TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Many a thing has happened since my last hilarious, poignant, decaf tea and yoga mat post. There has been so much good, like, for instance getting a job at a gallery, which allows me to say things like, “What do I do? I work at a gallery.” There’s also been a lot of bad, for instance, losing my keys at two in the morning on a below freezing night and discovering that the diamond bracelet I found in the cereal isle at Harris Teeter is not just cubic zirconium, it is blood cubic zirconium—optically flawless but chemically produced by legions of poor Africans in horrid conditions. I’ve been trying to decide if the medium plus has outweighed the medium minus in the past few weeks. Right now and right here, scribbling on the back of a buy-one-romance-get-one-free coupon behind a register at my second job as a big box bookseller, events seem more terrible than wonderful. My heavy boots, however, could just be my right here and right now situation; that is, halfway through the early shift I take each Sabbath not out of the joy of touching other peoples’ money while accruing so little of my own, but because Sunday is the most dangerous day of the week. A bloody Mary breakfast leads to two p.m. PBRs leads to nine p.m. secret-sharing from a bar stool confessional. These Sabbath shifts are my stay-out-of-trouble plan, but forgoing eggs Florentine with my favorite friends harshes my mellow in a serious way, and so, right now and right here, I feel a serious Fuck You towards the world and want the past weeks and, perhaps, this whole miserable season, to be so far in past as to be forgotten.

The bad bad reached a mountain top on a Saturday two weeks ago. I stopped by our neighborhood coffee shop/chicken coop/bingo hall with my pal S. Windsor (of the Pensecola Windsors). A neighbor friend was there—a sweetheart of a guy who is not only a seriously good artist and a seriously important part of our community but also my style icon and the reason I wear my beanie above my ears like I’m about to swab a deck somewhere atop the Atlantic. Said neighbor told that us that he’d had a massive asthma attack a few days before, couldn’t find his puffer, passed out when all the oxygen had escaped his lungs, and, as he was dying, the capillaries in his eyes burst. At the coffee shop, my friend took off the sunglasses he will be wearing for the next few weeks or even months, and it looked like this good sweet man had been hanging out in the fourth circle of hell. There was no white in his eyes. None. They were a deep red, deeper than blood or stop signs. This story of near death and the shock of his eyes moved the fog in and all of a sudden I was on the ground, passed out, my own eyeballs rolled up in their sockets, out (Note: I wish I had seen this because swooning is probably the most lady-like thing I’ve ever done). When I came to, I was being held up by friends. It felt like I was really, really drunk. Like more drunk than I’ve ever been, more even than Ibiza New Years 2006 when I woke up in a sandy trench covered in body paint. But more than just shaky and Casper white, I was upset the way one gets when learning that someone we care about saw the end.

Two years ago, during my annual pap smearing, my doctor found a lump in my breast. She said it was probably nothing, just too much coffee or a pebble that worked it’s way into my nipple. She told me to keep a hand on my mammaries, do the monthly shower exam, and come back in if anything changed. I tried to self-examine a few times, but who can tell the difference between a lump of cancer and a lump of coal? Besides, I was young and healthy and I ride my bike and drink green tea and eat kale at least once a week. The only bad things that had ever happened to me were of my own creation, like when I’ve opted for dance parties instead of work, which is still kind of worth it. I was twenty-four and I was more than special. I was invincible. But in that moment, when Dr. Chai went from my left breast to my right breast and then back to the left, probing one spot over and over, I wasn’t special or invincible. I was human and I was scared.

After I woke up from temporary blackness two weeks ago, my first impulse was to call the person who, until recently, had been my person. And I likely would have called her but I deleted her number and, besides that, the surrounding friends have more sense than I and would have thrown my phone in the nearby Port-a-Johns before allowing me to make that call. But I passed out and my friend almost died and hers was the voice I wanted to hear and she wasn’t there and it was all so very wrong. S. Windsor (of the Pensecola Windsors) took me to the hospital after coming to out of a fear of seizures and also because I wanted to take advantage of my health insurance. I didn’t have a seizure, just a blood-rushing reaction to trauma, but the doctor told me to take it easy for a little while. I said that I couldn’t because there was a hot babe coming to town that night and I wanted to party. He understood but advised me to get an EKG while I was there. When the he came back after the test, he showed me a graph of the results. There was an irregularity, he said, most likely nothing serious, but something to watch all the same. There’s no shower check for your heartbeat, so he told me to get it checked by my doctor as soon as I could. Again, most likely nothing to worry about. But in that moment, when I expected to be fine, for him to send me home with a lolipop and immaculate bill of health, expected to be twenty-six and not just special but invincible, I was scared again and human again.

When I got home, freaked out by the whole experience, I emailed the person who used to be my person. Something happened, I said. Please call me. My heart beat was broken and my friend almost died and imagining what he must have felt when he looked in the mirror after suffocating alone on his floor and saw the red in his eyes made me so sad and so worried because I am not invincible and neither is he and neither is she. She called me the next day and I told her what happened. I wanted her to say the right things, to tell me that she was worried, that it would all be okay, and, mostly, that she missed me. But she didn’t say those things. She seemed, if nothing else, annoyed to be pulled back into my life. This, not hearing those words, made me curl into a cave of blankets and sleep for hours because when you sleep you don’t exist and there are no words to hear and no words to not hear.

It is a crime to make someone else unhappy. All crimes start with making ourselves unhappy. Roger Ebert said this. He is facing the end of his life, unable to eat or drink or speak or even open his mouth because cancer took his jaw. And he is right. As unhappy as I was not to hear the words, I miss you, I can only be unhappy with myself. Unhappy that I wanted to hear her voice, unhappy that I tried to force someone who wanted two nights a week, who wanted no obligation, to hold hands and shop for groceries. We were best together when we were sleeping, my arm over her torso, still and silent for a few easy hours, not asking each other to want the things we didn’t want.

And that’s what this terrible winter has taught me: when it’s two in the morning and you’re locked out of your house, when your tree house blows down and the neighbor’s dog keeps barking, when the streetlight wakes you up at midnight and you can’t go back to sleep, when your rent check gets lost and you can’t afford another stamp, when you’re behind a register while your friends are all at brunch, when you catalog the month’s events and find there’s more bad than good, just find your puffer and take a breath. And then, when you no longer want to call, when you take off your sunglasses and see the whites of your eyes, when your heart beat isn’t broken and a lump is just a lump, stop making yourself unhappy and see the people holding you up.

Valentine’s Day lost it’s sparkle for me a few years ago when a girl threw up sake and sashami on my Nikes after a romantic dinner at China-A-Go-Go and then karate chopped me in the gut when I tried to get her in the shower. Besides, mandated flowers and edible panties are about as romantic as my old Sunday night routine with Small Fry: large pizzas and laxative tea. When I choose to be with a person who chooses to be with me, I don’t need a holiday to do sweet shit. I do sweet shit all the time—see, for example, Fall 2006, when I donated a kidney to a girl I had a crush on, who then lived to marry a doctor. I don’t need a construction paper heart to show a girl that I want her on my health insurance. But because I work at a bookstore and have been ringing up more Sade albums than New York Times in the past few days, I’ve got Valentine’s on the mind. Actually, it’s probably less the pink and white displays that’ve got me reflecting on love and the lack thereof and more the fact that I’m a few weeks into a break up. Not an angry break up, but still a break up. I’m looking for someone to blame for my dirty snow and litter box opinion on matters of the heart, but because it’s really no one’s fault that I currently feel like the world is a cruel blue orb and I hope it only survives for another 5,000 years before the sun explodes, I blame the advent of mobile communications.

