Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.
I was seventeen, and I thought I was in love. The fact that I might have no idea what love actually may be never entered my mind; it becomes clear to me later that the reason every teenager makes the same mistakes is because there are certain things you have to experience for yourself. For me, one of those things was hanging myself up on a girl for half a decade.
We’d had the whole relationship in a flash, cycling through the whole process. Meet, flirt, kiss, girlfriend/boyfriend, make out some more, “I love you”… answered with evasion. Too stupid, too soon.
I made promises then that I had no reason to make, no way to know if I could actually keep. Some of them are seared into my mind, repeated so often in memory that I can’t honestly tell you if they truly happened or if I just imagined they should have and made them part of the story. Others are lost entirely to me; in my mind, it is a linear narrative, and when you’re crafting a narrative, it is often best to jettison anything that doesn’t further the plot.
It’s not easy living your life that way. When you expect everything to have exposition followed by rising action followed by climax followed by falling action followed by denouement, it has a way of being self fulfilling.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad for someone who also believed in happy endings, but I happen to believe that everyone gets, at most, one of those.
She wasn’t mine.
In the back seat of that car, I put my hands over the seat and on her shoulders when “Enjoy the Silence” came up on whomever’s mixtape was in the deck that night. I sang along with the song, “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed…” and I felt her stiffen and I sat back, in my place, by myself.
That night she pulled me aside and said she wanted to talk to me. I knew what was coming; even then I could read the signs.
And Depeche Mode can take me back to that night any time I’m in the right mood.
An example of just how wrong pleated pants can be, from amansworldco.com
The thing about pleated pants is that they are disastrously unattractive. I don’t know what it is about certain people that makes them think that this phenomenon does not apply to them — a lack of style? a failed understanding of the very concept of aesthetic beauty? — but they exist.
When I was younger, I miscategorized many things, from how fancy a given sit-down restaurant was to my own socioeconomic class. Among those things miscategorized was pants. I thought there were two types of pants: nice pants and not nice pants. I didn’t like to go outside in sweat pants and I hadn’t yet discovered that jeans came in any fit other than spandex-tight. (Turns out my mom didn’t understand that not being able to put my hands into the pockets meant maybe I needed a bigger size. Who knew?) So, for reasons of comfort and looks, I wore “nice pants”, and at the time, I thought “nice” meant pleated.
I also had a rattail and listened to Cinderella at a certain point in my life. Don’t you fucking judge me.
But I digress. Yes, I was the kid in school who didn’t wear jeans. That made me lame. Even more unfortunately, I didn’t dress up. That’s right, I wore “nice pants” with t-shirts. Every day.
I had friends. I do not understand why.
Eventually, when I started having a say in what I wore, I realized jeans suited me better. When, for Christmas when I was 12 years old, I asked for jeans, my mom rejoiced. I ensured that I specified size and fit (Levi’s 550 relaxed fit, 30 waist/30 inseam), and I stopped wearing nice pants. Only then did I see the evils of pleats.
As specified in this post on It’s a Man’s World Consulting, pleats distort your hips, making you look significantly wider than you are. Hey, guess what, America! Most of us are fucking fat! We don’t need wider hips. And guess what: if you need pleated pants because flat fronts don’t fit you properly, it’s time to get on the treadmill, tubby. Even little kids shouldn’t dress that way; the person I am now would, if given the opprtunity, beat some sense into my younger self, for this and many other reasons.
Luckily, it seems that most people agree with me on the pleated front. (See what I did there?) A friend of mine used to work at the GAP. She and her coworkers always made sure to bury the pleated pants at the bottom of the piles of clothes that people might conceivably look good wearing. Every time I’ve mentioned my strong anti-pleat stance to anyone who was buying me clothes in the past decade or so (read: girlfriends), the response has been as powerful or moreso than my own revulsion. (The best one: “Do you think I’d be sleeping with you if you wore pleated pants?” Touché, girl who I later realized was crazy.) I don’t personally know anyone under the age of 50 who wears pleated pants that I can recall off the top of my head, although that may be selective amnesia. I do see people on the street wearing them, though, and on occasion I’ve been moved to dwell on just what the fuck possessed them that morning to put on something so fucking stupid. I should probably just ask one of these days.
