After I made my big declaration about how Facebook is stealing our souls, I then spent the next two days posting things and chatting on Facebook like nothing had happened. I believe I can find a balance between this and that, but at the same time I'm concerned with the self-sabotaging psychology that kicks in, for example, when as soon as I decide to stop eating sugar, I make a big pan of brownies. I don't even tell myself not to spend money anymore or this will happen:
[via dh]
If that isn't the best video I've seen all summer I'll eat my grandmother's vintage cat's eye glasses. After watching it about six times Saturday night Jackson was all, "Are there any thrift stores around here?" Oh, my son. The golden days of thrifting in Santa Barbara are behind us now, but there still exists a magical town ruled by bikers and street people called . . . Ventura. So Sunday we drove down to the Goodwill in Ventura and bought Jackson a pair of red plaid pajama pants, a green and white striped hooded sweatshirt from the women's rack, a couple of white t-shirts, and we rescued a Build-a-Bear rabbit with floppy ears for .99 that doesn't appear to have lice, fleas, or bed bugs. I bought a pair of ballooning, high-waisted purple wool lady pants that are going to look pretty awesome somehow once I wrap my mind around what to wear on top. If I could find a cropped brown rabbit's fur jacket . . . I wouldn't buy it, but you hear what I'm saying.
Another crush, with free association:
1. Alan Arkin: because of how sexy he is when he's disgusted
Phrase from a comment on an old post that has stayed with me for years:
1. "Away-game pooping situation."
So along with opening back up to the Internet, I'm also trying to be more approachable in real life. I guess I'm an introvert, but I like being around people who are more open than me because they help me connect to that part of myself that doesn't see closeness as a threat. (I once had someone who knows about these things tell me that two lives ago I died by being drowned; as in, someone either held me down or pulled me down or I don't know what, but he was all, "Do you have trouble when people get too close? Because that would explain it." Holy shit, how do I get over that?)
Certainly the thing about working with the public is that every new patron is an opportunity to practice small, non-life-threatening connections. Most people seem to want that, which means at the start of every shift I unpack all of my extrasensory satellite dishes to figure out how best to make that happen. Some people, however, want a larger amount of connection, more connection than I am capable of (or paid to) provide as a public servant. Emotional vampires, in my experience, come off as super-extra friendly at first. Their requests start off normal, but somewhere along the line they try to lure you into the enchanted forest of weirdly-specific things most people don't normally ask others to do for them. "Will you text this 16-line e.e. cummings poem to my friend in Las Vegas?" happened recently, as well as "Will you read the descriptions of forty different children's books to me, both over the phone and in person the next day?" and "Will you build a web site for me in Wordpress?"
And I think, what is up with you? What is it? Just tell me. Is it that you get off on me touching your stuff? You're lonely and want me to keep you company? You disagree with the concept of outsourced tech support so you'd rather take advantage of my limited skills?
There's a great part of "Words of Advice" by William S. Burroughs that applies:
"If, after having been exposed to someone's presence, you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia. We don't like to hear the word "vampire" around here; we're trying to improve our public image. Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; "interdependence" is the keyword — "enlightened interdependence." Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little. However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave — and why, indeed, should they take any?"
I went into yoga the morning after a particularly lengthy exchange with one of these people and halfway through my practice I was all, "This is crazy, I'm too tired to do any more." And then after sitting there for a minute I realized that my body was strong enough to continue, the problem was that some other, ineffable part of me just didn't have the strength to go on. Once I had that realization, the exhaustion lifted and I kept going, but man. Feeling like you lost a quart of plasma. That's a real thing.
Don't put your finger up your butt to help yourself poop or you'll never be able to stop.
Henry Alford's wonderful essay about his brief stint as a runway model:
"It occurred to me that my lifelong slouchy posture is, in a complicated and wrong way, connected to my hatred of bragging. Somehow in my mind I've learned to equate slouching with modesty."
He then improves his runway walk by imagining he's a former Lufthansa flight attendant who likes vegan baked goods, vintage motorcycles, and Sofia Coppola when she wears aqua in airports. Henry Alford is now my spirit animal.
