New Years Revolutions: Time Can Never Kill the True Heart

On December 30th, 2008, I wrote a post that I was going to post on New Year's Day, but I never did because I decided it was too personal in parts, or that I wasn't sure it was stuff I wanted to really say. I think I had a lot of weird situations I was navigating then. Well, I've always had weird situations to navigate, at least since starting autowin and until about a few months ago. I'm not keeping anyone else's secrets now, except for Colonel Sanders, who gave me the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken before he died. One day I'll sell that shit on ebay.

Somewhere in the middle of this unposted post I wrote, "This year I resolve to begin with practice," and perhaps I did just that. Not like I'd anticipated -- but anticipation is just a fancy glowing crystal ball; who needs it.

A few days ago at therapy she let me go early. I couldn't think of any problems to talk about. I navigated briefly into the past, shut that suitcase, complained a bit about not having money, pitched the business to her in disguise as me working out my problems (Luckily that's how a pitch starts -- with a problem. then you state the solution, the solution is your business. Get it? Clever!). I attempted to get worked up about an upcoming three-day period when Natalie, Alex and Brookling will be out of town and then realized I was really just being paranoid. After I'd ranted for ten minutes about Prop 8, I was dimissed.

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I'm sure I do have problems, I'll have some this week maybe. But I gave up trying to change my personality and decided to change my life to better bring out the most functional parts of my personality. That makes it sound so solid, like Legos. But who doesn't love Legos. Asshats, that's who. I don't know. I want to talk to you. With you.

Anyhow this is what I wrote back then. [I just added pictures now] It's weird:

New Years Revolutions + Jaunary '09

I wanted to tell you that people never change. I know that sounds terrible, saying it like that? Especially from me. In September, only four months ago, I declared triumphantly: "... people can fuck you up but people can change. People will change, no matter what the stakes. People CAN change," and now I'm saying that's a lie. I wanted to tell you that people don't really change, not without a serious rock bottom (imminent death, eviction) and people change only when it's time, almost by default. Change can't be imposed by a mantra, an insight, another person or by anything so surface, no matter how resolutely these things poise to attack our stubborn souls. I mean and also people can change, to an uncertain degree of authenticity, with the right cocktail of regulated medications.

Somewhere between theory and the practice is the only me I've ever known. This year I resolve to begin with practice. It's never the bad behavior that bothers me in and of itself, it's the lingering guilt that these prescribed activities/habits are somehow responsible for the circumstances of my life and I feel, somehow, that the circumstances of my life are not enough.

If the circumstances become enough, logic dictates that guilt will then disappear.

When it's you alone -- guilt & other people & resolutions & declarations don't stand a chance against those tiny habits, your attempts to bridge the moat of your very existence, and then what changes is not YOU but the lie you tell me, or yourself.

I do it too I'm saying this to you.

But I'm saying I've seen people I love relapse consistently, sometimes innocuously, and I think nothing happens overnight, things happen exactly when these things better fit into your life.

So I'm saying people change but it takes years if it ever happens at all, so I think that's not people changing -- that's people growing up.

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"You're happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person happy. If it's not that way, then I don't know. I guess you're in limbo."
- Richard Ford, Wildfire
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Because my story is the only one I'm legally allowed to tell, I'll tell a good chunk of it now. It's not different from other stories I know, that's what I'm saying, there's nothing too spectacular about it, none of my bad habits are that dramatic.

So for the first 14 years I vacillate -- through no fault or doing of my own -- between princess or criminal. It just depended on who was in charge. I had no control because my treatment wasn't dependent on my behavior. It was wonderful and terrifying, I couldn't sleep, I told a lot of stories.

This is the story of what happened next, in chronological order: Darkness. Then watching tv & eating & running away & darkness.

I change because I run away to boarding school and I grow up there. Here I am both supervised and happy and deliciously codependent on R. and then he leaves, and then I pop caffeine pills 'til I take too many to talk or work so I have to stop. Then I am happy, incredibly happy, and then boarding school ends so then I have starving & working out obsessively. Then starving & working out obsessively & overeating & throwing up & flirting & shopping. Then exercising obsessively & overeating & cutting & caffeine pills & throwing up & sedatives. Then I get sick and I am not allowed to work out. Then just starving. Then I get better, get head/body back in shape. Then boys. Drinking & boys boys boys.

Then I get out of control like my body isn't mine anymore, like it's a thing other people can do things to, so then I get a dumb loyal boyfriend. Then shopping & boyfriend's rules. Then this really slow feeling like I wasn't myself anymore, like I was dead inside, like I had merged with the wall-to-wall carpeting and I was the only one with a chance to go out. Then I get fixed with medication, feel like self again, but faster, and I break up with dumb boyfriend three days later. Then starving & drinking & working & working & working & shopping. Then I meet S., get addicted to him hard, we fall in love, he has control, he fucks it up.

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"Help, I've done it again. I have been here many times before. Hurt myself today, and the worst part is there's no one else to blame."
-Sia, Breathe Me
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Then drinking & inhaling anything crushable or already in powdered format & running & starving & shopping & playing The Sims. Then friends return from being abroad. Then inhaling & speeding & addicted to S. and still & drinking. Then friends rally around me and tell me I can change and I think they are right and decide to change. Instead S. comes over an hour later. Over and over. Then swallowing everything crushable 'til I was put on Wellbutrin to ensure that wouldn't happen again.

Then S. stops coming over. Why? Not 'cause I've changed but because I leave the state. In New York now. Working & hooking up with girls & drinking & shopping & smoking & meeting strangers. I wasn't happy, but I was having a lot of fun! Then I meet J. Lying. Go off Wellbutrin, break up with him a few days later. Hooking up with girls, drinking, lying, applying the same fervor to paying off debt that I once applied to shopping -- not 'cause I've changed but because I have more money. Again I have so much fun, occasional bliss, and big plum-sized patches of misery! but such fun in between.

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Do I change here? Not really. I just change my perspective on confidence or something. Also, The L Word, I get addicted to this new awareness of this new culture realizing that the girls I'd always liked might actually like me back. I read & watched & dreamed & went out and spent as much time around and inside those girls as I could & fought with people who'd loved me before all that and were trying to keep it up. Fun but darker than expected. I became addicted to the idea of girl-on-girl culture.

So then girls & drinking & drugs drugs drugs & cigarettes & girls & cross-town cab rides & throwing up. Then I start doing this 60+ hour workweek, but have to take care of M. who's now back from the hospital and I'm too busy for much else but still drugs & smoking & girls, almost because of it, and it's an energized, focused darkness that often bounces and becomes light. Then L. & I become BFFs and I try to make L. change, try to be a living demonstration of how people change, but maybe I hadn't really changed at all, I just talked a lot.

Then I was lying but with a partner-in-lying. We had party tricks & games. Co-dependent. Wicked fun, sometimes. Then drinking & drugs & girls.

Then I meet Haviland, she helps me to change no, she helps me to evolve, no, it's just harder to lie around her so I have to make my life a life I don't have to lie about. Then drinking & drugs & girls & lying. Then blogging & drinking & girls & starving & smoking but actually here is a period where things almost get better, start moving forward, so I celebrate by getting drunk and ruining everything.

Then I stop drinking 'cause I want to help MM stop drinking 'cause she'd almost died of it, and because now I have the internet, and smoking and then ... well ... now we have new things ... and this is where you've come in, probably. This is where autowin became The Real Secret. I'm not ready yet with the story of this, 'cause I can't keep trying to kill those things with storytelling or make it a trump card. I'm trying to be careful with that.

What I mean is ... did I change? Have I ever changed, or do I just replace one bad habit with another, one crutch with another, and as I get older, it's not even new addictions, it's just recycling old ones to fit the void of the day. Do the sickest people I know ever stop being sick? How do you escape a ten-year lie, a five-year habit, how do you ever do that? Is it just replacing one addiction with another? To meetings? To the gym? To balancing your checkbook? I have no problems because I am productive and healthy, because I work harder than most people who never drink or lie. Right?

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"I think people can change dramatically, but not completely. I mean, I've changed a lot since we met, but not completely. I'm still a junkie. I'm still reckless. I'm still everything I always was, but I've been conditioned to hide it better or suppress it. The instincts never change."
(A friend)
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I'm trying to put all habits - -anything you'd resolve to stop doing -- on the same playing field. Like drug addiction is just a good example, but this isn't about that,it's not even about licking the edge of those solid addictions like you're starving for a reason but scared too.

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"In real life, every day you might come to a new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong--so much stronger than any dime-store insight you might come up with--that the stupid things you do are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel, Now More Again
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This is about how I wanted to tell you that people never change. Whatever our relationship is to that pit between our heart and our hips that stores all that is compulsive, comforting, familiar, habitual, uncontrollable ... the part of us so essential that it's immune to others' desires.

