Today I was supposed to go out and look at the snow, stamp fitfully to hear the noise, sad that adults seem not to have the imagination to take advantage of the weather.  Sad that time and seasons mean more to children.  I didn't go out or stamp or sled or be involved in a free four square like activity with some guy trying to avoid picking up the check for dinner.  So he'd rather go down a hill in a trash can top like he did when he was 5.  In the house with my hoarding tendencies and lack of sponges, I worked from home and was distracted by Mad Men.  The dishes in dual low towers in the sink, the border becomes square.  I am boxed in by the reflection of people addressing me as "ma'am" in my quilted Russian eskimo lady coat even if I don't radiate Chanel no 5.  Not entirely sure why I'm doing what I'm doing, the missed wake up and entry times.  The flubbed work times.  And around it the working dullness of having to be somewhere from 8:30.  I take the cloak of the working Joe even if I don't deserve it or fight for it.  I want another vision but don't know which one and know it involves a lack of heat, food, comfort that I like.  In selfies I glower with slits under my eyes, wall like and half closed, indentations that don't occur in anyone under 20.  Checking if I look as sad as I think.  I have the shyness and low self esteem of a 15 year old without a sense of preservation or any strategy to also look like one.  Things seem gray or limited or meaningless if you imagine they are.  The things I'm supposed to do I cling to with the only purpose being a fridge full of kale, a place to put my green pan.  The indignant faith that I'm allowed to be fancy free 5 years later than everyone else.  That I can eat cold cuts from napkins by Angkor Wat.  That I can converse with bright eyed artists in France.  Just because my parents can't push me into it.  I don't feel the way I'm reflected, like a "ma'am" nor like a working stiff.  And I can say for sure that gathering dust prematurely is a low level pain.  Feeling dull is low level frustration.  If I'm not suffering or living hand to mouth.  I am stopping before I try something related to whatever plan I don't have.  And this nothing will suck me in and provide a home if nothing else happens to me.  

I am you and dear you. At this point I am ready to leap into nothing it seems as long as I have the balls for it. What is my time for? 1 hour and 15 minutes lost in preparation of the morning. Preparation for the pain of problem solving that I feel like maybe is for nought. Today I lose an hour wandering after work. If the hours follow my passions they follow me the hungry anxious thing to pegu club. At night I have to get away toward the fashionably loud. The buttoned up lunch restaurants, lecherous bike messengers, north face dog walkers. All with its expiration time. We finish at 8. At 9 we hit the roof. I run toward my hairdresser the young creative Chris who doesn't talk unless prodded. Wide brick space where he knows how to work the head, my actual skull. As usual I'm hungry for the mood of maybe being top dog in this place, maybe finding an experience. He tells me he wanders the village till he heads back to the Bronx to his family where he has his privacy. He is careful and concentrated, pulls up a stool where he lines up my hair at the collarbone with a scissor. Like the rich old ladies and the long layers they ask for. I try not to judge the charcoal dry hair that refuses to be short out of his head. I need need to be around people who try for some artful reason even if they are fake. I mean what am I doing. My pet word is excellent. I am tipsy I am at pegu club and ray charles is excellent. The particular hipster bartenders talk the history of bourbons and scorsese. I wait for conversation because degustation is not satisfying alone. It is not satisfying alone or maybe satisfaction is not at all. Ray Charles voice the husky brick. The bartender moves with a quickness I can think of as virtuousity. He asks how's she treatin ya. She is frothy because of egg, tastes of mild earl grey and lemon like a delicate tea cake. And I wait for the side off duty bartenders to notice me. What am I doing . the daily question. He serves me a complex celery cilantro drink with a cover of sweetness that makes it taste less like a green juice. Ricky is 26. I am going to fall off the floor. She is lovely dude says the off duty bartender to the one manning the bar. About his wife whose birthday it is. Me. I am lovely too dude. Please. What am I doing. I'm drinking I'm eating I'm escaping I'm leaving the pain of rejection until rejection is the food experience. Tomorrow again I fight this program. I ask myself why I want to fly off and how I plan to do it. In new York this life this privileged thing where my ego will be no thing. Dude some girls are more willing to spread it to win. And feel pretty. Dude. Shanghai and oriental tang backlit red windows. They are for intimacy and the girl who talks to blond swede looks like krysten Ritter. Curved financial chairs. I am getting sad waiting for my chance to be pretty. Bartenders with their clear less masculine voices talk about drinks being more floral. He's the last one and I wait for him. Theyre talking about champers. The red lights but I am angled toward the light oak hunk of wooden bar and my drink with its strip of dried chili. 

