Anti-Pleasure Dissertation

R.E.C. and I have set this site to ‘private’ for some time now. There are some things I’ve written on it that I’m not proud of. I wasn’t exactly proud of them when I wrote them, either, but I still wanted to write them on the odd, shape-shifting palimpsest that is our Internet. I could have written them on a Word document if I really didn’t want them to become public, and I take full responsibility for that decision, even though it has caused me and people I wrote about pain. There are still people who I hope will never read this site, which I know is unreasonable, like leaving a diary open and saying “but don’t read it!” Nevertheless, I hope.

The reason that I’m making the site public again is because I want anyone who cares, if anyone does, to be able to read my side of the story and form their own conclusions. In the magazine article that Josh wrote about my having written about him on this blog, he made it sound like I had created this site in order to smear his reputation, which he found “creepy.” Well, yeah, that does sound creepy! But I think it would be hard to read all the posts that Ruth and I wrote and conclude that we were doing anything other than writing, for each other and whoever else wanted to know, about what our lives were like in the aftermath of long-term relationships, from manic rebound highs to depressive lows. Josh also made it sound like the impulse to share details of your private life with strangers was completely alien to him — in an article where he shared details of his private life with strangers. I hardly need to point out the irony there, except maybe I do, because it seems to have eluded him.

When you write about things as they’re happening — which is what most people do on blogs — you lose perspective, or rather, your perspective shrinks, so that only a tiny slice of your reality gets recorded. The cumulative impact of several months’ worth of posts can lead to an entirely different conclusion than a few snippets taken out of context. This is the danger of blogging and also its seductive charm. It’s so easy and fun to report on your current state of mind and your opinions, especially when you have strong feelings, and strong feelings are also fun to read about. You hated that movie! You’re in love with that guy! That person’s a douchebag!

Unfettered self-expression has its drawbacks, though. Like: what if you change your mind? What if you learn some things that make you feel entirely differently about that person, that movie, that guy? The version you recorded is still perpetually available, making you seem wishy-washy or, worse, like a liar if you flip-flop now. Your problem now becomes that the most popular result of a Google search becomes “the truth,” even if you’d like it to be otherwise.

Well: You can’t control what people think, and who cares what they think anyway? By now, the only person who really cares about this stuff is you, and maybe Nick Denton because he is, among other things, a pervert who delights in other people’s misfortunes. Josh is busy altering his odd sweaters with the $2K he got for his article and probably doesn’t give a shit about anything but that money, and the fact that the whole little scandal gave Gawker commenters another opportunity to marvel at the musculature of his torso. It’s better to leave well enough alone, take the high road, and just try to forget about the whole thing.

Well, obviously I couldn’t quite do that. But I also won’t go through that article point by point and refute what I think its omissions and inaccuracies are or try to revise history by erasing or altering anything I’ve written here, tempting as it is to do so.

I made some mistakes, it’s true. Writing this may well be another! But I am not going to shut up just because I might regret what I’ve said later. That might be the smart thing to do, and I’ve tried to, but I can’t. It must be because I’m a blogger.

 

Tea and cookies

My happiest moments in San Francisco were spent lying alongside RC in her cozy bed, dozy from her Vicodin, watching tv like invalids. We watched The Office and The Sopranos. We also watched a French movie that tracked the course of a terrible marriage backwards, from divorce to first meeting.

Neither of us could understand what the couple’s marriage was supposed to have been founded on in the first place: deep compatibility? Pure animal lust?  Love? Love wasn’t telegraphed in this movie the way it is in American movies, with wide-eyed staring, breathy whispers and smiles. Maybe the couple was in love and I just have no idea what that’s supposed to look like anymore.

We walked around in Golden Gate Park which, like a lot of other things about San Francisco, is incredibly pretty in the abstract, but grimy and depressing up close.  We walked along a lush forest path, everything extra green and enlivened by the soaking rain that had fallen nonstop for the first two days of my visit.

(Also it was very windy and cold and no one has heat in their houses, I feel obligated to point out!)

