Moving!

Hey Dudes! It's time for In Quarter Life Crisis to make a little move. From now on I'll be updating www.InQuarterLifeCrisis.com. Don't worry, all of the old posts have migrated, so if you feel the need to revisit the dark days spent in [MexicanRestaurant] or want to brush up on my tips for Smoky Eyes, you'll find it all over there. Cool? Cool!

A Prayer That Things are Where They're Supposed to Be

Thinking about some things that I can't see right now, things I hope are where I left them....

I hope that my warm jacket is somewhere at my Mom's house.

I hope that the photos are still in the book my friend lent me, folded in that old letter.

I hope my metrocard is still in the pocket of my other jeans.

I hope my sunglasses are at your apartment.

I hope my umbrella is in my locker at work.

I hope the treasure map I drew when I was nine is still hidden behind the painting hanging in the living room of my father's house.

I hope my iPad is still in my bag.

I hope my initials are still written on the desk in my first dorm room.

I hope the sweet thoughts you once had of me are still at the forefront of your mind. 

The Guide to Breaking Up Part II: Playlist Edition

“Oops, I did it again”… see what I did there? That’s a song. Anyway I took another tour through break-up city a couple of months ago, so I thought I would use this as a “teachable moment” to let you all in on my secrets for getting through these difficult periods with grace and aplomb. This time we’ll pay special attention to crafting the perfect break-up playlist, because how else will you really hit those emotional peaks and valleys?

The first track you’ll want to put on is Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness”. Summer is gone, so is your relationship… “Kiss me hard before you go.” It’s appropriately melancholy, but you’re not going to lose your shit. Right? Yeah, definitely not going to lose your shit.

Let’s move from nostalgic “tone” to genuine nostalgia, shall we? I recommend “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls. It’s got a sweet forbidden love tale at its core that might just make you feel like a kid again. Maybe it will bring you back to the first time you got your heart broken, circa 1999. This will inevitably force you to reflect on all the subsequent times your heart has been broken, which will hopefully make you feel resilient… and not just tired and used.

While we’re still in the pop music phase of the playlist, we might as well go deep and throw on “Wrecking Ball”. Maybe you don’t mean to listen to it. Maybe it just came on the radio while you were moving your car. Maybe you left it on ironically. Maybe now you’re crying so hard you can’t even sing along. Ah, the power of music.

I recommend creating your own at-home mash-up by playing Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” at the same time as “Wrecking Ball”. I’m pretty sure they’re in the same key, try to line up the choruses for maximum catharsis. Careful, your heart might explode.

Let’s try to bring the mood up a bit, shall we? Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” will remind you of all the fun you can have now that you’re single! Do it! Be up all night! Get lucky! Ha ha! Oh my God, we’re having so… much… fun….

I’ll let this next part be a free-style section. Try to choose some music that will really remind you of your ex. Stuff that you listened to together. Maybe that song that you talked about on your first date… like the classic that has been sung by so many people but personally your favorite version is… wait, that’s your favorite version too? Oh my God. We have so much in common. Yeah. Put that one on the list.

Make this next one more about your ex and less about the two of you together. Maybe he played in punk bands in the early 2000’s. Maybe you need to throw on a track by that other band that he went on tour with but DEFINITELY NOT HIS BAND. That would be creepy....

To pull us out of this rabbit hole, let’s throw in a few things that show how void we can be emotionally. Something super loud or droney that will numb our eardrums and our hearts. I’m a fan of “Gone Completely” by Disappears. Because the lyric “Do you ever think about what if we had never met…” (or whatever the fuck he’s saying, I don’t know) is definitely not emotionally loaded and could never become a mantra to your love-thrashed soul. Certainly not.

You know what, it’s time to move on. You’ve wallowed long enough. You’ve had your desperate revenge fuck while listening to James Blake “Retrograde”. You’ve flirted with strangers in bars to the dulcet tones of Sam Cooke, only to realize that you could never spend time with these people under ordinary auditory circumstances. Let’s do it. Let’s find someone to hang with.

