On Not Marrying

Marriage has always held a place in the image of myself that seems so far away, I almost believe I will have to be a completely different person by the time it happens, the way a child must imagine herself to be an unrecognizable person by adulthood – several feet taller, dressed in adult clothing, speaking in an adult voice, concerned with adult tasks. It’s easy to imagine yourself as an adult when adulthood is so far away from you that it renders considering who you currently are, in your mental construction of the imagined future self, a bit ridiculous. When I was little I thought I’d be like Phylicia Rashad when I grew up. Such deserts of time stretched between myself then and my adult self that more drastic personal revolutions than a mere change in skin color would have to take place to transform me from a child who played with her toes to the dignified woman who could instill awe into the hearts of her unruly family with a few sotto voce threats and a confusingly sexy stare-down.

But I’m now at an age when many of my friends are getting married, or have already gotten married and are now starting their own families, or are even divorcing. And yet I feel just as distant from the woman I imagine myself needing to become in order to be married as I did when I was a child. It has in fact become more difficult to imagine myself so, because, unlike the enormous changes to my person I could take for granted would happen between then and the imagined now, I have to accept that I actually am mostly as I will be for the rest of my life. For instance, my skin color won’t change, but then neither will my personality; I’ll probably never be the sort of career woman and mother who can subdue her family with a sexy stare-down and then be at work at 8 in the morning to start a day of subduing New York’s legal system while wearing pointy high-heeled shoes and power suits. I don’t mind this, but it’s something I know won’t happen. The person I am now is basically what I have to work with, and my imagined married self has to look, and act, something like I do now. But I couldn’t be married and act the way I do. I mean, I could, but I wouldn’t want to be married to someone who’d put up with that.

What man could prepare himself for the size and scope of my vanity? It is epic, it is legion; I am the Beowolf of self-regard. I’m not exactly ashamed of this, but neither do I want someone beholding its hugeness every day, straining his philosophical faculties to make sense of his own minuteness in comparison with it. It’s not like I could hide my mountain of beauty products somewhere in the bathroom where he wouldn’t notice it, or get crushed under it, or sucked into its gravitational pull. I can’t just leave my toothbrush and some baby shampoo and an unassuming white washcloth out and pretend that’s all it takes to achieve this fresh-faced fakery that is my look. It’s not that I’m profligate with my products either; I use everything up and then buy more. How can I explain that I really do need one cleanser in the morning and a different one at night, and an exfoliator twice a week and a mask and a peel and different moisturizers for day and night and parts of my face and times of the month and it all makes perfect sense to me, but yes I understand there’s not enough room on the shelf for all these bottles so please build some more shelves? It is almost impossible to convey what eyelash conditioner is without appearing ridiculous. And also, I know aging drag queens who own less makeup than I do.

And clothing—I have a walk-in closet. It is my bedroom. I also have an annex of bulging wardrobes challenging the floorboards of my apartment in the Bronx. I like vintage clothes, which went out of style before I was born and thus will never go out of style in my heart. Unless I gain weight and they no longer fit me, why would I get rid of them? Yet I shun jobs that have a dress code that doesn’t include Uggs and yoga pants. I once turned one down in London because it would have required me to teeter about in high heels on Harrod’s marble floors for 6 hours a day. Any job that starts before ten in the morning is a job that will never see me in mascara, and only occasionally with clean hair. So I can’t even promise a consistent payoff to the avalanche we would be living under till death by suffocation do us part. I don’t like imagining my future husband trying to look manly while being crowded out of his own house by a burgeoning forest of chiffon ruching, bias-cut crepe, and those fake pashminas with pictures of peacocks in metallic thread I love so much. He would try to talk sense to me, offer to drive me to the Goodwill drop-off locations, or even help me to start an ebay boutique. I would grow to resent him for refusing to acknowledge the value of a minidress I wore both to my senior prom and to opening night at the opera twelve years later, or the fact that yes, gorilla fur is un-p.c., but totally worth it and so much warmer than any of my other capes, or that these are not rags, these are my Bag of Sentimental Panties and no, they are none of your business.

And what about our domestic life? Obviously I am too much of a feminist to ever willingly take on the role of housewife (and my secret is that my feminism in this regard is buttressed by a generous helping of laziness and apathy that eliminates housework as a serious consideration for me anyway). But normal couples cook, or take turns cooking. I know people who enjoy it. They buy ingredients, and read recipes, and wait patiently for stuff to boil. They close their eyes and lyricize about the near-spiritual satisfaction they get from communing with the various twigs and animal parts and different-colored dust they flavor stuff with. Then they sit down, fully clothed, at a table, with mats and serving spoons, and eat in silence or while exchanging civilized anecdotes about their lives. I only want to eat if I can sit pantsless in front of the internet while I’m doing it. And I only cook for parties. Spending time in the kitchen is only worthwhile if at least two dozen people will adore me afterwards. Otherwise I can just pick the M&Ms out of a trailmix bag, sprinkle them over a cup of applesauce and be done with it. I only use my stove to store my wicker basket collection and for my weekly death-by-garlic pasta binge, during which I prepare enough food to feed Haiti, and eat it all myself. I’m not sure I’d ever want a man to know these habits of mine, let alone be legally bound to share in them with me. And after ten or twenty years of letting him cook for me, I might start to suspect I’m taking advantage of him, and feel guilty about it.

As I get older, I wonder about how much of my life depends upon privacy, how much of my daily routine I would suppress if there were someone watching me. Do I want someone to witness me choosing to watch LOLCAT videos rather than read a Great Book, or even a good book, or even a full HuffPo article, before bed? Do I want to inflict my apocalyptic hormonal mood swings on an innocent man, or worse, stifle them for his sake and just guess at when the ulcer’s going to hit? Do I want someone possibly taking a dim view of my frequent daydreaming and then telling me to put some pants on and go get a job at Starbuck’s or Home Depot or wherever? I suppose that’s the fear, isn’t it, that the proclivities of mine I secretly suspect aren’t entirely benign but that I usually assume will appear charming to most other people, will be seen and comprehended in their unsimple totality by someone who would get to be as much of an expert on me as a husband would. And if he’s a man he would then encourage me, maybe even try to help me change, put his hands on my shoulders and turn me to face reality, which I always hate doing and which is why I generally can’t ass myself to do it on my own. And then I’d have to admit that I clung to a basically childish version of myself for longer than was seemly, and that instead of dragging myself up out of it, I needed a man to compel me to. God, I hate him already.

Word.

A friend turned me on to The Believer magazine, which is now my bus and train reading. In the February issue, there’s a fascinating series of essays by transgender author T Cooper on different aspects of his transformation from female to male: unsent letters he wrote to his parents explaining his decision, personality changes he has gone through since his transformation, elements of womanhood that one would think he’d understand considering his past but doesn’t. But one essay, on the subject of his frustration at the “slip-ups” people still make regarding his gender such as accidentally referring to him as a “she,” suggests his frustration at not having his identity acknowledged and respected has surpassed his empathy for human error. It’s ironically the one closed-minded part of an otherwise illuminating, and entertaining, treatise.

Cooper argues,

“…say you have a good friend you’ve known for years. You used to go out to bars with this guy, snort drugs, hook up with strippers, and then wake up and do it all over again. If this guy is now 5 years sober and happily married with 2.5 perfect children, you probably wouldn’t call him up every day and ask him to score some coke and go whoring with you…It’s not the world he lives in, even if you still think or still wish he did. Maybe it never was to him, it never quite fit, and he had to go through all that to get to the happy rainbow place he is today.

Or, say you always played basketball with a buddy; that’s all you did together…But then your buddy is in a gruesome Staten Island Ferry accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, exiled permanently to a wheelchair. Would you forevermore go up to him, see him sitting there, and then be like, ‘Yo, you wanna go down to the corner and play some pickup? Oops! I didn’t mean to say that! Sorry, it’s just so hard to get used to!’

