Savannah Lee

His undoing has been to try to fix his despair.

He shoved solution after solution into the maw of the problem, and the problem ate them and got bigger. He shoved answer after answer into the maw of the question, when what he needed was to stare at the question until it started staring back.

The question has outrun the answers. The question has defeated the answers. The question is too big for the answers.

It always is. Even the one that seems small. Especially the one that seems small.

Yet again, I was the odd girl out...shoes just didn't move me. I knew a good-looking pair when I saw one, but joy was nowhere to be found.

A pretty purse, however, always made me smile.

In my innocence, I had not realized that you can obsess over purses. I thought we ladies were pretty much limited to shoes, lipstick and sunglasses as designer fetish objects. Silly me! I should have known...and I think, in some corner of my soul, I did...that Purse Blog was out there.

(Why, you may ask, am I blogging about purses at 3am? Well...if you woke up from a dream where one of your feet was amputated and you were in a brothel, with only a scarf-width afghan to cover yourself, limping desperately along in search of a client who was gay, but you had to make him want you anyhow--missing foot and all--because you really really needed the money....and you ran into your dad....what would YOU do?)

(Well, yes, I know, and that would be very sensible, but we don't have any whiskey in the house. So: purses it is.)

Never having pursued my love of purses in any kind of organized way, I needed--and from this blog, got--a real crash course in contemporary handbag style. I have learned the following things.

1) My god, they're huge. You could practically get in some of these bags and drive them down the street.

2) Fortunately, there are exceptions.

3) Except for clutches, many bags seem very bulky and busy to my eye, with lots of hardware.

4) Fortunately, there are exceptions.

5) Pink, a color that pleases me inordinately, is in terribly short supply.

6) Fortunately...well, you know.

I especially love this delicately hued Bottega Veneta, which also has a lovely shape. The wistful shades of pink are my favorites. Like these. If someone would make that YSL catwalk bag, particularly the medium flap one in soft textured leather, in pink the color of a whisper...

...I would go right straight back into that dream, shove my dad aside, and keep knocking on doors (they were old and paint-chipped) until I found my man. "You have to understand," I would say. "It's the kind of pink that would make a poet cry!"

And he would.

That was my weekend. Fortunately everything was more or less straightened out by Sunday afternoon.

I didn't watch the Big Game yesterday, but at one point I heard my husband scream at the top of his lungs. Like, seriously. I was therefore not surprised to discover that (you'll need to sit through an ad) he had witnessed "one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history."

This play was executed by...Giants?...yeah, Giants quarterback Eli Manning, who apparently made a once-in-a-lifetime throw to receiver David Tyree, who made a once-in-a-lifetime catch. (If I understand correctly, Tyree's brilliance was not so much in the catching but in the holding-on.)

A couple of weeks ago, Slate analyzed Eli Manning, and wondered, "Can A Meek, Befuddled Youngest Sibling Become A Great Quarterback?"

It would appear that the answer is "um...yeah."

Look, I mostly think sports is stupid. Even "girl" sports like gymnastics (which I used to watch). You've got judges distinguishing one vault from another by something like .001 point. What the hell is that? How is that real? How does that mean anything? Get them all some cheeseburgers and send them home. Figure skating too. After a certain point, you cannot ignore the inherently subjective nature of the judging, and the fact that so many of the contestants look numb and bored, and that you have seen every number fifty times before.

With football, I can't even pay enough attention to GET to that point. I don't understand it. I never will.

But I do understand this: Eli Manning--and David Tyree, who apparently hadn't even merited any condescending hand-wringing--pwned everybody yesterday. The idiotic live-and-die-on-each-play rules of football, the rules that had kicked Manning's ass enough times to make him the favorite whipping boy of all the armchair judges on earth...he took those rules and [UNPRINTABLE ON A SORT-OF FAMILY BLOG] out of them.

And that's nice to see.

Sports fans are cruel, but they honor their history. Manning will always have this victory. It can't and won't be taken away from him.

I'm glad.

Kid's up early.

The birds sound lonely. Must be the cold.

Another friend nearly cried yesterday.

The driveway was glazed like a donut. Today they're saying six to ten. (Inches. Of snow.)

It's hard to move in winter. Wrapped, bundled, iced, slushed, snowed, wind-battered.

There used to be so many things I wanted to ask him. But the rule is that he'll give me everything as long as I don't. The mystery will not just go unanswered, it will be ignored.

I can do everything but know him.

That's how it feels today.

I'm not complaining. I know what I know. I know his hand in the night.

If I wonder why it is so gentle, and why it takes its greatest pleasure from my own, I don't need to hear him try to explain.

Six to ten today. They say.

1991. September had precisely ten years left to go without shadows.

I and my fellow Septemberites filed downstairs for the first time to the basement where our department held its classes. We formed a cloud outside the seminar door. When the professor came and unlocked it, it was exactly like she created a vacuum; the open door sucked the cloud inside and atomized it.

We dispersed around the table. Blinking. Nervous. New.

