Some Incoherence About Sentimentality

My dictionary defines "sentimental" as "marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism"; it perhaps indicates just how sentimental I am that I cannot see exactly what that definition excludes.

I am sentimental. I am sentimental in trivial ways: I cry at the national anthem, or montages of the recently and heroically dead, I save letters and photos. I am sentimental in a more profound way: I ascribe emotional meaning to the world as it is presented to us, and, perhaps more importantly, I generally tend towards ascribing a kindly, or at least tender, emotional meaning to that world, when possible.

If you think of that line from "What A Wonderful World" that goes, "I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they're really saying I love you" you will have a fairly precise understanding of what my brand of sentimentality involves.

Of course, you can't sustain that mood of kindly smoothing over all the time. When hungry or pissy or nervous that's not how I feel at all. And, of course, there's the mood of seemingly misplaced sentimentality: something that you felt sentimental about -- a job, a date, a place -- turns a different side of itself to you, and then you get the horrible feeling that maybe the sentimentality you viewed it with was a matter of falsifying the experience, a psychic airbrushing. And I don't, really, have any desire to live in a world of illusion, whatever the background music.

But it's all a little academic, thinking it through like this, because I have not ever been able to escape my sentimentality. My efforts to do so, to adopt a strictly realist view of the world, have only ever succeeded in acting as so much concealer for the sentimental zit underneath.

If I wanted to be mean-spirited about it, I guess I could see my sentimentality as a kind of emotional capitalism, where experience, stored away, gains interest in the form of a vague benign glow that covers the good times and bad times alike. I don't know. I'm going to take a stroll, and look up at the new moon, and think kindly thoughts about the world we live in.

Stuck Outside Of Somewhere With The Something Else

There is a lesson to my current location, as there is to all things, which is that if you make too many jokes about Michael Vick you will find yourself stuck in Atlanta without a change of underwear listening to the owner of a Mexican restaurant attached to a Best Western express outrage that Vick is getting two years for killing dogs, which, the guy pointed out, his grandfather used to eat.

Fair warning: there are no general points to be made in this post -- it is all straight ahead personal narration although, as always, my general and always wavering levels of righteous indignation could stand some recalibration.

This morning I set off from Los Angeles. I was inspired by the extreme competence of my cab driver and the ease of my check-in. I was also a little loopy from the fact of getting to LAX by 4:30 a.m. That, my friends, is how I emerged in Atlanta at 1:30 p.m. to discover that my connection to my holiday destination had been canceled.

The lesson to all this may in fact be not to fly to a place on the day that it's being pelted by snow. That could be a lesson too.

I was prepared to roll with that punch, but when the Delta guy told me that because the next day's flights were all booked up that I would have to stay in Atlanta until Tuesday morning I got a little pissed. I believe my precise words were "You're fucking kidding me." If I had known how many opportunities for pissy behavior I would have and take in the space of the afternoon to come, I might have let that one slip on by.

Also we fought about whether the second night of a hotel would fall under the weather rule so that the airline wouldn't pay for it. He got pretty feisty in defending Delta; I suppose there's something inspiring about that quality of loyalty.

Anyway, we found a neighboring town to my destination that might have a flight leaving tonight (Sunday) and he said that he had also saved me a seat on the next day's flight to the neighboring town.

We parted on good terms. That was a mistake. I went and read trashy books and drank trashy drinks. That was not.

About an hour before my flight was supposed to depart (at 8:55 p.m.) it too was canceled. A second round of phoning was required to discover that I didn't have a seat on the Monday flight to the neighboring town. Discussions were had. She promised me meal vouchers, and said she'd see about allowing me to reclaim my checked bag.

Oh hell, you can imagine the rest. The luggage is not being released, the woman at the baggage claim told me with pride -- "Nobody going to Buffalo is getting their luggage back."; I had to get all rowdy to claim my $21 of meal vouchers which I will almost certainly fail to use; the shuttle driver for the motel I booked tried to convince me that I was actually going to another motel, and, on the way out of the parking lot, started praying loudly to god that the van would work again. Endless stupidity. And I swore a lot and told various Delta customer service representatives how shitty I thought their airline was, which I'm sure made everybody's day pleasanter.

And really, the downsides are these: I don't get to see the people I love as quickly as I would like to; I'm not going to smell very good when I get there; my carefully selected Christmas presents (I really want to write a post about present buying one of these days because it is the most enjoyable form of shopping in some ways, although also one of the most wrenching) may be gone forever. On the other hand, I spent a day drinking and reading trash, and feel vaguely virtuous about it. Also I'll watch tv. Also I can spend a day in Atlanta, which I think we are all excited about.

