remarkably effective. They are coping mechanisms, but a lot of us would acknowledge that they are bad ones and leave us feeling strange and unfamiliar with our true selves, and even hollow. Just generally, as a person, and not even as a woman, when I start thinking of all the conscious and unconscious ways I've learned to cope in the world since I graduated from high school and made the adjustment from a bookwormy isolated nerd to a seemingly well-adjusted person, I don't know if it's been entirely worth the price. And I scream of my need for authenticity from myself and others from the rooftops.

But anyway, that's why I found the Athill passage intriguing, particularly the idea that getting older changes everything. It's not just the child-bearing and rearing, when you look at all the ways in which gender becomes a distraction, even if it is used as a means to achieve things, it's sort of exhausting. And then you think of how complexly ingrained these patterns are and how difficult it is to break them because you can't break out of yourself. But the passage kind of makes me excited to get old. And despite the fact that the discussion might be unproductive or even too up-in-it's-own-ass-mired-in-biological-determinism, it resonates with me pretty strongly given the place that I'm finding myself recently.

I misunderestimated, I think.

I misunderestimated myself and other people and the world.

And so I am sad, because sometimes I think about my misunderestimation.

The day after I think I misunderestimated, I asked Kaizar, "It's not terrible is it? It's not like life or death. It's not like Bush invading Iraq. If I did, in fact, misunderestimate, and I won't know whether I did, for maybe a long time, it's not that bad is it?" And I had gotten a nosebleed the day before, which I'd never had before. And it freaked me out because I got it from being yelled at. Because I'm not used to being yelled at, and so it shocks my body. Or this is what I told myself.

And he said, "No, it's not that bad. And don't beat yourself up. And you're not a bad person. And you have good intentions. And you have a good heart." And it made me realize that my friends know me. They know that I can't handle things sometimes, and they know how bad I feel about it.

And I'm not (a bad person), I don't think. And I do (have a good heart), I think. And when I feel unsafe, or cornered, or pressured, I run. And get yelled at. And get nosebleeds, apparently. I just misunderestimated. People do that sometimes. And they shouldn't be made to feel bad about it. Because they feel bad enough as it is.

Running

isn't so bad. Jolene does it. Kaizar does it. Manu does it. A lot of people do it. And they can't all be retards. So a couple of weeks ago, armed with Murakami's book on running (thanks for the lend, Jo!) and a new pair of Asics, I started to run. Mostly because sometimes I experience this burst of energy and don't have an outlet for it. So I dance to like 80s music in my kitchen. But it's still not enough. I want to experience that sense of abandon I felt as a kid, running till you were exhausted. I did a mile and a half my first day. Now I'm up to three. It still sort of sucks sometimes. And I get stomach-aches afterwards, but I also get the high. Last week I tripped on broken sidewalk and skinned my knee. I was bleeding all over the place and this Armenian woman ran out and tried to help me get up which felt weird because she was in her 60s and I look like a relatively in-shape person, even if I'm not. But it made me remember the time I was running with my grandfather to the bus stop and fell and skinned both my knees and elbows. I was about three. There was blood all over the place and gravel embedded in my skin. My mom freaked out. Maybe this is why I've always hated running.

I don't think running is that bad anymore. I used to think it just hurt and made me feel out of breath and vomit. In 7th grade, I used to puke after they made us run the mile in gym because it would shock my body so much. And I was a swimmer so you'd think I'd have better endurance than that. But my gym teachers were assholes and I wanted them to feel bad, like they were killing me. But they were such fascist sadists that they didn't care. One year I accidentally puked on my gym teacher's shoes. Mrs. Anderson. She was such a bitch. I didn't feel bad about it afterwards. She always made me feel like an athletic loser. And then later, I had asthma, so I couldn't run because I'd like have to be hospitalized. But asthma's psychosomatic, so when I figured out my issues, it went away automatically. Now that I know I can run, I think I'll stop. Because that's some unpleasant shit I don't need to prove to myself anymore.

