HOW LIFE IS

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bad robot

(FYI: this post is full of spoilers for Mr. Robot, the biggest of which is: Mr. Robot made me really mad!)

 

Last week I started watching Mr. Robot, and for the first few episodes I really liked it. I liked how weird and stylized it was. I liked that the main character, Elliot, had social anxiety but a good sense of humor; I liked the twistiness of the plot and the way I wasn’t entirely sure if the narration was reliable or it wasn’t. I liked the cute dog. And I liked it because frankly it’s rare that my husband and I can find something to watch together where one of us doesn’t feel bored or vaguely insulted at some point in the first half hour. For a couple of days there it seemed like maybe Mr. Robot was going to be that kind of show that both of us could be really into.

Guess what! It wasn’t!

Pretty soon, there were a couple of things that started bothering me. The first was the weird Madonna/whore thing the writers set up to contrast Elliot’s childhood pal Angela with his drug dealer and friend-with-benefits, Shayla. Angela is blonde and perky looking. She dresses in collared shirts; she has a steady boyfriend and a corporate job. Shayla…wears a lot of eye makeup, is friendly but stupid, and has sex with Elliot even though he’s categorically not very nice to her? She sews artistic pillows, though, which made me think the writers were at least trying to do something with her, so I did what I do a lot when I’m watching TV and I shrugged off the laziness of the trope.

A thing that was harder to shrug off, though, was the bit of casual rape they threw in there For Grittiness. A couple of episodes in, Shayla’s supplier (whose name I don’t remember and can’t be bothered to Google, so let’s just call him Bad Guy) drugs and rapes her, then deposits her in a bathtub for Elliot to come rescue after a tense standoff. Elliot’s understandably alarmed, but Shayla insists she’s totally fine, so it’s never mentioned again. In fact, Elliot’s voiceover tells us explicitly what we’re meant to take away from the episode: that Bad Guy is escalating in his Bad Behavior. What happened to Shayla isn’t actually about Shayla at all.

My feelings about Casual Rape on Television For Grittiness are well-documented and could be a whole other blog post, so I won’t go into them too much here (except no, I HATE CASUAL RAPE ON TELEVISION FOR GRITTINESS; in addition to all the obvious reasons for hating it, such as being a human woman, I think that nearly all of the time it is lazy, lazy writing). Suffice it to say, the whole thing really bummed me out, but even then I was willing to keep going because I liked the other parts of the show, I wanted to see what happened next, and, maybe most importantly: being a lady who loves television often means accepting the fact that even really, really good shows are going to let you down from time to time when it comes to the way they treat people like you. If I stopped watching a show every time it made my face do a weird thing, I would have nothing left to watch (except the first season of Friday Night Lights, obviously; the first season of Friday Night Lights is perfect and if you can think of a reason why it’s not I don’t want to hear about it). Nah, it’s okay, I said to my husband. Let’s watch another one.

And then, at the end of Episode 5, Shayla turned up dead and mutilated in the trunk of a car.

Now, look. I feel like it’s worth noting here that I make stories for a living. I understand how they are structured. I can imagine what the conversation must have been like in that writers’ room: Guys, we’re halfway through the season! We need to raise the stakes and change expectations and give Elliot something to fight for and BLAH BLAH BLAH GUESS WHAT I DO NOT CARE, BYE FOREVER, I’M OUT.

I’m tired of bad things happening to women to motivate men to greatness. I’m tired of looking at pretty girls covered in blood. And I’m mad and embarrassed that I waved off the other parts of the show that bothered me, the parts that set Shayla up as less-than and disposable to begin with, as if those parts were somehow less egregious than what came next.

My feminism is not particularly academic. I don’t always have the right vocabulary for explaining why things upset me. But a thing I do know, and which I said on Twitter the other night, is that my standards are very low. Please no mutilated girls in your trunk, is my standard. Please no mutilated girls in your freezer, or your storage unit, or your basement.

Apparently, that is asking too much.

I read somewhere that if anyone actually puts you in the trunk of their car, you’re supposed to kick the taillight out from the inside and wave your hand until someone sees you. This is a weird, gross, horrifying fact to find useful, but because of the world we live in I do find it kind of useful, and I found myself wishing that I knew a similar tip for making that kind of thing disappear from TV.

For now, what I could do was change the channel. So I did.

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happening inside your head

In the lobby of the Fairmont in Manila is a pianist who plays a variety of standards and pop hits, quite loudly, every afternoon beginning at 3pm. Melissa and I make a game of identifying them, “Beyond the Sea” side by side with “Blank Space” and the entire Disney canon. “I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie,” I say, as “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” echoes off the marble floors and high ceilings. I feel like I am in a Woody Allen movie more or less the entire time I am in the Philippines, like my entire life has gotten away from me and the best I can do is hang on and see what happens next.

