oh-stella!

The quickest way for any thin person to send a not-thin person into an apoplectic fit is to fall back on the trusty old “Being skinny is just as bad as being fat.  People make fun of you for being skinny, too.”  Thank you, skinny people, for saying this.  You’ve helped me lose weight.  Because my head just exploded.

I’m not saying that no one makes fun of people who are unusually thin.  That’s not true.  People are made fun of for being unusual, period.  But the social stigma for people who are overweight is far, far greater than the social stigma for people who are underweight.  You have to be pretty damn skinny to be considered unattractive.  Yet you can be just five pounds overweight and there are people out there who will consider it their civic duty to tell you that you’re a fatass.  You know, because your weight is a detriment to society and these people will have to pay for your medical bills when you inevitably have to go to the government-run fatty hospital where all fatties end up.  Plus, their eyes.  You have given them a pain in their eyes.

The point is, I know, that it’s no one else’s business how much anyone weighs, and that very thin people often have to deal with people implying that they’re starving themselves, etc.  But for every person who tells a thin girl she needs to eat more, how many more people tell her that she looks good, or that they wish they could be as thin as she is, or ask her how she manages to not gain weight?  In our society, thin=good, fat=bad, and even if someone tells you that you need to eat a sandwich, they only want you to eat just enough sandwiches.  Not too many.  Because then you’re a fat person, and nothing good can come of that.

When I saw her for the first time in three years, my boyfriend’s grandmother said to me, “You’ve lost weight!  You look good!  Now, don’t gain any weight!”  One of her daughters was bragging about weighing less than a hundred pounds.  Probably because she does drugs.  I don’t remember anyone telling her to stop doing drugs so she could gain a pound or two.  Because no one did.  No matter how you become thin, it’s better to be thin.  You might overdose on drugs and die, but you’ll make an exquisite corpse.

My point, as always, is that it may not be the healthiest thing in the world, to be overweight, and no one is disputing that, and it may not be the healthiest thing in the world, to be underweight, and no one is disputing that, either, but it’s stupid to assume you know anything about anyone’s health, just by looking at them, and it’s bullshit, anyway, that most people even pretend that’s why they care.  However, the pretending to care about the health of thin people comes from a different place than pretending to care about the health of fat people.  And this is why people who equate being underweight with being overweight seem pretty oblivious to what it’s like to be overweight.

Most catty comments about a thin person probably originate from a place of jealousy whereas catty comments about a fat person come from a place of disgust.  People remark about thinness because they’re envious and they want to make the thin person feel less assured about that thinness being a good thing.  People remark about fatness because they find fat people repulsive and they want fat people to find themselves repulsive, too.  The difference is that one condition is desirable and the other is not.  The way people treat you when you have what they want is nothing like the way people treat you when they find you contemptible.  I’m jealous of thin people who don’t have to exercise or diet in order to be thin.  I seriously doubt that there are very many, if any, thin people who are jealous of me.  I also seriously doubt there are any thin people who would willingly trade places.  The best thing about wearing a fat suit is that it comes off.  There is no skinny suit.

It kills me when people preface a comment or blog post or an article with a warning about triggers.  Not just because it falls on the spectrum of unrelenting political correctness that I find grating, and not just because I hate the word trigger in this context, anyway, but because it implies that the world is full of people who are so fragile that even the mention of something bad will harsh their mellows so fully that they will never be able to be mellow again.  Really?

The worst part is, if I believe all of the disclaimers, anything can be a trigger.  Everything on Earth has traumatized someone somewhere at some point, and therefore, mentioning anything about anything is unsafe and socially irresponsible.  Unless you write trigger at the top.  At which point I should stop reading.  Or I will be triggered.  Like a Cylon sleeper agent.  Before you mentioned it, I was okay, and now I’ll never be okay again.  I’m going to walk through life not knowing how to live because you reminded me that bad things happen.  Thanks a lot!

There are always a bunch of trigger warnings on jezebel.com.  Which is a site dedicated to feminist gossip.  Sort of.  That’s got to be an oxymoron, there.  Feminist gossip.  Isn’t gossip sort of contradictory to the spirit of feminism?  It’s “I am woman, hear me roar.”  Not, “I am woman, hear me whisper to my friends about another one of our female acquaintances until she comes into the room at which point we abruptly stop talking which doesn’t look suspicious at all.”

