untethered

Do you remember tetherball?



Even for a playground sport, tetherball is completely inane. It is a ball. Attached to a pole. By a string. Because of its simplicity, too, I think it lends itself well to so many worldly metaphors. Life is like tetherball: the taller guy always wins, the endless pursuit of balls and poles, a game that just keeps going over and over and over. I don't know.

When we were thirteen, my friend Jennifer and I came up with 100 metaphors for Romeo and Juliet's doomed love affair. I don't remember why, exactly--maybe just to flex our infinite creative sides, or perhaps to prove that Shakespeare wasn't really all that complex and deep.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that when life gets really overwhelming and/or confusing, it is always nice to try and reduce the clutter down to a simple metaphor or even a lovely cliché. It just seems so much more manageable. I could really use something like that right now. Maybe it is as simple as: the end of the year is always a time for reflection.

It's December!

final compulsive post from the greatest place on earth

Don't you love it when your mp3 player is on shuffle and it seems to pick the perfect songs for your mood--songs you didn't even know you had? I sure do.

I'm bidding Buenos Aires good-bye in just a few hours. It is sad and stressful and I am terribly anxious about re-entering the English-speaking world. For the past nine months, I have largely been answering to nobody but myself. There have been few questions for me to deal with here, only what I want to do each day. Many days I did nothing. And many days I did exactly what I wanted to do. It has been such an amazing and refreshing experience that I just want to keep doing it again and again and again.

I am ready to leave, though. I am ready for something new. Maybe Marido is part of this something new. Today we were wondering for a bit if we are more in love with the romance of us than us in reality. Of course, this is one of the billion thoughts that has crossed my mind, and one of the thousand that has lingered and returned. But what I have to keep reminding myself is that, like leaving Buenos Aires itself, some situations may seem unreal...but they are just as real as anything, whether we planned for them or not.

Hasta luego, Buenos Aires. Thank you for being so good to me. Thank you for depositing me in this wonderful house with these beautiful people. Thank you for challenging me, and thank you for your patience, your time, and your comforts. I hope we'll meet again.

wired

After living without a television for ten out of the last eleven years, I am suddenly spending a lot of time with a giant one that could crush us all. I stayed away from it for the first week or so, mostly because I didn't know what to do with it. Honestly, I didn't know that the cable box had to be turned on separately. And then I didn't know how to change channels. Then once I got that all figured out, I didn't know what to watch. So I just gave up.

Then one evening my friend Ash told me he was going to teach me how to watch television. He showed me the joys of his Tivo, and forced me to watch one episode of 30 Rock and one episode of the new 90210. I didn't really understand the humor behind 30 Rock, and 90210...well, everyone knows how to watch that. It has gotten much more risque since the Brenda/n Walsh days of my youth.

Although I wasn't too impressed with this foray back into television, I did like the "I'm-doing-something-but-not-really" feeling I got from it. So I started to watch things. Any movie set in New York (about 80 percent of all movies). Cartoons. The Office. When I found myself watching an America's Next Top Model marathon, though, I knew something had to change. So I shut off the television and promptly burned myself by placing two fingers, deliberately, on the coffee burner. I was seeing if it was on.

I really feel much more stupid when I'm at home. Part of it is because my mother doesn't allow me to cook, which means the huge segment of my brain devoted to gathering, preparing, and consuming food has gotten soft. The other part is that my father doesn't allow me to take care of things, like replacing my cell phone which broke last week. Another part is because of increased access to television. And still another part, I really think, is because survival in the suburbs is so much less involved than survival in the city. I no longer plot the seventeen different routes I can take to get somewhere and still pass by the bodega that sells the cheapest cigarettes, miss the hill that gets slick in the rain, get on the A train before it stops running express, and be above ground for the most likely part of the day that my latest crush could call me for drinks. No. Survival is now so bloody likely that I have to drink four cups of coffee a day to keep from falling asleep because so many circuits in my head have stopped blinking.

