Category: solipsism

To restore silence is the role of objects

First of all, if commenting is any sign of collective resonance, I should write about high school reunions all the time. My friend BJG, inspired in part by my incoherent ramblings about the past decade, posted a knockout ode to the great love of his high school life:  Lauryn Hill circa 1998-9. He distills something pitch-perfect about his affection for Hill, namely its stuckness in a particular album, a particular mood, and a particular moment in time both in her career and in his own life.  I was thinking about this the other day when A and I got to talking about our first concert experiences and I tried to explain how much seeing Bush had meant to me when I was young. A is a few years older than me and responded with a typical revulsion to my declaration of youthful love of Gavin Rossdale. The standard response to such a declaration is to denounce the band as faux-grunge and to reassert one’s allegiance to and fandom of Nirvana. I forgive it in A and some of my other friends that actually are of the age to have had some semblance of pop-culture consciousness of the Seattle grunge scene. But when somebody who graduated from high school in 2000 in an upper-middle class American suburb tells me how their about their deep and abiding love of Nirvana prevented them from ever really getting into Bush, I feel a strong desire to call bullshit. I was nine when Nevermind came out, and so were they. Maybe there were a lot of extremely pop-culture savvy nine-year-olds scampering about in ‘91 and I was just deaf to their noise, but I highly doubt it. I can’t speak for someone born in ’78 or ’84. But I can say, pretty unequivocally, that if you were born in ’81 or ’82, there was a moment sometime in your adolescence in which you thought that “Machinehead” was the coolest fucking song you had ever heard. You also probably owned Dookie and thought of it as a punk album. It’s okay. Don’t panic. It was the suburbs, you were only twelve, and there were plenty of years left for you to get into The Clash and forget all about those early transgressions.

I’m surprised that some people are reticent to own these kinds of identifications, especially because they seemed so definitional of our social consciousness when they occurred. Bush—and by this I actually mean Gavin Rossdale—laid down the tropes for my romantic life to such an absurd degree that having a guitar and a greasy mat of hair were near-prerequisites for dating me in high school. Gavin was the perfect guy:  foreign (but not in an alienating way), talented, brooding, and volatile. He was always liable to punch through a door or get into a fight, but this was because he was passionate and damaged, probably by something in his past that was tragic and difficult and largely incomprehensible to a nice girl like yourself. Gavin would break your heart if you were actually available (Gavin wasn’t into available) but when things fell apart he would write you a song to try and win you back. The song he would write you would suggest that your adolescent connection with one another was singular, transcendent, and pure, and you would believe it with your whole heart. Or at least I did. One of the things I truly mourn as an adult is that kind of radical self-effacing emotional investment in an object. Yes, those early objects are always just a cipher, but despite this we never manage to cathect as acutely again, even though as a consolation prize the objects of our affection gain flesh and blood.

To wit, nothing on television or film has ever left the kind of psychical mark on me as did the following video. I was engaged in the perverse coming-of-age activity of watching MTV Spring Break and wondering what the bloom of my own youth would look like. It was 1996, and he kept playing in spite of the rain. I never made it to Cancun, but I can still say that there is nothing better than this:

Don’t call it a comeback

About a year ago I was invited to join a Facebook group to help plan my ten-year high school reunion.

Cue wave of nausea.

In the movies, people always say “Ten years! How can it possibly have been ten years!”  I don’t exactly feel that way.  I mean, I definitely feel a decade away from high school.  I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I’ve met scores of interesting people and made some excellent friends and dated so many guys it’s mildly ridiculous.  I’ve gotten myself good and unemployably educated. Basically, I’ve been busy and I feel like I have something to show for the past decade.  I don’t feel some cliché like “But my life isn’t nearly where I thought it would be in ten years!” In fact, if you sat my seventeen-year-old self down and told her what she would be doing today, she would probably be pleased as punch.

