Even-Keeled I Am Not.

I'm a little bi-polar. Note bene: I don't mean that I've seen a psychiatrist and have a diagnosis in my permanent medical file or ought to be on a lot of medications. I have a friend who is actually bipolar, and I'm not that. What I mean is, more so than the average person, my emotional state goes up and comes down with very little regard paid to external stimuli. Happy things will make me happy, and sad things will make me sad, but sometimes happy things make me less happy because I'm in the nadir of my natural emotive cycle and sometimes sad things make me less sad because I'm sitting pretty atop the zenith of that cycle.

When I'm "up" (which ought not to be confused with happy, because they're not really the same thing) I am fast. I talk faster by at least a factor of three, and sometimes as high as a factor of ten. I am wittier; my brain moves fast enough for me to come up with those charmingly barbed bon mots that we all love Violet Grantham for. I am constantly looking for new stimulation when I'm up. I meet new people at an alarmingly high rate. Sometimes I take reasonably alarming risks. I feel invulnerable, you see, so I can totally split that hash joint with some random man who is completely unconcerned by the fact that I cannot understand him outside the tiny dive bar in a city where I don't speak the language. Nothing will happen. I am fast, I am quick, I am capable and I'll get myself out of whatever happens. Nothing's going to happen anyway.

(In my defense, nothing ever has happened. For the record.)

When I'm down, I am slow. I speak slower than average. It takes me whole seconds to find the words I mean to say. I do not want to meet people. I want to lie in my bed. I want to watch movies that I have already seen again. I want to reread favorite novels. I become a worrier, half-way convinced that the roof over my head is going to collapse at any moment. And I become defeatist, because I am convinced that while the roof is going to cave and crush me, there is nothing I can do about it. Going outside would be too much effort, you see, and my bed isn't outside, anyway. I have no energy for getting out of the way of whatever impending disaster my worry-wort brain has settled upon.

(In the interest of fairness, none of the disasters I've predicted when low have happened, either.)

There are people that only know me when I'm up. They met me when I'm up, and I only see them when I'm up and flitting about like a manic social butterfly with my tiny butterfly feet in every pie I can spy. There are lots of these people. It's not really personal that they only know me manic, it's just that when I'm low, I tend to sit in bed. Not a lot of opportunity for social interaction when you're sitting in your bed, you know?

There are a few people, one or two, here and there, that only know me when I'm down. I can only imagine what they think my life is like. I count myself blessed beyond measure to have these people, even though most of the time I don't think about them at all.

And as I get older, there is an ever-growing number of people that know me both up and down. Anyone that knows me long enough is likely to come to the conclusion that I'm a little bi-polar. The longer someone knows me, the more likely they are to realize the full magnitude and interpersonal impact of my brain chemistry. I now know people that I've known for more of my life than I've not known them. This makes me feel old, a little, but it also is an amazingly affirming realization. People have decided to keep in their life for this long. They've done this even though I'm a little bipolar, and can't be easy to deal.

But I wonder, in these stretches of worrying and defeat and solitude, how all this up and down makes me appear. I'm horrifyingly image-conscious, when you come right down to it. I care very much how people see me and what they think; I put enormous and disturbing amounts of energy into cultivating public personas that are agreeable and likable and desireable. Or, rather, I do all that when I'm up. When I'm down, I don't have the energy, and so I withdraw from the world, and I often wonder what these absences say to people. It's impossible to determine how absence and silence affect perception, because in order to find out you'd have to appear and ask, breaking the absence and the silence.

Because I only stop to think about it when I'm low, I imagine that these retreats must make me seem unhinged, unreliable, flaky, flighty, unable to control myself. Something unflattering and damaging, to be sure.

I spent about three weeks, recently, UP. I was ON. I was HOT. It was great. It lasted forever.

Well, not forever, because I haven't left my house except to go to work or the grocery store since last Wednesday.

I fend off absolute despair by reminding myself, in mantra-like repetitions, that my emotional cycle is a cycle and I'll not be this tired, this uninterested, this uninteresting, this irritable forever. Acceptance really is the best check on anything. Accepting that I'm a little bipolar helps to moderate the lows. I have yet to figure out how to moderate my highs; I don't really want to, I guess. I suppose that feeling invulnerable will get me in trouble some day, but it hasn't yet. So why bother?

Maybe that's just the lows talking. Probably.

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.

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.

Family Weddings Are Giant Cliches.

So. It's a cliche, right? Hooking up with someone at a wedding. It's totally a cliche.

And I didn't do it. But the only reason I didn't do it is because it's a cliche. So it would be nice of everyone to tell me that it is a cliche, so that I don't feel like I threw away a perfectly decent chance to have really drunken sex for no good reason whatsoever.