Until then, I have online dating to distract me. But even that is reaching its limits.

suburban mindfuck, or, life as a freelance journalist

So, last night I was lying in bed with the window open, listening to the crickets and such when I heard a man cough and do the phlegmmy EKKRRR...ECK! thing with his throat. I didn't think too much of it for a few seconds when I suddenly realized "I'm in the middle of the woods! WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT?" You know, still in the NYC mindset of being okay with sirens, beatings, drunken shenanigans and car crashes going on within earshot. But in the suburban woodlife, a man clearing his throat outside your window is BLOOD-CURDLING.

Oh I miss New York. I've figured this out, that in order for me to live in New York as a freelance writer and photographer, I need to sell about 4,000 words a month for a dollar a word. That should get me one bedroom in six-bedroom house in Flatbush, health insurance, a MetroCard, incidentals such as replacing equipment I break when I am drunk, and just enough food and beverage to stop my gradual transformation into a Fat Girl. I currently have fucked up teeth and it turns out that even if I buy dental insurance right now, I'd have to wait 18 months before having the work I need done. So fuck that, my parents are going to pay for it because I carry their genes and they know that no quality gentleman wants to reproduce with a toothless girl.

Anyhow. My first story was published yesterday, and I was paid about fifteen cents a word for about 800 words. So, in terms of survival skills, it looks like I have enough to jump into a well wearing wearing an oily lead suit.

Or I could just live here with my Mom and Dad, which means I smoke less, drink less, and experience some sort of mental deterioration that I can only liken to adult onset retardation, with tendencies toward violence.

captain crrunch time

This was the train of thought today.

All right, Saturday, let's do this shit, and let's do it right.

Wait, it is not Saturday. It is Sunday.

Okay, let's do this shit, and let's do it fast.

Something just struck me as funny. In the midst of me trying to pull together all these disparate elements of my life while wrapping up this degree nonsense, I looked up at the tabs on this here blog: "Posting," "Settings," "Layout," and "Monetize."

That, in essence, is all I'm trying to do. Wrap my head around the content of my life, figure out what settings are appropriate/important, get the layout in order, and then click "monetize." Where is the damn "monetize" tab on my life?

not helpful

I am not a happy camper today. It has been a most stressful week, and today I was supposed to get shit done, and instead I had a rude awakening and could not get over it, and wallowed in anger all day and got NOTHING done on a day that I could not really afford to waste. I literally sat here all day and was just angry as all hell, so I ate candy and smoked cigarettes and don't think I took a real breath in seven hours.

Stress management much?

Do you ever have a moment where you look back on several distinct moments where you said to yourself, "I'll deal with this later," or "I'm going to hate myself later for this," or "Fuck it, I'm sure everything will be fine," and then you just want to go back in time and bitch-slap your former self eight times over --- because really, what did you do then instead of taking care of business? Who the hell knows? I sure as hell don't.

And yet I'm doing it again. I'm like, "Oh, it's okay. Everything will be fine. I'm just going to sit here until I can go to sleep, and when I wake up tomorrow, rested, I will be able to deal with it, because today...well, today...today is just not a good day. Today was never meant to be. And tomorrow...tomorrow will be better."

I never said I was good with stress.

Thursday I am leaving for the Atacama Desert:





















I will lay my eyes on something along those lines on Saturday probably. I don't know how, but somehow between now and Wednesday I am going to make write 20 more thesis-like pages appear out of NOTHING and then vanish into the desert for a week or so. I think it'll be good times. I want some peyote. Psychedelics are not on my list of banned substances.

Sobriety has been very, very hard this week. I miss Joe, and I miss the carefree feeling I had a few weeks ago that everything was going to be okay. Because I don't really feel that way anymore. I am really excited about my trip, but something about traveling and not drinking suddenly seems even lonelier than I ever imagined. I must be masochistic. And I can't stop thinking about the fact that I'm graduating in two months. TWO MONTHS. It's like reality suddenly decided it wants to be my new, annoying new best friend and I don't really like her very much.

Okay, me stop now, because this...this is not helpful. But I don't know what would be right now. Or...I do know...but...I don't do that anymore.

happy distractions from stress

I have been so damn good this week, nay, this MONTH. Tomorrow is my one-month anniversary of being drug-and-alcohol free.

How does one celebrate without drugs and alcohol? God, what a conundrum. I can't even think about it. Tomorrow I just hope that at the end of the day I will somehow end up passed out like this corgi:

So what if he looks stiff like a board, at least he's unconscious. And smiling. And fuzzy. And--unless that's his paw, I think he's got a hard-on.

