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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?

 

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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.”

 

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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.

 

Why am I telling you this?

“You think what people say is what matters, an older friend told me long ago. You think it’s all about words. Well, that’s natural, isn’t it? I’m a writer, I can float for hours on a word like “amethyst” or “broom” or the way so many words sound like what they are: “earth” so firm and basic, “air” so light, like a breath. [...] But of course what my friend meant was that I ignored inconvenient subtexts, the meaning behind the meaning: that someone might say he loved you, but what really mattered was the way he let your hand go after he said it. It did not occur to me, either, that somebody might just lie, that there are people who lie for pleasure, for the feeling of superiority and power. And yet it should have.” — Katha Pollitt in that great/crazy Webstalker essay

“You just bleed it out all over the place. Why can’t you keep yourself to yourself?” — my ex-boyfriend

“YOU should be password-protected!” — the dude who’s the reason parts of this blog are now password-protected 

Today I got my ear-holes stretched two sizes bigger. I’ve been slowly stretching them for about 8 months now with no clear idea of why.  At first it was because I thought it looked cool and badass but it turns out no one notices  your earrings except you unless they are giant African tribesperson plugs, and I don’t ever plan to get there, though I actually don’t know how far I’ll go.  The last time I got it done the lady at Sacred asked me how big I ultimately wanted them to be and I said I was “playing it by ear,” har. Now they’re a 6. Stretching one size bigger only twinges for a second but two sizes hurts and right now they are still dully throbbing.  Also today I got very thoroughly bikini-waxed.  In two weeks I’m going to get another big tattoo. I wonder wonder wonder why there’s a part of me that seeks out pain.

It’s not that I enjoy pain!  Pain, you know, fucking hurts. I think it’s more about mastery of pain.  I enjoy pain as long as I am in control of the pain, or I think that I am.  And it’s this maybe-misguided impulse that compels me to do other things besides poke holes in myself and swim until I’m falling-down exhausted and have my hair torn out by the roots. Like, for example: put big chunks of my “personal, private” life on the internet for anyone to see.

Maybe it makes me feel safe to think that I think that if I tell you all my secrets you won’t have any ammo against me that I haven’t given you.  Maybe it’s that I think that my pain and my pleasure are just that fucking important.  Maybe I just like telling.  Part of it, certainly, is that I don’t want to have these thoughts and feelings inside me.  I want to get them out.  But if it’s just about getting them out, why am I not just pouring them into a word document or some flower-printed dear Diary?

Because: I don’t believe that “private” exists anymore, if it ever really did.  Privacy depends and always has depended on pretense.  We politely pretend that the versions of themselves people present to the world are the ones we accept, but behind their backs we whisper. I hate that shit.  For a long time it has been considered unseemly but tacitly acceptable to mock and examine and analyze the personal shortcomings and proclivities of celebrities but now everyone who achieves anything like prominence in any field is accessible to us in a thousand intimate ways online. We’re all “celebrities” now.  It is futile and silly to pretend that we have “private” lives anymore, so why not just let everything hang out?

Well, for one thing, because other people besides me are involved in my secrets, and those people might still want to cling to the fragile little scrap of perceived privacy that is left to them, and might be sad or disappointed or angry to be portrayed in a public confessional.  Also: their own reticence prevents anyone from ever knowing their side of the story.  I can understand how shitty that must feel, which is why I’ve password protected some of the posts on this blog. (You can email me for the password and, quite possibly, I’ll give it to you.)

Here’s another thing, though: I know it is silly to imagine that, by preemptively spilling my secrets, I’ve been successful in controlling the pain.  I might just have been letting the pain control me.  And, perhaps, letting myself in for more pain.  But ultimately, I don’t regret telling you anything.  I’m glad you know.  I’m glad you heard it here first.

 

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