I guess my problem with trigger warnings is pretty much my problem with feminism, then.  It’s all very, very serious.  We are all very, very serious people.  We take our responsibility as commentators on the internet very, very seriously.  This is very, very serious, you guys.  Very. 

I’m a feminist.  I think that I’m intellectually equal to any man and that anything he is allowed to do, I should be allowed to do.  I just don’t think that I have to be a humorless killjoy to get that point across.  I also think that sugarcoating the world for the consumption of overly sensitive women is actually counterintuitive to the idea of feminism.  If you are trying to prove to the world that you’re strong and capable, what does it say that you can’t even read something that might be disturbing to you?  The world is disturbing.

Which brings me to the thing that irritates me the most about trigger warnings.  If there are people out there who can’t even read about fairytales that feature not exactly politically correct male/female relationships without a “sexual-assault trigger” warning at the beginning, why are these people even on the internet?  The internet is almost entirely comprised of disturbing things.  You can watch people be murdered, if you want to.  Or even if you don’t, if you get unlucky enough when following links.  Why go online to begin with, if you’re that fragile?  Why is everyone so interested in padding the sharp edges of existence in order to accommodate all of these fragile people?

I think people need to lighten up and toughen up.  Life is pain.  If you can’t get used to it and laugh at it and move the hell on, you might need a bullet-proof vest because there are triggers everywhere.

I read an article, earlier, in which various female Olympians were asked about their preferences when it comes to beauty products.  A stupid fluff piece, for sure.  Who cares about the makeup elite athletes wear?  It was probably just an excuse for some cross merchandising, because most of the products mentioned, by their full product names, no less, are made by P&G.

All except for the products mentioned by Johnny Weir, who listed not only the most products but also the most high-end ones.  Because a man who carries Louis Vuitton luggage and has a passion for full-length fur coats is probably never going to be caught wearing Cover Girl.  Which is fine with me.  The reason why luxury goods are so expensive, most of the time, is because they are better quality.  If you can afford to pay more money to get something better, then why not?  If I had enough disposable income to pay forty dollars for lipstick and it was really, really good lipstick, I would buy it.

Naturally, no other male athletes were interviewed.  No other male Olympians wear any products designed to make themselves more aesthetically pleasing?  Please.  Evan Lysacek wears enough hair gel to style Chewbacca with and he’s as orange as an Oompa Loompa.  Rachel Flatt’s favorite beauty product is Chapstick and Tanith Belbin mentioned her favorite shampoo.  So, obviously, the answer didn’t have to be some kind of makeup.  Male athletes don’t wear cologne, use lotion, or wash their hair and use hair products?  Even a man who thinks he’s the manliest man alive will douse himself in Axe body spray so that he “smells good for the ladies.”  Yes, Johnny does wear makeup, so obviously, the person who wrote the article wasn’t wrong in assuming that he would, but the fact that he was the only male who was featured says a whole lot.  The article doesn’t have anything to lose by asking him, but it might be seen as questioning the masculinity of anyone else who participated.  Because real men don’t wear makeup.  And Johnny Weir, ambiguously gay and admittedly fond of fashion, is not a real man.

At least, that’s what the comments on the article say.  You would think that being a man with foundation on was a crime punishable by death, from the hatefulness of people’s replies.  All of the real men were pretty offended.  One of them said, “Kind of a stretch to call Johnny Weir a man”.  Um, no, it’s not.  He has a penis.  He’s a man.  Unless when he puts on his makeup, it makes his penis magically disappear.  Maybe it does.  Maybe that’s why real men don’t wear makeup.  They fear the loss of their penises literally, rather than figuratively.

The part that bothers me the most is that it’s not just homophobic, it’s sexist, too.  Equations.  If a man wears makeup, he’s not a real man.  If he’s not a real man, then he’s contemptible.  Women wear makeup.  Are women contemptible, as well?  Women can wear makeup because we’re just women, anyway.  Men are better than that.  If you do something a woman does, then you suck.  Because women suck.  Women try to look pretty so that men like them, but the men view that as a sign of weakness and look down upon them for it.  They can afford to.  Men have better chances of finding mates than women do, no matter what they look like.

