not that it’s ever been hidden, but it came out recently that, absolutely opposite of my partner, i don’t set goals, i’m not a ‘goal guy.’ i just don’t think in those terms, in large part because my anxieties keep me so firmly in the present. when i do stray from that focus, it’s either because i’m fretting about something specific coming up that i’m afraid i can’t handle, or obsessively poring over some episode in which i’m sure that i failed to perform adequately.

that being said, lately i’ve had a goal i’m working towards: i’ve been very determined to stop ripping hairs out of my nose. this is important, possibly, and i want to make the change.

when i worked as a writing tutor, i frequently worked with students who had my partner as their teacher, as she was a lecturer. she mostly taught freshman composition, classes that accounted for the majority of students coming to the writing center looking for help. this was before we shared a last name, but occasionally one of her students would figure out that we were a couple, and some of them were really pleased by this, thinking that getting help from me was some kind of magic ticket to a good grade. to be fair, we have very similar (and at the time almost identical) philosophies about writing, so it really was useful to talk to me, because my assistance really accurately reflected her concerns and goals for her students, which is not necessarily the case for all writing teachers (since writing is a subjective, idiosyncratic thing). it wasn’t a secret cheat code, but it was useful.

there was this one kid, in particular, who, once he discovered this connection, would only work with me. that’s not a weird thing, as students will often pick a specific tutor who they feel understands them and whose advice makes sense to them more than the others (i always think of it like how you need to find the right therapist for you, the one that you just click with), but i never got the sense that, for him, that’s what was going on. sometimes, i wasn’t even sure if he was listening to what i said, let alone appreciating it. his motivation was based entirely on the connection between me and his instructor. he seemed to believe that simply talking to me regularly, regardless of any effect it may or may not have on his writing, would ensure him of an A. my partner would tell me how he was constantly letting her know when and for how long we were meeting, as though this was her goal for the class, to provide me with conversational partners. we both tried to remind him, gently, that simply meeting with me (or my partner or anyone else) does not guarantee a good grade. it’s useful, and it is likely to improve the grade you end up with, because the meetings are intended to help develop the writing and make it stronger, but just the meeting itself doesn’t affect the grade. students often operate under this strange assumption (and i suppose, considering the confusing demands the class makes on them, it’s not surprising, since this is a concrete task that can be accomplished, as simple as checking a box), and sometimes they even insist that it should positively affect their grade, because it is evidence of effort. this dude assured us both that he wasn’t working that angle, and that he understood where his grade was coming from and how to use his meetings with  me, but he also really seemed like he thought the meetings were the whole point.

also, my dude had crazy, out of control nose hair. this was an eighteen year-old kid, and he had hair shooting out of his nose like an blind old man who was a shut-in and also had no access to grooming implements. i couldn’t believe he never heard it rustling when he breathed, it was so much hair. there was so much of it, i wondered if the hair made it hard to breathe through his nose, actually. it was just beyond my capacity to imagine that he somehow didn’t notice it. but, at the same time, it seemed insane to think that he did notice it and then chose not to do anything about it. it interfered with our tutoring sessions, actually, because i couldn’t stop staring at it and thinking about it and focus on the essay in front of us. i can still see it clearly in my mind. it haunts me.

the most consequential effect it had on me, though, was behavioral. after meeting this guy and seeing his nose hair, i became obsessed with my own. i began monitoring it closely, checking every few days to see if there was anything amiss, if any stray hairs had escaped past the threshold of my nostril, becoming visible (and therefore, objectionable). when i first did this, i was shocked to find that there were a few hairs that, while not super noticeable, had clearly spilled out and become visible if someone was unfortunate enough to have to look closely at my face. in addition, there were multiple hairs that, when i looked closely, seemed to be threatening to make a break for it. i plucked all of these hairs with a pair of tweezers, feeling very satisfied by the sharp pain that followed each removal. i also noticed several hairs coming out of my ears that received the same treatment. in fact, the ear hair was even more alarming, because while it was less noticeable (it was all so light as to be invisible), some of them were long, to the point where one was able to be removed by wrapping it around my index finger and pulling it out without use of the tweezers. gross.

i became hyper-vigilant about this. maybe it’s just me (i am a pretty hairy dude, unfortunately), but nose hair is relentless. it just keeps coming and coming, so i have to be constantly on top of it. (this is a fucking dumb thing to say, though; i mean, that’s what hair does, it grows.) i would groom my ear and nose hair at least twice a week, somehow always missing at least one or two hairs that, once i noticed them, were long enough that i couldn’t believe that i had missed them. (to be fair this is more common with the ear hair, which is much lighter and easy to miss.) i even became more aggressive; after accidentally ripping out a long, dark hair from deep inside my nose, i began moving further beyond the immediate entrance and just started clearing more and more space. my partner is used to me getting sneezing fits from pulling hair from my nose.

