When I was her age, the age she happened to be turning on the day we had this conversation, I thought that making my living exclusively by writing was the goal of my life. Or if not “exclusively,” primarily. Dimly, and without ever lingering in thought too long about the specifics, I imagined teaching, being a teacher almost exactly like my least-engaged college professors, the ones who showed up to workshop with a large coffee and some xeroxed Raymond Carver stories and then sat there for two hours while their students talked, sipping the coffee and sometimes nodding.  The rest of my time would be spent alone in a library or a home office, some room with a computer, a desk, a chair. I would write novels and then, later in the day, make dinner. Maybe sometimes if I felt like it I’d accept an assignment from the kind of magazine no one really reads but that basically exists to pad the bank accounts of already-rich writers, travel and specialized beauty magazines, you know,  ”[So and So's] Wacky Adventures In Bangkok,”  ”What [Whoever] Really Thinks Of Several Slightly Different Spa Treatments.” I’d slide on up into that echelon effortlessly. My inherent greatness would be recognized and one day I’d wake up and just find myself there. I mean I’d also have published novels, in this fantasy.  The parts of this fantasy that pertained to my personal life were just as inchoate and illogical. I thought and maybe (cringe) even said out loud, “I’ll have my first baby after I finish my first novel.” As though those were two goals you could easily work towards simultaneously. As though they were not two distinct and unrelated life paths.

While I was busy fantasizing about the future, I neglected to realize that — aside from some details that would only grow to seem important in retrospect — I was already living my fantasy life. Well, sort of.  I did make my entire living, for a year or two, by writing. I did spend most of my days in a room alone with a computer. I didn’t teach bored undergraduates how to talk less annoyingly about short stories, but I did teach teenagers yoga, which was fun and rewarding and not in any way something that I was good enough at or cared enough about to push it towards being a meaningful secondary source of income, which was the ostensible reason I was doing it.  But I didn’t ever have to go to an office, didn’t ever have to commute during rush hour, didn’t ever have to go to a meeting, and never had to buy or wear any article of clothing because it would be good “for work.”  As my remnants of workwear wore out, my wardrobe devolved in a cotton-lycra blend-y direction. I got really good at creating elaborate procrastination regimens, taking advantage of my ability to do chores and errands on weekdays that office workers can only squeeze into their weekends and lunch hours. It took me several years – really, it took starting a business — for me to figure out that this attitude is anathema to getting any kind of work done; even if you don’t have a 9 to 5 job, it behooves you to be at your desk during those hours, even if it means taking more-crowded yoga classes.

During those years I thought about the baby thing a lot — would I ever get there, how would I get there, would I like it if I did get there — and for a long time I thought it was because of some genuine, possibly-biological longing my genes/soul. Now I think it was probably 90% because when you’re a freelancer in Brooklyn, walking around in Brooklyn in the middle of the day, mothers of young children are the only people you see. Most everyone else is in Manhattan (or Dumbo or downtown Brooklyn), working in offices. So of course you think about babies, the same way you’d think about sand if you lived in the desert.

Needless to say — you aren’t reading this in Elle, are you? — I was not lifted up easefully into the realm of the brand-name. Probably because I didn’t do any of the things that I would have had to do in order to get there. I still don’t quite understand what it takes to get there. More and more I think it’s not what I’m good at, or even what I want to be good at.  I still feel jealous of people who get paid well to go on junkets and describe them humorously and vividly, of course. But I want something else, and it does not, for the moment, involve sitting alone in a room with a computer.  It also does, of course.  I have been happiest and most miserable alone in that room.

When I went back to working in an office after years of not, I could suddenly see the particular brand of crazy my former compatriots in freelancing exhibited, revealed in high definition. Their obsessive Facebook status updates, their public declarations about how much or how little they’d written that day or how their writing was going, the kind of super-involved tweeting that you only see in people who are either trapped at desk jobs where there’s too little for them to do or in freelancers desperate to avoid the work they’ve assigned themselves. I have done all of this stuff, of course, but the moment I didn’t have time to do it anymore, I could see it for what it was. It was, initially, a blessed relief to be rendered unable to ride the waves of Schadenfreude and fleeting, irrational enthusiasm that wash over the social Internet all day.  I was also rendered incapable of feeling jealous of everyone whose writing was momentarily elevated by a stream of “THIS!”-style sharing. I had other stuff to do.  I have other stuff to do.

My fantasy now is that I’ll be able to write books AND run Emily Books AND have a full-time job  helping other people realize their Emily Books-style dreams, with the goal of learning skills that will help me make Emily Books into an enterprise that has employees and an office and a future that includes growth in all kinds of directions.  The only reason I think this goal is more attainable than my previous goal is that the outlines of that future aren’t hazy: I can envision the steps that will take me further down this path, in detail.  The only part — minor detail! — that’s hard for me to imagine is the writing part. I’ve never witnessed myself being able to get writing done without making myself bored and lonely and a little bit crazy. But maybe the future will surprise me; certainly the past, from my current vantage point, seems to have nothing to do with what I thought was happening at any given time, so maybe I’ll look back on right now in the same way in a few years.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, over and over again, so I won’t have to feel like I’ve failed the previous version of me, or the vision of success and happiness that version had. But that version’s vision does not seem relevant to my current life, except right now, as I luxuriate in the privilege of writing this blog post on a weekday morning in a deserted beautiful library.  I am not going to get to do this kind of thing whenever I want to anymore, at least not for a while, maybe not ever again.  Probably that’s why it feels so good. I have to remember that it hasn’t always felt this way.

Yesterday I left my part-time job in the middle of the day to take Raffles to the vet. He had been behaving strangely for a few days, hiding under the bed and acting confused and frightened when we pulled him out to feed him, and he’d peed on the floor. I thought it was going to be the final or penultimate vet visit; he was diagnosed with lymphoma last summer but has maintained an ok level of health on prednisone for almost a year now.  I spent a lot of time freaking out when he was first diagnosed, then as the months went by I guess I had slowly ceased to believe that he was dying. Or, well, I still don’t really believe that he is dying; death is one of those things that, no matter how much preparation you have, never seems possible until the moment when it does.  That moment finally came as I described his symptoms to the vet, who gently said that we were no longer in the realm of curative. “We haven’t been in that realm for so long now,” I said, and started crying in front of a stranger for the first time in a long time.

