This Year

I took baby steps towards appreciating baby steps.

The shape of this year

was distorted parabolic. In a good way, like a swoosh. Think: The Nike symbol. Loose ends tied together in the last weeks of the year, which was comforting and neat. It reminded me of The Wire.

There were highs and lows. Mad Men dress up parties and amazing food. Weddings in Boston and Claremont and Halloween fests. Dinner at Providence, at Bazaar and Oliveto. Road trips to SF, a few weeks in Paris and London. The best falafel ever. Angst, nostalgia, being terrorized by my own writing. Friends moving away, sometimes to other countries, friends getting married, having babies. I let go of a few things that I don't want to carry with me in 2010. It was time. I have resolutions. But this year feels complete. Like something shifted from within and hopefully will keep shifting in the right direction. I feel ready for a new year.

Wails of a Child

I am not as respectful of process as I'd like to be. I question things I don't know, don't understand. I brood. I ask, "Are we there yet?" incessantly. I fidget. I cry. I irritate myself. I irritate others. I can't stop speculating, wondering, ruminating, thinking.

And then, the process seems to end. And I'm not quite sure what to make of this, what to do with myself. Or where my central locus is, that place from which everything, for so long, appeared to stem.

Forgotten People

Leaving yoga at Runyon this morning, I saw an old roommate I lived with during that year in Silverlake on Micheltorena, the one who I had nothing in common with. She was an assistant to an agent and was rarely at home and would rarely feed her cat, so I adopted it. She lived on a diet consisting of beer and diet pills. One day, she yelled at a homeless guy, prompting me to move out.

And I realized that I hadn't thought about this girl in years. Maybe four or five. Isn't it strange how some people disappear and they really disappear? And others fade away slowly, as though they are reluctant-to-leave tenants of your mind. I did think about the cat, though from time to time. I hope it is still alive.

Reflection on Self

I once applied to a writing program, waited months for a response and then got a mass email entitled "Rejection Letter" in my inbox one day. A couple of days later, the email was recalled and the institution in question sent out acceptance letters to those of us who were mistakenly emailed "Rejection Letter" and slightly more subtly-worded rejections to everyone else. This made me think about how your self-perception can change on a dime. For a couple of days, my identity was "Rejection Letter." I walked around like a reject, an abject failure. I made jokes about it. Then, I wasn't a reject anymore. I was one of the few non-rejects. I'd like to tell you that this transition was a completely happy one, but it wasn't. The acceptance was a relief. The recognition of how I see myself, in part as a result of how others see me, was not.

There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).

- Ellen Willis

What I love about Damon Albarn is that he hasn't medicated himself with fame or wealth or success. Or even pretended to. This is refreshing. The people who pretend to are fundamentally the worst.

Try This

Throw something new into the gestalt of old memories: a shocker maybe, a red notecard in a mess of white ones. Now your eye halts at the bright crimson and doesn't know where else to go. Did you do this intentionally? Because your memories became too unwieldy to carry, sort through, ruminate on? Was it exhaustion or self-trickery that made you create a self-imposed stop sign? Don't go here, it tells you. There is nothing new to be learned, nothing new to be said. Stop here, it tells you, a shorthand mess of cards. House of cards, memories of cards. Is this a real stop or simply a yield?

Embrace

Drive by the Vista on a crisp California winter night: a pink "V" with a circle around it flashes on off on off. A phallic neon pole lights a path into the "V." How did I never notice the absurd lewdness of the marquee? Underneath, a man in a gray snow cap hugs a small twiggy girl with glasses.

"They're in love."

"No they're not. It's his hat."

Perhaps there is truth to this. It is hard not to want to jump out of your car and hug a man in a gray snow cap.

Away We Go

Perhaps it would be easier to go through life disappointing everyone rather than trying to psychically gauge their expectations and then attempting to appease them.

I'm 30. I should know better by now. I thought I did.

When I turned 30, I said, "That's it. I can finally not give a shit what people think anymore. How liberating."

How liberating.

I forgot that I am human.

I forgot that I am myself.

30 doesn't allow you to escape that.

Maybe 31?

This Gives Me Comfort

The idea that any story you might tell yourself or others, any story you hold dear to you can, has or will exist in reality. Maybe on the other side of the Earth, but it exists, somewhere. Maybe possibility is the only thing I believe in. Maybe I will never completely succumb to bitterness or cynicism. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I can live with maybe.

The hardest things to contend with are the things that feel shitty, but feel necessarily, purposefully shitty. Like you recognize that this is one of the painful tests on your life curricula.

Are you aware of your life curricula? I've always been acutely aware of it. Which truthfully sucks. Ideally, I'd like to go through life doing whatever the fuck I want and not giving a shit about the consequences, karmic or otherwise (Is there an otherwise?). I tried this once. It didn't work out so well.

I realized today that perhaps I haven't been entirely truthful on this blog. Perhaps I'm not as honest as I think I am. I have been censoring my cynicism for weeks, months, years. Maybe a lifetime.

