this blog post is 2,836 words long, all the words are true

[I think I accidentally wrote this because of Freedom, where Jonathan Franzen manages to make every single detail of every character's life seem necessary just because it was lived and therefore has meaning, but I'm not Jonathan Franzen, so maybe it'll be terrible. But I wrote it, so you know. HERE]

I am moving to San Francisco at the end of the month, for abstract and possibly impulsive/illogical reasons. I have no plan.

My last trip to San Francisco was in 2000, the summer everybody left everybody else, including me. It was the summer I felt fucked for no reason and kept traveling distances to watch other people fight. Mostly they fought about how it's hard to love people and be far away from them, or how it's hard to love people and watch them change into a person you don't recognize, which I think happens like a year after high school, maybe, or maybe it keeps on happening.

First up was running away from Manhattan, where I'd just finished up an NYU photography class and was waitressing at the Olive Garden in Times Square. I chose to leave suddenly, like the indifferent, fragmented, endlessly needy but cold-as-fuck person that I was. I just haven't really ever not known what I wanted more than I didn't know that summer.

It was June, maybe 2 am, when I waved at the doorman of our midtown post-work haunt (I'd befriended the owner's son, who'd sent me some mediocre love poems and earned me the eternal devotion of his employ, regardless of my age) and walked, uncertainly dressed in platform sandals and a brown sunddress that made my legs look good, back to Mike's going away party. Mike, the 27-year-old law student I'd been sleeping with since February, was headed to L.A. for the summer for no discernible reason. He was perversely delighted by our collective disapproval of this decision.

High drama was underway: Jen, another server, had baked a cake for Mike and also confessed her longtime crush on him. So she was crying next to this cake we were scared to eat. Mike was on a rampage, inspired by Jen's friend Steve asking Mike to be kinder about rejecting Jen. For example, the "YOU? HELL NO!" was unnecessarily cruel. This only enraged Mike further: "Fuck you guys! FUCK. YOU. GUYS. I dunneedyou! New Olive Garden, all new friends, alllll new women!"

I thought, I'm sleeping with someone who just said NEW OLIVE GARDEN!

I'd probably cried 5-10 times in front of Mike already but that night I was the calm, embarrassed/horrified babysitter, all crossed eyebrows & arms. On our way out, Mike spun on his heels, grabbed the hand of the new young pretty OG girl and stuck his tongue down her throat. They kissed for two mortifying minutes, I stuffed him in a cab and he remembered nothing the next day. Being with Mike felt like a claymation fistfight in slow motion, like a game of "How Low Can You Go?", where the winner must completely evacuate vast reserves of self-worth.

Mike left for the airport and I trotted back to my apartment where I was greeted by the ballistic face of my psychotic pseudo-beatnick roommate Evan. Gorey-like, the elongated tool of his mouth and eyes dashed at me from all corners, screaming about my BLOWDRYER being PLUGGED IN (apparently a primary cause of unexpected house fires) and also about his IMPORTANT VOICE MAILS from AUDITION PEOPLE which I'd COMPLETELY ERASED like a person with no RESPECT.

After that pissing contest I decided to move out the next day instead of staying for the summer. I moved swiftly about my mess & boxes like a swan out of hell. I quit my job and scheduled a flight back to Michigan.

I bid adieu to my Oklahoma-bred gay best friend from boarding school, Hayden, who I'd moved to Manhattan with from Sarah Lawrence and who'd let Evan move into Our Apartment under false pretenses. Hayden was obsessed with Evan's obvious gay crush on Hayden, though Hayden didn't really want to fuck Evan. Hayden had hated my relationship with Mike, I had hated Hayden's relationship with cocaine and Evan. We were at silent odds.

Hayden was my "other half." We'd been obsessed with each other for three years. We pawed, held, cried, saved, even fucked (we'd decided having sex would make us as close as possible, adding a physical element to the emotional and what we perceived to be a "supernatural" bond between us) -- we could barely breathe without the other. Friendships like that don't last into adulthood, because you should know better by then.

Later that summer, Evan would try to kill Hayden with a broom. In September, Hayden would move to a Navajo reservation and I would start school at the University of Michigan, where I transferred from Sarah Lawrence because I didn't know what the fuck I was doing and thought the in-state tuition was better suited to this kind of indecision.

I hugged Hayden like I might see him again in a few months. We'd never been apart much longer than that.

I never saw Hayden again.

+

I carried a barrel of anxiety/neediness in my stomach then. It was gigantic, it could swallow plants, but I also tried to keep it hidden by not talking too much. Then before you knew it you were knee-deep in my fucking barrel.

I was like a girl who wanted to be trampled on and was just looking for the right trampler. My personality was up for grabs -- first come, first serve.

+

I booked a handful of West Coast trips to fill Michigan's endless numbered days 'cause almost as soon as I got home, I started going nuts, and there wasn't enough time to get a new job before school started. My brother and I were silent fighting about our own self-loathing, my Mom was dating a track coach who's son had sold her a ton of Cutco Knives.

I felt like the protagonist in one of those popular late 90s films about sad people w/nice houses. I'd be watching TV but would feel like I was standing at attention in an empty carpeted room, staring out the window, vacuum cocked in my right hand like a machine gun.

