The State of the Schlocktorate

Hey. Hey guys. Guess what? I am in the process of getting a Schlocktorate. Schlock-torate! Haha! This Schlocktorate entails Schlocktoral coursework, and eventually I will write a Schlocktoral dissertation and earn the title of Schlocktor of Philosophy!! Alana Murphy, Ph. Schl.!!! Hahaha... HAHA... HAhaha... ohhhhhh.....

Clearly I am very pleased with my dazzling new bit of schlocky wordplay; however, at the same time I am astonished that this particular, um, neologism did not occur to me until after my blog had been kicking around in cyberspace for over a YEAR. You would think that a website that is predicated on two basic conceits-- 1) my so-called life as a sort-of-aspiring academic, and 2) Schlock (the concept of, and also the linguistic possibilities of)-- would have long ago trotted out a glaringly obvious groaner pun that is capable of welding these two blogular motifs into a single verbal unit of stunning lameness. But as a doctoral/ schlocktoral (!) student, I sometimes miss the forest for the trees-- like, I get hung up on finding a way to prove that Composer X was familiar with Piece Y written by Composer Z and thus was possibly quoting Piece Y in his own Piece Double-Z (whoops, I ran out of letters of the alphabet-- again, forest, trees) and I get compulsive and scary-intense in proving my point and yet I remain blind and deaf and dumb to the inevitable reality that I will not be able to do this stuff for a living forever, that at some point my funding will be cut and I will be handed a shiny diploma and then be made to walk the real-world plank and I will cry out at the last second that no! wait! I have good critical thinking skills and I can read medieval musical notation, so clearly I can also learn to become a programmer or content-builder or business-model-mogul-guru for your cutting-edge innovative outside-the-box startup social media web-design whatsit wait please just give me a chance I have the skills I swear NOOOOOOooooo....!!

(distant splash)

Anyway. School. Schlockorate. Schlockademe. Yes. That stuff. I have not written substantially about my adventures in higher ed here for awhile, mostly because it unleashes torrents of cynicism and anxiety like the one that you just witnessed, and said torrents reek of bratty first-world entitlement because of course I am insanely lucky to even have the opportunity to study something so impractical and take a stab at making a career of it. But I've been experiencing a malaise-y restlessness lately, a sense of stagnation and apathy that is difficult to articulate, and if I do not take the time to articulate it, to adequately diagnose the situation, then I will never have hopes of fixing it, and what is a schlockspot for if not for airing one's grievances and seeking counsel in the densely-populated echo-chamber of the interwebs? So let me lounge theatrically on the cyber-couch for a little while, Dr. Internet: toss me a box of Kleenex, have your clipboard at the ready, and hear me out on this one.

Getting a doctorate in the humanities is a gamble; everyone knows that. At some point in a past quasi-mythical golden age that I've heard rumors of, it was all but guaranteed that if you did the necessary hard labor to get the diploma framed, the dissertation bound and disseminated to a handful of dusty university library shelves, then you could secure a respected position and attain your upper-middle-class comforts, yaddah yaddah. Not so anymore, duh. We schlocktoral folk now exist mostly to give those tenured overlords something to do-- they need a few bright-eyed young advisees, after all-- and to serve as adjunct-y labor for universities, teaching entry-level classes for a fraction of what the Real Professor people receive. Disclaimer: I adore teaching! This is not the issue; I was essentially put on this earth to pace around and be a professional know-it-all who cracks bad jokes that will only be answered by answered by deadening silence or by the light tapping sounds of students who are texting. It's great! I love teaching! It's my calling! The issue is that I might not get to continue doing it after my funding runs out and my appointment is over, based on the dismal realities of the market.

But anyway. That's not even the REAL problem. I had grasped the scope of the job situation long before I had even committed myself to the degree (remember that once upon a time I had planned to become a Schlocktor of Piano rather than of Schmoozicology, which would have been an equally impractical decision). I came into this field of study in full knowledge that it would be a long slog for a big old question mark. But I also came into it thinking, "I am going to be so friggin' INSPIRED all the time! Imma live the Life of the Mind so hard! I'll eat Critical Theory for breakfast, I'll take Schenker Showers in the evening, I'll hum tone-rows to myself on the subway, I will dream of the Well-Tempered Clavier every night. I'll become a bionic super-bastion of musical knowledge, a seer and a prophet, a fearless defender of our culture's greatest artifacts! Hell yeah schmoozicology!"

I wanted to attain this state. I still want to attain it. True inspiration is a giddy drug, but it is difficult to self-generate: it often requires an external motivating force, and, in the moment, in my program, such an effort is not being asked of me. See, I have GRAND AMBITIONS and INTELLECTUAL FERVOR, but I will only act on these impulses if some super-driven upper-echelon heavyweight person is kicking my ass and instilling the righteous fear of God in me. I cannot kick my own ass in the way that I would like it to be kicked. When I try to do so, my thought process will go something like this: "Hmmm, you know what you should do, Alana? You should really read through the Beethoven string quartets to learn them better and to practice your alto clef reading. Piano's right over there. Chop chop. But whoops, your laptop is on the table on your way to the piano, so maybe you should look up a Yelp review of the new small-plates restaurant that is opening in your neighborhood, and also you haven't blogged in awhile and your faithful public is salivating with anticipation, so maybe try to eke out a few sentences but don't forget to check Facebook because something might have happened..."

Do you see the impossibility that is me being left unto myself? I need a hard deadline, a despotic adviser, something, somebody to not cut me any slack. And then I would shine! I would suffer and stress and wail and freak, but then I would break through to the other side and emerge triumphant in a delirium, brimming with knowledge and passion and drive. I want somebody to be all like, "What? You mean you don't know every movement of the Mahler symphonies by heart, and you couldn't sit down and read them on the piano from score at tempo, right now? How could you ever expect to produce a polished argument about this repertoire if you know it only superficially? No, get thee to an iPod and/ or a practice room, load thineself up with information, you turd, and do Gustav proud." See, if someone were to ask me to do that, it would be so great, you guys! I would die in the process, of course, but at least I would die in the luscious embrace of some tortured extended tertian chord.

Instead, my post-post-post secondary education has sounded a little more like this lately: "Well, when a reader interacts with a text, said reading is very personal and so it becomes difficult to say where the text ends and the reader begins, because there is no text in text blah bah Adorno blah blah post-structural blah blah limits of language blah blah so really, just write about something that might not even have an answer! Just explore." And of course I'm like, "so you're saying I can BS this? Done and done!" and then somehow I end up blogging listlessly about this state of affairs during the time that I should be frantically consuming and processing information to appease the Unappeasable Gods of Schlockademe. Huh.

Humanesque

Have you ever felt a little bloodless, a little clammy and zombified, a little not exactly 100%-here-being-now-carpe-diem-tastic, and then you looked down and realized, "OH, it's because my right leg had completely detached itself from my body, of course, but I didn't exactly notice my lack of limb until I started playing the piano again, at which point my missing leg started to twitch over there on the carpet where it had been lying, unperturbed, for several months but was now deciding to rejoin the main, uh, corpus of me, and it hurt like a bitch when the leg started to merge with my body because suddenly the body became aware of what had been missing, had to re-habituate itself to a full range of functioning, had to re-route its blood supply to a whole new promontory of soft tissue and bone, was kicking itself for abiding for so long in such an impaired state and just accepting that this was the way things were but now LOOK, it will soon be able to run and leap and use the damper pedal"-- have you ever felt like that, exactly like that? No? Just me?

...okay, so the leg metaphor was a bit weird. I acknowledge its forcedness, and I acknowledge that I plucked it from a recent life experience in which I had to perform Schumann's Fantasy-Pieces (of the Cello-Piano variety) on an upright with a NON-FUNCTIONAL pedal-- hey, so it was LIKE my right leg wasn't around to perform its role of pedal-depressor, and as a result the should-have-been-juicy arpeggiated sonorities suffered deplorably from a lack of pedally lubricant-- how pokey, how dry, how unsustained and ephemeral and strangled-- and the result was so painful that the listening audience probably experienced a certain amputation of the spirit: "Why is she DOING that to poor Bobby Schumann? Didn't Bobby suffer enough in life, what with the hand injury and the lovesickness and the eventual batshit insanity-- didn't he suffer enough not to be mutilated post-mortem by some schmoozicologist chick?"

Apart from the Schu-mutilation, however, I have not been playing much lately in any serious capacity-- I have been too busy running all over the boroughs of Schmanhattan and Crooklyn and Spleens, accompanying pre-ballet classes for fussy toddlers and lecturing college freshmen about treble clefs and teaching sullen Park-Avenue-bred teenagers how to play Justin Bieber songs by ear, all in the name of making a few extra bucks so that I may comfortably sit in PhD smart-people-class and circle noteheads and connect them with fancy slurs to other noteheads in order to demonstrate the hidden pretty fractally patterns that apparently govern all music and are thus the Undisputed Absolute Truth, and when I ask if the individual composers actually meant all of this stuff and if we aren't just cherry-picking a little bit, I am Shunned as a Nonbeliever-- SHUNNED! and anyway it all feels terribly far away from the immediacy of making music, an act that, due to all of the aforementioned reasons, I haven't been able to engage in recently EXCEPT for the time that I played Schumann, sans pedal, to the chagrin of everyone involved.

But then I was like "Whoa! Schumann! Where have you been all my life?!" and I couldn't shake the thought. Last year I wouldn't stop yammering about another Schu- guy of the -bert variety-- he of the distilled folky essence and the constant yearning for the Beyond, at once formally rigorous and fluidly spontaneous. We were sympatico; we communed frequently and fruitfully. And yet lately I've felt too flawed and human to entirely relate. Those gorgeous universalities, those things-in-themselves-- I cannot affix to them any particulars, any imperfect realities, any places or faces from my own little web of life. And Beethoven is even worse, always overcoming shit with his infallible compositional logic; he shakes his fist at your wallowing human frailty, the bastard!

Enter Schumann. Check it out, man, his name even contains the word "human", as though it was decided that he should be the one to speak for all of us just as we are, and not as we ought to be. Safe at home, I pulled out the Humoreske in B-flat major, an oddball work, close to my heart-- I had started to learn it a few years ago but it became a casualty of the Alana-converts-to-the-Church-of-Schmoozicology period (there are many such casualties) and I never performed it.

You would think, from a name like "Humoresque," that the piece would be a pithy little ditty. I expected as much the first time I heard it... but then there was pathos, lots of it, big splotches, and these wild insane gallops to the edge of pianistic plausibility-- the music switched between the two modes with no warning-- and then the whole thing should have ended long ago but there was more! more material, more non-sequiturial fragmented ideas, half an hour's worth, how are we still going? and then a mysterious ending that neither triumphed nor succumbed, and then I was sitting there applauding dumbly and wondering what the hell had just happened.

