the unbearable lightness of ke$ha

Is it me, or has Ke$ha’s music gotten a little bittersweet? There’s a plaintive note in some harmonic line that suggests that the queen of stuttering and sloppiness is ready to hang up her ripped tights and, God forbid, spend a night in reading her high school journals and drinking chamomile. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but haven’t you felt it lately, too? Doesn’t it seem like your salad days are behind you? Aren’t you, in spite of yourself, behaving with a startling amount of dignity and sense?

“Feeling like I’m a high schooler / sipping on a warm wine cooler”

She’s grown aware of her mortality, or at least of the reality of aging. A single taste evokes a vivid memory, and she’s swept back into a past that seems, suddenly, like it was another life. I found an old body spray, my freshman year staple, in a medicine cabinet at home some months ago. I sprayed it and suddenly I was sure that I was eighteen again and that I had a pressing set of logic problems and a hickey to attend to.

“Better pack a toothbrush / gonna pull an all-nighter”

She’s developed a healthy sense of pragmatism. Gone are the days when she could trust her oral hygiene to a bottle of Jack. Perhaps her dentist, like mine, gazed into her open maw critically and suggested that she purchase and wear a $457 night guard to cut the grinding that’s destroying her gums. Would Ke$ha wonder how to reconcile a life of non-commitment–a life of, at the most, three-month stands–with the cold reality of a night guard? When is it okay to bust out the night guard? 

Perhaps Ke$ha hasn’t crossed that bridge yet, but she’s certainly learned to plan ahead. Next thing she knows, she’ll be packing a change of clothes, too. After all, that dude only lives a few subway stops uptown from work, and wouldn’t it just be easier to stay over?

“Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone”

Ke$ha knows the pain that is being a twentysomething lone wolf and watching the rest of the world couple off. Perhaps she, too, has wasted a few hours commiserating with My Friends Are Married. It’s indeed a shame that the object of her affections came here with someone. And it’s a shame that repeats itself in every produce aisle and Starbucks line and Junot Diaz display at the bookstore. The handsome devil you might have shared a few seconds’ worth of eye contact with a year or two ago is there, but there’s someone on his arm now, and they went to Big Sur last weekend and they might take rock-climbing classes this spring and they love brunch.

Ke$ha recognizes that her glory days are fleeting. She can’t get away with warbling in a sparkling American flag poncho for much longer. Before she knows it, she, too, will be home at ten on a Friday, asleep on the couch in front of Netflix with a familiar pair of arms wrapped around her. She might even like it.

life was better when you had to invite the whole class to your birthday party

It might surprise people to hear that I suck at making friends. I’m a very friendly person and it’s easy for me to carry on a conversation at work, in line at Philz, in the locker room at the gym, on a plane, etc., etc. I have a plethora of opportunities to make friends! People like me! Unfortunately, I suffer from intense anxiety that manifests itself as what I like to think of as a little monster in the back of my skull that convinces me at every turn that I should stay home and watch TV on my couch.

This is what it’s like in my head when I do things that might otherwise lead to friendship:

Scenario: Someone invites me to a social gathering where I will sort of know people

I’m so excited! Someone has invited me to a social gathering tonight! I’m gonna make so many new friends! What should I bring? What should I wear? There’s a bottle of wine in the cabinet but like what if  it’s shitty and they judge me for being a shitty wine buyer? Or what if everyone else brings beer? Oh my God, what if they don’t drink? Should I just bring chips? What if they’re paleo? What if they think I’m a chip-eating fatty? Should I bring carrots? What if they think I’m judging their eating habits? I could bring hummus. Hummus is universally appropriate. Wait, but what am I gonna wear? Is this top too low-cut? Will everyone think I’m trying to seduce the host with my cleavage? Am I too dressed up? WHAT IF IT’S FORMAL? What if it’s a pajama party? What if everyone shows up wearing onesies? Are these earrings too jingly? Fuck it. I’m staying home.

Scenario: I consider inviting an acquaintance who lives nearby to hang out

I could totally take the train up to the city to hang out with this girl from my year at Vassar! I bet we have a ton in common and we just didn’t know it at school because the only reason we know each other is because we both hooked up with that dude with the receding hairline. Oh my God, what are we gonna talk about? That guy’s makeout technique over the years? Cappy’s haircut? Eggs all day? This is literally going to be the most awkward situation of all time. Oh my God, this is gonna be one of those situations where I just keep talking to fill the silence and then she thinks I’m batshit crazy. Maybe if I think of a list of appropriate topics, we won’t end up comparing “I-made-out-with-Receding-Hairline-Guy-five-years-ago” war stories. Umm… careers? Hobbies? Interests? Oh my God, she’s gonna ask me if I watch Breaking Bad and when I say I don’t she’s gonna think I’m super lame and a big weirdo. Fuck it. I’m staying home.

