ithardlymatters

I’m kind of lazy when it comes to Halloween. I have good ideas all year long, then the second someone asks me “What are you being for Halloween?” I lose all ideas and say something really un-fun, like, “I’m not dressing up this year” just to get them off my back. But then I stress out and end up throwing something together last-minute that I convince myself is a work of genius. Looking back, I realize that I dress as barely-recognizable random women for Halloween. Because this is the Internet, let’s take a stroll through the Halloween costumes of my adult life, skipping the years I didn’t dress up or don’t remember.

1994: Mrs. Mia Wallace
I cut myself some bangs, wore thrift-store black bell-bottoms and gold slippers, a man’s white Oxford, taped an oral hygiene syringe to my chest, and applied red lipstick to one nostril. Perfect, right? But Pulp Fiction had just come out, and though everyone I knew in the Film Studies program had run to the Nickelodeon to see it on opening night, the bro in the cow costume and other assembled partygoers had not. No one knew who I was, even though all night I danced by myself in front of a boom box playing only the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. It was too soon. Too soon.

1995: Anne Sexton
In college, I was obsessed with Anne Sexton. I thought she was a glamorous genius, which was basically what I wanted to be in life (CHECK!). Plus, my poetry workshop was held in the legendary Room 222 of the English Department building at Boston University, where she had famously taken Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop alongside Sylvia Plath 40 years earlier. My senior year, I was an editor of Urthona, BU’s literary journal (what, you’ve never heard of it?!). Some doofus who was obsessed with James Joyce decided we needed to have a literary-themed Halloween party at his apartment in Allston, and I seized this opportunity to dress as my idol. Apparently, I thought that wrapping a scarf around my hair, lady-in-a-convertible-style, wearing sunglasses indoors, and sporting my “sexy secretary” skirt would make it clear to my poetry-nerd pals that I was channeling Anne. No one knew who I was. And I even drank a lot, and smoked cigarettes, just like Anne. Le sigh.

1997: Princess Leia
Yes, people did recognize this costume. Moving on.

1998: Maddy Ferguson
My San Francisco peeps, like me, firmly identified as lovers of the television series Twin Peaks. If we met people who were not conversant in Peaks Speak, we immediately hated them. To further alienate ourselves from everyone else in San Francisco, we threw a David Lynch-themed Halloween party. There were several FBI agents, an Isabella Rossolini, a truly frightening Bobby Peru, and the requisite Log Lady. But no one expected (or wanted) to see a fully-accurate Maddy Ferguson, “naked” (grey tank dress, grey body paint), paled in rigor mortis, and wrapped in plastic. No, I was NOT Laura Palmer, dummy! I have dark hair! I’m obviously her also-murdered cousin Maddy Ferguson. Though I could afford 3 yards of plastic sheeting, I apparently could not afford a blond wig. Oh well.

2003: Foxxy Cleopatra
I love Beyoncé and want to be her. I am, however, white. That did not stop me from pretending I was her character from Austin Powers in Goldmember. I dusted myself with golden glitter, popped an Afro wig on my head, and showed up to my DJ gig shouting, “I’m a whole LOTTA woman!” And no one knew what the hell I was talking about.

2005: Carol Channing
My roommate and I decided to throw a last-minute Halloween party. Having a day to prepare, she and I raided our closets. She emerged with a sari and a long black wig (she’s a redheaded Irish lass who was dating an Indian man who is now her husband), and I emerged with a knit jacket bedazzled with sequins and trimmed with long spindly white feathers. I wanted to wear it, but who or what would wear such a thing? After a short perusal of our home VHS offerings, I came across the festive jacket of Thoroughly Modern Millie starring Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, and Carol Channing. Carol would wear that shit. I borrowed a glamorous gown and a blond bob wig from my neighbor, strapped something blingy to my throat, and voila! I was America’s treasured actress of stage and screen. Everyone who came to the party thought I was Marilyn Monroe.

2007: The Girl from the “Legs” Video
The band I was in, BB Gun (or GG Buns, as I sometimes called it) had agreed to play a ZZ Top tribute show at the Annex. (This is the kind of sentence that after reading it and realizing that it’s an accurate description of your actual life, can make you consider suicide. Anyway.) It was happening close to Halloween, and there was to be a “Best Legs” and “Best Beard” contest. We learned a couple of songs, and I went to American Apparel to recreate the distinctive and highly distinguished look of the star of ZZ Top’s ’80s masterpiece: the video for “Legs.” Baby girl socks with ruffles, pink pumps, an extremely mini skirt. And the blonde bob wig (close enough, the broad was blond). And the capper: lace fingerless gloves. We showed up and no one else was dressed up. I won Best Legs by default, and proceeded to get tanked on gin and tonics to avoid dying from embarrassment. But people kind of knew who I was, so victory!