I'm a Gemini.  Desperately trying to differentiate.  I flirt and my attempts to flirt are failing, so I redouble my intuitive tactics, aggressively.  Until you become just my friend, and until that friendship rekindles a hope that my standoffishness is making you like me.  First I tease and try to be witty and insulting, then I ask random questions, inquiring hungrily into the personality, I unburden and let show my own personality, tell you my favorite bands, ask about yours.  I don't ask desperate, psychologically taxing personal questions of people I'm not attracted to, or ask about their past.  I turn at a 45 degree angle and pretend they don't exist.  People I'm attracted to, very easily I get enthusiastic and they don't have to win me.  Then as I recognize my desperate attempts at flirting or trying to woo them with wit, uniqueness, quirkiness, that I'm not usual, with my words... I start to give up and try to get personal, ask personal questions, have the type of conversations I like in spite of them, even usurping their own ability to do something other than answer my questions.  Like whether a personality is important.  Earlier in my life, my randomness, my wit would soften people toward me as they realized I was not only harmless but sweet and interesting.  It would soften men who otherwise would see me as desperately entering their space.  Now as I try to observe and find the key to stop myself, I try to point out the root of my behaviors, or how I am aggressively bringing them myself, saying this is me without their asking.  And not asking about them unless it is personal and I want to compare to mine or what I want to know.  I am, I don't do.  I contemplate all day what I am and whether I am affecting anyone, or anyone I want to affect, simply with my personhood. 

I stand on the subway a jagged edge and posture with hands in pockets.  Men in black coats, depressing 30 plus women in their hasty slit rouge, under eye slits, long poofy down coats rather than the trim ones that cut off at the waist, with places to go.  I classify people endlessly.  Catching the lean professional men I like, erverything trimmed and nothing to spare, Gumby like silhouette of fitted peacoat or general black coat, slim cut pants, a line of a scarf perhaps, black sensibly cut hair or floppy, tall and slim like a knife.  The hipster men tall and cutting the same silhouette but with different clothing.  Attractive men are in such a uniform class because of fashion in life, they stand out between the cantankerous women in their floor length coats, huffing to sit down with their bags, they complain when there is an announcement and in the bathroom they sing, hum, use a cell phone, and complane, the shady worker like men too old for ]their Tims out of style baggy pants and Eskimo hooded down coats, with their legs and arms maximally apart, staring around like a warning sign to women.  Suspiciously dressed like it's 1996 or perhaps putting the Carhartt to its original use.  We wear black now, not the colorful mustard yellow and lime green Peter Pan collar 60s inspired coats of my college.  Our dilemmas are not obvious.  The subway is a sloping tile off white with periwinkle seats and in it we don't appear reserved, but at angles, clashing with each other.  Who caves?  Who provides space.  We don't seem obviously lost in thought, not me, not the pretty girl with the braided weave and nose ring who smiles and says sorry when someone takes her space.  I want her to summon her bravery, but not at me practicing masculine behaviors.  Not the tall kempt man who turns his face and body away when I glance at him.  Granted that I glance with a wide eyed, sudden look.  And away like I'm imitating an awkward bird.  We sit spread out and not.  I wonder if our minds are in important, significant places, I have no way to judge someone's depth and pathos like someone else might.  I believe their depth comes from their unavoidable duties, those that give them character, their family, their sons, the strictures of poverty, the people to whom we must give our love and time.  The people who we owe selflessness confer humanity on us.  It is not an errand, it is me rushing to pick up my son who is failing in school and in an after school program because I have to stay at work to keep him in school.  But, I can't see this.  I hear Russian women, rudely sitting with their bags by my thigh, soliciting with concern if the person on the other line ate because they just made aladye which are fresh in the refrigerator, once they wake up from their nap they should go and get it.  I wonder if my humanity comes from what I lack and what I aspire to.  Perhaps my lack of actually doing anything really just emphasizes my insignificance. 

I wonder if I'm as personable as I felt I was in college.  Or if my self oriented personality traits such as uniqueness or different thought process really make me at all worthy or interesting if I don't create anything with it. 

I don't know if its worth it. To assert myself and the pain of achievement. The world's judgment of my products but at this point I am not incurring the kind of risk that generates stagnant or frozen fear. I want to be something else and I thrash against ideal circumstances. Biddy like I seem to be curling into a plastic bag toting leather jacket shrew. I need help with my bags. But yet I still go to dance at parties. Wait patiently behind the jagged corners of men spreading their weight maximally to close in groups of women. It lacks excitement. The promise of emails the Ricky's smell of wigs and weaves. Most beauty and counterculture came from people robbed of a childhood. I don't know if a grinding desire for ego validation is juice for creativity. Less a pain than a tearing. A constant muscle hunger and stretching out of the head toward others. I can say that what I could do to change my day is undefined. Depends on who I must become now or later 

