I was a voracious reader when I was a kid, and I think this was because the internet didn’t really consume my life the way it does now. When I was in elementary school in the late 90’s, the internet existed solely in the sun room of our row house in Allentown, PA. It was one sturdy desktop computer with a dial-up connection. Now I am online almost 10-12 hours a day, and it feels like there is never enough time for reading anymore.
Mine is a family of readers. We never had enough room for all of the books in our house. When we moved in 2001, a third of the boxes we packed consisted solely of books. My mother was always reading memoirs, my father was always reading biographies about US presidents. Once a week my mother would take my sister and I to the Allentown Public Library and we would spend hours there, twirling around on the orange bubble chairs and picking through YA fiction. Judy Blume, Louis Sachar, Caroline B. Cooney: if it was weird or sad or about “being stuck in this town,” I wanted to read it.
I also had a very bizarre obsession with Holocaust historical fiction. When I go home to Pennsylvania I love to go through my old bookshelves, but it’s creepy how many of the books there are related to the Holocaust. There’s Number the Stars, of course, but there’s also When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (HUH?), Escape from Warsaw and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Apparently morbidity strikes young. It is easy to blame this on my father’s penchant for reading me Solzhenitsyn and The Atlantic as bedtime stories instead of Dr. Seuss, but I think that excuse is kind of a cop out. The first R-rated movie I ever saw was Schindler’s List. I guess it’s hard to say which came first: my parents’ willingness to cede violent media to me (but nothing sexual, of course!), or my macabre fascination with it.
Naturally prone to the voyeuristic as a child, one of my favorite movies was Harriet the Spy, a film that seemed to both validate and encourage my incessant eavesdropping. Crouched in my bed with a marble notebook, I’d spy on the neighbor who lived across the way and scribble down every inane thing she did. It seemed like a very important task for an 8-year-old to undertake; I was now responsible for documenting my neighbor’s life. Patti was in her mid-30s with white-blond hair and a 2-door red Chevy. I envied the breezy way she carried herself; at times she even seemed to float. At night sometimes I watched as she changed into her pajamas. As an 8-year-old writer, it seemed like everything in the world was mine for the taking, for the describing. In short, if I could observe it, it was mine to write about.
This is a dangerous thought to plant into an 8-year-old’s head, and Michelle Trachtenberg isn’t wholly to blame. I’ve been eavesdropping on strangers for as long as I can remember. To be honest, I do it even more now than I did as a kid. Sometimes I’ll be tied up in conversation with people and my gaze will drift to their forehead. If I’ve done this to you, I apologize, I’m just trying to overhear the woman sobbing two rows over. Why is she so sad, and in what way can her pain be useful to me? I guess it’s not that sociopathic, but being a person who turns my perception of other people’s experiences into pageviews can sometimes feel that way.
When I was 20 years old I was young enough to believe that it was still possible to invent new ways to love, ways which no one else in history had conceived of before. Lying in bed with my Macbook at night, “long distance” seemed like a concept that had lost its definitional punch. What was distance but a physical longing, one that we could now abate by a simple click of the keyboard? When I was 20 I had more faith in Skype than I did in neck kisses.
In the beginning long distance was easy: our veins lay out quietly like cables beneath the sea, transcontinental passages for messages to strike through. I woke up as he was coming home from work, our internal clocks ticking in mismatched rhythms, and we were happy every day. We sang Joy Division together on the telephone. “My mother thinks that you are pretty, too pretty for me,” he said, “and that this will surely end badly.” But he had the softest hands!
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Past Me: Still crackberryin’
FutureMe is a website for narcissists who know that in the future they’ll need some comfort from the past. I am unfailingly one of these people. The site allows you to write an e-mail to your future self, and they’ll send it to you on the date that you specify.
I apparently wrote an e-mail to myself on May 13, 2009 (the end of my junior year at NYU), and just received it today. It read:
Dear FutureMe,
I’ll be graduating in May 2010, so the nostalgia and uneasiness I feel now while sending this e-mail (in May 2009) will be far more warranted when I receive it. I know you are scared, FutureMe. I know the world is a weird, terrifying, sad place, but you should hold dear to you the prevailing good of all things. By May 2010 you will have hopefully made it through NYU happily and successfully with an impressive GPA. You will have hopefully made and kept the dearest of friends. You will have hopefully accomplished much as a journalist and new media diehard, braving your way into a well-paid and respected career, despite the industry’s financial woes. You will hopefully be in love with someone who treats you well and loves you back. Your family will hopefully remain complete, loving and proud of you. You will have hopefully curtailed the symptoms of OCD that required you write all these things in this message.
Always remember that, though sometimes you are so permeable that you allow too easily the negative thoughts of others to force you to think otherwise, you are and always will be beautiful, intelligent and kind. You are a good person at your core, FutureMe, and I hope that you will remain that way long after you receive this e-mail.
Love,
Present Me
It’s really funny how Past Me talks to Future Me like Future Me needs some philosophical, world-ending advice. Future Me is now Present Me, and I had to laugh when I read this e-mail. Why didn’t I just write something like, “It’ll be okay, lady” and press Send? Am I really that self-serious? (The answer is yes. Always yes.)
