The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

         The omlette was dill, basil, cilantro, and had a big slab of BRIE in it. And texas toast so big I could only have 3 bites. My friend and I sat in a corner booth,  drank tea, and marvelled over how amazing our bodies are and what they can do for us. We’d just biked around Portsmouth, New Hampshire on a brilliant crisp fall day, and (almost by intuition) had found the Friendly Toast Café.

I had a bit to process about the party we’d been at the night before (if only because we were hung over as fuck). Though I had gotten some serious booty moves goin’ on, I couldn’t help but feel irritated because some guy (who goes to my school, actually, which is nice because I have now hung out socially with 3 people from my school) said that he thinks it’s great that "older" people are still partying (he’s 22). I about fell over, and he was like, ‘Well, no offense, but I don’t know a lot of 29 year olds that party down.’ And the conversation just really grated on me for some reason, even though I know that 29 perhaps sounds really old to someone who is 22.  And that would have been fine if it would have stopped right there; I can deal with the fact that some people are older than others and that for those on the young side, a 29 year old grad student drinking a tall glass of Beam on the rocks might seem out of the ordinary.

But then he proceeded to talk about ALL the girls at the party he thought were cute. Now, again, I realize my own bias: I like to be the most special in the room. Or, at the very least, the most special to whomever I am talking to. I don’t know if this qualifies as self-importance or just a fine appreciation of conversational etiquette. But I was thinking, "Wow, this is interesting. Has my age removed me from his range of options to the point that he surveys his options without awareness of the blatant rudeness of doing so?"

And then I (stupidly!) thought , "Oh, if I was prettier, then maybe he’d be more interested."  The sheer ridiculous of this statement after the fact did not prevent me then from getting all lame and deciding that maybe I just don’t have my mojo going on anymore. I tried to dance up to some girl wearing a sparkly skirt, and she was so wasted she didn’t really respond well (and later, the 22-year old was spotted making out with her up against a pole; he emailed me the next morning to tell me that, in case he "didn’t say this already, she tasted salty.")  One guy asked me for a cigarette, and I suspect he was being flirtatious to me, but I couldn’t figure it out.

             When re-telling this story in the booth over the best omlette ever following a beautiful bike ride through the most picturesque New England countryside, it all seemed absurd enough to make me laugh until I thought my guts were actually accordions. However, at the party, I felt a little less amused. Since moving to Boston, I have felt at times a bit crazy for feeling like I am not very attractive (intellectually and physically).  And then I feel even crazier for spending any time thinking about who does and doesn’t find me attractive. 

         So, my friend and I had am interesting conversation over dinner about capitalism and how we have a compulsion to hoarde stuff. Like, even shopping at thrift stores or whatever, the urge to buy stuff is still compulsive; there is an urgent feeling of, "if I don’t buy this item right now, I might not get another chance to get it!"  And then later in the conversation, we were talking about age, and how people our age are starting to see marraige and kids as this thing that they had better do before they can’t do it anymore. And we wondered if this sense of rush is complicated dating and hanging out. And then I had a revelation; I thought that maybe because I am getting to "that age" where the stakes seem higher for making the decision about having kids or not, and that I moved to a predominantly heterosexual environment right at this time, of course the capitalist instinct is to assess my "marketability" (ie, my ability to find someone to nest and have babies with) based on men finding me attractive. This is the best theory going, because, honestly, the whole thing has not made much sense. I mean, on one level, yeah, whatever: who doesn’t like to feel attractive and who doesn’t like to be pursued by people in socially-powerful positions.  Who doesn’t like to be fussed over and complimented and gazed upon like high-femme royalty? But my queerness has really removed me from a lot of that questioning and agonizing over who is and who isn’t finding me attractive, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my age is fucking with me in subtle ways because I am visiting a lot of themes that relate to things deep within our psyche (about what makes me desirable, about what makes me a woman, etc).

And it’s especially ridiculous to even feel these thoughts roaming through my head. Why should I feel so upset because I feel either not pretty. Why should worry or feel badly because I think that guys don’t like stretch marks on hips, cellulite on the thighs, or anything else that real women have. Why this matters, I don’t know, because I am certainly not looking to really date men, and even if I were, I’m not sure that I would want a man who didn’t like stretch marks. What kind of idiot is that?

        Also notable at the restaurant was our waitress, who was so hot and sexy that my friend and I had several jokes relating to her "can I get you anything else?" question. She had long hair, and I had the thought that if I had longer hair, that I would look more like her, and thus "more sexy." I said to my friend, "I’ll bet if I had long hair, more men would be attracted to me." And he said, laughingly and bit pointedly, "Well, yeah, certain men. Like, most straight men. Is that what you want?" And I was like, "Well, no….(laughing) but it’d be nice to know that they wanted me" And we realized, "That is capitalism right there. Stuff you don’t want and you know you don’t need, but you are taking up an awfully large line of credit to pursue it." Brilliant.

          So that’s where my little Ivy-head is lately. Don’t tell anyone else that I told you this.

My current theory is this:

Look, it’s the time of the year when the membrane between this world and the afterworld is at its thinnest. This is the time when grief can be at its greatest, when our past is very much with us, and when the ache of death is present in all of our activities. It makes sense that things would get all freaky. I have to remind myself of this. I have been crying a lot lately about people who have died years ago, or people who are not in my life anymore, and I have felt very mournful for past incarnations of myself. Revisiting a lot of old themes and talking lots of walks in the old corridors of my mind.

It makes so much sense. I think that things are just this way, before we move into the quiet hibernation of winter. The wheel just keeps turning.

I think that creating and participating rituals are part of this, and I feel shy for not remembering before this weekend that we are in Samhain/All Saints Eve/post-Harvest time. Last week, I worked the Pumpkin Festival at the farm, and it was amazingly beautiful, an achingly brilliant fall day. I walked around the farm to check on the storm damage of trees (we lost a few, unfortunately), and was overwhelmed with the bare branches against the crisp sky and the fallow fields. The farm was silent, where only a few months ago, it had been buzzing with the heavy humid air and swarming insects. I felt like I could imagine myself going crazy, or stepping into another slice of time. I was, for a moment, nonexistent on this terra firma. And then I sweetly came back, and stumbled back to the festival area, where a high school jazz ensemble was playing Green Day covers, and families were participating in pumpkin-tossing contests and chestnut throws. Kids pedaled the bicycle-power blender to make whipped cream like their lives depended on it. We are alive in all our closeness to death.

Anyway, what really sealed the deal for me was bringing our houseplants in to overwinter. Rearranging the shelves to fit everything, repotting the experimental begonias and making room for them on sunny windowsills. The advertisement for the Requim Mass. The deflated pumpkins rotting on everyone’s porch.  These things are all so important, and everything that I do that honors this season seems to shed a little more light on why everything seems so crazy, so unstable, so freakish.

The afterworld is really breathing in on us close, and I think that this time of year is really asking us to face our relationship to failure, to future, to our own creativity, and to our own human strength.

I don’t know, those are my off-the-hip thoughts about it.