Oh, Yes.

Chan Chan

In Havana, you hear different variations of this song being played at every street corner. Of course I had heard it before, a million times. I love Buena Vista Social Club. But I had never looked up the lyrics. Hearing it again and again, I thought it would be about something deep and philosophical. I thought it would be about an unnameable longing, about things unresolved, about the absurdity of birth and death and life, about nostalgia and memories. I don't speak Spanish.

De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí

De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí

De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí

El cariño que te tengo
No te lo puedo negar
Se me sale la babita
Yo no lo puedo evitar

Cuando Juanica y Chan Chan
En el mar cernían arena
Como sacudía el jibe
A Chan Chan le daba pena

Limpia el camino de pajas
Que yo me quiero sentar
En aquél tronco que veo
Y así no puedo llegar

De alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llegó a Cueto voy para Mayarí

De alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llegó a Cueto voy para Mayarí

De alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llegó a Cueto voy para Mayarí

So I looked up a translation of the lyrics as soon as I got back. It's actually about a guy who can't wait to get laid. Go figure.

It's all too slick now. I want lo-fi music. I want things shot on film. I want hand-sewn. And cake made with a stick of butter.

Overheard

Man: If you saw a dead animal in the street, would you poke it with a stick?

Woman: (surprisingly nonchalant. Maybe she is used to this line of questioning) What? No. Probably not.

...5 minutes later...

Man: I love you. You're so beautiful and funny and smart and sunset walks on the beach.

Woman: Thank you. I appreciate that.

"Are you Ava's sister?"

"What? No. I don't think so. No."

This happens to me all the time in coffee shops. People are always asking me whether I'm related to someone they know. I'm not Ava's sister. Or Anita's. or Faranaz's.

Once someone asked me if I was Smitha's sister. My sister was in Providence. I was at a cafe in Los Feliz. This was the only time someone got it right. I looked around to see if this was some kind of prank. Would my sister pop out from behind a bush? No. I'd like to think people related to me are more creative than that.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"I was in Smitha's junior year abroad program in Egypt. You have the same hand gestures. And the same eye rolls. And the same earrings."

Hmmm.

I do come from a family that relies on highly animated hand gestures during conversations.

Most of my friends are heavy gesticulators as well.

In college, K made a short documentary about himself and his friends. It included a scene of me, drunk, sitting on the floor and eating sushi from a plastic container (bad idea, eating sushi when you're drunk). I was speculating on when the angst would go away. "Maybe when I'm 30?" I asked.

To the 20-year old me: No, sorry. not yet. 10 years and still going strong. We haven't beat that one yet.

There were other people in the short film. And K, telling stories, gesticulating wildly.

I think we had a viewing of the thing. We all looked like assholes. Seeing yourself on film is surprisingly jarring. I shouldn't talk while I eat sushi. We were all quiet after the film and one by one went back to our rooms to read or eat or work or avoid ourselves and each other. The next day I saw K in the CIT, looking uncharacteristically sad.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"I'm so dramatic," he said. "I hate myself."

"I know," I said, throwing down my bag and slumping in the chair next to him, "I'm so angsty and self-involved. I hate myself too," I said.

And we sat beside each other, in the CIT, sad and hating ourselves for being ourselves.

That is not a BOOK. That is a PHONICS EXERCISE

I'm going to talk candidly today about something that's been bothering me for a long time. I should note that most things that bother me a lot have absolutely no bearing on my personal life, but irritate me all the same. It's not like I'm going to tell you that there's a food shortage in my town or that I don't have an arm and therefore find it difficult to type, or that my neighbor beats his dog or his child. I'm going to tell you something that probably sounds inane and stupid, but I'm sort of offended by it as a writer or more accurately, as a person who writes and so I need to express it here. And no, no one's life will be improved by this declaration. Nothing will change. and I realize complaining about irrelevant things is a characteristic of the bougie and disaffected, but maybe it's time to call it like it is.

I should actually first note that my decision to speak candidly about this thing that irritates me stems from a larger decision to call out bullshit when I see it. I made this decision yesterday. I realized that at this stage of my life, I am old enough and have enough life experience to look something in the eye and say, "I'm sorry. But I don't buy it. I can't reconcile your bullshit with what I have come to believe about the world and about life, and therefore, I am declaring it bullshit. No hard feelings. I hope we can still be friends."

Actually, the decision to call out bullshit stems from an even larger decision. It's a decision to do something drastic on a weekly basis. Not like going skydiving drastic, or moving to another country drastic. But psychic drastic. A decision to change something about my writing or my thinking. One thing a week. 52 weeks in a year. I suggest you do it with me. Or don't, it's cool. Actually, I've recruited four of my close friends to do the 1 thing a week/52 things a year thing with me. And the first thing I'm going to start with is not letting published writers irritate me with the stupid things they sometimes say.

