To Paula in Late Spring

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment.

-W.S. Merwin

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
-Andre Gide

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
-Vaclav Havel

I am not a procrastinator. Till I have a massive potentially life-changing project to work on. Then I am a merciless cleaner. I bargain with God. If I clean the oven, will the short story just write itself? There's an outline on my desk, if you need to reference it. And the condiment shelves in the fridge call out to be neatened and pruned. All those pickles, five different types of salsa. Why are there two containers of Sriracha in there instead of just one? Can they be consolidated? How old is that Tapatio?

I am ruthlessly unsentimental with my closet in these moments. How did I accumulate so many vintage dresses? How many Marc Jacobs handbags does a person need? None. A person doesn't need any handbags. In some parts of the world, people don't use handbags. Shame on me for having so many. And my underwear drawer. Why do I insist on hanging on to holey pairs of grannie Victoria's Secret cotton underwear with period stains that I've had since college? Period underwear. Something that boys don't even know about till they live with you. Like urinal cake. Something we don't know about till we talk to boys. Or the pain of being kicked in the testicles. Is it really that bad? Do you really puke? Does the pain really rise up from your balls to your chest? I am fascinated. Really.

Yes. Period underwear. I cannot part with it. When I am PMSing and hanging around in my prescription negative 8.5 glasses and want to eat nothing but a carton of Carmela salted caramel ice cream I do it in my period underwear. And I revel in feeling and looking slobby. And resent being called "cute" in these moments. Cuteness suggests diminutive-ness and I am not small or petite in my slovenliness. I am hugely gross. I am blind and wearing old tattered underclothes. Every girl has a pair. Ask. It's our (literally) dirty little secret.

I think this story is going to be good, if I write it. But I shed like a cat and my bathroom floor is covered with long black hair. Gross. How did I end up living in such a filth-stye?

And why do I have canned black beans in my pantry? I don't even eat canned food. I should donate this to a soup kitchen.

And if I think beyond my home, there's my car, that needs to be washed.

And there is that old vintage map of Paris that I bought on the trip that needs to be taken to the framing guy in Chinatown who always tells me that I am his most beloved customer and offers me a discount. I am forever framing things that I don't have the wallspace to hang up. I should go visit him. I haven't seen him in some months.

I need to go to Trader Joe's and buy staples. I make a list:

Avocados
Lime
Ginger
Yogurt
Cilantro
Cherry Tomatoes
Kumquats
cucumbers
Walnut Gouda
Annie Chun's soup

I should be more disciplined about taking vitamins. And I've been really bad about consistently going to yoga class. Please, God. I'll leave my notes for the spec on my desk. If it is written by the time I get back, or if it drops out of the sky as I am walking down the street, I will go to yoga more regularly. I'll go to the Gurudwara on the top of Vermont for 40 days. I'll make burritos for the poor and hungry. I'll stop my consumptive patterns. I'll never buy another handbag again.

Look at this Jonathan Franzen guy. He is such a good writer. I should just give up now. I bet Jonathan Franzen doesn't make a trip to Trader Joe's every time he needs to write a short story. Or clean out his underwear drawer.

In my writing class, someone sincere once said that writing makes him aware of his mortality. The deeper he gets into writing his novel, the more aware he is of his own death, and the fear of death makes him want to finish it. I feel the opposite way. Please, God, just kill me now so I don't have to finish this damn thing.

Look! I just found a literary magazine I edited in college! Let's read it right now. And I have really been meaning to reread Grapes of Wrath even though I've never loved John Steinbeck in the cultish way that some people do.

Oh my God, my drawer full of mementos from the past! It needs sorting through and perhaps pruning, but I feel like rereading letters, and inspecting programs and ticket stubs and receipts and gifts. Let's listen to ALL the mix CDs I've ever been given. Quietly. Without the distraction of any other activity.

Look at this vintage typset drawer that I bought for $5 on Venice. I should pat myself on the back for accumulating junk at cheap prices. I meant to hang it up and use it as a curio. but it's been sitting here for some months now. Maybe even a year. I am waiting for Jolene to come to LA so she can style up my home. My mother is good at this activity too. They just have an eye for where things need to be hung up and placed. What goes next to what. I have an eye for things but perhaps not for curating them that well. I understand the placement of plants in a home though. And understand the principles of Feng Shui.

