webnography

For those who were unawares, my everyday/daytime identity is Dog Runner, or alternately, Canine Fitness Specialist. When I got a part-time gig as a research assistant, internet-bound, I sought something that would get me out of my cozy hobbit hole and into the heart of New York. Since I was something of a star cross-country runner in high school (go figure), the Running Paws company took me on quite readily. Though I’d long since strayed from the routine of running and, indeed, sportiness in general, I truly believe that distance running is a state of mind. A love of challenge, a capacity for endurance, and resilience to nature’s obstacles are intrinsic to the long-distance runner- maybe I should throw loneliness in there as well.

So, every day, I log into my “dog schedule” before 10 am and confirm- usually a set schedule, but important to note cancellations and additions. Typically, I get into Manhattan sometime between 11:30 and 12:30, and am usually done before 4:30. My days begin and end with half-hour puppy-care visits with Nigel, a 4-month-old cocker spaniel whose nascent development I’ve been proud to help nurture. He is incredibly soft and cute, and enjoys peeing on the floor and wagging his tail maniacally at passers-by. Also gnawing on my shoes:

Once or twice a week, I play with a Boston Terrier puppy named Maddy, who is a little princess and hates the cold. So, she wears a puffy coat. I try to stay bundled, too: In terms of running, my favorite dog to run with is a standard black poodle named Jasper. Actually, Jasper does not run, he bounds, and his exuberance is completely infectious. He is a strange doggie dancer, at times leaping higher than my headtop. Additionally, he is quite prone to tearing after squirrels, the excitement of which leaves him frenzied and sprinting as I race to match his pace:

Every time he spots an approaching puppy, he sits himself down quite gingerly and cocks his head, inviting a cautious greeting/butt-sniff dance. He nose me: In truth, this job has fast become integral to my identity, or at least the one I perform in public. While my nighttime hours can best be described by the reverie of the internet and the cultivation of words and ideas, it’s generally hard to talk about things you’re literally writing a book about. Rather, I take delight in extolling the virtues of exercise and animal friendship, relating the everyday frustrations and hilarities that make up my daily life. The city streets have become my oyster, teeming with novelty and potential connections. I have made someone’s day on countless occasions, and vice versa. That’s enough to keep me going, through the cold and the wind, the piss and the poo.

Also, pups are way more fun to hang out with than most people.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

seeing as i’ve been unanimously approved for application fee waivers by the schools to which i’m applying, i’m kicking myself in hindsight for not doing the same for the godforsaken GRE I took this evening - $140 so I could spend four hours in pure mental agony, desperately wishing i could treat it all like a game, but unfortunately dragged down to the shadows by a combination of my tepid fellow test-takers, the banal-to-the-point-of-vomiting,sadly cubicle computer terminals that made up the room (complete with partitions!), the menacing clock ticking down all the time i had left to be brilliant! now! do it!

i could go on. in fact, i think i will.

the essay topics were downright invidious. actually, the very notion of timed, structured essay composition makes my knees shrivel. anything i have ever written under such conditions has been pure shit. the act of writing is a fermentation process, not a robotic one. my creative juices utterly zapped from the get-go, it was thankfully not too difficult to resist the urge to thoughtstream, to let my words run wild on the page painting scenes. no. i had to be logical. non sequiturs are illogical, so i attempted to sequitize the lies.

and they are lies, too. the only thing i know to be true is that which i feel, am and do.

the verbal section is seemingly arbitrary, though the Kaplan word list I studied from did help me immensely. i abhor the idea that one’s grasp of language can be in any way accurately assessed through a barrage of esoteric words framed out of context. cool words do not generally stand alone; they exist in a more abstract compendium of cultural norms, stories, slang - those words are far more intriguing.

math was math. i did surprisingly well, far better than the verbal, though i consider myself a word-based, math-adverse person. the ’80’s-style computer monitor (BOXY FOXY) made grafts and subtle additions such as exclamation points difficult to read. a small sign next to the monitor begged me not to touch the screen. the whole time, i wanted to reach out and touch. those BANAL BANAL black-and-white graphs and charts and turn them into something colorful and engaging.

the exam took 4 hours total. i was the last person to leave the room. no one was sync’d or looked at one another, in fact when i finally broke from my math reverie, it kind of broke my heart to realize i was utterly alone in my despair.

oh yeah, there’s a lovely little bonus section that doesn’t count toward your score, but you don’t know which one it is! isn’t that clever?!

asinine-ass-exam, i am rid of you!