I’m reminded of the beginning of “What It Feels like for a Girl” which features a sample of some of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s dialog from The Cement Garden.  “Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it’s okay to be a boy.  But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading because you think being a girl is degrading.”  Men don’t want to be like women because they’re better than women and women would be better if they were more like men.

So the message this sends to people like Johnny Weir is “Why would you want to be one of them when you are lucky enough to be one of us?”  To which Johnny’s whole lifestyle replies “Why would I want to be one of you when I’m lucky enough to be me?”  And that’s why Johnny Weir is awesome.  He is who he is and no matter how hard people try to convince him that he should be ashamed of himself, he doesn’t appear to have taken the bait.

Of all the songs from In Rainbows, “All I Need” is by far my favorite.  I love it for pretty much the same reason that I love most of Radiohead’s slow-burners.  They’re atmospheric and beautiful and deep and thoughtful and they stick with you without ever becoming tiring, no matter how many times you listen to them.  If I were to become stuck in a stalled elevator with the audio playing the same music on repeat for hours, “Pyramid Song” is pretty high up on the lists of songs that wouldn’t drive me crazy.  In fact, there are several Radiohead songs to which I could assign high ranking positions on that fictional list.  “All I Need” is one of those.

Anyone who’s paid any attention to any of the times when I waxed poetical about Bat For Lashes knows that I’ve been a big fan for several years, now.  I was thrilled when the last cd succeeded in bringing Natasha Kahn’s music to a wider audience, because I think she’s a superstar who deserves to be noticed.  One of Kahn’s many talents is her ability to reinterpret other people’s music into her own style.  She’s a fantastic covers artist.  Her cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” is one of my favorite songs, period, and she did a lovely cover of “Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon.  So, naturally, when I read on pitchfork.com that she had covered, in concert, “All I Need” I was kind of wary but excited.  Excited for obvious reasons and wary because most live footage on youtube is terrible.  Fortunately for me and anyone else who loves Bat for Lashes and wasn’t lucky enough to be at this concert, the audio on this is pretty good.

One of the things that I absolutely love about the internet is how accessible it makes music to people who aren’t geographically situated in places where music scenes and movements emerge.  You don’t have to live in London or New York or Seattle or Los Angeles or Paris in order to hear new music.  You’re not bound by what you hear on the radio or what albums are sold at the local stores or what bands tour in your area.  Ten years ago, I never would have known about most of the musicians I love now.  There are a lot of seedy things that happen on the internet, and there is a certain amount of not entirely healthy escapism involved in how our relationships with the internet have evolved, but in a lot of ways, the internet really is a vital tool for communication and information.  It enriches people’s lives.

I’m feeling more poetic, as of late.  My poetic output over the past couple years has been almost nonexistent.  I think I averaged maybe ten poems a year.  Probably not even that many.  And it wasn’t just that I had stopped writing poetry, it was that I stopped thinking of myself as a poet.  I know speaking about the way you think of yourself in terms of art has a tendency to come across as being very self-serious and pretentious, so I didn’t really ever comment on it, but I felt it.  I felt that there was an empty space where I used to be creative.  Because even if I wasn’t writing poetry, it wasn’t because I found something else to do with my energy.  I didn’t take many photographs, either.  I worked and came home.  I bought a lot of shoes.

I go back and forth about where I should be, in regard to personal identity.  Sometimes I think, as a twenty-seven year-old adult, I should curb the urge to indulge in the things that I indulged in when I was younger.  The wallowing.  Thinking that it was okay to be grossly over-emotional because that’s how people with artistic temperaments behave.  Affectations of the sort that are unintentional because you really believe that you are that kind of person, even if you have actually had to learn how to be that way.  I can’t say that I ever would have cut myself if I hadn’t befriended a couple of female writers who were cutters.  In fact, before I met them, I had considered cutting yourself to be something crazy and stupid.  If you had asked me when I was eighteen if I would ever do anything crazy and stupid, I would have said no.  So I guess it’s only fitting that I quickly devolved into engaging in crazy and stupid behavior at every turn.

