Things I’m Thinking About Right Now
LONELY GIRL PHENOMENOLOGY
Yesterday I saw a swagged out couple on the train who looked so good and seemed so in love that it brought me to tears (this is abnormal for me). This event reminded me of the phrase "lonely girl phenomenology," from Chris Kraus in I Love Dick (a book I haven't read entirely, but is definitely on sad obsessive hot girl alt-lit bingo, right next to Annie Ernaux and Clarice Lispector. I think part of the reason why girls like reading it is because the title is shocking and perverse to read on the train.)
At first I assumed this had been a misuse of the word phenomenology (how could what is phenomenological, that is, an objective phenomenon of reality be experienced differently all because of temperament?) but after further investigation I have decided it is actually quite apt. I wrote my thesis on phenomenology, but instead of making me an expert on the subject, it has made me even more bewildered as to what the whole enterprise actually entails. This is a paradox of deep study: the more intimate you become with a subject, the more its total picture seems to obscure itself. While writing the thesis, and even now, I have to google the definition regularly. It's as if I've been looking at something up close for too long and have to take several deliberate steps back to remind myself of the full image.
Loneliness enables a state of yearning which changes the channel of your typical field of perception, as you subconsciously begin to search for whatever it is that you desire. When I am lonely on the westbound train on a Wednesday evening, when the light slants through the windows in that particular geometry around sunset on the Williamsburg Bridge (J or M train, I forget which), I find myself unable to feign interest in my book when diagonally across sits a young couple engaged in what appears to be the early, tentative architecture of romance. Not so early that they are timid, but in the depths of infatuation; that sacred interval of new love, when the body still trembles at unexpected contact but can intuit the touch. They have crossed the desert of initial shyness and arrived at that impossible place where comfort and obsession coexist in perfect balance—before habit dulls the miracle, before the extraordinary becomes merely quotidian. If someone were watching me watching them, they would think I was strange, possibly disturbed. But I keep looking.
Boredom, loneliness's more restless cousin, performs a similar alchemy upon the ordinary. The lint collecting in the corner becomes a tiny landscape that inspires imagination. The rhythmic tapping of a stranger's pencil against a notebook becomes a Morse code, seemingly designed for my deciphering. That peculiar crack in the ceiling plaster: it looks like veins running through an arm—no, rivers through a city—or is this perception merely the dividend of the mind's desperate search for novelty within constraint?
Of course it can’t be true that your temperament changes what objectively exists before you, but rather it changes the channel of your mode of perception so that you are able to see things that you were not able to before. They were still there, but not there for you. You are more open to receiving things differently, to noticing what would have previously passed you by. It is strange to think of all the sensory data our subconscious pre-reflectively sorts into the “unimportant” pile; yet, as soon as our subconscious yearns for something it appears at the forefront of our perceptive horizon.
On a beautiful day, I see more beautiful people. I am not sure if this is because there are actually more beautiful people out, or if my mood is so elevated that I am finally tuned into noticing them.
RANKING LOVE LANGUAGES
My ranking is:
1. Quality time
2. Physical touch
3. Words of Affirmation
4. Acts of Service
5. Gifts
I’ve been polling my friends, mostly curious to ascertain whether or not the ranking changes drastically between men and women. My hypothesis was that men would rank acts of service higher (this did not end up being the case; still, I think of acts of service as a more masculine love language). I also discovered that while barely anyone values receiving gifts, most prefer the act of giving.
BREATH-HOLDING SPELLS
When I have put everything off for too long, and the minor administrative and executive tasks of keeping myself alive have snowballed into an avalanche of neglect, where each unopened envelope becomes a To-Do pinned to the corkboard of my procrastination, and the phone—an insistent instrument of modern persecution—trembles with unanswered messages, a vibrating metronome counting the measures of my exquisite irresponsibility. The landlord's notice, the dentist's reminder, the tax form's deadline—all these vulgar intrusions now form a pantheon of ignored obligations, while I continue to arrange my thoughts into patterns that please no one but myself, savoring the perverse luxury of impending doom. In order to escape this, I have begun performing a practice I call “breath-holding spells.”
