Eternal Recurrence of the Schmoozical Peoples' Shindig

SO-- last fall, Pablo came to Schmanhattan on a whim (he had attended the Schmanhattan School of Schmoozick back in the day, although we had met in graduate school at Bleep U [and he also claims that we attended the same Southern California arts camp when we were twelve years old, although I don't recollect this, probably because I was too busy making crank calls from the dorm pay-phone with a foul-minded red-headed piano prodigy named Carter Cartel-- we delighted in dialing up titillating seven-digit combinations like 1-800-PENISES or 1-800-LESBIAN or much, much worse-- and Pablo was in the meantime probably practicing the piano and going to the swimming pool like a respectable future ambassador of the arts, so we may have never formally crossed paths that summer]).

Anyway, I was delighted that Pablo had decided to drop in on The City just for the helluvit. I showed up to meet him and JL at a diner near Carnegie Hall, a place that he had some sort of sentimental attachment to from his undergrad era. I didn't know the joint myself, but the very fact that we three former Bleep U piano-folk--who had already had some TIMES together-- were staging a reunion at this venue lent a preemptive "construction of nostalgia" to this otherwise-generic greasy-spoon establishment... it was soon to be in the lexicon of our collective experience! Oh YOU GUYS, remember the time at the diner?

Conversation soon turned to "what are you reading?" -- we had a bit of a book-club thing going on.--and I was forced to admit that I had been working my way through David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas on the subway recently because I had seen the trailer for the upcoming cinematic adaptation directed by the Watchowski brothers of Matrix celebrity (wait, one of them has now opted to become a Watchowski sister, right?) and it looked kind of intriguing, so I had picked up a copy of the novel BUT it was one of those garish flimsy movie-edition covers and I was SOOOO embarrassed to be seen reading this cheaply pandering paperback in public (even if the prose itself was decently literary) because then people were going to think that I was only reading the book because a movie was coming out, like a consumer, like a sheep-- which was exactly the truth, but I didn't want the general populace to know that! I dug the offending edition out of my bag to show to the table, hanging my head in shame.

"So, uh, what's it about?" asked JL with trademark supercilious skepticism. "Ohhhh, it's complicated," I said. "There are, like, six different storylines set at different points in history, or in the future... one of them is about a colonial maritime expedition in the South Seas, one is about a composer around the turn of the century, and one is a murder mystery from the '70s, then one is set in the present day in a nursing home... then there's a dystopia one set in Korea, and then the last story is this post-apocalyptic. Each story embodies a different literary genre; it's pretty clever. But the characters are all connected in some way-- like, the archetypes are the same in each story. And also, the future people have heard of the past people, so they make references to their forebears. I guess it's supposed to be about 'eternal recurrence' or whatever-- all of the themes and character types keep playing out over and over again. That's kind of the Big Theme of the book, as far as I can tell. So the thing about the movie is that the same actors have different roles in each interwoven storyline. I think Halle Berry plays a man in one of them!... no, that can't be right, all the CGI in the world couldn't efface her luscious melons in order to, like, project a convincingly masculine physique! ... No, wait, I think Tom Hanks plays a woman in on of the storylines. That's what it is. Hey, we should totally see the movie together! Don't you guys want to see Tom Hanks as a woman?"

Two sets of furrowed brows across the table, a swift and efficient division of the bill, and then we walked outside talking of other things. The leaves were yellow in Central Park so we adjourned there, stepped into the perimeter of this site where innumerable faceless-forgotten interactions had occurred but now we were co-opting the space for personal use; it was just another stage upon which to play out the dynamics of our pre-established triumvirate-- "Remember that time in the park, in the fall, us three?"

***

I never finished Cloud Atlas (nor did I shell out for the movie)-- the tawdry paperback ended up in that sad accumulated pile of Things That I Never Saw Through To Completion (also there: my Performer Diploma Degree from Bleep U, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the sprawling feminist sci-fi novel that I had started to draft in tenth grade, and, possibly to be joining the pile, my Ph.D. in Schmoozicology if I don't get my act together soon!) Despite not sticking it out with Mr. Mitchell's oeuvre until the bitter end, I did absorb the concept of Eternal Recurrence and started to notice it on micro-levels everywhere.

The first such example cropped up when I decided to host the rare Schmanhattan house party in December. I set out a few favorite Alana-snacks (hummus! olives! chocolate-covered espresso beans, awww yeah), improvised some whiskey cider to simmer on the stove, and awaited my guests. Peter was the first to show. A former flautist, he had been my across-the-hall neighbor at Snackwell Parish during the Bleep U days; after the ol' B.U. had effectively killed our ambitions of becoming professional musicians, we had both landed in this alien urban environment to strike out on new paths. Other guests started to percolate in-- a rag-tag bunch, some of them former Bleep U folk, some of them PUNY-ites, some of them friends-of-friends whom I had never met but whom I welcomed with open arms as long as they came bearing bottles. A pleasant buzz developed in the room, people chilling on the couch, people milling in the kitchen, people plinking out Chopin nocturnes on my janky little upright, and everywhere much conversation of "do you know so-and-so? did you go to X-festival/ institute/ conference?" and quickly it became apparent that no more than two degrees of separation existed between everybody in the room.

"I want to diagram the web of people in here! Everyone is connected, man," I said to Peter as we canoodled on the couch as only a sweet flitty gay flautist and a high-functioning-but-perpetually-jilted female can canoodle. Peter surveyed the scene and observed that it all ran deeper than mutual acquaintance-ship. "This party actually feels like one of your Snackwell gatherings," he said. "It's weird. Like, the actual apartment is different and most of the people are different, but the energy is really familiar because it's still your place, and the people here all kind of feel like stand-ins for other people who we used to know." "You're right!" I said. "It's total deja-vu. Except the people aren't even stand-ins, really. Maybe they're, like, reboots! Manifestations of types! And since I'm a type, I would draw the same spectrum of types to my sphere time and again... right? Or it could be that it's just the Schmoozic peeps together again, and this will always happen..." I took a long contemplative sip of boozy cider.

Peter cocked his head. "You know, this especially reminds me of the one Christmas party you had at Snackwell, remember? with the mulled wine." "Hey now, that was a NON-DENOMINATIONAL winter gathering to boost morale!" I rebutted, and then we were off reminiscing about that particular event-- how it had started off innocently enough, all gingerbread and steaming china mugs, but then it devolved into madness once the composers showed up and started doing shots in the kitchen, and I, a little sloppy-sentimental, starting going on about how I had never been the It Girl, the one to whom the cool kids flocked, but now a crowd of self-styledly "hip" individuals was using MY domicile as a locus for the poundage of tequila shots, so CLEARLY I had made it, I had transcended my awkward outsidery youth at last to be surrounded by belligerent drunkies! And as I rhapsodized appallingly, Felix-- at the time all baby-faced and underaged and not-holding-well-of-his-liquor-that-I-should-not-even-have-supplied-him-with-but-oh-well-I-delight-in-corrupting-the-young-- little Felix somehow managed to literally somersault from the couch onto the carpeted floor with a crackening thud that jolted the entire teeming apartment to attention for the splittest of seconds. (Felix was okay, only minor brain damages and a deep well of shame to live down until he came of age).

Back to the Schmanhattan shindig with Peter et al-- it did not reach the hysterical proportions of the Snackwell days and thank God for that, yet there was an unmistakable sense of familiarity hanging over the whole affair. "Good call, Peter," I said, "it's Snackwell recapitulated."

The very next night, JL came to visit, and on our agenda was the crashing of a Toolyard party-- well, technically I had a connection to the festivities, but I was by no means in the "inner circle," so the whole business felt vaguely illicit. The event was billed as a four-story funhouse with standup comedy, billiards, a jazz lounge, a speakeasy... mostly I was just curious to rub shoulders with the musical hotshots of tomorrow, so JL and I trekked across Upper Schmanhattan to the hoppin' spot, which turned out to be what I am certain is the only townhouse in all of Poshington Blights. It had a stunningly collegiate vibe and seemed utterly disjunct from its 'hoody environs. We stepped inside only to be informed that the jello shots were all gone-- that's BULLSHIT! I cried-- and the "jazz lounge" turned out to be just somebody's bedroom with an electric keyboard in it, and the whole place was swarming with young hotties of which neither JL nor I recognized a single individual, and they formed impenetrable rings of young hotness everywhere we turned, and the two of us eyed each other with mild panic. Eventually we took refuge in the space under the spiral staircase, a serviceable hidey-hole from which we could observe the proceedings without seeming like such a pair of wounded gazelles.

"I thought this was going to be more of a... you know, civilized networking opportunity?" JL said to me. "Ah man," I said, "I'm sorry. This appears to be more of a Dionysian mating ritual the likes of which we have, um, outgrown. Mostly. But doesn't the scene feel oddly... familiar?" I continued, thinking aloud as I took in the geometry of the first floor. "You know, I would never guess that we're in Schmanhattan right now. This place is straight-up Shroomingtonian. Big-Ten Small-Town feeling. The house is even laid out just like some of those cruddy boarding-houses right near the School of Schmoozic. Remember? And the little fenced-in backyard... can't you just see 'The Fuzz' showing up to bust the young 'uns and then there's some mass exodus through the back door with a bunch of scared-shitless kids hurtling over the fence and running in every direction?" JL humored me. He was my captive audience under the stairs as I started to think back across many years of Bleep U Bacchanaliae. ... "and there was this ONE party, it was in a house just like this, hosted by brass players, I think, and it was a Halloween party and I went with Peter the flautist-- you knew him, right?-- and he was dressed as Marilyn Monroe and I was a sexy librarian, glasses, bun, red lipstick, unbuttoned white blouse, the whole nine yards, but AS IT TURNED OUT that was kind of a dumb decision because at this point in time I was already a graduate student, and of course who did I run into but a group of inebriated male students that I had T.A.'ed for in Ear Training. They went nuts over my attire, or lack thereof. One of them was like, 'You were my T.A! But NOW I can see your bra!' and another one was like, 'I would have come to class more often and paid WAY more attention if you had dressed like this on a daily basis.' And I was halfway-flattered, because who doesn't secretly want to be the object of some student-teacher office-hours fantasy? but then I was PISSED too because I was like WHAT? my vivacious classroom presence and rapier wit alone were not enough to keep you engaged? And you couldn't discern that I was biologically female and not unattractive, even if I didn't put the goodies on full display?... ANYWAY, this Toolyard party feels like a reboot of that Halloween event somehow. Except, like, a dream version where all of the faces are switched around and we don't know anybody..."

