The First Thing You’ll Probably Want To Know

Here you are, waiting again in some dumb line like cattle, this time in a computer lab. This particular one is full of Dells except for the one table of six slick Apples, across from which you stand, waiting, waiting.

The line moves quickly until you are at the head of it when suddenly no one is leaving their computer and you are still just waiting, waiting. The screens of the Macs are huge, panoramic and glossy and you cannot help but gaze at the one closest to you. A tall boy with a trim haircut the dull color of straw aimlessly peruses some blogs. You recognize the crisp, minimalist graphics of The A.V. Club website. And suddenly a full page of text.

Title:

“R.I.P. J.D. Salinger, Dead at 91″

A.V. R.I.P. J.D.

And you realize this must be a significant thing because that man did write that one book that you did read which you did like and maybe did not love but you know that so, so, so many people do love it and love him, J.D., and him, H.C., by extension, or maybe vice versa.

But you feel somehow unable to connect to that pubescent angst you felt or identified with maybe six years ago when you read that salient novel for the first time, and on a more basic level you are unable to feel surprised at the death of others anymore. Especially 91-year-old others. Especially 91-year-old strangers.

And you stare at the back of that boy, the bold obit headline hovering, sans-serif, over the globe of his head like a horizontal flock of birds over some giant, thistled hill. 

You imagine, since he clicked on the article instead of just skimming the headline, that maybe he has some personal investment in the novels written by J.D.; that, like so many other boys probably just like him, he fundamentally identified with H.C. in a way that is inextricable and never quite leaves, in a way that makes one defensive and protective of that character and his disciples. You imagine the nostalgic affection coursing through that guy. As he sits there. As you stand there. Looking absently at the back of him.

Peripheral movement to your left indicates a free computer. All you need to do is look up an address from your email so that you can mail a book to someone across the Atlantic. This will be the third attempt to do so in a week. You hope he likes reading it, it’s one of those Bildungsroman novels that guys love, you guess. But you loved it too, and that’s why you’re giving it to someone else. And actually, the address might be scribbled on a folded Post-It note at the bottom of your purse. But you are already sitting down and already looking it up and already getting out your day planner to jot it down again. This research of the most minor order has already made you forget about J.D. and H.C.

Waiting for a 61C later, waiting again, always waiting. Two devastatingly hip students near you, also waiting, talking at lugubrious length about so sad and favorite author and such a classic and how tragic and you wonder if they have ever stopped to think about the actual, linguistic, etymological, conceptual meaning of tragedy.

And you are unable to stop the phrase from surfacing because it’s true: Bunch of phonies.