I spend an inordinate amount of time reading interviews given by writers. Often writers are asked that quintessential interview question that should elicit a good, creative, original, even made-up answer. Many times, writers are asked to pinpoint the moment they knew they would become writers or even when they wrote their first book, and I'm thoroughly irritated by the number of times I encounter this remarkably lazy, amazingly uncreative and irritatingly smug answer: "I wrote my first book when I was four years old. It was a booklet put together with staples about a bear and his mom. It was like I knew even then that I would be a writer" or this, "I wrote a book when I was three. It was about the plants my dad grew in his backyard. I've always liked putting stories together." or "I was really creative as a child. I wrote a book about an office. My parents said, 'You're going to be a writer someday.'" Sometimes really well-known writers give asshole answers like this (Yeah, I'm talking about you, Nicole Krauss). And there are two components to this answer that are really fucking irritating. The first is tightly encapsulated in the subtext: "I was special when I was four years old. I was a a precocious little writer hard at work doing something NO ONE ELSE was doing back then." I just want to put this out there: didn't we ALL write stories as children? Wasn't this a mandate of the American public school system? Didn't we all write stories about our moms and play with Legos and Transformers? Does this make everyone a writer? Yes, I suppose. And no. The point is, don't throw this answer out during an interview. It's bullshit. You didn't know back then that you would grow up to be a writer. You became a writer because you didn't get into law school. And that's fine. Because the people who did get into law school now wish they were writers. So, looks like you got a leg up in that situation, but if you're going to offer up an experience that foreshadows your supposed chosen profession, don't make it so cutesy and smug. You didn't know you were a writer when you were four. It was more like 28 and most likely because you found yourself unemployed and single and depressed. And when you give me that answer and tell me how much better your life is now, it actually makes me like you better. It makes me happy for you, and it makes me trust you. It makes me want to read your book. Not that you care, successful writer. Because the truth is, once you become successful, you don't actually care about your readers. And they don't particularly like you very much anymore either. Except for you, Arundhati Roy. I'll always love you. And you, Haruki Murakami. And you, Joan Didion. And Milan Kundera, I kind of love you too, although I've always suspected you became a writer in part to get laid. But I don't doubt you'd admit that, or probably already have, in some interview I have not yet unearthed. D.H. Lawrence, I know you respect your readers too. Especially your female readers. And Nabakov, you too. I don't know about you, though, John Steinbeck. I've never really trusted you. But I have to give you credit for never telling people you knew you were a writer at the age of six.

Also, I want to make a distinction between a BOOK and a PHONICS EXERCISE. What you are talking about, published, well-remunerated, successful author is not a BOOK. It is a PHONICS EXERCISE. And if I have to make that distinction for you, we're in trouble here. I mean, can you imagine Proust going around telling people "I wrote my first book when I was four. It was about a Madeleine I ate with a cup of tea." or Frank Gehry declaring that he's an amazing architect because he played with blocks as a child? I mean, I would even forgive Gehry if he made that statement because he doesn't make a living making stories with words. Writers get paid to come up with interesting narratives. So make something up if you don't have anything interesting to say. Or tell the absolute truth. Just don't tell me you wrote your first book at four. Because only deeply unlikable assholes do that. So just don't be one, okay?

Lyrics to Providence by The Love Language

PROVIDENCE IN THE RED JULY, WHEN WE BIT THE DUST ON PROVIDENCE ALL
TANGLED IN OUR NOT-SO-COMMON SENSE I HEARD YOU SAY YOU'D NEVER SLEEP
AGAIN, 'TIL THE BED WAS MADE YOU LIED, YOU LIED, YOU LIED, YOU LIED
DANCIN' AROUND WITH ALL THE GHOSTS IN EMPTY HOMES YOU SANG AND YOU
SOUNDED LIKE YOU KNEW IT WAS YOUR OWN RANG OUT A SHOT IN THE DARK,
SOME THINGS ARE BEST TO LET FALL APART AND HOW YOU KNEW, OH HOW YOU
KNEW IN THE RED JULY, WHEN WE BIT THE DUST ON PROVIDENCE OH TANGLE ME
UP, TANGLE ME UP AND ON THE LAST HURRAH, WE'D BETTER MAKE IT HURT,
'CAUSE OUR TIME IS SPENT WE LIED, WE LIED, WE LIED, WE LIED DANCIN'
AROUND WITH ALL THE GHOSTS IN EMPTY HOMES YOU SANG AND YOU SOUNDED
LIKE YOU KNEW IT WAS YOUR OWN RANG OUT A SHOT IN THE DARK, SOME THINGS
ARE BEST TO LET FALL APART AND HOW YOU KNEW, OH HOW YOU KNEW.

The best writing playlist I've ever had...

A day (one day, day 1, perhaps) of non-situational euphoria. To actually feel the completion of something that lingered, lingered, lingered. Even after the end of the malady itself. I imagine this is what illness was like in the olden days. Why Beth in Little Women never completely recovered from Scarlet Fever. Although really, she never recovered from her sensitivity to the world. And true sentimental heroines can't survive in a modern, consumptive, industrial world (BTW, I like words for old time maladies. Like The Consumption. Gawd. Sounds scary). Or can they? Hollywood heroines survive everything. But they are made of plastic and boring as fuck. And no one can really identify with them, not in a deep, dark place.