Three things

Every woman I know has three things she cherishes:

1. A Sunday morning fantasy (Mine: a brownstone in Park Slope, lots of light. Lazily reading the Sunday times. Friends over for brunch. Everyone in the kitchen, laughing, cooking, think: a print ad for Scotch from the 80s, just more artsy)

2. A favorite PMS film (Mine: Little Women)

3. Shit, I totally forgot. I swear I knew it when I ran from the kitchen to type this in. Damnit.

Memorable

I was 16, and (don't laugh) attending a Model United Nations conference at Princeton. It should be no surprise that I was a policy nerd, but this year was different. It was the first year that I was coming out of my awkward stage. Although, to be totally honest, sometimes, even now, when I'm approached by a guy in a bookstore who asks me for my number or stopped at Runyon Canyon by someone who wants to chat me up, my first thought is, "People are so friendly in LA," and then I think, "Oh! I must be coming out of my awkward stage." It's a strange sort of reflex that never quite leaves you. And it's true, I rely on my intuition for all kinds of shortcuts and build stories about people on the subway based on how they look, but I'm rarely attracted to anyone at first or second glance, so there's always something absurd about this kind of interaction for me. Perhaps this is an other male/female distinction I need to address later.

Anyway, Princeton, Model UN. My committee chair was bespectacled and tall and lanky. All weekend he had that serious but under-siege look that I've always liked in people, particularly men. Like a determination to shoulder the burdens of the world even if you know they'll leave you completely worn. Maybe he was depressed. I could tell, either way, that he was someone who was overwhelmed by life. Years later, when I got to college, I gravitated towards people like this - they were often from California and couldn't take on too many extra-curriculars because their three-class workload was overwhelming them and impeding on their happiness. I found this magnetically charming. I, myself, took five classes a semester and ran a magazine and organized an annual conference and threw cocktail parties on thursday nights and hosted brunch in my apartment on Sundays. But secretly, I told myself that I lacked a certain depth that these people had, the psychic pain that made them interesting and made it impossible for them to tackle the externalities of life wholly. And perhaps I gravitated towards them because I was a learned overachiever and inside, I was just like one of them, questioning the purpose of everything.

So Princeton. Tall, bespectacled. A real character case study. You could study him for days, or I would. I found him infinitely fascinating. And smart. And throughout the session he would keep looking at me and smiling, in that way that men often do, when they feel fairly confident that they can or will win you over. And this was clearly an unfair game, considering I was 16 and my life felt hopeless and he was 20 and had that beleaguered-ness that I can still smell like some sort of musk designed exclusively for my senses.

At the end of the session we talked, for two hours about Sudan and about Princeton and college and Canada, where he was from, and we got hot chocolate and talked more about physics and good hot chocolate and vegetarianism and Buddhism. He would pause after I said something, to think, and always respond with something witty and deep. There was something old about him. Like he was 60 and saw though people. He complained about the conference chair. I felt like a confidante. Even now, this kind of gesture feeds me, to be confided in with that sort of immediacy. It's practically all I need to fall in love. And sitting there in a coffee shop with this older guy who was confiding in me made me feel like a rock star. On the way back, standing on a curb, on the corner of Nassau Street, he touched the sleeve of my jacket, to stop me from crossing before the light turned green. Over the course of the next few days and weeks, I would run the events of this encounter over and over again in my mind, ending with this final gesture of familiarity that won me over completely. I would think about this particular day all the time, every day, especially during unpleasant moments, at the dentist's office, in AB calculus class, when my mom was yelling at me for something.

Other people used these trips as a chance to attend campus parties and drink with college students and it's not that I didn't go, it's just that when I did, I found myself wondering why everyone was having fun and I wasn't. College parties weren't fun, they were meaningless. You were surrounded by people you didn't know who were all drinking and laughing and it was like not being in on the joke. It was just stupid and pointless. And I often worried if my seriousness and hyper-sensitivity were going to be a liability my whole life. I needed to connect and there was nothing to connect with.