We stayed under the stairs for awhile and played a birdwatching game with the gaggles of Toolyard students who kept migrating through the room-- what are the distinguishing field-marks of the Brasshole? (Popped collar, long-ranging body odor...) And is that a flock of Soprani that I spy, all baubles and gesticulations? The excessive facial hair on that guy coupled with the bloodshot eyes leads me to believe that what we have here is a Double Bass Player, scientific name Excerpticus practissimus subspecies potheadicus maximus ... At that point, the stand-up comedy portion of the evening began, and the comedienne ushered in her set with a rape joke. JL and I exchanged a "time to bounce" look, and I assured him that there was a pub across the street from my apartment at which we could attain a moderate buzz in an acceptable adult manner, because clearly we had outgrown this scene even as we recognized certain aspects of it from our past misbehaviors, recurrent and abhorrent...

***

Returning now to Pablo. So Pablo now lives in Schlock Sangellis when he is not randomly gracing Schmanhattan with his presence, and since I am related to a bunch of SoCal-ians who expect semi-annual visits, Pablo and I have managed to sustain a truly bicoastal friendship. We have become close post-Bleep U-- he possesses a quality of all-seeingness and I possess a quality of, um, all-sayingness, and these two qualities combine efficiently so as to get at the core of things, i.e. there are not a lot of superficial pleasantries exchanged when we get together, just a lot of cogent aesthetic and sociological observations, exploration of DEEP TRUTHS (or so we would like to think, we wishful-iconoclasts, we false prophets).

In early July I was in Schlock Sangellis, and Pablo drove to pick me up outside of my grandparents' apartment complex. (Sidebar: the Kardashians also grew up in this apartment complex-- talk about brushes with greatness!) "Heyyyyyyy Poblano," I cooed, kissing him on the cheek. "Alanushka! Wonderful to see you." "Likewise, and THANKS for coming to get me. You know, I love my grandfolks so, SO much, but just a second ago my grandmother was literally instructing me on how to cross the street-- I mean, I thought she was being tongue-in-cheek because I had been teasing her earlier today for being the epitome of the Jewish matriarch who worries herself sick over minutiae that never would have occurred to your average Joe, but NO, then she started telling me that I have to remember to look both ways before stepping into an intersection, preferably twice, and I was like, hoo boy, she is not kidding, she is honest-to-God explaining to me how to cross the street, which is adorable BUT I kind of need to interact with my own peer group for a little while now and re-establish my competency as an adult human..." Pablo gave an indulgent smile. "Well, good thing we are hitting up this composer party, then... you'll feel young and hip amidst the musical intelligentsia... do you have Pan-Pan's number? Let's text him for directions while we're at dinner."

Ah, Pan-Pan. This guy requires a bit of exposition and some traveling back in time (can you HANDLE it? my narrative structure is giving Cloud Atlas some stiff competition on the chronological convolutedness front). So Pablo and I had met Pan-Pan, a composer and a medical student, about two years prior when I had hosted a small Thanksgiving gathering at Snackwell Parish. Pan-Pan was not a Bleep U person but was visiting Shang, an old friend of his who was at the time our "colleague" in pianistic grad-studentdom, and so both of these gentlemen secured a place at my dinner table that night. They came bearing a twelve-pack of Miller Lite. (My sister, who had helped me cook the Thanksgiving feast, had gone into full-blown hostess panic-mode that we didn't have appetizers, a tureen of soup, napkin rings, etcetera, but I had assured her that my guests, though "classy" in their respective ways, were just super- stoked to get a free meal and would not notice anything amiss-- like, they would not pitch a fit if we failed to supply them with vegan-prosciutto-wrapped hunks of melon on toothpicks or some shit. "See?" I asserted to the sister as Shang and Pan-Pan sauntered in with their twelve-pack of piss-swill,"lower your standards." [As the evening progressed we ran out of drinking glasses and so I grabbed some measuring cups and beakers to use as impromptu beer-vessels, thus further elevating the proceedings]).

So I had not known Pan-Pan beforehand, but I liked him immediately-- he was voluble and observant, yet his running commentary (heavily accented) seemed to stem from book-learnin', from pop psychology tomes that he had imbibed as a substitute for real experience. This became especially evident when he started lecturing the engaged couple at the table on the "five love languages," providing the pair with a veritable blueprint for their decades of married life to come... however, Pan-Pan managed to append to the discourse that, though a relationship guru, he himself had not yet had the fortune to taste of Love firsthand, having been profoundly unlucky in matters of the heart. Aw, I thought, a kind-of-kindred-spirit, a dreamer, a non-alpha and I sidled up to him to banter more about the baffling intricacies of human relations. At the end of the night,  he offered his appraisal of me: "You know, Alana, you are like, you are like one of these girls who is not showy, flashy, but you can hook all the guys by being a skillful at conversing, very good at the talk and listen." "I'll take it!" I said, "I mean, conversational know-how is low on the totem pole in terms of attracting a mate, I know, and, like, I more often draw people in on the basis of my badonkadonk that is somewhat proportionally large to the rest of my small-boned white-girl physique [I gestured to the legendary 'donk] and THEN that's when I force them to listen to me talk, but..."

And so on and so forth. Pan-Pan and I stayed in sporadic touch after that evening, having connected in an oddball way, having ascertained a mutual level of kookdom. At some point Pan-Pan landed in Schlock Sangellis to do doctoral work. At some point after this, I also landed in Schlock Sangellis to visit family, and this takes us to July, two nights before Pablo and I attempted to find the composer party.

My phone buzzed with a text; it was Pan-Pan. "A virtuoso pianist has come to Schlock Sangellis. Wow." I texted back to him that my chops were a little rusty these days but Hi! how are you? Meet soon? ... and before I knew it, Pan-Pan was pulling up to the Former Kardashian Komplex to take me somewhere for dinner. "Pan-Pan, is this a ZipCar?" I asked, surveying the wheels. "Yes," he replied, "I don't have a car but I a-had to pick you up like a smooth guy. So I arrange this for you on short notice." "Oh Jesus, you didn't have to do that! We could have just met some other time and I could have bummed a ride to somewhere more convenient to you, really... oh well, you already have the car, might as well be ridin' dirty..." Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde pulsed on the speakers. "Wow, you're a Mahler person?" I said, after listening for a minute. "Cool!" "Ah no," he replied, "but I know you like him because on Facebook you post about him..." "Oh Pan-Pan, come on, you can listen to whatever you want!" I said, smacking him on the arm.

We had Japanese dinner-- Pan-Pan insisted on footing the bill despite my protestations, my stuttering attempts to steer the evening away from the Date Zone-- and he engaged in one last heavy-handed flirtation with the waitress before we wandered off in search of dessert... the shaved-ice emporium had closed, so we hit up a bubble tea shop. Again Pan-Pan swooped in and paid for me before I could stop him-- "okay, FINE, but you at least have to have some of my boba if you insist on treating me"-- and we started walking back in the direction of the ZipCar. The power lines above us crackled dangerously-- "wow, listen to that humming," I said, and stopped for a second, at which point Pan-Pan stepped closer to me. "Electricity," he whispered. And then, "Pass me a boba."

"Sure." I handed him the portable plastic cup of almond bubble tea. He took a long sip with the straw. Then, several events happened in quick succession: he put his arm around me, leaned in, pressed his lips to mine, and then in probed the tongue, but there was something unnaturally slimy about the organ and it took me a split second to process that he had not only put his tongue in my mouth, but he had also slipped me the tapioca pearl that he had sucked in from the bubble tea-- a covert operation, a transfer of resources invisible to the outside eye! The unexpectedness of it all, the invasiveness, the sudden excess of saliva and tongue-muscle and tapioca slime in my private little mouth-chamber-- I acted on instinct, an instinct that was to splutter, spit out the foreign body onto the pavement, and immediately dissolve into hysterical laughter. "I'm sorry, Pan-Pan, haha.. oh, I'm sorry," I gasped, "but, um, we're taking things a little fast here and... ohhhh that was special, I did not see that coming, hahahaHAHA...ohhhh.... wow..." He didn't seem too perturbed by my reaction. "I got the idea from a commercial for Dorito," he explained, "but boba is even better for sharing!"

We were back at the car, and the "future" of the evening-- the question of continuation-- hung in the air so thickly that I had to cut through it on the spot. "Okay buddy," I said as Pan-Pan put the key in the ignition, "I think I should go back to my grandparents' place now... but hey, this was really nice tonight. And... memorable. And don't take anything the wrong way.... it's just that-- I'm only here for four days, and I live on the East Coast, and I'm a little bit of a mess, and you, um, you really deserve to get involved with someone who you can have a future with!... and--" He tried to kiss me again; I obliged but kept the tonguing business firmly out of the equation this time, because who knew what slippery surprises lurked there?! I was still gun-shy from the transfer-of-boba.

"Oh, you are so good a girl to have a conversation," he said upon disengaging from my face. "I would definitely chase you if we live in the same city." "Well hey, Pan-Pan," I said, squeezing his shoulder, "that's the way the cookie crumbles... but look, are you and your composer friends still having that party? I can probably come. I'll bring Pablo. We'll stop by, I promise." At this point the Pimped Out Ride the Zipcar had arrived at Kasa Kardashian my grandparents' apartment complex, and we said goodnight.

***

These events and others I related to Pablo two nights later over dinner-- he had taken me to a cafe called Leaves Of Grass that he claimed was a West-Coast iteration of The Crunchible Spoon, this a funky haunt near Bleep U that attracted a range of patrons depending on the time of day (these were: honking smudge-eyed sorority girls at brunch, aspiring literati during the afternoon hours, and in the evening a bizarre countercultural homeless population would congregate-- I remember their ringleader, a tall man with a long yellowing beard, who always seemed to be shilling some new homeopathic elixir to his rapt disciples ["It's a Life Enhancer, the stuff in this vial; it will alter your electromagnetic output, it will reverse the horrors that the pharmaceutical industry has wreaked on your body..."] The conversations that I overheard there led me to create a mini-blog-series called "Tales from the Spoon" back when I had a different blog that was even more embarrassing and in even more dubious taste than this one).