"Humoresque," as it turns out, refers to humors in the classical or medieval sense-- fluids, bile, phlegm, etcetera, and the corresponding moods that they evoke in their human hosts. The piece is a traversal of the humors: they possess, they interrupt, they fight, they wane at a moment's notice. (Oh Schumann, you moody motherfucker, I should have known what you were up to). And so now, reunited with the piece after such a long hiatus, I searched the notes. First I searched for myself, and then I looked for old nineteenth-century Bobby too, and then I looked for everyone who had ever felt as we had both felt, and then I noted forms, recurrent themes, techniques, quotations... and specifics dissolved into universals, subjects into objects, only to re-crystallize at a moment's notice as the intimate details of my own life.

***

I had a birthday recently. Now a lady never reveals her age, but I am only partly a lady (interpret that statement how you will) so I can give you some information to go on. Here are your clues. It starts with the number "2," and it is verging on Lateness but might still be riding out the last phase of the Middle Period. (Did you know that the ghost of Theodor Adorno is hard at work on a groundbreaking piece of criticism entitled "On Late Style in the Twenty-Something Years"? I've seen the manuscript, but most of the textual meaning was sadly lost on me since I have yet to really come into my own Lateness, or alternately because I will probably never understand Adorno at any age). Anyway, I am not morally opposed to the celebrating of birthdays-- TREAT YOSELF! LOVE YOSELF! have a cupcake!, they all proclaim-- but I am wary of ascribing too much significance to a single day, because so rarely does the appointed time seem to actually sync up with a rite of passage or a time of personal growth. See the child who has opened all of the presents, has gorged on all of the confetti-fun-cake, has bid goodbye to all of the classmates, and now begins the chrysalis hour in which the magic will take effect and the shining new era will be ushered in, but when all is said and done the child is still just the child, with the child's same problems and fears and the child's plummeting blood-sugar level because the cake-high has worn off and now the child is crying because it's all over and it did not deliver and it won't happen again for ages and ages and now we return to banality, to the endless ebbing and flowing of days and the inescapability of the self.

You would think that the buildup-and-dashed-expectations way of doing things would lose its appeal with encroaching maturity, but it has an adultish manifestation as well. Case in point: until recently, until right around the time that my birthday struck, I had held onto some subconscious, deeply-embedded belief that the tortuousness of my young life ("tortuous" as in twisting, not "torturous" as in Spanish Inquisition) and all of the stumbling blocks and the false starts and the red herrings and the feeling-so-incongruous-with-the-world-all-the-time... somehow I believed that all of this was just "early penance" for an easy and fabulous adult life that was promised to me. (You know, like a fricking medieval serf who endures suffering on Earth because he/ she is duped into thinking that there is an afterlife awaiting and it is gonna be SUH-WEET).

Something specific would herald this glorious Assumption of mine, something like, "I've decided on a new career path that is absolutely ideal for me," or, "I'm moving to the happeningest city ever, the place that only people who have really made it are allowed to inhabit," or, "I met someone who I really click with and we might even LOVE each other," ... and thereafter, everything would be just PEACHY, smooth glassy seas, oars ahead into the blazing horizon! Right? But no, of course even those landmark occurrences-- ESPECIALLY those landmark occurrences, those Facebook-boastful, "like"-accruing events-- come booby-trapped with a fresh set of opportunities for bodily injury: I will stub my big toe on the myopic drudgery of my chosen field, I will whack my head on the financial implausibility of living in Schmanhattan on a student budget, I will lose my right leg to Love, and then I'll be at the piano again, rooting about in the murky forests of Schumann for solutions or sympathy, thinking to myself that I shouldn't need to do this anymore at my advanced age, that I really should have figured things out by now... and then there comes the dawning awareness that I will always need to be doing this because life is kind of one giant booby trap and it shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.

***

There is one small thing that I may have figured out, though. That ending to the Humoreske, the one that seemed to make no sense-- well, that's exactly it. It makes no sense! We expect that Pieces of a Certain [Romantic] Age should culminate in triumph or transcendence, ultimately undoing all of the musical "wrongs" that were incurred earlier-- quite the redemptive model, sonic translation of Jesus coming down to absolve sins and suffering and to tell you, tell you all that it's okay from here on out. And then some other musical narratives finish in high tragedy, or drunkenly or diabolically: the effect (Affekt!) is still clear and decisive.

But Schumann? What does he do? After all the galavanting through humors upon humors-- the interiority and the impetuousness and so forth-- we come to a passage marked "Zum Schluss" : towards closure, toward the conclusion. The end is nigh! And it's a slow movement. Oh okay, I see how it is, we're going to have one of those starry Schumann finishes that gazes out on the Infinite with longing and rapture. But no, this is weird. What does the music want to be? It's tender, certainly,  almost a recitative, almost a love song or lullaby, but then it's shot through with musical signifiers that say "pain" or "disruption" (the fully-diminished seventh chord, the borrowing from the minor mode, the deceptive cadences) and it keeps stopping and starting in fits, overwrought. Soon we understand that two distinct voices are intertwining, dialogue-ing, and then just getting stuck on these knotty chords. This is how it ends? making the same attempt and reaching the same impasse again and again, with no release or resolution? But then the tempo picks up and there are accents everywhere and loud dynamic markings, and now that's more like it! a fitting way to cap off the rambling epic; here's our big brassy coda.

And yet not quite. While the left hand roils with energy and verve, seeming (to me) to recall the Baroque French Overture style-- all pomp and ceremony-- the right hand nods to quite another Baroque idea. It falls repeatedly, it falls by semi-tone over a fourth, three times over: this is a longstanding code for lamentation (almost a cliche). So we have Lament and Pomp together, overlaid, a mixed state! And thus combined, the two modes are no longer pure or straight-faced or entirely themselves,  there is joy, still, and there is pain, sure, but above all there is a sense of throwing one's hands up in wry resignation-- as if to say that yes, there is no way of making sense of the preceding fragments, that the shining dream of totality is dashed forever and now everything is infected with a knowledge of fracturedness that can never really be un-known, but go forth and enjoy the ride anyway (because, after all, you signed up for it) and BLESS THIS MESS.

Cult of Schlock

My best friend from high school was Rivka, and a very pure alliance we had. We were both good girls who never dreamed of skipping class or sneaking out of our parents' houses or putting an illegal substance to our lips; our worst transgressions were limited to starting our seven-paged term papers for English class the night before they were due (seven pages! what an insurmountable obstacle back then, and how laughable now that we have both gone on to graduate school in the humanities and can routinely pull twenty-five mediocre pages out of our arses in a jaw-droppingly slender interval of time) and to talking occasional harmless smack about our classmates, who were cooler than we could ever hope to be with their cars and their amateur ska bands and their scandalous tales of contracting secondhand highs from clouds of marijuana smoke that hovered over the live musical events that they liked to frequent (to this day, I can't believe that they would engage in such risky behavior! Standing in the vicinity of people who were TOKING UP! The kids at my high school were straight out of A Clockwork Orange: HARDCORE, I tell you). Rivka and I, meanwhile, had sleepovers where we would play with her dog and make matzo-brei in a skillet and watch the Marx Brothers and try to stay up as late as possible, whispering and giggling over our twin pillows until one of us inevitably sacked out.

But we were quietly subversive, goody-goodies with a secret stash of black humor. One night when we were in ninth grade, we were sitting around at Rivka's house in our matching flannel dog-print pajamas, flipping through TV channels and hoping to alight on something either of quality or of such un-quality that we could derive sick entertainment from it. That evening it seemed that the meter pointed strongly to "un-quality," because first we came upon MTV's Jackass, where a man in a Speedo was about to dive headfirst into a kiddie pool packed with elephant dung. We watched in fascinated horror for a few minutes until we could bear it no longer (here was unadulterated jackassery, here was scatology in its purest form-- it was like looking straight into the sun, beautiful and terrible and unsustainable). So we continued our odyssey through the channels and eventually hit the ultimate jackpot of Atrocious Syndicated Entertainment-- Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

For the blissfully uninitiated among you, Waterworld is a notoriously dreadful post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie from 1995. In this fine feature film, polar ice caps have melted and inundated the globe, obliterating most human life save a few nomadic factions who roam the waves on their makeshift rafts, getting into petty little scuffles and searching for a mythical landmass upon which to kick-start human civilization. (Can't you just feel that nascent '90s global warming anxiety? I'm convinced that Al Gore watched the very same rerun of Waterworld that Rivka and I stumbled upon in 2000 and, already having been shunted away from the Oval Office, spontaneously rerouted his career from politician to environmentalist in order to ensure that the events of Kevin Costner's epic flop would never come to pass). Anyway, Waterworld was supposedly the most expensive film ever produced up to that point, and it bombed at the box office. Titanic, another nautically-inflected cinematic masterpiece, would soon surpass it in terms of production costs, but we all know how that one fared commercially so it's not really the same story. (Also, Titanic was SCHLOCK whereas Waterworld was DRECK, and therein lies a key semantic difference, my dear friends who are not yet attuned to the nuances of the Yiddish tongue. Look it up).

Anyway, in the movie, Kevin Costner plays a mysterious figure known only as Noah Moses Jesus "The Mariner." He finds this creepy little girl with a mysterious symbol tattooed on her back, and he claims that the symbol is actually a map that will lead The People to mythical Dryland, AKA the not-yet-submerged peak of Mount Ararat Everest. But The Mariner is ostracized and feared by the masses even as he tries to help them. There's something off about him-- but what? All is revealed when an alpha male from the other side gets a close look at Herr Costner and proclaims, with horror and disbelief, that "HE HAS... GILLS!!!" You see, The Mariner has really adapted to life on the high seas; he is quite evolutionarily fit.

So back to ninth-grade Alana and Rivka. We lost it at the gills line, absolutely cracked up, rolling around on the floor and developing abdominal cramps from the propulsive intensity of our silent laughter. The delivery of the line was so wooden, so B-movie on top of the inherent mockability of the subject matter. We gasped for air; I thought I'd never be able to breathe normally again.

When we finally regained composure (this took approximately twelve minutes) we started pondering the significance of The Mariner's fishy anatomy. "Well, it's clear that he's some kind of prophet or Christ figure," I said (we had been learning about Christ figures and other hero archetypes in English class recently-- I distinctly recall that a classmate, a very cool one, had asked our teacher, "So Jesus is, like, one of those Christ-like figures, right?" and I had facepalmed and groaned and internally bemoaned the stupidity of the human race, but now this girl works in finance somewhere and makes more money than I will ever make in my life, so I am retroactively knocking fourteen-year-old Alana off of her freaking high horse already). Anyway, Rivka agreed with me about the religious overtones of The Mariner's character: "Yeah, a Christ figure for sure. Christ with gills!" "Christ with gills!" I replied. "Gill-Christ. Sounds like the surname 'Gilchrist. I wonder why that's even a name?'"