2008: Samantha Ronson
At this point in my life, I was fact-checking for Life & Style Weekly. This meant using Lexis/Nexis to find out when Miley Cyrus’s first semi-naked phone pictures appeared on the Internet. So I knew way to much about minor celebrities and the details of their LA shopping excursions. A big “story” that year was the on-again, off-again relationship between Lindsay Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson. So, I was her for Halloween. My friends and I went to a house party that featured several Snookis and Michelle and Barack Obama. No one knew who I was, despite the DJ-quality headphones dangling around my neck.

2009: Peggy Olson
There was nothing more topical and half-assed during Halloween 2009 than dressing as a Mad Men character. And I was right there, with a neckerchief and some hideously curled bangs, purporting to be Peggy Olson. People said, “Ooooh,” in an unimpressed way every time I explained who I was. My boyfriend at the time put on a suit and said he was Don Draper. (He looked more like Pete Campbell, but whatevs.)

This year, I’m going as a “cute witch.” There was a pointed hat lying around the office. Just praying people will know what I am.

When I was little, let’s say about ten, I was a bad and nervous girl. Not all bad and nervous, but I had some tendencies. At school, I bit my fingernails down to their quicks and left strips of jagged skin hanging from the cuticles. When they bled, I’d suck on them and like the metallic taste. See? Nervous. And nervousness can lead directly to badness. I once cheated in a spelling bee so I could win a plastic pen shaped like a raspberry-orange sherbet swirl ice cream cone. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t feel bad about it. After my teacher, Ms. Noonan, handed it to me, I wrapped my bloody fingers around the cone and practiced my cursive like I had been writing with it for years. That same year, I, how can I say this? oh what the hell, farted during a (silent) math test and blamed it on poor, redheaded Jonathan O’Neill by solemnly nodding in his direction just as the entire class turned around to suss out the source of the offending sound. Then the entire class laughed directly at him, including me. Poor, redheaded Jonathan O’Neill blushed so hard that he turned into a human version of my pen. I felt bad about that. I still do.

At home, I practiced my badness by chasing, catching, and beating on my little sister. To this day she’s the only person I’ve ever punched. I did this until she entered high school and I entered college and she grew taller than me, like I-play-varsity-basketball-as-a-freshman-tall, at which time I still taunted her but kept the physical violence to a minimum, fearing she’d lay me out. As another drop in the badness bucket, I did a lot of sneaking around the house. Well after my bedtime, I’d creep out of my room, silent as a spy, and squirm down the hallway to the living room to squat in front of the end of the couch to watch Love Boat and Fantasy Island as my parents drowsed, my dad in the armchair by the window, my mom on the very couch I was using as a shield. One shift of her foot and I was belly to carpet, wriggling back to my bedroom for dear life. I never got caught.

But the best place to sneak to was my parents’ bedroom, which occupied the entire upstairs of our little blue Cape Cod on Roanoke Road in Springfield, Massachusetts. At the crack of a Sunday morning, while the house was quiet, I’d creak open the door to my parents’ bedroom and slink up the maroon-carpeted stairs while they slept, Dad snoring, Mom mumbling. I’d drag myself soundlessly around the painted-white banister to the motherlode: the built-in two-tiered bookshelf that lined the half-wall created by the staircase. My parents weren’t big book owners—my Dad wasn’t a reader at all and my mother preferred to check out books from the library. Their collection consisted of gift books about sports, five or six Danielle Steels, a few paperback biographies of people like Nancy Reagan and Johnny Carson, a dusty pre-war edition of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, a nearly-complete set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias acquired in agonizing intervals at the local A&P, and the Golf Fundamentals workbook my dad had co-authored sometime before I was born.

The two books I was after were housed at the far end of the bookshelf, the one nearest to my parents’ bed. The History of Art, a fat, slick tome with a Roman bust on the cover must have been a gift or some leftover text from my mother’s storied year of higher education at Our Lady of the Elms. My parents knew and cared nothing about art. But through the magic of reading, at the tender age of ten, I became something of an art buff, for the same reason that many of my prepubescent friends had recently become avid readers—for the sex.

The History of Art offered page after glossy page of bare breasts and sculpted penises, each bulbous offering a thing of mystery and wonder that sent a bolt of embarrassment through my undeveloped body (exacerbating the already high-adrenaline state I was in thanks to all the sneaking around). The image that traumatized/beckoned me the most in that book was a Renaissance painting of St. Sebastian. Rubens? Botticelli? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was looking at my first naked man. He was beautiful, bound to a tree, and punctured by arrows that ripped bloody pink flaps in his impossibly white skin. The flaps, the look of agony, the bundle of male genitalia. Where to look first?

