Dear Mr. President...

CaptiveTV in my elevator just asked me what I would do in MY first hundred days as President.  

Well...

I'd probably wake up every morning and laugh my ass off until bedtime.   For 100 days. 

From the last days of my 25th year (aka - the quarter life crisis)... "Smart People"

The phrase “smart people think alike” starts with one of the greatest misnomers in the history of smart people. Seeing as how, in a thesis statement, exaggeration, hyperbole, or statements taken to be true that, otherwise, are not possible to corroborate, was intensely frowned upon in my elitist boarding school years and then went on to be expressly forbidden within the first week of ‘Expos’ in my ivy league college years, I figure doing exactly this is an excellent way of getting smart people to sit up and listen.

Hell, if the smart people want to sit down and listen, or fall over and listen, or plié and listen, I’m totally ok with that. But the point is it’s about time we debunked the myth that conformity marks intellect. Because, I have to say it, if “fools rarely differ” then why in the hell are there so many words for stupid?

There’s social stupidity (idiotic), fiscal stupidity (fiscal is just another word for financial – so that would be everyone these days - moronic), professional stupidity (unethical), romantic stupidity (a far cry from and a near death of social stupidity: platonic), and autonomy (autocratic stupidity is redundant). Isn’t modifying the word ‘stupidity’ and giving it random definitions FUN?
Being all of 25 years old, I have an excellent grasp of these nuanced failings. I’d like to try to convince you that (being 25) having fewer woes in the world has left me with a significant amount of free time with which to analyze the stupidity around me. But I doubt you’ll need any serious amount of research to be convinced of that so instead of cold, hard facts, I’m providing tepid, fuzzy anecdote(s).* *(I have yet to decide how much I really want to write on this topic. Have I mentioned I'm 25?)

While riding from the upper east side of Manhattan on the infamous 4,5,6 subway line, I observed a rather attractive man gesticulate wildly and proclaim to his party, “35 is totally the new 25!!” Having a short commute and an even shorter attention span, I took this to be the proximal statement of my time and failed to note any further pontificating coming from his direction. The statement alone made me think about how not only was I not newly 25, but I also wasn’t the new 25! I’m the old 25!!! Can we talk about this minor setback in a major way? Ok, I’ll talk, you listen.

Being an OLD 25 before I’m a NEW 25 is mildly disturbing. And not in some communicating electron time warping kind of way. It’s just that if 35 is the new 25, then that only leaves me nine years to rest before I have to do 25 all over again! I was really looking forward to those centuries in purgatory to rest and recuperate before being sent back for a do-over. “Centuries” seems like a decent amount of time to get to chill out before I have to be 25 again, yeah?

Needless to say, this assumed 35 year old freaked me the fuck out. Thinking about all the ways in which he could mean something other than 600 thousand 35 year olds flooding Murray Hill until 4am and hitting the diners “late night”, I finally stumbled upon a way in which I wasn’t the OLD 25, but was also not the 25 to which he referred.

There are two kinds of knowledge sets we steep in throughout life. (This is irrefutable for the sake of my argument.) There are the facts, the rules, the mechanics and the institutions. But then there are the eye brow raises, the stunted emotions, the back stabbing relationships, and the nuances of foreplay that basically exist in the interstitial space left by the structured, static facts and rules and mechanics and institutions. I think we can all agree that the first 10 years of our lives we’re basically absorbing the first set of bylaws and absolutely fucking up the second.

So if I construed for an age approximation what that man meant as a wisdom approximation, then he can have his new 25 and he can reclaim it, too. I concur! 25 years old and 15 years wiser to the second kind of knowledge set! A new gradation system that the 75 years old, 60 years wise gals on the upper east side would absolutely eat up like coffee creamer on their canary diamond studded pinky fingers.

I would absolutely not mind being stripped of a decade. I wasn’t using it anyway. And what I lack in decade accumulation and thereof fractional equivocation, I make up for in verbosity. I can officially say that I won’t be newly 25 for another 9 years because what really defines age is second-set-wisdom. Are you convinced that the conventional age is bifurcated by institutionalism and that we should all be pro-rated a decade?

I’m thinking no. If you’re a close reader, there were two things that may have seemed improbable in the aforementioned warm, fuzzy anecdote that led to this prophetic conclusion. Perhaps these two things indicate it was a fabrication? I will let you utilize (a fancy word for ‘use’) your own best judgment here. But remember: smart people and fools all think.

The first close reader might wonder why the 4,5,6 subway line is infamous. I can only say that if you’ve never been to Manhattan, you won’t understand even if I tried to explain it. And if you have been to Manhattan, then you know: what isn’t infamous on the island.

