the habit of being

I have the headache.

Oh no.

I’ve been having it all day.

Been drinking? Sinus? Hunger?

I had a plastic cup of white wine at the MR users meeting yesterday, but I think it’s sinus.

Do you have any Tylenol or anything?

I have Ibuprofen. Just took some. February is the worst month of the whole year.

Worst for whom?

For me.

Because of the March grant proposal?

No, because of just how I am. I am always sad in February. I have all these years of journals, so I can figure this stuff out. July and August are my happiest months; February is definitely the worst.

Come home and let me make you take a Goody powder and I’ll give you a Red Bull and vodka and you will feel better. I don’t know what mine are, maybe September or November. It was summer when I was young.

Summer was the worst or the best?

The best.

I think it’s just the light.

Got SAD? I used to think about that when you lived in the basement.

Yeah, living in the basement was awful. I never want to do that again. Unless I get a basement in the East Village or something.

There’s a whole different basement vibe there, of course. Granddaddy has had his whole house boxed up for two weeks now.

Did he start calling you again?

Yeah.

Was he mad?

No. He said no, but I’m not sure.

Have you ever read “Goodbye to All That,” an essay by Joan Didion about New York? It is so good. I had never read anything by her about New York before, always about California.

No. Is it in a collection?

It’s from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’ll send it to you.

I’m not really cleaning up, am I?

Not exactly.

I had a plan, part of which fell through when the car wouldn’t start - the grocery part. I walked to the bread store. On Saturday, our neighborhood has just as many cute dogs as Georgetown. I saw a Corgi, a Bernese mountain dog, a fox hound, just to mention the highlights.

The essay is so perfect. It starts off when she’s 20 and she just came to New York and she doesn’t know how much to tip people and she gets the bridges wrong and the whole rest of the essay is that good.

I would die before I asked for help from someone I didn’t know how to tip, and I’m not even young. But you are her.

If so, I will no longer be able to stand New York when I am 28, and I will move to Los Angeles.

You can be her and I will be … maybe Collette.

Hey, that’s not fair. How come you get Paris?

Because you get skinny.

Collette was skinny.

Not when she got older. She was very fat.

I’ve only read The Vagabond. She was definitely skinny in that.

Yep, dancer skinny, but later, fat fat fat.

Joan Didion is still skinny. She’s still crazy too though.

Exactly, but crazy in a having-a-good-income way. An essay-writing way. You may have already made me miss the whole cleaning window of opportunity.

Goodbye to All That

Oh, now you have Really done it. This might call for a cigarette. Another rule broken.

. . .

It’s very good. Makes me feel kind of sick.

Her writing is always like that. Her novels are even worse, or better. She writes about being crazy like it’s normal rather than like it’s some clinical specimen.

So, do some people read it like some clinical specimen, or does it make everyone feel sick?

I think some people just don’t understand it enough to feel sick. Like my professor, for instance.

But if you didn’t understand it, would it still be good to read?

Apparently just her descriptions of New York are enough to make it good to read. I don’t think you would have to understand. Her prose is really beautiful regardless.

That’s what I was thinking, looking back at the writing.

But my professor acts like it’s enough just to have beautiful prose. Which isn’t true. I mean, it’s fine that people of all different levels of craziness-understanding can enjoy Joan Didion’s essays, but they never would’ve been published in the first place if she hadn’t known what she was talking about.

Right.

It’s weird though, because with the essays from our class, the prof. is always emphasizing in the workshop “Do you feel like you know what the piece is about? Does it feel complete?” etc.. but with Joan Didion, it’s fine if she doesn’t know what it’s about or if she doesn’t understand why the character leaves New York by the end. It’s like if someone is good enough, you can just accept the worth of their writing without actually getting it.

I know everything there is to know about how it’s “relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning… and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day.” I think we all do it all the time, though. There is plenty of writing that is good to me but doesn’t evoke the feeling that I know exactly what is in this writer’s head. What it’s like to be them.

