Rant, Okay? But Just One, I Promise

At least Adam Goldman admits that his problems are bougie and stupid. I think this relative self-awareness is the tonal aspect that gives the piece some actual levity because without that admission, the clip would just be sad and infuriating. Don't get me wrong, I complain about stuff, but lately I've been reading a handful of blogs by people my age, and it makes me understand why terrorists want to bomb us. Granted, this is anecdotal, and limited to my experience with blogs written by self-satisfied people in their late 20s/early 30s. But I want to turn to these people and say, "You don't have real problems. You have bougie Silverlake hipster problems. You don't have to feel bad about it, it's okay. You can't help your upbringing or your socio-economic status. But you do have the choice of pulling your head out of your ass. And maybe even occasionally thinking about something other than yourself and your hedonistic pursuits." I think the Zadie Smith essay also threw me back in to the question of why people write. Isn't it supposed to be about new discoveries within your internal life/world? Rather than a series of rants about the useless things you don't have in your life? I can't champion these so-called writers. I kind of want them to fail in their life pursuits, because they have no ability to actually appreciate anything that they've earned. There's a complete lack of self-awareness and as a result, they say nothing new or challenging, they're so stuck within their own limited self-circuitry. This is why you start writing; it's an outlet, you have to get it out, but at some point, shouldn't it develop past that? Shouldn't it develop to something more than just you? But this makes me think that the vast majority of the people in the world are this way, stuck in their own thinking-grooves, stuck in their own relatively useless pursuits. And that makes me even sadder. Maybe I'm not any better than this myself. But I know that I want to be.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would lie in bed and watch the neem tree through the window. During the day, we plucked its tender, bitter leaves and stir-fried them. But at night, the tree was a perch for ghosts.

It is part of the conceit of Mad Men to contrast aesthetic perfection with underlying ugliness. That is why it stars supernaturally attractive people, including January Jones -- "model-turned-actress." That's part of why it's so important that it's beautifully shot, beautifully costumed, and beautifully lit. Everything on the show would look beautiful in an ad if you didn't see it in context, including Betty.

The Deadness of Cats

“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

-The Lazarus Project

Last night's Mad Men was a good one. Roger Sterling's former life comes back to seek him out. Betty finally confronts Don on the bread crumb trail to his hidden identity that she's found, the doctor gets a vase thrown at him for telling Joanie she doesn't understand what it is to wait for something, work for something her whole life and then to have it pass her by. The thing I like about this show is that the things you expect to happen never really do, and then other things happen and take center stage and the characters are compelled to react to these events as they unfold, just as surprised and unprepared as we are. It's like life; a curveball thrown at the narrative structure, forcing it to bend, recede, take a different route, form a new branch out of necessity, out of avoidance. Not the predictable route, but its more audacious twin, the parallel universe of the unexpected.

I've been wanting someone well-versed in physics (maybe my dad) to explain to me the Theory of Parallel Universes or the Many Worlds Theory. It keeps coming up over and over again; in the NOVA special that featured Mark Everett, the guy from The Eels, whose dad was a famous physicist, and then in the new Coen Brothers movie. it's funny how things knock on the door of your consciousness a few times before they go their own way.

The Parallel World Theory is actually a neat way to tie up loose ends; it allows all possibilities to exist simultaneously, every branch of choice is a legitimate one, and is consequently manifested. Maybe I am trying to reframe the unexpected, or attempting to impose some sort of order on a chaotic narrative, because lately, it's the chaotic narrative that I seek, that I am attracted to. Neatness and symmetry don't interest me, at least on the outset, but maybe old habits die hard, and subconsciously, I do want some sort of overarching order to things, to stories, to behavior. Maybe it's hard for me to believe that some stories branch off and die, or lay incomplete, and the Parallel Worlds Theory resuscitates the lives we didn't choose. They exist somewhere in some sort of receptacle of unworn choices. And I suppose I want to believe that there is some place for these orphaned choices to go. Nothing and no one deserves to be abandoned, especially a story. And sometimes I suffer from the affliction of having more affection for stories than for people.