And we learned to mistrust autobiography.

That was the first lesson in our first seminar as art history graduate students. We were to pick an artist's autobiography (I chose Odilon Redon's "To Myself") and cast a long, cold eye on it. Our assignment was to go out and learn so much about our artist that we could come back and poke holes in their own story.

Find the self-flattery, people. Dig through the pretty portrait until you hit the manipulation rotting at its core. Oh, it's there, the professor assured us. You naive little creatures...it's there. Where you least expect it!

Autobiography was a borderline evil in that room.

I was a bit put off by the insistence that EVERYONE who wrote one of these damn things MUST be using it for self-serving ends. (A certain condescending allowance was made that, occasionally, the self-inflation might be unconscious.)

I thought this belief said more about the professor than the books. She was obsessed that people were going to try to make themselves look good. Well, maybe so. But does gelling your hair and putting on makeup and a pretty dress make you a liar? You're still you. An autobiography can stand some gel and pancake before it crosses over into genuinely self-serving territory. It's not naive to give someone the benefit of the doubt. It's actually sensible.

Besides, we're talking about a bunch of painters here. What are the stakes? Even if some of them do tell their story in a calculating or self-serving way, who does it hurt?

It's not like they're...you know...running for public office or anything.

Like a politician.

Which is why--his merits as a candidate wholly aside--it was a huge and nasty shock to me to visit Salon yesterday and see this article (sit through an ad) by Gary Kamiya swooning over Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father."

"Obama's prose alone was almost enough to make me vote for him," says Kamiya. "But what tipped the scales was the portrait that emerged--of a man who has been tested and found true, who has proved he's ready to assume the most important job in the world. For the question he answered was the hardest one of all: Who am I?"

Mr. Kamiya, there's a minor detail here. The man who emerges so glowingly in that portrait...is the man who created it.

And in this case, that matters. In this case, gel and pancake are a big deal.

Because Obama's not looking back. He's looking forward. Any autobiography by someone at his stage of life isn't a summary. It's a pitch.

Most of the artists we studied in that long-ago seminar had written their autobiographies at the end of their careers. As a capstone. Obama published "Dreams From My Father" at age 32, at the beginning of his career. He might technically have been writing about his past, but such a book can only really be about his future. It's a stage-setter.

An old artist has nothing (worldly) to gain. A young politician? Everything.

What bothers me about the lengthy quotes Kamiya gives us from Obama's story is that Obama appears to have mastered the Disney trick: he writes from his weaknesses. Self-scolding--"You've lost your way, brother"--sets the stage for epiphanies of humility: "What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly."

This may well be genuine. I can't help but notice, though, that it's precisely what we want from our heroes: struggle, painful lessons, self-betterment.

Here's the thing. This book may be genuine AND cynical at the same damn time. The plain truth AND a manipulation.

It is not a basis for deciding whether to vote for someone.

With respect, I feel it's a staggering failure in judgment on Kamiya's part to have made his final decision in this manner.

Barack Obama is a remarkable man. And his self-portrait may well be ratified by history. He may really be "a man who has been tested and found true;" he may really be "ready to assume the most important job in the world" (although the idea that self-knowledge is his key credential seems a bit shaky to me).

But we need to find that out in other ways besides reading his own version of his life. Here, Mr. Kamiya, is how it's done; here's Richard Kim casting a long, cold eye (then voting anyway).

We should go into this with our eyes open. It ain't love.

Yeah, the whole family's down.

Light posting next couple of days.

My friend Kel once gave me the ultimate litmus test: "Who gets the last Twinkie?"

He was talking about life with two siblings. "Yeah, your parents can say they love you all equally/the same/blah-blah all they want, but that doesn't answer the question of who gets the last Twinkie."

Politics may be the art of compromise--but at the end of the day, someone has to compromise more. Someone has to lose out on the last Twinkie.

It ain't gonna be pretty.

By the way--can you believe those things were invented in 1930? I would have thought 1950s for sure.

From Purse Blog.

Look at that color! Isn't it beautiful?

I wonder how much pink stuff I could get my hands on if I actually tried.

A couple of years ago I found a coat on very steep discount that happened to be pale pink.

I found a pair of pale pink kid gloves (which I wrecked by using them to death, and currently can't find).

Winter woolens in pink is easy--hats, scarves, etc.

I found a pale pink checkbook holder.

The other day, I saw a whole display of pink yoga mats (not that I do yoga in any way shape or form).

Shoes? Boots?

Pink pants--that would be hard.

Purses in that color are not easy to find. Pale ones that have what I think is a pretty design.

Hmmm.

My daughter's dance company went to a competition last weekend. That means I did too, she not being of an age where she can ride to a big city, check into a hotel, and navigate the approximately six miles of skybridge between hotel and convention center without some assistance from a more chronologically-enhanced individual.

Speaking of chronological enhancement, I was old enough to feel the full horror of it when I saw on the schedule that one of the teams was doing a number to the Bangles' "Walk Like An Egyptian."

