different kind of human

What Sort of Hat?

2011-07-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve always resisted labeling myself, and I hate it when other people label me. Who wants to be put into a box? And it’s more than just personal revulsion — the whole business of labeling feels like shirking responsibility. Life demands that we make our own sense of a world where the terms are constantly shifting. Labels let us look at life through little windows — they limit what we see. I’d rather take it all in, even if the view makes me nauseous.

The first day I met my friend Jane, she labeled me. “You’re such a Ravenclaw!” she gushed. For anyone unfamiliar with Harry Potter, Ravenclaw is one of the four Hogwarts houses each student gets placed in by the Sorting Hat on the first day of school. Ravenclaw is for intellectual/creative types; Sytherin is for the smart, crafty, and driven; Gryffindor is righteous and brave; and Hufflepuff is the fun-loving stoner. I thought it looked like just another way of reducing people. But Jane is obsessed with the Sorting Hat, and through her I’ve started to see something strange and interesting, something changes the way I think about labels.

Most sorting mechanisms — Myers Briggs, IQ Tests, whatever — are a matter of input/output: As long as you answer the questions the same way, you’ll get the same result every time. (Who answers these crazy questions the same way every time? Not me.) But imagine a personality test that, like you, could change. That could be influenced by its mood, or your argument. (If you bomb the IQ test but manage to convince the tester to give you a high score, you probably deserve it. This is how I like to tell people the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department was run.)

Just like a personality test, the Sorting Hat’s whole purpose is to classify. But in the world of Harry Potter, this act of classifying is a character — as alive as anyone else. The Sorting Hat fumbles and deliberates and influences and is influenced. It almost sends Harry Potter to Slytherin, seeing that he’d do well there, but Harry protests and the hat sends him to Gryffindor.

When Jane declared me a Ravenclaw, it wasn’t just an act of definition, it was the beginning of a new life — both for me and for the category of Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw had to shift a little to make room for me, and I thought of myself a little differently now that I belonged to a society of bookish magicians. The way I interact with the label of Ravenclaw is sort of like the way I interact with another person — we both move and are moved by each other; we both read and are read by the other: text on text.

The Sorting Hat takes the act of labeling from limiting and definitive to infinite and complex. It makes labeling seem a lot more exciting, and a little dizzying — which is exactly what I thought labeling was supposed to shield you from.

I suppose that Jane would say this is all very Ravenclaw of me.

Milk & Meaning

2011-04-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

Surf is such an appropriate word for the way we consume ideas on the Internet. It’s fast and smooth, and it stays on the surface. With a few notable exceptions, what I do on the Internet isn’t reading at all; it’s surfing and it’s skimming, as if meaning could be skimmed off the surface of text like cream from milk.

For a second there, I thought I’d come up with the metaphor of milk and meaning all on my own. But duh — we call it skimming for exactly that reason: we assume that meaning in a text acts like fat in milk, in both cases the best parts rising to the top for easy removal. In the case of skimming a text, you might miss an elegant flourish, a sense of style, and you might not enjoy it as much — but you still get the meaning.

But does meaning really rise to the surface? Can you miss the tone but still get the meaning?

Well, yes — of course you can. I don’t have to suffer through a food blogger’s life story to get her recipe for quick pickles, or read more than an article’s headline to learn that “Taliban Help Hundreds Escape via Prison Tunnel.” The pyramid structure of a newspaper article is designed for skimming: put the important stuff in the first paragraph, because most people won’t stick around for much more.

But after a while, digesting meaning this way makes me physically sick, as if pure ideas, detached from language, were empty calories. A few hours of surfing the Internet and I don’t even want to look at a text. When I read something slowly and carefully, I have a much better time. A good, close read makes me want to talk to people! Write things! Read more! Close reading can’t make us enjoy everything, but it can probably help us enjoy a lot more.

So am I saying that skimming allows you to access meaning, only you don’t enjoy it as much? Well, no, I don’t think I am. Because if you don’t enjoy something, you don't digest it well, and you probably can't extract as much meaning from it. Skimming is quick and light — you get ideas without texture. Slow reading lets you feel the grain of language, and, to push the digestion metaphor a little more, to let all your intestinal villi work their magic. If meaning happens where reader and writer touch, you almost have to enjoy a text to understand it. I like that: enjoyment as a mode of understanding.

Swallowing the Surface

2011-04-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

Before I had ever thought about going into advertising, I worked at a think tank. It was cool and everything, but I knew I wasn’t enough of a political junkie for it to work out for the long term. As my boss said to me, I appreciate “the surfaces of things.” I care more about choosing the right word than choosing the right side.

So now I work in advertising. But my old boss’s words never quite rang true. I do love the surface — in fact, one of my favorite pieces of prose is Edward Abbey’s celebration of the surface in the introduction to Desert Solitaire:

It will be objected that the book deals too much with mere appearances, with the surfaces of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. There are many people who say they have, I know, but they’ve been luckier than I.

For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces — in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind — what else is there? What else do we need?

What else is there, indeed. But as for the pages that follow, I’m lukewarm. So much description of rock and sand and long days where nothing much happens — I’m a little bored by a lot of it. Could it be that I like talking about the surface more than I like the surface itself? That’s a mouthful — and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If I truly love the surface, why is Desert Solitaire such a hard pill to swallow?

This thought crossed my mind again the other night, just as I was poised to give up on Nicholson Baker’s essay “Clip Art.” Two pages into his examination of fingernail clippers, I was longing for his festive backyard pornography, his meditations on women’s stockings, his tracing shower water into an open mouth. Not all surfaces are equal; I’d rather read about skin on skin than chrome on nail.

But I pushed on through the boredom, and I’m glad I did, because this silly little essay surfaces surprising meaning from a superfluous device. The fingernail clipper, it turns out, can be quite meaningful. It leaves behind a sharp edge that is perfectly suited to annotating texts when no pen is available. It’s not a practice I was familiar with, but according to Baker, it’s quite common:

Even with a closely clipped and manly thumbnail, the reader can and very often does, today in America, score a visible double line to mark an interesting passage, if it appears in a book that he is prevented for one reason or another from defacing.

And then I got to this, which changed everything:

Moreover, the pressure of the reader’s nail, deformed by its momentary trenchancy, against the tender hyponychial tissues it protects, creates a transient thumbwide pleasure that is, or can be, more than literary.

Talking about a thing has never seemed closer to the thing itself. Baker conjures the whole endeavor of reading in a gesture: the gentle, pleasing pressure of the surface of a text pressing up against the surface of a fingernail. And what a sensual pleasure it is, these two surfaces touching each other, imprinting each other. On the literal surface of the text, the literal and the figurative seem to collapse on one another. Baker isn’t talking about fingernails as a metaphor for something else — he’s talking about actual fingernails, and how physical pleasure commingles with literary pleasure to create meaning that is “more than literary.”

My middle school English teacher said that meaning isn’t in the reader or the text, but somewhere in between the two. I always pictured this “in-between” as a big empty space, a vacuum. But now I’m reimagining it as the collapsing of that space, as the place where two surfaces come together.

Mad Libs & the Dimensions of Thought

2011-04-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

A study from University College London published this week in Current Biology has discovered that there are actually differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives. Specifically, liberals' brains tend to be bigger in the area that deals with processing complex ideas and situations, while conservatives' brains are bigger in the area that processes fear.

(via GOOD)

…The study was based on 90 "healthy young adults" who reported their political views on a scale of one to five from very liberal to very conservative, then agreed to have their brains scanned.

(via AFP)

Ugh.

They reported their political views on a scale of one to five? I have no idea where I’d put myself on that scale. It doesn’t even make sense to me.

We take the figure of the Political Spectrum for granted, but it's just that — a figure. And a one-dimensional one, at that. If your ideas differ from mine, they can only differ in two directions: left or right. But I think we need at least four dimensions to capture the complex nature of ideas. Opinions are slippery, malleable, and always in motion. Shine a light on them, and they change.

But when we try to squeeze these exquisite and subtle creatures into the blunt figure of the Political Spectrum, they shrink and wither. This is something we have to resist, because if we don't, it will change the way we think — for the worse. If you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you’ve got a powerful metaphor that claims to represent viewpoint, everything looks dumbed down.

When I tell people I don’t identify as liberal or conservative — that I object to the very notion of such labels — they usually respond in one of two ways:

1. By conceding that no, labels are not perfect, but we need some common ground to discuss things, to compare and contrast.
2. By claiming that my failure to stake out a position is a copout.

Fine. But the notion of calling myself a liberal or a conservative fills me with disgust — a personal, not a political, disgust. It’s not that I reject certain tenets of these ideologies, it’s that I reject the oversimplification that permeates our thinking, our being. Even if it would make things easier. Even if it means being annoying.

My favorite people have the ability to surprise me. Their opinions on one issue don’t give away their whole body of thought like some domino-liberal or conservative whose beliefs always fall according to plan. These people demand time and attention and are forever slipping out of grasp just when you think you’ve got a hold of them. It’s frustrating and exhilarating and there are no shortcuts.

Remember Mad Libs? You feed a list of verbs, nouns, and adjectives to your friend, who fills in the blanks and reads you back a story of delightful non-sequiturs. Sentences seem to be heading one way, but then veer off unpredictably. Grammar is intact but the rhythm of language is distorted. We’re used to sentences gathering a certain momentum and taking off in predictable ways. But with Mad Libs, it’s impossible to know where a sentence will end up. It’s ridiculous, but in its best moments, it can create a resonant, meaningful ridiculousness.

