I AM AN INFANT-BABY-SMALL-CHILD TYPE OF WOMAN
though it’s impossible to know anything for sure
I didn’t do much listening in the past couple of weeks because my head has been too noisy on its own.
The issue is my thoughts and ideas don’t have anywhere to land. Nothing is clear. I’m not especially anxious, like I can be, like I was last week when I flew to New York for my Columbia MFA thesis conference. (The conference went really well, FYI. I heard that I am good at a great many things, but plot isn’t one of them. Richard Locke and Alana Newhouse, my readers, did say I have basket full of the best ingredients from the best market, but they just don’t know what meal it is that I’m going to make.) Their criticism was not surprising. But some accidental psychoanalyzing threw me off my game. I went to a therapy appointment after and had one of the best/worst meltdowns of all time.
I’ve settled my thoughts now. I’ve distilled them down and settled on this: I’m kinda sad. That’s not about being in Denver or taking a break from New York or having an MFA and still not knowing how to create plot in nonfiction or realizing that I’m $144 k in debt before interest. I think it’s because I wasn’t sad when I should have been years ago. I’m sad but full of gratitude. I’m sad but so clearly at a beginning that I’m also relieved, ya know? I feel like a baby. Beginnings are confusing and frustrating.
So far, I can’t hold anything I’ve done in this lifetime in my hands (not even my MFA diploma…yet. Not even the bill for that education.)—the lifetime in which I become a Writer with a capital W, the lifetime in which I write a book, the lifetime in which I finally step into a thing that I know about, but so rarely manage to embody: vulnerability.
I have relics from past lives, tangible evidence that I existed so many times before—stacks of magazines and newspapers with my bylines, scars and bruises and memories... But I don’t have any of that for the current life cycle.
I keep dying and starting over.
Visualizations help. Seeing other people living lives I want to live, that helps me stick around, and when it kills me, I start again.
Cris Beam (my workshop professor my final semester at Columbia who connected me to my agent) said hands would reach out and pull me up to each next step. She said I didn’t need to know everything at once. Every step I’ve climbed, after every curtain that has been pulled back, a certain undoing and unwinding and untangling has occurred. An unfurling. Oh god, I’m a Girl, Unfurled. If I was in the military, I’d still be in the “breaking down” part of the program. I haven’t reached the “building back up” phase. That’s okay. I’m okay.
I had lunch with Voldemort while I was in New York last week. Don’t be mad at me. I’ve decided not to be mad at me. In my last life, he was a poison. I don’t think he is anymore.
I had to take the subway for 40 minutes each way to spend one hour with him, but I didn’t care. No one else was available, though I didn’t try very hard to see anyone else. I would have stayed in my bed if I didn’t get up and face her (New York). I didn’t care when he almost canceled—I had expected he would cancel, I had assumed he would flake because he always flakes. I hadn’t been on the subway in three weeks and I was about to finish Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?, and since no one can get to me on the subway, and my thoughts wouldn’t stop, I didn’t turn on a podcast like I normally would have, and I was fine to be trapped underground, reading. Sheila Heti was the only person who was going to make my goddamn thoughts be silent, bless her soul. But, I finished the book on the way there and so my thoughts spun on the way home. Click here if you want to read them—I typed them on my phone as they occurred to me…
I realized after that when I’m near Voldemort, by no fault of his, I am reminded that I don’t know myself very well. Maybe I realize this around him because I can see that he doesn’t know me at all (I wonder if he thinks he does). Our dynamic encourages me to be raw, but I don’t know one true thing about myself whenever he is near. Realizing this felt like closure but was alarming.
He always says things like, “Feel your feelings,” and he’s always telling me to take care of my body and he is so utterly himself, it makes me wish that I could be myself, too, and stop trying everyone else on. I can’t try him on. He doesn’t make any sense, so I can’t try him on. Maybe this is where the closure part comes in? I suspect something in the chaos he keeps is why people believe he is dangerous. What they don’t realize is that I’m the dangerous one. I am not obsessed with him, I am obsessed with myself. His existence points out everything I don’t understand or have ignored in my own. He’s not actively pointing out my defaults anymore, most of the time. It’s a good thing to have a mirror like that. It’s a miracle, in fact. But it will mess with you.
THIS WEEK’S BEST-ISODE
“Transformation,” TED Radio Hour — a model tells her trans story. It’s incredible. It’s vulnerable.
