I am narrow minded in my thinking.  Debate tends not to work on me because I cling defensively to my opinions.   I fight for my generalizations, and defend.  I sideways attack because somehow i feel "gaslit."  Part of the reason I draw lines or make judgments is that I see things, a recurring pattern and I don't want to sugar coat it by saying that "no two people are the same."  When people retract what they told me and tell me I'm generalizing about them, I feel gaslit because they're lying to me.

 I chase my own tale tail and defend my half baked opinions because I'm mad, but also they have more than a sizable grain kernel of truth.  I think I'm fighting through a fog and ultimately fighting

myself.  The term gaslighting came up. I feel like the idea that "everyone is different, no two people are the same" can frequently be gaslighting for someone observing and remarking on a pattern in human life. It diffuses any attempt to draw parallels between people.  To categorize, describe, synthesize, and cut apart, to explain what we see in people.  

I tend to hold on to these opinions until they're wrested from me because I never get to the point where I deepen or test them.  I simply keep describing and defining them without a structure.  The introductory paragraph without the middle that moves the story along.  Deconstruction is what I'll blame for this because the half baked way deconstruction was imported in my school was that terms are rehashed but not defined in  their beginning continuously, and never accepted to a point where they can be used and a story moved along.  I.e. That neighborhood was sketchy.  What does that mean?  What is sketchy?  How is that bound up in our institutionalized dialogue?  What is a neighborhood?  Have you read bell hooks?  You don't have the right to use that word.  On and on.  The argument stalls in its beginning stages.  This is a crime.  No one's mind gets past square one.   

Whenever I state an opinion I'm angry in advance.  No matter what.  Because the first sentence will be challenged.  The beginning principles, the fact that I made a generalization or a definition challenges people who do not immediately and facilly start a story with undefined terms immediately, but hash over the beginning because their terms don’t deserve to be taken at face value.  This is our education.  To consider all things that are PC.  

I fight in a deluded way, swiping with my eyes closed.  I refuse to let the alpha dog get to my mind.  In my mind I can rewrite the story right?  But this in itself is lying about history which is EXECRABLE TO ME.  The only way to fight to grow ones ideas is to develop them in writing, then have them critiqued and force them to move past square one.  To listen and slowly ingest the criticism.  Then decide if it's correct when not drunk on defensive emotions.  

And it's hard to pull me out of my narrow mindset.  It may be making me stupid or deluded. 

I'm mad all the time.  I think that a professor would get me for my half baked arguments and ideas but no one's here to check me.  To expand my mind.  Who wants to go through life believing in a falsity?  To be glib and sophomoric?  Without knowing that they are?  The big fish in the small town, the "'realll nice writah," says one's aunt while doing needlepoint.  

Fighting through a fog of one's own ideas is pitiable.  Without having emerged with a goal, without having emerged with insight or truth.  It's possible to never bring an idea to fruition and reach truth.  This means bringing it through a middle paragraph and end crisis.  To test the idea against itself and others.  One can live perpetually deluded, in a pink fog.  I can and do.  The minute I start elaborating an idea I'm in my comfortable place.  It is never challenged in a way I can't foresee.  One can spend life unenlightened.  Untested by wise critics.  Sitting in one's own juices without anyone alerting them to the state of things.  This is the way with talent that doesn't get tested.  Who in the small town is going to tell their only writer he is glib and has to know to develop?  

I don't think truth comes from debate.  Not when either person clings to their opinions.  Truth can arise from discussion.  Debate is an argument, a verbal fight.  The winner can leave feeling like their appendage got really hard.  Or call me an "emotional" girl.  I'm a sore loser.  In hand to hand combat.  A fight dirty.  One who is accustomed to feeling emasculated by fighting in honorable combat and losing.  Women can feel emasculated.  As two dogs in the park, puffing out their chests to see which is dominant.  The A dog wins and the B dog honorably removes himself but with humans it's more chaotic.  The B dog can delude himself or covertly undermine the A dog or simmer and wait for revenge and never get over it.  The A dog can boil over.  Denial powerfully copes against stark defeat, denial, isolation, and reworking the story.  Becoming drunk on reliving and repositioning events.  Epiphanies are cheap, they are tacked on to the ends of 20 minute episodes like SATC where every break up ends in an epiphany.  Relationships are broken less than a character learns something that will later be proven useless to him.  Jack Donaghy thinks he provides a solution in every other 30 R episode, epiphanies appear longer than lasting relationships, thus insight is cheap on television, the one solution, the magic bullet is repeatedly revised.  Relationships are entered into rapturously, like the "happy ending" of star crossed lovers in Golden Age 1940s movie, both kissing ferociously with their mouths closed and necks wrinkling.  Yet, the raison d'etre of the relationship, what each liked about the other, what keeps it moving, this is not allowed to be developed.  A couple is not allowed to stay together and grow.  But, damned if a character isn't moved to learn a disparate thing every episode!  What brought the two together, what were their separate worlds like and what brought the two to meet?  How do they survive on a daily basis and their union still stands?  These questions aren't answered as much as a character making a conclusion about their life direction based on the events of the day.  I don't think this is realistic, other than someone driven to find stereotypical "self help" and "purpose" in their life, I meet few people who have an epiphany a day.  The epiphany is true and precious.  It is approached with the integrity of wanting to find the truth and being willing to discard an idea if it is false.  This is mental integrity and philosophical integrity. 

The idea that we may be fighting ourselves through the fog is a fascinating one.  The topic must move, it must move toward resolution, insight the petit enlightenment.  Critics may hold value because they jolt us out of our own perspective, of our own movie that we set up about our work, our own narrative.  Having only one's own opinions to go by has a potentially drunk effect.  I remember that when I would be stuck in a string of thoughts, soundtracked by a song in my head, a movie with a different storyline had a potentially sobering effect.  Perhaps generalizations would tell me that women don't act this way or that men who are estranged from their families must be avoided.  Little jokes like those on Mindy's show.  Jokes that reference deeply held generalizations.  Like the episode in which she tries to sleep with someone she has diametrically different ideas from and doesn't respect so she doesn't get attached.  Or Meg's scene at Katz's.  Sometimes I'm shocked that televised rules of behavior are so far from what I've known.

How to combat narrow mindedness?  How to get to the correct, the true idea and not be deluded for the rest of one's life?  Intuition?  Maybe being deluded, but alive (which is true) isn't so bad?  The truth may be more shocking than we know.  Maybe the arrogant wrongheadedness of a college sophomore isn't so bad.  Battling for my opinions against people who know more than me.  Maybe we have to be more gentle with ourselves as the truth is unconcealed.  The people that know view our divided ideas with a kind pity.  A compassion and love and wrongheadedness.  When we get it we'll shit bricks right?

The key takeaway today from my friend is that I need to structure my writing.  My friend says find which thoughts and sentences work well together, and in what order they are at their most riveting

My tea has roses in it.  The truth may be more shocking than what we know. 