I'm going to be done with $chool in about 52 hours. I can't believe it! I've been charging through everything so hard. It's kind of crazy. I've been writing-bullshitting-researching pretty hard for the last week. This is what finals week is like. Thank god I'm on this marvelous drug cocktail or I think I would have lost my mind.

There are other things that are making me happy right now. In the absence of the extreme releases of stress caused by boozing, I am experiencing this structural shift in my brain to contenting myself with prolonged contentment instead of instant gratification. It's pretty stressful because instant gratification is so fucken great, right? I've kind of gotten grossly addicted to bikram yoga recently, which isn't gross in and of itself, but gross because it's kind of expensive to do it, and kind of a pain in the ass, with mats and towels, and they'll charge you for everything, even water. But I've become addicted to the high, because...that's all I have left in life. (bwahahaha.)

I am also super addicted to Joe lately, which is a really crazy prolonged high that I will have to explain sometime, because after all these months I've suddenly realized how great he is and it is both awesome and disconcerting. Let's just stick with awesome for the time being. I got to see him for a minute this weekend and he made me go "aw..." inside because of something so simple. When he saw me he said something like, "Hey, that's the shirt you were wearing when I first met you."

I'm excited to see him in about 52 hours, when all of this $chool shit is over.

K lucho, feed me. I'm starved.

the lighting of the candles

I am so stressed that: (a) I went to the driving range to hit golf balls with my dad yesterday even though it was snowing, (b) my period is so late that I'm beginning to think I'm pregnant and (c) I searched "stress" and when this link came up, this photo to the left came up with a caption that said something along the lines of, "A severely stressed person will find many differences between these dolphins jumping out of the water when in fact they are identical," and it took me several moments of severe inner reflection before realizing that some people out there think it's funny to toy with people who are on the brink of losing their minds.

I have embarked on my 8 days of serious business. It is that time of year when I want to give up on things like (a) the five classes that compose $chool, (b) attempts at self-reformation, and (c) geniality. I become generally unpleasant. I don't know how I got through this last year...and last year I had quit smoking at this time. I have lost a lot of faith in myself I guess. When I looked at that cow and that dolphin and really doubted myself, I knew I was in trouble. It's funny when you go through big life changes and instead of feeling proud and strong, all you can think of is that you sure weren't as smart as you thought you were. It makes me wonder if I know anything at all.

I have been thinking a lot about Joe lately, but I can't call him or anything. Of course not. This is part of the lack of self-trust that's happening lately. In the absence of any high for my mind to latch onto, it seems to want to glom onto Joe really fucken badly. When I think about him, it kind of has the same effect on my brain as the fond recollection of a seventh beverage. I'm starting to really miss the love-inducing feeling of The Booze. Without it, I guess I get like this. All self-doubty and dolphin-and-cow-y. I'm getting all weird about everything now. Everything feels strange. Dolphin. Cow. Dolphin. Cow. Dolphincowdolphincowdolphincow.

I have decided not to go to Miami with ACLU lawyer. The dates turned out to be a weekend off kilter, and I want to try out being good to Joe now. I know I said that I thought I was going to marry the lawyer, but like I said, dolphincow.

Or, like this dude said to me on the plane last night, "I'm trying to be honest in my relationships now, and part of that is giving relationships an honest chance."

Summer Regression Theory

I have serious San Francisco nostalgia this week. Even though I have my last week of classes and then finals, I was *this* close to buying a $200 ticket for next weekend. I think this warm weather is doing it to me. There are motorcycles out on the streets now and I am daydreaming of the ocean, the hills, and sunbathing/beer-drinking/dog-watching in Dolores Park.

This is the feeling I get when I think of San Francisco:



Just got off the phone with The Ex. I realized it had been a long time since we talked and I caught him on gchat and asked if it was a good time to talk. This happens to me a lot now. I get to gchatting and then it's like, "Wait...we could be having a real-time conversation, you know. Should we be crazy and ...chat-chat?"