Nothing happened. My friends were out of town. Nothing to think about but the past; which I hadn't enjoyed too much at the time. Or the future, which made my stomach hurt.

You might notice that nothing was wrong, really. Like I didn't have any "problems."

+

I'd spend a week in Berkeley with my old friend Magali and another in Seattle, coinciding with my friend Genna's trip out there, to visit our friend Sabri. Genna & Sabri were boarding school friends. I can't believe I traveled so far to be around people I loved. It was unlike me.

Seattle was pleasant -- we went raspberry picking, made a lot of complicated meals, went to a museum or two, took an overnight jaunt to Vancouver where we fell in love with the city, and also, for one drunken night in a restaurant we couldn't afford with big windows overlooking the water, fell back in love with our friendship.

But also Sabri & Genna, who'd been best friends like small beautiful turtles, were having the first falling-out of their friendship for reasons including Genna's disappearances to meet up with her boyfriend and Sabri having read Genna's diary.

I was stuck between Genna & Sabri and their fight, but I wouldn't take sides. They'd been these little rabbits, see. Like little animals joined together, like Hayden and I had been. They were both short, and Sabri was a designer-clad Indian and Genna a pale redhead who preferred Value Village but they had this special thing that made them seem identical.

Now they hated each other and I didn't know anyone anymore. That's how it seemed.

+

Mike emailed me: i'm gonna get a local exchange # so it's cheaper for my many ho's to call me. so, speaking of ho's, I've already had a date. Yep. going back out with her tonight. she's sweet, but not as sweet as you. as i remember when i first met you you put up this 'facade' :) of how you really are. a bunch of bullshit. you are truly a nice genuine person. see the good things i say about you?

+

"Sooooooo I'm a total pothead now," Magali told me when she picked me up a the San Francisco airport.

"Magali, guess what? I actually want to smoke pot right now," I said. I never wanted to smoke pot.

"Really? Ooo, this is so exciting!" she smiled. Magali was warm and sunny and optimistic and my time with her was serene, but distant 'cause I thought she could tell that I was changing into a person who might try and "fit in" at the University of Michigan when classes started in September. Selling out, like Ani had told us not to do.

I also knew she hated Mike, for example, and hated my fixation on him as I had no explanation for liking him besides that I was needy.

We saw the Indigo Girls, smoked pot from Magali's sister's Oregon farm, took hikes in boots & shorts and went to museums and mostly I thought about how crazy it was that I'd always had the upper hand in our friendship despite Magali always being infinitely cooler. She spoke three languages, eschewed leg-shaving and other patriarchal beauty institutions, kissed boys and girls, made perfect mix-tapes and sewed fabric into her bellbottoms to make them baggier. I guess I made her laugh.

But then things got bad, just like with Genna and Sabri, because Magali's ex-boyfriend Joe had illogically decided to visit her and she didn't like him anymore. His need made her cranky.

Mike called and said I should fly to LA from SF to see him. And so I did. In LA, things were already sad because Lana, an Olive Garden friend, had decided to also visit LA that week to see Gerard, a friend of Mike's who she'd fucked a few times. She'd also fucked Mike and two of their other friends. I hated hearing Mike and Gerard talk about Lana, like she was a hamburger they'd both eaten. I felt bad for her because I thought the only thing that made her sex life different than mine was that she was really funny-looking and I was only kinda funny-looking and I had that one brown dress that made my legs look cute.

But Gerard had a new girlfriend now, Brittany, who was 16 and rode in the front seat of the van like a terrier, tucking her lanky tan legs beneath her and eschewing the seatbelt for an advantageous body position that enabled her to constantly keep tabs on the passengers facial expressions; like maybe she already knew she was dumb and wanted to make sure her new boyfriend's friends hadn't noticed yet.

"Hey uh, I told you I quit working at The Olive Garden, right?" Mike asked. He always started sentences with "I told you" or "Can I ask you something" and ended conversations with "Lemme go."

"Yup, three or four times, genius." I said.

He rubbed his knuckle into my ear; "Oh, how I've missed my Marie!"

Mike took me back to his place. I'd helped him pack to leave Brooklyn, so I don't know why his barren room surprised me.

"You couldn't even buy sheets?" I asked, staring at the bare mattress he'd dressed up with a pillow and that comforter I'd always hated.

We had sex. Afterwards he said that although he'd dated a lot of girls this summer, he'd missed 'my body,' which I took as a huge complement and rode it like a dream through everything that happened those next two days and big chunks of months afterwards, which would be some of the most numb and miserable and empty of my life.

I'd only planned to stay in LA for one night, 'cause Mike frequently stressed that he couldn't stand being around me for more than 48 hours at a time. When I called Magali to tell her I was staying an extra night, she seemed distracted and more than fine with it, but I felt guilty, like now she knew that I just wanted to be fucked, but also to complain about being fucked afterwards.

We traveled mostly as a group -- Mike, Gerard, another friend, Brittany, and Lana, who cried in the bathroom, messing up her makeup, while I tried abstractly to help her with problems that seemed insignificant compared to my self-loathing and World Hunger.