Scenario: I join the website Meetup and study the opportunities available for twentysomethings living in Silicon Valley

What a great website! It’s just what I’ve always dreamed of: OkCupid for friends! Except you don’t get to know anything about the people you’re hanging out with. And they’re probably all gonna show up in groups anyway and you’re just gonna be awkward in the corner alone until some weird engineer dude from SurveyMonkey tries to get in your pants under the misguided impression that you’re looking for love with an MIT alum who dresses exclusively in T-shirts they give him at work. Oh, God, what if it’s all dudes from SurveyMonkey wearing T-shirts from work? What if they all band together and talk about NoSQL and think I’m a bimbo with a worthless degree? What if there are other bimbos with worthless degrees there and they’re all prettier and more charming than me? WHAT IF THERE ARE REPUBLICANS? There is a zero percent chance that I’m going to end up anywhere but awkward in the corner alone. Probably without even a weird dude from SurveyMonkey wearing a T-shirt from work trying to get into my pants. Fuck it. I’m staying home.

Scenario: I debate the merits of sitting down to eat lunch with coworkers I vaguely know versus bringing my lunch back to my desk

I’m going to go sit with that table of people I vaguely know! There’s an open chair! They aren’t playing a card game with an arcane set of rules that you practically have to have a B.S. in computer science to understand! It’s a perfect opportunity to make new friends. Wait… are they all on the same team? Are they having a lunch meeting? What if I sit down and they’re like “Hey, um, sorry, but we’re having a lunch meeting” and then I have to get up and move? And then they’re all like “How did that girl not notice that we’re having a lunch meeting?” Fuck it. I’m going back to my desk.  

hoarders

I am desperately afraid of losing my memory. Sometime last year, I read neuroscientist Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice, about a woman’s descent into Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t the finest piece of literature I’ve ever read, but I read it in a single sitting and sobbed for HOURS. To lose your memory seems, to me, akin to losing your sense of self, your purpose, the ability to comprehend and interpret the world that you’ve painstakingly refined since birth.

My friends and I spend a good deal of time reminiscing. I mean, I know everyone does this, but I’m not sure that anyone is as hardcore about it as we are. We can pass hours reconstructing the events of a single night in gory detail, prompted by the memory of an object or a moment–it goes something like this:

“I would really kill for one of R.M.’s brownies right now.”

“Do you remember the last time we had them? It was the night we crashed the end of a cast party for a show we weren’t in–”

“OMG, I fucking HATED that show. J.W. was the director–you remember J.W.? She was psycho–”

“Wait, but wasn’t that the show where B.P. was shirtless?”

“When was B.P. NOT shirtless? Whatever. But remember, we were at the cast party, and we had run into J.F. in the College Center on the way–”

Here J.F. himself interrupts. “I still can’t believe you didn’t make me come with you! I was in the midst of making a VERY BAD life decision!”

“Um, YEAH, you were. But seriously, J.F., when were you not in the midst of making a very bad life decision?”

He sighs.

“Anyway, it was like, March, and it was still super cold, and we weren’t even drunk but we decided to go to this party anyway because R.M. always made really delicious food for parties, and we ran into J.F. on his way to make a really bad life decision, and B.P. had been shirtless, and then we ate brownies. Wait, but what else had we done that night? Why weren’t we with A.S. and M.K.?”

We have memories like elephants. We are a herd of memory-hoarding elephants. It’s silly how much we love to do this, and perhaps a sign that we should be doing more constructive activities as a group, but we’re memory-hoarding elephantine storytellers and maybe we’re writing the sequel to “How I Met Your Mother” and it’s what we like to do. We like to hoard our memories, use them to build stories, marvel at the absurdity of life. 

I hoard memories, for certain. In my living room, I have an ottoman that opens to reveal boxes of journals, photographs, show reviews clipped from newspapers, notes, letters, cards. That’s a lot of paper with a lot of memories that I don’t need to hold in my brain.* And perhaps in decades when I’m in the throes of dementia, I’ll sit for hours digging through my vast stores of paper, unfolding the notes that the cute boy in freshman geometry used to write me back in 2003, tracing my tenuous path to adulthood through a pile of spiral notebooks, aching for the details–details that I could never capture in words or photos or origami or Crayola marker song lyric collages.