Inevitably, after my visual stimulation, I needed more information. I’d close The History of Art, peek over at my parents to make sure they were still asleep, then run my index finger along the paperback spines on the upper shelf until it rested on the black and gold secret treasure that was, I kid you not, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story by Xaviera Hollander. How and why my mother (it couldn’t have been my father’s, right?) owned this tattered smutfest was beyond me. To this day, I can’t ask her. But again, it didn’t matter why she had it. What mattered was that back in 1984 I held it in my trembling fingers. 180 degrees from Little House on the Prairie, my usual literary fare, Ms. Hollander’s “own story” was nothing more than a series of detailed anecdotes of her frequent and freaky sexual escapades, a fact you could tell by title and author photo alone. In the photo, on the faded black cover with gold lettering, a woman of about my mother’s age with a blond flip peered suggestively out of a circle just below the word “hooker.” She clutched a leopard-print faux-fur jacket with an enormous fuzzy black collar around her shoulders. In my mind, she was naked under that coat.

And, oh, what adventures the Happy Hooker had! She was in France a lot, innocently sipping champagne by pools until a random man passed by. That’s when it got good. Sometimes it was a handsome Mediterranean businessman and his Doberman Pinscher, other times it was a poor-as-dirt Spanish artist with a paint-splattered tunic billowing in the poolside breeze. Either way, the man would approach our happiest of hookers, say something seductive peppered with foreign words like, “Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle. What is a beautiful fille like yourself doing all alone on such a glorious day?” That’s when Double H would use all of her descriptive powers to give us, her ravenous readers, a second-by-second account of each aspect of her physical being—taut nipples, quivering thighs, etc.,–and her mental state—“I had been with handsome Turks before, but this one, with his strident passion and thatch of thick black chest hair, ignited some distant flame deep inside my broken and battered soul.” I made that up, but you get the idea. And it went on like that, with plenty of body parts and swear words and descriptions of spatial arrangements of human bodies that I didn’t realize were achievable without superpowers.

The Happy Hooker did it with every guy in the book, regardless of race, class, or creed. She did it by the pool, in cabanas, on silky hotel bedsheets, in moving automobiles. She did it with them and then they paid her. She even did it with the Doberman, hand to God. That’s the story that was too much for me, the one that prompted my slow, silent, horror-struck descent down the stairs accompanied by the innocent breathing sounds coming from my parents’ bed. Back in my room our new puppy rested on my patchwork pillow sham, curled into a yellow ball until I knocked him off the bed, a bit too forcefully. Time for this bad girl to go to sleep and dream gingham dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A single female friend recently sent me an email entitled “Freaks and losers.” Inside was a verbatim message she received in her OK Cupid inbox in this brand spanking new year full of possibility and dreams of true love. It is a melange of abject insanity, utter delusion, and batshit crazy.

After my immediate delighted/horrified response, she granted me permission to post it. Here it is:

Jan. 3, 2011 – 11:28pm
Okay. I checked your stats and it appears that no strong theory can be devised using the data provided by okcupid regarding your’ purity or lack thereof. I must tell you that I usually only converse with beings of highest purity, those having levels ranking among those of the angels at the 99th percentile. I find your proposition to be highly inappropriate and exceedingly titilating, a feeling which I have not felt in years. Back when I was a child, in a queer land known as “Iowa”, we often would “titilate” our tame ungulate, where upon she would give forth a rich white substance we called ” milk”. I’m sure it sounds strange to a modern woman such as yourself, perhaps even revolting, but we would drink this milk from a glass with a fresh cookie, or straight from the bulbous source itself. Those were simpler days, magical days when a boy could run barefoot through the pasture without a care in the world and a man could die and be assured that his wife and possessions be buried with him, leaving said boy with nothing but the callusses on his toes and a debt so large that it require him being sold into slavery at the local brothel/ sanitarium. We called this place a “convent”. Listen to me gab away! Now, what is it we should discuss?

Let’s unpack this. (She rubs her palms together like a villain about to concoct a potion.)

1. Purity, angels, and percentiles. You know that one great aunt who makes life decisions based on numerology, wraps herself in flowing scarves, and seems to think that a dream catcher is an appropriate, nay, welcome, Christmas gift? If that’s what your email to a potential dates conjures up, then, newsflash: potential date is not writing back to you. She is not going anywhere with you. She is horrified in a spiritual, feathery way, i.e., completely turned off.

2. Titilating [sic] propositions. I can only assume this is an attempted reference to something put forth in my friend’s profile. Knowing her, I’m sure her profile is not going for naked “titillation.” The misspelling alone is a deal breaker, and this particular one rests one’s mind on a bosomy pillow, thereby making the potential date feel objectified. Plus, you can pay for a bosomy pillow, so why go through the hassle of dating?

3. Iowan milk drunk straight from the “bulbous source.” This means boobs. Boobs as udders, potential date as cow. How now does one think potential date will respond favorably to this analogy? How now?