Come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come sings morrissey. I have to make meaning of this life because this life has not amounted to achievement or memory. Have I broken through routine? Who knows if I can emerge beyond what is handed to me. Beyond the egos search. My ego enters the bowery poetry club and looks for validation or binding. I enter establishments and sliding walls of people face perpendicular or backward. I'm going to sit at another rectangular counter as at a 45 degree angle men and women in conversation turn in curlicues, at the wooden table responsible to each other and each others feelings unveiled. We make room for others or else walk in continuous sliding doors of people moving somewhere. I imagine that relationships and children and blood bonds are obligation that pushes us to pain and satisfaction. Satisfaction seems to come from obstacles. The pain and the risk threshold of climbing mountains and providing for our demanding children. I am at that point where providing for my basic needs is still an accomplishment.

I can't feel my friends or my closest people.  If they don't pay sufficient lip service I tear them apart.  I find myself tearing maternal and paternal figures apart who are more resilient.  Because I pay them.  I tell them they aren't responsive, they aren't walking their talk, or whatever.  I tear the few apart that I choose to take care of me.  They are a scant few.  Friends don't need that burden.  Only if they bear down and assume an intimacy untoward, like some introverts do.  Expecting you to open like a clam shell.  If you don't soften your belly for me, if you prove inadequate and cold I will tear you apart if you're standing continuously in one place.  It is windy outside and I can't sleep without a sense of emotional security.  That I'm okay.  We're okay.  It isn't brokered, words that color the perspective, the way we see the world is intoxicating and all permeating, and a way to redirect that perspective, even to recharge by feeling like milk fed sleepy puppy.  Which I need to venture out, like the attachment theory three year old, every four hours.  Then propelled by nostalgia for the freewheeling countercultural times, that come with leaky roofs, open bathroom doors, artistic penury, squats and communal childhood.  I venture out briefly at night into the possibility of a driving artistic passion, to hang out with artists who are hipsters who spend the days crafting their style on mood boards.  Rather than my friends and their emotional honesty, their cynicism, their openness, introversion lack of satisfaction... we are who we hang out with.  The artistic life in its monastic purpose is the tonic for my daily lack of propulsion, the artistic life is propelled by the outward interest of creation, the mission, the seeking, which must be recharged on a daily basis, and the inward editing, adjusting, the philosophy of editing which must be to refine the message of the piece or something.  Or to redirect it, of integrity.  To live with integrity is a risk, whatever this integrity is.  I know that the exchange of money means that our artistry is commodified.  My writing is shaped by what he wants for his website and what he wants is listicles about the 90s or pizza cakes or shoes because what the audience wants is a reflection of themselves and human lives and what they already knew... our writing is about you discovering yourself.  Or you remembering something funny.  Much like humor is sensitive to the room, web pieces depend obviously on the generosity of readers.  Katherine Anne Porter's careful and biting, pitiless examination of humanity and its ugliness had a less obvious connection to the generosity of the passing reader's attention span and more of a link to the publisher or editor.  The editor's one judgment, rather than the statistician's, determined what the people want to entertain themselves with.  Our integrity and artistic freedom, if we were to freelance, is less free than if our role was specifically defined as the guy who optimizes page views with logistic regressions, the guy who is given the option of being an influencer.  The owner can set the price, bargain with our desperation to create and live with the integrity of creation, though living interrupts creation, the preoccupation with living and balance interrupts output and the form and beauty of the output.  Output is a noble sacrifice to a beautiful and healthy life.  Noble in the sense that it is the perfect chip to gamble away the possibility of failure or the potential of love.  Wilder than the monastic existence, the creative's is the bare wire that must ping with all emotion and carefully and analytically absorb all human evidence in the world around it, analytically produce insight on humans and what it means to be this one type.  On this beautiful blue ball, focusing on humans and their little fears.  Why focus on them?  The selfish thought comes back, because I am important, and I want to embody what's important, and all I see is humans.  So I will talk about humans.  It is self righteous to talk about topics without a personal touch, or to exalt animals or current events above people, even if current events swallow us up and make it less important to be a people.  People who created things and did it well had a reason I can't assume.  Artists since 1910 are invested in making their words and intentions impenetrable.  Intentions ruin the immediacy of the art. 