Mike was uniquely chivalrous at times, like taking sticker pictures with me at Venice Beach and telling me he loved me in a big brotherly voice. For a second it sounded like a fatherly voice, which scared me but not as much as it should have.

Mike said he had a cold and insisted on taking NyQuil for it.

"But you'll be sleepy! You'll sleep through our time together!"

"No I won't."

"But why take drowsy and not 'not-drowsy'?"

"Uh, because the drowsy kind works better? That's why it makes ya sleepy!"

After sake bombs at a strip mall sushi joint, more drinks at a club I'd gotten into with Lana's ID, and, once home (Lana spent the whole way back fighting with Gerard), a joint, Mike fell asleep on the floor. Everything felt trippy like I'd been dropped into the story of someone else's life; or rather like I'd flown myself right into someone else's life.

After Mike fell asleep, I wandered innocently back into the living room, where I was greeted by the unexpected sight of Lana's ankles on Gerard's shoulders and him fucking her like a jackhammer. I scampered back into the hallway, horrified, my head in my hands in the darkness thinking how the fuck did I get here. Lana was gasping, Mike was snoring, the dude was grunting, I was not yet crying but surely would be soon.

What the fuck, you asshole, I said to myself. Who are these people? How did you get here? I was stoned, they were fucking, he was an asshole but a passed-out asshole and who the what the how did my Mom let me go here. I met him at the goddamn Olive Garden. I'm a child, goddammit, I'm clearly unable to care for myself, will somebody please, please, please, please rescue me please just tell me what to do I'LL DO ANYTHING and what did I do with those thoughts, what did I do.

Well I drank the rest of the NyQuill and passed out into cherry-sticky sleep and flew back to Magali's, where she and Joe were at odds. She smoked maniacally and worried about me leaving her there with Joe. Just like I'd left Mike to pick up Lana's devastatingly lonely body the next morning and left Sabri with Genna's secret emotional breakdown and its walls. I'd left Hayden with Evan, and now here I was in this totally fucked place, and it was one of those moments, you know. When you realize you're fucked and you realize, I am a person who takes wrong turns, I am a person capable of gigantic miscalculations of spirit and personality, I am anybody really

+

Magali and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in early, dark, morning, flanked by cars headed to work. I told her that it looked beautiful out there and she agreed. She was taking me to the airport, and I didn't know if I was ready to leave or not. Surely I was ready to leave these people, but I wasn't ready to give up on mountains.

I'd seen cities that looked big enough for my needs -- Vancouver, where I wanted to live. San Francisco, where I wanted to live. Los Angeles, where I knew I'd always be visiting people. Seattle, which is a difficult place to complain about because everything seems fine there.

I came back numb, thinking only of the geography and not the people in it. I'd had a good time with the trees, I thought. I had a good time with that bridge. I wanted to be like Sweden, somewhere green where people never changed and always gave me what I'd come for; some place like my first two nights in Berkeley before Joe came, smoking and pouring cream in our cereal.

Maybe we'd emerged to announce who we'd become and then retreated into the new universes we'd been preparing for, alone. We had to tear each other apart in order to change without being sad all the time.

Really, I guess, it was a matter of who had the guts to scream NEW FRIENDS, NEW LIFE, NEW OLIVE GARDEN, NEW GIRLS into a crowded room. Who among us was willing to not only push people away in order to evolve and leave without dying, but to announce this intention to whomever is within earshot? It was better to pretend, after all, like we were just cranky, that it didn't mean anything bigger how selfish we were that year. Me too, including me.

There is a need, sometimes, to run away again, because it's just been so long since I've done it. It's just been so long since I've had a chance to leave, and sometimes I'm not sure what else I can do to show you how much I love you.

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.

+

+

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.

++
"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
++

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.

++
"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
++

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.

+

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?

+
"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)
+

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.

+

+

"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
+

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
+

++

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.

++

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)

The Year in Review 2008 [All I Know is That I Should]

Dear Dad,

I’m writing you from the airplane. It’s a really tiny jet, just one seat in my row and two across the aisle. On the right side (I’m on the left) you can see the sun setting across the whole wide world. There’s one solid line of burnt orange, sandwiched by a dark sheath of cloud and the earth below it. It’s pretty beautiful.

I had lunch with your Mom and Dad today. Grandma’s doing well, actually, better than I’d expected, maybe even better than she was a few years ago. Grandpa just sits in his chair, he doesn’t know what’s going on. We were having dinner yesterday, for Christmas – we still do our celebration on the 24th, but now on the 25th I'm flying instead of going to the movies like we used to do together -- and everyone was watching the babies play with their new toys and Grandpa says “Where am I?” and everyone ignored him. It was real quiet and maybe only I heard him. He says stuff like that all the time.

Anyhow we were watching the babies. Carrie and her husband have a boy, Kyle and his wife have a girl. I guess we always knew they’d be the first ones to do that.

Grandpa’s chair has a button on the arm-rest so he can lift himself up almost all the way into a stand. Sometimes you’ll just be sitting there and you’ll hear this buzzing – that’s the sound the chair makes when he’s pressing the button to go up. That’s how you know Grandpa wants to go somewhere.