So one must find another way to evolve or one must trick those same destructive rotations into a new song.

++

"The problem with your life is behavior, not disclosure. Secrets are what addiction calls foreplay. If you want to live a life that you can be honest about, live one that is worthy. The answer to life is learning to live."
- David Carr, The Night of the Gun
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What I mean is do what you can to make your dreams come true. Don't assign value to the things you can control and the things you feel you cannot, just control the things you can control until that side tackles the other.

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So I guess my New Year's Resolution/Revolution is to do what I want to do and I think from there the rest of it will fall into place. (Dec '08)

Are You There Blog? It's Me, Autowin!

+ We had a team meeting tonight. Like a real one where real things happened!

+ For most of last year I'd wake up and for the first hour of every morning it'd be this game of detective trying to figure out what I'd done the last hour of the night before. What I'd written (the typos! what a laugh! how silly I was!) and to whom. Glasses and ashes and lots of open tabs.

It was like the opposite of laying your clothes out the night before school. I talked a lot about purpose but I felt powerless as a concubine; still but swimming furiously. I think those were all things I needed to go through but I'm still not sure exactly what I was doing. You start doing something and then you just keep doing it. Suddenly; then constantly. It kept me safe in a way because I had secrets I had to keep, there was no question.

+ Sometimes I caught myself mattering

+ Sometimes it comes back. One thing will feel wrong and the darkness unfurls enthusiastically from my chest and stomach, like an airy familiar evil pressing out against my skin and brain. It's a fear of losing things that I truly like and love and things that I feel are good for me, which is a different kind of fear than the fear of losing something you love desperately and absolutely despite how clearly rotten it is most of the time.

+ That happens less and less now but when it happens it's not just the fear, but the fear of more fear.

+ I don't want to be the girl who cried let's change the world but I feel whole right now, and solid. No one is crying here, no lies, just love, I mean it, I love it. I love life so much that I want you all to love it too, for all your right reasons.

+ Besides that fear I mentioned before, the crippling panic demanding attention like a child crying in public. Then it passes, like everything does. Sometimes I have fear about money and that's a new panic, like an itchy panic. I try to push it out of my brain.

+ We have this little temporary castle in the sky for another week or so where we can have meetings for Team Autostraddle. It was sweet tonight to talk to Laneia on the speakerphone and talk in real human voices. We talked to our programmer Tess on the phone a few weeks ago which was also awesome. It's been sweet to do things like eat pizza and talk about our dreams. We have like twelve interns which is awesome, and two came over tonight, so it was me, A;ex, Stef, Brooke, Robin, Carlytron, Tinkerbell who I put in the washing machine so now she is really clean and fresh-smelling, and Haviland!! and Intern X and Intern Jessica. If Crystal had been there/in our time zone that would've been perfect obvs.


+ A few weeks ago we had an interview rescheduled but Robin was already in the city and wanted to shoot something and so she was like, let's go to Brooke's, and so I was like, okay, and then A;ex and Carly came too, and it was fun! I look super serious! See:

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+ Anyhow then we got to interview Julie Goldman last Sunday which was awesome awesome -- Robin took photos and Alex video'ed and I asked questions. Also two weeks ago Laneia and I started a feature we're doing about lesbian YA novels which I really love a lot. Also we did a Hot 100 and it was funny.

+ That's all. Just checking in! Hi guys! I just wrote "High guys!" I'm not high. If I was high I'd have a lot more metaphors.

And I Am Telling You, I'm Not Goin'

I'm writing a really terrible Top Ten! Hi internet! What are you wearing! It looks RAVISHING!

Here's the thing: it's hard to maintain a personal blog for a long time. One reaches a juncture when one must either pop out a fried chicken baby or eight (therefore providing lots of baby stories, nap/diaper opinions etc.), stop blogging, or stop writing about themselves and start writing about sports, or shoes or something.

I feel a lot of anxiety that I haven't updated in many days, maybe 'cause I'm all about the follow through? But at the same time, I'm so just really truly happy about this new project and I've been waking up feeling more energized about my work and excited for the day's unraveling than I've been in as long as I can remember, perhaps since some really engaging classes I've taken in college and high school.

This comes at a time when I recently had a final straw of sorts with a girl I considered -- and said as much, to her -- my sister. She was a big cheerleader for me. Even if it wasn't true, it helped me and it felt real and empowering. I mean don't forget: when a madwoman shouted nonsencial insults to me, it too felt real and still feels real. I haven't forgotten a word of it. Whether any of those conversations were real -- the good ones I had with (uh huh) her, or the bad ones I had with another Her -- their emotional impact was cavernous as sky. Of course I'm lucky to have plenty of amazing friends in my life who've always been there and I know always will be -- Haviland, Natalie, everyone on Team Autostraddle and more ... but that doesn't seem to lessen my sense of what's missing.

I've sort of hinted at this in my last few posts, and it feels tacky to say it all outright, or even to go into any more detail than that, but it's left this strange hole inside me. But I think I have most of my feelings in this weird gray matter that doesn't have its own noun yet because that space is like the "opposite of "noun," it's "adjectives waiting for a noun and they will never find it but that's FINE." So it's just always a bit harder to navigate in the fog.

I don't know why I feel I need to apologize for taking five days off when only two or three people have expressed anything remotely similar to demanding an apology. Because I don't know how the new facebook works I'm not sure if Lozo has registered a complaint quite yet. So I ramble. Typetypetype.

When I said two weeks ago that I'd be back to a regular schedule here within a week, I was totally wrong -- if anything, every day has contained more and more things to do -- good things! - but things.


So what I'm saying is that I've been doing this long enough that I hope -- despite my complete weirdo-hood -- that you know I'm not going anywhere.

If anything I hope that going forward my posts here will be better than before. They will be more necessary.

Writing on the internet is fucking scary because I have about a bajillion words in the archive of this blog that probs haven't been combed over in months. I write something new and the old fades away, and that can be disheartening, and the temporary nature of it makes it easy to get away with sucking sometimes.

And I'm in that same spot I was in this time last year where I felt like I'd already said all the stuff about myself I was willing to say and every Top Ten I started to write required 40 searches of the archives to be sure I hadn't already said it. That's followed by an hour of self-doubt -- "Who am I kidding? Who would even remember what I said in June 2007?"

[That being said, when I don't update for a week, check out the ARCHIVES!]

I don't want to say something just to say something, I want to say something because I have something to say.

So if you've been here for a while you know that I never run out of things to say, and I haven't. I just need a bit more time to figure out how to say them, or for it to come to me in the night.

And I do hope to be back up to reasonable speed (aside from autofun, I haven't really been doing more than one or two full blog posts a week for a long long time now) once Autostraddle is established enough that I can stop freaking out about the financial risk I'm taking (and I wouldn't even be where I am with it were it not for the generosity of readers like you) and when things are running more like those well-oiled machines I hear of so often. I comfort myself, as I so often do, thinking of how Emily Gould doesn't post as much as she did before she became Emily Gould, but when she does, I think it's worth it.

My Ambition Was to Live Like Music

[picture/lyric concept forthcoming has been shamelessly co-opted from my cryptic friend Juan at Achtung Baby!, who I interviewed tonight because I wanted to, 'cause it was related to what I write about here. I'll put up the brief q&a tomorrow on autostraddle, first q at this post's end.]

[I thought I was gonna have time to edit this today but then all this stuff happened. So I hope it's okay. I guess it's like a blog, so there are no rules, just right.]
I started with music like everything, like girls: it was on and I was there. I loved it from where I stood but I couldn't get close, so I mouthed the words while everyone else sang.

I was one of the only girls I knew/know who couldn't sing or dance or play an instrument, and I was jealous of the girls who could. That was one reason I never felt like a girl but more like this half-breed androgyne child on the outside of things girls could do. All I was sure of -- I mean unsure -- was girls and music.

I started this blog for a girl. Girls are a lot like music, I think that's why my favorite love songs are written for girls. Lesbians specialize in achy raw gutted acoustic love songs [songs you either ADORE or completely despise because they annoy you] and gay boys put out the best pure happy thumping pop songs you'll ever hear. Because when girls make music for girls there's so much room for drowning, it's bottomless ... and a man can write a song for a girl that splits your heart right open. But it won't climb inside your heart and claw at the inside of your gut with a guitar string like a girl-for-girl song will. Girs-for-girls can be wide open and not worry about losing political capital in the process. They can just wail wide open.