Breath-holding spells are a real thing: when a child holds their breath, usually out of anger, frustration, or pain, sometimes to the point of passing out. My version is when I mentally hold my breath so I may silence the insistent voice of my internal protests in order to complete all of the tasks that I don’t want to do. It feels like a great inhale right before I pay off my credit card, respond to the four emails looming over me, then walk with brilliant urgency to the grocery store and buy kale and lentils. When I arrive home, I am able to exhale my mental breath, giving air once more to the gratingly petulant voice of my procrastination until she has ruined my life once more, when I will have to perform another round of asphyxiation. That cycle continues—the domestic suffocation of the will—in this respiratory drama which plays out not in the lungs, but in the mental theater of obligation where I am both the reluctant hero and sinister villain in my own monotonous epic of “completing tasks.”
WOOL/CASHMERE BLEND
You can’t have a bad day while wearing wool/cashmere blend, or just cashmere. You can, conversely, have a bad day while wearing just wool.
“THE BOYFRIEND-SHAPED HOLE IN MY LIFE”
I've noticed a curious pattern among single women approaching the age of 30. They adopt a "locked in" approach to dating—this often entails downloading Hinge and setting a goal to go on one, even two dates a week, interviewing a stream of eligible specimens until they find one willing and able enough to occupy the boyfriend-shaped hole in their lives.
The nature of this hole is peculiar, or perhaps it's the geometry of the absence itself that intrigues me. The hole itself changes in scale but never in shape; it is largest during late nights and Sundays, when its emptiness becomes something more like an ever-expanding vacuum, while other times it is more like a pea-sized hole in a moth-eaten sweater, just large enough to stick your thumb through.
The woman with a boyfriend-shaped hole in her life has succumbed to a reification where the idea of “boyfriend” has taken precedence over its reality. A boyfriend, after all, is not a concept—it's a man. She has constructed a mental shrine to an abstraction, a concept made up of qualities that cannot exist independently of a human form. The boyfriend-shaped hole awaits not an individual with his own character, habits, and contradictions, but rather a collection of idealized attributes borrowed from an array of sources, all stuck together in some Frankensteinien patchwork to create a faceless figure who does not exist in any plane of reality (the woman with a boyfriend-shaped hole in her life is the kind of person who gets the ick when she sees a man do something that reminds her that he is distinctly human).
Over voice memos, I was idea-freestyling to my friend about how getting a boyfriend should feel like you are either creating or reinventing its very concept each time. "Boyfriend" is a universal term we give to a specific person with whom you are so enraptured that you must rearrange the architecture of your life so that it can include them in a significant way. When we speak of "making room" for someone, we are acknowledging a renovation in the structure of our routine—altering the architecture of our life to accommodate another consciousness.
This same way of thinking is also what spawns the sort of woman who thinks of a boyfriend as a theoretical concept in the negative sense—someone who takes up her time, or imposes himself in her space. It is dreadfully obvious when a woman has become so jaded from her past experience that the word “boyfriend” becomes a slur—a scheming charlatan who tricks you into handing over your time, attention, and affection.
For the woman who regards the word “boyfriend” as a slur, the idea of accommodating the empty shape that holds the concept of a “man” is unappealing and arduous. Such people have managed to organize their lives in such a way that there is no boyfriend-shaped hole at all. And in fact, if they were to encounter a specimen who assumed the satisfactory shape of what commonly resembles a boyfriend, they too, would have to reshuffle the structural hierarchy of their lives in order to accommodate him. But to the woman who never had a boyfriend-shaped hole, such an affair is overwhelming, a shock to the ordinary system of one’s routine strong enough to discourage her from incorporating a new presence into that delicate architecture of her life.
This is why the boyfriend-shaped hole is based on a dangerous fiction—it presupposes that there exists within us a pre-formed vacancy that awaits only the right applicant. In actuality, the advent of getting a boyfriend works in reverse: it is not that we discover someone who fits a requirement, but rather that we encounter a person so compelling that we spontaneously create space where previously none existed, we “make room in our calendars” where we had previously pencilled in time for ourselves. The relationship becomes not the filling of an absence but the revelation of an unexpected discovery—not a void satisfied but a horizon expanded.
