Summer is ready when you are

Summer is about saying yes. My schedule is at the whim of every invitation casually tossed my way, my taste buds ready for every bite of fruit and sip of nectar offered. Delightful to set out with friends for an impromptu popsicle at a gourmet popsicle pop-up shop this morning, for instance. (Well, not this morning – soon after I got up, rather, having played a show into the wee hours last night.)

A hazy, humid morning has matured into a shady 82-degree afternoon, bathed by nearly imperceptible breezes. I walked to the grocery store for veggie sausages for Monday's cookout and ingredients for a cucumber gimlet granita. It turned out to be one of those patches of time where the very texture of experience seems to become more dense, where pleasure in existence pools – the one peach in the bushel that has unaccountably ripened more fully than the others – sticking you to while also removing you from your surroundings: everything is supersaturated, and therefore not entirely real. You half suspect that you may have been snatched up by the hand of God and set down in an ideal heaven. And this is almost a source of worry, but not quite. It's something like a photorealistic painting that doesn't quite come off, the painter having zealously lavished as much attention on the feathers of the bird in the sky as on the picnickers in the foreground.

(This is how I was sure it would be, heaven, when I was a a religious child convinced of my own virtue and likely future sainthood, when I'd wander around the soccer field at recess basking in the promise that God had bestowed upon me. It would be this very state of grace and abundance, only forever, untainted by the thought of death – that little vial of poison with the crumbling cork, always perched in some precarious place and waiting to spill over.)

It's easiest to achieve this state in the woods, alone, with endless hours to roam, filling your heart with the afternoon light like a basket with blackberries – which, as it happens, drop from the bushes, too copious for even the birds to eat, while dragonflies hang in the air. I've walked through fields and down paths unable to stop, sometimes, from laughing aloud, even as my eyes filled with tears of diffuse gratitude.

But it's possible in the city, too. This neighborhood encourages such idylls; it blossoms with so much care. Gardens spill over the borders of nearly every yard; husbands trot assiduously with push mowers, back and forth. A man climbs a ladder with a shutter, perhaps thrown down in the recent storm, tucked beneath his arm; another man steadies the ladder, which seems a little unstable; and for a moment I watch this silent scene with bated breath until he reaches the top. I walk past St. Gertrude's Church; all the stained-glass windows are pushed open in the heat, and from inside, music: either a choir practicing, or just an extraordinarily tuneful congregation. It's good to live here. It's good to live.

(Title credit: The Breeders, "Saints")

Les choses

We moved recently -- Heather and I, to the same place -- and she commented today as we were walking back from the thrift store (a lantern for the porch, some things to hang on the walls) and the garden store (a plant to fill a bare space on an end table) that this whole business of having a home involved spending a lot of money.

"Well, nobody's forcing us," I said, a little unreasonably annoyed, feeling that if one is going to spend money it is in rather bad form to fret about it afterward.

But it is compelling, the desire for these things -- the 1960s European mod accessories and the antique zoological prints and the porch full of flowers and herbs. We think we can construct a happy life with them. 

And they do make us happy. Heather has watched in amused disbelief as I've spent minutes moving furniture and vases back and forth, inch by inch, to find the aptest arrangement. At the same time, if I didn't live with someone else -- if there were no one to observe the details of my daily life -- I would surely not invest this effort. I would hang the same three things on my walls I've hung on the walls of the last three apartments I've lived in and let the initial order of everything else steadily decay until I moved again. But now there's someone to share all this with; plus, we'd like to have parties, and have our friends admire the work of all our good taste.

When I was a kid my mom and I would go out on summer evenings and walk the dogs and look into the lit windows of other people's houses. Richer people's houses, I should say. I grew bored of the same few neighborhoods and occasionally tried to tug us in the other direction, towards downtown and the somewhat more jumbled blocks before it -- my appetite for variety did not discriminate -- but would generally fail. There's nothing to look at there.

We'd walk and ooh and aah over thick drapes, gleaming lamps, expensive-looking just-built decks -- scoff at the super-sized TVs beyond them, too, or anything else in obviously bad or outdated taste. Later I thought my mom was being a little bitchy and judgmental with all this -- she, who decorated our home with faux-global tchotchkes from Meijer and had a stack of Cosmopolitan magazines on the coffee table -- and then later still I thought she must have been propelled by a certain longing.

I've felt it too, the beckoning of other, warmer, well-provided lives. In college during parties at professors' houses, their shelves full of books and desks full of pictures of children radiant with all the love and confidence they'd soaked up in those rooms. Wanting to curl up in -- forget that, even beneath would do -- one of their tastefully plump armchairs for the rest of my life. Visiting the childhood homes of college friends and tripping awkwardly over the casual abundance of their lives, which was being constantly thrust my way by their impossibly generous parents.

Heather and I loved this apartment right away, but it wasn't our first choice. There was this other one, in a building owned by a slightly brusque, flannel-shirted divorcee who lived on the first floor in dim rooms still decorated with the breathtaking stained-glass fixtures her ex-husband had designed; her adult son inhabited the basement. We walked inside and stood in the largest space I've ever seen in a Chicago apartment. Shiny wood and yards and yards of windows; a fireplace; huge wooden beams astride the ceiling. The currant tenant reclined with a glass of wine and a book on a chaise longue in a corner of the room, and looked up serenely as we entered. Her furniture was all very large and sturdy and expensive-looking. This could be mine -- this serenity, this space. I could feel myself moving daily through these rooms, becoming with every step a different and more elegant being.