Maybe I've just been humoring myself like forever. This was a startling recognition.

I realized it in yoga this morning. I was more distracted than usual. The guy who looks like Howard Dean lit incense by his feet, which I found irritating. And two blonde women walked by talking about how a coyote had eaten Jessica Simpson's dog, "Like, I don't even know why she sent people to go looking for it. The coyote, like, had the dog in its, like, jowls."

Then a Mexican woman started telling her friend about an expression used in Spanish - something about "taking your foot out of it." Removal of foot. Take out foot, it was such a great expression. I have to remember this, I told myself. Remember the word. Remember the fucking word. Every now and then eavesdropping can reveal such gems, particularly when people talk about language, etymology, emotions, being.

And I realized I wasn't in yoga. I was avoiding myself by getting wrapped up in other people's minds, lives, expressions. This is necessarily a part of being a writer. You let down your own boundaries so you can access other people. But it prevents you from being you, accessing yourself. I spend so much time in other people's shoes, sometimes I don't know what it is to be in my own shoes.

Then I thought about the wedding I had attended two months ago, where a woman cornered me and started telling me the saddest of sob stories. I didn't know this woman. She didn't know me. She told me the saddest sob story I've heard in maybe a few years. She told me that what she was telling me no one knew - not her husband or her parents or her closest friends, all of whom were at this wedding. But as she was telling me the story, I started recognizing a pattern. People often corner me and tell me horrific sob stories. It's been happening for 30 years now. And then I internalize these stories and think about them and carry them around with me. And this often happens at weddings, birthday parties, even my own birthday parties. There were 200 people at this wedding. Why had she picked me to share this story with? As I was handing her Kleenex and holding her hand, I started to feel something I'd never felt before as someone has shared a sob story with me. I felt used. And irritated. T used to tell me that people dump their sad lives on me because I have some sort of empathetic halo over my head. And I was angry at T all of a sudden for saying this to me. After the wedding, I called her and yelled at her and cried. Because I have a right to be irritated and mean and entirely unsympathetic. I'm tired of being manipulated. And I don't have a fucking empathetic halo over my head. Fuck empathetic halos. Fuck me for being such a sucker my whole life. Half the rotten things that have happened to me have happened because I've gotten sucked into something that isn't even mine to contend with.

This morning, on the way back from yoga, I was listening to KCRW and they announced that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins are breaking up. And I was oddly devastated. Why? I asked myself? Why does this bother you so much? It's like when Heath Ledger died and so many of my friends were kind of fucked up over it, like really affected. And I thought it was sad, but it didn't get me in the gut the way it did for some people. And later I realized that all the people who I knew, who it really had affected, were the ones who had a tremendous capacity to manage their sadness. And perhaps when he died, the worrisome perceived truth that reared its head is that there is no managing sadness. Sometimes its just bigger than you. We all internalize narratives, to a degree, identify with them, feel out the shape of a story, see if it corresponds with ours.

Maybe this is how I felt when I heard the Susan Sarandon story on KCRW. There's no stability, no guarantee of anything. Of course I knew this, in a logical sort of way. But it felt like a personal betrayal, like it was my marriage of 23 years that was falling apart. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why can't I be a normal person and keep all the doors of my house shut? or at least a few of them. It's like those pictures you see of neighborhoods after Katrina. Some days it feels like my whole house is submerged under water.

Maybe I'm temporarily shutting down out of necessity. Because I've been too open for too long. Zen Buddhists talk about how there is no truth, no reality, no belief. These things lead to attachment and attachment ultimately binds and constricts us. The real us, the larger us. I think I have to start to evaluate and question what I've really been believing all this time, about myself, about other people, about life.

Do you wake up some mornings and you can't access familiar emotions? I reach for nostalgia because this is the tool that lousy hacks write with (and live with). But lately, I wake up and I can't even access my own feelings of nostalgia. I somehow managed to abandon them, like a litter of wailing kittens at a bus stop. They'll come back, I suppose. They always do. I wish I could care more, because I am used to caring. Too much for my own good, clearly. I never thought I'd be capable of turning my back on some inherent part of myself, but I did. And I have. Initially you do it because you feel forced to, and then you keep doing it because you recognize some sort of ugly truth about yourself: that you're capable of it. Maybe this is a warped practicing of non-attachment. I don't know. Somewhere along the way, I got sick of being a nursemaid to my own emotional fluctuations, often the result of having to deal with others. And I think I'm tired of writing and living from that place. Maybe not though. I can never tell.

I'm also tired of my own lack of predictability. I don't seem to know how I will react to things and sometimes I scare myself. I change my mind about things approximately fifty times a day and hope that others can read between the lines and decode me. Principle, emotion, intensity, hypocrisy. In NY, T and I were grabbing doughnuts at the Doughnut Plant and I started talking about doughnuts and circles and nostalgia and Atlanta and contradictions and how I hate people who talk incessantly about their principles because dogmatic adherence to anything eventually leads to hypocrisy and T was like, "But you always talk about principles."