Greenwich High School was a dumping ground for superficiality in every form. And it was a four-year expanse of emotional gray. I read an absurd amount, and watched people. I observed them in the student center, girls flipping their hair and flirting with lacrosse players, boys in Northface jackets and L.L. bean backpacks talking about their parents leaving for the weekend and a party in the East wing. There were parties and fashion and cars and college applications and this is what people talked about. There were grades and the Honor Roll and the desperate need to get into Yale or Duke and Wesleyan is my safety and let's go to the Ave after class there's a sale at Saks! and can you believe it? My parents only gave me $1000 for my 16th birthday, I mean what the hell?

I felt like a foreigner in this land. One who wasn't welcome. Maybe it would have been better to be a complete outsider, a complete nerd who sat in the corner of the student center, and talked about ninjas and World of Warcraft. At least there was a community there. But I navigated in and out, I had no real friends, or at least not friends by my own definition. I sought a kind of complete and overwhelming connection that is rare even now, at 30. I was president of a few clubs and edited the newspaper. This gave me something to do. But I acknowledged that it was just something to do. I wasn't a complete nihilist, I guess, just dangerously close. To make matters worse, I was terminally incapable of small talk. I still am, or I should say, I am better at it, but it still strikes me as pointless and leaves me uncomfortable. I didn't particularly want to hang out with people in my school, I wanted to stay home and read. I did what I needed to to keep afloat but I felt so many walls between myself and these people, and when I was near them, they felt like sandpaper on my soul. No one had to say it, I just heard it, "You don't belong, you're not like anyone else." And I knew it had nothing to do with race or how I dressed or looked. There was an absurdity to it all, to this system, to what we were all doing and I felt it so deeply, all the time, like a migraine that you have to live with. And I kept on waiting for someone else to come out and admit it, so that I could too, and no one ever did. So that was that then. You accept a kind of psychic loneliness, at 16. The fact that this is what the world looks like, people don't connect, at least not on a deeper level. And somehow, they're okay with it. There's nothing wrong with them. There's something wrong with you. Unlike you, they seem happy. They laugh about mundane things and get into college and go to awful parties that aren't fun and achieve and achieve and achieve and dress nice and there's nothing else.

So to be at Princeton and to be talking to someone who thought about real things, someone who reflected and saw the absurdity of it all was miraculous. It gave me a kind of hope. And being a 16-year old girl, I fell hopelessly in love. This guy could have been a charming but philandering asshole, but who cared? And how would I have known anyway? I was 16. It was practically the first time anyone outside of my family or teachers had paid any attention to me in a real way and I was obsessed.

I went back home to Greenwich and I was energized in some way. I was happier, no longer teenage Sylvia Plath. I laughed, I made an effort. I talked to people, and it wasn't even that bad talking about math test scores and college applications and a sale on the Ave. And I thought about him, constantly. There is nothing more powerful than a teenage girl's capacity for obsession. So I dreamt about a tearful reunion, confessions of great passion, admission into Princeton followed by an intense freshman-year romance, he would help me with econ papers and then beleagured and bespectacled, he would spend the night and get up early to make us coffee and review my paper a final time (After admission to college I actually realized I had a freakish preternatural talent for econ and wouldn't have needed help) and we would take weekend trips to Vermont, we would walk around campus hand-in-hand as the leaves turned red and orange, and we would tell all our friends the story of our first hot chocolate on Nassau Street, and he would laugh when I would admit to him that I spent a year of high school obsessing over him, and then the long distance relationship that would ensue my sophomore year and tearful phonecalls and admissions of missing one another so desperately. And the whole meeting the parents thing and arguments about moving to Canada after graduation. Although of course, I would eventually concede because of their social welfare programs and because of how much it meant to him. And there would be long, heated, passionate conversations about international issues and transcendental meditation and Arundhati Roy. And we were meant to be together. And we both knew it, at first glance. And eventually, we would get married at a Chapel at Princeton and all our friends would come, forget that I didn't have any, I would by then, because I would be transformed into someone who was no longer maladapted to the world by...love. Because this is what I thought a relationship was, a smooth and intense never-ending dialogue with nothing else in between. And to be totally honest, that's still what I wish it was in reality. Shiny and certain and ever-so-deeply connected, like a rubber-band ball, so tightly wound with strands of conversation and connection and memory that there is no room for dissent, for questioning, for breakability. Rubber isn't breakable. It bounces beautifully.