No offense whatsoever to Bangles fans. And in fact, I'm one of them--I still listen to their cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter," and I remember "Manic Monday" fondly. But "Walk Like an Egyptian" really did not work for me.

And wouldn't you know--when I was busy gelling my daughter's hair for their final number ("YOU'RE GETTING IT IN MY EAR!!"), one of the other girls wandered in from the ballroom with a funny look on her face.

"They were just playing the most awful song!" she said. "It had all this clanging and banging."

Yep, that sounded like our 80s culprit. I ran the title by her.

Her face lit up in recognition. With perverse enthusiasm she repeated, "It was awful!"

"Hey," I said, "I had to actually live through the time when that thing was a hit."

It was unexpectedly fun to say that. In this culture we're supposed to be jealous of younger people, particularly kids, because they've got it all ahead of them. But think of what they missed! They weren't there to live through "Walk Like an Egyptian"!

The girl, in fact, clearly started putting that together in her mind--imagining some fresher, smoother version of me ducking the airwaves that carried that song in a world where she didn't exist. And still might never have, her own mother's future not yet being set.

The past is safe for us because it's done. But perilous for them, because when you're so young you think somebody still might take you back.

"Longest four months of my life," I told her. "Go ask your mother what it was like."

--Bring extra false eyelashes
--Find someone else to actually put them on your child
--Instead of bringing food, save up for room service
--To the competition itself, however, bring three Snickers bars: one for before, one for during, one for after. (These things run six to seven hours, and while your dancer will need energy, she won't want to eat an actual meal)
--Bring an extra Motorola cellphone charger. Someone will need it, and if you give them an extra, you won't have to be stunned the next day when that enormously self-possessed eleven-year-old on the team hands it to you after you completely forgot that you lent it out to one of the teenagers.
--Don't check your luggage at the hotel (the people who did this were stuck in line for half an hour and nearly missed the bus back home)
--If it's around forty degrees in your town when you leave, plan for it to be -5 when you come back.
--Ballet is the oppressed minority of the commercial dance world: most of them hate it, but they can't do what they do without it.
--On the bus, when they turn up the volume on the DVD that they are playing which you have already seen four times, bring earplugs so that you can be spared.
--When did charter buses start coming equipped for DVD anyhow?
--After it's all over and the moms break out the wine--have some.

Kids lie, this article informs us, for four reasons: avoiding punishment, gaining autonomy, exerting control, and because they learned it from watching their parents.

And they do it a lot. In the study described, teens went through a deck of cards representing topics about which they might lie to their parents. They described lying about spending, dating, parties, 'bad' friends, drinking, doing drugs, and--everyone's gonna love this--riding in cars being driven by someone under the influence.

Interestingly enough, the teens themselves ended up being a little shocked by all this; for the most part, they didn't see themselves as lying, even though they were. Researchers theorize that this is because their main motive was not to deceive per se, but to reassure.

And to prop up their self-image. "Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating," says the article.

It would appear that there's no way to stop this, although families with the stereotypical few-hard-and-fast-rules combined with being "warm" and approachable do manage to cut it down by about half.

Well...actually there is a way to stop it. Cold.

#

"A few parents [in the study] managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion."

And that's the trick. Don't want your kid lying to you? Break 'em.

"Those teens," reports the article, "weren't rebelling. They were obedient."

Of course there's going to be a slight catch:

"And depressed."

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As a teenager, I was obedient.

All those things the teens were lying about in that study? I couldn't have lied to my parents about any of that even if I'd wanted to, because I wasn't doing it. Any of it.

I was obedient.

And I was depressed.

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But then, it also works the other way around: I was depressed...and I was obedient.

This, to me, is the key flaw of the study: how do they actually know which came first? Those teenagers, are they depressed because they're obedient or are they obedient because they're depressed? The parents who seem "intrusive," is that because they ARE intrusive, or because they've had to pick up the slack for their paralyzed offspring?

Either way, though...those kids are up the creek. They may not be riding in cars with drunk people, but believe me, that doesn't mean they're okay.

#

A year or so ago, my mom kind of looked at me sadly and said "You never got to have the fun of being young."

But I remember those years very clearly, and I didn't want to have the fun of being young.

After reading that article, though, I see that I missed something much more important than fun. I missed something more important than "having a life." I missed selfhood. By an even wider margin than I thought. I thought selfhood was just about what went on in your head (which for me was self-annihilating enough, since after a certain point I stopped imagining myself completely and dropped out of my own mental life). But no, it's more than that.

The teenagers who lie--they have things to lie about. They have a separate interior space that's actually real, not just in their heads. If you have something to lie about, you have a self.

I never did.

I'm almost not sure I do now.

I don't really know what else to say today.

The greatest poets of loneliness are the ones who never wanted to be. They are the ones who will take the empty table or the silent playground and echo it through their hearts forever.

Do you have to hate something in order to truly understand it?