Then she looked in his eyes with a lens and put him on the floor to see how he interacted with a new environment, and as he took a few tentative steps than looked up at us, clearly just turning his head in the direction of our voices, I realized what the vet had probably suspected from the outset and confirmed for herself with the scope a moment earlier: he’s gone blind.  He hadn’t been peeing or hiding because he was demented or sick, he’d been doing it because he couldn’t see and couldn’t find his litterbox.

So it didn’t turn out to be the last appointment, or the second to last appointment, at least probably not. (Whatever caused him to go blind — ministroke, brain tumor, etc — isn’t exactly a good sign.) “Blind animals adjust really well, as long as you don’t move things around,” the vet said, and this does seem to be the case — he’s since found his litterbox, explored the apartment with more confidence, eaten, etc.  As he lay next to me on the pillow last night making little sleep grumbles as I watched Buffy on my laptop, he seemed so peaceful and happy it was hard to imagine that he was suffering. But if I think that he is suffering I have to summon the strength to end his life. I can’t imagine where that strength will come from. There’s a lot about the immediate future I can’t imagine.

What made my first year of full-time freelancing so happy, besides not ever having to ride the subway during rush hour,  wasn’t anything specific about what my workdays were like. I wasn’t accomplishing much, I was wasting a lot of time, and a lot of the time I was bored.  Most days, my work did not go well and I felt dejected about my actual writing. But I still felt good and hopeful, because all these potential paths seemed possible. Everything seemed possible. Unpleasant things had happened to me but I still had never been majorly unlucky.  This sense of infinite possibility was like a drug; hooked on it, I clung to it even after it should have been clear that I needed to move on, I couldn’t just stay poised to do something forever.

Besides its incidental Internet-Antabuse benefit I am also enjoying the work and being around people.  The only downside is that I am rusty at writing things that aren’t copy and fear that I have maybe completely forgotten how.  Oh and also my shadowy one-sided relationships with People From The Internet are suffering, which is a weird problem to have, but I like to know what’s going on in my favorite semi-strangers’ lives. Unfortunately I have been so overwhelmed — with this gig, with Emily Books, and with my nagging guilt about not having even looked at the edited manuscript of my novel that’s been in my possession for a month now —  I have been barely managing to maintain my friendships with my friends who I see regularly IRL.  The one huge exception to this trend is that I started posting little profiles on the Emily Books blog of some of our subscribers and frequent book-buyers, which has given me an excuse to peek into the lives of people I’ve previously only known by their usernames or avatars.  Now I know all about the books they’re reading and how one book leads to another for them and how the Internet informs their book -reading and it’s one of those exercises that’s simultaneously superficial and so intimate.  I am totally obsessed and what I’d really like to do is make every single one of our subscribers answer these questions, and maybe I will!

One of the first things I did after it became clear that the subscriber profiles were a GREAT IDEA (they were Blake’s idea, btw — thank you Blake!) was to contact someone who’d recently purchased ten books from us over a very short span of time who, per her order information, was located in Tokyo. She wrote back and explained  that she was 9 months pregnant and had been put on bed rest due to threatened premature delivery. She apologized for her English, which was perfect.  She wrote “Devouring those books you selected really really saved my life (thus, I guess, my baby’s too).” I can’t even try to describe how I felt, reading that!  Like my heart would break from joy, basically.  She was due to be induced last Wednesday. I hope she and her baby are well.  I have thought of them so much, even though I know almost nothing about them except that she publishes a zine named after Kathy Acker and has translated Michelle Tea into Japanese.

Today I put some of my collection of early-period East Village Inkies in the mail to her because that’s what I always think of giving new parents, and because she is a zine publisher.  It was a gray day, my neighborhood had a sad fried chicken and damp smell, and no one I passed on my way to the post office seemed particularly thrilled to be alive.  I also had really terrible period cramps, not usually a problem for me, but I haven’t been exercising much and have been drinking a million cups of coffee a day.  I felt okay on the walk but then standing in line at the post office I suddenly felt extremely terrible. I thought about maybe just going home. Then I had the sudden thought that giving birth was probably kind of like this but a whole, whole, whole lot worse, and how on earth does anyone ever do it? How does anyone do any of the excruciating but necessary tasks that must be done?

The moment passed, though, and I went on to the drugstore and the grocery store and home.

Toward the end of our retreat experience I said something mildly bitchy to my Mom about the whole thing of [retreat center] — I can’t remember what it was — and my mom said that it would be great if someone wrote about [the place] because there was so much “material.” I told her that this surplus of material was exactly why it would be impossible to describe. There’s just too much detail, where would you start?  Sure, you could describe the place’s ample ridiculousness  – the “Noon Dance,” the army of near-identical ladies of a certain age with a certain haircut and a certain type of shawl talking to each other very seriously about Eastern spiritual matters they have learned about in the previous half-hour, the injunctions posted in the stairwells  that read, for example,”Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” — but it would be tricky to do that and also capture the profound seriousness of what happens there. I just deleted a whole paragraph that had the words “good energy” and “healing” in it.  Anyway: not the point.  The point was that we were having a conversation about “material” and what writers do with it.

One idea that I felt like Emily Cooke’s essay gave me permission to have: there’s a fine line between rejecting formal conventions and just being too lazy or incompetent to adhere to them. Often critics get this distinction wrong, or privilege “craft” in a way that is plainly sexist. Still, it’s true that New Narrative-school writers sometimes exploit the fuzziness of this distinction by being lazy and incompetent and passing their laziness off as, at best, a formal choice and, at worst, a revolutionary gesture.  When someone publishes a book that’s simultaneously self-serious and sloppy, even I — bloggy writing’s #1 fan —  lose my patience.

And yet I would still hesitate before privileging,  as Cooke seems to by the end of her essay, the tried-and-true methods of “ordering experience” that her “semiautobiographers”  have one way or another rejected.  ”New Narrative’s inheritors invoke a repressive culture that no longer really exists, traded in for one that gorges on sex scenes and has no use for privacy,” she writes.  While certainly some amount of sexual weirdness has become more mainstream, and Dick Hebidge’s piteous cries of violated privacy circa I Love Dick’s publication are incomprehensible in our era of constant social media self-surveillance, I have a hard time seeing these cultural tendencies as liberatory, exactly.  Repressive cultural forces still exist, they’re just changed shape — self-repression, in an era of widespread self-publishing, is a newly relevant enemy to be reckoned with.  Market forces — the people who are in charge of, per Chris Kraus’s maxim, “who gets to speak and why,” give us all those sex scenes to gorge on. And as large as “Girls” looms in the Brooklyn-based cultural imagination, it’s still true that only a small sliver of sex scenes reflect women’s perspective and women’s experiences.  Women who bring cultural artifacts into being still, unless they’re unusually uninhibited or plain crazy, have to shake off all their fundamental training and self-preservation impulses in order to produce work that is at all truthful. If “repressive” isn’t the word I’m not sure what is.

