Narrative Structure

Confessions of a Compulsive Chronicler

 

For my fifth birthday, my parents gave me a puppet theater. Before ceding the stage to my malleable marionettes, I was compelled to step between the curtains myself. A home movie shows gap-toothed me posing for the camera, framed by yellow fabric and a sign reading "Theatre".

I've always kept records. A recent excavation of my room from high school (which also contained box upon box of unexplored relics from middle, even elementary school) uncovered countless notebooks, binders, and photo albums.

Some were diaries, others were academic, but clearly preserved less for their educational content than the epic exchanges of gossip and confessions in the margins-- some in my hand, some not. One contained no writing directly on the page, but instead served as a sort of covered corkboard onto which I had pinned dozens of letters. What's more, this notebook featured an index cataloging the dates, players, even providing context. A black nylon trapper keeper labeled in blue white-out pen turned out to be a treasure trove of meticulously printed and three-hole-punched AOL Instant Messenger conversations, alternating red and blue text, rife with exclamation points. Again, I found a preface complete with dramatis personae, dates, and a summary to set the scene.

I can't have been older than twelve when I assembled these.

Some conversations were printed more than once-- I found them in the binder, then again tucked into a stray global studies notebook. I must have copy and pasted them into emails and saved them. Probably so that I could read them over and over again, even thirteen years later. Indeed, I found myself not needing to read more than a few lines into some of the most coveted chats and letters, because I remember. I remember the accusation of too quick a turn-around after a "breakup", or the cold sweat of hearing some rumor about myself, recounted by a "friend" over the internet.

I especially remember the tactics: walking the line of true and inflammatory, looking for a rise, backing off full of defenses and apologies once the desired reaction and slew of exclamations points ensued. Picking fights. Fights I could win. Asking questions I already knew the answers to.

Maybe it was less that I didn't need to read the conversations, and more that I didn't want to. Maybe twelve-year-old me was more familiar than twenty-five year old me would like her to be.

I'm still pulling the same shit. Sure, I'm better at it, but it's the same. The same hard-to- detect manipulative tendencies. The same admissions of "wrong" that are part and parcel to an absolute need to be right. The same regard for drama as sustenance. For me, upheaval has always been a life force.

Talking to my roommate (and best friend of eight years) about some fall-out from a recent break-up, he looked me in the eye and said, "You know sometimes I can't tell if you hate this stuff, or if you live for it."

But the question remains-- did I chronicle all of those letters and conversations in anticipation of the nostalgia that would agitate my future soul? Or was it for someone else? If I was going to look back on these things (not-so) fondly, couldn't I have just put them in a shoebox, like so many ticket stubs from Paris? These documents bear the distinct trace of an archivist's hand. I doubt that I would have been so naive as to assume it would be for posterity. After all, I always wanted to be the architect of the story. Let us not forget, it was a puppet theater my parents gave me. One in which I was to be both co-performer and director. And of course, story-teller. I preserved these pages for myself-- I was offering future me material.

Let's take a minute to acknowledge that this is posted on a blog that I keep about my own life. Moving on....

Little did I know how pertinent the exploits of yester-me would remain. The pages I found from high school are works of fiction, mainly short stories and plays, some poetry, a couple of short films. The script for one particularly embarrassing video-art project involves a girl and her (shaking, hollow) animated alter-ego. The girl keeps talking about how OK everything is in the wake of some unspecified event, and how it's "sucks" but she's "fine". The animated alter-ego interjects with quickly cut-off emotional outbursts about being not fine.

My senior year of high school, we were assigned the task of writing a letter to our future selves, with the promise that our teachers would mail the letter to us in four years’ time. Amongst the love notes from middle school, the letters tucked into yearbooks, and the angsty short stories was this letter from my 2005 self. “Things are going swimmingly,” she says, “they’d be better if…” a slew of revisions to my then-life ensued. “I have no idea where you’ll be later,” former me says in closing. “In the city maybe. Writing, hopefully, or doing something at which you excel and basically I just want you to be happy. Assignment complete.”

The letter is awash in cynicism, tempered by a lot of forcedly-optimistic back pedaling: “You have more work than you should and less free time than you need but summer holds a lot of promise. Graduation is exciting and prom is even better.” I seemed to have a deep aversion to admitting that I was any less than in control, at least emotionally.

The most recent script I've written is about a young woman on the day her boyfriend breaks up with her. Most of the scenes end with her friends saying things like "You'll be fine. You're always fine." The end is someone telling her "You know it's OK that you're not OK, right?" A script I wrote last year ends with a character (based on my roommate) solving months worth of failure to communicate with the line "You know what? I'm not fine. I'm angry. And I'm really fucking sad."

