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:

(I took far too many versions of this photograph than is healthy for a college-educated person.)

You see, I am thought of as rather outspoken in my ordinary daily life, and even my internet life, there is a surefire way to my heart, and it is animals.  I will throw around the word “patriarchy” at a dinner party, but put a kitten or a dog or even a hamster in front of me and I lapse into baby talk, often in a French-English patois.

So, I chose the Galapagos because I can’t picture anything more relaxing than hanging out with a bunch of iddle biddy widdle animahls.  Does this make me vapid?  Possibly.  But at the moment I’ll take a week of vapidity over a week of writing memoranda, so there you have it.

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.

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.

I do, so it felt like I had committed a betrayal. My parents emerged from it, and they still bear the marks. My dad has a college degree only by the good graces of the Canadian military. Neither my mom nor my dad buy clothes at anywhere more expensive than Kmart. They listen to country music. My dad is the closest my extended family got to what my new milieu would recognize as a “professional” before I went to law school. We read books, but mostly they were the sort of popular fiction I might now roll my eyes at if I ever forgot that one book always leads to another.

A couple of weeks ago, in what almost seems another age, Ta-Nehisi Coates said of Sarah Palin, “We are not so different, you and I.” And immediately I knew what he meant. I can’t claim to have come as far as he has to be where I am now, because I had parents who let me stand on their shoulders once they’d pulled themselves into the middle class. I didn’t have to fight for books. I got to go to Europe when I was seventeen. My parents could afford to pay for my undergraduate degree. So my own background isn’t particularly hardscrabble, though my parents’ was.

But when I arrived at university, I knew immediately there was something a little off about me. I hadn’t read the right books and I didn’t say the right things and I’d never had sushi and couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat it. I didn’t read Vogue and could not have told you the difference between Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I had no appreciation for classical music. My European trip, which had seemed so culturally enriching at the time, scarcely impressed since it was just assumed that everyone knew something of the Europe. I didn’t get people’s jokes about obscure shows on CBC Radio and I had never heard of the New Yorker or the Economist. I definitely watched way too much television and way too many contemporary Hollywood movies. And some inner part of me shrunk whenever I heard people make fun of trailer parks and RVs, since my parents had always spoken of RV-owning as a dream of theirs.

In the interest of full disclosure, of course, I was awkward straight through late adolescence. I never was as comfortable in the world as I was in a book (but not the right kind of book, of course) or a movie, and it showed. Into my early twenties, I spoke like a person who had only recently awoken to the reality of social interaction. So some of my fish out-of-water was par for the course in a life that has never felt altogether in sync with the universe, if you catch my drift.

Still, as I’ve gotten older and much better at the people stuff, the reminders that I was not brought up by quasi-bohemian urban professionals continue to pop up frequently. And they have surfaced in the political context too, because some part of me responds when I hear populist slogans, which in the circles I travel in is generally uncool, uncool. Some part of me wants to smack anyone who uses the phrase “white trash.” Some part of me becomes small and hard and defensive when I hear complaints about the general ignorance of the working class voters who respond to Palin, or when someone affirms that their smartness is self-evident, since they attended (insert college).

At this point I’ve lived among this bookish liberal sort of person, of course, for the entirety of my adult life.  Some of them are my very best friends. And I love them dearly.  More importantly, I think, on first impression, I now appear to be one of them.  But I sometimes feel alone among them. My manners and my references are not up to par, and they probably never will be.

And every year I get closer to being the kind of person who belongs here, and farther away from whatever I used to be, which of course is the only thing that got me into this strange straddling of universes I now live and which I would, in any event, never give up. I wonder if I had a child if I’d let her read the Babysitters’ Club with impunity the way my parents did. I wonder if I would buy her expensive clothes and teach her to put on eyeliner. I wonder if I’d raise a child who years down the line, hanging out as an adult, would make someone who hadn’t grown up with a mother who took her to the theatre and liked French thrillers best feel small and hard and defensive, and altogether out of place.

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.