It's cold and crisp here, and my only real regret is that I couldn't properly overhear the owner of the Mexican restaurant when he explained how he would prefer his wife cheat on him, if such a state of affairs had to be. I feel like I should regret being such an jerk-off to the various customer service reps, but really I also kind of hate them.

Remembering, Misremembering, And Bad Deeds Of The Past

I woke up this morning at 5:00 a.m. for a telephonic job interview on the East Coast. It was done by 5:45, and I was drowsy but not particularly ready to go back to sleep so I was reading Straight Man by Richard Russo.

I have a very vivid memory of how I first read that book, which is that I was staying with these people in Berkeley for a weekend when I was deciding whether to go to college there or not, and it was on their bookshelves and I took it down and read it and it stuck with me.

But there inside the cover is the copyright date, 1997. Which means that it didn't happen like that, because by January 1, 1997 I was already a sophomore in college. I still think I probably read it when staying at that house, because I housesat a couple of times for them over the years, so I'm maybe not wrong by so much, but it changes my vision of the story so completely, because I remember myself as so different in 1997 than I was in 1995, that it's all a little unsettling. And casts doubt on my memory in general, which I tend to rely on heavily and enforce on others with a pretty high degree of severity.

So there we go. The past is uncertain, and our memories are just best guess reenactments. And then I found myself thinking about how once, I was staying with some people, and I started to read a book off their shelves, and not having finished with it by the time I was leaving, I just took it with me. Without asking permission, and without, I think, feeling particularly guilty about it. I must have been sixteen or seventeen at the time. It was pointed out to me sometime later that this was not good behavior in a houseguest, and now I cannot think of it without some guilt.

It's strange to look back in time at the things you did that you are now distinctly not proud of. I would say the things you did in innocence, except that innocence is hard to establish in retrospect. When I was eighteen I made a boy that I knew had a crush on me trek out into the cold to pick me up dumplings, knowing full well that I was never going to date this boy. Or knowing with an eighty percent certainty that I was never going to date this boy, because nothing is written in stone. I feel ashamed now for having done it, for having taken advantage of his chivalrous impulses; I think at the time I thought that sort of thing was allowed, but I wouldn't say it was innocent -- can a failure to consider the feelings of the other people that are staring you right in the face really be innocence?

Indiscretion: A Defense

I'm a big fan of gossip. Or, as I like to call it, community building. I like hearing it, I like spreading it, I like the meta-analysis (Why did X tell me Z about Y? What does it all mean? Where are we going? The end is upon us. Etc. etc. etc.). I like it all.



Except for a couple of things. First off, it's not exactly one of the dignified human passions. You don't hear a lot of people going around talking about how great it is that other people are gossips. Somewhere in my collection of Nancy Mitford letters is this letter where she talks about how she's a fundamentally disloyal person, and she says it without apology, and it was one of the more shocking confessions I'd read, because while a lot of dissolute behavior has a certain cachet to it, gossip doesn't. I think that's because the gossip underlines a fact that we all secretly and deeply resent: that we are, like it or not, part of a broader human community that watches and judges us, ascribes motives and grades to our behavior that contradict and confuse our own assessments, and that we will never be rid of. A good thing, a bad thing, it is what it is.

A short digression about loyalty: I was, for a time, a tutor at a literacy center. And I had to explain to my tutee what the word "loyalty" meant. So I'm talking about it, and she's like, "Oh, so a loyal person is a good person." And I had to say that that wasn't necessarily so, that it depended on what you were loyal to.



By the way, that's an anecdote, and therefore could be classed as gossip. Just to alert you. Actually, while we're here, let's talk about the difficulties of classifying gossip. Is it gossip anytime I say something about somebody else? What if it also involves me and I want to talk about that? What if I'm upset by something somebody did? Is it gossip to pass that along? If I don't use names or other identifying factors is it still gossip? Does it depend on traceability? Can I be said to have gossiped about myself? What if I'm trying to make an abstract point and use somebody as an example? I myself find it hard to take in abstract points without concrete examples.

Does it depend on whether it's a good story or not?

So one of the downsides of gossip is that it's not socially well-regarded. (I am reminded of a David Sedaris essay where he talks about his daydreams and how in one of them he's famously discrete.) But obviously there's more to it than that.