4. Running barefoot through pastures. Two words: douche commercial.

5. Death and burial. Um, don’t need to say much abut how this is inappropriate potential-date banter.

6. Callussed [sic] toes. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew.

7. Debt, brothels, sanitariums, and convents. Thoughts of these nouns will send potential dates running for the pastures.

8. Gabbing away. You go on with your bad self, girl!

With this missive, we now have proof that the unfiltered ravings of a certain lunatic are considered by some to be part of the “modern” dating game. Lessons? Don’t lead with sex, don’t compare women to cows. Don’t allude to disgusting and unpleasant things in a devil-may-care manner. Steer away from pennilessness, whores, madness, and nuns. And douching. And udders. And calluses. And death.

Having dated online in the past, I stand in sympathy and strength alongside anyone who is currently signed up to find their mate. I fling good wishes in your general direction as you slog through the sludge on your path toward relationship-with-an-actual-rational-human-adult-land, which can be found. We just have to believe that.

Good luck, girls. Do keep sending me this stuff.

When I was a 29-year-old couch surfer, I did not brand myself as the NYC Nomad, nor did I get profiled in the New York Times. Instead, I processed the fact that my (print) magazine idea (MOVE: for NYC girls on the–wait for it–move!) was not going to happen (due to a scattered editorial vision and a lack of any other interested human being) by using landlines to dial up to my Juno account to check my Yahoo and Friendster accounts. Oh, the Year 2003.

I had just up and quit my job as a bartender, relinquishing not only my income, but my social life as well. I had also chosen to move out of the microscopic room I rented in the West Village for the larger, greener, pastures of Brooklyn. This had effectively ostracized me from my neighborhood, the only I had known in New York, and my dear roommate Annie, who was my touchstone in many ways. I was thrilled to be paying less money for a bigger room, but felt a bit atwirl as I freelanced my way toward the rent money each month. One of the stipulations of my moving in to my room in Brooklyn was that I’d have to evacuate the premises after four months to allow the girl I was subletting from to move back in to finish her last semester at Hunter College. Fine! I said, with the stipulation that I’d be moving right back in the minute she finished. What I would do for those few months was something I hadn’t quite figured out.

So I told everyone I knew–mostly people who worked at the bar or drank there often–that I needed temporary housing. My friend Clay said I could stay with him and his girlfriend for as long as I wanted, and that I could store my crap in their basement. My former boss said I could crash in his 5th-floor walk-up while he was in Miami for the month of February. A neighborhood couple let me house sit while they were in Mexico. A mildly alcoholic sitcom actress let me dog sit her two loose-boweled pugs while she flitted to LA for a couple of weeks. A work-at-home graphic designer and his wife let me clean up after their new puppy while they traveled to England. I stayed on second-hand couches, loft beds with Laura Ashley sheets, luxurious wrought-iron-framed King beds. I stared at original artwork, cockroaches, unused Soloflex machines, shoes that cost more than my monthly rent nestled in individual velvet bags. I read borrowed books, watched pirated cable television, smoked out of cracked windows. I felt weirdly buoyed, and the longer it went on, the easier it seemed to be to not have a place of my own.

In a hobo-like fashion, I dragged a couple of suitcases, my donated laptop, and my grandfather’s guitar to each temporary pad. I edited manuscripts for cash on that laptop, and spent all day indoors (minus dog-walking), grabbing a shower and some food as the sun set and the bars opened. I’d visit Clay, or Andrew, or Campi, or Thomas, or Jason, or Angela, and drank for free every night. I’d talk non-stop, suddenly alive with pent up sociability. I’d stay late, until I started feeling pathetic for having been there as long as the bartender, then I’d wend my way back to whatever apartment I was occupying for a lonely late-night snack and a few pages of whatever book kept me company until I fell asleep.

I was grateful for the network that kept me afloat. It was something I explained to my mother repeatedly in response to her questions that mostly meant: What are you doing?? I didn’t have an answer for that except: I’m waiting. For what, I didn’t quite know. I was on pause. I wasn’t ready to make a move.

There is one occasion per year at which I consume multiple Bellinis and mini-pyramids of caviar perched atop tiny pancakes as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. That occasion is the National Book Awards, or as I like to say, The Oscars for Books. Well, maybe the Golden Globes. Or the SWSX Film Festival. Whichever analogy, it’s fancy with a capital F. And it’s an honor to be invited–to volunteer.

A very cool and very nice poet/rockstar friend of mine works for the National Book Foundation. Every year she asks for volunteers to help with set-up, check-in, and winner-ushering duties at the NBA. As a relatively unaccomplished writer who would otherwise not be invited to a book-related gala (not yet!), receiving my friend’s email asking for help is like winning the Golden Ticket. I get to be a swanky fangirl, a chatter-upper of agents, fellow writers, publishing types, and famous authors. I get to do an interpretive dance in 4-inch heels to Montell Jordan next to C.D. Wright. It’s random and absurd and fun, like a wedding gone wild for a bunch of semi-repressed writers in sparkly outfits.