I was afraid to come, obviously; it’s the furthest I’ve ever traveled by myself and feels like the furthest you can travel, period, even though I know objectively that it’s not. Every night I call my husband from twelve hours in the future and listen to his phone ring on the other side of the world. On the plane I curl up under my blanket scarf with Harry Potter, which I am reading for the first time and which both distracts me and helps keep my anxiety in perspective: Harry’s twelve years old and fighting the sum of all magical evil. Certainly I can saddle up and sign some books.

“Have you sorted yourself?” Robyn asks me over one of our many truly extravagant breakfasts, omelets and bacon and croissants the size of my face. When I tell her I think I’m a Hufflepuff she nods like, that makes sense: a nice girl, a hard worker, loyal. Prefers if you don’t look at her most of the time.

We do mall events that make me feel like One Direction; we do TV shows that make me feel like Taylor Swift. Everyone is so much lovelier to us than they have any reason to be. The fact that I’m reading these books turns out to be a rather excellent talking point—everybody has an opinion about Harry Potter—and I chat happily with more than one reporter about herbology and Scabbers and which characters should kiss. Hufflepuff, I say over and over when they ask me what house I think I’d be in. I’m a Hufflepuff.

Our last day there we have six interviews in the lobby, the coffee table littered with five hours’ detritus and the three of us perched on the sofa like birds on a line. The pianist is playing a vaguely recognizable tune with great gravitas but I can’t figure out what it is, working it over and over in my brain like a kernel of popcorn stuck in my molars; Melissa is halfway through answering a question when I finally realize it is “Killing Me Softly”, which strikes me as the most hilarious thing that has ever happened in the history of the universe, but I know that I can’t start laughing, because if I start laughing I will never, ever stop: at the song, at the situation, at the idea that I came here to this place and did this thing even though I knew with one hundred percent certainty that I couldn’t. I smile, bite the inside of my cheek.

After that everything seems easier somehow, like I’ve finally figured the spell out; suddenly I am sliding into a cab and onto a plane and flying back over the ocean, moving back in time and going home. “There you are,” my husband says, when he picks me up at the airport.

“Here I am,” I reply, and take his hand.

Two nights later I have dinner with a friend back in Boston. We talk about my trip and about her summer internship; we talk about Harry Potter, like you do. She asks if I’ve sorted myself and when I tell her Hufflepuff, she shakes her head as if that’s the stupidest thing anyone’s ever said.

“You’re a Gryffindor,” she tells me, like she can’t believe I don’t know myself better than that. “It’s just that you’re a different kind of brave.”

 

 

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59th street bridge

I handed my book in and yesterday I did nothing.

Well, not nothing. I made brownies; I started two loaves of bread. I puttered around in the kitchen like I used to at my mom’s house in the summer in college, when I worked at the children’s library in the mornings and time spread out in front of me like a picnic blanket. I watched TV for a while (a long while). I read.

But mostly: nothing.

I thought over and over: I should get up, I have work to do, all those things I’ve been putting off for weeks while I finished.

I made myself stay on the couch.

It was harder than it should have been, really. I’m not wired for it. It made me feel irresponsible and guilty; it made me feel like I was cutting school. Did you see that up there, how I told you I did nothing and then rushed to amend it, to make sure you knew I wasn’t a total waste of space? Like taking a day off after turning a book in would somehow make me one?

A lot has been written about busy-ness, about how never sitting still is some kind of weird badge of honor, how filling up the calendar pages means we’re somehow getting more out of our lives. And maybe that’s true. But I was happy doing nothing yesterday, and I want to remember that this summer. This summer I want to s l o w  d o w n.

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summer’s here

The first Memorial Day party we ever had was in 2008, when we were still living with the boys; I got back from New York and it was already happening, Q in the living room in his flip-flops, a water balloon in either hand.

“Are you okay?” he asked, slinging an arm around my shoulders. This was a day and a half after my parents announced they were splitting up, divorcing after twenty-five years together; I’d gone home to drink iced coffee in the yard in the suburbs, found a crater where my house used to be.

“Sure,” I lied, dropping my overnight bag and smiling. I took the water balloon he offered, hucked it out the window into the street.