There are no words that can capture the most precious feelings. I don’t know how to write a book that will explain to an elderly, confused version of myself how strangely warm it feels to see someone cry because you’re leaving them or how cold it feels when someone leaves you. All the photographs and programs and ticket stubs can’t encapsulate the ecstasy of being onstage. I can’t write a poem about the spins. 

I cling to the most visceral elements of my memories. What will I do when I can no longer remember the feeling of your hands on my back? When I can’t remember how cold I was that night in October, how I had to put on a bathrobe over my sweatshirt to keep out the chill? When I can’t hear the applause of 1300 people giving a standing ovation in the middle of a high school theatre performance? When I can’t relive the feeling of my stomach dropping as the cops burst into the backyard at our Memorial Day roller disco in 2007? When I can’t see the green paper that I used to write my goodbye letter to our house on Brook Bay eleven years ago?

*Guys, what if I started referring to my brain as my personal virtualized storage solution? I AM THE CLOUD. Only I’m not a particularly non-repudiating solution. I can’t vouch for the integrity of my data.

didn’t Dumbledore say something pithy about choices once?

It is a conscious and mindful practice to live, content, with the choices you make. 

Thus spoke my yoga teacher this morning. I’ve taken her class on and off when I’m in Vegas and she is one of the rare yoga teachers whose opening monologues or class themes I take seriously. I have a low tolerance for new-agey bullshit–I don’t generally believe that the divine light within my yoga teacher honors the divine light within me–especially at yoga classes where you can tell that the teacher is just parroting the same crap her instructors feed her. But this teacher is one of a few who put original thought and even research behind her words. She spoke to us today about recent research that has revealed connections among decision-making and the production of various happy-making chemicals (dopamine, oxytocin, other things I don’t remember from Intro Psych in 2007), offering a possible explanation for why we never feel satisfied with the choices that we make.

I made a lot of grand and dramatic choices this year, as I do, with little thought behind them. These choices have led me to grand and dramatic places and experiences, but I’ve been disinclined to live contently with them because I am constantly distracted by what else could be. I tend to act on instinct and to make rash decisions based either on what seems most attractive at the time or what will make the best story. It’s kind of a hedonistic, careless way to live and is contrary to my disablingly hesitant nature.

But I believe that had I thought any more critically about the decisions I made this year, I would have traveled down worn, dull paths that brought me no heightened emotion. Living on instinct, aside from the fact that I would probably be an excellent hunter-gatherer if called upon, is a great way to upset expectations and follow a path other than the one that society or your mom or Hollywood or whatever has set out for you. While I probably would have ended up being a professional nerd no matter what path I followed, I have a pocketful of untraditional experiences that set me apart from the rest of the nerds. I love being different and memorable and I’ve achieved this by just doing what seems fun or interesting rather than what other people have done before me. You know how little kids wanted to be a firefighter fairy princess ballerina mailman? I mean, I’m a proposal writer ballerina blogger a cappella singer actress haiku enthusiast. I’m every nerdy yet strangely agile and rhythmic little girl’s dream, entirely because it seemed like it would be fun to take a ballet class and audition for the musical and apply for that long-shot job that my sister’s husband thought I might be good at. There was no indication that any of those paths made sense for me, but I thought they’d be interesting to wander down regardless. 

Nevertheless, I wonder. It’s natural, if I believe what my yoga teacher told us this morning, to consider the alternatives: to wonder if I’d be happier if I lived in a different city or if it would have been more sensible to ignore my feelings for that boy or if I should have found an apartment that allowed cats or if I should have eaten less bacon at breakfast (NEVER) or if–and it continues, in an endless loop of dissatisfaction with my charmed and interesting life caused by the distraction of possibilities.

Perhaps this should be my New Year’s resolution this year: to either live, content, with the choice I have made, or to make a new choice that supersedes the previous one. It seems wasteful, given that I’m pretty sure we’re going to get nuked at some point in the next few years, to spend as much time as I do wallowing in a pile of “what ifs.”

Or perhaps my resolution should be to convince the yoga teachers of the world to stop babbling about divine light and either say something interesting or just STFU and let me savasana a little while longer.

things that used to cause me existential worry that no longer bother me

1. pit stains: I’ve tried all the magical aluminum prescription deodorants in the world. I’m just a sweaty, unfeminine person. It’s okay. I make up for it with my sparkling personality.