When we didn't get it, I shed real tears, albeit laughing all the while at my ridiculousness -- that this ache for the inanimate should be so terribly real! 

There is a part of me that is a strict ascetic; I've lived on $20 a week for months at a time and could do it again, and something in me never fails to flinch when I think of spending money on anything not strictly useful. I enjoy camping and backpacking in part because it plays to my Robinson Crusoe fantasies of paring down my needs to a sinewy package of essentials. How is it, then, that things call out to me so strongly, seem to promise so much? 

Certain gifts I got for Christmas or for birthdays as a child deeply satisfied this itch; I felt wonderfully well-cared-for, well-attended-to, when I received the troll doll on a skateboard, the trick yo-yo everyone was getting in sixth grade. Such things were not only symbols that I, too, was loved, but were also keys, it seemed, into a larger world, my letter of introduction into a friendly social web until now closed to me. 

So some of it is surely just a taste for beauty, the chord that lovely objects and well-appointed rooms strike on my heartstrings. But some of it is, maybe, this other thing -- this feeling that I have not yet quite been loved enough, but am about to be. There is just one more thing.

"We had it before, but then it was going to end"

It's been up for a month by the time I'm finally writing this, but Willis G. Regier has a great article in the Chronicle, “The Philosophy of Insomnia,” a small compendium of notable writings on sleeplessness. A lot there for the eternal reading list, and a lot that resonates.

I don't have problems sleeping much, anymore -- most days I bike enough miles that my body takes over soon after I hop into bed -- but I have at various intervals since childhood, so that now whenever I have the least bit of trouble falling asleep I can pretty quickly work myself into a panic that I will never sleep again. Especially when my days have been full of responsibilities, insomnia has seemed so tragically unfair – I have worked all day to earn this bit of sleep and it is being stolen away from me while I look on with helpless, weary eyes. In my mind I am already living through the miserable, bleary, sun-struck hours to follow, head dull, aching. Perhaps some demented bird will start to sing, and the streetlight will take on the tint of a slow, infernal dawn. I could cry in these moments. You work so hard to make the mind hospitable to sleep that you catch yourself staying awake to welcome it in.

From Levinas: "Insomnia is wakefulness, but a wakefulness without intentionality."

When I was in high school I tried to turn my perpetual sleeplessness to productive ends. I thought I could break up my sleep into little blocks – rest a few hours, then rise, in the cool stillness of the sleeping house, and think, and read, and write. Then maybe another few hours before I had to go to school. This never worked. Frequently, I couldn't fall asleep to begin with, and then, once I finally did, the 3 a.m. alarm clock was not welcome. So I'd get four or five hours before lurching out of bed in the clammy pre-dawn, wracked with anxiety beneath a foreboding sky, off to complete the monumental task of not falling asleep too noticeably during class.

From Maurice Blanchot: "In the night, insomnia is discussion, not the work of arguments bumping against other arguments, but the extreme shuddering of no thoughts, percussive stillness."

Insomnia is the perfect setting for the fear of death. As a child of five or six I would lay on my bed on summer evenings – the light not yet gone from the neighborhood, the shuddering heartbeat of basketballs on the driveway next door, and the mourning doves cooing achingly for my imminent demise – close my eyes, and feel myself shrink, a tiny speck of a barely-living thing, a shriveling spider on a vast desert plain, insignificant atop the pale shroud-sheets.

Before this, even, I worried that if I slept I'd just forget to breathe.

(I wonder how I learned about death. No one I knew died at all until I was already long disabused of Santa Claus, I think -- I didn't even have a goldfish to instruct me. I suppose it's just around. I was maybe four when I became certain, from TV, that I was about to die of AIDS any day.)

The other day at band practice I was talking about how when my last job got so overwhelming I began to get white hairs and Joseph asked if it made me think about my mortality. I said I am always thinking about my mortality. This is absolutely true, especially at night - the all-dissolving fear which can never be got through. Death is certainly intolerable, and I can find only scorn or pity for anyone who tries to argue otherwise, depending on their mode of attack. Says Philip Larkin, perfectly (“The Old Fools”):

“At death, you break up: the bits that were you

Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else.”

With no one to see. This is perhaps the hardest part. It is why fame matters in a sense. But it isn't the only hard part – there's also that “million-petalled flower.”

Says Cioran, who, among these affably gloomy souls Regier has introduced me to, sails to the top of my reading list with this: “"We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help."

I cannot imagine being consoled from this (and, if I am honest and impolite, equate such consolation with delusion) – cannot even imagine wanting to be consoled, which is perhaps the test of truest conviction. There is a sense in which I am rigorously certain about only two things: I exist, and am going to die.

At night, unsleeping, the mind comes up against a coldness that is yet comfortable in its solidity and familiarity, like returning to some long-shuttered ancestral home of stone. Its “percussive stillness” echoes with only one's own footsteps, only one's own words that come back huge and empty.

One has always known that this is the place of return -- can only hope it is where one will be buried, should one have the good fortune of remaining undeceived. 

Weightlessness

I work from an office in the sky, and whenever it's the least bit gloomy at ground level, fog presses tight against the windows. Sometimes it will clear for a moment, and then I can look out and see neighboring skyscrapers similarly swaddled within a protective cloud. On a sunny day we can see straight into the very chic European hotel next door. Sometimes I can glimpse a program playing one one of the rooms' large TVs, or a pair of bedside lamps, one on, one off, but the rooms' inhabitants must generally be reclining somewhere out of view.

