Milton Avery, Little Fox River, (1942–43)
meditation on: escape
I’m having my own personal 2008 financial crisis (no sweating on my behalf, it was absolutely necessary) after doing taxes, upon realizing I took home only $49k from my $62k job and still owe NY state $1,600 in taxes because of making $3,350 in freelance this year. Tough math there. Let this be a wakeup call for those of you who are thinking of switching to freelance for your self-touting freedom of spirit.
Such realization brought on a bit of what I was feeling last time I wrote here: the slump, the itch. I am more than desperate to leave town and see the beach. I’m not sure my skin has really ever been this color, which is so translucent it’s purple. I look vaguely ill these days, despite moving back to fish and salads, a multivitamin, and a sunbathe every 11 days when the godforsaken star reveals herself.
I’d argue that our knack for survival these days—perhaps this is part of why we’re such sick animals—is our unawareness, our ability to forget the rest of the world exists, to think of it as solely a place for “vacation,” unsuitable for living; our ability, also, to forget our ability. We have to forget in order to live in our dark, mean cities, to wake at 7:15am to do yoga or meditate or run to forget our inner hell, our violent unhappiness mediated by our tiny rebellions of self-care. We have to have our happy hours and anticipated Instagram story sales, motivate ourselves to the next timestamp of The Bachelor episode release, catheterize ourselves with the mellow, offered entertainment of media, live by applied meaning. Blah, blah, we know this, and choose it, because they don’t offer Lexapro in the dosage we need to think critically about our own situations and still exist in them. Because, also, we fear the rejection of difference—the loneliness of choosing something else, the un-U.S., rejecting the shared language of pedigree to instead make pineapple smoothies in a remote part of the world for white people on vacation from the life we expelled. We’d pity them, of course, remembering how we once, too, had to strategize our 40 hours of accrued vacation time that took 10 months of working overtime to pool, but pity ourselves, too, for our loneliness, all the people we no longer speak to, who feel uncomfortable on our behalf for the choices we made, and annoyed that we effectively don’t have a working cell phone. It’s hard to maintain friendships in different time zones, and on Vodafone service.
Unfortunately, after so much time away from the beach, and the sun, exhausted by your need to keep yourself chipper and engaged, 9-5ing like a good girl, eating your breakfast salads, and seeing your general practitioner about the strange dark cloud above you (saying I’m not sure why I’m feeling this way when you know exactly why, you’re educated and literate and five years ago, even, life was promising you something different, you could still imagine you were going to be an artist, or afford, at least, being a blonde), you have accidentally snapped out of it—for one shy second, I’m sorry!—and realized your circumstance, Truman Showed yourself and seen the slow-rolling Sisyphean beast of capitalism and your shy life in it.
I won’t do it—I should say that now, before anyone in New York texts me to ask if I’m leaving again—as I’ve done before, leave for something impulsive and artistic and outside. Each time it was the loneliness that was the worst part, the serrated gnawing of irrelevance. The sloughing off of established relationships, and then, perhaps worse, was the dizzying task of returning, getting drinks with people who had spent months having a shared experience, falling in love with adjacent friends, making their new friend groups, being promoted. And no one knew how to ask you what you’d really been up to, they only knew how to talk about how much they’d loved their study abroad, 650 miles from where you were, but relevant enough, probably. And they knew, too, they weren’t asking you because they weren’t exactly interested, and that was awkward also.
The sticky part of the whole thing is that unfortunately I recall my times away as the most exciting and moving parts of my life. I remember writing in Maine a few summers ago that I hadn’t felt so close to my life in some time, I felt like I knew myself and loved living through the day. That’s a very un-Julia thing—I know myself as someone who does not necessarily love living through the day.