Last week, a very old woman instigated an interlude in what is normally the spot where i plug into the web whilst chomping an everything bagel. after a short conversation about the quality of the yogurt, we sat near each other with a shared wariness. she snapped, “young women these days, with their tits and their asses just out for all to see!” She eyed me slowly up and down. I was wearing grey sweatpants, a brown long-sleeved shirt, and green sneakers, no makeup, hair up in a ponytail. “You don’t do that, do you?” Responding in the entirely present moment: “no, I try not to attract too much attention.” This seemed to please her, she nodded approvingly. “This city’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I agreed, distracted by the intense desire to check my e-mail. Somehow I felt that would be inappropriate. Turns out, I was right. Later in the conversation, she would speak of nearly all modern technologies with no small degree of contempt. In the interim, there were long silences.

She broke one: “Now, you’re under no obligation to answer this,” (oh boy, I thought), “but why did you move to new york? were you thinking of opportunity?”

I could answer this question with glee. “Not at all! I finished my master’s degree, and now i’m just working, trying to save money and building my life while my boyfriend finishes his degree.”

(Earlier that week, a Russian housekeeper at one of my puppy’s homes had received this same response and replied, “oh, so soon you will get married and get fat! trust me, i know.”)

The old woman (whose name I never did catch) eyed me suspiciously. I caught the vibe and attempted to convey my feelings toward this city: “people are too angry here. i want to have a garden. possibly a chicken. we are going to move west as soon as he finishes.”

At this, her eyes lit up. She nodded enthusiastically, her cynical old-new yorker guise slipping off. “Yes! That’s a very good idea.”

Our conversation moved to the economy, to the job market, her dour persona returning. “I’ve lived through a depression,” she said softly. Our eyes locked. I wanted her to send me the feeling she was exuding, and asked, “does it feel the same as it did back then?”

“Oh, it will get much, much worse,” she said ominously. “It’s terrible.” Her eyes misted and she looked distantly at nothing, mournfully, “I really don’t know what will become of us.”

And yet, yesterday morning I took a trip deep into Brooklyn. At Broadway Junction, an older black man in a dark green coat bellowed “Obama! Obamaaaamaman,” laughing maniacally. Around me, his giddiness spread like a virus. I found myself grinning despite my suspicions and doubts. Throughout the day, as I zipped through the streets of lower Manhattan on my new kick scooter, people murmured that name, shouted it, wore it proudly on their foreheads and chests. As I stopped at my favorite bagel place (where I had met the old woman), I recalled the man who’d sat near me two weeks ago, enthusiastically befriending another older man who’d been loudly championing John McCain. They went on for awhile, at some point one of them making a comment stupid enough for me to glance up in disbelief, which garnered the response, “I know you’re not happy, honey, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Oh, I’m perfectly happy,” I had retorted, “this election is going to be a goddamn landslide!” Moved my gaze quickly back to my handheld and twittered about it.

Over the course of the past few weeks, my outlook toward my newly adopted neighborhood of Bushwick has changed dramatically. I barely noticed it happening, besides noting with relief that my panic attacks (lingering remnants of several traumatic incidents earlier on in the summer) had all but ceased. You see, as I came out of Mr. Kiwi’s the other day, groceries in hand, I was stopped by two eager young guys, musician types. “Excuse me,” one of them said, “do you think you could talk to us a bit about the neighborhood?” I drew in a breath, looked furtively toward Troutman, then met their eyes. They looked so hopeful, so willing to believe that this area wasn’t so bad as it looked, but instead, full of promise. It really struck a chord in me.

I began hesitantly, mentioning my recent arrival and subsequent mugging. I mentioned my fear of walking down even Broadway after dark. They were quick to point out that the danger is certainly more paramount for a young woman walking alone at night, and I agreed. They said they were looking at a place right where we were standing, and I found myself boasting about Mr. Kiwi’s, grinning as I mentioned the evangelical preaching at the corner of Myrtle & Broadway, praising the JMZ train. I spoke of the new bodega, Broadway Pizza, Goodbye Blue Monday, the eclectic and increasingly gentrified population, the many Hispanic families and odd Hasidic Jew, the fantastically low rents. They thanked me profusely, looking so excited and hopeful it just about broke my heart.

Inspired to become more involved with the community here, I wrote in to the editor of BushwickBK, a fantastic blog and my primary source of information about Bushwick. I told my story, pitched from the heart, and asked to write for them. “Ethnographic vignettes?”