When I was younger I didn’t have as much control over the narrative strategies I deployed; I didn’t really have multiple strategies at my disposal.  I don’t think I could have figured out how to “cook” my experience; it was raw or nothing.  I’ve just begun to get slightly better at cooking, and many of the people Cooke lists as New Narrative’s progenitors have, too — either they have shifted away from first-person writing to close-third-person narration mostly full-time (Chris Kraus) or they are consciously deploying different modes as different projects demand them (Dodie Bellamy). But I think it’s dangerous to see this as a straightforward path of evolution.  In that same conversation with my mom I tried to tell her that I’d been sad to lose the previous clueless/fearless self who had put so much of her unmediated life online.  Here is E. Cooke’s deft and almost unjudgemental analysis of the “raw” “blog-like” or “bulimic” style:

Never edited by an alien hand, totally under the control of the writer, the blog post refuses to be anything but what it wants to be. It will not subject itself to “some highly toned artificial neat form,” to quote Zambreno. The (ostensibly) vomiting or blog-like narrative will make the mistakes it makes; it will be as clear or unclear as the writer pleases. Most important, it will read as it was first written. The amount of time that passes between the writing and the posting is between the writer and herself, but if she wishes, there need be none at all.

One of the terrifying things about writing is that sometimes the same techniques and strategies that can improve your work can destroy it, and it’s hard, as you work, to know what’s happening.  Sometimes a long process of revision and outside editing can strengthen and clarify stories and make them worth reading; sometimes it can leave them as limp and lifeless as an oil-free steam-table vegan curry.  Worse, incompetent editing can shunt experience and description into the evil proscribed molds — This American Life-y punchlines,  women’s-magazine happy endings — that kill truth.

Writing that’s aware of itself as writing and that is performative and spontaneous will often be able to sidestep those concerns.  As much as I regret huge swaths of what I’ve written — sorry to sing this tune again, but I have to remind myself that it keeps being true — I am grateful to myself for not always waiting for my “material” to coalesce into meaning before writing.

I can’t think of a way to end this so I’m leaving you with this Gabrielle Bell comic, which somehow says it all.  It’s from her new book  The Voyeurs.  Dear Emily Cooke: read this next!

And that wasn’t really what the panel discussion was about, anyway. To the extent that it was about anything, it was about how annoyed all the panelists were that despite the big differences in their work and career stages and cultures, they had been united by their biological femininity to deliver some kind of definitive conclusion about “what is particular” about “women’s depiction of sex.”  The panel  began with each writer reading a prepared statement, and the only theme that recurred in all of the statements was that there aren’t panels like this for male writers, because no one would think to make a distinction between “male writers” and “writers.”   After the prepared statements were read aloud — copies were also distributed to the audience members so we could follow along — the panelists mostly complained about how their work had been misunderstood and insulted, and how frustrating this had been.

I sympathize with this frustration, having experienced it myself, but I am also sure that everyone in the audience of New School students and faculty and French cultural-embassy types and people who work at New York-based magazines and publishing houses already knew and sympathized with this issue, so it seemed extra silly that we were devoting an evening to complaining about it. What would be cool is if there was ever a solution posited, rather than a litany of grievances. I wanted all the writers to be free of having to talk about this shit so that they could get back to their work.  I was also annoyed that no one mentioned money, making a living as a writer, and what that has to do with writing narratives with “unlikeable” ie fully human women narrators or protagonists.  I mean, it was a panel of people whose work is not published by major publishers in the U.S. and later, when someone (ok it was me) asked about money some of the panelists laughed it off and made fun of themselves for being inept at making money with their writing.  ”Whenever someone wants to pay me to write a book, I can’t finish it!” Wendy Delorme said.  Lynne Tillman mentioned teaching, which is the dignified way for writers to make a living.

I don’t want it to be ridiculous to want to make a living at the thing you’re best at.  And I think women who want to make a living as writers have to make compromises that women who’ve figured out how to make a living some other way have the luxury of never considering.  Can we find a way for women to join the “big league” of writers, the Jonathans and Michaels and Pauls and Chads, without either unsexing themselves or playing to cuddly, maternal or sexpot-exotic sterotypes?  This is what I should have asked a question about, if I was going to ask a question.  Instead I was that terrible person who asks a statement-question that was all about myself.  I started out trying to ask the money question but then I got distracted by the Bookforum banner covering the podium where Sheila stood.

I didn’t tell this story last night to complain, but it sounded like a complaint.  I fucked up the telling. I was nervous and scared. I’m telling this story now to expose what happened, not to blame anyone or grind an axe. I can’t go back in time and change how my book was received or how my behavior and the way I’d led my life up until that point fed into that reception.  But the fact is, when my book was published two years ago, Bookforum asked my publisher to provide my author photo.  But when the review was published, it ran alongside a photo from two years earlier, the photo of me in a bathing suit giving the finger.  It’s a cute photo. I’m not sad that I posed in a bathing suit giving the finger, and seriously fuck anyone who thinks I should be. But the review was negative, and negative in such a gendered, stupid way, and the combination of review and photo was so blantantly sexist, so ridiculously unfair, but there’s no way for me to talk about this that doesn’t involve me being an author whining about getting a bad review.  Look, I’m not “okay with it” when people hate my book, and I’m not pretending to be.  Despite its flaws, I love my book, in the same way that I love my most-despised parts of my own body: because they’re mine, because of what they’re capable of doing.  There are valid reasons to dislike my book, and there are things about my book that make me cringe. But this review did not engage with the book as a book at all. The review was a review of my body, which illustrated the review, and of my personality, and more importantly, this happens to women

ALL

THE

TIME

and it still happens in Bookforum, too.  So kudos to Bookforum for helping the French people throw together this panel discussion, but I do not accept it as even a first step in the right direction. Corralling women into a pen together and feigning concern for them when they say they feel trapped is not helping anyone.

There are concerns more pressing right now than how people who aren’t heterosexual men are marginalized and condescended to in the literary world, like how someone who believes women should be forced to give birth against their will might be elected president of this country.  But this is not an unrelated issue, or not as unrelated as we in our privileged panel-discussion-attending world might like to believe that it is.  Books, words, stories are still at the heart of our culture, and we need to look right into that culture’s dark heart, rather than its most esoteric fringes, so that we can figure out how revolutionary ideas about real justice and freedom can exist and thrive in both places.

