The dark side of smiley face ties

I have mixed feelings about positive thinking which is weird because I like being positive. I’m probably annoying, I'm can be so positive. I couldn’t wait, when I was younger, to find out what would happen next. Regardless of sharp mood swings, I had an innate trust that I could do anything, anywhere. Be anyone. Name it. Give me an idea. I'll figure out the details later. I'll send you a postcard. I owned that optimism.

Around age 30 I got discouraged because I wasn't sure what my point was. I felt like I was just drifting around collecting experiences, but for what? Was I really committing to anything or did I always have one foot out the door, at least wedging it open, if not kicking it down?

These days I have as many questions about my life as I ever have but I’m back to that comforting state in which the answers, answers I don't know yet, are exciting, not worrying. For a while there I was worried. When I had lunch with Ingrid and LAM in Seattle last fall, LAM said, "You're GOOD at exits." That comment stopped me in my tracks. She was talking about me quitting my publishing job when I knew for sure that it didn’t make me happy, when I resisted the unbelievably tempting offer of an office WITH A WINDOW.

A window! For me?? Another physical remind of the world out there that I’m not participating in the way I want to be? AND a promotion consisting of a better title with the same shitty pay and backstabbing co-workers? I’d be a fool to say no!

She was also talking about how I'd just quit an unhealthy relationship, left a message on my phone telling people I was on the beach drinking out of a coconut, and went to Mexico. When I decide to act, I don’t usually waste time. Part of me felt proud when LAM said that I’m good at exits because I like that when necessary, I say Oh hell naw. I have my patterns and not all of them are good but I don’t get stuck in many ruts. I am rut-phobic.

I thought for a minute, "Yeah. But I wish there were less situations that I need to exit."

She and Ingrid lifted their eyebrows and nodded with consideration. Since that lunch I’ve had a kick ass year and am shaking my pom poms for the one ahead. I’m back in action, suckas! But still I get stuck on the concept of being positive. Are we supposed to be positive ALL THE TIME because there are things - some big and some small - that make me feel really negative.

That sentence alone alerts the annoying imaginary life coach who whispers in my ear: Nothing can MAKE you negative. You DECIDE to be negative, Jessica Ann Roncker.

And my honest immediate reaction, "Go fuck yourself," sounds another alarm. THAT was defensive! Why am I so defensive? Wait, what about just being human for a minute? What about wallowing and wailing and being pissed and sad and mad?

My annoying imaginary life coach is not unlike the doctor at the natural health clinic in Seattle who talked me into letting him do some craniosacral massage on me. Which is to say I basically let him MASSAGE MY AURA. I know. Don’t ask. I was living in the Pacific Northwest. This doctor guy ended up hurting my aura. He whipped his hands over and around my body and my body started aching in response. No shit. The pain upset me and he and his smiley-face tie – the tie that should have been my sign to get the hell out of there before I let him go all Rambo on my personal energy field – leaned in close and whispered, "You’re in a safe space…"

That’s nice, dude, but YOU ARE NOT. I don’t know what Wiccan drum circle you earned your degree from or why I let you get an inch away from my ear but I am this close to grabbing your smiley face tie and choking you with it.

Lately anything fake makes me negative. Fake human interaction, fake customer service voices, and anything two-faced or insincere makes me want to scream. I was headed to the pool at the St. Louis hotel and asked the women working in the spa area where I could buy a coffee. One of them was telling me about the café downstairs when another cut her off, "Or you can order poolside and we’ll bring it to you."

Fine, fair enough. Until she paused, looked "warmly" into my eyes and said, "GO PAMPER YOURSELF." Hey, you go pamper yourself lady. You’re the one talking in that fake voice you learned in some hotel management training. You’re the one who’s into that. I respect real, honest exchanges. It’s okay if it’s messy or dirty or bloody or whatever. It’s okay if you stutter or have spinach in your teeth or you’re having a bad day. It’s okay if you cry and it makes your nose run and you have to wipe it on your sleeve. It’s okay if it’s difficult and doesn’t make sense right away.