The second close reader might have noted the use of the ‘attractive’ modifier of the ‘man’ in the anecdote. What can I say? I heart attractive people. They make me work harder, criticize louder and wax more poets than I ever thought possible. They make the world a better place as they’re a constant reminder that no matter how high up you get, you’ll never make it to the top. And if you never make it, you’ll never be disappointed with the view from where you are. Thus, attractive people are indispensible to the hording of small dreams in our back pockets. (A tight squeeze after a winter of food-festing and gym-fasting.) But I’d take two dreams in the wrong pocket over having nothing left to squeeze into there- and I can think of a few trillion other people who would agree. Mmmm. Thanks attractive people!

That said, back to my wildly absurd posit that the greatest misnomer in all smart-person history was that “smart people think alike”: clearly the greatest misnomer has to do with chickens and eggs and a post-coital cigarette in bed. I think the real problem here is that we’re modifying the un-modifiable. “People.” Smart people…Pretty people, Polish people, pleasant people, poor people, pesky people, psychotic people (the greatest would-be alliterative spree- thwarted!!), tall people, chubby people, clumsy people, insightful people… There really is no such thing as a modifier of ‘people’ nor is there a degree to which the modifier can be applied – as a scale completely undermines the unity of the modifier and the Venn diagram would be as useless as a frat boy at an S&M convention. So akin to the diversity among the stupids, unless you’re listing every attribute of a single person scaled by a billion, you’re grouping an un-group-able. Put in yet another way, this gross oversimplification is inaccurate, it lacks precision, and it’s generally about as useful as this last bit: it’s vague. Trying to define a group of people in less than twenty seven million pixels (I hope that’s a lot of pixels) is like trying to divide ocean front property between ISTJ’s. QED: ‘Smart people’ don’t exist (and neither do the stupids).

This phenomenon I’m ranting about, now, after pretending to talk about something entirely absurd to being with, namely, age, might be the single most frustrating field of study within the study of phenomena and I think they call it ‘labeling’ or ‘marginalizing’ or ‘generalizing’ or ‘profiling’ or 'substandardizing'. But I’m not quite sure; I wasn’t ever all that bright. Good thing I have a few years left until I'm 25. (again)

Dreaming of Sugar Plums

In my junior year at college I decided to take an anatomy/physiology course. This was, obviously, back in the days when I thought I'd grow up to be a doctor. Alas, that white coat has been donated and what I'm left with is a catalogue of memories from which to draw recurring dreams. Specifically, today, I've been reminded of the time I was dissecting a calf's heart and it was still connected to the lungs/trachea. Finding this an interesting, rare situation, I cut off a finger of a rubber glove, inserted the calf trachea into the finger-hole and blew air into the rubber glove from the original opening. In this way I entertained, nay, educated my peers by literally inflating and deflating the calf lungs while people took turns holding them. Keep this in mind.



Below, I've recounted the dream that drudged up this memory, I'll be the first to tell you how boring it is to listen to other people's dreams so I promise I'll keep this somewhat exciting... by utilizing italics. 



5 people hot-boxed an Aerostar minivan.
With carbon monoxide.


I open the sliding side door and pull out the three people in the back. After some crude dream-like CPR that inevitably involves a sledge hammer, they survive.


The 4th person is my high school nemeses and I can't reach her on the passenger side (though I'm not really sure I'm trying).


The 5th person, driver's side, has lost the entire top of his head from the jaw up. So CPR involves pounding on the chest, looking quizzically at the non-face, and blowing into a windpipe.


The guy survives and all I can think is that he's blind (and brainless? Who knows why I could only diagnose the absence of eyes - potentially it's a good thing I'm not a doctor) and as he starts rolling towards me like some maniacal steam rolling threat, I reach deep into my bag 'o tricks and come up with the only thing I'm sure will save me: I shall do 'high knees' as I run away from the rolling man with a windpipe for a forehead.

See? I bet you're sitting there thinking about all the ways you can make my life more exciting, thus robbing me of the time to cross-reference my sick dreams with atypical anatomy lessons. Mission accomplished.

And on the seventh day...

This blog is an effort to blog without a point. Inspired by a dear friend responding to my crisis of 'tween project boredom (though I think she was just tired of having to amuse me on gchat all day...) I've decided to write something about the thing I know best.

Not pharmaceutical strategy.

So last week I experienced an entire birth and collapse of a relationship. In my head. The week started out normally: I asked out a girl I thought was cute not knowing she was overly invested in one of my best friends or that she had previously, as she would again attempt, five days later, ask out said friend in my presence. (Par for the course when you have hot friends. A blessing and a curse.)