Anyway, Pablo was right that this Leaves Of Grass place had a whiff of the Crunchible about it, albeit cleaned up (and see, this is why I love Pablo-- he understands the recurrence thing too about people and places-- essences that stay the , old wine in new bottles). I sat mopping up my Huevos Rancheros while Pablo howled with laughter over the Pan-Pan boba-swap story... "Hey, don't be malicious about it!" I admonished. "Yeah, it's a ridiculous thing to do, but I kind of admire that he went for it, takes a special degree of chutzpa..." "Now I'm looking forward even more to going to his party," said Pablo with a twisted smile. He glanced down at his phone. "Shit! My phone is about to die. Alanuschka, remember this address: 340 Cloverdale Boulevard. I guess it's his friend's apartment where people are getting together." I made up a ridiculous mnemonic device and we set off in search of the shindig.

After a few wrong turns, dead ends, blind alleyways, we pulled up in front of what seemed to be the correct apartment building (there was a cab parked in front, next to which a stilettoed broad was kneeling and dry-heaving on the pavement while the Pakistani cab-driver appeared to be wiping down the upholstery of his appeared-to-have-already-been-puked-in car-- "this is a sign," said Pablo, "that we're in the right place!") But then. But then! We hit a snag. "Pablo," I said, "what was the apartment number again?" "Hmmmm... I don't think he gave me one." "Well, there are maybe, like, seventy apartments here? And we don't know the name of the friend whose party this is, right?" Negative. I tried to call Pan-Pan-- "He never picks up!" said Pablo, "he doesn't take calls. He only makes them. Original Gangster." "... Well, maybe he'll take a call from me, the bubble-tea dream-girl," I said with a little shimmy, and dialed, but-- straight to voicemail. DENIED!

"What now?" I said. Rows and rows of intercom buttons swum before our eyes, each emblazoned with the surname of a stranger. "Should we ring every person? Knock on every door? 'Hey, we're looking for a composer by the name of... I don't know, it's some guy, are you him?' Nah, not gonna work." We were so close yet so far, barred from Elysium by our ignorance of one crucial detail... I started to feel dejected, as though this were a metaphor for my whole life, standing just outside the threshold of where all the people were having so much fun and I had not gotten the secret password that would grant me entrance into the Kingdom of Fun and here I was looking at the empty eye sockets of windows and.... "OSTROVSKY!" Pablo exclaimed. I was yanked out of my existential spiral. "Eh? Come again?"

"OSTROVSKY!" said Pablo again, pointing to one of the intercom buttons. "I know exactly who that is! Vladimir Ostrovsky. Vlad. He's a violinist. It must be his apartment that the party is at. He went to the Schmanhattan School with me back in the day-- was a real pimp back, always wore gold chains, he ran some kind of website where hot musician chicks could get some extra exposure, if you know what I mean, but a nice guy... " "And he lives in Schlock Sangellis now?" I asked with a raised eyebrow. "I have no idea," said Pablo, "but it has to be him! Of course it would be him!" "Ummm, Pablo," I said, "we're in a large metropolitan area, and while 'Ostrovsky' is, like, not a common last name by our personal standards, I'm sure there's more than one of them out there in this very diverse and densely populated , and besides, we're looking for a composer, not a violin player, and you haven't seen this guy in four years and don't know what he's up to and--" Pablo had already pressed the button.

"Chello?" said a deep male voice. "Hi," said Pablo, "hi. Is this Vlad?" "Yes, who is thees?" (I smacked Pablo on the arm in disbelief, mouth agape). "Hey! Vlad. Hi. You wouldn't believe this, but it's Pablo. Pablo Gerstner, the pianist, from Schmanhattan School. Do you remember me?" "Pablo! No way, man! How are you? Hey, I'm in a club right now. How did you get my number?" "Wait, we're in front of YOUR apartment, Vlad-- how are you in a club but talking to us through the intercom?" "Hokay, I see-- the intercom is hooked up to my cell so I hear from veesitors even when I'm out. So what are you doing at my building?" "Well, actually, we're wondering if you know a composer who lives in the building too. We're looking for a party but didn't have the apartment number." "Oh, you mean Julio? Julio is my roommate. You know him too. He mentioned having people over tonight." "Wait, JULIO? Julio Arroyo? NO. WAY!" Pablo turned to me. "Julio went to Schmanhattan School too and he's a composer. Must be him that's hosting the party. We used to be good friends but I haven't seen him in years, he went to Toolyard... it's so insane that we would all end up in the same Schlock Sangellis apartment together just by chance, all because Pan-Pan, who we met at your Thanksgiving in Schmindiana two years ago, tried to tongue you a tapioca ball and you weren't into it but you wanted to let him down easy and agreed to come to his party... this kind of thing only happens when we're together, Alanuschka." "I KNOW!" I gushed, "our powers COMBINE and we, like, unite the musical world. We fortify the network. WE. CONNECT. THE. DOTS."

"So, Vlad," said Pablo, turning back to the intercom, "should we just buzz Julio to let us in?" "Oh shit, mahn, his buzzer is broken and I don't have hees phone number. But yah our apartment is 9G, just wait for somebody with a key to come through the main front door and zehn you can follow in and take up our elevator. I'll be back in a leetle while." "Okay great, see you soon! I can't believe this!"

Pablo and I waited on the sidewalk, marveling over the smallness of the universe and congratulating ourselves on clearly being Important People, convergence points, liaise-ers of once-disparate socio-musical circles-- "Now I may never amount to much as a pianist or as an academic," I intoned, index finger pointed at the sky, "but by God, I will have known everyone, partied with everyone, and possibly have made out with everyone who is important or marginally important in the up-and-coming classical schmoozic scene, so that's gotta count for something!" At that point a older yarmulke'd gentlemen put his key in the front door; he cast a scornful glance at us good-for-nothing loiterers but allowed Pablo and me to follow him into the foyer. We had breached the walls, we had captured the castle!

An elevator ride up to the ninth floor, a ring of a bell, and then we were greeted by a lanky Latino-- the elusive Julio, composer, thrower of shindigs -- who gave Pablo a hearty embrace and expressed astonishment that an old chum from schmoozic school in noughties New York had turned up unannounced at his door. I introduced myself and we made our entrance.

Now, neither Pablo nor I had ever been in this particular apartment before, of course, and neither did we know the majority of the people in the room (save Pan-Pan, who blew me a kiss from the couch before returning to an intimate discussion with a pretty honey-tressed girl) but that deep familiarity, that deja-vu, that "ah, here we are again" feeling washed over the both of us and we looked at one another in amazement: here was, somehow, the same scenario playing itself out, the same energies crackling in the air, the same types milling about... it was a music party; we were among friends. Soon the "do you know so-and-so from such-and-such" game began amongst the guests, and the smallness of the musical universe re-asserted itself as the coincidences abounded (Example 1: Julio had gone to Toolyard [Hooliyard!] and knew the guy who had organized the bizarre, teeming, borderline-fratty event at which JL and I had awkwardly sequestered ourselves under the stairs last December. Example Deux: Vlad-from-the-intercom finally made a flesh-and-blood [and ghetto-gold-chained] appearance and proceeded to tell us that, prior to clubbing that night, he had played an orchestra gig with a young hotshot pianist who had performed the Tchaikovsky concerto, and said young hotshot pianist just happened to be the guy who lives one floor below me in Schmanhattan... again, I asked myself if I was really at the center of the action to know all of these individuals, or was I a wannabe, a fringe-folk, a draw-er of connections and believer in kismet when we were all really just random bodies colliding in an indifferent void..?!!)

Julio and Vlad whipped out their violins and started a friendly battle-of-the-bows. Meanwhile I tried to speak to Pan-Pan but he seemed to have discovered a new muse and was immune to my charms. "Look at how interchangeable we women-folk are," I snorted to Pablo in mock-bitterness, gesturing to Pan-Pan and Honey Hair. To which Pablo replied, "Aw damn, looks like you missed your shot." We slipped out onto the balcony. "Nice view," I said. "Yeah," said Pablo, "different from Schmanhattan, right?" "Well, yeah," I said, thinking, "but it's so weird, I feel like we could be anywhere. Snackwell Parish in Shroomington. My apartment back in the city. Some janky student 'flat' in Europe. Just any place where Our Kind congregate... we, like, create the space, time and again" "I know," he said. "Eternal recurrence! Cloud Atlas. Did you finish the book?" "No, of course not. But wait, aren't these things supposed to recur over generations, over millennia, not within the space of a few years? Are we just having deja-vu?" "No no, the things are recurring through us from Time Immemorial and that's why they seem familiar, we're just the latest vessels for the eternal truths..." "Hell YEAH I'm an eternal truth!..."

... and on and on, silly soft theories that we bandied about with half-rolled eyes, but see, when you are a musician and you spend so much time by yourself in a little room trying to pin down the ephemeral,  and you are a godless heathen, you have no organized religion (save the trinity of Bach-Mozart-Beethoven and all the disciples, apostles, affiliates) but still you are driven to find order in chaos, and so you all permit yourselves to see the divine in the mundanely coincidental, to create imagined communities, to comfort yourselves with the daffy speculation that all over the world there are secret security bubbles to which you have access-- it's a schmoozical Illuminati, an insider's game from generation to generation, all you need to do sidle up to the intercom that calls out to you, speak "friend," and enter...

Pendulum of SUCK and WUT

Sorry, guys. I have schlacked off, I have schlucked up, I have schlock-blocked you and led you on and let you down. And it's not that I WANTED to inflict a massive schlockular dry-spell on anyone. The truth of the matter is that I tried many times to set something down in this space, but I actually, misguidedly, ridiculously aim for a certain degree of formal rigor in my personal writing-- even within a stylistic medium as "de-regulated" as blogging, even when absolutely nobody and their mom reads the schtuff that I post here (except for you, Kevin Costner; I know that you creep on me), and even as I simultaneously hold myself to an abysmal, Wikipedia-paraphrasing standard in my scholarly work (which is read by about FIVE people! I'm starting to amass a real audience, yo!)... I must craft the Schlock with all of the schlocky craftsmanship that I can muster, and sometimes it takes a while, okay? It's not an exact science yet. I think that my compulsive drive-to-cohesion stems from the fact that I have spent quite a lot of time chilling out with dead male German composers who prized organicism and motivic integration and teleology, and I have absorbed their dead-white-male aesthetic values, and thus even in my blog entries I strive for thematic unity and a logical progression of ideas because I somehow missed the memo that Structuralism has been dead ever since, like two World Wars or some shit happened, and everyone's illusions about objective truth and the redemptive power of Art had been exploded long before I emerged, Caesarian-style and squalling, into this irremediably shattered world.

