we have to follow a consistent schedule or the baby will become a psychopath and our lives will explode
family microcosms and time passing and surrender
i am currently roasting zucchini, mushrooms, broccoli, and carrots in my oven because all of my vegetables were about to go bad + because i desperately need to meal prep something to take with me to work tomorrow for lunch so that i stop spending money on the halal carts near my office or the overpriced vegan baked good stand in union square market. i just got home from a really nice closing shift at the coffee shop i recently started working at part-time. through a series of unusual and lucky circumstances i became a barista last week at one of the best-tipping and quaintest coffeeshops in the hip and overpriced asf neighborhood of soho, manhattan. during my break i got a free vegetable and grain bowl from the restaurant down the street that my cafe has an employee-alliance with and explored a new public library (my fifth in the city so far).
on my way to work on the train this early afternoon i finished my argonauts audiobook. there was a lot of birth content and reproductive existentialism towards the end that i wasn’t prepared for. maggie nelson tells an anectode about how her toddler stepson runs around the playground shouting who wants to touch a really soft head? to the other kids about her newborn baby son.
i ended up missing my connecting train because i was having a teary-eyed moment on one of the public benches in the center of the platform. babies don’t remember being held, they only remember not being held. this made me think about the 48 hours i spent addicted to reading the intensely-depressing autofiction memoir of a woman who’s child i knew in real life. about how this child once literally tucked me into bed, kissed my forehead and pressed their mother’s quilt around me in the early morning to keep me warm while they left for work. about how i can clearly and physically remember being rocked and sung to sleep as a toddler by my dad (always exclusively bob marley). about the sensation of being carried in from the car when you fell asleep while your parents were driving when you’re little. about the vulnerable and intimate experience of falling asleep on someone you trust’s shoulder in a moving vehicle.
about how we all hold and are held. about aftercare. about a man i slept with in december who i made wait until a little after 2 in the morning to hook up with me because i was working on something important at a 24-hour coffee shop but it was the last time we were (probably ever) going to see each other, so we met up in the middle of the night in my room completely sober wearing glasses and pajamas and afterwards we laid upside down on my bed looking at the ceiling tracing the lines on each other’s palms and listening to each other’s favorite songs (both associated with memories of our fathers). about how he fell asleep curled up on my chest a little before sunrise with my arms wrapped around him like a child.
i like physical experiences that involve surrender. -maggie nelson, the argonauts
she mentions anal sex a surprising amount of times throughout the book. she calls out joan didion (as she should) for being oblivious to her daughter’s massive amount of privilege in blue nights. i walked through times square last week crying, listening to her describe the exact moment in which her mother passes away. i looked up a photo of her, expecting to find a much older and wiser looking woman, and was surprised to find that she looks eerily similar to the mother of one of my mormon friends growing up. i kind of wish i hadn’t seen it. the audiobook is read in her own voice - which has over the course of the past couple weeks become my comforting and grandmotherly inner monologue.
the closing quote of the book is: i know we’re still here. who knows how long?
this makes me think about death. which makes me think about what i would do, what i would possibly feel, if (when) someone that i love or once loved dies unexpectedly. my experiences with depression have never particularly manifested as suicidal ideation (like ik it does with so many people) but in the depths of heartbreak several years ago i remember thinking about how part of me wished that i’d randomly die in a freak accident, so that my recent-ex would regret breaking up with me and start romanticizing me and our memories together in the way that only death-grief can produce. i’d daydream about whether he’d attend my funeral - of course he would, right? which made me think about what i would do if he died. would i be invited to the funeral? would anyone even tell me? how soon afterwards? at what level on the totem pole did i stand now? how would i possibly feel? does it feel worse to be the ex or the widowed partner of a recently-dead person?
losing you by solange just came on, on shuffle.