2. buying feminine hygiene products: I mean, someone’s gotta let the pimply teenage drugstore clerk know that ladies do, truly, bleed out their uterine lining on a monthly basis.

3. my embarrassing lack of knowledge about current movies and TV: There’s literally nothing I want to do less than watching a midget in fur getting it on with the princess or whatever “Game of Thrones” is about. Plus, I like to think that it makes me look more intellectual when I say, “Oh, I’ve never seen ‘The Wire.’ I don’t really watch TV.” (This is a lie and a half. I just only watch mediocre sitcoms and “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” which is decidedly anti-intellectual and actually kind of embarrassing, especially since sometimes I start fantasizing about how fun it would be to go on a culinary tour of the Midwest with Guy Fieri in his convertible. What can I say? I’m a sucker for frosted tips.)

things that will indefinitely cause me existential worry:

1. holding babies: I got to hold my boss’s itty-bitty month-old infant last night. I tried to tell him that holding babies gives me an aneurysm, but he just laughed at me and told me that it isn’t that hard. Which it isn’t… but man, if I had dropped that baby, I would TOTALLY be fired. (I did not drop the baby, and there is photographic proof that I held it properly. I might have even managed to wipe the look of terror from my eyes for the length of the flash.)

thoughts on living alone

The knock came last night around eight. I froze in panic, hoping that my inertia would somehow trick the visitor into believing I wasn’t home in spite of the lights and the television and the fact that until the knock, I had been belting out Brandi Carlile. I waited motionless in my desk chair until the danger passed, left the TV and the lights on, and wondered if I could escape through my kitchen window if they broke in through the front door or if I would end up like The Shining. 

They didn’t knock again. The panic receded. 

I wonder what they wanted. I wasn’t expecting a package or a pizza or the cable guy. I haven’t met any of my neighbors yet; perhaps one was stopping by to introduce themselves or give me some Christmas cookies or beg me to please God please stop singing all the time. (In my defense, only one of my walls backs up to another unit, and I never sing near that wall unless my neighbor is playing TV really loudly, in which case I think I’m justified. Also, I am the reincarnation of Karen Carpenter, and they should appreciate the nightly free concert.)

I didn’t consider answering the door. I live alone and I’ve been led to believe by our misogynist collective wisdom that a woman living alone who dares to answer the door is akin to a woman who wears a short skirt in public: she’s basically asking to be robbed/raped/murdered. (This is sarcasm. Enjoy it.) I’ll continue to tell myself that it was a kind neighbor or a lost delivery boy because I relish living alone and I don’t want it to become part of my omnipresent low-grade panic, which is usually fixated on more pressing matters like whether I’ve gained a quarter-inch on my waist or if the next flight I take will crash into the Rockies or when I’m going to make a critical error at work and get fired. I don’t want to add to that the possibility that I’ll be murdered by an axe-wielding stranger. 

I often feel incompetent; I’m young and look even younger and I don’t generally present myself in a way that makes people take me seriously. (I don’t say this to insult myself. I’m just kind of… a young person. Like, my spirit animal is a baby pigeon, and I’m willing to post a phrase like that under my own name on the Internet.) To say that I live alone lends me an air of credibility: oh, you live alone! You Swiffer your own floors and toast your own bagels and write your own rent checks! (Is it me or do those all sound like bad euphemisms for masturbation?) I spend more than I should on rent and I’ve built a lot of furniture alone that was meant to be assembled by more than one person. I’m probably doomed to be crushed by a bookcase because I couldn’t figure out how to attach it to the wall using the included wall attachment kit so I just… didn’t. 

The joys of living alone are well-documented. You only have to wipe your own hair out of the shower. If the dishes lay crusted over in the sink for a week, you know exactly whose bed to dump them on. Nobody will sing opera in the shower while you’re lying in bed trying to sleep off an inadvisable series of whiskey gingers. I’ve had my share of roommate adventures–senior year of college in a wasp-infested glorified double-wide with my four best friends; a ratty walk-up in Astoria with three strangers from Craigslist; a converted three-bedroom separated from campus by a graveyard with two girls, two kittens, two guitars, and a saxophone for four months in 2008–and I can state definitively that all these benefits outweigh the occasional bout of existential angst that interminable hours alone can beget. 