Most bookish women I know dislike him too, though there are exceptions.  I was puzzling this out with someone the other day, oddly enough.  Without reducing anyone’s writing to their genitals, though, I think a worldview like Foster Wallace’s feels somehow false to most women.   To me, the arrogance involved in testing the limits is something that seems to be completely given and obvious. This is not so for most young men that I talk to. They bristle when I suggest that it is anything other than true that the world is full of possibility – even, as they say in this country, if they are liberals. This is the privilege, I suppose, of being born in a world where you are a member of the universal, and everybody else gets to be different. Things “are” for such lucky people in a way they will never “be” for the rest of us. It is your privilege that allows you to think things work the way you think they do.

Which isn’t to say they don’t feel the constraints. Icarus flies too close to the sun, and all that. Indeed, they probably feel them harder than the rest of us because the limits of what you can do in this world don’t just hold you back, they destabilize the way you think.

As you know, Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. Whenever I hear of this kind of death – by which I mean the by-your-own-hand death of a creative person, intentional suicide or accidental overdose – I am never surprised. I guess I still harbour a romantic view of the artistic temperament. If you’ve always got one eye on the stars, it’s pretty startling to be pulled back to earth by a mortgage bill or an out-of-nowhere miscarriage or illness.

Who knows what pulled this particular person back to earth this time – but it’s evident he did not land softly. I feel for his wife, who apparently found him. But at the same time, when the first person at the drunken table I sat at last night found the story on her Blackberry and told everyone, the lot of us cried out in sadness. There is something in that, having people know who you are when you, quietly or ostentatiously, leave the planet. Someone somewhere sees a candle go out, and you know they felt that little bit connected to someone on this earth. It’s just too bad Foster Wallace didn’t feel any obligation to keep that porchlight on for himself.

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.

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.

And, to get up on an internet soapbox for a moment, it worries me that blog writers – the ostensible critics of mainstream media discourse, particularly when writing under a Gawker-sponsored masthead – jump into this fray.  It’s always worrisome when the “outside” talks exclusively in the dominant terms of the discourse.  It’s not that there’s no native American outside to be had, of course – Jon Stewart has taken liberal pundits to task for their extremist, asinine, partisan one-upmanship.  But I’m not hearing people pay so much attention to that particular problem.  If anything, people are internalizing the hyperbole of punditry as the election gets closer and each side gets more and more nervous that they just might lost.

Don’t get me wrong – Palin is playing this game herself, beginning with her snide and race-baiting (and hopefully strategically misguided) talking point on the alleged irresponsibility of “community organizers.”  She’s not playing nice, and neither is McCain for all his talk about bipartisanship and changing Washington and self-effacing chuckles.

But all this eye-for-an-eye stuff their critics might want to cite as justification for throwing third-grade insults isn’t any more productive as a political tool than it would be as punishment for a murderer.  It might be viscerally satisfying, of course, to throw an epithet at these people, but at the end of the day, your c-words and f-words and ass-words are going to prematurely end your conversation with a voter who could maybe be persuaded to vote the right way.  Even worse, it’ll likely destroy your credibility in starting the next one.

The truth, which is almost never located at the extreme anyway, is that people who are still investigating how they’ll vote in November don’t care particularly to hear your anger or rage, however justified it might be.  They want to hear your reasons, and “McCain is a motherfucker” is not a reason, it’s a dagger.  And nobody wants get stabbed, so your audience is going to get out of the way of that type of talk right quick.

Now, the good news is that Republicans have handed the Democrats a gift in this election, which is that they are displaying a remarkable lack of interest in seeming like the voice of reason in this particular cultural conversation.  They’re happier to yell louder and throw more balloons and substitute “POW” for every third word in their average sentence.  This makes for excellent television, I’ll admit.  Even as I began to froth a little at the mouth in the privacy of my living room, watching the RNC was much like watching The Hills; it is utterly banal and stupid, but its monumentally offensive display of white privilege is somehow impossible to turn away from.  But I don’t think the undecideds are suffering from a thirst for a Presidency with a reality tv approach to the issues, as it were.

I know that this penchant for over-the-top behaviour was cited by disgruntled Democrats as the reason the GOP handed them their ass in the last election cycle.  But in general the Democratic base tends to overestimate the talent of their candidate pool in his regard.  That was certainly true of Kerry, a candidate whose only universal appeal was the profound feeling of sleepiness he elicited in everyone, himself included.

