New Year's Resolution

1.  Wear more lipstick

Life Lessons from Kim Deal (excerpt from a 2008 interview in SPIN)

SPIN: You were married when you started in the Pixies, and you were credited as Mrs. John Murphy. Do you ever regret not having that simple, domestic suburban life?

Kim Deal: Why do you torture me? [Pretends to weep] Yes, I'm lonely. Yes, I'm single. And yes, I'm childless. What more do you want? Yeah, of course. But I can't do anything about it. I was married briefly to a nice guy, but he wouldn't quit dating. Awkward.

S:But you bounced back — you were in relationships after that.

KD: Not a whole lot. I was busy. I read this article on a plane, in, like, Newsweek, about women breaking through the glass ceiling in business. It was an editorial where she was saying, "I have regrets, and one is that I waited so long and I'm now childless." It reminds me of a Roy Lichtenstein shirt: "Oh my God, I forgot to have a baby!" Well, I was in my early 30s when I read this, and I thought, "Note to self: Got it. Won't let that happen." And here I am.

S: Was it hard to slow down?

KD: No, I felt like I was available. I don't know. Maybe it's because I look like a guy — it's true! You know, they like girly-girl people, for real, and I can't — I'm just like, whatever, friend zone is cool.

S: Does that bother you? Looking back, would you have done anything different?

KD: It used to. Now it's just too damn late. But in the late '90s, it was really bothering me. I was using a lot of drugs. You know, I think I was available, but maybe I wasn't. Obviously. But I'm really jealous that guys making the same career decisions I made find themselves with children running around their house and a woman making them dinner: "Honey, no, you go work. You're an artist, that's what you do. You're a poet." Sometimes I think I need a wife.

Now for Something Completely Different

A coworker/friend asked me yesterday "Are you doing ok?"

The answer right now is "Maybe." It's been a strange kind of time. Funny how unexpected life can get and how something you didn't plan for, hell, could never have anticipated, fucks you up just enough to make you struggle some moments and go "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

It's been a kind of rough year for the residency. The recent event aside, which I haven't yet been able to think of in any way besides small flashes of memory and haven't been able to articulate in any appropriate way, there's been a lot. Tumult within the program, site reviews, faculty switches, medical catastrophes which again, I haven't wrapped my mind around just yet.

My mind perseverates on the little pieces though. Walking home today, I felt a thick melancholy around me. For a second, my body stopped and the greatest need was to lie down and cry. But I didn't. Because I can't.

Riding in the car with my family today, my dad told a story about how I had told him that I promised him I would go into medicine and how he had then told me that there was no one that I should promise that to but myself if I wanted it. In that moment, the part of me that is terrible, tells him that that is not true. I did not promise any of this to myself: the endless hours, the misery, the absolute lack of even basic decency I'm often confronted with. It's a revisionist history, one that gets to be written by the victor who gets to look from afar and say "Have I ever steered you wrong? Could you be any happier any other way than you are?"

These are questions I've yet to answer.

Why Haircuts are Sometimes Essential

Lying with my back pressed closely against him, he blows a strand of hair off my neck and with a finger sweeps my long hair over my shoulder. "What are you thinking?" he asks. I don't respond. My eyes shut tightly, hoping he'll think I've fallen asleep. He drapes his arm over me and kisses the back of my neck.

That was many years ago. It is a wonder to me still, the question: What are you thinking?

Another time, away from the feeling of my arched back against a certain frame, another formless shapeless man would say it differently: Why can't you let me know what you're thinking? Tenderness absent, he stares me down. I bite my lip, crying, and twist the knotted ends of my hair between my fingers. I look at him and do not respond.

I've since cut my hair short.

A Placeholder

I've been meaning to write something meaningful but I haven't quite formulated it. There are thoughts I've had lately: a slight sense of personal dread and a greater sense of the world falling apart. What do I do with this deep melancholy that creeps along the edges of lesser things?

Circling around the gyre. I will tell you soon when I have found the center. I will tell you soon if I fall apart.

Let's be meta and just like the likes though.

3rd year Residency's Eve

Today I had dinner with my sister and we talked about anxiety dreams. This must be a familial thing. Often I wake up with vague memories--faces melting, walking into a hysterectomy only to find all the laparoscopic tools have been replaced with kitchen sponges--ridiculous scenarios that bring an old familiar sense of dread.

Lately I've been having trouble sleeping. I sip rye whiskey and wait for sleep that never comes. There is a low level of anxiety that permeates my life, shapeless and misdirected.

Good job Dr. Frustrated.

