an old friend just reminded me

there's been another wave of marriages recently. There's also been an endless rash of me failing to notice. So, maybe it's time to take a survey: If you've gotten married or divorced recently, or know someone I know about whom I should probably know such information, let me know? (Even if it seems obvious, like, I went to their wedding shower or something—'cause you never know about these things, as it turns out...) (on a similar note: Don't you hate it when people don't leave their number because they assume your cell phone picked it up? Because mine doesn't, most of the time. Especially if I don't know you, or it says "private", or there are tons of unmarked numbers, or my phone was out of reception, or ...)

birthday stories

I'm working on putting together an enormous four-person-birthday unbirthday party. Basically, the house will be hyper-birthday themed, but I doubt anyone will admit it's their birthday. For the occasion, I'd like to collect birthday stories. I don't care if it's PostSecret-style haikus, or huge Sixteen Candles-type sagas—I will find a way to print or bind them attractively and have them set all over the house. Even just old photographs of birthday girls crying, or evidence of fabulous parties from second grade. (Happy stories are fine, too.) If you have anything to contribute, please leave it here, e-mail me, or drop me a line and I'll send you my mailing address. Deadline on the whole thing is two or three weeks from now. (And, of course, you're invited to the party. Bonus points if it's your birthday this month and you want to be an additional guest of honor...)

I wonder what it says

I just noticed, reading the paper this morning, that I never read the last paragraph or two or a given article. And I can't decide whether that means I want to come to my own conclusions, or I don't like the writers, or I get bored too easily, or I don't need closure to feel accomplishment, or I don't think you should get a sense of accomplishment from reading the newspaper, or Sunday mornings aren't really my best reader-response time, or what, and then I totally skipped a boring paragraph (of mostly quoted text) and landed on the phrase "I have yet to make it through that paragraph without losing interest". And then sometimes I think things I think are just me really aren't and I should stop worrying, or at the very least stop feeling so special all the time.

oh, lord

Is it really possible that it all started here?

addendum

I do this weird thing where everything I do is extremely coded, but not, like, you're not supposed to get it, coded, like, I pretty much expect you to, especially if I love you [,coded], which is why I've always, strangely, liked the idea of having someone around through the entirety of one of my (disastrously) failed relationships—so they will actually understand every particular about the peculiar way I go about things, and will know exactly what to do (or, at least, what to ask) when the time comes—but I think I've pretty much given up on that ever working, especially after today when I spent a number of hours (I couldn't believe it, either) reading through old e-mail, and the first several made me want to cry, but the more I read the more I realized it was a good idea we broke up in the first place, and, probably, a good idea we don't even bother to talk to each other, and then someone goes and sends me something like this and I start to think that just this little bit of insight has /got/ to indicate that I'm not completely crazy, right?, if all I've ever wanted was for a certain someone to read (and believe, and understand, and apply to my life and our amazing new relationship) something as simple as Aristotle?

"wait, inflammable means flammable?"

Why does the word 'flirt' mean totally different things in different situations? Why can't you flirt with a person the way you flirt with an idea? Or with disaster? Doesn't that mean, trying it on for size; kinda, seeing what it might feel like, without really committing to anything? Why have we conflated the ideas of flirting and courting, and whose ego was that supposed to pad?

things I should keep right on doing if I'm going to win the "who's better at destroying relationships" contest I've just been challenged to

• staring shamelessly at the cute waitor who already knows I think he's cute and is probably creeped out by the whole thing, especially since he said hi this morning and I think I just took a huge gulp of coffee and looked at him over my glasses, with my tongue curled up over my upper lip


• replacing inappropriate text messages with complimentary, though completely confusing ones


• not eliminating the inappropriate ones, but just diverting them elsewhere


• considering that aspects of theories of polyamory might actually provide practical tips for balancing these different compulsions


• continuing to imagine projects that might stop it all by feeding it first

things to wean people off of

• excessive commitment to demonstrating proficiency


• failure to enjoy repetition


• inability to recognize language barriers as (often) more relevant than perceived mental deficiencies

but also,


• tendency to conflate lack of differentiation with creativity

plane tickets

• from Carolina


• to Memphis


• to/from L.A.


• /NY


• to Nashville


• abroad.

this might be a week for lists

• birthday cake (the kind that's 2/3 frosting, 1/3 cake)


• and some cupcakes, for good measure


• plenty of candles


• flowers, for sure


• huge papier mâché balls


• playpen balls??


• cranberry juice


• crepe paper


• pin-the-tail-type games

this morning's brilliant ideas

1. When someone does a terrible job of making what should have been a good movie, someone should just re-make it right away, not like forty years later. That way, a month after the stupid Ben Affleck version, you could go see the /real/ movie to get the horrible mistake out of your head.


2. also, Figure out how to not yell at the nice computer geek just because the idiot computer geek is being smarmy and messing everything up.

