March 9, 2009
I’ve been kidnapped to happiness. I’ve been away from my house for the better part of the past three weeks, taken hither and thither by the terrible twosome that now rule my life.
Mother is being an almighty pain in the ass. I really don’t need to be treated like a child when I’m 23, living on my own, and supporting myself. I’m sorry that I’m not at the place that saintly brother was when he was 23 but he’s always been special now, hasn’t he?
I want to be fucking special for once.
March 5, 2009
I don’t mean that men are things. They’re not. They’re fully functioning human beings (at least most of the time). I even kind of like them quite a bit. My best friend is a man. My brother is probably one of the best men I’ve ever met. It’s a good time. But lately I’ve been thinking that the prospect of getting a man is rather tiresome.
It seems that in the time that Jane Austen was writing I would have had it a lot easier. I’m a fairly good prospect in her termsa and I could have done well. I could have a nice husband, a nice home (maybe two), and some cute little children. I may live in London and wafting through the whims of society or amidst the beauty of the country.
Either way, I have to believe it would have been a lot easier to find someone who wants to love me. Maybe it wouldn’t be real love. Who knows. Maybe I would actually find my Mr. Darcy.
At the moment, I just hope that my Mr. Right Now can see me as his Elizabeth Bennet.
March 3, 2009
Why are these three hardest words in the English language for me to say?
Damned if I could tell you. I could list off years of experience and past horrors that would make a pretty convicing argument, but I don’t really believe that myself, do I?
I’m going to have to say it real soon. The words are going to have to spill out of my mouth into the unbelievable chasm between me and you. It’s funny that I can use poetry to describe our situation, write you a book on the mysteries of love and yet the one thing I can’t do is say the words.
They’ve become this mythic quest that is going to lead me to being a nervous wreck if I don’t sit down and start makin’ plans to be happy. I want to be happy. I really do. I want to know what it feels like. I don’t want to have to walk around thinking everything’s so goddamn hard.
Cuz it is. But a lot of the time it’s not. I’ve learned so many ways in which things are ok.
So I think I’m going to try this brave thing out. Cuz to be fair, the pansy ass crap hasn’t worked at all.
March 2, 2009
It’s been a weird sort of week. The terrible twosome have gotten me addicted to DOTA, I’ve had a snow day and I think I may be falling into stupid.
Nothing feels like it should…if that makes any sense. I’ve always been fairly good at rejecting happiness. It’s not that I don’t want to be happy. It’s just that I don’t really know how to be. I was miserable for the vast majority of my teenage years and somehow I think it’s going to take more than a few years to get over it. How do you write over a decade’s worth of distrust and pain? How do you recode your DNA to not be one that immediately runs away when something good happens?
I’ve spent so much time running away from myself. I get afraid even to think that something good might be happening. I can’t let it happen. I have to analyze and prevariacate and generally be worried about everything. Even when my lovely friends try to beat it out of me I worry like a little girl. And to be fair, what good does it do me? Am I winning anything by being constantly, endlessly mad at the world? Isn’t there a point at which you just have to say, STOP!
I don’t think I can fix this is in a week or a day or a month or a year. I think it’s going to be slow and exhausting and I’m not going to get what I truly deserve until I decide to change. I want to decide. I’ve tried over and over again. But how do you unwrite what’s happened? How do you not predict the future from what came before? Can you? Should you even try?
So I’m a little introspective, hmm? I don’t even know if that’s a good thing anymore.
:(
September 16, 2008
Ever since I heard on Sunday about the tragic death of David Foster Wallace, I haven’t really known what to think. It’s hard to know what to say about the death of someone you didn’t actually know but that had a huge cultural and personal impact on yourself or someone you know.
I never had an exceptionally personal connection to him. But my brother on the other hand…
I’ve learned a lot from my brother over the years. He’s taught me how to be sarcastic and to deal with the inner workings of a crazy family. He’s been a parent to me in a lot of ways. He’s protected me and helped me when I needed it. He’s my brother, plain and simple. It doesn’t necessarily sound like a lot. But to me it’s meant more than you can imagine.
Not to long ago when my brother and I were both at our childhood home for one of our ever rarer visits he came into my room, handed me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and said something along the lines of “Read it.”
My brother has always been remarkably close-fisted about sharing his interests with me. He’s remarkably wide-reaching in what he does read and listen to but he’s never been one to give me suggestions. I have two main influences from an entire life knowing him: Weezer and an uncanny love of Sci Fi. So for my brother to actually come and hand me a piece of writing that I know he considers important enough to share with his bonkers little sister, well, it’s pretty important.
I think I read at least part or all of one essay but I tend to be rather like a bird with essay collections. I rarely sit down and read the whole thing in one sitting. I generally can’t be bothered and the sheer shifting of topics is rather tiring. Anyway, the book never got moved back to my apartment and thus it’s still sitting in my room, probably under my bed, gathering dust.
About two months ago I was wandering around the used book section of my local bookstore and I saw a copy of Wallace’s A Broom of the System. I thought about buying it but then I remembered that although I am generally financially solvent, I having been lacking in finances. Of late, I’ve been borrowing books from the library-a weird sort of fusion between my child and adult selves.
So I got A Broom of the System and Consider the Lobster out of the library and set about reading them. Unfortunately, mostly due to sheer size of my library, I’ve been inundated with books as of late. I actually managed to start one of the essays from Consider the Lobster but by the time the due date came up I already had at least five other books started and/or waiting to be read and I returned the books.
These memories have been pinging around my mind the past few days as I try to make sense of the loss of one of the great writers of our generation. Wallace was one of a host of unbelievably talented writers who all came of age at a certain time and in a very short amount of time have changed the way the world and the way I think of writing. The poetry of their writing (for that, more than anything, is what it is) has changed the way I think of literature. We need not read those dull tomes of pain when we can read the great novels of love and pain and confusion.