I think I Broke OkCupid

Does anyone else use OkCupid to have long stupid one-sided internet arguments? It's like we're all ready dating but I don't even get dinner out of it. What I'm saying is I LIKE DINNER. 

Example below:

Some Dude: Its tough to tell, but I think you might be one of those cool women I'm always hearing about.

Me: Sorry buddy, that's not the compliment you think it is. 

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. 

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)” 
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

SD: That was quite a thought. 

SD: And I certainly can't argue, but it was kind of 1 dimensional assuming that your definition of a cool women (sic* as in "Grammar mistakes make me...") is the same as mine. I like women who can teach me something. Do you think you're cool?

Me: No, I don't think I'm cool. That's me though, I don't bank on cool. If I've made it this far in the big bad world it's on some modicum of skill, intelligence, and prevailing weirdness that makes me a little tougher. 

Admittedly, it is quite a thought and it popped up because it was in the book I was reading at the time. You're right in the respect that it is 1 dimensional. That's the point. Whether my definition of a "cool woman" is the same as yours is moot. The cool girl is a contrivance; she reflects all the things you want her to be and nothing of herself. It's a mirror to people's narcissism and lacks any true depth. Sadly, that ain't me. I'm not saying women don't do this too. For every man who wants a cool girl, there's a woman who wants a "strong and sensitive guy." What she is really saying, what all these reductive labels are saying, is "I need someone to boost my fragile ego." 

So no, I'm not cool. And I'm cool with that.

SD: I'm happy to catalyze your desire to put your thoughts on paper.

I CAN'T REPLY ANY MORE. YOU'RE A TOOL. I'M NOT CAPABLE OF TEACHING YOU NOT TO BE ONE.

YOU OWE ME DINNER.**

*Ok that was an editorial sic. Whoops.

**Please send dinner by express one day mail. Alternatively, I will accept payment towards a fancy meal of my choosing. However, at no point try to take me out. I will refuse. You are a tool.

It's funny (but not really)

It's funny how even equipped with expectation, simple things will set me reeling. What's worse than the classic tale, boy meets girl, girl understands the concept of futility, and when met with futility, girl loses it? Same story, same narrator. Where is the creative growth?

Then everything becomes less symbolic. The shadows cast are not some premonition of good or evil, just the gentle outline of the ordinary--the kitchen chair, a vase, a shoe in the foreground.  

Suddenly, life becomes real. The warm feeling in my belly, the strength I feel after several shots of gin, the mess in my apartment, my unwashed hair, a stack of unpaid bills, the unanswered message, the dryness in my mouth, my garbled half speech, my warbling sing-along voice. It's symptomatic. It's pathologic. 

When I was 16 and just a set of inexact words, I remember lying in bed half way across the world listening to the only album that mattered and mouthing the words, looking for some semblance of meaning. My mother yelling, my father crying for the only time I've seen him do so. I walked off into the world that I hoped would engulf me. And in all this, I am not thinking of what it is I am feeling but verb and tense.

Thinking back I was a mess: still reeling. The world set me off kilter. Towers crashing, smoking in alleyways, thinking things could only be better or worse from here on in. I sat in a counselor's chair trying to align it together. She smiled slightly, asked me if I ever thought about medication, asked me if i ever thought about dying. What is the human experience like for those who don't?

What could a 27 year old version of me say to a 16 year old version of me? Maybe there is no such thing as better or worse. I can cut my hair and brave through though. A man can tell me about growing up in a refugee camp, trim the ends and tell me, well, it wasn't nearly as bad as that. A child can play behind barbed wire as easily as he can on open astroturf. He tells me about growing orchids in his home these days. 

What can 27 year old me, who is beautiful and broken and aging and too wonderful and too awful, but likely just mediocre, say about anything? I'm just all these cheap rags and too much eyeliner, garbled words and inexact feelings. I haven't figured out a way to be right just less overtly wrong. 

What does 27 year old me have on 16 year old me except a sense of longing that is deeper? My father once told me growing up that a man can love a woman who is pretty and nods when he speaks but an intelligent woman would always want more. Or worse, because in truth, he doesn't tell me this but says it'll never be easy for me because I don't know how to do either. I am still reeling from this but sometimes I just want the warmth of someone pressed closely against me. 

In my apartment, I wish I could work or break or cry but I haven't found a way to do any of this.

Defining, not defined

So I've been sick as a dog this whole year. URI? Atypical pneumonia? SARS? Ebola? Unclear.

Plus it's my birthday. Birthdays are less fun when you are sick and working night float.

The only reason I thought to open this up was that it occurred to me that there are too many factors I've let dictate who I am but in fact, have nothing to do with me at all.

What am I talking about? Possibly too much NyQuil.