No, it’s fucking not…..it makes me feel like shit when people refer to me as she. It doesn’t matter if it’s with the best of intentions, or whether it’s obvious to those in earshot that I’m male, and nothing’s technically been lost, that there’s clearly been a mistake. Or even if they are talking about the past.’

(quoting his wife) ’How would I feel if I were called sir while I was out on a date, wearing a dress and heels and cherry lipstick? How abnegating it would be to have the world decide, no matter how many signals you give, that you are something you are not.’

Of course, his frustration is understandable, and so is his pain. But I’m not sure his impatience with people who slip-up, and his dismissal of them as somehow lazy or dismissive themselves, is fair. It got me thinking about how I “group” people in my mind, what the most basic thing about them I remember and associate with them is. What are the characteristics that, no matter how the signals they deliberately send change over time, identify them to me?

This analogy might not immediately be apparent, but the essay reminded me of the way I think of words: how I group them, how I remember them, how they affect me. Sometimes when I’m trying and failing to remember a word that is “on the tip of my tongue,” the closest attributes of the word itself that I can remember might be the number of syllables, or the rhythm of it, or perhaps whether it was Germanic, Latin or Greek in origin. If I remember speaking it aloud to myself, randomly throwing in a few rough breathing marks for fun and imitating a recording I once listened to of The Iliad recited in a dialect believed to be similar to Old Ionic, I know the word was Greek. If I recall intentionally mispronouncing it in an Italian accent, I’ll know it is from Latin. If it sounds sexy or romantic, I’ll know it’s Frenchified Latin. If it’s phlegmy and uncouth, it must be German.

But more palpable than my memories of the attributes of the word itself, are my memories of how I felt when I first encountered the word. I can remember whether I was happy or sad, in love, depressed, feeling accomplished and smug, or put-upon and useless. I can remember if I was eating at the moment, and if so, whether it was sweet or savory, and how I felt as I was eating, if I was just grazing or eating until I was full, or ate too much and felt sick. Or maybe I was just having a coffee and felt the acid tenderize my stomach as I first read or heard that word.

That’s another thing I can remember even if I can’t remember the word itself: I know if I heard the word on TV or read it in a book. If it was from the television I can remember whether it was on a news or commentary show or in a movie or serial. If it was news and commentary, I can remember if I agreed with the person who used the word, and if it was a serial, whether I had a crush on the character who used it. If it was in a book, I can remember if it was fiction or non-fiction, and if fiction, which voice spoke the word aloud in my mind’s ear: if the narrator was female, regardless of the cultural origin of the book, it was my own, as I pride myself on being good with dialects. If male, the voice belonged to Jeremy Irons, naturally. If it was non-fiction I can remember whether it was British or American, or a translation. I can remember if I learned the word in conversation, and whether that conversation was in America or Europe, and if in America, on what coast, and if on the west coast, whether it was with a friend from high school, the theatre, or the opera, and if in New York, at Saks or some other job, over drinks or lunch or shouted at a noisy party. I can remember my status relative to the person who used the word, if it was a boss or a teacher, or a colleague, or a nuisance—did I feel intimidated, worried, delighted, or annoyed when I heard this word? Do I associate the word with satisfaction (words I learn while happy) or frustration (words I learn while trying to distract myself from unhappiness)? I can remember that, if not the word.

The clues are ghosts, and ghosts of ghosts, not of the thing itself, but of who I was at the moment of reception. It’s why, whenever I hear or read the word “assuage” I recall myself, if ever so faintly, as an 18 year old crushing on a teacher, or why “parameter” triggers a surge of disdain: I remember my father, in our Oldsmobile some time in the ‘80’s, complaining about the clichés of the day, the trendy words he was so tired of hearing, such as people droning on about the “parameters” of something when they just wanted a fancy word for “limit.” “Diminute” makes me think of London, Shakespeare, a Kensal Rise flat filled with books and art, good friends, Turkish rugs, grass and red wine. This is because, having heard my teacher Ben use the word several times in class, I asked him one night at his home, where I spent my best English evenings, why he didn’t just say “diminish” (the answer is that “diminish” is a reflexive verb, and “diminute,” an obscure active one, or less obscure adjective). With “pervasive” I’m back in Santa Fe on a warm dry autumn night under a sky the color of rust, reading my classmate Chris’s freshmen biology essay, astonished at the brilliant 16 year-old’s ability to interpret the sodden innards of our dissected cat, and wondering if I’d ever be able to hold my own with such scholars. The sentence itself wasn’t too spectacular, something about how the arterial system of the cat was “not quite pervasive,” but I recall that mix of admiration and apprehension perfectly, for it revisits me every time I use, hear, or read that word. “Abstruse” places me back as a breathless stagehand over ten years ago, working a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in which the word appears), always over-sugared, over-caffeinated, and hungry from eating dinner too early before the marathon play. The fricative “s” escapes the plosive “b,” breaks the tab “t” and gushes out through “ru” and suddenly the coca-cola is spumy in my empty stomach, its sugars caustic on my teeth.

These peripheral experiences that I recall with every word, or instead of the word, if it eludes me, only mean that more than the literal or technical definition of a word, I remember how I felt at my initial encounter with it.

I’ve realized, however, that out of all this mnemonic detritus my experience attaches to a word the most basic thing I project onto it is gender. I can remember if it was a male or female who spoke it or wrote it when I noticed it. If it was a man, I remember which category I had placed him in: guide and mentor, friend and equal, romantic interest, romantic interest and friend and equal, romantic interest and mentor, or pest. If the speaker of the word was female, I remember if she was a mentor, a friend and equal, or if I felt threatened by her or confident that I threatened her, or if she was a friend I felt threatened by or towards whom I was careful not to act threateningly. But ridding the word of my collateral experience, it remains, to me, male or female. “Atavistic,” “frisson,” and “palimpsest” are all male, because I encountered them reading Martin Amis, A. A. Gill, and Will Self respectively. Female words are “Effulgence” (Wharton), “tautology” (another great Gill, my former classmate Karina), and “limn” (Fuck You, Michiko Kakutani). “Droll” is female (mother) and “subsume” is male (Michael Schneider). “Judicious” is female, and “histrionic” is male. The gender I associate with a word has only to do with the gender of the person from whom I first learned the word, however long ago, regardless of the actual definition, etymology, connotations, or the gender, if any, with which the word is usually associated. “Histrionic” is a word I usually hear used, justly or unjustly, in connection to femaleness (or to me specifically, totally without basis). But my first hit of it came from a male drama teacher, so male it stays.

Of course I’m not really talking about words, I’m talking about myself, and the associations I make that make no sense of anything but my own experience. However disparate my experience is from the truth about something, it provides a deeper meaning for me than the objective truth about that thing. And gender, somehow, is the most basic element of that experience. I wonder if it is so for other people as well. If I’m alone in a room, and my back is turned to the door and someone else walks in, I can tell if that person is a man or woman. And it’s not from some obvious “signal” like the sound of high heels on floorboard or the smell of perfume. It’s visceral and I can’t justify with evidence, but I’m almost always right.