Let’s treat people — let’s treat life — more like Mad Libs.

Just Say Yes.

2011-04-07T12:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been told to just say no to smoking. That whatever fleeting pleasure a cigarette offers, it subtracts minutes from our lives, plants cancers in our lungs and mouths.

The one awful puff I took of my friend’s cigarette in middle school was enough of a deterrent for me; I’ve never been tempted to go back for more. As a kid, I’d watch my uncle enjoy a cigarette and wonder how many he had to suffer through until they started tasting good. Why would anyone do that, especially when cigarettes give you cancer? To look cool? I couldn’t think of any other explanation.

But a while back, I heard an interview on NPR that made me rethink my assumptions about smoking. It was with a guy who, though not a smoker himself, had written a book in defense of smoking. Smoking, he argued, was an adult pleasure, and all adult pleasures have an element of poison, of danger, of pain. The bitterness of coffee, the sting of alcohol, the tenderness of sex: these things are not just incidental but essential to enjoyment.

When we get older, our ideas of pleasure change. I remember sneaking a sip of my dad’s coffee, and feeling perfectly mystified at the strange world I was destined for where bitter black liquid tastes good, and where it was conceivable to enter an ice cream store and not order anything.

But when I was a little older, my dad would sip scotch and pour me a taste, and we’d argue and discuss the world in a way that only a New York lawyer Jew and his daughter can. Scotch started to taste good in that context. He’d share bits of wisdom with me like “with freedom comes responsibility,” and, come to think of it, you could say the same thing about adult pleasures. Scotch and sex are more demanding pleasures than popsicles and Polly Pocket. They require knowing the size of your own stomach, as Nietzsche said.

If you don’t pay proper attention to adult pleasures, they will hurt you. But the dark side of a thing needn’t be its refutation. We should teach our children to avoid risk, yes, but we should also teach them to use discretion, to savor. I think that method would go a long way in reducing smoking deaths — because the worst part about addiction is that you don’t enjoy your poison as much. You can’t taste nuance when you reach for something by rote.

So instead of a just say no campaign, why not a just say yes campaign? Say yes to enjoyment, say yes to your own limits. Smoke Well. Don't remove danger; heed it. Be present. Smoke a cigarette like you’re in yoga class. Inhale, taste the smoke as it dances down your throat, hold it in your lungs and enjoy its...well, I don’t know. I’m no smoker. But I can appreciate it from afar.

Image & Context

2011-03-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite blogs is LeslieMILES. Each post is a succession of images, curated according to loose interpretation of a theme. The themes are something between snippets of overheard conversation and aphorisms — not enough meaning for the latter, but too much for the former. Things like: "It was time to stir." "Keep Curious." "Little to no distance between us. Please?"

These themes, along with a soundtrack and a quotation, are the only context offered. Everything to be known is contained in the particular post’s succession of images. There is fame and anonymity, innocence and experience, portrait and landscape: just images, one after another. Their relationship to one another is tenuous, and it always gives me a little anxiety. Am I missing the point? But no, I don’t think that’s what’s being asked of me here: to identify a fixed point. The images create a pattern as they go, with sense emerging and shifting as I scroll through the series. What I like about this is that it’s active; it requires much of me.

If you follow the blog, it doesn't take long to pick up on the curator’s interests, his obsessions. Whatever the theme, certain kinds of images repeat. This curator, whoever he is, loves girls, preferably young, thin, and naked, and preferably Kate Moss. She shows up again and again, as kind of muse, or a god, presiding over the constellation of images. Even when she's absent, you can sense her presence, informing everything.

And it’s not just general themes that repeat — individual images repeat too, weeks or months after they first appear. I can't tell if the repetition is intentional or just curator oversight, but the effect is uncanny. Many of the images have an air of familiarity, but I’m never sure if it’s intrinsic to the image, or if I’ve actually seen it somewhere before—and if I have, is it because it’s a famous image? Or just a repeat on this blog? There is no way to know; none of the images are attributed to anything. They refuse to have back stories. The only story is the one being told here and now, in their convergence.

On precision, briefly.

2011-03-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

The other night, I was thinking about good writing, and I decided that it came down to two things: precision and surprise. The surprise will be a topic for another time; today I want to focus on precision.

Precise writing inspires the kind of appreciation one might have for a well-tailored garment. It’s the triumph of a slippery idea, cut from the fray along its contours. It says exactly what it wants to say with just the right words. This justrightness is what separates good writing from bad; the latter can’t quite hit on the idea, so it just keeps shooting. And missing.

Precision means “exactness and accuracy of expression or detail,” but it’s more than this — it’s also an enactment of the aesthetic pleasure it describes. It leaves the mouth like a blown kiss, with lips pursed for the pre. Then comes the chomp of cise, ruthless and exact, claiming its prey before going in for the kill. It’s pure confidence.

It makes me think of incisors, and how trap is another name for mouth, which seems particularly apt here. What is conveyed through the mouth is sensual.

Chess & Infinity

2011-03-23T23:17:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker ran a great profile last week of Magnus Carlsen, the 20-year-old from Norway who rose to No. 1 in the global chess rankings last year. It made me think some cool thoughts about the intersection between creativity and the infinite, but it will take me a minute to get there, so bear with me for a few paragraphs while I summarize the article.

Carlsen’s playing style is unusual; most master chess players rely heavily on computers for their training, but Carlsen finds them annoying. “It’s like playing someone who is extremely stupid but who beats you anyway,” he says.

Chess is mind-bogglingly complex; the number of possible moves in a chess game exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. It's easy to see the draw of a computer program that could turn this labyrinth into an algorithm.

But computers’ eagle-eye focus on checkmate offends Carlsen's sensibilities about chess. He loves to win, but chess to him isn't just about winning, it’s also about how you play the game. There are competing schools of thought about how to play chess, but Carlsen’s approach isn’t grounded in any of them; he plays by a logic that is immanent to the game before him. He says he likes to have an "all-over sense of the board," heeding the situation, the mood of his opponent, the temptation of whim. It's an emergent strategy, based on feeling things out.

Computers aren't affected by affect, which is what Carlsen seems to enjoy most about chess. One of his proudest moments comes during a game he didn't even win — near death, he executes a series of moves that closes the game in a draw:

"I just thought I'd never seen this combination before, this theme. There’s no better feeling than discovering something new." ...He had 'created something special,' a small legacy of intuition and feeling that no computer or trainer had forecast for him.

This singular feeling of discovery isn’t limited to chess, of course. What Carlsen is describing is creativity — and the anxiety and thrill of finding a solution where there is no guarantee that one exists. I feel the same thing when I’m writing: what if there’s no answer? There isn’t one. You have to make it up, and when you do, it’s with the pleasure of having created “something special” — something truly new.

But you can't make up just anything. As my middle school English teacher told me, you can say anything you want about a text so long as you back it up with evidence. The possibilities are literally — and limitedly — infinite. An argument can't be random — it has to heed the demands of the text, to feel out the confines of the limited infinity dwelling between the covers.

Chess offers a similar infinity. Each game shapes itself as it plays out by a multiplicity of forces: yes, the possible moves already outnumber the atoms of the universe, but Carlsen has so much more to consider: how many games into the tournament is he? Is his opponent fatigued? Is Carlsen himself bored, and if so, would playing poorly for a few rounds revive him? The article even mentions that during one key game, Carlsen sips orange juice while his opponent drinks tea — as if this, too, mattered.

Being creative feels like sipping from infinite, which sounds like some kind of drug. One that we should all do more of.

Rice Reversal

2011-03-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I thought about the part of a person that never changes (the word “part” somehow diminishes my point, but I won’t linger on it). This week, a bowl of rice shifted my attention to the part that does.

Monday night I came home after work and made myself dinner. I didn’t have much food in the house so I made my fallback meal: a bowl of rice. There’s hardly anything I find more comforting than a big bowl of grain topped with plenty of olive oil and salt. And I can put away a surprising amount of rice for my size. At dinner I’m the last one fingering sticky globs of it from the rice cooker, long after I’ve abandoned the half-eaten steak on my plate. It’s not that I don’t like steak—nothing could be further from the truth—it’s just that rice is so easy to eat. I could eat rice forever. I’m a bottomless pit, and a happy one.

But on this particular night, something wasn’t right in my bowl of rice, something that no amount of fancy olive oil or salt could remedy. The rice tasted dirty, it tasted empty, it tasted sour. It tasted like a premonition of itself sitting in my stomach, poorly digested. I poured more oil, sprinkled more salt, but by some black magic the rice refused to accept any flavor. Still, I finished it all, and all night I could taste it from the inside out.

The next morning, stomach still reeling from the aching betrayal of my old standby, I had another problem: what to pack for lunch? I’m a runner; carbs are a mainstay. I felt lost; I longed to fall back on a tried-and-true rice-based meal, something I could assemble by rote. But no—the memory and the sensation of the rice persisted persuasively.

I made bacon and eggs. At the office, I dipped the crispy shards of pork fat into the oozing globes of yolks, and all was well. I made it again the next day, and enjoyed it just as much. And when the bacon ran out, I fried chard in its leftover fat, and poured some heavy cream on top for good measure.

Now, I should stop here for a minute, because I don’t want to sound like one of those nutritional naysayers waxing poetic about deep-fried pork belly in a show of challenging the low-fat dogma. That’s all well and good, but it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about knowing what serves you—in the Nietzschean sense—and enacting it.

