the habit of being

What some people think is, all potential long-term memories go through what they call a consolidation period, where they are vulnerable to being lost. That’s why when you have some sort of major head trauma or someone cuts out your medial temporal lobe or something, you’ll probably lose what happened in the weeks or months just prior to accident but you’ll still remember your childhood. Your childhood is consolidated and last night’s party isn’t. Apparently there’s also some sort of evidence that when consolidated memories are accessed, they become vulnerable again, so you might also lose whatever you were remembering around the time of, say, getting hit in the head with a hammer repeatedly, which is something my mother has anxiety dreams about. But it’s not just that memories can be deleted, but that they can be changed. So everytime you retrieve a memory, you’re also modifying it. Which is why people are such unreliable resources, compared to, say, computers.

This is the sort of stuff I learn about in the cognitive neuroscience classes I take. I also learn more “concrete” things about underlying mechanisms of this and that. I am particularly fond of the NMDA-type glutamate receptor and the impressed reaction people have when I tell them I am studying neuroscience. Like that somehow proves my worth, marks me as a bonafide smart person. At least until you think about how stupid it is to do something just because you like the way you think it sounds to other people. The “just because” is an exaggeration, of course. But the truth is we know next to nothing about how the brain works, and all the studying I’ve done has left me with only some tiny fraction of that next to nothing knowledge, and it’s not entirely clear to me that I’ll ever make use of it once I stop waiting for my life to happen to me. What does this stuff have to do with the writing life I want for myself?

My favorite story to tell myself is that I’m a writer, an artist. I continue to tell this story no matter what behavioral evidence to the contrary I might have. And according to one of my psychology classes, the discrepancy between who I think I should be and who I actually am is what makes me anxious. And the discrepancy between who I wish I were and who I actually am is what makes me sad. This is what passes for understanding. I give this theory as an example only because it resonates with me more than most.

My impression was always that writing shaped my memories. Like many other people who write (or who think of themselves as writers), I’m prone to statements like “I haven’t really lived something until I’ve written it down” or “I write to know what I’m thinking.” I’m terrified of losing everything that’s happened since the last time I kept a daily record. And I have a fear that my life is worthless if I can’t use it to communicate something. There’s research on how language shapes perception. The words that we call the world can define the way we see it. The vision lab where I work has been poking at the idea that there is no such thing as visual memory. Could it be that everything we remember is verbal? I am fascinated by this, and terrified by it. All the power of a writer is captured by this. But I feel trapped by my belief. Of course there could be a type of memory that is neither visual nor verbal. M says he thinks without words and can remember these nonverbal thoughts, but often has great difficulty communicating them to others. There are things that can’t be translated. Is my devotion to words keeping me from experiencing something profound? Or do I experience it all the same but feel like if I can’t report it, it isn’t real?

I had been up all night playing Mah Jongg solitaire, which Air France was calling Shanghai, keeping my eyes peeled in the darkened cabin for a certain stewardess with a black bow barrette clipped over her dark brown chignon. When we arrived in Paris on the 19th, I was unsure what the absolute time was, only that we were only minutes away from missing our connection to Russia, but as it turned out 40 other people were missing it too, so they waited, and D ran to get us cafe au lait and croissants while I held our place in the security line. On the flight to St-Petersburg, we got out our phrasebook and learned how to say yes, no, please, thank you, I’m sorry, hi, good day, goodbye, and vegetarian in Russian, and, along with theatre box office, that list nearly sufficed for a whole week in a largely non-English-speaking city.

We were immediately immersed in the cultural phenomenon of the Long Russian Line. Going through customs, registering at the Hotel St-Petersburg, and, we’d soon learn, everywhere else, all queues in St-Petersburg move at approximately one fourth of our accustomed American speed. Our earliest impression of the city was that it was much more American than European, and that it seemed to be stuck in the 70’s. This was partly a consequence of our first meal, dinner in the hotel restaurant called the Mirror Room. This was a large wooden room in the basement of the gargantuan building, and it was decorated like a high school prom. There was shiny blue fabric on the tables, ruffled up instead of pulled taut, and there was a red lamp with tassels on every table. The napkins sat on the plates in the shape of cones. A few branches of foliage were stapled to the walls. There were two vegetarian options on the menu, and neither was an entree. Half asleep, I discovered Russian elevator music and the local beer Nevskoe, which we’d be drinking a lot more of.