But in Obama, the confidence one can put in his talent is pretty deep.  I’m not an unqualified fan, or an Obamabot as Megan Carpentier at Jezebel likes to say.  I haven’t even sipped at the glass of his Kool-Aid.  But I think even his critics admit that dude can give a speech like few in American politics today – witness the stunned silence of the punditry post-Convention speech.  All this talk about inexperience and celebrity and slickness does frequently seem just that – just talk – when he actually gets going.

And why is that?  Because even when on the attack, he (and his running mate) wields sarcasm with a purpose – for example, they are only interested in the number of McCain’s houses to the extent that it belies McCain’s claim to be more of an “ordinary guy” than Obama.  There’s something ultimately respectable about that – about choosing to conduct oneself publicly with dignity and class, about keeping a campaign from getting distracted with idiotic sidetracks like questioning McCain’s patriotism – that I think will ultimately help him win over that sliver of people who decide all elections, the undecided.

This doesn’t mean you have to pull punches.  It does mean, however, that you have to make your blows with purpose and with intelligence and always pay lip service to why you sound the way you do.  You want to change Washington?  Then you have to be willing to talk in a different way than they do.  You have to quit sounding like you’d be a welcome foil for O’Reilly on his show, because anyone who thinks of O’Reilly mode of talking as trenchant criticism is a lost cause for you.  All you do when you hyperbolize is risk tarring Obama’s campaign with a brush it hasn’t, as of yet, taken up.

If only his supporters understood as well what his campaign does implicitly: it’s the discourse, stupid. Talk to people like they aren’t mindless morons, and they aren’t likely to identify you as one so quickly.  They’ll at least keep listening, and as long as you’re saying something worth hearing, you’ll keep well ahead of the GOP.

P.S. I’ve been neglecting this blog while I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but I expect to be posting daily for the next little while; this is the first in a series.  Next time: How Sarah Palin Can Unwittingly Revive American Feminism.

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.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a paean to the teachers in our lives who Make A Difference, who Change Young Minds, and Deserve Better Salaries for their trouble.   Even were I tempted to write something so earnest, it wouldn’t do Mr. C— justice, because he openly despised everything in the world that so much as leaned towards the insipid.

The best memory I have from his classes, the one that presents itself at the most inopportune times, in fact, was him rebuking a student for observing that Biff, in Death of a Salesman, was “really sad, because he found out that his whole life kind of sucked.”  (I’m paraphrasing; you get the idea.)  Mr. C— eyed this poor soul carefully before breaking eye contact to stare out the window.  This was his standard signal that a speech was coming on, and from what I remember this was quite a long one.

I could try to reproduce words, but the funny thing is that beyond a certain roughness and deep baritone, I no longer remember his voice very well.  My memories of him depend less on who he was than on the things he said, and how he said them.

But what he said boiled down to this:  Biff’s experience seems really terrible, yes, when he finds out that his dad was, in essence, an archetypal schmuck.  It’s terrible to find out that people you admire are not what you think.  But without that realization, Biff would have walked on thinking the world followed some kind of obvious story about how you Grow Up, become a Man, have a Family, and do Good ‘til you get to the end, usually a hospital bed when you die surrounded by your family.  Living in a delusion doesn’t benefit Biff; it locked him into a kind of insincere existence.

This memory unfurled for the thousandth time when the person I started out this entry talking about said what she did.  Because I understand getting tangled up in issues of regret, because you don’t want to think you’re a bad person but you also don’t want to be afraid to admit mistakes, because you’re closer to fine the less you seek your source for some definitive, because you have to seize the day, and because, as in the case of Mr. C— vs. the student that pitied Biff, it’s not always obvious what’s a good experience and what’s a bad one.  I once tried to compliment a friend by telling her I found it admirable how unapologetic about herself she was, but I’ve also condemned public figures for being afraid to admit they were wrong as cowardly.

But I don’t know how to be consistent about all of these things that are true.  I don’t think Mr. C—did either.  I don’t know if he’s still teaching; some part of me thinks he isn’t.  He didn’t much like it; it wasn’t him.  He didn’t fit into that Make A Difference narrative, at least not in the traditional sense.

But I’m not sure he should regret it.