I felt humiliated after I told this whiny story last night, rightly so I think. It was inappropriate and selfish. I kept reliving it on the way home and wishing that I’d articulated my thoughts better, or not at all.  When I got home I made myself some dinner and then we watched the latest episode of Homeland, which Keith had pirated from, I think, Russian Facebook?  The video quality was very bad but we persisted in watching it anyway because we knew that this would be the episode when Carrie got to find out that she was right all along about Brody.  Carrie, a disgraced and discredited former C.I.A. agent who was fired from the agency last season for being “crazy,” in part because she persisted in telling her male C.I.A. bosses  about her suspicion that Brody, a heroic-seeming former P.O.W.  had been turned by Al Qaeda during his years in captivity and is now a dangerous double agent.   She kept believing this and telling them it was true until they fired her, and then she had to get electroshock therapy. (This is not a subtle show.)

But the scene of Carrie’s vindication was not very satisfying.  Instead of a glorious return to her old job and apologies from the bosses who fired her, she watches the video that proves her right alongside her mentor Saul, who’s mostly been on her side all along, and now it’s not clear whether anyone will believe either of them, and it seems like maybe the evidence will be lost — she and Saul are still the only ones who know.  And Carrie isn’t happy to be vindicated, either.  She weeps as she says, “I was right … I was right.” She seems to be mourning everything she lost in order to be right.

Sometimes being right is not very satisfying in and of itself.  It seems like, on the show, Carrie’s troubles are only just beginning.

I have composed an email in my mind to the sublettors asking them politely exactly what they expect the cupboards to be like. Empty? Full of immaculate, unopened pantry staples?  Full of half-used spices and unpopular canned goods? I’m hoping they prefer the latter. (I’m not sending that email.) There’s a lot of stuff like that.  I had thought I would tackle the remaining packing and organizing and laundering and deep-cleaning and loose-ends-tying piecemeal, a little at a time every day this week, but just now I noticed that IT IS WEDNESDAY which means it’s time to resign myself to the idea that I will end up doing a lot of it in a big crazy burst tomorrow night and Friday morning. Keith is floating around in the Arctic Ocean for a story, mostly incommunicado, which is fine, actually. I’m sure if he were around we would be dithering about exactly how to go about packing and cleaning and how much money to spend on stuff like getting the mail forwarded and buying boxes and garment bags and none of it would be getting done any faster or better, we’d just each be resenting each other for not shouldering our fair shares of the work.  At least this way I only resent him for being gone (which is not fair) and myself for being useless (which isn’t useful.)  I’ve at least mostly given up on the idea that this is some kind of a chance to finally get organized. I got through about 25% of Keith’s giant collection of vintage bank statements and maybe-important contracts and drafts and 0% through my own similar giant collection before deciding to just shove everything in a filing cabinet, lock it and deal with it when we’re back.

Adding to my crazy — perhaps compounding it somewhat? — is the idea that I have to get all my fucking around on the Internet out of my system this week because after that I am offline (except email, email is kosher) til September.  When someone who knows you well, whose opinion you care about, says to you point-blank: “I can’t believe you when you say you’re working as hard as you can to finish your book when I can see exactly how much of the day you spend on Twitter,” you have to take that seriously.  I mean, I have to take that seriously. I don’t know about you. Maybe Twitter and the endless-refresh cycle aren’t problems for you. Maybe you’ve never procrastinated, maybe procrastination isn’t a problem for you. Maybe your first  impulse, when you’re 75% done with a long-term project, is to cut yourself off from distractions and focus, eschewing even your routine responsibilities and other people’s needs, until you’re past the finish line.

Personally I prefer to take the cat to the vet, get sliding-scale acupuncture, book work lunches every day of the week (lunches are a surefire writing-day ruiner, a fact I know but often allow myself to forget, and sometimes they’re unavoidable), clean the fridge, volunteer to help people do things they would definitely never volunteer to help me do, do loads of every-sheet-and towel-I-own laundry instead of dropping them off, overinvest myself in a book review to the extent that I then start procrastinating ABOUT THAT, drink too much while watching Breaking Bad alone til the wee hours so that I wake up at 10, structure my whole day about making it to that one yoga class and then not make it to that yoga class, become weirdly overinvested in the idea of my “immunity being down,” develop dietary neuroses that come closer than I’ve ever come in my life to disordered eating (no gluten? no, no dairy! no, no meat. No, extra protein! No, no soy! etc.) But above all I procrastinate by reading the Internet, specifically by reading the 568 blogs I follow on Tumblr and the 526 people I follow on Twitter. I also read the things those people link to and think are important, and a couple of other digest-type blogs but really it’s mostly just those Tumblrs and Twitters. Keith used to ask me “What happened on the Internet today?” at the end of most days and I finally got him to stop by complaining that it was too sad of a question, and now he’s not around to ask I wish he was, just so there would be some outlet for this information.  Today I wasn’t that present for the Internet scandals of the day so it wouldn’t be a good day to ask me. I do know something scandalous happened involving Kristen Stewart, though, because I sat in the backyard of the church where I was supposed to be washing lettuce for a salad, tapping the same button repeatedly while I waited for Twitter to finish loading.

There’s more to addiction than straightforward self-destructiveness, though, especially this addiction. (But maybe everyone feels this way about their special, unique addiction?)  For one thing, the Internet is a tool with the potential to facilitate real interpersonal connection and communion — mediated, but still real. When I think about giving up Tumblr and Twitter for a month I think about the people I’ll miss. These are people who, in many instances, I have never seen or met, some of whose real names I don’t even know or would be hard-pressed to remember if I did encounter them at a party or walking down the street.  (“Hi, are you The Kids Have Arrived? ” I stopped myself from saying just in time recently).