Mobile technology has changed the entire courting process. Texting is the first step in creating a connection, meaningful or mean. When my favorite and most current ex and I started dating, we gave ourselves carpal tunnel with all the texting. I worried that if we continued with such behavior we’d never be comfortable on the phone and I’d spend the next sixty years wearing off my thumbprints when I could just call to ask if she wants to eat in or take out. I solved this problem by calling her from the living room when she was in the kitchen so we could practice.

The ability to give good text is an indication of intelligence. Highly intelligent people can give terrible text if they are too busy deconstructing deconstructionism to bother with correct punctuation, but the ability to make a person LOL in 140 characters or less is more important than holding open the door or having great taste in music. I send or receive an average of forty-seven texts a day and actually talk on the phone only when ordering sesame tofu from Jade Palace. I’ve had entire relationships that have never gone from textual to audible, which is a sure sign that something isn’t going to work out. It is also possible, however, to fool yourself into thinking that because she sends texts that you read aloud to your friends not to analyze but because they are actually funny, that because her Facebook profile is honest but not too honest, ironic but not too ironic, that because she is awesome on Gchat, the real life person is going to be as cool as her avatar. But there’s no guarantee that she’s anything but quick wit and fast thumbs. It’s a 2.0 problem in a 2.0 world, and a serious one at that.

Facebook is the place to go when you’re in the mood for a good cry. You don’t want to look at your ex’s profile but you do it anyway. You can’t see her sitting on your couch in woolly slippers and her grandmother’s sweater anymore, but you can see her on Facebook. You let your mind run to the dark every time you log in. Who are those new friends? What’s that status update mean? She’s says she stressed. Is it because of work or because she misses me and regrets saying she would never have babies with someone who uses self-tanner. She looks happy in the photo. Does that mean that she’s over me? Or maybe she’s trying to look happy so I think that she’s over me when she’s actually sitting at home watching Law & Order in her sweat pants and sleeping with my old Camp Kanuga t-shirt under her pillow? Shit. She’s definitely over me. Facebook is a living archive of your relationships, one you can’t delete without deleting the proof that you were real. Those pictures? Those comments? You did exist. There are no letters to hold when you want to feel her again, but there are emails to reread.

The Internet is also where you find the refreshment of a new crush. You’ve never actually hung out, so it’s her Facebook profile that provides your only insight into who she is and what her life’s like, if she’s a Pisces (good) or a Scorpio (bad). You scan her pictures, throwing out anyone with self-portraits taken in a bathroom mirror wearing only a towel. You judge her taste in books and music, looking for evidence of humor and depth. How much information did she share? Too much or too little? You friend her, then you message her, write on her wall and respond to her status updates. And then, in this ritual, you proceed to text messages and phone calls and, eventually, actually getting coffee or a drink or walking around the neighborhood, your footsteps beating in real, not virtual, time.

And this, when you’re finally stalking someone besides your ex—when you’ve stopped trying to understand why two people who fit together don’t fit together—is when you know you’re going to be okay. It might be Valentine’s Day, but you’ve stopped looking at your ex’s profile, checking your in-box, waiting for her to come back. The Internet is a space to despair, to find solace in other peoples’ pain, a place to feel good about feeling bad. But it is also a place to renew your interest in the world, to move on and feel better when you start to think less about her and about more about the ones you don’t yet know.

Dear Katie,
What are your thoughts on marriage?  It is something I struggle with; yes, I see the benefits, yes, I see how it’s a fucked up “unnatural” institution.  If gays could get married, would you?
Sincerely,
Cold Feet

Dear Cold Feet,

There are several key elements to any successful marriage—good communication, congruent values, similar goals, common interests. Imagine that you’re into crocheting and he’s into scrapbooking? How could that marriage last any longer than it takes for the cake to get stale?

Another integral element is more than one person in the relationship. And this, not just because I’m gay and actually can’t get married, is what keeps me from buying the rings and hyphenating my name. It’s hard to consider marriage when your last girlfriend broke up with you because you both like to be the little spoon. And the one before that because you consider Nottinghill a foreign film and would rather watch it than anything with subtitles. And the one before that because one of your legs is shorter than the other and you once referred to synagogue as “Jew church,” which your Jewish roommate thought was funny so you really don’t understand what the big deal was. The point is, when you’re single, marriage is less important than finding someone to get brunch with.

In theory, however, I do want to get married. This is a recent development in my emotional life. I used to say things like, I don’t understand why you’re going on your honeymoon alone. What happens when you get sick of each other? A week of conversation with only one other person? Yeah, it’s Jamaica, but there’s only so much to say about beaches. I really felt this way, that monogamy is inherently boring, like crafting or sobriety. I thought of myself as a sort of gay George Clooney—a free spirit, unrestrained by commitment and obligation—except without fame, fortune, critical acclaim, or symmetrical features. At that time, I was less likely to wake up with a phone number than with a hangover. And that, not fighting over who’s going to wash the egg pan or mail the rent check, is boring.

But even though lasting commitment appeals to me in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated when I was schlepping around town, marriage probably isn’t in my future. Here’s why: I’m terrible at break ups. I delete her number, block her email, defriend her on Facebook, and generally try to forget that she ever entered my mind cloud. Also, I cry a lot. Even though this complete severing is dramatic and maybe a little immature, it’s necessary, because the hardest part of breaking up is hope. Hope is what makes your blood pressure rise every time your phone dings, every time you check your email, every time there’s an unexpected knock on your door; hope that even though you asked her to stay away, she won’t. Hope is what keeps you submerged. Severing kills the hope, and you can’t do that when you’re married.

In most break ups, you move her toothbrush from the cup on your sink to the wastebasket beside the toilet. Later, when the trash is full, you toss it with the rest of your household garbage, bag it up and leave it on the curb. It moves to the dump truck and to the landfill with all the other toothbrushes, all the other reminders of things that don’t exist. But when you’re married, you can’t just throw out her toothbrush and take her favorite sweater to Goodwill. There are houses and dogs and papers to sign and rings to hide in the sock drawer you no longer share.

I don’t want to split possessions and negotiate custody. And so, even when it becomes legal and normal for two women to promise their lives to each other, when we stop referring to gay marriage in air quotes, stop noticing when women refer to each other as “wife,” I probably won’t make it to the altar. There’s too much possibility that it will all go terribly wrong and you’ll be left in a house that’s twice as big as it was, with half the dishes, with a mattress but not a bed frame, your toothbrush alone on the counter.

But, CF, just because I am not brave, just because I’d rather sleep in the middle of my bed now than get used to an empty side later, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get married. I still think that the honeymoon would be more fun if you could take your friends, but don’t let the fact that some of us can’t get married keep you from it. Good luck.

I grew up about five hours from here, in a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s not so much a town really as there’s a gas station and a Mexican restaurant with a constantly rotating name and ownership but not much else beyond its 3,500 residents. It’s beautiful and it’s quiet. Even though winters in the mountains see far more snow than we do here in the Peidmont, people are equally unable to deal with it there. The closest grocery store—which only started selling alcohol a few years ago because it’s across the street from the high school and the management thought it was morally wrong to sell booze in such close proximity to the fine young minds of Jackson County, North Carolina—sells out of eggs and bread and American cheese and plastic bottles of Diet Coke. Like here, the roads don’t get plowed because there aren’t any plows. And the power goes out. This happened often enough when I was a kid that our parents bought one of those big kerosene heaters that smell like brain damage and melt your new flannel pajamas if you get too close when trying to warm your butt.