Laissez-Faire

Probably what bothers me the most about my writing or lack thereof is that I never know what to write about. That in itself sounds so vague and hollow and frankly like lazy whining because there is so so much in this world, stupid amounts of stuff that needs to be talked about but isn’t, stupidly monumental amounts of ideas that are only discussed badly or not at all, monumental amounts of stupid things that might mean something to someone or at least to me or might mean nothing but might signify something grander than itself, like in the way that some blogger who is good at writing in run-on sentences tenuously connected by so many “ands” is so interested in something as asinine and culturally taupe as The Hills but, in the relentless viewing and overconsideration of it, finds ways to turn every cinematographic decision/accident into a meaningful one, one which references or even knowingly appropriates the style of actual, good filmmakers like Antonioni, which is an okay comparison even if it’s wildly inaccurate, because it gives smarter people some way to think about something that, for whatever reason, is culturally relevant but bankrupt in depth by associating it with something that is backed by the placating, legitimizing cushion of scholarly criticism and peer-reviewed theory and Good Taste. Truthfully, I think about things like this all the time, actually more or less constantly, like what it means that Lady Gaga is so insanely popular among pre-teens and over-thirties and dumb people and smart people and gay people and straight people even though her entire image is, or is made to appear to be, based around a “self-conscious” “reclaiming” of the idea of fame so that the fame she legitimately has is a sort of meta-fame and the absolute rararomama inaneness of her lyrics and the cardboard manufactured quality of her sound (because seriously, guys, seriously, lines like “You and me could write a bad romance” mean that she just ain’t care) contradict the unsettling awareness she seems to have of her own aura, and despite all this clever image-manipulation and blatant flaunting of her status as a commodity there is the lingering suspicion that her act is just another way to dupe Western consumers into a mass obsession, because why, whenever I blithely bitch about her to a friend or acquaintance only to find that they too have fallen prey to the veritable pandemic of Gaga, la influenza of the unsuspecting but unwittingly willing West, do I inwardly and often outwardly CRINGE? Why do I often feel, despite my friends’ even quasi-apologetic face-scrunches, that with each intelligent person felled by her sword of raw spectacle that I PERSONALLY am that much closer to losing some integral battle, that I am the only one who can see that the emperor is fucking naked? And will I finally succumb to her gloriously anesthetic bite once I am sufficiently outnumbered and surrounded? As Dickens writes in A Tale of Two Cities, “In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease–a terrible passing inclination to die of it.” He was talking about the appeal of nihilistic resignation over tragic optimism in the face of mob-rage and mass executions during the French Revolution, and I am talking about Pop Culture. The idea of popularity is that it represents or is What The People Want and there is a reason it is What The People Want and eventually the whim of the majority become the reality of the whole group, which is the very essence of the representative-democracy in which we operate and for which we would die. The idea of populism is that a thing becomes popular by convincing a majority of the people that that thing is What The People Want through deception and/or propaganda AKA advertising, so What Some People Want (for selfish reasons [money]) eventually becomes What The Majority Want becomes What The People Want, and if you think that Lady Gaga is an individual and not a highly managed flashy product pushed by an entire industry then you have no idea how this world even works. Even the very image produced for her is really the sum of multiple other images, those of the designers she wears and the champagne she drinks and the piano she plays and even the people who take her picture and the magazines in which she appears. The image of her image is derivative, even the very idea of the image of her image. She could literally not exist if Madonna never existed or if Andy Warhol or Candy Darling or Edie or Nico or any of them never existed (and arguably the latter beautiful people could only exist because Andy existed) and it’s increasingly apparent to me that Lady Gaga is just a mash-up of everything that was ever culturally relevant, the King of Pop, the Queen of Pop, the High Priest of Pop (as Andy was known by some or many), until she is this hypermosaic of that entire pantheon of cultural mirrors, known as Lady Gaga, the Jester of Pop if we are to maintain this lexicon of cultural monarchy. She exists because those higher and better than her allowed her to and her sole purpose is to reflect their behavior back to them in a way that is laughable and “outrageous,” and laughable because “outrageous,” but ultimately inoffensive…what she does is exactly what a court jester does, she mimics and imitates exaggeratedly that which has proven to be at one point successful and popular and possibly groundbreaking, basically raping those things in order to make a joke out of it, except nobody knows it’s a joke because our very culture is constructed in such a way that makes us and even encourages us to forget; or if they do know, they praise her for making that joke even though it already existed and all she did was convey it. I think that’s it. Lady Gaga is famous for telling a joke that already exists, and not just telling it, but being it, really committing to that one sad joke. I think what incenses me most about that is that I consider our society to be at least, if not past, then at least self-conscious of this whole postmodern condition, and even if some aspects of our society can’t ever escape this sort of hamster wheel of postmodern fun/frivolity/hilarity/ornamentation/neo-rococo/mass spectacle that are natural byproducts of capitalism and a fundamentally visual culture then AT LEAST can we begin to approach, if even asymptotically, the adoption of a somewhat cynical or critical attitude towards this remix habit which shamelessly appropriates art and regurgitates something that is less than that, but still resembles the idea of that original art enough that most people who don’t give a shit anyway buy it all over again because Why Not. You can dance to it.

But to the original point of the problem with my-writing-or-lack-thereof: I never write about stuff like this, because who cares anyway, it doesn’t even matter because Lady Gaga will still dress like a used tampon and everyone will be able to buy her image and be little miniature Gagas by letting her aura mix with theirs and soon we’ll all be mirroring each other until all we can see are the mirrors and nothing else. Infinite reflections of reflections, like tying string on yourself to remind you of something until you are just bound by the string and can only remember the string and can only remember that you were supposed to remember something but what? What were you remembering, what are you reflecting, what are you remixing? It’s not important, all that is important is that you do. “Is this anyone to trust for a story?” asks Jonathan Safran Foer. No, but it’s not the story that matters, it’s the retelling of it infinitely, if you tell a joke you heard then the laughs belong to you, the credit is yours for telling it, we can all tell it, we can all keep forgetting the joke and laugh when we keep hearing it and keep telling it so we can make that laughter our own. It’s fabulous. It’s American.