And then I realized that I am a hypocrite with no principles, really. And cynical to boot. T watched me eat my peanut butter and jelly doughnut and said, "I wonder what it's like being in your head sometimes."

It's pretty awful most of the time actually. Occasionally, I am entertained by it. Lately, less so. I am going to do another hour of yoga now to quiet my unprincipled, hypocritical mind.

Broken Things

Does this ever happen to you: someone asks you a question and in that question you hear ten questions?

And you have the option of being quiet.

And you have the option of being mysterious.

But instead, you find yourself vomiting the truth onto the Altar of Broken Things.

And then the truth is somewhere outside of you like a helium balloon that you've lost your grip on and you're like, "shit. I need to get that back immediately." But it's too late. You can't. And so you throw your hands up and hope it lands right. This has happened to me a few times in the past couple of months.

In one instance, it cleared the room.

In others, it didn't. In most instances, it is a fucking relief to say what needs to be said instead of letting it fester.

Alessandro says that vomiting the truth onto the Altar of Broken Things is cruel. To myself. To other people.

And maybe it is.

He believes it is unkind to break a thing and then vomit truth on it much later. It is better to leave it alone. Like this: if you see something you have broken in the past, on the street, let's say as you are walking along, it is best to look away and keep walking.

I've tried doing this, believe me, I have.

But I'm not much good at it.

It's not like I am mean or crude. Just frighteningly lacking in personal boundaries. My own, that is.

My mother says this is a horrific lack of restraint and discipline. When I tell her things that I find myself saying to people, she is appalled. "Why would you do that?" she gasps.

This is how people with restraint act. Like you are crazy or like a spoiled child running amok. Like your inability to hold things in makes you a flight risk or scarily, erratically unpredictable.

I am wary of wreckage. Sometimes I feel like I can remember things that I broke not just a year ago or five, but lifetimes ago. Sometimes, I am too scared to venture into the wreckage of something that I feel I broke so long ago, that it can't ever be fixed. And not even the truth can fix it. Not even a million apologies. And sometimes you see something or feel its presence as you are walking down the street and the weight of all those lifetimes, the gravity of it pulls you in. You have no choice. And you can't just keep walking. You have to at least acknowledge it, at least stop and say that you remember how things were, before you broke them. Maybe this was a million years ago. And you wish you had known better than to ever have broken them in the first place.

in an ideal world

this is where i would live, for a year or two. and work on my book.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, is the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

-e. e. cummings

the challenges of a democratized internets

Sophie Conti from Stylelikeu.com from Stylelikeu on Vimeo.

Thank you, T, for sending me this. Words cannot do justice to this beautifully horrific piece.

Thunderbird, Norval Morrisseau, March 14, 1932 – December 4, 2007

A girl with Leika, Alexander Rodchenko, Dec 5 1891 - Dec 3, 1956

The Last Station

I heard Helen Mirren talk about this movie the other day and she said something about how Russians and Italians have a performative quality in their daily interactions. Everything is big and dramatic. The need to narrativize experiences is paramount. I don't like to generalize, but I think Indians are a little like this too. Or maybe I'm just generalizing based on my own family. Every discussion, opinion, conversation at the dining table is sort of dramatic and full of impassioned opinion. Maybe this is why I love Russian literature so much.

Unlike Mr. Bridges, Bad, who is 57, seems to be running on the last fumes of his talent. He drives from one gig to another in a battered truck, playing bowling alleys and bars with local pickup bands and sleeping in less-than-deluxe accommodations. He smokes and drinks as if trying to settle a long-ago bet between his liver and his lungs about which he would destroy first. The chorus to his signature song (one of several written especially for Mr. Bridges) observes that “falling feels like flying, for a little while.” That time has long since passed for Bad, who is scraping the bottom and trying not to complain too much about it (except when he can get his agent on the phone).

What does Jean see in this wreck? Mr. Bridges, settling into Mr. Cooper’s understated script as if he’d written it himself, makes the answer both obvious and a little enigmatic. There is a playboy’s charm and an old-fashioned Southern courtliness half-hidden behind the weariness, the anger at squandered possibilities, the flabby gut and the unkempt beard. This fellow may be bad, but he’s also dignified.

Guggenheim Museum, Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency, 2009

This morning

On the sidewalk: a broken full length mirror, lying on its side, reflecting peoples' shoes as they walked by. Specifically: boots, two pairs. One pair of emerald green heels, two pairs of sneakers.

Sometimes the things I catch while stopped at red lights is happy.

Stratagems

While I was on the east coast, V invited me to partake in the planning/research and development stages of a stratagem. Of course I obliged.

Those closest to me know that planning stratagems is like my favorite activity, next to eavesdropping on people's conversations and wild speculation - in fact, stratagems often necessitate eavesdropping and wild speculation, so really stratagems allow me to engage in all of my favorite activities at once. I am often invited by friends to help with the planning stages of complex stratagems. I am also sometimes lent out to friends of friends to consult on their stratagems. This is in part because I am so skilled at stratagems, and also, in part, because I am a 15-year old girl with an embarrassing amount of free time on my hands.