I wonder sometimes if I’ll turn into a weird old lady who lives alone with a lot of cats and a garage full of newspapers. As it stands, I’m a weird young lady with a lot of books and a faux leather storage ottoman full of journals. The world makes me anxious and I derive a lot of comfort from retreating into my house and writing for hours, reading for hours, watching “How I Met Your Mother” for hours.

I have one or two friends that I could live with and I like to think that one day I’ll love someone enough to stand their toothpaste stains on my bathroom countertop. In the meantime, I’ll continue to live blissfully alone, to relish the hours I spend in the company of my own mind, to pass hours in exciting places with friends and to come home to the comfort of my sheets that may or may not have been washed in the past… month or two. I think that of all the things that I’m grateful for right now–and it’s a laundry list if there ever was one–living alone is near the top. It is a gift. 

Where was I? A stranger knocked at my door, and there was nobody there to defend me but me? I suppose I can handle an axe murderer, so long as I don’t have to clean their hair out of my shower drain. 

happy Thanksgiving!

This year, I’m thankful for my friends and for the joy I’ve found in watching us all stumble toward adulthood. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be a parent, minus the part where you’re allowed to keep them on leashes on public places (wouldn’t that make going out to crowded bars so much easier, though?). I alternate between a maternal sense of pride, a sisterly sense of solidarity, a knowing sense of pity; I know that my friends feel the same way about me. It is this vicarious experience of growing together that I’m thankful for this year. At any given point during the past five years since we started college, we have all been–and many still are–three sheets to the wind, hoping that our callings and our soulmates will drop out of the sky on top of our heads. It seems that this year, at least, we are all beginning to fumble in a more appropriate direction. It’s exciting and I’m deeply grateful to experience and to watch it in my friends.

I had breakfast in Chelsea with my old friend Grace yesterday morning. When we were younger, we’d sit for hours on warm summer nights on the patios at our favorite coffee shop and time would linger as we talked. Yesterday, I had dashed into work at 7:30 to bang out a draft of a last-minute assignment, sent it onto my co-writer, and put on my New York walking legs to make it to the diner on time. We sat in metal chairs and drank coffee and ate eggs and time stood still again.

Grace is my artistic friend and she has always taken great pleasure and great pain in being different. We grew up in ballet together and when her back gave out during our freshman year of college, she left the barre behind and threw herself headfirst into choreography, poetry, and photography. She reinterprets the noise of the world now in exquisite, embodied, scripted silence. She is 23 and she had her Judson Church premiere last month. For those of you who aren’t keyed into the postmodern/tanztheater scene, Judson Church is a big deal. Gracie is making it, slowly but surely, in the big time. I look forward to being able to say that I knew her when her largest audience was our senior dance class at the Las Vegas Academy. We all knew her work was something special then, too.

I should note also that Grace has always had a touch of morbidity about her. When we were sophomores in high school, she wrote a poem that included some line about drinking the blood of children and never lived it down. Everyone loved her, and we went to performing arts high school so in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t actually that weird, especially considering we had classmates who wore cat ears to class, but nobody let her forget that (especially since it was for, of all things, world history class). I asked her yesterday if she was doing anything new and interesting to pay the bills. She squinted at me sheepishly, shook her head, and said, “I’ve been studying to get my crematory operations license.”

Our friend Joey got married at the beginning of November. I could write a novel about this, but I want to note that that is far and away the most adult thing any of us has ever done. The rest of us are still generally celebrating that we clean our bathrooms on a regular basis and don’t usually drink to the point of vomiting anymore. I am grateful that we go to watch Joey get married, especially since we got to dance the night away together at his reception for the first time since college. I’m even more grateful that he set such a high bar for us. His husband Chris is everything that I want all of our significant others to be: smart, kind, funny, generous, caring, and incredibly tolerant of a very high-energy, high-personality group.

I’m grateful to live vicariously through all of my friends’ joys and sadnesses. Our collective adventures are rich and exciting and totally not what any of us had planned just a year and a half ago when we graduated from college. I’m grateful that we’re all having unique experiences and chasing happiness how we think appropriate. I don’t believe that we’re resigned to live out the lackluster, played-out version of our twenties that Lena Dunham and Thought Catalog have ordained for us. I’m grateful that my friends are paying the bills doing crematory operations while they pursue careers as postmodern dance choreographers and I’m equally grateful that my other friends decided to quit dance and go into arts administration instead. I’m grateful that we’re trying to pursue sensible, meaningful, fruitful, rewarding lives with people we love instead of trying to cling to our wild youth. (I’m grateful that this doesn’t mean we can’t still drink until we have the spins and have to cab it home from Brooklyn.) I’m grateful that I have a tribe scattered to the four winds, from New York to DC to Paris to the Mississippi Delta. They are my everything.

haterween

I hate Halloween.