Yeah.

Like, Ishiguro in the one about the servant [The Remains of the Day]. I love every word, but the character’s feelings don’t affect me, except aesthetically. I feel for him, and I think I understand him, but not like I know the feeling.

I haven’t read that. I almost bought it the other day. I’ve seen the movie.

Lemme go look.. it’s not here, check your box. I read it last right before we moved. You will like it.

I really like sad love stories and books about crazy people and I’ve read a lot of them and liked a lot of them, but it was still something totally different when I started reading Faulkner. Not only were these people crazy, but they were crazy in the same way as people in Statesboro were, people I grew up around. With Joan Didion it was like that - she’s not just crazy, she’s MY kind of crazy.

Exactly. The sick feeling does not lie.

The literary-induced nervous breakdown is the only true measure of a writer’s talent.

Absolutely, a first date question: What work put you in the hospital? And, why?

I can’t decide whether it would be worth it to be crazy to be able to write about it like Joan Didion does.

I got to a point when I had to stop even reading her, because I didn’t want to go there.

Maybe it’s better just not to go there.

You have to be braver than me to go back, when you get past those times.

I don’t think they ever really go away.

No, but you have to do them over to write them, and I have to keep some distance. Maybe if you don’t live with anyone.

Did you write a lot when you were my age?

Not like you. Nothing like. Only sometimes. You know, in notebooks. You are the one. Reading is way easier.

Writing is awful.

Causes crying, drinking, smoking, total unavailability.

It’s this masochistic desire to turn your personal misery into some beautiful work of art, which is totally impossible, only leads to more misery.

Well, I dunno. Look at that essay. She was brave.

She’s really good.

Or, she was crazy again, so she was already there and could write it.

She probably wrote a lot of it down when she was there, and then just held on to it until she understood it.

There’s my advice, write it while it’s happening, or else wait till everyone else is dead and you have nothing left to lose.

Anais Nin wouldn’t let her diaries be published until everyone she wrote about was dead.

I meant it as in everyone would have to be dead before I’d be alone enough to write what I would write if I could write.

Maybe there’s only a certain time-frame to get things written in, before you have to be a real person. But Joan Didion’s married and has at least one child.

That’s why she’s so brave. Maybe if Virginia Woolf had been alone, she could have stayed alive. She had to write, and then go downstairs and be married and have a social life. People around checking to see if she was normal all the time. How could she be?

I don’t even see how you can really be expected to write anything while you’re trying to have a job and pay rent and not cry all the time, let alone when you’re trying to be someone’s mother or wife or daughter or a halfway decent person at all.

Exactly.

But if you don’t do those things, what is there to write about?

You have to be able to do both, that’s the hard part. I guess if you are writing about stuff that doesn’t blow your own mind, you know, like mysteries or something you researched, it can be done.

I’ve never wanted to write about anything like that. I don’t see how people put in all the energy they do just to write about someone else’s writing or someone else’s art. I mean, no matter how great an academic paper is, it won’t ever be as good as the work it’s written about.

Yeah, but it’s the kind you can do and have a life. It’s intellectual, and that’s where the safety is.

I don’t understand how I ever thought my intellectual ambitions could even hold a candle to my artistic ones.

Maybe because you are very smart. It isn’t easy, being like you.

I don’t think being very smart is really worth all that much. I would rather be very kind, or very talented.

Not a kind word to say for very rich?

Being smart is just a way to make up for not being rich. Being kind and being talented have nothing to do with it.

It would just make it easy to live, and I think it would be more fun to be kind with money. I would be very kind to you, for one thing.

I think most really kind people don’t have much money.

‘Cause they can’t keep it long enough to accumulate?

Because they’re more sympathetic maybe. Being sympathetic is really important. Right up there with being a good writer. You’re really kind though, plus you’re kind for good reasons, unlike me.

What?! I think you are way kinder than me.

I’m just selfish. I’m nice to people because I don’t want anyone to get mad at me ever.

