Aging

I think being old has snuck up on me, and then jumped me in a dark alley and forever left its mark on my life.

I'm 27. True fact. I've traveled the world, been married and divorced, given birth, been abandoned. Now I've got a job and a 401(k) and I drop my daughter at kindergarten every morning on my way into the office. She takes dance classes on Saturday. I schedule phone calls with my best friends. I shop online because it's easier. I have a cocktail or a beer after work. I'm in bed, asleep, by 10:30 most nights.

This is what old people life is like, isn't it?

I mean, I could still go out on Wednesday nights if I wanted to, but getting five hours of sleep and being slightly drunk when I wake up is hardly worth it when all that's going to happen is I'm going to go to a bar (alone), sit there (alone) and then go home (alone). Plus, I'll probably end up spending more money than I ought to, considering I really want to figure out a way to rationalize the purchase of a ridiculously expensive dress that I have nowhere to wear, and it's really hard to do that when you just dropped $25 on craft cocktails.

So basically, it's not worth it to go out and be wild and crazy and young. I don't want to go out unless I have guaranteed sparkling conversation. Which means plans made in advance, and I am so horrible at asking people to do things and most of the time it doesn't work out anyway. So why bother? I can watch Netflix in bed or write about theater events I haven't seen or read 10,000 word articles about Dominionism instead.

I'm old, guys. I'm a fuddy-duddy. A spinster.

It won't be long until my jowls start to sag and my tits are around my knees and I wear support stockings and complain about my knees. (Actually, I already have some serious wrinkles and I am more apt to complain about my cartilage-less hips. For real. They hurt.)

I'm old. It's pretty terrifying. I'm shallow, and so being old also means no longer being pretty, and that's really, really scary. I honestly don't know if my self-esteem will be able to handle the blow of no longer being looked at by men.

But it also means that nothing I accomplish between now and my death will be as notable as it might have been. I am not a prodigy. I am not a wunderkind. Even if I manage to publish a book or write for the New York Times or really just about anything that I might want to do, it won't be the kind of show-stopping accomplishment that it would have been if I'd done it young. Somewhere in my head, I wanted to be Tavi Gevinson, and now I have to deal with the fact that I'm not. I'm not that great. Even if I manage to accomplish great things eventually, I'll not be great-great, just normal-great.

Nothing will ever come ahead of schedule. Now I'm stuck in the local lanes, slogging my way through all that detritus.

I'm old. I'm scared. I guess this is growing up.

Adventures in Internet Dating, REDUX

So lately, my OKCupid profile has been languishing. I've been in full-blown hermit mode, spending my evenings snuggled into my (brand-new, absolutely beautiful, and far-too-expensive) sheets (from anthropologie) with Netflix and hard cider. (I'm twelve episodes into the first season of Roswell. Also, The Man Who Cried is currently streaming, and I highly recommend everyone out there watch it. It's a gorgeous little gem of a movie that was terribly under-advertised and under-rated, probably because it was directed by a woman, but it is intense and beautiful and it has a great cast.)

But my profile is active and everything, so I still get email notifications of certain kinds of things, and I totally got an email when this guy that's friends with this guy that I maybe kissed a lot a month ago was checking out my profile.

I may have laughed inappropriately loudly and for an unacceptable length of time.

But it did get me to go back to the site to see what else had been up lately, and WOW. Apparently, September is the month where people scope the dating site profiles of people they peripherally know in real life.

Stop it, people. YOU ARE CREEPING ME OUT. Also making me feel like a loser. Why do I have a profile on OKCupid again? Weeks like this, I forget. Seriously. Why do I? All I want to do is lie in bed and watch Netflix. And I am not going to invite some random internet stranger over to do that with me. I mean, real talk, I've had entire relationships during which I wouldn't have invited the person I was dating over to do that. Netflix in bed is serious business. Netflix in bed is more or less the absolute pinnacle of intimacy.

But OKC. Right. It's a little disconcerting to look at my visitors list and see so many familiar faces. I mean, it's funny and all for about 30 seconds and then I rapidly go into a shame spiral for even having the damn profile to begin with, and then I become concerned that these familiar faces might want to sleep with me, and then I get all nervous and all it does is reinforce my decision to become an agoraphobic hermit shut-in who watches Netflix in bed every night.

