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It was not entirely intentional, of course. It was just that I have been working and going to the Galapagos and considering going to the Amazon in the fall and occasionally facebooking and even going out and seeing plays and whatnot every once in awhile.
I promise to improve.
via Flickr
Since I no longer have to worry about the well-being of America, I have decided that for my next vacation – scheduled for March – I will go to the Galapagos Islands. Now let me be clear: I am not a travel person. I am a vacation person. In short, I am so pleased by the prospect of not having to check the Blackberry every five minutes that I am largely indifferent to how I will pass the time on those few precious days a year I am released from the chains of my livelihood. (Melodrama intentional.)
But I went to Hawaii with the parents last Christmas, and by far the best part of it was the animals I saw everywhere. The sea turtles, the seal that beached itself three houses down from the one we had rented, the sand crabs. Oh, the sand crabs! They burrowed into the sand whenever they felt me watching them, but once or twice I caught them sneaking about: (more…)
So while America may have been on the brink of something good well over a month ago, I myself was on the brink of work, work, and for good measure, work. Somebody has to do it, I guess.
In general I am the kind of person for whom busy is a desirable state of being, but not only has this neverending stream of work left me bored out of my skull and antsy for some non-work-related endeavour, my body is beginning to rebel. It demands caffeine at odd hours and is always on the lookout for a sugar rush. It also lacks the stamina to write/read/watch anything in the evenings/on the weekends. My “free time,” cobbled such as it is in five minute increments over the course of sixteen-hour days where I am continuously on-call, is spent reading blogs because my addled mind is too tired to process anything else, and suddenly it’s 2 a.m. and I might as well get to sleep.
I am in full re-evaluation of this current mode of living at the moment, which feels a little too much like, well, not-living. Don’t get me wrong – I’m materially comfortable, I am treated like an adult at my job, and I have lots of friends. Also I have an excellent cat. But this vibe is not a sustainable one.
I have received many competing pieces of advice on this point, which often include some variation of “You’re awesome, you’ll do awesome things” (see above re good friends), which is self-esteem furthering but mostly discardable due to bias (I am, after all, somewhat lovable in my tendency to dream up one world-conquering scheme after another, and Tuesday’s is always a complete departure from Monday’s, if you catch my drift).
Another common theme: “can’t you just enjoy the simple things after work?” You know, I wish I could. I see all these people – and let me be clear, I think they are generally better and more useful human beings than I – who are happy with their expensive bags and dinners out and beer, and I don’t really understand why I aspire to something else.
However, in the spirit of the Great Democratic Experiment that is the internet, I hereby put the issue to a vote:
I remember being in undergraduate classes back when Fukuyama was still being taken seriously and feeling a sort of depression that history appeared at an end even as I was just starting to get my sea legs in the actual lived world. All the progress there was to be had seemed, to me at the time, to have been made. All the great leaders had come and gone. I regretted that I had missed, among others, the Salt March, the “I Have a Dream Speech,” the Blitz, the Depression, the Cultural Revolution, the Kent State massacre. I thought, from all the books and the primary sources and the movie-watching, that one thing about all these times seemed most true: people were alive then. Things mattered.
You all know the end of that story. About seven years ago, the world came to a sudden and rather terrible agreement that there were probably some things that were, actually, good. There were also, as a consequence, bad things. The best you could do, we all concluded for a day or two, maybe for a week, was reach a hand out to the person next door and hope none of the frail little life you built would come crashing down around your ears because someone flew a plane into it for no reason at all. However squandered that cultural moment later became, it was worth something because all the old gears of time started, albeit creakily, to turn again.
And so by some strange stroke of luck I am writing this from my adopted hometown – that it was home never became apparent until I came here for a day to interview for the job I now have – and an adopted country that, whatever its faults, stands today to maybe, knock-wood, I-don’t-want-to-jinx-this, but altogether probably will elect its first black President. If it doesn’t, it will come damn close, anyway.
When I go back “home,” which isn’t often anymore for the same reason I felt compelled to use those scare quotes, people often ask me why I live in America. Things seem so bad here, from the outside. There’s no health care and there are people starving in the streets and don’t even get me started on that Fred Phelps character, people say. When I was coming to New York to live for the first time, some people warned me not “to say anything bad about Bush.”