But I think I grew up listening mostly to boys. I liked my parents' big record albums, heavy things, but I couldn't make the record play myself. I had a portable cassette player I'd carry around with me so I could listen to the right music all the time, record things, or, later, provide a soundtrack to our music videos. Just because.

On Saturday mornings we had Carole King and french toast with Shabbat dinner's leftover challah. It sounds so fucking cutesy now, like it's about music AND food, like the Jews with the hippie music and flat, sweet slices of bread. The sun shining on us like dust.

James Taylor. The Who. Pink Floyd. The Beach Boys. The Allman Brothers. Some big brassy showtunes, like Gypsy. Mostly though I loved The Beatles. That was where music began for me. There was The Beatles, and then there was other music, and all other music was considered as it related to or differentiated from The Beatles.

The Beatles sang songs about boys -- about what it was like to be boys who liked girls, but it was more about the liking itself than the object of their liking -- and so I grew up listening to these songs about boys sung by boys, their yearning animal mouths almost kissing the round bulbs of their microphones. There was a period where The Beatles started writing songs about teenagers and sometimes songs about men who were dying, but you could still hear the Boy in it. After The Beatles I had a phase of The Bangles and Paula Abdul and Debbie Gibson. Then The Police and INXS and Phil Collins, and then junk throaway pop like New Kids on the Block. Then a period of love songs -- big uncomplicated love songs with simple names sung by women who knew a few things about life like I Will Always Love You and Total Eclipse of the Heart and Save the Best for Last and Now & Forever. The first cassette tape I ever bought was Madonna's "Like a Virgin."

But I grew up with The Beatles. We listened to children's music too -- Raffi, Free to be You and Me, The Gemini Brothers, The Song Sisters, Really Rosie, alleged recordings of muppets singing. Those gigantic records were bigger than my head. We had every Beatles record.

I remember the wild trippy colors and pictures on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. I wanted to memorize it, and then later announce it to a room like I was just guessing. A lot of growing up is finding places where you can just memorize something instead of doing too much work.

Then it's nearly the mid-nineties, and I move on from the uncomplicated by-women-for-men love songs to songs by men about misery and being scared about the increasing distance from being a boy. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails. Then we got softer as the decade itself soothed out. The Lemonheads, The Fugees, George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, the Grateful Dead, and the first threads I ever heard of Ani DiFranco. Then onto mostly Billie Holiday and Gorecki and musicals, just music too fantastic to not be theater.

Then I just listened to music made by my friends, or soft poppy girl-boys singing about cartoons, like Belle & Sebastian, The Sea & Cake and Heavenly. From there it's been all over the map. Every year I have at least one period of Just Hip-Hop Hop Hop Just Hip Hop and at least one period of Ani & Chris Pureka & Melissa Ferrick and at least one period of dying men like Jeff Buckley, Martin Sexton, Rufus Wainwright.

My relationship to the girl-on-girl music is more private than the other songs. We just can't belt Fiona Apple together, that feels lonely, you can only belt it alone. But there's other music I feel safe belting in the car - I was remembering earlier about the night we drove home listening to The Killers and I knew you'd tell me later that you felt infinite and then you did and I thought then we were safe for some reason. But that was just girls and music and the drunk airless night.

Thanks for telling me about your favorite songs last week.

Some time later, a Beatles-themed restaurant came to Ann Arbor called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club. They randomly booked good shows at night, all the good indie bands. The catch is you had to play a Beatles song. These bands -- mostly boys singing about girls or girlish boys -- skinny/fat boys with bangs on purpose and so many feelings -- always chose Hey Jude. They liked it's mournful, young thudding spirit. My friends' band did something else. Twist and Shout, maybe.

Stef is at SXSW. I went last year with Crystal, Cait and Tara, which feels a lot like yesterday even though clearly -- look at us -- it isn't. Cait & I were dedicated to the "Uh Huh Her - and - Uh Huh Her - only" Project and Crystal & Tara got out and saw lots of bands including a band called "The LK" 'cause of the name and it turned out to be really good.

Even though I've never known how to do music, I've always ended up with musical people, good dancers or musicians. Except Chris. I'm remembering a bar on the main road in Ypsilanti -- which I remember as always gray, rainy -- Theo's? Cheap, with red lights, Hey Ma and Ludacris's Growing Pains and Jay-Z's booming swagger got inside these kids like hormones themselves -- something untouchable, something they could never shout that loud themselves -- this desperate sex filled the air. It was gross power; the kind that felt right at the time.

I'm not noble, there's always a girl or music or both. I think one of the first songs I ever really knew was "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

I'm glad I was raised on The Beatles because it made me hopeful, because I think their music was inherently likeable & pleasant. Their music even at its trippiest or most indulgent was an earnest beating thing you wanted to bop about to. You kinda want to french kiss The Beatles. Hard! "I Saw Her Standing There" was my favorite. What magic -- the way she looked was way beyond compare. Way beyond compare!

Because music is more real than anything else, it's like it doesn't exist 'til you turn it on.

But now that you know so much of my fact, it seems even more naked to dare to write fiction, or to write like music. Fiction which I hold so dear. Which come to think of it was probably also for a girl, to some degree, and because of music. I don't trust writers who don't have music happening all the time in their head, like in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [quoted in that picture -- "All the time -- no mattter what ..."] and I don't trust musicians who don't read. I trust nearly everyone, because Paul McCartney told me I was way beyond compare.

Do you remember when you were first allowed to pick your own music? Or girl? Even if you've already made a choice, the permission is rich, as endless as music.

Question #1 from my Exclusive Interivew with Luna Dot Typepad Dot Com . He's in Austin, Texas right now too but he always is.

Q: "I thought you were a female lesbian or bisexual when I first read your blog. Does this surprise you? Why or why not?"

A: "It did not surprise me because for some reason since around a year into the blog's existence, I started to get emails from some people assuming I was a girl. When it first happened I was surprised because I could not step away from the source and inspiration of my posts and think of it in any other way than a guy writing about a girl. If I read it objectively I can now see how it could appear as a female lesbian. With one objection though: Leonard Cohen worships women but in my mind his point of view is distinctively heterosexual so I would expect quotes from him ( and Charles Bukowski or Bono among others) to lean more towards the fact that a guy was writing the blog."
[the rest of this Q&A will be on autostraddle "tomorrow"* with maybe some other stuff about gender/art.**]

[he picked: Love is a Battlefield ]
[I picked: a catalog of increasing disasters, sex for depressives, the art of losing -- god! I'm morbid tonight!]

There's a lot of blogosphere people at SXSW. I hope you're all about to have a kickass time. If you're there or not you can answer a question: what's something you want someone to say to you tomorrow? Or you can just say something else. Or music.

*I have a very loosely defined concept of "time."
**Usually when I split posts up, it's to make all the comments in one spot on one blog or the other, but this time it's 'cause I genuinely wanna add some stuff to it before I put the rest up "tomorrow," it's not like a gimmick.*
***FYI we made Advice Vlog #35 !!

Autoportrait 3.0

[Autoportrait]

It's April of last year. This is where I've started to begin; April of last year. We're in Malibu and the wind is as perfect as wind has ever been. You're looking at the beach because you recognize a celebrity and her dog down there and she's huddled in your hoodie, her whole body squeezed up inside it 'cause she's always cold and even colder now smack between the pool beside us and the ocean below. She's so tiny in there, like a girl, and now looking back I remember it like this: it's because it was your hoodie, that's how you made both of us feel sometimes, like a girl all wrapped up. And alternately, like something torn of its surface and alone. But maybe that was just me. It's just easier to imagine or remember that it wasn't just me. I mean I feel smarter that way.

The wind picks up. We put rocks atop our construction paper and our crayons throw caution to the wind.

I come back to this beginning [Malibu, April] because this is the scene that opens the novel [fictionalized, of course, with everyone playing someone else, including me] I assume I'll eventually finish, otherwise this whole thing [my life] is kinda anti-climactic. In the novel, we are there with our crayons when I get an email on my phone from my other half, who I haven't heard from in years -- I've lost him, that much is true -- and it turns out he's in LA but he doesn't know I am too.

When I tell vosotros, you say, Clearly we are going to stalk him right now. My friends love me like that, drive faster for me. It's a novel. This didn't happen.

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Malibu in April was a place where everything felt perfect except me. And you and you and you and you and you, and her. It was like crying and laughing at the same time, it was the opposite of fucking & laughing at the same time. The air and the sky, and how at night the stone floor would get so cold, and how I slept so easily next to her because I trusted the silence so bad. I was torn up from all sides, like a fistful of frayed rope.

The three of us in the sunshine; three jellyfish with hoods up and phones out but unimportant, dream on, shades shading.