Everything's up to date in Kansas City

I've finally done it. Found the logical extension.



I'm in love with a guy who's been dead for forty years.

(Also, I think after the second ukulele, I'm going to have to find a harpsichord.)

can you say that? really?

I guess I'm trying to find the line between holding grudges and holding on to meaningless friendship placeholders.

I guess, "I'm not mad. I'm not anything."

general announcement

So, um, apparently I am not receiveing phone calls or text messages. If you've tried to get in touch with me recently, I promise I'm not being rude. (Also, if you haven't, but feel like you should have, here's your opportunity...)

start of a birthday list

two-deck tape deck

probably a new cd player, while we're at it

soprano ukulele

(some lessons)

(also, voice lessons)

the urge to go to the gym

a campervan

with a built-in electric piano

and maybe some nice old vintage speakers that pop up out of the tailgate

and plenty of gas to get to, where is it, Memphis in August?

oh, and a coffee grinder

to everyone in particular

"So, I guess I'm not feeling bad any more, except in so far as I know that not bad is also not good."

Where have I gotten that I say this kind of thing in all earnestness? And no, it's actually not lack of an ability to complain that's so confusing.

it's too cute, isn't it?

next

A while back I decided to write this article about /Lovemarks/—a book by the head of the branding firm that came up with the whole Moleskin thing—that was basically outlining this theory of getting the customer to fall in love with the whole brand, really develop a relationship with/a psychological attachment to it. Basically, applying everything I hated about what Seventeen magazine told you about how to snag a hot guy to marketing theory. And I decided to write the article by reading through the rash of books that had come out right around that time about the scientific basis of love—about the advantages and disadvantages of various adaptive behavioral techniques in the ancestral environment and such (the most memorable title was /Lovesick: Love as Mental Illness/). And before I met a boy I kind of liked and decided I didn't really want to be thinking about love as being "designed" to protect paternity and made up of random neural connections, I read a passage that really struck me.

"From this it follows," the book explained, "why people in love look—to the casual observer—crazy. In fact, they are crazy. All these chemical mechanisms that create behavioral patters that are maladaptive in normal life, are perfectly normal to the person in love."

On the heels of a series of self-proclaimed discoveries, I decided the converse must apply to my life. That I'm not crazy at all, I'm simply a great lover (in the grammatically productive sense of that word, not in the idiomatic sense, which would make that statement a gross overcompensation for obvious actual feelings on the subject).

But this morning I realized that this must be why there's always a disconnect—why I only feel empathy for people with crushes, and why people always assume I'm boy crazy. So I guess I'm destined to fall in love with a crazy person—someone with OCD (or the other way, with Asperger's, or NPD, I suppose)—or just resign myself to this disconnect. Or continue only trusting people until that honeymoon stage passes and I'm left standing clueless.

accidental passenger

maybe there are people who need to be friends first, and people who need to be lovers first, but have you ever known the latter to stick around?

We're not friends, [      ]. We were working on becoming friends, and then at some point you stopped working.

It may have been something I did that made you not want to try any more. It may be something I did that made you think you didn't have to try any more.

The scary part is, just because I believe that (and I really do), doesn't mean I'm not fully committed to the friendship. Perhaps I am even more so. Or, at least, more obsessively so, since I'm coming more and more to realize that it's this ambivalence that triggers my obsession. Or maybe I believe it obsessively, to somehow negate the notion that the original thought is anything more than a simple observation.

I've never been able to create anything I cared about for any reason at all. More specifically, I've always felt like you should make things for the fact of having made them. But I've never been able to sort out in my mind whether that's an "art pour l'art" conceit, or actually just pure "oops, there's a fence, better jump" practicality. So the combination I've found is obsessive needs and gift-giving.

I heard this radio piece the other day about a guy who paints horses, over and over and over again, and he was explaining it as a kind of tuning—the way you'd tune a guitar until the dissonance goes away, and you're left with a single note. That he simply paints until it feels tuned, and what's left on the canvas are these horses. [I could go back to explaining how eerie some of the coincidences over the last week were, but]

Tuning isn't exactly how I've been thinking about it, but certainly resonance (eek!), and also that analogy to old sticker books, where you have the black outline of the full-color sticker you're supposed to put in its place. So the point is, when I want to work on something, it always gets tied up with someone, and the combination creates this outline, and my OCD creates this need to fill it(, and since I came up with the outline in the first place, there's no sticker), but the real Putting the Sticker in the Box is giving the damn thing away. And the part I keep explaining to people (but they never seem to get) is, they were the conception, so the sentiment remains in tact, but the actual effort of it—the part that seems like the basis on which to judge the value of the gift, if you're comparing—is all self-indulgence. It's a compulsion to counteract the obsession with the idea. It's the manifestation that alleviates the annoyance. And that part's finished when the project is, but I can't come to terms with having done it until it's yours.