This year, like last, I arrived at Cipriani Wall Street around 3:30. I immediately located the group of harried NBF volunteers that was unpacking boxes of nominated books in the far corner of the ballroom. The event techs were testing audio, the cater-waiters in white jackets were lining up like a football team ready to win State, and the maitre d’ was fussing about in an immaculate suit. The tables had been set, and our job was to unpack the books, then to create mesmerizing stacks of them so the table decorators could arrange them into centerpieces. Fifty-six tables, 15 books each. One of each genre, at least, Tom Wolfe’s (that night’s lifetime honoree) The Right Stuff on top. Go!

One of the perks of volunteering is that we each get copies of all the books to take home. So I packed an empty box full of slim poetry volumes, fat novels, and hardback nonfiction (I skipped the YA books, because I know no tweens), and hid it in the back room under a chair. It was nearing 6, so the volunteers changed from jeans into cocktail dresses, and headed out to the front lines to begin check-in.

“Codrescu. C, O, D…”

“Yep! You are at…Table 13. Have fun!”

The more famous a person was, the more polite they were at check-in. Patti Smith walked up to my station, looked me clear in the eyes and said, “Smith. Patti.”

“Of course. Congratulations!” I practically gushed all over her nominee medal.

The less famous were high-strung, had problems, wanted to know lots of things “Bathroom?” “Coat check?” “What table is ____ at?” “Can I have a look at the list?” A few actually grabbed the list from my hands and started flipping. The volunteer next to me ran to get Bellinis for us, scooping three off of a passing tray, and maneuvering them through a throng of tuxedo-clad gentlemen that seemed to grow exponentially with each minute. A tiny blogger wasn’t on the list. An older couple wasn’t either. A casually-dressed press-type had no seat. They squawked and fretted in varying degrees of intensity until one of the NBF event coordinators got a place set for them.

All in all, check-in went smoothly. We snacked on the aforementioned pancake/caviar morsels, tiny meat on tiny bones with mustard sauce, fried olives, and crackers adorned with miniature globs of mysterious (but tasty) red stuff. A voice over the loudspeaker asked that everyone take their seats. We volunteers teetered toward Table 55, and promptly consumed the breadsticks fanning out of tumbler glasses. Andy Borowitz emceed, the applause polite for his sardonic “publishing is dead” jokes. A man introduced the woman who created The Children’s Television Workshop, who stood on stage next to Elmo (wearing a tux), who stood next to his handler, a large black man. Wine poured into glasses tumbled quickly down throats. A puppet in a tux–so it’s going to be that kind of party.

Tom Wolfe took the stage in what else but white. And he talked of his early days as a writer. And his middle years as a writer. And his mid-late days as a writer. And his early-late period. The volunteer table was tipsy and tittering. At a neighboring table, a glamorous woman in a spangly jacket clasped her hands behind her head and just rested. I’m not sure how long Wolfe spoke, but in my mind it was a solid 20 minutes. Hey, he’s receiving a lifetime achievement award. So let the guys speak. The only problem was that no one could eat until he was done.

He finished. Bring on the canneloni. The canneloni led to branzino, which led to chocolate cake. The awards were distributed. YA: a woman won for something. Good for her! Poetry: a gorgeous man won. Woot! Nonfiction: Patti would never win, right? It’ll be one of those books about war. It’s Patti! Press box and volunteer table, leap to your feet and holler! Fiction: a woman won for something. Good for her. Can we get up now?

We could, and did, and ran to the bar for whiskeys and champagne. We hopped up the carpeted stairs for the afterparty where poets and interns and photographers danced under a “I love the ’90s” DJ who stood on a balcony 30 feet above the dance floor. The lights spun and shoes were kicked off. Men in suits and shaggy haircuts danced so violently that their ties took flight–a tetherball string with a pretty girl at the end of it. The volunteer crew danced and smiled and looked around for famous people and yelled over the music and squealed for RUN D.M.C. and Jay-Z. All the people with medallions had left. And as I danced and bookended my night with a Bellini, all I could think about was the box of books downstairs that I got to take home and unpack and place on my shelves, each one containing a secret I was about to get to know.

10/10/10, Monday night, a violent hailstorm. Bare knees below the hem of a miniskirt shot by balls of ice, just after an outdoor meal in balmy weather. The sky fell, the wind flipped, the streets flooded. Doom and gloom and force and a kind of cleansing. Maybe it was that date with its slick 1′s and shocked 0′s, that set of code, numbers meaning letters, that blew open the universe. In its wake, the storm left a carpet of wet leaves and the realization that I am not coded. I’m just letters, simple, old-fashioned, clear.

So when on Tuesday, my relationship ended, a Band-Aid ripped, a DNA strand separated by some giant invisible scientist, I wasn’t shocked. It just seemed clear: He was numbers. I was letters. And he didn’t know how to read.