The hotel itself was right on the Neva, and had a gigantic SAMSUNG sign on the roof. My room wasn’t air-conditioned. It was very small and had both thick orange and blue mesh curtains. The bed was a thin palate on a wooden frame, but that first night I slept 14 hours. It would be the only night in Russia that I slept more than 5 or 6 hours, and the only night I wasn’t bitten by mosquitoes, because I hadn’t yet discovered that the windows opened. We joked about the rooms being like something from a James Bond movie.

We had a whole day before the conference started, so we the next morning we headed for the Hermitage, and went straight for the 19th and 20th century collections on the top floor. If you’ve spent a lot of time at New York museums, the presentation style at the Hermitage is a bit shocking: the rooms on the top floor are very plain, the paint is cracking, the windows are open, spilling so much light onto the paintings that you can’t make out some of the glass-covered ones because of the reflection. But there are beautiful Matisses, and you feel like you’re seeing them in someone’s house, rather than a sterile museum space, and the rooms are airy and small, and, because there are only a small number of paintings in each room, you never feel overwhelmed. Until you go downstairs, which is a very different story. The rooms are grand, ornately decorated, and much larger. The older collections housed here are more spectacular for their quantity than their quality. For instance, there is an entire hall full of nothing but Dutch (I think?) paintings of hunts and food.

That night, Sunday, August 20th, at the opening reception for the conference, there was a military band and hundreds of tiny glasses of vodka. A big group of us went out in search of a Lebanese restaurant from the Lonely Planet guidebook, and after walking for about an hour, finally found the place, only to discover it had gone out of business. We wound up eating bad Chinese with the help of a tourist from the UK. None of the staff spoke English. By the end of the night, I’d had champagne, vodka, beer, and wine, and really thought I was doing surprisingly well…

Unable to get to bed at night (St. Pete is 8 hours ahead), I slept through a lot of the conference during the first few days. We saw Le Corsaire at the Mariinsky Theatre Monday night. The story is all about pirates and slave girls, and unlike most ballet I’ve seen, it was fun and funny, not at all pretentious or high-artsy. The famous Kirov company was on tour, so we got a travelling Russian company with a tall prima ballerina in a hot pink tutu. Every drag queen’s fantasy, she came out for no less than five curtain calls at the end, when a dedicated group of men and women simply would not stop clapping. Afterwards we ate in a fantastic restaurant called the Backstage, which was decorated with ballet paraphernalia and whose walls were covered with dancers’ signatures.

Tuesday night we ate in a Georgian restaurant. Wednesday we blew off the conference altogether and went on a day trip to Peterhof, the “Russian Versailles,” on a hydrofoil. Wednesday night was the conference banquet, and I was feeling sick to my stomach, presumably due to having not been warned against drinking the water for a couple days after arriving.

Thursday morning I gave my talk, on our three-process model of reading rate, and, as usual, after who knows how many weeks of panic and anxiety, as soon as I was actually doing it, it was fine. That night we rode the Metro for the first time, and it really does have even taller, scarier, escalators than the Washington, DC, system, but otherwise is very nice. With a group of four friends, I saw a Russian production of Cabaret, which seemed much grittier and more authentic than the Broadway production I saw in 2001. Being in the front row, as we also were for Le Corsaire (and later for Giselle), didn’t hurt. Then we wondered around the main drag, Nevskiy Prospect, looking for a place to eat, and finally found a great Georgian place called Kafka. I should mention that in nearly all these restaurants I was eating aubergine. I had no idea Russians were into eggplant, but it would seem that they are, and that they do it very well.

