Sorry to get you all involved in it. But I can’t write anymore because nothing is more important to me these days than boys boys boys boys boys boys boys. Briefly, war. Is that repulsive? It must be, to think selectively about boys and war, war and boys. I need to delete Instagram and I need to eat more vegetables and I need to hydrate and I need to get back to running. I’ve lost my touch, I’ve lost my passion. My dad in tears on the sofa, sulking because I was squandering my potential. My dad in tears this week in Montréal over a funny story I can’t remember. Over the years he has become more delicate as I have become more cruel.
Grouchiness looms like a cloud. I’m hoping it’s a “we needed this” sort of storm. Increasingly I’m realizing: I am bored. I am bored and so I am becoming boring. How can I fix this? Should I write on here more often? Write less often? Unpause my Hinge profile? Restart therapy? I am already doing that, though I forgot how annoying it is, the whole rigamarole of drafting a story of your life with a stranger. I don’t even know if she’s any good yet, and I won’t know for a few weeks. I wish I were talking to Shamma, though I always wish I were talking to Shamma. On Instagram I watch as she dips into the Florida sea, her smile glittering against the waves like a caustic.
There’s a 30 Rock joke where Liz Lemon says she signed up for a class called “Cooking for One” but the teacher killed himself. I’ve been watching 30 Rock as usual and going to weddings, imagining my own. Blues in the bouquets, something outdoors. Hair curly, lashes glued on. How might I make it Iranian and American and whatever the culture or desires of my spouse might be (less important in my daydreams) but in a way that’s chic and genuine rather than try-hard-diaspora-kid-cringe. At the Montréal International Jazz Festival I watch a girl tilt her chin up to the side so the boy she’s with can kiss her on the cheek. He gives her an ugly one that I’m embarrassed to have seen. How do you mess up a cheek kiss like that? I’m appalled. Nobody to snark to; I’m with my parents. The band that’s playing is called “Dolphin Hyperspace” and my mom tells me she thinks jazz is just not for her.
It shouldn’t be possible to be this dramatic without being a songwriter. At least when they’re left on read other people go: So true. It does feel like the worst thing in the world. When I get ignored, what comes of it? I wish my therapist would prescribe writing fiction as cure. What would’ve happened if I had been kinder? Maybe that’s a world someone would want to read about. It’s not the one I’m living in.
Recently every boy I kiss winds up leaving the country, like, immediately after. When sparse but fat raindrops smack me on my walk from the bus stop I think, “fuck my chungus life,” a horrible phrase, though an illustrative one. I am laughing, maniacally, at my misfortune. It’s not so deep now, is it? I don’t hurt so badly, I just keep getting cuts and scrapes, like a skateboarder. I’m approaching “fuck my chungus life” with an extra layer of irony, by the way. Whatever you’re thinking is funny about fuck my chungus life — add a layer. I’m thinking this way because I’m better and smarter than everyone.
I’m far stupider and worse than all the people I adore. I worry that my advisor is the only person who sees anything in me, and I sweat a bit. I need a job. I don’t think I can be an academic forever now that I’m writing up some peer reviews and comparing them to the other reviewers, who think so deeply and critically. Instead I’m like — I don’t know, it seems ok? Other people’s research is always so boring; I can’t bring myself to assess its rigor and validity. I wish they were writing about boys. Boys boys boys boys! If you love what you do you never work a day in your life..! I worry: I can’t have anyone I work with see this. I can’t have anyone I work with know any of this.
My therapist said I should start telling my parents even a little bit about my dating life so they know I’m trying. I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom almost 2 years ago when my mom asked if I had ever had a boyfriend and when I said no she exclaimed, “then something is seriously wrong!” Maybe she was right, but she didn’t have to say it like that, breaking my heart. 2 years later, today: Baba is digitizing our family videos and every time he looks at me I can see he is looking at a girl with big brown eyes. On the phone last week he tells me how cute I was. “I feel like we didn’t realize we brought a clown into our home“ and I can hear his smile through the phone.
I’m struggling to read so I peck at a nonfiction book I “borrowed” from a boy a few months ago on the night he called me brilliant and soft-dumped me on his porch, in the opposite order. Book borrowing ethics are that you don’t have to give it back unless they ask, and I’ve already promised my dad he can read it after me. When I’m not pecking, I’m reading substacks with far more likes and comments and praise than mine, though I have told myself from the beginning that that wasn’t the point of this exercise. Bad girl. Scold myself back into some sort of ascetic approach to using the amazing Substack application.
I’m captivated by one writer in particular, a young woman who lives in New York and is constantly writing about the boys she dates or kisses or sees or saw. So of course I love to read it, I’d read her words a million times over. I am so jealous of her, though she seems a bit miserable with a job she doesn’t care for and boys who treat her like she’s dumb. But at least she is getting attention, isn’t she? I grow jealous of everyone who has the one thing I can’t seem to get my hands on. I don’t know what it is yet but I can smell it and it’s making me drool. I’m acting feral and people keep asking me questions like “what’s your type” and “what do you want?” I tell everyone something different; I want love, I want a partner, I want a situationship, I want a fling, I want to be slutty, I want seclusion and silence. I want to sit in a canoe in a lake by myself and just look around, 360 degrees, and taste the air.
When Shamma and I lived together and she would go out of town I would start doing weird shit like watch baseball. My roommates have both been out of town for nearly 2 weeks. I complain about one of them in particular to my friends, because she is an extreme chit-chatter,1 incapable of sitting in silence with another person even if I’m just walking from my room to the bathroom. After stopping in my apartment for five minutes, one of my friends described the experience as “mental noise.” But when my roommates are gone for more than a few days I start to think: Should I watch baseball? I start to miss wiping up their crumbs and feeling resentful and superior for always unloading the dishwasher. I miss listening through the wall to see whether they’re done using our tiny galley kitchen. I’m learning my annoyance is key to maintaining some homeostasis, after all. I’m trying to figure out if it’s the same as caring and being cared for; if it’s a way for me to feel purposeful.
there are a lot of ‘some things’ but to be honest i’m soooo sleepy today. i’m considering forcing myself to write weekly so that I am forced to write bad bad bad bad stuff. hope you’re all taking care. ILY
PM
I’m not being overdramatic I have witnesses who can corroborate