We built this city on rock and roll.

Great news. 

We now have an upstairs neighbour that plays the drums.

And we can clearly hear him from our living room. 

It’s never for very long, but it’s just enough to make me want to move.

Autoimmune.

Having a mysterious autoimmune disorder is kind of like having a choose-your-own-adventure book, except that I don’t get to choose.

I just get to kind of HAVE the adventure. Yippee. 

Going to Mars.

My friends have recently started saying things like they think that they want to try being a mother in their lifetimes.

When my friends say things like this to me, I get so confused.

It’s like somebody told me that they think that they want to try being God in their lifetime.

You can’t just “try being God.” That’s nice, sweetie, but that position is filled. Pick something else.

I have a mother. She’s great, and she already exists. Must there be another one? I’m just not sure that I see a need.

I think some of my bewilderment is because I didn’t grow up wanting to get married and have children — I grew up wanting to be a writer. And an artist. But primarily, a writer. I thought that when people grew up, they went to college and then went to graduate school. That’s what, so I heard, adults did. Then, maybe you fell in love — if you were lucky. But that was the end of the line for that train.

My parents didn’t really mention babies, and the thought of babies didn’t occur to me. Even the books I read as a little girl never really mentioned actually having children — I read books about girls who wanted to be writers, or who went through wardrobes into faraway lands and had adventures, or who were in fairytales and fell in love and sometimes got married and lived “happily ever after.” Looking back, of course, I think that having children was probably implied somewhere in the “happily ever after,” but it never really occurred to me to think about things in that way.

It’s never occurred to me to want to be a mother. And, now — the thought that I could and perhaps should want to be a mother feels strange. It’s like somebody said to me, “All of your friends are going to Mars. Would you like to go to Mars?”

“PS. — You should know that you only have the next handful or so of years to decide about Mars. After that, your Mars options start to dwindle. And you might really want to consider this Mars opportunity. Most people go to Mars in their lifetimes. It’s a significant part of the human experience. It’s not to be missed.”

Would you go to Mars?

Outraging My True Nature

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

— George Orwell, Why I Write

Stylistic Perfectionism

I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

George Orwell, Why I Write

Selling is like dating.

I’m feeling a little bit jaded with selling, and I imagine that this is how my clients feel about dating.

Dating feels discouraging, and the ‘solution,’ if you will, is just adaptation: trying new things, learning new information, experimenting and trying to keep your ego out of it as much as possible.

BUT. Especially if we make it about our egos, we are going to want to give up, when what we need to do is practice resilience. We are going to look at all of the things that we’ve tried and convince ourselves that our having tried many things means that we’ve tried “everything,” and, if we aren’t people who are well-practiced in the art of resilience, we may come up with a more palatable explanation for our egos.

These explanations tend to go: ‘This is probably my sign that this isn’t the right time for me to find love,’ or, my favourite ego-supplicant, ‘Love just must not be meant for me.’

These explanations serve as little placeholders that keep our egos quiet, and obscure more nagging, truthful explanations, like: ‘I’m feeling exhausted, but I know that a solution has to exist out there because I see people in relationships all of the time. And it isn’t reasonably possible that love was meant for so many other people and not for me.’

Alternatively, I also see us blaming externalities – ‘dating apps,’ ‘men,’ ‘women,’ ‘our culture’ (whatever that means!) and ‘the media’ – instead of embracing the bitter-but-honest philosophy that if we want something, the work of figuring out how to get it lies with us, even if (when!) that work feels difficult. And when the cards are stacked against us, due to those pesky realities ‘dating apps,’ ‘men,’ ‘women,’ or ‘the media,” their frustrating configurations make getting what we want more difficult, certainly, but they don’t make it impossible.

Moreover, if ‘other people’ are out there getting what it is that we want every day – it must be possible for us! Like Thomas Edison, we may have found 10,000 ways NOT to invent a lightbulb, but the lightbulb can nevertheless be invented.

But – sometimes it’s true that believing that love ‘just isn’t possible for us’ lets us off the hook from needing to try. Sometimes it’s easier to throw up our hands in frustration, or to lament that “love isn’t meant for us” than to dust ourselves off and have a good cry before getting back on our feet and finding a solution to our setback.

Spring is coming. And spring feels like hope.

Walter Lippmann on Friendship

I’m reading Walter Lippmann again for another paper, and I forgot how much I LOVE his writing. I just found this on ‘stereotypes,’ and couldn’t help but think of it in the context of the experience of meeting people–and dating–as a 20-something:

“In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is no shortcut through, and no substitute for, an individualized

understanding. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and

women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than

with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we

might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association has final dignity in which each does not take the other as an end in himself. There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.”

(Public Opinion, 88)

To contextualize–he isn’t against stereotypes. This example was the exception–not the rule–as to when he thinks stereotypes aren’t applied.

“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.” — René Char

Art of Fiction: 143

INTERVIEWER

But you taught only through your twenties, and have refused countless invitations to return to university teaching. Is this because you came to feel that being an academic and being a creative writer are incompatible?

SONTAG

Yes. Worse than incompatible. I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.

INTERVIEWER

Do you mind being called an intellectual?

SONTAG

Well, one never likes to be called anything. And the word makes more sense to me as an adjective than as a noun, though, even so, I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity—especially if one is a woman. Which makes me even more committed to my polemics against the ruling anti-intellectual clichés—heart versus head, feeling versus intellect, and so forth.