last of the baby boyfriends

a pretty useless dispatch, actually

Genieve Figgis, Boat Trip (2020)

meditation on: bliss and its revelations

I’ll alert you to something already obvious to you, who haven’t heard anything from me since early May: I haven’t been writing at all. 

Instead, I got bangs more or less accidentally, but more so at the behest of my amazing hairdresser who said something had to be done about my baby hairs, finally. I strained my neck dancing to Cascada. I lost my credit card. I started running again, sporadically, which more or less means 40 minutes of trying to channel a rage long lost to my personal history, turning maroon and lying on my floor. I watched Submarine. I went to England, and then North Carolina. I got a scalp massage that made me believe massage was a non-consensual act, which I left out of the Coveteur article about it, hoping to keep my job editing and writing there, before learning through an AdWeek article Coveteur was shuttering, and my scalp article very well may not come out at all. (P.S. please help me find new freelance gig!!!)

I became obsessed with this one album of Ricky Nelson’s. I turned 27, and I read almost nothing, which is the true sign, I am convinced more and more, of being healthy.

I have read enough classics and adjacent classics and buzzy modern lesbian novels to affect being well-read without actually reading very much at all. But, for example, my roommate Kate reads two 800-page books a month and that’s barely an exaggeration. My other roommate Iz gobbles probably at least one historical novel a month. And I’ve been reading the same absurdist English garden lady navigating meltdown pamphlet from Fitzcarraldo since I returned from England in May. 

Part of it is, of course, the things I choose are never easy or quick reads—they’re cerebral and pained and self-aggrandizing and completely exhausting. And then I mean to just read The Guest like I’ve been asked to, but something always gets in the way of it, some further obscure Patti Smith edition and I can’t help myself. At the bookstore trying to purchase just one fucking Ali Smith, Julia, please, and I see a busted-looking Che Guevara and think but that’s been on my list for years and I have to have that. And then it’s like oh okay I’m on the parched roads of Latin America with a principled outlaw and I’m boobing Marxist theory, and suddenly reading is too tiring. I could instead nap or shop on eBay for those tan Barney’s slides I saw for $480 at Chickee’s. 

Our sensibilities always bring us back to our cheap and wicked self, don’t they.

---

I haven’t been writing or thinking much because I’m doing very well, and I like someone very much. Which means all the time that should be spent, oh, wondering about the human condition, the role of spirituality in my life, introducing new concepts and questioning ideals, is spent instead reviewing my fancy little feelings for another—can we believe—man, and otherwise spending $1,000 a month on social activities. To improve your life and excel in it I’m realizing you need to be doing medium to medium bad. There’s no impetus otherwise. I am feeling, unfortunately, vastly loved and above my sufferings. And as a result: I’m stupid. 

What is there to say about exuberance, really, besides that which Mary Oliver has already said: soft animal this, frolicsome that, etc. We are intensely bored by the happiness of others—where is the drama of it, the conflict, the narrative, the reason for us to return speech. And how jealous we can be—what muscle it takes for us to be thrilled for our people, to say “I’m so happy to hear that” and mean it. I often think of something my roommate said when our other roommate was getting ready for her date with a celebrity’s grandson: “it’s really hard for me to be happy for my friend right now.” 

I’ve been telling people recently, when they ask how I’m doing, “I am well,”—not “happy,” a self-help plagued concept, and something “inane to approach” my father once said. But “well” as in well-being, well-adjusted, well-ness, dare I say, that most scorned of words that’s been optimized and disordered by a thousand copywriting campaigns for ineffectual vitamins. 

But I am, well. I have very little issue getting out of bed besides laziness, but it’s not the lead foot kind or the heavy heart or the absolute fucking dread of another 10 hours of behaving far beyond what you feel capable of. 

