The Incredibly Fucked Up Classism of The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night (and stayed up far, far beyond my bedtime, so if this is muddled I'm going to blame mild sleep deprivation and not my own flawed analytic skills, mmk?) and good God, someone has the most fucked-up sense of class consciousness ever.

Honestly, that was the over-arching thought in my mind as I left the theater. I initially assigned this incredibly convoluted, nonsensical world view to Christopher Nolan, and I still think that it's largely him, but he is working with characters and stories written by other people, so it might not be entirely his fault that nothing makes a whole lot of sense.

There's a fascinating little vignette near the end of the film as lightly (nightsticks, the occasional handgun) armed cops that have been being held underground for months escape and march through the streets to confront legions of heavily (automatic rifles and machine guns) armed revolutionaries that have all the power. The sense of existential vertigo is startling and almost nausea-inducing if you've been paying attention to the news. Who has power? Who should have power? How do you take power and keep it without becoming the thing you took it from? The symbolism is both stark and gradient.

This movie is both cartoonishly comic and simplistic, and simultaneously jumping on the trend of heroes as anti-heroes, or at least complex beings living in unbearable tension. Character sketches of the four main characters, with particular emphasis on class, go something like this:

Billionaire playboy/superhero.
Billionaire female investor/CEO.
Working-class female cat burglar.
Escaped male convict.

What's fascinating in Nolan's universe is the interplay of these four main characters. Both the big hero AND the big bad are wealthy elites. Both of their sidekicks are decidely neither wealthy nor elite. Both the big hero and the big bad espouse "helping humanity" rhetoric. Neither one of them does nearly as much good as they could if they weren't so fucking self-absorbed.

(Don't argue with me. Batman is a megalomaniac. I mean, it's cool to watch him play vigilante, but he is absolutely an incurable narcissist.)

So, the world is threatened and destroyed by two people of the same class. Both have help from the underclass. And really, that's where the characterizations get interesting. Before I get to gushing about the incredibly fascinating, human portrait that is Selina Kyle (and you can call me a whatever-you-want, but she was absolutely the best/most interesting part of this movie, I don't care what sort of purist opinion you've got because I've never read a comic book in my life), a few notes on Bane.

An escaped convict that we find out lost his face after protecting a six-year-old girl born in a prison, he's set up for most of the movie as the villain. It's only at the end that we find out, despite his self-consciously pseudo-Stalinist rhetoric, that he's actually been acting on behalf of that wealthy lady investor, who turns out to be the kid he saved from some hell-hole prison. So, at sort of the last possible second you realize most of his rhetoric was empty (and there are some truly hilarious/cringe-inducing/exasperating visuals, including a scene straight out of Marat's French Revolution with Cillian Murphy inexplicably holding court atop a pile of desks; the gold-velvet upholstered Regency wing chair made me sigh/sob/choke all at once) and so maybe you don't have to be terrified of people advocating for a world in which the few do not live large on the blood and tears of the many.

But, most people won't think that far, and clearly the savior is a billionaire and the villain cloaks himself in "people's revolutionary" garments and then proceeds to pretty much destroy everything, so that's the message most will take. Sigh. Christopher Nolan, fuck you.

Still, the actual villain is herself an elite and monied woman. And Bane did, years ago, save her from a pretty desperate fate at the cost of his face. He clearly does believe quite strongly in the idea of caring for others, no matter the cost. He just goes about it in spectacularly bad fashion, acting out of an implied love for the (beautiful, innocent) girl (who is very beautiful but not at all very innocent) who leads him astray. (I am not going to begin a feminist critique of this movie until I've seen it several more times.) Human beings make mistakes; maybe that's why we should be trying to make sure no one human being has the power to make mistakes that will destroy everything? Just a thought. Although I can't say definitively that it's one Nolan had. But maybe he did. Who knows. Anyway, it's just pop-culture, right?