I work at the crest of a hill, built on layers of roads and girders rather than earth. The city swoops up here before it drops off into the lake, and navigating the lower, sunless streets you feel that even the highest buildings on these blocks might be only the iceberg-tip of stacks of subbasements stretching for miles below. Sometimes when walking here, through this densely-packed space that no longer even registers as land, you come across an empty lot, a missing piece in the puzzle, where a quarry of grass grows yellow at the bottom of its quadrangular well and perhaps a bulldozer dozes to one side. It is as shocking as I found the lake itself the day when, after my first few weeks in the city, I walked to the shore at Addison and for some moments could not at all understand the suddenly empty skyline. And the job is, in some ways, as stratified, as artificial as this landscape. Together, a massive organization works in precise stages, more or less anonymous to the outside world, to achieve the monumental task of selling goods and services to people who must be made to feel that they are not being sold to, that we're all in this together, are all friends.

It does not feel important. It is not. But this kind of insulation from the sort of public that was mine in my previous job fosters a kind of collegiate ease and pleasantness. I come in every day, more or less as I wish, and after some wriggling around to find the most comfortable position atop my exercise ball (that symbol of the enlightened modern workplace), I begin writing. It has never before been my only job to think of words and write them down. This is really about all I must do. I sit among people around my age, whom I genuinely like, who, like me, want to be creative and funny and, being new, as I am, are still a little in awe of the fact that they are being paid (though not a fortune, certainly) to keep making these attempts.

None of it seems permanent in the least; I feel I am entirely prepared for the whole edifice that employs me to crumble rapidly some day, as internet startups are supposed eventually to do. But I'm content to bask in weightlessness a while – strange luxury. And strange, of course, for work to seem a luxury at all.

Springtime in the near-nothing

We've had some true spring days here this past week, and after a long bout of flu I have only now been well enough to leave the house and enjoy them. The sky this evening just past dusk was an extraordinary intense bright blue, a shade I'd never seen before – I was about to say, in Chicago, but it may in fact honestly be left unqualified. Afterward, the sky was vibrant black, a relief after months of weird orange and purplish tones caught in the low snowclouds.

It's become a reflex, I've realized, to append a “for Chicago” to the end of most expressions of delight. A wonderful sunset, for Chicago. A really good sledding hill, for Chicago. “In Chicago, one becomes a connoisseur of the near-nothing,” wrote Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift), and, having moved here directly after four years among the enormous landscapes and cloudscapes and brilliant heavenly bodies of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the surrounding Southwest, this seemed immediately true to me. (Bellow and his cohort were more concerned, I think, with the perceived cultural flatness of the tackily new city, but for a modern rube like me, this is surely the most “culturally advanced” place I have lived.) Even neighboring Michigan, where I was born and which, we have been told, is a rusting wasteland everyone is trying to escape, is far more beautiful than northern Illinois.

Insofar as Chicago is impressive, it is so on a textural rather than a monumental level. It is a sprawling mass of details. Its exciting current is produced by rather small changes in charge as one moves from place to place. This suits the cast of mind of someone like myself, always saying “yes, but not quite” and “some, not all” and “well, maybe,” who has thought of the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China and considered how exhausting it would be to have to pass these things each day. But sometimes it puzzles me a little that I am still happy here, as I also like adventure, or at least think I do; before ending up here I had an idea that I might move from city to city as in fact I've moved from neighborhood to neighborhood. Instead, I have traveled much in Chicago.

A guest speaker in one of my classes the other week was urging us to consider moving to find work upon graduation, and I folded my arms against the idea, although she was probably right. I have all these things here now – a girlfriend, friends, a band, a citizenship of this place. How impoverishing for the connoisseur to be denied the substance of her connaissance. Certainly I'm willing to admit that many other places may turn out to be as rich in yielding the tiny bits of knowledge I pore over jealously. But this is like saying, after shattering someone's collection of rare jazz 78s, that he might profitably turn to breeding show pigeons instead. It may be true, but it is hardly any consolation. 

Public Noises

Above all other train lines, the Green Line to Pulaski is in my experience the most filled with the doomed and the desperate. Every time I ride it is packed shoulder to shoulder with varying states of crisis.

Being poor, or irreparably damaged, or both, is always very urgent business, much of which must be conducted in public. The air inside the cars is loud and heavy with cell phone conversations, often not quite one-sided, since many of these talkers have the volume set so high that one can understand at least the interlocutor's mood: frequently just as repetitive and raging, but sometimes reticent, sometimes putting forth the calm, impermeable realities at hand with initial patience which drains away slowly or quickly.

Sometimes you think a new angry conversation has been dialed up from behind or beside you, only to realize that the person sighing violently and saying “God damn” or muttering “enough, already” is just responding to another's rudeness. You are on the same side of the battle but resent the complainer's choice of weapon, resent the added noise.

On two trips today alone – from downtown to Oak Park for a job interview (I'm getting those now, in quantity) and back – I have been confronted in this way with amputated toes, broken teeth, disputes over the custody of dogs and children and, at greatest length, a middle-aged  and violently ugly man sitting across from me methodically dialing every number he seemed to know and barking into it, “TELL THAT BITCH SHE BETTER PICK UP HER DAMN PHONE.” He rarely offered any elaboration, except at one point when he instructed someone to go to the woman's house and regain possession of his shit.

(A week or two ago on the Harlem bus I sat near a man conducting a much more civil-sounding conversation, which did not begin to filter into my awareness until it became apparent that he was trying to talk a girl into appearing in some form of pornography: “No, no, I mean, unless you were planning to maybe run for office some day, or really break into mainstream movies, there's no way it's gonna matter. We had one girl, she's in law school now.” It seemed unlikely that the girl realized that he was laying out his business plan from the bench of a public bus in the suburbs.)

