The Snob

2. desensitize myself to posting my own thoughts on the internet, whoop de do

What’s missing here? You ate good. You slept good. You did laundry. You went to the grocery store. You knocked 10 COUNT ‘EM 10 things off your list this week. This is good!

But man! Lonely? Bored? SOMETHING.

You did good at your job. You talked to your mom. What is it?

I seem only to be able to write when I’m longing for something. A boy or a job or a different life, some sort of connection, some sort of peace, attaining some goal. I can’t help it, I can’t stop myself from thinking about it and dissecting it and going over it in my mind forever until I’ve whipped it into a cloud of foam that obscures every other thought. And then I have to distill it and it drips out my fingers and nose into the computer and tissues. My nose drips when I’m stressed out, I’m just running with it (har har)

What am I longing for now. What do I need. I need some peace and some comfort, which is strange and a bit selfish because I am the most privileged and the most comfortable. I am not getting shot at or beaten, my family is well, I am well, I want for nothing. I regularly buy $14 lunches. It’s bonkers.

But there’s something wrong in my brain – not in a medical way, but a vague undercurrent of generalized dissatisfaction. I don’t feel SAFE. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel able to innovate or create or explore because I just don’t feel safe. I don’t have a life, I have a job I don’t want and friends on the other side of the planet. I’m not in the right place somehow, even though something tells me that the right place is where you make it. I can’t run away from my problems, and moving new places won’t fix stuff, but I have to say that moving here did grow me up a whole lot faster. I want to do it again. I want to play hopscotch on the world and end up someone better, my life somehow bigger and more whole just through having run the gauntlet of an upheaval.

I have something big to say, but everything I write seems so small and so personal. I can’t imagine that anyone would ever be interested in reading something like this, even though I read things just like this by other people constantly, consistently, and I value them all. I especially value the concentrated minutia of other peoples’ daily lives. I LOVE that. I love the small and quiet emotions. Every second counts (said the motivational pair of sneakers), by which I mean that time travel is real and anxiety is stupid and this moment is one of the many that make up the life you’re living, so to change the life you have to change the moment (said the encouraging poster. “Hang in there!”)

What is the life I want to have? I live in a sweet, medium-sized, well-kept clapboard colonial-style house somewhere between the Hudson Valley and Cape Cod. I can get to the mountains and the sea in an equal amount of time, but if I have to, I always choose the sea. The house is dilapidated enough to be affordable, but sweet enough not to be TOO creepy. Part of what makes the East Coast so charming is its inherent historical creepiness. You can’t get away from everyone who’s lived and died there, all of the stories that have had time to build up in a muted, depressing sort of palimpsest. It’s not like the West Coast isn’t creepy. The West Coast has murder cults and biker gangs and that bright neon pink checkerboard 1950’s-via-the-1980’s aesthetic. The East Coast has covens, axe murderers, and racist fur trappers frozen to death underneath the maple trees. I know which one I’d pick.

I have two dogs, Boo and Radley. I live close to a town full of old hippies, but not the kind who are gonna Rosemary’s Baby you. The worst they’ll do is try to sell you some clumpy pottery and a dime bag. You could do worse. I don’t live alone, or at least one of my sisters lives within a 20 minute drive, and my closest friends are no more than an hour away. I always have someone to go to the movies with, and someone to eat the fruits of my procrastinatory cooking. The homemade bread never goes stale. Someone mows the lawn. Someone will listen to my absurd theories about nothing.

I want for nothing. I have a car that is neither too nice to get stolen nor too shitty to run properly. It handles well in the snow and has plenty of room for groceries. I take it on road trips to aforesaid mountains and beach with the dogs and the sisters and the friends, and sometimes we put the backseat down and lie in our sleeping bags in the back and look out at the scenery.

My dishwasher never needs cleaning.

But this isn’t my life, either. I’m not ready for this life. This life has an awkward partner-shaped hole of negative space that I’m not at all prepared to fill. This is a life-cycle built for two, at least. This is like one of those crazy bar-stool bicycle contraptions that you pedal with your friends while drinking around a table and steering collaboratively. I haven’t had enough children to fill the seats yet.

1.     Sometimes you get what you need rather than what you want. Perhaps you could see this as needing not to get what you want sometimes, which all of us do. Calvin’s dad says it builds character.

2.     You are smart. Things come easily to you. Things no longer come easily to you. You decide to reject this by not-understanding things with sheer brute strength, and you succeed in rejecting them right back, and you lose. This has been happening since you mulched all of your seventh grade math sheets into the bottom of your backpack after drawing a picture of your teacher as the devil onto each one. You played Snood all day instead of learning algebra. You were both happy and unhappy about this.

3.     The honors program rejected you. You believed their assessment of you. Your mother didn’t. She appealed. You got in. One day, your mother will die, and there will no longer be someone to tell you you are smart. Will you then not be smart?

4.     You got into your thesis program because of course you did. You got an A on that thesis because of course you did, why wouldn’t you, who are so smart. You didn’t get that prize and then you let that prize tell you how smart you were.

5.     You got a full-time paying job in the country and industry of your choice right out of college because of course you did, that’s what smart people do and you are a Smart Person. Smart People don’t have to work at being smart, they just are Smart, that is who they are. Smart is innate, not learned. Smart is special, important, real and legitimate. Smart Always Wins, Smart does not Struggle. Smart is polished quips from the great writers of the past. Smart is the perfect, elegant theorem, as clear and self-evident and ubiquitous as the curved bottom of every raindrop there has ever been.

6.     Smart is not: embarrassment, frustration, balled-up bits of paper, (if you were smart enough, wouldn’t it already be perfect?), not immediately getting the job of your choice, being passed over by anyone for any reason. If you are not Smart, what are you? If you are not Smart now, were you ever? Who are you if you are not The Smart One?

7.     Smart feels like: never submitting any writing, because if you are never rejected, you are always better than everyone else, you simply choose not to show it. Smart feels like: feeling that if you are repentant enough for your previous complacency, the decision will be reversed and you will be deemed good enough to get a chance at the job of your choice. Smart feels like: I must be smart because I deserve it, there must be order to the universe, there must be a way for me to manipulate my situation to the better. I am good and smart and things go well for me, if they start to go badly, I must be gooder and smarter than ever in order to receive my Universal Reward.