This is not always a simple thing. Rice served me quite well until a distinct moment on Monday night when, suddenly, it didn’t. Perhaps it will serve me well again tomorrow. But I’m not content to just leave it at that, at listen to your body, and it will all work out.

Listen to your body. I’ve always had trouble with this maxim. For one thing, I’ve listened to my body all the way to a couple of stress fractures. Of course, each time I ended up in the MRI tube I berated myself for not listening to my body: why did I go on that long run when my shins were sore? Why did I do that race when I was tired? But there have been plenty of other times when I indulged the urge to run as much as I pleased, and nothing broke.

But the even larger problem with listening to your body is this: how can I listen to what I am? Wouldn’t that make me separate from myself? Isn’t that like saying: listen to the listening?

Listen to the listening. I’m not sure if I mean that as a way to prove that listening to your body is preposterous, or as a kind of zen koan, something that sounds impossible but makes sense on some deeper level.

And that’s all I got.

Some Thoughts on Souls

2011-02-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else—and the soul is just a word for something about the body.
-Nietzsche

The first time I encountered Nietzsche was in this quote, printed as a chapter heading to an anorexia memoir I read when I was 13. I was instantly smitten.

Years later, I’ve still never read the quote in its original context, so forgive me if I’m missing something, but here’s how I read it: The body is limited, yet vast. It’s all that I am entirely, and in case that wasn’t clear: and nothing else. And the soul? Just a word. It makes me think of another beloved quote, this one from Frida Kahlo: “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope I never come back.” What devotion! What bravery!

It’s possible that the memoirist meant the Nietzsche quote to be a bitter reminder of the warped anorexic reality where body is everything—but I don’t think so. I think she saw in it what I did: a beautiful idea, made even more beautiful for its terrifying consequences.

So for a while, I was very anti-soul: souls are for pussies, I thought. For people who need to believe in something that lives behind and beyond the body—something without the cumbersome limitations of weight and mortality, that goes on forever without memory or desire. I don’t want to live like that: with a body as mere baggage. I prefer a body that I inhabit fully, even if it means I have nothing left when it’s all over.

I remember that the New York Times criticized the memoir for being too bleak, for not offering enough hope. And it wasn’t really offering hope—it was offering reality, which in this case meant exquisitely rendered suffering. But I didn’t find her story bleak, and I don’t find the idea of a soulless body bleak either. Of course, when I think too hard about death, I end up with the same existential nausea as everyone else. But there’s something exciting about embracing that emptiness, so I take my stand with Frida and with Friedrich.

But something I heard on NPR the other day made me reconsider my reading of the word soul. They were interviewing an expert on aging. She said that when people get older, they don’t change—they become more of what they are. If you’re wise at 27, you’ll be wiser at 97. And if you’re a bitter young man, you’ll be a bitter old one, too.

That resonated. I thought of a body drying out as it aged, losing the lubrication of youth and becoming not just more wrinkled, but more saturated. Tasting more strongly of itself.

And I thought of my friend Lexi, an artist in New York who I’ve known since kindergarten. Everything about her shares some common thread of Lexiness. I recognize it in her work, her handwriting, her voice, her walk, in every room she’s lived in, and it hasn’t changed in the 20 years I’ve known her.

People do change. They grow up, get religion, get jaded, get married. But there’s also something that doesn’t change, and personality isn’t a strong enough word to describe it. It’s more physical than that.

What is the thing that doesn't change? Looking back to the Nietzsche quote, I see now that it’s not dismissing the soul so much as offering a different way to use the word. Instead of the soul being a life raft to something beyond the body, it’s a word for something of the body. What about the body? The way it coheres.

This Is What Sex Looks Like

2010-01-25T08:42:00.000-08:00

I. TWO CLIFFHANGERS. CIRCA 1994

My family is on a skiing trip in Vail, Colorado. My mom rents the movie Cliffhanger and puts it on the hotel room TV for my two younger siblings and me. In the opening scene, a man and woman are suspended by ripcord over an expanse of snowy mountains thousands of feet below. The woman's equipment malfunctions and she slips; the man grabs her hand. She loses his grip, and is now held only by a rapidly failing plastic clip. She gazes up at him in panic, both of them full aware of her impending doom.

But there are technical problems; the screen goes to static. We call the front desk and they send up a technician. He switches the mode from VCR to cable as he works, and two adolescent figures appear on the screen, boy and girl. They sit on a bed in a darkened room. They kiss. The boy asks the girl if she's ready. She is. He turns a switch, and illuminates a string of Christmas lights over the headboard. They start to undress, pause awkwardly, and turn their backs to each other before they continue.

I am riveted. The actors don't appear much older than my nine years. I know from somewhere deep in my being what is about to happen, and I need to see it. But my mom snaps at the technician to get this pornography off the screen—there are children in the room. He complies, fixes the VCR, and we return to the dangling woman, who is dead in minutes.

II. FARGO. 1996

I am at my grandparents' house. My cousins and I go through the movies our parents have rented that week, and choose Fargo. I'll grow to love the Cohen Brothers, but as an eleven year-old, the humor is lost on me and I'm bored.

That is, until we get to the scene with the hookers in the hotel room: two men, two hookers, two twin beds, one pair in each. Up until now, my idea of sex has been of man and woman embracing one another and rolling around in bed—literally rolling, like a log rolling down a hill. It doesn't occur to me that any dynamism involved, but Fargo is about to show me otherwise. Instead of clamping onto the men and slipping beneath the sheets to commence with the rolling, these women sit upright astride the men, bouncing—bouncing!—up and down. I am slightly disgusted but also enthralled.

* * *

The first sex scene piqued my curiosity but left me unsatisfied. My mom's intervention denied me the opportunity to get a glimpse, and I have a feeling the film wouldn't have been very generous with the details, either; these were teenagers, after all. But I wanted to see what sex looked like—all kids do. My friends and I would look up sex in the dictionary, hoping for a clue, but like another three letter word—God—it points to something so vast that it's almost meaningless.

The sex scene in Fargo took a concept and gave it a body—four bodies, in fact, engaging in the act of sex simultaneously, graphically, unmistakably. This was what I had hoped for during that brief interruption to Cliffhanger. It wasn't about love, or even desire—it was about sex, and what sex looks like.

I don't recall any written sex scenes that made such an impression on me as a kid, which is surprising, since I was a precocious reader and had more access to graphic adult material in books than I did in films. But the sex I encountered in novels was probably couched in innuendo, in metaphor. I'll bet I passed over some of the more artfully constructed sex scenes without even realizing that they were supposed to have been sex scenes at all.

The one written sex scene I do remember—in a book my mom gave me about how to be a writer—didn't actually contain any sex. In the chapter about writing sex scenes, it instructed budding authors to get a little creative with the act. Don't be so expected, so banal, it urged. There was an example of a "good" sex scene (I almost feel like "sex" belongs in quotation marks too). A woman asks a man if he has ever held a raw egg. She breaks one in his hand, and he describes how it feels for the runny white to slide between his fingers. Something weighty and important was being communicated, something that could not be conveyed by a straightforward description of the sexual act. I felt like a joke was being told that I didn't quite get—it was slippery and off-putting, like the egg itself.

While the humor in Fargo might have been over my head, the sex scene was not—there was no mistaking what was going on in the two hotel beds. Those bouncy hookers took my curiosity and shoved it down my throat in a way that almost made me want to gag: there was something repulsive in the way they bounced so nonchalantly and openly, panting alongside one another like animals.

* * *

Now I have a full-fledged sex life of my own, but my childhood frustration with the bigness and vagueness of the word "sex" persists. I don't see how a single word can encompass such conflicting encounters, such cacophony of emotion, and still hold meaning. The word doesn't contain the experiences it references.

I keep a mental (and written) list of everyone I've slept with, and people sometimes tell me this is silly—that a blowjob is just as intimate as intercourse. I think that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Holding hands with my middle school boyfriend while I rode his skateboard down the street was more intimate than the sex I barely remember having on the last night of summer in Yosemite. Should I put that on my list?

I suppose I could make one list for all the intimate encounters, one for all the non-intimate ones, and one for everything in between. But at a certain point, this exercise would render me list-less, with separate accounts of the radical particularity of each encounter. And the list was supposed to show me how these elements hung together as one. In many ways, they don’t.

You could say that this shows the failure of the word “sex” to serve as an appropriate category for my experiences. But this would be denying the ability of language to do more than just categorize—it also performs. The point of the list was not to simply catalogue intimacy but to enact it—to make something out of language that did more than just reference and describe the past. I want to make a list that is as vivid and surprising as the sex it points to. I want to find language that surprises and delights and disturbs and disgusts, that is as viscous and raw as the egg it describes.

On Running into One Another.

2010-01-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

I went on a run in the rain yesterday. It was coming down hard, and windy too—the ground was slippery, the sky was dark, and very few people were out braving the streets of Berkeley. Descending Euclid Avenue at the end of the run, the wind picked up and I started to get worried. What if my hands go numb? What if I slip? What if it gets colder? Luckily, I cut this line of inquiry short with another question: am I in pain right now? And honestly, the answer was no.

I ask myself this a lot when I’m running, usually when the conditions are fine and I’m just bored. Is there anything wrong with how I’m feeling right this very moment? Occasionally the answer is yes—like the time I was running intervals around the track and I felt the soul-crushing sensation of localized tenderness in my foot that every runner dreads. But far more often, the answer is no. Most of the time, running feels just fine, and I just have to remind myself that I’m okay.