Even less malevolent conversations can be poisonous, if there are enough of them. You may change trains or disembark and then see sickness everywhere -- passing judgment on all the faces whose features disorientation seems to have permanently displaced by a few crucial millimeters -- and feel as though you are the last civilized being in the city or the universe. 

Then you may remember, for instance, the time coming home so late at night, the last traces of a little too much alcohol helping to weigh down your eyelids, when you found yourself utterly unable to determine how to reach the other, necessary side of the train platform. You wandered up and down the empty Thompson Center escalators in a fuzzy panic, descended to street level, looked around, and still were baffled; you ended up taking a longer route home. It may have been months later when you finally returned to the station and realized that you need have only looked up: a perfectly normal footbridge arches over the tracks.

It is not so hard to imagine this kind of confusion becoming permanent. One thing you hear in this bleak chatter is the kind of schedule it is often necessary to keep when you are poor. You may need to travel two hours each way to reach the single, minimum-wage, full-time job you could find a few months after your unemployment ran out. You may need to awake each day at 4 AM. This may cause you to fall asleep on your way home and miss your stop by miles, costing you more time. If you are ill, or have difficulty moving, travel will be that much more tortuously slow.

If you are a woman, you probably will add all this to the time and effort of transporting your children; when you are not with them, you probably will be on your cell phone with the unreliable web of other persons and institutions that share in their care.

Anyone has had to catch a 6 AM flight without having slept beforehand, or a panic attack in a public place, or a particularly enveloping head cold, one of these thorough burglars of lucidity. There is no reason why such a state could not keep perpetuating itself, especially under conditions of enforced exhaustion. In the wrong circumstances life could certainly become an unending bad dream, in which you are constantly exposed in public, made to conform to standards and fulfill responsibilities that are unfamiliar or had been totally forgotten. This could be a reality from which you would not be able to see out, though everyone could watch you writhe and call out in the throes of your dreaming, everyone could glare your way and say: “Enough, already.”

When I transfer to the Brown Line all is quieter. Here too an older black man with a cane is declaiming the history of his medical problems, near-death experiences, and subsequent recovery through Christ, but he has found a flesh-and-blood listener, a younger white man. The listener is polite and responsive. He is trying to do it right, to engage honestly although he would not have chosen this conversation. He is, I'm almost certain, a young liberal with the luxury of enough space and clarity in his life to accommodate problems that are not his own and conversations that are not acts of dire self-preservation. I recognize him, though I would not do quite so well, I think. Us types. What're we gonna do with ourselves and the world. I suspect we take it on as a kind of social service, to sit and listen, a service which is not entirely unrecompensed; we may feel a shameful impulse to tell our friends about it later, inviting them to marvel at our goodheartedness. But the kindness is at least partly genuine, the sense of duty somewhat realer.

The storyteller leaves the train. I've changed seats and without turning I can't see the listener, who remains. But he does not sigh in relief or exchange a knowing chuckle with anyone else who has been listening less gracefully, as I've seen others do, as I might do myself if I were the type to voluntarily make any public gesture. That's good, I think, observing the space around him. That's a start. 

As it turns out

This is the last week I'm allowing myself to find a job that I reasonably may like; next Monday I will begin throwing myself at anything that pays okay and won't kill me. It's hard to believe it's been three weeks since I left work.

How dispiritingly easy it is to do nothing. I have the idea upon looking out over any such expanse of luxuriantly ungoverned time that I will be able to do everything all at once. Then I step in and find that here I am, leaving my slow clumsy footprints all over this clean lovely time, not getting much done. It's embarrassing.

The problem I guess is temperamental. When time pressures are released, decisions become far more arbitrary, and I have always greeted arbitrary decisions with apprehension. It seems that if one does anything it ought to be something grand and important but it is hard to think what will really be best, what will really measure up. And neurochemically I am an imperfect specimen -- that doesn't help.

So now already it is dark and I have spent the hours dithering, ill at ease with my leisure. Shall I start to learn some Bach on the guitar. Shall I finally listen to Neil Young. Shall I finally wash the dishes. I sit on a chair in the kitchen for several minutes while the mind offers up irrelevancies: I could eat a tangerine. All day I do little bits of things: read a few documents for class, write almost a verse of a new song, order some poetry online, buy groceries (a vibrant jumble in the grocery basket) which refuse when laid out on the kitchen table to assemble themselves into an appetizing meal. A collection of not-quite-useless fragments in the dustpan at the end of the day. 

Reading the internet too much, certainly. The feeling that I spend too much time with things that are only about other things, and not the things themselves. The insidious ease of criticism.

(I mean, I just like conversations, partly. If I spend time with the thing itself who will I talk to about it. It's just me, in the house or the world or a crowd of people I probably don't like. You read criticism and it's already taken care of.)

It's getting better, but the sun's still going down too early for someone who gets up at nine or ten. Looking out the window I think of the days until spring will become at least a realistic expectation. A vision of all that heavy time stretching out along the snow, compacting it.

(You think it has melted considerably, until you try to clear it away -- as it turns out you're barely strong enough to lift the shovel.)

"With fragile certainties"

There's an excellent and accurate article right now on Slate.com by Mark Oppenheimer on being a snob. How to define a snob? Let's say, perhaps: someone who has confused an aesthetic for an ethos. And undoubtedly I am a snob, if a self-aware one. (But then it's possible that all snobs are in fact highly self-aware, in that they cannot fail to acknowledge that their tastes are not those of the mainstream -- if their tastes were mainstream they would not be snobs; if they were unaware of this divergence, they would merely be eccentrics and not snobs at all.)