But Selina Kyle. Selina Kyle is a goldmine of nuanced super-hero characterization. She wants social and cultural change. She can taste it. She is acutely aware that the world she lives in is stacked against people like her. And she steals. The implicit suggestion of her as a Robin Hood figure (steals expensive things from fabulously wealthy people, but lives in a small apartment in a crappy part of time; has a big-sister relationship with a young woman) is touching, but she consistently deflects it. She's equally repulsed by the wealth of Wayne's world and attracted to it. In that sense, she's a good allegory for most of us in relation to our economics: horrified at and covetous of excess.

In the final analysis, she (literally) saves Batman's life because she can't just abandon him. Clearly, there's sexual and romantic tension there (but I'm not writing a feminist critique until I've seen it WAY MORE TIMES) but I like to think at least some of that is her own morality. She believes in helping her fellow beings, so she helps, at risk and cost. And in the end, when she's being inexplicably squired around Italy in luxury by Bruce who was suppposed to have lost all his money, what came to my mind was a bitter comment she directed at him an hour earlier in the film: "You people don't even go broke like the rest of us." Maybe she's betraying her ideals, maybe she sold out, as was suggested to me in a rather incoherent phone call as I walked home from the theater at 2 am, but she, like Bane, is human, and makes mistakes, and if we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt about his motivations for being such an evil monster, she certainly gets the same consideration considering she hasn't actually done anything on his level of maliciousness. Yet. That yet is implied, of course: once you're living the high life it's hard to disentangle yourself from its siren song. As long as temptation exists, you have to fight it.

What is undoubtedly most fascinating about this film as a dissertation on class and class consciousness is the interplay of these four characters: the ways in which they are the same and the ways they are different, the way those similarities and differences were grafted on by external conditions or consciously chosen. Bane and Selena could maybe have, with different choices, ended up in each other's shoes; so, for that matter, could Wayne and Tate.

And that's why, despite all the heavy-handed, trite, simplistic SUPERHERO COMIC OMG shit, it actually is a pretty complex movie. If you're bothering to think about it. Or, overthinking it, as I'm sure I am. Then again, the real world is pretty simple on the surface, too, which is why so many people are convinced they have it figured out: they just ignore the pieces that don't fit.

Your First Time Is Never Any Good

This is a thing we tell teenagers, or young adults, about their first sexual experience. Maybe it's just girls we tell this to? I don't know.

It's totally true, though. Your first time is never any good. Mine sure wasn't. My first few times weren't very good. Possibly my first few hundred? It took a few years for me to get the hang of sex, and then I'm pretty sure it just happened on accident anyway. Now, I find myself at the ripe old age of 27, actively working at my sex life for the first time ever.

It's weird. The working at it is weird, I mean. I am not naturally a "worker." My natural state is much closer to "dilettantism." I am very good at doing nothing. I don't actually like to work at anything. That's probably why I flunked out of college (twice) and now have a mindless administrative job. So working at sex is something of an unnatural state of affairs for me, as my character is so unsuited to work in general, and that goes double for working at things that are supposed to be pleasurable.

I have been having better sex in the last year, though. So even I must concede that there must be something to this work thing.

A few months back, when I was riding high on some confidence-binge of unknown origins, I submitted a short story to a bonafide literary publication.

SCARY.

Almost immediately after hitting the "send" button, I wanted to take it back and be all like, "Oh, hai, can you just delete that? Don't bother reading it. Kthnx."

I didn't do that, of course, because that would have been stupid. Also, even though I knew I was setting myself up for rejection, I sort of wanted to see what happened. Expecting anything other than rejection on your first submission attempt is pretty much ego-suicide, and I know this. Much better, and much more deserving, writers than I have been rejected hundreds upon thousands of times.

But still, some part of me wondered if maybe I hadn't just stumbled into a good story, the way I accidentally stumbled into good sex.

I didn't. The expected (albeit VERY TARDY) rejection letter arrived in my inbox this afternoon.