I evaluate my good and bad qualities. I am honest and not defensive when people tell me I am being an asshole. I concede when I am being an asshole. Or selfish or difficult.

But sometimes I am difficult and uncompromising.

I am neat and organized.

I procrastinate when things need to get done.

I judge people in my head.

I have a hard time keeping secrets.

But I am emotionally generous.

I am empathetic.

Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut rather than tell people off but I don't have any self-restraint in these moments.

Like that guy in my yoga class who picked a fight with the homeless guy who walked in. This has really been bothering me.

Why would you pick a fight with a homeless guy? Before yoga class? And he was mean. You don't belong here. You can come when you have a home. This class is for people who are really interested in yoga, not drunkards.

It's like I can feel that sense of justice rising in my chest and if I don't do or say something I'll implode. Or go home and cry. And I am not letting this asshole make me cry.

That really wasn't necessary, you know. He has just as much a right to be here as you or me. And it's inappropriate for you to tell him to leave. It's a public space, Runyon Canyon and this is a public class. you ruined the atmosphere of the class before it started. And you don't speak for the rest of us. I don't have a problem with him being here. In fact, if you have a problem, maybe you should attend another class, (you asshole, I am thinking).

I ask myself why I am doing this. Am I really doing this in defense of the homeless guy or for the abstract notion of justice in my head? Or is it an outlet for my own outrage? Is this about me? Or about someone who was just wronged and humiliated in front of me? I don't know. It's a mixture of both. But I have to admit, I like bullying bullies. I like when douchey grown men over six feet tall quiver in discomfort and fear when a five foot tall girl confronts them. And they always do, in my experience. But I also can't stand seeing someone get picked on. And I feel an insane empathy for homeless people. This is, for some reason, my easiest trigger. I think I was homeless in a past life. Or a refugee. Why make someone's difficulties even harder?

But I want to make the bully's difficulties harder. I kind of want to make him cry. I am so angry in these moments. I can't let it go. Ever.

And then there is a camp of people behind me. Yeah, she's right. You shouldn't have done that.It's a yoga class, man. That wasn't cool. And then he is the victim. Scared of a mob who is judging him.

Why am I all about an eye for an eye. You ruin someone's day in front of me, I'll be sure to ruin yours. You fuck someone over, watch your back, because I'll make sure you can't come back to this yoga class without a little bit of shame in your eyes.

I am awful. I am such a scary bitch.

I go to this yoga class all the time. It is about peace and harmony. And I am picking a fight with a guy and justifying it to myself in the name of justice for the homeless.

I wish I were one of those people who could let it go. I wish I didn't talk back to cops security guards who are clearly abusing their authority. But if I hold my breath and count to ten I am just angrier. And no one else is even saying anything. Aren't they just as bothered by it? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be?

And am I defending this homeless man because there is nothing more that I can do for him beyond defending him, and this raises feelings of frustration and inadequacy in me? And do I feel any better after doing this? No. Yes. A little. I feel ambivalent.

This is exhausting. I am going to go write my story now.

Right after I watch the BBC World News report about Iran.

bush, you need to shut the f up. seriously, we had to suffer the ignominy of having you as our president for eight goddamned years. we've earned the right to not have to see your face or hear your voice. just keep working that brush on your ranch and keep your mouth shut, because no one wants to hear it, a-hole.

http://www.foodincmovie.com/

When I am here, in my parents' house, especially in the sunroom, with sheets of rain coming down, and the trees like some sort of painted landscape, I feel shielded from all kinds of change. Especially change that I am not a part of. The change of things moving on without me.

In The Sopranos, Chris gets angsty over his screenplay because he starts to internalize it, starts to wonder about his own story arc. "Where's my arc?" he asks himself. "Where's my inciting incident?" And he is so sad about it, so wrecked.