i was mainly on register at work today, smiling widely and giving compliments and engaging customers in small-talk and meaningful eye contact, and thinking a lot about how much of life’s interactions (especially those related to money or consumerism) have to do with attraction, with coming across as attractive, as desireable, in whatever way that means in the given scenario. one hip queer man complimented my hair and said i was giving early 2000’s justin timberlake. another older man who my coworkers said is a regular recommended a restaurant with good mexican food in the area to me. i had just accidentally called out 4 drinks wrong and needed to re-make them so i faked interest, promised i’d check it out, and promptly forgot the name of the place completely. another guy told me he was from michigan and his shirt (that i complimented) was from a niche skate shop there. he asked if i was a skater and i said mm just a little bit and i think he wanted to talk to me more but i had orders to take. an obviously wealthy man asked why i really moved to new york with a knowing smile and i said that i wanted to be a filmmaker and he said he could see it, said something encouraging. a customer came in and looked nervous. i asked what he was up to. he said sheepishly he was waiting for a first date. my coworker and i wished him luck, and tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on their conversation. i think it was going well.
i had a dream last night that i shared a massive sleeping bag on a camping trip with two people i used to be romantically involved with. i woke up feeling warm and safe and cuddled, in a puddle of sunlight from my window on the third floor of our house. i realized i had two more hours (isn’t that the best feeling?) before i needed to wake up for work (my other job, a film internship) and then woke up 2.5 hours later, calculated that i would be late even if i was somehow able to teleport to the train station right then, and emailed in sick to work from home.
i got a sponsored ad on instagram this week for this article by The Cut (since when do publications use targeted ads for their articles to get more views?) that seemed ridiculously tailor-made for me. the author is a financial advice columnist, which makes me wonder how and under what circumstances she pivoted to write this article exposing her own issues with lateness and also how she got this far in life working in such a time-sensitive industry with such issues. i was an intern a couple years ago for the Austin Chronicle and while i loved writing and pitching articles (and think i was pretty good at it if i do say so myself) one of the hardest things for me to wrap my time-blind as fuck brain around at that job was being able to get things submitted by their deadlines. the issue has plagued my entire life and the prospect that this woman was able to make even minor progress is encouraging.
When I became a parent, I surprised everyone (particularly myself) by becoming more on time to things. The reason is straightforward: We have to follow a consistent schedule or the baby will become a psychopath and our lives will explode.
-Charlotte Cowles, A Late Person’s Guide To Being On Time
that made me laugh out loud on the subway when i read it. the thing that resonated with me the most was how she talks about how late-people often don’t respect their own time or schedule boundaries, and so it makes it hard to respect others’. yeah. also:
Fuschia Sirois, a psychologist and professor who studies self-regulation and time management, tells me that promptness is a behavior that can be learned. Conversely, so is lateness: “At some point, being late was modeled to you as acceptable behavior,” she explains. “And if it’s what you know, you’re more likely to repeat it.”
so basically, just like everything else, being a chronic late-person is a trait connected back to our parents and the behaviour and relationships we saw modeled as children.
i barely got any work-from-home work from my boss, and so i spent the afternoon impromptuly making art in our sun-drenched living room with my two roommates while (among other things) we talked shit about various men we’ve encountered in our lives. decaying teeth, wearing flip flops, living with one’s grandma, not being able to take no for an answer, having zero drug experience, being too close to their mom, and being an alcoholic were some of the red flags we discussed. one of my roommates told a horrifying story about how the boyfriend of a friend of her’s once threatened to throw a spear at her [the girlfriend’s] face while belligerantly drunk at a party.
i’ve never really encountered or dated an angry drunk, but the prospect is terrifying. toxic masculinity plagues us all, regardless of gender, in different ways. i think about how a man who’d been nothing but gentle with me in all other areas of our life slapped me in the face unprompted the first time that we slept together. i laughed and said what the fuck don’t do that in the moment. said i forgave him. but i could never look at him the same way.
i think about how the very mechanics and social structures of sex between men and women inherently contain a power dynamic, that must be acknowledged by both parties if one is to proceed without taking advantage or feeling taken advantage of. i think about the pressure to be a cool girl. the dichotomy between advocating shamelessly for your own desire yet also interrogating where those desires originated from. everything is a performance and i could talk about this forever.
in other news i am astounded and disturbed that it’s already march 1st. time is passing like it always does, too quickly. i’m not a teenager anymore and every month that passes feels like it’s inching closer and closer to my youth’s expiration date.