And now I find myself in the distasteful position of having to work at something else. If I'm going to publish anything, clearly I have to clean up my act, write more, dedicate time to it, read about writing, all that nonsense that all those silly "get-published-quick" websites tell you to do.

How common. (I'm really a snob at heart. I don't pretend anything else, ok, so don't get all up in my business about it.)

Still, if your first try is never any good, and working at sex has made my sex better, maybe I'd better stoop to being common. Clearly I am not extraordinary, anyway, as the rejection letter in my inbox keeps yelling at me.

The Depths of Toddler Despair

My three-and-a-half-year-old is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. I know that sounds adorable and precocious and like a good opportunity for personal growth for a Mama that purports to be mindful, and it is all those things. It is.

But, no jokes, no funny business, it's also hell. A three-and-a-half-year-old existential crisis involves some pretty horrendous temper tantrums. You can't really blame her, really: it's got to be awful to be in the grips of angsty ennui when you don't even know the words "angst" and "ennui." As nebulous and imprecise as they are, they at least provide some sort of structure for your feelings.

It's been a really tough week for us, these past seven days or so. She's been moody, operating on a hair-trigger that sends her from smiling and delightful to anger ball monster in a matter of seconds. There have been lots of thrown toys, lots of screams, lots of "NO!" regardless of what is being offered.

After her angry outbursts, she always starts to cry and then tries to burrow into me. If I ask her to stop crying, she'll look up at me with tear-stained cheeks and whimper, "But I'm really sad, Mama. I'm really sad."

It's heartbreaking.

But for seven days, I have been unable to get her to tell me what it is, exactly, that she's sad about. She's either ignored the question completely when its been asked, or mumbled some throwaway answer along the lines of  "I don't know."

Yeah, yeah, I know: she's my kid. She's MY daughter. This behavior makes perfect sense when you think about it that way, right?

Last night, after the fourth straight dinner-table meltdown, I took her upstairs to calm down. Time-outs weren't working, obviously, so I sat with her, instead - the two of us cuddled up in the rocker in her room.

And she said to me again, "I'm sad, Mama. I'm just really sad."

"What are you sad about?" I asked, again, with no hope or expectation of a response.

She lifted her chin, and the lamplight glinted on her wet, mottled cheeks. "I don't know who I am, Mama!" she wailed confessionally. "What's my fourth name?"

I was taken aback. What did she mean, fourth name? What was this about not knowing who she is?

"You're Genevieve Anne Findley. You're my snugglebug, and you are my best girl, and you are clever and strong and big and beautiful," I said to her. "Mama gave you three names. Genevieve, for St. Genevieve; Anne for Anne Shirley; and Findley, just like Mama."

She wasn't sobbing anymore, but there were still tears making tracks down her face, and her grip on my shirt was compulsively tight.

"But what about my fourth name, Mama? I should have four names," she choked out.

"Well, you think about what you want your fourth name to be. You think about all the names you know, and all the names you've heard, and when you find the perfect fourth name, you let me know, and we'll add it, ok?" This is me trying to be supportive in my absolute bafflement.

She snuggled deeper into my chest and stared at the wall. I stroked her hair. We sat and rocked, gently, back and forth, back and forth.

After what felt like an eternity, she straightened up and looked me dead in the eye.

"Bookwriter," she said. "My fourth name is Bookwriter."

"Absolutely," I replied. "Genevieve Anne Bookwriter Findley."

She squeezed out a tiny smile, and back we went to the dinner table, where she still didn't eat anything, but at least she didn't howl the whole time.

My three-and-a-half-year-old, who can't write her own name yet, wants to be a bookwriter. And is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. Perhaps some stereotypes exist for good reason. And perhaps all writers really are crazy, right from the very beginning. It would sure explain a lot about me.

"The Artist"

Winter is my season for movies. It always has been. I enjoy a good summer blockbuster (What up, Inception? The Dark Knight? Love you guys.) but really, winter is my season for movies. Winter is the season of gems like Blue Valentine, like Tamara Drewe, like Biutiful, like jeux d'enfants, like Let the Right One In, like The Science of Sleep.