You and they are the most vital to me when they're taking care of me.  The bookends of my life.  Fear is a protective instinct.  If I can imagine myself exposed to the worst, myself and the dragon in the bathroom as such, or in the hero's journey, the confrontation with the ultimate evil... you can tell me that Ebola is for the time being in Africa and we are not yet subject to the luxury of the decaying.  We are intact.  The family where the child looks pie-eyed at the idea of time and frailty.  Half the time the child looks out the window seasick, car sick and imagines the scenario of being exposed to the ultimate elements.  Until reassured.  The child will spout grim ideas about themselves, that perhaps they don't feel or love.  Until given an idea otherwise.  That perhaps they are the spawn that sets their family in a maelstrom and can only create emotional typhoons to mimic feeling.  Other than that is a font of need, validation, mistaking others for a teat.  The Jewish family is built on the model of the endless sacrifice, and the endlessly ungrateful beneficiary.  Since the giving, the sacrifice, the self deprivation is endless, the beneficiary has nothing to compare it to in their own lives other than to expect it....

I am saying this and SLC calls me.  Sarah.  Some odd metaphor that those uncomfortable kids, my tribe, or were once kids and now get married surreptitiously in a barn against all our hopes that they scale trees, become Nora Ephron, decorate Dubai with street art, our discomfort binds us.  The reminder of the comfort that I had, having time to become something, is a check in.  To see if I've become anything.  Whether it is even possible based on those vague parameters.  Maybe what we have in common are the itchy expectations and perennial disturbances of middle class youth, everything is fine within the middle class community, we have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we hope we will become something big... we forcibly stand away from our peers and create mystery outside of adolescent group dynamics.  Spend time endowing the escape or our explorations of past music, past books, with the vague danger of their parties.  The moment we fly the coop becomes an erotic preoccupation.  Perhaps the limitations of who we will be and whether we can buy a wheel of party cheese with that never sinks in because...  The future becomes the fetish.  The bounds outside the walls of suburban adolescent hierarchies.  I think the imaginations of future SLC kids were dominated by that. 

I can't listen to Next to Normal.  I find it "triggering."  The nagging sense that one ought to be happy with one's basic (food shelter) and secondary (love family) needs met.  This guilt fuels middle class anxiety ("I should be happy but I am... discontented").  The stagnancy, of material contentment.  But, still this woman suffers the alienation of a different emotional compass, crushing lows and annoying manias.  Which psychiatry wants to control for the sake of her life, but has no idea how to normalize into something livable, rather than numb.  I've had friends who told me that the numbing effect of experiencing a median of their high low emotions is not a way to live life.  And this woman constantly threatens to dip down in suburban calm, stagnation, and meaninglessness.  With material wealth, children, all the shallow meaning signifiers, a woman feels no right to be uncomfortable.  Suffocated by the warmth of the house, the polyester blazers, the quiet of the street at night.  The pathlessness of making it and still being mentally ill.  She sings that "everything is perfect, nothing's real."  Apparently in "the mountains," running free she could whip herself into a frenzy and be close to collapsing from the low point and convince herself that riding her emotions was "real."  Rather than safety which is not worth its salt.  I think that whatever struggles she experienced in the mountains were mainly emotional and just as unreal.  Problems whipped up by brain chemistry rather than bein a menace to south central while drinkin your juice in tha hood. 

I need more markers of warmth and security than the suburban schools, their white walls with one strip of blue ringing bell precisely at 7:30 am and the hazy future promise, the abundant possibility of leaving and the path set free.  The well appointed floors of our houses, they are willing to shuttle us to soccer practice, to therapy, to occupy our mind,  maybe the bright future is what makes the isolation of the nuclear family on its tucked away street, which makes sense for the children to play on a patch of land, while the constant state of parental sacrifice and childlike bringing up is in motion.  What meaning does the isolation take on?  The prosperity and mediocrity?

I am afraid of coldness and ingratitude.  The Hyde.  My Hyde that will do what?  That I know will retire when needed.  That won't man up.  I'm afraid I was hurt maybe and didn't know it.  But this doesn't compensate for selfishness.  The brand of selfishness and egotism that stuck with the child who got what it wanted from the endlessness of care, the lack of reciprocation, and it stuck because it's true and not an excuse.  The excess of love and the expression of love can hobble a person for a while.  I dislike how easily I sever connections, but would need to bathe in the amniotic fluid of someone's promises of security preferably hers, and how I don't pay for what I get.  I see what I am.  I'm in this phase where I blame others.  The twin forces of nostalgia and inability to do anything with the Hyde of psychopath and emotionless abuser bring Hyde back in.  To live hemmed in by 9 to 5, unable to pursue large risks, hungry for precisely maternal affection from anyone when remotely displaced from the feeling of security and that everything's going to be ok.  I suck out emotional empathy from others.  Am not able to provide it.  Because I am Joe Schmoe.  Understandable.  And have faith in vindication, my own vindication.  The twin forces of coldness and child hurt apparently drive the fear and the ugliness.  In this world that exacts the basic responsibility from me. 