We returned to the Hermitage for a second round on Friday, but it was dreary out and somehow it just wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the first time with all the open windows. With a lot of pushing from me, still wanting to see a “serious” ballet, we snagged tickets for the next night’s production of Giselle at the Hermitage Theatre, and had one of the slowest meals ever at another restaurant on Nevskiy Prospect.

Before coming to Russia, we’d concocted this brilliant plan to take the overnight “Red Arrow” sleeper train from St. Petersburg to Moscow (where we’d catch our flight back to the States) on our last night. Despite the large number of websites that claim to be capable of booking Russian train tickets, I had no success purchasing them in advance, and despite resolving to take care of getting tickets early after arriving, we waited until the day before we were leaving (Saturday) to walk over to the Finlandia Terminal (which was nearest to our hotel) to get tickets. This proved to be the most stressful part of the entire trip. No one working at the station had much English, so we were reduced to trying to write notes (28 August 23:55? 1st class?) and holding them up to the window. Our train was sold out. There was no other train Sunday night. We could get tickets that night, but we’d miss Giselle. Furthermore, I needed my passport to buy a train ticket, and it was back at the hotel. After I went back to get it, we discovered that there were, in fact, second class tickets on a different train Sunday night. It wasn’t a sleeper, and the arrival time was very tight, but it was a better option than missing Giselle and having to find a hotel in Moscow.

From the train station, we went on to the Russian Museum, where a woman in a large hat impressed upon us that she had two degrees and could give us a tour in English for 300 rubles (about $12) per person per hour. D talked her into a half hour tour and she took us through the icons and asked if we were Christian (oh right, you’re scientists! she said when Denis shook his head) and then told us stories about Catherine the Great’s love life. Afterwards we explored the rest of the museum alone (the icons were definitely the high point, along with a portrait of Anna Akmatova), and then walked over to the Church on Spilled Blood and the souvenir fair, where there are more matryoshka dolls than you’ve ever seen in your life. I bought a silver bracelet that says something on the order of God Bless and Protect Me in Cyrillic. Then we headed back to the Hermitage Theatre to see Giselle, which is about ghost maidens who’ve died on their wedding night.. totally goth. And then we went back to the Backstage Restaurant, which we’d enjoyed so much the first time.

On our final day, we managed to cram in the Zoological Museum (15,000,000 specimens!), a canal tour of the city (it was originally based on Amsterdam), the Dostoevsky Museum (I insisted… it’s in the actual apartment where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov), and a 3-hour Russian play (based on Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave.. I felt like I missed a lot due to only knowing about seven words, but it was clearly good, serious theatre), before running off to Moscovsky Station to catch our midnight train.

We decided it was worth another shot at getting a better ticket, but were having even worse luck trying to communicate with the station agents, when a Russian man who spoke excellent English came up to us claiming he could get us 1st class seats on the Red Arrow (#1) for 5000 rubles. This wasn’t too much more than the asking price. He called someone up on a cell phone and gave them our names and passport numbers, and several minutes later a military guy showed up with the tickets, which were actually for the #3 train, not the #1. And then we sprung it on us that the 5000 rubles didn’t actually include the price of the ticket, so it was all seeming very sketchy and expensive when he guided us to the beautiful red train with a final: One question, George Bush: good man or bad man?

Bad man, said D, and they were in fact valid first class tickets on a sleeper train. We had our own little room with a flower, sparkling water, and two boxed meals including foie-gras, salami, and caviar. I managed to sleep a few hours and suddenly we were in Moscow at 8 in the morning. Our cab driver kindly took us by Red Square on the way to the airport, but it turned out to be closed on Mondays.

