No Great Illusion

edgarsux:

Me, three years ago after my final Statistics exam: Done with math forever! No more math! Math is stupid! Boo math! BOOOOO!!!!!

Me, every other day since: If I have 7% battery on my laptop left and this porn video is 20 minutes long and I need at least 5 minutes of prep time and I want to make sure there’s enough battery for me to see how this thing ends, do I need to get up from my bed to reach for the charger? 

Basically this.

wellalright:

2009: okay, just got dumped, but don’t worry, you can use this time to really grow as an individual. you know, learn from stuff. this is great, you’ll come out of this a better person and then in the fall maybe meet someone new.

~3 years later~

growing as an individual fucking sucks and isn’t even real.

the employees at Beacon’s Closet were nothing but professional to me and I walked out of there with $50 in cash. I also took a small bag of the cuter things they didn’t buy to see if I can sell them elsewhere. The rest I donated and I feel much lighter!

Feeling oddly nervous about going to drop off some clothes to potentially sell at Beacon’s Closet right now, mostly because of this article.

I don’t own designer anything and I probably won’t sell enough to cover the cab ride over, but they donate whatever they don’t buy and I just can’t have all this stuff in my apartment anymore. I’m drowning in it.

I should probably shop less.

Anyone else going to the NYC hairpin meetup tonight?

jamiedrew:

In response to that rejection letter – not my first, by the way, not even my first of the year – a few people came out and said “oh, that’s too bad” or some other motivational one-liner. I appreciate it, I really do, but it’s fine and I’m obviously fine. Not only is every rejection a signpost on the road to success, but I’ve also been printing them off in the hopes of decorating my room.

Right now, my room is covered in unicorn wallpaper, and it’s peeling off the walls at the top. It looks like a serial killer’s lair. If I get enough rejection letters, I’m going to paper over that with them and when I move out I’m just going to leave the lightbulb bare and perpetually swinging over a battered typewriter. It’s fine!

If I don’t get enough of them by the time I move out, I’m planning to carefully peel off the unicorn wallpaper, paste up some newspaper clippings on the wall and then re-paste the unicorn wallpaper back where it originally was. When the next lot of people move in, they’ll tear down the unicorn wallpaper and find the newspaper clippings.

I don’t know what this impulse is or what it says about me, but I don’t plan to stop any time soon. When I was eighteen, about a month after I’d moved into student accommodation, I snuck into my neighbour’s room and wrote I’M UNDER THE BED in thick red ink on the ceiling, right over where her face would be when she was trying to sleep. About three days later, she noticed and screamed everyone else awake. At the time, I was more proud of this than anything else I’d ever done up to that point.

I went back about a year later to pick up a few letters that had been sent to the wrong address by the bank. The words I’M UNDER THE BED were still there. Someone had actually switched rooms because of it. I had to revoke the “best thing ever” status from that last thing.

Am I proud of this today? Well, I’m more sad than anything. Those four words had a more visceral effect than any of my subsequent literary work.

This is hilarious and you are great.

Hey NYC - low key Internet get together set for tomorrow (Monday). If you’re still interested in joining (or you’re just hearing about it now) and you don’t have plans for tomorrow night, message me for the details.

Halfway across the Manhattan bridge, I am crying on the subway. I am texting my best friend quickly, desperate to get out the words before I reach the tunnel. I tell her I am sick to my stomach. I tell her I want to die. But let’s start at the beginning.

The date was going well.

I had been on a slew of just alright first dates in the past few months. Actually, the numbers go something like this: 1 boring coffee date with zero chemistry (I didn’t expect him to call me and he didn’t), 1 awkward concert date with zero chemistry (I didn’t want him to call me, but he did), 1 promising movie date (I really wanted him to call me, but he didn’t), 2 almost dates that were broken off via text before we ever went out (there must be something going around), and 1 promising bar date (we texted and then never went out again). That’s a total of six men in under four months. Six men with whom I failed to establish a romantic connection. It’s sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: a comedian, a doctor, an artist, a muscian, and two grad students walk into a date. A blogger walks out alone, with a lot of feelings. 

First dates make me impossibly nervous. Between my myriad of insecurities, my emotional instability, and my uncanny knack for overthinking every situation, I am a veritable bundle of neuroses. Still, I suppose I imagined a girl like me would flourish in a city like this. Shouldn’t there be a queue of next generation Woody Allens swooning in my general direction? 

The answer is a resounding no. Dating in New York is a competitive sport and I always hated gym class. My potential paramours describe their ideal lady as a laid back, extroverted explorer with athletic inclinations. The words “adventurous” and “spontaneous” appear again and again on the online dating profiles of 20 and 30 something men in New York City. It is also very important that she “take care of herself” which is guyspeak for a woman with a gym membership and a close relationship with her bikini waxer. As a tightly wound introvert who cuts her own bangs and despises running with every fiber of her being, I quickly discovered that I might be out of my element in the dating world after spending the past seven years in a series of long term relationships. 

And yet. Here I was on a pretty good date. He was a 31 year old bartender/actor, tall and bearded with an open, honest face, and we were drinking whiskey at a bar in my neighborhood. We talked about summer camp and Christopher Reeve, Rockaway Beach and Lionel Ritchie. He was learning to play the organ and knew how to build houses. We were still perched on our barstools when they began to turn out the lights, but I wasn’t drunk, hardly even tipsy. He walked his bike to my apartment and chained it to the tree outside. There was no discussion about whether or not he would come upstairs. He simply followed me in and I apologized for the mess. 

