Quake, Wave

Looking at the satellite

photographs of Japan before

and after makes me think

of photographs of the body

inside the skin taken before

and after a virus and its cure: a crawling

steady sickness with abolished symptoms,

pathology reversed,

signs of long illness .

I need more time, but then

everybody does. But it’s only Friday,

only March, only raining, only warm,

and the twenty-first century is still new.

But years like airports, like Tokyo skyscrapers

owe little to their makers.

We named eons and calculated

distances between sunsets while

Japan stood impatient and momentary,

as imperceptibly brief as an ocean

shudder, like summers

before school. We never learned

precisely how to make the sticky

breezes stay. How could we, when

to be alive is always to be leaving?

We have no practice with permanence

in the crackling space of the world

or its starry negative.

We clatter inside a mirrored corridor,

no recourse but to mistake

observation for understanding. Japan,

how like us accidental

witnesses, to have a word but no template

for changelessness:

forever never fact

but lamentation: how little

we saw!

 (c) march 2011

Mr. Robinson:  Ben…  How old are you now, Ben?

Ben Braddock:  20.  I’ll be 21 next week.

Mr. Robinson:  That’s a hell of a good age to be.  I wish I was that age again.  Because Ben?

Ben:  Yes, Mr. Robinson?

Mr. Robinson:  You’ll never be young again.

Ben:  I know.

I first watched The Graduate when I was 11 or 12, after Hannah and I went through a “Wayne’s World” phase.  It was the first time I remember hearing Simon and Garfunkel, and my dad pointed out that this ending sequence was a spoof of his favorite movie.  

“What’s that?” we asked, stomachs still sore from laughing.  Mike Meyers holds up, guys.

“The Graduate!”  My dad bellowed, shocked at his failure of parenting.  ”C’mon, you’ve seen The Graduate!  The best movie of all time.”

“No,” I said reasonably, lacking the presence of mind to add, “Because I’m eleven, Dad.”

“Aw, man, you gotta see it,” he moaned.  ”We’ll get it at Blockbuster or something.  You gotta see it.”

So we did.  I remember watching it as a family.  I think Hannah, then only seven or eight, fell asleep, and I’m not sure she’s viewed it in its entirety to this day.  Afterwards, my parents communed over the genius of Mike Nichols and Buck Henry, the perfection of Dustin Hoffman and Ann Bancroft.  I mainly took away from this first encounter a new obsession with Simon & Garfunkel, which led to some very questionable middle-school music choices.  That was the summer I listened to April, Come She Will on repeat and mourned the passage of time (the first of many episodes).  ”I can’t believe I’m heading into junior high,” I wrote in my diary, feebly imitating Ben’s postgraduate angst.

My dad always said that I wouldn’t be able to understand the movie until I graduated college.  Over my teen years, I watched it a few more times, sometimes alone, and I think I read the book it’s based on after graduating either eighth grade or high school, thinking maybe I was finally old enough to get what my father was talking about.

Last year, on the eve of graduating, I tried to stream it on Netflix, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  It felt too cheap, or too dated, or too White Male for my Oberlin consciousness, or maybe just too close.  Plus, I didn’t feel like I’d understand the drifting postgrad mentality, since I was so clearly pulling it together and off to a job in Denmark.

It’s coming up on a year since I graduated.  It’s a Saturday night in Copenhagen and there’s little to do, which sounds crazy but really isn’t if you take into account how little I enjoy getting drunk.  I would go to sleep early but there’s a raging party happening on the floor below, reminding me again just how little I have in common with movie heroines like Holly Golightly and… every other one, who always seem to be the life and soul of their apartment building’s social scene.  Still not sure any of my neighbors know I live here.

I browsed Netflix and debated reading a book when The Graduate, which has been #1 on my queue for over a year, finally caught my eye.  For months I’ve been skimming right over it, bypassing it in favor of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Season 2 and Janeane Garofalo: Live in Seattle.  You know, higher pursuits.  I readied myself for the whole process of Finally Understanding My Father, and turned it on.