By Wednesday I was at sea, literally, on a Tall Ship that sailed through the wind over the East River. A pair of 120-foot masts stabbed the skyline as we bobbed along, grazing the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Buoyed by wine and warmed by people that I looked at newly, as if I had bobbed up from some waterworld into a strange but friendly population, I dared  to smile into the black night that glittered with lit windows on picturesque shores, each one a complete life comprising the swarm of Manhattan.

Thursday was at first on fire then squashed into wet kindling. Knocked over by waterfall, gasping like a drowner.

Friday was pinned to itself with darts of winter cold that no swingy skirt or high-heeled boots or leather jacket could combat. The day battered, the night threw punches.

And on Saturday, the wind whipped through the sunshine and pierced through the thin plaid shirt I wore to meet him. We exchanged keys, a few books, wet looks, disappointment, guilt. Fallen leaves scratched the sidewalk as we disentangled with no intention to ever touch again. After he left, I walked in circles all the way to Sunday in some attempt to rev, to bore through the stone of sadness that had lodged itself on top of me, knowing it was sturdy enough to bend metal, wondering if he also had a stone or if, instead, he felt relieved of one.

I just spent some time with 14-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. Spawned by the collective cosmic impulses of her 1) guest blogging for Jezebel, 2) writing a story in First Kiss, 3) me attending some fashion week events for the first time, and 3) Lizzie Widdicombe’s curiously, subtly fence-straddling profile of her in the New Yorker, I searched out Tavi’s blog. And, wow.

Wow for so many reasons: her level of awareness, her voracious acquisition, absorption, and parsing of things she finds beautiful and inspiring, her (has to be said) adorableness. Her writing skills. Her level-headed angst. Her admiration for the things that I admired in high school (Sassy, Nirvana, fashion mags and the models and items within, Harold and Maude, pop culture, etc.) Her joyous IDGAF outfits. Her articulation of why she loves these things, summarized here by Jezebel, is pretty great.

Getting to know Tavi through her blog brought to mind the bedroom I had when I was 14: “collage” walls smattered with Seventeen, Sassy, YM, and occasionally Elle or Vogue editorial spreads, posters, cool-looking ads (Bongo, Swatch), postcards, 8×10 glossies of Rob Lowe and to a much, much lesser degree Kirk Cameron, Tom Cruise, and Jason Bateman; stacks of tapes arranged alphabetically on the plastic shelves beneath my dual-cassette boom box (for making mix tapes); rows of Clearly Canadian and New York Seltzer bottles that I kept because I loved the labels; rows of books. I was a trend hoarder, a culture junkie who was arguably happiest when locked in my room with the radio on and all my beautiful stuff in arm’s reach.

Getting my hair crimped by my friend Heather, 1988

So while reading her blog, I felt a little kindred-spirit-y. And a little jealous that she is able, because of technology, put her beautiful dear things out in the world so easily. Her blog also made me change my mind about the effect that technology can have on children. Not that I was necessarily scared for the future, but I kind of felt badly for kids, with so much available to them on the Internet. (And, yes, okay, a little afraid of, say, my niece someday Googling “Top Chef blond female” as I recently did and finding, well, not much Top Chef and lots of blond females who were fully or partially naked and in compromising positions.) But when a girl like Tavi can use it to express herself so eloquently, and galvanize a staid industry/community like the fashion world, it shows the Internet’s power.

Tavi posted something called “Sanctuary.” It’s a collection of movie stills featuring girls in their bedrooms. What’s great about them is the stillness–you can peruse the (set designers’) choices for each character: a floppy hat hanging on a nail for Samantha in Sixteen Candles, the gilded glass case and wall hooks for Cher in Clueless, the stuffed elephant for Jeanie in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Those little details are the things that make these girls real to us. And by Tavi sharing her sanctuary through her blog (incidentally, she was photographed in her bedroom for the New Yorker article), she turns her innards out for all to see. It’s brave, and lovely, like a postcard from my teenage self to my self now, and I just want to say to Tavi: thank you.

Full disclosure: I have not read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. And I don’t plan on reading it, ever*. But I hate it.

Let me rant/explain.

(Warning: what follows is reductive and uninformed, but needs to happen—so much so that me and a writer friend, Carla Sosenko, made a pact to write parallel blog posts on the subject. Click here to read Carla’s kick-ass and much less bitter essay on her blog, Such a Pretty Face.)

1. The author’s last name is my last name. If I ever publish a book, there it will be right next to hers (or maybe one book away if poet Jack Gilbert somehow gets into the nonfiction section). This is a totally superficial, immature, and meaningless reason to hate a book, but it’s felt strongly enough to include here. Score one for writerly narcissism and petty jealousy! God, that felt good.