I’m not into glossy perfection. I don’t think it exists outside the world of marketing. It’s an image, an inhuman image, and I don’t trust it. Part of this world is the marketing of positivity. The whole create your own destiny / manifest what you want / the law of attraction / your thoughts become reality. Clearly I believe in all of these things; I’ve been using my imagination and making my ideas happen for years. I think the philosophy goes too far, though, when it turns against the person it’s supposed to help.

If you are positive, positive things happen to you. If negative things happen, you must be doing something wrong. You’re being negative. If you’re sick, imagine yourself well. If you’re poor, imagine yourself rich.

But what if you don’t get well and you’re still sick and you still can’t pay the rent? That supposedly has nothing to do with cell growth or health insurance or the job market. No, you just weren’t positive enough. Instead of getting you to take some responsibility, it tells you that you have total control. Everything happening to you, you allowed to happen. You created it. If you need $10,000 and you keep imagining a $10,000 check coming in the mail and it doesn’t, well, you fucked up. Except don’t use the word fuck because that’s negative.

Keep smiling and keep spinning the story. God, it gets to me. It makes me want to do all kinds of things not condoned by The Secret. Or the police.

So what about this contradiction of mine with positive thinking?

All I can come up with is smile when I feel like it, frown when I don’t. Do the most I can with what I have. Love the people I love. Be as positive and hopeful as possible without being a control freak. I don’t know what else makes sense.

Summer reading and reading gender

I was inspecting my room at the hotel in Arizona when I saw the books. I stood on tippytoes to read the spines: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King and Undue Influence by Steve Martini. Fittingly, wedged between the two, was Stop the Insanity! by Susan Powter.

Okay. Stephen King, whatever. Beloved by many people, I've never really gotten into him but I thought his book about the writing process, On Writing, was pretty good.

Susan Powter I remember from television commercials in the 90's. I didn't pay attention to her and there's a part of me that regrets that because I suspect that I'd agree with some of what she had to say about health and fitness and the horrible diet industry.

But I was too busy being turned off by her aggressive approach. She always spoke in caps and couldn't stop telling everyone to stop the insanity and was so fucking JAZZED all the time that it made me want to immediately turn off the TV, light a cigarette, and eat a whole box of non-fat cookies.

People on a mission are passionate, I know. I just happen to prefer that they'd casually mention their passion and then give me some time to let it sink in. They don't have to yell in my face; that makes me anxious. The third book on the shelf, the one by Steve Martini, stopped me for a minute. Why is his name so familiar?

OH YEAH. I decided back in April that I hate that guy! Before I found a good crime story to read in Berlin, I tried to read Steve Martini. I hung in there for like 180 pages until I finally admitted that the book was formulaic and boring. I decided at the very end, with only a few pages to go, that if I died I'd be happier NOT knowing what happened. Knowing which yuppie lawyer got pushed off a Mayan pyramid would actually make my death less meaningful. So I closed the book.

And now? Two months and nine time zones later? Here he is again. In my bedroom. What Steve Martini needs to know is that I've moved on.

These are the books that I packed in my suitcase for the summer:

1. The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City by Joseph Rykwert
2. The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
3. Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, Edited by Mattilda AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore.

I brought the one on cities because I like thinking about how environments affect people and vice versa, the one by Alain de Botton because anything he writes inspires me and makes me laugh, and the one on gender for a few reasons.

I heard about Nobody Passes on mimi smartypants and I perked up because the book was published by Seal Press, where I interned in Seattle.

I read an excerpt or a review and caught some of the following words in the context of BELONGING: gender norms, genderqueer, mixed-race identity, white liberalism, immigration, sexual liberation, domestic violence prevention, ecstasy, academic tokenism, SM, do-it-yourself hypocrisy, the psychiatric industry, international travel, anti-Arab hysteria, marriage, fetishism, consumerism, personal responsibility, gay male fear of female bodies, motherhood, homeless shelters, public school, private school, the suburbs.

AMONG OTHERS.

Some people may find this book overwhelming, others a primer, but either way I think it's essential in asking you to CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS. Do not assume that you are normal or that you are automatically right. Definitely don't assume that you are not accountable.

Everyone should question themselves as much as they question others.