See -- I'd decided to go to Malibu only a few hours before I got on the plane to go to Malibu. I was still packed from the trip to China I never took, and though that dream had been dashed a few weeks prior to Malibu I had not yet unpacked because I was very busy self-destructing in New York, crawling with blades flared across those creeping warm dumb almost-spring days. Then you called me from the airport and said do you want to go.

That was the week when my heart crashed. I don't mean broke. I mean everything breaks my heart but my heart still works though, I mean that my heart crashed.

I was alone at the time of the crash. There were no witnesses. Or there was one witness; later. Your finger on my skin, and maybe I told you it was your fault and maybe I didn't but it didn't really matter, it wasn't her fault, I mean it wasn't your fault, I mean it was my fault, I mean nothing is anyone's fault except my own and cracks like blades and I had a magic pill that made me forget. It kills me now not to remember.

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In Malibu we spoke in little bright charges of electricity and then retreated like lights going off. We drove like nothing bad had ever happened. Does she know, she would ask, does she know? Does she know?

No, of course not. No one knew. We thought we knew and we didn't.

Something changed that week inside me. I mean it changed before I went. In a way I knew what I had to do but I decided instead not to do it because I was scared that if I did what I had to do that I would end up alone and heartcrashed. I mean that writing this I have to pretend like you'll never read it. You, and you, and you and you and you and you and you it was not just you, or even just you, vosotros, you, you ah'tem, ah'ten.

I mean that now as I write this I am heartcrashed to know two or three things I know for sure: that you will not read it, and that you won't either. You weigh against one another like steel and iron, like fire.

++

In the past week, three people have mentioned to me that it's still hard to see themselves, here, sometimes, in the right kind of light. If I get you at a bad angle. If I was in the right place at the wrong time. I was, I guess. I love the wrong time. I am the wrong time, you're a circle and I'm a fist and an angle. No, I'm a circle.

It's just that I don't know that much about the right time except that I'm determined to prove to you that right can come out of wrong, that right doesn't need to be new. Like I don't trust my own decision to always prefer the blank slate. Like I don't know what I want so I just feel like right now I am trying to remove myself from everyone who could be impacted by that decision.

++
I was someone else before you and you. The red bulb and drawing on her back, the girl who lied and the girl who cried, Brooklyn and Harlem and red red red and smoke in the air and the secrets you share alone and naked that you can't explain, which is what makes everything exactly what it is.

And now when we talk about the way we were back then (before you, and you) -- before I knew the jellyfishes I know now.

I don't think I could do shit like that anymore, I said, I mean. Now you can't pretend like you don't get what you deserve when you get it.

Dra-ma, she said.

I don't want to do anything we won't remember, I'd said then.
But it's fun, she'd said.

I don't know that girl back then. I was all desire, no want. I was patient and fast. I dug that Radiohead last night, she said the next morning a chunk of years ago. I love the things there isn't time to say at the time. That was years ago. One day I too would no longer want to remember.

++
I was born with three wishes, but I didn't know any words. My head like a cannonball and flames to the brain. I wasted my first wish on words. My second: no one can leave before I'm ready. Third wish = Infinity.
++

Now she's picking glass out of her foot with tweezers.
I missed the part when she stepped in the glass.

"Don’t hurt me," she says.
Her first wish.

I ask her if she wants a the middle or the end of the sandwich

and she says she wants the end. She says she likes the ends of things.
"I like pretzel ends, I like hot dog ends, Twizzler ends. The ends of things."
++

When she wrote me and said It's stagnant, and you don't like that, I said you're right even though I'd never really thought that before. I never thought I craved change because I didn't like staying still. I always assumed I craved change because where I am never feels right. By "assumed" I mean "I've always known."

But did I tell you about how the air in Malibu was so perfect, how everything was so perfect and airy, how slippery it is on top of a rainbow and skating.

I'm telling you the air was perfect. I mean it when I tell you that I think it was in the air. In Malibu, remember? Where we were when this story began, and a place we will never be again. Those were the last moments of that dream. So there it is. Behind me. I had mentioned, after all, the ocean.

++

I've never been good at describing the weather 'cause it always just seemed so obvious. Now I'm obsessed with it. I want to know about the wind and the ocean and all the things that people who like life like to be close to.

Maybe that was because that was the week I realized that everything was so much larger than me. The good and the bad. That's when things started changing in me. In the fall I decided I wanted to be infinite. In the winter I hid in the middle of everything.

Now there are so many yous, there are so many shes, it's like the universal you. The universal she.
The memory, which we can forget if we want to,
or change when we re-write it,
or eat it, and keep it in our guts forever
like o
like h
++

When I re-write you, I will make the breeze breezier. I will make your eyes bluer even if they weren't blue in the first place. I pick blue because it's the color of sky. You will laugh at me when I say this.

And now I feel like you laughed at me from above and she laughs at me from below and here I am in the middle, nowhere near the ends of things. And I can't hear. Because isn't the wind terrible.
++
Which is to say none of the pronouns I so carelessly employ necessarily apply to anyone specific, I mean that.

I wish we had a proper vosotros.

I'm sort of on my own right now, in a weird way. Not for reasons I can explain. But I am, in my head. Oh, no one ever makes sense.
It feels almost like when I stopped taking the anti-depressants years ago,
like coming up from underwater onto a shore that looked black to you but golden to me.

++

The night before I left for Malibu (before I knew I was going to Malibu), I was on the phone with her and then you arrived and I told her my Mom was on the other line but she wasn't, and never would be. Not at that hour.

And I saw you. And we were together for a moment or twenty in the darkness. And then you left. I felt like a very very bad person, which was sweeter than saltwater. Maybe that happened or maybe you didn't.

I called her back. "So anyway ..." I began.

And we spoke like only simple things had transpired between before and now, like nothing had changed, maybe she'd had a snack or I'd put on my pajamas, like we are two little rocks of love that are stronger than time or change or memory or anything. That's something. You need two or three things you know for sure, a person and maybe two or three more people who are like rocks. Then you can have wind on top of the rocks which don't move. The trouble begins when you mistake Malibu for forever. When you mistake anything for forever.

And the next day I slept until I couldn't sleep anymore because every waking moment was hard. I woke up and you called and asked if I wanted to go. Of course. Of course all I ever want to do is go. I didn't tell you that I'd gone until I got there and you were mad at me for going. But I was safe.

And I went.

++

We came back laughing. We took two Valiums each, or maybe you took three. Then we were really flying. Nothing hurt. I'd always hated flying but I wanted that flight to never end. Our seats were large, we pretended to be rich people because you pretended to be a rich person all the time and I went with you wherever you wanted to go.

And I loved you so much in that moment. As a friend, perhaps I had never loved you or needed you more as I did in the air that day, coming back from where you had taken me and feeling you'd never take me anywhere again. I always knew, you know.

Hiding in your hoodie, and the Valium you put into my palm.

The food they brought us on trays. We flew through sky and clouds and the world was as perfect as it had ever been.

++

Nobody ever really changes. So you take it or leave it.

++

I've always wanted to run away with someone crazy.
Instead I came back to someone who made me smile.

Instead now I

++

I think of Neal Cassady,
I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found,
I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.

I've got a postcard super-glued to my desk of William Burroughs trying to stab Jack Kerouac with a dagger. I did that 'cause I opened a super glue bottle and it got everywhere and so I had to put something new on top of it, so I put this postcard on top of it and after all this time it is still here on the desk from the whorehouse. "That's what you call it?" She asked me, once. "You call it 'the whorehouse'?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said to her.

++

The ends of things.



Then you left, and I wasn't ready.

Autoportrait 1.6

[Autoportrait]

[I'm hopeful that this random mishmash of words came all in a row for a reason and so as I try to make it into something that makes sense and has a point, the version number will increase. Larger numerical changes reflect larger changes in content and structure. This here be Autoportrait 1.6. - shifting notes around -- Feedback is welcome & appreciated -- there's parts I wanted to cut that I didn't 'cause you said you'd liked them, so it's good. You can tell me anything, clearly I will tell you anything I mean look at this carnival.]

It begins last year. It's April. We're in Malibu and the wind is as perfect as wind has ever been. She's looking at the beach because she recognizes a celebrity and her dog down there and you're huddled in her hoodie, your whole body squeezed up inside it 'cause you're always cold and colder now smack between the pool beside us and the ocean below. We put rocks atop our construction paper and our crayons throw caution to the wind.

I come back to this beginning [Malibu, April] because this is the scene that opens the novel [fictionalized, of course, with everyone playing someone else, including me] I assume I'll eventually finish, otherwise this is kinda anti-climactic. In this novel's opening scene we're in Malibu and I get an email from my other half -- I've lost him, that much is true -- and it turns out he's in LA but doesn't know I am to. When I tell her and her, she says, Clearly we are going to stalk him right now. My friends love me like that, drive faster for me. It's a novel. This didn't happen.