This is more than just the exploration of an alternate version of you, because the journey through unmanifested possibility is what writers do. We trace the dots and dashes of what didn't happen rather than the clean lines of what did. It's more than Gwyneth Paltrow's two identities in Sliding Doors, the Tube doors slamming in our faces to reveal that some part of us yielded to a life of Other discoveries. I can't say for sure what it is about, really. Maybe I want to conserve the various parts of me the way we conserve limited resources, or pretend to. I want to believe that the unexplored possibilities of this world are being explored somewhere, in some capacity, rather than just in my own silly, speculative mind. Does this make sense? But ours is a culture where we don't really conserve anything. And if nothing is safeguarded, nothing is saved and rationed out, how do we know what's really precious, unusual, worth socking away?
What I know is that the basis of the Parallel Worlds theory is a thing called Schrödinger's equation. Schrödinger's equation involves a cat in a box with a lever that will release poisonous gas at any second. Actually, there are two cats, in parallel worlds, one dead and one alive. Or perhaps it is just one cat, simultaneously existing in two parallel worlds. Actually I have no idea. All I really know is that the dead cat has two x's over its eyes and apparently x's represent deadness.

Is the inability to accept the intrinsic wastefulness of the notion of choice an inability to accept death? When I struggle with choice, is it actually my own mortality I am struggling with? The thing is, I think about death a lot. I am a morbid person, but I'm also a Buddhist. Maybe I am looking, in narrative, for the lever that allows an escape, into what, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of transcendence. The limits to a story are in it's structure. It is trapped within a limited number of dimensions. And I am constantly feeling around the edges of things, like a blind person exploring the borders of a new neighborhood than like a sighted person exploring the spaces within. But the cat without the x's over her eyes escapes the inevitable trajectory of death time and time again. She always escapes, at every branch of choice, this cat of an infinite number of lives, and probably never realizes just how close she came to death. How is that possible? The extreme possibility in Schrödinger's equation is the cat that never dies. The cat who transcends life? Does this exist? As Buddhist, I believe it does, even if most of us never find it.

memory of a good day a long long time ago

Missing New York

Gotham City, 2006

Chavez Ravine, Echo Park, California, by John Malmin, 1959

Chavez Ravine, Echo Park, California, by Don Normark, 1949

Anouk Aimee, Lola, 1961

It’s so much better to desire than to have. The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen - that’s the most exalting.

-Anouk Aimée

Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, Love Story, 1970

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

Mick Jagger, St. Tropez, France, 1971

Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non-sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

Zadie Smith’s essay, Fail Better,

Love at the beginning of the 21st century has been diffused and discredited. Feminism is partly to blame, but only partly. We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.

- Cristina Nehring

Contents of my Purse

wallet
change purse
blackberry
phone
charger
flip flops
swimsuit
Jonathan Gold's 99 essential restaurants
3 notebooks
my dad's old Ray-bans
post-it notes
dark chocolate
paper bag with yuzu macaron bought yesterday at jin patisserie
small tube of crest fluoride anti-cavity toothpaste
burt's beeswax
kiehl's pear earth day lip gloss
pack of marlboro lights bought in late may with 17 cigarettes still in it
lighter
4 packs of matches
2 silk sari scarves
tissues
tampon
sanitary napkin
2009 datebook
recipe for simple popovers
triple A sticker
band-aids
movie stub for an education
movie stub for we live in public
ipod
10% off coupon for boho
note that says, "problem with people who have a rich interior life is that they often don't want to reveal it. Chapter 4 talk about issues of access and how she wishes we could all walk into a room of strangers and reveal everything at once."
menu for via quadronno, 25 east 73rd street
card with a baby elephant being nudged by its mother
directions to montebello
revive lip renewal cream
ayurvedic cold medicine
homeopathic cold medicine
small pack of advil
coupon for ***recession buster special offers*** at the office of afsoon barkhordar, D.D.S.

Early Colors

Group of workers harvesting tea. Greek women, Chakva; between 1905 and 1915, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

"He once said asteroid instead of hemorrhoids, which made me bury my face in my arms.

'I don't know - words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage makes me think of sausage. I don't know why.'"

-Lorrie Moore, Gate at the Stairs

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #29, 1960

light whisper sand

Nacreous clouds

Blue Dream Street

Camaguey, Cuba

The notion of different selves within a single person is not new. It can be found in Plato, and it was nicely articulated by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote, “I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination.” Walt Whitman gave us a pithier version: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I Fractal Mandelbrot

So I've been sick. The month finally did me in and for the past couple of days, I've been bedridden, or couchridden, watching movies and eating soup. Hence the writing hiatus. My head is in such a cloud.