Well, I kinda believe that, but more about me than you.

Jennifer thinks she is not as nice as I am, but at least she tells people the truth. If Joe upsets her, she tells him so. If I don’t do the dishes and it annoys her, she tells me so. I never tell anyone anything.

I know, it’s so much nicer than saying nothing and then saying “nothing” over and over when they ask you what’s wrong, like I do. And if someone hurts my feelings, apologizes, and says they didn’t mean to, I will still insist that they were not hurt at all. What’s up with that?

I do that too. I feel like there are only two states… completely accepting unconditional love, and being an awful person.

Right. Betty was one state and I am the other. You are more like her, but not as much of a sap. Remember when you made snacks look pretty on plates?

Yeah, back before I started being a horrible person. I never do things like that now. Betty never stopped making snacks look pretty. I was already ruined by the time I was 13.

No way, you are much better now, but we shouldn’t be talking about you today. Les monthlies will be making you cry.

I’d rather be a crazy artist than a good person. That is where you and Betty are the same and I am different. Besides, I’ve been crying all month. I hate February.

I am not like her. I knew it when I was 12 and read Gone with the Wind, that I was a Scarlett and she was a Melany. But, her kind of goodness is not a good thing when the people around you aren’t kind too.

In books about saints and things, they’re always acting like if you’re kind enough then other people almost can’t help but be kind to you back. It is too bad that is not really true.

Yeah. Other people have to be perceptive or also kind. Like with Betty, I’m not naturally kind, but I could see how kind she was so it made me be kind to her. Oh fuck this fucking kind shit. You know?

No, not really.

Thinking about kindness makes me feel like I’m drowning in mud.

Joan Didion definitely never writes much about kindness.

Kindness makes me feel sick a whole nother way.

Yeah, there’s the sickness of what you think you are, and the sickness of what you think you’re not.

In the lab, I was told that a notebook that loses pages is not a notebook. I wrote this truism down immediately, in my notebook, which is falling apart.

How much of my everyday life would qualify as panic? By professional standards? For instance: my heart is often pounding. My dreams are often bad.

When my benefits come through I could see someone. I suppose.

It took me two months to remember that the second anniversary of my death had gone by. I overlooked it because I was too busy moving. I moved to New York two years, to the day, after my abortion. How else could I have missed it? I know the day very well. Coincidences of this magnitude convince me, more than anything else, that there is God.

I told him that the blood clots were the size of plums. They were plumlike in many ways. He said he had no idea. He held me and I cried. As could be expected.

In the park, a man in a yellow robe handed me a daisy. He smiled and the daisy was white and a little bit droopy.

I vomited on the train. I made it to the second-to-last stop, my eyes closing heavily and opening slowly and everything rocking and rocking. I got most of it into my bag but some on my coat and when I told him, he didn’t understand why I hadn’t just puked on the floor of the train. But then what would I have done?

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and tried to pretend it had not happened, that no one had seen. I got off at my stop and walked home in the late-night drizzle, with my kitten-ear hoody hanging off my shoulder and my bag full of vomit. Someone honked at me. Someone always does. Later, I wiped a mushroom off my cell phone.

I want to get married and have a baby.

I shouldn’t be at home now. I shouldn’t be feeling the lavender-scented bubbles slip down the backs of my thighs. I shouldn’t have been in the bath, reading about crazy women and their lost children and how those lost children made them crazy. But I don’t feel well. I feel dizzy and I don’t know which came first anymore.

Now, when my mother tells me how she cooked something, she does it in a serious way she never had before. Like she’s just realized I am an adult and there is a place in my life for recipes.

The man in the yellow robe was only an actor. His smile was fake. Someone filmed him handing me the daisy. I got up and left it on the park bench.

I did work on Sunday. If I did work on Sunday, why should I have to do work today?

There’s a tin can of grape leaves beside my bed. I have these sheets with a high thread count and two ink stains. I have those screaming kids under my window, the job I didn’t go to, the nausea behind my stinging eyes.