Then I paused it after 20 minutes in to write this blog entry, because the scene with Ben and Mr. Robinson hit me squarely between the eyes in the way it never has before.  Dad was right.  The urgency of Mr. Robinson’s declaration to Ben that you’re only young once sounded especially sad, Ben’s “I know” especially resigned.  Even more, I recognized in the opening shots of Ben on a plane and Ben in the airport and Ben framed by a fishbowl, almost crying as he stares off into space the immobility and anxiety I’ve run away from for a year but only deferred.  I’d barely even remembered the scenes before the seduction, but now they seem like the most important part of the movie.

I care less now about what’s coming next, with Ben meeting Mrs. Robinson at the hotel, Buck Henry cameo-ing in the lobby, and the introduction of Katharine Harris.  I don’t know if I need to watch it all the way through until the end.  I’ve always hated the scene in the strip club when the woman swings her nipple tassel in Elaine’s face, and I’ve never understood the alacrity with which she almost marries the guy at the end.  I guess my small problem with the movie is that it’s Ben I identify with, but Elaine as a woman is supposed to be my point of entry.  Well, that’s not how art works.  That’s not how audience works.  We don’t need to identify with the character who most closely resembles us, because the point is empathy, not sympathy.  I get Ben’s stasis and his desire not for Mrs. Robinson but to go wild while he can, and then his reluctance to resign himself to his mistakes at the climax, and the returning fear that clouds his face in the closing shots.  That cliffhanger ending always used to annoy me, but it doesn’t anymore.

Because what happens to Ben in this movie?  He’s stunned by something— graduation?  life?  the future?  the past?— he’s suffocated by his parents, who in Chekhovian style never listen when he talks and steamroll his persistent requests to “hold on a minute, please.”  His virginal politeness with Mrs. Robinson abruptly recedes when she questions his sexual prowess.  ”Just because you’re inadequate in one way…” she begins, before Ben resolves to carry on and slams the hotel door behind him.  After taking the plunge into adultery, Ben spends his days drinking beer and sunning himself in his parents’ pool, his nights mechanically seduced by Mrs. Robinson, no longer the aspirational young man hinted at in the first scenes with mention of his trophies, his scholarships, his newspaper accolades.  

Mr. Braddock:  Ben, what are you doing?

Ben:  Well, I would say that I’m just drifting, here in the pool.

Mr. Braddock:  Why?

Ben:  Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here.

Mr. Braddock:  Have you thought about graduate school?

Ben:  No.

Mr. Braddock:  Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?

Ben:  You got me.

Ben’s realized something even more profound than sex with a woman his mother’s age.  He sees the disappointment of Mrs. Robinson and feels it himself through their relationship, which is the precise opposite of the “sowing wild oats” advice her husband gives him at the start.  There’s a sequence where Dustin Hoffman first watches Ann Bancroft as though looking to be comforted, then finds nothing.  His cool, unaffected disillusionment registers as a single eye flicker, but it permeates the rest of the film and stands in contrast and clarification to the early moments when he seemed on the verge of tears.

And watching The Graduate now, isn’t there something to admire about Mrs. Robinson?  As a child, media consumption encoded by Disney archetypes, she used to seem to me to be the villain, her salt and pepper hair reminiscent of Cruella DeVille, her later pressuring of Elaine into marriage at 20 so classically storybook-witch-evil, but as a young woman now I find her stunning.  She knows exactly what she wants, she knows exactly how to get it, and her shift from casual seductress to active antagonist manages to be both unfair and genuine.  Life is unfair, and Mrs. Robinson knows it.  One of the best exchanges of the film is when Ben wants to talk, and she suggests sardonically that they talk about art.

Ben: That’s a good subject! Why don’t you start it off?

Mrs. Robinson: You start it off.  I don’t know anything about it.

Ben: Well, what do you want to know about it?  Are you interested in modern art or classical art?

Mrs. Robinson:  Neither.

Ben:  You’re not interested in art?

Mrs. Robinson: No.