Back to the story. So we went out. It was great! It was great in that very topically oriented, amusing but superficial, energetic but a-chemically inclined, first date kind of way. I wasn't astonished to learn that my preconceptions of her were entirely wrong though, despite falling short of insta-love, I didn't mind drinking beer shooters across a tiny table and would have, in fact, done that repeatedly for some indefinite amount of time. Perfect. The wooden shelves that the beer came on were bigger than the plates our burgers came on and this was helpful because, as I mentioned, I clearly didn't get the memo about her sustained preoccupation with my friend and the beer helped a LOT to keep me in the dark. (One could argue that I did get that memo, but dismissed it in a convenient kind of way. And if one would like to argue that, they can start their own blog to do so. <3)

After Monday, still absorbed by my delusion, I was unclear if we had plans to get together again. We have about a billion mutual friends so I figured I'd undoubtedly 'hang out' with her soon... (A billion mutual friends is a sure sign that if things move past 1 week they're going to either blow up or be fantastical-- until they blow up.) Needless to say (I totally spoiled the twist in the third sentence) the whole adventure didn't get anywhere NEAR a week. And I have to wonder how I came off with such a different idea of what we were up to (achem, on a DATE).

I think I thought we were on a date because: I paid, I maintained 'engaged' body language, I told her about the time I thought waxing my legs was the most desperate, selfless thing I could do to win a girl back, I only referenced an ex girlfriend 5 or 6 times (to make it clear that I date women), and I made an awkward attempt to hook her belt loop when we were walking aimlessly around the park. Maybe the un-date-ness of the situation should have been confusing/telling/obvious when I/we never managed to kiss (her) after 4 hours of banter. On the upside this means we're able to maintain a semblance of propriety around our friends sans furtive apologetic email writing to all those that share the room with us.

I see all this in retrospect but what I had started to write about was the insecurity that comes with dating. (You know, back when I thought I would see her again. Alone. On another (used loosely) date.) At what point do you really need to figure out how you feel about someone? Day 2? Date 2? Date 574? At what point do you chalk something up to just wanting to be enrolled in classes again without really paying attention to whether you end up in a history of WWII or a figure drawing class? And how do you know you're ready to deal with homework and tests and 'that guy' again?? I'm leaning towards going back for a masters but I can't even decide if I want an MFA or a masters in finance... I hear both are equally useful these days. Oh how my father is cringing right now...

Eff. I've lost track of my metaphor.

So far this birth-year (clearly starting at the dawn of march) I've chased a wife, a wounded warrior, a divorcee and an auctioneer. None of which were actual candidates for a sustained relationship. And that was just the last 2 months. Aside from all those unhealthy undertakings, my very first girlfriend and her FIANCEE are staying with me (femme meets flamer. I'm unclear if that's ironic or a stab at the Republican Press endorsing same-sex marriage), I talk to my proximal-ex daily, I txt my favorite 'mexican' whenever I 'accidently' land on Fox News, and more than anything, I can't stand when someone tells me what to do. I'm a child with a blog.

Oh! I have a point!!!

I don't know what I want right now but I know what my objective in this whole department is. And getting there is proving difficult because failing at stuff is REALLY REALLY bogus. But I'm getting used to it. Like it's less of a failure and more like highschool. You remember: that time people dated people based on who got new kicks that week? I missed highschool. Missed like skipped. I was a lesbian (lesbian = married) in highschool. Did I mention I kissed a butch lesbian this weekend?

(Tav, I love you, now pick your jaw up off the floor.)

Whitewashing the Sepulchre.

So in the back of my head, lingering like the aura of pheromones on the cuffs of a teenager (literally - from my own stab at being 14), I've had this idea about what it means to die.

There's the immobilizing fog of grief that slowly turns into rage and hatred and eulogies and tributes and toasts and drunkeness. There are the empty stomachs that slap into ribs as bodies rock in the night pressed close to pillows being pelted by sobs, temporarily embedded with the musk of depression. There are the foundations, the buildings, the hospitals, the libraries, the orphanages and the subsequent naming boom. There are backs to be rubbed and calories to consume and ignore and streets to wander and laps to be made into head rests. There are monuments. There are wars. There's confusion. There are embryos to nurture and dollars to be birthed and spent and donated to your namesake. There's the blaring silence of an undetectable disappearance. There's the next year. There's the next month. There's the next week. There's tomorrow. There's acceptance. There's triumph and defeat and resignation and perseverance and the veritable phoenix preening through the ash. There's a tightness around the holidays. There's nothing. There's the waste of something.