Yes, world, I went there. I hate Halloween. I’ve hated Halloween since I was sixteen and my parents and I got food poisoning celebrating my mother’s birthday the night before (never get the chocolate fudge cake at the Cheesecake Factory. Why did we get anything that wasn’t cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory? Why were we at the Cheesecake Factory in the first place? It was probably karmic food poisoning for having poor taste. But I digress) and we spent the whole day, plus a couple days after that, puking our guts out. My first college quasi-relationship–we didn’t have relationships at Vassar; only quasi-relationships and marriages–fell apart during Halloween my freshman year. I spent Halloween evening in my bed in four layers of clothes, shaking. I get cold when things fall apart.

When I was a little girl, Halloween meant my mom making me beautiful costumes that were, in retrospect, totally culturally inappropriate (I was a geisha one year. Give me a break; it was the 90s and we lived in Nevada). It meant tromping the neighborhood with my best friends from down the street, Kaitlin and Carolyn, and eating candy for days until I had finished my own bag, then starting in on my sister’s. It was a glorious time and I relish every cavity I’ve had filled since.

I don’t need to wax poetic on college Halloween or postgrad Halloween because I think we’re all well-acquainted with the traditions. You dress in some costume based on your position on the scale of intellectualism (somewhere between “unironic ‘Jersey Shore’ viewer” and “person who drops the number of times they’ve read Infinite Jest in conversation, including ‘one’”). You go to a party with your friends and you cling to your friends the entire time and so does everyone else and nobody makes new friends and you drink themed drinks and someone gets sick and you wake up the next morning with a raging hangover that is ENTIRELY not worth the spectacularly mediocre evening you had.

I hate Halloween now for the same reason that I hate Founder’s Day at Vassar and any other event characterized by crushing peer pressure to HAVE FUN and GO CRAZY otherwise you’re SUPER LAME and KIND OF TRAGIC. It’s no great secret that I’ve downed my fair share of too many tequila shots and that I have a whole slew of embarrassing and potentially incriminating stories from my wild youth. But FACT: not one of those crazy stories is from Halloween or New Year’s or St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras or any other those other holidays where if you aren’t wearing pasties and, like, doing body shots, you’re a loser and you’re never gonna be in any cool Facebook albums. They are all from cast parties. Almost exclusively. (Except for that one time with the Australians, but what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so I can’t elaborate.)

I like parties where I know everybody, or have at least identified them as Cute Sound Guy and called them the bullseye on my emotional dartboard. I really hate parties where the sole purpose is to drink until you puke in a houseplant. I like parties where the purpose is to drink while you play word games. I like parties that turn into everyone having intense drunk conversations in various corners. I like parties where you make new friends that aren’t trying to have a CRAZY NIGHT. I find that on holidays where fun is preordained, everyone is trying to have a CRAZY NIGHT, and they’re annoying and too drunk and someone is probably going to pass out and you’ll have to poke them every twenty minutes to make sure they don’t aspirate. Nobody wants to make new friends on CRAZY NIGHTS; they are too busy posing for Facebook photos and drinking the appropriate drinks and fixing their costumes.

I get bored at these kinds of parties. I don’t think it’s very interesting to sit around and watch other people do crazy things, and I’m not really the kind of person to do crazy things myself. Sometimes, when I get sad that I didn’t go to wild parties in high school, I remember that I don’t actually like wild parties. I like drinking too much with people that you can have a great conversation with, especially when you’ve collectively drunk away the fact that you’re all a little socially awkward and inhibited. My favorite nights from the months since I’ve graduated: the night Lauren, Julie, and I killed two pitchers of sangria at Firefly and sang Adele in Julie’s backseat until we were sober enough to drive. The night before the Fourth of July at book collective, talking about everything from philosophy to the company mission to God knows what after the fourth bottle of wine until four in the morning. 3 AM the night before my cohort parted ways after our new hire training in California, sprawled out across beanbags in the office rec room, listening to my coworkers–my new friends–swap stories about life in Afghanistan. Sitting around the coffee table at Jon and Jeannine’s apartment in Sunnyside having meta-conversations about the same conversations we had in college, which were usually deconstructing the nights we couldn’t remember, which were never Halloween.