(That escalated quickly).

No, so really, it comes back to this: remember when I said that my life had, for a time, turned a Cesspool of Suck? Well, I would characterize the last few months as more of a Whirlwind of WUT-- truly po-mo ("postmodern," "weird for the sake of weird") and dizzying and SO MUCH FUN but a little whackadoo and just generally not the kind of raw autobiographical material that one could potentially fashion into an organized narrative with a take-home message. When I am able to tease out a common thread of meaning from the as-of-now unintelligible morass of WUT, you will be the first to know!

So, anyway. To the heart of matters: I go to this support group at PUNY. It is called "Ongoing Challenges of Graduate Life," and I fell into it somewhat by accident back when I first moved to Schmanhattan. Historically I have been wary of support structures, of self-help, of therapy, of anything that might enable me to complain (any more than I already do) and to introspect obsessively and to make excuses for my shortcomings. Man up, Alana Murphy, face the music, dig yourself out of your doubtless-self-inflicted hole! But I decided to give this group a whirl-- I envisioned it as a graduate-school-themed "Stitch 'n Bitch" club wherein I might meet some kindred spirits who were not so intent on projecting auras of bulletproof-ness but who might actually want to discuss the hangups that come with being marginalized, poor, hyper-articulate, self-sabotaging, post-ironic, and generally useless to society. And The Group was exactly that, for awhile! But then we hit some snags: after I thought we had established a rhythm, we fell into an odd pattern of using our allotted hour to debate what we should use the allotted hour for, i.e. "what does this space mean to us? what is the ideal function of The Group? what should our attendance policies be? what is our protocol?" and I started to get annoyed with what I called this "meta-Groupology," this state of perpetual self-defining that never seemed to quantum-jump to the domain of actual insight or productive life-strategerizing. "Guys," I finally wailed, "when can we talk about REAL THINGS?"

And hey, it took some time and some experimentation, but eventually we broke the tautological death-circle and came up with some constructive directives for our Grad-lives. So, in that spirit of straightforwardness, I am RIGHT NOW dispensing with my meta-blogular tendencies ("what IS a Schlockspot for? what do I DO with my corner of cyber-space? what is the nature of space itself? I guess I should pose these questions for about four paragraphs before seguing into a cryptic meditation on my love life or my dog or something"). No. No more! From this moment onward I will write about REAL THINGS. Read it and weep.

So back to the Cesspool of Suck and the Whirlwind of WUT: I am going to throw out the cutesy shorthands and replace them with more categorical terminology as befits a serious inquiry into the nature of ME. The Cesspool becomes "kind of severe and scary depressive episode." The Whirlwind becomes "renewed desire to wake up in the morning, with touches of mania and recklessness and a whole lot of ill-advised YOLO." It has been a journey, you guys.

(I can't type the word "journey" without hearing it in Teacher's voice. When I was about to give my Master's Recital at Bleep U, there I was, waiting in the wings, saying a little prayer to Jeebus that I wouldn't get lost in the Rachmaninoff, and I was just about to step out to perform when Teacher stumbled into the backstage area all disheveled and out of breath. He scanned me with his dark soulful eyes, said, "Well don't you look lovely!" and took me by the shoulders. "Now listen: you've done all the work, there's nothing more to do in this hour, so just go out there and explore, and listen, and share. It's a journey. It's a JOURNEY." I nodded with all the earnest solemnity of an acolyte. And then he said, "Now hang on a minute-- I have to go to the men's room, don't you dare start without me!" so I was put in the ridiculous situation of calculating roughly how much time my teacher would require to get to the restroom, take a whiz, wash his hands, and return to the concert hall. And, by the power of suggestion, suddenly I was stricken with an urgent pee-need of my own... though it might have been a pre-performance nerves-induced phantom pee [yeah, it's a thing with me, okay?] So anyway, these are my inextricably urinary associations with the word "journey").

God, I'm stalling and I know it. Deflecting personal pain with humor and all, oldest trick in the book. Okay, back to the meat of the entry: depression stuff. Ugh you guys. It's hard for me to write about this, not only because my experience was a frightening one and part of me would like to just sublimate it and smile-grimace through the rest of my life like a real pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps Amurrican! but ALSO because I am a f*cking hipster when it comes to the originality of my blogular content, and the depressional-confessional thing has been attempted by everyone and his or her mom. Seriously, it's so mainstream these days! Et tu, Murphy? I am not even joking when I invoke Your Mom: The NY Times and The Daily Beast both recently ran pieces on the alarming rise of suicide in the Boomer Generation, citing all manner of reasons ranging from the failed economy to the erosion of spirituality and community in our society to the digitally-induced isolation of our supposedly hyperconnected brave new world. As for my own Millennial cohort, the author of the blog Hyperbole and a Half has recently emerged as a courageous chronicler of the serotonin-imbalanced condition. (Now tell me, if her blog is Hyperbole and a Half, what does that make mine? Hyperbole and Three Quarters Times a Billion, To the Power of Infinity, Divided by Zero? Has a certain ring to it, I suppose). And there are all the other memoirs, the personal testimonials, the barfy emo effluvium, all those treks to the darker corners of the psyche that are just cluttering up the Web and the bookstores and the library shelves (here's looking at you, Sylvia Plath and Ernie Hemingway and Virginia Woolfie and Johann Mother-Loving Goethe and innumerable other long-dead sad-sacks). Who am I to add to the noise, the tired discourse, the self-indulgence of grievance-airing? Why do my pithy over-edumacated white-girl problems deserve a voice?

AHA. Bingo. That last sentence of the paragraph. Check it OUT. As obnoxious as the sentiment is, it in fact quite succinctly sums up the depressive mindset-- put another way, "my O Schmerz- moments, my pathetic little self-created loops of suffering, are in fact so pathetic and so little that I am going to make myself suffer further FOR DARING to suffer from such trivialities in the first place." Oh the twisted, paradoxical, self-reflexive logic of it all!

So how do these bullshit suffering-loops even get a chance to take hold? And once they've established themselves, how is one able to break them asunder? At this point, in order to adequately explore the issue (which I feel I must)... sigh, I in fact do need to be exploitative of my singular, unremarkable experiences and put them on the internet. I shall term this "The Altruism of Narcissism." See, if an act of self-indulgent exhibitionism on my part can be simultaneously cathartic for ME, the writer, and relatable or insight-granting or at the very least voyeuristically gratifying/ train-wreckingly Shadenfreude-tastic for YOU, the anonymous reader, then by God I will abandon all pretense of decorum and plunge full-speed ahead! Wasn't it Johann Mother-Loving Goethe or some other navel-gazing nineteenth-century German who said, "That which is most personal is most universal"-- meaning, roughly, that specificities define generalities much more effectively than other generalities? And isn't the latter sentence just a perfect example of why I should jettison all the abstract nouns in favor of some juicy "deets" and get on with the story already?!

I. SUCK! Episode One: The Exposition

Did I, in fact, spring neurotic from the womb? Let us not delve too deeply into a genealogical explanation, an epic origin story, but suffice it to say that I am of Irish and Jewish descent and, historically, those are two seriously sorrowful cultures. Genetic predisposition to victimhood, check! Born to kvetch, born to kvell, born to seek solace in the bottom of a whiskey glass, check. (Did you know that whiskey was my first solid food? No, just kidding, my first food was actually quiche. Quiche! In my day, I was totally the bougie-est one-year-old on the face of the planet, although I'm sure that the stakes for the Baby Bougie Prize are much higher these days).

Anyway, I was a sensitive, outsider-y child, expressive and dynamic at my best-- see me rhapsodize about the plenitude of primordial life in the tide-pools on the beaches that I was privileged enough to have grown up roaming! look at me, dancing and ditzy, over-bright and drunk on the wonder of it all. But I fell apart just as easily. That state of revved-up zest, that coruscating joie-de-vivre was impossible to sustain (and also endlessly mockable to my cooler-blooded peers, as you can imagine) and when I was confronted by anything that would throw a wrench into my Utopian child-vision-- cruelty, alienation, injustice-- I would cry and cry, and so I became the classroom crybaby, the kid who lost her shit. (Sometimes I would cry from more pedestrian things, too, like skinning my knee on the asphalt, or being forced by the lunch-lady to drink my prescribed carton of 2% milk when we only drank skim milk at home OF COURSE, because this was the fat-free '90s, come on lady, get with the times!)

My behavioral patterns only became more pronounced after I was visited by the Monster Pubertus. Teachers at my foofy feel-good privileged private Episcopal high school would write detailed evaluations of students every semester, and I was often "incandescent" but "mercurial," somehow not living up to perceived potential because my flakiness, my fragility was getting in the way. And I just wanted to tell them that it was interesting that they would use the word "mercurial," because didn't they understand that said "mercuriality," my quicksilver thinking patterns and verbal acuity (on full display here? or mega-run-amok here? you decide), could at the drop of a hat turn into fucking mercury poisoning, that in the course of doing a trigonometry assignment I could at one moment be marveling at the beauty of a mathematical formula (like a complete tool) and then whoops! without warming my radiant inner world would go all wonky, my thoughts would take a swerve down some scuzzy alleyway and not only would I become painfully aware of my tool-ery (not to be confused with tomfoolery) but I would also utterly lose touch with whatever had, for me, ever briefly lit up the "maths" in some gorgeous metaphysical way and instead I would see a series of cold symbols that invalidated all of the feeling-y feelings that I was feeling and had no right to be feeling in an unfeeling world, and clearly I was going impale my weak soft self on the spikes of this unfeeling world, this mechanistic mathematical world that would never stand for my chaos!--and, in the wake of such chaos, I wasn't exactly going to finish this trigonometry assignment either. I mean, what did one miserable homework assignment matter when NOTHING mattered. (And therefore the squandered potential; retroactive apologies to my teachers if they are reading this [oh God NO please don't be reading this, Former Teachers, it's worse than the stuff I published in the literary magazine back then {a fine peer-edited journal that was called H.I.P., short for "Hormonally-Induced Psychosis." I'm not making this up!!}]).