So, now that I’m older, and I realize how, for lack of a better word, lame I was, for a very long time, I don’t know how to divorce the things I did creatively from the mindset that allowed me to be creative.  Because if I’m not crazy and stupid, who am I?  If I can’t write about the chaos of being that kind of person, then what do I write about?  If I don’t have those same eyes, then what will I see when I look through the lens of a camera?  The life of the recovering drama queen is very boring.  Nothing bleeds.

Of course, I can’t pretend that I’m a completely changed person.  Because I still act crazy and stupid on a more regular basis than I would like to admit.  It happens.  Only, then, I don’t want to romanticize it, so I say nothing about it, even if what I would say about it would be something worth saying.  Something beautiful or striking.  I’m afraid of the possibility that when I was “bad” I was better.  And that trying to be “good” will take whatever talents I have away.  Like I have lobotomized myself, somehow. 

But right now, I’m writing poems.  I’m letting them explode from wherever that place is inside of me that all of my repressed feelings go to hide.  It’s nice, remembering how it feels to give words to something intangible.  I don’t want the best parts of me to go to waste.  I just need to figure out how to be who I am while being who I think I should be.  There’s got to be a way to fuse those two personas together. 

Because life is all sunshine and daisies with a smattering of kittens and puppies and rainbows, I have a urinary tract infection.  This makes the third one I’ve had in less than a year, which, in addition to being not fair at all, is kind of confounding, because I’m not allergic to anything as far as I know, and I have good personal hygiene.  There’s no reason why I should be suffering from a recurring case of bacteria deciding that the best place to throw a party is in my urethra.  The only conclusion I can come to is that god hates me.  He wants me to pee acid.  Apparently.

Monday afternoon, I felt like I might be starting to get an infection.  Once you’ve had more than one, you can usually tell when you’re getting another one.  Frequent trips to the bathroom and feeling like you have to go again even though you’ve just gone.  I started taking the cranberry pills and I even took some urinary tract infection pills that, no exaggeration, turn your pee florescent orange.  By the time I got halfway through work Monday night, I had gone from frequent urination to extremely frequent urination accompanied by quite a bit of discomfort.  So I went home, waited for my doctor to  be in and then called and asked if I could come in that day, instead of the next day, when I had an appointment for my regular thyroid checkup.  By that time, my pee had blood in it, and I had probably been to the bathroom twenty times.

Before I left to go to the doctor’s office, I drank a bottle of water because I knew they’d want to do a urine test.  Holding all of that water in became discomforting pretty quickly, so when I got to the office, I was beyond ready to go.  Still, I had to sit in the waiting room and wait for the doctor to be ready.  Right when I was about to go up to the receptionist and straight beg for a cup so I could pee in it, the doctor poked her head out into the waiting room and called for me.  And then she said, “Let’s go get your weight.”

What?

Now, generally, this wouldn’t have bothered me.  I’m on doctor-prescribed diet medication and I’ve lost forty-five pounds in about half a year.  I have to go, every month, and be weighed and otherwise checked out before she’ll rewrite the prescription for the medicine.  However, on a day when I was both dying from the need to pee and bloated from illness and the gallon of water I just spent the last twelve hours drinking, I did not want to be weighed.  I’m nothing if not polite, though, so I went to the scale and let her weigh me, even though I knew it would not be a figure she would be happy with and that it would just postpone any relief to the pain in my bladder.  Sure enough, I had gained weight, and sure enough, she didn’t seem happy about it, even though I told her that I had gained six pounds in one day from all the fluids I’d been ingesting.

After I finally got to go to the bathroom, and she had tested my sample, we went to one of the exam rooms.  She confirmed the bladder infection, asked me maybe two questions about it, and then moved on.  Of all the things that we were supposed to be there for, the UTI, the thyroid levels, and the weight loss, the weight loss was the one that got the most attention.  Instead of seeming at all concerned about the fact that I keep getting bladder infections, she grilled me about exercise and calorie counting and fat and carb grams.  She was more worried about the fact that it looked, to her, like I had fallen off the diet wagon than she was about me having an actual illness.