A year went by and I was a junior. The countdown to the conference had begun. There was no way of knowing what committee he was going to chair but he was interested in hunger issues and world finance so I was guessing the financial committee? Or maybe the social issues? No, he was a finance wonk, definitely finance. I signed up for the social issues committee because you don't want to be too obvious when you're stalking someone. I researched issues, wrote a paper. And I dreamt about how amazing our reunion would be. What would we talk about? I had to have some good conversation topics, I had to sound smart. This was years before I realized how easy and effortless it can be to engage someone after you've had a little practice with it. And years before I realized that smartness has little to do with that particular kind of engagement.

I scoured back issues of Time magazine for current topics. The Brazilian rainforest, the Balkans, what was going on in Chad. And literature. I had to be prepared. He was in college, he was smart. And he was perceptive. He would be able to see through anything rehearsed, so I had to be so well-rehearsed that I sounded like a natural when I talked. The planning was exhausting. but exhilarating. On the bus ride to Princeton, I was jittery. A two-hour ride. But I had waited a year, what was another few hours? When we got there, I tossed my overnight bag at the dorm I was staying at, had a cursory hello with my host and then went for a walk on Nassau street. I stood outside the coffee shop we had met at. What was it like, to be here? To live here, to be a semi-adult and to be happy? To be able to access that possibility of being around people you could potentially connect with? To not feel like a pariah. To have people understand you. To have long, meandering conversations about things that actually meant something, to have secrets with people, and sidelong glances and relationships that lasted and held together because of the fundamental depth of the connection. Maybe I just needed a real friend, but misunderstood that impulse or that desire, clearly I did.

The actual conference was starting at noon, after opening ceremonies, a keynote speaker. And registration, we had to make it through that. God, this was going to take forever. Piling into that old wooden boat of a hall for a speech and applause, and then lunch. I couldn't eat. And then getting into the main conference hall. The Woodrow Wilson Building. Finding my room. 119E in the basement. I couldn't concentrate during the session. People introducing themselves, shaking hands, who cared? I don't care about you people, I thought. On the schedule it said he was chairing the finance committee. Room 20B. I was right. I had to make it there during break. To say hello. Or maybe I should wait till the end of the day. No, I couldn't wait anymore. It had to be done now. I had to see the look on his face. We had to have a beautiful reunion. My life depended on it. Everything else felt meaningless. And in fact, Model UN felt more meaningless than ever. What were we even doing here, pretending to solve world issues when the actual UN couldn't do anything about them? Break session. I went to the bathroom, checked my hair and my dress. I looked passable, even pretty. Up a flight of stairs, and then another, my legs were shaking. This meant so much. It meant maybe a lifetime. I was getting a chance to repair my already broken life. And if it didn't happen, my life would never be good. It would be what it was and what it was was becoming unbearable. At 16, I was getting a chance, a chance to reach for something, something. Something that would anchor me. Something that would give me a reason to move forward. Something that would make me happy. And then there I was, standing in the doorway of Room 20B, watching him shuffle papers as he talked to a boy in an Oxford shirt. He had gotten a haircut, but he looked the same. A minute went by, maybe two. And then he was alone, reading something. Still that under-seige look, still that seriousness.

There were 28 steps between him and me. I know this because I counted them, all the way down and then stood there till he looked up.

"Can I help you?" he asked, with no recognition in his eyes.

I felt it, in the pit of my stomach. He was kidding right? he had to remember me. We had talked for two hours. He had smiled at me in that way that no one had ever smiled at me before. Even if it was a year ago.