At the free breakfast in the hotel one morning near the end of the conference, people were asking one other what their strongest impression of St. Petersburg was. One man talked of almost getting robbed on the metro, others of various tourist sites, and when it was my turn I said it was the Neva. The city is huge, but because of the canals, you never feel like you’re very far from the river. One night on the way back to the hotel, which was right on the Neva, we saw these huge crowds of people lined up along the sidewalk. When we asked the cab driver what was going on, he said they were waiting to see the bridges go up. The various bridges go up on a schedule late every night, to let larger ships pass through, but the idea that people who lived there would wait around to see it amazed us. In New York, we have rivers, one of which I can even see from my window, but they really aren’t “important” to the city at all, apart from their role in giving it its island-ness. Apparently almost all the great European cities are built around rivers in the way that St. Petersburg is, and that’s why no one other than myself (the only person there who had never been to Europe) thought this whole “river thing” was such a big deal.

I guess that’s the short version of What I Did On My Trip To Russia. In conclusion, when it comes to visiting faraway places, a picture’s worth a thousand words. And, also, I can’t wait to get another stamp in my passport. Prague, anyone?

Dear Someone,

I haven’t been writing journal entries. It’s been a long time. I had to write things called journal entries for a class, but because I had to write them, they weren’t. I’ve written a few longer pieces. I’ve finished my first semester back at school. I made A’s in all (two) of my classes. I’ve sighed in the relief that I can still do it, and maybe better than before.

I’ve gone to Florida as a scientist, and come clean about being a writer, only to have my Emminent Colleagues in the Field tell me (after a few glasses of wine) that I could still do it - I could get my Ph.D. and go off to some small college (closet) and teach and write and Be Happy. The idea made me happy. The wine made me happy. The only thing is how everyone says a graduate program done well is all-consuming, and I don’t think I could stop writing for five years now just to get a vita. And the other thing is how I don’t even have a BA, but I’ve broken so many rules already. I’m much too friendly with people I oughtn’t be, and not at all friendly with the people who ought to be my friends.

I seem to be in a terrible rush to be an adult. Many of the other students in my writing class assumed I was writing about things that had happened to me very many years ago, and were surprised to find out that I’m not older than I am. Sometimes it does feel like by writing about things that happened, I put them further into the past than they would be otherwise. Once a girl that was me is committed to the page, she is no longer happening, and I am someone new.

Sometimes I think I will always waste the same amount of time, no matter how busy I am. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I find that I look more like my parents than myself. Sometimes I feel ridiculous in the clothes I wore a year ago. A year ago, I did not pay any attention to the news. A year ago, no one ever asked me if I had kids. No one ever asked me if I were married.

I did handstands in the ocean, off of Lido Key. I never wear make-up anymore. My birthday is coming up, and I want to know my entire genealogy. I don’t just want to know about the famous relatives or the crazy relatives or the writers - I want to know about all of them. I want to cry because I never met them.

Today I bought Electrelane’s new album. Today I signed up for a pilot program the MTA has put together where they’ll email me if my subway lines are screwed up. Today I had a falafel super combo and went to a talk about computer vision and laid out a plan for a paper about peripheral reading and told my ex-boyfriend he could sleep at my place this weekend. Today I had 1 skinny latte, 1 coffee with milk and no sugar, 1 earl grey tea, and 2 English breakfast teas. Today I went to my first yoga class in five months, my first yoga class since I stopped going because of morning sickness.

I want to live in New York City until I’m 30. I want to live in New York City until I move to California or Europe.

Yesterday I got passport pictures taken and I looked like a hag. My hair was a raging frizzy mess and my eyes were different sizes and my lips were bleached out and I don’t care. I haven’t had sex in almost half a year and I don’t care.

A man came up to me while I was writing and asked me if he could draw my portrait. I asked if I could read. I read, and I sat so still my back hurt. I sat and sat until he showed it to me. My nose did not look exactly like my nose, but it was a nice drawing. He had a large gap between his teeth. He was very Black and very big. He asked me my name and I said Kat and he said meow and I said yeah. He wrote my name of the picture and said he was Ron and it was nice to meet me. I kept reading.

I’ve noticed that loaning out my favorite books feels like letting someone sleep with my lover. It makes me feel sick.

