A Better Kind of Fraud

Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction. Many of us are walking around with the uneasy feeling that we missed the first day of class and wondering if there are CliffNotes. Most people desperately want someone to tell them what life’s about, what people are for, what we’re supposed to do—how to be a human being. But serious literature, at least since the 19th-century, has been disdainful of fulfilling any didactic obligation. Sorry, kids, that isn’t what art is for.

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.

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Internet Dating and the Concept of the Self

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.

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That’s All Well and Good But

You don’t have to be overly macho. You don’t have to be over-complimentary. Gain her respect. And that’s treating her as an equal. Don’t bullshit her. Treat her as a human being. Treat her as you would treat yourself. As soon as you have that respect from her, she’ll treat you with the same respect that you show. Then you fuck the shit out of her.

In an ideal world, yeah. And I’m that head-in-the-clouds idealist, too, with a little cynicism sprinkled in for good measure, of course. Or so I would like to believe.

But, as happens all too often, if you’re not macho you’re a pussy. If you’re not over-complimentary you’re a dick. If you treat her as an equal you’re a pushover. If you don’t bullshit you get bullshitted. And giving respect and treating someone like a human being rarely means you get that same respect and humanity returned, no matter what their gender in relation to your own. And that last part sounds great. If only it weren’t so oft reported that many women prefer things like chocolate over sex.

Undoubtedly, all of this has to be taken with a grain of salt. This quote was spoken by a porn star and I found it on This Recording by way of a blog called Synthetic Pubes. And anyway what the hell do I know.

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Better as a Shadow

Yesterday morning I woke from a dream in which I was looking out the window of my sister’s bedroom in my parents house and a nuclear explosion erupted in the distance, bright burning white light and fantastical mushroom cloud and all. I stood for what seemed like unrealistically too long, watching it and wondering what kind of political turmoil could have caused this and what a shame it’d be that I’d never find out. I turned to the two people with me in the room and shouted that we were going to die. I woke up, earlier than usual, gasping and panicked and waiting probably to completely disintegrate.

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Liberation

Perhaps I am so distantly separated from the situation at this juncture that that part of me has been adequately anæsthesized, but it’s still surprising for me to look at a photo and think to myself that yeah, she looks happier with him and then to feel good about the thought.

However dismally, it’s liberating in the idea that I won’t have to be burdened with finding anyone in the future because, all things being equal, they will all more than likely be happier and more appropriately paired with somebody else.

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Selective Perception

I was running late for work and only making it worse by choosing just then to stop on campus and deposit a check into my bank account.

Normally, with a particular class routine, you know when you’ll be on campus and you eventually become accustomed to seeing the same people each day at the same times. This, however, was a timeframe during which I’m generally not on campus this quarter.

Walking to the university services building, I looked up from my feet and saw him, my ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, walking in the opposite direction. I felt that, out of courteousness, I should flash a half-smile and give a nod. Make eye contact, or something. Before I knew what I was doing, though, I was taking the check I was on my way to deposit and my wallet out of my pocket and fiddling with them in my hands, looking down at them as if they were of some greater immediate importance.

I suppose I just don’t have the kind of nebulous fortitude it requires to look my failures in the eye and acknowledge they exist, rather than pretending to have something incredibly interesting inside my wallet.

Posted in Angst | 2 Comments