(I just realized that only two of those movies are in English and only one of them is American. I promise: I'm not actually a foreign-cinema snob, ok? Those are just the best of the best of the last ten years.)

This winter is shaping up to be no exception. Melancholia? LOVED it. Two separate social commentaries, elegantly spliced together into a single film, dealing with the reality of depression and the need to understand and accept life's impermanence. The message is strong and strongly delivered, the script is fantastic, the cinematography is lush and sparse by turns, and I cannot express to you how nice it is to see Kirsten Dunst actually *acting* again. Not to mention Charlotte Gainsbourg.

But I think the darling of winter 2011/2012 is easily The Artist. The trailer makes it look like a simple love story, and there is a love story buried in it, but it is so much else, and so much first, before it is a love story. The Artist is an allegory, an extended metaphor for Hollywood dealing with the internet. It is an admonition to adapt or die, but to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it is an artfully drawn portrait of the sort of terror and absolute despair an artist feels when they feel as if they have no voice in a brave new world, or even a tired old one.

The Artist is (with two notable, and powerful, exceptions) a silent movie, shot in black and white. It establishes immediately that whatever hokiness we may see in old silent pictures of the 1930s, it is possible to effectively tell a story and engage emotionally with your audience in the medium. The story is of a star of the silent era that is hesitant to jump on the "talking picture" bandwagon, and who is ultimately nearly forced out of show business entirely. He is "saved" by a young starlet, in love with him, who helps him build a bridge between the world of his silent pictures and the talking pictures that she is such a hit in.

The allegory is clear, at least to me: pre-Internet era production types and distribution models are the silent pictures of our era; the Internet is as a big a change as sound in movies, and requires as big an adjustment to everyone involved in the business. That The Artist is distributed by the Weinstein Company, bastion of current Hollywood that it is, at first struck me as highly ironic. Hollywood understands the need to adapt, and to change, but it is making a movie about coming to terms with the need to adapt and change under the old system.

However, upon reflection, I'm not sure that it's ironic so much as it is self-preservation. The strong undercurrent of the "adapt or die" message is to be careful not to do away with the good things about old models when you do change. It is possible to effectively tell a story silently in black and white; we didn't need sound or color to do that. The young starlet in The Artist consistently recognizes the value and emotional resonance of the aging silent star's work. She cries for him, and his ideas and his vision. She understands that her medium is the future, but she doesn't want to lose the artistry of his medium. The Weinstein Company distributing this film is a broadside against irrelevancy, and it's a good one.

The secondary message of The Artist is the existential angst and terror of an artist, any artist, when they begin to feel as if they have nothing to say. The silent film star refuses to move into "talkies" at least in part because he doesn't think that people want to hear his voice. He's never told a story that way; he's never expressed himself that way. He doesn't think he can. The Artist is also the personal story of one artist facing the need to adapt or die, to find new ways to express what is inside, to be continually searching for new avenues to explore.

We, as individuals, as artists, as creators, must also adapt or die. And that is a scary prospect. We must constantly push forward, push boundaries, find new things to say and new and nuanced ways to say them. And when we, as individuals, as artists, as creators, feel stymied in that quest, the dark depths to which we fall are frightening.

This is a movie I need to own; this is a movie I need to be able to watch once a year or twice a year or maybe just whenever I feel like it. Adapt or die. Change is not the end. There is always a new way to bring your internal reality to the exterior world. Because that's what artists do, isn't it?

Moments, Liminal

I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.

It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.

But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.

I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.

My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?

But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.

I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.

Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.

Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.

A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.

Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.

I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.

New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.

Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.

And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.