And I thought I was creative.

Evidently there is nothing new under my sun. Not even the notion that I would be trading in memoir. Maybe I needed to keep track of all of these documents so that I could come to understand the only character I seem capable of writing: myself.

It’s like the recently-viral website that generates facebook statuses based on things you’ve already written. Everybody likes to see an analysis of who they’ve been. It’s almost like someone is paying enough attention to offer insight, even if it’s just a robot.

But can that sort of self-indulgent excavation help us become better people? I thought that I had grown in so many ways. I've been patting myself on the back for all of these steps in the last few years: Becoming less judgmental, less uptight, getting out of a toxic relationship, taking charge of my career. Cleaning out my bedroom from high school. And then I realize that I'm still up to my old tricks. Maybe what the robot does is force us to confront our habits. You are what you habitually post on the internet?

Recently a gig took me to LA for one night. They needed to make a life-cast of my body for special effects on a TV show that I'll be shooting this month. There is now a silicon mold of my entire body and head. There will soon be another me. A replicant. Twelve year old me would have had it made purely as a reference.

Anyway I called J, my boyfriend from high school, you can read about him in "We Go Way Back". He lives in LA, and who can resist the "I'm in town for one night" card? So as my fifth grade crush, my prom date, who I reunited with nine months ago after eight years apart, stood next to me on a mountaintop overlooking LA and the dying sunset, he said "at least this makes a good story, right?". And I thought quite simply, don't fucking tempt me.

That night we had dinner with J’s roommate, who described the arc of our friendship as an hourglass. I couldn’t help but appreciate the metaphor.

I care about J. I always have. What our relationship will be, I don't know. What I do know is that some sort of life-long overwhelming devotion to the narrative could in this case prove blinding. If J and me are going to be part of each others’ lives, we have to just be us. It's not some fairy tale. It's not that simple.

This poor guy has already been subjected to me writing an epic essay about him. I also vaguely based a short film on our interaction last January. When you see someone sporadically, it’s easy for them to become more myth than muse, and perhaps more muse than man. Or at least, things get blurry.

Driving down from the mountain, J and I talked about lessons. We talked about learning and changing and growing. We talked about how you can say the things you need to say because you know you're supposed to say them, and how it can mean nothing, it's just going through the motions. It's rote. It's sex with someone you don't care about. Maybe if in my letter, I convinced future me how excited past me had been about prom and graduation, then I would somehow be insuring my future happiness.

We also talked about not buying into your own bullshit. How humans have issues and that's not an excuse. We discussed processes for dealing with our own faults, even if they don’t work a hundred percent of the time. It's progress. It's learning, kid, we're all just learning.

What I am learning is that nostalgia has its place—in this case, a trip down memory lane showed me just how far I have to go. If I’ve been frustrated by the same things since I was a teenager, maybe it’s time to let those things go. And if the characters I write when I’m in my twenties continue to have so much in common with the characters I created when I was in high school… well, that would make me a pretty boring writer.

I'm always going to want there to be a story, and I'm always going to appreciate that the role J has played in my story. But I have to cut the impulse to act in the interest of serving the narrative. It’s hard for me, because this is who I’ve always been: a compulsive chronicler. It turns out that my identity is wrapped up in… well, my identity. And believe me, the snake-eating-its-tail nature of writing about this at all is in no way lost on me. But I think it’s about time I learned that, while life events can lead to movies, one cannot live a movie.

I've Heard So Much About You

Muskit

We all know what it’s like to smell our best. Not to smell the best, but to smell our best. Our own, personal best. Like our true selves.

It’s not when you get out of the shower, where you’ve been using overpowering tea-tree oil shampoo, chemicals to burn the bacteria from your face, and Dr. Bronner’s that leaves you smelling, well, like everyone else who uses Dr. Bronner’s.

You smell your best when you smell like you. Maybe that’s when you get up in the morning. Maybe you were out drinking the night before. After you got off your shift in a restaurant with a wood-burning oven. Maybe you smoked some cigarettes. Maybe you then went and got tacos at a place that also serves fried food. Maybe that’s a little salsa roja in your hair. Maybe you then broke a sweat biking home. Maybe this is the third day in row that you’ve executed those exact same activities, without showering.

And that’s it. You are what you do. And you should smell like who you are.

But we all know those days, those days when your natural state just isn’t going to be appropriate. Maybe you have a job interview for a position with a salary… oh wait, those are extinct. It’s a freelance gig. But still, you might want to wash your hair, and un-wrinkle your slacks by hanging them in the bathroom while you run the shower on hot with the door closed.

