Death in 140 Characters

Eric: oh god, i did it.

Eric: i have a twitter.

Me: what is your first tweet going to be?!

Eric: "this is my first tweet, @america"

Eric: or #america?

Eric: how does this work?

Eric: IS IT AN AT OR A HASHTAG

Eric: [has mental breakdown]

The Things She Did With That Broom!

Abbey: literally stuck in a conversation with people seriously discussing 401ks. i just laughed at a 401k joke i didn't understand!

Me: get out of there and come to musical monday. a tranny just nailed 'defying gravity'.

I Blame Disney

Sometimes, when a date is going well, I do a terrible thing where I envision the other person and myself in situations in the distant and sometimes not-so-distant future, like taking him to a co-worker's housewarming party that I don't want to go to by myself but also don't want to subject any friends that I actually care about to. Or taking him to a friend's wedding. Maybe you do this, too. I am going to suggest a new plan of action for both of us and that plan of action is: stop. Things can change a lot in a week, things can change a lot in a day, and, truth be told, that loser probably wouldn't even sing along and dance to Shout! with you anyway and what good is that?

Daddy Issues

I try to make myself inapproachable on the train. I put my head down and read a book or the New Yorker [address label removed] and keep my earbuds in and turn them off. Or keep them on and lose the book, making sure the music is playing at a volume that will not bleed out into the car because, for some inexplicable reason, I am physically unable to skip over that Taylor Swift song and really like Rockapella's rendition of Canon in D. I am not sure how either of these songs got on my iPod, but they are there and they aren't going anywhere.

I do this, put up my New Yorker wall, because the first week I was here, I didn't. I was riding the train to the park to journal and be around people and try to figure out why the guy I was dating at the time was all of a sudden having "phone trouble" whenever I wanted to talk and to figure out where all of my money went. This is when a homeless man touched my face. He just grabbed it, after asking me numerous times whether I thought he should shave his beard or leave it. And when I finally responded, staring straight ahead, that he should keep it, worried that if I encouraged him to shave, he would whip out a razor right then and there and take it to my ear or throat, he grabbed my face and asked me didn't anyone ever teach me to look at someone when speaking to them? This was with the hand that he had just been twirling in the beard in question. My earbuds have been in ever since.

They were in on the day when a very Park Slope-y couple got on the train with their Trader Joe's bags and running stroller and sat down next to me and I felt something on my leg. I looked down and it was a baby hand, straining and reaching and landing on my leg. The hand was attached to a baby body and a baby face and it was baby smiling at me. I like babies, I am not one of those people who try to amp up their street cred by saying how much they hate kids. I like kids. I don't know how to talk to them, I talk to them like they are little adults and, shockingly, most babies don't care about the documentary I watched on my friend's Netflix Instant Queue last night, but I do, as a general rule, like them. The mother began to apologize like mad and I told her it was fine, because it was. The dad stayed quiet. He looked like one of those hipsterguys who just cannot be bothered to talk unless it is over some pretentious cocktail or imported beer and only then if it is about the new "sound" of so-and-so's album [IT SOUNDS LIKE MUSIC!] or the aesthetics of post-modernist anti-transcendentalist screen printing shit. We got to talking and the baby kept reaching for me, smiling, grabbing my leg. It is exactly the way you want a first date to go and exactly the way you don't want a train ride to go.

This conversation ended with the mother asking me if I ever babysat, presumably so that she and her husband could go to some vegan independent press book release party, and I said ... uh, yes, because I am poor and have managed to make it twenty three years without killing any humans yet. She asked me for my number and I gave it to her. I have not heard from them and secretly hope not to.

I was my telling my friend Carrie this, as we were riding the train to the Brooklyn Flea, which I like but can be oppressive with the amount of people who would have lots of things to talk about with the Park Slope husband. Once we got there, I was crouched down on the floor, admiring a pair of boots that 1) would never in a million years fit me, and 2) if they did, would probably cost as much as I spend on groceries in any given month, when I felt a familiar weight on my shoulder. It felt like a baby hand.

This time the baby hand was accompanied by a baby voice and it said: DADA!

I turned around and even after the kid saw my face he kept lurching at me, asking to be picked up. His mother, to her credit, followed closely behind saying "no no no no," and apologizing and telling me that I looked like her husband from behind, which I am still not entirely sure how to take.