The event precipitating this purchase was the Blizzard of ‘93, also known as the Storm of the Century or the White Hurricane. This storm was huge, actually huge, and not just because I was kind of short for my age and could jump into snowdrifts and disappear. It stretched from Central America to Canada, and in places where it’s more likely for cocaine to fall from the sky than snow, people wrapped their hands in newspaper and learned to shape snowballs. The Florida Panhandle got four inches, Birmingham, Alabama got twelve, and Cullowhee, North Carolina got four-and-half feet. It was as white as the time when I worked at a bakery and my boss dumped a bag of flour on my head after I forgot to put sugar in a dozen batches of muffins. School was closed for so long that we forgot how to multiply and we had to start from the beginning, singing the alphabet and counting on our fingers. The whole town lost power. A neighbor’s house had a wood-burning stove, so my family stayed there. It was their family of four, the five of us, and our various pets, including a couple of dogs and my brother’s boa constrictor Sam, who stayed under the heater in a pillow case with the neck knotted shut, unbeknown to our hosts.

All we did was sled. We lived on a hill about a half-mile long. It’s steep—hard to ride your bike up, a pain to walk up when you’re not up to your knees in snow, and really, really fun to sled down. Because the roads were covered, we didn’t have compete with cars. We started from the top, often two or three kids on each plastic sled that soon cracked from abuse, and sped down, hitting ramps carefully manufactured out of ply wood by my brother and his friends–flying for a brief second, hitting the snow with a jarring thump, and then walking twenty minutes up the hill and doing it again. From the thinking-back years of adulthood, it was idyllic: drinking hot chocolate made on a camp stove, sleeping on the floor with all the blankets we could find and then towels thrown on top of them, sighing every time the sun came out, not ready for those inches to melt and for life to go back to what it was.

During the Blizzard of ‘93, our six-month-old puppy Tsali disappeared. It was common for dogs in the neighborhood to wander off for a while. It was a sort of free-range zone for neighborhood pets. We didn’t take our dogs for walks because we didn’t have to. We just let them outside and expected they’d come home when they got hungry. We never owned leashes and never worried about the dogs getting lost. Tsali, however, did get lost during the blizzard. She was the same color as the snow, white like only puppies can be. She just disappeared. Her collar was where we left it, hanging off a closet doorknob. We hiked all over the neighborhood, calling her name even though she didn’t even know it yet. We saw her last when the snow started and didn’t think we ever would again. It was a traumatic glitch in our week of powder. About a week later, when the snow was turning dirty and the fun was wearing off, Tsali wandered into the yard. We found out later that another family had taken her in in storm and, when it was over, she simply walked home.

Snowstorms aren’t as fun when you’re grown. As comfortable as it is to hibernate every once in while, to really be at home, it reminds you of what it is to be young and also that you aren’t young. I hear the shouts of my neighbors’ children and the occasional adult reliving the easy joy of speeding down hills and I feel guilty for not joining, for sitting on my couch when I could be breathing hard with laughter. There are so many reasons to stay inside—you’ve got the day off so you might as well clean out those closets, and you’ve always wanted to make bread and there’s plenty of flour in the pantry so you should do that instead of blowing on your hands and getting snow in the cuffs of your pants. And there’s books to read and essays to write and endless episodes of Law & Order to catch up on. Besides, you don’t have the clothes for sledding and it’s too cold and you’re just so cozy. So you stay inside but still feel a little guilty for enjoying the quiet from the heated interior of home.

My parents are snowed in right now but their power is on, unlike most of the neighborhood. Their neighbor is staying at their house tonight, the same neighbor whose house we stayed at seventeen years ago. Things are different now, of course. None of the kids live at home. We’re dealing with power outages and cabin fever on our own or with new families and friends. Tsali is gone, and so is Sam, and, sadly, terribly, so is Malcolm, the father and husband of that family we stayed with seventeen years ago. And this, when the world is still but for snowball fights and sledding children, is what makes me miss the Blizzard of ‘93. Not just because we were all there, but because the idea that someday we would not all be there hadn’t yet penetrated our little minds. Our world was snow and sledding and finding puppies and, we thought, it would it always be.

Because I am UNEMPLOYED and have NOTHING TO DO beyond applying for jobs that I’m NEVER GOING TO GET, I’ve been spending a lot of time reviewing my life. And by “my life,” I mean, the Internet.

The Internet gives you the illusion that you are living far and wide. I haven’t actually spoken to anyone today, for instance, mostly because it’s cold out and I don’t have to leave my house, but I’ve still communicated with half of my graduating class and a multitude of distant relatives via status update (currently, text msg from my dad: “snow. kitty scared. about to lose power. if mom and i freeze to death, remember we always loved you best.”). All before getting dressed!

First there was a series of text messages between my sister and I about the origin of buffalo wings, which taste like your freshman dorm room and originated in Buffalo, New York. The name, I now know, pertains to the sauce, not the genre of meat. After texting a few more people on such matters as the possibility of one’s nipples inverting when one sleeps on one’s stomach so one wakes up with innies and whether or not my boobs hurt because I’m pregnant, which would be a miracle and also a really great story, I turn to the Internet.

The best time of the day is right when I get up—about noon. This is not because I do my best work fresh after a good night’s sleep or because the gym is empty in the early afternoon, but because you’ve already been at work and on the Internet for several hours and so my in-box is full.

There’s so much potential in those first few minutes deep in my in-box. First, there’s messages I still get from the graduate school I dropped out of even though I’m about as close to a master’s degree as I am to the Pope. Then there’s a few job rejections, some ads for shit I can’t afford, and the occasional bill notification. Delete, all. Next, I turn to the Facebook notifications and delete everything that seems below my station in life (e.g. Farmville). After that, I glance at the event notifications and then delete them, as sure that I’ll hear about events worth attending when someone asks me for a ride. After that, friend requests! Accept, because who am I to be choosy? I haven’t used my voice other than to hiss at the cat all day. A clean in-box is very important too me.

My favorite mornings start with notifications that someone has donated to my PayPal, but that doesn’t really happen that often, so than I like notifications that you’ve commented on my blog, which also doesn’t really happen that often. After that, I spend a few hours Gchatting with various friends and family, some of whom live across the country and some of whom live across the street. A vast majority of these world wide webular communications are with my Virtual Girlfriend. A typical conversation:

VG: When I thought that your and your lady broke up, I told my IRL girlfriend and she was like, “oh, so you guys are back together?” and she was NOT smiling or joking.
Me: LOL

When VG has to look at spreadsheets or take her lunch break, I try to find things online that challenge my assumptions about the world. That’s boring, so then I look for funny shit. But because the Internet’s been a real mellow-harsher lately, what with the largely bummer state of this blue orb we call home, and the only thing I’ve found recently was about Nancy Kerrigan’s brother killing their father, which isn’t really funny.

Oh, and the following videos, which will make you feel like you found a pair of Dunks in just your size and your best girl always texts you back….

Another thing to bring levity to an otherwise heavy boots time in the world: As soon as I walked into therapy yesterday, my therapist was like, “YOU LOOK SKINNY WHAT IS GOING ON?” And I was like, “It’s nothing. I’m just stressed about job stuff and I can’t eat when I’m stressed. I’m fine.” And she was like, “YOU ARE LYING YOU ARE ON COCAINE I CAN TELL.” And I was like, “Slow your roll. I’m not doing cocaine.” And she was like, “YOU ARE I KNOW YOU ARE TELL ME NOW.” This went on for a while, and then, not thirty seconds after I finally convinced her that I’m not on drugs, MY NOSE STARTED BLEEDING. True story.

