Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST

Who else is bored by that last post? Yeah. Anyway, now you know how I write after a few glasses of wine.

Air travel to Tallahassee was pleasant this season. Met a Williamsburg-residing art enthusiast on the leg down to Orlando; made nice with several little kids on the return. One sister said she liked my Unicorn in Captivity tote bag, so I told her about the Cloisters. Her brother had already found an affinity for the Middle Ages via a battle ax included in a McD's Happy Meal. A Columbia sweatshirt-wearing preschooler danced and waved at me singing "Jingle bells jingle bells" for about an hour, filmed occasionally by his father, drawing close and then giggling away behind a row of chairs. Waiting for luggage at JFK, a precocious gal and I discovered that our mothers had both tied ribbons onto our suitcases.

Coasting over a fluffy sea of anecdotes, I took some notes during "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." You know who's in that? Luke Wilson, Rainn Wilson, Uma Thurman, "Cameron Diaz" from Lost in Translation, and a very butch Eddie Izzard, who sneaks in a Switzerland joke. NB, the shortest distance between two plot points of this action-manhattan-romcom happens to include hurling a great white shark through the window of a highrise. Those New York chicks don't know their own strength.

Spent the late wee hours of the birthday drinking wine with Rat P. and friend, listening to my old rival and love get excited about Nabokov and French film theory, as well as his stories about a friend who served on special forces in Afghanistan, undergoing training getting held underwater until he passed out, mailing home spare funds in an Xbox or some shit. On the 23rd, one of the two young women at the party who had survived brain tumors (what) didn't recognize me at first. Out on the patio, I fraternized with culture workers: an old best friend who hosts dance parties in Sarasota and a casting agency assistant in LA who still insists that clicking ballpoint pens open and shut on my arm passes for flirting.

Christmas Eve I cleaned out my bedroom closet. It had been my closet since I was 9, so there were some pretty good finds. Still best ever yearbook signature, from the vaguely predatory dude who now goes by Golden Bull on MySpace: "I'm glad I'm signing this instead of Jeremy, who could never appreciate the gravity of the situation." The naked reclining fairy tucked away in a notebook. Lots and lots of poems, like the one about listening to Mazzy Star in the driveway. About ten years worth of movie ticket stubs, stashed inside a L'eggs egg. Some diplomas. Notes, letters, and postcards from as early as sixth grade and as late as the semester abroad in Japan; scripts for summer camp performances of abridged Shakespeare; physics homework; my first two diaries, one of which bears the distinction of beginning mid-sentence...All hand-written and photographic evidence of more people than I regularly conceive of having passed through the muscle of my affection. What a blessed, desirous, dizzy-headed gal have I been, all the while inside a sufficiently rational gourd. Who knew? My phone rang while I paused outside the car; I put the last box down on the asphalt. Five and a half inches of rain flooded down and something invisible yet still rain-like flooded up.

I saw some important ladies for lunch on the 26th, a date with real emotional heft, and a feeling I wasn't quite familiar with as we greeted each other, something smack between fear and love...exaltation? They are these sublimely strong women, probably the bedrock of goodness that kept me from really getting fucked up by that punk senior year. Like, I want one of them to be pope. Pope Caitlin the DAMN FIRST. I should probably tell her that. She started asking hard questions of her faith on a volunteer year with the Jesuits in Birmingham.

Dad didn't come along to the airport, so I listened to him encourage me to keep studying Buddhism over my brother's speakerphone. As we pulled out of the garage, Dad all smiling and worried I might sleep too late or watch too much YouTube, I teared up. Alex and Mom were teasing each other about something in the front seat, and family felt complicated. I love all of them but almost never at the same time. What's the deal with that?

Back in the city, albeit briefly, I lunched with Yuko at a v. traditional noodle house, lots of "gomenasai"s all around. We practiced the social kiss outside Starbucks, and she kept running her cheek into mine too hard. She had many interesting things to communicate, from her views on bisexuals to feeling the soul of her father go to heaven to who's on her team in our class.

Heading into 07, I’m looking forward to working on the following resolutions: (1) cultivating a scholarly New Yorker writing style, (2) staying on top of my work, and (3) not worrying. Heterogames have been green-lighted clear through spring.

Preface/Afterword

For those of you who didn't spend the day talking about Kiki Smith and Ideological State Apparatuses, you might find the next post, er, sad. Don't be alarmed! Writerly people eat sadness for breakfast! Also bagels.