Snobbery as we generally understand it is class-based, but it is not only a phenomenon of the upper class. Any person or subculture acutely concerned with the appearance of authenticity partakes in snobbishness, I think. Snobbishness is always aspirational, but it is fanatical about avoiding the appearance of aspiration. One should have been born with an impeccable set of tastes; all one's choices must appear to emanate from the core of one's being – indeed they should hardly be choices at all, they are simply the natural consequences of one's way of life. This is why snobbery is much easier to pull off for the upper-class: they may have the advantages of not actually having to work very hard and of being tutored in good taste by those within their milieu.

The working-class snob has it harder. She can turn to those subcultures that define themselves in opposition to what one might call the “preppy” strain of snobbishness: punk rock, say, or the thug culture in which the ultimate accessory and badge of authenticity is a gunshot wound. But the bookish and shy are unlikely to successfully pass in such a scene. Instead, one ends up cobbling together an aesthetic from bits of books, movies, magazines, the elite of previous eras, and comes to develop an idiolect of signifiers which may overlap with those of other snobs but never connect one to a larger snob culture. One takes the Pillow Book in which one has scribbled hastily over the years and turns it into doctrine. For the working-class snob, this may resemble the Ten Commandments more than a style guide: without a unified model to aspire to, one works mainly with negative space to create a picture of the appropriate. No, one must not hang a television on a wall, or museum-shop reproductions of famous works of art. One must not wear Uggs or Crocs, or sweatpants, or sea-foam green, or anything with a prominent logo. One walks down every street saying no, no, goodness no, interrupted by the occasional yes, an approving nod in the direction of the object that knows its place, the person who understands how to behave.

Oppenheimer worries about the effects of his snobbishness on his young daughters, and it can certainly be toxic to family life. My childhood years were spent cringing at and railing against the bad taste of my surroundings. There were so many sources of outrage: the plastic bouquets at my father and stepmother's wedding, the enormous “antique,” “distressed,” “Asian” print of a tiger that my mother brought home from Meijer for our living room, the nattering television shows that nobody was really watching but which nobody would ever let me turn off.

Under the tyranny of my taste, over the years my mother has made steps towards snobbishness herself. Her tastes in music, movies and reading material have by this point all been heavily inflected by my own; she is surprised when I do not agree with her, that she can have picked up on the details of my snobbishness without discerning its larger shape. As a teenager, these near-misses irritated me more than if she had wholly ignored my preferences. She was too clearly trying. It ruined the whole thing.

In his essay Oppenheimer mentions, almost offhandedly, “the tragedy of the snob, which is that he needs to think he is grand just to think he is worthwhile.” When love of God or country or money are not enough to shape one's life, other standards are required. The snob knows that, judged on his or her inner qualities alone, she will always be sorely lacking. Better to locate success in the arbitrary, the anti-pragmatic, the obscure. One has so much less competition there, there where the appearance of competition itself is enough to disqualify any competitor. The sovereignty of the snob remains intact.

Things You Can Do When You're Unemployed

• Dye your hair a bright color
• Get in fights (like the kind where you might get a black eye)
• Eat leisurely lunches
• Go to museums for free
• Get arrested
• Express strange and unpopular views in a public forum
• Hitchhike
• Go to the Social Security office to get a new Social Security card because you lost yours
• Buy groceries when the grocery store is not so crowded

The Nice Parts

On the eve of my final day of the job that spawned this blog, I feel that I can finally find in it some droplets of affection, however laboriously squeezed from the dense mass of surrounding dread. I've been filling the last few days with words of slightly disingenuous warmth for the place and its residents, so unaccountably nice, saddling me with such heartrending parting gifts as some gorgeous roses and a hideous handbag that smells of chlorine. I know that I will not miss this job. The nice parts of it will be nearly as pleasant in memory as in experience, and the bad parts will, I think, take some minor works of exorcism to lift from me. But I will say this in its favor: it has brought me into closer and more meaningful contact than ever before with people who are truly different from me, and allowed me to like them very, very much.

For instance there is Patty (no, the names aren't real), a guard at a women's prison who has outlived a couple of husbands by now, unassailably tough and radiant with unassuming kindness. There are so many things I could say about Patty. When Barack Obama was elected she took a bus to Washington for the inauguration and came back with two giant black trash bags full of souvenirs – t-shirts, key chains, fake million-dollar bills with Obama's face on it, one of which she gave me. (She tried to give me other things as well.) The first Thanksgiving I was employed there she came downstairs with a whole sweet-potato pie in hand for each of us. Once or twice a week she receives in the mail the “thank you” gifts (address labels, “Indian” crafts) that charities send out to guilt people into paying for them; she tries to send money to them all, and laments when she cannot quite manage it that month.

What is not coming through here is that she is funny. She spends her days shuttling between the inmates on the west side and her elderly, ailing mother in the south suburbs on public transportation and from this material she builds conversations full of humor and totally lacking in self-pity or self-seriousness. Her sister Pris lives in the building too and is more obviously hilarious; you can hear her braying from halfway down the block, and she continues to work blue even upon reaching the echoing lobby. The trick is that she is unfailingly funny and never actually abrasive. It's not clear how she does this.

Pris is huge and compact while her sister seems looser-jointed, more casually assembled, and her demeanor is frankly confrontational when compared to Patty's casual cool. If no one told you, you would not guess them to be sisters before becoming deeply acquainted with the goodness and strength common to each.