And then my eyes lit up insanely as my neurons started firing off associations (most of these associations being things that I had learned in our mandatory Bible Studies class the previous fall-- see, I used to really pay attention in school once upon a time). "Wait. Hold up," I said, mind racing. "Gills on Christ. There's all this 'fishy' stuff surrounding Jesus... the feeding of the masses with the loaves and FISHES... the walking on water... and remember when he said 'Come, and I shall make you fishers of men and women'? And the SYMBOL! There's the Christ symbol! You know the one, the little loopy fish... it's almost like a stick-figure... you see it as a magnet on cars sometimes... or you see the other ones with the amphibian feet and they're Darwinist symbols... but anyway, my dad-- you know how my dad is chock-full of those religious history nuggets-- so my dad used to tell me that Jesus had a code name among early Christians, you know, when they were being persecuted and fed to lions and everything. And the name was 'Ichthus,' the Greek word for FISH! And that's why the symbol exists. And then there's that Gilchrist name. So I'm thinking... I'm thinking that there's more to this than symbolism. I'm thinking there was a major cover-up. I'm thinking... what if Jesus WAS ACTUALLY A FISH??"

Rivka cracked up again, probably because she now had ultimate clinching proof that her best friend was bonkers. But she played along, and soon enough we had created an entire doctrine, the core tenet of which was the fish-ness of Christ Jesus. We christened our fledgling cult "Osteichtheism" (osty-ICKTHY-ism). This title was a mashup of "osteichthyes," the taxonomical class name for "bony fish" that we had learned in biology recently (again, marvel at our erstwhile scholarly enthusiasm and sponge-like learning capabilities-- long gone, they are) and "theism," a noun or suffix meaning-- well, y'all know THAT one, I ain't condescenin'. Once we had a name, we got to work on the details. We marshaled evidence to support our bonafide bony-fish theory. We composed a pseudo-Gregorian chant for the clandestine services and rituals that we were going to hold. We made plans to convert the masses-- we would confer new identities on our most shining members, grant them "fish names" to denote their status within the organization. Rivka and I, of course, would be the Dear Leaders to whom all members would defer.

We giggled with the wrongness of what we were concocting, we two vaguely Jewish misfit girls who attended a warm-and-fuzzy private Episcopal school that doused the student body with messages of tolerance and respect on a daily basis. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! We kept our sacrilege a secret from our more sanctimonious friends, and the element secrecy, of course, made the whole thing even funnier to us. (Perhaps some of my current acquaintances of the sanctimonious stripe are even reading this now, becoming steadily more offended and resolving to pray for the desolate empty crater where my soul ought to be... but if this kind of thing bothers you, then I suggest that you get off the internet right now, because there is an abyss of debauchery out there and I am just the very tip of the Debauched Abyss-berg. Seriously, you should just close your browser right now and go turn on Sesame Street [though that might offend you too, come to think of it, what with the show's decidedly New York Jewish cultural sensibility and the black people and the two male muppets who are clearly in some kind of sinful domestic partnership]).

Anyway, our "commitment" to the "faith" flagged as we made our way through high school and became preoccupied with dopey boys and choir rehearsal and Driver's Ed and practice SATs and college counseling and whatever else seemed so life-or-death back then. But we still inscribed the Ichthus symbol in one another's yearbooks and reminisced, from the incomparably more mature vantage point of Senior Year, about that time way back in the day that we created a cult. It was a pact of friendship more than anything else.

Or was it? Poor reader, you are probably sitting there scratching your head and just trying to puzzle out why I decided to add this random-ass story from the Annals of Alana to the selective and authoritative Canon of Schlock (and you are also possibly praying for my poor immortal soul-- again, if that is you, just kindly leave me alone and go watch Teletubbies. But wait. The gay purple one. Shoot.) Well, let me elucidate. I believe that the Osteichtheism episode from yesteryear not only cemented a lifelong friendship, but also spoke a secret yearning on my part to become a cult leader. I shelved this aspiration for a long time, believing that I was not charismatic or testicular enough to hold sway over a population, and resigned myself to a schmoozicological life of obscurity. But then. But then! Last year I created a Schlockspot, the very same one that you are wasting your time perusing right now. At first my endeavor had only had a few fringe supporters, a few die-hard devotees who also happened to be, um,  my close friends or my blood relatives. Slowly, however, the little Schlock-Site started to pick up more hits. From whence emanated the hits? My site-meter was not so specific, but still  it informed me that my Schlocky message was being spread, that the masses were starting to take note. Cult status was within reach. A Schlock-Cult! I could almost taste it! It would be kind of like the Occult, but with less paranormalcy and with more cliched whining about the indignities of the twenty-something life!

Any respectable cult, however, needs a few influential heavyweight members, a few Tom Cruises and John Travoltas. I knew that I had truly broken through when I gained an eminent and well-respected acolyte, one whom I would not have pegged to enjoy amateur scattershot prose peppered with choice words like "dilche," but I would not have pegged Señor Cruise as one to fall at the feet of the Dark Lord Xenu either, so search me. And since I seem to be on a roll with gaining followers these days, I am eying Kevin Costner as a new recruit because he seems ripe for inculcation (doesn't he?) and because he has gills! That could only be an asset!

Also, any respectable cult requires a significant endowment to perpetuate the lies take care of its members. And this, dear readers, is where you come in. You see, I have recently communed with the Schlock Deities and they have requested that all members who seek a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment should donate a sizeable chunk of their income to the institution that gives them answers and facilitates their rich inner life. So without further ado, if you could make out your checks to the Alana Murphy Needs Beer Money Foundation High Church of Schlock Annual Fund, I will see to it that your Midi-Chlorian Count  oops I mean Thetan Levels shit! I meant to write that your MYSTICAL SCHLOCKITUDE QUOTIENT will be raised to hitherto unknown heights, and that your rewards will be great.  

Top-40 Bliss-Haze, or, The Decline of my Art

God. God damn, you guys. Look at me. I was never athletic, but hell if I don't I win the Negligent Blogger Olympics, because I have made Non-Blogging into an extreme sport. I'm a natural. I milk it-- I like to keep the crowd extra-on-the-edge-of-their-seats by ALMOST wiping out, ALMOST caving and writing a new post, but then, in a sheer act of willpower bolstered by a deeply-ingrained sense of duty to my country, I muster up the requisite lazy assholery to leave my blog untouched. ("UNBELIEVABLE!" shriek the commentators. "We thought that so-and-so-Professional-Lazy-Asshole-Person was a lock for the gold, but dark horse Alana Murphy sweeps in and DOMINATES by taking one look at the blinking cursor on her laptop, closing the Blogger window, pulling up an episode of "Louie" on Netflix, and PASSING OUT on her bed eleven minutes into the episode, not even bothering to change into pajamas. WOW! Now Murphy HAS been inconsistent over the past year-- sometimes she falters and doubts herself, like those few times when she really went off the tracks and stayed up all night, churning out paragraph upon paragraph of personal history and scathing cultural commentary out of a burning deluded need to Capture the Human Condition, to pin Life wriggling to a wall, to prove her writing mettle to a nebulous and fickle online readership. But now, in the summer of 2012 when it really counts, Murphy has stepped it up; she has become a ROCK-SOLID, WORLD-CLASS Lazy Asshole Negligent Blogger. Folks, this is a HISTORIC. PERFORMANCE.")

Now that the Lazy Olympics are over, however, and I have my medal, I am permitting myself a momentary lapse in dedication to my sport. Kind of like how Michael Phelps kept getting caught with his face in a bong post-Beijing, you know? Except I'll be caught writing in my blog. EQUALLY ILLEGAL. Don't tell anyone.

No, in all seriousness, there is much to write about... but I'm not the writer to write about it, not yet. You see, this summer has brought in an unexpected abundance of riches-- wonderful, longed-for things just suddenly washing in at my feet like treasure from a shipwreck (ARRRRR, MATEY!) And I've been undergoing some deep, positive personal changes as a result. Something to the effect of this: imagine that, for whatever reason, you felt that you had been marked from birth, that you were somehow designated as wrong or "Other," and everybody knew immediately, especially all of those fortunate unmarked souls who instinctively knew the rules of the game. They knew to avoid you, because your disfigurement was contagious. As you grew older, you learned to disguise your markedness, to blend in and even cultivate closeness with other marked folk. But invariably you would be pushed away when you came under close scrutiny-- that MARK-- and so you resigned yourself to a high-achieving but somewhat personally impoverished life. But then! What if the Universe had spontaneously decided to reevaluate you, had determined that LOL there had been a mistake and you were not condemned after all? "We're going to erase your mark, sandblast it off!" says the Universe. Or, "You never had a mark at all! It was everyone else who did, all along." Or, "Public opinion has changed and now your mark is IN, it's beautiful, everyone wants one now, grafted onto their souls, but lucky you, you just HAVE it, girl!"

And that, circuitously, is how I have been feeling these days. Free, un-cursed (blessed, even), given to spells of intense happiness. And therein lies the problem: such sentiments do not for good blogging make. Why is it, exactly, that you tune in obsessively to Writer's Schlock time and again? (Come on, just play along and pretend that you do). Why does your heart leap when I sporadically, unpredictably post a link to a new entry, holding out the carrot, jerking you around and leading you on in some kind of morally questionable psychological experiment? What is it about my stuff that keeps you hooked like a teenager from a broken home who cuts class and turns tricks in exchange for painkillers?  Well, I'm guessing that your addiction is more a function of salty, tasteless, borderline-shouldn't-be-posting-this-online sentences like that last one than of the instances when I gab about some huge effing BOON in my life or when I wax rhapsodic about the peachy contours of a sunset or something.

There was some smart foreign dead guy-- Tolstoy, I think, though I forget now because I haven't read a book since the internet was invented (JUST KIDDING, I read The Hunger Games earlier this year and I might even tackle Fifty Shades of Gray soon if I'm feeling really intellectually ambitious)-- who said that all happy families look alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. And he went on to write about some seriously messed up shit, and became famous for it. That guy was onto something, because happiness/ bliss/ joy/ rosiness etc. are lovely states to experience, but they are strangely uniform, garden-variety, always exactly the same for every person ever and so they are especially susceptible to trite, cliched depiction in writing and in art and in popular media. Not so with misanthropy, pain, pessimism, betrayal, grief, jealousy-- states that can be arrived at an infinite number of ways in life, that can be ceaselessly reformulated and permuted, and that can thus receive premium artistic treatment from tortured souls who must fashion something eternal, something universal, from their one-of-a-kind suffering.

In other words, I, like many others, am most impelled to write when I am vaguely miserable or insecure or restless or lonely, and it is at those times that I heap on the delectable vicious cynicism that you all can't get enough of (right? just humor me) with only an occasional detour into poetic excess or tremulous, naive idealism (which can only be earned after I have been sufficiently snotty for a few paragraphs, and even then only let out in short embarrassed gasps). With this setup you all can come Schadenfreudify with me, revel in my acidity, my ironic distance, an ironic distance that you also take comfort in because it is borderline-necessary for survival.