Also, why’d I stop going to my yoga classes? And did someone really call me ethereal? In my presence? Could I OD on echinacea?

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Sitting on the floor next to a tub of Edy’s Double Fudge Brownie ice-cream with a spoon sticking out. Getting a stomach ache, slowly, and no quick fix. I am anxious, I’ve had a hard day, and I look at my writing with squinted eyes. I am tired of writing like a girl with emotional problems. I am tired of writing like I’ve been hurt. I am too old for this. I am too fucking grown up to eat ice cream out of the carton, on the floor, and think it might make me feel better.

It worries me, that I can’t seem to sit down and write for more than two minutes without mentioning sex or my boyfriend. I feel sleazy and dependent. I feel like a girl with emotional problems. I don’t really think about sex that often. I don’t really care about it that much. I like it more in theory, the idea of it before the actuality, and I’ve always been that way, though I have had some indescribably beautiful nights. Indescribably. But sometimes I have to remind myself of what is happening, physically, so I don’t take it for granted, so I appreciate the act itself and not fixate on all the emotions I should be having, the emotions I may or may not be having. And about my boyfriend, he said “you don’t love me, do you?” and I said nothing. I lose my identity when I am near him and I have to remind myself that this is not his fault. Sometimes I am tearfully devoted; sometimes I am so far away.

I feel so sickeningly cliched, so predictable in my cyclical moods, and shockingly unsatisfied with my life. (I practice yoga regularly, I keep a diary, I email my stepfather. I even have a job I do not hate. What does this add up to: not enough.) The only thing I never counted on was my newfound capacity for anger. I did not think I had it in me. I get pissed off at the Foo dogs for not holding up my books.

That saying “you can’t love anyone else until you learn to love yourself” is just echoing in my head.

I was walking to Jennifer’s to return her roommate’s CD that I borrowed four months ago and never listened to but managed to scrape up horribly. I was walking to the bookstore to see if there was anyone there who could give me my last two paychecks, because I quit unexpectedly in the middle of rush by sending my manager an email saying I wasn’t coming back and I thought they would mail me my money but they didn’t (there’s wasn’t anyone). I was walking to Safeway to get the most chocolate-saturated ice cream I could find. I was almost home when I noticed my scarf was gone. My grandmother’s cashmere scarf, the only heirloom type thing I had managed not to lose yet. It must have flown off in the wind; it was windy, afterall. I looked behind me, down the road. It was nowhere. It could be anywhere. It was name-brand; someone would’ve picked it up. I came home and laid on the bed and was sad. I cleaned my room and was nonresponsive.

I wish I had a camera so I could just take pictures of myself in my underwear and not have to expend so much energy trying to express myself in an artistic manner.

A lovely and oh so meaningfully cryptic lyric about a charlatan and a harlot (or perhaps a harlequin named charlotte) would do for today, this week, this month. This month is crazy.

Made of swollen tonsils and stinging lips (yes, they actually throb), I am all a flurry of heat and unknowing. Thinking thinking thinking too much and worrying and my head hurts and my back hurts and I radiate but don’t work. There is excess fluid in my ears. (Can I still hear you? Did I never hear you at all? When things go right everything melts?) Pretty grey socks, soft. I remember a grey kitten that died within hours of its birth, it had a pink nose like mine and fur like my socks. (Schrodinger’s kitten? Inside out? I walked in from the cold this morning and everyone said “aww look at her nose,” and I said “I am sick.”)

Part of me has fallen in lust with an out of shape bald man, and what’s more- he’s short and he voted for George W. Bush. Yes, there are fantasies, and yes, it is sad. I can’t help it; he’s smarter than I am. (Don’t tell anyone ego turns me on. They might say I am sick.)

My right breast itches.

There are so many striking things about June, but lately the most isolated and poignant memory I have… we are playing Scrabble with my mother and little brother, but for some reason they have both left the room. We sit across from one another at the card table. You lean in and tell me I am beautiful. I say thank you.