I am here in the downward portion of the rollercoaster.  Where am I going is a daily question.  A victimizing question that removes agency.  As though it's not me that controls where I'm going.  Options are limited, the future is limited and not nebulous.  My great buddies are marrying in unassuming barns retiring to Rhinebeck rather than making butter sculptures of Nixon across the country.  Rather than what?  The awe inspiring senior or older brother trailblazing in Russia, who did we admire?  When will I push toward some sort of fearful cheap coffee based prospect and bite back my pride for the sake of the illusory dharma?  The dharma of counting pennies or maybe not ever breaking in any way.  Or worse, being the one.  Or not the one.  No good.  Not knowing how to even start driving.  Should I be excited about the future?  People are calling me ma'am and helping me with my bags.  Will the desire to live a rich life and being generally lazy to learn all there is about a craft dampen any hope that I can be great... at something?  Without reflexively thinking dream on bitch... or reflexively wanting to change the word great because of that aching hubris and that fear.  And what is stopping... the nightly wandering into this or that expensive food establishment or ramparted street with definitely Cafe Habana hidden and Back Forty West facing me like an American dull wall.  Will there be anything left over to say once the endless me and needling search dies down and the business must be attended... the cakes made, I watch the truffle dealer child move boxes and hide from competitors, rich fish eggs floating on the website alternated with dill crackers of gravlax.  He is young, authentic, strangely specific, full of potential, a wunderkind with time to change.  The kid takes to the cobbled streets and works the unglamorous 60 hours, or has the gauche rich family, or something the camera can't display by tagging him "truffle don."  Teflon truffle don. 

I am going to now misinterpret David Sedaris.  I went to see him after his reading at his book signing and he gave me three pieces of advice, one I can't remember.  One of these pieces of advice was to "make something out of nothing."  His very kind replies to my questions scared me.  Implicit in them was that successful writing requires you to get your shit together yourself.  I remember my reaction to the two books of his I read.  He has a style of writing, conversational, concise like an essay, but with a light touch of the building up to a punchline of jokes.  He is a writer who most closely resembles a comedian, or someone who lightly sprinkles his narrative with the principles of comedy.  This makes him so effervescent and entertaining on the radio or as a tv guest.  When I read his books, I wondered about him, despite writing about his life, he seemed mysterious, or never revealed himself.  Each of his stories would flesh out a piece of his life with a sometimes absurd sense of humor.  In recalling an earlier time in his life, David Sedaris would have objective, somewhat omniscient distance as a narrator.  Early David Sedaris would be examined with a dismissive, self deprecating eye, someone who "tended to exhaust people" or unsuccessfully took up random pursuits like conceptual art or competitive swimming primarily to get attention, to the forgiveness and dismissal of his future self.  He was ostensibly vulnerable in recalling his past missteps, but not vulnerable enough and still mysterious to me as a character.  I didn't feel close to him or like he exposed himself in his stories.  I think maybe making something out of nothing requires creating an anecdote that takes a slice of one's life and makes a certain point to make room for other anecdotes.  The interesting thing about books of essays is that because the essays are about discrete times in someone's life, they may not have an obvious unified purpose to be collected in the same place.  Joan Didion's book of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem was easy to cull some sort of large profundity, big steak, out of, because the stories were set during one period in her life, divided into encounters with people she met, and meant to be a slightly sloppy microcosm of the meaningful social moment captured at its time.  It was easy for me to see useful import and poignancy or a unifying theme in Joan Didion's writing for that reason, because they came from one time in her life and either reflected on American history such as counterculture in the 60s, motherhood, aging and other things it bothers me to talk about.  Perhaps the unifying theme in two of his books that I read are a similar tone shared in the essays.  Naked tends to be edgier, angrier, with longer sentences, longer, more autobiographical.  Me Talk Pretty One Day has taut, hilarious stories that frequently brought me to tears with their humorous commentary about the absurdities of languages and their rules.  There are glimmers of familial pathos and pain, the meandering path he took to get to a place as a very successful writer, and meaning and poignancy delivered with a lighter touch than his deft skill at telling an anecdote.  I guess I wonder if he is a "deep" writer, an "intimate" writer, if his skill in entertaining people while they're in the bathroom moves him up from the NY Times Bestseller list to that of a reliably great modern writer or even modern classic.  Maybe I'm missing a greater depth in his stories or unifying theme in each book. 