It’s much easier to be virtually there for someone than it is to be there in person, looking into someone’s eyes as they tell you something personal or painful. I have tended to be be a repository for the virtual version of these confessions  and sometimes I feel like I’m failing even at that. I know I let people down all the time by responding too tersely to their long emails or sometimes not responding at all.  This sucks because these relationships, as one-dimensional and ephemeral as they can sometimes be, are important to me. There are people who I’ve met on the Internet who have become my IRL friends I see and hang out with all the time, and there are other people who I know I’ll probably never meet because, for example, they’re teenagers who live in California and it would be almost inevitably weird and awkward  if we did meet, but I still feel close to them.  I know I’ve said some version of this before but it’s still the best way I know of describing these relationships: a part of me knows a part of these people really well, and vice versa.  Our whole selves aren’t communicating, but those parts are close.  Even if I’ve never emailed or messaged with someone, I sometimes feel like even just repeatedly “liking” their posts constitutes a tiny bit of a relationship.  And sometimes there’s much more than that: a daily dose of information about someone’s outfit, food or mood, or the kind of books they’re reading, stuff I don’t know about some of my close friends.  Stuff these people might not be telling their close friends, that they’re telling the Internet.  Stuff they’re telling me.

So while part of what I’ll miss is the blissful self-annihilation that comes from immersing myself in the stream of news, tidbits, images and information, the other part of what I’ll miss is this way of communicating with all these people: seeing them, being seen, feeling known and recognized,  feeling like I know and recognize others.  It would be egomaniacal to imagine that they will miss me — that you will miss me.  But I still didn’t want to just leave without saying anything.

I’m dreading it, of course. I will feel lonely and probably a little bit desperate. But I’ve done it before, so now I know that feeling that way is the only way for me to live fully in the imaginary world I’m creating. And this time, I’ll live there for as long as it takes me to finish creating it.

In June of 2007 — sorry if you’ve heard this one before —  I had become afraid to leave my apartment. I would, under duress, walk to the grocery store at the end of the block, but even that was excruciating.  I had to take an Ativan to get on the subway.  The fear seemed completely irrational, which made it even more frustrating and maddening and painful.  It was also hard to explain to anyone else what was happening.  I would lie and say I was physically sick; it wasn’t really lying. I would stand in the vestibule of my apartment building, waves of nausea washing over me, willing myself to push the door open.  Half the time I’d go back inside.

In retrospect, my fear doesn’t seem irrational.  I was afraid to leave my apartment because my subconscious had access to the information,  stored in some mental safe that my conscious mind couldn’t unlock,  that the day was coming when I would leave my apartment and everything in it and everything about the life I was living in it for good, forever.

If anyone is contemplating doing something like this I recommend just going for it.  Some things to know: it’s terrible at first, and by “at first” I mean “for several subsequent years.”   All your fears are well-founded. Everything you’ve dreaded will happen; it’ll be even worse than you think.  But the upside is that after those things happen they will have happened, which means you won’t have to worry about what might happen anymore.  Also, you’ll have a new life.

The other important thing to know is that you can only do this once.  Doing it repeatedly looks like you haven’t learned anything.  Waiting until things get so catastrophically bad in your life that you have to burn everything to the ground  in order to change is not the ideal way to make changes.

I don’t really remember anything about the day I left except that it was sunny and Greenpoint was its usual big-skied self.  I got up early in the morning, when the heat of the day was only latent in the pavement and salty, sewagey breezes were still blowing in from the river.  I got on the subway and took it to Penn Station and got on the LIRR and took it to the ferry and arrived in Fire Island and started knocking down the dominos.  Descending into the subway I was terrified, nauseated, sweaty, white-knuckling it the whole way to 34th street. But as soon as I started doing the things I had been so scared to do I wasn’t scared anymore, which is usually the way.

I’m having a hard time pinning down exactly what I find so offensive about this whole endeavor.  Part of it might be the project page itself, which seems like an afterthought — un-copy-edited, un-thought-through, hurried.  ”The Canyons documents five twenty-something’s [sic] quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood,” one sentence reads.  Elsewhere: “The Canyons team has realized that Kickstarter is indeed a part of this new independent change, and is seeking to connect with our fan base even further with this campaign.  Raising money will assist us in the production of our film in addition to increasing awareness of it.  There is a distinct value in having an intimate relationship to those who care most about our work, and we are thankful to Kickstarter for helping foster these relationships.”

Simultaneously raising money and awareness is, of course, Kickstarter’s raison d’etre.  While famous people do use it, it’s most exciting when it’s used by unknown or little-known creators whose work might otherwise slip through the cracks of the free market economy. For those people, it’s a lifeline.  For the household-name author of bestselling novels and the director of Taxi Driver, it’s a marketing campaign, and not a very slick one.  There’s something gross about these people openly admitting that, while they could just fund the film with their own money, they’ll happily take yours and consider that to constitute an “intimate relationship.”  Oh, and they won’t even spellcheck the form they’re filling out in order to ask you to pay them.

Paying attention to a publicity stunt is inevitable. Paying into a publicity stunt is … new.

On the other hand, what chutzpah!  It’s classic BEE, and I admire his consistency.  I also admire his books — I’ve read and I like them all, for different reasons, even Glamorama, maybe especially Glamorama, anyway, I am a BEE fan from way back.  I find his utter refusal to censor himself or to make concessions to the mealymouthed logrolly hierarchy of literary fame incredibly appealing.  I love how he truly does not give a fuck about offending anyone. His twitter is awe-inspiring — and though the flavor of awe it inspires  is often a bad one, awe is in such short supply these days that I’ll take it where I can find it.

And if people want to pay thousands of dollars for walk-on roles in vanity projects, let them!  Who are they hurting?  It’s not like the money people spend supporting The Canyons is money they’d otherwise spend supporting, say, my friend Kat Hunt’s movie What’s Revenge.  Or maybe they are — the dollars we all have to support the arts are finite (or nonexistent.)  But I would go crazy (crazier) if I let myself go around believing that Kickstarter — or success, in general —  is a zero-sum game.

Speaking of jealousy, Kat’s movie is about justice, and one of the rewards is that you get your chart done, a bargain at $100.  Or, for $5,000, Kat and her crew will “plot and execute your own vengeance.” (NYC only.) Most of the crew is female.  And I get the sense that your dollar would mean something to Kat and her collaborators that it might not mean to the kind of people who use crowdsourced funding as a way to make headlines, all the while pretending they’re using it as a way to make friends.

I was so upset about this sexist thing, whatever it was, because it affected me personally. I was pretending to be angry about the larger implications of the person or policy, on behalf of all my fellow oppressed seventh grade girls, but really I was angry that there was something I wasn’t allowed to do or someone who was getting something I wasn’t getting. In other words, I was jealous. And I knew that I could make other people pay attention to my jealousy by calling it feminism. In this respect, if no other, I was a bit of a prodigy.