NOTES
{If you see an episode you listened to, too, stick me with a note, yo. They are in alphabetical order by podcast name.}
Professor Blastoff —Reality TV (with Lauren Lapkus)
→I totally agree that conversations about reality TV are mostly worthless, especially between people who don’t fall on the same side of the aisle (I.E. one person thinks reality television is lame and the other likes to unwind with it). But, what I don’t get, and see so often, is this superiority complex people who don’t watch reality TV exude when the topic comes up. It is as condescending as the douche who says, “Hey, did you hear that smoking’s bad for you?” to a smoker as they’re lighting up. I know reality TV is lame. I know it has very few merits. I also know that I prioritize the television in a very different way when I’m watching it. So, GO FUCK YOURSELF. I am fine with turning reality shows off in any and all instants, but I won’t have someone acting as though I’m stupid because I find enjoyment in stupid stuff. Everyone does. One thing I learned from the “Science” Mike episode of You Made it Weird is that the only ideas that are poisonous are the ones in which you white-knuckle to the point that you can no longer tolerate a difference of opinion, the ones that you must convince other people to go along with in order for them to remain valid for you. I often find reality TV haters fighting the frustration of having to reckon with the fact that a friend they care for and respect likes reality shows. They can’t wed the two together—something they love and hate so much—and want to talk the reality fan out of their “bad habit.” For what reason? I don’t know. The point is, it’s okay. We’re all going to get through it.
→It was good to hear Tig, not a fan of reality TV, bring up the point that people who watch the stuff are often just trying to shut their noisy brains off.
→It was good to hear Lapkus bring up the point that it’s background noise until it’s all yelling and becomes terrible.
→I hadn’t watched reality TV for many weeks. I was on a Homeland binge, but these guys talked about the show “Married at First Sight” (and Voldemort is actually doing the production coordination for the second season) and I’m totally hooked. You guys, it’s so good.
The Read—Switch (feat. Reagan Gomez)
→Okay, this podcast is great. And SO necessary. I like that it’s pop culture. Thanks, Tuck, for the recommendation!
→The guest, Reagan Gomez, and the hosts spent a lot of time talking about being beaten as children and their philosophy on their spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child mentality. I honestly couldn’t believe how casually they were discussing it. I couldn’t believe that they were only “entertaining” the idea that future generations in their family might be spared the rod. They were saying that some kids need a whoopin’. I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve never had a dog and I’ve never had a kid, and I’ve never hit a friend’s dog or kid, but fear-based submission doesn’t really fall in line with anything that I value. It really threw me off to hear them discuss it like they did.
→However, I will say this: for however much I am throwing them under the bus, they’re brilliant, smart people who are nowhere near as stuck-up or elitist as I am (god, I wish I wasn’t—working on it…). I try not to judge, but then there it is: alllllllllllllll the judgment.
The TED Radio Hour — Transformation,
→The host fauns over the model who shares her transgender story in a way that I found so fucking refreshing. He wasn’t distancing himself from her, like I’ve so often heard people do. He went on and on about her physical beauty, while recognizing what felt like such a correct amount of turmoil her own physicality has caused her. And, she wasn’t making herself an object in a curio cabinet. She kept so much of her story private—namely, the private parts—in this way that demonstrated her comfort level, her struggle, and her utter certainty that some people are born in bodies that they have to change. There is often a block when the topic of transgenderedness comes up that just wasn’t in this. But, I’d be interested to see if someone closer to the subject felt the same. I’m a relative newbie!
You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes — Kate Berlant & Live from Bumbershoot
→ I love rituals and so do Pete and his guest Kate Berlant. They talk about it in the exact same way I like to talk about it. And then Pete when on to talk about his rituals surrounding masturbating: the wiping the search history on the browser/cleaning up, etc., are all part of it. It made me so grossed out and ashamed, but it also has the touch of truth that maybe I was not ready to confront.
→When Kate and Pete start talking about actors being vulnerable—let me add this: Paul Rudd in Wanderlust making faces at himself in the mirror. I mean, so brilliant. http://youtu.be/G8dR2Xs7ZBI. I used to make faces and screw up words in the exact same way in the mirror when I was younger.
→They talk about how they’re in industries where people are required to pay attention to them. That rang all the bells for me, too. Shit.
→“Roll that beautiful bean footage…” I mean, who says that? FYI: It’s what I always use as my hangman phrase. More evidence that Pete and I have many common neurons. →Ordered The Power of Myth because he hasn’t stopped talking about it in weeks. Also, got Creative Visualizations because a lovely human (responsible for a beautiful clothing line that I will show you once her site is up and running) recommended it.
Who Charted —Steve Agee and Two Charted 138 & 13
→I’m starting to really dig the hosts. And I wish my friends and I (Eva & Fisher, especially), could just casually record all of the magical songs that we come up with. Speaking of which, I went to Snoop, Warren G, Xzibit and Too $hort over the weekend. 1. Too $hort is much too short. 2. I forgot that his favorite word is bitch. He made us repeat the word back to him for about five minutes straight and the intense look on some of the faces of the men in the crowd was truly alarming. I laughed for a long time (from nerves).
WTF with Marc Maron — Nick Frost
→Um, Marc Maron doesn’t consider himself a cat person. What? I was doing research for one of my freelance clients and found out that October 16th is National Feral Cat Day. Don’t worry, I emailed him about it.