Best,
Katharine

I am oppressed by variables. I sit before the computer screen in the lab and the program jumbles. The language is Hebrew to me. Brackets versus braces. Vectors, matrices, cell arrays. I am sick and afraid. The headache approaches. A function and its arguments. Subroutines. My stomach tumbles. The length of time I’d like to sleep increases exponentially. But I only dream I am stuck in the command line and someone keeps pressing enter and getting an error and backspacing over me and retyping. This goes on for hours. Or else I am falling down a pit with tumbling numbers, and I wake up anxious. I do not want to go to work. This is not what I wanted to be doing at university.

* * *

Someone ought to warn about the real dangers of leaving school. There are, in fact, dangers greater than perhaps not getting a high-paying job. Being stuck as a little degree-less fish in the job market is not the greatest risk of abandoning academia. They should warn about the danger of forgetting how to concentrate, the danger of having no intellectual training to fall back on in an argument or even a simple conversation, the danger or not being able to caress an idea all night long if there’s no body available.

When your brain has gone limp for lack of study, and you cannot wrap your mind around anything for any length of time, you may become a silly girl, a girl who would rather wrap her legs around a man. But men fall asleep or go back home and what are you left with? You are not left to your work because you will have none. You are left with only yourself, your guilt, your unfulfilled potential. You are left with the idea that you ought to be heard, but have nothing to say anymore. You try to remember the last time you had an idea, the last time you really thought about something. You have a vague notion that you once Made A’s, but what did that mean? You have a vague notion that you once knew things, like the steps one must go through the clone a gene, like the constitutional amendments, like what a logarithm is, how to write a 20-page paper.. but you soon realize that having once known something isn’t much to be proud of.

What else is there? You ponder this long enough and one day it might occur to you that you ought to be Expensive. Not because of your smarts, but because of your stature, your thin-but-not-unhealthy shape, your grandmother’s diamond ring, which you pull off fantastically, the way you can be dressed up to look not only pretty but almost regal, as young as you are. And then there’s your experience In Bed - it’s not all good experience, but experience none the less. All these things suggest that you ought to be Expensive. You have not considered this before… maybe there is hope. This will be the beginning of the end.

* * *

After I escaped on the weekend, we went the wrong way (my fault) and turned around, and then we were right behind my boss - his curly hair, monster gut, suspenders, disaster of a brief case. I said “Denis?” and then there was a scene on 54th street, a hug-thing between us that didn’t seem awkward until I rethought it later. “This is my friend Mark,” I said. They shook. “This is my friend Silma,” he said. We shook. He said something to her about singing my praises. I said we were late for our lunch reservation. Mark said wait a minute and asked him about a play he’d seen the night before. Not as good as the London production.

Later Mark said I was really lucky to have someone so brilliant like me as much as Denis clearly does. I tried to explain how stupid Denis usually makes me feel, how I’m terrible at my job, how I don’t even remember basic math, how I’ve almost cried in front of him so many times. It’s clear he doesn’t believe me anymore, though he had until now.

* * *

Sometimes my roommate leaves her many papers and comes knocking at my door to tell me her sorrows. I try my best to offer advice, but at times I envy her even her problems, however genuine her tears. In order to hear her, I have to block everything out - her tiny shoulders, her Cleopatra eyes, they way she always looks better in my clothes than I do, her gorgeous academic records, her bigger vocabulary and more books read, her med school boyfriend, her fairy godmother with her generous checks, her teenage depression that was deeper than my own, her sentences, her wit, her long long hair, her diligence, the keys clicking until 3 am, the way she loved me when I was young - and listen only to the part of her that still feels like a failure, they part of her that feels like I feel.

I could name her virtues as quickly as she could name her flaws, but she is not mine anymore, and I wonder if that limits how much I can help. She has her boy lover and her best girlfriend isn’t me, and sometimes I’m afraid to hug her even when she cries. I don’t know if I’m allowed to. She points out that it’s been eight years with us, and it has, and somewhere I still feel like I fucked up four or five ago, that I failed her and she put my love for her in a black box and hid it under the bed with other things that could not be trusted. I failed her and didn’t make it up, and now I watch her live the life I might have lived if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I watch her suffer through the pain of it, but ultimately get the work done, proceed. I offer my parents her accomplishments instead of my own - “as long as someone is considering law school” says my mother. Sometimes my jealousy is thicker than the wall that separates our bedrooms, and I wonder how it could be possible to miss someone I see everyday.