One thing I do know, is that what David Sedaris is presenting makes me want to get closer to him, to know the protagonist.  Personal essays expose one's life to a reader and offer them an opportunity to relate to the writer.. or not.  Observational humor causes the audience to relate to a comedian who is freshly exposing common elements in their lives. Observational humor, particularly narrative humor, forges a warm connection between audience and comedian because it illuminates elements in human lives and provides a window into the comedian's life/how he sees the world.  This is why I love to listen to the albums of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Patton Oswalt, whether or not they narrate anecdotes about their lives, just being able to enter into their perspective, the way they see the world, is a warm rapport that doesn't leave me feeling like I don't know the comedian.  Even if they are creating a persona (like Anthony Jeselnik who I don't pay attention to) or editing their stories to only include what audience members respond to, their voice and the way they flesh out and finish their stories provides clues to whatever their point of view might be, even if they are miserable alcoholics or, like George Carlin, way nicer and quieter than their abrasive onscreen character.  There is an honesty in sharing one's observations.  Creating distance while exposing one's life and thoughts with charisma is an uncomfortable juxtaposition.  I only found myself missing Aziz Ansari, pacing my apartment after watching the good comedian, because of emotion or the strangeness of seeing such a real talent in its raw developing stages and possibly missing other parts.  

The promise of meeting David Sedaris after a reading and the possibility that he will talk a fan's ear off further brings the possibility of vulnerability and connection.  I hoped that if I stated my case strongly enough, or drew him out enough, the very tired writer would come over for salmon some time next week... or at least we'd have a good laugh.  Yet, his attempt to have a personal conversation with each fan who wanted him to sign the book was maybe an exercise in politeness and grace.  As well as quirk and observational ability.  I guess I wanted to overshoot and be friends.  Even though a creative talent and a fan that doesn't create anything aren't equals.  Creative talents are allowed to be distant, loony, cold, experiencing things and observing people in the service of their art.  I wanted to be friends with David Sedaris.  So does everyone else.  People's creative talent is obvious to the cold objectivity of an outside observer.  Especially a wise professor or talented writer.  However workaday it may be.  Meaning we aren't special, we are consumers of David Sedaris' gift, people whose only art is life and only production is children or things like raising revenue or supporting a companies' bottom line.  So there is always a power differential.  We aren't equals any more than Rembrandt was with Ferdinand Bol or Gerrit Dou.  Or with Hendrikje Stoefls.  Personal relationships don't come to be as valuable as the art produced and being good at pleasing or befriending an artist doesn't come to mean much.  You are a person in their painting.  I think Sondheim already tackled this in Sundays in the Park With George. 

I wanted to know what brought him to doing drugs, how he felt about his mother, the fact that they cursed in the house (slightly tougher parents than my family), growing up with all those sisters and which he was closest to, whether he could relate to his father, why he wanted to date Hugh so much, what makes them get along, whether he thinks he is now getting the attention he wanted, what he really thinks of his fans, when he started writing, when he got good at it, how he met his friend Alicia, things I wonder.  I always want to ask REALLY intrusive questions.  But, the fact that I feel like they're unanswered (whereas with Joan Didion I mostly wonder whether her daughter was easy, how and whether she learned to cook, the challenges of being a mother, whether she was actually a good one.)  These questions also remain unclear so's to create more books.  His love for and estrangement from his engineer father is obvious in his books. 

I am not a stranger to fear, fear of beginning, changing, and constructing an entire plan by myself.  Somehow for years I've avoided having to be a "self starter" (perhaps due to the slightly bite-sized and regular homework assignments, the loopholes in an ostensibly Dewey-based education system from truly "constructing my own education," and other ways I've slipped through the cracks or out of the system without letting it make me feel upset too much.)  I've been surprised and blindsided by the combination of having to develop the skill of being "the CEO of my future decisions (responsible for top down planning)," being forced at work to take drastic initiatives and also construct things from top down, as well as a differently flavored ability to self reflect that began in my early mid 20s.  (As I gain distance from my childhood that I've tried so hard to imprint with fidelity on my brain, my memory comes to new conclusions and falsifies facts.)  This may be because I am the type of person who continually checks in with myself on my status and how I'm feeling, the kind of person who curiously noticed veins popping out on her hands and had to reconcile to them.  Or maybe I am like a person whose muscle has atrophied to a breaking point and who notices how weak they are when they have to use them.  I am continuously shocked about new developments that I register before their crest both in the collective and in myself before I reconcile myself to its long term existence.  I am curious and overwhelmed that this is a muscle slightly different from the ones I've had to use.  One thing that seems to define being an adult is others taking a more or less hands off position to curating your activities.  You curate the course of your life with long range goals that I used to find super annoying and pointless on health class worksheets or soft skills segues in all the fact memorization of public school. 