We merely ask, rhetorically, whether such nonsense is of interest.

Meet Reality, My Praying Mantis

In honor of potential new readers, some diaristic nonsense which I blame on beer and the A train running local.

The steady destruction of fantasy. Why isn't there a profession for me? That's probably the best question I can ask tonight...We have eyes, fingers, a tingling below. The rest blurs. Our economical selves cry at the first hint of uselessness. Time passes. We know we'll die. The professionals have earned their bread making our lives less plausible...You'll never read this! The very movement of my pen eclipses your name! Love is not what is beautiful, but the Beloved! The closest I will soon to have to home is L.E., because my parents are moving, because they have aged, because I abandoned Caitlin and Diane, because Sean abandoned me, because I will be someone who dates, while the stone of philosophy falls blindly through the crepe of my heart and because, for the mistake I believe I once made, I will lie myself a solution, abstract and round, to match my mind and the world, where I misrecognize my father's smell in Richard's Aesthetics class, and my mind turns back to sand, the boy, his hairless chest, my brother's skin before I had perfected subjectivity.

26 possibly best birthday ever

Last year it was the subway strike; this year it's a worldwide orgasm.

Pure Boy: Further Specters of High School

I so love looking at this. Perfect.

Leotard/Lyotard

I had this embarrassing moment of confusion at the publicist's office this afternoon, when I was searching through the Village Voice's archives for old press about her husband, and I kept being confronted by all these ads from American Apparel with women in...I said "unitards" first, because my mind was working faster than itself. But then it came catching up and I sat in a doubtful silence trying to become sure whether the word actually could be "leotard," when I knew the man was named Jean-Francois and was not an item of clothing I wore in preschool when I wanted to feel a little special.

But they are the same. "It's 'leotard,' isn't it?" I had to ask the publicist. Yes, it was. "Lyotard is also a theorist," I tried to explain, and she laughed, though I knew I had irrevocably exposed myself as Not a Normal Human Being, a person able to be stopped mid-sentence by a homophone.

Bravo Christgau: "Eclectic neoclassicism versus childhood-oriented avant-primitivism as global warming swamps our history." And of course I love me some references to JClo.

All that's new around here are some skinny pants and the temperature of the rain.

I live for the noise

Noise definitely one of those words that sounds ridiculous upon close inspection/repetition.

This post isn't actually about noise. We're not sure what it's about yet. In the title we refer to the burgeoning self-awareness of our dependence on little tokens of success, including Rightness and Male Attention, to make us happy.

Having, over the course of the past ten days, written an article, a response paper, a five page paper, a ten page paper, and discussion notes, as well as editing someone else's article, reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, some Kristeva, most of Ways of Seeing, and four pages of Simmel, I have granted myself permission to still be in my pajamas at 3:30 in the afternoon. Soon I shall shave and go to a li'l magazine launch, and then mebbe hear Seigneur Pepper Grinder talk about how to read fiction, and then return to the life of the tippety-tappety, in which we extol the virtues of up and coming music presenters in the greater Philadelphia region.

Repetition is definitely worth thinking about. On a mundane level, we notice how temporarily repetitious circumstances guide our responses: having busted two hair ties in the past week, I conclude that I need a hair cut. Squirming around with the laptop on my lap keeps pulling the powercord, which wouldn't be a problem, except the battery is bad. Two Wednesday evenings in a row waiting under a canopy with someone for the rain to slacken leads the mind, not necessarily to any conclusion, but to the expectation of one. It sets us in motion.

They say the profundity in Warhol's films, such as Haircut, consists in his resensitization to experience in time of the viewer. The films are long and boring; nothing much happens; but in that boringness the smallest action is rescaled as interesting. Minds make their conversation out of events of any size; all that's required is an emergence from a background. In quiet periods of meditation, a cough or sneeze tends to ripple small actions through other people in the room: a shift, a rustle, a sniff.

And perhaps what I really want to know is whether there is any kind of human causality *other* than this minor scatter of affect. Each person absorbs even the most major event through the senses and their mental equivalent (mind is the sixth sense organ in Buddhism), in the form of an intrusion or insistence that he or she can appropriate. Negative emotion seems often (always) to take the form of a sort of friction caused the process of appropriation; the churn and flake of what hasn't yet yielded to transparency. Positive emotion, that which sings with ease of knowledge, use. The deep metaphor of consonance and dissonance.