It’s a practice of genuine self-awareness—not some quasi-self-awareness based on external cues like the weather or what I ate for breakfast. Those things can have an effect, but feeling defies reason. Sometimes it’s sunny and I feel shitty. And on this particular run, it was pouring out and I felt better than ever.

* * *

Sometimes I get jealous of myself. I’ll be sitting at home alone, remembering that night a few weeks ago when I was happily romping around between the sheets with so-and-so. How lucky I was! To have all that unmitigated contact with skin! And kissing! And ear-nibbling! Why didn’t I appreciate it more? And oh, to be doing that right now…

Then I’ll stop myself because, hey, he didn’t call me today. Maybe that means he doesn’t like me. Maybe I was just a conquest, a rebound, a drunken mistake. I shouldn’t set myself up for disappointment. I should pick up a book, cook a meal, go on a run—anything to stop thinking about this.

The tension between the reverie and the worry is enough to make anyone woozy. I can never seem to remember the little trick that comes in handy when I’m running: how do I really feel about this person? When I stop to consider this question, I often find that my memories are more powerful than the experiences they seek to recreate. That it was more about uncertainty than ecstasy. That I looked at him sideways and thought his feet smelled funny and he was too blonde and he talked too much. Or not enough. The point is: I don’t know you very well. And may or may not want to get to know you better.

And why all this anxiety over someone who I might not even like? Why am I thinking so hard about what he wants, and wanting that to be me, when actually maybe I don’t even want him? When you merge too quickly, it’s easy to disappear.

Because when two realities merge, it can be quite jolting. One minute I was complimenting you on your shoes and the next minute you were asking me if I had come. Yes, thank you, but wait, what? Do I know you from somewhere?

That’s pretty much how I always do it, and I’m not very well-practiced in the alternative, whatever it is. Getting to know each other slowly, over time? Like dating, or courtship, or something? It all seems so antiquated. Maybe I should just accept that that’s not how things are done in this day and age.

But the way they are done feels like the time I crashed into a walker when I was running fast on the track. He didn't move out of the way, and he didn't acknowledge what had happened. It was weird. But then, why didn't I acknowledge it either? Because it is really weird, isn’t it? It can’t be just me.

Conquistadora

2009-12-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

I heard a rumor that a former history professor of mine made out with a student during office hours. My first reaction: envy. My second reaction: what the hell, Linz? This man isn’t exactly young and he isn’t exactly handsome. Why do I find him so appealing?

I know why.

Because actually my second reaction was to put on my little conquistadora hat and start scheming. I like a good challenge.

What do I mean by conquest? Not what you might think. I’m not particularly pro-active in these attempts, because if someone is worth my wanting to conquest, they’re also unattainable enough to scare me away from anything so bold as actually making a move. I just sit around and wish intensely for it to happen—a strategy that has proved surprisingly effective.

The last time I conquested I persevered against all odds and I succeeded—only to find that the fantasy didn’t quite live up to the reality. That’s pretty much the whole point of fantasies, if I’m not mistaken: to make reality disappointing. Not to say that I didn’t have a lovely time, because I most certainly did. More than lovely. But it became crystal clear, in a way it never had before, that conquesting is a rather selfish endeavor, and two people being selfish together quickly becomes boring.

“Boring” doesn’t quite capture what I mean, which is actually closer to emptiness—my number five provides a prime example. The sex was silent and brief and anticlimactic—for me at least. I couldn’t figure out why he even bothered, but then, it takes two to tango and I was bothering too. I was always shocked when he asked me, after each exchange, if I had come. So shocked that I always answered yes. It was my first time faking it, and I didn’t even mean to.

I get the sense that it’s different for the guys I’m with. I’m not sure what’s going on in those impenetrable heads of theirs, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the same nervous analysis that’s buzzing inside mine. It seems more like a kind of complacency, one that drives me crazy...and that I can’t help but mirror. But it’s a dumb kind of mirroring—more like a pantomime. I’m not privy to the logic that governs his oscillation between devouring me and ignoring me, between his wanting to do sweet things like read aloud from Harry Potter but then not be my boyfriend.

But then, is it possible that I started it, and the complacency that drives me crazy is just my own, mirrored back at me? I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it. But I think the answer is no. I think that the male animal is better able to separate the physical and emotional in a way that I am simply unable and uninterested in doing.

But getting back to this professor. I’m sure that if by some miracle I wound up in bed with him, it would first be wonderful, and then be weird, and then I might be sort of over it. Right now I can’t imagine being over it, I suppose because it hasn’t started yet, and almost certainly never will. I’d like to think that after having collected a fair amount of these conquest-cum-letdowns, I could preemptively dismiss new ones as not worth the effort. Apparently I haven’t quite reached that level of maturity yet.

Synecdoche Nickname

2009-09-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

Oh, to be called "L." It's belittling—literally—and delightfully so.

It's similar to the feeling when someone happens upon my main nickname, Linz, for the first time—I'm caught off-gaurd at how confident the syllable sounds in their mouth, how cavalier of them to call me what they please. When new boyfriends first say "Linz" I want to turn into a cat and rub the side of my face on them.

But L is different than Linz. It fills my heart with a more complicated joy. The first time my name was reduced in this way was in my first real job after college. My boss took to addressing me by L in his emails, as in: "L, do this. Signed, M." It was clear that I was interacting with someone important, someone who didn't have time for details like "indsay" or "ichael." I had never encountered such a person before, and I didn't so much want to rub against him like a cat as I wanted to perform the tasks requested swiftly and satisfactorily. I felt like a robot, a servant, or perhaps a secret agent—in the loop but also subservient.

This was one of the strange and surprising things about entering the professional world—people call each other by letters. There's nothing personal or familiar about the practice, but I can't help but react as if I'm being branded with a fresh new nickname. I start to see the L of me, and it's a different me than the Linz or Lindsay of me.

I suppose branding is what's going on here—a kind of corporate branding. It probably says something about the perversity of the workplace, and symbolizes the reduction of our complex selves into anonymous automatons of the state. But I'm new to all this, and not yet jaded enough to make a statement like that and really mean it.

Of Men & Music

2009-08-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed the way some people seem to seethe sex through their skins? On the first day of running club one year in college, I made eyes with one such creature, and was immediately captivated. As we breezed down Broadway, I was high on endorphins from two potent sources—running and sex. Not long after, he became my number four.

Everything he did seemed an allusion to a sexual act—nay, everything he did was a sexual act; that was the whole point: for him there was no distinction between the arenas of sex-life and life-life. He moved through the world with a physical integrity that bespoke heightened sensual awareness; with a hyper-expressive face and mischievous smile, he seemed more fully in his body than others.

With guys like this, to interact with them is to think about being in bed with them. Everything is on display; nothing is hidden. They're like walking advertisements for themselves as sexual partners.

And as with advertising, the effect is instantaneous. With Four, all it took was a glance and a smile.

* * *

Sasha and I used to talk about how some songs you love right away, and other songs take longer. She’d make me mix tapes and sandwich the tougher-to-love songs between two instant gratification songs, knowing that I’d suffer through the weird, unfamiliar notes because it was a hassle to fast-forward. It worked—after listening to a new song enough times, it would transform into something entirely different than it had been when I’d first heard it. I wasn’t that I’d changed my mind about the song; the song itself had changed.

Often I ended up loving these ugly duckling songs even better than the instant-loves, which started sounding insipid if I listened to them too much. You could say that Four was like one of those songs, but the analogy is limited, because my attraction to him never dulled. With Four and others like him, when it came time to cut ties, it was never for lack of passion.

There’s a better parallel between men and songs that take longer to fall for. Sometimes a guy doesn't do much for me at first, but things change after I get to know him. It’s hard for me to reconcile this phenomenon with my belief in the integrity of physical bodies. I like to think that we are what we are, through and through: no soul behind the body, no life after death—as Nietzsche said, “Body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.”

It follows that I would know automatically upon meeting someone whether I’m attracted to him or not, and this is often the case. But when the opposite happens—when I’m not attracted at first and become so later—it’s not that I become so enamored with his personality that I decide to look beyond looks. No, he actually starts to look different.

I don't really know what's going on here. Why does becoming more familiar with something cause it to become more enticing? It seems that the opposite should be true. How is it possible for a song to go from unappealing to play it on repeat, and a person from forgettable to fuckable?

Anyone?

On Suffering & Naiveté

2009-06-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

I met my second boyfriend in a specialty running shoe store—he watched me walk and analyzed my stride, and then invited me to go on a hike. After we’d been together for some time, we’d tell each other our creation myth, as couples do.

“When I first walked into the store, did you think I was a 12 year-old?” I’d ask him, because this happens to me a lot.

“No baby,” he’d reply, “I could see suffering in your eyes. I could tell that you’d been through heartache; I could tell that you were old enough.”

A sweet beginning, no? He was right—the breakup with my previous boyfriend, in high school, pretty much sucked majorly and made a lasting psychological impact that apparently shone through my eyes. To be human is to suffer, right? We all do it.

I first learned about suffering the way kids learn about most things—by watching their parents. We were in the car one day, dad driving, mom in the front seat, me in the back. He was teasing her playfully about something, and she, being the sensitive one of the duo, burst into tears. It was the first time I had seen my mom cry, and I thought I could read her mind, and that she was wishing she could go home to my grandparents in LA, and wondering why she ever married my dad and let him take her away.