Perhaps you have a date with that babe you met at your favorite late-night ramen joint, and you’re worried that if she runs her fingers through your hair and it looks like she manhandled the scallion pancakes, she might not wind up back at your place.

So you shower. And now you smell like Dr. Bronner’s and your roommate’s conditioner. How are you going to show your prospective employer or your foxy date who you really are? How are they going to smell it?

Never fear-- now there’s Muskit: For when you just can’t not shower.

Muskit is a highly un-scientific formula of all of the things that make sexy, cool, unclean humans smell just that: unclean, yet somehow sexy and cool. Each scent is based on our own trademarked “musk” scent… we can’t tell you what’s in it, but we’ll give you one clue: beard.

Start with basic Muskit, or try one of our unique blends:

• Tobacco and Cholula

• Flannel, whisky, and salt

• Garlic and yoga mat

• Umami Margarita

• Vodka, cherry chapstick, and mascara

• Sweaty sheets, bonfire and… is that urine? Probably not….

And be sure to check out our seasonal blend, temporally titled “Last Night”.

With Muskit, smell like the you that you’re supposed to be. Or at least the you that you were yesterday.

Alterations

It’s hard to find a cute bag that you can bike with. One that can hold the innumerable items that you require for your day, stay on while you ride, plus an accessible pocket for you bike lock (the frame attachment for my kryptonite lock remains on a Schwinn that was stolen from me years ago, goddammit). You need a bag that can still look reasonable when you go into a bar and have to stand without access to below-bar hooks. Or not take up a ton of space when you’re squeezed into that middle two-top on a date. One that can fit neatly under your seat at an off-off-off show down-down-downtown where your knees are already up against the back of someone else’s seat (OK, let’s admit it, you’re still in a bar, they’re just doing theater there that night).

But I found one! It’s perfect. It’s this weird faded black leather that still goes with gray or brown. The strap has a zipper down the middle so it can be worn across the shoulder, or as a backpack, or as a more traditional purse. The main pocket has zippers on either side, plus two smaller pockets, and then a large pocket on the back that is perfect to slide my lock into. I can fit my wallet, my makeup bag, the other little bag that I use for lipstick/makeup removing wipes/jewelry, my pencil case, my notebook, plus maybe a dress and some bike shorts, my bike lights, and my keys!

I got it for $15 at pretty good vintage store. When I bought it, one of the hooks that clipped a strap to a metal fastening was not entirely functional, but I quickly repaired that with a small key ring from the hardware store. It doesn’t even look weird.

So my bag and I biked, dined, and drank in perfect harmony for several months. I realized that the interior cavity was not actually separated from the two smaller pockets inside (which were also not separated from each other), but I turned the whole thing inside out and stitched that right up. My attempts at organization would not be thwarted!

Unfortunately I think maybe the makeup bag, other bag that I use for my lipstick/makeup removing wipes/jewelry, pencil case, notebook, dress, shorts, bike lights, and keys were maybe a little too much for the little bag. I mean, they all fit in there, no problem, but if I happened to carelessly put a too-bulky lip balm in the front pocket, the zipper would split open. Same for the secondary pocket. I could get the zipper back together after much back-and-forthing, but the fact is, without a more robust closure, this bag was just not going to hold what I wanted it to.

I had even made the mistake of putting a few items into one of the smaller pockets willy-nilly, i.e. not just putting them into one of my other little bags that I keep in my bag. Sure enough I got to work, the exterior zipper had split, and my favorite necklace was nowhere to be found. Catastrophe.

But I loved the bag! So I decided to see what could be done. I took it to a shoe/bag/leather repair guy. I asked him to please replace the zippers, repair the strap that was threatening to break (probably because of the weight of my bike lock…), and to also please sew up the interior pocket that I had neglected.

He looked over the bag. Turned it inside out. Looked at my seam work on the other two pockets. Said I had done a pretty god job. Checked out the zippers. Said no problem, $65. I said what if we leave off the interior seam? He said sure, no problem, you can take care of that yourself. $50.

I know this seems like a lot for repairs— $50 to replace two zippers and repair one strap.

But honestly, this bag had already proved itself as ideal. It was just a little wanting in the mechanics department. And I’d only paid $15 for it in the first place—for a leather, lined bag. So is $65 worth the bag that you really want, that you already know perfectly suits your lifestyle?

I said yes.

A few weeks later, boyfriend and I had a wedding on the books. It was going to be a bunch of his old friends. Some I’d met, some I hadn’t, but I wanted to make a good impression. Plus my wedding-attending days are just beginning, so each one is basically a very exciting chance for me to get dressed up (read: play grown-up).