Cooper analogizes the slip-ups people make regarding his gender with a slip-up no sane or sensitive person would make in two hypothetical examples, of the whoring buddy now settled and the basketball partner now paralyzed. But the activities one enjoys with a person, however regularly, and for however long, are not nearly as identifying as that person’s gender. The two examples Cooper uses are a false equivalency because it is much more natural to dissociate a person from the hobbies you shared with them than it is to suddenly start thinking of them in a whole different gender. Yes, one should acknowledge dresses and cherry lipstick as signals of how a person prefers to be regarded, but in the moment of a “slip-up,” one is guided by something deeper than the part of one’s brain that acknowledges and interprets signals, before that part of the brain can catch the mistake and correct it. I had a friend while living in Europe, a male who had made the transition to female long before I ever knew her. She did not tell me of the change she had made at all. I heard about it from a mutual friend but didn’t think much of it, since I’m from San Francisco and don’t find such stories to be too exotic. I would have known anyway, as her past maleness was unmistakable--again, not because of any signal I can put words to—I’ve known women who were taller, broader-shouldered, slimmer-hipped, deeper-voiced, had more, er, manly facial features, and wore less makeup on them. No, there was just something “male” about her, and, months into our friendship I slipped up once while ordering in a restaurant and referred to her as a “he.” I was mortified, of course, and hope I did not make her feel like shit, as T Cooper describes such gaffs as affecting him. But I also can’t quite agree that this slip-up is on the level of accidentally inviting a man in a wheelchair to play basketball. Hobbies and the accidents we suffer do not occupy space in the same atavistic chamber of our psyches as gender. I can understand “how abnegating it would be to have the world decide that you are something you are not” but a slip-up is not a decision, and cannot be resented in the same way.

Cooper and other people who have undergone gender transformation say they did it to honor what they know to be the truth about themselves. “…to be trans is to feel the truth so acutely you can’t fake it. It is to be so consumed with the truth of who you are that you are willing to risk everything to inhabit it.” But it is unreasonable to expect the world you live in not only to acknowledge that truth (that is indeed reasonable) but feel that truth as acutely, as unmistakably as you do, and to be offended when the signals you labor to exhibit are no match for what millions of years have hardwired into us. I read a study recently that told me I am likely to behave more protectively of myself around men when I am ovulating than when I am in the less fertile phase of my cycle; I will avoid sketchy areas, I will dress less provocatively, I will subconsciously regard men as potential rapists and try not to act as if I’m “asking for it,” in a biological mechanism designed to cope with my greater attractiveness during that time. My body wants to be impregnated and so subtly enhances the signals of my fertility, but it also wants to minimize the chances of the “wrong” male taking advantage (i.e. it wants a baby-daddy and not a rapist). Of course this is offensive. As a level-headed woman I prefer to think that I gauge my safety from situation to situation rationally, based on observations and crime statistics and the like. I also resent the implication that the hormones sloshing around in me will soak my deductive powers so thoroughly that on some primordial level I think any dweeb on the street is a threat to me in my fecundity. Who knows if the study itself will stick, but it says something about people and gender. Our reactions to maleness and femaleness are beyond what our conscious selves can grasp. It is what makes people like T Cooper know, in their deepest selves, what they are, despite all the contrary signals with which nature has assembled them. But it is also why (I suspect) it is unlikely that trans people will ever feel understood and acknowledged as totally as they understand and acknowledge the truth about themselves, whatever level of enlightenment our culture achieves. Not everyone ascribes a gender to words as I do (but, ahem, many cultures do), but everyone comprehends and reacts to gender, in ways that may be partly societal, but primarily evolutionary. Millions of years have taught us to recognize and react to gender. It is asking a lot of people that they not only reject, but forget.

Scared of Everything

When I was a child I was scared of many things, all imaginary. I had a vintage Everyman Library edition of ghost stories that I tortured myself with at bedtime, and my parents foolishly allowed me to watch TV specials on alien abductions, hauntings, and unexplained phenomena and monsters. I endured periods during which it took me several hours of trembling beneath the covers to get to sleep at night, because it didn’t seem unlikely to me that Scotland’s Loch Ness monster might swing its head around my bedroom door, or that some bride suicide in her tattered whites would rather trouble me than the cad who jilted her.

Everything I was aware of in those hours before I fell asleep frightened me. After my father kissed me goodnight, he switched the light off by pulling a white string attached to the ceiling lamp. The centrifugal swinging of the string in the dark formed a faint vibrating image that in my imagination transmogrified into a bleakly staring face. I insisted my door be left ajar so that light from the hallway could stream in, and despaired if my parents went to bed before I fell asleep, turning the hallway light off and leaving on only a dim nightlight which barely illuminated my room at all and left me vulnerable to the horrors of the dark. Of course, even with the hallway light on, what was to prevent an alien from appearing in the doorway? There was really no good solution. I often opened my window curtain to let the light from our neighbor’s window, which shone from across the shaft, spill in to make a comforting pattern on my ceiling. They were awake and unafraid, chatting with the lights on, and so I could relax. But then they turned the lights off, went to sleep, and left my ceiling bare, and me with only the grim shapes hovering in dark relief against the blankness.

Ghosts and aliens alternated worrying me, depending on what I was reading or watching on TV. Those were the two big fears, although once in a while the Jersey Devil added some flash to my paranoid fantasies as well. Occasionally I’d enjoy an extended period free of night-fears, when I’d know how silly it had been to be so afraid of these, I knew, imaginary things, but then I’d catch a special on some alien they dissected at Roswell, or flip open my ghost storybook and read about the driver who finds out that the hitchhiker he picks up has actually been dead a week, and feel the arrant dread rising like mercury in me, and know that that was it for the next few months at least. It grew tiresome, this nightly anxiety; the fear itself was just so tedious, that I actually grew to resent myself for being so frightable. I’d like to say it had worn off by my teenage years, but I was such a fan of the X-Files that a milder form of my old fears would revisit me every week, but luckily not last more than a night or two. Particularly effective episodes were the one about the tiny Canadian insects that suck your body of its fluids if you stepped into shadow, the one about Eugene Victor Tooms, who lives in an elevator shaft and eats human liver, and the one in which a dying circus performer’s conjoined twin goes rogue and makes many fatal attempts to attach himself to someone more healthy, and Agent Scully eats a cricket (crickets look too much like cockroaches not to give me the heebie-jeebies).

I’m still afraid of the dark. I stupidly watched Paranormal Activity 2 the other night at my sister’s. Of course I’m too sophisticated now to be duped by spooky music and trick lighting, but it was the very banality with which the malevolence asserts itself in this film that made it able to catch up to my now-diminished frightability. Everything looks and sounds so normal. A pot falls from the hook in broad daylight, unartfully recorded by a standard CCTV lens, like the kind they use to catch shoplifters at Century 21. Well, my house has no spooky soundtrack, and no Hitchcockian-lighting effects, and pots fall off hooks all the time. The similarities are endless. And right now my 70 year-old atheist hippie mother isn’t at home to protect me from the hell-sent forces of evil. That was a bad movie night.

Furthermore, I live in a railroad-style apartment, in which all of the rooms branch off from one long hallway. Believe me, you don't have to be all that stoned to envision a torrent of blood splashing towards you from the kitchen.

There are things that would make more sense to fear, but somehow I can’t be bothered to fear them. I’m stoical about flying. I’m aware the plane might explode, but I’d rather go where I want to go and accept the risk. I don’t let a little mad-cow fear scare me off steak when I’m in Europe. I don’t wander about in “bad” neighborhoods, but neither do I worry about getting mugged or attacked. I wouldn’t think twice about returning home by train at 2:30 to my apartment in the Bronx. No, I’ll charge down the dark street past my fellow nightowls in all their colored bandanas and tear-drop tattoos, kicking the bullet casings aside on the way to my building, and then get home and worry about the scary shadow-shapes my dolls make along the wall.

Also, if it isn’t bragging (or even if it is, I guess), I’ve not been as fearful as I could be in my interactions with people. I don’t shrink from an argument, and I don’t believe that frequently bursting into tears should disqualify me as a rational being. I’m usually honest about what I’m thinking or feeling, and am even willing to be the first to admit to something, like with men. In fact, I’ve come to realize that not much happens in my life without my first making some mortifying confession. I suspect that such forthrightness can sometimes have an emasculating effect, and might cause my plans to backfire, but this, too, I am willing to risk in order to start something that won’t start without my own initiative. Sometimes I resent being left to do the courageous thing, but then I consider that they will eventually find out that I would rather hold my pee in all night than get up to use the bathroom if the nightlight is out or the heater is clanking more ominously than usual, and I figure I should get my points for courage in early.