And now, on the subway yesterday, a kid ran across the car calling out the familiar DADA and lunging straight for me. It is like there is a magnet or something, drawing these kids in my direction. I don't feel old enough to be a dad, but if there's one thing I've learned from 16 and Pregnant, it's that that feeling is wrong. Guys my age could, technically, have kids entering middle school. I still feel terribly young, still get offended when the spindly salesgay at Uniqlo calls me sir [moreso because I don't believe that anyone shopping at Uniqlo deserves to be referred to as an adult].

I want kids. Someday. In the very future tense. Abbey's brother is having a baby and already talks to his wife's stomach asking the baby for confirmation that he or she hates Obama. Abbey said she wants to take the baby aside, early, and let him or her know that he or she is loved and that they can be whoever they want to be and do what they want to do even if that means smoke a little pot and not vote Republican all the time. She wants to tell them that it is okay if they don't want to wear a dress or if they don't want to wear pants and that it is okay for them to love whoever they love. She wants to let them know that it will all be okay. I want my future kids to know the same things and also, to know that I will understand if they run across trains or reach out there hands to strange men and say DADA as long as, at the end of the day, they know who their real dad is.

Abbey's Reaction to YOUTH IN REVOLT

"Michael Cera needs to stop losing his virginity"

Forgetting and Remembering

My friend forgot how old she was.

I was not there, so maybe parts of the story are wrong, but I know that the part about her forgetting her age is not. There was a time when it seemed like we knew everyone that the other knew, but we live further away now and a friend of hers I have never met was telling her about a boy she had never met, but that this friend thought she should meet. And, using the theory of relativity [well, a theory of relativity], instead of telling her how old he was, said, "He's four years older than you." And she said, "Oh! So, 26?" My friend is 24. Making this boy 28. And she is bad at math but not that bad. She told me this with lots of exclamation points and can-you-believe-thats, how she really thought that she was still 22. Sometimes she feels younger. Sometimes I do, too.

I have been forgetting things lately. Mostly unimportant things: names of old professors, plots of books I didn't really connect with, TV shows from youth. When I was little I prided myself on remembering things and the idea that I would never stop remembering things. Life, then, felt not-so-long and not-so-expansive and there was a time when I truly believed that, if pressed, I could name from memory every person I had ever met. More recently, I believed that I could name every person in my graduating class. I would tell people this, anecdotal evidence of the small place I'm coming from, but it was true. This was years ago, when I was 18 and new to college but had never felt further from high school. Saying those names then would have felt like a memorial service. Now, I would have to read the names from a paper someone would have had to provide for me and I fear it might feel like a seance.

I guess what I'm saying is that some things fade.

There is a girl at work I don't know very well. On my first day, I was warned about her, told to stay away and that she was crazy and that if you gave her anything, conversationally, to latch onto she would cling to it with sharp nails and drag you to her choir concerts and knitting circle and did you really want that? I thought this was unfair. She had smiled and greeted me just as warmly and generically and with claws hidden as everyone else. But I'm not much for knitting. So I avoided her. And, in the meantime, I have come to realize that we would probably not be friends in real life. But that doesn't mean that would be true for everyone.

Regardless, this is a girl who remembers things. Recently, she posted on our virtual staff sign-in board that it was six years to the day that she had first stepped foot into the Mediterranean Sea! Another co-worker and I rolled our eyes at this and I said , my god, I can't even remember when I lost my virginity.

It was just something to say, but it was also true, for a second. And then the memory flared up again, like the middle of a fireworks show and there we were. To be fair, I have an aid in remembrance in that it happened on September 11th. Not in 2001, but you still remember something like that. When I tell the story I throw in a line about two national disasters in a single day. A particularly crass friend made a comment about twin towers.

I didn't know him very well. I only knew his major because he took classes with some of my friends. I didn't have his phone number. "This was not the way it was supposed to happen," is hackneyed, but is also usually true. People who don't say that just haven't been dumped by that person yet or haven't really lost their virginity.

But listen, I didn't know his vitals or his five year plan or anything, but - and this may sound ridiculous, but - I didn't want to. All I knew was that he was drunk and I was drunk and I wanted to and that he wanted to. And when you're 19 years old and it still hasn't happened for you and you are starting to think, honestly, that it never will and that you certainly aren't going to get any more desirable from here on out and you truly believe that you will die and in the autopsy they will be able to tell that you never had sex because you saw a Law and Order once, accidentally, where that happened and that the coroner or whoever does the autopsy will be too busy laughing that they forget to find out the real, actual cause of death [which is not virginity!] and your family will never find out and it will severely impede the grieving process, well, mutual desire is enough.