I don't always do this. I can be a self-righteous and assuming and that's why I liked this book. It reminded me of going to school at the Evergreen State College in 1996. I drove to a Gender Studies conference in Portland, Oregon with my professor, the only student in my class who wanted to go. I went because I was curious about gender regardless of the fact that I was fairly f'ing certain that I was a straight girl. I wanted to know what other people thought.

It made me think about how far, at times, I've strayed from that point. How simplistic and limited I can be when reading people. I just recenlty found out how much I influenced Charlie when we met in New York. How my work at the Feminist Press and the people I exposed him to gave him the first few words of a language that he took home with him and began to master. It changed him and now he's fluent while I still speak baby talk.

It hit me one night in Berlin when I was in a room surrounded by people who many others might wrongly - in ignorance and fear - call freaks. Charlie introduced me to someone and said, "This is Jess. I stayed with her for five months in New York. She saved my life." I was struck. I was in a space where I didn't look like I belonged. I'd had, in the past, some influence on someone there yet in the present I had no idea what was going on. I didn't feel uncomfortable, though. I felt curious.

Inga Muscio, another Seal Press author, wrote about how certain books saved her life. I believe that. And when it comes to my life, I'm not relying on Steve Martini.

"Fuck you, Rene Descartes, I need to sleep"

Two weeks ago I signed up for a philosophy class.

On the first day of class a lot of the students said they took The Mind and its Place in Nature to get out of a history requirement. I said was there because I wanted to be and that was enough to make two students ask me after class what my story is.

My story is that I want to understand why things are the way they are. I want to know why we think about ourselves the way we do. I want to know how this relates to the ways we govern and educate and behave. I want to know more about our assumptions and our judgments and want to look closely at human nature.

But during the first day of class I had some moments of "Uh-oh...."

Maybe I DO want to know this stuff but don't necessarily want to hear people TALK about it. I wrote in the margins of my notebook There is an awesome conversation happening about PINK ELEPHANTS. Do they exist just because you think they do? After class I kept smiling and thinking, "Goddamn kids. They are some argumentative motherfuckers."

The next day I read about how Rene Descartes (1596-1650) studied with Jesuits, got a law degree, and joined the army. Descartes really liked travel and wanted see the world so he threw himself into the good life and partied, presumably with this smirky look on his face.

In his 30s, he realized how uncertain he was about everything he'd been taught. He left France, went to Holland, and sat around asking scientific questions all day long, trying to empty himself of everything he thought he knew. Oh, and he wanted to prove that there's a unity to knowledge that had been lost and that there's a God and a soul that's separate from the body.

You know, the usual.

I'm totally into this. I don't care right now if I agree with Descartes; I just want to know what he thought. Descartes isn't the easiest person to wake up to and it did take me three hours one morning to read 17 pages of his book but I liked doing it. Yesterday morning, however, was different. I'd stayed up late reading the night before and had been thinking I didn't know where Descartes was going with it all but I'd figure it out in the morning.

Unfortunately my morning and night were separated by only four hours and when I woke up, I had a sick, shaky feeling in my gut. I started to read and became quickly enraged, due more to lack of sleep than anything else. This guy is making me CRAZY! I don't care if he's the father of modern philosophy! THIS IS BULLSHIT.

I got up from the couch, poured another cup of coffee and said out loud, "Fuck you, Rene Descartes." We made up yesterday when I stayed after class with some other students to talk about him. FOR FUN. Bring on the pink elephants.

Don't make me read Descartes outloud

Last night on the phone, Carl was pestering me and I tried to make him stop by threatening him, "Don't make me read you a sentence of Descartes. BECAUSE I WILL."

He challenged me.

I opened my book, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), found my sentence and said, "This one's perfect. It makes no sense at all."

In the words of Rene Descartes, "The first is that, from the fact that the human mind, when turned in on itself, does not perceive itself to be anything other than a thinking thing, it does not follow that its nature or essence consists only in its being a thinking thing, such that the word only excludes everything else that also could perhaps be said to belong to the nature of the soul."

Carl hooted, "What worries me about that is what if everyone in the seventeenth century read that and thought, 'Well, sure, that goes without saying...'"

I began to cackle uncontrollably and Carl asked, "Is this the point in our conversation where everything deteriorates?"