Anyway we walked  along, smelling the eucalyptus and pine, avoiding eye contact with the grimy people who live in the park (”It’s like an outdoor music festival with no music,” RC had explained earlier).  We started talking about how she thinks her exboyfriend never loved her. I eventually got her to amend this to: He never loved her, based on her definition of “love.” From what I know about them, this seems accurate. She said she wished she’d never gotten back together after the first time they broke up.

And I remembered, for the first time in a long time, about how, a couple months into our so-intense-so-fast relationship (I’ll never be that young and trusting again!), William had freaked out and tried to break up with me and I hadn’t let him.

I sat on his lap in the kitchen and deployed the biggest weapon in my arsenal. It was the only weapon in my arsenal, actually.  Also it had only just then occured to me. I asked him to imagine me with someone else and, because he couldn’t imagine that, he stayed with me. I wonder whether it should have ended then. I wonder what the past six years of my life would’ve been like.

RC’s relationship totally should have ended the first time it ended, right? Or maybe there’s a purpose to everything she’s suffered since. Does all suffering have to have a purpose? Does any suffering ever have a purpose?

Anyway later we went to a teahouse that had at least forty floridly described varieties of tea on its menu. One had been specially blended for the Dalai Lama. Another was described as being somehow like the thundering hooves of a herd of majestic stallions.

San Francisco!

RC sat across from me, dipping green tea cookies into her $6 chai. “I wonder if I’ll ever date anyone again,” she mused.

I got ready to launch into “Don’t be ridiculous, of course you will, and sooner than you think,” but it was late in my visit and each of us had given the other one so many hollow pep talks by then, all the words had been said so I stopped a few words in.  I ate a bite of cookie.  It was delicious.

“I wonder if I’ll ever love anyone again,” I said.

Then we sat there silently for a while, stabbing our forks into a little puddle of green tea mousse and then into the fudge brownie alongside it.  It was an unexpectedly good flavor combination.  San Francisco does have the most amazing food.

 

Hippie Soup

“This is my little brother Ben. He’s a hippie,” I told Patrick, who owns the friendly cafe a block away from my house where I always feel bad about noticing movie stars, because they have so obviously come here to be safe in a homey little corner of Brooklyn where no one will recognize them. (However, someone once sent a sighting of ME at the Victory to the Gawker Stalker tip line, so this is a delusion on everybody’s part).

“Nice to meet you, Ben,” Patrick said, and told us a story about how he used to steal pot from hippies when he was 11. Then he gave us a free breakfast. I really like Patrick.

Ben rolled his eyes. He doesn’t especially like being called a hippie, but that’s what he is. Personally I would be a little bit flattered if someone called me a hippie, but I guess that’s one of the differences between being a (semi) adult person who has always had a job who, like, has some tattoos and will order her entree with brown rice instead of white if that’s an option and being an almost 22 year old male college sophomore with long, long Jesus hair who has spent time — like, years — living on actual communes.

Anyway, Ben and I took our tea and bagels and walked to the Flatbush Avenue Long Island railroad station, where we caught the train to Rockville Center to attend our grandfather’s funeral.

The funeral home was lame as fuck, not at all like Fisher and Sons. I found myself wondering whether a small cottage industry of Fisher and Sons-themed funeral homes has sprung up to tend to the deathtime needs of hardcore Six Feet Under fans, and whether it would be possible for me to have my funeral at one, and whether I would actually want to do that. I also mused about a lot of more appropriately somber things as I sat on some fake-fancy furniture with my family, facing away from the corner of the room with my grandfather’s coffin in it.

I really appreciate about Judaism that everyone gets buried in the same unvarnished wooden crate. It was jarring to actually see it, though. The funeral director came and made my Dad look in the coffin, which I guess is an important duty that someone has to do. This started a mini-trend of people looking in the coffin: My aunt and my brother both did. “He looks good, he looks good,” my aunt kept repeating. My brother said he wished he hadn’t looked.

I felt like I was being chicken, but I was not about to go look in the coffin.