Last night, high on cough syrup, I watched a NOVA episode on fractals, which had to be paused and rewound at certain parts in order to fully understand what was going on. After the episode, we had this conversation:

Me: I love fractals. I want to go back to college so I can study them.

D: I want to print up "I heart Mandelbrot" T-shirts, but instead of the heart, there would be a fractal.

Me: Do you think people would understand that?

D: People who watch NOVA would.

Me: Would people over the age of 60 want to wear your T-shirts?

D: My mom would.

Me: I thought the coolest thing was how your healthy blood vessels look like a pretty fractal tree and cancer blood vessels look like a messed up fractal tree.

D: Like evil fractals.

Me: Do you think there's a parallel universe made of evil fractals?

D: No.

Me: Do you think when we dream, our dreams can be translated into fractals?

D: Maybe.

Me: Fractals kind of make me want to cry. They're so beautiful.

D: I think we should buy Mandelbrot's fractal book.

Me: It's like the key to the Universe.

D: It's like the Bible. Only real.

Me: Yeah.

Fashion Bitches

On last night's episode of Project Runway, Milla Jovovich turned to Michael Kors, Nina Garcia and Heidi Klum at the end of the show in tears, "I don't know how you guys do it," she said, referring to the elimination of one designer every week. And they all just shrugged and smiled.

Here's how they do it, Milla Jovovich. They're all heartless little bitches who kind of enjoy watching someone's dream get quashed. That's how they do it. I'm just saying. I love the show, I watch it every week. I kind of hope Christopher wins and not that snobby Irena. Shirin was robbed. But those judges suck. In my head, I categorize people as people I would want to invite to my house to dinner and people I wouldn't. And I would not want to have any of those judges over to my house for dinner.

A spokeswoman for Polo Ralph Lauren has apologized for the photo of the stick figure with the freakishly out-of-proportion head, albeit after the company tried and failed to suppress dissemination of this image on the Web. But the story has a final twist. Last week the company fired the model in the ad, Filippa Hamilton. She says she lost her job because the company thought she had grown too fat. She’s a size 4, 120 pounds on a 5-foot-10 frame. The company says it ditched her because of her “inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.” Just a crazy coincidence, I’ve no doubt.

Here's the Thing...

I have an extremely unhealthy obsession with chairs.

Maybe precision isn't a necessary part of what constitutes talent. Take Nico, for example. The Velvet Underground wouldn't be The Velvet Underground without her, and she kind of had a terrible singing voice. But it worked. And she was hot. My friends and I would do Nico impressions in college. Then I learned that her heroin addiction caused all her teeth to fall out. That made me sad.

Sometimes I am braindead and uncreative. And I have already read the NYT and the LAT and the WSJ and The Guardian and gotten my daily blog fix. And I just seek to be entertained and look at pretty things. So I got to this site.


Which is just fun whether you're a design whore or not.

Synchronicity

Like the time a friend and I were sitting at the Coffee Bean on Hillhurst, working on a script, specifically a dialogue for the one we had dubbed the Michael Cera character, and all of a sudden, the door opened and Michael Cera walked in.

Or the day I decided to go through a file of old magazine clippings I had saved for the past year and stopped when I got to an InStyle piece on the Maharani of Jaipur and then went to my computer to check my email and inadvertently caught a headline that the Maharani of Jaipur had died, just two hours ago.

Or the time I was thinking about a former crush as I walked through Indira Gandhi International Airport and then ten minutes later, found myself sitting across from his parents in the Air India business class lounge.

Or the time that I had a dream about a boy in my freshman year English class - a dream of him bringing a boom box to class to play "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder and getting up in the morning, still groggy from the dream, and going to my computer and logging on to facebook to see what he's doing these days only to balk at his status update: "Listening to I Just Called to Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder."

What does it mean?

I've read Synchronicity by Jung, but he only confirms that these things happen. Not what they mean.

Pet Peeve(s)

Bachelorette parties and baby showers are generally a horrifying experience for me. I once went to a baby shower where attendees were forced to play a game where they guessed the circumference of the poor pregnant woman's belly and then a tape measure was procured in order to humiliate her further.

People who force others to play lame games at baby showers

Please don't.

People who make the bride wear penis tiaras or bake her penis cookies for her upcoming nuptials

please don't.