Everyone helps him get up and then he gets on his walker and walks to the back of the house, then he gets confused and Grandma goes and takes him back to the chair. She takes care of him all the time. It’s something to do.

Anyhow, it was good to see them and see everyone – Mom, and your sisters and my cousins, and to spend time with Lewis. I guess you know what happened with S., I’m sure your sister told you about it, or maybe she didn’t. All the lies he told and what he took from her; his mother. One of the things I learned this year was that that kind of thing actually happens more than people think. You know – people make up lives and stories they like better than their true lives and stories. Sometimes they do it for love or money but usually they don’t even know why they do it, they just do it. Like how I don’t know why I sometimes get swallowed in darkness, it just happens and there I am with my eyes open but nothing around me seems light.

I wish I’d had the time to know you. Maybe what I mean is I wish you'd had the time to know me. I’m obsessed with you.

++

Last night we were talking about Obama and Aunt B said “You know I’d always wondered about your father, you know, like now with Obama -" and I said that I know you would’ve loved him. (Mom said that too, she called me the day after, she wishes you could’ve seen it happen. You know Aunt B went door to door in the whitest whitest parts of plain flat Ohio for Obama? She did that. And you should’ve heard Grandma talking shit about Palin Dad, you would’ve been so proud of your parents. (Grandma told me a story about when they first met my Mom, the first “Jewish person” they’d ever met, and Grandma made these potatoes wrapped in bacon, and Grandma Goldstein went apeshit? Amazing.)

Then Aunt B said, Oh no honey. I mean I wonder if your father would have been in the cabinet. I laughed like we were talking about spaceships or something. He was on track to be an economic advisor for Clinton’s second term, she said then. I probably laughed again. I mean still as I write this I feel like I’m writing lies too.

Uncle T said: At the funeral, strangers came up to me and said losing Vic is not just a loss to the accounting community and to U of Michigan and to Price Waterhouse but losing Vic is a loss to the world economy.

We talked for a little bit about that; you know, how you never told us anything. Top ten accounting researcher in the world, Lewis saying your study was material in an investments class he took in college. You never told us anything besides that your work was boring and we didn’t want to hear about it.

Maybe telling myself you quit while you were ahead was the only thing that got me through, so I’m going to say that I think they were bullshitting about that too. Everyone seems better in retrospect. I mean it’s over Dad so what can anyone really say?

++

Everyone always talks about how you were a genius. Does that mean I’m a genius too? Sometimes I feel really stupid, Dad.

++

Anyhow so I was going to tell you about 2008. It’s probably weird that I’m putting this on my blog. You get it though, you always knew this is what I’d be doing. When you and Mom started having me dictate my diaries to you before I knew how to write? You told me it mattered enough to write it down. Maybe that’s all I needed, maybe that’s why I guess you get this.

I hope so ‘cause everything I do, I do hoping you’d approve. It’s kinda difficult since you’re dead, I have to do a lot of guesswork.

++

Anyhow so 2008 was crazy. 2007 was crazy too but 2008 was a different kind of crazy. You're a good person to talk to about the years because it's your birthday. December 31st. You were born and then the new year started right away.

++

I’ve spent the last two years in other people’s fantasy worlds. I think that says something about my ability to accept the world as it is. It’s just that as it is; the world is sort of ugly and mundane and miracles don't happen every day. In the subway I look around me and see faces like paper plates. It’s just that I died when I was only 14. Fuck. I’m sorry. I mean that you died when I was only 14.

I’m obsessed with you, I like you so much, I talk to everyone but you. I pretend sometimes I couldn’t care less.

I've learned that I don’t have eternal life, that I haven't been chosen by some higher power to change the world, I'm the one with that choice, and speaking of the opposite of that I learned this year that I’m not truly able to jet to Malibu and drink cocktails and read novels by the pool all the time and over-tip and give everything to everyone who ever needs anything. It was fun though to believe those things. It was a time. We laughed and ran, like you did. Always running, laughing, always in the air going places.

I tell you Dad, I loved it. All the places I got to see. I’ll see anything. I feel like everything is interesting! Crossing that bridge at night in Austin, heat like a desert dressed up as an acoustic embrace.

The moment right before Austin I first saw my secret cyber-savior walk up the stairs to my stupid linoleum Harlem place and even though I was so nervous I was already high enough to not know what to say, and stayed nervous for weeks, and then how this year I nearly lost her like I lost you – I mean it Dad -- and how one day when we have that kind of vocabulary Dad? I’ll understand how much it meant that I didn’t. We didn’t lose her. Anyhow I was talking about flying.

The peace of the bed in Miami, alone when they went into town without me. Hiding from the world beneath those sheets, and the silver to eat with. I said, what do you want. I said, I have access to your happiness. I know someone who knows someone. I said I was a superhero. No one is but like I said anyway I was talking about flying. The thing about flying is all you see. You can see for miles, sandwiched in that hot orange place between earth and sky.

I went to a lot of places, which is funny ‘cause in ’07 I never went anywhere at all, just to Philly, and out to the hospital and out to see her family in the suburbs. ’08 is the first time I’ve traveled for the sake of traveling since you died.