Do you have to fight it in order to get it under your skin?

In that case, I'm the poet of parties. I'm the avatar of fun and togetherness.

But people can be forced to be lonely. No one can be forced to join the crowd. Push me into it, and I can still secede; to the winter dance in that darkened hall, I brought a book, and sat and read.

(The cover of the book was yellow. The first sentence was about the eyes of a snake. I was wearing high heels, one planted on each side of the chair, and a big dark glittery skirt that served no purpose. A tied-up T-shirt commemorating Clint Eastwood's mayoral career by showing him pointing a gun and saying "I said curb your dog.")

And did you notice that more people were standing on the sidelines? Wondering why they were there? Than danced in the center with a drink in their hand?

Our silent nation.

I wouldn't turn here because it was too much of a lake and wouldn't turn there because it was too much of a lake and then the thick white flakes started down. And everything that wasn't too deep to drive through became, just that fast, too slick.

And it's raining down our chimney.

Sigh...

Ordinarily I don't get too excited over Chicken-Little-style shrieking that Americans are getting more ignorant by the day. These things usually blame video, for which I have no patience; visual media are NOT the problem. It's how they're used.

Granted, right now they're being used to foreclose rather than expand. But if the author of this article had thought back to a certain hallowed tome, namely Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, she'd know that words do just fine at that too when given a chance. (Orwell was smart enough to show how stupid language could be.)

And as for bashing "screens," aka computers--go check out Dave Neiwert. I defy you not to learn something.

Again: it ain't the media. It's how it's used.

But this article had one graf that stopped everything for me. Here it is:

"People accustomed to hearing their president...[snap] 'I'm the decider' may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio 'fireside chat' so they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80% of American adults tuned in to hear the president."

"This is," the author justifiably tells us, "...a different country and citizenry."

Yes. One that gave a shit.

That is the difference.

Of course, we are the legacy of those people, so they obviously went wrong somewhere--possibly in believing that everyone would always care as much as they did, so there was no need to actually teach that virtue.

But anyhow, this hit me right between the eyes. Eighty percent? Poring over maps? Listening to the president? Listening to the president admit and discuss defeat? I for one am glad that this kind of kinky, perverted bottoming to "reality" has been abolished on our shores.

And it really has. "Nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it 'not at all important' to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it 'very important.'"

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Why is this?

Jonathan Schwarz has a theory: "Power makes human beings stupid."

It's real simple. "If you're at the top of the social pyramid"--or under the media-control of those who are--"you won't perceive things that are unbelievably obvious to those lower down."

And you'll start thinking, you know, who cares where France is? Or how they talk? Why do I need to know?

#

You can even see this in the dance world. My daughter's dance company went to a competition last weekend, and let me tell you, it was a hard time to be a bunhead (a serious ballet student). Teachers repeatedly made excuses: "Yeah, yeah, you will have to take a ballet class later on. I know, I know, boring. But [name of teacher] makes it fun! She really does!" In the halls, I heard not one but two random cellphone conversations where a mom said of her daughter: "She hates ballet."

Yeah, it's only the foundation of all western movement, guys. Why should you put up with it? Why should you tolerate it for a minute?

You resent the demands it makes on you. It's hard to pull up, turn out, get your fingers right, and get your head right all at the same time, let alone hold all of that through an excruciatingly slow and demanding grand plie, so you just hate on it.

You are the victim of an ethos which says nothing SHOULD be demanded of you.

At least not without simultaneous massive reward to take away the pain.

You have been spoiled.

#

Who profits from that? Who banks on it?

And what do we lose?

Thousand-fingered gloves of frozen rain.

Underneath tire-packed snow, the roads are hard with it. Cars lavishly draped. I brought my husband dry socks this morning as he scraped at it.

I knew a couple once. The wife converted to charismatic Catholicism. Her husband wouldn't follow, so she left him.

Why do we do that? Why do we struggle to destroy our lives as we build them? Is it because we have to die anyhow? But that's the part of us, I think, which hates death the most. The part which decides that we can't stay married to this man another minute because he wouldn't follow my new rules and get his first marriage annulled so I could feel better in church.

Every fiber of our being can hate extinction--but that is the part of us which will not trust it. I think.

The wrecking balls inside us never swing to help. Only hurt.

And things aren't steady on the ground right now. Be careful on the ice.

In the end, it came down to Iraq, and I decided to support the high-profile presidential candidate who did not vote for it.

But there's one last thing that really worries me about Barack Obama.

Life has not given him a good adult smack upside the head yet. In political years, he's young, but his life and career have taken off. He's redeemed the suffering and instability of his youth with a trajectory that has overall gone nowhere but up--and fast. Both professionally and, with his stable family life, personally.

This is the trap the universe sets for the people it particularly hates.

The ancient Greeks believed that you could have too much luck. There's a legend about Philip of Macedon which says that, one day, the king was resting from the hunt with his friends by a river. A rider came with news for him: "Your general Parmenion has won a great battle against the Illyrians, your horse has won a race in the Olympic Games, and your wife has had a son [none other than Alexander the Great]."