For the past several months, I've found it difficult to reconcile myself with everything around me. The structures of the capitalist system, the disappointment of Obama's Presidency, mass suicide among farmers, the death of journalism, the stories my girlfriends tell me about dating (Gawd. Who ever invented such a wretched thing? I'd just as well stay in my home and never come out. Thank God I've never had to do it). The world is a super shitty place run by incredibly retarded people. I became unglued and unhinged. The way the corners of old pictures are the first to curl away from the black pages of an album. Not mine, not mine not mine, this. This time isn't mine, this space isn't mine. This life isn't mine. Everything felt like a fucking waste. I cried while watching Nova documentaries about Benobos and their matriarchal societies being destroyed by impoverished locals hunting them down for food. I listened to tons of Depeche Mode and Buena Vista Social Club. Take me to Cuba. I really believe Havana is my home. I was born in the wrong place. I thought a lot about my favorite literary heroines during this time. Beth and Jo March, Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Daisy Miller, Edna Pontellier, Ammu. Not all of these women were entirely ruined by the modern world. But most of them were. Most of them were burned at the stake or died alone in hospital waiting rooms or disowned by their families and separated from their children. Oh God, I would be ruined by the modern world. Like photosensitivity during PMS, I became photosensitive to the world. Everything in me teared up at everything.

Then I realized I will always be photosensitive to the world. This doesn't make me crazy. And if it does, it does. The light will always be a little too bright for my eyes; things will always be a little too intense for my processing. My processing system is intense. And I don't need to make jokes about it anymore. I don't need to pretend I'm okay. I'm not okay by the standards of the modern world. And I'm okay with that. I'll always identify with ruined literary heroines. They were fucking smarter than everyone else around them. And far more interesting. People get scuffed up rebelling against the inane structures of modern society. But they don't have to be ruined.

This is my afternoon, my time. Finally. After the Scarlet Fever, there's the recovery. But I'm recovered. I also need to stop overusing mixed metaphors. A boy in my writing class said this to me once. Pick one, he said. JUST ONE. Not like five. We get that you like metaphors.

I need to savor a day like today. And harness it and write.

On Writing

Writing is not fun. Falling in love is fun. Or sitting on the beach in Santorini. Or eating an 8-course meal at Bazaar. Or spending an evening at the Bowl. Reading is fun. Dinner with friends is fun. Flea Markets are fun. Lazy Sunday afternoons are fun. Winning anything is fun, whether it's a $10 raffle or the affections of someone you're into or an argument with someone you don't particularly like. Weddings can be fun if you like the people getting married and generally enjoy big parties with cake. Writing is sort of a miserable activity. You do it to maintain your sanity, to parse out what's important to you, to negotiate your reality. You do it so this churning volatility within you has someplace to go. You do it so you don't sink. Like meditation, it has to be a daily practice. Maybe even like medication. Some days, I think I can manage without writing. I'm in a good place, I can go off these meds. But you can't, because you find yourself right back where you started. Back into old habits, old patterns, old ways of thinking. Your emotional pathways (I imagine these as mini interstate capillaries criss-crossing my body) start to atrophy and the will to try something a different way, the will to grow dies.

* * *

Late Summer/Early fall is the worst time of the year. For 18 years of my life, this was the time we'd return from India, and I'd head back to whatever school I was attending then, knowing that I'd spend the next nine months jumping through hoops like a well-trained circus animal. I was good at this and I did it by rote, memorized vocab words calculated the surface area of rotating spheres sliced off 6-inch columns in Times New Roman typeset about school bake sales with an exacto blade to paste onto white card that would be sent to a printer to be printed and distributed as a newspaper that people would use to mop up cranberry juice spills in the student center. I was earnest and sad and lost and yet still doing, but uncertain of where the cards would eventually fall after all of this was over. By the end of it, there was no resistance left in me. I was a teenage lab rat in an experiment on learned helplessness.

This is the time of year that I feel it again. Like the smoke from the wildfires is slowly suffocating me and I wake up in the mornings unable to breathe and unable to change. This is my own seasonal despair. Some people tell me they feel it in February. Others say that early Spring is the worst. For me, the acknowledgement of the limits of my life resurfaces annually, right about now. And I respond to it like the trained lab rat who has given up. Who can't find a new road or has simply decided it's too hard. I'm not as enterprising or as ambitious as I once thought I would eventually be.

* * *
Women close the spaces between them through acts of confession. They whisper secrets to one another and in this way become friends. Confession is about letting someone access your secrets, but there's also an exclusionary aspect to it. "He said this," "She did that," and you and I are friends. You and I are not them. You and I are us. With some people, no matter how much you confess and no matter how much they confess, the space can't be bridged. There's still a palpable distance. And in this space, some sort of tension, some sort of resentment builds. We don't like being kept at arm's length by anyone. "Why does this happen?" I ask him. Why is there space between her and I? Why can't we bridge it? And why does it make me mistrustful of her?"

I know that feeling, he says. Some people seek closeness, but they can't seem to land it. They are always afloat at sea, unable to dock their boats. You shouldn't be resentful, she can't help it. There's something claustrophobic about emotional closeness for some people, he says. They seek it and when they see it in the distance, closing in on them, they decide to hedge their bets and stay afloat. They can see you in the distance, and that's enough.

That's not enough for me, I say.

I know, he says. You're not built like that. You're the boat that needs to come home to a dock, he says.

I guess I am.