Last night I dreamed that the earth shook. I also dreamed that a random New York taxi driver threw a huge bag of weed at me, but that part makes far less sense.
I was in an apartment in San Francisco with bright white ornamental doorframes, and when I felt the earth begin to shake I grabbed my sister from the bed she was sleeping in and made us both stand clutching the doorframe until it stopped. Afterwards I was afraid I had imagined the whole thing, so I Googled “San Francisco earthquake” on my Blackberry, and thankfully the US Geological Survey confirmed that I had not hallucinated the event. The earthquake was a magnitude 4.
It’s unsurprising that I doubted the legitimacy of the quake even in my dream, since I have a pretty irrationally intense fear of them. When my ex and I were planning our move out to SF, I made him fill out an “Earthquake Preparedness Worksheet” with me so that we could insulate his apartment from earthquake damage. We also planned to meet at the Southeast entrance of the 24th St. Mission BART station in the event of a natural disaster. I still wonder sometimes if, when the Big One hits, either of us will show up now that we no longer love each other.
This is the story of me ruining someone’s life, but then finding out years later that that’s not actually what happened.
In The Things They Carry, Tim O’Brien writes extensively on the limitations of memory, how malleable the nostalgic narrative arc can be. Two people’s experiences of the same event are rarely the same, and years later, the way they remember them may render that same event completely unrecognizable. I was reminded of these sentiments last weekend when I called up an old friend I’d wronged and asked him to tell me in detail all of the awful things I had done to him.
It’s a long story that would read too much like a Gossip Girl script, but in short, Alex was one player in a series of relationship mistakes I made over eighteen months of my college life. The mistakes began with Daniel, my sophomore year boyfriend, and ended with Alex and the third figure in this story—Zach—driving his car into a wall at 50 miles an hour with Alex in the passenger’s seat. The three men were friends, and through what I can now only chalk up to something akin to female witchcraft, I managed to make those eighteen months as painful and messy and upsetting as I could for all four of us. I have a cruelty inside me that mostly lays dormant, and is on the whole a subconscious part of my personality, but at times it rises to the surface and wreaks havoc in ways I can’t comprehend until months afterward. In this instance I had fallen in love and gotten my heart broken by Daniel, then strung along his best friends, Zach and Alex, to a point where we were all literally going insane. That is, at least, how I perceived the narrative of those eighteen months in my own mind.
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On my way home from work this afternoon I was crossing 13th street at 2nd avenue and I looked up to see a woman with her hair tightly pulled back coming towards me from the opposite corner. As she approached, I realized she was crossing herself, forehead, heart, left shoulder, right shoulder, and then she kissed her fingertips and flicked them into the wind towards 1st avenue. I thought it was strange, and considered that she might have OCD, or that she was in a state of intense emotional turmoil and was praying en route to wherever that turmoil was forcing her. But then I looked at the spot where she’d sent that kiss, and there a half-block down was a parked Beth Israel ambulance with its lights flashing white and red.
I’m not a religious person and the last time I crossed myself I was 14 years old, but suddenly I was seized with the undeniable urge to hug her. I wanted to hug her because I knew that she was sending whatever she personally considered to be good faith in the direction of a stranger who was ailing. She didn’t know who was in the ambulance–if anyone even was in the ambulance–but that didn’t matter to her. The facts were irrelevant because sending that kind of goodness is never a bad thing, even if there is no one to receive it on the other end.
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If scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, then hearing must come in at a dangerously close second. The ailing logician in me is constantly inventing new ways to measure time, and one of my tried and true methods is through music. Once my roommate remarked how I listened to the same exact Taylor Swift album every single morning. At first I was embarrassed, but eventually I had to admit that he was totally right. In the same OCD way I develop routines and throw three-year-old-like temper tantrums when daily life strays from them, I seem to always have a soundtrack lined up to coincide with those routines. The weeks leading up to and following losing my virginity in high school it was the same song over and over on repeat– “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens, which is an interesting choice considering that song is about someone dying from cancer (the heart likes what it likes!). In Paris I listened to nothing but the Mountain Goats and Yelle. This semester it has been a heavy rotation of Metric/Emily Haines, Cat Power and Liz Pappademas, and last semester it was Taylor Swift, Ingrid Michaelson and Hurts to Purr (I am apparently a sucker for badass ladies with sultry voices).
I tend to mark each important time period in my life by the band that I was listening to then, and there rises an overwhelming desire in me to do this now that I am officially an NYU graduate (though I’ll get to that in more earnest terms in a later post, natch). When I think about my tenure at NYU, four specific songs come to mind that illustrate my experiences here–for better or (mostly) for worse. If we’re friends IRL, you’ll probably find yourself nodding in agreement. I mean, song number 1 is:
“Heartbeats,” by The Knife
Techno power anthem of freshman year, the badass beat was the perfect soundtrack to the pounding of candy-flavored vodka shots we so favored. They played this over and over again at Ruff Club. Yes, I used to go to Ruff Club.