Dear Katie, Should I quit my job? I work for a pretty good company but I don’t feel appreciated. I have enough savings to stay afloat for six months where I live now. Or I could sublet my place and travel for three months! What do you think?

–Considering Other Possibilities

Dear COP,

Your boss is an asshole. Your customers think of you as the help, which you are, but the help with a bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts university. And not just any liberal arts university—a really good one with a beautiful campus and gender neutral bathrooms and an excellent Frisbee golf team, on which you were somewhat of a star. Other things you were a star of were bong hits so huge that you could hotbox an entire dorm suite with a single lungful, chalking terrific political slogans on the sidewalk in front of the cafeteria, and making out with attractive underclassman of every gender. You were very open. You loved college so much that you stayed in it for several years past your friends, although, truth be told, in your final two years you were more concerned with not doing work than doing work. You expended more energy writing pithy emails to your professors to explain your many absences than actually doing the reading, reading you actually might have enjoyed if not negated by your primary interest, which was spending your textbook money on weed. Regardless, it worked. Your professors loved you and wrote you great recommendations for graduate school, which you surely would have gotten into if not for misreading the deadlines and submitting your paperwork six weeks late. But do your customers at Whole Foods or Restoration Hardware or IKEA see this when they look at you behind the counter, pouring their lattes and bagging their groceries and answering their questions? No, no they do not. They see the help.

Your boss is an asshole. Your swivel chair hurts your back. You spend all day Gchatting with your friends about how much you hate your job. You have a self-induced migraine because you went out last night, not because you wanted to, but because you had to, because your co-workers were going out to bitch about your asshole boss and your asshole co-workers who are too good to go to work hungover. You don’t want to be one of those asshole co-workers, so tell yourself that all you’ll need tomorrow is coffee and  a protein shake, which you do need, but which also makes you want to vomit. Other things that make you want to vomit are these spreadsheets and this fucking swivel chair.

Your boss is an asshole. Or, at least, your boss would be an asshole if you actually had a boss, which you don’t because you are a master bridge-burner. Because you are smart and talented, you thought it was okay to quit jobs on impulse. There would always be another job, another chance. Your didn’t get the days off you requested to go to Bonaroo? Well, fuck you, place of employment! I do what I want. This pattern started early. Your first job was at Taco Bell at sixteen. The shirt they gave you was too big and was definitely left-over from the last person to quit and probably hadn’t been washed and measuring half-ounce bags of tortilla chips didn’t hold your attention and someone spilled an extra large Mr. Pibb and the bottoms of your shoes stuck to the ground and so you folded up your uniform shirt and laid it beside the door and drove away on your lunch break and didn’t come back. This is how you’re supposed to think at sixteen because you are stupid at sixteen. It is for this reason that it is acceptable for sixteen-year-olds to smoke marijuana out of tin cans and tell each other they love each other when all they know about love is that when you say it you get laid. Other bridges you have burned include but are not limited to your work study job in college, which you thought was safe as long as you let your boss mildly sexually harass you and so it was a surprise when you were fired after being caught cutting up Adderoll on your desk; a summer job waiting tables at a pizza joint, which you stopped going to after realizing that the cooks stirred sauce in a plastic trash can, up to their bare elbows in marinara; the coffee shop across the street from a bar whose servers traded you vanilla lattes for domestic beers; a job at a magazine with three cubical walls that you could decorate any way you wanted, a job that probably would have worked out if your boss hadn’t overheard you speculating about his sexuality with a co-worker, a conversation that may or may not have including the terms “wrist flapper” and “Vaseline alley.” Ten years after you quit that first job, your only references are friends who have their own phone lines at their jobs and don’t mind lying for you.

As a child, it never occurred to me that I’d have trouble finding a career, much less finding an eight dollar an hour job. Why would it? I was raised on homemade pasta sauce and PBS and the occasional reading dinner, when all five of us passed the salad and the salt and sat together around the dining room table and read. Why would I be any thing less than successful? It had nothing to do with talent or ambition, just that I was born lucky. But my First World problems are becoming actual problems. It’s no longer about feeling sorry for myself because this relationship failed or that one never existed, about losing another iPod, about having carpet instead of hard-woods. It’s about living in an arrested state, not working and not knowing what to do with my time. It’s about wondering what the point of applying for more jobs is when all I get is rejections. It’s about the future, not just mine, but yours and everyone’s, because if things are bad for those of us born lucky, they are really, really bad. So, no, don’t quit your job COP. Or do, but give it to me.

Send your questions to krherzog @ gmail

There was someone named Miriam a few years ago. My friends said that she looked like a Kohl’s model, and she did—beautiful in a way that’s not aggressive or threatening, like she would never snort lines off a cardboard coaster in a fifty dollar motel. She was like that girl in high school who was popular but didn’t blow half the soccer team. Miriam was bisexual. This is something that many of us near-hundred percent lesbians struggle with. It’s completely unfair, and we realize this, but there’s something that makes us uncomfortable about bisexuality. This is especially ridiculous when you consider that when you substitute the word “queer” for “bisexual,” it’s somehow political and okay, but when you are dating a self-proclaimed bisexual, you just want her to choose. But she can’t choose anymore than you can choose. You know this and you try not to think about it but it still bothers you. You typically only admit this in the presence of other lesbians, who almost always agree.

Miriam and I didn’t date so much as occasionally kiss and more often fight. We wouldn’t speak to each other for a few weeks and then we’d make out and be mean to each other a few hours later. Before Miriam was an actual person with a slight temper and not just an attractive fantasy, I felt like maybe the part of me that froze over the first time my heart was broken was starting to thaw a little bit. And so when it was clear that there was something important and fundamental lacking in our relationship—like, perhaps, the fact that she likes men and also didn’t think I was funny—I was sad. I was also angry and may or may not have referred to her as a “dirty bisexual” and “women’s studies gay” more than once.

Several months after Miriam and I had stopped torturing each other for sport and settled into a tenuous friendship,I met my pals Shannanigans and Small Fry at our neighborhood bar. It was Valentine’s day and we celebrated with late afternoon shots of tequila, toasting to Cupid and Cuervo. When it got dark, we moved up the street to a restaurant that turns into a bar after ten or so. But it’s wasn’t ten, wasn’t even close to ten, and we were shit-housed and everyone else was eating their Valentine’s dinner in low lights. Miriam was there with her boyfriend, a young lawyer type, and his young lawyer friends. She introduced us. He seemed nice, though probably not so pleased when I said something like, “Good to meet you. She’s great in bed, isn’t she?”  And because Miriam and I can’t be in the same room without one of us acting the fool, we made out in the bathroom and one of her boyfriend’s young lawyer friends walked in. The next day, Miriam told me that her boyfriend was more shocked by Small Fry and Shannanigans, who were slapping each other and then kissing each other at the bar as everyone else ate their dessert.

Things didn’t work out with Miriam, not for me, and not for the young lawyer, but we’re friends again, and when I’m sad, it’s helpful for me to remember of how much I liked that girl and how low I felt when it became clear that we would never have more than a strange brand of friendship. It’s good to remember how something that felt so bad just sort of disappeared with time.

It’s called limerence, or an “involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person.” You know what this is. You try to think of other things but it’s you can’t. It’s bad enough when you’re in happy love, trying to spread your glow but really just driving the people around you crazy with your silly joy. You want everyone to know that you are a person with a person. You are happy and you are obsessed with your happiness because it might end at any second.