And while I'm at it, people who call me "honey" or "sweetie" at these events or otherwise

please please don't.

Observation

I had forgotten how riding any form of mass transit, but particularly the subway, can inspire exaggerated feelings of kinship or disgust with humanity.

Betty Draper Doesn't Know What She Wants

Or at least, this is what seems to be the male interpretation of her increasingly erratic behavior the past few episodes of the show. I think she actually knows precisely what she wants. She wants neither the mundane, nor the tawdry. However, the men in her life are such bores and/or scolds, they don't seem to understand this. She wants the ethereal, the unusual. And because she is clearly alone in harboring these desires, she has to delve into her own interior life to find what she's looking for. So she does - through an evening in Rome, pretending to be someone else, or through the purchase of a chaise lounge that allows her to be transported into another world.

Unfortunately, the price of admission into her escapist fantasy is a commensurate level of disappointment with the futility of her day-to-day relationships. "You had to come to me," says the remarkably uncreative Governor's aide, when she confronts him at his office. Later he tells her he's not playing any games, despite the fact that he showed up at her door out of the blue one afternoon, and then sat at home and twiddled his thumbs while she hosted a fundraiser for him. Who are these people? And why don't they seem to understand that starting something prosaic and cliched is hardly worth starting at all?

L'Esprit de L'Escalier

In the fifth grade, Ms. Pedersen, who was overly snide and sarcastic for an elementary school teacher, handed back Astronomy quizzes and as she did, loudly announced people's grades. There was something gauche about this; we attended an international school, not a fascist institution run by the stasi, and most of our parents were diplomats and had taught us at an early age to make nice at all costs and not ever marginalize anyone or make them feel bad if we could help it. Ms. Pedersen seemed to know this, and sometimes it appeared that her aim in teaching at this school was to provoke, and to throw the weight of her aggression against what she probably perceived as our sissy effete ways. I disliked this woman quite strongly, but I didn't hate her, because at the time, I didn't really hate anyone. I should credit her for inspiring my first taste of rage, my first sense of deep injustice. She was tall and red-faced, with stringy brown, blonde streaked hair. She wore tight acid-washed jeans and white sweatshirts. She would make inappropriate and sometimes lewd jokes about sex and menstruation, which made us uncomfortable, because we didn't know much about either of these things. But she also made us feel uncool if we didn't laugh along with her. She was like a grown-up mean girl. I found something about her deeply distasteful. Maybe a handful of us did. The kind of distasteful that makes you wrinkle your nose at a person and also be a little afraid of them. If you had a choice, you would stay far away from them, but the thing about school is that you're forced to interact with all kinds of assholes, who in an ideal world would be quarantined at an asshole camp.

By contrast, my homeroom teacher, Ms. Cannon, was elegant and jovial and kind. She wore white peacoats and told stories about San Francisco in the 60s. There was something beautiful about her. It's important to resist the urge to get nostalgic or start projecting here. But her beauty had to do with her kindness, her openness. I loved Ms. Cannon. I still love her. Like in a deep place in my heart.

But Ms. Pedersen had a meanness to her. Looking back, she could have been in a shitty marriage, or unhappy about teaching fifth grade science, or maybe she had parents who were sick, or maybe she was just a straight-up mean bitch. But it seemed as though she looked to create a terrifying sense of volatility, and I felt it every time I walked into her classroom. So it wasn't entirely surprising that she would do something yucky and uncomfortable like reading people's grades aloud. When she got to the girl who had received a D, she decided to recite, for the benefit of the entire class, all of the girl's answers. I looked at my quiz. I had gotten an A-, but I almost wished I was the one who had gotten the D, because Ms. Pedersen seemed to relish these moments where she could make fifth graders feel even smaller than they were. I knew she would draw this out for as long as she could.

"Why do we have night and day?" recited Ms. Pedersen, giggling with a kind of scary and unpredictable meanness, "because people need to sleep. That's the answer written down here," she laughed and then turned to the rest of us, an audience. A couple of people laughed. This was horrifying. She looked directly at the girl wearing a turquoise jacket and purple sneakers and a blue headband. The girl looked at the desk in front of her. She was trying not to cry.

"What kind of answer is that?" she rolled her eyes at the girl. The girl looked back at her desk. She didn't even wipe away her tears. She didn't even sob out loud. She just sat quietly and said nothing. No one did. We were all shellshocked, entirely unprepared for this ugly pageant.