"You were my committee chair last year? Remember?" I asked.

He looked at me for a second and a flicker of recognition registered on his face. Then, nothing.

"No, I'm not sure I do."

I looked at him stunned. Then tried again, "Remember? We got hot chocolate? On Nassau, at that coffee shop?"

He shook his head, "No, I don't remember."

I was getting desperate, "We talked about how you're vegetarian and you like to cook, and I was thinking of applying to Princeton and you told me that..." I stopped. there was no point to this.

"You should definitely apply. It's a great place," and then he smiled at me in that same way. And this time it seemed so false and even mean that I couldn't smile back. I told him I had to get back to my committee and left.

Looking back, he could have had serious holes in his brain. Or maybe Princeton students do a lot of drugs. Or maybe he was uncomfortable. He pegged me for the high school stalker that I was. But the fundamental message that I took away from it was clear to me. That I was completely and utterly forgettable. That nothing about me or what I said or the content of my mind or even the way I looked left any sort of impression on anyone. I stood there, uncomfortable in my own skin. In an instant, all my dreams of a Princeton admission and arguments about moving to Canada evaporated and in their place was an empty vacuum in the pit of my stomach.

"I'm not sure I do." What does that even mean? Even fourteen years later, I'm befuddled by this. I remember people I had a two-line exchange with on the subway a decade ago. Granted, my mother says my emotional memory is freakish and somewhat legendary and uncannilly accessible at all times, but still. This wasn't a two-line exchange. It was the best day I had ever had.

But it didn't matter. There was nothing memorable about me. And all of this was clearly about me. It was about the fact that I was the most forgettable girl on Earth, the most forgettable person on Earth. You could talk to me for a couple of hours, even spend weeks and months with me and a year later, if someone asked you about me, you would turn and say, "Who? What girl? I don't remember her." And why would you? I wasn't charming or flirty or even pretty. I didn't have that ease that some girls in my high school had, that complete lack of self-consciousness that I would observe and envy. I was serious and plain, but till then, I had thought I was at least...interesting.

I returned to Connecticut on a bus full of people singing and laughing. We had taken home so many trophies, and people lined them up the black rubber floor of the passageway of the bus. I pretended to sleep. The sun was setting and the sky was an orangey pink over Princeton. It was pretty. But it didn't matter. I knew then that I wouldn't apply to this college for admission. I would never set foot on that campus again.

There were two elements to the disappointment, there was the shattered adolescent dream as well as the recognition that even the people you connect with don't see the world as you do, and how do you reconcile that insurmountable gap? What was the point? Of connecting or dreaming? What was the point of bonding or fantasy? What was the purpose of sharing or hoping? Was this how it was always going to be? Not just a disappointment, because that was bad enough. But a disappointment that was beyond the personal; it revealed something about the nature of people and the world - that even the most meaningful things, the experiences you cherished, ultimately meant nothing because they weren't entirely shared. The best thing that had happened to me in three years of high school was something he didn't even remember.

I stepped in a puddle on the way off the bus, to my ankle, and waited till I got home, to my room and to my bed before I started crying. The crying lasted a couple of days and that, combined with the puddle misstep resulted in a full-fledged case of bronchial asthma, which lasted three weeks. I skipped school and I was relieved to not have to go. I would have taken bronchial asthma over the feeling of interminable loneliness any day. I missed two physics exams and an AB Calc one. I retook them when I came back, entirely unprepared. It didn't matter anymore anyway. Everything else was ruined, so why not wreck a perfect transcript too? I ended the semester with a B plus and a B minus. This was charitable on the part of my physics teacher, who could see that something was clearly wrong with me and attempted to talk to me, something I avoided at all cost. There was nothing to say. The student center was grayer than ever. I had a year and a half left of high school, but so what? I couldn't envision anything worthwhile beyond that year and a half anymore. Maybe I would get into a good school, and even lead a decent life on the outside. But who cared, if there was no one out there who would ever understand me? In the way that I needed, the weird, dark, lonely crevices of my brain. I wasn't even memorable, how could I possibly be loved? I was asking too much of life. There was nothing left to count down to anymore. There would be no big drum rolls. It was just...this. The bronchial asthma developed into full-fledged asthma. And till I was 21, I had to carry an inhaler with me in my bag, a constant reminder of the second memorable trip to Princeton.