My rule for stratagems are that they must a) not harm anyone and b) that the end-goal should ideally be a happy ending. In other words, I like playing God. Albeit, a benevolent one. Not like, Zeus or whatever.

I also have a high success rate with stratagems, which is important because if you are not skilled at stratagems, they can backfire in your face and make you look like a real asshole/stalker/crazy person. And that's just unpleasant for everyone involved.

Stratagems require you to sharpen a number of skills in your arsenal. You must be MacGyver, a skilled thespian, a good journalist and know how and when to play dumb and how and when to reveal important information. Sometimes I am not good at this part because I don't have a poker face. You also need internet skills, rope, duct tape, an emergency kit, a camera phone, a facebook account, a sewing kit, contacts in the travel industry, the ability, space and time to throw a cocktail party on a whim and a general curiosity about people's lives. It also helps if you're a girl, because guys who engage in stratagems are just weird and creepy.

Convergence

Patiensez s'il vous plait. I come from a family who for generations searches for a home. My grandparents were exiles, unable to return to the place of their birth. This, at a time when people lived, bred, aged and died precisely where they were born. They managed but I think lived with a constant sense of loss. Saudade.

Perhaps the pieces are always, were always missing. My sister and I had a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the Alps. It wasn't till we completed it that we realized that all along, three pieces had been missing. Even before the puzzle made it into the box, into shrink wrap, and onto the shelves of a store in Geneva where my father bought it and brought it home for us to work on.

Maybe you don't realize what pieces are missing till you finish the puzzle. This is horribly cruel on the part of puzzle-manufacturers. And life.

I think it's kind of an interesting thing to think about...is it cruel to give somebody the best day of their life just because they'll never have another day like that again? I don't think so. It's kind of like a wonderful dream and you wake up. It sucks for a second when you wake up, but you'll always have that moment.

-Charlie Todd

The Spy Who Loved Everyone, the second story in this week's This American Life, about Improv Everywhere (if you live in NY, you might have caught one of their spontaneous musicals at Grand Central or their no-pants subway rides - they are BRILLIANT) and the band Ghosts of Pasha. It's kind of an amazing, thought-provoking story, worth a listen.

Yurts

When I was little, I wanted everyone I loved to live with me in a yurt. Or maybe a collection of yurts.

I'm beginning to think this wasn't such a bad idea. Yurts can be pretty design-y now, and eco-friendly. You'd feel good about your negligible carbon footprint, and you'd be a happy socialist, living in a yurt community of with all the people you love. You could probably buy one for a couple thousand dollars. If you bought in like, Florida, maybe a couple hundred.

Friends and loved ones, consider how happy we could all be with this arrangement.

I don't text. I can't condense language into phrases like "c u 2morrow." And it kind of pains me to see other people do so. I generally ignore texts or pretend I didn't get them. In posting this on my blog, I have a sense that I am going to get a flood of texts from friends tonight filled with all kinds of nonsense.

I also write people off when they use/overuse (any use of the following is, in my opinion an overuse) net jargon like LOL, BRB, or L8R, or use emoticons. Just the sight of these things makes me cringe. Sometimes, against my better instincts, I befriend people who use emoticons or LOLs and I almost always regret it. My instincts are generally right. In my experience, emoticons are used by only the following kinds of people:

a) people of bad character
b) emotional liars
c) the frivolous and shallow
d) lazy dullards
e) people who failed high school English
f) passive aggressive people

I'm sorry, but it's true.

Yes, he uses only prepaid disposable cellphones. No, he never takes pictures of the work, travels with stickers or paint equipment, or saves anything to his laptop. Yes, his mother thinks he is crazy (she is one of a few family members and old buddies who know he is the man behind B.N.E.)

“You kind of isolate yourself, living this life,” he said. “You meet a girl and she asks, ‘What do you do?’ and right way, you have to lie.”

Connaught Place, Delhi, India 2006

What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex? Our goal and how to reach it were strangely unclear. We all know what marriage is: a legal commitment between two people. But a good marriage? For guidance I turned to the standard assessments. The Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test instructs spouses, among other things, to rank themselves along the “always agree” to “always disagree” continuum on matters ranging from recreation to in-laws. This struck me as scattershot and beside the point. For all the endless talk about marriage — who should have the right to be in one, whether the declining numbers of married-parent households are hurting America’s children — we don’t know much about what makes a marriage satisfying or how to keep one that way. John Gottman, in his Love Lab in Seattle, claims that he can analyze a conversation between spouses and predict with 94 percent accuracy whether that couple will divorce over the course of six years. But many academics say that Gottman’s powers of prophecy are overblown, that he can’t truly predict if a couple will split. Those not selling books, workshops or counseling admit to knowing surprisingly little. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, likens our current understanding of “relationship science” to the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man “feels the tusk, inferring that elephants are hard and sharp-edged, like a blade. Another touches the soft, flexible ear, concluding that elephants are supple, resembling felt. A third imagines massive strength from grasping the pillar-like structure of the leg. The perspective of each person touching the elephant is valid, as far as it goes. . . .” But no one understands the whole beast.