Treating Happiness As A Goal Does Not Work

I was watching the last episode of 30 Rock, my favorite show, which I don't even know I want to talk about.  But Jack's goal oriented, strategic approach to gaining his own happiness made me think.  In art as well as business, the process is streamlining a plan toward a goal, removing the extraneous, and making the path easier to achieve that goal, analyzing, refining, and moving in a targeted way to add to a check box.  I understand this in terms of segmentation.  For instance, a campaign for a particular product is one goal in a series of goals to boost profit margin.  The analytics team's complex task is to review the past strategy and its success against predictors, examine the current market of customers and refine the attributes of possible responders, refine the attributes of a new campaign or who gets offered what, test a campaign for those responders with a control, send it out, and then check the lift of their segmentation.  If this customer segmentation is successful, there is a higher profit margin for the particular campaign and product.  However, the product still has to be refined.  There have to be strategies to stay on top and diversify.  In other words, analyze, strategize, and succeed only checks off one success in the continued success of one or the other brand in its competition against others.  One has to A.S.S. again.  The creating, strategizing, and overcoming of goals is satisfying during the process and at the resolution, particularly in a high pressure workplace, but happiness peaks once the goal is achieved and another has to be set.  In this sense, one who thrives on overcoming diverse challenges in a strategic way thrives in the workplace due to testing their capability and continually proving themselves able.  The artist similarly refines whatever product they are producing, there is the planning of a new project, the process, the result, and further refining.  The drive to create and perfect is torturous because it continues despite achievement and the creation of even a perfect product.  The goal is to refine one's art until one achieves what is wanted, but the artist is defined by their continuous process of creation, therefore the refining never ends and the artist is not happy in simply achieving their goal.

I read articles on lifehacker that provide a streamlined approach to achieving happiness, ticking off check boxes, "thinking outside the box" or repositioning one's thinking.  An article volunteers removing distraction, adding organization, removing work one's unhappy about, thinking about one's life in a different way, taking hold of riskier projects, tweaking, rotating, kerning.  I don't know if a targeted, goal oriented approach is the way to achieve happiness because if one views life in a goal oriented way, in taking certain actions to achieve happiness, the satisfaction after achieving a goal fades rather quickly.  A Type A approach to happiness is similar to a hyper regimented approach to eating, trying to "win at life" structures it into a series of initiatives with strategy, self status meetings, next steps, onboarding, and whatever else, it can be as execrable as a personal brand.  I strongly believe that regimenting one's eating, something that involves pleasure, society, and adventure, into a series of numbers, quotas, or something based one having one's body look a certain way warps eating to a form of control that may lead to an eating disorder.  As an activity that is bound up not just with family, friendship, and culture, but emotion, sensual pleasure, and broadening one's horizons, eating merits a certain degree of disorder, spontaneity, abundance, and enjoyment.  When one structures one's "happiness" to literally, it is placed on a grid or pie chart as the case may be.  The life conforms to a structured outline and is subsumed by a graph.  I think that spontaneity, mess, idleness, failure, and creativity is required, a breather from the structure of constantly winning and snapping at happiness is required in order for life not to become a drawn out campaign initiative.  Minimalism is a targeted process of removing the extraneous from one's life to achieve happiness, it's currently popular and may be overdone.  Recreational assumption of any of a suite of philosophies native to India such as yoga and Buddhist philosophy does not fully respect the deep cultural context this comes from and is tantamount to cherry picking.  As I understand, Buddhism takes into account the acceptance and understanding of the full reality of the present moment and the pain of desiring and the various ways the ego expects it to be something else.  Such a path toward happiness is not easy, nor is happiness necessarily the goal. 

I think that happiness is a byproduct of achieving other goals.  Subsuming one's other duties in favor of achieving a temporary emotional state is not the way to achieve happiness.  All the acquisitive, creative, process or goal related things that are supposed to give us happiness or even statistically make us happy, may not, the right job, love, marriage, children, and I think children make life complicated, but in the process of sacrificing, of making the children the goal rather than the achievement of happiness, a segment of us is happy, that was the segment that lived for ourselves, that subsumed none of our desires for others, or the segment that provided service to a well oiled corporate machine, service that was not necessarily constructed, but built in an efficient way to bolster the bottom line at the least.  I think humans recognize a discomfort as they violate certain basic choices in favor of other responsibilities, especially during their non on the clock time, whether those are sleep, dinner, using their free time the way they want, or not reading emails at 6 in the morning to prepare to put out any fires the next day.  If this is in service of their update of a presentation or the big pitch to a potential client to help them convince the American populace to buy their unhealthy grub, it may be less of a meaningful service than the care and maintenance of their child, whose link to oneself due to love is intrinsically motivating, more than a significant other who we build a relationship with out of compatibility, compromise, and chemistry.  Ideally, the goals and work we achieve should be satisfying, to be satisfying, they have to be externally oriented, other oriented, service oriented, to be specific.


Any achieved goal that is particularly satisfying and meaningful is done in service.  We are driven to other-oriented action, we are shored up by it, and it gives us a more lasting kick of satisfaction when we achieve an other-oriented goal.  Whether we are driven to love our significant other or immediate family, to create art, to communicate, to extend our spiritual reach and broadcast knowledge, to make the world habitable for others, to advise and shore up (had a little help from a little certain wheel there), I know that people are driven by different things.  I also do not think that the answer to happiness is to maximize our other-oriented action in a quantifiable way.  I think the answer is to be slapshod about happiness, to let go of the idea of moving toward a faraway goal of happiness and focusing on other achievements, just as we are not goal oriented about friendship or family.  The friendship between Liz and Jack Donaghy progresses naturally and in a free form way as they play around with the sources of their happiness, the sources of their dissatisfaction, and their countless epiphanies of possible solutions of how those are shot down.  The communication of friendship and the bond requires no rote series of hoops like dating, it requires little impression other than growing to tolerate and support each other, it is very goalless unless we find that we are no longer making friends as easily, then friend dating gets awkward.  Friendship is oddly goalless in this example, two people simply going through life changes together and trying to support.  Happiness can be outside the realm of goals, too. 


At the same time, I know that living without challenging oneself, without creating and producing with the desire to fulfill a goal will not make you happy.  It will put you in a stagnant place.  I am not happy when idle.  While idleness apparently breeds creativity, an excess of idleness feels purposeless and leads to depression.  Each person is an instrument for the possible larger benefit of other beings.  This benefit can be oblique.  Working toward this benefit is satisfying.  The corporation that is large and successful is a machine with varied cogs and an inner structure with little excess or a program to trim the excess that is not related to achieving its goals.

All these tips people give about rising in the office, achieving their "personal brand," and growing up and not being so entitled are simply about becoming more of a honed, sharp instrument for another's goals.  For instance, we are meant to be both detail and big picture oriented in the job, to succeed and be promoted we must be leaders, take on more responsibility to be indispensable, think like an entrepreneur (act like we own the company, which we don't, and have personal investment in it and think of more ideals to drive them forward).  This is in service of taking up as many possible functions, to be small and big picture oriented, to be the ideal leader and the ideal follower, to work well under pressure and to also structure one's time planning forward during lulls, to be an entrepreneur and a team player in someone else's company, to thirst to learn but require no resources to do it, to be a one man band and require nothing, but give everything.  This is a worker who succeeds.  One who is instrumental, who is all instruments to the point of being a one man band.  If one is to perfect the craft of being instrumental, to know their businesses needs and fulfill as many as possible, one needs to be satisfied with the machine that they are a tool in.  One must be throwing oneself into working toward the correct goal.  If the purpose of putting in all this energy to be indispensable is to put food on the table and make money, then the dislike of the end goal will bring cognitive dissonance and discomfort.  You are moving in concert with others toward a goal, you must want to go where you are moving with such great energy.  Vague dissatisfaction is common when you are not liking the goal you're working toward, if you don't like being a criminal lawyer or tax assessor or in my case an analyst who tries to get a fast food restaurant chain more money. 

I think the personal brand is the saddest attempt toward full instrumentality.  Off the clock, our private life is our own, and as disorganized as we want it, in service of divergent goals, whether the sensual like going out to eat or drink, or directly instrumental like being with our kids.  The personal brand regiments the hobbies, internet presence, and side projects of one person outside the work place to fully sell their work persona, with no fat like drinking photos, etc.  One does not have the freedom of one's private life because one's off the clock time becomes a tool for personal advancement, whether to hone the personality as a jewelry designing, cartoonist, web designing, life coach renaissance man whose personalities are united on one's blog, or to be a super Consultant, day and night.  Each word and descriptor is chosen carefully.  I understand that one's internet life is not fully private, but when did it come to this?  To subordinate one's personal life to the advancement of one's career goals?