I have seen the going-out-to-the-graveyard scene in a hundred movies and tv shows but this was my first time experiencing it, and those tv shows and movies have it right, pretty much. People in black stand in the wintry, windswept graveyard looking stoic while a priest or in this case a rabbi says a couple of things, and occasionally the people burst into tears. Again, Judaism has a good aspect: everyone shovels a ceremonial shovelful of dirt into the grave. The dirt makes a loud plopping sound as it hits the coffin. When you see a coffin lying in a grave as you shovel dirt on top of it, you cannot help but realize that the person in the coffin really is dead.

Afterwards, we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the couch in my grandparents’ apartment, eating cold cuts and rugelach. For the next few hours, old people and middle aged people were talking about movies they’ve seen recently, what their grandchildren are up to, doesn’t Medicare suck, what medications they’re on, and other old-people topics. I kind of wished that someone wanted to talk about like ‘death, man, what is up with that’ but a funeral isn’t really the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation.

However, the rest of the evening, which I spent with my little brother at my apartment, completely was the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation. We talked, not only about ‘death, what is up’ but also: ‘is the government spying on us at all times (yes)’, ‘capitalism is so so so so bad’, and also ‘consumerism, corporations, and global agribusiness are so so so so bad’. We talked about ‘basically we live in the Matrix’ and about the commune in Hawaii Ben’s hoping to start. It was equal parts bleak and fun and annoying. Along the way, we — or really Ben — made some soup out of the vegetal contents of my fridge. We ate it with a salad and some Irish soda bread.

Hippie Soup (tastes especially good if the only thing you’ve eaten all day is a bagel and some funeral meat)

One can black beans

One can whole tomatoes

a few cloves of minced garlic

a diced onion

Whatever vegetables are in your fridge. I had:

Half a head of Savoy cabbage

Four potatoes

A parsnip

Saute the onion and garlic. Dice the potato but leave the skin on. Remember, you’re a hippie! Slice up the cabbage and the parsnip and add those too. Add the beans and the tomato, salt and pepper, and a bunch of water. Simmer until the veggies are soft.

Irish soda bread

2 cups of preferably bread flour but it’s not like I have bread flour

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 cup buttermilk or failing that, milk or even (this worked!) soymilk with a splash of vinegar added

Preheat oven to 350. Sift together (or just whisk together) the dry ingredients. Add the buttermilk or faux-buttermilk and knead on a well-floured surface for about a minute. Add more flour if the dough is too sticky. Shape into two mini-loaves and place them on a greased cookie sheet, scoring across the top with a sharp knife. Bake for 45 minutes. Try to let them cool before you eat them.

You’d think a hippie would use whole wheat flour but life is too short for that bullshit.

 

Not hungry

In the trash room of my parents’ new condo in Coconut Grove, you can press a button to tell the trash chute what kind of trash it will be receiving: periodicals, cans and bottles, or regular garbage. The hallways are plush-carpeted and floral-scented. Even the gym, which is just a largeish mirrored room full of different kinds of brand new exercise equipment, is plush-carpeted and floral-scented. Everything is done in subtle, soothing shades of cream and pale brick red and pale green, and in the hallways there are large oil paintings of dead pheasants and tapestries and heavy chandeliers. It’s like a cartoon about the idea of luxury, sort of like how Florida is a cartoon about the idea of paradise.

Today we went to a big manicured tropical garden where my mom has purchased a membership and we walked around the man-made ponds and waterfalls looking at hypertrophic versions of familiar houseplants. There was an iguana with a ruff around its neck and I moved too close to it and made it hurriedly clamber up a palm tree.

On her cel phone, my mom was talking to my little brother about the plans for my grandfather’s funeral, so I didn’t have to smile or make conversation and I could just walk around and think about whatever was in my head. I stared up at the perfect blue sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds. I bent my head and took a big whiff of some little purple flowers so sweet-smelling they didn’t even smell real. I felt the warmth of the sun and the slight balmy breeze on my bare arms. I tried to absorb it all through my eyes and my pores, like it was some kind of medicine. I tried to remind myself that beauty is here for us to enjoy, and that we are here to enjoy beauty.

But I didn’t start feeling better. I keep not starting to feel better. There’s nothing I want to do and nothing that I want to think and nothing that I want to say. There’s no one I want to talk to and no place I want to go. And there’s nothing I want to eat. I haven’t been hungry in weeks.