The thing is, the exact same thing happened last time I had a bladder infection.  I gained weight and she seemed disappointed because I gained weight, and assumed it was due to me not following the diet rules or whatever, when it was that I was just, for lack of a better word, overly saturated.  The next time I went back, after that, I had lost twelve pounds.  Partly because, as I recovered from my illness, all of the water weight went away.  I’ve already shed the six pounds I acquired this time.  I knew I would, though.  I think she thought I was just making excuses.

Just to add a nice touch of the absurd to the situation, my doctor wrote a book about herself, and had it displayed at the receptionist’s desk in the waiting area.  The name of the book, as far as I can recall, is Being a Size Four with Four Kids at Forty, or something like that.  So, yeah.  My skeleton wouldn’t even fit into a size four.  I’m sure she thinks I’m a giant fatass and that I gained weight from eating Twinkies and that I keep getting a urinary tract infection from using the cream filling in the Twinkies as lubrication to masturbate.

The truth is, I don’t eat that much.  I’m an extremely finicky eater and a creature of habit, so being on a diet with the help of a pill to curb my appetite isn’t exactly hard, because I have no problem eating cereal bars and fruit cups and sugar-free Jell-O every day for lunch.  I am not the kind of person who gets burned out on diet food, because I don’t get sick of things that I like, since I don’t like that much.

I read a quote, earlier, from Kelly Osbourne that said "I took more hell for being fat than I did for being an absolute raging drug addict. I will never understand that."  Exactly.  Why is not being fat more important than not doing all kinds of other things that are bad for you?  Why is being fat the more pressing health issue when I am neither obese nor afflicted with any weight-related health defects?  I think she should have cared more about the other things that were wrong with me instead of focusing, due to some personal prejudice of her own, on the fact that I had gained weight.

The sad part is that this isn’t even the first time that’s happened.  Early last year, my throat felt swollen all the time and I very often felt like I was choking.  According to the thyroid ultrasound, my thyroid wasn’t enlarged, so my doctor sent me to an ear, nose, and throat specialist.  I went to the office, and when I was filling out the paperwork, I noticed that all of the brochures they had given me were about acid reflux.  Some of them were about acid reflux as it relates to being overweight.  I started having a sneaking suspicion that I had been diagnosed before I ever even showed up to the office.  I wasn’t wrong.  After I waited forever to see the doctor, he ended up putting a scope down my throat and pronouncing that my throat actually didn’t look all that swollen to him, but he thought I had acid reflux, anyway.  I told him I didn’t have acid reflux, so, he dictated his diagnosis into his recorder, including the statement, “The patient claims that she doesn’t have any symptoms of acid reflux.”  Like I was lying about it just to avoid the treatment for acid reflux which is, take this pill, try harder not to be fat.  Or because I’m a blimp who doesn’t know what’s going on in my own esophagus considering how numbed it must be from rubbing up against all the food I shove down it.  I took the medicine that he prescribed me for a month, didn’t see any appreciable difference, and so I stopped taking it and didn’t go to my follow up appointment.

Again, I am not even obese.  I’m chubby, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not trying to pretend that I’m normal-sized.  But I’m within twenty pounds of my ideal weight, and even when I weigh more, I’m tall and large framed, so I carry it pretty well.  So, if this is what I go through, being slightly overweight, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for people who are morbidly obese.  Having people treat you like you don’t need to be taken seriously because of how much you weigh sucks.  And you are supposed to just take it, because you deserve it for being fat.

I am not exactly a member of the Fat Acceptance movement.  I agree with both sides of the argument a little bit.  Yes, people should try harder not to be overweight and being overweight is not a good thing.  However, it’s no one else’s business if a person is overweight and just because someone is overweight does not mean that they should be treated badly.  Overweight people feel bad enough without the rest of society thinking that they’re doing a public service by being rude to overweight people in an attempt to shame them skinny.

Also, it’s been my observation that most skinny people are skinny due to genetics and luck.  My boyfriend eats all of the same things I do, so when I’m eating crap and gaining weight, he still has a thirty-inch waist.  So, if you’re skinny but you’re not doing anything in particular that contributes to the way your body looks, then who are you to lord it over people who aren’t skinny?  We should diet and exercise?  You’re not dieting and exercising, either.  You’re just blessed with good genes.