2. Its premise is so routine (woman leaves drudgery for a life of freedom and fabulousness), its message so mundane (choose yourself). My reaction to both is: Duh. It’s hard to be a woman. We have to make a thousand choices a day, and most of them are scary. But “bravely” choosing to leave your unwitting husband whom you married out of cowardice, fear, laziness, or some combination of the three, is offensive to me and all of the women that I know who have chosen to live bravely, make hard choices, and move toward happiness. Why marry a dud? Why settle? EGilb did, then she didn’t, or something. That’s a story? That’s a book?

3. Wow, so you went abroad. We all have already. EGilb, is it really a revelation to you to crave to know the world and to know yourself? I don’t buy it. You’re ostensibly a writer, so how could travel and knowing yourself not have occurred to you until you were 35? It makes me question the depth of your soul and your motives for writing. Yes, sometimes traveling is not the easiest to do (financially, time-off-wise, etc.), but if you want it enough, you can manage something. If you are open enough to discovery, you can expand your knowledge of yourself on a road trip to, say, Pennsylvania. Also, why is flying to Italy and India and Bali the antidote to an oppressive life? I believe that travel and self-discovery should be integrated into life, not some prescription to cure your boredom.

4. It perpetuates the “all-or-nothingness” that gets us into trouble. Married=bad. Single=good! Home=bad, traveling freely abroad with no cares=good! It’s all too simple. Good books are complex, and dive into the complexity of existence. They are not prescriptive, whiny, self-involved, and simplified. Hey, kind of like this post! (But I’m not fielding phone calls from Oprah and the TED organizers (see #5), so I’m giving myself a pass.)

5. She gave a TED talk. Really? As what, a great memoirist of our time? An innovator? An inspiration to women? A mentor to budding writers? An artist? Someone who has suffered to create something meaningful and put forth their unique vision into the world? No, no, no, no, no, and no. Seems a great fit for Lifetime, not TED. World, get your categories right!

6. The hype machine. Oprah likes EPL, so therefore it’s good, and worth all of our time. Therefore, the book and its author walk in the light of goodness, as the Big O does. Maybe I think I’m a hype-maker myself and I’m mad I’m not first to the endorsement market. Maybe I’m a little anti-bandwagonesque and want to find my own Good Things (apologies for mixing my female media tycoons). Maybe I wish I had Oprah’s power and influence, not to mention her luxury items. From what I know (which isn’t everything, I know at least that), EPL is about a narcissistic scaredy-cat who abandoned her marriage to eat pasta, find a new man to marry, then write about it, then write another book about how she hates being married, leading me to ask what exactly is being hyped here? Oprah? Anyone?

7. It keeps memoirs in a sub-category of literature. Just because you did something “interesting” doesn’t mean you are a writer. Jeanette Walls is another one. Yes, agreed, you went through some serious shit, but stop pretending you are a writer. Have someone else write it, someone in possession of skills and artistry. Well-written memoirs are out there, and they are rarely read. It just makes me sad. EGilb, you are not helping the cause. Because of EPL, publishers want every memoir to sell regardless of quality. It’s nothing new, I know. But it still sucks.

8. I’m jealous. EGilb finished something, and got it published, and it has spawned a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts, several lines of jewelry, and god knows what else. I haven’t published anything longer than 3,000 words.

[Image from The Frisky.com]

*I apparently made a pact with Carla that I would read EPL. Perhaps I will—I’d like to think I’ll honor my word. But I might not be able to. We’ll see.

This past weekend, E. and I went to visit his father. We bounced from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Jersey to Interstate 80 in his orange 1989 Nissan pick-up across the interminable verdant nothingness that is rural Pennsylvania. Damn, that state is boring. I had made the drive before, in a vehicle as badly in need of new shocks, but that time is was clear across the state on the way to Chicago. That trip was cross-country one-way–ribbon after ribbon of foreign highway to a new life in California. I can’t say which was more surreal to drive through: PA with its phallic silos and bored cows and Amish eateries, or the moonscape that is Utah before you hit the mountain range. Both held Lynchian charm and a dulling repetitiveness that could inspire either great art or homicidal thoughts.

But across 80 E. and I sped, NPR streaming through the beat-up radio, dead furry things dotting the breakdown lanes. We were going to State College to celebrate E.’s dad’s birthday, and after the clusterfuck of New Jersey, we were making good time. It was calm and comfortable in the truck. Our gifts hopped like corn kernels in a skillet in the truck bed–his a vintage Whole Earth catalog, mine a set of boxed treats from Ferrara’s in Little Italy.

We made it there by 2. E.’s family was in place, lunch hot and waiting. The African Grey uttered the sounds of the microwave as we devoured a frittata fresh from the skillet stuffed with vegetables fresh from the garden. While we ate, the dogs stood outside in the yard. Two enormous Belgian Sheepdogs and a new puppy, at attention beyond the sliding glass doors. Ella, just 11 weeks, was a bolt of brown fur from which a pointed black face emerged. Her most adorable feature was the set of fuzzy ears that snapped together to form a triangle when receiving sound.