When I am here, it doesn't seem to matter that my life doesn't have an inciting incident. Or, I guess I should say, there have been many inciting incidents. And they've catapulted me into places and situations and people, but I still am not sure what all of that means. I am still sort of trapped in some weird version of waiting for godot. waiting to get on with it already.

I don't know what I am waiting for.

I just took a break and read this article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/10/AR2009061003902.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national&sid=ST2009061101808

"Each of the characters in these movies shares one major trait: the insecure belief that they -- and possibly their friends -- are singularly incompetent and unprepared for life, more so than their parents or grandparents or any other humans in the history of adult preparedness."

Shit.

Maybe I should do a Chrysalis Workshop. Why not? I've already tried writing a novel, three screenplays, seen a Vedic astrologer, done several transcendental meditation seminars, attended the Landmark Forum and attempted seeing a therapist. I have to remember that I am not so termnially unique.

In Boston, the first day, I kind of had a meltdown at the bed and breakfast. Just walking around Cambridge took me back to freshman year in Boston and how it had been 12 years since then and how I had pretty much accomplished nothing since then. Like seriously, where had the past twelve years gone and what had I accomplished? How had I suddenly become Queen of Mediocrity when once upon a time, I actually felt like I had some sort of potential? Maybe it's like what Mary Oliver says, that I wasted time looking for an easier life, a better life. Maybe. maybe I spent too much time imagining. But I think that's the crux of what makes me a writer.

I feel oddly sedated in Greenwich. Like once upon a time, I had a script in this particular play. I had lines of dialogue to memorize, a costume. I had to know my stage directions. Coming back here now is like being an emeritus actress coming back to watch the play she once performed in. And at the end of the production, they'll point me out in the audience, and I'll stand and wave, but this time I'm just here to watch. I can mouth the words that the actress on stage is saying. I still know them. But that's not me anymore. I'm retired from this production. I just don't know what my next job is.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
-Milan Kundera

Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility......the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them.
-Milan Kundera

There is the memory of something and then there is the something right there in front of you. Take noodles: there is the memory of Maggi noodles, from a yellow package made by my grandmother for lunch and served in an era of more finicky dining sensibilities when only certain things could be consumed: fried potato sticks, but only if served in a conical shaped container made with the heavy card of pharmaceutical marketing material, or sliced tomatoes with amchur. Or cucumbers, sliced, with the bitter rinds cut off, their acridity removed with a rub of salt. But only in a steel bowl. The smallest one, one slightly bigger than my fist. Any kind of pickle, except onion. Candies that are orange. Shaped and colored. These foods should be coaxed upon me. If this fails, then they should be forced upon me, first with verbal threats of hospitalization and a shower of guilt - something to do with starving children, then Then there are no more pretenses and it's best that you give in before this part. But a kind of stubborness provides a thread, of character, of time. Character prevails. In the moviespeak of now, this is a "thruline."

Thruline said the boy who also asked me what my major was and what genre. Then every time I saw him on the main green, this time sober and avoiding me because of the ridicule I inflicted on him in my mind at that party (that he could read, telepathically) I called him genre. First in my head. Then in my sleep. Then always. With my friends. At a peace rally in Washington years later, I saw him and turned to my companion - "There's genre," I said. And there he was.

And then there are noodles. Noodles of now, a drive across the reservoir to high-end noodles, eaten with chopsticks over hipsterized minimalist formica tables and dim lighting. Integration means acknowledging how well things get on without you. How well New York gets on without me! They are even remodeling the museum. And how well Delhi gets on without me! New highways all over the place and it takes longer to get everywhere. And how well Copenhagen gets on without me and they have asked me to come to the reunion but no one will miss me if I don't come. And what about all the threads of my being that have been discarded just as carelessly in order to move forward, strands like the ambition of high school swim meets, lone midnight walks into downtown Providence, why did I even do this? because even then I was the dramatic heroine of my own narrative, tempting fate because what else is there to do?