My advice for happiness is to neither be slapshod nor goal oriented in the pursuit of happiness.  Riches, fame, ham, artistic talent, entrepreneurial risk taking, most of this success thrives on the unhappiness of constantly going toward the next thing.  In the situation of the great talent, there has to be deep resignation for the being unhappy for the rest of your life.  Monomania may breed greatness, but unhappiness as well.  Perfect organization or treating one's life as something you can hack with tips becomes an obsession, an overfocusing on the day to day, a way to consume one's life without taking the time to produce an external product in service.  This is why I think life coaches are often crazy.  People who went through pain to pitch a style of life, to turn a lens on their life and make it something to be analyzed and theorized about.  To not let the frayed ends stay.  To not allow for vague malaise or moments of happiness.  There is not a perfect life, I don't think, my idea of a good life is one where there is room for dreams and imagination, one where the next turn around the bend is mysterious because I don't yet have the yacht and the bitches.  I think the guy with the yacht and bitches, Jay Z, is extremely hard working, risk taking, and goal oriented, to the point of not ever being on that yacht, and Beyonce apparently catalogues every appearance she's ever been in.  This level of success requires constant, dogged professionalism, which makes moments of happiness and leisure as we hoi polloi see them or our image of their lives as a great Cristal and love fest be far from the countless hours in the studio, them asking and demanding to stay the longest to get a hook right.  Treating the ideal life as something to be won with pig headed pursuit means that when we get it, we are a person whose character is one of constant pursuit.  Thus the build of the process and the high of the goal has to just keep on going, with the goal becoming larger and more momentous, until we reach our final goal and find that we still aren't happy.  The marriage of A.S.S. in one's work life and the amorphous bond of friendship in one's personal life.  This is when we realize that we love business, we love to strategize, and we love Liz Lemon. 

I was watching the documentary "Paris Is Burning."  Incredible to witness the raw orphaned desire for belonging of a marginalized culture, at the same time it's brilliant, glamorous unappreciated creativity.  The film encompasses the grit of the 80s with its unsafe streets juxtaposed with glorified high materialism, fetishizing wealth,large cold modernist apartments, the brands and outfits of class, and this world that the young gay people in the film are barred from.  They run away at 13 or 14 and become hustlers.  A world I can't fathom, one where childhood and the security of parents standing in an unambiguous role of protection, one where the people we have sex with or those we work with those we befriend also become our parents.  The pathless longing for warmth, acceptance, and the markers of what growing up in a family is, without knowing why you want it or what.  These kids would be absorbed into the competitive, creative, glamour imitating circles of the "houses" of drag balls.  They would find an anchor in slightly older people who are gay.  Motherless, but talented, creative, competitive, fiery and full of a great vibrant subculture.  They craved to be appreciated, part of the establishment, to come out on top, to be in a modernist mansion away from New York and the windows facing on other projects, dark forest puce colored rooms with peeling wallpaper and cut outs of models.  Glamor of the kind mainstream and accepted on television varnished was fetishized by the unappreciated, the artists whose edge and burning creative competition, their society and the ways to hone their craft, would come from being on the sidelines and longing to be in the forefront.  I have always been surprised at the way gay men fetishize the outer varnish of aristocratic wealth, the style, glamor, and class which is the exoskeleton of what is left of the appropriate courtesies and rituals of the born and bred elite.  Style and class have become the husks, easily cast off, of the proper obligation of the aristocratic classes, once a stuffy burden that America fought to remove, yet style, the je ne sais quoi of class and the muse-like appearance of beauty that says nothing for itself is precisely what makes wealth and its trappings compelling, style is the mythology of wealth, class is the rudiment of meet and proper noblesse oblige. Just as the feathers, outer garments of camp, mannerisms, and make up are the outer markers of drama and theater.. lights and glitter are the arrows and clues that point to the substance of the show about to begin, yet the lights, the costumes, the theater make up "the costumes, the scenery, the make up, the props" carry the legacy of the golden age of traditional theater and vaudeville before it, the plot, the tight comedic lines, these are what we associate with the capital T Grand Theater.  The old diva theatrical principles with their aura of strength, drama, and attitude are behavioral examples and their confidence cues us to expect the substance and beauty of a great performance, a legendary performance that sets us in a legendary time.  Let's not forget that the lifeblood of the theater and actors is one of vanity, closeness with a camera and nakedness in front of it, familial intimacy with a crowd, an audience that feeds, validates with applause, and creates a reciprocal relationship in the actor's mind that is not in the audience.  What feeds the actor is substantial, is emotional, full of depth, the study of acting, the repartee and interrelationship with the audience, the set up, the stage, the world they live in at that moment is their lens on life.  And this is what produces the veneer, the veneer of camp, glamor, lights, sparkles, the strength and beauty of the diva principal from a long line of diva principals.  The promise of a beautiful, golden show can be more beautiful than the show.  Is this what gay men love and idolize in the theater, in fashion, the style of the rich, and the many creative arts?  The balls are replete with glitz as well as the ethos of battle, which is competition, specifically, competing group prowess.  What do the competitors have prowess at?  Both the silver veneer of glamor that calls up so many associations of class, taste, aristocracy if they are imitating models, drama, intensity, theatricality if they consider themselves to be poor versions of their favorite celluloid screen actresses.  The beauty of Hollywood and the beauty of fashion maintains itself as a hologram, the promise of transcendent art based on the idyll of unadulterated glamor that it sells.  Marilyn was very much a hologram of herself, a different woman on the inside, yet one who smiled orgasmically, whose gown sparkled in the white gentle light of the celluloid old world cameras, her veneer took the breath away because, like that of Gilda, it lived on its own. The veneer was the peerless Platonic ideal of Hollywood beauty.  And so it wouldn't die.  Regardless of who Marilyn was on the inside.  Much like advertising, the aspect of glamor, carefully filtered and produced, is a come on and promise of the more immediate life, the more beautiful life, the better life, regardless of what video camera tricks or illusions of makeup it took to produce it.  The muse lives on in distance, uniformity of the veneer, we can take on a glimmering husk of it when we dress like that, when we embody ourselves with the confidence, sharpness, and pain of glamor.  Which indicates struggle inside, fragility and vulnerability, in perpetuating the art of using one's body and personality to appear as an art and canvas for the idea of glamor.  Thus, beautiful pained people in this movie, the most beautiful and poignant being Venus a pail, thin charismatic shade were the most poignant because they would be sacrificed to their cult legend.  The mix of being shut out and unwanted by a society that values mainstream wealth, cobbling together a family with danger sex and drugs in the mix, and wanting that mainstream recognition despite creating a community that feeds on the glamor of insular fame created this delicate art, this scene that soon people would not turn away from.  I don't think this sort of dance, creative fecundity, and attitude can be produced in any other pressure cooker.
If they grew up differently, they would be me, craving for the intensity of a fresh venue, creating problems in their middle class environment like Goth Jenna Malone.

The drag ball is a show of prowess and a dance.  It is a competitive, driven group effort and the drive is toward art, a personal art that is a resurrection of the veneer of glamor worshiped in various forms of art for mainstream consumption such as fashion and movies.