Venus square Neptune. Karmic delusions about love. It's like Sunset Junction, the Bermuda triangle of LA. Does Sunset go East-West or North-South? I don't know. I used to get lost here all the time, the first three years in LA, despite pretty good navigational skills. I still get lost in love. This is the basic and fundamental similarity between Sunset Junction and my heart. I can't trust my intuition, I can't trust myself with either of these things. So I don't. I throw up my hands and trust what other people tell me. Which is a pretty stupid strategy too.

"It's one of two karmic imbalances on your chart. You're lucky. Most people have several. You have only two. Sun opposition Pluto, and Venus square Neptune. But you'll work it out. It might take some time, some years, maybe. But you'll work it out."

I guess I will.

Lottery

lately, I've been indulging a rather hackneyed fantasy. The receptionist at our office buys a roll of lottery tickets. We all pitch in $5. We stand in front of a TV, all of us, and watch as white ping pong balls with numbers shoot out of a vacuum tube, and then we are all millionaires. I quit my job, donate some of the proceeds to build schools in India, some to Planned Parenthood, buy a cottage in the hills and spend my life writing and having friends over for organic dinners made with herbs grown in my backyard. What surprises me about this fantasy isn't how often I've indulged it in the past couple of days (I'm nothing if not indulgent, particularly when it comes to the world in my mind) but the lack of originality in it. I am far more creative than this. And I know something about lotteries. I am obsessed with statistics, I read, memorize and misquote them often. Sometimes I exaggerate them to prove a point. I sit with this fantasy after the fourth or fifth screening in my mind and tire of it. Haven't I already won countless lotteries? And haven't they coalesced into a mass of luck that's brought me to this place and left me asking myself "what now?"

I was two and a half playing with a red tricycle in the front courtyard of my grandparent's house in Delhi. My grandmother was inside slicing guavas, freshly picked from the tree in the front yard into a steel plate for me to eat later. My mother was at the Delhi University library, doing research for her dissertation. And I was riding my tricycle in dizzying circles around the front courtyard till I got bored and went inside to bury my head in my grandmother's lap, so she could put aside the steel plate of guavas and focus her attention on me, stroke my hair, tell me a story and once I was satiated with my fill of attention, I was left to go outside and ride my tricycle again. I had left it by the black iron gate at the front of the courtyard and there it was. Except now there was a little girl, outside the gate, in shabby brown clothes standing with outstretched arms through the iron bars, touching the muddy wheel of the tricycle. Her clothes were rags, her hair matted, her lips chapped. She was the child of the construction workers who were building a house on the edge of our street.

She had seen me riding my tricycle and now she was standing, reaching for the tricycle's muddy wheel through the iron bars of the locked gate. She looked at me with an expression that I couldn't understand then, or maybe I could. Perhaps this was my first memory of discomfort, of a sadness, of a void that I still just want to leave alone. But in that moment, I couldn't avoid it. She was standing there, touching the muddy wheel of my tricycle, looking at me through the gate. I was wearing green shorts and a red shirt. They smelled of soap and felt strange on my body all of a sudden. I froze and watched her. She didn't move, her hand still stroking the muddy wheel. And perhaps this was my first bout of guilt, of shame, for a lottery that I had already won. And I knew I had done nothing to win it. It was an absurd lottery, and a scary one, because the stakes were so high and so complex. If you won, you got a mother who would scoop you up in her arms when she came home and read you books and feed you orange candies that she had stopped to get on her way back home. If you won, you would sleep in a bed with a blanket that had tiny green and yellow cars printed on it. If you won, and you ever got a fever, your parents would wipe the sweat from your forehead with a tiny washcloth and speak to you in hushed tones and hover over you for hours and days. But what if you lost? I didn't know what it felt like to lose. And I didn't want to know.

