bl•gsp•t disloyalty
Tuesday 27 January 2004 | I like a cookie
Moveable Type! Could it so soon be ours? Why is Mandarin’s Doctor’s Husband being so generous? We can ditch all these silly entries and start anew. There’s enough blog in us for about five of these things, I fear.
Keep thinking of Mandarin peering out at the big fluffy wild ovulating yowling cat. Hope her and the Snag are safely in bed and dreaming of nothing particularly thrilling.
Mandarin calls herself a waffle, but then, she said sternly, she is not a waffle. Well, maybe an organic wheat-free wild-Maine-blueberry one. What’s not to adore about the Umbrella? I still find him stern and unbending and intimidating as hell, even in his admittedly rather tenderer email to her, but of course that would only make me adore him rabidly all the more. Cf. House of this that and the other, featuring my own half-sympathetic, half-stricken, all-eviscerating but mercifully temporary crush on him. Not to bogart Mandarin’s Grand Passion, not at all; just to say, oh you poor darling, I completely understand. Of course you adore him.
I love when he says, with a kind of wry anticlimactic fatigue, “So I sat there for a few more days.” And imagines going to the Congo, or becoming an astronaut. Sounds like he definitely Had a Sesshin. And the monastery where he had it sounds a creepy bit like the one near me. You know, that one. Also singsong chanting, sitting facing out, and a more or less neurotic reparenting setup.
Now on to more attainable love objects: Anthony Lane. Suddenly I imagine that in some weird alternate universe I did go to Columbia and afterward got an absolutely reasonably post-MFA job as a fact-checker for the New Yorker, and then I call Mandarin some fine day and tell her winsomely over the phone, soprano and blushing, “And the only person who was nice to me all year was this British guy Anthony! So I’m marrying him.” Oh, that stodgy Ms. Pearson is so unworthy! (I didn’t really type that; it was the owl.) The only problem with shagging Mr. Lane would be that he wouldn’t be able to satisfy me: I would only want to write his features for him.
Now I am going to drag my sorry sciatic carcass to bed. Four, count ‘em, four difficult phone calls with M. tonight. Each terminating in my stupid cordless phone beeping insensitively at us, chirpily noting its drained battery. I feel like weeping and may go clutch the stuffed Possum and do just that. (I said “stuffed” so any casual readers, though I don’t think there are any, wouldn’t think “clutch the possum” was an euphemism for something less polite. Hello Kitty has recovered, by the way, though I think it’s only a brief hiatus before her eternal slumber.)
But before I go here is a Lydia Davis short story in its entirety. From the McSweeney’s book Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. I love her, love it, love them all. Love. More happy, happy love!
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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight…. He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, but so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.
A bonus:
THEY TAKE TURNS USING A WORD THEY LIKE
“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.
“It is extraordinary,” says the other.
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