To go back to Kelly’s point, maybe all of us fatties should just become giant meth-heads.  We’ll get skinny and therefore be healthy.  Except not.  Why do so many actresses and models smoke?  Because smoking helps you control your weight.  But they’re healthy.  Because they’re not fat.

I have to go back in three weeks for a follow-up.  Right after I get back from my vacation.  Which means that instead of eating what I want and enjoying myself, I’ll be thinking of all of the things I shouldn’t eat, so that I don’t have to deal with two epic fail weigh-ins in a row.  I’m going to eat a cheesesteak, though.  I don’t care if it makes me gain ten pounds.  I’m not going to Philadelphia and not eating a cheesesteak.  I haven’t had one in two and a half years.  I’ve suffered enough.

Celebrity culture is stupid. We make people famous and then we feel like we own them, and that’s such utter idiocy that it pains me to contemplate the fact that most people buy into it. If I buy your music or a ticket to your movie, I bought your music or a ticket to your movie. I didn’t buy you. You don’t owe me anything because our transaction is complete. Yes, I understand celebrity gratitude toward the people who, through their patronage, make it possible for that celebrity to have a financially lucrative career. I just don’t understand how so many of the patrons end up feeling like they’ve bought the celebrity themselves and not the celebrity’s product. Maybe it’s the human obsession with power. Having the power to build someone up and then tear them down.

This is precisely the reason why the public apology of Tiger Woods grosses me out. I haven’t watched it or read any text from it because the very idea of someone feeling like, just because he is famous, he owes an apology to the public at large for misdeeds he carried out in private, that doesn’t sit well with me. Tiger Woods didn’t do anything to me. Tiger Woods didn’t do anything to you. The people he owes apologies to are the members of his family who have actually been affected by what he’s done. He doesn’t owe an apology to his fans or to anyone else because he didn’t do anything to any of those people. Tiger Woods is famous because he’s good at golf. Cheating on his wife doesn’t make him an less good at that. The idea that because he’s famous he should be held to some kind of higher moral standard is ridiculous. Why do people who are famous need to be held to any kind of moral standard? As long as these people aren’t out committing violent crimes, what they do in their personal lives is not the business of anyone who isn’t involved in those personal lives.

Many people are saying things like, “Tiger Woods is just apologizing so that he can save his career.” Implying that his apology is not sincere, that it’s just an attempt at trying to reverse what has been a public relations nightmare for him. This probably is completely true. What’s sad is not that he’s publicly apologizing for something like this in an effort to save face, which means that it might not be the most heartfelt apology, ever. The sad thing is that obviously he feels like it’s necessary to be able to continue with his career. “I’m sorry that I had sex with someone who wasn’t you and who you don’t know, therefore cheating on my wife, who isn’t you and who you don’t know. I’m sorry that, because of this, I’m now a terrible golfer. Oh, wait…”

This sort of stupid celebrity logic is, in a way, the flip side of the coin to the Chris Brown fan reaction. With them it was “Chris Brown’s music is good, so he can’t be a bad person, so he didn’t do anything wrong.” The argument was never whether or not his music was any good. It was the horrifying ability on the part of his fans to reconcile his music with his personal behavior, to the extent that they just fanwanked that behavior away by blaming the victim and acting like an apology was sufficient to prove that he had suffered enough and should be forgiven. In this instance, it’s “Tiger Woods is a bad person, he did something wrong, let’s make him pay for it by making it so that he can’t earn money at the thing he’s good at, so that he knows that we can punish him.” So people aren’t supposed to take into account whether or not they still like him because of the thing that he does that made them like him to begin with, they’re just supposed to hate him because he did something totally unrelated that they should find morally offensive.

Ultimately, I think it comes back to race. Which doesn’t exist. In post-racial America. Yeah. I think white people feel like they made Tiger Woods famous, for playing a sport that mostly only white people play, and they let him make lots of money doing so, so he owes it to them to not offend their since of racial injustice. And he totally did so when he married a beautiful Aryan white woman and proceeded to prove himself to be the stereotypical deflowerer of white womanhood by fucking as many random white women as he could, while his wife stayed at home, already deflowered, nursing her sense of abandonment and her off-white children. Because Tiger Woods was just white enough to be allowed the status of golden boy, and just black enough to have it taken away at the first sign of not conforming to white people’s expectations of how he should behave. We gave him a day pass to roam off the plantation, and when he stepped out of line, we took it away.