My mom used to tell me about how marrying my dad dashed her girlhood notions of being swept off her feet by someone tall, dark, and handsome. "Dark and handsome, maybe, but you have him to thank for being so small." I was always sort of surprised to hear her talk about her marriage like this—I mean, really? Love isn't grand and romantic and earth shattering? How disappointing.

As far as I can tell, my parents have a good marriage. Sometimes my mom exasperates my dad, and my dad makes my mom cry—but mostly they get along and seem to genuinely enjoy each other and maintain a satisfying sex life, about which they sometimes drop lewd hints at the dinner table. (I wonder where the desire to create this unladylike blog came from. Well, to be fair, it probably comes from my grandma, who once told my 9-year old brother, as he stroked a velvety soft ball of yarn she was using to knit a sweater, "One day you'll want a nice soft pussy to be stroking.")

So my parents have this stable marriage, and meanwhile, everywhere around me I've been reading all this shit about not settling for the status quo. A friend emails me a review of “A Vindication of Love,” a new book that is pretty much a paean to stormy relationships. If we want to find passion, the thesis goes, we must break free from our conventional notions of love:

“We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” she writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring’s literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections. Her heroes and heroines tend to die, like Young Werther, who shoots himself; or try to die, like Mary Wollstonecraft, who throws herself off a bridge; or suffer, like Abelard and Heloise, one of whom is castrated and one of whom ends up in a nunnery. And yet Nehring admires these flamboyant men and women for the creative force of their affairs, for their ability to live outside the lines, for the ferocity of their feelings. She sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad, and quotes approvingly Heloise’s statement to Abelard: “ ‘I looked for no marriage bond,’ she flashed. ‘I never sought anything in you but yourself.’ ”In her most provocative and interesting chapters, Nehring argues for the value of suffering, for the importance of failure. Our idea of a contented married ending is too cozy and tame for her.

And my college rhetoric professor, on his blog, rhetorically asks us to consider our parents, and their marriages:

I want you all to think for a moment: Are your parents happy? Do they consume life with unabashed joy, with voracious abandon? Now think of all your friends' parents: Are any of them happy? Are they lit up—by life? By ideas? By art? By their respective spouses? Are they happy? Do they really love each other? Do they enjoy life?

Wait—yes! I think mine do, but I sense that this is the wrong answer. Am I naïve? I'm used to being told as much.

Once, a man said to me: “I get the feeling that things have come pretty easily to you in your life. That you haven’t had to suffer much.” He said it while he was doling me out a minor hardship, and the context made it feel a bit condescending—an older man implying that he knew me and knew what I needed. It’s true that I grew up with loving parents and lived in a nice town and went to private school and am a well-adjusted and productive member of society. But I sensed an underlying accusation, one that I’ve heard before: you are naïve. A naïve little girl. So much to learn.

I do have a lot to learn, and this man was good intentioned and probably didn’t have an inkling about all these dark undertones I read into his words. And yet: I felt robbed of my suffering, which is another way of saying I felt robbed of my legitimacy—my “reason for being,” as we say in advertising—and perhaps even my humanity.

The implication was that I had to break free from the status quo to suffer and experience true emotion if I ever wanted to realize my true creative potential—to find greatness. But I’ve found that life already offers plenty of opportunities for genuine suffering, without having to seek it out in some unconventional way—I saw it in my mom’s tears that day in the car, and I felt it as a naïve little high-school girl breaking up with her boyfriend. We all suffer—suffering is incredibly mundane, common, and vital, all at once.

So call me conventional, or call me naïve (you wouldn’t be the first), but I’m underwhelmed by enlightened attempts to find passion by breaking out of the mold—polyamory and what have you. I’m reminded of a summer day I spent sitting naked with a boy by a river in Yosemite. He was trying to convince me that there were no boundaries between lovers and friends—that conventional monogamy was a farce, and hence I should forget about my shoesalesman boyfriend back home and make out with him beneath the waterfall.

His logic was tempting, but ultimately unconvincing. I couldn't put my finger on why at the time, and my uncertainty led me into a gray area of cheating/not cheating. Nothing really happened, but when I returned to my boyfriend, the damage had been done and things soon fell apart. I may have been naïve back then, but at least I learned one thing: when a guy tries to convince me he knows me better than I know myself, he's usually just trying to get into my pants.

Thoughts on No

2009-04-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

No. It’s a word that lays boundaries—we were that, now we’re this, which is to say: nothing.

But it doesn’t always work that way. The serious business of “if she said no, it was rape” aside, no is rarely an absolute, and sometimes it means wholehearted yes.

There is the private no, when you’ve actually said yes but you’ve already moved on. Like the months of break-up sex with my high school boyfriend. I was so not interested, but I let him talk me into it.

There is the half-assed no, where you might as well be saying yes. Like when I knew it wasn’t a good idea but I sat on a guy’s lap and wore jeans with no underwear and let him sort of brush his hands around the edges. Just enough to not say no but not enough to say yes.

Side note: did I really just say I “let him” in both those descriptions? Ew. Therein lies the yes in those no’s, I suppose.

Finally we come to the no of exquisite renunciation. It says: you don’t get to have me anymore, so there. This no is particularly hard to come by, and can be painstaking to execute—but done well, it’s nothing less than triumphant. I don't say yes to everything that crosses my path, and saying no to certain things affirms my particularity.

I’m far from a master at this no, having used it only once or twice. I discovered it in the drivers’ seat of my car, dropping off my not-boyfriend at his apartment after a night out together. He had made the limits of our relationship clear weeks before, and I had voiced my frustration to no avail. But we were still sort of sleeping together, now and then.

“What do you want to do, Linz?”

I wanted to go inside and let him fuck my brains out, then cook a nice breakfast together in the morning. But after months of this relationship-masturbation, I knew I wouldn’t get what I wanted.

“I want to go home.”

Letting him out of the car and driving off took more discipline than almost anything I’ve ever done—and we distance runners have a lot of discipline, so that’s saying something.

In this case, I wanted a relationship and he wanted no-strings attached sex. But even in situations where neither of us want anything more than sex, I often find myself frustrated and in need of a good, solid no.

To another guy, I was something preferably ordered no more than 12 hours in advance of consumption. As if I would spoil if opened too soon—or his desire would.

This quickly became complicated. His schedule was unpredictable, so my attempts to initiate our trysts never worked. I never knew when I was going to be called upon, and I started making tentative plans with other people just to leave things open for him.

I was basically a call girl. And though that might have been part of the appeal, it gets tiresome when you’re never the one calling the shots.

That’s why these non-relationship relationships always come stamped with expiration dates. Destruction is written into their form. After a certain point, I get attached to someone or I get bored. Some people seem able to coast in non-relationships indefinitely, but this has never worked for me. Not that I don’t have fun while they last—I do, for the most part, but it’s a complicated kind of fun. It makes me unsure of my boundaries, and slightly nauseous.

In any event—harumph. It hasn't worked. No need for explication. As an old boyfriend used to say: I do what I want, goddamnit. It was his little mantra, delivered with a distinct and confident rhythm, and it conveyed a sense of ownership over his life—ownership that defied reason, ownership for ownership’s sake. He used the line to justify anything.

There was something very masculine about the way he said it. Something reckless and proud and rugged. Something I could use a little more of, I reckon.

Six Eyes Are Better Than Two

2009-02-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

In high school I spent a few weeks making out with a kid who thought he was Hunter S. Thomson. He carried his little reporters' notebook everywhere and wrote longwinded accounts of his mushroom trips at Stinson Beach. He also wrote a thing or two about me, as I learned when I caught a glimpse of his notebook one day:

It had everything to do with Linz, her beauty, wit, intelligence, artistry…I wanted to see what was behind this front that Niko and Matt tell me about.

There was something immensely satisfying in knowing that the gonzo-wannabe was thinking about me during his sessions of brow-furrowed scribbling; in a way, reading his notebook was even more satisfying than making out with him had been. He didn't know how to do anything worthwhile to my body, and even if he had, I wouldn't have known how to let him. So why did I bother?

As a means for delivering physical pleasure, our sex (or whatever it was) was unreliable. What it could deliver with remarkable success was the pleasure of feeling another's gaze on me. The making out had been mostly a game of imagining how the gonzo saw me: when I smile like this does he think I'm really enjoying myself? When I look off into the distance like that does he think I'm mysterious? With his notebook in hand, I was taking a shortcut straight into his head, seeing him seeing me without all the messy business of making out. And to top it off, these Niko and Matt characters had apparently thrown in their two cents too. It was like a gang-bang fantasy come true!

* * *

If there’s a motif in my writing on this blog so far, I think it’s this: that sex can make a girl feel split in two. It’s a phenomenon that affects me just as much now as it did at age 14, with the first boy who tried to do more than just kiss me—a yeshiva student in Israel, go figure. In that King David hotel room, and many times after, I slunk out of my body and watched from the sidelines, mocking his fruitless probing as a way to distract from my own feelings of awkwardness and inexperience.

And while I might not feel so awkward and inexperienced anymore, there is still sometimes a vast chasm between what my body is doing and what I’m actually feeling. It’s an acidic, persistent soliloquy that won’t shut up, that mocks and yawns and ultimately inscribes a circle of myself around whomever I’m with, so that our interaction is limited to the points where our bodies physically touch.

They say that for women, sex and attraction are all about being the object of a gaze. As Berger wrote: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." If this is true, it means I look out from at least three sets of eyes during sex: not just my own, but also from my partners' eyes, looking back at me (like with gonzo), and from those mocking eyes that watch from the sidelines (like on that hotel bed in Israel). I may go into sex as a unified self, but somewhere in the middle my perspectives and experiences fracture.