I don't think they could be satisfied if they grew up in what they perceived as the majority, and their creativity would not be as immediate or their talent or drive as incisive.  The possibility of living a passable life that does not leave a wound could consign them to mediocrity, that of the accountants and collegiate assessors who would never be confident in their art, would consume, spend "quality time," and not create.  I think that sacrificing for the art of living a good life, of only being one's ow art, of one's children or one's day job being one's own art, precludes sacrificing one's happiness to create a tangible product and form of art.  Which requires full attention.  Which will leave varying intensity.  Which requires an unopened unhealed wound that leaves one to the observation of extreme states as well as their fellow man.  We forfeit a life in art when we focus on "self help," when we try for the art and science of making oneself happy.  But, I'm not convinced at all that the person producing art is not happy.  They may not be happy ever due to the requirement to produce be the vessel empty the vessel.  But, the person who does not create anything will never know what it is like to be an empty vessel.

I think that focusing on an artfully lived life or going for "self help" if you do not have diagnosable problems is a mistake.  I think that turning one's monomania inward on oneself does not produce a happy life.  Regardless of whether or not we work hours and hours on the treadmill of a promised promotion or salary raise.  It becomes disturbing to be a rat on a treadmill when we realize that we are compromising our values and replacing our goal track for someone else's.  The discomfort comes when we have changed our lives past the point that it suits our own needs.  When we become a cog in the wheel of what a job requires, which is service and utility to the organism you are a part of, as great as possible of utility with evolving self determining ways of being more useful, we forget that we and the job have a reciprocal relationship, or at least we have a reciprocal relationship with ourselves.  When the job begins to dictate how we live to a point of discomfort, this is when we feel controlled, when our highest goals become not our own.  We stay up later than we like to, we get up earlier than we like to, in the service of working more than we like to and as a result we are unsatisfied to sacrifice our base line requirements for the way we want to live (for instance, eating fresh food at dinner or going outside for lunch) to increase yield and profit margin, to wholly align our mindset with the organism we are in service to.  This is when we reassess.

Anyway, the kids in the movie experience privation, lack of family roots, danger, and marginalization.  They are starved of family and the community of people they know through that.  They make their own family.  They do not romanticize 80s New York and its danger the way I do.  They see it as a place to get through and get by and one where they are shut out of the most glamorous tidbits, where they are forced to subsist on a lack of success despite their outstanding talent, competitive spirit and passion.  I am still amazed at the gay fetishization of glamor and the trappings of class.  The allure of fashion is in the ineffable quality of glamor and class, the allure of theater is not in its words and substance, but in its drama, theatricality, and camp.  I see the trappings of bohemia and the quite tragedy that makes it so beautiful, I see a boiling subculture I missed.  I find their perspective and world unbelievably seductive, beautiful, and torn much like Candy Darling, and find the world of straight men and people around me dull and stentorian, their insistence on the "banality of evil" unless it's superhero vs supervillain.  The lack of mystery in their music, the lack of edge in their gore, the lack of sexuality in their prn, simply two barbie like leathery skins grinding up against each other with cartoonish body parts overexposed to the camera like in a fisheye.  How can they find sexuality and mystery in this and not see the sexuality in the husk of glamor, the mailed hologram of the muse, what gay men saw in Gilda flirting for the camera? 

The angriest are the least mobile, those who have no integrity and seek to ingratiate themselves with others by cloaking their true personality.  If you want to be great, you have to bust ass.  Bust ass at what?  The act of busting ass itself for no reason dissipates inspiration and fun.  In order to bust ass, one must first joyfully explore the thing they want to chip away at for the rest of their life.  Anyway.  I can say for sure that I am tired of the conventional advice that both recommends that people sail the wild blue, grasp at and structure big ideas, and bust their ass ragged beyond the intuitive point where they get something done.  Now here's my OkCupid hamster meme.

What is my gripe with my imagined OkCupid hamster?  Is it that he is a sensitive schmendrick with a sleek marketing package of being a self-effacing go-getter, but yet desires the exact same piece of azz that Mr. MBA Douche is hunting for?  A slightly different self-presentation for the same wife-able bimbo.  The Josh Radnor schtick hoping that Eurasian Maggie Q Meatpacking hostess (or hopefully marketing analyst/jewelry designer) who can also cook and is sweet, positive, sporty can accept the capital of someone of a well traveled nature and well loved job, rather than finance douche with face tattoo.  As opposed to the Manic Pixie Dream Girls' catnip, the creatively blocked schlemiel.  Maybe because the writer, sensitive Ruby programmer, and desirer observes and the desired, muse, tai chi enthusiast with a penchant for pretty dresses is desired, observed and drawn by older college guys in a totally legit way when she herself is a high school student.  She is the back up dancer in Pretty Girl Rock.  She is in some ways confident, in others raw, edgy, crazy adventurous in that "let's hold some knives and shoot some guns to feel" way, a crazy, dangerous woman like Olivia's character in the New Girl.  I am a slightly less goal driven version of this observant male archetype and "on the bleachers."  I always said that I would in some ways rather be Nick Carraway than Gatsby, observing the ephemeral actors in their shifting zeitgeist than being the Mary Pickford-like shimmery players who have "It," until it changes.  Wasn't Frank O'Hara so beautful, musing on construction workers during his lunch break?  New York still has construction workers, but lacks the raw immigrant power of those who worked a specific job at a steel mill and the gay artists willing to accept a window on a brick wall and roaches to live and drool among them.  I'm always shocked at gay men's worship of the quasi Aryan body and lack of acknowledgement of the fact that the faces attached often have little sparkle of intelligence or character.  Hence the sharp divide of gay men not being attracted to "nerdy" Jorma without definition and women falling all over his self effacing mop of hair and self deprecating D jokes... though he is less believable as an overconfident and under tall art star Girls douche.

I read the New Yorker story "Creatures," but what I remembered about it tended to dissipate in the pageantry of the Golden Globes.  The show of the crazy, image obsessed screen holograms whose hard work, passion from an early age, and bond with cast and crew dominate their work.  The actors we honor with their green juices, youth elixirs, botox, fad diets, and tendency to call what they do a "job" and being on the job.  Many of the actors came up and thanked their crew, claiming that the odd, intensely communal existence of the shoot brought them closest to the crew and cast.  The crew, the unseen and invisible handymen who inevitably form bonds with the actors.  I see the actors and faces of Hollywood that digest national calamities with "Feed the World" songs as a sounding board for national ills.  The somewhat vulnerable and sensitive, required to maintain a polished image for HD, ambassadors on the state of America.  In 2010, the awards ceremonies reflected the wake of the earthquake in Haiti and economic problems in the US, tearful celebrities thanked their spouses almost first, like now they mention their crew.  They seem to be our official face when we are wracked with calamity or not, even Clinton coming out in his less than glorious retirement to commend the portrayal of a president on the celluloid screen, acting as himself recalling his acting as a president.  I see their formal reception and internalization of the national state of mind as somewhat tragic.  Much as I saw my professor talking and philosophizing about human ills, her intellectual detachment somewhat shaken by the fact that she sometimes felt ungood even in class.  When those who comment on our condition, reflect it, or seem to sit behind an unreal screen of it, are themselves vulnerable to it, our condition is doubly vulnerable.  Actors exclusively represented a glossy version of our somewhat past reality that's okay to talk about now (Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln), moreso in the days before the internet when film and publishing companies mostly had control of content.  Now they must reflect and dialogue with the internet.  Thankfully there were no lifetime achievement awards for Grumpy Cat or a Twitter feed above the screen like there was for the hurricane concert.  Similar to the tragic nature of a femme fatale breaking down or being of frail health in an exquisite dress, red lips, and pancake makeup, trying to hold it together despite mascara running..  Keeping up appearances in itself can be inherently tragic.  The refusal to rest, to laugh in spite of the threat of chaos, if the straps on one's boots start to fray.  Laughter in crisis, dressing up to pick up the garbage, spritzing on perfume, it depresses me more than taking care of oneself, more than submitting to the cocoon of self preservation.  Even if it's necessary to stay alive. 