Then it was birthday gifts for E.’s dad, then a long, warm walk along the edges of cornfields in late-summer abundance to a dog run where Ella scampered with grown dogs half her size, then a delicious nap while the dinner ingredients were chopped and drained and rolled and peeled. Stemmed glasses suspending ruby-colored wine bought especially for the occasion rested in cupped palms throughout the house. As E.’s dad and sister supervised the boiling pasta and whisked the bechamel, E.’s dad’s wife played standards on the dusty Steinway and his brother-in-law-to-be sang along. E. typed on his new laptop in the study.

I stepped outside the front door. Bees and flies flew psychotically from flower to flower on the shrubs flanking the large concrete front step. I smoked; I stood there completely untethered. I felt nearly absorbed into the impossible blue of the sky, the impossible white of the neighborhood garage doors, the impossible heat of the sun. The impossible nothing-is-happening-ness. I was just one of a cluster of ions around the nucleus of that house that I didn’t know the number of on a street I didn’t know the name of, hours and hours away from anything that required me. And I didn’t mind at all.

Gold is the color of my “performing career.” I started off as a 5-year-old tap class “baby duck” with a sun-yellow tutu and tap shoes that had been spray-painted gold by my dad in the driveway, my glossy brown bowl cut bisected by a crinkly silver headband sporting a small fountain of yellow feathers. After that crushing success at Ms. Charmaine’s dance studio, I knew another kind of gold awaited–in the form of some kind of award or prize for my outstanding achievement in doing something on stage.

Ten years later, not too long after I drooled over the gold lame tap-tuxes worn by the beaming winners of the coveted spots in A Chorus Line as they were refracted into glittering infinity by some tricky late-1980s mirror-based special effects, I was myself sporting gold tap pants while clicking out a jazz square. In front of actual people. Hostile high school people and their parents. All staring at me as I wildly manipulated a pair of gold “wings” (ragged fabric attached to wooden dowels that I held in each hand) into grand swirls–grand enough, I hoped, to distract from my mediocre tap dancing. Even my mother, always supportive of my endeavors, mentioned after the show that tap wasn’t my strongest skill. Got, it, Mom.

I was an angel, see. One of a quartet of tough-talking borderline prostitutes (I played a lost soul named Charity) that surrounded Reno, star of Anything Goes, in a handful of scenes. I had approximately three lines (which I delivered with wisecrack-y snap and a ’20s twang, as I was instructed) and us “angels” had one whole song to ourselves: “Take Me Back to Manhattan.” Well, we started it alone and then that old Reno busted in and ate our scenery. Typical diva behavior. God how I wished I were the diva.

But it wasn’t to be. I had been dragged to auditions by my friend Tina, who was the sort of enviably positive girl who lived to be involved. She was a co-captain of a cheerleading squad, a member of prom committee (and prom court), and the yearbook-editor-to-be, among other positions. If it weren’t for Tina, there would have been only one photo of me in the yearbook–my portrait–instead of the 20 or so that she gleefully inserted. It sure looks like I had fun in high school.

Tina was also in plays. And the plays done in my high school were always musicals. She had dragged me to Grease auditions the previous summer, and I got a part: “Pink Lady #3.” I was going for Rizzo, or Marty, at least. But even though I kind of nailed my rendition of “Freddy My Love” (a Marty song)–I sang that little-known Original Broadway Recording out into the empty band room in a kind of reverie in which I pictured myself safe in the shower or the car, the only other places I had really belted–I didn’t get a speaking part. Well, neither did Tina, and that made everything okay–better, even, because the burden of responsibility of carrying the show in any way was replaced by the prospect of having a fun summer.

And have a fun summer we did, carousing with Danny Zuko (played by a scrawny blue-eyed mailman from a neighboring town whom looked like a young Travolta and whom everyone was in love with, including me) and the other boys (men, really) in the cast, arriving early to rehearsal and staying late, then hanging out with the cast and crew, all of whom we couldn’t bear to be without. Tina and I shopped at Salvation Army for our costumes, practiced numbers in her bedroom, in my pool, in the mall. We were consumed with Grease, and all other school-year obligations, crushes, goals, plans, or friends faded into memory. It honestly was one of the best summers I can remember.

The next summer, Anything Goes. I didn’t know the show, and didn’t really want to audition, thinking I wouldn’t get a real part. Again. But a lot of the Grease-ers were going out for it, and with a bit of cajoling from Tina, I agreed to try out. To my surprise, golden-winged Charity was mine! And Tina was Chastity, or Purity, or Virtue, I can’t remember which. But all would have fit. Her beautiful heart was as gold as they come.

[Story inspired by the excellent musical theater essay series on The Awl.]