Guy DeBord and a life less ordinary March 2, 2009

Yesterday my cousin and I went to a Guy DeBord film festival at Lincoln Center… and found ourselves genuinely preferring our own lives, and our own opportunities, over the spectacle that DeBord created to deride the spectacle… or as my cuz said, “deconstructing the master’s house with the master’s tools.”

We walked down Broadway from 66th street to the bottom of Manhattan Island, wrapped but not chilled by the damp pre-blizzard air, holding perfectly round oranges  in our mittened hands, nearly stolen from Whole Foods but technically purchased for much less than their real value, causing quiet ruckuses, having loud philosophical discussions passing through Times Square and in a way disrupting the endless noise that is that intersection…

Thinking not about the elements of our lives, but the overarching themes, the wonders of how WE DECIDE to live.

And today I am awake to a winter wonderland… in like a lion, this March.  I have already been productive.  And I will continue to accomplish, because whenever I spend a day following the threads of life with my cousin, we always find the spool again… The spool that I lose every other week, for so long.  She helps me find and follow the plot again.  She’s not a checkmark on my to-do list… she’s the pen that gives me the new ink with which to make the marks.

I love you, cuz.

The impossible dream February 27, 2009

Last night I wrapped my body like a corpse in a pink sheet and threw a small blanket over me for good measure.  Aside from my small pillow, that was it.  Just me, a bare mattress, and the darkness.  “COME AND GET ME, FUCKERS!” I cried as I switched off the lamp and laid down.   My heart was tight and my mind was racing.  The unwritten future threatened me with visions of an empty house, all my possessions scrapped, raised rent, an angry landlord, and dogs sniffing the corners of my very small room for bed bug babies.

Are they there? Or not?  Two welt like bites have sent my head into hysterics, calling my parents near desparation, wanting to run away but knowing that if I do indeed have them, there is no escape.

Granted, logic tells me that these bites could be due to the warm weather and the fact that my pants are always slipping down the slope of my booty, exposing the EXACT spot where the sole bites exist.

But logic and I aren’t getting along since my hotel incident, when every morning I awoke to new pointilism interpretations all over my skin, my favorite being a zigzag down my left butt cheek and a corolla coming out of my belly button. Sun king indeed!  A week of despair, twice a day showers, gold bond everything, and smelling like summer camp followed, until the bites disappeared and I began to regain my fragile sense of security.

Once you’ve been covered with bites, and feel the anxiety of blood sucking vulnerability, your brain never returns to full functioning capacity.  Now I live like Don Quixote, fighting enemies which may or may not exist, attacking my furniture with ill will and astringent, spending my week’s pay on zip covers for my mattresses. Good bye vacation dreams, hello insomnia.

To say I’ve never experienced such peril is misleading.  The paranoia and distress is a mirror image of when I came downstairs, June 2005,  when I lived in the East London house.  I opened the door fixated on some cereal and a bath, and instead of my roommates,  found company in a fleet of 1000s of ants climbing the living room wall.  Who knew we had a big hole in the floor and garbage buried underneath the house? Only the creepy tenants who preceeded us.

I remember standing  there with a vacuum, trying to stay calm, and realized that the ants were crawling right back out of the vacuum bag and up onto the kitchen table.   Even after the emergency exterminator came, our counters, dishes and furniture was covered in ant carcass for many weeks afterwards.  Hooray for summer!

Now I am off to steam all of my possessions, my walls and my carpet with the “turbo hand held sharper image travel steamer” I just purchased. I dare you to name a better use of my day off.

but is it love? February 9, 2009

In our world we have always validated certain emotions and feelings over others.  “Love is all that matters” after all, and everyone always wants to know if you “hate them.”  But really if we are to get anywhere, ever, we need to stop limiting ourselves to these truncated and highly empiricized forms of emotion.

All that matters is that you FEEL, not what or even especially how you feel.  It does not matter if you feel love, or an appreciation, or an infatuation.  What matters is that you FEEL, you experience, you pay attention to the subtlities of existing in a world with other people.  That you allow yourself to be human, to experience emotions at all levels, to experience attraction and repulsion in all of its various and colorful forms.

I suppose the obsession with LEVELS of love, and of caring, is in self protection.  In my experience I’ve found people, and most troublingly it seems to be especially young people, proceeding with the utmost caution when it comes to conveying enthusiasm and tenderness towards each other.  Everything is focused, it seems, on the end result.  We ask ourselves far too early for a prediction of the final outcome– we don’t know how to enjoy the experience of being alive, we want to underwrite the mostly unpredictable narratives of our interactions.

My generation hides behind aloof facades and euphemisms to prevent having to make commitments.  And commitments don’t mean “til death do us part” alone.  My friend Mark, who is quite a bit older than me, told me a story of how he decided to love a woman, and then indeed was deeply in love with her for 15 years, their lives tightly and happily knitted together, after he decided to open himself to be vulnerable and possible for this other human being, whatever it was that the emotions would evolve into.

When I was in middle school I had a penpal who I wrote oddly mushy emails to.  He paid attention to me in a way no one else had, and so I felt a special affinity towards him.   One night,  I wrote “I love you” to him.  Whether or not this phrasing was appropriate is, in fact, moot.   My parents discovered the email and wigged out about it, telling me I didn’t know what love was, and that i was behaving dangerously. That was when I learned that calling an emotion “love” could be a weapon that you could use to separate, alienate, and threaten.

If we stopped attempting to title emotions with any one word, we could instead start to appreciate the experience of our sentiments and motivations.  We could use the movements in our souls as opportunities to describe and explore the experience of living as ourselves!  Then relationships could become an open field of possibility, something completely non threatening or non-isolationist.  It would not limit, but instead create a situation so ripe with possibility that we could all feel more electrified, more touched, and more appreciative of the subtle complexities that color us all.

Here we go again. February 9, 2009

In the year 2005 I retired my original blog. From 2000 to 2005 I had blogged obsessively, to reflect, admire and analyze my personal life.  I was very young and just starting to really understand myself.  I came to a startled and xenophobic conclusion, quite suddenly in January 2005, that my blog was detrimental to my mental health– that although I had built a community of supporters and friends through my transparency, I had also made myself deeply vulnerable to the criticisms and scrutiny of others whom I did not trust.

Now the world has grown to include the internet in wider ways, and what was once deeply subcultural has become a worldwide fascination with hyperconnectivity and “oversharing.”  I have also grown up quite a bit myself.  Now, instead of an adolescent, I am an adult, and I have learned to a certain degree what I am willing to put out into the world and what I am not.  I have also learned a thing or two about relationships and personal growth.  Reflecting back on my former blog, I recall more good than harm coming from it.  I remember it as a platform from which I could explore ideas and exchange opinions on life– on an examined life.

I have been having undeniable urges of late, to begin again, to rejoin the network of examination, and I am rejoining it with a more adult perspective. So I’m beginning again, with a new platform, and I’m hoping that I take good care of it this time.  We’ll see how it goes.