Note to Self, at 35
Observations, accusations, opinions, memories
I never learned how to sneeze properly.
I never learned how to spell exercise. Is that right? That can’t be right.
I don’t exercise. I’m told I should.
Fine.
But also, shut the fuck up.
A few things that give me sincere joy: yard work, a good sandwich, t-shirts that fit, the low hum and thrum of a dishwasher, dishwasher as an onomatopoeia (dish-wash-dish-wash).
I regularly have about three cups of coffee before 7:00 AM. I’m told this is not healthy and/or is otherwise concerning. I’m sure that’s true. But consider this: I feel pretty good!
I despise Play-Doh.
I am increasingly impatient or otherwise more aware of my impatience.
I am often angry and have no idea why.
Possible explanation: I am often hangry.
I am more attuned to hunger as a metaphor.
I think about money constantly.
I appreciate anyone who can be passionate without being smarmy.
I like how old I am. Few things are more tiresome than a thirty-something lamenting their age.
Oh good for you! I guess you’ve got it all figured out!
I think about money constantly.
I think some people think I don’t care what other people think about me. Just to be clear, what other people think about me is nearly all I think about.
Then again, maybe no one thinks that about me.
Does anyone think about me?
Sometimes, probably.
I am a serial fantasist — one of my most precious qualities.
I’ve come to believe that chores are the highest expression of self-care.
Eight heroes from my first eighteen years or so: Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Trey Anastasio, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis, Ryan Adams, T. S. Eliot. (LOL, stop.)
Eight heroes from my last eighteen years or so: Charles Taylor, Guy Davenport, Eudora Welty, Stephen Malkmus, W. H. Auden, Fleming Rutledge, Olivier Messiaen, Alan Jacobs. (I said STOP.)
I despise ironic nihilism.
I worry irony is my most recognizable personality trait.
Am I a snob?
You might be a snob if you outwardly reject being labeled a snob, but inwardly worry the stuff you’re accused of being snobby about is actually a little middle-brow.
A favorite bit of meta-snobbery: “snob” is shorthand for “sine nobilitate.” Snobbery — the defining feature of the middle class.
Another favorite bit of meta-snobbery: it turns out the above etymology isn’t true (presumably just the invention of snobs).
I’m grateful to have been extraordinarily bad at test-taking and a generally mediocre student for most of my life. This kept doors closed that were better off remaining closed.
I regret being subjected to the cheap platitudes, smug nostalgia, and outright lies of classic rock radio.
I can no longer drink a regulation-size Coke.
I get very sentimental about bad beer.
I took a Joyce seminar in college. As we were discussing the final chapter of Ulysses, famously narrated by Molly Bloom, I decided to chime in on the question of why Joyce might’ve chosen to close his opus from a female perspective. I don’t remember my actual argument, insofar it existed. I do, however, remember prefacing it with “I’m not really a feminist or anything, but—.” But! I think about this moment constantly and would like to apologize.
I sometimes wonder if anyone under, say, twenty-five should be considered capable of articulating an informed opinion. You should still be allowed to vote, of course, but in most cases your thoughts and actions should be judged at the level of a goldfish’s.
Then again, many people under twenty-five are quite wise, or at least no dumber than the half-bald homonids who happen to be their seniors. Keats was dead by twenty-three. So maybe, probably, the problem is me.
Another memory from college. I had a professor who once declared that wearing headphones in public was the height of narcissism. He was right.
I regularly wear AirPods. They’re six years old. I’ve never cleaned them.
There’s a difference between being a dilettante and being a charlatan. Shakespeare was a dilettante, Stalin was a charlatan.
There’s a difference between romanticism and sentimentalism. One is a legitimate way of seeing the world, the other is catastrophic to human flourishing.
Flannery O’Connor: “Sentimentality is an excess, a distortion…in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.”
On the origin of the Lost Cause, from Confederates in the Attic: “By 1865, one of every three Confederate soldiers had died from battle wounds on the killing fields of Virginia, were defeated, dispirited, often maimed. ‘But the women had found in a strange way that they were stronger than before,’ Wells said. ‘They took care of the widows and orphans and wounded men. And they felt a solidarity and sentimentality about the South.’”