Wearing pajamas to school

I recently strolled around the grounds of Ohio State University. I sat on a bench by Mirror Lake and thought about how campuses feel to me now rather than twelve years ago when I started school. These days I'm not stressed about finding my people or the least bit concerned about who I'll eat dinner with in the cafeteria. I'm certainly not pretending that watching the Star Wars trilogy every week with the stoners down the hall is stimulating.

Now I get a kick out of observing people and pretending I'm making a documentary on them. The kid with acne, the one smoking a pipe, definitely made the edit. I kept my fingers crossed that I'd spot someone wearing an elbow-patched blazer, preferably someone else who also looked barely pubescent, but it didn't happen.

What did happen, however, was GIRLS IN PAJAMAS.

The trend of attending class in sweatpants with the waistband rolled down and a word plastered across the behind, top picks being PINK and JUICY, is pervasive by all accounts so far, which leads me to conclude that school these days is synonymous with slumber party.

I happen to realize that this is far from accidental: Victoria's Secret targets 18-to 22-year-olds, and, as part of their fall 2004 collection launch, selected 20 college students from a nationwide search to be spokeswomen in university dorms. These campus ambassadors - Team Pink - were chosen because they're a) cute and b) know a lot of people and can get the word out: pajamas are in, thongs are in, flip flops are in!

Victoria's Secret proclaimed in a Associated Press statement that the Pink collection "expresses that lingerie is more than just underwear, but a necessary and fashionable wardrobe extension. Some of the ambassadors are ready to wear the longer, more substantial pajamas right into the classroom."

You can sleep in it and get up for that 7 am class, and go!

Well, that marketing blitz worked. Christ Almighty.

I also happen to realize that I have little ground to stand on when I get critical. My professional wardrobe over the years has included combat boots, overalls, and tank tops, so who am I kidding? Not a certain lady at the Woman's National Democratic Club a few years back.

I used to go to conferences and events regularly in Washington, DC for my publishing job. Once I went to the WNDC wearing cowboy boots, big belt buckle, purple velvet blazer, and hair festooned with blond and red streaks. I was nibbling on a cheese cube and listening to a political debate between my boss and the lady when the lady stopped, glanced at me and said, "We should stop. We don't want to scare the child." I stared at her as she continued, "Are you even an adult?"

My boss shot back, "She's an adult. She's just a cool-looking one."

We gave each other high fives with our eyes and made fun of her later in the taxi. What I was wearing was appropriate for a New York function but wasn't quite as conservative as DC decreed.

I do think, however, that there's something to the notion that WHAT you wear and WHERE you wear it do two things: 1) reflect what you think, 2) affect how you think about whatever it is you're doing. I'll wager that aesthetics of people and of environments mean something. I'm just not sure what.

Take my grey years. My office in New York was grey: grey walls, grey floors, and grey cubicle dividers. The motherfucking bulletin board was grey. I hung photos I'd taken in Alaska in my cube to remind myself that there are things in the world that are not grey and that those things are called glaciers. When I got my own office, I installed a giant red-orange lamp to cast a lovely non-grey hue about me until maintenance men kept singing "Roxanne" when walking past and I gathered they might be getting the wrong idea. But all along I was fighting a grey, grey feeling.

So, do pajamas-in-public make a girl more interested in cuticle treatments and mud masks than her diploma? I don't think so. And I'm sure the medieval founders of modern academia would find my Converse and Levis an abominable affront. So why do all those juicy pink cabooses make this girl want to put someone in time out? I'm getting old.

Delicious diligent indolence!

On February 19, 1818, John Keats wrote a letter to his friend J.H. Reynolds about the sheer pleasantness of reading, to "wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it."

How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!

These thoughts were penned between when Keats gave up his medical ambitions for poetry and got a sore throat and died from consumption AKA tuberculosis. Keats wrote a hefty number of odes in his time, pondering everything from nightingales and Grecian urns to women, wine, and snuff.

I dig the three words delicious diligent indolence because that's what I'm after. Dictionaries don't think too highly of indolence and define it as habitually lazy and disinclined to exert oneself and use sentences like LEPROSY IS AN INDOLENT INFECTIOUS DISEASE to capture the slow nature of indolence.