Living With Art

Last night, I stood in the presence of art. Art. Capitol A Art. My nose was inches from a Picasso ceramic. I put my hand on the frame of a Matisse. The room hummed and thrummed with energy, with life, with beauty and statement and meaning and history and emotion. This is why people create, isn't it? So that all that life inside them gets transferred to some other vessel, and when they die, some part of them is left behind. And when a group of art is gathered in a room, the room sings as if the artists were there, having a party.

Madame Pampadour, Henri Matisse.



We were just a group of people at a holiday party. There was wine and beer and food and laughter. But the party was in the former gentleman's homestead of Mr. And Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, and still houses the collection of work Mrs. Lynde Bradley amassed that has not been donated or loaned to museums.

Vase, Pablo Picasso



It is an amazing, incredible, uplifting, giddy feeling: to be in the presence of art, of Art, without glass or sensors or security personnel watching silently and with hawks' eyes. It is a rare thing, to be able to reach out and touch and feel the buzzing from the canvas, the cool porcelain regal and domineering and utterly self-contained. I could have spent hours, days, months in that room. I could have gently placed my fingers on each and every piece and slid it carefully from its place in the rack made of two-by-fours. I could look at each of those paintings, each of the Toulouse-Latrec lithographs, forever.

Every moment is eternity in the presence of art. In the presence of Art.

But, as I was discussing with a fellow adventurer prior to being overawed by Mrs. Bradley's collection, living with art is a very different experience than visiting it in a museum or a gallery. There is a subtle pressure, when you go out of your way for something, to experience it fully or to appreciate it all, and immediately. It's the Mona Lisa syndrome: visiting the Louvre inevitably means a trip to see the Mona Lisa, even though the painting is small, and the crush of people around it so thick and intense that you don't get to look at it for more than a moment before the tide of humanity carries you away. And this generally leaves one with a sense of ennui about the whole experience: "All this, and just for that? Sigh."



Treasures at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.



But living with art is different. Matisse in your living room can be sat and stared at for hours, just you and it and the quiet of your home. It can be absorbed, in slow sips rather than great gulps. It can be taken in fully.

And, Matisse in your living room can be ignored. It can be pushed to the back of consciousness while you read, or entertain, or play the piano, or eat a midnight snack, or chat, or write, or whatever it is you like to do in your living room. And then, at some point, you look up from what you were doing, and Matisse is still there, and you are struck anew, and you want to devour all that beauty again.

I want to live with art.

Low Ebb

I'm at low ebb. The lowest of low tides. I have nothing, nothing going on. I've been reading a lot of blogs focused on dating and relationships and sex and the interplay of stereotypes and expectation in each and all of these things and thinking about the interplay of all those stereotypes and expectations with both sexual ideas and loving ideals and the ways we conduct relationships.

But I don't have any conclusions from any of that.

At a certain point, reading something like The A(n)nals of Online Dating crosses a line from funny to abusive, and as a friend of mine said about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "You can only watch people be assholes to each other for so long." In the end, somewhere between nine and eleven pages in, I only end up feeling sorry for these people, these people that have no idea how to get what they want. Or even, that don't know what they want. It's heartbreaking. And I want to take each of them by the shoulders and give them a gentle shake and tell them to get it together, that life is full of disappointments, and that the only real guarantor of happiness is a long perspective.

I was talking about perspective this weekend, too, trying to sort out at what point altering your perspective on an emotional reaction become rationalization instead of healthy adjustment. Or, more accurately, I was trying to make a case for pure feeling that just wasn't happening. No matter how true I feel a rush of joy or a rush of sadness, it is just a perspective, and there's nothing sacred about anything.

I'm not as smart as I think I am.

Two weeks ago, I became completely embroiled in Susannah Breslin's Letters From Johns, for surprisingly similar reasons. There is enough there to disgust me, to turn my stomach and make me doubt the goodness of men in general, but there's also enough vulnerability, thinly veiled, and enough genuine confusion to make me want to do something. There's enough yearning and searching there, among those johns, to make me think that someone ought to be taking them by the hand and putting them on a different path. Maybe that's what the working girls are doing. Maybe that's what the working girls are hindering. It's hard to say. Sex is so fraught with terror.