Malibu in April was a place where everything felt perfect except me. And you and you and you and you and you. It was like when crying and laughing at the same time, which's something all people should be able to do, in fact I require my loves to be capable of doing the following things simultaneously: cry & laugh, fuck & laugh, yell & laugh, hurt & laugh.

Oh my G-d. I've just realized it. The air, and the sky, and how at night the stone floor would get so cold, and how I slept so easily next to her because I trusted the silence so bad. I was torn up from all sides, like a fistful of frayed rope. Hoods-up, phones out but easily forgotten, dream on, shades shading.

The three of us in the sunshine; three jellyfish. It was a reunion with her, and I needed it. But almost nobody knows how I self-destructed in New York during those warm dumb almost-spring days before Malibu and the week after.

In Malibu we spoke in little bright charges of electricity and then retreated like lights going off.

I've just realized I remember Malibu because of where it sits smack perfect between those weeks where my heart crashed. I don't mean broke. I mean everything breaks my heart and my heart still works though, I mean that my heart crashed. I was alone at the time.

Something changed that week inside me. I mean it changed before I went. In a way I knew what I had to do but I decided instead not to do it because I was scared that if I did what I had to do that I would end up alone and heartcrashed. I mean that writing this I have to pretend like you'll never read it. You, and you, and you and you and you and you and you it was not just you, or even just you, vosotros, you, you ah'tem, ah'ten.

++

In the past week, three people have mentioned to me that it's still hard to see themselves, here, sometimes, in the right kind of light. If I get you at a bad angle. If I was in the right place at the wrong time. I was, I guess. I love the wrong time. I am the wrong time, you're a circle and I'm a fist and an angle. No, I'm a circle.

It's just that I don't know that much about the right time except that I'm determined to prove to you that right can come out of wrong, that right doesn't need to be new. Like I don't trust my own decision to always prefer the blank slate. Like I don't know what I want so I just feel like right now I am trying to remove myself from everyone who could be impacted by that decision.

++
I'm in her basement right now as I write this. We were talking about the way we were, back then. Before I knew the jellyfishes I know now.

The red light bulb in my Brooklyn room which was fine, because benders look good in red -- all dressed up and no place to go. I don't think I could do shit like that anymore, I said, I mean. Now you can't pretend like you don't get what you deserve when you get it.

Dra-ma, she said.

I don't want to do anything we won't remember, I'd said then.
But it's fun, she'd said.

I don't know that girl back then. I was all desire, no want. I was patient and fast. I dug that Radiohead last night, she said the next morning a chunk of years ago. I love the things there isn't time to say at the time. That was years ago.

I was someone else. If you knew me then, I wouldn't want to talk about you. I wouldn't want to ruin what's left; or spoil what we did. It was so sweet. It was terrible, I loved every minute.

++
I was born with three wishes, but I didn't know any words. My head like a cannonball and flames to the brain. I wasted my first wish on words. My second: no one can leave before I'm ready. Third wish = Infinity.
++

++
In the past day, the same solicitor has called me twenty times. Finally I answered and she said I was a past customer but she won't even tell me what I bought. She wants to give me gas cards, I don't have a car, she says it's their way of thanking me for being a preferred customer, I say what did I buy, she says it's privileged, like you, our privileged customer, I say I don't even have a car, she says my friends and family want me to buy gas for them.

That man yelling in the stock-trading room or whatever, that man confuses me. I mean I'd like to see you take that to Camden and interview someone and see if anyone is audacious enough to declare want so loudly, and now, and I promise you that they wouldn't, because you know what they never thought anything would be that easy.

It's funny. Money money money. I don't know why I continue to refuse to take it seriously. I'm stunned at very basic symbolic level that it exists with such subjective power, and so consistently. I am interested in going back to a trade system.

I made an appointment with my local H & R Block Professional today so I can get my shit together for real this time but I don't know how to explain what I've done. I mean 2008. 07. 06. 05. I mean really all the way back. I just don't know what to tell you about what I've done, but I'm hoping for some stimulus.

I don't know what to say for this world right now, it's like we're all at a manic low secretly grasping for shooting stars and scared knowing they aren't there, and what exactly are we supposed to reach for if not stars.

Ultimately most education is traditional, life has its likelihoods, this is the national crisis. I don't love or hate it. I don't even know if I like my life. I've never been so detached from my own opinions. Not my feelings -- I'm down with my feelings. I'm confused about my opinions.

And we're pretty sure the sky's falling, we're just trying to figure out exactly how many hours we personally will be required to put in trying to hoist it back up. Pretty much since the year I graduated from an institution that had the balls to tell me I was preparing myself for a world where art matters I've been painfully aware of how little it ultimately does. I mean tangibly. First and foremost people need to eat and need to be safe I want art to be the safe part.

++
Now she's picking glass out of her foot with tweezers.
I missed the part when she stepped in the glass.

"Don’t hurt me," she says.
Her first wish.
++

Is that what you want.
You want me to buy you gasoline.

When I wrote a letter to my father, everyone with a stake in my heart read it and that letter was addressed to a ghost. No. It was addressed to a dream.

I mean everyone. I mean everyone who shared my blood or fucked it, a boring biological bond I've always disregarded in favor of the bonds I choose, which are many, and changing, and when she wrote me and said It's stagnant, and you don't like that, I said you're right even though I'd never really thought that before. I never thought I craved change because I didn't like staying still. I always assumed I craved change because where I am never feels right. By "assumed" I mean "I've always known."

They all read it and that surprised me. Things have been different since that time around Malibu when my heart crashed. But did I tell you about how the air in Malibu was so perfect, how everything was so perfect and airy, how slippery it is on top of a rainbow and skating.

++
She just came down with a sandwich and asked her if she wants a the middle or the end of the sandwich

and she says she wants the end. She says she likes the ends of things.
"I like pretzel ends, I like hot dog ends, Twizzler ends. The ends of things."
++

I'm telling you the air was perfect. I mean it when I tell you that I think it was in the air. In Malibu, remember? Where we were when this story began, and a place we will never be again. Those were the last moments of that dream. So there it is. Behind me. I had mentioned, after all, the ocean.

++

I've never been good at describing the weather 'cause it always just seemed so obvious. Now I'm obsessed with it. I want to know about the wind and the ocean and all the things that people who like life like to be close to. I mean. I dunno. Maybe that was because that was the week I realized that everything was so much larger than me. The good and the bad. That's when things started changing in me. In the fall I decided I wanted to be infinite. In the winter I hid in the middle of everything.

Now there are so many yous, there are so many shes, it's like the universal you. The universal she.

What scares me is not what is said publicly, but what is said in response to what I said publicly when we're alone. It doesn't seem fair sometimes. This has gotten difficult at a remarkably easy time. It is never an easy time. I was in the wrong place at the hard time, the right time can appear similar to the wrong time at the time. But isn't the moonlight terrible.
++

I think writers feel like they'll have a chance later to re-write it, so they're more comfortable with shit not making sense at the time.

When I re-write you, I will make the breeze breezier. I will make your eyes bluer even if they weren't blue in the first place. I pick blue because it's the color of sky. You will laugh at me when I say this. I kinda feel like one of you laughed at me from above me and the other laughed at me from below which means obvs I am in the middle laughing at myself and I can't hear.

++

Which is to say none of the pronouns I so carelessly employ necessarily apply to anyone specific, I mean that.

I wish we had a proper vosotros.

++

I feel like ... I have some questions for you, readers-you, internet-you. Some other stuff. More general stuff. Bigger stuff. About what you want. Some things to launch.

The world stuff.

We'll see.

A break from mememe.

I'm sort of on my own right now, in a weird way. Not for reasons I can explain. But I am, in my head. Oh, no one ever makes sense.
I think of Neal Cassady,
I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found,
I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.

++
The ends of things.

Then she left, and I wasn't ready.

Whoodie Wednesdays & This Girl Called Automatic Almost-Winner

Hello, friends. I'm in a weird mood today [and by "today" I mean "yesterday," Tuesday, when I wrote this post, not "today" as in Wednesday, when you're reading it]. [I know, how'd I manage to get a Lezzie nomination when I can barely construct a sentence?] I mean everything feels totally off. All day I've been a beast. Anyhow! Speaking of things that are ON: 'cause you're all so amazing at voting, I'm now a finalist for "Best Beast Blog" for The Lezzies. I mean "Best Personal Blog." The other two nominated blogs (Peaches & Coconuts and A Brown Girl Gone Gay) are excellent and newer. I love them both already, they're fresh young muffins of delight. Also whether you want to or not, vote for Grace the Spot for best humor blog and also for Sugarbutch for best Gender-Bender & Short Story/Erotica. Just do it, okay? Just do it. Like you would with a sneaker. Also vote for Auto-Winner Dorothy for Culture & Entertainment.