At least I admit this now. Do you know why? because of integration. A summer of walking home from the Time Warner Building to a dorm on 117th street. A nearly two hour-walk. Sometimes I would stop to get a slice of pizza, or a flower. Once I bought a blue linen shirt from a Russian man who told me he'd give me a discount because I looked like his sister. I didn't like people this summer. I couldn't speak to them and when I did, it felt as though we spoke a different language. And whenever people tell me they are taking evening walks, particularly in scenic areas, I read this to mean that they are being sentimental or recovering from heartbreak or trying to integrate or hopeless romantics or carrying some kind of unnamable sadness, and then I remind myself that I have to stop inflicting imprinting my narrative on them. And what to do with unnamable longings, and why does unnamable look like such an ugly word when it is typed? unambled. Ambled. I am bleeding.

Bleeding what even? And I can tell you're being inauthentic, wife of Jonathan Safran Foer whatever your name is whenever I read your voice in interviews and your constant talk of nostalgia, because I don't believe all people who claim they suffer from this ailment. Perhaps I don't even believe myself. perhaps it is borrowed, a contagion I pretend I caught from someone I once knew. An honorable sort of ailment, a war injury. Not accidentally ramming your hipbone into the corner of a desk and waking up black and blue. And how carefully I inspect bruises, and their strange and beautiful colors, Purple, yellow, even green. And how carefully I inspect the other bruises too. Sleep with them next to me in my bed, grow them up so they are ready to go out in the world. How I care for them and love them. What to do with unnamed bruises, strange injuries that landwhere they please. Even after the wonderful. Like: how wonderful it is to fall into a room! And how wonderful it is to walk in the rain! And how perfect it is to sit on the curb outside Good Luck Bar for an evening and just talk. And not acknowledge that there is a price of admission. And you don't have the money to pay it. To forget about fines for a moment.

A different kind of hard labor. A different kind of ticket. And it won't do, you won't find it, searching through old drawers and cabinets. You won't find it in the pile of ticket stubs and receipts that are proof of all the times you did pay, proof of your good citizenhood all these years, proof of responsibility beyond your years. no one cares about all the times when you paid your own admission because if there is a once when you didn't, then it is like throwing a red shirt with your white linens in the wash. That is the price of integration. To bear what you can't be without. And then to be without it.

sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. i don't even know where to start with this one.

events that make up my day

long distance call to london made in the office. on office time. on company phone.

ginger-lemon-honey tea.

lunch with L. fusion tacos. gossip, advice, confessions. the way women bond.

forcing someone to divulge a secret. please, please, please. you can tell me. i won't tell anyone. i promise. you have to tell me now. why'd you even bring it up if you weren't going to tell me? he tells.

long email exchange with k about how we need to do something radically fun on wednesday. not just fun. radically fun.

recounting details of dinner at bazaar to fellow foodie.

remembering details of dinner at bazaar the way one newly in love ruminates on a night of passion.

and again.

smile.

agitating my father by asking him to speculate on something. i do not speculate. i could give you facts, but i don't have any. i could lie to make you happy, but i don't like to do that, he says.

asking him to hand the phone to my mother and making her speculate instead. she indulges me in our learned way.

reading jonathan franzen's piece in the new yorker. oh. my. god.

reading nyt.

freaking out about planes. phone call about freaking out about the fact that we have to be on a plane on friday. i am comforted.

having a strange man yell, "you're beautiful, can i have your number?" as i am pumping gas at the gas station. he is driving a white windowless van. remembering that my feeling about white windowless vans is that they are driven by child molesters and rapists. is a compliment from a child molester/rapist a compliment that should be accepted without some degree of internal conflict? i contemplate this. i smile politely at the child molester/rapist and hope he drives away soon.

twitter is for douches

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31153130/

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/06/08/090608fi_fiction_franzen?currentPage=all

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03weds4.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Los Angeles and I