Because, as mentioned above, it has this necessary quality of disrupting other people's lives. Or not so much disrupting, as taking bits and pieces of those lives out and looking at them somewhat out of context. And sometimes that's just bad because it causes trouble, causes fights and hurt feelings. But it might also be bad because it has this way of blithely ignoring the whole person, of simplifying that person down to a collection of tics and anecdotes. It makes them less real.

Also gossip is not always just a utopic free exchange of information. Sometimes, when I've said something about somebody to somebody else, I realize there was a certain kind of posturing involved: look how much I know, look how connected I am. That's more than a little bit creepy. Or it can be a way of getting close to the person you're gossiping with. Which is also creepy.



On the other hand, I love it. I love the sense of all of us, going about our lives, getting ourselves into stupid situations with our tics and our neuroses and our dancing on tables. It makes it less lonely, this human existence. I kind of wish I were more discrete; I kind of wish other people were less so.

Sometimes I Run Out Of Quarters While Doing The Wash

Do we really have to do things the right way?

The money is starting to run out/slow down to a trickle here in Los Angeles, even with the cigarette savings, and the job hunt is heating up. The preseason is over, you could say.

Today I applied to two jobs. I was almost done with the second application, when I realized that to upload some relevant documents I would need first to reduce those documents from hard copy to something a little more malleable. I could have figured that out with a couple moments hard thought before I started the process. But instead I left my computer screen sitting there and went tearing through the streets of L.A. in search of a place to get them pdfed. And then I got lunch and then I came back and then I had been timed out of my application session and then I tried to log back in and it didn't recognize the password that it sent me in my email when I hit the "Forgot Password" button and it thought I answered the secret question wrong, which would mean that I don't know my grandmother's first name.

So I ate my lunch and started the whole process again. And in fact, magically, it had saved all my earlier-entered information, so I didn't have to tell them again whether I had received a commendation for working well with others in any of my previous jobs. And then I tried to upload the documents and then it told me the documents were too big and then I split them in half and then they were the wrong format and so on and so forth.

The whole thing took me a good hour and a half. And the whole time hovering in the back of my mind was that secret guilty knowledge that if I had done things right, if I had prepped my documents and read the instructions it all would have gone better and faster and smoother and I would right now be running through the fields instead of having a pounding headache to go with my sense of disaster narrowly averted.

This is something I run up against a fair amount. Sometimes I do things, but I just do them, I don't think them through properly. Now that suggests that I should try not to hold it against other people when they don't go along with my half-assed attempts to alter the situation. But assuming I don't blame others, and assuming I do what's needed to fix things, is it bad to behave in that flailing way?

I'm voting no, myself.

Me And My Neurotic Desires

This post of Noko Marie's made me think about it. Also this discussion.

There are certain categories of things I want, or want to avoid, that I can't really explain or justify. One time I took this weekend trip on a whim and I wanted to stay in this one hotel that was really far away from everything I wanted to see and it was impossible to get to and I found myself walking on one of those bridges across a freeway in the pouring rain and when I got to the hotel room I had broken out in welts. (Anybody want to see the poison oak picture again?) From the rain and the cold and probably a little bit the stress. And then they told me there were no smoking rooms and the bathtub was broken and I felt like a moron.

Now that I'm a non-smoker the lack of smoking rooms wouldn't be an issue, of course.

But anyway, I think about that. Because I couldn't come up with any real basis for wanting to stay at that particular hotel. Or for not checking in advance whether they had smoking rooms. Or for not finding a better way to get there that wouldn't involve freeway overpasses.

I wanted to stay there though. That was what I wanted it, and once I wanted it I wanted to see my desire, however petty and inexplicable, satisfied.

I have a friend who tells me sometimes that I shouldn't give in to my desire to avoid driving -- he says that the only way to deal with neurotic desires is to fight them. And I do have this very vivid mental image of myself giving way to all my counter-productive impulses and becoming a complete wreck. Like how my other friend was telling me that if you cut a one square foot hole in the top of a barn it would be completely destroyed by nature within a year. That's what I imagine happening.

All I can say it hasn't happened yet. And that I'm not sure how many of my desires, however, plausible seeming, would stand up to some kind of neurotic vs. non analysis, if you really started thinking about it. Especially because defining a desire as neurotic seems to imply that it's less real than other desires, that it doesn't count as much.

I'm operating on the assumption that all desires are not created equal here -- after all, I'm trying not to smoke. But I don't have a goddamn clue exactly how the calculus of which wants to pursue should be conducted or even whether it really exists.