 

Marinated Kale Salad

The acupuncturist had just gotten to the part of the form I’d filled out where I’d described “any major recent life stressors.”

“So you broke up with your boyfriend of six years six months ago and moved into a new place by yourself. You have an ovarian cyst and you’re in pain a lot of the time. And on Friday you quit your job with nothing lined up.”

“Mhmm. Also I forgot to put that my grandfather’s in the hospital and it seems like he might die.”

Then I cried a little bit before hopping up on the table where the acupuncturist inserted tiny, thin needles into my feet, calves, wrist, stomach, and ears and I lay there for a while, feeling sleepy and calm.

Then I got on the train and headed to Greenpoint, to Scuttlebutt’s apartment where she lives with her boyfriend. Since the last time I was there, he’s put up a mirror in the hallway and a lot of little shelves. They also have a 48” white fiber-optic Christmas tree. We cuddled up by the tv and had a healthy dinner of tofu and rice and marinated kale salad.

Ingredients:

Some kale

A lemon

garlic

olive oil

young sweet carrots, cut into thin coins

avocado, cubed

Combine the juice of the lemon with the pressed garlic clove and the olive oil, then put the washed, cut-up kale in there and massage it with your hands for a few minutes until it gets nicely wilty. Integrate the carrot coins and avocado cubes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve. This salad is improbably addictive and delicious and very, very healthy for you. You get the sense that if you smoke a cigarette or eat a bag of M&Ms afterward, the kale in your stomach will be offended somehow.

I love Scuttlebutt but it made me so sad to be in her domestic, cozy apartment that she shares with her adorable boyfriend, and it made me even sadder to be in Greenpoint, which is familiar and homey to me in a way that I worry my new neighborhood will never be. The Christmas lights are strung up across Manhattan Ave. and as I walked from Scuttlebutt’s apartment back to the G train to go home, I had the wild impulse to call William and invite myself over to my old apartment to say hi. I imagined walking through the door.

And then I realized that what I was imagining going back to was our apartment a year ago, with a Christmas tree in the corner decorated with the ornaments I bought at Pearl River Mart and the ones from William’s grandmother. I remembered how happy I’d been to look in the window and see those lights every time I came home. I could almost smell the old fuggy smell of our apartment, pot and incense and pine needles and cooking.

I wanted to go there so badly. I wanted to run there. But you can’t go back to a place that no longer exists.

I stood on the platform of the G train with tears streaming down my face. It did suck living off the G train. That fucking train always takes forever to come.

 

Sweet Potato Casserole

Apparently it’s now “traditional” for me to make sweet potato casserole with crunchy pecan topping for Thanksgiving. I made it a few times, I guess, and everyone loves it, probably because it’s loaded with butter and sugar and is for all intents a crustless sweet potato pie. I was a little grossed out by it yesterday, but then, I was feeling grossed out by a lot of things.

I was grossed out by the sadness inherent in a day that’s about the anticipation of a heavy meal that everyone inhales in minutes. I’m also grossed out by the suburbs. What a snob, right? After all, I grew up here among these strip malls and and prefab houses with their potpourri bathrooms and sectional sofas. But this isn’t my home and it hasn’t been for seven years.

Back in New York, my dad’s father is in the hospital and not doing well. Last Sunday I went out to Long Island to visit him. I’ve only had to do this once before; I’m lucky I guess. The other time I think I also panicked beforehand. Actually I used to panic before every time I would be setting out early in the morning to visit my grandparents, because of how much I love them and how irritating they are and how much I feel like they’ll never understand anything to do with my life at all and how inevitably they’ll die soon. William was always pretty good at calming me down.

So the night before I was to go out there, I called him. There was no one else I wanted to talk to. It was the wrong thing to do but I needed to do it. It made me realize that there’s still a part of me that doesn’t quite believe, yet, that we’re not together anymore and that we’re never going to be again. That part of me is kept afloat by the knowledge that somewhere out there, he’s still caring about what happens to me. And that’s what I need to let go of before I can love anybody else.