It's hard to believe that we're so fully separated now. We're in the phase that I dreaded but also wanted, where we are supportive and friendly but have no idea what's going on in each others' lives. I guess that's what you want with a clean break-up, but it's jarring to hear someone say, "So tell me what's going on with your life...you dating anyone?" The Ex makes it hard too because he's always in a rush, and so conversations like these just beget very superficial conversations, and I hang up the phone still wondering how he's doing. At the end of our brief conversation he told me he loved me. He does that from time to time, and it always catches me off guard. One minute he's telling me about this new sandwich place where you can get outrageous toppings (like mozzarella sticks...MOZZARELLA STICKS!!!) and then, pulling me back into the last embrace where I felt really, truly loved.

Man, that fucken killed me.

So yes, San Francisco is on the brain this week, even though I am really excited to party party party all summer long in New York. I am not keeping my promise to myself not to obsess over the latest boy, but it is hard. I really want to see him again but I want to exude patience and confidence and play the Tao of Steve: Be Desireless, Be Excellent, Be Gone...

Boobs, booze, and basic understanding

There are some "news" topics that are pretty rote every year and, despite seeming more fit to Cosmo, always get some hefty coverage in our finest newspapers, including: how to avoid those holiday pounds, the perfect Valentine's Day gifts, how the dye the Chicago River green, and, how much college students drink over spring break, particularly south of the border.

With the onset of the Spring Break "coverage," of course, there's also a lot of lamenting by middle-aged women about the slut factor, and how deplorable it is that despite all of the strides made by the feminism movement, so many young women "seem so happy to let men lick tequila shots off their body parts." (Meghan Daum, LA Times, 031508)

This never ceases to amaze me. It's like these women were never young once and never experienced the rites of passage that girls today have to go through in order to join the sisterhood, things ranging from: wardrobe tricks like boosting your "confidence" with a push-up bra or breaking an ankle in hooker heels to mental games discovering that the more you drink, the more fun you have AND the less guilty you feel in the morning. And yes, every woman has sat done and made the calculations of what adult beverage will get her the drunkest the fastest with the fewest calories. Don't lie, Meghan Daum. Everyone has made this calculation, or at least read the breakdown in Mademoiselle. You think all women just coincidentally share the same taste for white wine and vodka-seltzers? I think not.

Part of being a young woman is doing all these things. No, graduate school and career ambitions don't factor into these conversations because they're not particularly unique to being a woman. Being a woman is biological and cultural; it involves trying to understand how you want to express your cup size and who you will invite to your poochie party. These are things that take some figuring out. Of course you have to slut it a little to figure out these things for yourself. A lot of us women probably run the full gamut to 'ho and back and settle somewhere comfortably in our own definitions of what it means to be a woman. But until then, we've got hoochie culture, and so that's what we try on first. Go figure.

But I fucken detest any older woman who's going to look down on girls today for the way they think and the way they act on spring break. When Daum decries that women are "deciding that the way to measure their readiness for the adult world is not in terms of education or emotional maturity but sexual desirability," she's totally missing the point that the way you get to be emotionally mature is by figuring this shit out. Why don't you tail these party girls and see where they are in 10 years? I'll bet most of them will have caved into conservative family values by then, only after submitting to 10 years of intense therapy to disentangle their alienating feelings of guilt that seem to have been forced on them by a mass media so deeply embedded in their consciousness that they think it's their own conscience they need to battle, and not the affirmative culture that promises a healthy pinch of moral backlash for every pound of empty glitz produced.

The most telling line of this op-ed is Daum's observation that "When they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives, they spoke not of jobs or grad school but of looking good, of having the right equipment and experience to ensure a place in the raunch-obsessed pop culture they'd come to see as the real world."

I got news for you, M.D. If pop culture is manifesting itself in people's minds and actions, that's no longer pop culture--that is the real world. Is it that you're bemoaning pop culture's effects on women today? It's not that culture that we should be worried about, or whatever loss values you may be mourning, but the conflict between the two that this kind of anti-anything editorial highlights. The reason why young women have to drink so much to do what the pop culture dictates is that there are so many old-world values holding them back. But women say they drink for "confidence" rather than "numbing the confusion" because booze advertising is traditionally targeted at men.

Articles like this just make women drink even more.