I should probably edit this blog in the morning like a proper person [UPDATE: Eh.]. You're all wonderful. Have I told you that enough? I haven't, I never could. I think blogs are magic. You've brought magic into my life. Not the rabbit stuff I could already do that.

I feel vulnerable today. I have two choices: beast or gutted.

THIS JUST IN!!! You have one choice: watch Riese & Haviland on Alexi's Closet Episode #17! (Screencap above) In this episode, it appears at times that I almost know what I'm talking about.

++

I'm ready for my recession to be stimulated. Yes We Can! I've been living this self-created "what I'm doing now is perfect for now but won't be good long-term" life for quite some time now.

You know how it goes with things that were meant to be temporary and then become your whole life. Before you know it, it's been forever, you're stuck in a prologue and you can't get out of it.

Now my/our traditional state of existence has become the National Spirit, now's the time for us all to suck it up for two years, we're told these temporary measures will enable stuff getting better later. I'm down. And though it makes me itchy to think this -- because so many people don't have homes, or credit cards, or any of the wonderful support systems that I have -- my number one feeling about the Recession is that I feel like suddenly now everyone is feeling the way I've felt (alone) for the last two years or so. You know.

Lately I've been fine with putting periods at the end of questions. Maybe I've stopped expecting answers.

Tomorrow I should fix this blog post. I don't know what it is about extra attention that makes me want to talk crazy. By "fix" I mean I should write proper sentences like I went to college.

++

One thing I like about this "Best Personal Blog" category is that I don't have to compete against people who rely on on external happenings/content to provide post topics. See I have to think of all these things myself. Like how can my navel lint compete with Tank Top Tuesdays or like actual news.

Did you know I've written 463 posts? That's so many. Since April 2006. I was so young then, so full of light and angel food cake. Angel food cake is bullshit cake.

++

I thought it would be fun/appropriate to celebrate the nomination by asking everyone to tell me something personal they'd want to know about me, but then that seemed so ridiculously self-centered and presumptuous of me, and it seeming that way made me not want to do it. But I still think it's a good idea. Secretly.

I have a strange definition of the word "secret." Stephen Dunn said something like; there's a lie behind every lie I've told. I think.

++

You know what the hardest thing about writing a personal blog is? That at any given moment absolutely anyone in the whole world you've ever known can make a decision to read as much of it as they want to and consequently email me to let me know they've read it.

There's nothing wrong with this, obvs, but it can be jarring. When someone unexpected does this I have a knee-jerk reaction to go back and look at everything I've ever written to make sure I never wrote something about them or relating to them expecting them to never read.

Any given day -- a boy I slept with in college, an ex girlfriend or boyfriend, a former roommate, relatives close and twice removed, my mother, my cousins, the girl that decided to get all up in my ex's grill, an employer, a co-worker, a former anything, the boy i loved at 13, the girl who loved me too much, the ones that got away, the muses and the dreams, the lost friends of the 90's, the one I envied, the ones who hurt me, those I've forgotten, the famous person I wrote about, the blogger I linked to, the writer I liked, an old teacher, you, you, you, you, you.

It's like imagining if your facebook page really did contain most of your book and a lot of your face and privacy settings were not an option.

++

I say it's not hard to have it all out there and have my name on it -- not just my name but my face and my everything. I mostly rely on my tendency to ramble to be my main defense from ever really attracting the casual attention of someone only tentatively interested. Anyhow that's what I say but that's not true. It is really hard. But it's not as hard as like, working on a shrimping boat or something. It's hard but it's easier than not saying anything.

I don't think G-d believes in blogs. Do blogs believe in G-d? Time will tell. I tried to do handstands for you, every time I fell on you ...

++

You know I genuinely think Uh Huh Her is one of my top ten favorite bands of all time. I can't imagine them ever coming out with a song I don't want to listen to. I admit that Tegan & Sara have had like 3 or 4 songs I've really disliked (Freedom, Superstar, The First, Hype -- but they're all earlier songs) so I still think they're 95% likely to make a song I want to listen to every time.

++

I should do Hoodie Wednesdays instead. If it was Whoodie Wendesdays it would be better actually, then it'd be alliteration like Dorothy's, which would be perfect since she beat me last year and was nominated in like every category this year. I need to show you some photos of critters. Obviously. Critter photo time. Also vote for Dorothy in one of those three categories or more than one, she deserves it.

WHOODIE WEDNESDAYS*!
(this will be the one & only whoodie wednesday, don't get too excited.
I like words not pickshurs.)

Top Critters of the Universe Week
++

Spencer is cancelled, also has a hoodie on.
++

Look, I do secretly think dogs are kinda cute.
++

Babypop Number #1 Critter Hoodie
++

Tegan or Sara? You decide.
++

Like a city, but free.
++

Tasha: should wear more hoodies.
++

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hoodie.
++

The Beautiful Margaret Cho Hoodie
++

Teen Preggers Hoodie
++
GO TEAM GO HOODIE!

November Rain & Auto-Fun of the Thank-full Weekend, 11.29/30.2008

Have you seen Haviland & Riese on Alexi's Closet on AfterEllen yet? 'Cause all the cool kids are doing it. Did you have a fun Thanksgiving? Ingest some hot succulent turkey? Read our South of Nowhere Recaps for Episodes 13&14?

Haviland & I had T'giving with a bunch of crazies, including a member of the Coast Guard who just started smoking a month ago, at the age of 26 -- and can't stop chain smoking now -- and when asked why, answered that he went as Hunter S. Thompson for Halloween and just hasn't given it up since. He actually reminded me of the kind of boy I would've made out with in college. I think I once often played the "who do I want to make out with in this room and how can I make that happen?" game whenever I felt, you know, potentially bored, like at 95% of the gatherings of people I'm not related to. It's not that I have more fun with relatives, but obviously I'm not going to make out with any of them, I don't want to get whatever Sarah Palin's kids have. This whole paragraph has been kinda weird. I guess you change your mind about what feels personal and what seems like silly dust in the wind. Funny dust. Auto-funny dust. Anyhow I wasn't bored, so that whole thing was just a waste of words.

Afterwards Hav said, "He was insane but cute, he seemed like the kind of guy you would have hooked up with in college and then not wanted to talk to again." Sometimes Haviland & I actually agree about things, strange things, and I think we've finished a period where we were focused more on uncovering the differences than relishing the similarities -- you know how you do that, the relishing, when you first meet someone? Like our mutual love of Christmas Specials and dislike for public discussions of bodily functions.

I've spent the last two Thanksgivings with Haviland actually, I just realized. Last year at my place w/my roommates and her friends. There were board games and obtuse text messages. At night we made a vlog, and life was strange and silent and dead or almost-dead or heartbreaking or devastating or exploding with promise. It was a lot of things, this time last year.

Two years ago, my brother brought macaroni & cheese from New Orleans. Stephanie was visiting her family, but Haviland & Mina & Janet came over to my apartment, and eventually my roommate Maggie too. Hav had to leave for her show ... then we went to the movies, the new Christopher Guest thing. It was pouring rain and Mina dashed into the rain like a waterproof tiger to get us a yellow car. Each year I've said I'm thankful for my friends and that I'm not homeless or dead. Last year I think I jinxed myself. I've spent a lot of time the past few years in other people's versions of reality. I can't say which I ultimately liked better. Probably the fantasy.

---

quote: "Insofar as you are able, I would ask you, then, to be wary of the distractions of fame and the blandishments of commerce. I would ask you to be tireless and devoted in the courtship of your own imagination. I would ask you to nurture your friendships, your alligence with other human beings. If you feel grief or rage or love, give it a shape so that we as readers will know what you mean, and be able to better understand, better cope with the landscapes of our own grief and rage and love." (Barry Lopez, address to 2008 Whiting Award Winners)

---

links:
1. Lulled by the celebritariat - the end of the meritocratic ideal? [by Toby Young of "how to lose friends and alienate people," son of the author of "The Rise of the Meritocracy"] (@prospect uk)
2. Britney Returns. (@rolling stone)
3. I don't even know how I got to this page or what it is -- the linking page has receeded into the history -- but it's just really good so you should read it. (@johnny i hardly knew you)
4. The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. It's not like that movie anymore. (@portfolio)
5. Forty-somethings on Facebook (@forbes)
6. Authors like Elizabeth Gilbert, Nick Hornby, Geraldine Brooks, Melissa Bank tell what they want, what they're giving for the holidays: What to Give & What To Get (@penguin)
7. Chuck and Blair Going To The Movies (@emilymagazine)
8. Greatest Moments of George Bush's Speeches (@achtung baby)
9. The Perfect Workplace: "Jealous of your friend who gets massage at work? Yeah, we are too. Turns out that was just the beginning. As the business world races to merge the lost luxaries of the dotcom boom with the responsibility era, we construct the ideal workplace - Perfect, Inc. (@good magazine)
10. I have a lot of questions about this article, mostly that it seems almost like an encyclopedia entry than a trend piece: Making Artistic Careers Lucrative (@nytimes)
11. Sparkly, Sticky and Creative Art Supplies - the gift finder 2008 (@nymag)
12. Five ways Obama Has Already Changed Washington (@the daily beast.)