There is Mrs. Santos who, more than almost anyone, has indulged my limited Spanish and trusted me to understand hers. She has just a couple words of English: “Hi, honey!” she beams upon entering the office, eyes brimming hugely with good-will and a sort of worry that someone within her gaze may not be entirely happy, her wrinkles alive with an anxiety that seems not wholly unpleasant for her. She has a large family who visit frequently, and they are also very kind, if in a less otherworldly way. Among them are two granddaughters about three or four years old, cousins, one a little sulky and shy and the other flamboyantly sunny. The first day I met them the sunnier one strode into the office behind her grandmother, climbed up on a chair, kicked out her legs and declaimed: “My name is Lulu Modesta!”

And of course there are other wonderful babies. The Carroll girls, a year apart, who need only the prompt “Hello, girls!” to say, in the perfect unison of their slightly froggy voices, “Hiiiiii!” There's Wolfgang, Wolfie for short, who has just recently been transformed from a quiet, highly embarrassable four-year-old who was up for endless games of peek-a-boo into a five-year-old who announces his entry to the building each afternoon with an escalating series of formidable monster noises. He exasperates his saintly mother, Jeanie, who makes beautiful soaps by hand and has shared with me her memories of China, where she grew up: “So dirty! There is dirt everywhere! And just dogs, running around!” In the past year there has been born a new generation of adorable creatures. Now they are just beginning to try to run, having not quite mastered walking yet, or trying out smiles and frowns that gesture towards a real intelligence growing within.

In some ways this job has taught me plenty about human meanness and stupidity. One can take such lessons and use them to recalibrate one's instincts of mistrust or self-preservation, I suppose (though I hope instead to more or less forget them). It's harder for the mind to get a hold on the kind of inexplicable goodness I have also encountered here. Each instance when it comes is apparently sui generis and difficult to schematize. One can only try to preserve a certain attitude towards it, I guess: a standing still before kindness, the mouth slightly open, slightly smiling, for as long as the world will let such peace exist.

Born with a weak heart / I guess I must be having fun

Another laundry-day dispatch, as I sit tucking my legs out of the way of a tiny woman dressed like a teenager (purple velour pants, pink plaid hooded jacket) whose voice reveals her to be fifty or so. My head is fuzzy from a weekend of sitting – in the cars between Chicago and Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids and the nameless woods north of White Cloud where my grandparents live, at tables and on sofas, at the cramped bedside of my grandfather in the hospital where he has been since damaging his 82-year-old hip. Hours of waiting. Sleepy though I have done so little to tire me, enervated by the cloying air of such close quarters. I'll be glad to ride through the wet chill of the evening to Heather's tonight.

My dad and stepmother offered to drive me back to the city to spend more time with me; we spent almost the entire time in silence. There is just nothing to say. I am snappish at the questions that emerge cringing from the quiet spells, which start from such incorrect assumptions that I grow exhausted at the whole world of information I must attempt to convey in order to provide an accurate answer. (Such as: “Do they have Panera in Chicago?” and “Are you still playing with your band? At least you can make some money that way.” Yes, and yes, but no, and this is all quite beside the point.) They are suspicious and naïve, in terror of and incurious about the big, strange city where, to their bafflement, I insist on living. “There are so many buildings,” my father says with disapproval over and over as we go up Lakeshore Drive. “Starbucks,” my stepmother reads out, and then, “The Uptown Lounge.” And it makes me so mean, so mean.

I got a birthday card from my father this past year and it occurred to me for the first time – in at least a decade, if not in my entire life – that he must actually love me. I saw him standing before the rows of Hallmark cards (“Birthday – Daughter”) and selecting this particular card after reading several others, because he thought it was the nicest, and this vision seemed produced not by imagination but by sudden knowledge. The thought made me terribly sad.

I'm very bad at all that sort of thing, filling out the social forms dictated by the flat fact that one has fallen into some relation to some other person. It is not this way for everyone – I know that this is true but it is not a state I can feel my way into very well. Some people are able, with conviction and without further explanation or qualification, to say that “family is important” to them – not that they like, or love, their relatives (as I do truly like and love many of mine) but that their being family is enough to make them matter, not just socially but personally, spiritually.

Perhaps it's a feeling of kinship, a happy recognition of oneself in one's family. But the traits I observe in both my family and myself are not the good ones; they mostly make me despise the both of us a little. So I hear in my voice my mother's nice-lady drawl (without having her commitment to being an actual nice lady); I see in my grandfather's unshakeable routines my own curmudgeonly rigidity; and in my father's greenish eyes, looking away, I see my unwillingness to risk confronting any truths between us. (The greatest unreasonable hatreds are produced, I think, by just such unwilling acts of identification. I have dropped friends because they made the faux pas I would make, told the bad jokes I had to force back from between my teeth. I felt complicit in their every infelicity because I had felt so deeply the impulse to commit it.)

And the qualities I don't mind observing in myself rarely receive their fullest expression in family situations. I am glad to have inherited my grandmother's entirely non-ideological atheism – a sort of natural irreligion -- for instance, and my grandfather's unfussy competence in handling practical affairs. But these are not the basis of a normal conversation. Most of the time, we speak of what we know and have experienced, not what we are – and appropriately so. My new and awful coworker is constantly making such asides as “Well, I'm a very social person” or “But then, I am extremely perceptive.” One doesn't do that. But the shared knowledge base between me and my relatives is tiny; it will support hardly a dozen sentences or so before collapsing into silence.

