Yesterday, while at work, a break room conversation broke out (see what I did there?) about relationships (surprise) and, specifically, how I’m the only employee not in one (surprise again). My coworker suggested that I put up a personal ad on The Stranger’s LoveLab, implying that I would garner a very large amount of dates this way.
I then expounded on my thought that I would be the person least qualified to write a personal ad for me, reasoning that, of everyone that knows me, I know myself the least. And frankly, I’m biased. We all are. We all have this hope that we’re the best possible person we could be and I know that, despite my grandest delusions, I am not. So, by my twisted logic, if I were to write a personal ad it would be filled with details about me that I have cherry picked and described in English sentences which naturally ends up being an embellishment and making me feel fraudulent (which fraudulent feelings alone—let me tell you—is a can of worms you do not want me to open).
And anyway my supervisor says, “Have someone else do it for you!” This I feel is a great idea. The people around me in all likelihood know me better than I do. They’ve experienced me being a dick to them probably at some point in our interactions and I have not (despite what some might say, I think being a dick is like tickling: it’s not possible to do it to yourself) and could probably paint a better portrait of who I am than I.
In thinking about this whole business of Internet dating, while at work I tweet about my reservations in trying it: do I want the humiliation associated with appearing in a personal ad and then the risk of either getting a date or not getting a date from it (both entail their own sets of issues, practical and existential)? Cut to later in the day: my good friend Zane replies to my tweet urging me to put up an ad, saying he was “totally considering putting an ad for [me] on Craigslist the other day.” Oh, gosh. While I appreciate the coincident nature of the whole situation, it’s slightly harder to appreciate that I know so many people right now that want to hook me up with someone (anyone more likely) which I can only imagine is to shut me up finally about the whole thing.
I guess the moral of the story is that recently it’s experiences like these that are teaching me how healthy this time alone is for me. I mean, did you just read the last three paragraphs? There’s some serious self-loathing-thinly-disguised-as-self-depricating-humor going on up there. I spend so much time talking about relationships only because I’m trying to derive meaning from experience through language (I’m only an undergraduate liberal arts academic for a couple more weeks, let me have my moment, OK?). That doesn’t mean I’m actually ready for one. While I’m always down to meet new people, dating just seems like this weird, foreign thing right now.
So, in the meantime, if you have anyone in mind feel free to send her my way, though probably nothing will come of it. I will simply respect her, treat her as a human being, then fuck the shit out of her.
Just kidding. Unless, as Nelly says, [she's] gon’ do it.
A Better Kind of Fraud
I will not disagree that there exists a certain amount of contemporary art that’s “anti-didactic” (if you will), but my immediate reaction is to dispute any assertion that all modern art avoids entirely this edification, for any age group.
This article is incredibly important, I think, and not only for its considerations about the state and the nature of literature in our lives, but also about our lives themselves. The author says, “I’m over 40 now … and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do.” Reading this, I could not help but feel that he’s expressing (through a meditation on literature) a fear that’s also been at the forefront of my thoughts lately.
I wasn’t kidding when I said my feelings of fraudulence are a can of worms. They’ve developed pretty steadily through the years; I felt I was a fraud in school because I strongly believed that I’d learned little other than how to bullshit other people. Now I feel as though I’m just bullshitting on my résumé to appear more qualified for jobs.
Last week while at work I expressed this fear to a coworker and he surprised me when he said that those fears don’t go away. “I feel like I should end all of my posts with, ‘You buy that?’” was how he put it. “And the closer I get to people higher up in the field, the more I realize that there are no ‘experts’.” So basically, everyone is some varying level of fraudulent. What matters, seemingly, is how effective of a fraud you are, which I used to think was the secret role of education and the need to accrue knowledge. If I could only be a better fraud, I’d get the best jobs, the hottest girls, et cetera. Cynical though it sounds, what he said actually made me feel better about it all. Yet another friend put it simply:
“It gets better.”
That, I submit, is the true and guileless didactic quality of the art that the above article’s author may consider “anti-didactic”. All the convoluted pomo stuff, all the self-conscious stuff, all the abstract expressionist stuff—those thinkers are trying to show us that we are frauds by exposing the nature of their own fraudulence. It’s an attempt to bring us out of ourselves by trying to bring us further inside ourselves, the sole edifying quality, distilled, being that “It gets better.” It doesn’t get easier, but it gets better. And this is the real secret purpose of education that I’ve been missing all this time. Because here I am retreating further inside my self, and yet I’ve learned to write in ways that try to bring a better you out, trying as best as I know how to relate to you a simple truth that I myself haven’t yet found a way to believe: It gets better.