I'm sure in a week, when my extroverted tendencies have again conquered my introverted tendencies (I am constantly at war with myself, it's really unpleasant) and I'm all social butterfly again, I will be flattered by all these creepers. But right now, I'm just weirded out.

P.S.- You should probably keep a throw-away OKC profile with no pictures so you can scope out your friends and your friends' friends without causing existential meltdowns in the people you're checking up on. I mean, I totally understand curiousity, I'm more curious than a cat that's only got one life left, but really. A little courtesy, here. It's the internet. You can TOTALLY BE ANONYMOUS if you just put a little effort into it.

Don't Settle, or, There's Enough Happiness To Go Around

Today, a friend of mine dug up a three-and-a-half-year-old piece from the Atlantic called "Marry Him!: The Case for Mr. Good Enough." I have a vague recollection of there being some kind of stir around it back in 2008, but in the early part of 2008 I was heavily pregnant and also completely in love, so I wasn't really paying much attention to tomes with dating or marriage advice.

Today, a single mama with a case of the lonelies, I read through the whole thing. Actually, I've read through the whole thing three times now (my boss really loves me today, guys) because the first time was full of so much emotional reaction that I had to read it a second time to get a rational read on it, and the second time was so full of incredulity at the terrible analytic capacity and also the extreme sense of over-privilege on display that I had to read it a third time to make sure I wasn't emotionally over-reacting again.

It's HORRIFYING. Really, truly horrifying.

The basic premise of the piece is that if you're looking to create a stable family unit, you don't need grand passion in your choice of partner. And on its face, that's a true and valid statement. A stable family unit is not the primary goal of most people out there looking for a life partner, though. The author takes issue with this fact, reflecting on her own dating experiences and those of her friends, and finally coming to the conclusion that a stable family unit is the goal that everyone OUGHT to have. Those that have made the trade off of passion for stability and complain about it now are lucky to have made the choices they did, and the author can't believe that it took her own self so long to figure out what she ought to want.

And that's where everything she says just breaks down and becomes the kind of drivel that I hate to read but can't stop myself from compulsively looking at.

Moral prescriptives about what people ought to want are always fraught with logical inconsistencies and mental acrobatics. Ms. Gottlieb is no exception. She starts with the realization that she's not happy. She then constructs an argument for why she'd be happier if she'd made other choices earlier in her life. The whole thing is the study of an acute case of Frost syndrome, in which "the road less traveled" is held up as some sort of saving grace.

But some of the ways in which she attempts to justify her position are interesting to me, a single mother in my 20s (rather than my 40s) who is also single, and also gets powerful lonely on occasion. The subtext of many of the most offensive statements in the piece make it clear that I am not the target audience for this piece. And I can't help but feel that perhaps if I could infuse some of my own perspective into Ms. Gottlieb's thought processes, I might be able to help her out a bit.

For starters, what is a stable family unit? Why is a stable family unit irrevocably and for all time a man, a woman, and two point three children living in a house with a white picket fence and a rose garden and a dog? On paper, I'm a single mother, but I live in a house with my parents (both my biological parents, in their 25th year of marriage), my biological child (concieved in a foreign country and born out of wedlock and with no legal father) and the two adult children of my oldest sister, who is actually my half sister (the product of my father's first marriage). No dog, no white picket fence. We're pretty stable, despite the tensions that sometimes erupt. I would even go so far as to call us a stable family unit. And my daughter certainly gets the advantage of all that stability and also all that attention.

The idea that two married, hetero-sexual people raising a child is the only thing that qualifies as a stable family unit is tied to the statistics about the children of single parents (specifically single mothers) that exist out there, and I'll be the first to admit that such statistics sound dismal. But I have always questioned those statistics, and not just because statistics can be manipulated to show just about anything. No, I've never been fully convinced that the relationship between single-parent households and under performance at school or behavior problems wasn't completely spurious. Because here's a little secret: most single-parent households are also POOR.

Yeah, shocking, I know. But true. And poverty carries it with a whole host of issues that might affect things like school performance and behavior a whole lot more than not having a daddy. Like, hunger. It's really hard to concentrate when you're hungry. Also, malnutrition in infants can and does lead to diminished mental capacity, period. And I've never seen a study that controlled completely for the variables that come with poverty when trumpeting the ills of single parenthood.