Hell is Your People

I got an invitation in the mail the other day to the annual “Russian Festival” at the San Francisco Russian Center, an event I attended regularly as a child. I remember tables of cherry pastries and pierogi, game stands where you could play for a quarter and win tiny plastic toys, and rather thrillingly athletic dance performances by local professional Russian and Ukrainian folk dance troupes. I also remember the weirdness of seeing my classmates from the Russian Orthodox school I attended part time in this other context, outside of school and with their families. At that age, the people in your life fit neatly into categories: there were my mother’s friends who ushered with her at the opera and always wore black, my father’s friends from Vesuvio’s, who grew their hair long and argued about poetry, his models, who were always naked and very sweet to me despite my frequent interruptions of their sittings, my friends from my regular school, who wore their hair in dookie braids and played football with me, and my classmates from Russian school, who wore navy blue skirts or pants and white blouses and were generally terrors. It was strange seeing them in normal clothing with nice grown-ups who resembled them and who didn’t seem aware of their awfulness. I assume I was awful then too, for at that age I would do anything to fit in. I even played along when they’d flip their bottom lips down and their upper lips up, a “game” we called “n***** lips”.

As she handed me the invitation (a print of a smiling Matryoshka, of course), she said that it had always been a regret of my American father’s that they had not worked harder to insert me into that world, the Russian immigrant community. This had been a platitude of my growing years, the importance of ensconcing oneself in the culture of one’s ancestry. For my parents, especially my mother, this importance had several bases, one being that one had to look outside the American mainstream for culture worthy of the name, and she had me watching Russian childrens’ shows, Russian opera and ballet, studying art, math, and chess, with teachers from institutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (all of which I still believe are leagues superior to their American counterparts). The other was a belief that in order to assess the virtues of whatever world one lives in, and even to gain respect within that world, one has to be able to stand aloof from it somewhat, to know things, have experienced things from a different world. I still like to be a little different from whatever circles I’m moving in at the moment, and find myself emphasizing what foreignness I can lay claim to when I’m with Americans, and acting the unrepentant ugly American amongst foreigners.

Of course the modern, western affection for multiculturalism reinforced these notions, and I never thought much about them. But when my mother mentioned this the other day, that even my Midwestern American father genuinely wished he had made more of a Ruskie out of me, for the first time I considered whether I shared the same wish, now that I’m an adult. I realized that it was no longer a given that I shared the same regret. I wasn’t sure, as my parents had been, that closer ties to the Slavic community here would have been a boon to my life. How, exactly?

A couple of days after that, I went to the Russian deli in the Outer Richmond and ran into an older male acquaintance—I say acquaintance although he was as good as a stranger to me, but seemed to know my mother. He spoke to me in Russian and I had to tell him in the few broken words at my disposal that I only understand a little, and speak badly. He looked crestfallen, stunned, bewildered at both my ignorance and my willingness to admit to it. He had a friend of his own with him, who was definitely a stranger to me, and who asked,

“Don’t you speak any other languages??”

“French.”

He looked off into the pickle shelves and then down at the floor, as if he might find the reason for my having wasted my life like this spelled out in the squashed caviar along the linoleum.

He looked back up at me, a scowling acheiropoietos, and said,

“It would be good to have….something else.”

I’m never as offensive as I want to be in the moment, so I replied with a curt, “Yes, it would” and walked off wondering how much more connection to my people I could stand. This incident on its own is of course unimportant; who cares what these alter kakers think? Let them wear their Texas cowboy hats and vote Republican and believe themselves more erudite than the spoiled layabout natives of their adopted country. But the incident is not unusual; all my life our Russian friends, and not only friends but strangers we met for the first time, like this man, have felt it’s ok to criticize as insufficient the education I was and was not getting from my parents. They felt it was ok to interrogate me as a child, and to criticize my mother to her face for not making it easier for gems like them to talk to me. The arrogance, the bald-faced rudeness, the presumption, but more than that, the supernatural patience and decency of my mother to refrain from telling them (in English) to fuck off back to bloody Odessa, or Novro-piss-sick, or Nouveau, New-Mafia Moscow, to go shoot a journalist or neglect a nuclear plant or bomb an orphanage or do fuck-all about sex trafficking or whatever our people are up to these days besides berating second-generations for not wanting to be more like them.

When I was younger, it always bothered me, but only as a well-aimed accusation. I felt they were right, their accusations righteous, and was ashamed of myself for not having tried harder to become more like them. But now I see that I can go ahead and be ashamed of them instead. Ruder and drunker than the British, more racist than the Confederacy, more arrogant than the French, more maternally-smothering than the Jews or the Chinese, tackier dressers than new-moneyed Italians, as untrustworthy as any souk pickpocket, as superstitious as Gorky’s peasants. And how do we explain the utter lack of regard for their own? There are Russians, millions of them even, who still mourn the death of Stalin, the outperforming autogenocide. When Moscow has money, it builds new towers and embellishes its squares and lets orphanages, hospitals, and asylums rot.

This is the work of Ukrainian photographer and documenter of post-Soviet wretchedness, Boris Mikhailov. Go ahead, do a google image search. I fucking dare you.

There’s a quotation from Dostoevsky that has been bastardized to read, “It’s easy to love mankind. It’s hard to love a man.” I think I can further bastardize it to say, “It’s easy to love your culture, but hard to love the people in it.” I’m thought a Russophile by everyone who knows me, and to an extent, it’s true. Most of my favorite works of art, in every medium, are Russian in origin. And the more I learn, the more I see that to get training of any seriousness in so many of these art forms, you need a Russian teacher. How sad it was to visit the great Pinacoteca in Milan, and study the art projects of its graduating students, and see that they haven’t learned even the basics of rendering the human skeleton, something I had mastered by age eleven with my teacher from Petersburg. Watch the Kirov do Swan Lake and then watch any American company do it; there is no question of the superiority of the training dancers receive at the Vaganova School. Sorry, ABT. The few weeks I spent in Moscow I still consider to be the best and most concentrated theatre training of my life. My favorite movies, my favorite operas, my favorite painters, actors, writers, poets, my favorite cities with my favorite architecture, my favorite pastries and soups and wines and garlic zakousky, my favorite sacred music and dirty jokes, all Russian. Yet I don’t perceive a connection between any of this and the gauche, heavy-handed, heavy-bottomed, boorish examples of this people that I meet and interact with in my day-to-day life. Have you ever been hit on by a Russian man in his twenties? Have you ever had to do business with a Russian? Did you ever get your money back?

This is all very grim for me to be thinking and saying. I will leave you with a video from my favorite cartoon series from my childhood. It’s called “Nu Pogodi!” or “Well, just you wait!” The wolf (the bad guy, not only morally bad but ill-kempt and uncouth) always pursues the rabbit (good and neat and classy). I watched this incessantly as a child. I cite it as an example of superlative Russian children’s television programming because along with being hilariously entertaining, it always slipped in high-cultural references, thereby sneakily teaching us about art while we thought we were just goofing off. My first exposure to Swan Lake was in this episode (around 4:30). Later, around minute 9, the wolf does a brilliant impression of the great subversive singer Vladimir Vysotsky, so beloved of the people that even the Soviet government couldn’t touch him. The second video down is just damn funny.

Here we go again...