Los Angeles and I made friends quickly. Not too quickly though, I'd be lying if I said we were attached by the hips overnight, or it was love at first sight. At first, I didn't think she was pretty. I didn't think she was my type. And I was a city slut; by the time she rolled around, I had flirted with a range of cities, but failed to commit to anything. Atlanta was a fling. She was pretty and offered a smattering of things - good food, amazing art and music, but I knew that Atlanta and I wouldn't challenge each other for long. It would be short-lived and fun, then, goodbye Altanta, it was nice knowing you. Cruel, maybe, but we both knew it wasn't a lifelong pairing. Why delude ourselves? You just know, early on. Paris, I love and admire. Whenever we meet, it's amazing and magical, but at times, she can be cold and detached. We'll meet up from time to time, but we'll never declare a lifelong allegiance to one another. We have a special relationship, but she'll always be a mistress. New York is an aspirational love. She's beautiful, brilliant, incredible. But we have an unpredictable relationship. Some nights, she offers up the world, and I am more than satiated, others, I am alone in my apartment, wondering what she is doing without me. She just makes me feel kind of insecure and I realize now, at my age, that I can't do that for a lifetime, so I'm walking away. London is quirky, fun, offbeat, but ultimately not for me. I just don't feel like myself when I'm with her. I feel like I would have to change to keep her and myself happy, and that won't do. Rome is fun for a while, but we don't have a primal connection. After some time, we've depleted the energy between us, we are left to ourselves, no more magic, just the two of us arguing over what to eat for dinner. Delhi is too comfortable. Copenhagen too complacent. San Fran to edgy. Chicago, forget it. Boston, cute, but no.

So Los Angeles. Who would have thought that if you warm up to Los Angeles, she would warm up to you? But she did. We always had this incredibly complex and nuanced dialogue, L.A. and I. And inside jokes. Just tonight, at Jose Andres' Bazaar, she said "Look to the table next to you. It's Pam Anderson. And look at the bar behind you. It's Marcel from Top Chef." And we laughed, together, L.A. and I. Only L.A. understands why these two particular sightings are significant to me. No one else. L.A. just gets me. She understands these parts of me that no other city ever has. She offers me tiny superficial jokes, but then she pushes harder, and hands me something so much deeper. She manages that line so well, with such ease, because she's brilliant and beautiful, but only if you recognize that kind of beauty. You think she's a slut, you think she's superficial. But that's because you don't really know her. And another thing, she doesn't put out as easily as you believe she will. And she resents it when people think she's a cultural wasteland. And I do too. If you appreciate her, truly, you'd realize just how amazing and brilliant and complex she is. And that she has a sense of humor about herself. That's more than I can say for you, S.F. Yeah, you. I'm so in love with L.A. I can't bring myself to ever leave her. And she knows it. She knows she has me wrapped around her little finger.

And L.A. is emotionally generous. She offers gifts I never even asked for. Yoga in Runyon Canyon, fig farms in Malibu. Union Station, Olivera Street. The views from the Bonaventure, Cemetery Screenings, barbecues at the top of Malibu Canyon, pit seats to Radiohead concerts at the Bowl, ice slushy caipirinhias, rent control, Lisa Cholodenko showing up at my door telling me she wants to shoot a movie in my living room, Omar from the Wire sitting next to me at Intelligentisia, horseback riding in Griffith Park to amazing sunsets, tea houses in Venice, incredible sushi, Ravi Shankar at Disney Hall, afternoons reading in Griffith Park, meta moments where she reminds me that this street or this park was in a movie I recently saw, laughter, and ache that makes me feel like I am finally undoing my own knots, forcing me to bring forth old hurts only in order to make peace with them once and for all. Los Angeles is like that. She wants the best for me. She really loves me.

And she reminds me of the India of my childhood. Something primal and nostalgic. Even my father noticed this when he first met her. L.A. reminds me of India, he said. So there you have it, my dad approves.

And I realize, only now, that L.A. reminds me of that thing I was always waiting for but could never really articulate or define. That primal component of love: the familiarity, the reminder of something deep within you, the spark of that recognition that this is love. A connection that's simply too intense to just leave alone. The stamp of confirmation that you've found your soul city.

So there it is. I'm about to propose. Because we're just too good together, L.A. and I. Sure, I think the traffic and the smog suck, but L.A. is more than accepting of me, with all my flaws. So who am I to judge? We're just right for each other. And we're clearly in love. We have a bright future together, and I think she's pretty committed to me. I trust L.A. completely. I trust her with my future, and more than anything, I adore her. My friends shake their heads at us, they tell me that they hope one day, they'll find what L.A. and I have. And truly, with all my heart, I hope they will too. Because I know how lucky I am. I've found real love.