Ben: Then why you wanna talk about it?

Mrs. Robinson:  I don’t.

[They get into a discussion of her marriage.]

Ben:  Why would you marry him?  Unless… you didn’t have to marry him?

Mrs. Robinson:  Don’t tell Elaine.

Ben:  Oh, no, you had to marry him because you got pregnant.  So he was a law student, and you were… what was your major subject in college?

Mrs. Robinson:  Art.

How useless it all was, they know.  The world of the movie is very small.  No one is helping others; no one has dreams.  This is the easy and infinitely harder choice to make in adulthood: the compromise of mediocrity based on the fear there’s nothing else.  Ben is staring it down at the beginning, accepting it in the middle, suspicious of it in the climax, and mourning it at the end.  Deep sadness is better than apathy, isn’t it?  That’s the question The Graduate leaves us with; how we metabolize disappointment defines our parameters for happiness as adults.  How do we make mistakes and live with them?  A blameless life is impossible because stasis is impossible to sustain, and choices necessitate culpability and manifest fallibility.  But privileged young adults who have followed the rules for two decades, when first faced with the postgrad landscape of limitless choice with infinite consequence, can get paralyzed into inaction.  The world is unpredictable, and therefore choices are harder and their effects impenetrable.  You might sleep with someone inappropriate, fall in love with your lover’s daughter, or crash a wedding.  No one will tell you what happens next.

I thought that just by virtue and effort of moving my schlubby American bottom to Europe, my hopefully transitional twentysomething body would naturally slim into the rail-thin, enviable shape promised by genetics in photos I have long admired of my mother at this age.  It was destiny.  Those of us with the ugly ducking teenage years behind us (their cruelty sharpened by having previously been attractive children) are expectant of a predestined swanhood, hinted at by those early years of cherubic toddler looks and preteen swagger.  It never comes, or at least not to every duckling, and on no reliable schedule.

It turns out that looking good and being healthy take effort, something most people my age seem to have grasped while trying to get lucky at college parties but which for me has remained an inscrutable, incomprehensible desire, just after “Live forever” and “Be the next Susan Sontag” on my short list of quaint but impossible ambitions, so unattainable I’ve never seen a point in overexerting myself in an earnest attempt.  Weighing yourself and dieting are trappings of unenlightened womanhood, I told myself, reluctant to graduate into the bourgeoisie maturity that necessitates a gym membership and investment in a scale.

My coworkers are a peculiar mix of self-controlled Scandinavians and perpetually snacking Americans.  Those that join me in persistent searches of the next great pastry or daily afternoon tea with cookies— and in fact sometimes initiate these forays into the dark, fatty underbelly of Copenhagen sugar factories— tend to be more watchful of their figures and to exercise more regularly than I have ever had will or discipline to imitate.  As I am writing this, two of them recommended I join them at weight-lifting and Tai-Bo classes at the local FitnessWorld.

They talk about eating too much but I rarely see any of them do it.  They all look fantastic, and with good reason.  Apparently, they all understand the relationship between looking good, feeling good, and life expectancy.

A supervisor recently told us over lunch that he was going to use his vacation time to start running and eating healthier.  “You can eat well and get fit, but we all die anyway,” I said brightly, espousing one of my deeper philosophies.  I smiled at the lunch group of coworkers, expecting their faces to register the impact of my profundity.  They smiled pityingly and I noticed a few glances at where my stomach hung over the back of my skinny jeans.

No one here is out of Mean Girls.  It’s an incredibly supportive and encouraging environment.  When someone decided to give up sugar, a few of us tried to join her, and there were daily cheers in the office when a cupcake was passed up in favor of fruit.  Since when is my life The Devil Wears Prada?  I find myself wondering, curious as to how even an international education office can become preoccupied with wellness and tailored clothes that actually fit.  At what point is my comforting brand of pastry-hoarding hedonism just a lazy girl’s romanticism?