After that first blush, you become a worrier. Not that she is going to leave, but that something will happen to her, something bad, something you can’t fix, because how could you possibly survive without her? It is a selfless love and a selfish love. You would give her organs major and minor, move far from your friends and family, quite smoking, take up yoga, do anything to make her happy. But it is a selfish love because you are only happy when she is happy.

And when it ends, when unhappy love replaces the barrel monkeys and the rainbows, you get sick. The first time I saw heartbreak, I went to a friend’s house after her boyfriend had finally and definitively ended it. I’d never see crazy like she was crazy that night. The tears and the laughter took on the same manic pitch. One second sobbing, the next laughing, dragging a vacuum behind her in curlers and slippers with a glass of wine in one hand, like a 1950s housewife with new appliances and nothing to do. I didn’t understand why she didn’t just make a list of his flaws and be done with it. Take a shower and drink some tea and sleep in and be okay.

But then I understood. I was twenty years old and I thought I’d never stop crying. Heartache takes on the physical symptoms of disease, and I had all of them.  I was sick and I was crazy and I was sick because I was crazy. Hyper-vigilance. Insomnia. Weight-loss. Behavior bordering on scary that I’m still ashamed of, including but not limited to slicing up my arms and waking up in bed with my best friend there to make sure I didn’t grab another kitchen knife. After I woke up, held by someone who did love me, I drove to my ex’s house and knocked on the window until she answered and begged her to hold me. She did. I felt safe those few minutes in bed with her, under her blue flannel comforter with stars scattered on it. I rubbed her comforter between my fingers like I have since I was a thumb-sucking child and she told me to stop fingering her blanket and we both laughed and then I started crying again because it was almost daylight and almost over and at that moment I would have traded every day of my life just to stay under that blanket with her.

She used to wear lavender baby lotion, the kind that’s supposed to soothe cranky babies. When she was leaving for a long trip to South America, I asked her to put the lotion all over her body and roll over that starry comforter. For the three months she was gone, I smelled her when I fell asleep and when I woke up. After we broke up, I couldn’t smell that lotion without a wave of hurt. Even seeing the bottle at the drug store brought me back to a place I wanted to avoid. And then, maybe four months ago, I came across that same lotion on sale at Wal-Mart. I bought it and didn’t wait to get home to open the bottle. I wanted to smell her again, two years after we last spoke. But it was the wrong smell—more floral than I remembered, not as soft. They changed the formula and now it doesn’t evoke her or anyone else. When I wear it, I don’t think of her.

There have been other girls, of course, but it’s the first one that takes the endless hope away, the first one who teaches you to make a list of her flaws the next time around, to shower and sleep and be done with it, to hold your own blanket in your fingers instead of wishing for hers again. And when, years later, the memory of the flood falling from your eyes has faded enough so that you’re ready to try again, it isn’t terrifying because you’ve already done it and nothing can be as bad as the first time. And when that one’s over and you’re feeling not so terrible but not so great, you become jealous of your cat. It eats like eating is simple thing. You pour food into it’s bowl and it eats, and, for you, eating is impossible. Even if someone poured a bowl of food and set it in front of you, you couldn’t eat it, wouldn’t eat it, because eating means getting over it. First you eat, then you have to get out of bed before noon. After that you’ll need to pay your bills and call your mom back and you aren’t ready to be done just yet because being done means starting over again. But you do. You start over, wait for the next one. When you meet her, you talk about families and jobs and figure out what makes each other laugh and find a new sleep position—your arm around her torso, her feet touching yours—and hope that this new one will be the last.

Although the population that identifies as homosexual in this country is a relatively small 10.43 percent, a recent New York Times article, “The Americanization of Mental Illness,” argues that, like democracy and the colors red, white, and blue, homosexuality, once a solely Western phenomenon (See: Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s response to a question posed by a likely homosexual during appearance at the notoriously liberal Columbia University, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country…. I don’t know who told you that we have this.”), is spreading. The author, Ethan Watters, whose book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, will be published next month, doesn’t actually mention homosexuality in the article (or, at least, the portion of the article that I read because it was kind of long it seemed more important to throw a tennis ball against my neighbor’s house than finish reading), but this is because Mr. Watters lives in San Francisco, a noted hotbed of sodomy and Mexican food, and doesn’t want you to equate homosexuality with other mental disorders, despite what the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Vol II, 1968), which was written by licensed medical professionals, states.

Watters does, however, analyze the spread of other mental illnesses from West to East. Take, for instance, anorexia, which was an unknown dietary plan in Hong Kong until a fourteen-year-old girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying collapsed on a sidewalk in 1994 after skipping breakfast one too many times. What was rare became an epidemic in the aftermath of Charlene’s death, spread in part by  headlines like Thinner Than a Yellow Flower, Weight-Loss Book Found in School Bag, Schoolgirl Falls Dead on Street. What was less common than koro, or the fear that one’s genitals are retracting into one’s body, became as much a part of the cultural landscape as vending machines that sell used underpants. That is, anorexia didn’t exist until the media made it so.

The same can be said of homosexuality. The proof is in the numbers. In 1975, for instance, Googling “Anderson Cooper + gay” produced approximately zero results. Today, however, the same search produces about 938,000 hits. Every time Anderson Cooper shows his well-toned facial muscles on cable news, a gay is born. And so, even if you are not a homosexual and no one you know is a homosexual, it’s only a matter of time before your son tells you he wants to quit Little League and buy a tutu. What follows in meant to help your transition into the world of homosexuality.

In case you’re unfamiliar with homosexuality, let me explain. Homosexuality is a psychological disorder in which one is attracted to members of the same sex. Symptoms among males (also know as “fags”) include a love of the color lavender, the pop music star Beyonce, and hair products. Symptoms among women (”lesbians” or “dykes”) are more subtle, as there are many varieties of homosexual females (see, for example, a common middle-aged variant recognizable by their Labrador retrievers and Life is Good hats and/or tee-shirts), but they are easy to spot as they tend to move in packs. While homosexual men may seek companionship among heterosexual women (”fag hags”) as well as other homosexual men, lesbians (see also “gayelles,” “scissor sisters,” and “Queen LaQuiffa”) tend to segregate from other parts of society, preferring to maintain friend groups composed solely of other homosexual woman. This does not, however, mean that all it takes to befriend a lesbian is membership in what they refer to as “the family.” On the contrary, lesbians naturally separate into different sects and look upon sects other than their own with derision. You will never, for instance, see a softball lesbian sharing a blanket at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival with a hipster dyke with prominent and colorful tattoos, most likely of inanimate objects. While it is true that they may both have bowl cuts, any chance of friendship is negated by the fundamental disparity in the widths of their pant legs.

There are multiple variations of homosexuality. Bisexuals (see also, “dirty bisexuals”) are noted for the intense jealousy they incite in their partners, who become suspicious not just of other homosexual women but also of heterosexual men, and, at times, of anyone with viable genitalia because, hey, she’s obviously undiscriminating, right? Another variation of homosexuality is transgenderism, symptoms of which include the unstoppable urge to change one’s name from something gender specific (e.g. “Sarah”) to something gender neutral (e.g. “Toast”). Transgendered populations are also marked by a decrease in sense of humor, which is the result of the large doses of hormones transgendered people often take in order to alter their physical appearances. This does not effect all transgendered people, just the one who stomped my foot when I expressed confusion about said person’s adopted pro-noun (”y’all”).