Confessions

I am biased against men with nasal voices. During my period, I become so photosensitive that I have to wear sunglasses. People think I am wearing them to be cool, but really it's because the light hurts my eyes so badly. My mother says you can see patriarchy on a man's face. I tell her I haven't developed that skill. You will, she tells me, by the time you're my age. We run through a list of the men in my life. She assures me that none of them have patriarchy on their faces. You pick men well, she says. My father definitely doesn't have patriarchy on his face. This might be the byproduct of being worn down by three very opinionated women. I miss home a lot. I miss reading in my pajamas on the couch in my parents' sunroom, surrounded by fica and banana and rubber trees. Reading in my pajamas is my favorite activity. I write really well in hotel rooms by myself. I discovered this on a focus group trip to Chicago. When I think about my parents at my age, young and adrift, it almost makes me cry. I don't know how they did it all and I don't know how I will either. I want to go back in time and be friends with them when they were my age. When I see pictures of myself in the third grade, fat and bespectacled and uninvited to slumber parties at the popular girls' homes, I want to hug the 8-year old me and tell her it gets better. They all become insurance agents in the tri-state area with boring husbands and you get...well, something else entirely, but it'll definitely be an adventure. The last time Jo was in LA, we decided that if she would be my interior decorator, I would be her personal stylist. I've been secretly wanting to make this agreement for a while. My favorite scene in Little Women is the scene where Jo comes home crying to her mother because she's just rejected Laurie, who she wishes she could love because it would make her life considerably easier, but she's too honest and willful and self-aware and also aware of how much this sucks and how difficult life will be for these reasons, and she wishes she could just be like everyone else and she turns in frustration to Susan Sarandon who says, "Jo, you have so many extraordinary talents - how could you expect to lead a normal life?" I always cry at this scene because it reminds me of the number of times my mother has given me some variation of this speech, and I think Jo is lucky to have Susan Sarandon as a mother. And I am so lucky to have my mom as a mother. My mother and I have decided we go back lifetimes, and when I am away from her, which is a lot, I miss her in my bones. I wonder what it might have been like if my parents had stayed in India and I had grown up in Delhi. I wonder what I would be like. I like 30. I think I will like 40 and 50. And probably 60. I like the idea of aging. I know the older I get, the more I will become the kind of person I like. When I go home next week, I will go into Manhattan and have lunch with my papa at that really good Chinese restaurant in midtown, and then I will go back to his office and look at the view of the Chrysler building outside his window. I love the view from his office window. I feel at home in the UN building. Once on the 4th of July, when I was 15, I had a fight with my mom on the UN lawn during the annual picnic. It was before the fireworks started, and even though we made up afterwards, sometimes I still feel bad about this. A year ago, I started smoking. Not much, just a cigarette every couple of days. I did this for a few months. But I never got good at it. I don't think I know how to properly inhale a cigarette, and when I do, it makes me kind of nauseous. So I stopped. But I cannot bear to be without my lighter. A certain calm in a metal box of fire. A certain longing for heat.

Dream

I knock on your door and you are no longer there. I look in through a window, no furniture. It is all gone. "He left days ago," your neighbors say.

"Where?" I ask. They shrug. They don't know.

"Where were you?" they ask. I have no answer.

I walk up and down your street. I ask people. I make phone calls. I can feel the panic rising in my chest.

I don't give up. I get on planes. I go to places where there are hints of you, memories of you. Once in a maze-like city, I feel like I see you, turning a corner. I follow you through crowded streets and lose you, once again. Was it you, on that street corner? I don't know.

And then that's all there is. Intermittent chasing and waiting. Waiting for hints, for tips. Chasing them down dead ends. Perpetually haunted by what I don't know, by what I once knew, by what once was.

I swear June Gloom makes me feel like I am living on the set of La Jetee and waiting for impending apocalypse. I'm going to go buy several containers of water on my way home from work.