I daresay the dictionaries are one-sided. There are both physical and mental ways to exert oneself and the dictionaries don't take into account that DDI could just as easily define someone who spends hours reading and writing and thinking as it does someone who is slavishly devoted to eating multiple boxes of Cinnabons while watching the WB all day long.

Last year my official workday ranged from 0-18 hours and due to this extreme range I am protective of my time. Solitude rules because I develop and order my thoughts when I'm alone and thereby avert early-mid-life crises like the one that made me cry like a baby back in November. Right now I balance scholastic moments by working with other ZenGenius freelancers, talking shit, and tuning in regularly to Sex and the City and American Idol Season V.

But I get this response from some when I find myself blogging a lot, "You must have a lot of time on your hands."

Well, sometimes I do have a lot of time of my hands. Sometimes, though, I just make time by waking up too early, going to bed too late, and sequestering myself from people. Sometimes I can't make time and I feel nuts. When those 18 hour days happen, I run on morning coffee, afternoon adrenaline, and nightly gin and tonics. Then I don't have the wherewithal to reflect on Grecian urns much less the Socratic Method because I JUST WANT TO CRASH. So I'm treating what I have right now - the opportunity to concentrate - as one of my jobs. And like Keats' voyage of conception, it is delicious.

Ten Commandments: reflections from a hair salon

I had no idea that getting my hair cut this weekend would make me think about the Ten Commandments. I showed up for my appointment, met Natalie the stylist, and showed her the multimedia presentation I had prepared on my laptop regarding the kind of hair I do and do not want sprouting off my head. This is how I approach haircuts since September, when a New York hairdresser listened to me explain what I wanted, nodded, and then did the opposite, leaving me with a bowlcut not unlike the one I had in sixth grade.

Any perspective will reveal that a bowlcut shouldn't be that big of a deal but several people could testify that my immediate reaction was a fantasy involving the Anarchist Cookbook, a hardware store, a pipe bomb, and doing something DEFINITELY prohibited by the Ten Commandments. Natalie and I quickly struck up the sort of salon intimacy that usually makes me feel phony. For some reason, though, this time I yakked away with fluidity. 

While Natalie washed my hair, we talked about Columbus and how I like living here. She asked where I lived in New York and I told her: the East Village and the Bronx. She also asked about Cincinnati. The client before me had also been from Cincinnati and told Natalie that there isn't much racism there. Ahem. I'm thinking that this client has either not spent much time outside her secluded monochromatic enclave in the last ten years or she had recently been cured of deaf-blindness, realized her hair looked like ass, and that's how she ended up in Natalie's chair that morning blabbing about how progressive Cincinnati is.

For 18 years I lived in the pleasant and mostly-white suburb of Hyde Park and for a year after that I lived downtown in historic and mostly-black neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine. I told Natalie it's a pretty segregated city and that race relations can be tense. She asked what Columbus neighborhood I live in and I told her Old Towne East.

"How are your neighbors?" Natalie wondered.

"Um....I don't know. I don't know any of my neighbors."

We moved on from the subject and by the time I left the salon I felt light and bouncy and pranced down the sidewalk pretending not to secretly check out my new reflection in the storefronts. But there's one thing that will almost surely alter this sort of glib and self-absorbed mood and that is PIRG canvassers. I encountered one within a few blocks of the salon. A kid from the citizen organization Public Interest Research Group was standing down the street and I know he gripped his clipboard a little tighter when he saw me coming. No amount of eye-averting or false distraction on my part was going to keep him from posing whatever thorny question he felt obliged to ask.

The Village Voice calls these goodhearted civic-minded workers charity muggers. In New York there were charity muggers outside my work who would ask me, "Do you have a moment to help save the children of the world?" Except for the time I stopped to give one my parents' address since they actually do reserve lots of moments for saving the children of the world, I would say "No, I don't" without stopping. Which, GOOD LORD, sounds callous in writing.

I'd think, "Don't you all know you are on Fifth Avenue where stopping could result in injury?"