It was bad and it was short and there was no lube and I think we both got hurt. I did. I walked back across the quad. Because, of course he lived across the quad. They always live across the quad. And it was late. And I called my friends, those who had been at the party with us and those who I had known from high school, and no one was up. Except, finally, Milena. We hadn't spoken in awhile, but she let me talk and then cry and then cry harder when I discovered that my polo shirt [my god, I was nineteen] was inside out. At that point, such a small and unimportant thing had the power to absolutely shatter me.

I didn't know at that time that I would go a little crazy with the hooking up that year and that it would get a little dangerous and that I would finally have to impose a year of celibacy, for my sanity and for my self-respect. I didn't know that someday I would get good at it, the whole sex thing. Better, at least. I didn't know that it would not always hurt so much and that it, actually, is better if you know him very well, if you have his phone number. Well, not better, but certainly not the same. I didn't know that I would forget the things we talked about before and after. I didn't know that I would forget all details of the story that I haven't already included here.

Things have been happening around here lately. They feel very important, most of them, and heavy. They feel like things I will remember for awhile, or at least not forget. But I think it's healthy to keep into perspective that things fade. Some of these things will certainly fall away - those that are not necessary, are not really big-picture important, along with weak plots, unimpressive professors, your age. And some of them won't. They will crop up again, years later, as vivid as that day you walked into the Mediterranean for the first time.

Facebook Ads: The Definition of Couth

God Bless You

Supervisor [carrying a stack of papers]: I feel like I can pretty accurately gauge your emotional state on any given day by the size of coffee you have [glances at the GIGANTIC COFFEE sitting on my desk] ...I'm going to give you a few minutes.

I Don't Even Know One Man Named Monday

When Annie was little she didn't really understand the concept of 'opinion.' Especially how it related to the concept of 'fact.' It is a hard thing for a kid to grasp, I guess. Hard thing for an adult to grasp. But she was convinced that because she thought Barbara Streisand was the greatest singer that it meant that Barbara Streisand was the greatest singer.

When I was little I thought that once there was a song title out there, that no other songs could have that same title. I was outraged - scandalized - when Sugar Ray came out with that song "Fly" [although, when Mark McGrath sang "put your arms around me baby, put your arms around me baby," the 11 year old me wanted to so bad, ya'll] since "Fly" was already the name of the closing track on Celine Dion's Falling Into You album.

I also thought that "Just another Manic Monday" was "Just another man named Monday" and was like another?!

The Book Trick

So I'm standing in line at the library, ready to check out, and the book I'm holding is this:

Although, to be fair, I did not come to the library for this book. I came to the library for an entirely different book, a book that is hiding underneath this book in a very deliberate move that I will from here on in refer to as The Book Trick. This is the other book:

I am worried about what the librarian will say because my library is not a library where the librarians just love books so much that the only way they could continue to operate in this life was to share their love of books with others. No, this is a different breed of librarian.

And I use the term librarian loosely. This girl awaiting me might be 16. It's not like she went to school for this. She's a lie-brarian. Do you think in librarian school there is a class on how to moderate the face? When people like me check out books like this? Or when middle aged dudes check out books with Fabio covers? Regardless, this girl has not taken that or any librarian classes. She looks like she just read The Crucible because some commie-lovin' English teacher made her and she is pissed as hell. Like, ask her to name a Modernist writer, just one, and she's going to answer: Stephanie Meyer.

I am thinking that the sheer level of macho of the McCormac book [there's blood in the title! This dude wrote No Country For Old Men, muthafuckas! The jacket blurb name drops Faulkner. FAULKNER!] will cancel out the pair of feet kissing on the book I really came here to get.

Regardless, I have plans for what to do if The Book Trick doesn't work, if she laughs or scoffs or gives me that awful, questioning eyebrow raise. I have a nightmare of her waving the book around over her head. In this nightmare she also has a fast food microphone and it is hooked up to every speaker in the library, maybe in the world. But if any of these things happen or even look like they have a chance of happening, I have plans. The first being what my first plan for most things is: deny. How did that get there? I must've grabbed the wrong book by mistake. The end. The second is to say that I am volunteering for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and what are you doing for the community, hmm? Instead of being boring and playing basketball with them or slipping them drugs, I'm giving my Little Sister the gift of words. I suppose there is a third option, although it had not occurred to me at the time, and that is to tell the truth.