I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.

The best thing about this interview is Jack Nicholson's abrupt, slightly asshole-line of questioning.

On Death and Elephants

Some of us, because of the makeup of our psyches, require as though to stay alive, the occasional beating of a dead horse. Or, let's not even bring horses into this. They are the wrong symbol, and I don't want to bring injury of an animal into this.

Let's instead put it this way: in that article, years ago, in the NYT magazine about elephants, there was a passage about how elephants bury their dead, hold elaborate funerals and occasionally return to the graves of those they loved, to honor them or remember them.

So the metaphorical path was in the right vein, not the injury of an animal, but the death of an animal was where I was looking to go, but through a different lens, a different angle of the story.

Do you get what I mean?

Things don't die. Not even elephants. They exist, albeit in some other form. And we must honor them, because for some reason, we are compelled to.

The Scale of Magical Thinking

Where do false hopes eventually go? Are they relegated to the basement of your psyche, stashed away like elementary school essays and shoes that are too scuffed and broken even to give away to the Salvation Army? Are they managed and maintained by some other part of your being even if they have been consciously forgotten? And what if you are the kind of person who harbors guilt over your mere existence? Do your false hopes weigh less, if they were to be placed on a scale, than those of someone who believes that she is deserving of her hopes?

Are there people in the world who are immune to magical thinking? I was given a reality-check talk today and I didn't like it. That is, I didn't like being told that my hopes were false, even if I knew that they were. On occasion, I have willed my false hopes into being, breathed life into them even if it has nearly taken the life out of me. You would think that this process is painful, to be avoided, but it's not. It's euphoric, liberating even, to forget yourself over a flight of fancy. I am not a dogmatic person by nature, but I must admit, it feels good to have a dogged, unwavering mission. I recommend it at least a couple of times in life.

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

— Proust

There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her claws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others.

— Anton Chekhov

Allen Ginsberg by William S. Burroughs, on the rooftop of his Lower East Side apartment, between Avenues B and C, 1953

Pebble in My Shoe

Since this morning/A foreboding sense that what I don't know is not good/strange bouts of status anxiety that I haven't had in maybe a year/Some sort of loud reemergence of ego/accompanied by sadness/The things that I am not a part of/That seem so much more enticing/glamorous/fun/exciting than what I am a part of/The sense that talking and writing this through will not help/Scheduled an eye exam/because my vision is/was/has always been somewhat impaired/scheduled a ladydoctor appointment/because this is what I do at years' end/booked through my calendar till early January/made a Christmas list/have been crossing things off/I am nothing/if not organized/but where has this gotten me?/People move through different thresholds/identities/relationships/pastimes/jobs/I've always carried a strange awareness/call it the thorn in my side/that all these things are really irrelevant/costumes/maps/scripts/plays/Things must change from within/before they change without/otherwise you arrive at the life you have chosen/unprepared/so I put things off/delay/not because I am lazy/or scared/although this might be what some people think/that complacency suits me in some way/but because I know there is so much work to do/from within/but this doesn't mean/that I don't look/around me/wanting to scream/because/people move at such speeds/through life/that it inspires envy/seeing them zip/in and out of lanes/a swoosh of color and light/and ultimately beauty/maybe they can get away with this/but I can't/because I have to learn these roads first/or I will crash/I'd like to think that I am the tortoise/but I must remind myself/that this isn't a race/and I'm not even sure what I believe/anymore.

Wefeelfine.org was originally conceived as a web program that isolated online entries of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling" — typically clocking in 10,000 such admissions daily.

The Extended Family I Never Had

After stopping at Stories today, I decided to take a different route home and got lost in Angeleno Heights. Near MacArthur Park, a multi-generational extended Mexican family was having a barbecue: kids riding around on tricycles, elderly men and women in lawn chairs, colored paper plates, music, several conversations taking place simultaneously. I watched them for a bit and for the first time in my life, wished that I was part of an extended family like this one. Where everyone is up in everyone's business. Where there are weekly barbecues, and birthdays and anniversaries and celebrations and everyone is obligated to be there. Where everyone has known everyone else forever. Where most of your memories are communal, and those you are closest to, those who know the significant details of all of your experiences are in your life every day.

I wonder if I've started to feel this way because so many people I love are far away, and it's been getting me a little sad lately.

incentive to move to a cave

Could any fault weight heavier on human conscience than that by which, however unwittingly, another human life had been distorted? I believe that we should all strive to be good models for others. We often attempt to influence others directly: by force, manipulation and blackmail, by nagging, pleading, hectoring, commanding. To change yourself is infinitely better than to change others and to be a living model of good use is perhaps the best way of indirectly helping others.