Philip, appalled, prayed on the spot for some bad luck to offset this dangerous amount of good fortune. He supposedly threw his hat in the river to help things along.

Barack Obama has had the kind of luck that would make Philip of Macedon throw away more than just his hat. Young, charismatic, brilliant, and rewarded for it, he rocketed to stardom after his awe-inspiring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, rose to the Senate (after his strongest opponents were undone by personal scandals) in a historically large victory, is crushing everything in his wake in his current Presidential campaign, he's solid in his personal life--he hasn't even had a major screwup, like when Bill Clinton lost his reelection campaign as governor of Arkansas in 1980.

This, for god's sake, is even more dangerous than the life trajectory George W. Bush.

George W. Bush has had no luck at all, and I mean that in the technical sense; if you read about his early career, his connections and money loom large. As befits a conservative, he lives in a world where money and power talk. It's a predictable, logical world--provided, of course, you're not dumb enough to start a two-front land war in Asia. Ahem.

But Barack Obama is a child of destiny. And as the ancient Greeks knew, destiny is cruelest to the ones that seem most favored.

I hope, I hope, I hope--audaciously as the case may be--that I am wrong. Or at least that Miss Destiny waits until it no longer matters to anyone but her and her beloved.

So okay. I put my slippers on, threw my coat over my robe and ventured out the front door.

It was about twenty after nine at night. The lights made all the ice glow against the black. The snow, watercolor-darkened, still sparkled in the artificial suns.

Was that what he'd brought me out to see? The winter night?

He turned me around and pointed me up, through the blackened branches of the highest tree.

The moon was turning red.

My father and I saw a red moon once. Years ago. We were driving home from somewhere and pulled into a parking lot to get out of the car and look at it. I was young; I remember singing to it, and feeling like I would somehow understand it better if I were a deer.

He'd called me this afternoon. Funny.

My husband said "It's a lunar eclipse. And there's going to be a full solar in August."

"Really!"

"Yeah."

His face was spanking-red with cold. We were on our way down to -15. I said, "You gonna stay out here?"

He laughed and shook his head.

My father's red moon had been warm.

"Let's go," my husband said, and we crunched our way back up the driveway and down the walk, brushing the ice-fingers of the bushes and trees. They made a 'crinkle' sound, the music of a crippled bell.

The silence of the cold became an echo.

I read Lori Gottlieb's paean to settling and was honestly not sure what to think.

Gottlieb is single and regretting it. Basically, she feels like she should have married one of the okay-but-lackluster guys she dated in her youth because now she's middle-aged and faced with "damaged goods." She imagines that she would have been content with one of those guys who were mostly fine but for whom she was "just not feeling it."

There are so many ways to slice this--and it's such an important topic for women (at least for this woman; my marriage is a huge part of my life, YMMV)--that I'm going to gnaw on it like a dog over the next couple of posts.

Gottlieb's article is a mishmash of several distinct strands. Today, we're going to deal with her assertion that you should marry that okay guy you don't love because, if you don't, you're going to regret it.

I disagree.

Not because of the lack of love. But because of the lack of The Moment.

In my experience and the experience of my friends, there comes a moment between you and the man you're destined to marry. An instance when you both realize that something bigger than the two of you is going on.

For my friend Louisa, it happened shortly after meeting "Rick." (I'm not sure that's a good pseudonym for Louisa's husband--a man I actually knew several years before I met her--but it's the first thing that popped into my mind and I decided to go with it.) She and Rick were at dinner with friends. She asked Rick if he wanted kids, and he looked her right in the eyes and said "YES." It was a "whoah" moment for Louisa. She never looked back.

For me, it was one night when my boyfriend and I were out to dinner and I realized I could eat. During those years, eating was an enormous hassle for me because I was so tight in my chest. Yet here I was, eating (because at last I was breathing) unselfconsciously and freely and comfortably. I knew that something major was happening.

An old TA partner of mine was dating this guy, and one morning in the office she started nodding her head like an old New Englander sitting on a porch. She said "Yep, I think he's the one."

Note how it was not "Well, he's not too bad, and after all, I'm staring at thirty." No. It was instinctive and nonrational: "I think he's the one." It had nothing to do with love. It had nothing to do with any of this guy's objective qualities, about which Gottlieb keeps going back and forth in her article as if they were the deciding factor. It was something deeper; it was instinct.

Gottlieb's account of her dating life is completely devoid of any moments like these.

That red-flags me. It makes me feel that, as difficult as her path has been, she was right to turn down all those men she turned down.

In my opinion, and as always YMMV, there really does have to be A Moment. There's nothing romantic or idealistic about it. It's real.

(ED.: And lord knows a lot can still go wrong. It's not the end of the story. It's the beginning.)

I enjoy reading Mistress Matisse's Journal, the blog of a Seattle writer and dominatrix. Today, she's got two responses to Lori Gottlieb, one on her blog and the other in her column (to which she links).