I don’t like golf. I don’t care about Tiger Woods. I have never once cared about Tiger Woods. I also don’t care about whether or not celebrities are faithful to their spouses. I don’t care what drugs they do. I don’t care about their plastic surgery. I don’t care about their religion or lack thereof. The only thing I care about is whether or not they entertain me when they’re supposed to be entertaining. I have no desire to have power over someone I have never met and will probably never meet. It really doesn’t matter, all these things we pay so much attention to. I wish that people could figure this out for themselves. But they won’t. They’ll keep waiting for Snooki’s sex tape. I’ll just be over here waiting for Snooki to go away.

Someone drew a map of the world. The inside of Africa was a blank and the oceans were full of dragons. At the edge of the map was a waterfall where the seas spilled into the stars. You could try to sail a ship into forever but there would be no wind to push her forward. It’s a different kind of floating, when there’s no water to hold you up.

The world has ended. Yet it turns, and we are still here. Some of us. We breathe. And those who have died are not dead. There was no heaven to ascend to and so they roam the surface of a broken planet. Like the living, they have not discovered an effective means to surrender. The days of the white flag are over, swept away by the blast wave. They will not come again.

*****
If you met me now, would you know me? Would I make your heart race? Does your heart even remember how I made it feel, or why? If I met you now, I wouldn’t look twice. I’ve learned the hard way that love is highly impractical. Love doesn’t know anything about the business of being together. Love doesn’t care how hard it is, symbiosis. It only knows what it wants, and it will manipulate you accordingly.

It’s funny, when I tell people the truth, that I don’t like myself and I think that everyone else hates me, too, they always seemed shocked. I don’t know why. Because most people wouldn’t admit to that, or because it’s not apparent by my behavior that I feel this way? I don’t go around advertising that I don’t like myself, and since whether or not other people don’t like me doesn’t really affect how I view myself, I don’t give much thought to that, either. Maybe that reads as self-confidence. I don’t know how it would. I have a “just don’t give a fuck” attitude because I just don’t give a fuck, not because I think people like me well enough to overlook it if they don’t agree with what I say.

Discussing attempting to find a girl for a coworker to date, I said, “I can’t help. I don’t have any friends, so I can’t hook him up with anyone.” At which point the people at work who I’m friendly with protested that they are my friends, at which point I voiced my usual dissent. People from work who you are friendly with aren’t your friends. You’re forced together by work. Who knows if you would like each other if you had met outside of work. Probably not. I have little in common with any of the people I take breaks with and talk to regularly. In fact, they, being mostly older women, generally are somewhat disdainful of the things I do like, and, so I don’t look like I think it’s all them, vice versa. They wrinkle their noses in distaste at the clothing I like to wear and I mock them for liking American Idol. I don’t need people to like everything I like, so it doesn’t bother me, but I do think that friends need to have some kind of common ground in order for a friendship to flourish. I told them, “I like you, you say you like me, but if we didn’t work together, if we met on the street, you’d probably spit on me.” They all seemed shocked that I would say that, and of course I was exaggerating, but the fact is, there would be no reason for a woman in her late forties or early fifties to befriend a girl in her twenties, apropros of nothing. I’m younger than most of their children.

I’m fine with not having friends. There are a few people online that I consider my friends, and that’s good enough for me. I’m not a herd animal. I never have been. I don’t dissemble well enough to fit in. There have been lots of people who have said that they liked me, but a much smaller number who really knew me, and that’s one of the hazards of friendship. You place your trust in someone and expect them to figure you out because you’ve gone to the trouble of figuring them out, only to find out that they were never paying as much attention as you were. And that hurts, when you realize that you never meant as much to someone as they meant to you. I’d rather have no friends at all than have to go through that again. Sometimes I get lonely, sure, and sometimes I wish I had someone to confide in about the things I’m angsting about, but, in the long run, it’s better, I think, to keep things to myself, than to reveal them to someone else and spend every moment after that waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I’ve got my iPhone. I’m good.