Probably what is keeping me from writing about stuff like this, American stuff like this, has nothing really to do with Lady Gaga or the people I know and don’t know who might like her or even love her but more to do with my crippling habit of preemptively self-editing in response to an imagined sea of critics that don’t exist, telling me and telling others that what I’m writing about and the way that I’m writing about it is not important; worse than that, it is redundant; worse than that, it’s badly written. The other, bigger, broader thing that keeps me from writing about Lady Gaga et. al. is being a part of what someone who is probably smarter than I am calls the malcontent, pseudo-intellectual American circle-jerk of “What Is Art” that keeps us from engaging in the reality of art. The frightening implication of that strain of criticism is that Lady Gaga is the reality of art. She is certainly the reality of something, but if I, more than 1,500 words into this diatribe, have not figured out what that something is, what that reality is, then I probably never will. What these >1,500 words mean is that I have a different strain of the same virus that everyone else has been infected by. Mine, unlike the more common variety, has the unfortunate additional symptom of crippling self-awareness and bitterness. I want to blame Lady Gaga and all the moneyed executives hidden behind her exuberantly large sequined headdresses and those in front of her, taking her picture and writing spectacular tidbits on her. I want to blame them so much. But even when I catch the common cold I have to think that if I had washed my hands more regularly or eaten more grapefruits then I wouldn’t have ever caught it. This could actually be all my fault. After all, I seem to be the only one who feels like they are doing this wrong.

5-7-5

Last spring I went to an MFA exhibition at Carnegie Mellon. In many ways it was typical of university art–there was the work that commented on war media, the work that commented on sustainability via interactive installation, the work that involved some infinitely looping single-shot film on a small TV, the work by the artist who is good at materials construction but bad at making it mean something. I shouldn’t whine, it was a great space and the art was quite sophisticated. 2-D mediums are so vanilla that utilizing it in an impressive way is no mean feat, but the piece that stood out to me the most happened to be a work on paper that was matted, framed, and glazed in the most common living-room-decor way. I should clarify that by “paper” I mean specifically paint chips from a hardware store. Everyone knows the format of these as vividly as they know the format of a Dollar Value Menu at any drive-thru: opaque wash of color in a frame, color code bottom right corner, color name bottom left corner. Stacked three or four on top of each other like strips of photobooth pictures–all frames resembling each other but slightly different in their own ways.

Long story short, Allison dragged me to Wal-Mart and we bitched about how weird it is that you can buy a (shitty) “Hannah Montana + Max Azaria for Wal-Mart” mini skirt two aisles away from where you can buy a (shitty) camouflage padded carrying case for your assault rifle two aisles away from where you can buy so many cans of so much paint. Walls and walls of infinitesimally divergent shades and hues. How many of these have never been used before, and are just there for the sake of the spectrum? Which is the most used? Probably some relative of taupe because that seems like what would most please the average do-it-yourselfer who consults Wal-Mart for their interior design needs. Will clash with neither NASCAR memorabilia nor Titans football decorative tortilla chip bowl with matching salsa+guac dish. It lets the walls be present without announcing themselves; it is and is not. I picked up a few paint chips from the gray-blue scale as we ambled away. Walking through a big-box with Allison is like being in a Richard Linklater film. 

The framed paint chips in the MFA exhibition were arranged in the form of a haiku: words were associated and the colors signified by their names accompanied them as a function of the poetic arrangement. So the color patterns were incidental, and a sort of meta-poetry was created, in which it became unclear whether the words or colors were the original poem, and which dictated which. Raised and answered many questions about language and beauty. Does our idea of beauty stem from how we express beauty, just as how in this work the formal arrangement of color apparently depends on an arbitrary arrangement of syllables–haiku–a structure which itself is considered to reflect some sort of essential beauty that exists in the fundamental cycles of nature. In the artwork, the words themselves construct little narratives, tidy images. Your attention is, at some point, drawn to the fact that the cycle of meaning began with the color, and the word on the paint chip from the need to describe that color, then juxtaposed with other words to form new ideas, the colors described by each word respectively thrown together as a result of those new ideas, and, finally, those colors themselves forming a sort of aesthetic patchwork which both asserts its own meaning–as pure formal color often does–and influences the meaning of the verbal haiku. Or rather, its ambience.