exactly one year ago i was falling in love with someone. they were one of the loveliest and most special people i’ve ever met. i haven’t spoken to them since june, and i’m not entirely sure why. the past year i’ve found myself doing (or not doing) a lot of things that don’t entirely make sense to me. i fell a little bit a lot to pieces, post-graduating.
let me set the scene: you’ve just finished a massive creative project that is probably the most important thing you’ve ever made that you’re actually genuinely proud of. it was incredibly difficult and you spent a lot of nights crying at 4 in the morning in the abandoned humor magazine office on campus. you got a single parking ticket one of these nights. you’re romantically involved with 3 different people — 2 of them are about to move to the other side of the world. who knows when, if ever, you’ll see either of them again. the other one keeps making you cry. you sleep alone less than half the nights of the week, on average. when you actually sleep.
your recent ex-boyfriend and former best friend (for a very understandable reason) just told you that everything in his body wants to run away from you and that he has no desire to ever talk to you again. you’ve graduated from college with an objectively useless degree in film, and have not applied to a single longterm job (mostly out of self-sabotaging perfectionism and a deep-seated and only-worsening fear of rejection). you’ve fallen into a part-time elected-leadership gig at your majority-student cooperative housing community, which gives you subsidized rent at least. you’ve made plans to move to new york city in january 2023. you don’t know exactly how, yet. these preparations fill you with dread (see: self-sabotaging perfectionism and fear of failure from before). last, but extremely significantly not least, your best friend — the most meaningful non-romantic connection you’ve ever made in your entire life, who you’ve gotten used to seeing every single day and don’t know how you’re going to live without — is moving across the world too.
so what do you do? you get blackout drunk the night before you leave to travel to india for a month to visit your extended family that you haven’t seen since you were 16 (because your parents are paying for it, and they need help sorting through your dead grandma’s belongings — she passed away from breast cancer during 2020 when the indian border was locked down. you attended the funeral over zoom.). you black out because you haven’t eaten anything at all that day because you’re earth-shatteringly depressed and anxious because all of your closest people have just left and you’ve had to drop them off one by one at the airport and drive home alone in the sweltering tx heat in your air condition-less car.
while blackout drunk you apparently make out with 3 of your housemates (only one of whom you’re remotely interested in), attempt to kiss your friend’s ex girlfriend, break into a storage closet in the club and start crying when you get in trouble, lose your phone in an uber, run headfirst into a tree (causing a nasty bruise that lingers for weeks), make an indecipherable instagram group chat with your best friend and 3 complete strangers, attempt to fill up your water bottle with an empty keg, log into your icloud account on your laptop with the help of your life-saving friend to use ‘find my iphone’, get your phone returned, tell everyone the pool is this way and walk out the front door into the street, and somehow find a way to text a man throughout all of this to invite him over to have sex with you. you wake up with the worst headache of your life not knowing who’s body is next to yours in bed. you’re afraid it might belong to the asshole who lives across the hall who keeps inviting you to raves. it’s not. you’re not sure if what happens next is better.
you fly to india positively burning with rage for this ridiculous man who keeps hurting your feelings and at yourself for letting him. you watch the entirety of scenes from a marriage on the plane and sob your eyes out. when you get into a weirdly emotional argument with your father on the way to lunch with 10 of your extended family members you cry into the mirror of an indian vegetarian restaurant’s bathroom and think maybe all of the relationship problems i encounter are really all my fault and of course someone would abandon me once they got to know me better. you splash your face with water and go play with your baby cousin. you haven’t been around babies in a long time and it’s kind of nice. you speak the same amount of malayalam as them.
you start running until your body is dripping in sweat. you buy cheap paint for less than a dollar and start sketching to keep yourself from going insane. you sleep a lot — too much. you drink a lot of chai. you can’t stop yourself from letting everyone around you down. you look through every single one of your dead grandma’s old film slides. imagining each stage of her life. you regret not spending more time with her, appreciating her, while she was still alive.