I also considered long range goals the corporate self help harping of Type A people, but perhaps it is necessary for the survival of people who don't know how to dictate the course of their lives without imposing outside structure.  Hollywood has always pictured Type A women portrayed by Amanda Peet and Katherine Heigl as side-note effective, but annoying and in desperate need of a lifestyle change.  Their ability to streamline themselves and their team as an effective speeding bullet toward their bottom line is powerful and assertive in the business world, but definitely not a trait in someone I would want to "have a beer with" or talk to.  Chris Traeger's relentless, desperate positivity in the face of aging and loneliness is also seen as more of a trite crutch and less of a tool that maximizes success.  Taking the reins of my career life and redirecting it myself terrifies me and doesn't stir me from an inert state.  Perhaps giving shape to my ideas with the large exoskeleton of long term and short term goals emulates an imposed outside structure that I so long for. 

I have been content to remain a child, a baby, that is what I'm told.  I have often surrendered to a sense of fidelity and hope.  There is a possibility that I will never achieve any personal goals or career.  Time is not going to steer me toward something or change me magically.  I have continued to be someone who is inert and doesn't move unless there's outside imposition.  This is a personal trait I could use to my advantage by lighting an artificial fire under my ass, whether igniting the historic shame I knew since childhood, the shame of when a spoiled and sheltered person feels when caught by an outside authority, at being outed for being spoiled, the fear of outside judgment that keeps us spoiled babies behaving disgustingly only in the shelter of a house with two acre zoning. 

I used to love to read a site that called on people to discuss and reflect on their lives with a Jungian and Freudian slant.  People would reflect on how their past got them to where they are and, while it also involved terms like "collective consciousness," "projection," and "shadow," it also involved a great deal of reflection on roots, or blaming things on the mother and family.  The people on that site frequently came from raucously bad childhoods and broken homes, unbelievable horror stories, and looked back with forgiveness and the understanding of the strength and positive qualities it developed in their lives.  They talked about how things currently unpopular are meaningful, such as one's roots and family tradition, the ego, the idea of male and female energies, one's values, boundaries, and what couples owe each other to make it work.  They forgave the sins of the mother and gained strength of character, denied a childhood, they gained resilience.  I wondered where my parents played into my problems because as far as I could see, though spoiled into a horrifically selfish paste, I was given a lot of love and support my whole life.  I really am a difficult, controlling, selfish, egotistical, headstrong person.  It can't be denied that as a child I sometimes felt like a "monster," over sensitive to itself, completely cold and callous to other people's emotions, and it took a while to deny the monster within while still taking selfish actions. 

Now I am beginning to see what choices my parents made that left my muscles atrophied after childhood.  And why they made them.  I was an oversensitive and easily depressed child.  I remember begging to see various R rated Oscar nominated movies, Dead Man Walking, The Green Mile, etc., saying I could take it, and coming home with my eyes bugged out and depressive thoughts in my brain.  I remember when I got my first watch at six years old, and how, being taken to a beach traditionally inhabited by old people and half empty, in my most Dixie cup color schemed windbreaker, on a windy fall day, when I sighed about how time flies, or saying at 10 years old how I felt like an 80 year old woman.  Thoughts like these are typical for the wondering mind of a 10 year old. 

With the rush of pubescent obsessions and later adult responsibilities, our brain gets slightly quieter about these things.  This is why I wasn't taken to depressing ceremonies.  Until a couple weeks ago.  Granted, my nuclear family is three people (plus me) who had to move for a job away from our Brooklyn distant relatives on one side who tended toward trashy Russian Brooklyn fashion and mores.  I dreaded having to go to extended family parties as a kid with the scarlet haired women with penciled on eyebrows and six course meals at tacky Russian restaurants with unspeakably bad 80s haired pop pumping in from all the tvs.  Or awkwardly hanging around when my parents visited friends and had no one to babysit.  As a glowering spoiled kid I was receptive of very few people, most of them being my brother.  I believed that "kids ruled" and didn't have a now-fashionable retro sense of how a Confucian style respect for elders or African style being part of a large community is what prevented millenial happiness after the Boomer evolution following America's nuclear family, two car garage 50s.  I'm oversimplifying, I really was an intense, literate, deep.... horrifically spoiled and sheltered, kid.  And kind of still am. 

I was curious how to universalize and theorize about my Russian Jewish roots, what could I say about the women of my family and the attitudes I inherited from them.  I felt more like a liberal arts student than anything else, and for a long time didn't care to dissect my cultural identity like this interesting website invited me to.  Especially because a certain war whittled away at elders who led completely different lives than their expatriate children, liberated by the Iron Curtain.  A friend of mine with a coven-like sensibility was interested in channeling my grandmother.  Hmmm.  How little my grandmother and I have in common and what a shame it is.  She lived in a village with several sisters which was probably cleaned of men in WWII.  She suffered through famine, migration to the city outside her village, had her husband, a tank commander, die of gunshot wounds in his prime, as well as her oldest son who I don't hear much about, and had to raise her two boys by herself.  She was inveterately kind and helpful to others, I hear, and, while using corporal punishment and things to keep the boys in line, sacrificed her personal happiness to raise them.  In other words, like at least one of her sisters, she was an indisputably good, strong, matriarchal woman who learned to provide, scrimp and save, as the poignant Zhvanetski skit says about the war generation.  The kind of women who save shoes, ship out cheaper items to relatives, work endlessly, recycle underwear to the embarrassment of their grandchildren, and demonstrate the strength and kindness tested by years of privation.  This goodness is a kind of power.  I'm a weak sauce, to be kind to myself, intellectual and we have nothing in common.