There comes with pleasantry its little privileged errands—how can I remember to take morning vitamins and evening vitamins? When is the time to run? Or ponder? Daily someone I love is having some dark personal crisis or licentious drama that needs to be attended to. I have to cook myself dinner every night, prepare lunches for work, have to bear the weight of the graduate admissions department in the day and its hundreds of blundering adult students salivating for debt and pedigree, artists picking up their work and dropping off their work blissfully foregoing my appointment schedule and demandedly appearing at their whim. I have no less than two freelance jobs at all times, writing and planning and coordinating. I have an activity every evening. I have, blessedly, enough close friends here that my social life is double-edged: there is always something to do and every social event I miss I feel punitively checked for missing. 

In fact, I feel so terribly overwhelmed by building out the logistics of my life I am feeling intensely different about the role of partnership. The role of partnership now includes, besides what it did before: help me with my life, please, I need help with my life. I need you to hold open the window while I shove the AC unit in it, I need you to tell me if this shelf looks even, I need to book the rental car on your credit card because yours has the insurance for it, I need you to pick up dill because I forgot to grab it, and this fish is going to be terrible without it and in fact while I’m on the phone I’ve already burned it so if you don’t mind picking up a pizza on your way home that would really be so helpful. I need you to throw in the towels without my asking because you have noticed there’s just one left and for no goddamn reason I’m at work until 7pm tonight. 

Particularly funny still to me from Submarine (2010)

Is it so suddenly that I’ve lost the inclination for a simple boyfriend? To hang around a hot and incidentally tall man who finds me strange enough to be entertained? A drinking buddy, a concert partner, a shaggy-haired and transparently ungentlemanly presence who knows my friends, my alma mater, my hometown, Wahoowa, YSR, etc.? Is it really so real that a binch turns 27 and suddenly might want to get pregnant with a man who makes her at least wonder about the outcome? Was that, chillingly, perhaps, the last of the baby boyfriends?

My friend Isabel calls a certain kind of boyfriend an “iPad baby”—she means the kind of boyfriend who is on his phone when he’s with his girlfriend’s friends, or her parents, one who can’t entertain himself. This is the kind of boyfriend I mean also when I name him baby—a boyfriend coddled, and forgiven for acting childish: watching Tik Toks while she does the dishes, watching the game under the table at dinner, blatant boredom when the Women Are Talking. He works something unrealistic because his parents haven’t yet withdrawn his allowance, or done anything more than lightly suggest he might stop being a bartender to amplify his brand as an artist.

Baby boyfriend is a heavy drinker, a stay-out-late boyfriend, a lazy sex boyfriend, an unmedicated-and-should-be-medicated boyfriend, a boyfriend who knows how to cook only one dinner and it’s four Everything But The Elote-seasoned chicken breasts; an I’ll meet up with you later boyfriend, a sullen wedding date, a passenger princess, a college sports boyfriend, an always split-the-bill boyfriend. He wears loose pants and expensive sweaters and does not believe women can have good opinions about music. He has a number of female friends he hooked up with in college. He does not know how to make coffee or properly clean a dish or use his insurance; he drives his mother’s car and she pays to fix the bumper. He does know, however, how to chat at parties and where to buy drugs and how to make you feel better after making you feel worse.

And having loved my iterations of baby boyfriends, really, honestly—who, by the way, were certainly not close to all of the above, and were ten dozen other wonderful things not outlined here—and met dozens of other women’s iterations, I am weary, finally. I want a helpful boyfriend, a favors-oriented boyfriend. A boyfriend with sound and resolved female relationships, a boyfriend with his own car, a job, two friends I like, a willing chef, a sentimental airport chauffeur, a Just Because boyfriend. He doesn’t think bacon is Too Slimy To Touch, and knows the answer when I ask stuff like what’s the land speed record and what’s that fish that can be both genders? He is not a Can’t You Do It boyfriend. He doesn’t weaponize his sexual history or go through my phone or tell me not to worry about it. 

