Thirtysomething? Perpetual Adolescence?

Is anyone else out there returning home early from the latest noise show, not because it sucked (well, I guess it's better than dub step) but because you need to continue watching Thirtysomething on Netflix Instant Watch? Either I'm doing that thing where I find a way to isolate myself so that I can complain about how lonely I am, or I'm on to something here!

If you haven't watched it, now is the perfect time to get totally absorbed. The styling is so now--now in that 1988 way-- more chambray button ups, well-made oxfords, and pastel southwestern thick knits than you can shake an American Apparel catalog at. I've even been lusting after a set of dishes that hope brought out in episode 11. I came for the style, but I stayed for the emotionally fraught communication. Man can these people emote! Never has television heard so much frustrated sighing, or seen so many tight-lipped looks of disapproval.



One criticism I have of the show is that it seems to imply an inherent flaw in single women-- they are emotionally unsteady or otherwise damaged in some way-- and that's why they are unable to find decent men. It also implies that if only they were to find decent men, life would suddenly be fixed and secure. The protestations that "it isn't really so easy," coming from Hope, the show's key married woman, are weak, considering that she is rewarded with constant physical affection, a house of her own, and a beautiful collection of earrings. Though maybe this is more of a selling point than a criticism, because who doesn't half love that feeling of having your blood boil over a perceived injustice?

If I still haven't sold you on Thirtysomething, then behold Melissa's math equations coat that I covet fiercely, and tell me you don't want to get in on this.




I'll be watching until I run out of seasons, or until I get a job (whichever comes sooner.) Consider joining so that this doesn't become some weird "no one understands my shows" mopefest.

Up next: Northern Exposure. Stay tuned.

Suggestions For Your Jug Band

To those of you who make your earnings by busking: are you worried that the early American roots/jug band music you've perfected is becoming too hack? Maybe you just haven't taken it to the absolute limits of frustration yet. Take your signature song about a hobo boiling his own shoe and going blind drinking rot gut whiskey, and consider adding an eefing and hambonin' routine! I'm sure you'll find it to be the perfect addition to your set. Bonus: it will make you look really, really poor, and as you know, looking poor is ideal when you are asking for money. Good luck!

Breaking the Loop

I have experienced a shift in perspective on living in San Francisco. It came with the gradual trickle-in of a few friends, the anticipated arrival of spring, and a potent cocktail of melatonin and 5-htp giving my receptors a warm fuzzy. The fierce loathing and paranoid anxiety died down and what was left behind was bland exhaustion. Newfound "positive" attitude notwithstanding, an opportunity to jump ship came; watch my cannonball!

Initially, I felt some reticence in leaving San Francisco after not quite a year; I thought that maybe I would lose something by a sudden discontinuation of my daily routine (even though my routine filled me with despair and gave me weekly migraines). I was afraid that I hadn't yet learned the lesson, hadn't yet discovered the "reason" for my being in San Francisco, and felt if I left before some oracle divulged it to me then I would be doomed to repeat the cycle of working as a secretary and living in sub par apartments with too many guys on an endless loop. I've been in the new place, a studio I share with just James in Davis, for a little over a week, and can already see that all my reasons for staying in San Francisco as long as I did were motivated by either pride or fear. Oh, and I learned my lesson after all! Of course, it was stupidly simple and I wish I didn't have to have such a crap time in order to get it.
I came up with it myself. It is:

QUIT DOING THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE.

I will miss my SF transplant friends, La Mediteranee, Outerlands, The Painted Bird, Golden Gate Park and The Presidio, but with this move I got myself back-- a worthwhile trade. Maybe some day I will go back once I'm sure there's no danger of me trying to move in with a bunch of 22 year old dudes, work front desk jobs, or otherwise look to punish myself in any way.


Me with Goethe in GG Park in my mom jeans, our last weekend in SF

Grotesques

Many times in my life I have wondered, "what am I doing here?" and "what am I for?" Fighting the initial, negative instinct that I am completely without purpose and I don't belong where I am, I return again and again to the idea that I must be in this particular place at this particular time to help someone-- that my presence is instrumental in aiding someone in a way that I don't yet understand. It is a vanity and a delusion that persists without any kind of evidence. I've learned many times (and forgotten just as many times) that people don't want you to come up with solutions to their problems when they complain about them; they just want you to listen to them. Take it from me-- your overweight friend does not want you to exercise with her, your coworker does not want you to point out that her crippling insomnia is the result of the 2 gallons of diet coke she consumes daily, your OCD friend doesn't want you to calmly explain how things couldn't possibly be as contaminated as they seem. All that concern of mine just warps into something resembling snobbery or self righteousness. I get frustrated that I can do nothing to reset the course of peoples lives, that all I can do is sit there and listen, feeling more impotent all the time.
It's common for me to actually abandon the relationship or the job, as I can't stand the constant reminders of my own impotence and lack of influence, can't listen any longer. It just seems so cruel that we can only help ourselves. It's the hardest thing to do. I wish that I could help other people and that other people could help me. No luck. So what am I doing here? What am I for?

It occurred to me while watching a bald woman spit seeds into a plastic sandwich bag that I was born for no other purpose than to bear witness to the grotesques that I encounter on the muni, in line at the pharmacy at Kaiser, and lurching down the aisles at Safeway. One day, while riding the bus that takes me to work-- the 24 Divisadero-- an elderly Latino man got on the bus. He was wearing a neat little linen suit and a fedora, and carrying an ornate wooden cane. His eyebrows were drawn on cartoonishly thick with what could have only been a black crayon. He was bald under the fedora, but he drew in a hairline with the same smudgy black crayon. His entire face was covered in a thick layer of petroleum jelly. He looked like a wax doll. Looking at the tired and bored expressions on the faces of the other passengers, I realized no one else noticed him. He was there just for my noticing and I was there just to notice him.