-Pedro de Alcantara, Indirect Procedures, A Musician's Guide to the Alexander Technique

washingtonpost.com > Print Edition > The Extras > District

correction

Thursday, December 3, 2009

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Thoughts About New York City

Subway Portraits, New York, 1930s, Walker Evans

You don't need to like people to live in New York, but you have to be somewhat open with your humanity, somewhat okay in your own skin. Conversations and interactions are everywhere, chances to study faces, listen to arguments. At Momofuku, the couple next to us was having a breakup discussion. She was leaving him. On the other side, a group of investment bankers ordered a round of drinks, attempted to flirt with us. In New York, the awareness of experiences unfolding simultaneously is heightened, the way a cacophony of sounds in heavy metal eventually gives way to some sort of harmony. Or not.

In Los Angeles, it is easier to be present in your your own life, even in public, but in New York, there is a constant awareness of the shared space between people, shared air, a sense that you are a small part of a larger whole, and the edges of your singularity are constantly being blurred or eroded.

Lives intersect, for a moment, tourists ask for directions. People stop to listen to drummers in the subway or rush to catch the 6:20 local. You catch glimpses of people you might know, you might have known, you might know someday. The city buzzes with a kind of aggressive possibility, possibility on steroids.

I once made Alessandro walk 52 blocks from the Time Warner Center to the upper West Side. This was the summer I was sad and walked over fifty blocks a day, till I was whittled down to a slip of air and couldn't recognize myself in the mirror. This was a merely a byproduct of walking-while-thinking. Alessandro complained the whole time, suggested the subway every ten blocks. But we walked the entire distance to Columbia. We had plans to meet Jo later that night, but we serendipitously ran into her around Broadway and 86th. This happens a lot in New York.

The subway, even at rush hour, even in the middle of summer with no air conditioning is a boon. I'll say it. Again and again if I have to. I live in a city with limited public transportation, and I miss being able to zip across town with ease.

Jo told me a story about messing up her contact lenses and having to toss them out on the subway and then listening for the stop and walking home in a city that looked like a Monet painting with it's blurred lights and soft shapes. I could understand what she was saying because I am blind too without my glasses, and intrigued at a New york with softer edges. But I wouldn't want to try this.

New York is a fantastic receptacle of memories, even if it is constantly changing. See that boutique? It used to be the only Urban Outfitters in New York City and I would go there, on weekends in high school, to buy vintage orange-tag Levis. The Chinese restaurant in midtown where my dad and I always have lunch when I visit him at his office is gone too. Once, on the 6, Jo and Al and I rode home with a friend who peed into the tracks in between carriages while the train was in motion. We watched, sort of horrified and fascinated at once.

Women walking on the street in New York are beautiful. You only catch their faces for a minute, for a glimpse, because mostly people are in a rush. I think it comes down to the sense of openness in the city, the fact that everyone is constantly afoot. This is my face. This is who I am. There is a beauty just in that.

There are regular stops on every trip. I didn't make it to Grimaldi's this time, or to the Pickle Guys, but I met up with the nice Hare Krishna man at the Doughnut Plant and the boy with the newsie cap at the Chocolate Bar. He wrapped my chocolates with a kind of care that might seem incongruous with the city, if you didn't know it well enough. Brown boxes, with the swoosh of silken brown bows. "They're beautiful," I told him, and he beamed with an endearing sort of pride.

After lunch on Tuesday, I still had a few errands, but then it got gray and I decided to head back home to Greenwich. Also, my heels were hurting from all that walking. I kissed my New York goodbye and told her I would be back for more possibilities in a couple of months.

Subway Portrait, New York, 1938-41, Walker Evans

On Writing

I think I finally understand why I like Jason Reitman's writing so much. Aside from the fact that he delivers meaningful, complex ideas with a good amount of levity, is essentially a writer's writer, has a gift for dialogue and a sharp economy that I can appreciate, he writes/explores women the way I'd like to write/understand men. I am always conducting informal surveys with men I know. Polling them on hypothetical questions, trying to understand the mysteries of their psyche. Because ultimately, the experience of being male is one that I most likely won't have in this life. And I sometimes wonder what it must be like to occupy a male body and see the world through a lens of male emotionality, even in our post-gender era of hyper-emotional/hyper-sensitive men.

And I know it's not about binaries, about either/or, about making gender-determined conclusions. Because ultimately, we're all individuals and generalizing based on gender is kind of a pointless activity. But you can tell from the way that he portrays women that he's studied them carefully, painstakingly, for years. When I saw him interviewed, he was asked what's made him such a sharp writer, and he said, "Just growing up." This reminds me of something I heard Arundhati Roy say once - "You don't work on writing, you just refine your way of observing the world. That's what ultimately makes you a writer," she said. I have to remind myself that it's not about the writing. It's about living in a particular way, in a meditative way. It's about watching and listening. And slowly, slowly, your vision of the world becomes more refined, and the vocabulary to carve it out springs out of a kind of necessity, organically, on its own.