And the truth is this: my friend has just finished writing a Young Adult novel. She asked me, before I read it and give feedback that I familiarize myself a bit with the genre. This is only fair. And I want to support her to the best of my ability. Even if it means having, for the sake of my very male ego, to pull a Book Trick. What I haven't told her, what I haven't told anyone, is that this isn't my first time at the Book Trick Rodeo.

Back in fifth grade, I would check out these:

To cover up these:

I wanted to know about high school, okay? I was so sick of Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club, I think we can all agree, just sucks. And I loved them both. In a way that I didn't love grade school. I wanted to live in Shadyside and Sweet Valley and not to live where I lived and I wanted these people, the Wakefield twins and the lucky few who survived the Fear Street sagas, to be my older siblings. When I was in first grade, I got in trouble for telling people I had an older brother and sister. No one ever saw them because they were in college. I really thought that if I said it enough it would come true, that I would get a big brother and a big sister. I didn't. And years of begging for foreign exchange students didn't get me anywhere, either. But these books got me somewhere. I loved them. And although I was always worried and would pull Book Trick after Book Trick without fail, the librarians would always smile and never say a word. And I am so grateful for that.

But here, now, in the present? I am next in line and I am terrified. I feel like everyone here is watching me and is ready to laugh and maybe take pictures to publish on every website on the entire internet. I feel like every single boy I have ever liked, boys who I've always prided myself on having better taste in books than, are lurking around the corner, waiting for me to be completely mortified. I am worried that I am going to be exposed for whatever I am, or am not, or be defined by what I doing, rather than who I am as a person and this is an issue, okay?! This is a dilemma and I don't know if I can survive it. And as I walk up to the counter, a counter that I will walk away from in under a minute without the lie-brarian ever seeing the cover of either of my books [are you kidding? She is flipping them over, she is scanning the back, she is not making small talk, and she is not doing anything more than the minimum she gets paid for] I realize that I haven't felt most of these things since high school. And I am ready, inside and out, to read the book I came here to get.

Fun With Words or, Just Not Very Vigilant

Today, my supervisor was out of the office [full disclosure: SHE HAS CHICKENPOX! I know. And we were all like, "Have you had them before?" and she was like, "YES I HAVE HAD THEM BEFORE" and we were like, "Oh shit. Maybe it's shingles?" and she was like, "THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT BUT THE DOCTOR SAID IT WAS NOT SHINGLES, THAT IT IS JUST CHICKENPOX AGAIN." Which made me wonder if everything I've ever learned about contagious diseases is maybe a lie.] and we have a very high-tech "In/Out Board" on our staff login page which is supposed to be like a kind of time clock, but is really more of just a lame, work-only second-rate Twitter [people post Olympic medal counts and things about Humpday]. Anyway - they throw it up on there if someone is going to be out of the office or is sick or is on vacation or whatever, just because knowledge is power, I guess. And today, next to my supervisor's name, it said:

sic 3/3

Which is funny, because what does that mean? Like, while it might seem like a mistake, she is actually out? Does someone else in this office care about "[sic]" as much as I care [and this guy cares] about "[sic]"? [full disclosure: I have maybe written "[sic] 'em, boys" in a margin once] Unfortunately, I think, the answer is no. Someone in my office just cares about their job as little as I care about mine.

"Baby, I Love You, But

I'm going to need you to stop shaving your pubes with my beard trimmer. I am also going to need you to sweep the bathroom floor."

[Actual email just sent to my roommate]

What do you actually do at your job all day?

What do you actually do at your job all day? [is a question you ask me a lot if you are my parents] Lately my answer to the question - if I were to be honest rather than tell them that I am really developing important skill sets, "networking, networking, networking," and figuring out what I really want to do with my life - would be: write short stories and copy and paste news articles and blogs in Outlook drafts, so that if anyone glances at my screen, it looks like I am actually doing work. Also: gchat the hell out of anyone who is on, even if they are red, convinced that no one is ever busy. Also: gchat Annie who sits right behind me to talk trash about coworkers ["what is she eating?!" "he thinks people actually believe he's straight?]. Also: fully participate in "What does the stairwell smell like today?" [An omelet that someone left on the counter overnight, drunk uncle dancing at a wedding reception, and burgers - all recent, actual smells] Also: field personal phone calls for my supervisors. Also: prepare to throw my supervisors under the bus for the sheer volume of their personal phone calls if they ever call me out on any of the above activities.