The funny part is, I have plenty of friends I don't talk to for /months/, and we're fine. Better for it, maybe. But I think maybe the key is, they've gone through all three parts. And we're stuck on my indifference until I realize I love you; and we're stuck in yours until you believe that I do.

And the kicker is, I do it, too.

That was the summer baby racoons, exhausted by an epidemic of ennui, threw themselves at the highway in droves.

DEP MIN 0700
ARR SEA 0800 (+1)

"Box containing the volumetric representation of the amount of time it took me to think up this idea."

You wouldn't believe that I'm not stalking, like, everything in my life. And, as I keep meaning to mention, just because subjective experience is necessarily primary (for the individual) doesn't mean we have no responsibility to at least /try/ to look past it. And I know that memories are created (and then recreated) and narrativization is a big part of that (and mine seems vaguely autistic), but this was almost creepy. And on top of that, the first book on tape I bought (that, I don't even know where I bought it) I totally should've known was about Chicago, but I actually didn't, and it totally started mentioning that only when I started moving toward Chicago, and then when I changed my mind, and went toward Minneapolis, this random subplot emerged that was totally about Minneapolis (and the next day, going from one to the other, there was this other guy from Wisconsin...) and even more of those than I care to mention

And now that I look back on it, maybe I was just conditioned (by all the other coincidences) to think that this had moved on to mapping my brain (and, actually, basically the calculus version of the other maps)(, and my passenger was just conditioned by my stories, and then again by my reaction to this story, and ...).

(Ooh! or, maybe you can be stalked backwards, the way a really good detective can follow while in front of the suspect? If you're still listening, Letham, feel free to steal my inner life whenever you want, but if you're going to write it instead of me, why mimic the inevitable plot degradation and petering out in to ridiculousness that I already do so well?)

I still need a haricut (and also a cornfield)

what what the New Yorker says about me says about our relationship

from a guy I don't really know any more, but am getting to (over text message):

There was a poem in this week's issue that reminded me of you.

from a friend of mine who'd heard that there was something in this week's issue that reminded [some guy] of me:

from an extremely close [though still potentially estranged] friend [who's maybe estranged because some things I thought we all knew we shared, maybe we didn't—because my empathy looked to him like sympathy (who I'm sure sent this because it reminded him of him, but maybe also of me, and of course, it reminds me of us, though I wonder if it's telling that it doesn't him (or it does, but he doesn't say it...))] (over e-mail):

p.s. In the meantime, this is pretty great:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2007/04/30/070430sh_shouts_simms

pub trivia

• Very Superior Old Pale;


• yes, The Band;


• "but that's an urban legend! The internet says so!" (but, just because I'm actually a bigger nerd than you, the fact that a certain website told you the damn plane wasn't /named/ that, does in no way prove that, as the answer to the question went, the song /refers/ to said plane crash);


• Iggy Pop—of course

And it is, indeed, roughly eight hours to Chicago.

Thanks so much to everyone I met in this beautiful town. If I didn't have somewhere to be...

also, Is it time?

but, really actually a question

One of my favorite lines in one of my favorite books is

"It's the new thing, like steering in the direction of the skid."

and I say it all the time (well, to myself at least), but it just occurred to me that I can't remember what she was talking about in the first place. What's the new thing? And is it important? If you know, and it is, tell me? If you know, and it isn't, you could just say that, I guess. (Oh, and I don't mean to be coy or anything, but I have this thing about not being that person who says, "Oh my god, you like that /too/?? That's so crazy!" to the point that when I actually have a crush on someone, and it turns out we have a lot in common, but /he/ says it first, I usually hide my interests. I know—it's kinda backwards, but how fishy is that? When suddenly everything you say illicits the same response; when suddenly s/he's really into something you wrote about on your blog yesterday, and you're walking that line between just quietly holding on and claiming things by overstating them. (Oh, and I don't mean for anyone to go and look it up—I can do that when I get home.) See? This is why we need a little narrative advantage once in a while.)

"I've been hallucinating you, babe"

Although perhaps not the /best/ instance of dreams literally coming true, listening to someone talk in her sleep is really pretty fascinating, especially when the hearing starts while you're asleep and only becomes conscious when it's loud enough to wake you up. Kinda like sirens, I guess (wow—the double meaning there really brought it back around, huh?).

Also, I'm starting to think obsessive tendencies might have something to do with faulty memory. And that that book (/The Gift/?) might be totally plausible, if we're talking about self-delusion. How do you remember delicate things? And do you fear or envy people who actually relive experiences? And if you're reliving them, does that mean they were traumatic? (And does "trauma" go both ways the way I used to think "ecstasy" did?)

Also, it's definitely time to read /Beautiful Losers/ again.