But the pull of pattern and habit is so strong. Like: settling into being lectured by William felt so normal and natural, just listening to the cadences of his voice as he told me everything I’d done wrong.

When I hung up with him I felt temporarily better, and then I felt even emptier and more alone than before.

We used to have Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house in College Park. Now we have it at my uncle’s house because my mom’s parents live in a place called Riderwood Village, where the apartment hallways are plushy carpeted and the different buildings have names like ‘Orchard House.’

I used to stay in my old bedroom in the house I grew up in when I came to stay with my parents. Now we stay in a Marriott Residence Inn.

Also I smoked pot for the first time in four months last night, with a 19 year old friend of the family who reassured me that I don’t look old (”I thought you were 22 or 24″) and wanted to talk geopolitics (”I’m just gonna lay this out there: we’re fucked.”)

Some things are traditions and some things are patterns and some things are bad habits. I can’t tell which is which anymore.

This casserole is good, though, in a “it’s bad but you can’t resist and after what you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?”way.

4 cups mashed sweet potatoes

3 eggs

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

splash of vanilla

pinch of salt

Topping:

1 1/2 cups pecans

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

Combine topping ingredients in food processor and pulse a few times until they’re a fun coarse brown topping-looking type of thing.

Beat the eggs, milk, melted butter, sugar and vanilla together, then add potatoes. Plop the orange mix into a buttered casserole dish, top with topping, and cook for a while in an oven (350 for 45? 375 for 30? You want the top to be crunchy basically).

 

Dear Diary

“I’m going to try to never write about you,” I whispered to the boy whose shoulder my head was on two nights ago.

Oops.

Well, here’s the thing, though!  One of the hundreds of incredibly good reasons I’ve been so wary of letting myself feel the feelings I’ve been feeling for this boy I’ve been seeing is: I don’t know if I can be with someone and still write these kinds of things.  I’ve always had this problem. I think it’s pretty common.

From fourth grade on, I kept a detailed, multi-volume, sometimes illustrated (oh man, what a gay little nerd!) diary where I mostly talked about my crushes and occasionally stuff I’d bought or eaten.  I would do a full-body involuntary shiver of embarrassment if I was forced to read any of it now, but it was a document of my life and in its way kind of awesome, like all diaries.  And in 11th grade I stopped writing in it.  Why? Well, part of it was that all the stuff I’d been recording could now be told to my first serious boyfriend, who was so fascinated by everything about me that he would happily listen to me ramble for hours about a comic book or a dress I’d seen in a vintage store.  And another part of it was that it’s hard to write about relationships when you’re in them.  When you’re happy, that’s boring, and when you’re sad, it’s sometimes hard to pin down why you’re sad, especially if it’s the kind of slow encroaching sadness that you don’t even realize is sadness until you’re sort of caught in its patterns.  Like, for example, the pattern of humoring someone who, it’s become clear, is way more into you than you’re into them, which is what was happening with Chris during all that time I wasn’t writing stuff down.

Toward the end of high school I wrote two or three entries in a rainbow-bound journal about how it felt to be cheating on Chris and then I didn’t keep a diary again until the spring of sophomore year of college, when I broke up with Nick.  That diary is the only one I still have. It’s about Theo and moving to New York and I wrote in it furiously, constantly, ridiculous things, real ‘deep thots.’

“The first thing is to be honest, really honest,” my 19 year old self had decided. “Not to tell the version I’d like someone to read, not to gloss over details to make myself look better to an imaginary audience.  The second thing is not to write a sordid confessional just for the sake of doing so, just to feel cleansed somehow, so that it ends up boring and trite like all wannabe-salacious memoirs.  Fuck fuck fuck I should not have had that coke, I have to work in five hours ….”  You get the picture.

Oh here’s a good part!
“Fucking boys. I wish I was better at shooting people down … being pursued should make me feel good, and instead it makes me feel persecuted. Also it makes me mistrust boys — are they ever sincere when they say they like me, or do they really only wanna fuck me, and the more sophisticated/analytical types justify it by convincing themselves they really like me?”

Good question, 19 year old me!  I wish I could tell you!