Very different from mine. She's mad and she's got a right to be, because she did what Gottlieb advises--married someone just because she was afraid of being alone. She lived to tell the tale, but doesn't want anyone following in her footsteps.

Matisse's anger made me think, actually. I hadn't noticed this--there is so much to notice and argue with in Gottlieb's piece--but Gottlieb actually pretty much tars all marriages with the "settling" brush. "How sad, they settled." She seems to see the world as being divided into boring people who marry and their tragically brave hipster sisters who hold out for more, except then they end up alone, so they should have gritted their teeth and submitted to boredom like their duller but smarter sisters.

This is what sucks about being on the more gentle/receptive/submissive side of the rainbow, at least for me personally--I can absorb an insult (as opposed to a threat, to which I am hypersensitive) and start patiently working the argument towards broader horizons on the heart and the instincts, when I should have noticed I was being kicked and said something. See? Look at me, I'm still not saying something. Not directly.

But Matisse did, so check it out.

My second response to Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him!", which advises women to marry men just to keep from being alone.

Gottlieb and I are polar opposites: she has never been married; I have never lived on my own.

She'd probably tell me, therefore, that I don't understand how grievously it can suck to live alone. So how can I object to her advice that a woman should marry Mr. I Guess He'd Be Okay?

All I can say is: she does not understand what it means to be married. There's nowhere to hide. When you go into your most secret room, your bed, your naked place, he's there. As you dream, he's there. When you open your eyes, he's there. Have I scared you yet? Good.

Gottlieb feels that she got in trouble by being overly idealistic about marriage. But her vision of settling is actually far more idealistic than her vision of Romantic Wedlock. She seems to think she can marry someone--anyone--and he will proceed to become living furniture to hold down part of the bed, keep her warm on the couch watching TV, take care of some errands on cold nights, and bring in some money so she can cut back her hours at work. End of story.

Yeah right.

In actual reality, husbands come factory-equipped with personalities and ideas of their own about how to live. Boredom is the least of a married couple's potential problems. Gottlieb claims to have heard her share of bitching from her married friends--she must realize it's non-trivial to interface one of these creatures into your life. (Not to mention potentially dangerous. See above.)

She says "Having a teammate, even if he's not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all."

Only if he's on your side. Not all teammates are. Some of them turn out to be quite the opposite.

I know someone who is married to her mortal enemy, someone who spends her money and denies it, brings her donuts when she's dieting, calls her fat when she's not, isn't there when she needs him, and is ALWAYS there when she doesn't. This state of affairs developed gradually, subtly, year by year. My friend did not see it coming. She's not even clear what's really going on. She makes excuses for him: "He had a bad childhood." (And he did.) She keeps telling me, "But in a lot of ways, our marriage actually works really well." Why? They like to talk about their favorite TV shows.

Nothing is going on here that is outside the bounds of a 'normal' marriage, yet it is hell.

Is death by a thousand cuts any way to live?

When you're alone, at least they're self-inflicted.

Gottlieb writes:

"As your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called 'deal-breakers' change."

As your priorities change.

From romance to family.

She hasn't interrogated her own wording closely enough there. It tells the whole story, if you know how to read it.

There are women, and I'm one of them, for whom THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE between romance and family. They come fused.

It's not like my boyfriend and I intended, for example, to start talking about kids on our third goddamn date. But it happened. Shocked the hell out of us, actually. But, wide-eyed and a little scared, we went with it. (We called them "the hypotheticals," just to make it less freaky.)

Gottlieb does not appear to have had such a moment. She doesn't say "There was this freckly guy with dancing eyes** and I had the strangest thought when I looked at him, I thought 'I will have strong children with him,' but then I pushed it away. And now I realize that I shouldn't have." The article is not about the still small voice. In fact, the absence of that voice screams louder than Metallica having a play-off with Megadeth. With the laboriousness of someone flying by instruments rather than radar, Gottlieb says "I didn't fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship."

See, there it is again--that split. "What makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship" (which is clearly what she wanted because it's what she kept pursuing).

She adds, with garbled insight, "Once you're married, it's not about whom you want to go on vacation with, it's about whom you want to run a household with."

But Ms. Gottlieb. Many women use romance, or more precisely dating, to test marriageability. They use vacation to test household-running. You watch how the two of you work the travel, the check-in, the what-do-we-do-first, the where-do-we-eat, the inevitable emergency illness. Is he kind? Do you laugh through it all? Do the tasks seem to fall out naturally?

If you're not noticing all these things automatically, and in terms of what they mean for the "very small, mundane and often boring nonprofit business" that is your potential future life (a great description by the way), then

MAYBE YOU'RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE.

For example. When Gottlieb says something like "It's hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who's changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook," I honestly don't know what she's talking about. Really. What--you get bored with a person if you have to talk about a boring subject? You lose interest any time you're not bungee jumping off of Kilimanjaro?