"Why can't people live on the moon? Because there's no electricity," she said in a little girl voice, turning to the crowds and encouraging more laughter.

And she went on and on and on. She read every single question and answer on that test before she threw the piece of paper in front of the girl with the bright blue headband, who by now was probably permanently damaged for life. It was over. It couldn't be undone. Now it was stuck in all of our minds, this terrible, scary violation.

And then we got on with the next unit like nothing had happened. Something about deciduous trees that I don't remember. What I do remember is that the girl with the blue headband continued to sit at her desk, continued to cry. I couldn't concentrate. I kept looking over at her, and then at Ms. Pedersen who was drawing trees on the chalkboard with a cool defiance, distancing herself from the remarkable unpleasantness that she had just created. I could feel the sense of injustice rising within me. I wanted to stab Claire Pedersen in the throat with my pencil. Repeatedly. I wanted to smash her head into the chalkboard. I wanted to scream. I wanted her to lose her job and end up penniless on the streets begging for change. I wanted to humiliate her in front of a room full of people, for doing what she had done, some sort of semi-permanent damage that she inflicted so carelessly, with a laughing ease and then seemed to forget about, just as quickly. I looked at the girl with the blue headband that her mother had probably picked out for her to wear that morning. If she had known what her day was going to turn out like, she probably wouldn't have come to school today.

When we left the classroom to go to recess, no one said anything. It was almost as if it hadn't happened. But it had, and we had all witnessed it. It was the 5th grade equivalent of watching someone get raped and not saying anything about it. I know that sounds like a lame exaggeration, I know. Worse things have happened, are happening, around the world, at this moment. Terrible terrible things, awful violations. And time allows you to turn people into the worst caricatures of themselves. I spend so much time in other people's shoes, analyzing the various dimensions of character, but in my mind, Ms. Pedersen is a one-dimensional demon and will probably, to some extent, always be. That's kind of what you get for being an asshole to fifth graders. Kids don't have the facility to give you the benefit of the doubt, to blame your wayward behavior on your sad childhood or oppressive life circumstances. But what about the adults those kids eventually become? Do they have the capacity to absolve you of your rotten behavior? Maybe. But that doesn't mean they should or will. I don't know about the girl in the blue headband, but to me, Claire Pedersen still represents abuse of authority. She provides the basis for every villainous character I write. She's the reason I yell at people who are mean to the homeless. She's probably (God, I cannot believe I'm admitting this) part of the reason I spent eight years protesting against the Bush administration. She is, to this day, the only grudge I can't let go of, even 21 years later. It's fucked up, right? I know. And yet that experience is so much a part of my personal fabric that I still think about it, I still react to it when I'm reacting to other injustices, I still write it when I write about imbalances of power. It can't be undone. But how strange, to think that your entire worldview can be shaped by one instance, by something you observed when you were 11 years old.

Flashdance

Isn't this just about your favorite movie of all time? I still can't believe it came from the same mind that created Showgirls and Jade. When I was a little girl, even before I wore a bra, I aspired to learn the art of bra-removal that Jennifer Beals perfected - unhooking it and pulling it out through your sleeve, without removing your heather gray sweatshirt with the collar cut off, all while discussing your passion for ballet and art. This was, in my 7-year old mind, the ultimate symbol of sexy womanhood.

Look out kid They keep it all hid

My college Anthropology professor, Lina Fruzetti, attended some college in the midwest and had a roommate who was blonde and blue-eyed and involved in a long-distance relationship with some guy in New York. One weekend, the guy came to visit and brought a friend. Fruzetti's roommate urged her to come along to dinner so the friend would have someone to talk to. When the two men came to pick up the women from their dorm, the boyfriend was cute and likeable, but the friend was sort of dour, sulky and not particularly cute. He had a weird nose and big, frizzy hair. Fruzetti feigned sickness and politely declined the dinner date. The friend left, sad and dejected.

Years later, Fruzetti was in her apartment watching TV and all of a sudden she saw the blind-date reject. He was still dour and still had big frizzy hair. He was playing a guitar. He was Bob Dylan.