* * *

Last night was the Atwater Village street fair. What I liked about this event was that it was one of those things shodilly thrown together with little skill and lots of raw enthusiasm. It was refreshing. Sheen and composition are overrated anyway. And I liked walking down the street in my flip flops with a plastic cup of sangria in my hand, being offered mini Napoleans and organic dog biscuits for my non-existent dog and T-shirts with hipster-designed owls on them. It reminded me of college, the raw cheer and goodwill of it all. People talking to their neighbors about where to get the best Vietnamese food, storekeepers asking pregnant women when they're due, women asking other women where they bought their earrings, flamenco dancers giving a demonstration on the sidewalk. It was night and the air smelled of smoke from the wildfires. These kinds of things are best conducted under a smoky night sky.

I looked East and pretended for a moment that the smoke was coming from a smoldering volcano. What would we do when this temperamental volcano stopped issuing smoky threats and finally erupted over this tiny village of flamenco dancers and pregnant women and dog owners? Did their raw enthusiasm for the evening matter to the volcano? Did he sense their cheer as audacity in the face of doom, did he see it as an insufficient response to a threat that was intended to be taken seriously?

What did it matter? There was no volcano. And I need to break this habit of directing, in my mind, fruitless and odd Twilight Zone scenarios. How does this serve you? asked a boy to whom I recounted the findings of some study on creativity that concluded that as late-bloomers, we were somewhat doomed.

It doesn't, I said. It didn't. But how could I explain to him that I live in a world of hypotheticals and as time goes on, the hypotheticals become more and more divorced from reality, more and more convoluted. More and more fruitless intellectual exercises that benefit no one. Especially not me. And yet, they are necessary in the face of life's electric shocks. This is what lab rats like me do, I wanted to say. Maybe you're an active lab rat, but I'm a passive one. I need to ponder useless studies and pretend that there is a volcano just a mile and a quarter away from us in order to contend with the impending and erratic shock of what may or may not come. They boy got into his car and drove away from the hypothetical world of the girl who was prepared for any imagined catastrophe, just not a real one.

So there was no volcano, no reality, only us, on the street, with spiked pink lemonades in our hands now, listening to a lousy neighborhood band of shirtless (and hairless) men in cowboy hats.

"It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself."
-Michael Ondaatje

Children typically start to feel guilt in their second year of life, says Grazyna Kochanska, who has been tracking children’s development for two decades in her laboratory at the University of Iowa. Some children’s temperament makes them prone to guilt, she said, and some become more guilt-prone thanks to parents and other early influences.

On the Renaming of Things

This weekend, your name shall be Gunther. On Monday, you can go back to being who you were before today. Because your name is Gunther, you are Swedish. And a graphic designer. And the lead guitarist in some terrible Emo band. Because you have been renamed, you require a new identity. Like all things. The past can be reinvented so easily.

Look at these:

They are called Kandinski weeds. They look like drawings in Russian children's literature. They grow in places where people have a large Russian literature collection inhabiting their bookshelves. They grow outside my home.

On friday, on the way to yoga at Runyon, the street smelled like lemongrass and Eucalyptus. Like it smelled in Bangkok that one time. Except I was never in Bankok. But I could easily have been.

When I was stopped at the grocery store by a woman who inquired about my necklace, I told her I had found it at a flea market. Where? she asked. In Zurich, I told her. It sounded like I had made it up, but it was true.

That man standing on the street corner is a writer. Look at his hands. His wife died a year ago. He is lonely, but he has a cat. He grew up in a tiny town in Wisconsin. He drinks his coffee black, and hasn't cried in two months.

Do I look like my story? Do you? My mother says after a while, your history starts to show up on your face, whether you like it or not. But I think your history inhabits your body, affects the way you move, talk, hunch over. What do my movements reveal? What secrets can be revealed through my hand gestures, in my eyes? In yours.

What does it matter, truths and untruths? Stories are stolen, invented, renamed.

A brown showbox, with a yellow and goldleaf interior. I call it knesset.

IF A CLOWN

If a clown came out of the woods,

a standard-looking clown with oversized

polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,

a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him

on the edge of your property,

there’d be nothing funny about that,

would there? A bear might be preferable,

especially if black and berry-driven.

And if this clown began waving his hands

with those big white gloves

that clowns wear, and you realized

he wanted your attention, had something

apparently urgent to tell you,

would you pivot and run from him,

or stay put, as my friend did, who seemed

to understand here was a clown

who didn’t know where he was,

a clown without a context?

What could be sadder, my friend thought,

than a clown in need of a context?

If then the clown said to you

that he was on his way to a kid’s

birthday party, his car had broken down,

and he needed a ride, would you give

him one? Or would the connection

between the comic and the appalling,

as it pertained to clowns, be suddenly so clear

that you’d be paralyzed by it?

And if you were the clown, and my friend

hesitated, as he did, would you make

a sad face, and with an enormous finger

wipe away an imaginary tear? How far

would you trust your art? I can tell you

it worked. Most of the guests had gone

when my friend and the clown drove up,

and the family was angry. But the clown

twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird

and gave it to the kid, who smiled,

let it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid,

the birthday boy, what from then on

would be your relationship with disappointment?

With joy? Whom would you blame or extoll?

-Stephen Dunn

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

"...Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose...Most great poetry is like that. If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem."

-Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want.
-Frank Bruni

There was once an Empire of Malady, ruled by a King of Unintended Consequences. The capital of the Empire was the Province of Absurdity. The people who lived in this Province ate their meals laced with tiny increments of poison, and the poison seeped into their psyches, into their identities. As a result, their decisions were poisonous. Their dreams smelled of impending death. They dreamt of a different time that never really existed. They just believed that it did, because the poison flowed through their nerves and made them unconsciously absorbed in the ruinous work of nostalgia. They were a selfish folk, and had to offset any decisions made by the King of Unintended Consequences. Decisions that would affect them in good ways and in bad ways. But they never knew which would come first. And every decision led to a stalmate. To status quo. At the center of the Province of Absurdity was a volcano. The volcano was always smouldering. The volcano didn't understand how fragile people are, how tiny and scared. How easily their skin burns. The citizens of the Empire of Malady prayed to the God of the volcano. They begged him to hold off his punishment. They pleaded with him, negotiated with him, appeased him, without realizing that death was already within them, waiting, waiting, like a ticking time bomb. The joke was on them. Only the volcano knew this.

I really really really want to read this paper and talk to the author but I can't download it onto my computer. This is seriously bumming me out. Like inordinately so. Also, I sliced open my finger grating gruyere on a cheese planer this weekend and my finger is now retarded and can't properly type. And this is a problem because I type with two fingers. Like a stupid person. And I haven't blogged in a week because what I want to write about is not something I want to have floating around the internets. So it is in my journal. And in my head. And slowly and surely making me crazy. And the season premiere of Mad Men was kind of a letdown. And I thought we were past June gloom. And I thought we were past all that. And I thought maybe for once in my life I have an answer. But I didn't. And I don't. So all I want is to read this fucking paper. This study of matrilineal societies in Kerala. And architecture as metaphor for gender power structures. That's all I want to do today. I don't want a glass of wine. Or to cry in my car. Or to journal for half an hour. Or to go to yoga in Runyon. Or a hike in the hills to make me feel better. I want to sit with myself. And read this fucking paper. But I can't. And this makes me want to fling something (heavy) across a room and have it hit someone and preferably break their shoulder or collarbone. And then blame it on the fact that we don't live in a matrilineal society. Sorry about the collarbone thing.

The Indian world is filled with charlatans, men and women who pretend—hell, who might have come to believe—that they are holy. The year before, I went to a lecture at the University of Washington. An elderly Indian woman, a scholar, had come to orate on Indian sovereignty and literature. She kept arguing for some kind of separate indigenous literary identity, which was ironic considering that she was speaking English to a room full of white professors. But I wasn’t angry with the woman, or even bored. No, I felt sorry for her. I realized that she was dying of nostalgia. She had taken nostalgia as her false idol—her thin blanket—and it was murdering her.

The haze that seeps into various corners of a city, white streets, blind corners. Standing by a window on the 27th floor, I imagine it as a life-sized Etch a Sketch. I want to draw a new city, a new life. This is it, a slate wiped clean. or a drive to a new corner of the city. for the sake of. A tiny restaurant in a cottage. I'll have the collard greens, no the vegan ones. I'm vegetarian. I empty my pockets and the next day they are full of coins, receipts, ticket stubs. Time, time, time, the restless tick of it. Ten years ago today, I was twenty. I was lying on the grass on the main green by Faunce Arch, contemplating the possibilities of then which became the reality of now. A conversation. A boy who likes me and doesn't know how to show it punches me on the shoulder. It is easier to laugh like you don't go home and think about things. It is easier to make a joke when you are angry. it is easier to let someone off the hook when perhaps they shouldn't be let off the hook. It is hard to hold a grudge, I've learned. It requires more effort than I can put in these days. At the bowl, an orange moon like a peace offering. All right, I concede, there is nothing left to say when you are faced with unreasonable beauty. Or unbearable longing. Like for water. I decided when I was 15 that the worst way to die was to die of thirst. There are many kinds of thirst. Varieties that I didn't even know of when I was 15. Of course this is how it is. This is how it always was.

Emotional volatility

This happens to me once in a while when I'm working on a writing project that I'm really into. I don't really want to talk to people, or interact with people. I feel things, everything too acutely. Hostility, sadness, euphoria. During the KCRW beg-a-thon last weekend, I had to pull over my car because something about KCRW being 8 million dollars behind in funding made me think of poverty and the absurdity of a monetary system and how funds are always where they shouldn't be like lining Dick Cheney's coat pockets and not where they should be, like with KCRW or homeless people who have no food, or going towards a nationalized medical system and not towards a woefully misguided war, and I kind of broke down. Then it happened again last night during Rachel Maddow's story about various baseball equipment manufacturers donating baseball equipment to Iraq because the national Iraqi baseball team only had one bat. Then, this morning One Love was playing on the radio and I had another meltdown. It's like I'm entirely too emotionally porous, like everything sticks to me and I can't shake it off.

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.

--Wendell Berry

Bears figure out that bees are just bluffing and they learn to put up with the sting pain as a cost of getting honey from the hive. And there’s probably a life lesson in that: You will do better once you learn to distinguish between the things that can kill you and the ones that merely sting.