I watched La Pianiste or The Piano Teacher.  What strikes me is the poisonous quality in which repressed desire dulled by lack of understanding or shame is quickly attenuated and becomes something cruel.  Violence mimics the first physical passions of copulation, not to speak of copulation informed by other emotions.  Voyeurism becomes a point with which to access the physical abandon of copulation.  From her voyeurism and desire to pee or cause herself pain, Huppert's character transmutes the hopeless urge and the desperate finality in her life with a kind of beastly desire to feel an urgency of any kind, a violence that mimics the emotions or rituals of sex.  The violent visual of a woman only servicing and not being touched itself becomes a grotesque and the smelly cloth she holds up to her nose, all are a marker of the taboo and the ripping apart of the previous innocence and lack of intimacy.  Her lack of privacy, her hopelessness and her tight repression further distances the act as a violent rushing that is taboo.  She takes a razor to her much as people "hurt themselves to feel."  As the door is shut on a commonplace sexuality, the crack in her character's joyless, stentorian veneer as a teacher and the spoiled, predatory relationship with her mother at home overwhelms the space she allotted to her shame and lack of experience.  Her fascination with the simple and physical sensuality of the adolescents in the food court and the animal act in the drive in movie keeps her at the basic level, where the act is taboo and purely satisfying to the damaged id.  Her character is sociopathic in her cruelty, sometimes childlike when she sprinkles crushed glass into her student's coat after watching her young man comfort her.  And markedly without compassion or relaxation.  The moment of functional copulation is stolen from her in the her language, the violence and dysfunctionality with which she indirectly accessed a pantomime of sex.  Her young man falls, first from disgust and simply giving up on this woman with more mental problems than she's worth, to a violent adoption, a hopeless adoption of her own language.  Her understanding of sex through violence does not prepare her for the cruelty, violation, and abandonment that is copulation on her own terms.  Merely, from not having been touched, she only registers sensuality through being beaten.  These are the metaphors, the proxy of the mimicry of sex, its violence, tendency to ravage, unite, and unleash.  Her cruelty stems from not allowing herself to experience the acuteness of physical pleasure, whose intensity can be mimicked by physical pain, expressing urges and thus transcending them into a version of adult love. She first services the man the way she sees in her movies to mimic the animal violence of the love she sees and also to avoid being touched.  Control and the setting of masochistic ground rules keeps copulation in the dirty model she learned from various sources, rather than his somewhat more experienced rote blandishments.  Her perversion of the copulation act due to repression scares him.  The desire to be hurt, thrown around, made to serve, beaten, but not touched in a way that catapults her into vanilla procreation, that strips away the veneer and sexual holograms she held in fascination during her perceived virginity.  As her sexuality molders in spinster adolescence, her relationship with her mother is controlling, co-dependent, and adolescent.  Two women separated by no wall slowly eating each other alive.  Though she appears to test her young man and claim that she doesn't love him, the fact that he not only rebuffs her, but says that her urges repulse him, hurt her and cause her to transfer or displace a storm of her misdirected sexuality to her mother, acting out a passion of emotion she might feel for him.  Offense, the desire not to be left like an outmoded toy, and knowledge of a love opportunity completely frittered away by her cold exterior possibly motivate the silent and frightening attempt tto pin her mother.  The adolescent image of copulation, when it is still taboo, is shrouded in mystery and mostly physical like the subject of her voyeurism.  As personal experience increases, the alchemy of sexual experience and the gamut of emotions and complexity it allows one to access becomes manifest.  As the young man again rebuffs her and her experience with him at the concert, she is, despite her sociopathy and compulsive behavior due to long drought, kicked away like a puppy.  She responds again with violent misdirection, perhaps desiring to knife him instead, perhaps to take him again or otherwise express the betrayal that his supposed love made so easy, by hurting herself in a place other than her lady parts and her heart, that she both wants to fill and stab away. 

The desire is passive aggressive, unused to, inexperienced in, and not expecting the rote maneuvers of courtship, it deviates to the perverse which is also the safe.  Copulation in the imagination becomes a dark, movie-like, mysterious, and wholly physical act.  Other women are safe and her mother is both taboo and easy to find, the theaters she goes to require an exchange of money and no contact with a human being, the slapping, humiliation, the providing of pleasure to another does not satisfy, but merely distract from or mimic the hunger, just like taking a razor to herself to avoid touching herself.  All is painful, but in terms of sexual taking, prim. 

Her character is not only an archetype of rankling, spoiled, spinster hunger that still longs for the "7 Minutes In Heaven" happiness promised, stuck in the moment before despoiling.   She does not resemble an un-innocent Gerty Farish type of character who distracts from, but still longs for the happiness of pressure and courtship.  Her sociopathic actions, as they cascade on each other, urge the unexplainable.  They do not fully demand compassion from the audience, but they beckon understanding.  Why, the audience asks, is she doing this, and her silent actions and quiet avowals of motive are all the audience has to go by.  We are not called to pity her, but we are called to observe and begin to piece together the great tearing damage of her person.

Update

I start the year with nothing to say.  It isn't a beginning as much as an end.  I'm standing looking off a precipice with very little bargaining power in terms of content.  I thought that writing was a suitcase or ace in the hole I always carried.  My obsessions dominate my style and make it difficult to write anything with an emotional storyline.  I'm not prepared to give up the hope that there is something to express rather than an empty mouth.  Words will eventually fill if I walk around aimlessly enough.  More like I'm desperately assembling the impressions I've had of vacations and events this past year.  Teenagers called me egocentric randomly on the street.  And it's true that I have little concrete to offer than a tornado of self obsessed insecurity.  The worker artisans who dig with smiles on their faces are liked and respected for good reason.  I'm not sure what interesting I'm bringing ton anyone or anything this year, walking empty handed without charms, easy blandishments, or intelligent discussion, walking around at night like I do, demanding that the rest of the world be interesting.  Ho hum.

Amazing (Is a Word We Overused in 2006)

I start the year with nothing to say.  After all this time of holding something in my pocket, that maybe there was one thing I could excel at and call my calling, I say the same thing.  So no ace in the hole because nothing significant is said.  Repeatedly, that I'm shocked at the changes, that I'm trying to stay abreast of them, that I want to define and codify them so that we knew exactly what was happening right now.  That I'm not stereotyping.  That I want to satirize and encapsulate the emerging DIY spirit, emerging from lame artistic grifterism, that is now commercialized and remarketed by desperate corporate sources in the same way the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was codified by commercial interests in 500 Days of Summer as an unreachable, perfectly quirky jacking post.  The new Mobile start up boom is powered by the refusal to compromise one's dreams with the savvy niche marketing and "big ideas lure" of the entrepreneur, as well as the specific creative output of the artisan.  Parodied by the Google Chrome ad of the man who created a book of schmaltzy Basquiat/Adventure Time/Daniel Johnston scrawled drawings with a vague, entrepreneurial message of dreaming BIG (which has renewed the lease on life of 40 year old porkpie wearing Baby Bjorn dads... seriously, "Now I can get my mbira band started!!"), the internet Stilton enthusiast friendly word AWESOME, and the social media branding roustabout acclaim of randomly being picked up by a German blog.  The TED Talk graduate metaphor couldn't be more perfect.  On a diet of TED Talks, working class salumi courses, Times Magazine, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and 3rd Ward classes, who could have produced something better?  It's a better highly specific legacy than being famous for temper tantrums and catch phrases on a reality tv show, or avoiding selling out by choosing a vague artistic Caption of Drew Bertram, Artist, Lacey Butler, Photographer, or being photographed splayed out on the floor in a fashionable pool of PBR, American Spirits, and a headdress listlessly mumbling to Steve Aoki on the phone.  I'm happy those days are over...Ms. Kennedy.