I like those kinds of nights. They’re still impractical and a respite from the stresses of the real world, but unlike the CRAZY holidays, they’re actually fun. And memorable. Minus the blackouts.

So this year, I bought two bags of Halloween candy at Target to hand out on Halloween. Tonight, while everyone else is at Halloween parties HAVING FUN and GOING CRAZY, I am binging on orange Kit Kats and watching reruns of “How I Met Your Mother” and thinking about how happy I am that I don’t have to clean someone else’s puke off the carpet at a party full of biddies dressed as Sexy Mustard. Also how happy I am that nobody is bleeding all over my kitchen floor because they bit it while drunk-biking across campus in their Sexy Giraffe costume (unrelated: apparently gay men have their own rules for Slutoween).

May I spend all Halloweens in my future like this one; may my weekends be filled with pretentious conversation and nobody puking in a houseplant.

boys don’t make passes…

I believe that the wearing of glasses should be exclusive to nerds. Let me tell you what sparked this audacious statement:

Of late, I have seen many a photo of my elementary and middle school classmates doing their creepy sorority cult poses* and noticed that many of these obnoxiously pretty girls are wearing GLASSES.

When I see Facebook photos of those long-haired, long-legged, perfectly proportionate beauties accessorizing their Herbal Essences commercial-grade locks with a big pair of plastic frames, I am filled with INORDINATE RAGE. If I were to speak my feelings aloud, it would be in a sort of guttural, Exorcist-style grunt: “YOU CAN’T WEAR THOSE.”

They have undergone none of my struggles! They were never caught picking their collective nose in front Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, never to live it down! Nobody ever accused them of reading the dictionary! They were never dubbed “Dorky Dana” during the unfortunate first-day-of-school icebreaker game when you’re supposed to think of an adjective with the same first letter as your first name, only that doesn’t always work because there are no good adjectives that start with D, and someone will inevitably think of an insulting one before you’re even called on to speak! They have never been unceremoniously dumped via text message, nor puked in a parking lot! (I can tell, because they have perfect hair.)

When I was a kid, I was convinced that all of my struggles could be blamed on my glasses. I wished on stars and eyelashes and birthday candles and yellow lights that I would wake up the next morning with perfect vision. I was painfully different from most of my classmates and it drove me insane; I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like them. Sometimes I read my old diaries from elementary school and that, for years, was the underlying theme of my existence: why, but why, am I not like everyone else? Why is my brain so noisy? Why don’t I like the same TV shows and games and magazines as everyone else? I could not relate and in my mind, it was because I wore glasses. They were the physical symbol of my geekdom, my nerdiness, my dweebery, and I was convinced that if I could only cast them aside, I would understand what was so fun about running around and shrieking on the playground, and “Rocko’s Modern Life,” and maybe I would be good at soccer, and everyone would like me and nobody would tell the class that I picked my nose.

I, and my fellow geek-nerd-dweebs, are uniquely qualified to enjoy the fashion benefits of glasses because we suffered the angst of wearing them when they were decidedly uncool.

I am 23 years old and it has been fourteen years since I, um, hypothetically could have been caught picking my nose in front of Mrs. Bowman’s fourth-grade class, but actually I just had this really atrocious itch somewhere on my sinus and maybe found some gold along the way, and I’m gonna quit while I’m behind, but suffice to say that I have not grown up to the point where I’m over my childhood. I’m still socially awkward; I still don’t find social interaction as comfortable as most people seem to; my brain is still so noisy that it regularly keeps me awake at night.

(I’m lucky here in Silicon Valley to be surrounded by many, many like-minded people. We are, generally, the meek inheriting the earth, and it feels great, especially since I don’t have to trip all over myself wearing heels and business casual. It’s oxymoronic, but here I feel I can be unabashedly socially awkward because everyone else is too. People here, like me, are earnest and curious and unconcerned with looking uncool. It’s a comfortable place to live.)

And so I still feel a residual bitterness towards people who seem to have always had it “easier” than I do. Their lives are hardly anything I desire; I have never wanted to be in a sorority and don’t have the energy to maintain Herbal Essences hair and I don’t want to work in fashion or PR or go to med school or do anything besides what I already do. Not to mention that my life is actually embarrassingly easy nowadays. I don’t even have to do my own laundry (thanks, Silicon Valley perks!). I can easily afford my rent and my car insurance and my cable and a couple new pairs of shoes every so often, and I have health insurance and voting rights and freedoms and privileges that many people lack. Frankly, nowadays, I only complain because it’s something to do.