Being a person of somewhat nauseating privilege, and being emphatically not cool enough to run with a social circle that would further mess me up, I was supplied with enough shrinks and pills and stimulating extra-curricular activities to hack my way through adolescence, after which the rest of my life stretched out, the promised land, the great deliverance, and I shook hands with Dr. Depression, said that "it has been a pleasure but your services are no longer required," and I watched that scary mofo retreat deep into the recesses of my system, dead or dormant. Hardly a trace was left on the surface, like a faint scar from a teenagery pimple that had once throbbed disgustingly and conspicuously but was healed now that your hormones had died down: when you pressed with morbid curiosity on that scarcely-perceptible radius of scar tissue, you "remembered" the pain in some abstract sense, acknowledged that it had existed but you didn't actually feel it anymore, couldn't access the core of that feeling if you tried.

II. SUCK on Hiatus: The Sublimation Years

It's not like I never had a "pimple" again. Adult acne is a thing, y'all! (It is the documented leading cause of Boomer-suicides, in fact).  But, on my own at last, I was able to devise a personal system that kept my loony leanings in check most of the time. I learned to ride my waves of intense blissed-out inspiration, milk them for productivity because I knew that they were unsustainable and they had an underbelly, a dank un-fun flip side that would inevitably follow on the heels of the dazzle-times. Shaky spells, brainfog, periods of being withdrawn and feeling flattened or somehow disjunct, alien. But I developed coping mechanisms. Phone-a-Friend! Take a shot! Come back, come back, find your way to the landing dock and rejoin the human race! And I always managed.

I even learned to troubleshoot, to use an ounce of prevention. You've seen Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," right? (If you have not, get the eff off my blog and fix this right now!) Well, remember when Maurice, Belle's endearing eccentric old dad, sets out for the inventor's exhibition-- "I'm off to the fair!" he asserts with crackpotted enthusiasm, kooky owl eyes wide and head cocked, only to get whacked in the noggin by by one of his own inventions-- and he jaunts off into the woods and sees two signposts, one for the Main Road and the other for a seedy-looking shortcut, but OF COURSE he takes the sketchball route (thus setting the plot in motion) and ends up getting pursued by a pack of wolves and subsequently imprisoned in the dungeon of the freakiest castle you've ever seen. (This sequence scared the LIVING PIDDLE out of me as a small child: when my parents gifted me the VHS for Christmukkah, I immediately spazzed out and threw the cassette into the kitchen trash, loath to revisit the trauma of Maurice's woodland excursion. [The tape was rescued from the garbage by my dad, who was laughing his ass off]). Anyway-- thought experiment. Say you were Maurice, and you had survived that harrowing sylvan ordeal: would you be so keen to barrel down a creepy unknown road again, or would you stick to the map? You would start to know where the bad routes were, the gnarly neural pathways, and you could just say NOPE, not even gonna go there, I already know what awaits so why bother enacting the whole bloody process again?

(Of course, Maurice and co. eventually had to go back to the castle, face the beast within, realize he was an okay guy-- just a lil' misunderstood-- and then defend the fortress against the real villain, Gaston AKA The Patriarchy! And yikes I don't even know how to fit Belle into my schema; you would think that I would identify more with her, that bubbly bookish brunette with a bit of a savior complex, but no, Maurice the whackjob is mah MAN, and the metaphor is unraveling fast now, but the point is this: you can circumvent the deep dark woods for awhile but not forever, you have to go back in for the "third act" and face up to things, and every folk-tale and myth is just an archetypal rendering of one's inevitable confrontation with the self, blah blah. I didn't know that yet, though).

III. SUCK Reloaded: Hemophiliac Attack

So I existed, for years on end, flirting with crisis but always coming back to a safe harbor, just a wee bit "fragile" of emotional constitution-- an image that I was okay with, because it was Romantic and maybe even momentarily enthralling to a few poor suckers out there (and here is the point where I must admit the shameful truth that I sometimes fantasized about being really fucked up, about having a "fun" mental illness that would engender wild bacchanalian attempts at oblivion and forays to the spiritual hinterlands from which I would return, damaged and trembling and haunted yet ethereally, irresistibly fascinating to all worthy onlookers. But no, instead sometimes I just got vaguely sad, vaguely checked-out, carb-craving and prone to feeling unloved and under-appreciated-- and what a trite and prosaic state of being that was, and all the more reason for self-loathing: I couldn't even manage to be screwy in a compelling way!)

For a long time nothing serious came of these tendencies; I always kept the lid on the simmering pot, even when it twitched dangerously with steamy condensation... but then I had this bad breakup last fall, and it kind of blew the lid off of everything. Ugh. UGH. That is THE most commonplace reason for a human being to "ausflippen," so basic, so high-school literary magazine that every fiber of my being wants to press "delete delete delete" and abandon this worn, weary, been-there-done-that territory. Tale as old as time. But, truth be told, it gets to the center of the issue, so persevere I must. To distill the matter: I fell victim to something that I am now codifying as "The Completional Fallacy" (I am officially adding this term to Lady Philosophy's lexicon of "fallacies"-- my major contribution to Academe will be something that I discovered incidentally through my relationship failures! Boom). The Completional Fallacy is this: "I am not complete, I horde within me a sad wounded child, and therefore I require someone to complete me, and this 'someone' had better also not be complete (because what need would he/ she then have of me?) and then we could press one another's injuries together, staunch the flow in a mutual healing process." Pretty fallacious, eh? Now I am not saying that romantic partners should not help one another to grow-- no duh!-- ;  rather I am just saying that it is kind of a bad idea to either deliberately or subconsciously seek out someone on the basis of his/ her instability in the belief that this person will then empathize with you, accept you and your similar inclinations, be the one who will not hurt you as everyone else has [supposedly] hurt you (because you're Irish and Jewish, ergo you're fucked, the world has it out for you, has had it out for you for centuries).

So I got involved with this dude who had a lot to recommend him but who had his own demons, and we entered into this covenant where he was all like, "Tell me absolutely everything about you!" and I was all, "You really wanna know?" and he was all, "Yeah! We need to be vulnerable to each other; it's an act of trust, I'll show you mine if you show me yours, " and I was all, "Okay, deep breath, here you go, here is my messy and potentially very unattractive interior, maybe it's time for me to come to terms with it if you will first," and he was all, "I accept it unconditionally!" and I was all, "Great! Hokay, here you go." ... BUT, since I had put my stock in an well-intentioned yet fundamentally unstable individual, it was not long before my apple-bruises, those imperfections that I had with great difficulty revealed, were flung back at me as insupportable, as burdensome and altogether too much to deal with when he had his own full roster of issues; I was marked "defective" and sent away freshly cognizant of my perceived innate defectiveness. Thus the Completional Fallacy made its Fallaciousness manifest.

It was nowhere near the end of the world, this breakup business! Sure, it felt like I had been cut to the quick, but it was really only a flesh-wound and in fact I was culturally entitled to a sick enjoyment of this initial bleeding-out period-- what better time to soak oneself in booze and consume an excess of fried food and run through one's list of underutilized phone contacts to cash in on sympathy? And eventually the immune system is supposed to kick in where the flesh-wound is concerned; a clotting mechanism gets to work, a scab forms, becomes a scar; time and distance work their wonders in this natural physiological process. HOWEVER, if you tend to depression, or at least to my particular brand of such, then what should be a mere flesh-wound becomes a mortal wound because you lack a specific coagulant, an inhibitor that tells the body to stop bleeding out. You are an emotional hemophiliac, and after awhile it doesn't even matter what caused or catalyzed the injury-- it just matters that your system is "irresilient," cannot buffer. The mind says, "Okay, I get it: this hurt a lot, this was perversely fun for awhile but now I am ready to be done, would like to wake up in the morning without instantaneously thinking, 'Oh fuck, I'm awake,' would like to take a simple subway ride without feeling like I perceive in the faces of strangers the Darwinian cruelty that lies beneath the veneer of civilization, I would like very much to not almost lose my shit in the seminar room when the professor sasses me for being five minutes late because the reason I was five minutes late is because I almost didn't get up this morning but I somehow convinced myself to come participate in this charade, a decision that I am IMMEDIATELY REGRETTING b-t-dubs."

The voice of reason, the self-outside-the-self, wants to put a stop to these destructive patterns once they have lost their initial reckless allure, their cute sophomoric abnegational spree. But the chemically-imbalanced brain has other ideas, it has an override button-- no, the old analogy was better: basically you are bleeding out unchecked, and the further depleted you become, the less capable you are of rationally evaluating your circumstances, and in your supine hemorrhagic position you really kinda lose the impetus to spring to your feet and reverse the state of things.

It is scary and disturbing to lose control-- for example, to experience a moment of levity with a friend, a snap-out-of-it joyous bubble, only to be made acutely aware of the moment's transience because you know that soon enough you'll have to go back into your head by yourself, a boomy domed cage from which nothing good is coming these days. "Don't make me go in there alone!" The pallor and bloodlessness, the Dementors, the encroachment of ick, the colonization and conquest of my entire consciousness by SUCK-- it snuck up on me, the sense that something was wrong, off-er than usual and not amenable to a quick fix or a shoving-under-the-rug. Allow me a few snapshots to illustrate the mucky progression of events:

1. I am in NOLA, Nawlins, the Big Easy, at the annual meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, standing alone in my hotel room on the fifteenth floor with my head pressed against the glass; the seafood gumbo and the way-too-many-mint-juleps that I consumed the night prior have combined in my body to form a toxic sludge that I would not wish on anyone. I am supposed to be downstairs at this paper session or that networking event, but the thought of all those humbuzzing people... snappy in their conference attire, labeled with their university affiliations, eyes always scanning the room behind your shoulders, and the refrain of "so what do you work on?" and  the sizing up, the peacocking, how do they do it all day, every day?... and suddenly I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo: the already-formidable distance from my vantage point to the ground augments, accordions, and I have a vision of my forehead shattering the glass and then a perfect parabolic swan-dive to the pavement and I won't ever have to engage in the niceties or the artifice ever again because I am just so *exhausted* ... and then I laugh darkly to myself, a distancing irony swoops in to save me, I am just grotesquely hungover and having conference blahs, and probably more than half of the people who are in attendance here secretly want to defenestrate themselves anyway, it's no big deal.

2. I'm at a small social gathering in my neighborhood with Pablo, an old friend. He and Jana have come up with this rollicking party game called "Suicidal or Homicidal?", the premise of which is that every individual, when pushed to a crisis point, will fall definitively into one camp or the other and it will be obvious which one. They are going around the room diagnosing everyone who is present; when it's my turn to be evaluated, there's an instant chorus of, "Ohhh, Alana's suicidal. Definitely." I give them an eye-roll and a thumbs-up. I almost say, "Pills, uh-huh, definitely pills, maybe a mix of ibuprofen and heavier painkillers and sleeping pills, just enough to go to sleep and check out permanently, no razors for this girl, oh man I really hate blood," but I decide against it because I'm not sure they would know that I'm kidding, because I definitely am but my delivery might fall a little flat.