As if I needed more commitments…

As summer reaches its frenetic finale, the uncomfortable confines of my mind have begun to fall away. Still deeper in I go, nomad by day, warmed at night by the cocoon we have made to shelter us from the hectic deluge of city life. There is much to be done: more research to conduct, literature to dive into, tests to take, recommendations to procure, papers to submit, e-mails to send… but this much I can say for certain: I’ve got purpose, ambition, and a deep passion propelled like legs turn to windmills as they make their way downhill. Factors of “success” aside, the detachment and anxiety I’d been fighting all year (akin to constantly watching oneself on videotape) have been replaced by the sudden, startling return of my laugh. I’d missed that the most.

In exactly one month, Joe and I are traveling to California. While we may be romanticizing the great frontier, it is precisely such hope and planning for the future that has me utterly buoyant these days. Most astonishing is that I am actually connecting to some of my intellectual heroes on my own terms, which I was quite worried about, given Wesleyan’s complete inability to help graduating students network or find careers:

“You’re majoring in… anthropology? Have you thought about a job in advertising?”
*vomit* “Why no, not at all. In fact, after five years of being thoroughly indoctrinated in post-hippie nihilism, my options are pretty much limited to starting a commune, becoming a bum, or returning to academia.”

The first is more of a long-term goal. The second doesn’t quite align with my desire for the former. So, a return to academia it is, for I know myself well enough - born to write and read, a hunger for research and new ideas, an insatiable idealism and a desire to commune and connect - keeping hope for humanity alive.

Postings of a less self-indulgent nature to come, now that I’ve a mission. Kickin’ into high gear once again…

could it be any less clear
which path to follow?
night falls, the woods turn sinister,
no longer do we romp through that which is well-trodden.
rather, we step gingerly,
picking our way past the ditches, the floods,
telltale signs of impending doom.

lost in thought i slammed face-first
into a tree,
just hard enough to shake it free.

watch the tracks for rats
seeking scraps.
we seek scraps of hope,
climbing up the weary rope.

some build structures and rejoice,
but we, we sing best as they burn.
burn our bridges, burn a city,
fire is so pretty.

Perhaps it’s but a personality trait, but I find myself decidedly undecided, residing in a constant state of indecision. For better or worse, I turn to the steady hum of the interweb for inspiration. Going out to dinner entails a lengthy perusal of online reviews (three cheers for yelp!). My life decisions, beginning most memorably with the college search since the advent of high school, are group decisions. This is not to say people have not always been composed of their collective interactions (read: culture), but that this process is occurring in new ways that have yet to be understood and categorically ordered into consciousness.

For as much as we are conduits of culture, we are also its composers. Being as it is the dawn of a new era of mediated communication, we are in prime position to create new memes for future generations. This is imperative, for as anyone tapped into the collective neural net knows (and that’s everybody, to varying forms and degrees), the world is in a deep malaise that, while it may never be undone, must be remade. Degunk the junk and foster the funk.

Through the mirror, darkly sinister forms abound. The websites I have been researching glamorize “stupid spoiled whores,” revel in misanthropy, and celebrate self-mutilation. This is the ugly underbelly of a jaded generation, saturated with the soulless machine of a media industry gone mad. Eventually, one would imagine, we will reach satiation and revolt against this funhouse mirror of our society. That is to say, we may and must remake the mirror.

Here we stand, poised at the precipice of a new era of information flow. The simple existence of these websites is telling: with the ever-evolving tools of the interweb, the ever-increasing population of the digitized can join the conversation. Little surprise it is that we converse online in the same way we converse offline: we gossip about others, consume media and talk about it, create representations of ourselves through performative acts, confess our darkest secrets and innermost longings in the sanctuary of like-minded others…

And, like in life, some clamber for soapboxes where they may espouse prolifically to a mostly unseen (but potentially vast) audience, while many lurk about, not wishing to be heard but willing to absorb. Though most of us be sheep, theories regarding the wisdom of the crowd contend that diluting and diversifying such a crowd will increase the chances of its survival. 

In order to survive, we need to be critical producers of alternative points of view. This post was originally inspired by the research I’m conducting on pro-self harm websites; having sussed out the black-and-white, the extremes, I’ve moved on to the nuanced middle ground. In this space that is neither supportive of self-destruction nor condemning of such a perspective, there are emerging voices that seek to not only reflexively examine the issue as it stands, but to redefine the very definition of “pro-self harm.” Not supportive of the disordered habits that are the coping mechanisms for our culture, but supportive of those who are clearly in need of support most of all. Effective support entails not only empathy and understanding, but strong voices (herders, if you will) with the capacity to critique our disorderly conduct and call new memes into being. So clamber on up, to the top of the search results, redefine the folksonomy, and remake that mirror (repetition numero tres).

Consider this a call to action.

