Category: solipsism
Ready to surrender
I’ve been indulging in a lot of behaviors lately that make me grateful to live alone. If I had a domestic companion, they would have surely notified the Adult Police by now. I’m pretty sure that 27-year-olds are not supposed to pass out in crumb-filled beds at 4 a.m. after watching eight episodes of The Wire while eating Special K Fruits Rouges directly from the box. 27-year-olds should wake up before noon, brush their teeth at least twice a day, and write their dissertation prospectuses in a timely manner. I’ve been doing none of these things. I like the idea of a S.W.A.T. team-style entry into my apartment in which shouts of “Adult Police! Hands in the air!” are met by my bewildered face, illuminated only by the glow of my laptop and with a dehydrated strawberry stuck to my cheek. After reading me my rights I’m dragged, hands in cuffs and wearing the same dirty Bob Marley t-shirt I’ve been rocking for a week, to the re-education center where I am forced to relearn good eating habits and reestablish a sleeping schedule. Graduate school and its attendant ocean of unstructured time can be perilous when there is nobody around to shame you into getting your shit together. It’s times like these when one of you who cares about me needs to turn me in, for my own good, even though you will be likely be wracked with guilt that you had to turn to the authorities instead of keeping it in the family. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much of The Wire.
It got me to thinking about how exactly people do manage to cohabitate. I’ve lived alone for nearly five years now and I don’t know how I ever managed otherwise. People joke about their “secret single behavior,” but it always is something cute and manageable to do while living with someone, like plucking the odd hair or eating pickles straight out of the jar. I feel like I have an entire secret single way of being. As anyone who has stayed in my company on my turf for more than a few days can attest, I start getting jumpy. My best friend, upon learning that her week-long visit was on the tail end of my mother’s two week trip to Paris, gleefully cackled and said, “Oh man! Three weeks of constant contact! That is going to drive you NUTS!” I can’t even imagine how I could possibly have someone around when I’m one of the manic work-binges that I have to enter ever few months to stay afloat in my ‘career.’ Don’t significant others disapprove of significant lapses in hygiene? Wouldn’t a domestic partner disapprove if all three meals a day consisted of coffee and microwave burritos? How about if the “work” area spread like cancer over the dining room table, couch, living room floor, and bed? Or do people quit doing these things when they are real adults?
Photo courtesy of the bounteous M. Starik
Nobody wants to read your blog
I’m overcome with the urge to tag every single entry as “barf” and call it a day.
I sent out a few e-mails out yesterday publicizing this place to friends. It felt really yucky, like I was parading around my dirty laundry. To add insult to injury, I managed to write the wrong blog address on not only the initial e-mail, but the also the SECOND e-mail I sent out to remedy the first one. As a Freudian, I decided that two times made this a meaningful error. Also by that point I was far too ashamed to send out a third e-mail directing people to a blog they likely have no interest in reading. In addition to being a malignant narcissist, I’m an entirely ineffective self-promoter. What a combination!
So, if you made it here and it wasn’t particularly easy on account of all the misdirection, thanks. Seriously. I’ll try extra-hard to keep you entertained.
* * *
About a year ago I scoffed pretty hard at a Style Section article about Seasonal Affective Disorder. A+ for a culture that produces acronyms that makes more sense than the names of the diseases they abbreviate! It was easy to scoff at home UV lamps, of course, from my warm little existence in Orange County. You know, that place where it rains like once or twice a year and everyone scampers around in flip flops and glorified sweatsuits? Cut to the present day and man, oh man, am I sick and tired of this grey, rainy weather. I’m tired of wet shoes, carrying around an umbrella, the smell of wet wool on the métro, and this half-assed version of “daylight” that begins sometime mid-morning and ends before 5 p.m. You might even say it’s making me SAD!
Puns are certainly the lowest form of humor.
I was kvetching about this (the lack of sunlight, not puns) with some friends and a Londoner said that he didn’t know what to make of my complaints. “I like to be my own little ray of sunshine,” he impishly declared. I feel sheepish at my total lack of that particular varietal of self-sufficiency. I’m officially one of those people ruined by California, the ones who complain when it is anything less than sixty degrees and sunny.
* * *
Someone who had held out for a long time on joining Facebook got on the boat last week. He suddenly appeared on my radar with dozens of friends and a readymade knack for the clever status update. I was disappointed to see that he disappeared after three days. I sent him a standard “quitter or defriender?” query. He wrote back to say that he had realized how toxic the place is for things like “productivity” and “sanity” and he wisely decided to depart before things got too serious. Oh, to go back to the time when things weren’t too serious between me and FB, as I hear the kids are calling it these days. To be able to depart before things got too complicated! Lemme tell you what, I’d sure like to be the dump-er in that scenario. If only there was a way to say to a social networking device: Look, I’m really sorry. It isn’t you, it’s me! I know that you provide a valuable service to many of your users! How did anyone ever remember wish anyone else a happy birthday before you came around? Especially since the recent sneaky shift in the privacy standards, you make it easier than ever to stalk high school boyfriends and old coworkers! But this just isn’t working out. I’m sure you are going to make your next five million users (largely women between the ages of 55 and 70 apparently) really happy, what with all the posting about cats and grandchildren that your relationship will surely enable! You deserve someone who will appreciate you like they will, not just someone who is in the habit of being in your company. Trust me, this will be better for both of us in the long run.
But as any addict will tell you, deactivation is like taking a break but never really breaking up. Facebook is the bad news codependent boyfriend that will always take you back when you are feeling weak, the one who remembers every single petty detail of your relationship and plans to rub them in your face when you shuffle back with your tail between your legs. So good for you, S, for getting out before it was too late. Wish I could join you out there on the other side.