This makes it tough to buy presents for each other. We ask others for suggestions and after much struggle come up with things like gloves and socks and lotion. It seems that I am nearly alone in really liking to buy gifts for people, so my inability to think of something perfect and unexpected bothers me more than it does my relatives. I like the bright paper and the surprise; it matters to me that I try.

Sometimes I do okay. “Hey, you're good at this,” my grandma said after my gifts had been opened this year, and it was one of the best compliments I've received in months. But I am not getting permanently better at knowing these people. I will wring my hands over all of this again next year, not being able to fill the deficit of feeling in myself that keeps me from making any lasting improvement. I'll return and stand again coldly to one side -- a snowgirl with a heavy heart. But cheered by the surrounding colored lights.

Title credit: Talking Heads -- via the excellent mix Heather made me for Christmas.

You Can't Fire Me

Outside it's the right temperature for snow to achieve a certain perfection, fluffy but still crisp, around twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. This is not the snow that on colder nights seems to be dropped in from the darkness of the outer cosmos, the flakes landing one by one, their shapes precisely outlined as on microscope slides. No, this is a convivial, Christmasy snowfall, charmingly eager to cover anything grown gray and sludgy since the last snow. (It has its work cut out for it in the landscape surrounding the laundromat where I'm writing this.) It's nice.

I feel a general giddiness in winter. Big decisions or big catastrophes (big relative to the regular small texture of my life, that is) tend to happen to me in these months. The evening mood is restlessness, a dreaming of big projects that will not let me sleep. During the days I am held down by gray skies and the half-frozen slop of the roads, but between these heavy layers there is a twitching paranoiac intelligence felt mainly in the chest, an uncomfortable sharpening and branching of the senses which seems always about to resolve into some revelation. And when, as happens once or twice a month in the midwest, sunshine breaks through, the thaw brings into me a sort of blubbering gratitude; every motion is clumsy and bizarre because it is the holding back of a skip or a leap, and even the least heartfelt smile is accompanied by a welling of the eyes. In winter even relaxation is only a temporary recovery from some exhausting minor mania or other.

Along with these familiar moods, I lately had been feeling again as I did when I was least well (OpenOffice's autocomplete feature believes that I mean “least well-loved,” and this is probably also true), in high school, so desperate to be left alone by life as to be constantly inviting crises that might provide some valid exemption from it. If one can not act out, one instead walks along and conjures violence upon oneself: so sorry I could not come to work, but on the way I was stabbed in the chest. My apologies for the lateness of this exam; it is just that I fell off a building in the middle of Question 5. Some near-fatality from which one could slowly recover into a quieter, warmer new life.

But this is just a weakness of the will. (As eventually I learned.) It is a fear of making decisions, of the damage one might do if one assumes control of one's life, of the blame one might incur. I have worked hard at being less afraid. With much nail-biting I occasionally now manage to resolve to change my life rather than dreaming of calamitous escapes. Accordingly, on Tuesday, I quit my job.

I gave a month's notice. Besides my boss and the board, I've so far tried to keep the news to friends who will be understanding, rather than the anxious majority who will cluck at me with questions about what I will do next and do I understand how awfully unwise it has been to leave a job without having another lined up. To avoid such conversations, I've tended to lie when quitting jobs. More than once I have quit over the telephone with apologetic stories of the new job I have been offered out of the blue, which requires that I start in a week or two, or right away.

This is, according to an imprecise and paranormal logic, how I got my current job. I was sick to death of my job waiting tables, and wanted to spend more time with my visiting boyfriend, so I called and explained my imaginary situation, and never went back. Two days later, walking through the tropical bird house at Lincoln Park Zoo, I received a call from the temp agency I'd worked for months ago offering me my current job.

To avoid meeting with another such winking trick of fate, I told more or less the truth when I resigned this position. To be sure, I hung the whole thing on a rather minor reason for my dissatisfaction – my salary – and crossed my fingers against a counter-offer which, thankfully, has not come. Any efforts to convince me to stay have been so small that I am sure those making them must know how ineffectual they will be. And every day my relief to be leaving has grown stronger. I could withstand a lot in the way of persuasion now, I think, and still not turn back from the door.

Did I ever say what happened? No, not really. It involved an overnight ouster of my old company and takeover by a new company, the firing of my one remaining office-mate, an interview before the Board for my old boss's position (which seemed as close to campaigning for office as I ever hope to come), and my being given an absurdly adult and responsible job. For a month and a half I have been trying to do the work of three to four people, succeeding only well enough to keep up appearances. It has been almost no fun. There were almost no reasons to keep doing it, except for the ones that other people will seize upon immediately: the money, the authority, the experience (in a field I do not plan to spend my life in), the unusual and really underserved good luck having of a job at all. 

It will be hard for a while to deal these worried ones, parents and the like, so concerned for my well-being. I instinctively bristle at such lamentations (always barely hiding accusations), as when I'm told to “be safe” on my bike. But I am feeling rich with the good fortune I have just claimed for myself and must be generous. I must remember to remain polite, and hide my rather gauche smile. 

I Dream Again Now of Spectacular Failures

I dream again now of spectacular failures,

to cushion me against the rude shocks

of success. In the unfortunate case

of my bosses, for instance, I will resoundingly

announce my verdict. (Tough but fair.) I'll let

the next blind shoulder that knocks into me

just push me down, and lie there in the street.

I will not suffer anyone to help

me up who is not of pure heart. (I will

wait hours, blocking traffic.) At last

I will become completely unembarrassable,

and make flamboyantly embarrassing

displays.