---

[This week's insomnia poem has been assembled from random lines pulled from my Diaryland entries, spanning August to October of 2000.]

Diaryland Insomnia Magnetic Poetry 2K
Love is How It's Lost, Not How it's Found

Tomorrow,
I am not going to monkey class.

My Mom says my intense fear of the phone,
sweating, etc, is all related to "generalized anxiety."
Is anxiety generally ruling my life?

I mean, I want to have sex, but I don't want to get laid.

This whole campus is horny and drunk, or playing on their computers.
I wonder about all these people.
They confuse and bewilder me.

I had yoga this afternoon.
I already knew the downward dog though,
always two feet ahead.

Apparently, last night, someone peed on Sarah.
And this kid with too many earrings threw up a lot.
And two more people had sex.
I, on the other hand, was rushing.
IT'S ALL RICH WHITE GIRLS.
I quit. Boring, shallow.

I missed the Death Cab for Cutie show on monday
'cause I couldn't think of a single soul that would wanna go with me
except maybe Samara,
but I couldn't call her, 'cause I'm afraid of the phone.

I DON'T FIT IN
and this doesn't embarrass me anymore.

I have friends that don't make any sense,
and a couple who do.

Billy Blanks told me I could do anything if I reached into my soul
and grabbed the piece of me with power.
Even if I'm tired, I can still do it, he said, and I am tired,
so I slept all day.

I'll never get over tea or lights.

I think Al Gore is cute, but if I ever liked him,
a pretty girl would steal him from me.
She wouldn't even know that I liked him.

For the past two nights I've seen Sandra Bullock romantic comedies.
I sit on my bed and it's right at the foot of my bed and
for some reason, I really like that.

That year, Anna dressed as a frog with two little styrofoam eyeballs
on her forehead. I thought that was so cool.
I wanted eyeballs like that too.

The best Halloween was when we did Peter Pan.
I think my Dad was Captain Hook, and Lewis was Peter Pan.
I was Tinkerbell.

I cannot surrender to a moment.

I think some things are just extinct.
++

Ultimately, I Burned the Popcorn.

Best excerpt so far from the book containing all my Diaryland entries from 2000 (I was looking for a detail I needed for my occasionally truth-based novel):

"My brother said that I don't like automatic anything. Like I don't like the auto air conditioning setting on the Bravada that allegedly adjusts the SUV temperature to what is considered ideal. I don't use cruise control either 'cause it scares me. I try to pretend that the little knob that turns the car from neutral to drive is my stick shift, even though I don't have the patience to learn stick. I used the automatic popcorn function on the microwave last night and it made me very nervous. Microsoft Office is automatically correcting my spelling, grammar and other typos, and it's really, really annoying. Not comforting at all, like some other recent technological advances.

It's raining super hard. I drove halfway home with no windsheild wipers, which I thought would be cool, but it was really just stupid.

I am ruled by fear and apprehension."

(August 27th, 2000)

i've seen the worst of you too: auto fun of the day 9.12.2008

[david bicho]

---

quote: "the greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. we are at our most honest when we are lost." (kierkegaard)

---

links: [I think every time I do auto-fun, I will personally implore you to read one of these links regardless of how you think you might feel about it. this time, it's number 7.]
1. mostly i am excited to hear about the heartbreak and hardships: tila tequila don't work right. (@fourfour)
2. "There is no negotiating with insomnia — you are at the mercy of your brain’s whims, like a pregnant vegetarian who finds herself eating slices of bologna slathered in jam": jessica cutler'strouble sleeping? read insomniac. (@the smart set)
3. holler j-beals: top ten sex scenes involving food (@nerve.com)
4. the sixty-day war: with one hastily made decision, john mccain upended the presidential race. an investigation of the bloody new political realities. (@nymag)
5. i knew it! talking is good; too much talking may not be: adolescent girls are totally talking like way too much -- "the term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem ... it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say." (@nytimes)
6. i didn't actually read this, but adam, maybe you will: over my dead body (@n+1)
7. i will forever remain faithful: how lil wayne helped me survive my first year teaching new orleans (@oxford american)
8. re: dream house ... decorating with books. (a bunch of links @bookslut)
9. fragments from palin! the musical (@mcsweeny's)
10. what makes people vote Republican? (@the edge)
11. the many faces of sarah palin! including the vlog! (@wired)

---

insomnia poem #13

remember when i used to sit alone
in my room all night
alone
i mean it i could write and write
riding a spaceship of dark cave and starlight
alone

the first rule of autowin club is
don't talk about bliss or
you'll knock it right over.

the second rule is
alone is the new multiplication
see: it's more, not less.
double the me, double the auto-fun
girl why don't you run

i used to like going to sleep before you
and waking up to hear about what i'd written
the night before
like maybe you'd read it
before i did
like you knew about me
before i knew about me
like time travel, which i love
and also doves
seem like nice birds

speaking of birds when i was a kid
i'd make lewis play pretend with me
we were birds, our nest a trampoline
you know
a place to feed and sleep and care
and by that i mean
a place to bounce
a place to flounce
a place to fly

what i mean is
i think i confused
home
with jumping

alone.

Sunday Top Ten: Automatic Fundamentals/Look At You, You're Growing Old So Young

I was thinking about a Sunday Top Ten and ten hours later I was knee-deep in the cyber-quicksand created by switching topics every five minutes, trying to escape via creating a New Topic that'd encompass All Failed Topics. A-ha!: 'TOP TEN THINGS I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT." I asked myself "is that the best you can do?" Then, myself said: "Yes, it is."

[Yes, it is: a conversation between me and memememememe.] [It was maybe two years ago or thereabouts when she drew me a diagram on scrap paper to explain to me the "me" and "not me" -- the stack-sullivan psychoanalytic theory of selective inattention. good me, bad me, not me. she was explaining to me how, exactly, I'd managed to rationalize talking my way out of accepting responsibility for being an asshole.]

So I'm just gonna ramble. Ramblerambleramble.

Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme Morons

I saw Gimme Sugar. It's a new show about lesbians. The topic is: "Lesbians are pretty!" The sub-topic: "Much like straight people on scripted reality teeevee shoes, lesbians can also drink too much and talk about nothing." The girl who narrates sounds just like Jackie Warner. It's the "scripted reality voice-over voice."

I'd like to corral the writers of Gimme Sugar and the creators of Tila Tequila into a dark cave with The Iliad, The Bible, Mediated and "All Aboard!".

The thing is ... Gimme Sugar isn't even terrible/awesome. It's just terrible. After-Ellen thinks so too. I'm not sure why I care so much about the portrayal of women -- and queer women in particular -- in the media, but I do. I care deeply. AE says, and I agree, that basically if you're already into [other, hetero-based] shows that involve "seeing young people doing nothing and clubbing and coming up with bad business ideas" then you'll like this show.

Speaking of sugar, this weekend the woman brought us breakfast and announced the contents of the tray in great detail: "splenda, sweet & low, equal," etc. Everyone in Atlantic City says: "good luck!" 'cause they're counting on the gamble. We didn't know how to gamble [at games], we just thought the city itself seemed like a funny place to go. But we got lucky, and had good luck.

My first love [of all trump cards: "first"? of all first things: love] wore those jeans with "Lucky You" on the fly. In case we got there, and I forgot.

*
Taking Back the Internet: Last Week's Topic of Cyber-Talk

I don't know. We're/it's young, we're cyber-tadpoles -- still lightyears away from universal broadband access or a "worldwide" network that can provide all people worldwide w/high-speed uncensored content. There's problems with overexposure and conspicuous anonymity, the tipping balance between emotional withdrawal and frightening investment. Our backs hurt, our eyes burn, our wrists hurt. But everything has pros and cons. [Howevs, it'd be a 100% tragedy for interwebs users to inadvertently lose deep reading skills.] We live in a world where too much ice cream makes you fat. Just think about that.

