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.

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.

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.

Men are from Mars...

There is no space travel here, FYI.

So recently, the Manfriend informed me that one of his friends (not a good friend, but an old one) is getting married later in the summer and that he assumed I wouldn't want to go and that he's taking his mother as his date.

That's actually a very truncated snapshot of the whole picture.

He assumed I wouldn't want to go because his ex is standing up in the wedding, and she and I (or rather, her sister and I?) have already had one completely bizarre and moderately unpleasant run-in in recent months. Looking back, the whole thing makes even less sense than it did at the time. I ran into the two of them at a baby store, and the sister threatened to "punch that bitch in the face." She was looking at me when she said it; I assumed she was talking about me. But, the ex is happily married to another man and has (a really rather adorable) baby boy, so I don't know why any of them would care that I'm dating the Manfriend.

No sense, I'm telling you.

Maybe she wasn't talking to me. Even though she was looking at me.

Anyway, there was this incident a few months ago, so he assumed I wouldn't want to go to a wedding that his ex would be at.

I don't think he should have assumed that.

And if he doesn't want me to be at an event she's at, why doesn't he just say that, instead of couching it in pseudo-considerate and mildly condescending terms?

On the other hand, his mother has known the groom for upwards of 20 years, and didn't actually get her own invitation to the wedding, so maybe he just wanted to take her to be nice to her.

But if that's the case, why not just say that?

And furthermore, I was supposed to attend another friend's wedding with him previously, but he backed out of that one, too.

Which leaves me with this icky idea at the back of my head that I'm like the red-headed-step-child of girlfriends and he's hiding me. I don't think there's anything so wrong with me that I need to be sheltered away from polite society. Really, I'm nothing to be ashamed of. I have the requisite number of limbs and brain cells.

So I'm curious about the full reasoning behind the decision-making process, both assuming I wouldn't want to attend and immediately inviting his mother to be his date.

But I've been informed by several (male) friends that doing so would be "cling" or "controlling" and that I should "pick my battles." I'm not trying to fight a battle. I'm curious. And he is perfectly welcome to go without me, but I would really like to know the why. And have it explained to me.

My female friends tell me to just ask, because there's no harm in satisfying curiousity.

Is this a gender thing? Should I ask, or should I bite my tongue? And if I do inquire, how do I go about it in such a way as to make it clear I'm not picking a fight, not demanding he take me with him, not being clingy or controlling?