And that I believe is where the callousness stemmed from. Leaving work in New York was a uniquely bad time to be asked to stop, at least for me. I was usually in a rush or my mind was busy emptying out what I'd just done for the workday and filling up with what I wanted to personally achieve in the hours I still had before sleep. Right or wrong, in those moments I was self-absorbed and not focused on world issues. I'd also imagine myself stopping to explain to them that I, too, worked for a non-profit organization and was underpaid because my publishing company struggled financially, that I simply could not spare a donation right then. I'd wrestle briefly with my conscience and continue rushing to the 6 train.

Saturday's canvasser in Columbus wore a huge button on his coat emblazoned with a graphic of the Great Lakes. I smiled as I got closer and maintained eye contact while he politely inquired, "Excuse me, can you spare a minute to help Lake Erie?" I smiled ruefully and said, "No, sorry."

"Have a nice day!" He said as I passed.

"Thank you," I said over my should and then proceeded to wonder who I had apologized to. I decided I apologized to Lake Erie as well as to the children of the world who have been saved enough to inherit the earth and the dismal shape it's in. A fog settled into me and sunk fully into place while watching the local news in the living room. The Columbus news loves crime and seriously won't shut up for five minutes about all the horrible stuff happening locally, some of which takes place in my neighborhood.

In Old Towne East, stately stained glass windowed houses share corners with decrepit lots. It is a community in transition, which I believe means that of the neighborhood's residents, there's a wide range of both money in people's pockets and melatonin in people's skin. The first month I lived here I walked home at night a lot. I sensed that maybe it wasn't the BEST idea in the world and stopped listening to my iPod so as to be more alert. Bova told me to stop but I did it few more times until someone else told me stories involving kidnapping and an attempted break in: exhibits A and B of why my mother doesn't mind my having borrowed her car for weeks on end.

In New York there are hundreds of people around at any hour, day or night. There's so much going on and so many things to look at that "Oh, a crackwhore" is instantly followed by "That woman has her dog in her handbag" and "I think I'll buy a falafel sandwich." This is not so in smaller cities. I was dogsitting this weekend and while walking the dog yesterday I remembered my conversation with Natalie about my neighbors and I thought of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments get shuffled around and mean different things depending on whether you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim and I'm certainly not literal enough to want to love all my neighbors just yet, but I would go out of my way not to bear false witness or covet their houses, wives, manservants, maidservants, oxen, and asses.

I'd actually prefer to just be friendly with them. I exchanged several "How's it going?"s and laughed when a kid on the street asked the dog's name.

"Her name's Karma," I told him.

"I better not pet her, she'll come back to get me."

Good one, kid. You're awesome.

I don't think that a universal code of conduct that may have been given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is necessarily going to do anything about the people who really would like to do all that coveting, much the less the graver thou shalt nots of bodily harm as seen on the Columbus nightly news, but you gotta start somewhere. And maybe that's where the canvassers do come in.

The Closing of the American Mind

ni·hil·ism, n.
(Philos.)-Rejection of all moral or religious values and beliefs.
(Psychiatry) -A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.

HAPPY SUNDAY, EVERYBODY!

This weekend I am what Allan Bloom called American nihilism: a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. Nihilism without the abyss. Please understand that I barely know what I am talking about and that that is part of the condition. I awoke yesterday from a dream about my brother, Neill, being tangled in trapeze lines and dangling at great and dangerous heights and thus sipped my coffee with unease. A few hours later I put my coat on over my pajamas and drove to the CVS Pharmacy where my credit card was declined, indicating to me that my financial situation is, in fact, as pathetic as I secretly knew it was all along.

Back in the living room, I decided I'd stay in my pajamas all day long and poured a vodka and apple cider cocktail, reasoning that it was a brunchable hour (12:30 pm) and that a mimosa or bloody mary would be perfectly acceptable if I were with friends in an outdoor cafe in the East Village. After one satisfying swill, I knew the time had come to start reading The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

Jocardo called a few hours later and asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was reading and getting confused by Allan Bloom. My hand was cramping from all the sentences I was underlining and how many times I wrote DAMN in the margins. I wanted to read his book because of the second part of the title: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.

See, I'm critical of academia yet love taking classes. I'm thinking about the philosophy vs. the practical use of higher education and how bullshitty it can get. But I might want to go to grad school. I've had a funny mix of education - Montessori elementary, classics-based college-prep high school, big 10 university, hippies-in-the-woods college - and now I have Allan Bloom.