There's another activity besides sex that splits me into multiple selves: writing. Writing is a trick that I can't really play on myself unless I pretend I'm at least two different people. I'll write a few paragraphs from the perspective of that sex-spectator, cool and detached and utterly unsentimental, talking down to silly little me putting on a show for a boy. Then I'll read it again, this time imagining I'm the boy reading what I've written about him; then I'm someone else I've slept with, or someone I want to, or someone who intimidates me or whom I admire.

In this sense, isn't there something inherently feminine about writing? As a woman interacting with men, I’m very aware of myself as being seen—I see myself not only through my own eyes, but also through an imagined pair of male eyes. And isn’t writing a similar exercise? Don’t writers write for readers?

Even the gonzo, in his writing, was caught up with being seen—when we were making out, I could feel his gaze on me, but there was something narcissistic in the way he wrote about seeing me. He’d make a point of carrying around his notebook everywhere, and leaving it open on coffee tables to pages he must have been particularly proud of. When I caught a glimpse of my name, he actually gave me permission to read what he’d written, and then watched intently as I read his words.

The act of writing for me is a performance for fabricated readers, and it’s rare that I get to behold the beholding, so to speak. I’m always imagining how readers will see me, but I know that some readers won’t see me at all; I showed my writing to someone who read it right in front of me and was clearly skimming, scanning the paragraphs for something familiar sounding, or references to himself, perhaps. Kind of like the way he was with me in bed.

But what happens when someone really reads my writing is beside the point—it's the control I have over the various imagined perspectives that makes me go rushing to my journal after unsettling sexual encounters. I may not have control over whether the men I’m involved with see me or not, and when I feel like they don’t, sex carries a twinge of loneliness. But if sex splits me in two, writing joins me back together again—and isn’t joining what sex is supposed to do anyway? Often it doesn’t, and when I’m left feeling the weight of everything my partner doesn’t know about me, writing is an opportunity to set the record straight—a kind of reconciliation.

It's Not You, it's You.

2009-02-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

The first and best rejection I ever got was from Alan Haimowitz in fifth grade. I made him a little cherry out of Femo clay and placed it in the palm of his hand after school one day.

Yes, I made him a cherry, I am dead serious.

The heavy symbolism of this particular fruit was over my head at the time, but I must have intuited enough to know that offering him my cherry was offering him myself. The next day he passed me the following note:

Dear Lindsay, thank you for your cherry. I don’t know if Sarah told you or not, but I want us to be just friends.

The letter didn’t give a reason. It didn’t apologize. There was no mistaking the message it contained: I don’t want you.

* * *

With many things, when we grow up we lose the innocent, effortless perfection of childhood; such is the case with rejection. As a teenager I learned the “I like you, but…” method: I like you but I’m already seeing someone. I like you but I’m not looking for a relationship. I like you but I’m moving to Siberia next week.

No matter how well intentioned or earnestly spoken, this strategy has always struck me as patronizing—as if the guy is scared I’m too fragile to handle the news that I’m not the love of his life, or even his sex life.

I much prefer Alan’s tell-it-to-you-straight method: you’re not to my taste. I don’t need any more reason or justification than that; taste is limited and fickle, and it’s rare to find someone who suits yours. This kind of rejection makes me feel not offended but relieved: I don’t have to prove myself or fight for your affections anymore. After that initial flash of disappointment, it’s quite a freeing feeling.

That’s why, when the need to reject someone recently presented itself, I thought it would be a great opportunity to brush up on my honesty and go with the straightforward approach:

Friday was great and fun, but after some thought, I've decided that I want to keep things platonic between us.

He asked why. I elaborated:

No particular reason, but I just don't think I feel that way about you. I guess these things are out of our control.

I wasn't prepared for his response, which was filled with spiteful-sounding sarcasm. I suppose I could have just been reading it wrong—such are the perils of electronic communication. Nonetheless, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Had I been too brusque? I sought advice from a friend, who showed me a copy of her own recent rejection letter for comparison:

I've really been enjoying hanging out with you the past few weeks, but I'm afraid after last night that our relationship may be heading in a direction I'm not really ready for. I love talking with/gchatting, climbing and biking with you, and I hope we can continue to do all of that. I just also wanted to take a step back and reassess because I'm not really looking for something romantic right now...

Sorry if this unnecessary. I just want to be as upfront with you as possible because I think you're awesome and I hope we keep hanging out. I just don't want to mislead.

Anyway, hope you're having a good day today, enjoying the rain. It's beautiful out, isn't it?

It’s a paragon of sensitivity, right? I can’t imagine someone responding sarcastically to such a beautifully-wrought rejection. But despite its kindness, it’s still total bullshit. She just didn’t find him attractive—same as me.

* * *

Before things ended the way they did with the boy I rejected, we watched the movie Man on Wire. Philippe Petit, when asked why he would string a wire between the two World Trade Towers and dance across it for 45 minutes, responded simply, “There is no why.”

His statement feels particularly applicable here. We’re always looking for reasons why we’ve been rejected, but are there ever any real reasons? Any reasons I try to come up with all sound painfully, ridiculously banal: too tall, not enough money, not smart enough, not funny enough. No, if I like you, I’ll forgive you almost anything. We might not end up together, but it’s not for lack of feeling.

Trying to quantify dislike is just as silly an exercise as trying to explain why you do like someone. When I started dating my last boyfriend, my mom asked me what I liked about him. “What do you like about Dad?” I shot back.

She thought this a hilarious response, but the humor was lost on me. What could I have possibly said? He’s nice, he’s funny, he’s a good guy—as if I could fall for anyone, or everyone, who possessed these common qualities?

No, attraction doesn’t work that way. The ones I’ve rejected didn’t stand a chance—being a little funnier or a little smarter wouldn’t have helped them one whit. Any number of people might fit your little picture concerns, but when you zoom out, the overall impression might not be that impressive. When it comes to attraction, the whole can be much more than the sum of the parts—or much less.

Deconstructing the Low-Maintenance Ethic

2009-02-10T22:44:00.000-08:00

I have a bone to pick with Sasha Frere-Jones from the New Yorker. This week he reviews Beyonce’s new album, in which she takes on the persona of Sasha Fierce, a “wilder alter ego.” Frere-Jones likes the music, but he quibbles with the message, which he sees as tame and banal:

Why is she out on the town? Because her man didn’t “put a ring on it.” But this is Sasha Fierce we’re talking about here. And what does Sasha want? Matrimony! When does she want it? Before “three good years” are up. “Single Ladies” is an infectious, crackling song and would be without fault if it weren’t the bearer of such dull advice. The wild R. & B. vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What’s next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low-sodium soy sauce?

Now, this might sound a little feminist of me, which I regret, because feminism really annoys me sometimes (read: its reclamation of the word “cunt,” a former favorite of mine). But is Frere-Jones saying that if a woman knows what she wants and asks for it—and if what she wants happens to be commitment—then she’s being dumb and girly and cliché? High maintenance? Because that would be sort of fucked up.

Let me explain.

I used to think that being called low-maintenance was a badge of honor. Maybe this has something to do with where I grew up—I come from Marin County, which is wealthy but in a completely distinct way from the sort of wealth you might find in, say, New Jersey, where I have this image of girls clutching their Kate Spade totes close to their Burberry coats and batting their long eyelashes and twirling their pearl necklaces. Where I’m from, the only pearl necklaces we wore washed off.

I come from a hardier stock, where we peed in the woods and wore Birkenstocks and daisies behind our ears. The ultimate insult was to be called a JAP. When my high school boyfriend called me low-maintenance, I beamed. Yes, I thought, this validates the flowy skirt wearing, skinny-dipping, rock-hopping me.

But this paper-bag princess fairytale didn't hold up as well in college. I’d lie in bed next to the boy I was sleeping with—or were we dating?—trying to summon the courage to talk about what we were doing. But when I rehearsed the words in my head, I couldn’t get over how annoyingly girly it all sounded, so I kept my mouth shut. Every time I left his house, I felt the heavy loneliness of what I’d left unsaid.

“You’re not like all those other dumb girls,” he’d tell me.

“Yes,” I may well have answered, “they expect you to return their phone calls and make solid plans—but I’m always here for you when you feel like fucking.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out that those other dumb girls were the ones who wanted relationships, and that what I had going for me was being cute and fuck-able and not asking much of him. I wasn't sure how to feel about his compliment—I relished his approval, but I had won it by making him think that I didn't want the one thing I wanted most. It was a pretty classic case of putting some one else's needs before your own; this is what Sasha Fierce is rallying against and Frere-Jones is ridiculing her for.

Maybe I shouldn't blame him for not understanding. I get the feeling that it’s a uniquely female phenomenon to lose your rational faculties around a guy and start flirting on auto-pilot. This drive is so powerful that I can feel it at work even around men I'm not attracted to. In one such case, I had lost interest in my lover, but instead of telling him so, I tried harder than ever to make myself appear interested. And it worked; one night, with a spark of awe in his voice, he told me that he'd never slept with anyone who smiled as much as I did.

You don't have a clue, I thought, all smug and sardonic. But how lonely it is to deceive someone in this way, to isolate yourself with smiles. Just as lonely as lying in bed unable to speak my mind. In both cases, the person I was with was so utterly estranged from me and my wants. It's a shifty exchange we were engaged in, and neither of us knew the true score.

It's amazing how little good sex depends on trust.