* * *

It’s all in your head. Just keep trying.

Lacking subtlety, I do myself no justice, but perhaps I have exhausted all the justice I might have done.

Sometimes I say to myself, “You shouldn’t be trying so hard,” but I don’t listen, and it hardly matters, because I am not trying very hard afterall.

The unfortunate thing about the young writer, the younger writer like me, is that she hardly cares a bit for setting - not as far as it extends beyond the boundaries of her cranium. So there are only sentences, ungrounded, and if by luck one of them turns out well, it is still quite homeless and lost.

* * *

There was a time I believed my writing self to be my highest self. I wrote the self my day-to-day self wanted to become.

Now, it’s not at all like that. I write my lowest, foulest, most-flawed self, with all her faults magnified. I take up my notebook and my ego stares straight into a makeup mirror. I write my bitterness, my selfishness, my greed, my crudeness, my sense of entitlement, my hate, my arrogance - all the things I want hidden as I walk through the world and my relationships. I’ve actually said to people, many times, that I do not feel or understand anger, and yet you read these diaries and it is so glaring and so intense.

I would like to think this is some cleansing practice, a way to release all this pent-up self-pity. But I don’t know. If it’s on paper, then it is there. I have to stare it in the face, yes, but do I have to deal with it? Do I not just glorify it and perpetuate it further?

There is a sort of person I would like to be - a person who is loving, forgiving, compassionate - and I know that I am capable of being that - that I have had moments of realization that were quite intensely felt, quite beautiful. But those times are so hard to write about, and my narrative avoids them. This is not only true of the story of myself that I write on paper, but the story of myself that I tell in my head, the story that I whisper to myself relentlessly.

It is a constant battle not to believe that all the drama is really who I am. The most important work happens in those moments between thoughts, the gaps in the inner dialogue, but when those gaps are still very narrow, it is hard to believe that they exist at all.

There is a long history of other writers, much better writers than I am, writing of their, or from their, insanity. Writers tend to be bipolar, and I am beginning to realize that the “poles” involved aren’t simply depression vs. mania, but conflicting views of the self. There is the self that is great and brilliant and artistic, and the self that is horrid and flawed and broken. It is painted that a bipolar person would be always stuck in one of these modes of thinking, but it seems to be that the real trouble, my trouble at least, lies in the fact that I often feel both of these ways at the same time. It is very confusing to feel at once that you are beautiful and disgusting. And it confuses matters even further when you begin to realize that feeling either of these ways is a simple and similar ego-trip, and that there is yet another option that is vast - an accepting, non-judging way to look at it all, a feeling that all is as it should be and these labels have no meaning.

In the lab, we study whether objects are recognized as wholes or by parts. It seems I recognize myself by parts. The whole is just too vast, embodying too many contradictions. I don’t know why it is that I’d prefer to write the part that has to have the big crying complaining breakdown, and leave out the calm, sensible, self that steps up afterward, embarking on the next paradigm.

It may be simply that artists paint the picture of their insanity because their sanity is just too busy to pose. If only a fraction of your self is stable, that fraction has be devoted entirely to getting and keeping your life running with some degree of order. I can sit and write of my confusion and all my various feelings of loneliness and desperation, but the fact remains that there is part of me that is keeping my shit together all the while. I just don’t write about the self that is wading through a sea of scientific papers, the self that’s attending talks at the Center of Neural Science, opening bank accounts, paying taxes, learning programming languages, making me get up in the morning, watching the presidential debates, keeping me in good graces with my parents, negotiating my return to school after three years away. Maybe I just don’t find that self as interesting as the self who never grew up and never had to deal with adult concerns.