however, the more i moved towards tearing out all the hair in my nose, rather than just the ones that had noticeably exposed themselves outside my nose, the more i started to worry. should i be pulling out all this nose hair? isn’t it there for a purpose? doesn’t it like catch bacteria or something? am i hurting myself, leaving myself unprotected by tearing out my body’s natural defenses?

this is a really easy question to answer, in the age of the easily accessible internet, but i put off finding the answer, simply because i like pulling these hairs. the pain is immensely satisfying, and i enjoy it. i even like the sneezing fits, to a point. i suppose it’s a bit of an obsessive-compulsive thing, but i didn’t want to give up the practice.

but i finally did look, and my suspicion was true. we need nose hair, it performs a valuable function, unsightly as it may be. (i also found, looking at various search results, that it might be good for them to let kids eat boogers.) now my mission is to stop this practice i enjoy so much. i’ll still tear out hairs that i find that are growing out of my nose and becoming visible, but my main mode of upkeep now will be some tiny scissors to trim, instead of remove, my nose hair. it’s disappointing, but i’ll just focus all that energy on my ears. to be honest, in some ways the ears were always more satisfying, because there’s less hair period, not to mention less noticeably overgrown hair, so when i do find one and tear it out it’s more satisfying, because it’s more rare, and therefore more special.

this has been a story, and it’s been about real life. have you felt a connection, a shared humanity? i’ve done my part. this has been interesting.

here’s this, as well: one time, on a crowded bus in Chicago near the United Center, a teenage girl loudly asked me if she could braid the hair on my arm. she and her friends laughed, and i was so humiliated that i wanted to cry.

when I was first getting to know my partner, before we were ‘together,’ I remember having a conversation with her that was really important (for me, at least). I remember we were talking about friends, and we both expressed the feeling we’ve always had that, in any friendship we were part of, that we were always the ones who were, clearly and demonstrably, the one in the relationship who was more invested. We felt that it was always us who cared more than the other person, that we were consistently— exclusively, in fact —the one who would put themselves out and keep the friendship going. It was almost, sometimes, like the other person didn’t even care if they had our friendship or not, that it was an entirely one-sided situation where we valued them without any kind of reciprocity.

on the one hand, this is a highly suspect characterization coming from both of us, since we’re both mad neurotic anxious fucking basketcases, but it still felt, to me, significant, since I’d never met anyone else who had this feeling strongly enough to name it and articulate it. I don’t assign any importance to these kinds of coincidences, but still, it felt like we were kindred spirits in this way, and I liked it. So when we ended up getting together, I remembered this discussion, and I hoped that we could both make sure that we never made the other person feel like they were holding up and maintaining the whole relationship in that way. Because we had both experienced being in the other end of that feeling, hopefully we wouldn’t inflict it on each other. of course, however, that’s not how human relationships work, so one of us did. I think. I’m not sure, because I think it’s me. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Obviously, this is not something that I did (and continue to do, I’m afraid) on purpose, but that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I am afraid I have given my partner the impression that I’m not as into her as she is into me.

Part of the issue is that, naturally, a person will not maintain the same intensity of feeling (or, more to the point, intensity of performance of feeling) at all times. We have been together for almost fifteen years, so there’s going to be ebbs and flows in that time. If I’m being honest, I am bored of her occasionally, as I’m sure she is of me sometimes. I consider what my life would look like without her (sometimes in really specific ways), as I’m sure she does too. I don’t feel like these things are uncommon or cause for alarm, and they don’t worry me.

what does worry me, though, is how these natural consequences of time and familiarity combine with what I will very charitably characterize as my natural impulse toward ‘aloofness,’ because I worry that it sends the message (and maybe even sends it strongly) that I’m no longer engaged in our relationship or that I’m no longer stimulated by her. This is not the case, but it would, I think, be easy to understand it that way. Consider the facts:

• I am not sentimental. In fact, I am aggressively unsentimental. This means that I don’t attach any importance to things like birthdays or anniversaries. This is not to say I ignore them, but I treat them more as excuses to give gifts.
• I’m suspiciously and hostile to rituals and symbolism, so that’s out, as well. We engage in these things solely to satisfy my partner, and she knows this.
• I’m deeply cynical and pessimistic. The only outcomes I can ever imagine are bleak, and I assume the worst of everyone, including and especially myself.

couple these traits, which lead me to dismiss any and everything that’s conventionally romantic, with the corroding/deafening effects of time, and I think that it is highly likely that I probably give the impression to my partner that she’s way more into our relationship than I am.