That said, if we’re lucky, maybe pleats will go the way of the dodo. Except, you know, without all the mythologizing and lament for their passing and metaphorical meaning and stuff.
Awake, late, hot, naked, reading a couple hundred pages of someone else’s dream and wondering how I got here, but we both know that’s exactly the kind of half-secret half-mystery that I’m never going to be able to answer.
I took the day off from writing at RoastBean because I spent the whole morning writing checks to pay my company’s bills and my hand cramped up. I wasn’t using my pen, and I’m not all that used to writing by hand anyway, so doing it for 2 1/2 hours with minimal break was more than my pathetic extremity could take.
I also reached out to a friend today for some help. You would think (if you know me at all) that I would have a well and truly deep grasp of the fear of failure. Which is true, by the way. The problem is that I don’t know how to write about it in an interesting way for more than a couple sentences at a time.
Turns out that consistently joking about how much I suck at life does not make for a compelling narrative. I know, I know, I was surprised, too. But there’s also the distinct possibility that I’ve never composed a compelling narrative in any case. So, you know, have that argument with yourself.
If anyone has advice, please, by all means, let me know.
I have been trying to be a patron of the new coffee shop on the corner of my block. The coffee is good, the prices are comparable to Starbucks, and they had the stones to open up literally across the street from a Starbucks in the middle of a recession.
In the past week, I’ve whiled away my lunchbreak listening to scary music and writing twice (actually making progress, strangely) and spent a couple hours in the pleasant company of Matthew Sheret, curator of the surpassingly excellent Phonogram vs. the Fans, an old-school zine-like to which I happen to be a contributor.
Unfortunately, due to my current personal economic circumstances, my patronage has not extended beyond a single cup of coffee on any of these trips. But the place is clean, the decor is nice, and there are lots of tables. So I’m going to keep going back.
That’s not why we’re here, though. We’re here to talk a little more about Seven Sisters. What’s Seven Sisters, you ask? It’s the project I mentioned in my previous post. It’s going to be tough.
I originally came up with the idea in January 2007. I knew even then that it wasn’t something I was going to finish quickly; I usually take many months to make a single mix, never mind seven separate ones with very specific thematic requirements and a host of arbitrary rules that I am self-enforcing. I also disallowed myself to write any of the stories without a finished mix; the idea is that I am listening to the mix as I am writing, to help set the mood in the story.
I am writing the stories out longhand in a leatherbound journal that I got from my friends Manny and Anya for Xmas a few years ago. For anyone who knows me, it becomes abundantly clear that this is very inefficient for me. But it seems the right thing to do and is another rule to hold myself to. The rules are very important.
I’ve set an arbitary date to be finished with the first drafts of all seven stories: September 9 of this year. To reach that goal will require writing with much greater speed than I usually do, but a deadline is what I needed, and a deadline I have.
I have started moving forward on a project that I first came up with two years ago. What do you get, I wonder, when you combine mixtapes and short stories, matching a mix to each story and loading yourself down with a host of rules and strictures to make everything go together? I don’t fucking know, and neither do you, but if we’re all lucky, we’re going to find out.
I gave myself a set of rules because I have never been happy with what I’ve done without them. I am creating themes around which to build mixes to listen to while crafting stories based on those same themes, which will eventually be accompanied by those same mixes.
This is significantly more work than you would imagine. But so far, so good.
When I was in middle school (which, for me, ran from sixth to eighth grade), every sixth grader was required to take an “exploratory” class as an elective. Which, you know, required elective. Very funny, right?
Anyway: this exploratory class covered the four main classes that could be taken as electives as a seventh- and eighth-grader. You had one quarter each in basic (notBASIC) computer programming, tech ed (shop class), art, and home ec. As far as such things go, this was a pretty effective way of exposing kids to the choices available to them.
I learned several things from the exploratory section. I learned that sewing is pretty awesome (which I then promptly forgot for 13 years). I learned that (obviously) shop class is awesome, if for no other reason than you’re dealing with fucking METAL. Also, wood. I didn’t learn that art is pretty awesome, because I already knew that. And I learned that computer programming is not really my thing, to the eternal shame of my bank account balance.