I knew that she had been born outside the gate, that her grandmother carried bricks on her head, mine suffered from depression and sliced guavas. Her mother struggled to feed her and couldn't always hold her in her arms when she cried, because she had to work. Mine brought home books and held her hand over mine as she taught me how to wield a pencil. I didn't want to know what losing this lottery meant. And so I snatched back my bike, burdened by what I had learned in an instant. By what I now knew, the unjustness of it. I was angry with her, for invading my world. Even though she hadn't even entered my side of the gate. She had stood outside the metal bars, touching the muddy wheel of my shiny red tricycle.

At the door, I stood back and looked at her, her hand still outstretched through the metal bars at the gate, looking in. Looking at my home, my life, my tricycle.

"Don't touch my tricycle ever again," I told her. She was quiet. She hadn't learned to speak yet, at least not in complete sentences, but she understood the sentiment.

I went in and cried in my grandmother's lap for a long time, and never told her why. I never forgot her face, her eyes, her arms outstretched through the metal bars of the gate. the way she looked at my tricycle and at me.

At two and a half, I was haunted by a question that I still don't know how to answer: what if it had been me on the other side of the gate? And why wasn't it me?

lots of good reads in the NYT the past couple of days...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07bhutan.html?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fashion/07dreams.html?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/magazine/10Depression-t.html?em

Are we really talking about horses here? I don't think so.

N: You know what? I'm glad you didn't buy the three-legged horse. Because you know the kind of person you are? You'll buy the three-legged horse out of pity and take care of it and nurture it and talk to it and give it physical therapy and devote all your resources and time and heart to that horse and then, like a few years later, you'll get pissed off that the three-legged horse can't jump. The three legged horse could never jump. It was a handicapped horse. And you knew that, but you think you can make it jump. Because you like performing miracles. But let me tell you something: no matter how much you love that horse and feed it sugar cubes, it's never going to fucking jump. It's not going to jump, Aditi. You need to finally understand that. So stop feeling bad about the three legged horse."

words that i like

dulcet
yaourt
Vladivostok
scrim
zephyr
ohm
august
brontide
esplanade
melancholy
syphilis
plural
ephemeral
moxie
chlamydia
heliotrope
sepulveda
tilapia
soliloquy
poignant
creole
ebola
non-pareil

awesome

http://gizmodo.com/5239812/coolcop-is-a-hose-that-runs-ac-right-into-your-shirt-but-only-if-youre-a-cop

Luck is with you now. Act upon your instincts.

05 12 35 38 45 06

Who hired the Waking Life animators to do Charles Schwab commercials? I guess you can't hold it against anyone to sell out in this economy.

IM. Yesterday.

me: Just wanted you to know - I borrowed your Anurag Mathur poetry book and i don't think he's a very good poet. Case in point:

"The pores of the night/sweat glistening memories"

eeeww.

also:

"You straddle my days/like bookends marking/the distance from/memory to memory"

awful shit.

S: why'd you borrow it? I don't think its good either. I don't even look at it.

Zen quote

"A master in Zen is not simply a teacher. In all the religions there are only teachers. They teach you about subjects which you don't know, and they ask you to believe because there is no way to bring those experiences into objective reality. neither has the teacher known them; he transfers his belief to somebody else. Zen is not a believer's world. It is not for the faithful ones; it is for those daring souls who can drop all belief, unbelief, doubt, reason, mind and simply enter into their pure existence without boundaries. But it brings tremendous transformation. Hence, let me say that while others are involved in philosophies, Zen is involved in metamorphosis, in a transformation. It is authentic alchemy; it changes you from base metal into gold. But its language has to be understood, not with your reasoning or intellectual mind but with your loving heart. Or even just listening, not bothering whether it is true or not. And a moment comes suddently that you see it, which has been eluding you your whole life. Suddenly, what Gautam Buddha called 'eighty-four thousand doors' open.