Right after you died, we tried to go on vacation without you but it wasn’t the same so we stopped trying at some point. It wasn't anyone's fault, it's just we were reminded. Grandma mentioned Hawaii, she still remembers the food on the airplane. That's the farthest away your parents have ever been from home, because you took them there.

++

In 2008, I tried to fix the biggest hole that’s ever been dug in my heart since you’ve died and for a lot of reasons, I failed. So I just have to let that hole sit there, un-fixed, and do what I can to tread efficiently and productively on the fissures. I am figuring out how to see it and feel it and say: that's okay, I can go on.

I’ve found some wells of happiness. I sometimes sit at the bottom, splashing and happy as a clam.
I mean it. Eyes like saucers, blue and open to anything, even me.

I had a really brilliant June and July. A solid January full of hope. Some of February. Oh ... some of all of it.

I can’t really say anything more about that part of my life because something else I learned this year is that when I write things down, I make them true – permanent at least – so I try not to do that to things that are still happening. I don’t want to fuck with time and space. I mean that I do – I do want to fuck with time and space. What I learned this year is that I actually cannot do that. All I have is this time, my little space. Insert myspace joke here.

I think I’m more confident now than I was, even if I don't deserve to be. Remember how I kept getting fired? I was the worst. Not all of us were put here to work, Eileen Myles says: “Why can’t I just act that way. why can’t I write everything down like my life counts, like I’m the Queen of England or Bobby Vee, and that way I can be safe and not have to wait to die ... why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work.”

Actually I think we are all sent here to work, it’s just different kinds of work.

Anyway Dad I was talking about flying and in that burnt orange space I need to tell you that anyway I have this hope that people are gonna come to me when they oughtta. I gotta believe that things are gonna work out somehow and that all choices in retrospect become good ones because they are true and if something is true it must be good. Anyway I was saying honesty is a real bitch.

I want to be more self-reliant because when I hand the wheel over to someone else, I’m not even like a backseat driver. I just recline and stare at the stars and wait to become infinite.

Like you; infinite.

++

I have some really good friends you’d really love, I’ve always been blessed with good friends. When I fall to pieces they’re there. When THEY fall to pieces they’re there. Like angels. They aren’t angels because no one is angels but they are very similar. There are some people I love with a deep, radiating love, a love so strong it transcends logic but not in a crazy way, just in a super-love way. Like the way superheroes love other superheroes after they’ve lost their powers.

I have really amazing readers who do crazy things for me! It’s so awesome, I think you’d be kinda proud of me sometimes.

I’m living with someone I love and I love our apartment and being here with her. I get scared just writing that, I always jinx good things.

"Listen, my truest love.
I've tried to clear a late century place for us
in among the shards.
Lie down, tell me what you need.
Here is where loneliness can live
with failure,
and nothing's complete.
I love how we go on."
(Stephen Dunn, “Loves”)
++

So anyhow. I’m still writing and editing videos. Still scraping by. Still have all kinds of debt I know you’d hate. I think you wrote the book on how to avoid that. I still rely too much on substances to make me feel anything other than this. “Not me” is what all those pills and drinks should be called. I’ll just have a “not me on the rocks.” But Dad I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon, so I’m gonna figure out how to better live with it.

I guess that’s the thing – accepting things as they are. Accepting discomfort and making a life anyhow. I want to start my own magazine online so I’m going to do that, alone I guess, starting real soon I hope, I’m getting ready. Or not, I mean. I was talking anyway about flying. One time we went running together, you and me. One time in Orlando she jumped on the grass, one-two-jump-on-three. Everything was beautiful and perfect. It’s just that I rarely let go. I let go a lot last year and this year. I was dropped too, but first I opened up to like ... I dunno. Joy? Comfort? I just always felt like if first I had the help to jump, I could fix something. Just I want to help the world get better. God, I mean, that’s so pretentious. Who am I, no one. But that’s the thing who cares? I’m no one but if everyone is who is no-one wants to help the world get better than surely we’ll all make a difference like by default.

I think I have some things to say and I’m hoping there are people willing to listen. I know the economy has crashed – which probs made your head explode, how avoidable that whole thing was – but we have a new president who you’d like. Hope and that.

I feel optimistic right now, who knows how I’ll feel in five minutes. I feel sad right now, I wish I could die tomorrow and I hate myself for a selfish wish. I feel so happy, I feel so beautiful, I feel ugly, I feel terrific, I feel whatever the fuck ever, who cares. Enough feeling ... I'm hoping to act on that.

I love how we go on.

Anyhow, I just wanted to let you know what’s been going on. I know you’ve been worried. I keep trying.

You two were so close, your Mom said to me. You two were glued together. You were just two peas in a pod.

++
later:

So, you, it’s Christmas. I’m writing you now from my bed, it’s been several hours since I was on the plane. My friend picked me up from the airport, I had champagne and we talked about how things are better in a lot of ways since last year, and how there’s nothing else to do but go up. Okay, so we didn’t say that about going up exactly but that was what was said. We will. What I mean is we try to predict the future, which is boring 'cause it's never true, so in the meantime we can play infinite. Anyway I was talking about flying.

I made some bad choices this year, you know. But I grew and keep on.