So I don’t know exactly what undergirded the denial that resulted in a swift click of the “decline” button on Facebook.  I didn’t know why, but I knew that I didn’t want to be part of that noise.  Not one bit.  I managed to blissfully ignore the whole event, until the well-meaning individuals responsible for organizing the group concluded that I must have declined in error. I received three more invitations to the group, each of which I swiftly rejected.  The last time I was invited, however, I made the decidedly creepy decision to poke around the group.  I was flabbergasted to discover that nearly two hundred people from my graduating class had coagulated and were eagerly discussing banquet venues and family picnics.

The whole experience threw me.  I didn’t recognize a lot of the names, until it slowly occurred to me as I scrolled through the photos that many of the women had changed their names when they got married.  And a lot of them are married.  Many of these women’s profile pictures are professionally-shot family portraits in which children—and I mean full-fledged, walking and talking, personality-possessing children, not just recently acquired babies—frolic in matching outfits and fake snowscapes.  Some of the people I went to high school with own houses.  Houses with furniture, some of which has been scotch-guarded, and not because of all the tequila-drinking that is going on.  Many of these people would be horrified by the fact that my largest financial investments are in books about psychoanalysis and French handbags. These are not people who go to the grocery store and walk out with only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, a jar of cornichons, and pre-prepared tiramisu cups to show for it. These are not people who have to ask their parents to go to Costco with them when they need new tires.  These people have their own Costco cards.

There is no lure more putrid than internet voyeurism.  How on earth did people go about nosing about in other people’s business before this generation?  Gossip at the country store?  Letters delivered by pack mules? Must have been nice.  Now, a startling amount of information is available to anyone with an internet connection and fingers and the desire to know.  Know what I’m not entirely sure.  All I know is that I have spent too many late nights, damp with the sweet sweat of stalkerdom, combing Google for insight into the lives of people who have absolutely no relation to my current situation whatsoever. I suspect I’m not alone in doing this.  I certainly hope I’m not alone in doing this.

But in a funny way, doesn’t all this information kind of obviate the need for high school reunions in the first place?  Aren’t high school reunions all about seeing what became of the people who consumed those highly fraught, emotionally charged years of your life?  It isn’t really about getting back in touch – if you’d wanted to stay in touch, you would have.  Especially with Facebook – it isn’t really like anyone loses track of anything unless they want to.  I’m “friends” with most of the people I would be curious about. If I really wanted to get in touch with someone, a banquet hall with mini quiches certainly isn’t where I would want to do it.  It seems to me that high school reunions are about showing off and showing up and showing yourself that the choices you’ve made for yourself in the past decade were the right ones, or at least not as bad as they could have been.  High school reunions aren’t really about other people, they are about giving an account of oneself to oneself.  Right?

The upsetting part is that I wasn’t feeling bad about not being married, not having kids, not owning a home, or having to ask my dad if I can borrow his Costco card when I need new tires.  It isn’t like I haven’t had the chance to have these things.  A few years ago I found myself in a position where I could have been settled with someone and on my way to the lawyer husband/2.5 kids/Orange County mega-mortgage/Costco-card equation in no time.  I bolted, quickly and unceremoniously. I might as well have been looking down the barrel of a gun.  When I found out I got this job in Paris, I found myself immeasurably glad not to have a husband or baby who might change my decision-making process.  I felt positively liberated when I sold all of my Ikea furniture, packed my books into boxes in my mom’s garage, and moved to Europe for an indeterminate length of time.

So why are some pictures of other peoples’ lives leaving me unsettled?  I don’t know any more about their situation than they do about mine.  I have no idea what it would have been like if I had settled down with a guy I knew when I was nineteen, if we had kids together, if we had a mortgage and a tube of toothpaste together.  I would say that from my perspective now that I would resent him, and resent those kids, and resent that mortgage and the fact that he might squeeze that tube from the middle and not the bottom. But maybe I had that husband, those kids, that toothpaste and that mortgage, I wouldn’t resent not having scads of time to myself to read novels or go to museums or learn about Italian cinema. Maybe if I had those other things I wouldn’t care less about having a preposterously expensive purse or the time to attend Zizek’s lecture. I don’t know, and I can’t know.  I guess it’s the not knowing that makes me somewhat melancholy. And unfortunately you can’t Google that sort of thing.

Photo courtesy of the unflappable M. Starik, whose photostream you should visit.