She’s openly affectionate and regularly tells me that she loves me for lots of specific reasons. She asks for affection. I do none of that, because it’s just not me. I react like an abused dog when someone looks like they’re going to try to touch me, and I’m not comfortable with saying that I love her, because it feels false. (In my reasoning, you show that through your actions, and focusing on communicating it verbally or other dedicated gestures is a way excuse not being reliable/supportive/attentive in more consistent, concrete ways.) I am working on this, because I want to give her what she needs, but it’s hard.

Also, as a symptom of my pessimism and cynicism, I almost never talk about our relationship with any kind of forward-looking anticipation, beyond some negative, dark jokes about why we’ll eventually split. Again, it’s not a commentary on my investment in the relationship, but I imagine it’s very easy to take it that way.

one of the worst things about me is my all-encompassing aversion to sincerity, and I’m afraid that it might be causing my partner to have the impression that I don’t care about her like she cares about me. This is not true, and while I do remain somewhat convinced that something I do or fail to do will be the cause of the inevitable demise of our relationship, I really don’t want it to be for this reason. It’s not accurate, and it would be the worst ever if we split because I am unable to communicate clearly to her that I’m as into her as she’s into me.

I actually am getting much, much better at telling these kinds of things to others, and I feel great about it when I do it, so it’s even more frustrating when I can’t do the same for my partner. It shouldn’t be like that. It’s perverse.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, actually. This isn’t any of your business. 🤨

I have read two excellent workshop pieces from my classmates this weekend. They are both fiction pieces; not my genre, and yet I am jealous. I want to have written them. The one, a surreal, funny story about stunted, frustrated young adulthood, and the other a vivid story about an adolescent girl that revolves around horrific violence visited on an animal. The first one, though it is far from fully realized, is weird and compelling and I could probably read it all day, regardless of whether it ultimately has a point or not. The second one is beautiful, and it made me feel sick it upset me so much. It was amazing, and I never want to read it again. Both authors are wonderful writers. techniques dripping from their butt cheeks.

These are not the kinds of things I write, not the kinds of things I have interest in writing. But I am jealous. I want them to be the kinds of things I write, though I also want to continue writing the kinds of things I do write. I want to write all the kinds of things. I want to see all of it, understand everything from every perspective. I don’t want to leave anything for anyone else. I want everything anyone says or thinks to be, technically, a rip-off of my shit. I wouldn’t need anyone to know, I don’t even need to do anything with all of it. I just want to see what everyone else sees, understand the world the way they do.

It sounds exhausting, but what else is there? I’m not doing anything else, anyway. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I have lurked on lots of internet message boards, so I’ve seen seen much more than my share of internet jerkoffs. I’ve seen guys (and it’s always guys— at least the ones I choose to pay most attention to, anyway) making asses of themselves in so very many baffling (to me), pointless (to me) ways, just choosing the most ridiculous (to me) hills to die on; many of them would probably embrace that dumbass military metaphor for their virtual, textual crusades.

For example: this guy who was militant in his belief that you should never edit a message after you hit the ‘Submit’ button. He would call other posters out on their edits, shaming them for going back and making adjustments. Not like they had altered the content or anything like that— everyone hates it when people go back and change their post to say something different after they are taken to task for its content —but rather just to clean up language or add an extra sentence, or even just to fix a typo. He’d chastise them— if they were dudes —for being so uptight and concerned with how they came across. His argument was that you should just let it rip, at all times, because going back and editing is a sign of weakness. That’s a paraphrase, but it accurately communicates his philosophy of posting written messages on the internet. Don’t think, just post, and damn the consequences~! He described this practice as ‘running and gunning,’ like posting on a message board is a competitive sport. You just gotta leave it all out there on the field/court/whatever. Like it’s a sign of weakness to edit yourself, because, I guess, it betrays some kind of lack of, like, confidence in your own abilities. Own everything you say, be proud of mistakes or moments where you lack clarity or fail to make your ideas clear to others, because to worry about helping others understand your intended meaning is a bitch move.