Well, maybe so! So then maybe what you want out of life is to have your companionship always spiced by safari or shibari. But then you don't want a partner. You want playmates. You need to be clear about this.

And you can't have it both ways.

So Gottlieb wasn't wrong. She made the right choices for her. But apparently she didn't understand where those choices were leading her. So now, she says, she wishes she had seen things differently.

But that's like wishing that the rain didn't fall.

She lays the blame on false consciousness: "we grew up idealizing marriage...if we'd had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently."

I doubt it. The heart can only see what it sees.

People want different things. They don't have a choice about what their heart is looking for, any more than I have a choice in what I write about. What Gottlieb is really saying is that if she'd known that her restlessness would leave her single near forty, she would have fought her heart.

But fighting your heart is the only thing on earth worse than giving in to it.

As one of her friends said, "Either way, I was screwed."

Yep. We all are. As the battlescarred Anne Lamott put it, "We are all terminal on this bus."

#

**In fact, there's nothing that complimentary towards any man anywhere in her whole article. There's no evidence that she even so much as liked any of the men she's dated. They were apparently all defective in some way: "[he] doesn't delight in the small things in life," "he was rude to the waiter," "one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn't seem emotionally stable enough, and another's values clashed with mine." "Sweet but so boring." "A half-note off." She describes feeling "a cold shiver down [her] spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy."

You can look at this as mean and entitled and stuck-up and cruel. You can look at it as ass-covering. "It's not me, it's them--they just weren't good enough!"

Me, I just get such a strong and horrible feeling that Gottlieb is a human being who can't feel joy.

I accidentally dropped my kid's clean clothes into the wash and, 15 minutes before she had to leave for school, she had nothing to wear.

While she was running around trying to find something anyhow, I turned my attention to getting dinner into the slow cooker. (Dumping the wrong armful of clothes into the laundry had put me behind schedule, you see.)

So I took the lid off the slow-cooker, unwrapped the meat, picked it up, and...saw that the tip of it had gone bad and I was going to have to cut it off. This being a bit problematic because I hadn't gotten out a cutting board or anything, had no other place to put the meat, and did not want to just shift it to one hand and use my other raw-meat-imprinted one to open the cabinet and reach in for the board.

But there was no one to help me, my husband being outside trying to fix the windshield wipers on his car. Which, he had discovered ten minutes earlier, were broken.

What did I have to work with? Well, I had the meat tray, which was flapping bloody plastic wrap and broken in one place. Okay, better than nothing. I retrieved it from the garbage and slid it gingerly onto the counter not quite far enough for the bloody plastic wrap to touch anything. Set the roast in, grabbed our good knife (the one that's actually sharp) and...no. Could not cut the tip off.

This rattled me. It should have been easy. But there was gristle everywhere and the knife couldn't seem to get through it.

My husband stuck his head in the door. "I'm not done with the windshield. You have to take [child] to school."

Argh! No! Now I had no more time! Now I had to grab my keys and get her in my car in the next two minutes or we'd be late.

Even more rattled than before, I got stupider. The question "What am I going to do?" took on the sinister invincibility of the military-industrial complex.

But look! There's that big microwave bowl, sitting on the counter! I can stuff the roast in there and kind of get its end down flat and THEN I can hack off the tip totally immediately and run for the car.

Yeah, no. Gristle everywhere, and the knife kept glancing off it instead of slicing through it.

Maturely and with Zenlike calm, I expressed my cosmic acceptance of this turn of events by flinging the uncooperative roast right in the trash. That'll teach it to not let me cut it in a bowl!

(Folks, remember that I'm a professional. Do not attempt this level of self-indulgence at home.)

Husband again, in the doorway. "When you get back, we have to go to the auto-repair shop."

Daughter: "MOM!! I don't have any socks EITHER!!"

#

It went on from there, you know. One of us cried. One of us fell on the ice. One of us, seven minutes before a freelance interview, discovered that her headset was missing.

And there's going to be snow. Did you know that? We don't need more, in case you were wondering. But we're going to get it.

I gotta go buy some dinner for tonight. See you later.

The sucky thing about being young and naive is that you're young and naive. So when my parents decided to send me to an all-girl high school, I did not understand what the consequences were going to be.

After slogging through four years of it, however, I was ready when my folks came to me with a plan to extend my female utopia another four years into the future.

NO!!

They blinked at me in puzzlement.

NO!! I repeated.

Wellesley! Bryn Mawr! Vassar! protested my parents, with such hope in their eyes.

I folded my arms. WHY do you want me to go to another girl's school?

You'll do better at math and science!

Yeah, which was why I spent the past four years struggling titanically to barely achieve a D in those subjects. The lack of surrounding penises didn't help me then; why do you think it's going to help me now?

They responded to this by putting me in the car and driving me to the Wellesley campus so I could live out their dream. We toured bright buildings with a super-cheerful guide. My parents asked her to demonstrate how she did Much Better at Math and Science here at Wellesley. She took us to a lab (lots of multicolored pipes) and talked about electrons "holding hands." That was to show how these Wellesley profs really knew how to explain chemistry to us girls.