I must belong here in this disgusting city and all my wandering is over.

Demons

For an embarrassingly long time in my life, I would not go to sleep unless the mirror in my bedroom was covered with a sheet. It's hard to remember how many years this went on--probably well into high school-- as the ritual was as essential as brushing my teeth, and I gave little thought to it other than it had to be done. Failure to perform the mirror covering left me at the mercy of Bloody Mary who, in my version of the legend, needed no provocation to pass through the mirror and seize me. Over time, the evil witch in the mirror has been relegated only to bathroom mirrors, where her potency hasn't really diminished (at 25 I still won't go into a bathroom without first turning on the light, and even then I won't look in the mirror). I was reflecting on this insanity recently, wondering why this remains scary when all other childhood bogeymen have faded away long ago. I realized that, like a lot of people, the things that scare me the most appear when I'm deep inside of myself. Naturally, an evil presence that is activated when I'm looking into a mirror, looking at myself, would be especially real to me.

Last night, in the delirium of migraine, I told my boyfriend that I wished we could go into a spaceship when it was time to go to sleep, where our brains would both be plugged into the same program. That way, we could be together as we slept, instead of him drifting off and me staying awake, alone with my worries that overpower me when no one is around to challenge them.

Reflecting on the Bloody Mary fear and the anxiety of insomnia has left me with a realization that I find troubling: I hate being alone, because I hate the sounds of my own thoughts, and am more afraid of knowing myself than of anything else in this world. I am afraid to pursue my interests, because doing that would leave me alone with myself in the creative act-- I am afraid to spend that kind of time with myself. The longer I spend doing a job I hate, living an a place I don't like, etc, the further away I get from myself, and the harder it makes it to return.

New year's resolution: Cut it out.

The Bouche

Why MacFrugal's was changed to Big Lots I'll never understand. A better name might be Ugliest Available Everything. I didn't know I had a certain taste in alarm clocks, laundry hampers and slop rags until I went into this store and found all of their offerings to be unsuitable/hideous. I wanted to take a picture of the object that best symbolized what I felt to be the prevailing aesthetic at Big Lots-- an oversized, clear plastic, lumpy, guitar-shaped container filled with neon orange cheddar cheese flavored popcorn with a highly stylized airbrush rendering of Elvis on the front-- but I wanted to leave more.

This was not my first brush with Big Lots, nor will it be my last, as my memory will lapse and I'll go there to look for an affordable coffee grinder again someday. In 7th Grade, Kim Danko's mom took us to MacFrugal's and we bought a plastic comb with orange wax heaped onto the base. The idea was that you drag it through your hair and it leaves an "edgy" looking orange streak that I'm sure would have looked really great offset by about 12 butterfly clips, a zig-zag part, and body glitter (the chunky kind). What in fact happened was the wax ripped our hair out and so what we had then was a plastic comb with clumps of hair embedded in a wax chunk. We called it The Bouche and tormented each other with it on weekends. I'd like to think that this relic of our tween years is buried deep in a Caboodle filled with Wet n' Wild nail polishes, ready to ruin some upholstery or melt in the backseat of a minivan when the mood takes us.

The California Lifestyle

...every religious man places himself at the Center of the World and by the same token at the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him communication with the gods. But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential decision to situate himself in space in fact constitutes a religious decision.
-Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Prophane

I used to refer often to what I called the California Lifestyle. Loosely defined, it means doing whatever I want to do, while also having peace of mind, enough to eat, and proximity to nature. To me, it is akin to the feeling of first falling in love-- a state of constant ecstasy. I always felt that this could not be achieved anywhere but in California. Of course, any person with the most cursory knowledge of psychology will tell you that it can't be achieved anywhere or at all. Still, I maintain that it is even more impossible outside of California, where your chances of 75 degree sunny days, season notwithstanding, become very slim.

Version one of the California Lifestyle was something I fabricated in high school, and thanks to a blossoming obsession with Richard Brautigan, it was extremely San Francisco-centric. I had probably been to San Francisco a total of three times, so it lent itself beautifully to fictionalization and idealization. In this version, I was making a living as a writer, cataloging many charmingly absurd occurrences and thoughts like so many Brautigan narrators, and living on California Street in San Francisco. I had it in my head that if I lived on California Street I would have reached the apex of what it means to be a Californian in terms of the sacred California Lifestyle, and a greater understanding of humanity and all the cosmos would be revealed to me from the hallowed halls of some oddly affordable, sunlit bay-windowed Queen Anne.

I spend 5 days a week on California Street, working in that Victorian. As the 24 bus labors up the hills, I see that the gods of California have eluded me again, having fled with the California Lifestyle to a cabin in Bolinas... or something.

Totally the Same Only Writ Large

During a bout of rare lucidity attained through what I'm guessing was stroopwaffle consumption, I pondered the course of events from May to September. I left my life as an underpaid dental office employee dwelling in a house full of dudes, only to arrive...at another dental office, another house full of dudes. Granted, now I am not so underpaid, as some of the dentists I work for are high profile in some surprising ways (see video below) and, naturally, I live with different dudes. Still, it seems that my daring attempt at changing the course of my life was, in fact, a complete circle and, in essence, a failure.

Some positive improvements:
-great AM oldies radio station... all the hits in mono!
-less financially destitute
-my boyfriend likes it here
-I think this time around we're going to actually get a desk instead of just talking about how we wished we had one

I hope to learn soon whatever lesson was intended in repeating my previous dissatisfying mediocrity so that my life won't become an unfunny Groundhog Day knockoff with my unflattering harem pants acting as a poor substitute for Bill Murray's charisma.