Staring at these blue-to-gray paint chips by themselves, sifting through them one by one like someone counting a stack of dollar bills as Allison and I walk through the sliding doors that open for us automatically, I observe that the wells of meaning associated with just the words themselves are used to pin an associated aesthetic–more specifically, an almost nostalgic, imagined experience–to the color. So when you choose a color from a paint chip, you are not choosing that color, you are choosing an experience suggested by marketers via the color’s assigned name. For example. The blue strip I chose has a gradient of four different shades, all attached to nautical imagery. From lightest to darkest: “Cruiser,” “Blue Wave,” “Portal Blue,” “Aegean.” The words themselves, read vertically, imply their own, self-contained oceanic narrative. Meanwhile, the colors in the white-gray scale all have to do with snow and coldness. Top to bottom: “Winter Wind,” “Stillwater,” “Silver Streak.” And another: “Blue Dust,” “Aerial View,” “December Eve.” Looking at these paint chips is like gazing out a frosty window during a blizzard as the sky slowly darkens.

The irony of the haikus, of course, is that here the paint-chips are the impetus for visual beauty both real and imagined, rather than merely acting in their intended roles as guides for buying paint, which is a volume of something to coat an entire space in whatever aesthetic experience you choose after sifting through any number of meticulously labeled strips. Paint is that which manipulates light and creates visual contrasts, the most basic vector of beauty and character to a room besides the architecture itself. On canvas, paint is that which traditionally gives form to ideas and stories and images.

Is it possible to separate one’s physical experiences, as well as both emotional and intellectual responses, from that which surrounds them on all sides? The room in which I currently sit (and generally exist) is creamy-colored, like whipped cream made by hand with a teaspoon of vanilla extract mixed in. Its texture is that of an egg’s shell. How many times have I wanted these walls to feel like stucco, not so uniform and pat, when I run my hand across them? How many times have I wanted these walls optic white, or chocolate brown? Perhaps the only way to break free of the tyranny of your surroundings, to lift the veil that covers every surrounding wall, to rupture that wash of uniform opacity, is to close your eyes to it. Clarity via blindness. Creation via destruction.

Gertrude Stein demonstrated the tenets of Cubism as manifested verbally in the sentence, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Cubism as this obsessive intellectual exercise in examining a single thing from various, possibly infinite perspectives. Where does the experiment end? Perfect forms do not exist; there can only be infinitesimally miniscule facets to a prism which appear, from a certain distance, smooth. I suspect Cubism is less about solving those forms than it is about revealing their facets. Perhaps also Cubism was eerily prophetic in describing the world as we would come to know it. As someone who at times both consciously and unconsciously avoids major media outlets, I realize it is nevertheless impossible to avoid that which is prolific and relevant in whatever capacity. Today, awareness is a commodity infinitely propagated and proliferated, a Hydra of consciousness if you will (it’s okay if you won’t), and ignoring collective consciousness is less feasible even than ignoring one’s own. And everything you see and hear and think and do and say is influenced by an exponent of actions and equal-but-opposite reactions and the eternal flutters of a trillion butterflies’ wings, by everything that has ever been seen and heard and thought and done and said in the history of the universe. And maybe that is beautiful, that inescapable interconnectedness, that infinite intricacy, but maybe it is also grotesque. Maybe to understand that is to look into the gorgon’s face and be paralyzed from performing any action ever again.

Maybe that is why Stein, living in Paris during the war, decided not to observe her very neighbors get pulled from their apartments to be persecuted at whatever remote location for whatever reason, and cancelled the delivery of her newspapers, and read only works of fiction, and ceased to communicate with the world outside her habitat or even venture from that habitat except to prune and care for her rose bushes. Maybe she was a coward for choosing that blindness, for looking only at roses when there was death all around, or maybe she understood everything more clearly because of it. Who’s to say, really? A rose is a rose is a rose.

Teen Dream

From my old blog

Do you ever wonder very strange things, like what if the space in between your individual cells began exponentially increasing, how long it would take you to be dispersed about unrecognizably, would you be the dotted line of yourself in the room or just dissolved into the atmosphere completely? Some really delicate songs make me feel that way. Like I am being sloughed off grainily and tumblingly as the side of a sandcastle when it’s not compacted enough. Sort of.