All this, as a child, and not a thought about finality. About forgetting as you turn to face the empty chair, the chair is empty. Nothing about an unmanned email address becoming a virtual vortex of lost thoughts, empty promises and broken plans, collecting kbs only as the autosave updates the timestamps. There was nothing about the expansion of the soul to absorb and muffle the blows... A transcendence out of reality just to check-in to a new day.

That said, I never thought I'd live past 17. I couldn't imagine being older than that. I stood in front of a mirror when I was 14 years old and searched for my 17 year old self and I decided that if I couldn't even know myself in three years, how could I know myself in 10. Sometimes I think I was unprepared for all this. Like every day that passes I'm surprised by the very life-like things that crop up. Like rent. Every month. Surprise! Like my 26th birthday. BIG shock.

But I'd never want to be 17 again and I'm glad I've stuck around to see 26. I mean, at this point, go big or go home, right? Because who wouldn't want to juggle all the shit that comes with being alive? At least it gives you something to think about. What does it mean to be battling the slow death of the soul as you slip into a routine you didn't plan for in a year you didn't think you'd see? What does it mean to never have acknowledged an afterlife but be constantly aware that you're always looking to refute it? To always remind yourself that your thoughts are chemical and they manifest very corporeal reactions and you won't find anything eternal in the process? Like you don't WANT this to go on, endlessly. What does it mean to want to accomplish something significant, someday, and yet be lost in an abyss of today? Like tomorrow isn't a big enough adventure to prepare for but 'someday' is?

My father once posed, on a particularly long car ride to one of a thousand Brookfield Bullets soccer games, "What matters, in the face of infinity?" And though I'm sure we haven't spoken about that conversation since I struggled, an idealistic 12 year old, to prove that SOMETHING mattered, I remember the conversation like I've had it with myself a million times since. Predictably, I wasn't able to sway my devil's advocate of a father from his, now I see, easily defended argument. But in his insistence that I did not matter (obviously extrapolated from the idea that 'nothing' matters) he gave me a lens with which to scale the impossibilities of life.

I'm now embarassed to announce that despite a 15 year incubation period, I've only recently learned to use this lens-tool as I grapple with being 26, adrift in a drying sea of potential, challenged by the people I love in ways I never thought I'd have to grapple with alone, trying to figure out what it means to be alive by having recently been exposed to a situation wherein I could only be relieved that the love of my life wasn't dead. I guess I've realized that in the face of infinity, we can only hope to matter, but how we're gonna make it through tomorrow is probably a much more useful exercise.

So I don't care what the numbers say, today I'm the oldest I've ever been and I sure hope I can stick around to be perplexed by tomorrow-- and death, while an interesting process that to ignore would be like ignoring how ovaries work, is definitely not the only way to understand life after 17...

Oh, and last night I had a dream about nursing an infant. What. The. Fuck.

Lie to me. Please.

In a city of 9 million people – where the cab drivers are qualified to perform surgery in more than a few (sizeable) countries and your barista will someday be your boss, is it surprising that my most consistent relationship of late has been with the man who hands me my morning tea from the breakfast cart on the corner of 35th and broadway? When he handed me my steamy cup and exclaimed, “You’re early today!” should I have had to ask him to repeat what I had missed – three times? I was expecting our usual back and forth that always followed the following, informal yet rigorously enforced rules:

1) Observe and comment on the weather without referencing the specific impact it is having on any present individual;
2) Inquire as to how the morning is progressing (on the typical ‘stay in bed’ versus ‘face the day with gusto’ scale);
3) Impart some banality that implores the other to seek safety until the next morning – or – if Friday, shelter through the weekend. This exchange is often looping around to reference the weather: “Stay warm! (insert pause to reinforce feigned enthusiasm here)” or “Enjoy the spring-like morning that will turn into a blizzard of an afternoon! (ironic chuckle)”

Is it so hard to believe that this man with a gentle a demeanor and an endless supply of inexpensive breakfast wares is the only person I’m not PAID to see everyday? When I think about why I was engaging in the usual banter, almost 45 minutes early, I couldn’t help but be grateful that there was SOMEONE who recognized the inconsistency in my schedule. My roommate, as I write this, probably still doesn’t realize I’ve already left – and if she has the late shift, then she wouldn’t have expected to see me anyway. My latitude friends were probably not focused on my whereabouts at a quarter to 8 in the morning and I didn’t run into anyone I know on my way to work – though I looked! I mean, I didn’t look because I expect to know someone in this city I’ve been tripping around in for over two years, but because I know ONE person who happens to have a similar morning commute within that exact (early-for-me) timeframe and the chances of being on the train with her were staggering. (Staggering by the informal survey that I performed with bias and without any other information than time of day and a pathetic count of express trains flying by.) I digress.