So you’re sitting on your couch with the potential casual hook-up who can distract you until you’re back on the boyfriend train. How do you convince him you’re cool without actually having to say anything? Because Lord knows, talking will not make you sound cool….

Try the new Blood Orange album. It’s pretty sexy. Be sure to mention that it’s the “new” Blood Orange album, so he knows how “with it” you are.

Perhaps The Limiñanas—they have a timeless sound and also sing in French. Pretend you understand the lyrics. Speaking other languages is always cool.

Or maybe put on that Haim album “Falling”. It’s not particularly great make-out music, but it’s so exuberant it will make it seem like you couldn’t possibly have experienced a break-up recently. In fact probably nothing bad has ever happened to you or anyone ever! Wheee!

So you did it. He’s cool. You’re cool. You hook up. It’s cool. He leaves. You go down the spiral.

Ah the spiral. For this, might I recommend listening to Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase”. On repeat. For hours. Maybe a whole day. Maybe a week.

When you’re pretty sure that your brain has been reduced to nothing but a twitching thinking machine and that there will be no more of the feelings ever, you can try to reintroduce emotions little by little, like solid foods. A nice transitional option might be “Computer Love” by Kraftwerk. You will feel, but only as a robot who wishes so badly to be human can feel.

I’ll leave the last track up to you again. Maybe there’s some song out there that you really like, that you’ve always really liked. A song that doesn’t remind you of anyone in particular, just something that speaks to you.

For me, it would probably be The New Radicals-- “You Get What You Give.”

The Wilds

I have a case of the wilds, guys. Everything is so shiny. All the songs are so good. I just want to stare at everybody. Everybody is staring at me. So. Much. Eye contact. I walk around and I don’t even need to listen to tunes to feel like I’m in some sort of music video. It’s like the wind is blowing into my soul through my skin and carrying me around. I come home late and I can’t sleep and sit out on the porch in the cold and listen to everything buzzing. Then I dream so hard, I wake up feeling psychically purged.

Everything everyone says is either the most interesting thing in the entire world, or it’s like I can’t understand them. I’m not hungry not hungry not hungry STARVING. I’m afraid to drink coffee because I’m already so keyed up. I just want to put all my friends on this weird magic carpet with me and fly around town with them.

There’s a young woman carrying a book that’s still in its opened Christmas wrapping and an old man grinning like he’s waiting for someone to take his picture and I feel like I’m made up of strangers-- the ones I know and the ones I don’t and the ones I will.

Guys, the wilds aren’t forever, but they are a sometimes-kind-of-awesome.  

On Being A Lover

Image by Sophie Blackhall-Cain

I’ve always been a romantic.

It’s looking up your former lover while you’re in town and walking into his work unannounced—“Hello.” 

It’s having sex with the boy you dated in high school in the back seat of his car, as adults. 

It’s remembering that wordless interaction with the talented stranger on Governor’s Island, and finding out two years later that he remembers it too.

It’s the impossibly handsome man twice your age walking up to you while you’re working a summer job at an old-timey department store, and telling you he wants to take your picture.

Then you get to be the girl who tells the next older man, the one who drives you around Paris on the back of his vespa, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before.”

Then you get to tell the next guy with a vespa, “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

It’s apple picking. With every boyfriend you’ve ever had.

It’s positioning yourself in the right place so that you can "discreetly" kiss your secret-work-lover at midnight on New Year's Eve. Just like you did last year. And the year before that.

It’s the clichés, really. One string of silly-face-and-kissing photo-booth photos is cute. But looking at a stack of them with different partners starts to feel like looking into a hall of mirrors.

Because the juxtaposition of these rituals, the ones that are supposed to be so fun and fancy-free, inevitably evokes a transparency-style layering that makes me feel sort of hollow. Like a sketch that’s been traced over too many times. We can’t impose what is supposed to be impulsive.

But of course, that’s what we romantics do. We crafters of stories, architects of tales.

We see and speak the narrative as we live it. “You kind of want to kiss me, but you’re maybe not going to,” I said at the end of a date a few weeks ago. “I’m not?” came his reply.