Taking everything super personally remains my métier. Lately, however, I have begun to doubt its effectiveness as an activist strategy. I still believe with all my heart that the personal is political, that privacy is a patriarchal construct designed to keep women from telling the truth about their circumstances, and that “when a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” And I also think anger can be a powerful engine of action and change. But finally I’m realizing that walking around all the time feeling overwhelmed with anger and jealousy can interfere with your ability and your will to tell the entire truth, in ways than my 12 year old self could never have imagined.

Last night when I was taking out the trash I heard the song “You Oughta Know” spilling out of the bar downstairs. People in the bar were singing along, as people often do when this song is played. It was a rainy, gross night but I stood under the awning for a moment and listened. Okay, I was smoking a cigarette, which I almost never do anymore, but I’d had a couple of glasses of wine. I blame Mad Men. Because I almost never smoke (and because of the wine) I felt high from the first hit of nicotine, and all my limbs felt heavy all of a sudden and I realized how tired I was and I became glued to the spot, leaning against the building and feeling the thrum of the music coming through the wall. The words of the song were just an indistinct buzz from that distance but it didn’t matter; like everyone my age, I know them all by heart.

Well I’m here
To remind you
Of the mess you left when you went away
It’s not fair
To deny me
The cross I bear that you gave to me
You, you, you oughta know

If you’d asked me whether I loved this song when it was dominating the airwaves, a few years after the poster incident, I’d have told you NO FUCKING WAY! I HATED this song, man. I knew that MTV thought it was speaking to me via this person. But I was so much smarter than that, I knew this music was a commercialized, manufactured, dumbed-down version of the riot-grrrl real thing. I wasn’t buying that Lilith Fair crap. I loved Liz Phair, not Sheryl Crow. I loved Bratmobile, not the Indigo Girls or Sarah McLachlan.

It wouldn’t take long, of course, for such fine distinctions to start seeming petty: after Britney hit, Alanis and Bikini Kill alike were relegated to the miscellaneous yesterday’s-news rack at Tower Records, and girls like me, if we had a shred of self-awareness, started feeling maybe a little guilty about how we should have reveled in our cultural moment while we had the chance. Why hadn’t I embraced Alanis and her mainstream girl-power ilk? Mainly for the simple reason that there’s almost nothing more irksome than seeing a writ-large version of yourself that, inevitably, gets the portrayal just slightly wrong.

Ironically – or, ahem, Alanically – You Oughta Know actually addresses this kind of narcissism-of-small-differences directly. The singer imagines her ex’s new lover:

Another version of me?
Is she perverted like me?

Admitting to being jealous of someone who you then accuse of being “another version of [you]” is really not a cute look. This line pulls off the neat trick of being both super pathetic and incredibly self-aggrandizing. I wish I could say that it describes a sentiment that is totally alien to me, but unfortunately I have been feeling exactly that icky strain of jealousy lately – not in my personal life, but in my professional life. I know this is ridiculous, but at 30, I feel usurped by young comers. I feel like I wrote and said a lot of unpopular things, things that I took truckloads of shit for, that are now accepted as commonplaces.

I try to curb these feelings by reassuring myself with a rotating assortment of pep talks, some of which can temporarily seem to work. One of them goes: “a rising tide floats all boats!” Another one goes: “put your head down and do your work. No one can be better than you are at being you. “ Above all, I try to convince myself that the idea that there are limited opportunities available to women is a big fat lie that the men who control most culture industries would love to have us believe, so we’ll keep ourselves occupied getting into Twitter wars instead of making art. There are as many spots available as we create for ourselves.

But then there’s this other part: this feeling that I have lost the impulse described by the song I heard last night. For the most part, I no longer feel like You Oughta Know. I feel like: I have sort of forgotten what I ever thought the point of telling you anything might be. Did I expect you to be forgiving, understanding, sympathetic? Did I think you’d feel guilty for being so mean and making me feel so bad? Was I fucking retarded? You never really cared. You just wanted a distraction, and maybe someone to compare yourself to, so that you could feel superior. Well, someone else can be that for you, now. Does she speak eloquently? Seriously, fuck you both.

This morning I woke up with another song in my (throbbing) head: the Liz Phair song “Money,” an early demo that became the Whitechocolatespaceegg track “Shitloads of Money.”  In both versions this song goes: “It’s nice to be liked, but it’s better by far to get paid. I know that most of the friends that I have don’t really see it that way. But if you could give ‘em each one wish, how much do you want to bet/they’d wish success for themselves and their friends, and that would include lots of money.”

Liz’s career path is instructive in complicated ways. First she made three albums that sounded like the fulfillment of a totally uncompromised creative vision. I love them more than I can say. A lot of women and even some men say that these albums changed their lives. (“It’s nice to be liked.”) But they didn’t make Liz rich, so she made three more albums that had radio-friendly hooks and slick production values. They had just enough real Liz in them to prevent them from being really hugely popular, but they did have movie-soundtrack hits on them, and if Liz’s true-blue fans made fun of their weak, unworthy songs and wrote about how betrayed they felt, Liz made, one hopes, enough money from them that she didn’t care. (“It’s better by far to get paid.”)

The dream, of course, is to somehow pull off the trick of doing both of those things simultaneously. Right now I’m not doing either. But I haven’t given up hope yet of someday being able to do at least one or the other. I know/hope/imagine that I’ll get there by learning, finally, how to zoom out past personal resentment and see the big picture, and not only how some aspect of the unjust world affects me me me.

“But I’ve had enough of my cyber vulnerability and honesty. It’s time to direct these forces into book projects I want to finish. So, I’m saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here. I already said that, but I mean it this time. Any more I’d have to say about this stuff needs the intense focus and discipline of Real Writing to tease it out,” Dodie Bellamy writes, in one of the blog posts that became her book the buddhist.  This post comes about halfway through the book.

Luckily (and obviously) she does not make good on her promise to “say goodbye to the buddhist vein,” and in her next post she revisits this question of blog writing versus “Real Writing.”  “I’ve always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets’ insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they’re such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny?”   In the post after that one, she explains the idea of the “extradiegetic” while drinking “organic unfiltered sake, the creamy white kind”  (these details are so important to the Dodieness of Dodie’s writing that I can’t leave them out).  “Intradiegetic refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction” – plot, characters, dialogue, first-person narration – while “extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that narrative” – third-person narration, the musical score of a film, the audience’s preexisting knowledge of the ‘real life’ a narrative is based on, the audience’s knowledge about the lives of actors who play characters in a film.  The example that Dodie gives is how Heath Ledger’s death “added a frisson” to The Dark Knight.