A Room of Our Own

There's a story about Virginia Woolf; when she read Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, she was overcome with grief, depression, writing paralysis. She thought it was a masterpiece, that there was nothing in the world like it, and she felt strongly that she would never be able to produce anything as meaningful as this work in her own life. She believed that Proust had gotten the last word on the topic of nostalgia and childhood and memories and there was nothing left for her to say. For years, she struggled with this sense of inadequacy, even pulled out In Search of Lost Time and read passage after passage when she felt particularly masochistic. She walked a tightrope between wanting to produce something as meaningful as Proust's book and wanting to give up altogether. I can identify with Virgina Woolf. On some days, I feel really really bad for her. On other days, I want to invite her over for tea, crumpets and a pity party all of our own.

Rain makes me forget that I live in Los Angeles. All day yesterday, a big gray cloud sulked over the city and my view from the 27th floor was a blanket of iridescent gray. It was oddly comforting and a reminder that LA is sometimes capable of mood swings. I ate pumpkin soup and curled up in a wool blanket. I watched Little Women.

My first winter in Los Angeles, Nav and I went down to Pershing Square to ice skate and drink hot chocolate in a tiny rink surrounded by palm trees. We brought our New York mittens and hats and scarves. It wasn't even that cold. And there were only two other people in the rink with us. But it felt like reuniting with an old friend.

Anomaly in the Sky

It's worth asking why we're so intrigued by stories of absurdity. A 6-year old boy takes off in a silver mylar balloon built by his father, and swirls over Denver in a tiny compartment that hovers underneath the semi-inflated silver dome. It twirls and dances over fields before it gently settles on the ground, to reveal no boy. The internet screams, "Where is he?" The boy's name is Falcon, we learn. Of course it is. Within an hour, screen printers start manufacturing T-shirts that say "Go Falcon, go!" People sit, glued to TVs, to computers. By next week we won't remember this boy, we won't think of him. But at the moment, we are obsessed with the weirdness of it all, for lack of a better word. The creepy sense that maybe this means something, because it is such an anomaly, because it is so absurd. And maybe it means nothing.

Maybe the mark of a really good writer is the ability to resist nostalgia and projection. A clean, emotionally unfettered writing. It's certainly not how I write. And I have to wonder if relying too much on memories in writing suggests that you are stuck in a rut, that your life has stopped generating meaningful activities and experiences, or at least is not generating them fast enough.

I have been stuck in irritation the past couple of days, with things, with people. I have been struggling with the experience of having to wait for things, with feeling held back by people and circumstances. And the resistance to these small, meager experiences feels like resistance to the weight of the entire world, which maybe it is.

I can feel the imperceptible cracks between myself and everything else forming, and I know that this is one of two ways that everything ends - either slowly, with tiny invisible fissures that slowly overtake a whole process, or at once, with a loud shattering. I think I prefer the loud crash to the vague and nebulous descent into an eventual fracture.

The thing about time unfolding slowly is that it allows you to think; you have space to contemplate an impending tragedy, accompanied by a false sense of agency that maybe you can change things. But once the fissures are there, then what? Everything is directionally in line with the trajectory of time, and maybe this is the ultimate tragedy: that everything unfolds as it does. Tiny fissures form and become great cracks, illusions shatter, rose-tinted glasses have to be removed once the white glare of something beautiful fades.

The worst part about being human is this process, the trajectory of time, whether it moves quickly or slowly. We are trapped within the arc of a beginning, a middle and an end. The place with the broadest vantage point is at the top of this arc, where we can see either the folly or wisdom of how something started, and the numerous ways in which it can possibly end. Because everything ends. This is the curse of time. And perhaps the curse of being human.

Physicists believe that the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion but clearly, it is an all-encompassing illusion. The joke is on all of us. If only we knew the punchline.

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.

-Albert Einstein


Physicists are such imaginative people. I think really, they're just skilled narrativists with science skills. Either way, this sounds like a great basis for a novel. Or a bad movie. Like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Which wasn't a bad movie when it came out. It just is now when you catch it on AMC and realize how dated it is.

A number of people consider Guru Dutt the Orson Welles of India, and he was instrumental in expanding Indian cinema's commercial conventions. Pyaasa is one of his most famous movies. It was released in 1957 and wasn't immediately a commercial success; now it is one of Time magazine's 100 movies of all time. Like most Indian films, Pyaasa relies on the structure of traditional Bollywood melodrama, but it was unconventional because it focused on a sustained social critique of the shifting national and cultural order in a post-colonial India from tradition to modernity through the use of two key themes: the loneliness of the artist and the imprisonment of the artist's work within the expectations of the marketplace. In Guru Dutt's world, there were only two salient options for an artist in his era - a return to a traditional idealism or suicide. Guru Dutt's own life reflected this unresolvable tension between modernity and tradition, which culminated in his own suicide at the age of 39.