My number one feeling is dancing. My number two feeling is:

I love the past, which doesn't exist
until I summon it, or make it up,
and I love how you believe
and certify me by your belief,
whoever you are, a fiction too,
held together by what? Personality?
Voice? I love abstractions. I love
to give them a nouny place to live,
a firm seat in the balcony
of ideas, where music plays.
(Stephen Dunn, Loves)
++

I just want to live like music.

I'm still trying to reach you.


As Ever,
All my Love,
Ree

VLOG-Year in Review: Don't You Worry There's Still Time

Hey weirdos! Happy New Year! I thought I'd finish six months of the YIR pre-2008, but now it's the 31st, and I'd rather end the year with a post containing less apocalyptic undertones. So, I made a little Year in Review video. You're probs out on the town, causing ruckus and mayhem, and therefore unable to view this fine feature immediately on your sidekicks -- actually I feel like everyone I know is throwing a party. Like, who's gonna be left over to go to the parties if everyone is throwing their own party? Also, what about the band 'The Party'? They were really good. Hey, speaking of parties, you're gonna have a party in your pants when you see the new Autostraddle post about Episode One of Season Five, "LGB Tease," Lamest Godforsaken Bunk Title ever. I may or may not have seen this particular episode (not on ourchart, because I was at Carly's Big Effin Holiday Dinner last night with a bunch of homosexuals on their iphones playing Manhunt), and by that I mean "I may."

So, 2007: yeah, that happened. On a scale of one to ten, though it kept kicking our formidable asses, 2007 did not entirely blow. Bad shit happened, but I think everything's gonna be okay you guys, totally, no worries. So-- thank you. All of you. And those of you I found here, of course: Cait, Tara, Kim, Lozo, Carly, Alex/Semicolon, Stef, Crystal, Rachel, Caitlin, and many many many more. Thanks everyone for reading, and everyone who's emailed or talked to me or Hav or any of us, you know, whomevs. Whomevs you found here and whatevs you found here and also. also. also. I know it sounds cheesy as fuck, but it touches the hell out of me when I learn that something you experienced here helped you feel less alone in the world in some way, somehow. Knowing you were listening has helped me immensely, too. Rock on. I live in Planet Harlem, where people yell at each other really loudly at all hours and most of the time there are 6-8 crazy people standing on the block yelling into megaphones about the klan and Power -- I don't live in Brooklyn where everyone hides their feelings behind bangs and sunglasses that they purchased precisely for the purpose of showing their real feelings, so I'm allowed to say ridiculous gross sentimental things sometimes. 'Cause it could be worse, I could have a flier about it. Bla bla bla. Me. Me. Me. blablatypetypememmeblabalmemeememem. ... and then we emerged, to see the stars again. (thanks)

Sunday Top Ten: Each From Different Heights, Who Saved Me From Suicide This Week

The "T" Key is broken again. So is my soul. However, I have not jumped out the window or stopped using words with "T"s in them. You know what that's called? Inner strength. Know where I learned that? R&B/Hip-Hop, especially Beyonce.

This's one of the worst Sunday Top Tens ever written. Because I cannot possibly do any less than ten things at the same time right now, which means I can't do any of them well.

UPDATE: This post is a mess. However, I am not.

SUNDAY TOP TEN:
EVENTS OF THIS WEEK THAT HELPED ME STAY ON THIS SIDE OF THE OPEN WINDOW, WHICH I WILL ATTEMPT TO RELATE TO GAY PRIDE WEEK.
OR:

omg!!!! The "T" Key situation is driving me crazy. What if I wrote this whole post w/o Ts? And was just like "Figure it out, bitches, you know the alphabet, yeah? You know how words work?" But then I remembered I have international (that word really wanted to be "inernaional") readers who have a hard enough time reading my rambling whathaveyous. Seriously. I need o go o he apple sore asap.

There is a little dog on my bed. Oh. He just left. Sad. What a lark!

You know what? MySpace should have a category called "Damaged." I rejoined myspace. I like MySpace, it's cute. Try and find me, grasshopper.

10. My Friends

Y'all are totes hands down awesome. Also, I'd like to thank AIM for making our friendship possible. And thank you for taking that extra minute for yourself every morning to make sure you're pretty, otherwise we wouldn't be friends. Some of you are GAY and that's okay. I love gay people. That's why I'm excited about the cruise, which's so soon I'm getting tan just thinking about it. Wheeee! Love GAYS! I cannot wait for Susan Powter yoga, I need her to tell me how to become a warrior ASAP.

9. Depression Diet=Donuts and McDonalds

I recently lost much of my emotional and digestive capacities, and though I've always been a bit lanky, it's especially pronounced now. I had to purchase an actual belt and wear it every day, which's never been my habit. [People're often surprised that I don't own any: belts, earrings, necklaces, lube.]

"You look completely wrecked, to be honest with you."
-My Therapist

(Obvs I am speaking to her upside down with my legs hanging over the top of the chair which is not a Freudian couch, it's an actual armchair, so this's not how it's meant to be sat in, but I was too wrecked to be upright, obvs.)