I had to attend a scary event and had to learn what my family was about.  Stories were passed around about the strength of my grandmother's sister.  The descendants of my grandmother's sister differ from mine in the way they kindly and evenhandedly accept and continue to socialize with people we disdain for their selfishness and wrongs toward us, specifically the offspring of my grandmother's slightly more evil sister.  And also they don't avoid my annoying uncle like I probably shouldn't do.  My grandmother's sister was not only a peerlessly strong and kind woman, but a first female medical graduate, a sought after heart surgeon, and one who did not disdain to help pretty much anyone, who remained positive and welcoming.  Matriarchal strength is an interesting virtue in a culture that still has patriarchal values, so many strong and good women in this war generation of my family. 

How did they relate to the generation of women who emigrated to the US?  Some of our relatives are certainly self sacrificing and welcoming, but the bleakness in their lives that they hide scares me, so it's not often that I visit the avenues at the end of the alphabet in Brooklyn.  Perhaps the coddled children, the ones sacrificed for, who finally profited from their parents labor for their comfort are the ones not tested for the strength of their kindness, and as a result, layabouts reclining and being fed grapes.  I find that Russian Jewish parents are slightly less cold, expectant, and demanding that their children succeed than Asian parents.  Or at least this is how I was allowed to loaf about in liberal arts school.  Unconditional love also doesn't balance accounts, so I was ignorant of structural responsibilities and what I "owe" other than it amounts to everything.  So I am neither strong nor good, but receiving beneficence and guilty.  

I spun out after this event, I weakly sought some help or someone to calm down my obsessive emotions.  (The obsession is a 2009 development that I used to fight the darkening uncertainty of my post-Clinton and post-Bush environment with serpentine ritual.  Everything had to be more okay than my closing doors four times and spending 20 minutes picking out mismatched socks for a "good day.")  This was maybe why I was sheltered by my parents from the disease and suffering as a child, maybe it's in my nature to be sensitive, emotional, and fall apart like a two year old.  In my family, it's well respected to either freak out only when there's reason or to maintain composure for the sake of others.  Perhaps selfishness is a cardinal sin in our self-sacrificing culture.  One that judges people on the strength of their goodness in crisis moments or their ability to nurture and protect others.  And, in Russian Jewish history, there are so many crisis moments. 

Maybe I was born sensitive, requiring shelter or else my nervous constitution make me lie on the floor and throw up.  Maybe I deserved a childhood devoid of the selfish, neglectful, addict parents that forced the people on the site to step up as children and act like adults.  Perhaps if I were required to clean blood off a wall or cook my brothers and sisters dinner as a child I would have fallen apart inside.  Part of being an adult is not being allowed to fall apart on the outside or obviously and pleadingly, overtly be unhappy and seek help. 

I can say that one thing at the root of Jewishness is the unconditional love and nurturance of the children.  And not necessarily pressuring them to fit a mold or withholding physical affection.  Some children are fed and fed, physically as well as emotionally, as the stereotype goes... bagels, potatoes, and tomatoes shoved in their mouths by worried grandmothers as they are trying to play on the beach.  So much of Judaism has been holding out for a better time, shoring up strength for the future, and taking care, because sacrificing for children is worth it simply because they are our children and we want them to be happy.  When the debt to parents is immeasurable, how is it going to be paid off?  Where do our responsibilities begin?  They seem to ask for nothing and give everything. 

I can also say that two generations into my family, there is a tradition of women unexpectedly becoming worried, overprotective mothers.  My mother, her sister, my cousin, worry and tend and circle their children like brood hens.  However, my maternal grandmother isn't described this way.  Gay and fun loving, she and my grandfather created an intellectual household and nurtured their girls, but their long work schedules allowed the children to run free.  Somehow my mother developed an internal sense of pride, independence, and also following the rules out of respect to herself.  She wasn't disciplined or coddled into it.  I don't know how she did it's part of her character.  Neither was my paternal grandmother this way, obviously, due to using the rod on her boys.  My brother and sister weren't even raised the way I am and this may be why I'm at a disconnect.  Or why I don't gain profit from blaming the past on why I am so weak muscled now in terms of coping skills and adult ability.  Perhaps I over coddled myself.