It was going to be a pretty casual wedding, from what I understood. Additionally, I was going to be arriving directly from a trip to France. So if whatever I wore to the wedding were be something I could already justify having in my suitcase because I would wear it elsewhere on my trip… well, that would just be awesome. I was imagining a glorified sundress.

So the search began. I tried to borrow things from friends… there were options, but nothing quite right. Many sundresses felt too flimsy, many things that were too formal felt… well, too formal. Finally three days before I was set to leave for my trip I stopped into a vintage store across from where I do my laundry.

I’ve gotten some other great things from this store—the woman who runs it does an amazing job with selecting what she puts on her racks, I’m pretty sure she hand repairs everything herself. When something has a tag that says “as is”, usually I won’t even notice the issue, and she’ll just say “Oh yeah, there’s this stain here that I couldn’t get out all way…”. She knows. Because she handles every single piece herself.

So I tried on a dress at her shop because it was this amazing print—floral, I love boldly colored florals, this one was almost fauve-esque— and sort of water-color in style. I of course got the zipper stuck part way up because obviously I don’t have a way with delicate zippers, and rather than make it worse I figured I’d just come out of the dressing room and have her fix it.

She got the zipper unstuck—“Don’t worry, I’m pretty good with these things”—and then immediately said “That would be great on you, you’d have to get it altered.”

This woman didn’t try to sell me on anything, she acknowledged right away that the dress would need some work if it was going to “work” for me. And I loved that. She recognized a fixer-upper. She proceeded to show me how, because it’s a well-made dress from the sixties, there were several seams that could be taken in in order to achieve a precise fit. Fortunately the dress was too big, so we had material to work with.

I brought it to a tailor closer to my apartment who had done another (much simpler) job for me on short notice a few months prior. I showed him all the seams I wanted to have taken in, and eventually decided to have the whole thing made a little shorter as well.

I wore the dress out to drinks and dinner in France. Annika! Where did you get that dress?

At the wedding, Boyfriend’s very style-conscious friend told me that it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and that it looked like it was made for me. “Well, I had it altered,” I said. “Ah, you had it joojed,” she said. “Very good.”

Sometimes, the perfect thing isn’t perfect when we meet it. I’m not saying that every challenging item is worth our investment and sacrifice, but not everything worth caring about is going to be ideal on first sight.

That’s not to say that our vision for something, or rather, the alterations that we would prescribe, are correct. It has to be a balance, honoring the original integrity of the piece. I mean, that’s why you liked it in the first place.

But sometimes it’s worth the time. Not just throwing out those pants because you’ve stepped on the hem too many times or worn a hole in the crotch. Not saying no to a second date just because he wore ugly shoes the first time you went out. Not deleting the entire draft of the play you’ve been writing for months because you can’t fix that one scene in the third act.

I guess the point is, if you really care about something, it probably merits some effort. And if “growing up” means thinking about things like… you know, the future, then maybe it’s time to acknowledge that some things are worth keeping around.

This is My Girlfriend and I'm Completely in Love With Her

When Hipsters Fall in Love 

 

A few months ago I was in a loud, crowded bar with some friends from college. One of these guys, D, could probably be considered a hipster by most standards. He has a cool haircut and like, a mustache. So I guess that counts. He was with his girlfriend, who has enough 90’s style going on to also come off as pretty hip. They sat close to each other at the bar as we all caught up with our friend who was in from out of town.

It’s worth noting that the venue was sort of a hipster watering hole. I can’t for the life of me figure out if the signature frozen cocktails thing is supposed to be ironic or not, and that stresses me out a little. Choosing not to advertise that the burger is grass fed definitely feels like “the next thing” to me.

We were all shouting over the music, I was characteristically flirting with the bartender. Now, as someone who works in the service industry, when the bar is three deep, I never ask for anything with more than two ingredients. Three, if you count ice. And definitely nothing that requires stirring or muddling or blending. My usual shift drink is “bourbon in a cup”. I’m in the know.

Of course, D’s girlfriend ordered a piña colada. I was mortified. The bartender didn’t miss a beat, retreating to his post at the blender. I wasn’t sure if she had ordered it ironically or not, either option was sort of embarrassing. Because piña coladas aren’t just a pain in the ass to make, they’re also inherently lame. After a few moments and a lot of noise, she had a giant tulip glass with a cherry on top. I looked down at my whisky soda and felt like a pro.