Some inspiration:
mamaVISION: Highly controversial (read: popular) personal blog of a 30-something ex-model turned mother, dedicated to spreading awareness of our eating disordered society and empathetically communicating with the sufferers themselves.

We Bite Back: Post-pro-ana - Postmodernizing the discussion of eating disorders and encouraging recovery.

Suicide: Read This First: Another form of “pro-suicide”- offering empathetic understanding and resources.

Self-Injury: A Struggle: Longstanding site devoted to spreading awareness and cultivating a community of support for self-injurers, created by a fellow self-injurer.

“The world is a mirror of the mind’s abundance,”
is typed alone to a page near the end of this novel.

What Winterson makes abundantly clear is the true process of storytelling, a process that abstracts the past and remaps the future. Our heroine, Ali, taps out stories for her customers, sent through the ethereal interweb in pursuit of such an impact: “freedom, just for one night.”

As much as the story shifts so does she, hurtled through the lives of fairy tales past, retold again and again in various guises. Through such shifting of the story, for which the screen is a conduit, we find a metaphor for the ever-fluxing selves in which history and memory are contained: 

There are so many lives packed into one. The one life we think we know is only a window that is open on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can close that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view.

This window is emptier. The cross-references are cryptic. As we scroll down it, looking for something familiar, we seem to be scrolling into another self- one we recognize but cannot place. The coordinates are missing, or the coordinates pinpoint us outside the limits of our existence. 

If we move further back, through a smaller window that is really a gateway, there is less and less to measure ourselves by. We are coming into a dark region. A single word might appear. An icon. This icon is a private Madonna, a guide, an understanding. Very often we remember it from our dreams. “Yes,” we say, “Yes, this is a world. I have been here.” It comes back to us like a scent from childhood.

These lives of ours that press in on us must be heard.

We are our own oral history. A living memoir of time.

Time is downloaded into our bodies. We contain it. Not only time past and time future, but time without end. We think of ourselves as closed and finite, when we are multiple and infinite.

This life, the one we know, stands in the sun. It is our daytime and the stars and planets that surround it cannot be seen. The sense of other lives, still our own, is clearer to us in the darkness of night or in our dreams. Sometimes a total eclipse shows us in the day what we cannot usually see for ourselves. As our sun darkens, other brilliancies appear. And there is the strange illusion of looking over our shoulder and seeing the sun racing towards us at two thousand miles an hour.

What is it that follows me wherever I go?

Not that the self be shaken loose, but that it be found, reassembled, in the process of remembrance itself. Which is to say: I am the sum of parts, artifacts of time, indulgent fantasies and messier proclivities. And in this space, here and now, I am neither man nor woman but as yet an alien voice, hanging in makeshift space.

That said, I must say that this novel is reminiscent of my adolescent online diary: a tangled, messy, yet occasionally brilliant jumble of bits and pieces devoted to the wistful myth of romantic love. While the perfect companion to 20-minute subway rides, the writing here is oft redundant and cliched. Still, an inspiration for a new era of writing and reading.

…is the introduction to e.e. cummings’ collected works. i read it many years ago, and pull it up whenever i need a reminder as to why i live the way i do - in the pursuit of being continually reborn, in the refusal to settle for anything less than a little more than everything, with the acceptance that i don’t quite “fit” and never will, dedicated to truths found only by my own accord- pardon my tendency to manifestos, but you’ll see what i mean. enjoy! 

—

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to
fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

A couple of days ago, the following message popped up on my Facebook homepage and has yet to disappear:

It would seem those who choose not to identify as “his” or “her” has become an issue of some urgency for Facebook. They’ve written a blog post about the issue:

As Facebook grows in other languages, we are learning a lot about what the “Facebook Experience” is like for people around the world. One of the first challenges was getting words that are really long in other languages to fit on the screen properly. Recently, we’ve been figuring out how to deal with a new challenge—grammar. Ever see a story about a friend who tagged “themself” in a photo? “Themself” isn’t even a real word. We’ve used that in place of “himself or herself”. We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven’t, until now, selected their sex on their profile. However, we’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories. For this reason, we’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven’t yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as “him” or “her” in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won’t be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information. We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting. We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account, including how we refer to you in Mini-Feed. We hope this change will make the Facebook experience even better across the world. Let us know if you have any thoughts about this on our suggestions page. Naomi is a Product Manager at Facebook.

Apparently it’s an issue of being lost or, as the case may be, misconstrued in translation.

I didn’t select a sex, just clicked ‘close’; confusion regarding such things has a salubrious effect on consciousness, methinks.