Restless

Upon visiting my father last night

I’m in a bed which occupies the majority of what feels decidedly like a Guest Room. Empty drawers. A general disregard for aesthetic cohesion, marked by the mismatched furniture and leftover quality of the objects populating various flat surfaces. Even in the dark it’s hard not to notice the kitschy wallpaper border stretched along the perimeter of the room where the walls and ceiling meet: a repetitive frieze of schoolboy images–contextless still-lives of backpacks, rulers, assorted sports equipment, which I’m sure were at one point relevant to the interests of the room’s primary occupant. I have to get up to get up to fetch the book I brought to noncommittally flip through before falling asleep, clumsily rearranging the setup of the nightstand to accommodate it. Covers are thrown off again to retrieve the phone in my purse. And again, this time with a discontented sigh, for my notebook and pen. In my own habitat these would already be planted near me, indigenous to the space as pines to a forest. Here, they must be awkwardly transplanted like plants into foreign soil.

I have the urge to look at myself. Turning the knob to the bathroom is like shaking a stranger’s hand. It reluctantly gives, scraping across the carpet. Absently I begin appraising my features and I wonder why I’m doing this because it doesn’t seem to be for any real reason that I can tell, in fact it feels quite stupid, thoughtless and impulsive. Epidermis is scattered in a few places with soft pink splotches, the fruit of leaving makeup on for too long. A strip in the middle of my nose is beginning to shine. Indistinct yet seemingly permanent smudges of mascara shadow vaguely beneath each eye. I’m still and impassive as a mannequin, thoughts of how one can only perceive oneself indirectly and how that can alter one’s views of reality. If your idea of yourself depends on the medium through which you view it, can you ever know your true state? Can you ever truly know anything? The width of the protruding countertop keeps me at an intraversable distance from the reflection of me.

I have the idea to sit down on the carpet with my back against the wall and for whatever reason I follow through with this.

I’ve been sitting here a while. I consider folding back into that cool, firm bed and attempting sleep again. Instead, I arch my back against the wall and automatically commence chewing my fingernails to the quick. Every time I do this, I think of my father’s friend looking at my hands and calling me a “nervous girl.” Didn’t I tell myself I would try to stop that this year? Will think about that tomorrow maybe. Maybe.

Elephant

I watched Gus Van Sant’s Elephant today. It’s an instant classic, everyone should see it, if only for a quiet scene near the middle. The boy plays Für Elise like he’s practiced it dozens of times, steadily and with the satisfaction of having mastered a classic. Slower than the tempo requires. The more upbeat parts are rushed through; he hits the majority of the notes and doesn’t seem to care for the contrast of it against the main  theme. The transition into the sonata is uneasy and he takes it quickly because he’s got the first measures down but the counterpoint in treble is so elusive and requires a deliberation that he just doesn’t have. He’s easily frustrated and preempts his own failure, defeatedly jumbling all the notes before abruptly stopping. “You suck,” says the other boy from the couch.

Elephant. In the room? Never forgets?

Enormous Room

You know you’re being reclusive because the most extreme interactions with other people, the ones that make your blood rush the fastest even if it’s still at an objectively sluggish pace, are with strangers on the bus and in the grocery store and on the sidewalks. If you could even call them interactions. You notice a cute boy who looks nice in a sweater sitting by the window and even though there are empty seats behind and in front of him you sit beside him anyway. All twenty minutes of the bus ride are spent thinking categorically about his eyebrows and glasses, admiring the bone structure of his right hand that you glance at when you think he’s looking at the window. You get up at your stop and he picks up the headband that falls out of your purse. You grin and mouth “Thank you,” because your iPod is on and you don’t want to say it too loudly. The inelegant braking of the bus makes you lurch. Only when you turn the key in your front door, ultimately not having said anything to anybody, do you realize that absolutely nothing has happened. All of that was nothing, he was nothing, and you are nothing.

Things feel disparate and unconnected. The small cubic apartment is your cramped mind; every space and crevice is immediately visible. A depressing lack of surprises contained within. It is so easy to stay inside because to leave would mean returning to find things exactly as you left them. This place can seem huge, too. You think your apartment is “nice,” but there is the suspicion you don’t fill it well. You don’t even know what that means. At the end of the day when the dishes are washed, your skin is clean and dewy, and the blurry sound of some Post-Impressionist composer or other lulls you to reluctant sleep, you are left with those attractive eyebrows behind architectural frames. Those bones of the right hand. They don’t mean anything, simply signifiers bereft of signifieds, but nevertheless they are the daily remainder. This soon fades in the wake of drowsiness, leaving a lingering impression that this is not enough and will never be enough.