As it happened, I actually was a contributing member to the community where this dude posted, and, in a stupid fit of pique, I decided to challenge him one day on some other nonsense he was talking. His response to my challenge was mostly dismissive, saying something about how I was a good poster, but I was also a ‘sensitive AIDSfag’ who needed to stop being such a pussy. Again, I took the bait and kept going back and forth with him, proudly proclaiming that I had edited my previous post (“TWICE!”). At this point, I was pretty irritated with myself, because the exchange reminded me why I usually never participate in any online communities. I was stuck between the intense desire to show how stupid this guy is, and the understanding that that desire— the desire to ‘win’ a conversational exchange, in any context —is fucking stupid. But I had jumped into this, and now I felt trapped: I had embraced his goofy fucking posting-on-the-internet-as-a-display-of-masculine-dominance approach, and I couldn’t deny that I was fucking feeling it. Regardless of what I understood intellectually about the situation, or how much I hated myself for it, I couldn’t back down, because I needed people to see me take this chud down. There was some perfect thing I could say, some devastating reply that would leave this goofus speechless and probably drive hm from the community and force him to reconsider his entire worldview. Someone had to take out the garbage, and it might as well be me. I knew that this was all bullshit, but I imagined all the praise, all the virtual high-fives I’d receive (and humbly reject, of course) for my service, and I knew I wouldn’t stop. Fortunately, he must have thought that my little bitch-ass wasn’t worth his time, because he didn’t respond to my taunt, allowing us both to preserve what little dignity we both had left.

Anyway, I absolutely glory in the fact that the internet allows us to edit ourselves, to go back and make our pointless, dumbass missives as perfectly crafted as possible, even after we’ve hit the button and shit them out into the vast, virtual world for no one else besides us (and, possibly, a self-selecting group of jerks who are only pretending to pay attention, so that we will pretend to pay attention to their crap) to ever read or care about. I wish I could go back and edit every single interaction, real and virtual, that I’ve ever had in my whole useless life. I would lose myself in these edits, and that would be the end of me in the sense of any kind of forward motion in my life, and I would not feel one bit of regret. I would go back and try to fix it all, and my goal would be to make it perfect, no matter how many times I had to redo things. I would listen and pay attention until I understood exactly what other people were saying, what they meant, and I would revise and revise and revise my own words, expressions, thoughts, until they understood me. I wouldn’t care that this is an impossible thing to achieve. I would keep revising forever; the thrill of the impossible— of actually understanding and being understood —somehow within my reach.

*EDIT TO ADD:

(‘rapturous’ review of The Black Notebooks, by Toi Derricotte, not using the letter ‘a’)

Toi Derricotte is not here to comfort you. She is not here to tell you everything will be alright. She’s here to be honest, even when it’s ugly. Chiefly when it’s ugly. Derricotte’s nonfiction Notebooks is profoundly compelling. It unflinchingly explores the writer’s own insecurity concerning her ethnicity, consistently pushing beyond simple, comforting ‘truths’ to focusing on the conflicts, the complexities dwelling behind the disguises we put on to get through life while pretending ‘everything is fine.’ Derricotte is not, indeed, the first writer to notice how not fine she/we are, but she distinguishes herself by her commitment to exhuming the deepest, most troubling consequences of our obsession with ethnicity, forcing us to confront its distorting effects.

This book is not for everyone, to be sure, which Derricotte herself notes in the course of the book. Those looking for simple, comforting solutions will be foiled, since Derricotte pointedly, purposefully refuses to provide them, choosing to wrestle with thornier, more explosive (or implosive, considering the work’s focus on interiority) concerns. But those who find themselves touched by her difficult, uncompromising ‘interior journey’ will be forever indebted to Derricotte for her honesty, her insight, her generosity. I recommend it highly. You might not like it, but if you don’t then it’s you, not her. Her book is very, very good.

(this review is true, bt-dubs. the book is recommended in the strongest possible terms.)

Instructions for Observing a Tradition

1.) Consider the origins of the tradition/its larger significance.

Traditions gain their power from what they symbolize, not just simple habit. For example, the tradition of fireworks displays on the 4^th of July has its roots in, like, war, probably. They remind us that we like seeing things explode, and this shared enthusiasm ties us together as Americans.

2.) Learn about your past, your shared heritage.

While taking care not to let it get in the way of enjoyment, this is a good opportunity to learn about people who are dead and things they might or might not have done. These facts(?) can help you understand who you’re supposed to be and what should be important to you.

3.) Remember, it’s not about spending money.

Traditions are not occasions for ostentatious celebrations of material wealth (except Christmas, probably). They are opportunities to strengthen communal bonds, and the most appropriate gifts you can bring are your good will and alcohol.

4.) Maintain respect.

More sober reflection. Even if the tradition is based on profound disrespect for others, pretend it isn’t. Try not to behave in an ethnic manner.

5.) Use the opportunity to embrace your emotions.

Worry about consequences another day.

6.) However big or small, traditions are always about connecting with others, so don’t isolate yourself.

Celebrate with others. And if you have a ‘personal tradition,’ that’s okay, but technically, it can’t be defined as a ‘tradition,’ so you have to find another name for it. It doesn’t matter what, call it anything you want, just not ‘tradition.’ The goal here is to be part of a community, whatever it takes.

7.) Finally, don’t forget to HAVE FUN~!