*

Seven years later: we had five babies in the backyard on Saturday, climbing up and down the deck stairs, making funny faces, wearing baby hats while the rest of us ate potato salad and drank summer ale, our feet up on lawn chairs and the music probably loud enough to make our new neighbors wince. I didn’t know what the bushes were in my yard so P texted his mom pictures of them and ten seconds later we had our answer, hydrangeas, and instructions for how to keep them alive. “You’re here!” I kept saying all weekend, every time the bell rang, someone I loved on the other side of it. “It’s you, oh! You’re here!”

*

One year we made up a cocktail called the Cotuggie Noogie and made everybody drink it. One year we had a contest where everybody did the worm. One year the cops came, although to be honest that year is a tiny bit blurry. Two years we didn’t have a party at all.

*

The girls got a chocolate cake for my birthday. I told them all they didn’t need to sing. I closed my eyes and I blew out the candles. I wished it could always be like this.

We’re okay, or if we aren’t then we will be. We are all of us always okay.

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things to do in Boston when you’re home for six weeks

Invite people over. Make enchiladas. Perfect your summer capsule. Watch hockey games. Read library books. Read cookbooks. Finish your book. Consider resurrecting your pop culture blog. Quit Game of Thrones. Learn to take naps. Rip the siding off your house. Assemble a bed. Come up with something approximating a routine. Listen to the Beach Boys. Make cocktails. Contemplate a piano. Curate your tumblr. Call your mom. Go see Pitch Perfect. Go see Mad Max. Buy fancy pajamas. Meet your neighbors. Sit outside.

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and leave no trail

 

In case it’s somehow not super-obvious yet: I’m not a gentle person. I slam doors. I drop things. I thump down the stairs like an elephant; I blurt stuff and then immediately regret it. I do not always understand or appreciate the impact of my own self in space.

It’s part of why I’m so clumsy, probably: “Think about your steps,” my dad told me once, after I’d wiped out in the middle of one sidewalk or another, bruises on my shins or the palms of my hands. “Just move more slowly, and think.”

I try to, I told him. I just forget. 

This weekend, I messed up. It doesn’t matter how, but I acted like a bull in a damn china shop, and with a carelessness that is sort of breathtaking to me when I remember it now, I broke a thing that, for various reasons, I can’t fix.

I didn’t think about my steps, and I fell.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to write about turning thirty. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. In the past I’ve made long lists of goals and plans and visions but this decade I think I just want to live in the world more carefully. I want to leave a little less destruction in my wake.

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on mistakes

99 DAYS comes out two weeks from today, which feels insane to me. I think because I sat with HOW TO LOVE for so many years before it was published, the idea of this book coming out already makes me feel kind of like you’re seeing me in my underwear.

All my writing kind of makes me feel that way, truthfully. But you know what I mean.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Molly, my main character. Molly makes a lot of really bad decisions in this book. Like: a LOT. And then when she’s finished making them, instead of going and sinning no more, she turns around and makes them again.

MOLLY. GET IT TOGETHER.

Full disclosure: I was nervous to write her that way. I thought a lot about fixing her, about painting over some of the uglier parts, putting some makeup on her face. Because what if people didn’t like her? What if they wouldn’t forgive her for all the boneheaded, hurtful things she does? What if they shrugged and said “Well, she deserves what she gets, then. I never did anything that stupid.”

And then I remembered: I did LOTS of stuff that was exactly. That. Stupid.

Stupid boy-related things I did when I was a teenager, a selected list:

* Made out with a guy at a baseball game even though his mom was there and I knew she could probably see us. (She could.)

* Hid in the bathroom for the duration of an entire party because I didn’t have the ovaries to tell a boy who liked me that even though I liked him back, I thought people would talk about us if we dated, and I didn’t have the ovaries for that either.

* Threw my friends over when I got a boyfriend.

* Did a bunch of stuff with a boy that I wasn’t ready to do and that, frankly, was uncomfortable and unpleasant, because I thought there was something wrong with me for not wanting to.

* Wore an Abercrombie T-shirt that said CO-ED NAKED WATER POLO TEAM to a my now-husband’s family barbecue. To be clear: the first time I met my mother-in-law, I was wearing a shirt that said we do it better in the water. 

And again, this list is selected. The point is, if you are a person who doesn’t look back on stuff you did when you were sixteen (or twenty-six) and want to die a little, I salute you. But I am not that person! And I kind of don’t want to write about those people, either. Yes, Molly acts in a way that is occasionally kind of shitty. But so did I. And I was lucky enough to have people in my life who loved me anyway and taught me and rooted for me, and I learned, and now I am (at least marginally, I hope? Right? Guys?) less shitty.

I wrote this book rooting for Molly with every particle of my being. I hope you’ll read it and root for her, too.