While some homosexual people choose to fight the disorder with psychological intervention or commit to a lifetime of celibacy, and some choose to enter into traditional heterosexual relationships with the hope that their gayness will dissipate in a heteronormative environment, someday making it possible for them to make love to their spouses without imagining Tom Brady in a Speedo to feel aroused, an increasing number of homosexuals are choosing to embrace their psychoses. They enter romantic relationships with other homosexuals, form performance art collectives with other homosexuals, and even raise their children to be homosexuals. In light of this movement towards universal acceptance, study the following principles to best communicate with your homosexual….

1. Two bottoms don’t make a top. While this phrase likely means nothing to you, the principle is well-known in homosexual society. Whereas traditional male/female relationships often include a built-in “top” (male) and a built-in “bottom” (female), homosexuals must negotiate these roles. And because it can be uncomfortable to discuss such preferences when you’re not even sure of your new friend’s name, homosexuals often enter into sexual congress unaware of their partner’s preference for “topping” or “bottoming.” When two homosexuals prefer the same role, one homosexual must relinquish their preferred position, or, as in the two bottoms scenario, sex looks a lot like two people laying on their backs waiting for the other person to make the first move. While it is not unequivocally true that two bottoms or two tops cannot have a fulfilling sexual relationship, it can be a complicating force. Note: femme tops are a rare and valuable breed.

2. Also known as butch-on-butch violence, butchinsense is characterized by the unstated conflict between two lesbians of the same ilk, typically, lesbians who display more masculine characteristics. Caused by a generalized anxiety among homosexuals due to the small number of available partners, butchinsense often dissipates when said butches converse for the first time and realize that they actually have a lot in common and might as well be friends. Femminsense exists, but is far less common.

3. Lesbian bed death is a myth. Actually, it’s not a myth, although homosexual women wish it were. Symptoms of lesbian bed death include owning multiple cats and peeing with the door open, both of which exacerbate what is already a common problem in long term lesbian relationships: that is, a tendency to be boring. There is no equivalent in homosexual male relationships.

4. Your homosexual may at some point express a desire to marry his or her homosexual lover. When this happens, you should never express that homosexual marriage is a really fun game and you’d love to play along. You should react the same way you would when the heterosexuals in your life discuss the same subject. Support your homosexual and then, after she realizes that her partner’s new spoken word piece is actually about the shortstop on her softball team, gently remind her that the whole thing was as real as two four-year-olds reciting their vows and exchanging ring pops, and thank god for that.

Because the spread of homosexuality is inevitable and unstoppable, I hope this information will help you be better prepared the next time your brother tells you about the new friend he met while scarf shopping at Banana Republic.

What follows is a review of Julie Powell’s new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Disclosure: what I have is the advance copy, so I’m actually reviewing a late draft of the book. Also, I have yet to and probably won’t finish it, so I’m actually reading a late draft of I book I’ve only skimmed.
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Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, is really, really lucky. She started a blog, got a book deal, the resulting book was made into a (pretty good) movie, she met Meryl Streep, knows the answer to everyone’s favorite fantasy question (Who would play me in the movie of my life?) and got a Wikipeida entry. And why? Because the timing was right. Julie Powell started blogging before even technophobic grandparents with mild Alzheimers had a Blogspot. Her blog isn’t even that interesting. Let me paraphrase a recent post: “It’s New Year’s! I should lose ten pounds.” Compare this to my New Year’s post: “It’s New Year’s! I’m going to see if I can get to my low weight of six pounds, eight ounces by eating Capt’n Crunch until the insides of my cheeks are so torn up that the only food that doesn’t cause blood to pool in my mouth is distilled water. Also, work out more.” Who would you rather go to a strip club with? Someone whose dream is a dinner date with Julia Child or someone whose dream is a temp job as a census-taker? Bad example. Point is, her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession, is less fun than accidentally swallowing beer with a cigarette butt at the bottom.

The fundamental problem with Cleaving is that, after the success of Julie and Julia, Little, Brown, & Co. tried to capitalize on Powell’s new found literary and cinematic fame too early. Not a year went by since the movie’s premier when Powell’s sophomore attempt hit the discount bin. What happened in that time? Well, a lot. Namely, Powell got rich and famous, which is a story we all want to read and hopefully emulate. But did Powell chose to write From Minimum Wage to Meryl Streep: The Julie Powell Story? No. She chose to write about her unpaid internship at a butcher shop.

The premise: Julie Powell throws away her marriage for a lover named D. (This itself annoyed me. Why not give the adulterer a better pseudonym? At least call him Dick or something.) Her husband of ten years—who not only put up with her “year of cooking dangerously” when he just wanted some Kung Pao Chicken and a back rub, but was also portrayed as somewhat of a wuss in the movie—finds out, cries a lot, and is generally treated like a bad ant infestation by his famous wife. They stay together, but Powell moves to upstate New York to apprentice as a butcher for six months, all the while ignoring her husband’s efforts towards reconciliation because she’s waiting for a text from her former lover even after he’s moved on. And while I know what it’s like to obsess over someone else to the point of callous unconcern for the person you’ve made a life with, Powell almost seems proud of her adultery. I don’t care if you think that your fuck puppet is the love or your life, cheating isn’t nice. Just cut the fucker lose before you buy a time-share with the new guy.

Speaking of Julie Powell and her fuck puppet, reading about the author’s trysts was as comfortable as introducing your parents to your former professor/current lover. Every time Powell laid down some detail about her affair, I pictured Amy Adams, who played Powell in Julie & Julia and is cute but not sexy and also has a gummy smile, doing the illicit. Besides, reading about sex generally makes me uncomfortable. Although Mazog recently said this blog is about “raunchy gay sex,” I’m actually part Mennonite and part vanilla ice cream and thinking about Amy Adams ‘opening up like a grinning harlot flower,’ when D slaps her across the face makes me feel like I did five minutes ago when I saw my landlord manscaping through the window. I admit that after Google Imaging Julie Powell and seeing that she looks human as opposed to preternaturally sexless and gummy, my discomfort lessened a bit, but the sex scenes still made me squirmy.

And so, why I will not finish Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, in bullets:

• Terrible pop culture references. Various epigraphs include quotes from a Decemberists’ song, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and from Veronica Mars, a show beloved by teens throughout the middle states. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste as I’d rather have “Birthday Sex” stuck in my head for all of Spring 2010 than listen to a single Decemberists’ song, but why not use something that resonates with more than those still ruing the death of Buffy, a population composed solely of gay boys born between 1980 and 1985? While this may seem small, it speaks to a larger problem: this book is built with an expiration date. As much as I’d like to believe that the immediacy of blogs easily transitions to the printed page, it just doesn’t. Will a book that refers to Anya the Vengeance Demon, Little Feat, texting, and BlackBerries be anything but dated in 2011, when, instead of drunk dialing, we drunk time-travel? Yes, plenty of books are meant to be read right now (See: Sarah Palin’s American Rogue and Twitter for Dummies), but Cleaving was meant to last and it won’t.

• Product placement. I counted seventy-four references to Powell’s beloved BlackBerry, which is much like Season Two of Gossip Girl, in which even the cocktails are made with Vitamin Water. Even worse, I doubt BlackBerry ponied up any cash for this endorsement, which is free advertising I just can’t respect with the exception of the argyle sweater vest with a prominent Tommy Hilfiger patch that I’m wearing right now.