The Dream of the 1890s is Alive in New York as Portlandia perfectly summarized.  Your roustabout 30 year old trust fund artist is a farm to table charcuterie handler, your freelance photographer is NPR's most attractive rooftop kale farmer. Dyna Moe's hipster animals define the niches creative loafers have fought to find for themselves to experience their dream, a fulfilling work life, and business acumen with a grassroots sticker and no fear of selling out.  The wave of independent business is sweeping in anyone who can articulate their dream with a selling point and sun filled kickstarter pitch.  Want to be a food writer?  Start a bed and breakfast for penguin enthusiasts in the Baleares.  My stoner high school acquaintance who took up yoga created a line of Eastern Religion friendly confectioneries.  (I'm being vague on purpose.)  Could he have built his own website with serene, Toms-like assurance if he was merely a yoga teacher?  Could the girls who created a one stop shop for haute costume jewelry for gay men and their muses ever been in Forbes AND the Daily Candy if they stayed Financial Analysts and continued to wear a subdued gray palette?  No.  Their amount of fulfillment would only have correlated with buying the most bioluminescent sneakers and most stylish leggings with reflecting tape for NY Marathon training.

As mainstream regurgitations of "The Small, Quirky Problems of  a Dysfunctional/Mismatched Twosome/family in a Flyover State" replayed the docile, twee, sexless indie spirit of 2006 with full laptop dj indietronic apathy.  Garden State degenerating into the high paid stars slummin it for a heartfelt "Middle Aged Loser Befriending Pregnant Teenager and Buying New Lease on Life" indie dram..edy.  The already attenuated, anodyne idols that my friends pumped in through ipods even on the toilet, even eating, even doinking such as Okkervil River, Animal Collective, The Books, Iron and Wine, the popped up but well written songs of Rilo Kiley, Magnetic Fields, Of Montreal, The New Pornographers, and the insipid, bubble gum rehash of terrible 70s and 80s music that is Girl Talk, Ratatat, and Annie.  The playfully weak and childishly whispered anti folk of Coco Rosie, The Moldy Peaches as the least worthy offender (your 6 year old sister asking "Who-oo-oo's got the crack"), Devendra Banhart, Cat Power's voice crawling sensually on its last legs as millions of girls with bangs prostrate themselves in front of it, and the Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor that wormed its way into my ear that I actually liked.  Ultimately the winkingly weak, twee, and self consciously catchy nature of this music was parodied, like 500 Days of Summer, by the commercial sounding Peter Bjorn and John "Young Folks."  Smiling "dance" hooks like Phoenix's attempts lending themselves perfectly to car commercials. Degenerating into bands with playfully weak names, The Fiery Furnaces, Bat for Lashes, The Fleet Foxes.

What is the snooty, independent magazine and movie's obsession with the small, quiet problems of the possibly religious people in a Flyover state or otherwise unremarkable city?  I'm looking at you, sparsely written New Yorker articles about observant, unfaithful men in tipi motel rooms with a haunting twist, stories written from the point of view of a middle child adolescent escaping from religious band camp, and the recent story of a shy gay-looking guy doing fake weddings for Iraq soldiers with a Jennay Hollywood aspirant in Michigan that he's in love with.  People swishing their Riesling or Pinot Grigio in Scarsdale over a roast chicken or educated older people in Madison, Wisconsin have little to do with preteens, Iraq war veterans, flyover religious bible camp extremism, or, on another topic, profiles of underrated behind the scenes geniuses you just haveta know about like Tomas Maier or Ester Dean.  New Yorker profiles shine a, granted, more earnestly written, light on the underrated geniuses of the underrated movement you never heard of that snakes its spidery influence through the large cities of America, the uneasy marriage of nations in the UN, connecting its web all the way to your raised ranch in Scarsdale.  Ultimately, the message is that you must pay attention to this previously obscured person because their tiny light of genius or influence shines onto all the cities and continents of the current moment, and thus is obscurely pertinent to your previously uninformed light.  The finesse and delicacy of the non famous string puller like Ester Dean is outlined in compound sentences and adjectives that prickle against each other, piled into a complex result.  I don't understand why the New Yorker stories don't throw their readership's problems back on the page left open and planned to be read near or on the toilet, just like Stephen Sondheim did with Company.  Why beguile the reader with enigmatic, somewhat pointless fiction, of the specific problems of  a tiny Cooper salesman, his more distant disease stricken wife, or combative, beautiful and runaway logical teenage daughter?  Why not write a story about the small problems of a systems engineer in Westport worried about his heart health, his spiralling, boring wife, the autistic son of his old age, and needled vaguely by hints of promiscuity from his pre-teen daughter?  Without him traveling to Nebraska by Greyhound.  Why not write a profile that unashamedly shines the light of insight on a big ass big wig and not his right wing napkin tester?  Mike Bloomberg and not Mike Bloomberg's aide's child wrangler whose hand that rocks the cradle rules his tie choices and the infrastructure of New York?  Because the New Yorker dances awkwardly between the political articles of Newsweek/the Economist, the purely literary reviews and personalities of the Atlantic, your poetry teacher's crappy chapbook, and the Sunday Funnies.  The thin veneer of snobbery unites all the pieces as "I swear this is high culture" and "Did you hear Bruce McCall's high class parody of toddlers drinking Riesling with crushed Paxil to ease their anxiety of mobile phone apps and April 15th?  Roz Chast wrote about neurosis as if New Yorkers were still distinctive, agoraphobic Jewish people with accents!"  Indeed, they are your podiatrist in a comically loose fitting suit.  They are the chilled aluminum ice phallus in the plastic wine bottle when you should be getting a freakin Brita filter and switching to water with oranges in it.  As TED Talks' 20 minutes of specialized learning "I swear we're innovative and big ideas entrepreneurial... Now I know about the ecobiology of bee pollen courtship," the New Yorker's tidbits scream, "take this in in memory of high culture!"  Even the right triangle poem that says snow from all sides?  The fifth grade sonnet I sent was much better than that offering.  I challenge you to create immersive articles that either teach completely or create art earnestly.  These tidbits provide the satisfaction of a Pitchfork review, turning noses higher up (Dinosaur Jr.'s pre-first album unreleased cassette mixtape was better!) and educating no one.

I know what you're doing.  I hate when you're cloying.  I love when you follow your dreams.  I love when you create incisive, compelling content.  I hate when you use the same formula.  I love that you're trying to be serious about your calling.  I hate/love that you're secretly an unemployed freelancer with a big idea.  I hate when you're snobby, anodyne, and loving of snobby cheeses like Humboldt Fog and space distillers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  I love when you rage with intensity, when you tear and then create art.  I wonder where we're going to go and how we'll continue to make business dreams from penury.  I don't fit in, Let me watch.  Let's punk out without fully breaking or developing hifalutin non-business ideals.

I have the same thing, the same thing to say.  Last night some yelling teenage strangers told me "You're egocentric. Not everything in the world revolves around you." Because they were yelling the n word and showing their stomach and I turned around and said "Are you calling me that?" And the guy was like, "I didn't even notice you. Not everything in the world revolves around you." And I was like "Yup." And then a couple streets later I cried.  I'm here with nothing to say.

Whistling

I'm still uncomfortable with the differences between men and women.  I think it's important to be truthful, truthful of our differences and our emotional reaction to our differences even if it is one of anger.  I don't know how to work through it, but I don't want to ignore it because that would be lying. 