3. My sister has asked me to sub for her one Sunday at her choir job at a Unitarian church in Crooklyn. (FYI had a brief romance with the Unitarians when I was a teenager and was desperately seeking a spiritual center-- we would sit in drum-circles and sing Native American chants and I would just end up feeling really guilty because we were co-opting an art form of a genocided culture for our pseudo-spiritual self-interest). This morning we sing a version of Bach's "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben" (that's "Jesu, joy of man's desiring") that is overlaid with an insipid text about gathering together in a community for times of song ("Jesu" is not welcome here!) and I am inwardly snarling at the toothlessness of the whole thing, because I don't ascribe to Lutheran theology or anything but at least it has some friggin' incisors, unlike these people who have just stolen the pretty pleasant music to feel good about themselves for an hour. (And then I think that maybe it is these snarly thought-patterns of mine that cause people to ditch me like the Defective I am). After the service, a couple of sweet eccentric old coots invite me to brunch and I just can't handle it, I am too thick with disdain for them, disdain for myself, so I make an excuse. My phone buzzes as I slip out of the church. It's a text from the sister: "How did it go? It's a nice day, you should walk across the Crooklyn bridge if you can" and suddenly it seems like a colossal insurmountable effort to text back because I am sick with old corroding familial venoms, the years and years of sister-baggage that we are pussy-footing around and I just don't have the will to play anymore, and she shouldn't be suggesting that I go take a walk across a bridge at this particular point in time, what the hell was she thinking?

4. Chez moi, December. It's close to midnight-- the literary hour of reckoning, of crying out, oh how cute-- and I am in bed under the duvet sobbing and sobbing. It won't turn off this time, the shaking, the systemic tremors. I can't even pinpoint a specific thought or event that brought me here (this stopped being "about" the dissolution of a romantic relationship WAY long ago): I can only describe the feeling as "breaking," or, "crumbling," or "falling to pieces," or "cracking up," or "finally snapping," any of those commonplace expressions that we bandy about in our daily discourse, these aphorisms, these stand-ins for experiences that we hope to be lucky enough to never know from the inside. But here I am now in the belly of the beast. I just want it to stop. My self-outside-the-self speaks faintly, from afar, sees the state of affairs and offers this: "Alana. Hey. Maybe it's a good thing that you live fifteen blocks away from one of the biggest hospitals in Schmanhattan. Maybe you want to walk over there right now and, like, ask for a bright fluorescent room and an antiseptic white bed and for somebody to, um, keep an eye on you until the night is over." The self-inside-the-self says, "UGH NO, it would take so much goddamned energy to walk all the way over there to the hospital and even start to explain things..." so I stay paralyzed, face in the pillow, and then suddenly I cackle-snort at the whole twisted line of thinking (you know, that I would totally "off" myself or something were I not so zapped, zonked, and fucking lazy on account of the depression-- funny how it has a fail-safe built in, maybe the disease does not want to kill its host) and I hug myself in bed, and feeble laughter begins to dilute the crying spell and I say to myself-- this is both the inside- and outstide-the-self self weighing in-- that if I manage to ride out the night, I will call somebody up, I will eat crow and not give a deuce about my "image" (because  my image has been degraded so far in my own eyes that how could anyone think less of me than I do?) and I will try anything, yoga, therapy, Unitarianism, chemical supplements, a comprehensive rewiring of the nervous system, whatever, just as long as there is a sliver of a chance that I don't have to feel like this ever again...

IV. WUT!   

And so, really scared and taking things seriously now, I went out and got myself a coagulant, a fairly standard one; I kept the little orange pill bottle in my kitchen cabinet, began the practice of swallowing a green-and-white capsule ritualistically in the morning. At first the meds seemed to swap out my bleak weepy desolation for cracked-out anxiety: whereas before I had slept a fuck-ton and would "come to" as one emerges from a Rip van Winkle experience, now I sprung out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn all fight-or-flight, heart hammering hard as though I had forgotten to take care of something critically important. (And which is worse, Catatonia or Manic Panic? I don't even know. A splash of wine seemed to even the scales for me in those early medicated days).

I opened up to people, tentatively at first and then spilling out, opened up to professionals and then to friends-- most of whom were like, "oh, you too? yeah, welcome to the club, babe, I have my therapist on speed-dial, come check out my pill drawer!"and I was like, "whoa, we are a messed-up bunch! I guess birds-of-a-feather, you know, fellow Defectives... or maybe it's a generation-wide 'phenom,' or a condition of belonging to the Homo sapiens, who knows... and GUYS really we should have talked about all of this sooner, but I was all reclusive and ashamed and going-it-alone for so long and that's the sneaky thing about the condition, innit? that it makes you ashamed and you don't reach out to anyone."

After a little bit of time something started to kick in, a tingling, a Great Awakening. Maybe it was the combination of factors, of a chemically recalibrating brain and of the odd release/ empowerment that comes with admitting that things are not okay even though you have everything... finally the pretense is over, you know? You don't even have to try to exist within the lines anymore. And I entered this wild and wacky life-phase of Uncaring-- not in the sense of apathy or numbness but in the sense of bulletproof-ness, of "Yo dawg, so I really crashed, I mean really crashed because the worst enemy is, like, inside you, the Enemy is not being able to trust your own mind to not suddenly go apeshit on you, to cannibalize itself, and once you pinpoint the source of the poison and commit yourself to managing it you suddenly realize that the whole external world is child's play, it could never even hope to compete in terms of terrorizing you, so suddenly you're all 'Come at me, bro!' with the world and you can start having some serious fun."

My Euphoria Times, my Whirlwind of WUT, could be symptomatically strange to the external observer. Said observer might have thought that I was totally high, like, on drugs or something. (Oh wait). I was possessed of a sense of grand cosmic irony, of perpetual high comedy that was a purification of tragedy, as though my personal pain had passed through a Refiner's Fire and become allegorical and universal (waddup Goethe!) For example, sitting in the seminar room-- the dreaded seminar room where vitality and inspiration went to be euthanized-- I no longer crumbled despairingly at the meaninglessness of it all but I sat there scarcely able to contain my laughter, because here were all these little people like me who were scribbling stuff down in their planners to placate the professorial demigods and they were SO worried! and so earnest! and didn't they realize that just to be alive and to simultaneously want to be alive was the greatest gift that you could ever hope for?

I sat in the seminar room laughing loonily to myself; I tuned in and out of lectures, plucking the choice bits that lit up my intellectual sweet spots and blowing off the rest in favor of reading my horoscope on my iPhone under the table or something (apparently gloomy Saturn was leaving my constellation and I would soon be breaking some bad co-dependent relationship patterns!) I announced to most of my friends and acquaintances that I was going to quit my PhD-- see the kaleidoscope of possibilities out there in the Real World now that I had stopped being so afraid to face things dead on! and then I somersaulted on the matter, because I wanted to singlehandedly, grandiosely revitalize the Ivory Tower as the last bastion of intellectual freedom and BY GOD I could do it! I chatted up strangers on the street and the subway and in the coffeeshops because they had all stories, they had pain in their eyes and now I understood and wanted to reach out!  I went to a conference at Bleep U to give a paper and I finished writing the lecture the morning of. I had salt-and-vinegar kettle chips and beer for dinner about fifteen consecutive evenings in a row. I saw "Showgirls: The Musical" in a nightclub in the company of some guy whose life aspiration was to start a highbrow-lowbrow Philly Cheesesteak-themed food truck in Crooklyn. I asked my parents if they thought I would look good with short hair, and they shuddered and begged me not to be so rash, so naturally I went and lopped off the locks immediately (to great critical acclaim, I add!) I didn't finish any of my term papers or projects on time (the professors seemed to accept my "mercuriality"with a helpless shrug) but I did give two smashing concerts with a violinist (because musical performance is the life force, y'all!) and I wrote a satirical article for Toolyard's independent newspaper that got a few "likes" on Facebook.

One night I met up with my ex-ish person at the pub on my block. We had undergone several months of chilly radio-silence even though he had attempted to re-establish contact on more than one occasion: I fielded the efforts because it wasn't time yet, because on hearing from I still felt a little stab of something unsavory that was directly antithetical to my dippy rainbow super-high... but then, suddenly, the coagulants had taken effect and I didn't really remember the hurt in a visceral way anymore, and I saw that there was a salvageable element to our connection. So we hit the pub, at first approaching one another across the table with slight trepidation, but then the honesty bubbled up (for better or for worse we had a personal dynamic that could not support the superficial for long) and he bought my beer as recompense for "being pretty much the biggest jackass on the face of the planet to you, Alana," and I acknowledged the magnitude of the jackassitude, damn straight! but I also thanked him for, oddly, catapulting me to this plane of fearlessness that I might never have known otherwise. We talked about the fearless thing. "Schmanhattan just kicks the shit out of you," he said, ordering another rum-and-coke for himself, "and I was so insecure and unhappy for so long, and then I realized that ain't nobody got time for that." I concurred, adding that in his formulation,"Schmanhattan" could easily be replaced with "the world," or "the human condition," or "the self" -- you kick the shit out of you. Nobody does it better.

Boy was six drinks deep and it was time to call it a night. The subway was effed up and not running, so I told him that I would wait with him for a taxi; we stood on the sidewalk together in front of my apartment building and he puffed on a cigarette ("remember last summer when you gave up smoking FOR ME?" I said, arms akimbo) and he studied me slurrily through the haze. "Wow. You are really dead set on getting me a cab... you look good in those red jeans, you know..." but then there was a taxi-cabbus ex machina barreling up the block, and I shoved his arse in the yellow vehicle and gave him a peck on the cheek (of the face, not of the arse!) and I promised that we would talk soon, and then I went up to my apartment laughing all the way, incomplete and by my lonesome AND YET totally complete at the same time, a big honking paradox, a Schrödinger's Cat of completionality, a walking-talking Fallacy having the time of her life... 