But here is the thing. These days I've lost my edge. It's terrible! Shameful! I first noticed it when I started relating to the lyrics in top-40 music instead of hipsterishly decrying them as brainless and formulaic. I started cooing at small children. Horrific. I floated through a summer that has performed some funny temporal gymnastics, twisting and stretching and slow-mo-ing to accommodate endless meandering conversations, the sudden rapid accumulation of familiarity and closeness. In short, I'VE GONE SOFT. I've lost the ironic distance. I've become an experiential mess of flesh and blood, no longer even capable of aspiring to that shiny-simulacrum state that our generation prizes-- cool, critical, representational-- but now all giddy and hopeful and prone to thinking that I've unlocked the secrets of life when I do mundane things like bite into a nectarine purchased from my neighborhood bodega (a REAL nectarine, tangible and messy and juice-heavy in the palm of my hand, not an Instagrammed one that you documented all technicolor and sliced into a spiral pattern over your Greek Yogurt for breakfast) and I don't want to write about my bliss because it's hard to write about those kinds of things, which must be handled expertly, and my attempt would be sub-sub-par-- somewhere between Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks, not that there's anything wrong with them but OH GOD EW-- and anyway do you really want to read about spurting stone fruit and reawakened infant joy and mysterious, possibly terminal afflictions that may or may not sound a little like the word "glove?" DO YOU? DO YOU REALLY?  

Jobbing in Schlockston, the Sequel: Bunheads Revisited, Revisited

If you have been an avid reader of Writer's Schlock since its inception (or have creepily perused its archives at any point in time [yeah, you think I don't know, lurkers, but I DO]) then you may realize that the title of this current entry is, like, so self-referential, as in it's a riff on a post header from last summer. Wherefore the extra dose of meta? Well, I think that I have officially earned the right to cite myself because, as of now, my blog is a friggin' YEAR old! Whoa! This means that if it were to assume a human form, it would be eating solid foods and learning to crawl and maybe even uttering a few adorable preliminary syllables; it would also have been removed from my care by Social Services because I have been criminally neglectful, feeding it on average of once a month and often being verbally abusive, calling it schlocky and narcissistic and derivative and all kinds of other things that will nestle into its subconscious and eventually land it in a shrink's office when it reaches its mid-twenties, whereupon it will stare at an invisible point in the air and say, "It's like... I'm realizing that I just don't know how to love anyone else because... I never learned how to love myself and there's just something missing inside of me..."

But my blog is, in fact, inanimate and will almost certainly not exist twenty-something years into the future-- therefore let the abuse continue! SO. If you have kept up up with this erratically updated, unreliably narrated, occasionally-written-whilst-intoxicated little schlock-blog of mine from the very beginning, then you deserve some kind of metaphorical effing gold star. Or even a material award-- maybe I'll send you a cupcake, a trendy disgusting one with a caramelized bacon topping or a blueberry-balsamic buttercream frosting. You would like that, wouldn't you? Cupcakes are "in" forever, or so I hear, and hey, I believe it, because cupcakes will be in as long as the female portion of the population wants to keep infantilizing itself via cutesy, not-even-particularly-tasty designer desserts, which then serve as bite-sized consolation prizes for the fact that the patriarchy continues to oppress womankind, which has in turn made itself easy to oppress and impossible to take seriously because it is so fucking busy cooing over individualized indulgences and crowing that we should treat ourselves! because we are GODDESSES and we RULE and we are BEAUTIFUL just as we are and we should CELEBRATE ourselves all the damn time so let's plop down some money that we don't have in exchange for a refined-carby bomb that will go straight our asses. But I don't want to talk about this anymore. Can we change the subject already? Why are cupcakes always taking over everything that's good in the world? See, they've taken up a whole paragraph of my blog already.

"Ummm, Alana, that's the thing-- this is your blog. You're the one who brought them up." No! I-- oh, well, yeah, true...  "And actually it seems like the cupcakes are symbolic of a deeper issue that might be troubling you."  What? No, I am just morally opposed to cloying buttercream and dry, uninspired cake-matter as a national trend: it's a criminal waste of calories when I could instead have a gelato or a boozy truffle or a wedge of baklava or a Viennese quark cheese strudel doused in warm vanilla custard sauce. That's all I'm trying to say, so back off. "Well, Alana, it kind of seems like you have some pent-up hostilities toward other women, especially those who have been socialized to be more feminine than you." Wha--? No. No, I am just tired of these girls who are always pampering themselves without first asking themselves if they have accomplished enough intellectually or professionally to merit the constant pampering. I am tired of these effete pixies, cute as cupcakes, with their doe eyes and their vocal fry and their non-threatening giggles and their mysterious power over the men-folk, who time and again flock to these cupcakey girls because said girls are adorable and innocuous and make the men-folk feel re-masculated and back in their gender-mandated place of AUTHORITAH even if they might be unemployed and adrift and/ or living with Mom and Dad. "Okay, NOW we're getting somewhere. What you're really communicating here is that you're feeling passed over. The failures that you have experienced on the battleground of lurrrve seem to have caused you to doubt your strong personality and to resent others who have fared better in this arena by playing to their gendered attributes. It seems to be a sore point for you. Maybe you should bring this up to your therapist." Okay, GREAT, except I don't have a therapist. Do I look like someone who could afford a therapist? Come on.

But I do have a blog! And it was almost exactly one year ago that I had just started a short-term job in Schlockston and was about to move away from Shroomington forever to do a PhD in Schmanhattan in a subject that was new to me and was feeling a leeettle on the hot-mess-totally-unstable-headcase end of the emotional spectrum. One afternoon, as I was engaged in a typical navel-gazing session, I suddenly thought, "Damn, that's a pretty fine-looking navel-- you know what, I should show it to the rest of the world!" and I went to Blogger and with a few keystrokes created Writer's Schlock free of charge, thus setting up a nice cyber-toilet bowl into which I would occasionally heave my guts for all to see. And now I've completely lost track of all of the bizarre incongruous metaphors that I've introduced ("wait, now the blog is the therapist? a few paragraphs ago the blog was a patient in therapy... and what's up with the navel and the toilet-bowl puking in the same sentence? that's disgusting...") so I'm just going to stop.

Anyway, as the mysterious cyclical nature of the Universe would have it, I am back in Schlockston for the summer to reprise my role as Accompanist Extraordinaire for legions of aspiring young ballerinas (and the occasional male danseur). Earlier in the year I debated whether to take this job again-- life is too short for reiterations, so maybe I should try something new, maybe a music festival, or maybe I should go back to Bleep U to resolve some lingering bureaucratic bullshit (which I am not going to bother explaining here because it is so incredibly stupid that it makes me want to hijack a demolition truck and tear down the shiny new faculty building that they are currently erecting). But then I watched a Sassy Gay Friend video on YouTube, the one where he justifies his use of product placement in his skits, and he says, "Hey, I have options too. I can not make money or I can MAKE MONEY! ... these scarves don't pay for themselves," and I realized that I, too, covet more scarves to add to my already-impressive collection and should probably suss out a source of income to support my scarfy habit (and also to pay off my evil scumbag NYC landlords, who live out in Crooklyn and whose specialties include the raping and pillaging of the checking accounts of young people, but again, let's not get into that).

And I am actually incredibly glad to be back here. I know that I kind of dissed Schlockston at some point on this site, calling it preppy and white-bread and the square older brother of hip crazycool Schmanhattan. But by God, Schlockston has come through for me when I've needed it. Last summer I was just really Emotionally Frazzled for a number of reasons (some of which are mentioned above and others of which are unmentionable) but my stint in Schlockston was a little utopian window, an escapist dream in which I played music for ballet dancers all day and wandered around the red-bricked neighborhood on my breaks, flopping down in grassy courtyards to imbibe sunlight (and enough iced coffee to kill a cat, caffeine being an absolute must for six-plus hours of ballet class/ rehearsal). I saw old friends and extended family, I went to the beach, I read pretentious literature in independent cafes and attracted the attention of a hipstery silver fox who asked me out (I obliged, but it turned out that his idea of a rollicking good banter was to talk about the differences between 3G and 4G wireless for a fricking hour-and-a-half. Yawn.) Oh, and I started a blog. It was a beautiful summer, a deep circular breath-- at once a slow exhalation, a letting out of the tensions that bound me to my old life, and also a deep gulp of fragrant serenity to hold me over while the chaotic Schmanhattan chapter roared into existence.

This year, by contrast, I am not undergoing any massive life changes nor am I even anywhere near Emotionally Frazzled-- try Cold and Dead Inside. Ha! However, I am considerably Intellectually Frazzled, and even more Physically Frazzled. The Intellectual Enfrazzlement stems from the fact that not only did I finish the first year of my reading/ writing- intensive degree, but I also decided to undertake an extra-special PUNY exam requirement in the first weeks of summer. This process, a strange hazing ritual concocted by my department, works like this: you walk into the administrative office, whereupon you are presented with circa ten envelopes, one of which contains your fate. You select your envelope/ fate; inside is a sheet of paper that list two topics drawn from anywhere in the history of music. You have twenty-four hours to commit to one topic, and then you have exactly two weeks to research and write a term paper on the subject. So I decided to knock out this little exercise while I was fresh off the first year and not irreparably jaded yet. I resigned myself to spending the first part of summer indoors and swiftly set up camp in the student lounge slash the library. I chained myself to a computer, stared at books and articles and dissertations as if to suck the text off of the page, frantically digested the information, churned out prose that maybe (?) made sense, and monopolized the swanky new coffee machine that my department had bought recently (this was a powerful incentive to come in to school, I must say). Somehow I completed the paper, spurred on by my classmates and my roommate and my friends from afar (sample late-night inspirational text: "u better be on page eleven and a half now. Go go GO!"') So, in short, the unpleasant exercise is DONE, KAPUT, out of my sight, but as soon as I submitted it I felt as though my brain had been transformed into mushy peas and I never wanted to read anything again in my life unless it had a picture of a Kardashian on the cover.