I think I need to see this again

Even though I'm offended at the empty cheeriness of the tagline: "An Irresistible Treat About Love, Letters and Laughter!" It's been maybe 16 years since my last viewing. But I loved it as a teenager.

Also, it wasn't a romantic comedy. It was about Pablo Neruda's exile in Italy. And a postman attempting to win over a woman. And poetry.

They need to make more movies like this. And fewer movies like this:

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.

-Haruki Murakami, After Dark

We Are Three

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

-Rumi

This actually makes me want to see Funny People

I love you, Jeepie

I had the talk with my car today.

"Remember when I first got you? I was 16. We were both just babies."

"Remember that time, a month after you came, you broke down on the side of the street a block away from home, and I ran back crying because I thought I had broken you?"

"Remember that time in college when we tried to fit 12 people in you? And someone puked on your passenger side door? I'm sorry about that."

"Remember when we missed the parking lot in San Diego and ended up in Mexico?"

"Remember when I accidentally backed you into that dumpster outside Young Orchard and my dad had to come up to campus to get you?"

"Remember when we went to Atlanta? And when you got shipped out here to LA? We both hated it at first. There were all these asshole Hummers on the road then, trying to run us off the freeway, but we held our own."

"Remember when that stoned Prius lady hit us when we were stopped at a red light at Sunset Junction minding our own business?"

"Remember those days on the beach? And that trip to Santa Barbara? And the time we got lost in Long Island and I panicked that we would never get home?"

"Also, I resent it when people call you a truck. You're not a truck. You're way prettier. And you're the best color of all the Jeeps out there too."

My car silently mocks my sentimentality. She was always the more stoic one.

But she is aging. She even smells like sea salt these days. Although that could also be leaking freon or old age or Jeep rust/corroding battery. Or it could just be the sweaty yoga mat in the back seat.

I love you car. I'll miss you. You'll always be my first. I'll never forget that.

She's ready though. I think. I don't know if I am.

She tells me to stop it. That it's hard enough this whole thing, but on top of it, I'm sentimental, and feel strongly like everything is alive in some way. And that is why I'm always apologizing for life, or specifically the way my life interjects with the lives of other people and other things. But everything is alive, and has a trajectory, a narrative, a story. And everything comes before it goes, this is the way it is. I know this. I know this. But I wish I had grown up in one of those cultures where there is no word for goodbye.

Dream, not a nightmare for once

I have to fly into Burbank airport, but the airport had a fall-out with the plane's captain and they won't let him land at the airport itself. He chooses to land in a nearby field.

I am angry at the captain for involving us in his petty airport wars.

When I get off the plane, I decide to go to a Wendy's.

The Captain of the plane is waiting for me at the cash register.

I order fries and a Coke.

He tells me he doesn't take orders from Armenians or non-Christians.

I'm not Armenian, I tell him.

The other one, then, he says.

Now I am really mad. This guy crash landed our plane in a field and now he won't give me my fries.

Why? I ask him. Can't you just make peace with anyone? Why you gotta make your own life so difficult? I ask.

What are you going to do about it? he asks.

I dump a Coke on his pants. Then I grab his blackberry and throw it into a fryer. It sizzles and becomes a pie.

He shakes his head at me. You didn't get it, he said.

No, you're right, I tell him. I'm just like you, I say.

You are me, he tells me.

It's 12:30 AM

And I'm actually afraid to go to sleep because for the first time in my life, I'm having nightmares. I have seriously, never in 30 years had nightmares. The occasional anxiety dream, yes. But not full-on night terrors. What compounds this is the uncanny memory I have for my dreams. I wake up every morning with a full mental account of what happened during my psychic slumber.

When people would tell me about their nightmares, I would act like I understood. Maybe I even believed I understood, but I don't really think I did. I don't think I understood how dreams affect your state of mind, your state of being, because my dreams have always been magical, illuminating, informative, absurd and uncanny, fun. I actually look forward to sleep because of dreams, as weird as that sounds. And tonight, for the first time, I don't want to sleep because I'm scared of what I'll dream. I'm scared of what will be unearthed. I'm scared that I'm entirely ill-equipped to listen to the messages that are coming my way.

Anxiety Dream

Andrew and Lea knock on my door. I am excited to see them; they are my friends. But when I open the door to my apartment, they are each two feet taller than when I last saw them. They act as though nothing has changed, but it has. They are two feet taller. And when they hug me, they are giants. They seem happy to see me, they are cheerful and they act the same as always, but I am thrown. These are not my friends. My friends are not giants; they are normal people. They didn't tell me before they showed up at my door that they had grown. I wasn't prepared for this. And I am sad, not because they are tall, but because something has been fractured. Something has changed so drastically and we must pretend that it hasn't.

But I also resent them for growing when I have stayed tiny and human. Tiny in every way, resentful and bitter that I have not grown. That I am still the same.

And I want them to leave because I don't like the way this feels. I don't want them in my apartment or in my life. I don't want to be reminded of my own failures, my own pettiness, the ways in which I feel stunted.