Isn't it sad we're all so terrified of something that ought to be simple and uncomplicated and full of love? Or at least, trust.

But there I go again, wanting that pure emotional experience. That doesn't exist. It's all a matter of perspective. I speak from my perspective, and it is distinct and defined and I can try and adjust and that may change my emotional reaction. Maybe I don't want to change my reaction. Maybe I like compassion. It's a form of power, after all. All that caring.

What I mean to say is, I'm at low ebb. I have a thousand thoughts and there's a thread somewhere but I can't grasp it and I can't pull it and I can't spotlight it and make it easy to follow. I have nothing to say because I have everything to say. I can't bring any clarity to anything.

So I try and be oblique. You should see the backlog of half-started and absolutely atrocious poetry I've got catalogued. "Weave me a crown of ruby-colored leaves, and I will keep you against the winter..."

I don't know how I'm going to get through the winter.

Identity

I think I'm having an identiy crisis.

Or, I was. Maybe I still am? It's hard to tell. I'm certainly more than usually interested in certain questions that are often thought to be beastly and/or immature to expend mental energy on.

But here's what I've learned in the last four days:

I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations or ideas of good.

I mean, that should be self-evident, right? And when I say I've learned this, I don't really mean I'm ready to implement it. I will certainly still be chasing external validation for years to come.

But... when I don't get that support, that pat on the head, that "Well done!" murmured into my hair while someone wraps arms around me and holds me close, maybe I'll remember this, right now, and remember also that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. If I'm satisfied, then it's enough. Maybe I'll remember. Probably it'll take "learning" this several more times before that happens.

Which brings me to the question that I'm now wrestling with.

Am I satisfied?

No.

Why not?

I don't know. I can't separate my dissatisfaction with the ways in which I am perceived and receieved and judged and held to account from any internal dissatisfaction that may (or may not) be festering. Part of me wants to lay whatever nagging sense of "not doing good enough" I have lurking in my breast right at the feet of other people. But, that would be too easy.

We are each of us responsible for ourselves. We're responsible, ultimately, for finding our own happiness, for living our own lives, for coming to our own fulfillment. To push that task onto someone else is the height of selfishness. So, laying any dissatisfaction with my life and the things I do on someone else's shoulders, anyone else's shoulder's, is not a thing I am comfortable doing. I don't want to be that person that is selfishly putting their burdens on another.

Some part of me feels that people who love you should willingly shoulder some of that burden for you, though. Some part of me feels that loving someone is the act of attempting to ease burdens, without being asked. Pay attention, recognize need, help. That's how love behaves. Isn't it? That's how love should behave. That's how we who love should behave. But by that measure, there are strangers out there that love me more than the people I say "I love you" too, and strangers that I love more than those, since there are strangers I am more capable (and sometimes more willing) to help than my loved ones.

Perhaps it's true that familiarity breeds contempt. We can't help but start to take for granted that which we feel entitled to by virtue of some concept of love. And once we start to take actions of love for granted, they no longer seem like acts of love; they become merely what we are due, and we demand ever-greater feats of validation, of proof, of love and sacrifice to continue believing that we are loved.

It's a neverending spiral, moving up or down as you see it, positive or negative, up to the blissful heights of heavenly perfection in which we have obliterated a self for another and they have done the same and we have essentially swapped care of ourselves, or down to the depths of hellish despair where nothing is ever good enough, where nothing we give nor nothing we ever receive manages to prove that we still love.

But if familiarity breeds contempt and there's no way around it, then there's no hope for any long-term relationship. We should all wander the earth as half-strangers, helping when we think we are needed, being helped by those that think we need it, and allowing the connection to fizzle out as soon as whatever it is has passed. We should never try to develop or deepen our relationships. We should be forever generous, loving strangers to each other.

How depressing.