And as much as I plead guilty to acting one way but feeling another, it's still hard to get over the fact that the amorous movements of other peoples' bodies do not reveal their feelings. Body language conceals and confuses, and I've had to learn to disregard it, or at least take it with a hefty grain of salt. If I can't trust your body, and you can't trust mine, what light do we have to go by? No wonder sex is so infused with confusion and suspicion.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's difficult to speak my mind, especially in sexual situations, and the last thing I need is a nationally-syndicated high-culture columnist making it even harder by furthering the idea that cool girls don’t talk about commitment.

Ode to Twenty-Three

2009-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Oh to be 23!

…And to be aware of what a light and free and generous time of life this is. My career? My love life? My biological clock? None of this concerns me much. Perhaps it should. I don't care. I am unencumbered. I love my life and its fullness—a flighty fullness like an escaped balloon rather than an after-dinner belly.

We all have to eat. We have to rest. We need money, we need social interaction, we need alone time, we want to fuck, we have to breathe, we want to sit around and get high and listen to music all day long. Balancing all this used to be something I struggled with and stressed over: Run or rest? Read or write? Write or draw? Work or play?

Every decision carried the weight of a declaration: If I chose to write and not draw then I was a writer and not an artist. If I chose to stay in and not go out then I was antisocial. If I chose to sneak out to see ONE and not sleep over at Sasha’s then I was that kind of girl.

But at 23 these choices hardly seem relevant. It’s “yes, and” to everything, and lo: there’s been a pleasant effortlessness to my achievements lately, as if the choosing itself were holding me back. 23 is a bottomless pit—nothing I consume weighs me down. I have so much more room in me than I used to.

* * *

At 17 I was a brooding, moody teenager. I felt a heavy, spiteful unencumbered—a don't-owe-nothin'-to-know-no one, fuck-it, nauseous kind of lightness.

At 22 and working hard on a farm, I longed for the good life I had in college: "a lot of freedom and not much responsibility," as my dad so aptly put it. But back in college, I wasn't walking around in awe of my freedom—I didn't feel that lightness in my bones like I do now.

Girlfriends nearing the end of this fine decade tell me that their clocks are ticking. Someone who would know told me that at a certain age, women feel an almost sexual desire to procreate. Sexual! What a strange application. The only sexual desire I’m feeling right now is for sex. These women are looking for not just a lover but a father, and when they meet a man, they can see the long shadows his shortcomings cast on their future.

So remote that it feels almost unfathomable is a life with my own crop of those coveted little beings. Friends who’ve crossed that divide say simply that “everything changes,” and then they get silent and contemplative and I can feel the great distance between us.

Over on this side of the divide, I wonder: is it my age or my outlook? I’m not quite sure, but I can say this: between the heavy past and the looming future, I’m finding the present pretty palatable. Let everything change when it changes, but for now: 23! And to know how good I have it!

The Worst Birthday Present I Never Got

2009-01-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

I was 18 years old, wispy and wanton and supple, and having sex with TWO, who barely seemed to notice me on him. He’d smile contentedly, let his eyelids fall closed, and look a little like he was lying on a lounge chair at the beach. I was in a different world perched there atop him, and I knew it.

When we were new, he politely declined my inaugural offering of a blowjob ("eh, I just don't really like them"), and I had to go down on my hands and knees to convince him otherwise. I knew I was dealing with a different creature entirely than ONE, who had to pull over on the drive home from school every day to have me before his homework.

TWO, as I’ve mentioned, was complacent about sex. Curiously, he was also the boyfriend who’d slept with so many girls he couldn’t remember the number. But maybe these things go hand in hand.

He was an incredible cook, and he’d make lavish meals for me: hand-rolled sushi and home-fried tempura. Ice cream with candied lavender petals that I helped him brush with egg white and dust with sugar.

He was also a DJ, and I’d follow him around Amoeba for hours as he buzzed through the aisles with a spring in his step, his face contorting in pleasure with each surprising discovery. When we got home, I’d watch from the couch as he stood at his turntables, his long neck arching gracefully beneath the weight of fat headphones, his long fingers pulling rhythmically at the vinyl.

Sometimes I would quiz him: Sex or music? Music. Sex or sushi? Sorry babe, I’ll take the latter.

* * *

For weeks preceding my 19th birthday, TWO hinted that he had some sort of secret surprise, some secret sexual surprise for me. When the day finally came, he took me out to sushi and then back to his place where we sat on the couch with his younger brother. The two of them rolled joint after joint and blazed in front of late-night cartoons. I grew tired and bitter as I sensed my secret birthday surprise slipping away.

I’d been delighted for weeks with the thought of my sexually complacent boyfriend plotting for my pleasure, but now: oh what a letdown. No mention, even. Wordlessly, but with a glare shot his direction in the dark, I climbed up into his lofted bed and tried to sleep. When he finally climbed into bed and I asked him about the surprise, he taunted me with “What surprise?” and said it like I was some sex-fiend, like I was his pet teenage girlfriend with the big ugly sex drive hanging down like hairy oversized balls.

Still wispy and wanton and supple but now 19, I fell asleep in a sexless loft saturated in birthday disappointment, and shamed by my stoned boyfriend's taunt.

* * *

I’ve had my share of guys who were a little mean, but what TWO did to me that night still feels like one of the meanest things anyone has ever done to me. No one else has put my desire in the spotlight like that, just to throw rotten tomatoes at it.

For all its immaturity, my relationship with ONE had taught me that sex was something fun and joyful—something almost innocent in its purity of purpose. But this understanding was torn at the seams with TWO. Whether he meant it or not, our desire disparity left me with self-doubt and him with a valuable resource in a relationship: Power.

Power plays weren’t on my mind back with ONE—maybe because I so thoroughly and effortlessly controlled the game. And even though I wouldn’t realize it until later, ONE taught me how power is exercised by giving (daily coitus on the side of the road). TWO taught me how power is exercised—even by men—by withholding.

On Curiosity & Boredom

2009-01-24T22:20:00.000-08:00

Oh, to be in bed with someone new! The curiosity, the suspense, the surprise and the delight. The way his mannerisms translate now that neither of you have any clothes on. Because you just knew when you saw him walk like that or laugh like that or smile askew at you like that—you just knew he'd be fun, and you were right.

And the fun is so particular! Each fuck is a sparkling discovery: of tics and looks and laughs transformed, familiar but strange. The transformation of voices is especially acute. Once you've heard someone's sex-voice, they never sound the same. FOUR had such a lovely voice, with rounded words, like intricate hollow objects, or piping with water trickling through. And TWO had a toy box voice, a pop-goes-the-weasel voice, with all sorts of crackling surprises that made me blush and demur and look on in awe.

This is what gives me the most pleasure: to experience someone in all their specificity. Everyone's styles so deliciously different: I didn't know that a person could be like that! And their being constitutes a whole new take on life, a whole new life.

* * *

As a kid, when something funny made me burst into hysterics, it was always followed by a shot of panic: what if that's the last funny thing that happens, ever? What if nothing makes me laugh this hard again?

When I got a little older, the end of a sexual relationship left me with the same fear: what if I never have sex with anyone new? What if there's only a finite amount of newness in the world? Pretty soon I'll have discovered it all and be bored.

It's similar to a feeling I used to get lying awake in bed at night, paralyzed by the newfound realization of my mortality: I am finite. The things of this world are finite. Laughter and sex do not go on forever. Everything ends in death: the ultimate boredom.

* * *

Boredom, like death, can strike when you least expect it. I hardly knew FOUR when we began sleeping together—a first for me that should have guaranteed an endless stream of surprise and discovery. And it did, mostly. But sometimes I would catch a glance of something in his face that I recognized; it was the same face I first saw in ONE, and later recognized in TWO. A familiar something, neither attractive nor repulsive, but shocking for its banality.

Seeing this face obliterates my fixation on all those unique little features and mannerisms. You're nothing special, I think to myself. Seen you before, ages ago, a hundred times.

Don't Pin Me

2009-01-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

When I was 19 and a counselor at summer camp, the thirty-something cook took a special interest in me. We'd stay up late talking in his tent and he'd dispense hard-hitting epithets on my character (We were also fooling around. Is that relevant?). I couldn't figure out how he had me pinned after only knowing me for a few short weeks, and I developed a sense of awe for what appeared to be great wisdom.

It wasn’t just me he had a knack for analyzing. He’d entertain me by going through our co-workers and pronouncing them this or that: Alpha-female. Type A. Or her parents didn’t love her enough. Or, she’s American, so of course she’s got no passion. Being in the company of such an astute observer was intimidating—at times it felt like he knew more about me than I did.

But then one night he tried to mock me for my supposed naiveté. “You’re just a giiiirl," he crooned. I protested, playfully at first. “Ok fine, you’re a WOMAN.” But that didn’t feel right either, and now I was annoyed. He kept trying to pin me down under his thumb and I kept slithering out; I could see he was struggling and it only made me more indignant.

I’m none of those things, I told him. Why can’t I just be Lindsay?

At first, his commentary had been chillingly accurate, and it made me want to believe everything he said. But now I saw how inconsistent his little pin-me game was, and I began to question whether he had ever really seen me.

It became increasingly clear that he had not—that he was incapable of authentic vision. The cook saw the world in terms of types, a strategy that allowed him to produce quick insight with limited information. The formula is simple: take a single observation, plug it into the appropriate category, and bingo: he’s an Achiever, she’s an Intellectual, or maybe a Creative—along with all the associated attributes.