After that exploratory section, I chose to take tech ed for both seventh and eighth grade. In retrospect, this was a monumentally poor decision, and I’ll tell you why:
When I was a pretty small kid, I was not a bad artist. I could draw well and had a surprisingly strong grasp of anatomy for someone so young (thanks, comic books!). However, I didn’t really focus on it, and didn’t get better. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was no longer the acknowledged best artist in the class, not even by myself. In retrospect, it’s possible to read a lot into my reaction, but it was impossible to recognize then just how microcosmic my deciding not to worry about art any more in fact was vis-à-vis.
In sixth grade, my particular rotation of the exploratory sections placed me in art for the third quarter. Each quarter was tasked with drawing a holiday-themed piece, and our holiday just happened to be Valentine’s Day. While I hadn’t grown much as an artist, my skills certainly hadn’t deteriorated, and when I showed my angel-winged, t-shirt and jeans-clad version of Cupid to my teacher, she looked at me and stated, in no uncertain terms, “You should definitely take art next year.”
Now, I’m almost 26 and considering going to school for illustration or graphic design. I’m the biggest sucker in the world for a well-donegraphicimage. I even became a writer because I wanted to script movies, a way of creating a visual art using a skill that I had actually worked on and improved. Obviously, I should have taken two more years of art in middle school and moved on to more advanced arts in high school. But I didn’t. Instead, I took tech ed both years, including one year as the teacher’s assistant, which means the only thing I learned that second year was how to cut a metal tube to length to help my friend make a pipe for smoking… tobacco. I then proceeded to take four years of gym in high school, even though only two years are required and your average Special Olympian is more athletic than I am. I did take two more years of art in high school, and I still wasn’t bad… but I wasn’t as good as I should have been, either, and I’ve barely touched a pencil since then.
I chose not to do art (or home ec, something else that would have been more functional for me) because of some possibly (read: probably) non-existent social stigma. I went against my own nature and skills because I thought other people would make fun of me for doing what I wanted to do.
This is the reason that children need guidance. I was still too stupid to live when I was 19; who the hell allowed me to make decisions that affected my life so adversely when I was 11?
There’s a reason that every rebellious teenager who says they’re not going to treat their kids “like that” when they are parents grows up and changes their mind: they realize that kids are dumb.
So, I’m reading the accompanying article on Death Cab for Cutie’s session for Daytrotter when when I get bludgeoned about the head by this question: “If this isn’t love this time, then what is it now?”
I’ve asked myself that question many times throughout my days. Well, not that question. Actually, I don’t even ask. My version is more of a statement: this needs to be love, because I don’t want to feel harder than this.
It always feels true at the time, but then I’ve lost love, and I missed it. Those were always the best times for me as a writer. I have a theory that no one can write well when they’re happy. No one wants to hear about someone else’s happiness. Do they?
It’s good to know that I’m not the only person that has ever felt that way. I feel much better knowing that every other self-hating hipster feels the same way.
That probably shouldn’t make me feel better, come to think of it.
Almost a year ago now, I bought a Canon point-and-shoot camera from my friend. It was a useful sort of thing to have around. I did take a few pictures with it, but I quickly ran across a pretty serious problem: I didn’t get the charger with it, and it didn’t take long at all before the battery ran dry. Funny thing, I have repeatedly forgotten to either go get a charger or take the camera and have it charged.
There are a lot of people out there who use photography in the same way that I use writing. Generally speaking, a good photographer will give you just as much with a photo as a writer can give you with a short story. Photography tells stories in a different way, but it, like all art, is about storytelling.
Thinking that way, you would have assumed that I would have been more keen to use a camera to help tell my stories. But I haven’t been. I haven’t been telling any stories whatsoever, and that’s a serious problem. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot to remedy this problem, and another step I’ve got to take is getting that camera working.
The funny thing is, I don’t even know if I can tell a story through a camera lens. But I need to find out.
I woke up facing the windows, enjoying what little time I have to use my entire home as sanctuary. Outside, the bright light night was subdued by the ominous cloudcover, the same that had let it out on me and my eight million neighbors just a few hours earlier.