Shame has gotten a bad rep, but shamelessness isn’t any better. The inability to experience humiliation is the mark of a serial killer, or worse.
Childcare in America: impossible, imperative.
The only way to make anything of note is to be monomaniacal.
But monomania is hardly a productive habit, and there’s very little evidence that a preoccupation with making something of note actually precipitates noteworthy things — at least noteworthy things that are also good.
Leonard Cohen: “I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”
Sean Fennessey concludes his Letterboxd review of Arrival by saying, “Have kids, it changes you in good ways.” I agree but would add one note. Having kids reveals things about yourself to yourself, some good and some not so good. What matters is the revelation. Never waste a revelation.
A revelation: the strangest thing I’ve found about being a parent is not the degree to which I am physically, emotionally, and existentially tired — though all that is true — but the degree to which, despite or because of all that, I have more energy than I thought I was capable of having. Is it that I simply wasn’t using very much energy before — well, yes, definitely — or is it that parenthood can be — occasionally, with real exceptions — energizing, fortifying, quickening?
Or is that bullshit? Certainly I’m not comparing parenthood to a self-help exercise. In fact, the opposite. Parenthood is an exorcism of the self. It declares none of this is ultimately about you. Downstream of that fact is where things get interesting.
An anecdotal case study: I did not start writing seriously until three months after my firstborn.
Oh good for you! I guess you’ve got it all figured out!
I think about money constantly.
My first writing memory is from the second grade. It was around Halloween and our teacher had given everyone in our class one of those landscape-oriented, extra wide-margin sheets of paper to write a spooky scene. Probably all she wanted us to do was to write a single coherent sentence: The scary black cat is eating the big orange pumpkin. Boo! But I’d gotten it into my head to write a proper ghost story — and it needed to be good. So I spent nearly the whole assignment imagining what this story would be. When our time was up and the teacher came to collect our work, all I’d managed to get down was a few words, probably something like It was a dark and stormy night. I was embarrassed, but more than anything I was scandalized. How were we supposed to write anything noteworthy in such a short amount of time!? On such a small piece of paper!? With such childish margins!?
When I was seventeen, my external hard drive crashed while I was fidgeting around with the firewire, resulting in the loss of around 400 Phish concert recordings. At seventeen, every event is a crisis. But this was something more: the apocalypse of my identity. I called my girlfriend in shock and distress. I was supposed to hang out with her at a friend’s house later that night. But how? When I arrived late, shaken and somber, about ten other people were there. Condolences were offered and acknowledged. Thirty minutes later, with the wake concluded, we went downstairs and watched Little Miss Sunshine on DVD.
When I was twenty-four, a bachelorette party shoved me to the floor at a bar in the East Village.
When I was twenty-five, while walking from Alphabet City to the West Village one afternoon, perfectly sober, I misjudged the need and came within a half-block of pissing myself on 7th Avenue.
When I was twenty-one, after walking from our hostel in Edinburgh to some pub on the other side of town, I rushed to the bathroom and was at the urinal for so long that a half-dozen queued-up Scotsmen who didn’t appear to know each other started laughing hysterically and taunting me in unison.
When I was five, after my first day of school, I missed the bus stop on the way home. I figured the bus would drop me off directly in front of my house — not several houses up the street. Instead, as the bus approached my home, I looked out the window from my brown leather seat and caught a glimpse of my mother waiting in the front yard as the bus swiftly passed by.
Surely it would come back, though. There must’ve been some drop-off order I didn’t know about. So I didn’t get off at the next stop, either. A few stops later, I mustered the courage to ask some older kids on the bus. They conferred with each other and confirmed my theory: the bus would come back to my house. A few stops later, when there were no other children left on the bus, the driver, Mr. Butler, looked back and asked if I’d missed my stop. Apparently I had. There were no other stops. He asked me where I lived. It occurs to me now that I genuinely don’t know how I answered this question because I’m not sure I knew my address. It was the first day of kindergarten; reciting our address and home phone number hadn’t come up yet.
Maybe I knew the name of my street. Maybe my mother had seen her son’s forlorn face in the window and called the school to explain what had happened. At any rate, eventually Mr. Butler did drop me off directly in front of my house. So you see my reasoning was faulty, but my faith was redeemed.Among stories fit for publishing, few better summarize the first thirty five years of my life.