Of course, some of why I am here is just New York. Enough said.
But the rest of it? I always liked America, because with great power comes also great possibility, to riff off of Spiderman. Because they drink their own Kool-Aid here and every once in awhile it’s nice to live among people who actually, literally and totally, believe in freedom. Sometimes this leads them off the cliff, of course, but it can also pull a very heavy load up a very steep hill every once in awhile, and in my book that is something worth celebrating.
If things go the way everybody I know hopes tomorrow, if all the long lines and whatever shenanigans anyone gets up to doesn’t de-legitimize the result, I feel as though I can go home, the next time, triumphant. A few foreigners I know in the last couple of days have confessed how suddenly a jealousy has washed over them – just for tomorrow, and the next day, they’d maybe like to be American. They’d like to feel at the vanguard of something too, even if the feeling is only a fleeting one. And it’s not the Salt March, and Obama, for all his strengths, is no Dr. King. But for tomorrow, and maybe if we’re lucky, for the rest of the week, I’ll get to be in the midst of people feeling like they took a step forward. And if that’s the best I get to wash off that old undergrad feeling of having missed out on the best of this world, I’ll take it.
A friend of mine is fond of saying that the best movies are the flawed ones. His theory rests on something akin to the idea that everyone screws up their children; the important this is to screw them up in an interesting way. This is probably the best way to describe Synecdoche, New York, which I saw this afternoon amid a sea of New Yorkers who are, admittedly, an easy crowd to please when the menu contains such bookish ennui about how little anyone every knows of themselves, let alone their own life.
This is not the kind of movie that you walk away from with a clear idea of where it started and ended, or indeed, what happened. And of course, that’s part of the point – that you cannot see the whole except through a part of it, and then what you see is altogether inadequate. The point is to miss the point, I suppose.
Ordinarily this kind of abstract narrative – if it can even be called one – would have annoyed me. Back in my B.R. Myers appreciation phase, I used to rail that I needed plot in the things I read. That I saw no point in stories without stories, that playing with language for language’s sake seemed aimless.
But this largely plotless movie sent me home on the subway in a fog about whether, even if I aligned the stars and did only what was creatively important to me, I would get it, whatever “it” is. Whether you need to have a point. Whether the only thing that matters is the day before someone you love dies. Whether you see everything in small things, not in the big picture, which is so wide there is very little one can actually look at.
I read that a reviewer somewhere said the whole thing seems less a movie than a suicide note, which is at once apt and bound to drive people away. I hesitate to say much more about it, because it’s the kind of thing one can only write about in the most pretentious terms. And also because I know half my friends will hate this movie. Half of Cannes did, after all. A lot of people are going to tell you it’s boring, and it drags in places. That it doesn’t “make sense.” But that’s because they’re forgetting what a synecdoche is – at best a reference, that suggests a whole but isn’t the same thing as it. And most people, I guess, don’t have the inclination to live with any blanks.
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Three weeks ago I visited some friends of mine in Toronto while renewing my visa. All are of a bookish liberal sort. We were at brunch, and during the conversation. I commented that some friends lived in a “more working-class” part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Raucous laughter erupted at the table, at which sat two lawyers, an English lit PhD student, a legislative aide, a financial consultant and a former junior curator at the Tate. “By working class,” said one, “Michelle means people who work for the government, or, like, teachers.”
In that moment I was embarrassed on so many fronts that I could feel my blush seep into my cheekbones. Of course, I hadn’t meant it that way – it was, indeed, my impression that “working class” was the proper term here – but I had, as I seem so often wont to do in this particular set of company, spoken incorrectly. Even worse, all of these people – again, who I like a great deal and who surely did not intend all of these layers of shame to wash over me – were not people who knew the working class demographic very intimately at all.
A long time ago I picked up David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and immediately set it down again. Being the kind of person who can’t imagine ever reaching the end of her appetite for books, I will usually think: there will be time. There will be time to read this and understand it and think about it. And until that time, I think I will read something else to while the hours away. Something, hopefully, that does not expose me to the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. And that has no footnotes, none whatsoever.