PERFECT CAVA BOWL
Half lentils, half spinach, tzatziki, feta (the feta DIP not the actual feta cheese), chicken, broccoli, tomatoes & cucumber, Persian cucumber, corn, olives, cabbage, tahini herb dressing.
WEARING A HAT
I got my first hat ever last Wednesday at a bowling event and I have been wearing it (I wore it yesterday and I wore it today. Maybe tomorrow I will wear it again). I’ve been asking my friends if they notice anything different about me (they don’t). What’s different about me is that I’m wearing a hat.
WOMEN LIKE TO BE WATCHED WHILE DOING A TASK
While watching Angie clean her apartment, I noted that I could hardly imagine any of the men in our lives getting scaries at the thought of cleaning the kitchen. I’m not sure if they experience overwhelm at the daunting prospect of having to open the Amazon box, get out the paper towel, reorganize the cupboard to make space for the paper towel, then being faced with the even more overwhelming task of having to take the empty cardboard box out to the recycling, which means having to take the rest of your recycling, which means having to sort the recycling. One task easily becomes an entire endeavour, that stretches itself out into something far beyond the initial chore.
I took a cardboard box out to my recycling yesterday (only one, I left the others because this one in particular scared me. An anonymous person sent me a mysterious package that I did not order, full of shoulder pads from the 80s and I was scared that it was going to somehow kill me). I went outside, broke down the box and stuffed it into the bin, thinking to myself that I deserved an audience of spectators applauding me.
I changed the lightbulb in my bedroom that had been burnt out for three weeks and texted my friends in search of praise. The process of changing a lightbulb—seemingly easy—was daunting because I had to walk to the hardware store, find out what kind of lightbulb was best (warm? And I know nothing about watts), walk home, go to the basement (scary), locate a ladder, carry the ladder up the stairs (difficult), figure out how to unscrew the light fixture, return the ladder, then vacuum the debris of the whole affair off the bedroom floor. It somehow felt easier to sit in the dark for three weeks—I am rarely home, and I have a lamp.
For some reason, the presence of another person makes the process of completing tasks rather effortless and calm. To chat during a task relieves your mind of its tendency to spiral into itself. You’re able to physically operate on a mechanical level while your brain is distracted by mindless chatter.
PATCHES OF WHITE HAIR IN TARKOVSKY CHARACTERS
I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean but I’ve been thinking about it.
DISTANCE MUSIC
My neighbour just started playing the tuba in a sad, solemn way. I like it because it sounds far away and is very low and slow. I also like that he’s trying new things. A consequence of the Age of Airpod is that we more rarely experience sound at a distance. If we want to experience music anywhere other than directly into our ear or in the room with us, we have to artificially recreate it — the genre of Youtube video “[song] playing in another room with [ambient noise].”
I enjoy the relinquishing of control we are subjected to when other people play music—it requires a practice of mindfulness; an acknowledgement that we can’t control everything all the time. It is a test of patience when they play a song I don’t like at the coffee shop.
A family of seven lives above me, who played the song “Linda Muchachita” by Los Gallitos De Chibuleo (I Shazamed it) for two and a half hours at 8 am on a Saturday. After the first hour, I was shocked that anyone could play anything for this long, let alone a song so grating (I just sourced the video to link here, and am once more aghast at how annoying it is). After an hour and a half of practicing mindful patience, observing the helpless reality of existing in an intersubjective world, I caved and started playing Appalachian folk tunes in my headphones at a low volume, to simulate Distance Music while masking the uncomfortable truth of my actual circumstance. This is something of an embodiment of our modern condition: we construct elaborate defenses against the intrusions of others' existence through self-selected illusions, instead of confronting our lack of control over this shared reality—a lack that becomes particularly evident when that reality includes an interminable repetition of Linda Muchachita.