It's ridiculously symbolic, the taking back of one's alloted space--"no, it's okay, you can have that air back now, I'll just take up less room"--into a bony shell of your formerly robust self. But the best part of Depression Diet?! When you finally DO acquire an appetite, you can eat whatevs you want because you're just so proud of yourself for eating at all! For example, I haven't had a donut for breakfast since I was like, 12. Until this week, when I had like; 12. Donuts are delicious. Howevs, donuts would be even better if Dunkin' Donuts could just hire one person with an IQ over 40. I don't want sugar in my coffee so cut it out!

They should hire more gay people. GAY people are smarter than other people, because they need to figure out how to have sex, it's not just like get on top, stick it in, bang-bang-bang, it involves either: a) passion and dexterity, b) fitting a large object into a way-too-small hole without causing rectal bleeding. Sorry but someone had to say it.

8. My Mom.

I love my Mom. She's awesome and helpful. Also, she's GAY! Here's my Mom and I at her gay wedding. We're clearly eyeing different cameras. I'm wearing all pink, because it was a gay wedding and pink is the color of The Gays. No one thought this was as funny as I thought it was, unfortunately.

7. Alcohol

I can't say enough about this particular substance. It's reliable and it's always there in a pinch. Some totally flawed studies in the 70s and 80s suggested that GAYS are more likely alcoholics, but if someone did some new less dubious studies with better sample sized populations, I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least a little true. I mean, it's really depressing sometimes to be ostracized by your friends and family and denied the same political rights as strais. I've been very lucky to live in a tolerant little bubble of Gay Pride, though, thanks guys. Personally, I'd find it depressing to be regularly rammed up the ass. But that's just my own personal thing, and I'm not a good sample size, so that's that.

6. Chris Pureka

K-Lilly (GAY!) turned me on to Chris Pureka (GAY!), who sings perfect sad GAY folk music about how we lose each other, feel about it afterwards, and think about it later. but we never explain why we treasure our secrets we're in love with our sadness sometimes. I honestly don't know what I'd do without Chris Pureka. I put my ipod ibuds in my ears and she cries straight into my brain-cage. She validates me.

5. My T-Mobile Dash.

I haven't really figured out how to use it yet, but it looks really neat. It's everything I've ever wanted in a phone: a full keyboard, internet, and larger than a GAY fetus. I don't like small phones, as I've said before, because they remind me of my iPod and I don't wanna be all like "Hello? Prince?"

4. Going Out to NATION: Actually, Not So Bad.

Saturday night: Washington Square Park, an hour past dusk, met up w/Tara-D and her crew of GAYS. Split off from the Under-21s and went to GAY night at Nation. I've mentioned before that I despise Nation, as it is never fun. However: we had fun.

During a breakup, your priorities get shifted quickly. Emotional survival is your only task, really, which's why I spent the entire Summer of '03 playing 'The Sims." You're just trying to stay in the green, you know? Fun skyrockets, and the best way to enable fun is to drink as much as you can without dying. Tara, Vicky and I met up with Carly and we drank, danced [I only "dance" when drunk and/or alone and/or I think no one's watching], talked.

The music wavered somewhere between decent and fantastic, and pure, uncomplicated fun was had. SoCo and lime shots, like kids on vacation. As if we are not adults, as if life is not quite so serious as all this. All action, no head, like a Zen superhero, like your first time flying.

Nation employs these whore-ish girls to dance on the bars. One of 'em's ass cheeks were hanging out and then all this money came out of her shirt, like money was flying in the air, and I took it. That came in handy later when some whore-ish someone stole Tara's bag. I won't talk about that though, because it was depressing.

3. The Best Moment of My Life So Far: Sunday Night Dance Fever

After dinner at Vinyl, we [Carly and her friends Stuart & Matt, and obvs me] venture, full o' Pride, to Posh, a GAY Bar for homosexual men who like to have sex with other homosexual men, often via asshole.

My face still hurts from laughing at Stuart's story of last year's "Himalayan Hunter" Halloween costume (told during dinner) which involved a thong, a lot of feathers and very serious boots but most importantly: actually changing his skin tone via three day fake-baking/spray-tanning regiment. He took three days off of work to develop the proper skin tone for his Himalayan Hunter Halloween costume. I kept thinking: would someone've been like "You know, if you'd been just a tad whiter, I woulda thought Deer Hunter. But that orange glow just gives you away!"

I've been here, I think, as our quartet approaches the throngs of men in tank tops and cargo shorts. The boys at Posh look like frat boys, but with expensive hair gel and shinier muscles, and once inside I remember: I lost my cell phone here, '01: Happy Hour after a lunch shift at the Olive Garden. I remember telling James I'd never talked to the new girl, Karen, because I was intimidated by how pretty she was, and he said, but you're the most beautiful girl at The Olive Garden. This is depressing on many levels:

1. I totally wasn't AT ALL. I mean, total over-compensation complement Thank You James. The Olive Garden was full of hot girls, which's pathetic.
2. He's GAY.

Yes, that afternoon, 'o1: On the black couch I felt Jason's hand on my thigh, thought: You have a girlfriend, seriously, what the F is wrong with you? He tried kissing my neck, disguised as something he needed to say immediately, like via teeth-to-neck transmission. I squirmed. At some point, I put my Nokia on the glass table.