The sex was incredible, almost cinematic in its choreography. I leaned against the kitchen wall like it was a row of lockers and looked up at him, doe-eyed, like the sixteen year old cheerleader I never was. He took a swig from the flask on my counter and kissed me like they do in the movies. A standing on a dock in the rain kiss. A central park in springtime kiss. And when he lifted me up, I wrapped my legs around his waist and let him carry me to the bedroom.

I slept with him because I wanted to. Not because I wanted him to like me, or because I hoped he would find me laid back and spontaneous. On the contrary, it was almost in spite of these things. I slept with him because it felt natural and comfortable and exciting. I was never one to put much stock in rulebooks or playing hard to get. It simply didn’t make sense not to do something we both wanted to do.

Afterward, he asked if I minded if he stayed the night and we shared a glass of ice water on the bed, laughing quietly and sighing, as you do. I took out my contacts and turned off the lights and didn’t tell him he was sleeping on my side of the bed. I asked his last name, and he told me, but he didn’t ask for mine. It was then I should have known, but he fit his knees into the crook of mine and kept his hands on me, gently, all night, and that seemed like enough.

In the morning, the bedroom was too hot. He collected his clothes, piece by piece, from the trail through the apartment and I flitted around awkwardly, shyly, opening the curtains and applying chapstick. We hugged goodbye and I looked at myself in the mirror because that is how I make sense of everything. My hair was knotted and I was grinning. I felt amazing and sore and alive for the first time in days. I took myself out to lunch with my tangled hair and smudged eyeliner.

I told myself I didn’t care if he called me, and I believed it completely. After all, I was an independent young woman. An independent young woman who, frankly speaking, hadn’t gotten laid in four months. I had had casual relationships in the past. I wasn’t naïve. But I spent the day at work wondering if he would call. Wanting him to. Wanting to not want him to so badly. 

Finally, around midnight he texted me to say it was a slow night at his work, he had a lot of fun last night, but he didn’t really get the boyfriend/girlfriend vibe, and oh, how was my night going? All in one message, like it was a single thought. I read the text outside the entrance to the C train. Reading it, I felt quite literally as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. My breathing came in short, ragged gasps. I felt irrational and crazy and so intensely angry with myself. And the more upset I became, the angrier I felt about being such a fucking cliché. This is how I had a full-fledged panic attack on the subway platform over a man I’d just met.

I felt like a cautionary tale for a lesson I should have learned years ago. I could practically feel the fingers wagging in my direction. What did you expect? Why buy the cow? One night stand. It wasn’t even the first time I had done such a thing, but it was the first time I felt broken afterwards. How could I have so wildly misjudged my own emotions? How had I not foreseen this reaction?

There seems to be an unspoken agreement among women my age, especially those of the non-religious, liberal, city-dwelling variety, that we should be empowered by mutually satisfying casual sex, and that to misconstrue sex for love is childish, even ridiculous. In case you didn’t know, he’s just not that into you. How embarrassing for you, the unenlightened woman. And so it felt impossible to reconcile the modern woman I had fooled myself into believing I was with this stereotypical mess on the subway platform floor. I hated myself for caring so much. I was ashamed of myself for imagining he had cared about me. 

But there it was in a cool, blue text bubble. His carefully relaxed rejection letter, utterly to the point. Honest as a knife in the chest. I found myself apologizing on his behalf. How could he possibly have predicted how much this would hurt, when I didn’t even know it myself? But something ached in my throat about the way he had run his hands over my hipbones, knowing he didn’t want me.

Certainly, I am not unique. In beds across the city, men are holding women that they do not care about in their arms all night. Tomorrow morning, couples who just met will hug goodbye or shake hands and walk each other uncomfortably to the front door. And some of them will be content, even relieved, to never speak again. I thought  I was one of them. I wanted very much to be and I was startled by how emphatically I was not.

I spent the subway ride alternating between texting my best friend and going over every moment of the previous night in my mind. Surely, I had done something wrong. I had proved myself somehow unlovable to this man. Just as I had with the six men before him, and the ones that came before that. The difference was, I had let this one touch me, even wanted him to. I heard TV therapist voices in my head: you’re choosing the wrong men, the common denominator is you, how can they respect you, if you don’t respect yourself? I felt the blame swell in me like a beesting. I would be alone forever and it was all my fault.

I wrestled with these fears for days. I tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come. Since I moved to this city, I am reminded constantly of how very much I still have to learn. Some weeks there is more to learn than others. Some lessons are more painful, more immediate. Here is what I know now: there should be no shame in wanting, however desperately, to be cared about. It is not embarrassing or naive to expect kindness, even from strangers. Even from bartenders. There is nothing wrong with exploring your boundaries, but it’s absurd to expect yourself to be apathetic in the face of your own vulnerability. It is difficult and scary to be naked, both literally and figuaratively, in front of a stranger. Be as cautious as you are brave. 

Five days ago, my sister gave birth to a daughter, her first child. Two days ago, we met. She was so small, so impossibly new. If I could tell her something, it would be this: you are precious and beloved. Not everyone in this world will treat you that way, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Let them come and go, but have the courage to insist on kindness. And when you are broken and have forgotten how, let me remind you.

I am learning, still, to remind myself. I am still so small, so impossibly new at this.

veronicalovesarchie:

holy built in turntables and mixer! home and artwork love via freundevonfreunden

Love the colors in the space.