It feels increasingly like that’s the choice as I approach my 30’s—to live uncompromisingly inside your society or outside of it—and part of my frustration is that I will always choose people over experience, i.e. the inside. My ex-boyfriend and I used to argue about this nearly violently, he couldn’t understand why I was motivated by experience instead of relationships. I never was, though, not really, because I also moved back to New York for him (without using this language, I’m not a monster, but now I get to say it) and for my friends who lived here and for the expectation that long enough in one place could become something as good as two lovers tanning on a Sardinian beach having bread and boquerones and warm white wine, drying saltwater pulling at their eyebrows, nipples burning in the sun, draping wet striped towels on the back of wooden chairs to dry and cooking pasta in the dark with your bare feet on sandy, terracotta tiles. But, no, I love when there’s 17 minutes between the G trains and I love writing a check for $1,558 to Eric Adams so he can upgrade the bidets in Gracie Mansion.
Thinking like this, besides putting me in a horrible mood, has returned me to a habit of mine I forget about, which is that I relent sometimes, lucky girl that I am, in having absolutely no interest in how I look. Which is to say I’m in deep water right now with a haircut that is truly indistinguishable from that of the six-fingered man, and I’ve also come upon the devastating realization that—I discovered from a selfie I took in a balaclava, holding up a spoon of yogurt meant to portray my at-work malaise—my doppelgänger is the Pantocrator. Which is what I’ll leave you with:
So strange, I set out to write about how we can love again after having loved the most we ever did, but this came instead. Sneak peek! Unless in a fit of rage I quit my job this month, in which case the next post will be a video of me doing the Cinnamon Challenge and trying DMT.
review of: Priscilla
I walked into this with a lot of mixed reviews—Coppola girls who loved it, Coppola girls who hated it, men who had vowed off it because of their unconfessed Jacob Elordi-induced bi-panic.
Firstly: it was so, so slow. One of the slowest movies I’ve ever seen and all I do is watch slow movies. It was stylish, and the score was obviously amazing, and the woman who played Priscilla had zero charisma and was not a good actress and the script did not require her to be a good actress, and there was no sex in this movie which felt like an insane waste to cast Jacob Elordi and then not throw him a sex scene, but that’s sort of a plot point of the movie anyway. It felt a lot like having drinks with a fairly emotional and lost girl who has DM-ed you to hang out and is new to the city and is going through a breakup with a boy who defined her life and doesn’t have female friends and is really trying to remake herself but has no idea how to appeal to women. Is that too specific a scenario? I honestly haven’t experienced that for those of you that are prickling, it just truly felt like that. And I’m making it sound like I didn’t like it but I actually did. I liked the pace of it, I was interested in the story. I just didn’t care about it until the last 10 seconds of the movie, which I’ll sort of spoil for you but all there is to spoil is that Priscilla is driving out of the gates of Graceland into the yellow foliage of Memphis, Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is playing, and you watch her drive. Somehow, you can just feel the entire weight of her life. She’s barely even making a face. She’s not actually doing anything. It’s just the sense you get. It’s not really good acting, it’s just lucky acting. But who cares, it was moving, and made the entire thing worth it.
Disclaimer: your boyfriend will not like or get this movie and it will instigate an argument! See also: Lady Bird.
recommendations:
My balaclava is from Fiona Jungmann who is doing something so weird and unique with textile and deserves your attention
Dining experience at Somerville’s Field & Vine was soooo gnarly. Randomly get the grilled gem lettuce and the cheddar scones, both things I’m like ??? about ordering but rocked my world
Hope everyone is supreming their oranges these days because it makes an enormous difference
I am NOT recommending the first Hunger Games movie. I basically exploded watching that, inconsolable sobbing, couldn’t handle it, horrible created world, too devastating. Just watch Priscilla and have a good night’s sleep
Do not let the Papyrus font fool you! This wine is so fucking good! Was sort of drunk when I was having it so I won’t try to “notes” you here but it was awesome just trust me
This little zine Gunkyard is so helpful for finding New York music events that don’t involve getting stomped on by a hundred dirty pairs of Vejas holding $14 White Claw tallboys and competing for who can sing Madi Diaz the loudest <3
More zine content here, piece by Hua Hsu on American Counterculture Glimpsed Through Zines
Everything I’m listening to in the last 6 days here
I vigorously adore you and this synopsis of a life lesson