Moon over Noe Valley, San Francisco, CA

Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper’s scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

— Federico Fellini

Medina - Old City, Tripoli, Libya

I imagine that in a past life, I lived in a place like this, because it looks so oddly familiar. People from developing countries often joke that all of the third world looks the same, and it sort of does - Delhi, Havana, Cairo, Tripoli. That same dusty, shabby appeal, the same peeling paint, crumbling sidewalks, rusted doorknobs and hinges. For me, there's a sort of odd comfort in looking at pictures of places like this. The familiarity is primal. I live in Los Angeles, but in some deeper part of me, this looks perfectly like home.

Election Holi, Smitha Khorana

Undefined, Smitha Khorana

Things that Happened this Weekend

Dinner at Bazaar - cauliflower couscous with currants pinenuts pomegranate harissa, salt air margaritas, scallops with romesco, tempura asparagus, Greek yogurt panna cota with muscat gelee and apricots, sighting of Marcel from Top Chef/ "Here's a round of drinks on the chef!" / Wave thanks to Marcel / Tipsy walk to bathroom / mirrors in the bathroom stalls - not understanding the concept/joke of watching yourself pee/scary LA women by the sinks, tall and made of plastic, reapplying lipstick - "This one has the most beautiful skin, doncha think, Sarah? Look at her! You must be Eye-ranian! Eye-ranian women, I think they're so pretty!"/ sleep / yoga to burn off Jose Andres calories / A Gate at the Stairs / writing / kale salad to make up for Jose Andres calories / "Since when have you started watching your youthful figure?" / Dinner with M, T, and E / Discussion of furniture, art, the gentrification of Echo Park / scallops with nopalitas, cumin and corn, ratatouille, salmon with chermoula, rhubarb crisp / E entertains us with stories about the single life and receives two text messages from two separate women over the course of dinner as a demonstration of what the single life is like / we are all impressed / Post dinner drinks in lovely Echo Park home / a drive through the hills / regret at not waking up at 3:00 AM to watch the moon getting bombed / Thinking about the time my sister and I woke up at 3:00 AM in the morning to watch a meteor shower from a tennis court / remembering the recognition, the actual acknowledgement of the vastness of the sky-horizon-universe and the ensuing recognition of the limitations of human peripheral vision and not being able to wrap my head around it all / Remembering that I set the alarm in order to wake up to watch the moon getting bombed but didn't think it was worth it once the alarm went off and also remembering that I don't have a telescope / Regret and remorse about my laziness / having an argument with myself in my head about my laziness - "I'm not really that lazy. I'm motivated some of the time. No, I'm pretty lazy most of the time" / sleep / meditate / NYT/ trip to Montebello to visit a Sai Baba Temple / getting lost in Montebello despite the presence of an advanced navigational system in the car, an iPhone and handwritten notes from google maps (I know) / argument in the car about directions to Montebello / further angry discussion about the thought process behind building a temple in Montebello / arrival at temple / prayer / lots of Indian people my parents' age / drive home / coffee stop / farmer's market run /purchase of feta, olives, heirloom tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, Peruvian potatoes / homemade breakfast / Bill Maher on Tivo / writing / neatening house / laundry / grocery shopping / writing / Lorrie Moore / email correspondences /phone correspondences /my parents are at a Guru Dutt retrospective at Lincoln Center? / preparation of dinner / chopping of vegetables / sauteing of vegetables / seasoning of vegetables / pouring of a glass of wine / dinner / 60 Minutes / discussion of my crush on Rick Bayless/ angst over the fact that I am a failure / getting under the covers and bemoaning the fact that I am a failure / being asked if I am on my period / getting out of bed and writing / futzing around / trying to think of people who are worse failures than me to make myself feel better / feeling a little bit better / blogging / talk / sleep

All seats provide equal viewing of the universe.