The example that springs most easily to my mind is: the first time I heard the song “Video Games” I was lying in savasana at Go Yoga in Williamsburg. This was during the month that Ruth and I were doing vinyasa yoga every day in an attempt to keep from going insane as we launched Emily Books. During that month we comparison-shopped for discount class deals in a way that I, as a sometimes yoga teacher, find obnoxious, but what can you do?  It was the only way to afford it.  In the end it was fun to experience a lot of different styles and I ended up finding out that I like dancey sweaty vinyasa more than I’d thought, even though it sometimes contradicts my training and even though I am (though I  tell students there’s no such thing as “bad at yoga”) not, uh, naturally inclined towards graceful movement, let’s put it that way.

Lying on the floor and hearing this song turned out to be an amazing stroke of good luck.  Having my initial experience of this stupidly controversial musician’s hit occur in a situation that was so distant from any context gave me the opportunity to know what I really thought of the song. Lana Del Rey has had so many people’s worst tendencies projected onto her that now she’s interesting for that reason alone, but as I lay there, distracted from my single-pointed relaxation by those melodramatic churchbells and catchy “Honey, is that true?s,” I made a point of memorizing enough of the lyrics so that I could Google them when I got home. And that’s how I know there’s something to her music besides blog-churned controversy and images of images of images, whereas if I’d learned the other stuff first – if my experience of Video Games had been tempered by extradiegetic factors — I’d probably be more inclined to agree with the haters.  This concludes the one and only thing I will ever say about Lana Del Rey, because mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors are boring, and there are still many beautiful flowers that haven’t yet been pressed between the pages of the Internet and I am determined to pluck as many of them as I can right now before this coffee wears off.

I loved learning the word “extradiegetic” because it allows me to explain something about blogs that I hadn’t been able to, before. Last week Molly Fischer’s essay about “ladyblogs” got way under my skin, and I dashed off a quick response to it on my blog and thought I’d be able to leave it there, but then I woke up still thinking about it the next morning, and that night I went to a party and had a fight with someone I think of as a peer but who is a lot younger than me, a fight I tried to end by saying, “Well I’m 30, so I win!”  (Getting to the point where you say this is an absolute guarantee that you didn’t just win, in case you’re wondering.)  We were fighting about the short memory of the Internet, and how it might legitimately be possible for something that seems so obviously like an evolution to me to seem like a devolution to someone younger.  I was reminded that it’s hard for women five years younger than I am to imagine growing up in a time when the only information about being a woman came to teenaged you via a pile of dogeared Sassys in the corner of the public library.  And during this fight, I started to realize that I was jealous of these young women, and maybe clinging to something that it’s time to release.

I liked that Fischer celebrated the tits-out, smelly-tamponed era at the dawn of Jezebel, which for a time was genuinely radical.  I love Moe’s lost-tampon post so much. But how, I wondered, could Fischer have missed noticing that this golden age was quickly corrupted?  Gawker Media employees were rewarded financially at that time based on pageviews. The line between posting your goriest, druggiest, drunkest humiliations because you’re giving everyone permission to let go of their shame around these behaviors and doing so because you’re being paid more to write about that stuff is thinner than the thinnest bloodied maxipad imaginable.   Fischer sees things as going downhill from there – she focuses on the cute-overload, whimsical aspects of The Hairpin and Rookie, quoting their silliest posts, calling them conformist and slumber-partyish, missing the ways that they’re heirs to radical-era Jezebel’s most fearless, honest aspects.  I didn’t pause to consider that a lot of the information that informs my opinion about these blogs is – you guessed it – extradiagetic.  I only know about the circumstances surrounding Jezebel’s beautiful, bloody birth because I worked at Gawker while it was happening and because I felt the same strange tension between feeling free to (here it comes) overshare and being egged on towards it.  Let me just pause to make clear that no one ever told me to do it, my bosses explicitly told me NOT to do it, and I’m sure no one encouraged Moe or Tracie to do it either. But we could see the numbers; how could we not have been influenced by them?

Also: I tend to forgive blogs their sillier moments because I understand the exigencies of being an editor tasked with pumping out a day’s worth of content and this makes me sympathetic to the idea that a blog is less a text to be teased apart the way you’d dissect a novel but a performance to be critiqued based on its peak moments.

But there’s more to it than that. I stayed so upset about this.  A few days later Keith and I were talking about the essay in the kitchen and I was trying to explain what I appreciate about the Hairpin. Specifically I was trying to explain why Edith is a genius.  (For the record: I’ve met Edith maybe … three times?) I said that creating a new comedic aesthetic – a new style of being funny – is a huge achievement, one Fischer didn’t give her enough credit for.  We were still having a normal conversation at that point, not a fight. I started talking about the post “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” a very popular Hairpin post Fischer dismisses in passing as representative of the Hairpin’s “observational, peculiar, and irrefutable” brand of media criticism. This post has zero text. It’s just stock photos of women, laughing, alone, with salad.  There are a ton of them. They look familiar to anyone who has ever seen any advertising.  “Molly Fischer reads that post as mere absurdist humor, pure whimsy,” I said.  I think this is approximately when I started shouting in a tremulous, high-pitched voice:

“But HOW. Can ANY WOMAN. NOT UNDERSTAND. HOW THAT IS A COMMENTARY ON THE FACT! THAT THE REASON! THERE ARE SO MANY STOCK PHOTOS OF WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD! IS BECAUSE WOMEN ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO BE SHOWN AS HAPPY!!! WHILE THEY’RE EATING!!! IF THEY’RE EATING SOMETHING “GUILT-FREE”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Stop yelling at me! You’re scaring me!” said Keith. “I’M NOT YELLING AT YOU!” I yelled.  A minute later I was sobbing.  “I’m just so angry,” I told him.  “What are you angry at?” “At everything,” I sobbed.  “Well, you have to find a way to hold onto that,” he said. “I would rather not!” I sobbed.

Those photos of women finding salad hilarious are absurd, but they’re also, depending on how you look at them, a symptom of a serious horrible malevolent force in our culture that hurts and even sometimes kills (yes! kills!) women.   But instead of calling them out in the classical Jezebel style of LOOK AT HOW THIS TERRIBLE THING HARMS WOMEN, GET ANGRY AND COMMENT, Edith just stacked them up in a big pile. The overall effect of this post is so subtle and so hilarious that these images’ power– instead of being exaggerated because now we’re all up in arms! comment!! — was diffused in an instant.  A reader – well, let’s not generalize, this reader– goes, in those ten seconds of scrolling, from feeling secretly obscurely injured by a giant force outside her control to snickering at that force, which is revealed as idiotic and petty.  That is genius. It’s also something only the blog medium, which is what Edith’s a genius of, can achieve.