Of course he did, and of course it was sweet. But I couldn’t just let it unfold. Even my romantic “lines” sound like they’re describing the scene, rather than being in it.

I realized recently that one of my exes has gotten back together with his ex-girlfriend. The one he cheated on. With me. I have long suspected that I was attractive to him because, at the time, I didn’t want a narrative. Or not the one she wanted. On the rare occasions that the Ex would discuss this woman, the ex-girlfriend-girlfriend, he talked about how frustrated he was that she wanted to get married and have kids, because he didn’t think that was necessarily the direction he wanted his life to go. He spoke of that trajectory with a disdain that in retrospect I find deeply caustic.

But then I was twenty-three, newly out of a highly-domestic too-grown-up too-early relationship, and I had no idea what I wanted. Running around New York City heavily under the influence of black eye-liner and tequila was about all the story-planning I could manage. In fact I wasn’t planning any stories, I was chasing them.  

Not needing the Ex to be my boyfriend was exhilarating, to me and him. For about three months. And then suddenly I was in love.

So was he, but he wouldn’t admit it. I remember dramatically trying to break up with him on New Year’s Eve because he wouldn’t tell me he loved me, drunkenly twisting some Shakespeare quote to suit my needs. Probably because he wouldn’t kiss me in front of our co-workers at midnight. Probably because he had only broken up with his girlfriend six weeks earlier and we thought no one at work knew we were sleeping together (ha).

I had grown bored with the secret narrative. I wanted security. He had blown me off on my birthday a week before, and that had hurt. Mistresses don’t get to spend holidays with their men. I knew that. I had liked feeling mistress-y when the ex-girlfriend-girlfriend was in the picture, or at least I confused the sensations of guilt and audacity with something you could call a rush. But by December they were definitely done, and I still felt awfully mistress-y.

So I cried and I guilted and I pressured. I thought, like so many have before, that I wanted him no matter what. Under any circumstances. That I would put up with his unspoken, unspeakable love. That he would come around eventually.

Of course he did. And of course, sometimes it was sweet. But when I “got” what I “wanted”, it really didn’t look anything like I’d pictured it.

Some people would say he gave too little too late. But it’s as much on me. I wanted too much too soon. I let my inner romantic get the best of me. I couldn’t just be a lover, because I was too busy feeling like a mistress.

He did make room for me in the narrative, eventually. I remember obsessing over a book of photos that his ex-girlfriend-girlfriend had made for him. Pictures of them. Mostly one or the other, arranged next to each other. Very few together. I pored over it like fairy-tale I wasn’t supposed to read.

A year later, when he was trying to woo me back, the Ex made me a book of photos of us. Mostly one or the other— very few pictures of us together exist. He filled the pages in between with Shakespeare quotes he didn’t understand that he had looked up on the internet. I didn't find this book enchanting, I just found it sad.

The hooks this man left in me are still there. He made me self-conscious about my ears in a way I will perhaps never truly get over, ears that I had never been self-conscious of before I met him. It's taken me a year to finally re-don the socks I love so much that he mocked me out of wearing maybe a month into our relationship. He's still in my head when I get dressed, when I order food, when I go out with other people. But it's getting better. For awhile I was angry. Now I'm just aware.

So when I saw the photos online recently, the photos of the Ex and his ex-girlfriend-girlfriend resuming the positions they maintained before some mischievous wide-eyed waitress made him think he could have his cake and eat it too, I felt hollow. It’s weird to feel like an interlude in someone else’s narrative.

While he and I were together, I realized that I did want to get married and have kids. Maybe not with him, but I started to see it as a distant part of my ever-nebulous future. So when we broke up I reminded him that in the long term, we didn’t want the same things anyway. He said I had changed his tune. That I made him realize he did want those things.

I guess that means now he’s ready to give her the things she always wanted. They look happy in the new pictures together. There’s one of them on New Year's Eve, at the ball-dropping ceremony, doing what romantics are supposed to do on New Year's Eve.

Sharing these revelations with a friend, she told me that I was wrong. It wasn’t him getting what he wanted— it was him being too scared to look for someone else. I’m not sure that’s what’s going on, but I sure as hell don’t want to be scared.