This is a job where we started talking about the possibility of a snow day, and then got everyone talking about the possibility of a snow day, until there was a snow day. It is hard to take a job seriously when they pay you to not come in, drink spiked hot chocolate, and have indoor snowball fights with your roommates

But this took everything to another level: past stealth reading and writing, past any and all workplace related games, past fielding phone calls from cousins. One of the national directors of something-or-other recently had a meeting with our direct supervisors. He asked them if everything was okay. He said he was worried because Annie and I were getting our work done very quickly, with little mistakes, and not struggling like people had in the past. He was worried that something was seriously wrong, that we were hoarding our work, that one day we would leave the company and they would find piles of work stocked away in our desks [I am not embellishing - he actually presented this scenario to them].

Find me another job where it is cause for suspicion when employees are, you know, productive. Competent. Not dumbasses.

But listen: I like most of the fools I work with and I am getting so much reading done and they keep paying in dollars and I keep showing up.

Is This The Month I Finally Read ULYSSES?

I was considering it until some pompous librarian jerk put Clemens instead of Twain.

Unless, of course, they mean this guy.

I Live Here Now

Last night, I was planning on taking it easy, trying make headway on the stories I've been working on, and seeing if I could spend an entire evening in my apartment without making nachos.

I did not have a chance to fail that little self-imposed test.

Instead, my roommate was performing in a lounge show at one of our favorite venues and said he could get me in and that there would be drinks and that they would be free. I know that lately the girl who is working out for a year without buying gym memberships is getting a bad rap, but I understand her [and love her punny blog headline]. Living in New York is expensive. Whereas she has become creative and enterprising with her lack of funds, I have just taken to doing pilates on the [carpeted] floor of my living room.

What I'm trying to say here is: if it's free, it's me.

Adding to the price fitting the bill, this show was also a 60th Birthday party for Karen Carpenter. They were singing from The Carpenters songbook and I didn't know much about them. I remember the Behind the Music episode, knew about the whole eating disorder thing, and thought they were married. What I learned was that they were NOT married, they were siblings - which I suppose explains away their creepily similar marionette-esque faces. I learned that you will get in trouble with the Carpenters diehards if you refer to the music as anything but "prog rock." So I go, and while I had never been a fan, you better believe I was singing along to the chorus of this song:

[Can we just take a minute to fully appreciate the absurdity of the video's epitaph? Can you even make it that far?]

Yes, there were recorders, there were at least four women with the Karen bouffant and floor length flowy dresses, there were in-poor-taste [pun so intended] anorexia references, and there were drinks and they were free. This is where I get in trouble.

Moments are returning to me: my roommate and I sitting in the audience rocking out to a really good cover, a 60 year old woman sitting on his lap, discussing the politics of Catholic school and FTM transsexuals with a gorgeous girl with a bleached mohawk and pearls who was in the dressing room waiting for the next show to start, which was a burlesque tribute to Pulp Fiction [no, I am not kidding] and the girls called themselves "The Tarantinas" [I really couldn't make this stuff up], me asking a friend of my roommate's [who I had just met and who works for a very notable TV station in a very real capacity] how much time he needed to fire his current assistant before he wanted me to start working [oh my god, did I really say that? Yes, I did.]

And then, of course, puking all over our front sidewalk with a force and a volume that I thought was not possible to achieve after receiving your undergraduate diploma. It was embarrassing, it was painful, and it laid me out on my back for most of the day.

This morning, though, upon waking up and discovering that my life had not, in fact, ended, I saw a text message I had sent a friend in some fleeting moment of clarity last night. It said: i puked all over oure [sic] front sidewalk. i live here now. And, although I much would have preferred to keep my dinner to myself, it was one of those times where I really believed that to be true.

Is it wrong ...

to suggest to someone you are on a date with that they may be a better fit for someone else you used to date?

"If I Can Make It There..."

Me: Do you like my new haircut?

Paul: Yeah. It's very "New York."

Me: It's just like my old haircut, but messier.

Paul: Exactly.

Titanic as Life Metaphor

[I wrote this essay back in October for a blog project. I am posting the original here even though, you know, a few things have happened since then.]