Fear and insecurity separates humans from each other and underscores an individuated, separated experience that allows us to distrust one another.  Adding faith and lack of fear as well as self acceptance causes one's path, thoughts, and ideas to become clear without a distortion of another choice.  Faith indicates seeing the way one is going and the terrain around and accepting it, continuing on without being nervous or resentful of what will happen.  Faith is something that makes me resent other people less or set up curtseys and bird dances to get to know them less.  Social interactions require a certain amount of necessary prologue, but this isn't something I should resent.  My bitterness and resentment comes from comparison with other people, which is ridiculous in the achievement of my individual goals, though less so with my progress in goals related to other people.  I do not fit with the devil may care risk taking of the entrepreneur who arranges all to fulfill their impossible dream by monetizing it with a niche market, with the doing what you love and such.   There is a great bouquet of people founding specific and gimmicky vegan chocolate bars, pop up yoghurt kitchens, books and toys that our parents made inaccessible to us due to the gender divide, other gleeful TED-baiting ideas meant to quickly expand our consciousness in the space of a Google Chrome commercial.  I am too much of a follower, scribe, and detailist to focus on the huge array of syrup bars and girls' spatial reasoning toys I could be making.  I don't fit into the second dot com boom as an entrepreneur or evangelist.  Nor in the niche DIY rooftop kale farmer, butcher, single batch distiller, or other niche hipster animal that found a specific language to articulate and live their dream and get featured on NYT Magazine or NPR.  The dream of the 1890s is alive in hipsterdom today of being an artisan of one's specific wares, whatever they may be, but before joyfully humming away at work, one must carve out one's artisanal specialty, whether a Ukrainian-Korean fruit pickling brand or a raw aperitif bar.  Academia only brands itself with the specificity of one's subject.  The allure of staking out a new piece of terrain as being an expert of both an arcane and popular new subject.  One can take a new lens, but either the author or the focus must be narrowly arcane.  God forbid we have another Dickens or Tolstoy guy.  Yet, the delivery of the language, the product is not diversified, it is similar critical rhetoric, we don't use dioramas, lists, infographics, or the gimmicks Pitchfork used to keep its reviews sneering and engaging. This perceived stodginess in the medium of academic criticism and essays is probably getting a due revision in the form of the infographics and technological flourishes of the day, but isn't the point not the form, but rather the insight and the enhancement of truth in the discipline and in understanding the past and current time with it. 

Annoying

I am surprised and ever panting at the rate that my generation devolved from inertia, consumerism, and empty hallmarks of culture to living in interesting times.  The result of the baby boom was enough time to raise two generations whose faith in progress made them think they would never go poor or hungry again.  The freedom and future centric focus of baby boomers who broke through the ties of both the large family community where younger members have a specific place/owe a debt of gratitude to their elders and the quaint mores of the nuclear family cemented during the Victorian age brought forth in us materialism, individualism, and resultant alienation.  Our x-boxes, technological luxuries, independence and isolation as a country are being wrested from us at a non-idealistic level, our purse strings.  Americans have bought the freedom to not depend or communicate through distant relatives and community structures through avoiding the landline, moving far away, and building the kind of nuclear family whose reward is perhaps a mother in law not living in the next room and breathing down her son's neck or not living in communal apartments like my family has in the past.  Yet, when not distracted by tv, activities, or even a job, the discomfort of our alienation, our roomy suburban houses with two acre zoning or our tendency only call our friends to hang out is being felt.  The hurricane forced us to recognize that being trapped in the basement of our house without power for five days or much worse is less painful with the society and support of our neighbors.  Even if it means some unpleasant and outmoded social overtures.  I don't know if I want the interwoven social niceties of large communal societies or places where filial piety is more important than the freedom to realize one's wishes.  If America becomes a less individualistic society, I'm hoping that it will have a modern take on community.  I'm hoping that women will still retain some of the freedoms of, say, marrying someone you love rather than being married off as a political and economic decision or being able to take the career of your choice.  Better yet, I'm hoping for a re-definition of how the sexes relate to each other that will alleviate the anxiety of the fact that women are slowly breaking the barrier of a society in which they've struggled to have the same opportunities as men. 
Men seem to be processing this as "women trying to become men."  This is not true, as far as vague social definitions of gender, this means not being barred from doing things because they are only to be defined by weakness and childishness.  Mostly this is only to benefit from the same legal and life niceties as men.  This means to not to receive lower pay based on sex, to be able to be admitted to the sports of their choice, to not be judged disapprovingly or differently for their choices or bodies, to seek the careers, lives, and relationships they want without barriers because of gender.  And to not be defined in relation to other people in the same way men are not.  This doesn't mean that some women don't want the door opened for them or to be paid for on the first and second date, or that they don't seek a committed loving relationship because they don't keep the box locked.  My idea is that feminism is based on lack of impediment, rather than even equality.  Meaning, I don't necessarily want to be punched because a man got punched and we're equal and I can take it, but I don't want to be cheated of a home loan, discriminated against in the workplace or school, or at the doctor's office, not to mention deal with danger at night.  While our tendency to be seen as people "acting masculine" or "trying to be a man" is flawed and silly, the fact is that many women do want fulfilling relationships, and the sexual revolution has stacked cards in such a way that women are displaying their plumes to men and the plain grey men take their pick.  This is where the problem is.  A misinterpreted, simplified version of the feminism that I see as a historical, theoretical, and practical movement with many theories and great complexity is what makes a relationship where each person fulfills a different role or "energy" difficult.  As I understand it, in a relationship, each element maintains commonality, but fulfills a different function in working together.  This means that both members of the relationship are not going to be able to do the same things.  Taking care of one another is important, but each takes care of the other in a different way.  What I'm saying is that one thing I've learned from my mother is that the woman, due to being able to register emotional complexities, has to be the "cunning" one in the relationship in order to maintain it.  Avoid arguments and such.  Or at least one person has to.  I know that I want certain things, like to be protected and supported in a concrete, thoughtful, nonverbal way (such things in the past have been coming with me to places, bringing me something or acknowledging when I don't feel well, occasionally just paying for meals rather than the looking at the check like it's on fire song and dance, small things).  But, I am also controlling and domineering (when it comes to picking restaurants, music, and other trivial things),verbally overpowering, insecure, negative, and many other things that make it difficult to get the bottom line support that my father gives my mother.  This behavior attracts calm, quiet men who really want someone to fill the silence and talk and at the beginning don't care about trivial things like me choosing music or restaurants or foisting internet articles on them until I overshare or overstay or over everything.  In other words, there is a strong, rigid element and a flexible element.  This does not have to be gendered, but one element complements or supports the other.  I just want to be supported and the flexible element bends, but does not break, and therefore is the strongest.  There is not much use for a domineering, unsubtle woman, who just really wants to babble about her insecurities and be "completely open" just like a "straightshooting honest" man who delivers unpleasant comments in a random, unasked for way to women will not find a listener that he finds pleasant.  My mother changed and I have to change.  She became less sarcastic, more pliable and realized that she had to both play a game and pick her battles.  Mystery and challenge keeps both genders engaged, so, usually when I am on the chase, the man is challenging and withholding and I hold the losing hand.  There are certain feminine hallmarks distasteful to feminists who don't realize that a relationship has to do with complementary roles that I will have to adopt if I want a strong, supportive partner.  Like, I have to learn to cook and "keep the hearth" which is legitimate to me, because I want a hearth and either my apartment or my mom has kept it in the past.  These are skills and tricks that I took for granted before I learned what being a woman is.  Or being more positive and pleasant, which is a natural offshoot of going after my own goals.  As someone who loves to remark on things and generalize, I am negative and I imagine that it makes me more truthful.  Lemon is beautiful and relatable because she is flawed, vulnerable, and intractable in ways a woman can understand and has personal traits that make us automatically view her as the protagonist whose world we see through.  Most of the men I've met in a dating context have asked at some point if I cook (probably because I talk about food so much), if I love my job, like sports, if I want children "at some point," and such things related to being a woman who is both feminine, pleasant, and positive, or someone a man enjoys being around and coming home to.  I appreciate the value of home and hearth myself.  Good food, a beautiful apartment, and a nice place to live.  Who is going to create it if not me?  Eh, the man could screw it up anyway.  I loved the apartments I had, but they were lacking in furniture and certainly in timely meals.  I think I love to go to restaurants and coffee shops because they have a pre-created ambiance with homelike, discriminating taste without me having to do any of the thinking and decorating.  This makes them sound like an airplane food version of the home environment, but they are just trendier and I find home decoration really difficult.  Most people would find me really annoying and negative, but I'm lucky that my friends can stand me for any length of time.  Unfortunately, this requires little effort on my part to become a more engaging person, maybe one who talks less and asks more leading questions, so I can't say that I'm "good" at my friends.  I'm just lucky to have the friendship.  I've been frustrated that with little reveals or indiscretions, with staying too long, talking too much, showing too much interest, someone who you are trying to form a symbiotic relationship with can write you off.  Maybe I don't have the physical attributes that excuse my not winning at life enough (I'm sure sure super attractive unemployed girls get at least a couple of months before they are written off) or talking too much, as a result, the other person is testing me or interviewing me tribunally and I don't have the advantage.  At the same time, I've found the reasons for rejection to be painfully simple when people do tell me and painfully indicative of my core flaws, it isn't that they themselves suck, they do see me lucidly and why I'm not good enough for them. The freedom of having a home, job, and life whose course you steer is markedly different and provides a different set of challenges than those of living with and accomodating oneself to another person.  In the corporate work environment, one is an instrument toward a purpose and one's daily work must as much as possible be in service of that purpose as well as one's behavior as a "leader."  Going home, I have respite from needing to (and not making) calculated movements toward being seen as instrumental and surviving as well as the corporate rhetoric which is really of being a tool toward the bottom line or company goal.  I have the freedom to be vulnerable, to party, to eat, and to wander with dreams.  I imagine that home with another person again requires scrupulously framing your image as an instrument of preserving companionship, not seeming negative or crestfallen from the work day, re-applying makeup and brushing teeth on waking up.  And the worst part, not going to the bathroom because apparently women don't do that freely.  Omitting various things that make you shrill or slothful looking in order to have companionship, sex, and such things.  For a date, I feel like it's necessary to prepare most of the day before and get into the mode of having to possibly make the omissions, confidence, and concise phrasing that I only use on telephone interviews.  On telephone interviews, you are barred from saying anything unconfident or not positive about yourself so the content is incredibly rigid.  As a result, when men ask me what I have going for the rest of the day, I know it's over and I'm also livid because a date is something you schedule around much like an interview.  Maybe if I'm seeing a friend I have something going for the rest of the day, but no I'm not going to a benefit concert.  Loneliness and lack of companionship vs. some constraint and lack of comfort and vulnerability, which is tonic after the working day.  The strange thing is that romance fades as constraint, hiding, and playing games fades. 