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as loud as you possibly can

Right before we closed on the house I was feeling legitimately unhinged so I started listening to a lot of Hanson, which is not a coping strategy I fall back on a ton anymore, only in the most dire of dire situations. It worked reliably when I was fifteen, though, and I will tell you: it still works.

I’ve talked about my weird Hanson thing before, but for those of you who are new here: I have a weird Hanson thing! I used to feel a deep and abiding lady shame about it, but I don’t anymore. I’ve seen Hanson many, many times in concert, and last week as I was listening to the high-pitched cheering at the beginning of Live and Electric I thought to myself, goddamn, I wish I could see Hanson in concert right the fuck now.

I really, really wanted to scream.

When people ask me why I like Hanson concerts so much I come up with a lot of bullshit reasons, but the truth is as follows: have you ever read Margaret Atwood’s terrifying dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale? You know how periodically they let the women kill a guy to blow off steam and prevent a total revolution? This is like that for me, but without the horrible crowdsourced murder!

Here is a thing I recommend you do, if you are a girl with emotions that occasionally get the best of you: go to a place where you can stand next to a few hundred other girls who are screaming their heads off, and scream your head off, too. Just shriek. Holler. Cry a little if you need. The lights are off and nobody is looking. Everybody is doing the exact same thing as you. I like Hanson concerts for a lot of reasons, but a big one is because screaming out my joy and love and anger and sorrow is the most cathartic thing in my life and I don’t get to do it that often.

I was thinking about that last week while my feelings were at a rolling boil, about how there are really not a lot of venues for women to raise their voices in ways that are socially acceptable. I was thinking about all the girls who are heartbroken over Zayn leaving One Direction, and how easy it is to make those girls into a punchline. I was thinking how unfair it is that we teach girls the only places to feel loud feelings are places we find fundamentally stupid and deserving of our derision. And I was thinking I’m in the mood to open my mouth and make noise.

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at home

I watched all six hours of The Jinx in one go and scared the living daylights out of myself but other than that it was the most uneventful of weekends, a breakfast beer in Coolidge Corner because I had a gift certificate and an oil change because he had a coupon. I dropped paperbacks off at the Booksmith. I picked up some face lotion at the mall. We made steaks with blue cheese and mashed potatoes with truffle butter, roasted string beans with olive oil and salt, then walked down Broadway in the drizzle to try the new bar on Dot Ave. I packed a couple boxes. I wrote a couple hundred words. I put my tour dates down on the calendar, long stretches of travel in the next few months–everything coming quickly all of a sudden, long arrows drawn across the weeks.

“You’re here now, right?” he asked me, when I gave him the rundown. “Until we move at least, you’re here?”

“Yup,” I told him, sitting back in the passenger seat, turning up the radio. “I’m here.”

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oprah knows what’s up.

Sierra said she read you’re supposed to let your toes breathe between pedicures and I had a perpetual pedicure from 1998 until this past December, so I decided to take a break. Turns out I hate not having a pedicure, though, and recently it really started to make me feel like Meryl Streep in Into the Woods, so yesterday I took the day off from my office job– to do a lot of things, ostensibly, but really go to the nail place. I broke out my spring jacket. I brought the home decor magazines Marissa sent me in the mail.

It was the best day!

A couple of weeks ago I fell down an internet wormhole and ended up at a blog about being fabulous and manifesting your best life that I’m not going to link to because it’s embarrassing and I don’t want you to click on it and judge me. You know how you’re hate-reading something and then all of a sudden you find yourself nodding along and you realize it’s been like four hours and you’re not hate-reading it anymore, you’re just regular-reading it? That was my experience with this website. I told my sister about it and she laughed at me. Then she said: “Okay so what are we supposed to do to make it work?”

I think self-care is a gross phrase, honestly. It reminds me of “lovemaking” and is just generally a little too Joshua Tree for me. But the older I get the more important the idea of it feels to me–doing the kinds of things for myself I’d do for the people I love and want to make happy. Taking the steps I can take to give myself the life I want to have. I’m not about to hire someone to pick up my laundry or sort my mail or write my next book from a suite at the Liberty (although God bless you if you can make it happen), but I can damn well make a kale salad and put fresh sheets on the bed. A doughnut on a Sunday morning. A nap on a Saturday afternoon. A new pair of soft, pretty pajamas instead of the t-shirt with the name of my freshman dorm on it.

It’s easy to feel like the small things don’t matter–like they’re silly or frivolous or selfish somehow, like it’s wrong or somehow stupid to take the time to be nice to yourself. But it’s worth it, I’m learning slowly but surely. I can tell when I look down at my toes.

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