As for my Physical Frazzle Factor, I am fairly certain that it is rooted in my prolonged exposure to Schmanhattan. Now of course I adore my adopted city, the energy, the diversity, the sense that anything could happen, and all of the other usual praises that are heaped upon the Big Schnapple. Initially I seemed to adjust to the environment rather easily despite all of the chaos and the noise pollution and the bad air: I was honeymooning, running on adrenaline, shouting to the heavens that I'm here! I've arrived! But sometime around February I started to notice that I was not doing so well. I was clenching my teeth and balling my fists while I slept, which resulted in chronic facial pain and general muscle soreness. My migraines were becoming more frequent. My complexion, normally on the clear side, started behaving like that of a horny teenaged boy. (Whether I was exhibiting any other characteristics of a horny teenaged boy is open for debate). And all of these discomforts were accompanied by a constant low-level anxiety that sometimes erupted into panic. It would spike when my hood-rat upstairs neighbors forgot how to play the Quiet Game, which was most of the time; it flared up every time that I descended deep into the bowels of the earth to ride the subway with its rattlescreeeech while standing wedged between some thug deejay wannabe who was blasting music from his iPhone and some broad who was smacking the living hell out of her three screaming kids. And sometimes I would experience these panicky episodes when I went to class, too, because whoever designed PUNY ordained that the seminar rooms would be windowless and low-ceilinged and poorly ventilated and lit with dingy fluorescent lights (half of which were burned out)-- can you imagine discussing Immanuel Kant or post-structuralist anthropology in such a dismal environment for three hours at a time? You would go mad. You would lose all sense of the outside world. You would want to blast a hole in the ceiling and build a skylight just to remember that the sun is still smiling upon the earth and that you're not in a bomb shelter waiting out the apocalypse, after which you would then be left to re-populate the planet with your grad student cohort and create a master race of Schmoozicologists. Shudder.

I don't mean to imply that I was having a bad time. My department was great, my apartment was great, my roommate was great (she is probably my best friend in the city, and we didn't even know each other before we moved in together! WTF that's not supposed to happen; roommates are supposed to leave passive-aggressive post-it notes on the bathroom mirror, not go to Lincoln Center together and send each other funny links and share food and spontaneously watch The Mummy on a laptop at 1 AM). Things were damn good. I was given many opportunities to keep playing the piano, and I took them. I had plenty of entertaining misadventures in Not-Love that left minimal emotional damage. And yet by the end of the year I was just a bit battered in mind, body, and spirit, a little anhedonic, somehow incapable of scooping out the tension that had burrowed deeply into my bones and muscles. It physically hurt me to laugh; my smiling apparatus spasmed painfully when too much happiness was required of it. What to do? I tried changing my diet-- more leafy greens and quinoa and #whitepeople superfoods-- and I started running, and I slept with ear plugs and a face mask to blot out the environment, but still the symptoms persisted. And then suddenly I knew what would cure me, what would cut through the chaos and restore me to my full capabilities: WASPS. And sailboats. And lobster rolls (not that I eat lobster rolls, but somehow I thought that their proximity and availability would be comforting). And town squares teeming with college students who had been on the debate team in high school and who now aspired to misguided world domination. Of course! It was so simple, the panacea to all of my mysterious ailments!

So I wound my way up the Least Coast to Schlockston and felt my body un-knot itself instantly, and I took up my old spot behind the piano in the ballet building and relished the half-moon windows that allow all of this summer light to spill in, and I dashed outside on my breaks and wandered through community gardens, stopping here and there to pluck a basil leaf, a fennel frond, an oregano bud, a mint leaf, and I crushed them between my fingers to breathe in the essential oils and to reacquaint myself with the simple sensual pleasures of things that grow. And last Friday I was released from balletic duties early, so I sat in Schmopley Square with my feet in the fountain and I ate a whole pint of raspberries one at a time, dark juices staining the crevices of my hands, seed-shards lodging themselves into my molars-- there was not a bum berry in the box, and I thought, "Seriously, cupcakes can suck it: this is decadence, the living fruit of God's Green Earth "-- and these two twin Chinese toddlers were playing in the fountain, alternately splashing and hugging one another, and sometimes they ran over to tag my knee, shrieking with laughter, and the granite of the fountain ledge was sun-baked and warm on my bare legs but not unendurable, and I could smell the grass on the lawn, which had taken on this unbelievable hazy gold-green late-afternoon cast that says the day is winding down, yes, but stop and listen for a moment because whatever you think you need to run off and do doesn't actually matter as much as this. And I thought, oh, if only I could make a draught of this day so that I could have it on tap, keep it in a flask to take a swig from in some bleaker time when the fine wiring in my head is primed to snap and I kind of want to annihilate humanity (this time will come again, of course-- cyclic, cyclic, always it goes) but we don't have the technology for such distillation yet, so maybe I will just attempt to record a perfect palliative day in words-- words, those inadequate stand-ins for experience, those pale imitations, and weblogging is of course the palest of all wordy forms but hey, it's something, still a weak stab at the preservation of life, and maybe that's what I was really thinking when I started writing here a little over a year ago.

Unlocked

I.
It was about a month ago. I was sitting in Starbucks-- my Starbucks, the one across the street from my apartment that, in truth, is exactly like any other Starbucks in the known universe as far as product and decor, but has somehow managed to worm its way into my heart due to its proximity to my home, my haven, my resting place, and also due to its little idiosyncrasies (yes! a corporate chain can still have its idiosyncrasies: scruffy chubby barista and his half-wink of recognition, row of benches under the scaffolding outside on which roost the neighborhood characters with their dogs and children)-- and I was staring at Microsoft Word with furrowed brow, trying to knit together a few thoughts on the delectably gloomy Haydn F minor piano variations when suddenly, like an iron crowbar to the tenuous bell jar of my concentration, came:  "... and I am doing my wedding registry at Bed, Bath and Beyond and NOT Pottery Barn because it's like, NOT his mom's decision to make, I mean, this day is about US and what we want, am I right?"

Oh god, it was one of those girls with one of those voices. When she said"not" it sounded like "gnat," and each individual clause swung upward to a staticky drawl, never truly cadencing, and even in my peripheral vision I could see that her body language was so gesticulative, so declarative, that she believed every word emanating from her person to be of tantamount importance and deserving of a raptly listening audience. I swiveled my gaze away from my laptop screen-- from a bad, tortuous musicological sentence of my own creation involving the words "narrativity" and "end-weightedness"-- in order to identify the source of this vocal production. She was on the fleshy side, probably about five years older than me, wearing yoga pants; she had a female companion who, in a non-speaking role, nodded sympathetically at each re-occurrence of "gnat." As I surveyed the protagonist and her emphatic arm motions, I noticed that she had a small tattoo of a snake on the inside of her wrist. Of course she did! And of course this edgy, counter-cultural aesthetic statement was indicative of her inner edgy counter-culturalness, her  nonconformity, her special snowflakeness, all of which were further evidenced by her unique, mellifluous speaking patterns and her well-articulated, compelling opinions about world issues of great significance. Of course she was in no way a cringe-inducing stereotype of a yappy entitled materialistic yuppie wench, because she had a TATTOO.

Ouch. I was in a venomous place, even for me. It had all started earlier that day, when I had tried to write down my Haydnesque observations in the tranquility of my own living quarters, but said tranquility had been shattered when the two-year-old child in the unit above me commenced his usual routine of endlessly running the length of the apartment. Am I really so heartless, you ask? Do I really have it in me to despise toddlers and their abundant energy? No! I am all for childlike exuberance, for the pitter-patter of little feet. But when these little feet seem to have bowling balls strapped to them, and when the abundance of energy is so extreme and so unyielding that I start to imagine that the child is being raised on a diet of crystal meth dissolved in Red Bull, and when the leaden pitter-patter stampede is only occasionally punctuated by a crash, a wail, and a mother's vituperative stream of Spanish-- when these things happen, I grab my swiffer and bang it on the ceiling (to no avail) and my roommate and I indulge in creative but completely implausible revenge schemes involving fake eviction notices or tranquilizer darts, and, to make a long story short, I am in no state to write effectively about the subtleties of Haydn's phrase rhythms. 

So, seeking peace, I fled the upstairs meth-toddler bowling-ball blitzkrieg and went to Starbucks, only to fall from the frying pan into the fire. The tattooed yuppie had moved on from discussing her wedding registry; she was now offering an authoritative rant on the relationship situation of a friend. "And, like, it is GNAT okay the way he treated her, she does GNAT deserve that, and we all deserve the best, you know, we have the right to ask for what we deserve." What I deserve is to not have to listen to you anymore; can I ask for that? "I mean, he cheated on her, that would be, like, the ultimate dealbreaker for me, I would GNAT listen to any apologies because I know that I deserve to never have to be apologized to..." Funny thing, if I were your fiance, I would probably be cheating on you right now because you seem like you're a control freak and a bridezilla and not nearly as free-spirited or sexually adventurous as your inner-wrist tat would make you out to be.

Oh, this was bad. I was really on a caustic tear; my inner monologist was actually condoning infidelity. Why? all just because some stranger was annoying me with a sense of pseudo-feminist empowerment that seemed unearned? or just because her vocal timbre had the quality of a duck with a respiratory ailment? Clearly I needed to escape the Starbucks. It was no longer a benevolent space; it was no longer drawing the best out of me. I sucked down the remainder of my caffeine, folded up my laptop, and stalked out into the street, contemplating the notion that most of the time people don't actually deserve to get exactly what they think they deserve, and even in the rare case that their level of deserving-ness aligns perfectly with their expectations, it is still no guarantee of much.

 II. 

A few hours later, I was in seminar, and things were devolving rapidly, as they are wont to do in discussion-oriented setups involving people who think they are smarter than they actually are and have placed their entire sense of self-worth on this presumed intelligence (not that I am among these people or anything). A certain contingent of the class was, again, averring that music has no meaning, or that it can have any meaning that anybody chooses to ascribe to it, which ultimately has the same end result. This time the target was Haydn, and the argument was that the opening gesture of the variations, the insistent repetition of a single pitch-- LONG-short-LONG-- was nothing but three notes, notes alone, and could not in any way represent something specific (say, the declamation of words, of consonants spoken/ sung with urgent inflection) because all meaning is, of course, only constructed by the listener, who need not know anything about the tradition from which this music springs because that is all one big illusion.

The coffee from earlier was starting to pulse through my temples, and I was suddenly really, really hopped up, ready to take literal swipes at these punk-ass naysayers because here they were trying to take away my treasure-- everyone's treasure-- and devalue it, strip it of the subtle revelations that it might yield with some gentle pressure, with some fact-seeking and some poetic imagination. But NO, it didn't matter that there were infinity times a billion aesthetic treatises from the eighteenth century that would speak to the notion that music is inextricably wedded to principles of rhetoric and oration, not to mention all of the more recent scholarship on the subject. NO, better to just make up your own story-- oh, and then immediately disbelieve that as well because you, too, are just a construct, haha!