-Museum Guide, Hayden Planetarium

Cringe

If you live in Southern California, and you, for whatever reason, end up taking the 5 to Orange County (which I don't recommend), you might find yourself driving by this sad looking casino called Commerce Casino. And just where it's located, and how it looks from the outside, you can tell that the people inside are like divorced dads and sad old ladies trying to win money to pay their medical expenses. It's the kind of place you'd rather not think about, much less stop by and check out, unless, of course you're a divorced dad or something (If you have an Oakwood Apartments complex in your city, it's the same general kind of energy). Once, my gas light went on near the Commerce Casino, and I've always had this fear that I'm going to end up gas-less and stranded on the side of the road without a rape whistle, and so I had to stop at the gas station behind the casino, which was uncomfortable, because, like I said, I'd rather not think about the Commerce Casino. So imagine my confusion/distress when I came home from work the other day and flipped on Rachel Maddow, who cut to a commercial featuring a handful of plain-Jane girls pretending to be slutty in low-cut black dresses talking about none other than the Commerce Casino. So I hit record. And then went back and transcribed the ad:

"So it turns out there's a casino right here in LA that I love!

It's got all the glamour of Vegas, the shopping is great, and it's a perfect spot to meet up with the girls which usually involves food.

The menu is great for Gina who's always on a diet, and Amber who (confessional low voice) definitely isn't (Amber is a slightly plump Asian girl, btw).

And the drinks - FABULOUS!

The girls love the new 3-card poker. But for me, it's all about the blackjack - not to mention the guys who play blackjack! (siddles up to a very average-looking guy with blonde hair).

Commerce Casino. It's my kind of place!"

Of course it's low budg. That's not the surprising part. But it made me think about the people who go to Commerce Casino and the kinds of people the casino is trying to attract. And how the ad managed to squelch the fun out of any activity that might actually be deemed entertaining (eating good food! drinking! hanging out with girlfriends! meeting boys!). This ad just made all those activities look so sad and prosaic. Like, it kind of made me want to get in my bed and cry - it was that depressing without at all intending to be.

And I got really depressed thinking about girls in their early twenties who move out to this city and work in accounting and wait for friday night, when they can throw on their black dresses and drink Cosmos at like the House of Blues on Sunset. And that's bad enough, people. It's bad enough that anyone should have to trek out to the Sunset Strip on weekends, or feel they have to. When I first moved to LA, my roommate for the first three months held a similar life-schedule. She worked, and went out to happy hour. She didn't read anything. And she didn't listen to music. Aside from Kanye West. And she owned more revealing black dresses than anyone I have ever known. They were all kind of the same - one in jersey, the other in silk, one in some sort of synthetic polyester blend. She went to the gym a lot. Does reading this make you cringe? Because writing it makes me cringe. Because I didn't like the way I felt when I was around this girl. And the commercial reminded me of her.

And I wondered about these girls in their early twenties, my old roommate and Gina and Amber (who is definitely not on a diet) who work eight to ten hours a day and then go home and microwave some dinner and I thought about what they must talk to their girlfriends about and the kinds of men they go home with after meeting them at Commerce Casino and The House of Blues and what they think about when they are alone in their apartments, or for that matter, not even necessarily alone, but having sex with the guys they met at Commerce Casino or the Sunset Strip who they don't know and will probably never see again. Or even what they think about at the grocery store, picking up a bottle of SKYY Vodka and tampons and diet pills and grapefruit and Kashi cereal. My roommate used to talk about Oprah a lot and this made me sad too, because the only books she had in her bookshelves were the ones that Oprah had recommended.

I could explore this issue for hours, but I can't right now. Because it makes me feel bad, for several reasons. People in this city are fine and probably more emotionally healthy than I am and I shouldn't cry for Amber or Gina. I know what a patronizing snob-bitch I'm being, okay? And the thing is I don't mean to be. Because Amber and Gina are okay. They have jobs and apartments and friends. They have people to hang out with. And just because they're not people I would want to hang out with doesn't mean that Gina and Amber aren't happy. Just because I require more from the experiences of eating and drinking and talking with friends and grocery shopping and pretty much everything for that matter doesn't mean it's right for me to impose my expectations or hopes or ideals on any of these women.

In fact, maybe the person I should feel bad for is myself, because I need so fucking much out of this life, out of every fucking little experience. Maybe Amber and Gina are perfectly content. And maybe if a commercial about a casino can make you think this much, the problem is with you. And so maybe I should stop thinking about them because that's really all I really ever do: think. And maybe that's half the problem