Alright, I had some illusions surrounding the train. It was more glamorous than the bus, more economical than flying. I thought it would be romantic—a relic of a bygone era, like in the old black and white movies—jazz musicians and men in fedoras and sensible women reading fashion magazines. It made me think of words like ‘rendezvous’ and ‘intrigue.’ What I found instead was a platoon of iPods at full volume, huge men who should have been required to pay for two tickets, and blatantly breastfeeding women. It brought to mind phrases like ‘get me out of here’ and very specific and very attainable thoughts of homicide.

In this fantasy version of moving to New York that I had in my mind, I would arrive at the station and swing around my bags and make bold declarations like, “HERE I AM, NEW YORK!” or “I HAVE ARRIVED!” I would be wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The closest thing I have to the visual in my mind is this scene from the 1997 feature film Titanic:

My actual arrival in New York, hatless and with bags packed so full they could hardly be carried effectively, much less swung around, actually resembled more closely another scene from that movie about the fated ocean liner:

[It should be noted here that I do not own either of those images. Twentieth Century-Fox does. I don’t own anything. I don’t even officially own my IKEA bed until I pay off my credit card balance, which looks like it will happen sometime between awhile and never]

I found myself in Penn Station with my four bags of varying shapes and weights that made it virtually impossible for me to carry all of them myself. Whereas a more conscientious person would have ensured that their bags fit together like Tetris blocks, able to be stacked and interlocked and perfect, my bags looked like they had been stolen from other travelers—a bright blue duffel bag [sans shoulder strap], an overstuffed American Tourister [complete with 1 ¾ wheels], an orange, hard-shelled suitcase from the 1980s or before and a Swiss Army backpack [although I have never been hiking in my life].

I had a brief nightmare, standing at baggage claim, of trying to navigate my cargo and myself to Brooklyn alone. I exhausted all of the options I could think of—from hiring that guy who was bathing himself in the bathroom sink to help me carry them, to finding the closest post office and shipping a few to my new address—and finally, in the fever dream induced by the sixteen hour train ride combined with the fact that it was the hottest day that New York would see in September [keep this fact in mind. It will helpful to know later], I reached the conclusion that it actually made the most sense for me to step back, assess the content of each bag, decide which I valued least and just leave it there. Sacrifice it to the gods of Penn Station. This is the frame of mind I was operating within at this point.

Luckily, it never came to that. Gregg—the guy that I was dating at the time and who, on this occasion, saved at least my material life—met me at the station and we rode the escalator out of the belly of Penn Station and into the light.

When trying to catch a cab from Penn Station to Brooklyn, I’ve learned that what cab drivers will do is laugh. And laugh. And keep laughing. And drive away. Laughing. So we braved the subway, pinned down by the luggage that is my life [or, my life edited for New York purposes].

This is the part where it comes in handy to remember that this day was the hottest September day in New York this year.

There is only one word and it is: sweaty. Here we are, two relatively attractive, certainly clean-ish looking guys dripping in sweat. Sweat running down our faces; sweat pooling at our feet. You get the picture. We were certifiably the two most disgusting people on that train. And there were homeless people on that train.

We arrived at my apartment to find that the lights didn’t work and the toilet wouldn’t flush. Gregg made a comment about The Money Pit and laughed and I crumpled to the living room floor and cried. I slept right there on the floor that night; I had yet to brave the Red Hook IKEA to find a bed I could almost afford and all of the furniture had left with the roommate I was replacing. It might sound ridiculous, and maybe it is, but I hadn’t really thought of what I would do once I got here, beyond the answers I would give to family members and acquaintances, full of “hitting the ground running on the job search” and other overused, overconfident metaphors.

Now, a month into my new city, reflecting for the sake of this blog, and with the photo of Leo and Kate struggling against the water staring back at me from my computer desktop, I wonder if that photo may not serve as some sort of overused and perhaps overconfident metaphor itself. It has been a month of days spent applying to jobs that I always seem to be over- or under-qualified for, sending my resume and cover letters out into what usually feels like a gaping black hole, days of being lonelier than I have ever been, feeling so far away from everything, days of fearing I might go the way of Emily Dickinson [in terms of reclusiveness, not poetic renown], things ending with Gregg, phone calls home that have to be filled with good news even if there isn’t any.