Musical Associations

In college, The Creperie on Thayer Street: enter at any time of the day or night, and you would hear Bob Marley. Redemption Song or Could You Be Loved, Stir it up or I Shot the Sheriff. And you would sit at a tiny table against the window and look at the pale, butter yellow walls while you waited for your banana nutella crepe. Even now, crepes remind me of Bob Marley.

Sometimes late at night, you would be coming back from class or a meeting or Faunce House and even if it wasn't that late, it would be dark, because it was winter, and cold; cold enough that you could see your own breath, and you would have on mittens and a scarf and you'd be walking to your dorm, by yourself, and looking at stars in between steepled roofs. And you would walk past a dorm and hear some sort of winter/dark/steepled roof/late 90s-appropriate music playing. Like David Gray or something. Steeples+cold+winter=David Gray.

Lives I'd Like to Eavesdrop On

RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have produced acclaimed translations of works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. They have twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Their translations of Tolstoy's What Is Art? and Anna Karenina are published in Penguin Classics. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married to each other and live in Paris.

Hips

In Paris, at a dress shop, the saleswoman urged me to buy a dress. It was a size 26 and was the right color, but it was snug, like a second-skin.

"I need something bigger," I said, "I feel...hippy."

"No," she said sternly. "How old are you?" she asked. At the time I was 29.

"You are a woman," she said. "You have hips. You must embrace zees. Zee dress...it is made for you. Straight women (at this, she made an up-and down gesture with her hands to indicate skinny rather than heterosexual, I guess) try zees dress on and it does not look good on them. It is made for a woman, not a girl."

I laughed at the salesmanship. This dress would be an adjective wherever I wore it. And although I don't like to admit it, I know that I curate my identity. All of us do, to an extent. The prospect of this particular adjective being attached to my identity was scary territory. Too much hippiness feels offensive in some way. Hips are threatening. To you, maybe to me. I don't know. They must be kept under cover. They must try to pass by unnoticed. This is the philosophy I had lived with for 29 years. Hips are even more suggestive than boobs, and they tend to speak for you, even when you don't mean for them to. This is a problem. You constantly feel (and by you I mean me) that they need to be reigned in. It is even a little terrifying talking about them on a blog on the internets. But they must be discussed, because they exist and can no longer be denied or ignored. They must finally be integrated.

I always wanted to be beanpole thin, Audrey Hepburn thin, like my sister. Beanpole thin girls, they can be whoever they want. They can move in and out of spaces with a kind of minimalist elegance. And they don't need to have everything taken in at the waist. It's troubling to think how much my tailor has made off of me in the years since adolescence.

But the dress did fit perfectly. It was maybe the first dress that wouldn't need to be taken in at the waist. I could tell it liked me more than the other people who had tried it on. I bought the dress. I wore it out. That is to say, I wore it at my 30th birthday. No one seemed offended by the show of hippage. No one shrieked in terror, and by no one, I mean, I did not shriek in terror. I was calm and composed. This was ultimately a test of self-acceptance. "You are a woman," I told myself in a French accent. "Not a girl. Zees dress must be worn by a woman."

Wouldn't it be Nice

To be able to be two places at once? Not to expedite things, or get more done; this is a consumerist way of looking at life. But for the sheer purpose of experiencing more. I speak as though the current life that we inhabit doesn't give us enough, and that's not quite what I mean to say. It just chooses to speak to us in intermittent spurts and lulls. It is quiet for a while and then, all of a sudden, there is too much to encircle with our hands, with our minds. Life isn't rationed out in neat portions - we are starved and then overfed, gorged on experiences. And I just think that perhaps it would be more prudent for us to be allowed to be in two places at once, or for there to be two of each of us, experiencing separate things, but reporting back to one another every evening or every week, in order to resolve, consolidate, learn, share.

Bored to Death

This really is my new favorite show. I watched the whole series at home and then a few episodes with my family the other day. It's some of the best dialogue of 2009. Along with Up in the Air. Good dialogue is surprisingly hard to find on TV. On American TV, I should say. That new Prisoner show is a disaster that makes me want to cringe and curl up into a ball.

Without Words

I just realized that I overuse the word wordless. That I am obsessed with the dynamics, politics, and general analysis of wordless exchanges. What does this mean?

Anna Karina, Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960

Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy

Sunset, Aix-en-Provence, 2004

Amelia

At Burbank Airport, there is a 7-foot tall statue of Amelia Earhart holding a plane propeller. Or leaning against it. Except that she is so tall, and the propeller is so large that it looks more like she is a giant, holding a nuclear warhead. This is what I saw before I went through security on Wednesday.

Motifs

In the midst of a big decision, humming birds will appear, outside my window, on the front lawn, in parks, as I am fetching coffee. I should say, a lone humming bird. Always one. It's true, I neurotically look for patterns in life, in nature, in beauty. I catalog experiences, carry around a notebook, take notes, record people's words. Remember and analyze. This is maybe what writers and artists do. We notice in a neurotic way. And maybe patterns don't even exist. Even if there is no such thing as a coincidence, just our unconscious attempting to make some sense of things, impose some order on a set of experiences that transcend order and logic, this is what I notice. Lone humming birds strategically making appearances when I am caught on a threshold of some sort, unable to step back, unable to jump.