I'm pretty sure Ms. Gottlieb doesn't have to worry about poverty. So I think she can probably settle down a little on the desire to find a husband so that she can create a stable family unit. I'm pretty sure she can do that just fine on her own. Isn't that empowering?

But I don't really think that this woman wants to find a husband so desperately so that she can create a stable family unit. I think she's lonely.

And hey, I have a lot of sympathy for that condition. I suffer from it myself.

But here's what I don't get: she also acknowledges that most of her married friends are ALSO LONELY. SO, she's single and lonely, and her married friends are married and lonely, and it's better to be married and lonely because it's easier to manage kids when you've got a partner to help you out.

SO, a stable family unit is not actually one that's best for the kids, it's the one that minimizes stress on the parents. And sure, as someone that has a lot of help with her daughter in the form of the very non-traditional stable family unit I enjoy, I'll be the first to say that help with kids is a godsend. But again I say unto you: Help with kids doesn't come only in the form of a husband that watches them while you eat lunch and takes the trash out. (Seriously, these are her desired traits in a mate.) You've got lots of single parent friends, you imply. Why don't you all get together and crowd-source the kid watching while you go on dates and have lives?

Because the thing this woman says that offends me the most is this: "With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs."

Why don't you still do some of those things? You can. I promise.

You don't give up your life to have a child. You don't have to, and the kid will be a better person for you being an interesting, complete, well-rounded person than they will by you being a slave to them. They will be a better person even if they spend a weekend at "Auntie Em's" house now and again, or spend a week with Grandma while you go to Colombia. Really, I promise. It's not child abuse to get away from your kid now and again.

The rest of Gottlieb's dating advice, and exhortations to settle, spring from a complete misunderstanding of the difference between "lust" and "romance." Yeah, that biker that runs guns in his spare time probably gets your motor running in a way that the mild-mannered accountant with allergies to everything under the sun doesn't. But your choice is not dichotomous. Life is not black and white. And the lust you feel for the biker is not "romance." It's ADRENALINE.

Romance comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. For that matter, lust comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. And while you may not fall in love with everyone you fall in lust with, to go from that to the idea that you don't need any sexual attraction to your partner is a leap of logic that I can't even really quite follow. Yes, it's a cliche that long-married people don't have a lot of sex, but to turn that into the support for the argument that marrying someone you never want to have sex with is a good idea is just a little... off. To put it mildly.

So Gottlieb takes her own loneliness, her own frustrations with her (self-chosen, I must say) single parenthood, and turns that into a prescriptive for women everywhere. Marry a man so you don't do what I did? Settle for a man that's good enough so you don't choose to go to a sperm bank so you can have kids? Settle for Mr. Right Now so that you can be lonely with someone later on? I don't really get it.

Here's a better idea: be happy. Stop comparing your life to the lives of your friends and appreciate your life for what it is. Has it ever occured to you that you and everyone you know are unhappy because you're all desperately trying to impress each other instead of enjoying yourselves? Stop competing for happiness, because happiness isn't a pie that the world will run out of. There is more than enough happiness for everyone, more and much more than enough to go around, and you can be happy and they can be happy and I can be happy and we can all be happy. Even if we're lonely sometimes, even if it's hard sometimes, we can be happy. And if we took the road less traveled, there would still be dark places and you, Ms. Gottlieb, would have written a piece called, "Don't Marry Him!: The Case For Holding Out For Mr. Right."

Some people are never happy, and I'm sorry for that. But playing to the insecurities of single women, and exhorting young women to "settle" simply to avoid a fate that in your case actually looks pretty rosy from where I sit, is a pretty awful thing to do. Your life is wonderful. Deal with it.

On Language

I'm sort of a language/grammar/word snob. Shocking, I know, but it's true.

So imagine the actual shock I felt when I found myself in the unusual position of being the more liberal, free-spirited party involved in an argument over the (d)evoloution of language.

I guess, looking at my writing style now, it's not such a surprise. Just look at that use of the backslash, and also "(d)evolution." That's some next generation shit right there.

I use proper grammar and punctuation for everything. I use periods and commas, colons and semicolons, apostrophes and quotation marks, and I am fond of parenthetical phrases. I use all these exotic punctuation marks correctly. (I think I do, anyway. I probably mess up now and again.) Also, I always spell words completely. This is such a compulsion that unless I am seriously pressed for space (meaning, using Twitter or sending a text message) I always spell out cardinal numbers less than 21. Because that, kids, is how you do it.