“I don’t care, I love piña coladas,” she shouted at the top of her lungs, “I think they’re amazing!” I was shocked by her enthusiasm. Next, D turned toward me and yelled “This is my girlfriend, and I’m completely in love with her.”

It felt like it had been a lifetime since I’d heard anybody say anything so… straightforward. This is my girlfriend. This woman. This woman is my girlfriend. Not “this girl I’m hooking up with” or “someone I’m seeing” or “my… friend”. My girlfriend.

My last boyfriend probably referred to me as his girlfriend… once. In a year and a half. I think we’d been seeing each other for about three months when I told him I loved him. He didn’t tell me he loved me until about six months after that. And he hated PDA. We’d walk down the street and I would fantasize about him reaching out and taking my hand, or putting his arm around me. It never happened.

So the words “This is my girlfriend and I’m completely in love with her”… yeah, that was a lot.  But it wasn’t just about my ex. All of that distance, the not talking about feelings and not holding hands and not embracing titles… it somehow felt normal to me. Or like something that should be normal. We were the hipsters. We had a hipster relationship. And as a recent transplant, I’m sure on some level the whole thing felt very “Brooklyn” to me.

It also felt “adult”. Oh, we don’t need titles, we know how we feel about each other (of course, we didn’t). And “girlfriend”… what a juvenile term. No no, we’re just two humans floating along here, if our courses happen to run parallel for awhile, so be it. After all, “girlfriends” become fiancées, and fiancées become wives. And really, who does that? Marriage? Children? Plans? How passé."Yeah... I'll just text you later."

I didn’t think that we were inventing this model of relationship. After all, in college it seemed like everyone was just sort of “hooking up”. And isn’t life in Brooklyn just like college, minus the books?

The thing is, I wanted to be a girlfriend. And I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to call him my boyfriend so badly. In acting classes you talk about your “cap”—how your character knows she’s gotten what she wants. My cap would have been him looking me in the eye and saying: “Annika, you’re my girl, and I love you.”

How could I possibly admit that? That’s so uncool. I can’t be one of those “girls” that “wants” a “boyfriend”. It’s undignified. It’s old fashioned. So direct. So romantic. So lame.

And after all, the crux of the hipster identity is an eschewal of all things direct. Nothing too one-on, always through a haze of smoke and in quotes. You can’t actually just like a piña colada. They have to be funny. You can’t simply think they’re “amazing” and enjoy them. And you can’t just go around telling people that you love your girlfriend! Am I right?

But I thought it was… beautiful. Am I allowed to use that word? It was beautiful. I was… moved. Yikes. Feeling… feelings…. Not cool. Suddenly I wanted to go to the beach and drink piña coladas and fall in love and listen to the Beatles. All the things that normal people do. Obvious things. This is my life and I enjoy it. This is my family and they are important to me. This is my girlfriend and I am completely in love with her.

As the weeks went by I felt a cynicism that had become embedded in my psyche start to work its way out. D and his girlfriend are younger than I am, but I felt no obligation to discount their love, in spite of my own recent relationship difficulties. I adored seeing them together. And not like they were pets, or something. Not because it was cute. On the contrary, it was inspirational. The springtime PDA on the streets of Brooklyn started to feel like an array of exotic birds. I saw these souls as brave, their birdsong ringing something like “It can be cool to be in love. Or maybe it’s not cool, we actually couldn’t care less.” The oppression of winter had lifted, and people could help but celebrate by touching each other.

Love isn’t needing to be touched. It’s not a girlish fantasy about someone holding your hand. It’s a force that courses through you so vigorously, you can’t help but extend to other people.

A week later I sat in the living room of that bartender’s apartment, the one who had so chipperly made D’s girlfriend a piña colada. He played me a song on the acoustic guitar and he sang. He told me he was a hopeless romantic. I know that you’re rolling your eyes. Six months ago, I too would have cringed at the concept of the whole scene. You know what? It was fine. It was fun. And that’s OK.

Because I don’t need to be cool. And I don’t need to “act” “grownup”. You know what’s grown up? Neither do I, obviously. But I have an inkling that it might have something to do with acknowledging what you want, and being realistic in how you go about making yourself happy.

Last week it was late and I was sitting at the bar at the hipster watering hole, waiting for that same bartender to finish his shift so that we could leave together. He was engaged in a conversation with some guys who were pretty certain they were right about whatever it was they were saying. I sat there idly playing with a cherry, eventually tying the knot in a stem in my mouth. I handed my bartender friend the fruits of my labor, and he laughed.

“Can I just interrupt you guys for one second?” He cut off their discussion, holding up the knotted cherry stem. “Do you guys see this? This woman is my girlfriend, and I am completely in love with her.”