Borders/Barnes & Noble

This is a post about how I love Borders and Barnes & Noble.

I have not always been comfortable with that love. I have friends who feel very strongly about the importance of the independent bookstore. They command the facts much better than I do. I know nothing about economics or community-building or the dangers of massive media control. Let us assume, for purposes of this post, that big chain bookstores will destroy the world. I still love them.

I grew up in an era where B. Dalton and Waldenbooks were kings of the mall. I suspect that, undying distinguisher between things that I am, I had a favorite. Probably B. Dalton. The name seems vaguely sunnier; I remember the lettering as orange. These things make a difference.

It doesn't matter. They both sucked. They were small and cramped and had almost nothing that you would actually want to read. And they wouldn't let you read the books there.

There were also independent bookstores. I was lucky enough to grow up next to a pretty good independent bookstore. But I am here to remind you all that there were a lot of really and truly shitty independent bookstores out there. Bookstores where they hated to see you even open the books, bookstores which stocked the complete works of Robertson Davies and pretty much nothing else, bookstores which deeply resented the presence of children. You know the bookstores I'm talking about; it's all coming back to you now.

Those bookstores are no good for me. I never go to a bookstore knowing what I want to read. I go to a bookstore in a certain mood and I look for something that will satisfy my mood. More often a blend of books that holds the promise of satisfying my mood. A cocktail of books. This can take me several hours, especially since I often use the time to catch up on the endings of the major works of recently published modern fiction.

All this can, sort of, be accomplished at the library. But the library is usually not open until midnight. Also, and this is perhaps a little pathetic, sometimes you want the books to be fresh and new. Because in a dingy and beat-up world new books make my heart a little lighter.

There are, in fact, some independent bookstores that are as good or better for these purposes than the relevant chains. Elliot Bay Book Co. in Seattle, Cody's in Berkeley, Book Soup in West Hollywood, etc. Sometimes, for that matter, you want an independent bookstore: for particular books, for particular kinds of books, for your mood. Sometimes you want that cutting-edge or cheerfully communal or vaguely sneering feeling. Sometimes you want the fun Russian roulette effect of the used bookstore, where you have no idea what's in stock. When I was in New York I lived next to the Last Word bookstore and went there every day on my way home from class. (This may suggest that my impassioned defense of Borders has more to do with its proximity to my apartment than anything else.)

A quick note about the Last Word: not only a prince among used bookstores but home to an exceptionally beautiful employee. He would ask me for a cigarette and I would feel honored, honestly. One day I was in there and he was talking to a friend/customer about his recent breakup and he said, "Yeah, it wasn't going to work out. She wanted to start a family and I wanted to start a revolution."

I really love my local Borders. It makes me happy that it's there, that it's open so late, that it has such an infinite number of books and so many little tables marked "Great Reads" and "Paperback Classics."

A friend pointed out that he actually makes a distinction between Borders and B&N; I can no longer remember which he preferred. I'm all for Borders, for the same reasons I think I preferred B. Dalton so long ago.

This post was inspired by this post by Mr. Secretary.

K.I.T.

If I have met you and you have made an impression on me, and you possess a relatively distinctive name and some internet presence (who doesn't, these days?) I have probably looked you up on Google. Not once, several times.

This is something the people I know and like do as a matter of course. Last night a friend said something about what if Google started telling people who had searched for them and then we both said something about how we would be screwed, unable to hold up our heads for the embarrassment of it all.

(There is a historical precedent for this. Friendster, the pioneering social networking site, switched, without notification, to allowing people to see who had viewed their profile. I spent the first fifteen minutes after I found out trying to remember who the hell I had looked at recently. Then, of course, I dove for the computer to see who had looked me up.)

This is probably something that everyone does; it's why social networking sites exist, after all.

So why am I so embarrassed by it?

(When I looked to see who had been viewing my profile on Friendster I found, strangely enough, that I assumed of other people what I knew to be (mostly) true about myself -- that they were bored and mildly curious to see what I had been up to. This surprised me; I had expected to assume that they were totally obsessed with me.)

I do take it to extremes. A friend once hinted that he might have a blog and armed with no more than what I knew about him, which was not that much, and that fact, I went hunting for that blog. Four hours later I found it.

Also, a little embarrassing is that a lot of the time, having found someone, I make contact. I couldn't exactly tell you why.

But even when I just do a quick two-minute Google search, no varying the terms, no pages viewed past two or three, no contact to be made, still I feel odd about it. Odd to be carrying around this desire to know exactly what happened to that guy in college that I never liked because he thought he was cooler than anyone. Also odd given the people I am in touch with, the people I like and fail -- why spend time on people I didn't know that well even when I knew them?