you eat dinner with just your father and completely break down and cry in the middle of a packed restaurant while trying to make yourself eat the butter paneer curry you’ve ordered. for like 30 minutes, you can’t get your tears to dry up. it’s not because of anything he or you have done in the moment, but just about how badly you want to learn how to really communicate with your family and achieve the sort of deep meaningful connection that you’ve always wanted with them. anytime your family spends more than a couple weeks together all in the same place, this type of existentialist all-encompassing dreadful realization occurs. how much your nuclear family is just a microcosm of every little bit of fucked-up-ness that each of you has inside yourselves. how much of that baggage you carry with you every day into your relationships with everyone around you. you take hour-long hot showers and listen to wild horses (the sundays cover or the acoustic version) too many times.
you accompany your musician cousin who’s in a kerala-famous band on tour to another city. you leave at 5 in the morning and watch society wake up through the tour bus window. you play Uno and Indian Monopoly with your second cousins. you spend hours on your grandma’s roof people-watching and making a meticulous playlist for the ridiculous man. you go out in public once without wearing a bra and everyone especially your mom has something to say about it. you’re suffocating a little bit, your body feeling commodified in a way it hasn’t since high school. skin isn’t skin it’s temptation it’s shame. you eat a fuck ton of pazham pori. you read the entirety of days of abandonment by elena ferrante and someone who will love you in all your damaged glory by raphael bob-waksberg. you don’t finish editing your sibling’s music video and spend hours staring at your laptop hating yourself for not being able to even open up the premiere project file. you distance yourself from everyone you care about except your family and the ridiculous man and you’re not sure why you’re doing it. you feel a little bit like all you know how to do is hurt people. like no one will ever truly understand you. like you’re incapable of maintaining healthy relationships and so this lackluster connection is the only thing you deserve.
you visit Athirappilly Falls while it’s pouring rain and you get completely soaked and it reminds you of the scene in happy together (1997). you remember kissing in the rain. you think for an instant that love can save you. you return to your parent’s house in north texas and you re-bleach your roots, badly, with a box kit from the neighborhood walmart. you avoid going back to austin for an extra 5 days. you don’t really want to know what happens next. you wish you could hit pause on life, until you figure out how to fix things. how to be a person again.
you feel like you always do when you go away and return to the depressing suburban hellscape you grew up in - dissociative and ungrateful and dissonant with the different parts of yourself and who you want to be. you return to austin and join a queer kickball league with your close friend to find some semblance of the community you’ve lost. you try your best to enjoy the summer. you still can’t make up your mind about ridiculous man, but when he tells you he’s moving away in less than a month and he wants to spend that month with you, you decide fuck it. the countdown to yet another indefinite goodbye begins. you decide being a person again can wait.
you’re not that young and you’re not that stupid anymore — you try to maintain boundaries, to be a healthy communicator, to save at least 10% of yourself so that you have something to fall back on. but somewhere along the way the bar of what you’re willing to accept descends into hell and so does your self-esteem.
it’s not all Bad — a lot of it is even Very Good. but the gist is that you know it’s going to hurt you and you lean in anyway. the tragedy of the situation is too irresistable. you know this person does not know how to love you the way you want to be loved. you know this because they told you, in a million different ways. you want to believe they can be changed because if you can fix them maybe you can be fixed too.
and so, hence begins a series of self-sabotaging choices that trickle into almost every area of your life. you think pain is good, pain means i’m alive. you want to feel alive.
none of this is really an excuse or an explanation for how the rest of my year went but it’s a pretty solid origin story. things got better, and then they got worse, and then they got better, and then they got worse, and then they got so vastly better that of course then they got vastly much worse, and then they got a little bit better, and are probably continuing to get better but the worse comes and goes in waves. like everything does.
whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
-maggie nelson, the argonauts
in completely unrelated news, i am going to see my favorite musician at radio city music hall tonight. it’s the first time i’ll ever be going to a concert completely alone. something i’ve been wanting to do for a while. a guy i know saw her in austin a few weeks ago and wrote that she healed him. i hope she heals me a little bit too.
update: she did heal me. it’s good to see you she said to us all. if you’re ever feeling disconnected just close your eyes. they played this unreleased song live and i’ve been listening to it on repeat all day. her voice gave me chills.