V. Epilog: The Woods are Lovely, Dark, and Deep

Of course, my new Carpe-the-Shiznit-out-of-this-Diem mode of existing was not sustainable, was like overfishing for wild Atlantic salmon or something-- the ecosystem would not forever support the crazy excessive intensity with which I suddenly fished in the Seas of Life after going without seafood for so long (and I actually literally did re-introduce the delicious pescados and the frutti di mare to my diet this spring after a seven-year streak of vegetarianism-- symbolic gesture?) Eventually there were consequences for the YOLO, there was a spectacular trail of chaos where I had been, my coagulant proved not to be a miracle-remedy and things started to get under my skin again and I wasn't totally immune to banality, fuckwittage, the usual suspects. The untouchability had run its course. I had swung a little too high; what goes up must come down, right? (That's what she said?)

And I started to grasp that there was no finite "cure" for this thing-- that I could know myself and guard against the tendencies to a certain extent but that we were in it for the long haul, I would be no stranger to these patterns. The monomythic trajectory, all of those fairy tales with their freaky forests-of-the-psyche and their cathartic culminations wherein the hero slays the dragon, the demon, the stepmother or the witch-- we would like to close the book triumphant, we would like to say "well that was a satisfying ending! On we go!" but we keep getting knocked back afresh to some point in the exposition of the story... like we were moseying along on the game-board of "Candyland" and we had almost reached the elysian realm of Queen Frostine but then we pulled the wrong card and were punted all the way back to the goopy molasses quagmire or to Lord Licorice's Tower of Terror. Oh SNAP!

But there is tremendous healing in the reiteration, in the looping of the journey (HAHA, "journey!") You're, like, leveling up every time that you embark. Have you read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse? It's just the best: at the end of the novel, our protagonist Harry Haller the Steppenwolf has been through all kinds of trippin'-- he is hanging out with Mozart, for fuck's sake, and he has just "murdered" his female Doppelganger Hermine (who is really a projection of the self, obvs), and then suddenly all of the people in the scene turn into little figurines. Harry hears Mozart's transcendental laughter all around him and he realizes that he will never be done with the game, that he will traverse time and again the "hell of [his] inner being" (oh Hesse you are so FLIPPING Teutonic sometimes) but that in doing so he will maybe someday learn how to laugh. To know what is in the woods and to go there and back again and to wake up on a new day in spite of everything, eyes a little askew and overbright, to load up the cart with provisions in spite of everything and set out on the road and shout out to whoever happens to be around that I'm off to the fair!...

Expectation/ Fulfillment, Cycles Thereof

I, just like everybody else on the face of the planet, used to think I was really special and original, that my personal experiences were of an unusually heightened intensity and that my tastes and opinions were like totally rarefied. Case in point: when I studied abroad in Schockstria in my junior year, I discovered the paintings of Gustav Klimt for the first time. Well, I had maybe halfway-heard of "The Kiss" before, but had otherwise remained Klimt-ignorant because I had a great many other things to learn about in schmoozick school at Bleep U, like how to accompany an oboe jury while grotesquely hungover how to tell whether a piece of sacred two-voiced polyphony had been composed in 1100, 1150, 1200, or 1250 (true story, I was asked that on an exam once!) Anyway, when I was allowed my fairy-tale semester in Schlienna, my eyes were opened to the asinine and borderline alcoholic behaviors that underage American exchange students will exhibit in a foreign country the many cultural and intellectual treasures that have been bestowed on us by the Schliennese, like psychoanalysis and antisemitism and apple strudel and Mozart-Balls and most of all KLIMT, that sexy daub-er of golden hues and arcane mysterious symbols. I returned to the U.S. of A. all disaffected and world-weary--  the Midwest was one massive eyesore of strip-malls and squat utilitarian architecture and megachurches and how could I revert to such aesthetic privation after having lounged for so long in the honeycombed monuments of faded imperial glory? God, I was sulky. I clutched to my Schliennese souvenirs like Gollum.

One day I was walking past the college poster store and what did I spy with my little eye but a Klimt reproduction? It was right there, lodged between a poster of a glassy-eyed Victoria's Secret model and a chart of pornographically-named cocktail recipes (gotta love college towns). I knew this image from my studies. It was part of the Stoclet Frieze (Schlocklet Frieze, in my jargon?) which depicts the Tree of Life in fantastic curlicues; the tree is flanked by two figures-- to on the left, a woman, austere, vaguely Egyptian, regarding something out of level, critical eyes, and then, to the other side of the tree is the object of her lightly guarded gaze: a man and a woman embracing as if to fuse back together into some essential undivided state, as if to become an androgyne.

So that's the layout of the entire frieze, but the section that caught my eye in the poster store was just the first section, the watching woman. This section is called Erwartung. NO, not "EAR-WART-UNG," stop that. Say it with me: "EH-VAH-TOONG," luscious dark German vowels meaning "expectation." The final section of the frieze, with the couple, is called Erfüllung-- "fulfillment," or maybe, even more literally, "filling up" (giggity!) I cast about the store for this complementary tableau but it was nowhere to be found; it looked like I was stuck with Erwartung for now, with the expectant, narrow-eyed, perpetually unsatisfied chick. Still, it would have to do. I bought the poster, took it home, and jankily scotch-taped it to the closet door of my bedroom: BOOM,  I had brought high culture into the shabby space, just like that. Expectation, yearning, searching,  a reminder of... something yet to come. And I would find the Erfüllung tableau in good time, whenever it presented itself to me, maybe when I stumbled upon real-life fulfillment (whatever that happened to mean-- all I knew was that it had evaded me up to that point, that I was still waiting).

***

In the course of my waiting-for-life-to-percolate, to really get underway, I had to find ways to pass the time. One of my activities was to watch the first four seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on Hulu. And in the first episode of the fourth season, I was totally called out on my Klimtian pretensions, unmasked for the cliche that I was. In this episode, Buffy and co. go off to college (the fictional University of California, Sunnydale) and it turns out that there is a vampiric subculture of upperclassmen at the school that likes to prey on new freshmen (yes, it's a metaphor-- for anything, really, goths, peer pressure, fraternity/ sorority hazing rituals, etcetera etcetera. I'm sure that somebody has written a dissertation on this episode alone. I once saw an edited volume of "Buffy Studies" for sale at a meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, no joke). Anyway, these upperclassmen vampire-den-folk like to stealth-attack their victims in the dorms and then subsequently raid the spoils (easy mac? shower caddies? beanbag chairs?) and they also hedge bets on the wannabe-artsy posters that will invariably adorn the walls of the freshies. "Is it a Monet or a Klimt?" they wager in a little throwaway scene, because at UC Sunnydale it is apparently always one or the other.

Ohhh, the embarrassment that I felt. Joss Whedon and company had preemptively mocked me in the late 90s, long before I had even heard of Klimt, and then years later I had grown up and Seen The World and returned to my college town brimming with cultural messianism-- I had come back to tell you all!-- or so I thought, but really I was just playing out a stereotype, I was no different from the nameless, faceless hordes of fictional freshmen at a fictional Southern California university. I deserved to be descended upon by proto-hipsterian vampires and put out of my misery!

When I had finally figured out my escape route from Schroomington, when I at long last had amassed the means to get out of dodge, I peeled Erwartung down from the closet door and rolled her up and put her in a pile of cast-off possessions along with my cheap Target comforter, my plastic pencil canister, all of the collegiate trappings that I was determined to transcend en route to a new identity. Erwartung was going to Goodwill, where she would doubtless catch the eye of some fresh sensitive head-up-his/her-bum eighteen-year-old individual and find a loving home; I, on the other hand, had become a person of refinement, was destined for bigger things, was going to make a splash in the City of Dreams, was off to seek Erfüllung there.

***

This last January, I was in the metropolis of Schlock Sangellis-- probably not too far away from a real-life prototype for UC Sunnydale, come to think of it-- and I was catching up with an old chum, Raphael. And I do mean "old chum"; we go wayyyy back, prepubescent, prehistoric, to childhood piano lessons and goofy community choirs. Back in those days Raphael was a complete oddity: frail, skinny, home-schooled, hyper-bright and shrewd even then, yet so circumscribed by his cultish family upbringing that he lacked some basic human knowledge. (I introduced him to the phenomenon of rap music. Me! Yes!) We went to summer music camps together, caught frogs at dusk, herded our peers together and attempted to sing through fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. We were SO COOL, you guys. Anyway, the two of us had grown up, gone through this and that, and drastic transformations had been wrought-- he lost his religion, became a gym rat, tanned like crazy, moved to Schlock Sangellis to seek fame and fortune as a film composer, and I became... whoever I am today. And now we were sitting across from one another at a Mexican restaurant in Beverly Sills, having taken a jaunt through the bling-y neighborhood in his convertible with the top down (SO COOL, look at us now, running feverishly away from the misfit past that nipped always at our heels) and we munched a stack of fresh tortillas and updated one another on recent doings and undoings.

Both of us were emerging from rough spells, it seemed, though he had been working on himself for quite some time whereas I was just starting to rethink my coping strategies, i.e. realizing that I had none and should probably fix that. Raphael had an advantage over me, having actually endured palpable hardship and dysfunction in his life. "Let me tell you what I've been doing these days," he said. "Alana, it's great. I've never been so disciplined. I wake up at 6 AM every morning to meditate, and then I read through all these different religious and philosophical texts and contemplate them, and I've pretty much let go of all my anger, my anger towards my parents, towards my crazy exes, my coworkers, I've just forgiven everyone." I tore a tortilla into strips and said, "Wow, that sounds kind of awesome, actually. I want some of your Kool-Aid."

"No, it's amazing. I mean, I'm not perfect. I have to keep at it constantly, I'm always about to slip back into destructive patterns, but once I get to that place of non-attachment, the most amazing things happen. You wouldn't believe it, Alana: the most beautiful women you've ever seen, the most beautiful women in all of Schlock Sangellis! -- they just appear before me. And then they take their clothes off! And then they disappear once they've served their purpose, and I do whatever else I need to be doing! It's great!"

"RAPHAEL!" I exclaimed, punching his arm, "do you mean to say that your virtuous eightfold path or whatever is really just a giant ploy to get LAID? With no strings attached? You're something ELSE. You're making Siddhartha roll over in his grave... wait, was Siddhartha even buried or did he just dissolve into the atmosphere or something? Hahaha... oh, it doesn't even matter... haHAha, Raphael, you conniving douchebag, you rapscallion..." I was entertained rather than offended because I still held this image in my mind of Raphael as a borderline-emaciated little white boy who had legitimately feared the dawning of Y2K and was convinced that his roommate at music camp was a gangster on account of a pierced ear. The newly-assumed "playa" identity didn't quite ring true.