I'm back in New York now and have to do something with my life, or at least, to find a job and stall. After a cocky start with the New York Times journalism and education job market, by the end of the first week I was fashioning ways to pad out my resume so I could more confidently answer the craigslist fetish ads. This all induced the sort of motivational narcolepsy that makes sighing myself to death seem the lesser of two evils, the other evil being something I can't bother myself to come up with. So the next week I spent flopping from one supine attitude of self pity to another, unwashed and awash in drowsy consideration of the difficulties of my life. Finally I decided there had to be more to life than stoned iphone tetris and facebook snooping, and that I should perhaps take a shower and go into the city.

The level of purpose one needs just to walk down the street here is preternatural. The ambition, the exuberance, the if-I-can-make-it-there, I'll-make-it-anywhere self-belief is only uplifting if you share it yourself, and you can only share it to the same degree if you haven't already gone through the slogging, the day-to-day smackdowns, the landslides of rejections, and the regular revelations of your own minuteness that comprise New York’s hazing ritual for the newly arrived. The benchmarks of adulthood, like finding employment that justifies your education, accommodation better than your college dorm, financial independence from your parents, are at their most elusive here. It's not that you lose your hope, it's that you go from having huge, king-of-the-hill dreams, to weeping with self-pride over landing a job in something other than catering. Looming larger is the spectre of what you might become if you don't save yourself from failure. You know you have to succeed at something—who cares what—or turn into one of those people barricaded in their studio apartments by piles of dried catshit and unsent letters to Mayor Koch, who pass their time in picking skintags and talking to cockroaches. You become an American English eccentric, except unlike actual English eccentrics, other Americans don't regard you in your sphincter-cringing social inappropriateness as a quaint national personage. New Yorkers can achieve orgasm through schadenfreude alone, and there's only one side of that word you want to be on.

It occurred to me that now that I'm in America, I could put my networking skills back to use. I'll say this for New York—it doesn't pretend not to function in significant part by nepotism. One of the less admirable aspects of London is that it, too, is ruled by nepotism, but pretends not to be. You're not supposed to mention it, or admit it's there, or suggest to anyone who has achieved anything that nepotism had anything at all to do with it, or, worst of all, attempt to make it work for you. English nepotism works in such a way that, hustle all you like, you're not cooking with gas unless your name and alma mater are doing their part. Most helpful is sharing a surname with other people who have already achieved renown in your field, and barring that, go to Oxford for politics, or Cambridge for the arts. Of course it helps you get into either if someone else of your surname also went there, particularly if they went on to achieve renown in their field. So the English have developed a system that allows them not to have to sully themselves with gauche American-style “pushiness”--that so-undignified compulsion to make colleagues out of friends and friends out of colleagues. They've made a virtue of showing they don't have to stoop to self-promotion--that's all the famous English self-deprecation is about--and they'll put their smugface on if you so much as ask them to pass along your resume. New Yorkers are more honest. They accept that connections are how it's done and expect you—in fact, don't respect you unless you sniff out opportunities everywhere you go and do your damnedest to exploit them, whether you came from the right family or went to the right schools or not.

I still have a few acquaintances and ex-colleagues here from the first go-around. First I contacted the ones who hadn't already fired me. Most had changed careers in the three years I'd been gone. Sometimes I think taking a Notes From Underground approach to life is good for a laugh, and choose my next move based on what could make the most hilariously terrible story. So I called Richard, my old editor at New York Moves. People who pretend they're above eating shit miss out on all the fun, I say. Alas, he never responded to the message I left on his voicemail. Other colleagues were from jobs regrettable except for their blogability, and I've already written that story; I'm too old to find amusement in sacrificing myself to someone else's robber baron dreams. And so I'm left with the less entertaining, last resort, which is to start over clean—back to those grim job market pages.

Most positions listed have names I don't even understand, names with words in them like development, support, coordinator, IP Telephony, unpaid. And most have descriptions that would make Bartleby consider retraining. The unbelievable thing is how the employers don't even bother to mask the disparity between what they expect of applicants and what they're offering. A benefitless part-time position writing ad copy for a manufacturer of beige thread in a Hoboken basement requires a post-graduate degree in journalism, a working knowledge of Quark, whatever that is, and preferably a previous internship at the White House. On their applications they ask you to describe your leadership skills and an event wherein you showed yourself to be a “team player.” The worst, though, was when I applied to work at the famous Strand bookstore. Along with all the usual fill-in fields on its application there's a ten-question author-to-title match test. I could only answer six of them. I saw that there was an inaccurate match-up, where it listed Master and Margarita, but not Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky, but nothing by him. I considered scribbling ”Fuck your trick questions” in the margin and flouncing off but realized that wouldn't make it any less humiliating not to be able to complete the quiz. To be fair, the only qualifications one should ever have to cite on The Strand's job application form are whether one can look bored and be unhelpful, but I thought pointing this out to the human resources manager wouldn't help my case. The only thing I had on my resume that might have put me ahead of the emo throngs who apply there every day is that I studied the “great books” program at college, and now I proved, to them and to myself, that not only do I not know the stuff I didn't study, I don't even know the stuff I studied instead of the stuff I didn’t study. And then it asked me whether I knew how to use a cash register. I staggered down the stairs and out onto Union square with crinkled chin, pretending that I'd got something stuck in both contacts.

I'm still looking. I'll let you all know whether I find anything newsworthy.

In Defense of Sloth

Since I haven't posted for a while, here's another article from New York Moves's Christmas/Seven deadly sins issue (the one to which I contributed "In Defense of Vanity" and "Blinded by the Light," linked below. Thank you, Odious, for the inspiration for my thesis; you know what I'm talking about.

No other city in the world is quite as unforgiving towards sloth as New York. The expense alone overwhelms anyone who doesn’t exert a near superhuman effort to break into and succeed in our job market, the most overcrowded and competitive in America. The glut of cultural offerings shames people who might otherwise content themselves with Monday night football and the occasional Cineplex outing into becoming reluctant but regular patrons of the arts: it’s simply too embarrassing to admit that one hasn’t seen the Bodies exhibit, or that one missed The History Boys or that one still hasn’t visited the new MOMA. Thousands of restaurants featuring the cuisine of hundreds of different cultures encourage the frequent dining-out customary to New Yorkers, many of whom return home after sixteen-hour days to snatch too few hours of sleep before waking at dawn to start the frenzied day all over again.

Yet within each New Yorker is a “Secret Sloth” as my driven friend Aggie named hers, who would rather call in sick and spend the day sitting on the couch watching sitcom reruns and slurping Cup O’Noodles. The fact is, work is stressful and takes up a lot of time, and most people who are making enough money to live in the city are doing it in high-pressure jobs that don’t necessarily offer any creative satisfaction but leave one too exhausted to pursue other interests with any gusto. The city’s recreational offerings also have a cultural and historical gravitas that discourages regarding them as recreational at all. In any other city one can simply take a walk in the park. In New York, however, Central Park carries with its very name the countless remembered scenes from film and literature, which crowd in upon one’s consciousness while one’s merely strolling along its perimeter. One almost feels an obligation to match one’s scarf to the autumn leaves. And under-accomplished if one fails to meet the love of one’s life while sitting on the bank of the duck pond pensively tossing breadcrumbs into the water. A day at the beach requires an hour-long train ride and once you get there, you have to search the shore for empty patches where you can bury your wallet, and then hope your feet miss the shards of bottle glass strewn in the sand as you wind your way through the screaming children towards the water. In New York, even leisure is never lazy.

Why bother with any of it when you could just sit around? I for one grow weary by the mere process of deciding how to best take advantage of this magnificent city. The opportunities for enrichment terrify me. I am exhausted by the possibilities. The very idea of how meaningful a Saturday afternoon can be makes me want to crawl back into bed and only move to change the channel from Nickelodeon to TV land. Are other New Yorkers leading productive, culturally rich and satisfying lives? Should I feel ashamed that this is what I really want? Does Gray’s Papaya deliver?

