I recently held a dinner party during which an old friend who is going through a somewhat torturous break up gleefully exclaimed, “Everyone in this room is single!” We all laughed (nervously?) at the us-versus-them mentality. Most of us had been on both sides of that divide.

At the very same dinner party, over ratatouille and white wine, the very same friend claimed that I have a tendency to date assholes that are not good enough for me. These are the kinds of things friends say that are sweet, but a bit cliché and not necessarily true. I silently objected, not only because most of the aforementioned “assholes” are not assholes-in-general, just assholes-to-me but also because that statement effaces the complicated nature of human relationships and the proclivity of all human beings towards periods of romantic error. Or, wait, am I just lonely? Sometimes I get so confused.
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Katharine started wearing lipstick and smoking pot when she was twelve. By sixteen she was getting kicked out of boarding school for allegedly dealing cocaine. In the fourth grade I told her that the word “rad” was not in the dictionary. Clearly, I had no friends.

So, Sarah Beller’s totally rad new column got me thinking: do we mold our destinies in our tweenhood? Am I forever bound to being tragically unhip?
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Have you ever noticed how when you’re going through a break up your friends will often remark (whether it’s true or not), “You’re so much cuter than he is, he doesn’t know what he’s missing”? Or when an ex finds a new love, the first thing your friends will note is her relative attractiveness (“OMG what is with her hair?”)? As if beauty is the defining factor. As if it matters what the new girl even looks like or if your ex has hairy knuckles and a beer belly.

Whenever people say things like this to me, I tend to smile (admittedly slightly flattered) and then think, “God, how irrelevant… and such a fucking cliché.”
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I’ve got a joke I’ve been dying to tell you.

Sometimes I think the reason I have so much trouble loving myself is that I imagine my life as a narrative and I’m the person-less narrator. All my friends are the characters, imbued with fascinating attributes (the neurotic, blonde novelist; the disenchanted philosopher; the aspiring curator who loves to dance and refuses to wear jeans; the socialist art historian who can drink me under the table; and so on). The people in my life take on mythic proportions in my mental meanderings. But I cannot imagine anyone ever thinking such things about me. This is both self-defeating and arrogant in its assertion: no one else could possibly see the world as I do.

I confessed this to a like-minded friend and she responded, “When I was little I thought I was retarded and my Mom had asked the world to pretend I was normal.”
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“Thanksgiving isn’t about the blending of two cultures. It’s about one culture wiping out another. And then they make animated specials about the part where, with the maize and the big, big belt buckles. They don’t show you the next scene, where all the bison die and Squanto takes a musket ball in the stomach.” — Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Around Thanksgiving we all start to think about our relationship to food. Because, let’s face it, Thanksgiving feels like it’s more about yams than it is about giving thanks.

But food itself feels rather complicated these days. What with the factory farms, rising obesity levels, diet fads, fast food, and so on—I don’t need Michael Pollan to tell me that corporate America has a complicated relationship with what it puts in its collective belly. We also have a complicated relationship to this land and its history. As Susan Sontag has noted, “Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.” We have no memorials for our hometown atrocities—we don’t have museums dedicated to acknowledging the evil of slavery; and what is Thanksgiving but a memorial to an imagined, cleaned-up, Disneyfied history?
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One of the hardest things to admit is that you’re not doing okay. We want to be always glowing and effusive, charming and graceful but most of us hide little pits of darkness, ever growing and receding, in our guts.

I’ve never used the word “depression” in describing my life, but there has always been a sadness there, spreading like watery ink across a page. I suppose by sadness I mean a kind of melancholy, an unanchored sadness that is ever-present. I am not talking about an incapacitating depression, although it courts that state like a weary lover.
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For my ladies

I believe in post-feminism in much the same way I believe in unicorns. It is little more than a mythology Williamsburg twenty-somethings daydream about, whilst leafing through Zizek, with their MacBook and coffee on a Sunday afternoon at Atlas Café.

Don’t get me wrong; I would love to live in a post-feminist society. I would love to believe that we no longer need feminism. Can you imagine what a post-feminist society would even look like? I believe, to plagiarize and recontextualize the words of my good friend Ian F. King, we’d all be united (women, men, transgendered people, lesbians, and gays of all races) “under a linty blanket of forthright, vulnerable honesty, and we [would] be beautiful for it.”
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Do you remember what happened on this day, one year ago? Before the war in Afghanistan got worse, before Republicans and Democrats alike began to whittle away at our health care hopes? Do you remember where you were and what you were doing? I bet you can. I’m sure we all can. Yes We Can!

