the habit of being

Lately, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica. I keep saying this: when are we going to Antarctica? But I’m not sure if it’s really Antarctica I want so much as the idea of Antarctica. It doesn’t even really need to be that far away, just as long as there are hardly any people. Antarctica could be just about anywhere, except New York City, because just about everywhere feels deserted compared to here. But it’s also the idea of all that white snow and ice. To tell you the truth, after I made the switch, I never went back to liking the hot soaking tub at Osaka as much as the cold.

The other night, Saturday I think, I went to see the film adaptation of this book Into the Wild, which is based on a true story of a guy who dropped out of his regular life after college and hitchhiked all over the country, before going to Alaska and freezing to death. When I was eighteen I did something similar, minus the freezing to death, and I read this book while I was on the road. So I went to see the movie, and, in it, the guy carries the same book of edible plants my boyfriend and I had with us during our travels and used to make a few very unsatisfying grass salads. For some reason, I felt compelled to email my ex and tell him this. He read the book too, and I think he identified with the protagonist more than I did. After we split up, he went on to travel alone, thruhiking the Appalachian Trail, which was probably what he needed in the first place, and then he got married.

To make a long story short, our relationship was a big traumatic mess that haunted me for a long time afterward, and we didn’t communicate for years, until this past April, when I was in Portland, just at the beginning of waking up. I emailed him, and we wound up having sushi, me and him and his wife. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened at this meeting, but afterwards it seemed like I’d laid down an incredible burden. We pretty much hadn’t talked since then, until the other day, when I emailed him again, about this movie and the plant book. He replied, saying he still had the plant book, and rather nonchalantly added that he’d just been at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place when he just happened to be flipping through the friend’s back issues of a certain magazine when he found a story I wrote. The story was something I published under a pseudonym, and it dealt in part with some of the traumatic happenings of our relationship.

All of this is a little strange: the issue of the magazine in question is now about a year and a half old; I just happened to see this film and email him right after his discovery of it; and, to top it all off, apparently he and his wife have been planning to name their first son the same name I gave to “his” character in the story.

I distinctly remember being so incredibly panicked over the prospect of any of the real people in the story, which I wrote in early 2005, finding and reading it that I considered not publishing the piece at all. I finally convinced myself that that was incredibly unlikely to happen, at least not for a very long time… maybe in the very distant future, if I wound up getting famous, someone would make the connection. After all, it wasn’t that big of a magazine. Anyway, now that the dreaded event has occurred, I am much less mortified over it than amazed at how the universe must have had to conspire to allow it to happen. Things like this happen to me all the time!

I had this realization, while I was in the shower, about a week ago. The gist of it was this: I was in the shower, standing there under the water, and I was thinking about a phone conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I was in the middle of thinking about this conversation when I noticed that I was actually in the shower. I paused in the middle of the thought and said to myself, wait a minute, I’m in the shower now.

In this split-second pause, it was clear to me that while I was thinking about that phone conversation a moment earlier, I wasn’t just in the shower, I was actually still having the conversation, right then. The conversation wasn’t some event that was stuck in the past, over and done with and frozen and unmodifiable. The conversation, as I thought about it, was just as much in the present as the shower was, and in fact no longer existed in any other moment but the one I was currently in. The conversation wasn’t sitting back there behind me somewhere in a perfected form I could only partly access, it was right there before me, happening, even though I was doing something else. It wasn’t just a static thing I was remembering, but something that was still active and changing as I thought about it.

Thinking about all this a little more, it becomes obvious that not only is that phone conversation going on right now as I bring it into mind again, but everything is.. my entire history is in each moment. And every moment, my history is changing. Just as there are many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. There isn’t just this one immutable life story I can plug into or out of at different points in time. It sounds silly, but it is literally true that every breath is a brand new life: a new past, present, and future all in one. And this is why we cannot be forever doomed by the mistakes we’ve made and the traumas we’ve suffered. It isn’t possible, because those mistakes aren’t really the stable anchors we think they are. Or, to put it another way, they are only stable in as much as we think they are. All you really have to do is let go of the belief in this false stability, and you’re free.

I take it back. New York City can be Antarctica too.

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 am afraid of this being the year that disappeared. 2006 will be the first of many vanishing years, perhaps. Old people are always saying that time speeds by faster and faster. I am only 23, and already things that seem like yesterday are turning out to be last year, or even the year before that. It doesn’t help that I haven’t kept up my journal.

Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. In my early years of online-journalling (this was in the pre-blog days), this was something that sometimes happened: Suddenly, I was possessed to take down my site, leaving nothing but a splash page saying something about a “hiatus” and a link to email me (back then, people actually did). The typical length of such a hiatus was about six months, and I’d emerge on the other end of it with a new domain name (or at least a new design - Version 2.0 or somesuch) and what I thought to be a completely different persona.