The day is saturated with the tint of this dream, with the echo of it. I am small, I am small. I am so so small. Small in comparison to others, small in comparison to where I thought I would be, small, even, in comparison to those I love, to those I once loved. I keep shrinking in a world that keeps expanding, and I wake up again and again in a panic that one day I will disappear altogether.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside of yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

There are always small material delights; toes on a shag rug, salted caramels in a crisp cellophane wrapper, someone telling me that surfing is like harmony with the natural elements and then closing my eyes and imagining what this must feel like when it is done well; anything done well. A perfect yolk, tapped with a fork at dinner, on a sidewalk with an old friend. Not the place, or the yolk, or even the word "yolk," although it is beautiful in its perfect, tiny audacity.

The comfort of familiarity. Like this: some people feel like home. They are not home. But they feel so much like it they may as well be.

Or the satisfaction of tiny accomplishments: I was a fat child who was good at Chinese jumprope. Two feet together one side, two feet together the other. Cross feet. Double rope. Skip in, skip out. I can still do it in my mind 22 years later.

Yolk mixed in pasta. Carbonara. You do it, you're better. A bird watches us from a fence. We look back at it, guiltily. A biker stops and smiles. Ludo Lefebvre is in the kitchen, his tattooed arms preparing foie gras cupcakes and lobster medallions with honey demiglasse and watermelon soup and onion confit.

But this is not the part that is familiar. Or home. In India, my family would take walks in the park in front of their home in the evenings, and this was the best part of the day. Evenings. The smell of hibiscus and guava sleeping. Sycamore trees that only want help shedding their bark during the day. Not at night. There are rules to these sorts of things. Run-ins with neighbors because everyone is out in their evening clothes, white kurtas. And there is a safety to this because we are all family and these evenings are the seed of all memory. Sometimes, the feeling of that time catches me, and this is how I know I am home. This is a time when it is all complete; the yolk has not yet been broken.

But enough of nostalgia, enough of sad stories about loss. Things visibly wince when this discussion comes up. A table lamp slouches on a desk. A pair of scissors falls into an open drawer. Not this again, they all say. But I am not at home, at my desk, I tell them. I am on a sidewalk, eating dinner. No, you're not, they tell me. You're remembering that evening so you can use it as a metaphor to tell the same story of nostalgia and lost whole(some)ness.

It's a good story, no? I ask.

It's an old story. And it ages us, yawns the post-it note on the table.

All right. How about this one:

My friend E met a girl. Let's call her India (her real name was Chyna). He met her because she was a writer for a music blog that he wrote for. She lived in Seattle. He lived with his parents. This was years ago. He was 22. He fell in love with her through her writing. He thought she was brilliant, they shared the same thoughts. So he decided to drive to Seattle to meet her. So he drove. They decided to meet at a record shop.

You're embellishing, says the penstand.

I'm a writer. That's what we do. And what's wrong with meeting at a record shop? People in my stories always meet at record shops. I have a musician fetish.

You're not really a writer. You just tell yourself you are when you're feeling down, says the manila envelope.

Get off my desk now. I'm serious. I'm not going down that road with you today. And the rest of you, do you want to hear this story or not?

Silence.

Okay. So he drove to Seattle. They decided to meet at a coffee shop (happy?) and he had waited for this for months. Chyna was his soulmate. She was the one. He sat down at a corner table and ordered a hazelnut latte and and waited and waited. And then the door opened. And an old man walked in. And then it opened again. And there was an elderly lady with a dog in her purse. One of those tiny yappers. The kind gay couples always take on planes. Then, a little boy in a raincoat and an umbrella. Am I losing you?

(Chyna is about to walk in. So prepare yourselves)

There she is! I can recognize her from her red hair! But she has her back to me so I can't see what she looks like. And now the woman with the dog is blocking her. But it's her, I just know it's her! There! She's turning. And she's...ummm. She's not cute. Like really not cute. But this is not a deterrent. Because we have so much in common. And she's coming over and we're talking and...she's sort of awkward and pale. And sort of hunched over. And there's sort of no chemistry. And something is discernibly off. And E knows that she's not the one.

Soulmates have defects, apparently. No one tells you that in books or movies.

But E decides to spend the weekend with her. And they become friends. And before he leaves, he introduces her to the friend who he is staying with, and now they're all part of a larger (real and not virtual) web of friends in Seattle. A good deed.

That's it?

No. There's more.

So E, who is definitely a little disappointed but trying to be mature, decides to leave and go back home. His trip wasn't entirely the torridly romantic experienc he had in mind, but not an entire failure either.

So before he leaves, his friend, who he stayed with for the handful of days he was up there in Seattle, hands him like a pound of marijuana in one of these ziploc bags.

Hold it.

What, stapler?

Do you even know what a pound of marijuana looks like? Or if they make ziploc bags in that size?

Maybe it was a quarter of a pound.

Do you know what a quarter...

Enough of this editing!

Why'd you say a pound?

I don't know. I'm trying to tell a fucking story and I don't always have all the facts.

So you just make things up?

Yeah.

Okay. Just checking. Go on.

So E, as a favor, drops the bag into his car's glove compartment and begins the drive home. During which a rock hits his windshield, forms a crack that slowly crawls over the entire surface of the glass. E starts speeding to get home before the entire thing breaks, and he hears the cop's siren.

I know what's going to happen.

