love a little more / treat my friends better

i want to be / at least as alive as the vulgar.

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open. 

- Frank O'Hara. 

we'll have to muddle through

The thing that makes this song so heartbreaking, so unendingly melancholy, is that she knows - Judy knows - that she's lying. "Next year all our troubles will be miles away." Even as she's singing it, she understands that it's not true, can't be true. There will always be troubles. But there's something about Christmas that you cling to with this maddening hope, the possibility that bringing a tree into your tiny apartment and stringing it with the lights over which you had to fight with Jerry at the hardware store down the street and delicate glass ornaments you bought with your best friends at the flea market will correct something, or create something, a balm over all that went wrong, is still going wrong. I play this song and sit on the floor beside Fred and cry because I am so happy and sad all at once, just like Judy, alive with the immensity of knowing that no amount of tinsel and handholding and long tables set with the good dishes can solve everything, but also that it can solve - or soothe - something, and that can be enough. It has to be enough.

idols

We're all reading Roxane Gay's blog, yes? That's a thing we're all doing?

this

I’ve always believed that if you’re truly in love with someone, you shouldn’t be able to answer the question “What do you love about him?” with any kind of real satisfaction. The things you’re able to articulate should leave you at least a little hollow. Contestants on “The Bachelor” will usually have to answer this question for his family, and there will be the usual adjectives like “kind” and “generous” and “funny.” It’s not that I think anyone is intentionally lying, but that they’re describing traits that belong to the set of circumstances more than the person. “The Bachelor” is kind because he has no reason not to be; if he becomes disillusioned with you, he can just send you home. He’s generous because he has a production team purchasing intense, expensive experiences for your dates. He’s funny because you’ve both been flown to a charming village in Switzerland and a funny little cow wandered up behind your picnic. 

Andrea Seigel on the life lessons of "The Bachelor," in the Times. This is just the most brilliant, and also a perfect reference for when I need to explain why sometimes, the only thing that will scratch my itch is take-out and "The Bachelorette." 

To you / I am not speaking anymore.

Dire Wolf

Lucie Brock-Broido

Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. To you,
I am not speaking anymore. Whom

Shall I address?

Now that you have gotten these things off
Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing

Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared
By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum

Bucket of storm after
A great unlovely silvered thirst. How

Nice for me. In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over

Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of

Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt

Of red. There

Are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear

Of loss. Of loss:
You get to speak of it, once

You are its intimate, and not before; it would be

"Appropriation." But in the great white rendezvous, where

I was brooding Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.

here. 

the mysteries

"Turn soft and lovely any time you have a chance."

Jenny Holzer, Survival 1983-1985

One of the things I ask myself often is why it is so hard for us to treat each other well. Do you think it's the basic selfishness of the human species? It might be a survival instinct, really - maybe we are all driven by the feeling that we have to care for our own bruised bodies above all else. People say this is subsumed by parenthood, but I'm not sure parenthood isn't just another way in which we create a personal hierarchy of people who matter and people who don't. That's not really what I mean, of course - I'm only really talking about moments. We have in our power the chance to act out of compassion and empathy in every moment. We very rarely choose to exercise that.

I've done terrible things, too.

Almost three years ago now a thing happened to me that made me brittle and cold and angry in a way I'd never been before. It wasn't even that horrible - or it was horrible in its commonness, I guess - but it changed me, and not for the better. It left me with a lot of questions. One of which was whether I could continue to believe in my previously-held understanding that the world was split into good people and bad people. I felt that if you surrounded yourself with good people, you'd be fairly safe, as things go. What I started to learn, am still learning, continue to grapple with, was that, in actual fact, there are just people: people who sometimes do good things and sometimes bad things.

So everyone around me took on an animal-like unpredictability. Everyone, I realized, had within them the capacity for real cruelty, or a little voice saying, Go. Saying, It doesn't matter. Saying, Why bother. I have one, too. I tried to shut up these voices with a lot of insulation. I layered heavy things on top of the soft parts. I've written about this before, but the last few years have been a sort of reverse cocooning, with the lovely and open and hopeful parts of me at the center, and the cynicism and skepticism forming a crystalline case.

I'm not unaware of this, clearly. Or of its tedium, its unoriginality. And its ease. It is so much easier to be hard. Don't you think? I have been considering a change.

And then.

A couple of days ago I received a small package at my office. I opened it to find the most beautiful earrings inside. Earrings that I stared at in confusion before realizing that of course I recognized them - I had blogged about them in October, with the most facetious words about how they might magically appear in my life.

There was no card. I contacted the store; they said the gifter requested to remain anonymous. I emailed my parents, who were the only people I could think of who would do such a thing, but they had no idea what I was talking about. My coworkers and I did a Nancy Drew dance around them, and nothing. I gave up, and put them on, and smiled. They are incredible.

Whoever you are: you did a kind and generous thing. You made me so happy. You reminded me that I used to be a soft and lovely person, capable of warmth. You reminded me how wonderful it feels to love, and to be loved, even in these small ways, kindnesses that can be palmed and held in one hand. If you ever want to reveal yourself, I would be honoured to say all of this to your beautiful face. But in the meantime: thank you.

I am so thankful that you exist.

i hope you find a love / your own designs of love

I believe, I believe that I know you
But we've been a long time,
And now I got to show you, that I - 
Well, I never did believe in time
You know, changin' anybody's mind

Thanks Molly. Thanks Stevie. 

meet fred

I think he's just on the right side of morose. 

haters gonna hate

fragments

My family cannot help comparing South Africa to other places, to the familiar - "These hills look like Ireland, don't they?" "This could almost be Newfoundland!" The damp green, the gentle slope. Why? To own it? I feel compelled to imprint something recognizable onto this landscape. We try to drain the exotic out of it. It makes it easier to look at.

***

All the safari guides with their wide stances, with their moustaches. There's monochrome to all of it. Khakis. They hold their hands behind their backs in locked grips, two fists. Everyone is so solid. Someone once told me, or I read it, or something, about all the women who come to Africa and fall in love with their guides. I can see how this could happen. You bypass or hop-skip that initial period of getting to know a person before trusting them. You have to jump in. They have the big gun. They know the rules. It's an enforced intimacy that is somehow redolent of survival, of getting-by.

***

Animals, in order of awe-factor: #1 Elephants. There is no comparison. #2 Giraffes. The same. We come closer to the prehistoric. Let's put rhinos up there too. There is no reason an animal should look like this. They didn't get the memo. Evolution skipped a beat. Everyone wants to see the lions, but they are really just big, sleepy house cats.

***

There's an emotional there-ness to Africa that I find exhausting. I think about the people I love who love this place. They are not people who live at the surface of things. I could see how these countries, this hard work, could give them a place to put their emotions, when they are not so comfortable carrying them. It eggs them on. I do better where I am the most dramatic thing on the landscape, where I have more room to enact my own daily hysteria. Maybe I am too selfish. The emotional there-ness of a place. Is that a thing?

***

In the jeep I press my feet against the metal like I have brakes beneath me. He pulls us closer to the animals and I stop breathing. No one else is as concerned as I am. My dad tells me that they know what they're doing, can sense when the animals will charge, are incited. Fine. But I know what I'm doing, too - I know that everything is unpredictable. You can't ever predict what anything or anyone will do in any particular moment. This is a truth that no one likes to be reminded of. You can't ever trust anyone. You can't ever trust a 600 pound leopard.

out of africa