Wouldn’t it—is this sick of me?—be nice if your partner was not at a rave festival in Maryland at a time when the fire department shows up at your apartment because of a faulty smoke alarm? Wouldn’t that be nice? If they were around then? If they knew how to rig the washer downstairs so you wouldn’t have to put 40 quarters in it every time you want to do your laundry? If they would cook the meat and salt the pasta water and put your hair up for you when you have chicken juice on your hands?

And you know I’m sorry some of it is boring (and heteronormative, I know, it’s reeking of that), what I’m saying (in between writing this I’ve just read this Cut article that is doing the same thing here), but I just am feeling terribly concerned the way things are going that I’ll end up with someone who knows less about a grill than I do, or pitching a tent, or planting tomatoes, or steering fluid, or if you actually need traveler’s insurance, like all this stuff that just keeps becoming more horribly relevant. The phase of life I’ve entered is one in which I’m loved, certainly, but still on my own—I have to just know how to do everything and handle everything more or less solo, with, luckily, three group chats in which I can then complain about it. 

It’s not what I thought it would be that would tip the scales into the getting serious direction, which I thought would come with a sudden and terrifying awareness my fertility was waning. And then a partnered dark depression at the loss of my unserious and flagrant youth. It was instead the complete and utter sense that I no longer felt like fucking around. I don’t know why. It just happened, just occurred to me. Maybe this last emotional hell was so daunting, so exasperating, I just don’t feel I have another one in me.

It’s like a sudden barrage of expectation, like someone dumped cold water over me. But how was this not always the expectation? How was the expectation ever “he likes music <3”? Or what’s the point of past self-critique now, really, I loved so much and lost just less than much, and then sprang back with the tulips into a million more ideas of how to treat someone well and what to ask for in return.

I suppose it took, unsurprisingly, a cocktail of warm weather, and my first late-twenties birthday, and surrounding myself with women who are the most Just Because people I’ve ever met—Easter basket people, eat my leftovers people, non-stop cabaret of Instagram reel group chat people, undivided attention and so intensely considerate, hushed whispers as they assemble an elaborate birthday morning arrangement for me.

Yeah. Yeah, I wept. Because I don’t know love like that! But I should! But I’m learning! 

And you know what else leads every literary-presenting-and-not-really-reading woman to some kind of emotional revelation like this is reading one fucking thing from Mary Oliver’s Devotions. No, I know. But:

And anyway it’s the same old story
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

…

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

All wet kisses to y’all from my hot as balls apartment and rain hair ! ty for reading!

recommendations:

• okay well please come to this event I’ve curated with my favorite place in Brooklyn dear friend books, and a really cool project Chevere Means Cool that runs a dinner series called Sobremesa

• This EP by Bassvictim is sooooo good

• My friend Hayden released this pensive, endearing short film in which my aforementioned roomie Kate makes her vocal acting debut and she actually destroys it

• I’m attending this Ballet Body Basics class at Live the Process led by Instagram crush and old co-worker Isabelle Seiler who has promised me it won’t humiliate my uncoordinated and empirically bad-at-ballet body

• I really liked this piece in Dirt about froyo as an indication of the recession

• I am very obsessed with any and all exhibits at TIWA gallery but really into the Lindsey Adelman one up at the moment which is all oil lamps ?? that are amazing

classifieds:

• My kindred spirit Hal is looking for a place to live in NY around September! If you’re looking for nicest roomie in the world and to hang out with an incredibly talented musician and singer pls email halligan.delaney@gmail.com

• Sophie is selling cakes! I can attest these are some of the best I’ve ever had and I actually have never liked cake but every time Sophie makes one I have a fat slice because not only are they gorgeous but they’re doing something very special. Email soapysmith@me.com

• Freelance cinematographer and photographer Ivey Redding is looking for work! She has just released a little reel that exhibits her talent and otherwise moved me deeply! I’m recommending you watch it whether or not you’re looking to hire someone for that kind of thing. Email iveyaredding@gmail.com or slide in her DMssssss