I have a lover. He’s a good friend. We were talking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I put on my bowler hat. He told me that he likes being my sometimes-lover. How he sees me as a Sabina.

But I have certainly been a Tereza.

If I could have been a lover to my Ex, maybe I could have walked into his work unannounced years later and said “Hello” and had it be romantic. But I couldn’t be a lover then. I was wreckless with my desires, and I got hurt. So I got scared. Kundera writes about Tereza’s vertigo, how it’s the result of her desire to ascend to something higher. And of course, vertigo is not fear of falling, but fear that we’ll jump.

These days, I’m dating. I go on dates. With various individuals. And I sit at bars and restaurants and the anecdotes unfold. I sound like a girl who likes apple picking and vespas and Paris and Shakespeare. And I start to feel the imprint of all of the lines that have been traced on the sketch, rounding the same corners time after time. And I feel heavy. I get tired. Last week I looked up from my amaro into the eyes of a guy that I could probably really like, and I just had to tell him— “sometimes when I think about getting to know someone really well, it feels so daunting.”

It’s a lot of pressure, being a romantic.

Later that night we were at his apartment. We looked at a giant Shakespeare anthology. He lent me a DVD of My Dinner With Andre, saying it would be too depressing to watch together. I told him I was going to leave. We kissed. He put his hand on the zipper of my hoodie, held it for a moment, looked down as if he was thinking very hard about whether or not to pull it, then let go. I went home.

I’m tired, but I’m not scared. I have a big heart. Like Juliette, my bounty is as boundless as the sea—the more I give to thee the more I have, for both are infinite.

But “thee” can’t be just one person right now. Otherwise I start to feel a little less than infinite. Like maybe I need that other person to help replenish my sea. And I can’t do that right now. I have to swim by myself for a little bit.

And yeah, sometimes you tread water for awhile. But then the current picks up again and there are sharks and there are whales and there are really cool plants and slippery seaweed and even the occasional mermaid.

I’m not letting my vertigo get in the way. I am totally jumping into that water.

Being a lover means not imposing the impulsive. Participating in the moment—not constructing it from the past or the future or from some weird birds-eye view.

Today I am a lover— yes, of apple picking and Paris and vespas and Shakespeare. But also of winter and stolen glances and postcards and whisky-soaked late night discussions and a song called “Saturday”. I am a lover of many things.

Like A Kid on Christmas Eve

The Anticipation is Killing Me

 

My brother is twenty-one years old. He’s the youngest. And he was always the one to wake up first on Christmas morning. Six or seven a.m, our mom having been up until maybe only four hours prior playing Santa. The rule was no opening presents until the coffee was ready.

Of course I was always thrilled when Fletcher, my brother, would pad into the room my sister and I shared, launching the conspiracy of how best to rouse Mom and start the festivities. I myself had probably barely slept, so rapt with excitement about the day to come. I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, I never have. The only times I can’t sleep are when I’m a) sick or b) sick with anticipation.

December always felt like the longest month of the year. I remember counting down the weeks, days, hours, being so keyed up on Christmas Eve that I would have to calm myself with assurances about the inevitability of the passage of time. “Even if you just sat here and did nothing, eventually tomorrow would come.” And every year, the clock would turn, I would eventually shut my eyes, and like hitting fast forward, when I opened them it would be Christmas, and Fletcher would be bopping around trying to get us to come peek at the tree.

For my mother I realize now, it was the opposite. It takes a lot of work to give your three kids the most special day of the year. For her, Christmas morning probably felt like a deadline approaching with meteoric velocity.

Let me just say that, for our family, Christmas was huge. The traditions stretched out over a four-day period. Christmas Day was a three-venue affair. Each detail had been honed into a ritual to be followed with near-spiritual devotion.

Plus, it’s my birthday. 12/25/87, 5:32 p.m. They gave me a red and green striped hat at the hospital.

That might be why I couldn’t sleep the night before: this was it. My day. My one day. For the whole year. Jesus Christ, it had better be good.

