Must enjoy the sun. Must enjoy the sea.

18Aug08

I can’t keep up with this blog.

Everything’s personal to me. Honestly, I don’t see the point in writing something if it doesn’t mean something intensely, not just in and of itself, but means something about me. My biggest facination — maybe my only fascination — is human nature, psychology, why we do the things we do and why we don’t the things we don’t. It riddles me completely with crippling self-analysis, but I wouldn’t change that. I think writing is only beautiful when it reveals something about the human condition, and I just feel shallow and stupid when I write about external, material things that resonate nothing deeper than their shells.

Which is why I can’t keep up with this blog. Because I can’t write about personal things in this, because 1) I don’t want to be a 13-year-old Xanga Chick, and 2) I fiercely believe in secrets. I’m a guarded person, and I often find that sharing my thoughts, feelings, etc. just cheapens them because they can never possibly mean as much to anyone else as they do to me. I like to hold the things that make me, me, tightly to myself, wound up in a ball to my chest. This is why I was horrified when I showed up to a party the last week or two of school and AM grabbed me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” She was mad I hadn’t told her about my involvement with a boy. Everyone at the party knew. It is horrifying to be the subject of that scrutinity. It is horrifying to know that your feelings are entertaining as gossip to other people.

I really want to keep this up. I just have to find a way to write about things that matter — things about humans, about us, about me — without being the Xanga chick I so like to mock.

So here’s something: Last week was the other interns’ last week, so our boss and a few co-workers took us out to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory.  I thought it would be painfully awkward — I hate polite small-talk chit-chat, I’m terrible at it. I think sitcom humor is appropriate in most situations, and most people just think that’s awkward when they’re not watching it on The Office. But it ended up being okay, and here’s why:

We talked about laundry. Everyone has a story about doing laundry. Everyone at one time learned to do laundry, everyone dealt with scrounging for quarters in college, everyone fucked up and put a red sock in with his/her whites.  So for nearly an hour, that’s what the conversation was. Shared experienced are like a loosely-bound book we flip the pages of when we need to find common ground with anyone. We could have talked about laundry or 9/11. They’re the same thing when it comes down to it.

I had a terrific fight with my mother last night. I don’t understand where people get their idea of a mother-daughter relationship nowadays: from their own mothers, or from Gilmore Girls? I’m thinking Gilmore Girls (and so is Chuck Klosterman, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). I just don’t see the point in striving toward some made-up ideal. We are what we are, whatever, amen.

I’ve been plotting NBN non-stop. It’s like double-dutch to me. If I stop doing it I get terrified of jumping back in, afraid it won’t work out. But when I keep going, it makes perfect sense.

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Tags: laundry, mom, nbn, personal, writing