Dream: I am driving around Montreal in a green convertible. It is tiny and I can weave in and out of lanes at quick speeds. This is actually how I drive my car most of the time. I wish I knew how to drive stick shift. In the dream, I intuitively understand how to drive manual, and when I wake up, I am sad at the sudden loss of this skill.

Then: the Pope is retiring and decides to annoint my friend Wendy as the new Pope. She is curled up in a foetal position on my bed. "I don't want to be the new Pope," she says.

"Maybe it's destiny," I say.

"Fuck destiny. I want my own life," she complains.

"Destiny isn't like that. It's forsaking your personal will for the larger collective," I say. I don't even know if I believe this in its entirety.

"Fuck the larger collective," she says. And proceeds to nap on my bed while I read a book.

Oh Cary Tennis, How I Love You

"Contemplate one sculpture and think how long it took. Those who made great things had to stay in one place a long time. Their options were few. That is still the case. The plodders are still at it, invisibly making things we will briefly admire. Learn from them. Contemplate what it takes to make one halfway decent thing."
-Cary Tennis

I like these vintage prints:

http://www.judaicaheaven.com/Detail.bok?no=1167

http://cgi.ebay.com/LNER-East-Coast-Beach-umbrella-Purvis-art-poster-print_W0QQitemZ150287605805QQcmdZViewItemQQptZArt_Posters?hash=item22fdd6e02d&_trksid=p3286.m20.l1116

I am thinking of math, specifically the nature of triangles, and Lacanian psychoanalysis and narcissism, about our primal need to be understood, about addictions and shifting allegiances and the things that are stored in our cellular memory and about negative ions creating good vibes and positive ions causing depression, and the Santa Ana winds and full moons and catastrophe and the Bermuda triangle and the mathematics of happiness and relationships. I am thinking of Neptunian personalities is what Vedic astrologers would call them, what I have and what my mother has and what all dreamers have, and seeking proof of things that can't be seen or understood.

I am thinking that my hair is too long, longer than it's ever been, all the way down my back and ready to be cut off and donated to Locks for Love.

I am thinking that it is legitimate to panic when your plane hits turbulence over the Atlantic as I always do. And how nice it is when you're travelling with someone and can hold their hand when this happens. And how much this Air France thing really scares me, and I am thinking about the flight to Moscow when we dropped and I flew out of my seat and the duct tape over a hole in the wall and how there weren't enough seats for people and how we vowed never to fly Aeroflot again.

I am thinking of dinner. Something simple. Organic avocado, cucumber, Bermuda onion and feta salad with a red wine vinegar-sumac-zatar-lemon dressing and strawberries with Greek yogurt and agave nectar afterwards. I am thinking about how much 60 Minutes sucks these days and how Lara Logan needs to stop showing off her cleavage during Iraq reports.

I am thinking of how much I love peonies and Vietnamese soups and how these two sites constitute my daily online crack:

http://dir.salon.com/topics/since_you_asked/

http://www.orangette.blogspot.com/

I am thinking I would like to be friends with Cary Tennis and Molly Wizenberg. This is what I am thinking.

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
-E.L. Doctorow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my magic eight ball is skewed in my favor

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

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

Unlikely
Chances Aren't Good
The Stars Say No
No

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

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

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

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

-Henri Cartier Bresson, Seville

-Henri Cartier Bresson, Brasserie

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

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

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


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

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

A Hollywood Dilemma

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

Sightings

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

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

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

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

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

this is how i feel right now

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

I got nothing.

IM. Today.

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

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

T: ?

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

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

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

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

Me: yeah.

T: I don't understand the metaphor

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

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

Me: sigh. yes.

T: would you have dated that guy?

Me: probably not

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

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

T: but what if you fell in love with him

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

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

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

T: poor guy

Me: i know. it probably killed his love life

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

Me: yeah.

T: would you date a real date rapist?

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

NO

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

Me: are we really having this conversation?

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

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

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

Me: yeah, i guess it is.

T: well, thanks for refreshing my memory.

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

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

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

T: bye.

Thought

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

Bleecker Street

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

-Philip Schultz