I don't want to live in a world of strangers! Even generous, loving ones.

So how do we continually prove that we love, and continually accept that we are loved, without starting to trod that spiralling path that leads to utter disaffection or complete loss of self? How do we tread water and still get where we want to go?

I don't know.

I would like to know, though. I would like to know how to be happy for praise, hungry for it even, without trying to curry it. I would like to know how to not feel guilty when I can't help someone that something in me whispers I ought to know how to help. I would like to not be contemptuous of the familiar comforts that were once new and fresh and perfectly capable of lifting me up.

Perhaps I haven't resolved the identity crisis yet. Perhaps if there's a solid enough sense of self, of purpose, of skill and craft and art and love, of ideas, these aren't questions that need to be asked or pondered.

So. Am I satisfied? No. And it is my responsibility to change that. But it would be good to be loved, anyway. While I do that.

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.

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.

Food IS Art.

I think I just have read the only letter-to-the-editor in the history of my reading letters-to-the-editor that has honestly and truly offended me. Two weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published an entire issue dedicated to food and the ways in which food can build community. This letter was written in response to that issue, and published this week (about halfway down the page):

In dissecting the nation's eating habits, the Food Issue presents a smorgasbord of obsessions that are inevitably linked to the astounding fact that from the early 1960s to the present, obesity in the United States has risen to well over 30 percent, from 13 percent. Worse yet, abdominal obesity has risen in both women and men. These unsightly trends suggest that America's obsessive interest in eating is dangerously abnormal. Typically the plight of our nation's waistline is blamed on low-cost fast food and ever-present junk food. But clearly the malfeasance is broader and extends to more sophisticated, high-priced epicurean foods.

This end of the food spectrum needs to take more responsibility for the weight problem and start warning consumers that the tiramisu and T-bones are injurious to their health. Better still would be recognizing that food is not an art, that eating is not a sport, and that conquering obsession is good food for the soul. [Emphasis mine.]

Well, thanks for that lovely expose on what's really wrong with our eating culture. It's not the abundance of junk food or the high-calorie, high-sugar fast-food that's constantly being shoved at us in advertisements. It's not the fact that most of our meat and dairy comes from factory farms where conditions are deplorable, animals are genetically modified to produce more, fattier, and faster, and antibiotics are as necessary to life as water. It's not the culture of eating without thinking that's to blame for the myriad nutritionally-based problems that people suffer.

No, none of that.

It's those darn foodies and their epicurean ideals. It's those darn people that want to bake their cake and eat it, too. Preferably after having consumed a dinner that they prepared from scratch using fresh & locally sourced comestibles.

What we all really need to do is realize that food is not art, and that we would all be much better off eating nothing but bran flakes, sprouts, and water. Then, we could all be perfectly healthy and painfully skinny models of productivity that have conquered our need for comfort in life. Oh, and we'll be aesthetically pleasing to the fat-phobic.

"Food is not an art." I don't think I've ever been quite this offended. Food IS, in fact, a beautiful, primal, fascinating art form. To cook is play with color like a painter, with texture like a sculptor, with sound like a musician, with mathematics, with flavor. Cooking is the ultimate art form, creating pieces that indulge every single sense we have, not merely one or two of them.

In my kitchen, I am an artist. Forgive me, sir, that my obsession with the creative and curative power of food so offends you, but don't you dare detract from what I do with my hands and my time and my energy and my brain. How dare you denigrate my art form to such a degree. How dare you tell me that my life is unhealthy because I put care and thought into the morsels I put in my mouth, those bites that sustain me not just physically but also emotionally and spiritually? Yes, it's my thought that is the culprit, the root of all evil in the culinary and gastronomic worlds. Thinking is always, always the enemy.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make a pie crust. And start cleaning beans and potatoes. Food brings the family together, after all, and I've got 10 to feed for dinner this evening. Ten happy people with a little belly fat between them that enjoy a good meal and appreciate the art that is good food.