What’s extradiagetic here: being aware, on some level, that a lot of the stuff that filters in through the periphery of our cultural consciousness is telling women to hate and hurt ourselves.  And if Fischer and women Fischer’s age aren’t aware of this, why try to teach them how to be? If they’re not in pain, if they’re not enraged, why tell them they ought to be?  Maybe I’m too attached to my anger and my pain.  Maybe a lot of us are.  The girls and teenagers who are growing up now with Rookie tutorials on masturbation and exhortations never to fake an orgasm at their fingertips – maybe they won’t “get” Women Laughing Alone At Salad, either. I desperately that hope they don’t, but I’m also glad it’s there for them if they need it.

I talked on the phone yesterday to an author whose book I hope we’re going to feature as an Emily Books pick soon, someone whose autobiographical novel, written in the first person, is full of lucid, skillful, sometimes frankly horrifying descriptions of exploitative sex and bulimia.  “Do you think you’re crazy? I’m crazy,” she told me.  “I … try to keep the different aspects of myself in balance. I like that you’re crazy,” I told her. And then I said something that I didn’t realize I believed until I said it out loud. “Women who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are crazy.  But men who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are … just men.”

Obviously many men give a fuck what people think about them. But if they don’t, it doesn’t mean they’re insane. Whereas for a woman not to care – that’s actually pathological, self-destructive behavior, in the context of our culture. I love and valorize this kind of female craziness and the art it produces – I created a business to celebrate these women and their art. But I fear not giving a fuck, for myself.  I wonder what it would be like to let go that much.

Today I went to PS1, which longtime readers of this blog will recognize as something I tend to do in melancholy moods. This particular museum often works for me as a way of scraping something off the lens of my whole perceptual apparatus.  Something about the incredible old building it’s in and the way that building is situated — the views out its windows of ugly-gorgeous Long Island City’s big skies and schizoid new-old building hodgepodge – works for me. And I love the ancient classrooms and the ghosts of all the work that’s been in them; they ennoble whatever’s there and endow it with extra art-oomph.

I started on the second floor, enticed by a warm, carnivalesque loop of recorded music that it took a minute to place: it was the beginning of “Like A Rolling Stone.” It led me to a room with two wall-mounted speakers that on first glance seemed empty.  On second glance there was a little wall plaque that read: “chicken burrito beef burrito.”  And on third glance there they were on the windowsill:

In spite of not having been in a good mood a minute earlier I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Another girl entered the room and saw the burritos. Our eyes met and she laughed too.  She took a photo and I was emboldened (obviously) to do the same.   The rest of Darren Bader’s work included: a disassembled oven filled with pizza, a room full of fruits and vegetables prettily displayed on plinths in a room with a sign listing times when fruit and vegetable salad would be served and a room where “celebrity sculptures” will assemble if any celebrities volunteer.  Another room contained a croissant and an iguana — “iguana and croissant,” read the plaque.

And in the final room, in which only four visitors are permitted at a time, there was a couch, a stack of magazines, a PS1 employee, and three cats who are available for adoption.  These are very charming cats — if you’re in the market for a cat, go get ‘em!  (The iguana is also available for adoption, though it’s illegal to own one in the 5 boroughs of NYC, as I’m sure you already knew.) The obligation I felt to make awkward conversation with the PS1 employee rather than besotted babytalk conversation with a new cat friend was the only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for this artwork, which otherwise, obviously, !!!!!!

So I felt then like the museum had worked its magic.  Maybe it hadn’t given me any new ideas but it was getting to be around the time I’d thought I would leave and so I made my way in the direction of the exit.

As an afterthought, though, I hit one last gallery.  At the entrance to the hallway leading to a large room that in PS1’s earlier incarnation could’ve been a gymnasium a sign said:

I found this unpromising – oof, sound art – but could hear strains of music coming from the gallery so I went in.

40 speakers stood in a ring around the room at almost exactly the level of my head and a single voice sang from each of them, recorded so well and reproduced so perfectly by the speakers that, when you stand near the speaker, it’s like someone is singing in your ear.  Standing in the center of the room I could hear the cumulative effect of 40 voices merging: a choral piece, I guess in Latin, Deus Domine were the only words I picked out.  But walking near the speakers I could hear each voice’s singular human-ness – the glorious, virtuosic trill wasted in the cumulative muddle, but also the tiny stutter, the fading weakness at the end of a held note. Maybe the most striking aspect of this artwork is the 3 minutes of recorded intermission between the 14 minutes of song: coughs and giggles and deep, resonant expectorant sniffs emanate from the corners of the room, creating the almost creepy sense that you’re surrounded by a ring of invisible people.

When I first entered the room there was no one there but me and a young male guard, but more people came in as I walked the circumference of the room.  I pretended not to notice them, but I knew they were there and I became even more aware of them at the moment when, standing between two speakers at the crescendo of the motet and staring fixedly out the window, I realized that I was about to start crying and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I didn’t sob but tears came to my eyes and squirted out uncontrollably, like sweat from a cartoon character’s brow. I wiped them away furiously with my sleeves. I wanted so badly not to be crying. How ridiculous to be moved so much by art (never mind that I had come to the museum in hopes of being moved).  But I felt manipulated – “I’m so easy,” I thought. It’s true that something about the frequency at which spiritual music vibrates often makes me inexplicably, uncontrollably weepy, a phenomenon I have hesitated to explore lest I find myself having to Get Religion in some dumb time-consuming careworn-narrative way. Then I realized (this all happened in less than thirty seconds, probably) that the other reason I didn’t want to be crying was so much simpler: I just didn’t want anyone to see me crying.  I was embarrassed about crying, the weakness and vulnerability that crying inevitably conveys.

I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable.

And then I thought: what if I just didn’t care?

I thought: do any of those people care that I’m crying?  Will they even notice, and will they think less of me if they do? I don’t even know them so why do I even care what they think?

And for the first time, for just a moment, I didn’t care.

And I started crying harder, because now I was crying with joy.

And when I finished crying I sat down on the bench and listened to the rest of the motet, watching seagulls swoop by outside the windows and refusing to notice whether anyone was watching me.