Maybe I stopped writing here because I needed to grow a new ego. Or maybe it’s a combination of more mundane factors, like that I’ve been crazy-insane-busy. Back in February I was taking classes on frontal lobe functions and modern Indian history, editing the first story I’ve published in a national magazine (it came out in May, under a pseudonym), “finishing” my first scientific article (since then it’s been submitted, rejected, rewritten, resubmitted, lather, rinse, repeat), and sleeping with my best friend, among other things. The City was beginning to open up for me in big ways, and I was seeing a lot of dance and theatre for the first time. I also tend to get kindof SAD-ish in February, though this year it hit hardest in March.

I stopped sleeping with my friend and fell for a tall man with a Russian accent. I wrote manic emails like this:

I spent most of yesterday leading a gallery tour in Chelsea for the prospective graduate students, and then I went shopping in Soho and found this soft white dress that is so amazing and pretty that I spent $140 on it without even blinking, and this whole time it was freezing out and windy and I wasn’t dressed well enough. Buying the dress made me late for meeting the Russian boy at the bar in the IFC, so I called and was all apologizing and still wound up taking the wrong subway and having to walk a long way in the freezing cold and being even later, but I got there and he was all smiling at me and wanting to see the dress and hugging me and getting me some vodka to warm me up. And then we saw Manderlay which is incredibly intense and terrible and beautiful and we held hands the whole time and when it was over we were both just completely blown away and loved it and felt like the only people in the world who could see a completely disturbing film like that and come out of it excited and talking about how we’re going to make things like that someday. We went to the Belgian beer bar on West 4th and I impressed him with my knowing which beers were the best and we sat in a corner and had this whole conversation about world politics, and, still beaming about the movie, he kept touching my hair and we’d kiss and my hair would get in our mouths but it wasn’t even weird and he’s this amazing kisser. We wanted to go somewhere not so loud but we both live far away from there and it was so cold so I said, “We could go to my lab. It’s a few blocks away” and he said “Really? Okay. Let’s go.” So we stopped and got more beer to smuggle in and I took him to the Psychology building and up to the lab and he was asking all about my job and I swear to God I did not think we were going to have sex… Then we got dressed and were drinking beer and eating my Valentine’s Godiva my mom had sent which was still in the lab and a grad student I knew walked in but I just gave her some chocolate and it was fine. We talked and talked about my work and his work and I asked him why he’s not married and he told me about being engaged when he was about my age but it didn’t work out and they don’t talk anymore and if he’d married her he’d never be doing the things he is now…

And then he never called me again and I started reading The Rules and reciting them to all my friends on a regular basis. I made a proclamation — “No more telling them my whole traumatic life history. No more letting them read my writing. No more sex on the second date. Fuck being honest. I want to get married.” — and I then proceeded to stop dating altogether. I fought a war against bedbugs. My lab got a big grant from the NIH and I got a MacBook Pro. In March, I went to visit my parents, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother and I had our first mint juleps and derby pie at The Brown. In April, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and discovered that The Double Life of Véronique is probably the best movie ever made. In May, I presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference in Sarasota, saw my writing in Barnes and Noble, and had a birthday. At some point, I re-decided not to get a Ph.D. in neural science or psychology. In June, I landed a room in a West Village apartment owned by a 50-something Buddhist ex-dental hygeinist, but I didn’t move out of my old apartment in Astoria until July. I watched my ex-lover and his wife haul pieces of my antique bed down four flights of stairs and into a sudden rain-storm. I took a summer fiction workshop, and, reluctantly, wrote short stories. I decided I really want to get an MFA in writing. I dreamt that I took out my own heart and lungs and zipped them up in a transplant bag, but did not die. In August, my goldfish with no name died, almost exactly a year after I got it. I got a visa to Russia, where I will be giving a talk on my research in St. Petersburg next week. One Sunday, I wrote for 18 hours straight, and was incredibly happy. The next Saturday, I walked for miles and took hundreds of photographs. And then, I started to miss my website.

I wrote Mary Robison an email saying I want to be a writer just like her, comparing her to Joan Didion and Faulkner, the only other writers who ever made me feel like that.

I accidentally dyed all of my summer clothes pink, with a red shirt that must’ve been hiding. This marking the one-year anniversary since the last time I bought myself a new outfit. It’s been that long since I could afford it.

My boyfriend broke up with me. This time because he found one of the personal ads I placed online. Said he would’ve answered it, must’ve loved the right girl. It’s been seven months since the last time we had sex anyway. Last time we made love.

Have dates with two separate 6′2″ 25 yr olds. 25 seems awfully young. One of them has a beagle named Winnie. An apartment on Union Square. The other one is prettier than me. I could still back out.

There is a child screaming in the street below my window.

Two things I miss the most: the South and my mother. Really. Not just right now because I’m sad.

Ran into a girl I went to high school with in the lobby of the building where I work. This would be less weird if I were not from Statesboro, Georgia.

He tried to back out of breaking up but I wouldn’t let him this time.

I have to type up a Mary Higgins Clark novel to use for a reading experiment in the lab. I keep thinking about how Diane Arbus worried that looking at all her students’ bad photography would somehow damage her own.

Making my own coffee again. There’s a crack in the bottom of the French press.

It’s been how long since I wrote anything? I have how many things I’m supposed to write?