There are pages and pages of this kind of stuff and then the last few pages are like this: “I wish William would call … I must be strong and eliminate him from my life as soon as possible …” (two pages later) “This is the crippling self-destructive feature built into women that’s kept us from achieving our goals for years, despite our obvious superiority. I am so smart to have figured this out.” (Two pages later) “I sort of don’t want to ruin my good mood by writing.”

The last entry starts like this: “August.  Oh, being in love. What a rough development in my life. How will I ever get anything done?”

Okay, yes, in the six years that elapsed between that August and this past one, I did accomplish some stuff.  And I did write about William, a little, but we fought about it when I did, even when it was stupid stuff like his opinions of the season finale of Project Runway.  But I didn’t write about our relationship until it was ending.

“Writing about a relationship while you’re in it, especially in a public forum, always kills it, unless you’re Calvin Fucking Trillin,” I wrote recently. But is that really true?  It’s hard to say what kills things sometimes. (”You should be password protected.”)

I want to be able to write about what’s happening right now, but I want just as badly not to jinx it, because what’s happening is, mostly, good.  Terrifying, though!  Maybe one of the things that’s terrifying is this sense that I have to choose between analyzing my experiences or just having them.  The impulse to tell and tell and tell is, for now, gone, but that in and of itself scares me.  And so I find myself (okay, I know, I know, sorry!) wondering: is it possible to care about someone else without giving up any part of yourself?

 

New tattoo

I woke up this morning filled with the kind of nervous dread that feels just like coming down with the flu: it’s characterized by nausea, almost-feverishness, and an overwhelming desire to just lie in a dark room with closed eyes until the feeling passes. I know from experience, though, that lying in the dark not only doesn’t encourage the feeling to pass but also adds an overlay of feeling failed and pathetic.  So I got up and put on pants and shakily walked to the corner to buy a green tea and a pb&j bagel, and I ate it on the subway on the way to see Emma, my tattoo artist.

I felt a little self-conscious just now typing “my tattoo artist.” I would never say “my hairstylist” though I guess I do sort of have one (her name’s Shiho!)  There’s a certain weird  sort of possessive entitled Jennifer Anistonness to saying “my” yoga teacher, “my” manicurist, “my” bikini waxer.  These people obviously do not belong to anybody besides themselves.  But here’s why it’s okay to call Emma my tattoo artist: would you feel self-conscious about saying “my doctor” or “my therapist”?  Emma is a lot closer to those categories than she is to being some sort of aesthetician.  Actually sometimes I feel like the only difference between Emma and a doctor or therapist is that she’s much, much more expensive.

Today when I came into the shop Emma was finishing up a consultation with a woman who’s getting sleeves because, now that she’s almost finished with acupuncture school, she’s totally sure she’ll never have another 9 to 5 office job again so she doesn’t have to hide her tattoos on her core the way she’s been doing.  She had all kinds of incredibly specific ideas and visions and needs about what her first sleeve would be like, and she showed Emma (and me, because I happened to be there) pictures of intricately decorated Ukranian eggs, and talked about wanting fish because she has “a lot of fire.”  Over the course of her tattoo consultation, I learned: that she’s Ukranian and Jewish, born there but raised here, that her husband’s name is Bear, that she has two kids, a boy and a girl, 4 and 2, and that she gave birth to the first (Caleb) when she was 24, that doctors didn’t think he would live but he did and is fine now, that she has always felt a psychic connection to Caleb but that Bear has been closer to her daughter since the very moment of conception (”We just made a baby, didn’t we?” he said).  That she has stretch marks on her first tattoos and such low sensitivity to pain that she used to have 6 gauge rings in her nipples, but that her one tattoo that’s partly in her armpit made her cry involuntarily because of the nerves there.  That she teaches yoga at her kids’ daycare.  That she once damaged a freshly inked tattoo during a “moment of passion.”  All of this stuff was going to inform the designs that Emma is going to put on this woman’s body.

At one point, the woman started talking about her ideas for her right arm, but Emma cautioned her against it.  “It’s  story, it has to tell itself in order.  This arm will inform the other one.”