But the same thing that allowed the cook to be so perceptive at times also prevented him from ever really seeing what was in front of him. Confronted with oddity or novelty, he consulted his mind’s library of archived experiences to help make an appropriate judgment.

This is what I think my favorite rhetoric professor in college was getting at when he talked about “seeing sameness.” A comment on one of my posts illustrates the utility of this mode of vision:

People (in mass) follow statistical patterns and can be described by generalizations, whereas individuals can't be. You don't need to make a new "sense" based on what could easily be a statistical outlier.

When you’re a physics grad student, like this dear little commenter is, it’s useful to streamline the process of seeing otherwise you’ll probably never get through the first steps of your experiments to look for variations in the fine structure constant. There will always be statistical outliers, and sometimes its best just to ignore them.

But when you’re seeing in terms of pre-established notions—seeing sameness, seeing what’s already happened—you’re not really seeing. And when we’re looking at art, or listening to music, or trying to really know a person, it's those statistical outliers that make a painting worth looking at, a song worth playing on repeat, or a person worth falling in love with.

We don’t always see what we’re expecting to see, and when that happens the temptation is to look away—to reach inside our heads for the Platonic ideal, and see that instead. But when we let go of preconceptions, we can look at a thing as totally individual and completely unique—not fitting into preexisting categories but forging new categories.

This is what I think my professor meant by seeing difference. It’s a way of seeing that’s interested in the features that distinguish an object, not the features that align it with some larger category. Seeing sameness is an act of gathering up the chaos of the world and organizing it into boxes. Seeing difference is making more chaos, doing away with overarching order. The only presumption it makes in looking at the world is that everything it encounters will be unique.

Maybe this is why I’ve never been able to identify with a political party. Those labels have never resonated for me; they feel like cages. They’re shortcuts, and though I'm aware of their usefulness, I want you to really see me, see me slowly and carefully and not call me a “giiiiirl” in a knowing drawl like that damn cook. Or a democrat. Or an intellectual. Or an achiever. Whatever. It sort of all feels the same.

I’m glad that other people can call themselves democrats and creatives and conservatives and introverts—really, I am—but it’s just not for me. Sorry.

A List

2009-01-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

I once had a boyfriend who couldn't remember how many girls he'd slept with. Granted, his number was at least twice as high as mine, but the not knowing is inconceivable to me.

I'm a little fixated on my number. I'm neither ashamed nor proud of it, but I've always had a sense that it’s a number of deep significance—that every time it changes, I change. Within the first few moments I'm with someone new, the thought unfailingly crosses my mind, if only for a moment: you are Number X.

Maybe I'm giving these guys too much credit; it's not as if each new penis constitutes a life-changing experience. Ha. Sorry guys.

When I was a kid, I collected things. At one point I was into key chains—I put every new key chain on a string and wore it around my neck at all times, even though it was long and heavy and I was 3’9”. I just liked having it with me. It was fun to look at when I was bored.

That’s a little bit how my list feels: each new experience is something I get to string onto the chain and keep, even after the relationship—or just the relation, as the case may be—is over. One sits comfortably against the next, and when I look at them together I can find patterns in the sequence.

As time goes on, the emotional power of each muddled, fraught experience fades, and it becomes something I can digest—something I can work into a story and draw meaning from.

ONE was a sweet and innocent relationship with a bitter young pothead. He patiently chipped away at my resolve for six months of what must have been utter agony for him, poor thing.

TWO was quirky and lovable and not that interested in sex. His complacency was a difficult notion to digest, since ONE had spent the past two years trying to topple my naiveté complex. As soon as I knew that all guys would do anything and say anything just to get in bed with me, I met the boy with the headache who was tired. Accustomed to the five-a-day habits of bunnies as I was (I'm not talking about vegetables), I found him immensely frustrating.

With THREE I finally got around to losing my innocence, as I define it. He wasn't my boyfriend, just a good pal. As we neared the inevitable, I felt an old familiar protest—no real reason, but the same hesitance that had kept ONE waiting for those six long months. Only this time, it occurred to me that I didn't have to listen to that feeling—I could go through with it anyway. And so the relic of a childhood protection mechanism began to crumble.

FOUR—oh god. I was so attracted to him. We spent three nights a week together, we cooked dinner and went running and rode his motorcycle to the top of Mount Tam. We weren't seeing other people. But heaven forbid we call it a "relationship." It didn't make much sense to me, either.

FIVE—One of the most passionless encounters I've ever had; tampon insertion is more sensual. At the time I thought it so gracious of him to alert me to the fact (while I sat on his lap, gin fizz in one hand, condom in the other) that he wasn't interested in a relationship and just wanted to have fun. Fine, you weren't much fun anyway. But hey—when did everyone get so closed off to life?

SIX—I'm not sure we ever kissed. He'd invite me over, we'd share a bottle of Maker's Mark while we watched violent and disturbing Japanese films. At some point, he'd wordlessly get up off the couch and collapse on his bed. This, I later learned, was his way of wooing me.

SEVEN—Not hot. But really nice—or so I thought. This was my first and (I hope) my last experience with a "safe" guy: friends with everyone, good with kids, a little dopey. "Is this just sex?" I asked him one night. "Is that bad?" he answered, meek, sheepish, ever the nice guy.

EIGHT—Not much to report here. My one and only one night stand. It was fun. And then it was over, and so was the summer.

NINE & TEN I'll need a bit more distance from before I can distill them down to paragraphs.

* * *

When I try to digest this meal and draw some nourishment—some meaning—from it, it gives me indigestion. What are all these disparate elements doing together on a single list? Supposedly they’re all united by one thing I’ve done. But was what I did with ONE the same thing I did with SIX? It seems a different undertaking entirely.

You could argue, as one of my friends recently did, that it's silly to pretend that sex—intercourse—is a way bigger deal than everything else we do in bed. That there's nothing that distinguishes the guys that made it on this list from the guys that almost did.

Except that I'm pretty sure the ones on the list are going to be etched in my memory forever, for better or for worse. And I'll keep trying to ascribe meaning to them, because that's what humans do, isn't it?

But I Didn't DO Anything!: On Womanhood, The Indigo Girls and Cockteasery

2009-01-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to the Indigo Girls since elementary school, turned on by my best friend Sasha, who was turned on by her older sister Sarah. Sasha might insist that she came upon them independently, but either way, I still associate them with Sarah and the older-girl mystique she had: lipstick, high school, tampons, etc. I also associate them with summer days in Sasha's garden, and drives to Yosemite with the windows down when you get the first fresh breath of mountain air.

One thing I could never imagine is a guy turning on the Indigo Girls. If you happen to have one in the front seat of your car, a fun game is to blast the Indigo Girls and bask in your own girliness and try to catch them cringing. It's a good way to feel like a separate species from the thing sitting in the seat next to you. I've had boyfriends with a broad appreciation for music who insist that they think the Indigo Girls are great, but I'm not sure if I believe them, and even if I did, I'm quite certain that their appreciation does not run deep, like mine, like Sasha's, like Sarah's. When I turn on the Indigo Girls, it's because I want to hear the aural extension of a part of my soul that I'm pretty sure guys don't have.

***

I didn't identify with the Indigo Girls so strongly until I started having the kinds of experiences that once gave Sarah her worldly air. It offered a kind of escape for the times when I'd done too much and felt sullied. Their music takes me back to a world of prepubescent innocence—pre-guys, pre-sex. On second thought, this world isn't really pre-anything—unlike puberty, it's not a free-fall of teasing and flirting that finally culminates in the crash of intercourse. Boys are peripheral in this world; it's like an infinite extension of the peaceful afternoons I spent sitting in the garden with Sasha, licking sugar off lemons. Is this what Lesbianism is like? I wouldn't know, but I bet the Indigo Girls would.

***

There's one glaring exception for me to this theory of Indigo-girlhood Eden: Jonas & Ezekiel. The song is tribal sounding, rhythmic, heavy. Sasha put it on a mix tape for me that I played constantly on a family trip to Israel when I was 14, and so it was in my head when I found myself in the hotel room of a fellow young American Jew—Zach—whom I'd met by the pool. I was delighted with him when he flirted with me on the lounge chairs; I was in awe of myself as I sat on his lap on the swing set, my little sister watching from the adjacent swing. I imagined seeing myself in her eyes: old and experienced like Sarah had seemed to me. But I was far from experienced, and the half hour I spent in his hotel room left him unsatisfied, and me disgusted.

Apparently this is what they call a cock-tease. But I didn't do anything! Exactly.

As he fumbled with belt buckles and bra straps, I felt myself slithering out of my body and hovering near the ceiling over this mess of two teenagers. Look—he's doing this to her and he thinks she likes it. Idiot. When will this be over?

It was the first and most definitely not the last time I experienced the uncanny sensation of being two girls at once: the girl on the bed with her eyes half closed and her head tilted to the side in mock pleasure, and the girl in the air dispensing sardonic commentary on the coupling occurring below.

There is hardly any more lonely feeling.

Despite how icky the little tangle made me feel, I became fixated on it in the weeks that followed. I'd fast-forward my mix tape to Jonas & Ezekiel, close my eyes and let the drum beat and melody take me back to the hotel room and our awkward fumbling. With the music on, it was easier to recreate the scene in my head in impeccable detail: freckled shoulders, tucked-in sheets, the texture of the ceiling one that you could pull shapes out of—and I did.

It wasn't exactly what you'd call fantasizing, since the whole thing revolted me, but it was strangely similar…