I have a friend who describes sloth as the only vice which is its own reward. The other vices drag other people, other things into the picture. They require effort. Greed links the wish for an immoderate amount of something to the pursuit and acquisition of the same. Gluttony requires the material of indulgence. Lust culminates (the luster hopes) in the physical act driven by, but not itself, lust. Wrath involves a world of associated passions, and its extremity can be quite taxing. Sloth just is. One is slothful to be slothful, that’s it. Nothing but sloth is needed, and nothing but sloth results. Sloth owes its existence only to the will to be slothful, the wish to do nothing rather than something. It’s a powerful temptation, and a self-perpetuating one once tasted. It is a particularly dangerous temptation in a city like New York, and the only one of the “seven deadly sins,” as they are so dramatically named, that New York by nature does not encourage. It is hard to walk down the street any day here without contending with lust, gluttony, envy,…. temptations towards each of these are plastered on every billboard, walking their dogs in the park, safe behind shiny glass at Bergdorf’s, wafting through the morning air outside Balthazar’s bakery...wrath emerges swiftly enough when hailing a cab at Columbus Circle on a Friday night. New York was made for sins like these. The city, however, has very little patience for anything less than a super-heightened level of activity from its inhabitants, and thus sloth is the only one of the deadly sins which is out of place here. When one gives in to sloth, one “drops out” of New York and its ethos in a very real way. Practically, one can’t survive here without the energy to succeed and the willingness to exercise it. Culturally, the city is wasted on one who’d rather lie in bed than partake of the thousands of world-class offerings.

And yet, that “Secret Sloth” within each of us—dare I assert that every New Yorker has one? Am I the only who finds the constant pressure to “do stuff” oppressive and pushy? My bed is soft and warm, and my TV has so many channels, and Cup O’Noodles is really quite good; it recently introduced an excellent white cheddar flavor. Even as someone brought up to work hard and drawn to New York by that superior and prolific cultural life for which it is famous, the task of getting out of bed and living life to the fullest is a hard sell.

Sloth, by nature, is a very anti-New York sin.

New Year's Blogolution

I was asked to write an article on the nature of change (or something, I don't really pay attention) for the January double issue, which has now turned into the hulking January-February-March triple issue, of New York Moves Magazine. I originally felt it best and most appropriate to write one of those "the problem with you lot..."-type pieces and keep myself out of it, but then my editor suggested that it would be more convincing if I at least pretended to use myself as an example, which I did, in part. This is for anyone wondering about the inaccuracies of my life story as told hereafter.


“How few the days are that hold the mind in place; like four or five hooks holding up a tapestry. Especially the day you know you’ve stopped becoming, the day you know you merely are. What ought to be moves far away; what is comes close.” -Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Much commentary has been devoted to the infamous New Year’s Resolution and its hurried evanescence in the weeks following the New Year. Its inherent, doomed optimism is the stuff of sad jokes and wan regrets, yet every year, people resolve again to lose that weight, to quit smoking, to save more money,… as if they haven’t made these promises to themselves every previous year, and broken them through neglect, lack of discipline, or plain unwillingness. I’d wager most peoples’ New Year’s Eve resolutions didn’t survive their New Year’s Day hangover, let alone the ensuing weeks that have brought us to the threshold of spring. We are accustomed to breaking the promises we make to ourselves, and it is almost touching to see how innocently we go on making those promises, not just every New Year, but every new day.

But is our eagerness to make these abortive resolutions a sign of hope or self-delusion? As a country we descended from people who were willing to drop everything and sail thousands of miles into unknown and dangerous territory in order to pursue a lifestyle they dreamed would be better than the one they were stuck in, and we pride ourselves in our touted “ingenuity.” Change is an integral part of our makeup, and probably the makeup of any healthy human being, but what does it say about us that we seem to be constantly on the hunt for newer, better, and often unrealistic versions of ourselves, only to abandon the hunt with such ease most of the time? We spend thousands of dollars every year on fad diets we know must fail. Most of us can’t afford a new wardrobe every season but strain our credit limits chasing this tantalizing image of our chic new selves, hoping (and knowing full well it is an empty hope) that by “bettering” our appearance, so will our social, professional, and romantic lives be bettered too. We spend years in psychotherapy, only to find that, though we’ve “learned” a lot about ourselves and our atavistic compulsions, our ability or even willingness to change those habits somehow never caught up. Whose bookshelf isn’t crowded with half-read self-help books?

This isn’t to say that people don’t or shouldn’t change at all; New York is indeed the place to find people who have made real and lasting changes to their lives and themselves. But it seems that change—real change, not the kind bidden in a drunken vow made at 12:01 on New Year’s morning--can only happen a few times, those “four or five hooks holding up the tapestry” of one’s life. And it also seems that those few true changes only really happen, conversely, when we rid our minds of unrealistic pipe dreams and face up to our situation, and the changes that are indeed possible to make in that situation.

Some years ago, on another coast and after receiving yet another rejection letter for a story of which I was rather proud (the sort of defeat which always reminded me of my other disappointments: financial dependence, empty love life, facing a lifetime of obscurity, the usual), I came to realize that, by my own standards, and I’m sure, those of anyone with any sense of reality, I was a failure. But in that moment of crying into my pillow, it occurred to me that I had been in the same position, crying for basically the same reasons, more times than I could bear to count. And I also realized that the reason I hadn’t made any drastic changes to my life in any aspect was because for the past few years I had fooled myself into believing that if I made little changes, the bigger gains I dreamed of would magically come to me. My love life would fix itself in time if I just “improved” myself: I read constantly to sharpen my intellect, I worked out often, even did ballet, to stay in superior shape, I developed an eye for vintage fashions and always dressed elegantly. My career would blossom if I refined my skills and made myself into a great writer—some important commissioning editor or agent was bound to glimpse one of my stories or be charmed by my pitch letter and want to represent me. Basically, the changes I was making to my lifestyle were too timid to have any real impact because I was convinced that my real life—my destiny! was somewhere in the future, and it was my task to endure the nowhere life I was in and prepare for the coming miracle by making twee adjustments to my fundamentally defective modus operandi. I would not admit to myself that the paltry life I was enduring those years was indeed my life, my real life, and that unsatisfied, flailing girl, the real me.

I won’t go into the details of what happened after my revelation, but hope it suffices to say that I have experienced real change, several of them, even, since then, my move to New York being the primary one, and catalyst to all the others. And I think these changes were only made possible the moment I let go the cozy platitude that I was becoming, and embraced the ghastly truth that I was.

We are obsessed with becoming, and perhaps this has to do with our youth-fixation (for when we are young it is our duty to devote ourselves to becoming) or maybe it is the epic pressure of the American Dream which bullies people into disdaining their lot for a more dazzling one. Whatever the cause, it seems the constant encouragement to chase an idea of how much better, happier, more perfect one could be, provides a convenient and ever-renewable distraction from recognizing, and making peace with, who one is to begin with. Your first day of maturity is not your 21st birthday, or the first day of your job, or the day you first make love, but “the day you know you merely are.” Vital to change is the recognition that your real life, your real self, is not some perfected being waiting in the distant future for you to grow into them, but who you are right now, shortcomings, discontents and all.

Blinded by the Light

I didn't choose that title for another of my articles in the Christmas issue of New York Moves magazine, but that's what they named it. Several editorial changes were made, to which I objected noisily, but I included the piece in unmutated form here:

Both the faithful and the cynical complain a lot around the holidays. The faithful, that commercialism has debased the original spiritual purpose of Christmas, and the cynical, that we continue to pay lip service to this debased spiritual purpose. I for one have grown bored with both sides as hopelessly unfamiliar with human nature, objecting as though it’s news that we gravitate toward the material rather than the spiritual, and then try to make ourselves feel less crass by attaching a lot of Hallmark platitudes to our materialism. Of course we do.