For the next few hours, as I sat alternately gritting my teeth and chatting with Emma, I thought about my tattoos telling a story.  It’s a long story and maybe about as interesting as hearing about somebody’s dream they had.   It starts with the little heart and then it goes to the fish swimming down my shoulder blades, the chrysanthemum on my right shoulder, the poppies on my right arm, the crown of thorns starfish on my left arm, and now the smaller starfish on my left shoulder.  It’s definitely not over — in fact, I have another appointment in December to finish the shading work Emma started today.  It’s the story of the last six years of my life since I moved to New York.

Emma is trying to have a baby with her partner John so we talked about that a lot.  He only has two tattoos and she did both of them; she’s never been into guys with a lot of tattoos.  I guess I haven’t either.  I told her that Jake was the first guy I’d ever been with who had as many tattoos as I did and I described them to her: the “Mom” on one shoulder and the devil girl pinup on the other, the now-infamous portrait of Serge Gainsbourg on his back.  “Ah, so he’s got Mommy issues and thinks all women are either idealized virgins or dirty whores, and he’s pretentious but he doesn’t care if you think so,” she said.

Tattoos really do tell a story!

I told her about William’s tattoo, the outlines of a band of stars that encircle his bicep, and how I’d always wanted him to go ahead and get the stars filled in.  How, at several points in our relationship, he was just about to get the stars filled in, sort of like how he was just about to start riding his bike to work or start smoking less pot or start looking for a less shitty job.

“If you ever see him with those stars filled in, you’re going to have to marry him!” Emma told me.  But I’m pretty sure that’s never going to happen.

 

Pork Stir-Fry For One

Can you believe I used to ask William what he wanted to eat for dinner, and offer him options? I did.  And sometimes I’d  skip that and just announce what we were having, and he’d say “Oh come on, not pork stir fry [or whatever] again!”

Mayyybe this is why I’ve been living on sandwiches and takeout and scrambled eggs for the last three months.

Today, though, I decided I would go to the trouble of making a real meal for myself.  I didn’t feel like doing it — my stomach hurt and I felt sad and lonely — but I went to A Cook’s Companion and bought a saucepot with a tight-fitting lid for rice and a shallow big frying pan for stir-fry.  I’d left these things’ analogs, ones I’d used hundreds of times, behind in the kitchen of the apartment where I’d lived with William.  All the things I left behind, I’ve been replacing piecemeal. I tried to do one big shopping trip to replace them all at once right when I first moved in, but inevitably there were a bunch of things I didn’t realize I needed.  In these circumstances, there’s no way to know what you’re missing right away.  You’ll be halfway through a recipe and then realize you don’t have, like, a liquid measuring cup.

(You’ll be going through the motions and halfway through, realize that some key component is missing.  But you’ll go ahead anyway because what are you supposed to do, go to bed hungry?)

When I first started to develop this staple of my repertoire, I was reading a lot of Ayun Halliday’s zine, the East Village Inky, and sort of fantasizing that someday, not soon but soonish, I’d be living her life — brownstone Brooklyn, two kids, adoring husband — with William. I definitely never admitted this, even really to myself.  But why would you live with someone — why would you stay with someone for six years — if you didn’t somewhat think that they were the person you’d end up with?  Of course I talked a big game about not believing in marriage. But I had detailed, specific ideas about proposals and weddings that I would never have told you about if you’d held a gun to my head.

Anyway, Ayun’s zine had some ideas about what to do with “1/4 lb of ground pork” that I later combined with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for a Chinese-ish stir-fry made of sliced pork tenderloin.  First you cut up a quick-cooking vegetable or two into bite-sized pieces.  I like: baby bok choy or Savoy cabbage or snow peas or red bell pepper or bamboo shoots, or a combination.  Then you take a something like 1/4-1/2 lb of ground pork and sprinkle it with soy sauce and cooking sherry and mush it around. In a bowl, you mix together a little more sherry, 1/2 cup chicken stock, 1 tablespoon oyster sauce, 1/4 tsp cornstarch, 1/4 tsp white pepper, a splash of rice vinegar and a splash of sesame oil.  In another bowl you mix a bunch of finely chopped garlic and ginger with a splash of peanut oil.  Then you stir-fry the pork til it’s done, remove it from the pan, stir-fry the vegetables, shove them to the side put the garlic-ginger mixture in a little plop in the pan with them, count to 20, then stir it all around, add the pork back in, dump the sauce on, cook it all together, then serve over white rice, topping with scallions.  This is probably my favorite thing to make and eat.