Then I remember vomiting in the Times Square Burger King bathroom, stumbling back to the NYU dorm I lived in that summer, mumbling some nonsense to my BFF, then calling my phone from her phone, affirming I'd left it at Posh, and passing out. I returned later, when it'd transformed into a meat market, and I was like a vegan angel parting the waters of disappointment.

Anyhow, back to present tense: Stuart danced with this woman and it was really funny/amazing, Carly and I were like, this is the best thing to ever happen in the history of mankind. Also, this's one of those things that I should probably just write about in my livejournal, as it's hilarity has no hope of translating onto the page or feeling remotely relevant or interesting to anyone reading this blog besides me. But I don't have a livejournal. Or a t-key, p.s.

2. In the Flesh

On Wednesday, I attended the Special GAY In the Flesh Reading with Tara-D, Vicky, Angelica, and four other girls who's names I forget because I was depressed and wanted to die, therefore I was not paying that close attention. Also, I possibly put too much vodka in my Vitamin Water considering all I'd consumed on Wednesday was four four-packs of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers and a Lean Pocket. [Note to readers: I need to eat massive amounts of food about every two hours, so this's like, imagine if that's all a Sumo Wrestler ate all day.]

[Also, I'm refusing a return trip to Pathmark: last time, I literally waited THIRTY MINUTES to check out, which made me want to smash my by-then-spoiled Stonyfield Farms yogurt into the retarded eyes of the cashier til all the fruit sunk to the bottom of her retinas and blinded her for life, thus enabling her acquisition of a Seeing Eye Dog who could probs do her job better than she can.]

We saw JD Glass read, and I met her and Radclyffe, who edited that "Lambda *GAY* Award Winning Stolen Moments anthology I was in. Radclyffe's written about 5,000 books. She's even more prolific than my hero RKB.

Speaking of RKB, I talked to her (while drunk) and ... !!! .... I'll be reading at The Best of "In the Flesh" on September 19th. Clearly Haviland's reading with me. I think I'll extend the city-tour begun in last year's story, "Fucking Around." It'll be like: Philadelphia looked like a sweetheart, I thought he was gay, maybe, but then he stole my Sidekick. JK. Go Philly, I love Philly. Good cream cheese, travel/tourism campaign for homos, etc.

1. Y'all

I had an idea for this section: I was gonna get one of those ridic greeting cards with the sunsets and scan it and it was gonna be this weird like poem-y Thank You card or something, 'cause I was gonna be like "how can I talk about how my readers are so sweet and sent me not just comments but emails and stuff and honestly like, opened up to me and all of this and that's just really like, amazing, and unexpected, and heart-warming. Like my heart is officially warmed.

So yeah, I love all of you readers, GAY, straight, bisexual, red, blue, green, Jewish and Muslim, poet and preacher, administrative assistants and girls who spray perfume on you at Bloomingdales, I love all of you. Thanks for being really cool.

Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder: Summertime, and the Living is Easy?

So, spring is in the air ... which means that summer is coming.

Last summer, I freaked out about my annual SAD-SS (Seasonal Affective Disorder, Summer Style), and—truth be told—Summer 2005 turned out to kinda rock ... Noah's breakfasts of Queens-procured vegetables and Goya tortillas, being rockstars speeding across the island at night-time in Matty's Jeep, or in daytime climbing from the icebox of my room to the fire escape where we'd watch the neverending street fair and he'd blow cigarette smoke ruthlessly into the humid air, high as a kite at Tara and/or Lainy's while giggles pepper the fog of window fans and sweaty clubs, mocking queries over Yogurt Bowl with Cameron and Rachel in the dark kitchen, Natalie, the only girl in the world who'd take the 6 train to 116th street at 1 A.M. just to talk after working an 80-hour week——and, our two beautiful days in the Hamptons, when I was reminded of why people like the summertime after all.


I'm hoping this summer will also defy expectation. But just to recap, these are the viruses that cause SADSS to begin with:

1. Sweat. I do that a lot. Especially while waiting for the subway, which's really smelly in the summertime, and packed with uncomfortable necktied people & unfortunately near-naked people.

2. Sticky Things e.g., watermelons, popsicles, ice cream. Esp. when combined with eating outdoors, mosquitos, or parades/street fairs/barebeques/The Puerto Rican Day Parade.

3. Slut Patrol: I get really hot in the summertime. And I don't mean Paris Hilton hot, I mean like, Dante-hot. And so I wear short skirts. Sometimes, short shorts, like the girls in the Nair ads? And I think that's okay, guy-in-the-truck/disapproving friends. So shut the fuck up. Would you rather see my inner thighs sweat? Yeah you would, but NO YOU WOULDN'T!

4. Every Summer Brings me either one step closer to ugliness or one step closer to skin cancer. I tend to chose the latter.

5. Girls sometimes wear those silly flowy hippie skirts, and boys sometimes wear cargo shorts. Both of these things make me not want to have sex with anyone ever.


Reasons this summer may rock anyhow:

1. Living in Williamsburg with Lo-La
2. Wedding Crashers w/Haviland: July in Savannah, GA.
3. I Heart Pride, big-time.
4. New Orleans this weekend.
5. Hopefully London at some point.