just checking boxes atp
throwing up and puking
Here is where I’m at: I have woken up automatically at 6 AM almost every single day for the past two months regardless of when I’ve fallen asleep (2am, many times). I’m hitting a maybe 40% falling-back-asleep rate. “Radial” ringing in my right ear every nine minutes from 8:20 to 10am or so, iPhone tossing and turning in my sheets. When people ask me how I’m doing I say bad and I laugh, because it’s a bit funny to say you’re bad, a bit German. My appetite, once reliably vast, has shrunk into something meager and weak. I am losing weight, which I catch myself enjoying. I say I’m becoming “snatched” as a joke, but now I need to tailor so many of my pants.
When I complained about all this to my roommate she asked if I was stressed, and I said yes, and she goes, well, there you go. I lied and said it was because of work, but really it has been because of a number of different boys. This is significantly more embarrassing, because boys are supposed to be stupid and simple, so being affected by them is, to me, indicative of a weak constitution. But I care a lot—I want so badly to be unfazed and nonchalant instead of obsessed and obsessive. I am too curious about other people for this whore’s life (ok brag—I care too much <3).
I have never found it difficult to mine my personal life for content. Part of what made me one of the best writers at my college was that I wrote with audacity during a period where everyone else seemed to be deeply self-conscious, worried about their future and personal brand. I was too, but I just somehow had made my brand shamelessness, which most took or mistook for intimacy. I would write about my dad—emotionally, and often. My peers seemed to take to Baba as a character, a symbol of Boomer careerism and the American dream, one you kept fighting, embracing, fighting again. I felt comfortable exploiting him for content (and it was surely content, barely art), but somehow I struggle with it when it comes to my daily life today. When it comes to stupid boys. How do these fucking autofiction writers do it? I’m reading I Love Dick, and though it’s been an impossible slog, I find myself aghast at the indecency of Chris Kraus’s private thoughts made public. It’s one thing to talk about your husband like this, someone who knows you, and knows you know them. It’s another to write about a colleague in such lewd, unflinching terms. Talking about how much you want them, how crazy you are for wanting them so bad. It’s grotesque!
The titular Dick is based on the academic and critic Dick Hebdige. Per an article in The New Yorker on I Love Dick’s renaissance, “Hebdige told the reporter [of a 1997 article in New York magazine] that ‘the book was like a bad review of my presence in the world,’ and that it violated his privacy. From then on, Kraus acknowledged that Dick was based on Hebdige, and that their brief relationship fell along the lines described in the novel, in which Chris spends a night with Dick, who treats her with coldness the morning after.”
There are just, like, 4 things that have occupied all of my thoughts these past few weeks and one of them is my job and the other 3 are things I can’t bring myself to write about. I would humiliate myself to you all, my friends who I see in real life all the time. It would reveal too much. So I will keep this brief.
some things:
not to rehash haley nahman’s recent 15 things but RIP to Pocket, the app/firefox extension where I saved all my articles. i’m now on the Matter train i guess
speaking of haley nahman, i mentioned her and some other writers/comedians i like in a Q&A I did on my research. please if you don’t mind share this far and wide so someone will hire me (Thank you)
speaking of interviewsssssss i thought this interview my buddy Brendan did for Rolling Stone about his viral song (slash being lowkey cyberbullied) was very sweet, especially the last bit. it’s unsettling watching people who have had to grind in the background for such a long time become propelled into a whole new level of visibility and scrutiny.
I finished The Rehearsal, and I of course thought the finale was absurd, but I really liked the interview Fielder and John Goglia did on CNN. I wanted so badly to send it to the boy i watched the finale with but he never texted me back originally. Instead I’m sending it to all of you. We move I suppose. Back to no more TV to watch for me
Is it just me or is Roland Garros kind of boring this year? It’s funny how much I wrote about Mirra Andreeva inspiring me and then when she was faced with hundreds of French fans booing her that tenacity and resilience was way harder to tap into. She’s 18 though so we’re chilling I think. Mirranators stand strong.
Now that I’m done writing I’m wondering if part of why I could be much more “honest” as a college writer was because I was writing to a larger and more anonymous audience, for the most part. I had to be worried about what “Abe ‘14” in the online comments was saying, not really much else. I feel most comfortable when I get to write something and send it out into the world and hope nobody notices I exist ever again
my film, from shiraz, beacon, and DC:
bye
pm