*
"What the future might bring, Heaven only knew.
Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease.
High battlements of thought; habits that had seemed durable as stone went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it."
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando
*

I think we're still figuring it out. It's like when the cavemen first discovered fire. And Caveman #1 was like; "wtf why is my toe burning off?" and Caveman #2 was like; "OOOO all warmed up for the winter season!" Now, a bajillion years later, we know how to use fire responsibly, more or less. See what I mean? We're still figuring out how to keep warm without burning ourselves.

I like Emily and Keith and Tracie. I don't like Perez or TMZ or their collective insistence on permeating relevant spaces frequented by those of us who don't care.

Also, I like that the internet has enabled strong global grassroots networks like Students for a Free Tibet, smart pop culture commentary like fourfour and helpful gadgets & resources like MapQuest and Bartleby. I like when I read articles worth recommending. And poems.

I think, w/r/t Gimme Sugar and The Internet, that we've got to do our best to keep our fictions scripted. Also, we'll keep our realities improvised, and work with wherever we naturally attract reflection/attention, rather than attention for attention's sake.

In the future, we may find that the internet was invented in response to the hefty portion of the population who are simply more comfortable/eloquent when communicating via written words rather than spoken ones.

I think you can divide people into two categories: people who're content to live within anything that'll fit within (even just barely) the status quo, and people who'd like to change it. The first category also includes people who've chosen instead to live in the past, or recreate it in fear.

*
The Long and Winding Road

I've traveled a lot this year. I was asked: "Do you guys think it's possible you're running away from something, maybe?" and I answered, "Obviously." I'd like a short & happy life, like Francis Macomber's, or a Short & Wondrous one like Our Friend Oscar, running could be involved. But really it's that we prefer fun to not-fun. We try to have fun. Okay, okay, it's Tinkerbell. She's a diva.

Don't get confused, I'm still only somewhat employed and owe Visa a baby or two. The rest is semantics or logistics --

Speaking of numbers, I missed Four -- me, Caitlin, Alex, Haviland -- and now my friend is back on this side of the country. Briefly, but here. Shortly, happily, wondrously.

So many things can go wrong when you're traveling, like our unexpected pullover en route to the airport to fly to The House of the Mouse -- we barely made it to the flight.

But this weekend we went to Atlantic City and we weren't surprised when they said our hotel was overbooked, since ridic snafus are our collective travel-fukù and we were prepared to pop a cot and then take a morning swim w/asbestos at the Seaside Motel [later this experience could become a rich source of anecdotes, in-jokes and makes-life-worth-it-style laughter] --- but the desk-woman tells us how the problem's been solved: we're being moved to a better hotel ... for free.

Again, that assumption about gambling. Really, we're just amused by anything that's heavily thematic -- lit up by bells & whistles & glitter & graffics and big laminated promises in disguise as the Queen of Hearts/Spades.

Then Caitlin totally WON big-time at the slot machines -- waiting for me and Alex she just stuck a nickel in and gave it a go, like to kill time and -- Magic! Later that day, an escalade took an illegal left in front of us, like that shit that happens all the time in the city and you almost die and then somehow you get a ticket for someone else's mistake 'cause you've got expired plates ... and he got pulled over!

Also, we saw Melissa Etheridge. They surprised me with it and got away with it 'cause Caitlin pointed out that she never asked for anything, so asking me to put some pep in my step for an 8 PM fireworks show wasn't much to ask-- even though I insisted it was still totally light out and we can't miss the fireworks, they're in the sky.

Anyhow, the ploy worked and we were on time for The Eth. The lesbos sang our little hearts out for every window we've ever screamed at, bare and wide-open. We listened to the gauzy-voiced acoustic assurance that sometimes love means following someone around until you've lost all your fellow travelers. Pretense-free, open-air I feel my feelings. She carved out her heart in the 90's, left it on the doorstep of a recording studio and then ran -- a prank played in the game of falling apart -- and we got to see her hold that heart in front of her face and then sing through it. Amazing.

Happy independence day!

"When I first heard "Like the Way I Do" in 1988, I had no idea that Melissa Etheridge was gay, and I thought she gave voice to us obsessive, neurotic women who long to be this direct and obvious about the neediness we feel for the men in our lives ... perhaps the joyfulness that I feel seething, overbrimming from so much lesbian music, even when it is at its most heartbreaking, has to do with the simple fact that just to have the courage to find a voice to sing with in the context of societally censored desires means that anything you say, no matter how depressing the thought, will never come across as completely dispirited."
-Elizabeth Wurtzel, "The [Fe]male Gaze."
*
dear good me & bad me & not me & also me & mememe, sincerely anonymous
or "the babies were only water balloons."

What if from now on I made my blog into a retroactive game of self-indulgence. I provide excerpts from my past diaries for the present date in different years. You match the lines to the years and if you're right, you win the next book club book.

July 7th Throughout the Years, Compiled on Monday July 7th, 2008:
[Options: 1986 (age 4) , 1991 (age 9) , 1996 (age 14), 1997 (age 15), 1999 (age 17), 2000 (age 18), 2002 (age 20), 2003 (age 21), 2006 (age 24), 2007 (age 25)]
[Names have been abbreviated when appropriate]

1/Michigan: "I feel like we'll never truly connect 'cause Chris's 100% un-interested in what art has to offer him as a human being. He likes things cut and dry. He wouldn't like my writing, because he never reads, he's detached completely from literature. His scope is narrow. I'm afraid he'll try to compare his career goal to be a vet to my writing. It's not just my Top Interest, it's How I Think."

2/Boston-->Michigan: "Today we drove for five hours and we finally came home. I saw Anna first, but we had nothing to say. My room had hebrew posters all over the walls and all my animal posters except for three were gone! My drawers were broken, and there was mold in the teapot, yuck! The people who lived in our house weren't very neat! The toddler scribbled in Lewis's books. We had homemade pizza for din-din."
3/New York: "When E has the nerve to go off at me, I say-- 'It doesn't matter, I'm leaving!' E says -- 'You're not leaving soon enough.' So now -- I am. Now. I'm in the airport, going. I feel like Marc's going-away party was mine, too, not 'cause the people cared/knew about me leaving, but 'cause it's the end of something. An era. But M said, 'You're the guest of honor's special guest.'"

4/Australia:" "It was hilarious to bring these grungy surfer boys into a nice restaurant. Clinton insisted we go back to the hotel so he could experience the sauna and they'd left their bags and surfboards there. They went swimming. We took pics, they listened to our music, we talked. Jeremy made fun of our accents a lot. They go to raves at night. Clinton is 17, he dropped out of school to work in a Toyota Factory. Jeremy's 15. We have their addresses, thank god."

5/Michigan: "We made our certificates and then we decorated the knight in armour. Then we rescued the baby from the dragon. And after that we played a kind of hide and seek and some people pretended they were he dragons and some pretended they were persons who catch the dragons. The babies were only water balloons. our mommies or our daddies came and we had cake and ice cream after we had cake and ice cream we went home the end."

6/New York: "I don't know what to do, if there's anything that I even can do. It's terror. I feel powerless."

7/Michigan: "no cherry bombs, no sparklers, black cats, etc this 4th. u know, explosions -- go america. Scot took my car to canada and left me a love note. life has been up and down. absolutely unbearable, sometimes absolutely pleasant. i present the "every other day theory": one day he's delightful, the next day he balances it out by being a dick."

8/At Sea: "It's difficult to open myself up to another strong connection w/a friend this year, I feel so exhausted by last year's. I don't know if she really communicates honestly with me about when or if I bother her. She seems both set in her ways and not argumentative. Is it because we click so well, or is it 'cause she doesn't ever want to talk about what's really going on?"

9/Michigan: "Yesterday went to a whack party, talked to AG 4eva. It was weird, like a punk rock show, I don't dig that scene. At the start it made me depressed to be there. It was fresh as hell that I got to drive home though. Well, not home. To L's. Today MR and I watched Altman's Nashville, saw Casablanca at the top of the park, Amanda came just to see me! Wowsers ... I had a freaked out dream about Interlochen."
10/Michigan: "Tonight, Mr. D told me he thought I looked about 10 pounds less than I did when he last saw me. He asked me if I was okay. The doctor told me I was too skinny and asked if I'd been losing weight. All these comments make me happy. I wish none of this had ever started. I wonder why my Mom is letting me go sometimes. I wonder if I'd let my 17 year old daughter move to the same city that Son of Sam is about."

---

11.
Today I wrote this, and went to bed, and thought, holy shit, I talk a lot of whack hands down totes crazy. Will I ever learn to speak the grammar?
Stay tuned!
*
[all photos by julia fullerton-baten]
*
So, guess: match the number with the correct year, win a prize! The Dear Diary Award, very special.