Becca Jane Approximately
When your mother sends back your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you're tired of yourself and all your creations
Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?
Me Eat Food
Fiber 1 w banana
Lunchable
Lean Cuisine
1/4 chicken breast
Chicken sandwich
Piece of cake
Biscotti
10 saltines and cream cheese
Life Sentence
Last night I was watching Anthony Bourdain in Spain with a table full of people enjoying a lovely meal, talking about how this was one of the highest pleasures in life, and I started crying. I don’t cry very much these days. At a certain point I became so utterly beat down and unhappy that I don’t feel anything any more, or don’t allow myself to anyway, including feeling sorry for myself. It’s just I had expected something of my life that I’m never going to have, I used to have some hope.
The Reminder
Grape nuts
Plain yogurt
Green apples
Mango
Cabbages and kings
Let your smile be your umbrella.
Something like that.
Permanent collection
Maybe you can keep her in your Collection of Twee Objects; Subcategory: People?
Occasionally you catch sight of a person so intact, so egglike in his or her self-containment, that you can stare with impunity (the person will never notice). Here’s an illustration:
This raspberry of a woman was at a play last night that we attended. She was around 73 years old and wore a chenille top and matching pants with bright white sneakers. Nobody accompanied her, and she wore an expression of patience so eternal that it seemed carved or painted onto her face.
During intermissions, as you can see, she occupied herself with examining and organizing items from her bag. Her frame was one common to older women: toothpick legs and a large, soft torso that looks as if it were designed to protect the squishy organs within. Composure and vulnerability don’t often find such proportions in a person, and it is always a lucky thing to witness.
Go Anthropology! I wonder how similar this would be to Smith…I get the feeling neuroscience would not be as low down on the list, most of the people I knew in neurosci were more intense than, say, the PoliSci majors.
Virginity rates by college major at Wellesley (via Smitten). Artists are freakin’ promiscuous — no surprise there — but who knew neuroscientists get down?
And oh god — eighty-three percent of Math majors are virgins? That is dire.
Someone once said I reminded them of Lily Allen. Compliment? Maybe.
The most tender place in my heart is for strangers, I know it sounds cruel but my own love is just too dangerous…in the end I was the mean girl, or somebody’s in-between girl, now it’s the devil that I love.
Watch out! It could happen to you! I wish I could concentrate hard enough to read the not-about-Lily Allen parts of the New Yorker and then discuss them in my intelligent blog, but I cannot. Coming up: Lily Allen. That echo chorus lied to me with its hold on, hold on, hold on.
Imagine some sort of wolf-pack howl of recognition upon reading this. I don’t want to write about my own life too much in here, both because it is tedious and because it is my life, but I have been going through a Fall-On-Your-Knees moment, and it’s exquisitely difficult. I keep coming back to the idea of being a writer, as though that is something that will ultimately fulfill me, when…well, David Foster Wallace was 41 or around that age, and it certainly wasn’t enough for him. This is a successful writer, too.
The fact that he had a relationship with Mary Karr is delightful, however, as is the fact that he signed his letters to her “Young Werther.” But only to me. I suppose to them it was less amusing.
Where Does It End?
Options for the Next Few Years:
Law school
Americorps (City Year in Seattle or summer in Portland)
University of Washington College of Forest Resources
Living at home and being unemployed forever!
I’m sure there are a few other options, like getting a terrible terrible job I hate and going even crazier, but that looks like it for now.
Unfashionable
There is nothing like a book about a group of modern women in their mid-40s who don’t call themselves feminists and have decided to give up work to raise kids in Manhattan to cement two notions:
1. Never live in Manhattan (there are too many books about that area, no? Anyway).
2. Have creative life. Make stuff. Do not work in an office, even if I have to risk itinerant poverty and eternal debt. We’ll all be living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road soon, thus why worry about being substantial and important.