Summerteeth

It is hot, too hot to wear even my lightest scarf, too hot to leave the house, too hot to stay in the house with just the windows open. This morning my electricity shut off for about 30 minutes and for a wild moment I thought it was because of running the air conditioner all the time. I found out later it was building-wide, and it came back on soon enough. Too hot to make cookie dough in the kitchen while the oven is preheating.

I do love my oven though, despite the fact that it’s about half the size of the one at Sherbrook. All the temperatures are clearly marked. It takes about 10 minutes instead of 30 to preheat to the right temperature…for some reason the old one would stop at 325 and go no higher, even if the dial was at 450. 

I guess I just can’t wait for it to be fall, of course once fall comes I’ll be so busy with other things that I’ll forget to enjoy it and then there is ice all over the sidewalks and I’ll have to wait another long year. October has got to be the best month. How could there be a better month?

Lately I’ve been obsessed with older English novels. Like from the 18th and 19th centuries. Jane Austen, Anne Radcliffe, Samuel Richardson…it’s definitely the escapism of it, I love that period.If I were the sort of person to believe in past lives, I would maybe believe that that was one of them. Don’t know what it is about those dense, hyperconstructed sentences that you have to wade through like sludge just to get to the end of that transports me so much. I can’t imagine actual people really talking that way, no matter what century it is.

They’re selling Café Bustelo in Giant Eagle now, I’m not sure how I feel about that. I kind of liked it when it was this thing that to my knowledge you could only get at PennMac but now it just seems like ground espresso. Or, chill the fuck out Kiri, it is all just ground espresso.

Going to take my garbage out now. Going to do it. Now.

Sounds About Right

Kiri: “I just think that if I met Barack Obama, I could die after that.”
Uma: “No. You could begin to live.”

All My Little Words

I guess I’m not making any cookies tonight.

Sometimes I wish I could just tell all my secrets here. Blogs are weird because they are based on the idea of an audience, whereas diaries are like a conscious projection of one’s thoughts onto an unresponsive target. You can write anything you want in a private journal, but it’s kind of stupid to write down your secrets just for the hell of it, because in my experience it creates more anxiety than it dispels. What if someone reads it? It’s a total Harriet the Spy situation. Besides, it’s like just telling yourself something you already know, no catharsis. Whenever I tell someone something that is relatively personal, it’s for the relief of someone else knowing, having someone who understands how you’re feeling emotionally so you’re not completely compartmentalized. It’s for sympathy. Diaries are as sympathetic as walls. Blogs provide no sympathy either, just a stage upon which to parade a menagerie of thoughts and impressions. I should be embarrassed just for writing this.

Maybe the problem is that I’m bad at sharing secrets in general. Even when I do decide I want to tell someone something important, I begin awkwardly and end up watering down my actual thoughts so it’s easier for whoever I’ve talking to to give me half-advice I don’t even need, so they can feel as though they have been helpful, because otherwise what’s the point.

I talk about secrets like I have all these dark, hidden sides to me that no one knows about. That’s not really it. It’s more like Life Problems that would be inappropriate to tack up on a public blog for all to see, because they involve other people.

Also because I was kind of brought up in this unspoken environment of Leaving Your Shit At Home. I generally operate under the assumption that everyone’s home life ranges somewhere on a sliding scale of Mildly Sucks to Really Fucking Sucks, so, not to be all exceptionalist or anything, but sometimes I felt the environment at my house was more chaotic than anyone should have to deal with in their life. But no matter how bad things were at home, the rule was to not carry on when you stepped outside. Drama and discontent were for the house. To broadcast your issues to world, to the uninvolved, was just…trashy. There was a certain kind of person who didn’t care who saw them yell at their sister or mother in public, and you did not want to be that certain kind of person. When my friends met my mother she would use her “operator” voice, the same one she uses for her answering machine. It reeks of artifice. Sometimes it would creep me out in a major way, as if a store mannequin had come to life and started speaking. And I always felt that no one in my family ever really knew who I actually was, because they only saw the monstrous side of myself that I don’t think anyone else I know has ever witnessed, and which I hate even referring to as a “side” of myself. The home stuff never left the house, but the outside stuff never came in. Thus so much of me has been contained, like rotting relics in a canopic jar. Now that I don’t really have a particular “home” anymore, in a manner of speaking, it just stays inside me. I’m my own haunted house.

I have no “secrets,” really. Just stuff I wish I knew how to talk about. I know I tend to refer to my problems peripherally on my blogs and often retreat into absolute vagueness. That is just because I want to be talking about something without talking about it, to nit out the emotions without revealing too much.