And maybe [okay, certainly] this photo has to be looked out completely out of the context of the movie as a whole—Spoiler alert: Celine Dion sings. Kate Winslet gets naked. Leo dies. Old Kate Winslet throws the necklace in the water at the end—but there have been many times during this first month where life has felt like that: water up to my neck and rising, but I’m still kicking like hell. Leo dies, Kate lives. I’ll take a 50% chance of survival over nothing. Maybe one day I’ll go under, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t know if that is the moral of this story. I don’t know if there is a moral to this story. What I do know is the next morning, after that first night spent on the floor, without any logical reason, the toilet decided to flush and the lights came back on.

The Mediocre Date, or Carson McCullers is a Little Bitch

Last night I was on a mediocre date. These things happen. It was not the first and, despite all attempts at prevention, will probably not be the last. The Mediocre Date should not be confused with its evil sister, The Awful Date. I have had a few of those as well. So have you, probably. The mediocre dates should just be able to fall away, to end when they end, to have that be that. No harm, no foul. And parts of it were great. I got to see The Hurt Locker. He paid. We had things to talk about. It just wasn't ... good. The x factor wasn't there. No one's fault. It was so harmless that I might even be willing to accept the fault, if he wanted to push it onto me the way some people do. Maybe I was not interesting enough, maybe it takes a certain kind of person to have a not-mediocre date with me. Shrug of the shoulders and move on.

However, this mediocre date was different, in that he managed to say the cruelest thing that anyone has ever said to me. He said: You know, Carson McCullers was 23 when she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

This is after I told him that I had just started reading the book, that I was 23 myself, and had told him that I spend most of my free time making up stories on my laptop and one day might want to see if anything could come of them.

And I knew this, of course, that this little bitch McCullers was published at 23 to great acclaim. It is on the book. I knew this and already hated her for it, the same way I hate Joyce Carol Oates because she says she edits while on brisk jogs near her home. [Although, one time, when a lot of my crazy friends were coming to me with their crazy dating issues and I was considering putting together an essay collection called Your Slightly More Stable Friend Has A Few Things to Say About Your Non-Relationship, I decided that all I wanted, more than money or success or accolades, was a jacket blurb from JCO saying, It's like He's Just Not That Into You ... but good!]

The world was smaller then, I tell myself. When Carson McCullers was writing. Doesn't it seem like that, in old movies? Or when reading old books? That the world was just so much smaller? That there were so many less people? That everyone knew everyone? New York seems like a little village, like it could fit inside Central Park. So it must have been a lot easier to get published back then, since there were - what? like, three people writing. She just had to show up at a publishing house, with that starved, haggard look on her face [you've seen the cover!], hand them her stack of a manuscript, collapse at their feet, and she was in.

This is of course not true.

This is of course me speaking from the fact that I am turning 24 in two months and haven't had my novel published, that I don't even have a novel that could even be considered for publication anywhere. I am 23 and the extent of my writing "career" has been an undergraduate prize and a story about the Grand Canyon published in my school's literary magazine where the Grand Canyon represented the protagonist because, like, you know, people have layers. Don't look for it. I'm thinking enough time has passed, that it may not even be around anymore. Unless, of course, you stop by my parent's house and find the ten copies they have; one that, against my will and better judgment, I agreed to sign. SIGN! Ugh.

And I have been trying give him the benefit of the doubt, this Mediocre Date. Maybe he was trying to say that each of us, even at 23, has the potential within us to write or paint or do something great. I do not think that this is what he meant. But I don't think he meant the opposite, either, in which his statement is followed, in my head, by: and what the fuck have you done? I think it was just a statement, something he had heard somewhere and, for whatever reason, retained. Maybe because he, himself, is 23. That he was sharing with me without motive, simply because he knew it. Our previous conversation had suggested that maybe he didn't know very many things and when the chance arose to share some piece of accurate information, by god, he was going to take it.

It was also on Friday that I read in The Daily Rumpus that Hal Ashby [Harold and Maude, Shampoo] didn't really begin directing films until he was 38. A precedent has been set for late bloomers. I have nothing to worry about. 23 is not old.

That's good and fine, but at the time, what did I do? I did not handle the situation with grace. I decided that I would not be paying for dinner, told him [an aspiring actor] "Well, Tatum O'Neill won an Academy Award when she was, like, 11" [IMDB: "10"], and decided that this Mediocre Date was so over.