I know. He gets pulled over, reaches into the glove compartment. The bag falls out. A $2000 fine. He had just saved up enough money to move out of his parents' house and into his own apartment. Also he has to go to AA metings for the next eight months. And he DOESN'T EVEN DRINK. Damn that Chyna!

You tell that story a lot, they wail.

I do not!

You do, says the penstand. And do you know why?

Why?

Because it is a story about you. You collect narratives about you. Like your father collected stamps as a child, of all the countries he would eventually travel to.

Very wise, penstand. but I will choose to ignore the subtext of what you're saying because I want to avoid that conversation right now. Are you saying that I will one day be fined for possession of drugs, or have to attend AA or that...

No. It's not literally a story about you. But it is a story of irony. You tell those well. Sad stories of things getting completely derailed. Even for a moment. And then you laugh at them. Because you love that particular sentiment. You fall into it like falling into a plush orange chair. Because you can't sit still in the sadness of real loss. You tell stories of small losses. Or even big ones, but you tell them like a joke. You can't bear to sit next to the hopelessness of real disappointment.

You're saying that for me, life is cheap fodder for a good story?

No. That's a byproduct. A funny story is the echo of real sadness. You tell stories because you don't approve of the way life is run. Even little disappointments throw you off for months. So you avoid them. And then you tell a funny story about them. And everyone knows that sadness is irony (like a depressed alcoholic woman) before it's all dressed up and made up to go out.

So then it comes back to the same old story, doesn't it, of me, an ocean away from where I was born, sitting on a sidewalk watching someone break yolk into carbonara, the night enveloping us like quiet parentheses, in the moments before time would eventually have to release us into life?

Aren't stories like dissecting perfect yolks, stabbing them with forks? A tiny gesture that can't be undone?

No. Stories are the impossible. Stories are putting the yolk back together again. Closing your eyes and putting it back together again, because it can't be done in real life. That's what you do. Quite painstakingly, actually. Even more painstakingly than you live life.

I tell my plants stories because maybe they are sad to be indoors. I tell my car stories because maybe it will make her feel better about being old.

You tell everyone and everything stories, because you believe that everyone and everything hangs precariously in the balance and that the only thing that can hold it all together with shoddy little stitches is a good story.

II.

Tell me how to be an ice queen, I ask Nav, tiny bites of tiny things, a glass of wine. My mother is an ice queen too. Not to me, she loves me, she's my mother, and she tells me things, but I've seen her with other people. And I can see that she is sort of intimidating to some people, and when I was 13 she told me this: "cultivate an air of mystery." It was anxiety inducing because it felt like a complete impossibility. I write. I can't cultivate an air of mystery. Those are mutually exclusive things.

Clutivate an air of mystery. Cultivate an air of mystery. The stress of it. Later, years later, I laughed at the idea. Because I laugh at any idea that surrounds a person as though it is bigger than the person himself. I laugh at a lot of things that require selfconsciousness, identities that take effort. She is mysterious, I am not. You are mysterious, I tell Nav. Many of my girlfriends are. They have that enigmatic cloud hovering over them. A diffuse light of ambivalence. I don't have that. How do I get that? Can you teach me?

It wouldn't work for you, she says.

Why not?

Because you're transparent. It's charming.

I don't want to me charming. I want to be mysterious.

One day you will be, says my mother. or you won't. It doesn't really matter anyway. It's too late for it to matter.

III.

Sophomore year in college, a boy who must have really wanted to get in my pants told me, after a film class that I looked like Anouk Aimee. I laughed in his face because (1) this is so far from the truth, and (2) he must have remembered me talking about how much I loved her after the second class. I was delighted that he remembered. That he tried. and (3) This is a moment where an enigmatic girl, a mysterious girl would have smiled mysteriously. But when that trigger goes off in me, I start laughing and I can't stop. So I started laughing and I couldn't stop. And it was terrible. We were standing outside the courtyard of the MCM building surrounded by Eurotrash wearing black, buckles on their shoes, all chain smoking cigarettes and I was laughing so hard my sides hurt. He never spoke to me again. It was over even before it began. So much of life is like this. It was never meant to be. Years later, I ran into him in a tea shop in West Hollywood. You still look like Anouk Aimee he said. He remembered. This time I didn't read anything into it. I didn't even think. I smiled and thanked him.

IV.

Jo tells this story about going to a stupid therapist, using the word "melancholy" and realizing that the therapist doesn't understand what the word "melancholy" means. I stole this story about a month ago and pretended it was mine. It was just easier to do that than to tell the story of a friend who had gone to a therapist, and you know, all that. Is that unethical? Like when R told me about a friend who is a photo editor and I was like, I know her, and R was like, "She's not really my friend. She's the girl who stole my boyfriend. But it's too complicated to tell it that way and it makes me sound vindictive." Sometimes stories are better told in the first person. So you have to steal them. Or edit them at least. Sentiment needs to be preserved and tweaked. Otherwise, what do we even have left?

Every time someone asks me to take the Myers-Brigg Indicator test, which is like every few years, I'm like split identity on the Introvert/Extrovert quadrant. I don't know what this means. Apparently it means that I am either a "dreamer" or a "visionary," but my psyche hasn't decided which one yet.

For lovers of words

the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past