I know the difference between "your" and "you're" and also between "there," "their," and "they're." (And I am an unabashed user of the Oxford comma, as you can note. I nearly cried when that TOTALLY FAKE report that the Oxford style guide had dropped it was making the rounds a few months back.)

I also have a multi-million dollar vocabulary. Why say red when you can say scarlet or crimson, or even persimmon? Why say beautiful when you can toss pulchritudinous in the mix? I fancy myself a writer, and words are thus my bread AND my butter.

Idiomatic phrases are fun for me. For example, do you know where the phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from? Let me tell you. Back in the nineteenth century, mercury was commonly used in felting processes, which means that milliners (or hatters) were constantly being exposed to mercury. Most of them ended up with some degree of mild- or moderate mercury poisoning. Low-level mercury poisoning gives you the shakes; higher levels of toxicity can cause increased aggressiveness and wild mood swings. So, hatters (by consequence of their profession) shook a lot and were prone to outbursts, both of which will make you seem pretty crazy to the average guy who passes you on the street or has to sit next to you in the bar. Thus, most milliners were thought to be crazy. Thus, the idiom "mad as a hatter" was born.

I decry people that say things like "Wat r u doing 2day?" I weep for humanity and die a little bit inside when I see someone use the possessive second-person pronoun instead of the contracted subject and verb combination.

But I don't really have a problem with the way we've turned certain things into their own parts of speech, fluidly moving from noun to verb and back again. I do not take issue with the phrases "google it" or "email me." I don't see them as evidence of a widespread cultural ennui toward language, or a deep-seated laziness. They are simply evidence of the evolving nature of language.

Language is not a dead thing. If it was, we would never have moved from Old English to the current form we use today, and all of us would be able to read Beowulf without the assistance of a translator. There would be no dialects. British English and American English would be exactly the same. Someone from Scotland would sound the same as someone from Northern California. Someone from Alabama would sound the same as someone from Australia.

There would be no slang. "Cool" would still mean something that was warmer than cold but not as warm as warm. If the word cool had ever even developed in the first place, since actually we'd all still be speaking Old English and I don't actually know if the word "cool" exists in Old English because I don't speak it.

The constantly changing nature of language does not necessarily denote a devolution. Change is not always bad. Sometimes it is just change. Sometimes it is actually good. That is as true of language as it is of any other thing. Allowing the linguistic denotations of things as fluid and multifaceted as the internet and its brand-new ways of transferring information to also have some of that same fluidity by not tying them to a single part of speech is not laziness. It is a more perfect mirror of the concept that the grouping of letters represents.

Because that is the whole point of language, is it not? To facilitate communication by providing the tools to communicate both concrete and abstract concepts drawn from the world at large. As our world becomes greater and more complex, our language must keep pace or risk becoming dead. And so perhaps we must give up the sharp demarcation between noun and verb. That is a small price to pay for what we gain in the real world by doing so.

Just don't ask me to give up the complexity of "you're" and "your" in favor of the single "your." Because I will cut you.

Reckless Abandon

A friend of mine linked me to this picture, with the commentary "No one kisses like they did in World War II. And that is a shame."

She is totally right. No one kisses with this kind of reckless abandon anymore. No one dives out of train windows to lock lips.

Well, we don't really ride trains anymore, either, which is its own damn shame, but even without the train, you see what I mean. We don't go all out for anything as simple as a kiss anymore.

Kissing has become blase.

I shudder in horror at that sentence, because kissing is the best thing ever invented. Kissing is better than sex. Honestly. And maybe we don't kiss with such wild, impromptu passion because it's not World War II and everyone isn't in the Army and on their way over an ocean to fight Evil, but also, I think we don't kiss like this anymore because we're all too busy fucking, instead.

Stop that.

Start kissing. Enjoy the moment,. Enjoy the moment when it stops. Enjoy the anticipation and the possibility.

Kiss with reckless abandon. And if you dive out of a train window, please make sure someone is there to take a picture, and let me see it. I would really like to know that people still do this.

xo!

I Am A Girl Who Reads

Last year, as I was in the midst of realizing that the boy I was dating had a girlfriend and was a malignant narcissist, I discovered Thought Catalog.