I Am A Klutz

Last night I was walking idly around my apartment chatting on the phone and I looked down and noticed that my toe was bleeding. Kind of a lot.

I have no idea how that happened.

It did not startle me, particularly, because I am not a graceful person and am used to banging into things. When I was a child I would come back from every excursion dirtier than the children around me. Today there are relatively few occasions for getting covered in dirt, but I pick up stray bruises. I bump my head on things. I bang my elbow against walls. I trip, a little bit, walking down the street.

I am self-conscious about it. The ability to move smoothly through space seems like a desirable human attribute.
On the other hand, if it really mattered to me I could probably fix it. Be one of those people who takes up fencing or ballet late in life. Only some of my clumsiness is innate. Enough to keep me out of contention in competitive sporting events, but probably not enough to make me fall on my face.

The rest is lack of attention. I don't think about those things. I think about things that I'm good at, like smoking or sleeping. And lost in that haze, I knock over my coffee cup, and curse.


In some ways I wish it weren't fixable, that I could say, "well, I'm left-handed," or "I lacked proper training as a child." There seems something strange about deciding that I admire gracefulness in other people, think it a good thing in the abstract, but refuse, in the particular, to take the steps needed for me to obtain it.

Some Preliminary Thoughts On Smugness

Smugness, for whatever reason, is a topic that takes up a lot of my mental energy. (Probably the fact that I possess a friend who continuously urges increased smugness upon me has something to do with it. Not everything.)

Let's not start with that. Let's start with the reasons why, despite the fact that I'm jobless, and not pursuing any particularly arduous macrame projects, I haven't posted in a while.

One: I spent a night this week in Bakersfield, pretending, with one of my favorite people, to be a nineteen year old girl. This involved a lot of dancing around, a lot of willful irritating or provoking of the people around us, a reasonable amount of drinking.

Two: I have poison oak on my arms, and scattered across my stomach. It bubbles, and looks more or less like the bubonic plague to my untrained eye. It itches, and saps my will to live, although I have learned to love hydrocortisone cream.

Three: Quitting smoking. A process, not an accomplishment.

I mention these things not because they are interesting in themselves, but because, to me, they illustrate that weird difficulty in pinpointing what I mean by "smug". My dictionary just defines smug as "highly self-satisfied" -- surprisingly, the third definition for smug (the first is "trim or smart in dress").

And I think of smugness as a self-satisfaction in one's good qualities, real or imagined. People are smug over their prowess in wakeboarding or politics. I hate real-life nineteen year old girls who dance around because they are smug in their cuteness, and I felt in Bakersfield that other people were fully justified in hating our smugness, our "we will dance around now if we want to attitude." (Conceding that hatred is appropriate, by the way, is a far cry from saying that I think it's bad. I think nineteen year old girls, esp. real ones, should dance around. They should just be prepared for the fact that they will piss off those people around them who aren't thinking about taking them home.)

But you don't have to be self-satisfied about your good qualities. You can be self-satisfied about your bad ones. Poison oak sucks. I don't recommend it. It itches and itches and itches and just yesterday a new batch of sores bubbled up, leading me to worry that I would never be done with this and/or that poison oak oil was lurking somewhere on my pillow. That said, I dealt with a "why haven't you called me back phone call" yesterday by referring to my poison oak, and the inestimable pain associated with it. There's a certain satisfaction in direct and obvious weakness, in knowing that you can't possibly meet certain expectations placed on normal people out there in the world -- you are, for whatever smug and inward reasons, different and worse. (Quitting smoking also falls under this header of my preliminary thoughts on smugness. When I put it down I thought I might have something else interesting to say about it. I didn't.)

George Saunders, who is one of those vaguely familiar names that I couldn't have actually identified, has an article in GQ this month. I found the article, while fun to read and well-written and all that, fairly annoying. It's about the deleterious effect of the media on our discourse. Most of the reasons why I found it annoying aren't relevant.


This is. In the course of this article he writes:

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know . . . .

He goes on to say that good story-telling causes us to imagine other people as being, essentially, like us, while bad story-telling causes us to imagine other people as "essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible."

This strikes me as a prime example of smugness out of anti-smugness. It is good, he says, to be humble. It is good to act slowly. It is good, not to know.

Maybe. I, personally, think of myself as "unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible" -- that might be my problem.