To my reader with love

Happy Valentine’s Day, dearest reader.

I’m not so intellectually evolved as to be able to entirely dismiss the hulking specter that is Valentine’s Day as a mere contrivance of capitalist marketing.  It’s a day that makes a lot of people—single and paired-off alike—feel bad about things that they don’t feel quite as bad about on February 12th or 15th. I had written you a juicy, long post about my most over- and underwhelming Valentine’s Days of yore.  It involved red Mylar heart-shaped balloons, a horse-and-carriage ride, a handful of supermarket bouquets, some Kundera books, and watching my date get stoned in the Whole Foods parking lot.  I read it over this morning and realized that it is best left filed in the ever-growing stack of things I’ve labeled Overshare. It’s not that I’m really opposed to the practice of oversharing, as I’m sure you well know. But self-analysis can get dicey if you practice it too often, especially if you do it with the idea of producing a narrative arc.  Sometimes I worry that I am beginning to be like Mrs. Witt in D. H. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr.  I think ole David Herbert got something really right about a personality type when he described her as such:

Lou shrank away. She was beginning to be afraid of her mother’s insatiable curiosity, that always looked for the snake under the flowers. Or rather, the maggots. Always this same morbid curiosity in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy pre-supposes a corpse, then psychology pre-supposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, pre-supposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

Yes, of course. When they are severed open, my past Valentine’s Days stink of corniness and mawkish expectations.  But I realized this morning that all those poor gents that spent this silly holiday with yours truly deserve better than to have their histories splayed out on the internets for the sake of a laugh. Well, all of them except the Whole Foods guy.  He joked that I was lucky to have an “almost-date” with him to the grocery store, fixed me a frozen pizza, and passed out blackout drunk on strawberry-flavored sparkling wine on my couch by 6 p.m. Face-down. Feel free to remind yourself of that if you find yourself on a less-than-remarkable date today. You’re welcome.

At any rate, while I’m not a big fan of this holiday, I’m definitely a big fan of you. I hope your day is lovely. Thanks for stopping by.

Kvetch break!

My hot water heater isn’t working. Again.

If you know me well (and who am I kidding, all five of you do), you likely have heard me complain about the hot water in my apartment. You haven’t? Seriously?! Lucky you! I won’t go into detail about what has transpired in the past four months on this subject. Suffice it to say, I moved into a newly renovated (read: expensive) apartment where everything was supposed to be spick-and-span upon my arrival, and instead I ended up with two months of cold showers despite the fact that half of the wrench-toting Serbian immigrant population in Paris was coming in and out of my home daily. Between that, a nightmarish level of complication in getting internet set up, and a decidedly ghetto teaching gig, my first two months in Paris were not particularly glamorous. I wore myself and everyone I love thin with my complaints.

I know, I know. I’m living in Paris. Not Haiti. I need to shut up. Moreover, people are only interested in listening to your problems if a) you are paying them to listen or b) they have some of the same problems. The latter is why support groups or group therapy are effective. Take this theory with a grain of salt – I have no idea what happens in an AA meeting short of what I’ve seen on television. Nevertheless, there is a threshold for sympathy in ordinary relationships and I have stampeded past it too much recently.

This whole situation has made me bummed about living alone, not because I am so retro as to think that if I had a man around the house these things would get fixed more quickly.  (Though if the universe wanted to send me a guy capable of doing anything other than telling me how capable he is, I wouldn’t exactly spit in its face. Did you hear that Universe? I’d literally trade all the hyper-verbose, hyper-articulate guys I’ve dated in the past five years for one soft-spoken handyman. There seems to be a direct correlation between one’s level of gratuitous higher education and one’s general worthlessness when it comes to taking care of practical shit. And yes, I include myself in this observation. And yes, Angry Reader, I know that this is 2010 and not 1955 and I could easily learn about home improvement and car engines myself and avoid this situation all together. Or perhaps you are going to tell me about how despite your combo Ph.D./M.D. you have managed to single-handedly restore a Alfa Romeo 1750 and renovate a perfect little Craftsman bungalow by the sea, all while keeping a steady balance of great conversation and terrific sex in your feminist relationship with your girlfriend. Congratulations! Get your own blog.) I guess the situation bums me out because it seems like it might be acceptable to voice the white-hot rage I felt while taking a ice-cold shower this morning to someone if he was in the same position as I was. Maybe he would have just taken his own ice-cold shower and we could be angry and goosebump-covered together! Then we could leave angry messages in tandem on the voicemail of my Serbian contractor! Doesn’t that sound romantic?