I never really liked Wallace’s fiction that much – the short pieces I read, anyway. As is often the case with prestigious writers I don’t like, I don’t think he was untalented. I can see why young men love him. There’s a visceral, throttle-the-dictionary pull to his prose. I can see how that can get addictive. He wrote with what often felt like a strong optimism in the possibility of language, which was great in an essay but took me nowhere in a story.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Feminism, obama, palin, stupid stupid stupid
Speaking of discourse: Obama went there, and used the phrase “lipstick on a pig” at a rally yesterday. Oh yes, I know, he meant to attack the McCain/Palin’s claims to the mantle of “change,” not Palin specifically. Of course, Palin is the only reason McCain can now talk about change without looking like an utter fool, and as such the two aren’t precisely separable. And as everyone remembers from a short two weeks ago, “The only difference between a bulldog and a hockey mom is lipstick.” No matter how often Obama’s used the phrase in the past, in this news cycle the connection is swift and obvious.
So any speechwriter or adviser or for that matter, candidate, is smart enough to know that the press will go straight for any such remark as plainly referring to Palin. Even your average political rally audience is going to. Even assuming they were not that smart, you have to ask yourself what kind of dialogue is going on internally in a campaign that they are insensitive to the sexist overtones in an expression that only a few short months ago were being used against their own damn primary candidate? It boggles the mind that anybody thought the power of this phrase was worth the risk of using it.
Don’t get me wrong. John “At least I don’t put my make-up on like a trollop, you cunt” McCain gets no credibility with me when he cries sexism, particularly since it is he who started this whole lipstick on a pig nonsense against Clinton.
But it by no means excuses this asinine misstep that McCain is a hypocrite here. Obama rose to the bait the Republican party laid out for him – and he’s the one running on the platform about changing the way we talk about politics. It’s actually not that hard to practice what you preach in this instance – despite the anti-political-correctness brigade’s assertions, it’s really not that hard to avoid sexist and racist language if you would genuinely like to do so.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, indeed.
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Last night I had two Canadian friends to dinner. Along with pasta and cold cucumber soup, we had the typical sort of behind-closed-doors political discussion that foreigners living in the States excel in. In this mode of conversation, every statement is punctuated by an expression of incredulity at “America,” “Americans,” and their crazy ways. The subject almost always ends in the same place – disbelief at the completely polarized way Americans talk about public affairs. In a political discourse where the word “independent” more often than not means “equal parts Democrat and Republican,” the with-us-or-against-us mentality is more prevalent than anyone seems willing to admit.
This has been brought home to me in the last week listening to – and reading – various people whose opinions I respect argue about the perky moosehunter from Alaska whose nasal vigour has so captivated the nation. Jessica Grose at Jezebel noted that for a certain sort of woman, in which class she includes herself, Sarah Palin can cause “violent, nay, murderous, rage.” On Shakesville, while simultaneously decrying sexism in certain attacks on Palin, Misty says she is a “conservative fuckneck.” I could list more examples, but you get the drift.
Now, of course, both of these remarks are taken out of context. They are the icing on relatively coherent critiques of Palin’s political positions and her sugarcoating of her own record. And of course they are irreverent, in the way blog writers like to be irreverent because their writing is impulse-driven and off-the-cuff. But they’re still of that “irrational American” variety of political criticism that worries me.
I am told that I usually seem to have, as Margaret Laurence once put it, the “strength of conviction.” (Other people have been known to call it stubbornness.) But, you know, I don’t know everything. (I know!!!) Someone was telling me the other day that they thought there was really very little in life worth regretting. “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” this person said, grasping for depth, authority, I guess. No better place to go than Shakespeare.
In high school I had a crazy madman of an English teacher. I have succeeded in shedding most things from high school except the memories of this person. To my sixteen-year-old bookish self he was like Heathcliff, in more ways than one – there was always a hint of a storm cloud around his eyebrows.
I can’t say I was attracted to him, exactly, though perhaps my mind has whitewashed some schoolgirl crush. But he was the first person I’d ever met who did things like paper the walls of his classrooms with e.e. cummings poems. (Now that I think of it, in that time before the internet he had undoubtedly typed them out himself, an even greater sign of something-wrong-in-a-good-way.) So he had a sort of magnetism to him that, in college, I would realize, attaches to most people who are invested in some higher order of thing than themselves. At least, that quality is magnetic to me.