Except every moment of the preparation process (he used to tell me I couldn’t cook rice, well look at how well this rice turned out, must have been that old pot) and every bite (I am putting this bowl down on the coffee table and it’s my bowl, I’m not serving anyone else first) reminded me of William.  I was just finishing up the dishes when R.E.C. called.  “Are you at home? Check your email.”  She’d shown her ex (I forget right now what his secret-blog alias is!) her latest post, and, I guess, this blog, for the first time, and his response had made her cry and think and try to analyze.

We talked about the feeling of being alone, and how weird and uncomfortable it is to live for yourself when you’re used to living for someone else. Living for yourself is, I guess, some people’s default mode (male people mostly).  You should always be living for yourself, I’ve heard.  But how to shake this feeling of being so small and so uncared-for, the feeling of “nobody cares what I do or think or feel”?

“I could choke on a bone tonight and nobody would notice for days and Doree’s dog would eat my face,” I told R.E.C.  She laughed. “You do know that you’re actually quoting Bridget Jones’ Diary right now, right?”  I paused in my pacing around the rooftop and put out my cigarette (since nobody cares what I do, I’ve been smoking a little bit).

“Well the worst part about being single is realizing that all the cliches are true,” I told her.

The other worst part about being single and living a cliche is that you start thinking exclusively in song lyrics sometimes.  Like: “You really can’t give love in this condition still you know how you need it.”  And: “I’ve been throwing my arms around every boy I see. They only remind me of you.”

 

Sandwich

Scuttlebutt and I had just gone to Target, where she’d bought a vacuum cleaner. She’s nesting right now: around the same time I was breaking up with my boyfriend, she was moving in with hers. For most of the five years I’ve known Scuttlebutt, she’s been my incredibly single friend, always reliable for some drama at a party involving, like, making out with some dude in the bathroom or on the roof or being peeved because some dude made out with some other girl instead of her in the bathroom or on the roof. She was also the kind of friend who could be subtly — almost subconciously — deployed as a researcher when someone incredibly not-single (like, uh, me) was curious to know what a male mutual acquaintance would be like in bed. She really never failed in this regard, and some of her findings were extremely amazing.

Anyway, we were walking across Flatbush and she was sort of clucking and mother-henning me about a recent mistake (maybe not a mistake? probably a mistake) I’d made. “Never say you’re not going to have sex with them and then weaken. It doesn’t matter about having some bullshit third-date rule or not — you should do what you want when you want to do it. But if you do have some rule for yourself, that’s fine. Just don’t, like, tell them about it, and then break your own rule! You need to at least seem like you’re in control,” she scolded.

“That’s what I’m bad at, the seeming,” I told her. She gave me a long stare. “This is such a weird role reversal,” she finally said, and smiled.

It’s true: I’ve spent years hearing about her indiscretions and doling out advice that I was probably pulling out of my ass/some magazine I’d read/some feminist book, and she has spent years listening and then not following my advice.

Anyway, I headed up Atlantic and she headed towards the subway back to Greenpoint. Probably she was going to cook a delicious meal in her big new kitchen with the beautiful glass-doored cupboards. Walking home, I realized I had no desire to order takeout, nothing in the fridge except a Brita filter, a thing of soymilk, and a container of grated Parmesan, and no energy to cook anything real. So I stopped at the inexplicably crap-ish health food store and bought the ingredients for a sandwich.

White bread that is organic so, you know, it’s not SO bad. Sometimes whole wheat bread is just too depressing

Those presliced Applegate Farms cheese slices (cheddar, pepper jack)

sprouts

safflower mayonnaise (Hellman’s is better but: health food store)

avocado

dijon mustard

Combine into sandwich. Eat alone while typing.