This is what happened next: I went all Incredible Hulk, RAWR! veins popping and pecs expanding, and I jumped up on the seminar table, scattering papers and knocking over styrofoam coffee cups and banging my head on the projector-- the professor was stunned into immobility-- and I straightened up and proclaimed that I was about to deliver the Positivist Manifesto, and therein gave a passionate plea to not tear everything DOWN in the world that is beautiful, you dilches, but to be ADDITIVE in some way ("positivist"= positive= additive, yo) because guess what? the more you know, the more you actually know! and you just need to keep adding-- add factoids, fragments, questions, anything, even things that contradict one another-- and post-addition you need to look back and see what adds up to something more, you need to find truths are truthier than others and then say something instead of just sitting back and critiquing the nature of truth, because with this mindset you are alienating everyone (laymen, performers, people inside the field), you are shunting the humanities into obsolescence so that they will lose funding as well as respect and relevance, and in the process you are dissing my favoritest things, my bright treasure, MY PRECIOUSSSSS....!!

At this point in the diatribe I was pacing militantly around the seminar table like a little graduate student dictator, Napoleon the Fourth in a skirt an heels, and suddenly crunch! my stiletto went through somebody's iPad screen. The destruction of property, especially Apple property, shocked the classroom back into action: somebody tased me from behind (I know not who-- all PhD students carry tasers in their messenger bags, of course, right next to their moleskine notebooks) and I fell down twitching, convulsing and foaming at the mouth, until security could rush over to detain me, and somebody had been filming the whole thing on a mobile phone, and it went viral on YouTube the next day under the title "Grad Student Totally Loses her Shit!" complete with an inflammatory comments section, and thus I achieved the dubious internet celebrity that I had always secretly aspired to. The end.

Actually, that didn't happen. I would never wear stilettos just to go to class, come on-- that should have been your first clue. What really happened was that I sat there imagining this scenario (one only lightly plagiarized from a recent Great-ish American Novel, "Liberty") and then I kept imagining further ways that I could show them all, show all of these people who had kept trying to steal the Precious from me in various ways throughout the day-- the pint-sized crack-addled upstairs neighbor demon spawn, the grating bougie Starbucks chick, the post-structuralist hipster peers. I would show them. I would study the score upside down and backwards and and look at the original manuscripts and play through every keyboard work written in the 1790s and go study every compositional and aesthetic treatise of the mid-to-late eighteenth century and eventually come to a blazing, brilliant epiphany about the piece that would simultaneously wow the schmoozicological community and invite the non-music-literate of the world to no longer fear the Western Classical tradition as elitist and outmoded but to come bathe in its immediacy-- "Fear not, for behold: I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be for all the people."

I left class charged with evangelical fervor and delusions of badassitude. I strutted over to the library and busted open the doors like a rapper in a club, slow-mo, the nearby students my backup dancers, imaginary dollar bills raining everywhere, and I took one look at the looming stacks, and turned on my heel and left. All of that available knowledge had stared me down; it was just... there, waiting to be sifted through infinitely, and I was not infinite. In that moment I understood the allure of just saying that you could never know everything, so why bother knowing anything? It was so much easier, kind of like accepting the vicissitudes of Fate instead of feeling like you deserve things because you worked for them. It was easier than being obsessively additive, without limits, consuming information with no end in sight and straining yourself to fashion a meaningful truth out of it when there might be none, when all of your efforts might result in a stillbirth.

III.

I headed home. The train was crowded and I felt encroached upon from all sides by the sweaty masses; a few hours earlier, at the apotheosis of my gleeful malice, I would have observed that either the subway engineers had designed the seats to be too small or people were just becoming too voluminous for the allotted space, hmmmm, which one was it? But the piss had been taken out of me: I was piss-free, tired, and dejected.

Clearly, what I needed was a good meal. On emerging from the Mines of Moria, AKA Gringotts, AKA the impossibly deep-underground subway station on my block, I went to the corner store. I bought refrigerated tortellini, pre-prepared pesto, a plastic box of neon cherry tomatoes, saran-wrapped asparagus of suspiciously uniform thickness and length. The tortellini and pesto were probably from subsidiaries of Kraft or some other evil monster corporation; the produce looked genetically modified and was likely shipped, using obscene amounts of crude oil, from somewhere in the Southern hemisphere. But I would be damned if I wasn't going to do my part to destroy the planet via a foofy, seemingly-innocuous plate of pasta and vegetables. I scampered up the stairs of my apartment building, somewhat pepped up at the prospect of carby, cheesy dumplingesque delights to be boiled and sauced. I reached into my tote bag for my keys, and then I kept reaching, and then the entirety of the bag had been groped and re-groped, and I was forced to concede that my keys were probably on top of the microwave, or the coffee table, or the piano, or my desk, or some other accommodating flat surface just on the other side of this locked door. Whoops.

I slumped to the ground, grocery bag settling next to me with a heavy plasticky rustle on the mosaic floor of the hall. Of course I had left my keys at home. Of course! This was karmic retribution for my sustained misanthropy throughout the day. I took out my phone and first texted my roommate, but she needed to be at school for another few hours; next I tried my pianist friend Piotyr who lives one floor below me, but he was out seeing the Ring Cycle at the Met like a good Serious Classical Musician; then I phoned the superintendent, who did not pick up. I was officially out of options. I would not be getting into my apartment anytime soon. So I called Rav.

Backstory: before I moved to Schmanhattan, I would imagine my life there and assume that it would be nonstop entertainment and quirkery-- I would constantly bear witness to colorful incidents and collect strange characters as friends, in true sitcom style. To some extent this was true, but much of the time my Schmanhattan life took on the qualities of my former routine, with only the details changed-- just as in Ye Olde Days of Bleep U, I would stay at school late at night writing or practicing until the security guards kicked me out, at which point I would buy some jalapeno potato chips from the 24-hour drug store across the street, nom them voraciously, hop on some form of public transit, get back to my apartment, gab with my roommate, and explore strange corners of the internet until I fell asleep. But occasionally, in the New York 2.0 version of life, my familiar patterns have been broken up by some zesty, out-of-the ordinary experiences and interactions. Such was the case with Rav.

We had met a few weeks prior in that very Starbucks of yuppie notoriety. This time I had been reading, for another seminar, about the concept of "iterability," which, in my mind, kept getting changed to "irritability" (perhaps a reflection of my mood after chapters upon chapters of jargon) and suddenly this Jewish boy with a little bit of gangsta swagger jostled me by accident. Apologies ensued, and then we started to chat, and he quickly, unabashedly revealed himself to be a big pothead (in fact, he was in the neighborhood not for the sole purpose of procuring coffee) but he was wickedly funny, and our conversation was such a welcome diversion from "iterability" that I prolonged it unnecessarily. Maybe I shouldn't have; my historical soft spot for goofy, lost-soul stoner boys had never led me anywhere great, but somehow here we were, laughing and agreeing to meet again. We did, and it was all good fun-- we walked and talked, he regaling me with stories of his time in the Israeli army and razzing me for being a graduate student in an obscure, irrelevant field. But after this meetup he started to behave badly, texting me frequently and unisyllabically ("sup") and calling at odd hours when normal people should be asleep (I wasn't, but still). So-- flashforward-- as I sat on the tile floor of my hallway, locked out of my apartment and in a no-nonsense state of mind, I called Rav with the intent of setting up some boundaries for our friendship.

Somehow this conversation did not go as planned, because within fifteen minutes we were sitting on the steps across the street from my building; Rav was rolling a cigarette with tobacco and other vegetal matter ("What are you doing? you'll get caught!!" "Yo, no, you see, I'm white, the cops aren't looking for me in this neighborhood.") He told me how he had quit his job that day-- he had worked for his mother, but at almost thirty he had reached a personal impasse and couldn't deal with it anymore. "What are you going to do next? Do you know?" I asked with slight alarm. "I have no idea," he said. Not a goddamn clue." This statement launched me into fix-it mode: "Have you ever had the chance to choose your career? I mean, what are you really, really good at? What have you always wanted to do, deep down?" His reply, without a hint of bitterness: "I don't know. I'm not good at anything."

And I realized that this was so foreign to me, the notion that someone would choose not recognize his/ her attributes and capitalize on them to deserved success-- there again was that idea of deservedness, of taking what you felt was owed to you just based on who you were. Apparently I also ascribed to it to. Apparently I just was another overinflated Starbucks chick. Still, I pressed him: "No, you must have a talent. Come on. Think hard." "Well, I guess I'm good at talking to people. I can kind of talk to anybody, you know, schmooze, be comfortable." "There you go. That is a valuable job skill right there. There's PR, advertising--" "Or," he said, cutting me off, "I would really love to write comedy. I've always been interested in comedians. They're such sad, interesting characters, you know?" I got excited. "You. Have funny-man written all over you. You should go for it. That's genius!" We brainstormed a hypothetical screenplay in which the leads were based on us, because look! it was so clear that we were already comedic archetypes-- I was the high-functioning career-focused young woman who needed to loosen up, and he was the man-child with a secret heart of gold who needed to self-actualize. But it would all be kind of meta because, you see, the plot of the movie would be that we were trying to write a screenplay about the tropes of comedy even as we exemplified them. Wrap your head around THAT!

We were suddenly famished-- I had never realized my tortellini fantasy, and Rav was chemically predisposed toward hunger-- so we relocated to a pizza joint down the street. The owner, an older man of pan-Mediterranean descent, gave me a surly mafioso nod of recognition (he had once tried to charge me two thousand dollars for a piece of pizza and a garlic knot). Now Rav bought a slice for himself and also insisted on paying for mine ("What? you just quit your JOB! Don't!... okay, fine...") and we sat in the window, looking out onto the street as we noshed and contemplated our brilliant new collaborative plan. My phone buzzed. It was my roommate; she was back from school and could let me in anytime. I told her that I would be there in five minutes.

Rav was eying another slice of pizza despite an oncoming bout of acid reflux. I supported his decision and told him to take one for the road; he did as I said, and we walked out into the night, soon to part ways. A homeless man was begging on the corner. I brushed past him, per usual, but Rav stopped and said, "Yo. Do you want some pizza, my man?" and held out his recently purchased to-go slice. "Thank you, God bless," said the hobo, accepting the greasy offering. I was embarrassed; I had just been going along my stingy, self-regarding, way, but my sad, funny friend of so little ego had paused to contribute something, and again I thought "additive, be additive in some way."

Needing to save face, I rooted in my wallet for some cash, only to remember that I had dispensed it all on tortellini provisions earlier. Wait! Hold up! Tortellini! I still had the grocery bag on my arm! "Hey, hang on!" I said to the hobo, who snapped up from the pizza. "Hey. Would you also like... a pint of cherry tomatoes?" The man looked at me like I had two heads, and replied thus: "Aw HELLL NO, what 'choo playin' at?" At that point I dissolved into hysterical laughter, clutching the poor inadequate vegetables to my chest as I cackled helplessly.

Rav walked my slap-happy self to the front door of my building. We kissed on the cheek and he jetted off to wherever he was going, and I had the strong (correct) sense that we would never see each other again, for such is the way of the Lost Boys: they find you, and then you lose them, and they never really change (at least not on your watch) but maybe you are just a little bit changed by them.