I discovered it because there was a post that started making the rounds of social media. It was called You Should Date An Illiterate Girl, and it made me cry. I sat at my desk with tears dripping down my cheeks, my throat so tight I couldn't breathe, holding on to that knot desperately so that I didn't sob, so that my cries remained inside and only silent tracks of saltwater tracked down my face and over my chin and onto my neck and over the knot in my throat.

It made me cry because I saw myself as the illiterate girl. I saw myself as the settler and the one settled for, as the woman that would die with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of my capacity to love.

I shared it, of course, as I am wont to do.

And later, when the boy and I communicated for the first time since my sharing, he saluted me, "Hello, girl who reads."

I was confused.

I've been thinking about that piece lately, so I read it again.

And you know what? He was right. I am the Girl Who Reads. I can differentiate between the soullessness of someone that cannot love and the desperation of someone who loves too much. I can read the lie in the hesitation of the breath. I know the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and a lifetime's worth of bitter cynicism. I have said goodbye so many times I am comfortable with it. I can close a book and look at it with only a little longing, I can go back and reread the same words with nostalgia but not regret that the story doesn't change.

I do insist that my narratives be rich, that my supporting cast be colorful, that my typeface be bold. I demand these things because life is short and without good stories and good friends and beauty it is also boring. I will not be bored. I will not live a life unfulfilled.

And I'm sure that's why he couldn't love me. And I'm sure that's why I couldn't actually love him, despite all my best efforts.

I will tell my stories. I will read and read and read until I understand and then I will tell my stories. And my narratives will be rich and my characters will be colorful because that has been my life. I will live the stories I want to tell.

And it would be nice, at the end, when I am an old woman and I am fading into the dark of my own denouement,  if someone was there to hold my hand and stroke my brow and whisper that our life was good. But I won't sacrifice my stories to have that person.

I am a girl who reads. I have words. I have rhythms and cadence and connotation. I can feel love and truth in my skin and I want nothing more than to absorb beauty into my bones. And if you can really understand that, then you won't fail me. If you can really live with knowing that my stories come first and everything else comes second, you're not too weak to love me.

Worse Than the WORST

You know what's even worse than that thing that's just the absolute worst? Because there are things that just rip your guts out, and they're awful. But they're supposed to rip your guts out. So, when you're destroyed by them, everyone understands.

But what's worse than those things are the things that rip your guts out that shouldn't. The things that are totally rational, absolutely the right things, that are completely spot-on expressions of maturity... that still make you want to cry. And cry a lot. Those things exist. And they are worse than the worst.

It's a really hard thing to subjugate your emotional reactions to your reason. I have spent years, more than a decade, trying to do it. And I've been more or less completely unsuccessful. I can now analyze my emotional reactions. I can say to myself, "This hurt me because of this and that" and I can see how the pieces fit together. I can do it with things that make me angry and things that make me happy and things that make me sad. I can do it all day long.

But seeing why something hurts, or enrages, or causes spontaneous spasms of uncontrollable giggles, doesn't make the need to cry, or throw something, or laugh any less. And being able to see the whys and hows of your own reactions has the side effect of making it so much easier to see why someone else's decision is probably completely rational and reasonable.

So when a very handsome, very charming, very reasonable man that kisses delightfully and drops the word "penury" into conversation like it's no big deal tells you that he's intrigued by you but he's not attached to you, it hurts. Even though the 1,000 miles and the non-existent geographic flexibility pretty much make that position the only one to take. I can understand that. Really. I get it.

I still felt very much like I wanted to cry for a day or two, though. And that's totally not valid. I mean, I feel it, so it's obviously valid in some sense, but it's not really, because being hurt by that is grounded in being such a ridiculous romantic, such a fairy-tale laden sop, that it's really just silly.

I believe in love at first sight. More than that: I want it. I want craziness! But I want craziness that's built on solid foundations. Because actual craziness is scary and leads to death threats, actually attempts at murder, narcissists, cheating, and more tears than it would take to fill an ocean. But crazy romance built on a solid foundation is the female version of the virgin/whore complex. It doesn't exist. It's not possible. I can get that. I still want it, though, so when practicality and reason assert themselves into my crazy romantic fantasies, I want to cry.

Because it hurts. It hurts not to be fallen in love with.