Here’s what I remember: magic. I remember six of us huddled on a tiny bed in Greenpoint, drinking beer and wine, and shhhing each other every few minutes. I remember May Wilkerson crying hysterically and unabashedly as each state’s results were called. I remember sucking down my cigarette on the fire escape, hoping I wouldn’t miss the Ohio results. I remember giggling, holding hands, and jumping up and down on the aforementioned bed with May and two TTH editors after the election was called. I remember everyone’s cell phone beeping with text after text. I remember a million text messages saying simply, “I love you.”
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Carley dressed up as a tree last Halloween. Minus the plastic leaves in her matte of curly red hair, she really didn’t look all that different than she does on a normal night out. The tweed short shorts and tights and the brownish vintage sweater could’ve been part of her daily attire. We were late-night dancing at PS 122 with a few friends and Carley was on the floor shakin’ it to some soul music. I love the way she dances – flailing and spinning like a whirling dervish. She is a force to be reckoned with. Anyway, she was literally on the floor in some kind of backbend when a group of would-be do-gooders rushed over, trying to lift her up, assuming she had had one too many whiskeys in celebration. I understood their mistake, it’s an easy one to make; they just didn’t get it. Carley wasn’t drunk she just likes to get down. She just doesn’t give a fuck.
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I occasionally have emotional meltdowns at work. Happens to everyone, right? Well, for me, this is a rather embarrassing enterprise that involves dashing to the bathroom and hoping to God no one comes in while I sit with my head between my knees and attempt to stop hyperventilating in an ominously grey stall. Sometimes these meltdowns are actually work-related but, more often than not, they are caused by one of my many procrastination tools: Gchat.

Gchat, like its evil twin Facebook, is useful, sure. But it is also a torture device.

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Prologue

Last week I found myself at KGB Bar on a Tuesday night wondering how I could convince Arthur Jones to marry me. The room was, unsurprisingly, cast a warm tone of red that was particularly comforting after stepping out of the early autumn chill. I was nursing a glass of white wine and trying unsuccessfully to fix the bow on the front of the blouse that I had decided was just-Victorian-enough and certainly not-too-twee for a non-fiction reading featuring the work of a This American Life contributor. Abandoning my pesky bow, I dreamily gazed at my new imaginary boyfriend as he displayed his post-it note illustrations of a number of short stories written by himself, Mike Albo, Andrew Solomon, and Starlee Kine. My heart dropped when, during his story about his relationship with his evil twin, “the other Arthur Jones” (inventor of the Nautilus—Google him, it’s worth it), he mentioned his girlfriend, Agnes. Sigh. It only fell further during his animation of his friend and post-it note comrade Starlee Kine’s story.
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I generally can’t stand when people relate scientific studies to their personal life. For one, it stinks of self-absorption. And, besides, we’ve all been around long enough to know that most of these theories have the academic shelf-life of a carton of milk. One minute we’re all avoiding red wine, the next we’re boozing again. It can be even trickier with psychological studies. I mean, how does one quantify happiness? Love? Anxiety?

However, when I read Robin Henig’s recent article on the possible causes of anxiety in the most recent New York Times Magazine, I had my own “Aha!” moment. I’ve never really thought of myself as anxious per se. Shy, prone to depression, self-involved, sure. But, except during the few days after I quit smoking, I’ve never had physical panic attacks. I’ve never been prescribed medication. I fail at therapy because I tend to be so mercurial that by the time I’m sitting in the chair I can’t even relate to the girl who cried herself to sleep the night before. I can feign calmness. I’m not afraid of heights or airplanes. There are so many clichés that I imagined defined an anxious person, and I just never fit the bill.
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Have you ever had your heart broken? Have you ever broken someone else’s heart? Do you want to talk about it?

On a balmy early autumn evening I went to see (500) Days of Summer with my friend Andrew as kind of a lark. We ate burgers at a kitschy diner near Union Square and then, during the film, he squeezed my hand several times for solidarity.

1. I was seventeen. No other boy had ever seen me naked. How could I possibly know how much it would hurt when you told me, over coffee in Harvard Square, that you were sleeping with someone else? I couldn’t. I went home and watched Harold and Maude. For the first time, I wasn’t disgusted by the eighty year-old flesh. I got it now. I was free! There’s a million things to be, you know that there are…

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To Jackie: Welcome to the neighborhood.

David and I are walking home through the cooling almost-autumn air. Northern Greenpoint is shrouded in a quiet Sunday evening twilight; all the little Polish convenience stores are long closed. We are holding hands and I am half-jokingly proposing marriage. Why not David? He is one of my oldest friends and there has never been anything remotely romantic between us, but he has a job and an apartment and that’s more than I can say for at least half of the boys I’ve dated in the past two years. We are drunk on red wine.

