random act of bravery

Doesn't listening to Fiona Apple make you want to stop eating altogether and drop 20 loathsome pounds?

Just me?

Fiona actually starts to cry at the end of that video below. Did you notice? It's too much for her, somehow. Like she can barely choke out the words. Even though she knows what's coming.

It's the sentiment, right? That's why I'm not supposed to like her. Maybe it's indulgent. It's the "deep feminine" - Marie Howe spoke of it. I have only a handful of female artists on my iPod. I never got the Tori or the Ani. Fiona did something for me though, back when. She was more overtly sexual, which I dug when I was trying to figure out how that all worked.  She couched her anger in her sexuality, which I'm realizing is dangerous even as I type it. I'd like to say it was powerful, but it's not - just look at her. She can barely keep her head up. You know she goes home and sips milk and whiskey through a straw.

I've been having this ongoing argument with a friend over why I have such issues with humour. I don't have those same issues with sentiment. Obviously. Have you read this blog? Feeling, feeling, feeling. I deal in feelings. I read other blogs and think, damn, I should be funnier. I should be lighter. I should take myself less seriously (that's definitely true). It's not that I don't find things funny. I do! I probably think you're very funny. But it's that you have to work at it - really work at it. I am not okay watching people try and fail. This doesn't happen with sentiment. It's easy just to peel it back and lay it bare. It might not be pretty, and it is only rarely interesting, but it's what you're working with. Humour isn't innate - is it? Our conception of what is funny changes radically from culture to culture, decade to decade. What's innate is an ability to read people, to think on your feet, to adapt, to contort. But it's work - being funny.

Here is something you should know about me: I will go to the empty counter in the food court because I cannot bear to see someone giving something of themselves and no one else picking it up. This usually backfires - there's a reason no one is eating the $3.99 lo mein - but to see someone place the full weight of their hope behind an endeavour and to see it rejected is something I simply cannot handle. It's beyond being uncomfortable with failure - which I am - or frightened of vulnerability - yes, that too. It's that you're asking so much. You're asking me to feel something, and to show it. It's ingratiating, even when it is utterly sincere. And humour can never be entirely sincere, not really. It's a substitute for another emotion, or a place holder, or a stop gap so that we don't have to get so quickly to the meat of what matters.

Fiona is getting to it, in her own bird-like, overwrought way. There's so little honesty anymore. I spend so much time thinking about how to say it that by the time I finally do, it only vaguely resembles what I feel. The last time I was capriciously honest it came out like a hiccup, and only then because I'd wedged myself so far up against the wall that there was nowhere else to go. AND IT FELT SO GOOD. For two whole minutes I thought I would always be honest with everyone for the rest of my life. Two whole minutes.

We could all do it together, if you want. In increments. I could tell you that tonight I ate gummy worms for dinner. Last night it was four sunflower butter cookies. I'm listening to Fiona Apple. My hair is wet. And still there's so much I'm not telling you.