Photo again courtesy of the winsome M. Starik
The Puke Story
As anyone within hollering distance (and Skype gives me a wide fucking radius) might know already, I was recently and unceremoniously dumped. It sucked. These things never get easier. I won’t bore you (likely again) with the details of the relationship or its demise. But what happened next is actually starting to be funny.
I’ve always been an emotional vomiter. When overwhelmed, stressed, heartbroken, or otherwise at wits’ end, my physical recourse is always puking. After the long-distance breakup conversation, I immediately threw up. Following two long, tear-soaked discussions with my mom and my best friend, I threw up again. I went to bed, only to lie sleepless all night as my elbows were mysteriously aching. I finally dozed off at six a.m. and slept through my alarm, which was problematic as I was supposed to be giving a final exam to my students at eight a.m. I awoke and in a frenzy tried to make something of my pukey, swollen face. I was starving, so I pounded a raspberry smoothie. Bad idea. By the time I was scurrying through the frozen streets to my métro stop, hazy recollections of the breakup conversation came swimming into my head and I was overcome with nausea. I ran to barf on what I thought was a pile of trash nestled underneath one of the support beams of the Centre Pompidou. It was only after I had begun throwing up that I realized that I was puking on a half-frozen homeless guy who had taken refuge under all the trash. Horrified, I tried to back off and apologize, but I was still throwing up. As I staggered backwards, I proceeded to puke PINK BARF all over my peacoat, jeans, and shoes. Finally finishing up and mortified, I thrust a wad of cash at the poor guy, who was totally confused and upset by this rude awakening. Realizing that I was already late for class, I then made the incredibly dubious decision to CONTINUE GOING TO WORK COVERED IN PUKE. If you think that the French are ungenerous in their stares on the métro, try going on the train covered in pink vomit.
Thankfully the class I was proctoring was a loveable bunch I call the Tuesday Six, a bright and articulate group of kids who look like a Benetton ad for a fresh-faced multicultural future. Aghast at my appearance, one of my students inquired as to what had happened to me. Asshole that I am, I managed to whip up a story about how I had been spontaneously puked on by a homeless man in the métro station. It’s a good thing I don’t believe in karma.
Later, my friend B walked me home from work and high-fived me when we passed the frozen pink puddle that I had made earlier in the day. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a long time.
Funk
My friend B gave me a wonderful Christmas present this year, Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s (2000). From what I gather, Wenderoth overcame a period of personal and professional crisis by going to Wendy’s every single day and filling out a comment card. Over four hundred of these brief missives were then compiled to form the book. If you aren’t acquainted already, check it out immediately. I have laughed myself into stomach pains. But aside from pushing the obviously awesome and resisting the urge to fill this entire blog with transcribed passages from this book, I do find myself turning to the entry from November 14, 1996 to describe my mood lately:
Today the restaurant was filled with warmth, a spirit of caring. The food was just right and the service was prompt. For the first time this season, snow began to fall. Parents laughed with their children. Handsome employees made witty–but not inconsiderate–remarks. Retired couples were given Extra Value coupons. I felt like getting fucked up and watching t.v. forever.
There is something totally perverse about being in an amazing place and yet sustaining a low grade funk. In some ways, the guilt that I feel about how much I ought to be enjoying my surroundings right now seems to aggravate my negative feelings. I’ve been watching The Wire like a junkie and rattling on too much about my decidedly First World problems to my friends and family. The Wire is as fantastic as I had always suspected it would be. My Parisian blues are less atmospheric than I had hoped.
Photo courtesy of the singular M. Starik
First Day of School
So I’ve wanted to start a blog for some time now, but in the way that I’ve also wanted a puppy for a while as well. While in theory I imagine that I could be an excellent blog writer or puppy owner, I know enough about myself to suspect that I will eventually drop the ball in one way or another, leaving a half-assed blog or a mangey-looking mutt out there in the aether to fend for itself.
I’ve come up with many good excuses for not starting a blog. For a long time I felt like I need a blog gimmick so as to avoid being too self-involved. I didn’t want to be one of those bloggers, the ones who wrote about their baby’s poop or their new soup recipes or their academic work. A few of my friends had blogs that chronicled something particular, be it their purchases at the farmer’s market or the Rorschach-like shapes of their sweat stains. I wanted such a motif of my own! I thought about starting a blog where I would upload the funny or stupid things that my students write and say, but that eventually seemed petty and cruel. Who, after all, didn’t say or write something stupid in a writing class in college? All the anxiety about what my blog might end up being paralyzed me from even starting one in the first place.
Part of this anxiety stems from the knowledge that the first entry of any blog will necessarily be overdetermined. I made the reassuring decision to check out the archived first entries of some of the blogs I’ve read for a long time. Unsurprisingly, they were terribly anticlimactic. Nobody, it seems, appears to know how to start one of these things or rationalize why at this point in their life they are doing so. As far as a justification might go for me, I’m an American living in Paris for an indeterminate period of time and this seems worth chronicling, if only for my mother’s sake. I’m not going to use my name nor those of anyone I know, as it seems would be the prudent choice for anyone who is trying to have some kind of professional career these days. I hope that all three of you who might decide to read this thing enjoy what I have to say and might be so kind as to give yours truly the heads up if I do indeed start becoming one of those bloggers.
Who knows? If all goes well, I might just end up getting myself that puppy.
The Bear-Garden 