Last year was the first time Fletcher didn’t wake up first. I think my sister and I actually had to drag him out of bed. Everyone was equally enthusiastic about coffee, not just Mom. Fletcher’s in college, perhaps exhaustion outweighs anticipation. Maybe things just aren’t quite as exciting anymore.

Or at least, maybe Christmas isn’t. I’ve started to feel the same pressure my mother does, the preparatory scrambling. Like most adults, I no longer will the hours to fly by as I count down to being a year older. December twenty-fifth just isn’t that thing that I want to fast forward to anymore.

But the fast-forward impulse is still very much there. I constantly yearn to up the pace on every aspect of my life. Waiting to move forward with a project has become one of the more excruciating experiences I know. I meet someone I like and want to know every single thing about them, instantly. When I’m at rehearsal for a play, I’m thinking about band practice. When I’m at band practice, my mind is on going out after. When we’re out, I’m back to thinking about texting some boy, probably so that I can find out everything about him faster.

Is it an attention-span thing? It’s true, I get sick of the projects, often before they can progress to their truest form. I send off scripts before they’re ready. I play people demos of tracks before they even sound like music. I get bored with the guys, maybe because I didn’t actually want to know as much about them as I thought I did. 

It’s no coincidence that I work in restaurants— if nothing is happening on one table, I go check on another, and then another, in a constant rotation of activity.  

Someone who knows me pretty well told me my main problem is that I’m impatient. That I just need to stay out of my own way while things develop. But I think it’s more than that— if something is interesting to me, I want all of it at once.  

It’s sort of a binge thing. I’ll listen to the same song on repeat for an hour, every day for weeks. Then I’ll never listen to it again. Wouldn’t it be better to maybe let a little anticipation build? To continue to enjoy the song at a more moderate level for months or perhaps even years? Is it possible that I would actually come to love the song more, under such circumstances?

But my brain is always always always always going. It’s like a little kid that I need to keep constantly entertained. Otherwise these weird little fingers of doubt with long dirty fingernails creep up around the back and start to pick apart everything I’ve ever said or done or made or dreamed. So if what I want to hear is that song, I won't stop thinking about it. I'll just put it on repeat until I've gotten my fix.

I’ve started having mini panic attacks when the subway stops moving between stations. I freak out when people don’t walk on escalators. Recently I had an acting gig where all I had to do was lie there— literally, just lie there, for hours. It was the most challenging role of my life.    

Thich Nhat Hanh writes about the man who peels and eats a whole orange without realizing what it tastes like. His mind is working, but he’s not thinking about what he’s doing. I have really not been tasting the oranges lately.

The thing about Christmas is that once it’s over, it’s over. And then you have to wait a whole year to get so excited you can’t sleep again. At a certain point I realized that those hours I was wishing away were actually pretty sweet. The anticipation— that was the good part. Same thing goes for the time between an audition and when the casting is announced. Those are the days when you actually get to picture yourself in the role. Or when you start seeing someone you like, and you’re half daydreaming about them but half agonizing over whether or not you’re actually going to go out with them again. The “if” that accompanies the “when” is what makes it so sparkly.

And what wouldn’t you do to return to those days when you weren’t sure whether or not Jimmy even liked you back? Especially given that, after it turned out that Jimmy definitely did like you back, it also turned out that he was kind of a jerk who would break your heart six months later and who never did the dishes. You’d give anything to go back to the sweetness of waiting for the phone to ring.

So what I’d like to do is learn to appreciate the fun parts more. I want to slow my brain enough that I can get stoked on the early phases. The possibility. The unopened presents. And maybe take a little more time with my creative processes. Perhaps take the time to get to know people as part of an organic process, as opposed to binge-dating and burning out. Maybe not beat myself up too much for still having a service industry job as I embark on my twenty-sixth year.

Because this is the fun part. Being a kid on Christmas Eve is the best! Maybe we can get up early bop around with excitement, like Fletcher used to, and actually just have a good time doing it. This year I’m infusing olive oil as a Christmas gift for my family. It’s taking weeks, but it’s totally going to be worth the wait.