Allan Bloom studied at the University of Chicago in the 1940's and writes about how students changed between then and the mid-80's and how U.S. culture contributed to these changes. This book is mobbing my brain with contradictions. Mental fistfights are breaking out. I have been reduced to writing DAMN in the margins. I also write exclamation marks next to sentences I find funny. Ex: Mr. Bloom ranting about how rock music is destroying the ability of youth to have truly passionate relationships with art.

Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld.

Come on, that's funny. Of course, I scour his rants and raves for signs of myself.

Am I nice: friendly and as eager as a pup to please but not particularly noble or moral? Do I have heroes? Do I have any clue why history and philosophy might be handy to understand? Do I think the classics need to be thrown out in order to make room for less racist and less sexist and more multiculturally-inclusive texts? Do I think everything is relative? Are there any absolutes?

My confusion is growing because I'm trying to examine why I believe what I believe AND what I thought I believed but maybe am not sure about after all. It is a greatly unsettling exercise in not being defensive and reintroduces today's theme of nihilism as defined by Allan Bloom: Nihilism as a state of the soul is revealed not so much in the lack of firm beliefs but in a chaos of the instincts or passions.

"How in the hell do you understand books like that?" Jocardo asked.

"I just said that I don't understand most of it," I said.

"But at least you're trying..." he replied.

"I'm broken!" I said. "I'm drinking Bud Light at 3pm in my pajamas!"

I had run out of vodka.

Education in our times must try to
find whatever there is in students
that might yearn for completion,
and to reconstruct the learning that
would enable them autonomously
to seek that completion.

- Allan Bloom (1930 - 1992)

The life you were born to live

Joe Baer, my boss at ZenGenius, asked me for my birth date and I told him: 3/16/75! Tracy, who was in the office and sitting at her desk, made a crack about Joe doing numerology and I laughed but Joe walked over with a book in hand.

"This book is amazing. Do you want to read it?"

"Has it changed your life?" I asked.

"Yes it has."

I said I'd take a look. Joe opened it to page 210 and informed me that I am a 32/5. This means, according to Pythagoras and his notion that numbers are the essence of all things, that I may have some issues with freedom and discipline to address if I'm at all interested in understanding my life purpose. No biggie.

I don't usually read books with chicken soup, gypsy, or warrior, especially when teamed with gentle and/or peaceful, in the title and self-help sections of bookstores make me self conscious but I like Joe Baer a lot. His sense of humor is far too wicked to allow him to be the sort of man who has a dream catcher tattooed on his bicep. Dan Millman wrote The Life You Were Born To Live and after seeing his head shot I doubt very much that he has the sort of wit that I get a kick out of but I am here to tell you that he NAILED THE SHIT OUT OF ME with his Pythagorean profiling.

The freedom sought by most 32/5s manifests as a drive to experience and know. Boredom is their personal hell. 5s have such a natural drive and curiosity to know something about almost everything that their energy gets scattered easily.

Dan Millman (peacefully, gently) suggests that 32/5s must reign in renaissance ways by staying with something past the point of boredom. By focusing attention, setting clear priorities and sticking with them., they gain inner freedom through depth, rather than just breadth, of experience. With the balance of discipline and variety, 5s neither indulge their tendencies nor deny them. Damn.

Floral decorations for bananas

Wallace Stevens lived from 1879 until 1955 and wrote a whole lot of poetry while also being a lawyer. Wallace didn't publish until the age of 36 and even then took years-long breaks from the literary public but in his 50s he was gripped with word fever and was OFF THE HOOK for the rest of his life.

William Carlos Williams lived from 1883 until 1963 and was a poet and doctor.

William and Wallace were friends, hung out in New York, and were both part of the American Modernist literature movement which I think means that they were less about old school European forms and more about newer American styles. I do know that they were successful in their respective professions while also managing to be stellar poets.

Books from both men normally sit dusty on my bookshelf but are now in a duffel bag in my parents' boiler room. I dug out the Wallace Stevens book of essays after reading The Middle Mind by Curtis White, who practically creamed his underpants when referring to Stevens' brilliance and cracked the essays on reality, the imagination, and the arts.