My complaint is more specific, involving the reason I believe the spiritual aspects of Christmas, or, really, the trappings of any religion, are ignored so easily in the first place. From a literary point of view the stories of the world’s religions are some of the most astonishing ever imagined: in them are heroes and antagonists, obstacles, magic (for that’s really what a “miracle” is, isn’t it?), and distinctive moral themes from which one may learn how to live. To take Christianity in particular, in addition to the blockbuster spectacles of the Old Testament, the New Testament features the peculiar story of a tri-partite god who arranges for his son/self to take human form through virgin birth, and preach to those who’d listen a new and, at the time, completely innovative ideology. He foresees (and if one takes the “Judas Texts” into account, hand-picks and instructs his traitor), and sets into motion his own gory death whereby, through some mystical magic, the sins of mankind are purged. In this moment of his assuming the world’s evils, the earth darkens as god, the father, cannot look on such impurity, and in his dying moments god, the son, cries out at his abandonment. He then rises from the tomb and, before ascending to heaven, promises to return “in the blink of an eye.” Thus is man saved from his mortality.

This story shouldn’t leave me cold.

The problem for me is that this story has been told to me in so many dumbed-down forms over the years, starting the first day of kindergarten at a ghetto Baptist school in San Francisco, it has become part of the mere noise of my past, like the Sesame Street theme song or the emergency siren test that blasted through the city every Tuesday at noon. Every Monday and Wednesday morning at my elementary school, we convened in the chapel to listen to a sermon given not by an ordained minister, but by one of our teachers or the school’s pious headmaster. These often involved badly-painted placards illustrating some de-sexed episode from the Old Testament, or a bloodless version of the story of Golgotha. These were followed by their imploring us to “accept Jesus into our hearts” so that we may receive “salvation.” Imagine what this could mean to a seven year old. I actually envisioned a tiny Jesus, complete with curly hair, beard, white robes, and melancholy face, grasping onto nearby arteries while curled into one of the cramped chambers of my heart, blood sloshing about his sandals, his head bumping against the wall as it pumped. I worried he’d stumble out when I played on the swings. “Accept Jesus into your heart” was such a regular theme that I really can’t remember any of the other specifics of this brainwashing, but I do remember shyly asking my parents before they put me to bed one night if they would “accept Jesus into their hearts” so that they could go to heaven, and then, perceiving a lack of seriousness in their response, worrying all night over the fate of their souls in the afterlife. Which of course made me think on the possibility of their deaths. Which made me even more miserable.

For what was all this propaganda? How could they fail to see that an unripe mind cannot but reduce this majestic doctrine to absurdity?

More importantly, how could they fail to see that the doctrine would not only be lost on us at that age, but that our over-exposure to it would numb us against any power it might have had once we were mentally and spiritually ready for it later?

In A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit argues against the trend to teach sex-ed at a younger and younger age (which is purportedly done in an effort to beat the long arm of the sex-focused media to the punch), claiming that to introduce the details of the subject to a mind before the interest in it has arisen naturally has a warping, rather than educative, effect. Having learned the specifics myself long before I stopped believing in “coodies,” I’m inclined to agree with Shalit. I’d argue the same principle applies to religion.

At my school, as at any parochial school which includes religious inculcation as part of its agenda, we were fed some very grand and complex ideas, but before we had reached an age, or a state of mind-readiness, when it would have been possible for us to perceive the grandeur or even to perceive the complexity of those ideas (hence my imagined travel-sized Jesus). These ideas became “old hat” long before it ever occurred to us to ask what it really means that god died on a cross, or that this is in fact a supernaturally outrageous and heavy concept that should baffle, terrify, shock, and excite us. By exposing and over-exposing us to concepts unsuited in every way to our lack of maturity, they robbed us of the opportunity to be baffled, terrified, shocked, or excited by them then or later. The insult to injury is that their one concession to our unreadiness was in the anemic, baby-talk dilutions of these concepts they fed us. Not the Confessions of St. Augustine, but the Jesus is my Homie rap, undid me as a believer.


I’ll never forgive my elementary school for having wasted hours of my life filling my head with meaningless platitudes when I never did get a good grasp on long division. Or for the nights I spent crying into my pillow, envisioning my heathen parents unsaved and in flames. I am tired of the faithful and the cynical, and all their whining about the desecration of Christmas. These complainers seem to think that the thing that has been desecrated is the holiday itself, and our cheerful desecration of it, a symptom of some cultural disease which only surfaces, herpes-like, once a year. The truth is, few of us could ever even dream of appreciating the sacredness of the ritual or the mystery of Christ’s story at all. It is our own minds that have been desecrated, befouled from infancy with the stale rhetoric of people more interested in turning us into congregation drones than in helping us cultivate what innate religiosity--indeed—true spirituality, we may possess. I suspect the natural spirituality of a human being is a delicate and ephemeral thing, easily killed by over-feeding or careless handling. My own was beaten numb; actually, it was bored to death. It is no surprise to me that at Christmastime we shop and eat and drink ourselves senseless, when for so many of us, the story of Christ occupies the same mental space as the tooth fairy, and the word of god is a bubble-gum jingle.

In Defense of Vanity

I know, I know, I've been a bad, bad blogger, but I have a good excuse, which is that I've been spending all my time studying the art of classical acting and the thea-tah. Instead of dutifully keeping the world abreast of the ordinary horrors of my existence, I've been reading plays, scanning verse, enunciating, combatting a new and uncharacteristic stage-fright, and breathing in and out. The only thing other than course-related work I've done in the past few months has been writing for the magazine I've mentioned on this site before. So, now that some of the issues of New York Moves to which I've contributed have hit the press, I can replicate them for a geographically broader audience..... here's one:

There’s a story from my babyhood that I often ask my mom to repeat, partly because it’s so damn cute, but mostly because it’s about me, and I like hearing stories starring me. She says that whenever I cried, she’d hold me, and I would angle myself to face the large antique mirror that hung on the door in our kitchen and then just watch my reflection as I cried. She’d have to hold me up in front of the glass for a good twenty minutes while I sniffled and sobbed until I started kicking her in the chest, which meant I was finished and now hungry. If I was in another room at the time of an upset, she’d pick me up, and I would twist and strain in her arms as she held me, and instead of the usual uninhibited wailing, my sobs had a hesitant, questioning quality--my perceptive mother would then carry me to my favorite spot in the kitchen where I’d finally let it all out “on camera.”

Even today I can’t resist checking myself out whenever I’m distraught. My face flushes so that my eyes look greener, my lips get red and puffy, the tears make my eyelashes all shiny and they stick together like a doll’s. But even better is how very soulful I look when I’m upset. I take advantage of my heightened state and perform Meryl Streep’s famous speech from Sophie’s Choice where she admits her father was an abusive Nazi abettor: I pretend the mirror is the window of Stingo’s Flatbush apartment, stare out into the imaginary Brooklyn dusk, cock my left brow, let a single tear roll down my cheek, and whisper, “…he said, ‘Zozia, your intelligence eez pulp………pulp!!...’” Or I pretend that JFK, Jr. and I are sitting in a coffeeshop in the Village and he’s breaking up with me because of insurmountable class differences or he can’t handle my Slavic temperament or maybe Caroline feels threatened by my libertine tendencies, and he’s really a homebody at heart after all. Tomorrow all the beauty of my pathos will be plastered across the Daily News and the Post. Single women all over New York will discuss the tragedy over cosmo’s after work, and the men will shake their heads and wonder how John-John could have let someone like me get away.

Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. And not just crying, but toning, moisturizing, concealing, highlighting, powdering, SPF-ing, eyelash-combing, eyebrow-smoothing, and practicing smiles of varying degrees of toothiness. I’m currently trying to cultivate the ability to blush on command, very tricky indeed. I have spent thousands of dollars (in my lifetime, not like last week or anything) on hair removal, exercise classes, facials, not to mention clothing to accentuate all my favorite body parts. All to achieve that “I just rolled out of bed looking like this” look. Or better, that “I was born out of a giant seashell, locks a-flowing and heralded by naked baby angels” look.

I actually went to school with someone who laid legitimate claim to the natural Venus look: her name was Rafaella (how apt), and she had long blonde hair that curled and shone even though she washed it with pine tar soap. She never wore makeup and didn’t need to, as her skin was clear and her cheeks and lips naturally pink. No matter how little sleep she got, she never had dark circles under her eyes. She never bothered shaving, but why would she, with legs sprinkled with a soft down, invisible except when sparkling golden in the sun. I never saw her exercise, yet her legs were those of a dancer, without the duck-like turn-out. She never wore a bra, explaining that her C-cups were too small to need one (a thousand times, damn her). The ace up my sleeve is that since she’s too much of a hippie to moisturize or use sunscreen, the harsh New Mexico sun will dry her up like a yellow raisin by the time she’s 35. Hoorah!

Rafi was indeed the campus Venus, sort of a paradigm for unfussy hotness. Something bothered me, though, when people spoke of her, and despite the case I just made for my own monstrous and complicated vanity, it wasn’t quite competitiveness or jealousy, although I will understand if my reader thinks I’m a lying liar. When people discussed the Hotness of Queen Rafi, what they focused on almost more than her hotness itself was her seeming obliviousness to it: more than her actual beauty, it was her utter lack of vanity about it that most impressed people. “She’s so gorgeous, and she doesn’t even know it…” I couldn’t put words to it at the time, but it was peoples’ admiration of Rafi’s unawareness of her assets that offended and troubled me.

This is how people spoke of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, and is usually part of the hype over any starlet newly minted by the studios and the magazines. Even Vogue, that juggernaut of our collective obsession with the superficial, in a recent spread on Keira Knightly, cites couture giantess Vera Wang as gushing “…to be so beautiful and yet to be so unaware of it I find incredibly modern.” Please, Vera, tell us more about modernity.

There are two reasons not to praise someone for lacking vanity.

We live in a world which makes an unprecedented racket about physical beauty and places all sorts of debilitating pressure on people, and especially on women, to conform to evermore minutely finicky and widely unrealistic standards of physical perfection. It is unfair and hypocritical to expect a woman to be oblivious to, let alone unworried by, her physical assets or defects. How sick and self-destructive is it for us to uphold morals in direct conflict with our own self-generated ethos?

Secondly, it is backward and sexist to praise a woman for lack of awareness of any kind. In our society, beauty is power. A woman aware of her beauty, whether god-given or self-cultivated, is actually aware of a weapon in her arsenal that, if she’s smart about it, she can employ to her advantage. Someone (it’s usually a man) who praises a woman for her obliviousness to this very powerful asset is actually admitting his relief that the woman is wasting a tool she could use to gain the upper hand (with him) or to get ahead in our image obsessed society. Praising lack of vanity, like praising innocence, is praising the inability to function fully in this world.

For this embargo on vanity to be anything but bogus and oppressive, our society must either shift its monomaniacal obsession with physical attractiveness or allow for a less exclusionary definition of beauty, And until I see leg hair, ass fat, and crow’s feet on the cover of Vogue (which in the new world will be a women’s literary-political-theological journal), I’m not buying it.

On Wretchedness

An interesting, disturbing dialogue has commenced amongst several of my thoughtful blogger friends, Odious, Jack, and Kate, on the subject of, well, wretchedness: Why and when one is most susceptible to it (or, blessedly, not), how one attempts to keep it at bay, and the compellingly asserted possibility that it is an unnecessary pain born and sustained only by a lack of faith in the overarching divine goodness available to us if only we should believe it’s there and actually meant for us. I recognize my own experience in Odious’s self-doubt, apathy, feelings of guilt over being apathetic, even in his attempts to blur out with over-stimulation and constant fidgeting that ugly self-realization perpetually lurking in his periphery.

This…. longing for goodness is so striking that I worry a great deal about my lack of it. I do what is right grudgingly at best and with a feeling that everyone had better appreciate the sacrifice I'm making in trying to be a good person, rather than chasing joyfully after goodness without a thought of anything else. I am not attracted to the Good; or if I am, I keep it hidden, to disguise my failure to be good as successful apathy. This self-deception is too often triumphant. It is, of course, pride that keeps me from confessing my desire, and I've so suppressed it that I feel it only sporadically anymore. It takes quite a shove to make me realize how much I would like to be good.
I don't know about anyone else, but Pascal's "distraction from wretchedness" becomes more and more my motivation. I find myself singing, not because I like the song, but because old iniquities are coming to mind and I don't want to remember them. I read while I watch movies, because with only one distraction I might notice my fallen state, and the knowledge of how low I am is intolerable.

However, Jack’s position, that truly believing in the benevolence and even love of God cultivates a happiness magnificent enough to dwarf the insecurities, worries, and, yes, wretchedness, that come from a blinkered preoccupation with the secular, seems not just a mollifying sentiment but a wise and practical tenet to live by.

If we really believed, I mean really, experientially believed that we were personally loved by the Being Who created the universe, would we really be bothered if someone disagreed with us, belittled us, or really, harmed us in any way? Would it matter? The insecurity that compels us to lash out in despair would finally be resolved. Why would we need earthly validation if we knew that our real selves -- not the narrow mean selves we're forced into being -- were forever irrevocably loved.

Indeed, I suspect that if I ever prove capable of taking Jack’s invocations to heart successfully, I will look back on my hours (months? Years? Decades?) of anxiety and dissatisfaction as needless capitulation to pointless doubt, hours spent in godlessness, while God was right there had I just been wise and courageous enough to believe. But it is hard to believe.

Not “in God”— Since the first time it was mentioned to me in a ghetto Baptist school when I was five, it has never been difficult for me to believe in the existence of a God; this probably indicates more my sloppy and unscientific nature rather than any effortless inclination to religiosity. No, it’s hard to believe that the belief in God’s love is enough to assuage the sting of even the pettiest insult, let alone the devastation of real human tragedy. I’m not assuming Ivan Karamazov’s stand of, “how can we believe in a God who allows babies to be murdered?”—he made his point very convincingly and even so was soundly mo’ded by the gentle and persistent devotion of Alexei. I can accept that God allows suffering and I wouldn’t assert something so myopic as that this proves His lack of benevolence or even His absence altogether—but I can’t help but draw the line at His love for each of us being a palliative or encouraging conviction.
For something to offer encouragement or alleviation from wretchedness, one has to believe that that thing promises real respite from the things that make one wretched. But we know that whether God loves us or not, we are stuck until we die in a world which promises a near-constant barrage of insults, failures, grievances, tragedies, disappointments, iniquities, deaths, humiliations, resentments, sorrows, loss, and wretchedness. We cannot point to anyone whom, perhaps, God loved more and thus made to suffer less, nor anyone whom God definitely loved less and so who conversely suffered more. No, God loves us all equally, and yet suffering is doled out at best, randomly; at worst, with the totality of a carpet bombing. Knowing that God’s love has no effect on the events, good and bad, that befall us in our lives, and that neither does it gravitate in greater quantity to those who work harder to be worthy of it (i.e. those who make a more concerted effort not to be assholes), how can the knowledge that He loves each of us provide real solace?

Reduced to bluntness, my point is, “God loves me. ...And?”

God loves me and he loved Genghis Khan, and Ann Frank and Stalin, and the Grand Inquisitor and Dostoevsky and the slaughtered babies and their mothers and Milosevic and my dead father. This may be true, and I believe it is true. But how on earth can I glean comfort from it?