I should start at the beginning. Not the middle. In media res, people. I am an ARTIST.

Family weddings are always a delicate situation. There's always a sense of wait, who are you again? And what that particular question ALWAYS means at a family wedding is "Who do you share DNA with? So I can know if I share DNA with you." This is particularly true in large families, that don't see each other often, that take extended family very seriously. I mean, the families of people that married into my father's family are regularly included at family gatherings. When my father's mother's family has reunions, there's a softball game: the Tschinkle's versus the "Out-laws." Everyone with Tschinkle blood is on one team. Everyone without is on the other.

No, seriously.

Anyway. There's this guy that is in much the same position that I am in when it comes to family: his siblings and cousins are all somewhere between 15 and 25 years older than he is because he's the product of a second marriage. Just like me. We're actually the same age. At one of these massive weddings back in the day when we were something like three and four, we were made to dance together. He was wearing a tiny tuxedo, I had flowers in my hair, it was a thing. There is a picture. It is famous. Everyone and their mama has a copy of it. And I mean that pretty literally, in this case. I have a copy, my mother has a copy, my grandmother has a copy, his mother has a copy, his brother's wives have copies, my aunt has a copy, and on and on.

FOR THE RECORD here, we aren't related. We worked shit out.

But he grew up pretty darn foxy, if you ask me. He's got a nice beard thing going on, likes skinny suits, is sort of nerdy with his cell phone tower job stuff. And really, really gorgeous hazel green eyes with that super Italian round-almond shape and incredibly great eyelashes. Holy shit, the eyes.

So we're at this wedding that includes a solid three days worth of events, and we're talking and laughing and drinking with both our generation (who are now all in their forties) and the older kids from the generation below us (who start at about 24 and range downward). Everyone's always in high spirits because, hey, it's a wedding. Also we haven't had a big family wedding in AGES. Also, this is the last of Uncle Dan's boys, so we won't have another one until the older kids start getting hitched.

And this guy and I, we're laughing and drinking and doing it up all right with everyone else, but we're also sort of scoping each other. I mean, he's cute. I look good in a dress. He's the right height for me in heels and we're both a little more awkward and a little shyer than most of the rest of the family. It works.

AND EVERYONE IS SUDDENLY TEASING US ABOUT THE PICTURE WHEN WE WERE TODDLERS.

Then we get to the actual wedding reception. Last night. It's a black tie affair. There are tuxes and evening gowns and a cocktail hour that goes on for two hours and more champagne toasts than you can shake a stick at. But when it comes to seating arrangements, they have put this guy and I together at a table with a bunch of the rest of our generation. Meaning, a bunch of 40-somethings. We are the only two under 30s at this table. Also the only two single people at this table. And OF COURSE my cousin Craig makes sure to ask me if I am actually single as we're sitting down to dinner. You know, in case I had a boyfriend stashed away in Wisconsin that just didn't come with me. And then makes sure to point out to me that the foxy guy that's not my cousin, but my cousins' childhood friend's younger brother is also single.

We roll our eyes at each other.

Dinner, a whole goddamn lot of merlot and cheap beer later, and we're dancing. There are no slow dances at this wedding reception. We do not recreate the sweet picture from our youth.

We end up in the hotel bar with a collection of other partiers after the reception. We proceed to drink more. We chat together. Ignoring everyone else. I tell myself to stop flirting. It does not work.

I could flow through the rest of the night, but it ends like this: we're kissing in his empty hotel room. He pulls back and tells me that there are at least 20 pairs of eyes on us at this moment. I tell him that's ridiculous because EVERYONE ELSE IS ASLEEP. (They totally are, for the record. Asleep or passed out in drunken stupors. Same thing.)

He says it's still weird. It's now like 3 in the morning and I tell him that I can always leave and he kind of stands there like a deer in the headlights and so I just kind of kiss him on the cheek and book it out of his room and into my own bed.

But what I realized standing there, after kissing him for five minutes or so, is (one) that he was WASTED and (two) that the whole thing was just so cliche. I mean, I hadn't seen it because I was genuinely interested in him for his beard and his eyes and his awkwardness and his mixed up Long Island/South Florida accent and his nerdiness about cell phone towers.

But I'm pretty sure he was just all like: "It's a wedding. People hook up at weddings. She's my age and she looks nice in a dress. Good enough."

So, probably walking away was a great decision. I mean, for my heart and all, given how fucked up I already am.

But then I think that I haven't gotten laid in what seems like FOREVER and I think to myself, "You've got stop not being willing to settle a little bit for a simple one-night stand, Ryan. Not everything must or even should be grand passion."

Because getting laid would be really nice. Serious.