This morning I had the uncomfortable revelation that my as caffeine dealer commented on my shifted morning schedule I was uncharacteristically tempted to crawl into the cart and sit down at his feet and fill him in on the happenings in my world beyond the corner of 35th and Broadway. If I could have broken the shackles of propriety, when he said, “You’re early today!” I would have said, “I couldn’t sleep last night and then I up woke up at 6am after which I couldn’t fall back asleep because I knew that this girl I had a thing for (I would use that phrase as an irreverent and cavalier understatement) was getting up at exactly 6am and I laid in bed thinking about how she was faking out her morning by sleep-standing through the shower, sleep-staring in the mirror, sleep-dressing, sleep-uggs-shuffling down the street, sleep-passing within a block of me and sleep-commuting to work.” And he would say, “Wow, what happened? What brought her to the absolute center of your reality at 6 in the morning?” And I would say, “She crushed me. I begged her to lie to me and in the face of a masochistic interrogation wherein I was verbally assessing her fidelity in light of our established non-monogamy clause, my heart was begging her to lie to me. I grilled her because I wanted to hear that she hadn’t slept with the girl she ‘wouldn’t marry but is fine for now.’ And in the middle of this interrogation it became clear that she was a selfish truth-teller and refused to lie to me and/or wasn’t capable of lying to me and/or was consciously/subconsciously giving us both an exit strategy for this lesbionic maze we’ve been breaking our faces on. And as I heard everything I never wanted to know, I almost hurled. And then I couldn’t sleep. Because the finality of the situation is something I haven’t had to face and never wanted to face but this fence I’ve been perched on is getting really uncomfortable and before I could pick a side it damn near sliced me in half.”

And he would pause, reflectively, and I would take the moment to sum up why the situation itself (misapplying the term 'infidelity' to a relationship that is completely unrestricted) isn't nearly as damning as the implications inherent to the situation and I would continue with: “When you choose to risk the thing you love, you’ve lost it before you began.” And he would say, “Two dollars, please.”

After all, it IS a recession, even therapy should be cheap.

Falling out of like...

Like the preponderance of daisy dukes and UGGS, seemingly mutually exclusive clothing that had new york city by the cahones this temperate and tempting winter, the holiday season has, so far, been antithetical at best.

For all the Ho Ho Hos: yes. Holidays are hard when you're not hard-up. And for the hooked-line and swingers, a partner in crime is really just a cash-burn when the economy is crumbling (read: the devil wears discounts). And this year, out of nowhere, I'm caught somewhere between single and sworn so I'm not even gonna try to decipher how that factors into my temperament.

But romantic status aside, my own personal holiday season, like most of the rest of my life, has resembled a kiddie ride more than a roller coaster and yet still seems hard to navigate. Take away the dissenting aunt, the jewish factor, a little sister and the mom's-mom/dad's-dad 1-2 political polarity-- and add a few mood-stabilizers, new cousins, old friends, napping, and 17,000 empty calories and you've got, right there, the baseline in my 3 days without leaving the house (and counting).

But it still seems void of something weighty and meaningful. Maybe it's the distance between Massachusetts and Malawi... or the disparate family pockets that made for a higher frequency of emotional peaks but destroyed the amplitude of the holiday as a whole. I think, more than all of this personal mumbo-jumbo, there's an underlying current of religion that I can't hold on to. As many a jew has pointed out of late, Channuka really isn't a big deal. And Christmas, to me, isn't at all a religious testament. I know the word for that 'baby jesus meets adoring fans in a barn' scene but I can't tell you why they're up.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm falling out of like with the holidays as they've been defined for me. I think the religious facade is waning in the face of hardship- which is absurd, right? And without the public ramming religious enthusiasm into every wrinkle of my brain, without a family intact, without a land-bridge to africa, or a rented room in an NYC bar stocked with finger-food and karaoke and everyone I love in the moment, I'm losing track of WHY we do this to ourselves. WHY we engage in this over-stimulating, far too infrequent voyage to some pre-destined safe-space wherein we pay tribute to where we came from and who-all got us here... Baby jesus? Really? What could we possibly be celebrating!?! The idea that I'm celebrating something esoteric and religious is mind boggling when I spend 99% of the holidays trying to hold on to what keeps me put together. Family. Adopted, newly discovered, aging, rock-solid family.

Throw your creches to the mystics and let's just admit it. We're celebrating Kwanzaa here, folks! And next year, we're gonna do it right. We're all hitching a jumbo jet to Africa. Fo shizzle.