I’m pink.
One of the few things I’m looking forward to about the future is some kind of hyper-personalized individual recognition system that will keep track of my preferences and weaknesses and ensure that I never have to hear The National in public (which inevitably ends in crying, either quietly or loudly) ever again.
(Source: Spotify)
Obviously, people have differing opinions. Every time you try to write about something larger than yourself and your experience, something as large as a city, which is mostly made-up anyway, you’re going to get things wrong. Or not wrong, exactly, because it isn’t objective, which is sort of the point.
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I am doing a yoga teacher training. A couple of weeks ago we were sitting in the big room of the studio on a Friday night when there was an earthquake. The room stuttered, just slightly, the walls and the ceiling noisy when they moved. “Was that?” MK asked, and didn’t bother finishing the question, because yes, it was. We shrugged. We kept on talking about the sutras.
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Spring here vacillates not just between sunny and rainy but between two different kinds of climates, the dry air of desert winter getting hot and huge so that it was ninety in the shade last week. Then it rained, and now everything is beachy again, covered over by a marine layer in the mornings. I had forgotten how gorgeous dry heat is, the way the air billows and swells, the way you can forget it against your skin until the breeze blows warm and it feels like clean sheets, maybe, scratchy and pleasantly foreign all around you.
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I don’t know, everything is easy to make a joke about. Teacher training, the green juices everyone drinks for lunch, disaster weather and the relevant Didion quotes. I drive my car into the intersections when I’m waiting to make a left turn, because I’m impatient; the only person who has ever commented on this was a visiting New Yorker, who thought I was reckless and insane. Stories and stories and stories.
I’ve given up on convincing anyone else I’m right, and maybe that’s what bothers people so much about this place: it encourages a kind of living that isn’t interested in much outside of its own skin. If I were going to make generalizations, I might say that New York’s insistence is on the moral rectitude of ignoring physical discomfort and having a loud voice, that both modes work better when tempered by one another.
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Later today I’ll go to a yoga class with a teacher I know, and she will encourage me to identify my thoughts as thoughts, to think them without being attached to them, to find a way to observe myself as a thinking thing. We’ll do some poses. If there’s something she wants me to explore more deeply she’ll use her hands to show me how.
“Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now,” Sports Illustrated.
Not that this is, um, a truly crucial part of the story, but Collins is a Harvard-Westlake alum; I remember reading about him and his brother playing college ball when I was in middle school. (Also, fun fact: apparently Jason Segel played alongside him, in high school.)
Although we knew Z would go back to LA from the day she arrived on this coast again, it was still awful to see her go. For her going away party, I made as many Z-specific foods as I could think of — chocolate chip cookies, deviled eggs, etc — and we toasted her over and over with our martinis and wine and champagne.
December 11, 2012, 10:57pm
I know everyone feels this way but I’m fairly certain that I’m right when I say: my friends are the best friends.
— Doyle Smells: Opium, Taking Up Space, and Perfume Gender Panic
My mom has been to Coachella every year since its inception. I have gone with her twice, but I hated it, so now I just wait for her to give me a post-mortem over the phone. (You know: “The Postal Service was so good!” etc. etc.) It’s too hot and crowded, for…
Jane’s Addiction lived down the block from us when my mother was pregnant with me; they practiced loud and late, and she called the cops on them regularly.
Accordingly, I am skipping Coachella this weekend because a) why and b) yoga teacher training.
Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders via Konundrum Engine & Edan L.
“I don’t believe at all in the Deep Dark Secret theory of literature: this idea that there is a right or a wrong about a given story or a given approach. My own pathetic output is proof that, at least in…
mom discovers procrasti-blogging
On Sunday I was at this barbecue at a house in the hills in Echo Park and it was drizzling so everyone was making faces about it, including B, who had just flown in from New York. “You should be tougher than this,” someone said.
“It snowed last week,” he said. “I’m done being tough.” He’s moving back in just over a year; we walked around the property together, the yard and the porch and the deck overlooking a ravine, the steep sharp fall carpeted in what looked like nasturtiums, watching the sun set through the slits in the hills to the west. “People just live like this here,” he said, sweeping out a hand at it: space, sun, a pinata from somewhere south of here rigged up in one of the trees. “They just… do.”
They do; we do. I miss eastern spring a little bit, though, too. The day last year that I wore that stupid romper and drank rose on the train, brought N the season’s first asparagus, the curling tips of the scapes.
“Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else.”
“Part of the thing the character’s doing,” Ms. Adler said, “is trying not to live the stereotyped version of that story. There are many stereotyped versions of that story.”
”— Miranda Popkey interviewed Renata Adler about the rerelease of Speedboat and Pitch Dark. (via emilybooks)
About the novel … the one in progress … :
E had a dream in which a man came up to her on the street and demanded to know if her work was influenced by William Gass. When she woke up, she tried to reconstruct her response but couldn’t. Instead she made a new list (not Gass but yes, CPK and…
I promised I would out her if & when she started using it, and, faithful daughter that I am, I’m following through. My mom has a blog! She is going to post things on it, and write about writing her novel! You should read it, mostly so that you can see that everything I think about process & place pretty much comes from her.