• It’s hard to read. I don’t mean Infinite Jest hard-to-read, I mean IKEA manual hard-to-read. Example: after reading a 476 word passage on Frenching rib ends, I know nothing about Frenching ribs or even what Frenching ribs is, but, even if I understood this passage, it seems like it’s only there to fulfill Powell’s minimum page requirement. I get that cutting meat is intense and dirty and maybe even sensual, but if I wanted to French a rib, I would Google that shit. Cleaving isn’t just full of “practical” information like this, it’s also full of recipes. Again, filler. No one reads memoirs for recipes. No one. Stop it. You’re lying. You read cookbooks.

• Terrible metaphors, especially for a book that is basically a 303-page-long metaphor (Butchering as catharsis? Redemption? Sex?). In the aforementioned 476 word paragraph, Powell writes, “The crown is about the same circumference a garbage can lid, the white rib bones splayed atop it, the eyes of the chops plumped out below like a muffin top over too-tight jeans, if muffin tops were to be considered lusciously attractive.” I mostly read this book in bed, making mental notes because the last time I tried to write in bed, I woke up with blue ink in my hair. Because of this, every time I found I passage that bothered me, I folded the page over, hoping I’d be able to identify the offending part the next morning. In this passage, it was obvious. Muffin top? Please.

• Julie Powell is dirty, and I’m not just talking about sex. Powell doesn’t shower after a shift up to her elbows in edible carcass. I’ve previously discussed my own tendency to be obsessive about cleanliness, but every time she mentions falling asleep splattered with the blood and juice and bits of bone, I can’t think of anything until I come across the sentence, “And then I took a shower.” It’s distracting.

• When flipping through the final chapters of the book, I came across a few emails written between Powell and D. The final one was signed with an actual name!!! I won’t spoil it for you, but remember the penultimate scene in the Sex And The City series, when SJP is walking down the street and her phone rings and it is finally revealed that Big’s name is actually John? That worked in SATC because viewers had wondered what the man’s given name was for about a decade. But here? No one cares about D and no one cares about his name and it’s a stupid way to end a book. Maybe they took it out in the final draft. Hope so.

I will, however, admit that Cleaving wasn’t a total waste of time, although when your plan for the day involves taking an online aptitude test and cleaning the litter box, very little can be considered a waste of time. But I did learn a few important things from the text….

• Left-handed presidents include Obama, Clinton, Bush the Elder, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Hoover, and Garfield (159).

• Pig skulls are so thick that when shot in the head, the bullet merely stuns the unhappy animal and it can’t actually be rendered into breakfast until after you’ve shoved a pick into its coratid artery (87).

• Various recipes, including Valentine’s Day Liver for Two, Juan’s Mother’s Blood Sausage, A Nice, Simple Way to Make Short Ribs, Taking A Boning Knife To Your Spouse, and Trading Self-Worth for a Little Hotel Strange.

It’s not just facts and recipes, however, that I learned from Julie Powell. She also makes me feel better about myself. Why?

• Since I have recently taken real and positive steps to curb my own excessive drinking, I’ve taken up judging other peoples’ substance problems. And you, Julie Powell, are a sloppy drunk (i.e. “Meathead Holiday,” AKA the chapter about Christmas. Don’t barf in front of your parents. It’s tacky.).

• I have never spent fifteen semi-naked minutes against a hotel wall with a stranger who called me a “pretty little whore.”

• Given the accolades Powell received after J&J, I’d write a riveting memoir about what it’s like to go from sleeping on my mom’s couch to sleeping in your mom’s bed. Give the people what they want.

Let’s skip to the end. Actually, let’s not. I’m not going to finish Cleaving now, but I’ll pick it up again the next time I’m feeling jealous of anyone who has been able to make an actual living doing the things they want to do: those who publish in books and magazines, those who leave the butcher shop covered in blood but still smiling, those who would give it away even if they weren’t getting paid. It’ll remind me that there’s only so much work you can do: sometimes it’s just luck and timing that gets you the book deal and the movie and the second home and the frequent flier miles. I’m jealous of Julie Powell, yes, but I don’t want to be Julie Powell.

I wrote the following for the second in what I hope will be an on-going event here in Chapel Hill—a night of music provided by local and traveling bands and words provided solely by me at this point, but maybe someone else will read their shit in the future. That’d be cool. The theme was a sort of end of year/holiday thing and the first installment can be found here. Also, you may recognize some passages from previous blog posts, but time was short and I’m an avid recycler.

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I’ve never liked the holidays. I’m allergic to pine trees. Flashing red and green lights give me seizures. Carolers embarrass me. I’m not into Jesus either. Christmas in my childhood home was entirely secular. Our one nod to the holiday’s roots was a small manger my father had had since he was a boy, with figures of gnomes in the place of celestial beings. Like the biblical Mary, ours was sexless, with a beard hanging to her knees and a staff in one hand. The one year my family sent out greeting cards was after a nearby amusement park—a place called Ghost Town with a ski lift that you rode in a loop up and down a scrubby hill, and a place to pan for gold, and giant figurines of cowboys and Indians and mythological beings—shut down. Left with no one to care for them, the twenty-foot-tall statues gradually fell over: a cartoonish Cherokee warrior’s face broken in beside a cowboy with one arm resting a few yards from the rest of this body. My father gathered my brother, sister, and I in late November and took photos while we posed in front of Santa fallen on his back, unsmiling, our arms crossed. Instead of updates about our various scholastic and athletic achievements, the mass Christmas card we sent to extended family and friends said only, “Santa is Dead.”

Indeed, Santa was dead. I was nine years old when I found out the sleigh-driver doesn’t exist. I don’t know why my father chose the moment he did to drop the first real disillusionment bomb in his twin daughters’ lives, but he told Betsy and I on a summer day so hot and far removed from Christmas that the words coming out of his mouth hurt not just for the truth but for the shock. There’s no Santa!, our he yelled as we walked in the door after an afternoon at the pool. The tears were immediate and drenching, but our dad softened the blow with the caveat, And there’s no Jesus! which we already knew. A guy born in a barn to a woman so ashamed of her own sexuality that she told her husband she got knocked up by a dude with a heavenly zip code? Right. Her baby daddy was part human and part deity but obviously an above-average lover if he impregnated her from the moon. And Jesus’s step daddy was part fag if he was believed that Mary didn’t have a thing with the papyrus man. Not exactly plausible. But Santa? Now that was a shock. Maybe the death of Santa was the moment that holidays became a time to dread. Twenty years after finding out that Santa is no more real than Jesus, I have become a conscientious objector. When asked what my plans are for Christmas, I say that I don’t participate, which makes people uncomfortable, afraid they’ve offended me by assuming that I care about Jesus’s birthday, but I really just don’t like to shop.

A few years earlier, when Santa was as real as the boogieman or President Reagan or my second grade teacher, my siblings and I made a cinematic reenactment of the traditional Christmas story as a present for our mother. Our dad filmed us with an early ’80s camcorder so heavy that you had to rest it on your shoulder, and we recruited kids in the neighborhood to act as the extras—wisemen and shepherds and a couple of sheep on all fours with towels over their backs. My brother played Joesph, my sister played Mary, and I played the inn keeper whose prophet margin was more important than providing a sterile environment for the virgin birth. None of the neighbors would lend their babies for the starring role, so our six-month-old puppy played Jesus. But because puppies would rather play-tug-of-war then be swaddled in burlap, the video consisted of ten kids running through our house trying to grab the holy ghost and culminated in innocent voices singing Silent Night right before Jesus shit under the kitchen table. My mom was thrilled with the video, both because she encouraged any creativity displayed by her children and she knew it would piss off her Catholic mother-in-law, who told us that we would spend eternity in a Hell where your ice cream melted just before your first taste unless we convinced our parents to have us baptized.