I remember it well: watching the “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” trailer in the summer of 2004, suddenly shocked that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson had gone through puberty, then realizing that so had I.  We’re around the same age.  I realized that just as Harry and Hermione couldn’t go back to being young, adorable, and full of childish potential, neither could I.  Choices had been made.  Bras had been purchased.  At fifteen, I suddenly felt very old.

It wasn’t so much that 15 is old, and I didn’t exactly think of it that way at the time, but it was the first sense I had firsthand of how time marches inexorably onward, regardless of how much you really wanted Peter Pan to fly in your window before it got too late (and I did— I used to pray to JM Barrie instead of God in the hopes that Neverland wasn’t an idea but an actual island you could only get to by wishing away your period).

So I’m 22, living in Denmark for month ten, and not really thinking as much this year about my upcoming birthday as I have in the past.  Of course every age up to and including 21 was fraught with anticipation and excitement, and even last year’s 22 got to be in that club because it had the double prestige of being my long-awaited golden birthday (22 on May 22!  How fun was that?!  …Not as much as I’d expected) and about a week before I graduated from Oberlin.  Everything was all tied up emotionally— getting older, feeling adult, having a degree.  And 22 still has that precocious child actor ring to it.  Magazines still call famous 22-year-olds “girls,” so I didn’t have to contend with the w-word yet.

Ah, but here we are, the eve of 23.  I don’t like odd numbers.  I especially don’t like that Carson McCullers published one of my favorite novels, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when she was 23 (after working on it for 2 years).  Oh, the things I would have done had the internet not existed!  …Maybe.

Somewhere around 16 or 17, I started the habit of making lists of things I’d done the previous year so as not to feel unhappy about all the youth I’d wasted up until then.  It’s a tradition I still hold dear.  So, in the name of too much information and exhibitionism, here’s the list:

22 THINGS I’VE DONE SINCE TURNING 22 (in chronological order)

1. Graduated from college
2. Got my wisdom teeth out
3. Worked at JCYS for the fourth summer
4. Got my driver’s license
5. Moved to Denmark
6. Held first full-time job
7. Took Danish language classes
8. Modeled for painters
9. Got published for the first time
10. Made first serious workplace mistake(s)
11. TA’d for a Creative Writing course
12. Got home to Chicago for the holidays <3
13. Got through losing my first apartment to a major fire
14. Proposed/received grant to go to Paris Writers Workshop in June
15. Did an open mic at Studenterhuset, the city’s student union
16. Helped organize coworkers and change certain unfair conditions at aforementioned internship
17. Visited Prague with my dad
18. Did stand-up comedy in Malmo, Sweden
19. Visited Greece, Turkey, and Croatia for the first time
20. Visited London TWICE because I’m an unrepentant anglophile
21. Tutored a 10-year-old I adore in English
22. Won Newcomer of the Year comedy competition

Oy, this list is not meant to show off— this is copied from my journal; I do it for me— it’s meant to help ease the blow of having to lose another year to the sands of time.  It helps to psych myself into the belief I’ve earned a new age.  I think I have.  23 will be fine.  

Anyone have good “when I was 23” stories?

Video of my set from the Newcomer Awards at the Dubliner

Have a blurry photograph, courtesy my dear friend Sam: 

I’m going to London tonight with my friend Annie.  We have no plans except a possible day trip to Oxford, staying with my dear friend Willow for a bit, and… yeah, that’s it!  I like traveling without an itinerary.  Also without a computer, camera, and phone.

Am flying back at 7am on Monday and plan to go to work straight from the airport.  Please feel free to tell me this is a bad idea.

1. bobby pin-based hairstyles
2. hilarious tee-shirts from online comics that don’t fit quite properly
3. white cardigans
4. rainboots
5. me

I wore all of these things to a hot DJ dance party at Kulture Box last night.  In my defense, I had left the house that afternoon intending only to attend the Norrebro Litteraturhaus Poetry Festival, and from there was convinced to go to a freaking dance club.  So not my jam.  You probably had to be on ecstasy to appreciate it.

More Prague, April 3-5, 2012

In Prague, April 2012