I was humming the Haydn. It had just come unbidden to my vocal chords-- not the bleak main material, but the second idea, which, I suddenly realized, was nothing if not a musical depiction of laughter. Of course! Gloom was framing device of the piece, obviously, and it would win out eventually (doesn't it always?) but there were also, along the way, these wonderful shimmering patches of mirth, and they were not be discounted. I just had to get it all down in writing somehow, to convince the Philistines of the treasure trove of meaning beyond the symbols, but how to express it in a way that did not rely on my bizarre anecdotal encounters with blowhard yuppies and hyped-up leaden-footed toddlers and loveable Israeli stoners and street bums of discriminating palate? That part still needed some figuring out, I thought, as my roommate buzzed me in and I walked through the front door.

Anti-Tepidity

You couldn't pay me to go back to middle school. Oh God it was the WORST, a viper pit, a gladiatoral ring, the absolute nadir of my existence, the Eleventh Circle of Hell-- yes, thanks to middle school, Dante's levels of hell now go UP TO ELEVEN! It all got better, of course, as they (the grownups) promised. Each passing year applied a little more aloe vera to my wounded psyche, drew out the angst and replaced it with perspective; I came to understand that during the Dark Days my peers had all been undergoing just as much of a rocky internal shift as I and that their horribleness was mostly a side effect of crippling insecurity, invisible circumstances, unnavigable new bodily dimensions and crazy-making hormones. Eventually I turned into a luminous font of beatitude and forgave them all (of course never pausing to reflect, with a glimmer of superiority, on those erstwhile cool-kid little shits who flamed out early and never amounted to much while I, perpetual late bloomer but BLOOMER, goddammit, bloomed lately and attained something that, at least on paper, resembled success). I accepted that prepubescence was a universal hazing ritual, one that we ultimately transcended en route to becoming more thoughtful and compassionate adults. We were better for having passed through the crucible.

Still, I repeat that you could not pay me to go back there. I am content these days to maintain healthy and supportive friendships, to care about what I do and not fear ridicule, to wear whatever I want and feel okay about it (and what I want to wear these days does NOT include such sartorial missteps as platform flip-flops or saggy khaki cargo pants or blue eyeshadow or metallic rainbow butterfly hair clips by the dozen: good god, the lowest point in my personal life really coincided with the lowest point in all of fashion history, didn't it?) So you might be confused to hear that I recently paid someone else for the pleasure of going back to middle school, and that "someone else" was, um, James Cameron.

Yes, readers, you don't misunderstand: I ponied up seventeen dollars to see Titanic in 3D.

And why would I freely admit to this on the internet? Have I no shame? (Rhetorical question!) Well, given the name of my internet venture here, this space is actually a rather appropriate forum for discussing the towering, definitive Schlockbuster of my youth, because schlock is supposed to be, you know, my recurring blogmotif or something!  ... although in retrospect I think that I just found this Yiddishism to be pun-susceptible and phonetically funny, and that the real pervasive theme of Writer's Schlock is, "I have a lot of work that I'm avoiding," or, possibly,  "I wish I had literary talent." But no matter. If my blog is to live up to its titular schlockdom, then I am pretty much contractually obligated to write about Titanic. Also, the PG-13 rating of Mr. Cameron's schlocksterpiece is in line with the unofficial PG-13 rating that I have accorded to this site (see: judicious use of four-letter words, naughty situations implied rather than overtly described, and I'm still figuring out how to handle nudity but I DID just use the word "titular," so we're getting there).

A bit of background: I, like most every screwed-up pre-adolescent female in 1997 (and probably some reticent preteen boys as well), was unhealthily taken with Titanic. I saw it thrice on the big screen; I read every behind-the-movie publication or historical study of the wreck that I could get my hands on; I begged my parents for the VHS and watched it incessantly after they had finally acquiesced and given me the two-volume tape for my twelfth birthday (ohhh, they rued the day). And my behavior was the norm, not the exception! We were all universally mad about this stuff-- finally the popular girls and I had some common ground, because the movie tapped into some essential truth about us all. Many things, actually-- our fear of death, our nascent awareness of the transience and arbitrariness of life (an awareness that would shortly blossom into full-fledged sullen teenaged existentialism). And then there were Leo and Kate, of course. Who didn't identify with Rose? She was all, "I'm a free spirit and nobody understands me and everyone around me is so boring and superficial and my mom is a total raging bitch WAH." Such a fitting allegory for the middle-schooler, and Leo/ Jack was the perfect imaginary counterbalance. We all dreamed of some artsy, footloose-and-fancy-free love interest who would swoop in and see us as we really were, rescue us from the oppressive inanity of school/ family life and put us on a path to vibrant self-realization, and possibly also touch us in a special sensual way in the back seat of a car because oh yes, around that age those kinds of things were suddenly starting to seem enticing rather than icky. We were a demographic obsessed.

So when the film returned to theatres fifteen years later all pimped out in 3D, I couldn't resist. (I did not go alone, but to protect the reputations of those who might possess a gram of self-respect, I shall not disclose the identities of my companions). It had technically not been that long since I had seen the movie-- a few years ago during the Bleep U grad school phase, it came to my attention that my then-roommate had missed the boat, so to speak, and had never seen Titanic, so I sought to rectify this unfortunate situation by inviting my Masters' cohort over for an emergency showing on my ancient clunker of a TV set with its pithy, laptop-like screen dimensions. We ordered Chinese takeout, talked over most of the movie, mocked the easy sitting-duck groaner terrible dialog moments, belted along to Celine with deliberately terrible intonation. It was not a sacred moment. I didn't count it among my multiple reverential middle school viewings. But now, in the year 2012, I was going to do this thing and do it right, i.e. make my pilgrimage and also fully apply my sophisticated, PhD-level critical judgment to this cinematic work. So I went, and winced at the appropriate moments because wow, there is some undeniably wretched dialog in that script, and I thought of 9/11 and all of the obvious parallels, and I made the very clever and topical observation that the class distinctions depicted on board the ship rather resemble our current social hierarchy, and then suddenly my critical faculties struck an iceberg and suffered a system failure because I was stupidly, predictably swept up in the visual grandeur and the drama! and the passion! and the core human values! and it was as though my impressionable, deeply-feeling preteen self had jumped across a chasm of nearly fifteen years to possess my twenty-something body. I had been hoodwinked, taken in, manipulated by the same old schlock, and thank God for the 3D glasses which concealed a certain puffiness around the eyes, a certain evidence of crocodile tears. Oof.

I stewed for days after, sifting through these familiarities. Imagery and dialog had been re-seared into my mind's eye; snippets of synth-y score, having once been lovingly encoded into my musical memory, now played on infinite loop in my head, reactivated. And accompanying this was a sense of loss that was hard to articulate: it did not have so much to do with the actual subject matter, the great loss of life (fictional and nonfictional alike) which was certainly sad to behold, but... no, it was more self-specific (self-involved?) than that. Here is the thing. My feelings weren't real and I knew it: they were feelings about feelings, echo-feelings, resurrections of past emotional states that were more intense than anything that I seem capable of experiencing these days. I was mourning nothing more, nothing less than the gradual loss of my ability to feel that strongly. There I had been, young, poised for life-- confused and miserable, of course, but also fervent, fresh, and obsessive. And then the years accumulated and with them the settling of the dust, the necessary equanimity.

But didn't you fight hard for that stability? Isn't that what you wanted? Extreme polarity is exhausting. It is not conducive to functionality, to meeting deadlines or paying bills. And so tepidity becomes the name of the game, and it seeps into everything. You shrug a lot. Somebody breaks up with you via text message and you snort in derision and joke about making a voodoo doll and then you shrug. You go to your graduate seminars and you shrug, too, because it seems like you can say anything, any empty thing, and it might provoke a minor reaction but soon all is forgotten because the stakes are so, so low and everybody just wants to escape the stuffy little Skinner Box room and return to creature comforts and watch HBO. Nothing really makes a dent. Not even the tearjerker Schlockbuster of your youth can jolt you into wakefulness: it comes close, it tempts you, but you know better.

Then, about a week ago, there was something different. I decided, in preparation for a performance, to play piano for a friend, a brilliant and dedicated musician. I was so, so nervous because my inhibitions don't lie in the usual places-- I will speak publicly, blog ad nauseam, spill out whatever is on my mind, my childhood traumas or whatever, I will undress, it's nothing, easy-- but to play is to truly give away secrets. It is to expose your throat and the undersides of your wrists as an offering to your receiver. So I played for him, for my friend, and the performances were guarded, a little tepid. Especially the Schubert. Sorry to come back to Schubert again and again; I do play other music, I promise, but you must bear with my fixation for now. So we worked on the Schubert (the big A major sonata) and he pushed me off the piano bench and started tinkering around with the piece himself, and he came to this place in the second theme that I might attempt to explain as such: you have wandered, strayed very far away from your center and you don't even know it, you are remote, room-temperature, and you keep repeating the same perfunctory things to yourself but then, for reasons unknown, one repetition becomes imbued with deepest significance and it unlocks your return-- you are restored, full-blooded and tingling. My friend played the section, shouting out, "And here, rapturous!" and then he just stopped, staring into space, and said, "God. It's extraordinary." Lucky that I was standing behind him and could hide my sudden tears, because in that moment something like love rippled through the both of us. Not between us-- no, NO! not like that-- but through us, straight from the thing that was spoken in the music, and we both loved the thing back in the same way, three poles, a dynamic triangulation. And I had been working on this piece for months, and desiring to play it for years, and at the outset I had been so smitten with this particular passage-- melting, opening, wondrous-- but after a certain saturation point of repeated exposure and careless handling, the music no longer retained its meaning. Now, in my friend's apartment on a lazy Friday morning, I sobbed a little with joy and fullness and I thought, "How could I have forgotten, how could I have just stopped noticing?"

... and alas, I'm far afield from where I started-- like the second theme of a Schubert sonata! bam! wandering rhapsodic vistas--  and I fear that I don't have the skill to bring it all around again in some ingenious way to middle school, or James Cameron, or neon blue eyeshadow but I'm just not there yet; I can see it, I know to where I must return, but I can't always find my way back exactly when I want to.

All the Schlock that has been Blocked

Apologies, faithful readers: I know how it feels to be stood up, and I never meant to disappear on you, and by now you have probably decamped from my schlockspot in search of someone who knows the meaning of committment. Serves me right for being such a flaky tease. But rest assured that this was not the original plan. I had big visions for this blog; it was supposed to be the hottest thing on the internet, the Platonic Ideal of self-absorbed twenty-something verbal vomit that all other self-absorbed twenty-something verbally vomitrocious blogging endeavors could only aspire to. Back in January, when I was home on vacation and testing the outer limits of boredom and inertia, I would lie on my bed staring at the light fixture dangling from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and ideas for new blog posts would bloom freely in my imagination like...  polyps! yes, polyps on a mucus membrane, and these thought-polyps were scintillatingly clever and a smidge poignant and highly specific to my own life yet so masterfully executed that they would resonate with a universal readership. They demanded to be brought into this world; some serious polyp-actualization was in order. I sat down to make it happen, buzzy typing fingers at the ready, and what followed over the next few months was a series of valiant but ultimately aborted blogging efforts (I think that this condition has a name and it is Writer's Schlock). So in place of a coherent, unified entry, I give you this: shards, the Sparknotes version, the Blogs that Might Have Been.