Christmas is the most boring day of the year when you’re grown. If you’re with family, you exchange civilized gifts, everyone taking turns and thanking each other. You say how perfect your new set of knives is, how thoughtful it was for your sister to notice that your knives were dull the last time she was at you house and how nice is was of her to buy you new ones even though your knives are dull because you don’t cook. And you really do appreciate the knives, but not as much as you would have appreciated a bag of weed and a vibrator. If you are alone on Christmas, if you can’t get off work or if you don’t want to get off work or plane tickets to your parents’ house back in Omaha are too expensive and you have no girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s not like your three a.m. fuck buddy is going to take you home to meet the family, Christmas is as fun as using a bathroom after someone has emptied his colostomy bag into the toilet. The only gifts to open are envelopes and the only surprise within them is the amount your grandmother sent, which is never quite quite enough for a bag of weed or a vibrator. Everything is closed. You smoke the last of your pot because even your dealer is out of town, eating ham with the parents who think he works in IT. You order Chinese takeout wonder if this is what Christmas is like for Jews.

And then it’s New Years and you reflect on another year gone. I woke up early this morning and was lying in bed listening to my girlfriend sleep, which is not something I generally do because she is the type of person who wakes up and goes to work in the morning and I am the type of person who dreams that Trader Joe’s sells pound bags of an organic cocaine with really low addictive properties for the price of brown rice and then wake up so happy and then gets so sad a second later when realizing that it was just a dream and there’s no such thing as cheap cocaine. But this morning she was sleeping beside me and her dog was sleeping by our feet and I started going back over 2009 in my head and feeling very proud of myself for this year and for waking up early while my girlfriend and her dog slept and NPR played white noise on the radio. I felt so wholesome. Granted, my thighs might have been a little sticky from sticky gay sex, but it was sober gay sex, and sober gay sex is a healthy thing and not at all painful like other healthy things; for example, getting your pap smeared.

Reflecting on the past twelve months this morning, I think about how exceptionally good I’ve been. See, until recently discovering the human joy in waking up without a brain mushy and wet and trembling with alcohol and shame, I have a history of bad behavior. In recent years, the bad things that I’ve done are heavily dependent on how close my relationship with alcohol is at the time. The better friends booze and I are, the more my conscience and reputation recede. But now look at me, I thought this morning. Look at the girl sleeping beside me, a snoring furnace with dimples and wooly socks and a really great ass. I’m sleeping beside a girl I talk to not just at night when I’m trying to persuade her out of her clothes and into my bed, but also during the day when I eat solid food and go for walks and make plans to do things like fly kites and buy islands and winter in the Maldives. It’s so different from a year ago, when I woke up Christmas morning when my professor’s eight-year-old son walked into her bedroom while we were both passed out naked after celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus with bottom shelf bourbon. The kid wanted his presents but instead learned about a new side of his mother’s life: the gay side. His mom yelled at him to get the fuck out and I felt like I killed Santa. And look at me now. What a year. What a very calm, very easy year.

And I keep glowing in this as I listen to my girlfriend’s breath move in and out. After years of bad decisions and misbehavior and doing things that may or may not have included infidelity, academic dishonestly, petty theft, and once giving my ex girlfriend’s name, address, and social security number as my own after ending up in the ER after a drunken bicycle accident, I am ending one decade and starting a new one with a day-time girlfriend and her puppy. I am so proud of myself for 2009. I have been so good. And then I start cataloging the events of the past year and realize that it hasn’t exactly been 365 days of sunflowers and pony rides and it’s maybe only been in the past few months that I’ve been acting more like an adult and less like someone with a drug problem in place of a conscience.

Example: Inauguration Day. This was a big one for all of us. You probably remember it as the day snow dropped on your hometown and your boss said you might as well take the morning off and watch the inauguration since the busses weren’t running. You cried that morning, sitting on your couch with your kids, who really just wanted to sled. You let them, of course, but you made them watch their new president speak first. And I cried too, not just because it was a beautiful day and a beautiful moment, but because the bars opened at eleven in the morning to broadcast the inauguration and I started drinking then and didn’t stop until later, much later, when the snow had cleared but the sidewalks were still icy and when I walked home, part drunk off collective joy but mostly just drunk, I slipped off the sidewalk and onto my face and then spit my front tooth onto North Greensboro Street. This not only made eating, drinking, and breathing problematic until I could get my tooth replaced, the accompanying scabs made it look like my face had become a winter home for a colony of herpes.

This morning, Inauguration Day seemed so long ago but it wasn’t actually my only night of unfortunate decision-making this year, or, rather, not making decisions at all but letting booze make them for me. I realized this as I looked down at my bed, which was given to me by a friend who moved across the country just after her girlfriend found out that we had slept together. So there was that, the cheating and then the revelation of the cheating, which culminated in a week long hide-out in which I turned off my phone and closed my blinds and waited for everyone to forget the thing that I had done. And toward the end of that self-imposed sabbatical, I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud and insistent banging, first on my door and then on my bedroom window, at which point I stopped breathing and hid under my covers, sure that the window-banger was the girl who deserved to restructure my guilty face. And when the banging stopped and the breathing started I was awake, very awake, and then I was karma-slapped again when my neighbor upstairs started having the kind of sex that isn’t just about speaking springs but is also about sounds, human sounds, the very thing I hate to hear above all the things I hate to hear, more even than grinding teeth or Kenny G. Things are different now, and I know this, but there are a few other memorable events of 2009, chief among them being the second threesome I participated in this year, in which I learned that female ejaculate can be surprisingly forceful and also smells like pee.

But here I am now, watching my girlfriend sleep. This is not the girl who shoved her fingers inside of me with so little grace that my junk swelled up like a baboon’s ass. This is also not the Italian American who was attracted to me because I cured a yeast infection by sticking whole cloves of garlic in my cervix. And it is also not my best friend or my best friend’s girlfriend or the mime just old enough to vote. What do all of those girls have in common? The teacher and the squirter and the friend? We all tangled our lives together in a puddle of booze. They are all people who would be friends or acquaintances or strangers but not one-time lovers without a high blood-alcohol content and a disregard for what is right and what is good.

On New Year’s Eve, Ecuadorians construct effigies of the bad things or people in their lives–the one night stand that left you with a fresh STD, the cousin who invested your savings in old Levis that he planned to sell to Russian teenagers, the husband who left you for a personal trainer named Jimmy. They make their effigies from old clothes stuffed with hay and light their bad luck and the past year in the streets. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. Maybe I’ll say goodbye to 2009 and walk home with my girlfriend, our fingers touching, to her treehouse or minem with our toothbrushes and sides-of-the-bed. Will it last forever? Will their be fewer mistakes to burn next year and fewer still after that? Maybe. But sangria in the summer and bourbon in the winter are so good, and so sometimes is a night of complete oblivion, when you achieve an almost Buddhist state, where there is no yesterday and no tomorrow and no consequence as long as the bottle is in your hand and in your head. Greater still, though, is this—watching this girl sleep, lying together in the last hours of the decade, our organs beating not as one, but beside each other in real and asymmetrical time. What is greater is that the year is turning over and, maybe, this time, so am I.

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On more thing. I want to thank everyone who has donated to my Keep The Domain fund. People have been very generous, but I still need to raise about sixty dollars by the fifteenth if I’m going to renew this domain for another year. Please donate! Also, to everyone who already has contributed, your postcards are forthcoming….