I’m going home in a few weeks and one of the things I won’t fail to do is to put Wallace’s book in my luggage to cart back to Boston. I may even drag back some of my brother’s copies without his knowledge (is this ok, brother?). Sometimes it drives me crazy that we only realize the greatness of someone once they are gone from this world.
You will be missed, David Foster Wallace. I hope this honors your memory. I’m sorry it took me this long.
August 18, 2008
It seems that I tend to favor books most of time over magazines. Some of the most engrossing things I’ve read in the past year have been magazines but somehow between the cost of buying the magazine and getting a new one every month or week I just get snowed under and end up with a long list of articles to read in addition to my usually long book queue.
Which makes Mygazines a fabulous addition to my perusing pleasure. It’s already earning the ire of magazine publishers everywhere but it’s a fantastic diversion for me.
August 18, 2008
Sometimes I lose my way when it comes to reading. For me, reading is like swimming is for Michael Phelps. I hate to go a day without it. It feels natural to have my nose in a book (so much so that I sometimes run into things on the sidewalk because I can’t help but read and talk at the same time). There’s no other thing I enjoy more. It’s not hard, it’s not work. It’s just the simple act of being transported to a different place.
Every once in a while though, something goes wrong. I lose my way. I pick up a book, dig in, and then lose steam. I figure it’s the book. I start another. The same thing happens. It’s like I’m stuck in some parallel universe where reading is hard and I’ve got to fight to finish a book. Normally I try to make myself read slower so that I don’t finish the book too quickly. The past few weeks have been like that for me. I haven’t been totally lost but I have been unable to stick with one book long enough to finish. I’ve been jumping back and forth like the book will start to lose it’s brilliance if I read it for too long.
I was at a loss. And so, ever so typically, I went back to my roots and I found out why I loved reading so much in the first place. I have a deep love of the cheesy sort of high school teen dramas written by women like Meg Cabot and Anne Brashares. It’s slightly an offshoot of my love for chick lit (which has waned in the past year) but I think it’s also an outlet for me. I never really had the typical teenage life so I need to immerse myself in them whatever way I can. I don’t want to feel like I’ve missed and if reading is the closest I am going to get then I’d rather have at least that.
So for the past week I’ve been on a tear trying to read as much of those books of my teen years as I can. And here’s the amazing part. It’s brought me back to the stories I love now for their maturity and complexity. Somehow, these books about frivolous things have made me love the books about important things. I’m always constantly surprised when that happens. I fall in love with reading all over again.
August 13, 2008
I am completely obsessed with the Olympics. I’m on this kind of overdrive where I can’t miss a minute of the swimming or the gymnastics. It’s crazy and I love it. But there is one (one?) unfortunate side effect of this obsession—I’ve been reading a lot less. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still slogging through at least 50 pages a day (accumulated over more than one book). But my torrid pace has slowed to a trickle. And this blog has become about my fascination with Michael Phelps. For that, I am sorry and I offer a brief respite from those who have a more literary persuasion.
One of the things I’m reading at the moment (nearly finished) is the manuscript of ones the books that will be published by the press I work for. The book is about sports injuries in minors and then lengths we go to make our kids the best athletes in the world. (well, not me, considering I have no kids, but you knew what I meant) It’s part cultural deconstruction and part memoir, infused with the kind of perspective you can only get by going through the things you want to write about.
When I first got into writing, I desperately wanted to be a sportswriter and so this book speaks to me in a lot of ways. I also was a three sport varsity athlete my senior year of high school (which totally weird because I’m not at all athletic but I went to a school that required us to play three sports a year and it kind of stuck). So I know a little bit about the drive and fire of wanting to be the best, wanting to succeed. I know what Michael Phelps’s couch is talking about when he describes practices but I went through a similar thing (though much scaled down) when I was on the swim team.
I hope this book gets a lot of attention when it comes out. It’s fabulously written, well reported and it hits a critical issue that is too much ignored in our search for guts and glory.
August 11, 2008
Courtesy of the New York Times…
August 11, 2008
I used to be a swimmer. I wasn’t very good. I have nice form and all but I’m not very fast. But it’s an amazing sport. If you’ve never felt the exhilaration of coming off a really good race and realize that half the wetness on you is sweat mixed with the water of the pool than you’re seriously missing something. Or maybe not. I guess that may be a swimmer’s thing.
Anyway, watching the US pull off an upset yesterday over the cocky French freestyle relay team was unbelievable, even more so because Michael Phelps swam first and thus wasn’t the hero of the day. (Though he did get his gold and another day with a chance of kicking Mark Spitz’s record to the curb). The hero of the day was Jason Lezak who swam a race I couldn’t even believe, coming from at least half a body length behind from about 50 meters. He rocked that last 25 meters like his life depended on it. There’s a point in swimming where you lay it all on the line, throw it all in the pool and just pray that what you’ve got will be more than enough to beat the overly favored guy swimming next to you. It was almost pathetic to see the French team after the race won, adrift in disbelief while Michael Phelps ran around screaming like an insane lunatic. It was like the world had become unmoored in the space of twenty seconds.
These times, these little accomplishments, are when I’m proud to be an American. I’m not what one would call patriotic. I scoff when President Bush gives interviews with Bob Costas during Olympics coverage (Where in the world is your mind dude? America’s NOT in trouble?). I swear that I want to marry a Brit so that I can go live in that country and not have to deal with feeling like I don’t really like the country I live in. I don’t know. But when I watch an American team cruise to the finish line in that final burst of glory I want to leap with joy and scream at the top of my lungs. Because we are all American. And these are the times we can shine.
WonderGirl 