                 After this they will demand

so little. Once it was thought I would

not even go to college, my sickness be

my work. In such a state it's an accomplishment

to sleep eight hours soundly. In such a state,

to waste an afternoon in fabrication

of tiny beauties is still strange, but less so.

It is, at least, forgiven.

                                      So I

weakmindedly imagine. In truth in such

a state there are still bosses, they are doctors.

The work is not the sickness but the getting

well; one is demanded to perform it

with such haste, in such bad faith.

So what to do but to stitch closed that artery,

though it should mean forgetting the actual tint

and quickness of the blood.

________________________________________________________________

On the above: just a poemlet written on a train, in the blank spaces of an advertisement about airports and computers since I didn't have any paper. It doesn't rise to the status of anything much, I think, but it is a way of saying in brief how things are with me right now. There are so very many things I could say directly about what is happening in my job and my life but I no longer have any time to write them down at work because of them. People keep congratulating me, but most days I would rather have been fired. I think of quitting but probably will not be brave enough. I just got back from visiting a friend who never is afraid to quit bad jobs -- a good influence. My blue-collar sense of responsibility and my fear of angering everyone and also never finding another job again will likely keep me at it, even so. Truly I feel that the entire United States of America will castigate me as an ingrate if I deliberately leave such a very good job.

Another good influence is Laura Riding's Progress of Stories, which I have been reading lately for the first time. Some things she has to say:

"The wisest course was for the young to be grateful to the old and to show their gratitude by seeming to understand how important it was to have worries -- instead of behaving as if worries were a disease. It was this kind of delicacy that sold art." -- "The Incurable Virtue."

"And this was the difference between the world of self and the world of knowledge: that the world of knowledge was only and endless prolongation of uncertainty, while the world of self was a prolongation of fear of uncertainty." -- "Miss Banquett, or the Populating of Cosmania."

It's possible that I won't be able to update this blog in any regular way for several months, and then after that the substance of my life may be different enough that the concept of it will have to be changed entirely. To my very avid and loyal and very imaginary readers, I apologize.

Living in the day

On Wednesday I called in sick to work in order to finish writing a midterm essay that was due that evening, doing that thing I do where I put myself into a sick-person mindset in order to sound convincing on the phone and consequently end up feeling like a genuine invalid all day. Which only gets worse if the thing you’re staying home to do is sitting at your computer for hours while the perfect October sunshine waves outside your windows, crisp-edged October shadows parading slowly around the room.

Finally I went out to get lunch at Nhu Lan Bakery across the street, which was a good decision. The weather was a real masterpiece. It’s exciting to be walking around in the day when you’re usually cooped up in the office. You think that maybe if you kept a different schedule you’d have a better outlook, if your workday wasn't bookended by angry Chicago rush hours. I get the same effect when I have to run a lot of errands on my lunch break, riding around on my bike. The people I see out walking during the day look disproportionately attractive, happy, interesting. It seems like they probably have cooler jobs than everyone.

The women behind the counter at Nhu Lan are invariably charming, usually beaming. They have always indulged and encouraged my forays into the weirder parts of the Vietnames dessert canon -- taro-coconut-mung-bean pudding! sesame balls filled with red bean paste! -- without condescension, providing instructions as to their proper preparation (heat the coconut milk just a little first) when needed. Catching them earlier in the day meant that they had even more good cheer to share. For instance I always order my banh mi without mayonnaise, and this time a woman drew my attention away from the bizarre Vietnamese TV program that was playing -- some “comically” dressed soldiers were mugging their way through a mournful song -- to ask if I wanted veggie pate instead. What a nice idea!  It was delicious, though I’m not totally sure what the pate is made of; the bright pink food coloring thwarts any real investigation.

Maybe it’s sad when a good lunch seems like the high point of your day. But it made me feel less like I was about to flunk out of my life. I hadn’t stayed home just because I was too incompetent to finish my school work on time. I had stayed home to taste the particular pleasures of an autumn afternoon on Lawrence Avenue, and tinily succeeded.

Limping and Poorly-Dressed

As I walk back from the bathroom I watch myself in the mirror on the wall of the meeting room to gauge how well I am hiding my limp. Pretty well. It’s the kind of injury you’re a little embarrassed to explain: last night at the library I stepped onto an escalator and badly twisted my ankle, the one that’s always been weak from a fifteen-year-old rollerblading injury. (That was also a little embarrassing to explain, though I was a kid at the time -- I was doing a jump off this really “fun” (bad) section of sidewalk across the street and just landed wrong.) Okay. I might get through the day without comment.

I take a look at my outfit too -- a little bit better than usual, today. Sartorially I am not my best self at work. I’ve mentioned my use of chance operations to guide me in the otherwise-formless tasks of life; same goes for getting dressed on weekday mornings. For instance I’ll start at the left of the shirt section of my closet. If the first in line won’t work I’ll go to the far right, then back again if that one’s no good, and so on, making allowances for weather and a minimal level of matching.  

It is possibly a little obsessive-compulsive, this controlled relinquishing of control. Sure, maybe. A funny thing: I like to dress. I have many more clothes than I need; in my free time and especially on stage I give plenty of thought to how I look. Refusing to use my own taste and style to put together outfits for work is perhaps just one tactic among many for deflecting responsibility, another way in which I am always saying: this is not where my real life is happening. If anyone wants to know where the real life is, they might guess (and might even guess correctly, though I don’t think anyone generally is interested), but I am not providing any maps.