"Look," I said to a coffee companion once as a humming bird settled into a space behind us, and took its time traplining a row of Birds of Paradise. It stayed for a while, and we watched it wordlessly. And this was enough, to sit, wordlessly and watch a process without having to explain my neurotic history with hummingbirds, without having to say, "You know this happens a lot..." without being surprised or excited or anything. Just content and wordless for a moment.

These things really shouldn't have to be explained or articulated. It's unfortunate that I have a tendency towards oversharing. Maybe writing is an act of ego, the need to explain the world just as you see it. The need to articulate in a language, exactly your perspective on everything. The need to carve out a language for what you experience. I think my mother is right, though. It's not about leaving behind a legacy, or about people remembering your words. You are trying, against time, against reality even, to preserve the part of you that is timeless. This is ultimately an impossibility. All writers should be called Sisyphus. We are attempting to stem some sort of tide with words. Because what else are we supposed to do with all this time? Why else are we even alive? I think I am more aware of my own mortality than most people my age. I think about death and dying constantly. It's not morbid. It's just thinking.

To sit wordlessly with other people is enough. Words are also a necessary tool in conflict, in provocation. To sit wordlessly is to recognize that different things have different meanings for different people, that we all have our own set of symbols, that we ascribe different and separate meanings to separate things, that we are all in some way starring in each others' movies, sometimes with conflicting scripts and sometimes with harmonious ones. So to sit and watch a singular thing together perhaps means nothing and everything at once. I think this is why I like the experience of watching movies in theaters with other people. It's a dual process of being immersed in a narrative, and knowing that other people in the room are immersed in a similar process but most likely culling out other ideas, making other connections, picking up other nuances.

In the midst of a large-scale project, the kind that exists in my head, the kind that consumes me, the kind that keeps me obsessed, up late at night, thinking, problem solving, trying to make connections from one idea to another, I leave my house and see Tibetan monks in orange robes. Once at the bus stop. Another time, on the main green. This time at Burbank Airport. A single monk in an orange robe, who snaps me out of my thoughts. I always smile, make eye contact. This has been happening for years too. I don't know what it means. But it means enough. Enough for me to notice, document, and feel like even if there are things that exist that are not quite right, maybe something about the whole is just right, just as it is.

I was living in an apartment where I was right by the freeway and the cars would go by. In Encino, near Leon Russell’s house. And I remember thinking that that sounded like the ocean to me. That was my ocean. My Malibu. Where I heard the waves crash, but it was just the cars going by. I think that must have inspired the lyric.

-Tom Petty

Situational Depression

Rain in LA is a novelty. Rain on the east coast in November just kind of makes you want to kill yourself/not leave your bed. The view outside my window is gray and more gray and lots of leafless trees with dead-looking branches. No wonder I spent so much time in high school and college under the covers, reading, not really wanting to talk to anyone. Today, I felt the antisocial adolescent nerd in me resurfacing but the gray outside my window had robbed me of any spirit of resistance. I got back under the covers with copies of Pale Fire, Master and Margarita, and This Side of Paradise, the Sunday edition of the NYT and the latest New Yorker. And comforted myself with books and reading and didn't talk to anyone for hours.

NY NY

Whenever I get off at Grand Central, I run into people I know - friends from college or people from high school, former co-summer interns. Yesterday, after departing Metro North and heading towards the subway, I wondered who I would see. I ended up running into my dad who was catching the 6:15 local to Greenwich. He fretted that it was cold and I wasn't wearing a scarf or a hat. I wear scarves on the west coast but not on the east. All hats are too big for my head. They look absurd on me, like I am a small child dressed up in my mothers clothes. We hugged and then he went home and I took the 6 to meet Jo.

Food and friends are what I love about New York. Dinner at Momofuku with Jo followed by a stop at Milk and then a Chocolate Bar run. Slumber party in Williamsburg, lunch with an old college friend at Pearl Oyster Bar followed by dark chocolate and yogurt gelato at Grom. There was a mention of a David Chang outpost in LA opening soon. I cannot wait. Food kind of rules my life.

And at home too, asparagus cashew omlettes, fennel-blood-orange-walnut salads, Avocado-almond-grapefruit-celery root salads, glasses of wine, creme brulee, dumplings at Joe's Shanghai, roasted brussels sprouts, blackberries with kefir and maple sugar crumbles, vegetable fritattas, dark chocolate with banana filling, Spanish tapas - chorizo and mushrooms and shrimp with almonds and lemon, Thai lemongrass salad. Food, food, food. I will have to go back on raw foods and munch on kale for weeks to make up for this.

The East Side of Los Angeles on a Sunny Day from clark vogeler on Vimeo.