First, I was going to write about that time when I was browsing the foreign language section of The Strand for a German phrase guide for my sister and then, boom, there was an used copy of that book that you love. That book, which I had also read (because I am always expanding my literary tastes, blah blah, but really I just wanted to understand you better, even from an oblique point of entry) -- there it was on the shelf, askew and out of place between two standard German dictionaries. It had the unmistakable quality of having been shoved there in haste, as though someone had been sitting in that corner for hours, nose buried in the edition, until a staff member gave this delinquent reader a death glare that said "Buy or GTFO," whereupon the reader wedged the book in the nearest shelf and fled the rapacious maw of capitalism. The longer I stood there staring at this aberrant paperback, the more I became convinced that not only had my imagined scenario taken place, but that the reader had in fact BEEN YOU, and that I was now occupying the exact same physical space that you had taken up at some earlier point in time to page through your old favorite. Such a situation was not even remotely probable. You lived far away. We weren't even speaking-- there had been a protracted silence, unfortunate but for the best, just one of those things that I had eventually come to terms with-- but in that instant I didn't care anymore, grabbed for my iPhone, was going to call you and tell you about the book because it was a SIGN. But then my phone battery was dead and that was a SIGN too, or at least it negated the chance that I might contact you at that very moment, so I left the bookstore with a collection of funky German dessert recipes from the '80s and took the long subway ride home, by which point my self-preservational instinct had decided to show up and bitch-slap my generosity of spirit, ensuring that the phone call went forever unmade. 

I tried to write about this non-incident. It seemed rife with symbolic significance-- literature as a binding force between people, the connotative power of objects, unacted-upon possibility for resolution. Maybe I could even include a paragraph about how the whole thing never would have occurred if I had just done my shopping on Amazon, had found everything I needed algorithmically and not by foraging around in a physical space where other human beings could also leave evidence of themselves, where real objects could be incongruously shoved together so that some overly analytical, see-something-where-there's-nothing creature like myself could infer an elaborate narrative from their juxtaposition. But every sentence that I began to craft quickly choked to death on its own emo-ness and self-importance, and after a few tortuous attempts, I had become emotionally disengaged from the original situation anyway and saw no reason to document it. So I resolved to LIGHTEN UP, dammit, and moved on to my next idea.                  

In this hypothetical next post, I was going to index a number of my music-related dreams and nightmares, most of them riffs on the classic repressed neuroses of performing artists. For instance, there was the one dream where I was pushed onto the stage at Carnegie Hall and forced to sightread Beethoven's monstrous Hammerklavier sonata in front of all of the Important Musical Intelligentsia (and of COURSE this dream occurred on the night before my last Bleep U degree recital, and I woke up in a horrifying panic and it took me about fifteen minutes to remember that I was in fact only slated to perform the more modestly scaled Beethoven Op. 110 in a small university concert hall that day). There was also the dream, a few years earlier, where a spectral Johannes Brahms made a night visitation to my window like the Ghost of Jacob Marley and mournfully intoned that I had not studied my score enough and had not carried out his compositional intentions in performance. Guilt-tripped by a ghost Brahms! Oh SNAP! Then there was the dream where Artur Schnabel showed up at my apartment-- not so much as an apparition but black-and-white, staticky and flickering like a projection from an old movie-- and the Maestro convinced me to drop acid with him (I am apparently more freewheeling in dreamspace than I am in waking life) and we played through Beethoven's third concerto together, gloriously, and watched as the sound waves morphed into stunning patterns of color and light. And then there was my all-time favorite music dream, the one in which I discovered that the soundtrack to Disney's The Little Mermaid was closely based on Bach's St. John Passion-- Ursula sang material derived from the alto arias, Sebastian was the Evangelist-- and I presented these earth-shattering findings to the American Schmoozicological Society. I woke up still possessed by the idea, half-believing that some huge cryptic Dan Brown-esque cultural conspiracy had been revealed to me in my sleep; on arriving at school that day I asked Schmarvard Guy, a venerable Bach scholar, if my subconscious was actually onto something there. He gave me a searching look, as though trying to determine whether I was a pioneering visionary or a total crackpot, and then said, "The Little Mermaid?... You mean the Calypso cartoon movie with the sea creatures? Based on St. John? ... Is that true? Who knows. Maybe that's true. Actually, I kind of wish that were true."

I liked where this post was going. I was kind of rolling with it, venturing into psychoanalytic interpretations-- is Brahms representative of my father and have I disappointed him?-- and also Inception-esque philosophical inquiries-- if I have a drug trip within a dream, is it the same thing as a dream within a dream and do the same rules apply? But then my life was disrupted by a visit to Bleep U/ Shroomington to see Felix's graduating recital, and the whole prodigal daughter-goes-back-to-the-heartland sees-everyone-she-knows reassesses-her-formative-years tone of the trip seemed to necessitate an immediate blog entry, so I halted work on the music-dreams post and started to draft an account of the Great Bleep U Return Journey.

There was so much to write about that I hardly knew where to begin. My first instinct was to take a chronological approach. I could set the scene, describe how I waited at the gate for my flight at the NY airport and observed a group of lump-faced puppy-dog boys in suits who were trying to order beer off of the new touch-screen menus that had been installed in the terminal. As I listened to their conversation, they revealed themselves to be Schmindiana frat boys who had just interviewed for summer finance internships in the Big City and were now returning to Bleep U; in the past I might have been offended by their presence, but now I experienced a wave of affection at their antics (oh college days, the simple life, idyll, respite: I was almost home). If I wrote about being at the airport, then I would also have to include the flight, where I started to question the wisdom of making this trip at all-- would my cool, cultivated, citified persona crumble away on hitting the Midwestern atmosphere? Would I lose my critical distance, instantly regress to a sadly vulnerable and approval-seeking specimen? Anxieties began to stir somewhere in my lower esophagus. I distracted myself by thumbing through the SkyMall catalog and wondering who the fuck would ever pay ninety-five dollars for a replica of the Elder Wand or four hundred dollars for a make-your-own-soymilk machine (although the latter did come with a complimentary package of fresh soybeans-- hot damn, what a steal!) Finally I arrived in the cornfield state, spent the night with my wonderful friend Med Student Meg, took a deep breath and rode the shuttle bus to Shroomington.

Or was that whole expository section really necessary? I deleted it and started anew, at the actual point of arrival. Oh dear Shroomington, with its trees and clean air and little stone houses and sleepy students in sweatpants. The place embraced me as soon as I stepped off the bus, easy, familiar. To the concert hall to hear Felix, who had grown into a towering titan of the keyboard while I was away, then back to his house for the afterparty, which started slow with boxed wine and a few vaguely awkward conversations but hit its stride as soon as Teacher and Felix's dad showed up with some top-shelf liquor and started mixing cocktails for all. Before long Felix and I had accidentally kissed on camera in front of everyone, and Teacher was swooning over Felix's blonde bombshell of a mother, and a multi-generational group had formed in the kitchen to boisterously debate the merits and drawbacks of plastic surgery (emphasis was on boob jobs). It was a night to remember. And then I stayed for a few more days, wonderful days in which I had no obligations and could therefore treat Shroomington as a resort town. Which parts to include? Surely I had to write about seeing Schmarvard Guy, who took me to lunch at the supremely janky Chinese restaurant across the street from school that everybody secretly loves-- we sat there eating spicy string beans out of styrofoam boxes using plastic forks, and I told him about school at PUNY and he told me about his fabulous garage band that does covers of David Bowie and Procol Harum, and I made a mental note to try to be half as much of a badass by the time I reached middle age. And what other shenanigans warranted a retelling? Without a doubt I needed to recount the story of the impromptu latke dinner at Felix's house-- how Teacher and his son and I went on a quest for applesauce, which proved surprisingly hard to find, and as soon as we had finally tracked it down and were returning triumphantly with an extra-chunky variety, Felix called to tell us that the sour cream had somehow frozen in the refrigerator (it wanted to be extra-chunky too) and could we possibly double back to pick up a new carton? And after the Tale of the Latkes, maybe I'd have earned the right to wax nostalgic about some of the other little things, move in for the sentimental culmination, the core bleeding heart of the blog entry (there must be one, every time; it's a tenet of my blogular formula). This would probably include a description of the sublime coffee and pastries at Schitty Bakery and my joyous reunion with the staff, who all knew me well and still remembered my exact preferences (small hazelnut coffee in a glass mug, toasted everyseed bagel with goat cheese-chive schmear, and I'll be back later for a cinnamon sneagle or some carrot cake, you know it, and could you put on some Elton John?) And of course I would also have to end with a nod to the night that I walked along the quiet streets and looked at the lit-up windows of my old apartment complex and wondered who was there now, practicing and studying and worrying about the future, carrying on the music school way of life.

But then I was back in Schmanhattan and the city suddenly assaulted me with its frenetic overabundance, and I staggered from the onslaught of crackheads and overprivileged Millennials and camera-happy tourists and perpetually noisy neighbors and intimidating intellectual heavyweights, etcetera, and I had to seriously regroup and get a grip on myself, and writing about Shroomington seemed counterproductive because my visit had thrown into relief all of the beautiful details, the soft shadings and subtle intimacies that I had left behind, and if I dwelt on them too long then I would never be able to leave my apartment or face the squalid subterranean jungle of mass transit or go to school and seek advice from my current professors with whom I had not quite reached the spicy-string-bean-sharing level of comfort. So my Bleep U post languished with all the others, unrealized, trapped in Bloggatory.

Then my dog died-- Gypsy, our twelve-year-old dalmatian, our sweet spotted harlequin girl-- and it was expected, and of course this is the contractual agreement that every family enters into with pets, that their lives will flower and wither in a span that, to us, seems all too short. I thought I might eulogize her here in blogland, conjure up some memories of beach days or family trips, describe her funny doggy mannerisms. But every fragment that I evoked seemed garishly sentimental, rang false somehow, and I realized that it's because I haven't fully understood that she is gone yet: I haven't been back home to notice the missing sound of paws clicking on tile, the sharp happy bark when I walk in the front door, white hairs clinging to my dress pants. And then I thought that maybe it's a good thing that I'm in Schmanhattan now-- a place so numbing and fluorescent and self-referential that you can't even see the stars-- because it allows me to imagine that a new canine-shaped constellation might have appeared in the night sky since last I was home, up there just out of sight. And then I never finished that blog post either.