I folded my arms. "How am I going to meet guys?"

The super-cheerful tour guide enthused, "You can get on a train to Boston!"

My parents nodded at me. "See? You can get on a train to Boston!"

First of all, had I matriculated at Wellesley and proceeded to get on a train to Boston, my mother would have promptly freaked at the thought of me venturing like a doe into the concrete forest in order to talk to male strangers. And she was the sensible one. My dad would have actually driven up there to stop me.

But there was no danger of this, because I was in far too great a need for psychoactive drugs at that point in my life. I lived in a colorless fog. There was no way I could web my way clear enough to get a schedule, buy a ticket, and talk to ANYBODY, whether male or a stranger or not. My parents knew this perfectly well. They knew, as I did, that I wasn't going anywhere. They knew that if I was going to meet men, the men had to be there. In my classes. In my dining hall. In my student union. On my floor.

Standing on that well-manicured green, I remember debating whether to tell them that if I continued to be cut off from men, I was not going to let that stop me from dating. I'd waited four long years. I wanted a boyfriend, dammit, and if I had to take one with breasts, then what...EVER. You have to start somewhere.

I thought it over and decided that, on this particular issue, mulish stubbornness was the better part of valor.

NO!!

But...

NO!!

But...

NO!!

They didn't give up easy. I had to visit Smith. I had to visit Bryn Mawr. It almost wore me down. I started thinking: I've lived without men for four years. What difference does it make anyhow? Like I'd even find a boyfriend, male or female. I didn't have any friends! What made me think I was going to manage a date? And what did it matter anyhow?

This heady mix of confidence and assertiveness would serve me well in the upcoming years, leading me, for example, into a stint at graduate school that I never wanted and that turned out exceptionally badly. Yes, hopeless resignation has been just one of the many gifts of depression in my life.

Hope, though, is bad in my opinion. Worse than bad. It's crack. I hate it and have no use for it. I have found that determination, bloody and silent and fuck-all, works better. It gets you through.

Sometimes it even saves you.

NO.

NO.

NO.

#

My hopeless-resignation voice was right though. I never did find a date.

Instead, I met the man who would become my husband and never looked back.

she told me.

The sun is bold and insistent this morning. It's pushing through the tiny holes in the curtain weave with greater ruthlessness and determination than we've seen in a while. It will win, it tells us, over the cold. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.

It will be burning spring.

But actually just as shocking?

Stumbling to your computer at this hour, hitting all your daily sites and blogs, and discovering that Mistress Matisse has not only pointed people to your site, but done it with teh love ("she's a good writer on any subject, so check her out").

Wow.

Thank you, Matisse--and likewise.

As it happens, actually, I've been thinking deeply about Matisse's post from yesterday. It starts out by answering a reader question which justifiably freaks her right the hell out but then morphs into a memory which fruitfully tangles the lines between what we think of as masochism and what we think of as aggression. And what we think we know about how those things are connected in ourselves and others. Food for thought.

Anyhow--thanks again to Matisse and welcome to any of her readers who stop by.

WARNING: Parts of this post may be triggering.

I've never had an eating disorder. That is, there are times in my life when I've eaten very little, but not because I cared or even knew about the size of my body. My fellow women may not be able to believe this, but I was way too preoccupied with panic-level anxiety about breathing, swallowing, relaxing my vigilance sufficiently to go to sleep, and the fact that I even existed, to be able to notice something as completely irrelevant as what I looked like.

I didn't eat because I couldn't, because chewing and swallowing aggravated my wheezing so badly. I usually wasn't aware of feeling hunger anyhow. To the contrary, I felt constantly nauseous, which made me avoid food even more. Yeah, I know...that was the hunger. I honestly did not realize that at the time.

But even though I had difficulty eating, I did not have difficulty with food. When I looked at a milkshake, I did not think "calories!", I thought "damn, I hope I can breathe well enough to get that thing down, because YUM." When I looked at the plates of bacon, eggs, toast and danish my father made me (among the few meals which tempted me enough to make the effort), I thought "oh HELL yum!!!" I know what it's like to look at food and see only pleasure, and that is a mighty, mighty gift. I wish and hope the same for everyone.

In fact, I once got way up in someone's grill when they were dumb enough to state in front of me that they wanted to eat less food. It was at the Omega Institute, and this healthy, vibrant-looking, but extremely somber and solemn woman had just announced that she was embarking on a deliberate plan to--and she used these words--"eat less food." It appeared to be some kind of ethical matter on her part.

To my own shock, because as a rule I do not do things like this, I took two steps towards her and angrily demanded "WHY would you want to do that?"

She had not expected to be confronted in such a touchy-feely, granola-y place, and stood in shock. I wonder what she made of me--a pale sticks-and-bones apparition who quite obviously lived where she wanted to go, but was trying to chase her away.

I hope I did.