A feminist may take offense to the idea that, depending on the type of partner you want, you may have to exhibit characteristics that are not unpleasant or that complement their personality.  Or that you may have to take charge with the "picking battles" and not being shrill portion of the relationship.  This is something that I may have to do.  I don't see many women, particularly those in relationships, that behave like me so I don't have a good frame of reference, I am at a high scale of vulnerability and unattractive habits.  I carry rocks and peppermints in my pockets, I have a problem with my skin, I am bad at wearing make up, and bad at outfits among other things, I am quirky in a way that can be taken to an extreme, but not in my clothing or personal image.  I  bore myself with my stories and soliloquys, yet have the insatiable urge to talk.  I idealize my talking companions ability to satisfy my need for intelligent novelty and entertainment, as well as a quickening of the spirit, which most men can't provide.  I take a long time to do things like get up, cook simple things, etc.  This is partly because I'm unused to taking care of a partner and I'm not sure if the Ally Sheedy parka is endemic to me.  Yet, I don't like Liz Lemon for her finicky and particular habits like shrill insistence on rules:

       Cashier:    No $100s, Small bills.
       Liz:     Oh, I knew this was gonna happen.
       Cashier: Store policy.
       Liz:     Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this.
       Cashier:    No, I don't
       Gray:     Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
       Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water?
       Gray:     You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal.
       Liz:     It's an illegal policy.
       Cashier: You're holding up the line!
       Liz:     (Along with Gray) No, You're holding up the line!

I am surprised by the new habits I might have to learn to adopt because I haven't thought of them before.  Of course, attractiveness comes with realizing personal goals and the resultant contentment and busy sheen the body takes on in response to achieving personal goals.  Yet, what creative person can dedicate themselves to whatever unfinished, torn art they choose when they are working at every point to bring their persona into fruition?  What creative person does not allow themselves to be torn, uncomfortable, slightly broken rather than some sort of burpee-doing vegetarian going after their start up idea?  I'm almost worried about working on my intractable habits and sloth because of this.  Because I think motivational people who hold their lives up as an example are typically overly self focused and broken, because imperfection and the distance of a dream make it easy to calm oneself by imagining something better.  I don't think people who have simply realized their dreams, particularly material ones, are happy, I think they are people who know what is around the bend of a road and no longer excited to find out. The only way I can find to not become a soft feminine cat like Ms Alba is to treat externals independently of what is internally inside me and work on internal goals irrespective of how they might enhance my femininity.  Because ultimately doing something will make me more pleasant and less miserable to be around, and doing something that realizes my dreams, moreso.  Even though realizing one's dreams brings the possibility of monomania, as one becomes a vessel for the message of healthy eating, or sculpture, art, or worse, a motivational speaker.  I think seeking improvement through one's own body rather than creating something external is toxic and makes a life perfectly lived into one's art. When you make your life your art, that's just messed up, man.  Although, when you sacrifice an imperfect life with someone you love to the perfection of a goal or art, it can prove just as damaging.  Finishing A Hat, but giving up the idea of a perfectly or well lived life is the only avenue toward that type of happiness..

I've never really found my habits intractable before.  I didn't even see anything wrong with them.  And I think it's that I'm used to myself inexpertly holding up the hearth.  Or getting some ethnic food when I can't.  Maybe it's that men require things of us that we don't require of ourselves, things we have to learn later in this culture that protects us from learning about relationships, facilitating interdependence, or even the emotional dimensions of sex.  These are things we maybe think we don't need to learn.  I think the old adage is that in a primal sense, men and women are different and require different things of each other, things we can't automatically imagine.  These are shocking because they do not follow the "require of others what you require of yourself" rule.  The odd marriage of "companionship" or friendship with a side of sex that men seem to view relationships as, along with the strong emphasis on loyalty, is somewhat puzzling to me.  Though the various requirements of women to be supportive, but not excessively, to engage, provide a core of affection, entertain, and mystify are odd to men. 

We learn the shallow gloss of nonessentials like the time and place of the Tea Party, but not how to write cover letters, create solutions to problems as they come up, take calculated risks, bring an idea to fruition, and teach ourselves.  The baseline critical thinking, problem solving, and analysis required to learn and assimilate new tasks is something we learn when we are forced to make do with the insufficient teaching and lackluster instruction of weeks' training.  On the job we frequently digest insufficient information and are not led by the hand in any way.  There must be some benefit in not teaching us to exercise the mental tools we have equipped to deal with new information and amorphous problems because no teacher ever taught that to us.