Autumn 1999. David, Andrew, Alexandra, Isabelle, and I are skipping through the cobble stone streets of a medieval town in Northern France. It is a rainy September evening and we’ve been drinking. We are a chain of little, teenaged interlocking hands. We don’t speak French but we can order vin rouge and pizza margherita perfectly after a few weeks in this city.
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Unlike the TTH boys, I didn’t get a summer vacation, and, frankly, I’m exhausted. So I asked my dear friend Anna if she would be so gracious as to write a guest “Built To Last.” Anna Wainwright is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She runs the website www.francetoday.com, is a contributing editor at the Brooklyn Rail, and blogs for the Huffington Post. She is the coordinator of KGB Bar’s Nonfiction Reading Series, and is currently at work on her first novel. She loves Italian epic chivalric poetry, white wine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and talking about her myriad neuroses. Clearly, she is one of my favorite people in the world. Enjoy! – S.E.

I Don’t Need No Diamond Ring

You see them everywhere. They’re in the elevator with you, on the next bike at the gym, flashing at you from across a crowded room. Diamonds. There was probably over a million dollars worth of ice on my F train this morning, and that was in Brooklyn. Imagine what a busload of ladies on the Upper East Side must be packing.

I got in trouble with my best friend the other day. She expressed wistful admiration for her boss’s ring, a rock the size of my front tooth. Rather than just smile and nod, I pointed out that that particular diamond probably cost several small African children their lives. Her response was stony silence.
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Once upon a time (or more specifically last week) on Gchat:

me: i’m bored
Anna: here read this
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6805656.ece
me: eeeeeeeeeeeew
i hate richard dawkins
hate hate hate hate hate
Anna: why?
me: because he’s a moron
ok, he’s not a moron
but that book the god delusion
is delusional
he just hates religion
it’s like his one-man crusade
ack i am clearly getting irate
did i never send you terry eagleton’s review of his book?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
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I spent the better part of Tuesday morning in the USCIS office in Borough Park, Brooklyn. I found myself glancing nervously from the calming periwinkle walls to a poster that read “Securing America’s Promise” in bold white letters over an American flag. I was pretty hung-over when I got on the L train and it was already in the mid-80s as I dragged my sandaled feet down the empty streets under the N train at 8 AM. The green card application center itself was in a strip mall that had an abandoned look to it on a street home to little other than auto repair shops. None of the stores were open and there was an empty merry-go-round at the end of the darkened hallway. The only fluorescent light came from the USCIS office—a beacon, guiding me.

We are not the same I am an alien.
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I’ve been thinking about anxiety a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I’m reading Fear of Flying, which is honestly giving me nightmares. This passage will likely haunt me more than that awful horror movie I watched in some East Providence movie theater earlier this week:

You look like you want to be saved, ducks. You ask for it. You turn those big myopic eyes up at me as if I were Big Daddy Psychoanalyst. You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human.

How can someone my friend Anna so aptly described as a “narcissistic loon” write a book that rings so infuriatingly true? (And in such straightforward prose that, by page 230, she has me hating the word “cunt” more than I ever imagined I could?) All Erica Jong’s talk of anxiety about flying, sex, love, and psychoanalysis hits far too close to home. Even if the obsession with Freudian phallic allusions and marriage seem outdated, most of Isadora Wing’s internal dialogue could be my own or that of any of my overeducated, understimulated female friends.

Klonopin. Adderall. Xanax.
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PART ONE: The Girl Crush/Bromance Conundrum

Jen was beautiful in an unobtrusive way. She made quick, nervous and impossibly smart comments in our Baroque Constructions seminar. Her hair was always perfectly un-coiffed and she’d pick at her fingernails during lectures. She never said hi when she sat down and would usually scamper off immediately after class. Sometimes her boyfriend would be waiting out front of the building with their bikes; hers had a cute little basket.

We first spoke when we decided to co-author a catalogue essay for some mutual friends’ art opening. We met at a coffee shop and went over our notes, talking faster and more excitedly as the hours slipped by. It was a hot, sticky afternoon in August of 2006 and she later confessed to me that she had so desperately wanted to invite me out to her parents’ pool but was too nervous.
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In the Fall, I might quit my job and move to Cairo and teach English. Or perhaps I’ll move to Berlin and work in a youth hostel because I know a girl who knows a guy who knows a guy, so I might have an in. I hear there’s a really great art scene and I love the way German words are a paragraph long. I want to learn all about German words.

Last weekend, I was at a bar around the corner from my Greenpoint apartment for the after-party of some friends’ show in Hoboken. I was kind of sleepy from all the traveling to and from New Jersey in the rain—leaving New York is exhausting. By one AM, I was slumped over in my chair, watching my friend Dan ogle the bartender when Sam Axelrod turned to me and said, “Do you think you ever meet new people in this city? I feel like I never meet new people anymore.”
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