But I remember being a little girl and wishing madly that I could spend a day in the body of one of the “popular” girls. They were pretty and easy and happy and sunny and I was bespectacled and moody and lonely and sensitive and nothing was easy. (I was unaware of the concept of “white privilege” at the time. Don’t worry, dear reader, I now know that everything is easy except trying to keep my uterus out of the hands of dastardly Republicans.) None of that is particularly true any longer; I work hard to be happy, and also I wear contact lenses, and I have a lot of really fantastic friends all over, and people generally like me.

But it’s hard to shake the nighttime thoughts that kept you awake when you were a little girl, especially if you thought them as hard and as often as I did, and for me, it’s still those damn glasses that kept me down, kept me from being happy and normal like the popular girls.

Perhaps these girls were once as geeky and shunned as I once was by classmates who watched Nickelodeon while they read Newsweek (RIP, print edition) in the corner. Perhaps they are actually nearsighted and need glasses, which is probably the most likely case, and I should maybe shut up and get over myself. But I maintain that the wearing of glasses should be a privilege held exclusively for the nerds of the world – for those who have suffered the shame of being outed as a non-consumer of Pokemon, of consistently missing the ball during four-square at recess, of knowing the capitals of every nation in the world but not the basic premise of “The Angry Beavers.” For if my Coke-bottle rims are suddenly going to give me an edge on everyone else, to set me apart in a way that makes me look special and glamorous instead of mousy and pitiable… I think that I deserve that one, don’t I?

I bought a new pair of glasses recently and when I wear them, I feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Analyze that, Freudette.

 

*I would like to take this moment to note that sometimes I can’t tell when my friends are posing facetiously. I have many friends from pre-college who are in, like, Delta Gamma Theta Phi or whatever, where you do the little broken wrist with the fingertips against the forehead with the jutting hip, and I guess it’s universal because I also have a bunch of Vassar friends who often pose like that as a joke. And the only way I can tell if they’re serious is if I look closely and see if they’re all wearing matching T-shirts that say something like “DELTA BETA KAPPA EPSILON BOYS VERSUS GIRLS FIJI ALPHA WET T-SHIRT FUNDRAISER PARTY.”

Also, we used to take pictures in dance company poses ALL THE TIME, so I probably shouldn’t make fun of sorority girls for doing it, but obviously we were pursuing the high art of Irish step dance/contemporary ballet/”walk eight counts and touch yourself” and can deservedly consider ourselves superior.

lessons from 365

Last December, I started the Dana Cass edition of Project 365, wherein I take a photo every day and post it to my Facebook page, along with a caption that ranges from brief to long depending on just how many times that particular cat has already appeared in the album. (Cat brothers Basket and Trollop Cassidy-Slate are currently competing for that prize, although they will have fierce competition if my future landlord approves my parents’ cat…) I got the idea from my friend Julie, whose zest for life I have always admired and longed to imitate. Though I’m an abysmal photographer – like, I think that the fact that I’m allowed to take pictures and display them in a semi-public format is an insult to the art and really, I should not be allowed near a camera – my goal with the project was to find and document interesting moments in what I knew would be a year of changes.

 

Little did I know, friends. Little did I know.

 

Some months have passed since I started Project 365. I won’t bore you all with the particulars until the full 365 days have passed, at which point I plan to recap the year in painful and exquisite detail, but this has been a bizarre year full of twists, turns, and the Tactile Dome, and I’m glad that I’ve been documenting it in such an unconventional and telling way. Behind my pictures of random objects, candid moments, and delicious food are some of the most poignant and painful moments that I’ve experienced in my years on this Earth.

 

The most significant lesson I’ve learned so far from this project is that I must constantly seek out those interesting moments. As my life finally, blessedly, begins to fall into place, if I’m not careful, if I don’t work to make the world a lively and welcoming place, the days will begin to run into one another. I think now in terms of what my photo of the day will be, and so do many of my friends. I like that. I like that I have support in my quest to create and document the eccentricities of my world and that even though I’m embarking on a stable, long-term career, becoming an adult, stumbling towards banality, I will continue to cultivate the zest for life that my friend Julie so joyfully embodies. As long as I view it as such, the world will continue to be an exciting place. This is my new manifesto.