"No, I'm telling you, Alana, attachment and expectation, that's where we go wrong. Think of it like you think about food. You're hungry right before you eat, right?" "Well yeah, I'm jonesing for my chile relleno that I ordered... where is it, by the way?  "But see, after you've eaten the chile relleno, you're not going to keep obsessing over food, right? You're just going to go about your life until you're hungry again, and then you'll eat." I cocked my head. "That's the plan, at least," I said.  "So-- the hot Schlollywood babes, the ones that magically appear before you, they're the proverbial foodstuff?" He grinned. "Well, sure. But I don't overdo it, just like I don't overeat. And yeah, I work out a lot."

***

It took me a little while to furnish my room when I first moved to Schmanhattan. I wanted to do it right, mark the new chapter-- the nascent adulthood, the ensuing fabulousness-- with swanky material acquisitions. No more taped-up posters, no more Target plywood bookshelves or floor-lamps pillaged from the dumpster at Snackwell Parish. Unfortunately, I was also flat broke, so my lavish interior decorating plans took some time to mobilize (and eventually they just devolved into several disorienting Ikea binges in a dystopian warehouse in blighted industrial North Blurzy) but I swore that I would be painstaking in my art selection-- I would raid flea markets in remotest Crooklyn for one-of-a-kind finds, I would never again be the butt of a Joss Whedon joke because my wall adornments were too mainstream!

Then, one evening, I was taking out the trash; I went down to the basement, and what did I spy with my little eye but a reproduction of Klimt's "The Kiss" leaning against one of the recycle bins? It wasn't a poster but an actual painted canvas in a bronzed frame; I knelt down to run my hand over the stucco texture of the image's surface. Aww, how sweet, I thought condescendingly, some college student is growing up and rising above her schlock-art phase, just like I did once! But as I studied the painting, I noticed that it looked like a rotated version of Erfüllung, the "fulfillment" tableau-- this could have been the same couple, only viewed from a different angle, their faces now visible (he's darker than she, gives the impression of having swooped in and taken her by surprise but she just succumbs, sinks into inevitably there in the golden garden). And I felt stupidly affected by the painting-- I had a sudden urge to jet out to the bodega and buy a single fresh fig... but wait, they're not so well-stocked, okay, an orange, then, and I wanted to sink my nails into the peel and breathe in the floral-heavy-bitter scent of the oils... or I wanted to run upstairs to my apartment and dig out the mouldering old copy of the "Song of Songs" that I had stolen from my parents and whisper the tremulous poetry into some imaginary ear.

Aha, I thought, cliches like Klimt are cliches for a reason, because the original things are so good and true that they have been perpetuated ad nauseam. And then I thought, well, shit, I would be a bad person if I didn't adopt this orphan-Klimt. It's not Erfüllung, but it's close-- this must be a sign-- and besides, my walls are awfully bare, and maybe it would serve me well to have swoony Fulfillment watching over the proceedings of my life, and also, since when did I ever turn down anything that had been proffered to me for free?

***

Raphael and I had moved onto some post-meal espresso-- marvel at our sophistication now, remember when we slurped red-white-and-blue popsicles in the summer?-- and we were still riffing on themes of Zen and expectation and attachment and so forth (we were in the South of California, after all; it's a requirement). "You know, you're right, buddy," I said, "expectation just leads to attachment, and then 'attachment to suffering leads', like Yoda said in Revenge of the Sith."

And then, because I'm supposedly a schmoozicologist, and should have a better set of cultural references on hand than George Lucas' desecration of the Star Wars franchise, I started telling Raphael about Guillaume de Machaut from the fourteenth century-- how I learned, last semester, that he was as much of a poet as a composer, and how he wrote this epically involved narrative/ autobiographical mashup called the Voir Dit, the "True Story, " the "Real Real" (I had interrupted class to say that it was like one of those MTV "exclusive" artist documentaries where they're like, "You think you know? You have no idea. This is the diary of Britney Spears." See, I am nothing if not a constructive member of graduate seminars). So anyway, in the "Voir Dit," Machaut recounts how this random fangirl, Toute-Belle (which translates to "totally hot"),  writes to him in praise of his poetic and musical gifts and basically states that she has fallen in love with him from afar, although they've never met. Thus begins a fraught epistolary courtship wherein they send each other poetry, love letters, musical compositions, and it's all so over-the-top: he's like, "Just as I could never count all the stars in the universe, so I could never quantify just how much I want to meet you IRL," and she's like, "I'm dying of longing, you're soooo talented, I played the mix-tape you sent me-- er, I sang through the virelai that you composed, tra-la-la," and they both just can't wait to put their hands on each other and to consummate the damn thing. But then they finally do meet, and... ehhhh. Things fizzle. They maybe have sex one time-- Machaut is vague and euphemistic, Venus comes down to visit them-- and then Toute-Belle starts playing hard-to-get, and then she's seen around town wearing a green dress, and in the Middle Ages green was totally the color of loose women! so she's two-timing him, or worse, and then the book turns into a rambling, slightly bitter meditation on the vicissitudes of fortune.

"See, Raphael, what happened is that Machaut and Toute-Belle set up these crazy expectations about each other, and it just screwed them over big-time! Bit them in the ASS! And stuff like that still happens... I mean, my last boyfriend and I talked so much before we even met-- he was a friend-of-a-friend-- and we said all this ridiculous stuff to each other, like 'I've never known a beautiful soul like you,' or, 'you make me feel like major-major seventh chords,' and I was like 'oh VOM, this is too much,' and yet part of me so wanted to believe that it was real and genuine, our connection, and that somebody could care about me that much, so I went with it. And then we met and just supremely disappointed each other, because nobody could ever live up to what we had imagined, projected... I was just like, 'your hand feels wrong, you are crushing my fingers, bebb, ease up,' and he was like, 'you're so obsessed with trivial things, like, why did you just spend five minutes showing me how to water the mint plant in your apartment?' and I was like, 'your lack of interest in the mint plant is indicative of your lack of interest in the natural, sensual world and also of your inability to nurture,' and he was like 'you just never turn off your manic interest in everything, I can't ever relax around you' and so on, and we just tore each other apart all the time over things like a MINT PLANT. It was really bad! We probably damaged one another's psyches forever in the space of those few months. Fucking expectations! What a fail, man; what an epic, epic fail."

Raphael nodded in a been-there kind of way. "No, Alana, actually, this is so, so great. See, we need to have those experiences, we need to build something up so much that it can only come crashing down horribly, we need to get burned by these unstable people exactly because they expose all of our own instabilities, our weaknesses, and then we learn how to find our centers again, to let go of our expectations of others and accept limitations and eventually accept ourselves."

I raised my espresso demitasse in a toast. "Fine words, my bro, my Sensei," I said. "Easier said than done. But yeah, that's my long-term goal. So, hear, hear: in this, the Year of our Lord 2013, I do declare that I shall make a concerted effort to jettison expectation, to accept the limitations of my fellow man and to forgive their trespasses against me, and to practice more piano and to try meditation and yoga and to stop snarfing Thai-flavored potato chips and scrolling through Missed Connections on Craigslist when the going gets tough. But I shall also accept that I will fail a lot at these things, especially at first." "Yeah, you will," he said, "and it's completely okay. It's part of the process, and it's really good that you know that already." We clinked our coffee-cups together. "Look at us, Alana, we're doing so great," he said, and I saw the old innocence shining through the assumed hyper-masculine exterior, this goofy Guidonic shell of Raphael. We paid up, exited the restaurant, and jumped into Raphael's convertible; he put the top down and cranked up some Kanye West and revved up the engine and we sped away through the hazy hills of Schlock Sangellis, cackling maniacally.

***

So, once you give up Expectation, then Fulfillment strikes. Of course it does. Such is the way of the universe, the first law of human thermodynamics, the Tao of "stop chasing, stop trying, just sit perfectly still and let the butterfly come rest on your shoulder." So there you are, sitting still, ready to turn in for the night, mumbling things to yourself like "que sera, sera," or "so it goes," or "chopping wood, drawing water," and then BAM, in swoops Erfüllung and you're like, oh! really? now?! wait, what?... oh, okay. Okay. Okay! Let's go, then! But the tricky thing is this. Fulfillment comes-- mostly, almost always-- on the heels of non-expectation: it is unpredictable, un-summon-able, and then just as quick to depart. And when it does, it knocks you right back into the Realm of Expectation even though you swore that you wouldn't be hanging out on that side of the tracks anymore. So while your philosophy might have been "Just keep swimming," you are flush with your recent success and are tempted to go deep-sea diving for more of the various mollusks that are rumored to live down there, you want to snatch up as many as you can, extort them greedily for pearls or other pleasures, but the more you pry, the more they will clam up (ha!), and oh look, you're über-underwater now and at substantial risk of drowning or being crushed by the pressure, and anyway didn't you know that the only way to really coax a mollusk open is to steam it gently in white wine, whereupon it will yield its dead flesh to you, plump and delicious?

(Wow, that metaphor really ran off the rails, even by my standards).

Most nights, lately, I try very consciously to undo Expectation, to loosen the nefarious bonds of attachment; I repeat phrases to myself, read a few lines of this or that, make some herbal tea, close my computer and abandon the internet with its insatiable maw of wants and desire and one-upmanship and photoshopped happiness and incendiary comments sections and so forth. How virtuous of me. And then I go to sleep and my subconscious immediately rebels against every inch of the virtue, and I'm having some fever dream where I'm frying up bacon to dump into my vegan soup, and then my dead doggie comes trotting over to me (lured by porcine aromas?) and I rub the velvety spot on the crown of her head, and then suddenly I'm on the subway stabbing my mortal enemy with a golf pencil, and then you were there too (and you were there, and you were there...)

I wake up bleary, crusty-eyed, and Klimt is still on the wall, amber frame presiding over the room, man and woman doing what they always do. Screw you guys, I think, you and your swoopy embrace, the two of you always at the absolute zenith of the Expectation-Fulfillment cycle, preserved for eternity in that moment just after the waiting is over, just when the tension has ruptured, but then just before the inevitable fallout, the comedown, the waning. But I don't have time to stare, to indulge in another Byzantine reverie, because I overslept per usual and I need to go all the way out to Spleens and I'm running late and the subway has been so unreliable these days and I need to get dressed and splash some water on my face and now I don't even know if I'll have time to make coffee, shit shit SHIT...