These words leaped off the paged: THE PRESSURE OF REALITY, the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation.

It exists for individuals according to the circumstances of their lives or according to the characteristics of their minds...Reality is things as they are. It is a jungle in itself...A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree, with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow.

This makes me break out in a cold sweat. I immediately want to yank on my hair with one hand and start mixing cocktails with the other. My stomach hollows just as it does in my recurring dreams of having to go on stage without studying my lines and having to pass high school math after skipping class every day. It's not the poet part. It's not even the sinister "deadlier degree tomorrow" part. I just want to be able to contemplate consistently enough to create something.

William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens were businessmen and family men and creative men. The few years I experimented with being a businesswoman in New York found me either slogging home on the verge of tears with just enough energy to pop a movie in before falling asleep or high on to-do list mania concerning the grocery, the gym, and enriching social activities like happy hour.

Several years ago I visited Ali Schumacher in Tucson and she said, "You know, you've been kind of semi-retired since college." Right after laughing and agreeing, I bristled. Am I a bum? I was working in Seattle as a bartender and as an editorial intern at Seal Press. I made enough money and had abundant time to wile away thinking and writing in cafes.

Today I reckoned with the pressure of reality and its time consumption when I realized that I hadn't written in several days due to an event planning job I've been working on, one that involves floral arrangements, plaster busts of historical figures, and an ice sculpture.

I dedicate this entry to "Floral Decorations for Bananas", a poem by Wallace Stevens. 

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

The art of not feeling dead

I just read a book that did something exquisite. It explained to me what I experience.

This is not to say that I agreed with everything that Curtis White wrote in The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves but I appreciated his views because they were well-argued.

He forced me to tweak my thinking about cultural standards (academia, work), artful diversions (music, literature, and theater), and media (radio, television, internet).

I had to put the book down a lot and stare at the wall. When I'd realize what I was doing, I'd grab a pen and make a note somewhere. Or I'd just underline furiously and snicker because Curtis White's opinions tend to be aggressive.

He relishes dissing people who are almost institutions themselves and he doesn't hesitate to verbally flay them for lacking imagination, justice, freedom, and creativity.

In short, Curtis White is not afraid to burn a bridge.

The most lucid bottom line that Mr. White illustrated for me was the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead. The I GET IT sensation when reading his take on feeling alive versus feeling dead is related to the fact that when I'm mentally energized I tend to say to myself "I'm ALIVE" and write in my journals "I'm ALIVE I'm ALIVE" as if this somehow isn't obvious.

Yeah, I'm alive. My heart's been beating continuously for awhile now - not in dispute - so what I'm referring to is about more intuitive feeling.

I believe in curiosity, spontaneity, and risk and when I make decisions by these standards, I'm being true to myself and I feel alive. When I make decisions based on fear or because I SHOULD, I'm not acting out of desire, I'm being false, and the icky dead feeling starts its morbid creep inwards.

Examples:

- When I try to tie together a bunch of ideas and don't know if I'm making any sense, I feel alive.

- When I take a job with a publishing company, end up in the Marketing/Publicity department, and spend all my time thinking about sales and promoting other people's ideas instead of working on my own which was the reason that I wanted to work with literature and EVEN THOUGH I SHOULD BE HAPPY to have even found a job in New York where I have a lot of responsibility and can wear whatever I want and cuss like an infidel in meetings, I (eventually) feel dead.

- When I am surprised, I feel alive.

- When I go for the easy and predictable question, analysis, or response, I feel dead.

- When I experience art that makes me question everything, I feel alive.

- When I work closely with people and my work might help someone or something improve, I feel alive.

- When I hear debates about party politics and the differences between Democrats and Republicans, I feel dead.

- When I consider going to a really expensive grad school to learn a skill doing something I wouldn't love out of terror that I might never have a stable income, I feel dead.

- When I consider going to a really expensive grad school to learn a skill doing something I love and might never make a ton of money at, I feel alive.

- When adults play in public and don't give a shit if they look like jackasses, I feel alive.

Notice that not all of the alives are comfortable.