Teenagers

I was reading the New York Times yesterday and there was this piece in the Style section about the growing market of deodorants and body sprays for preteen boys.  I groaned when I saw it.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been rather disgusted by the recent spate of ads for Axe body spray.  I also spend my working days with the seventeen to twenty-two set, and while they aren’t quite as bad as the high schoolers that I’ve taught in the past, I will say that the sheer density of the Old Spice Red Zone is enough to make anybody wheeze.  Actually, Old Spice Red Zone, along with Aqua di Gio, instantly evokes memories of making out in the back of my first serious boyfriend’s silver Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder.  Let’s just say that it was a pretty rad car for my high school and that it had a remarkably small backseat.  At any rate, the piece in the Times is actually pretty great in that it manages to encapsulate the bizarre combination of total brazenness and utter insecurity that teenagers possess. While I winced at the description of boys spraying on layers of musk in lieu of showering, I was really touched when I read the comment of young man explaining body spray to a teacher who had confiscated his can: “I have to have it, Ms. G., because I don’t have the money to dress the right way. This is all I can afford.”  That killed me.

It got me to thinking about these summers I spent in the last few years teaching SAT prep for a private company in Orange County that largely serviced the Korean community.  The whole operation was rather shady, run out of non-descript shopping centers with lots of under-the-table cash payments.  But the money was good, the prep was minimal, and my student’s mothers often sent me jars of kimchi, so I did it to pay the rent.  The kids were quite delightful – sharp and ambitious if vaguely resentful of the bummer of a summer that their parents had signed them up for.  While they came from all different high schools, within a week they had already effectively cliqued and hierarchized themselves and it was evident even to the teachers who the cool kids were, who the weird kids were, who the overachievers were, etc.  The shopping center in which I taught had a number of fast-food restaurants and coffee places where everyone would eat and hang out before class and during lunch.  I enjoyed spying on my students from my table at Starbucks, watching crushes develop and dates get set, watching gossip and fights transpire, and above all watching them scheme about how to ditch class without getting caught.  Oh, how opaque they thought they were being and how transparent they were.

The thing that really broke my heart, though, was the few kids that never quite fit in to the busy little social network that formed around summer SAT camp.  I came to think of them as the “alone” kids, the ones who brought their lunch and ate alone, whose eyes grazed the classroom uncomfortably, looking for the most inconspicuous place to sit, the ones who waited for their parents to pick them up apart from the raucous groups, alone.  I know how they must have felt.  There is something about being alone when you are that age that is so devastating.  It feels not only that you are alone, but that you are alone because the entire universe has rejected you.  I wish that I could say that everybody who spends a lot of time alone growing up ends up surrounded by friends as they get older.  I wish that I could have taken every single one of those kids aside and said, “Hey, listen, I know it sucks now, but college is going to be amazing!  Your twenties are going to be amazing!  Just hang in there, you just haven’t found your crowd yet!”  But maybe that isn’t the case for everyone.  Maybe some people just end up spending a lot of time alone in their lives, and while high school is especially painful as far as that goes, there isn’t necessarily some brilliant social metamorphosis just around the corner.

I do wish, though, that I could have told them the one thing that I am certain of, namely that the being alone part gets easier.  I don’t know exactly when it happened for me, but I do know that one day I stopped feeling so excruciatingly visible when I was alone.  It felt okay to be alone, comfortable even.  At some point it even became a pleasure.  The girl I once was, cowering in the most inconspicuous place possible, is now a person that relishes going to restaurants and movies by myself.  I’ve gotten good at it, this being alone, and I think I can reasonably hope that the same will happen for those kids.  I think I can also reasonably hope that they will eventually lay off the body spray.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/fashion/31smell.html?ref=fashion