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.
