Everything I’m Holding, Everything I’m Dropping
Something tips out of alignment every few weeks, imperceptibly, until you notice you’ve been finding Lady Gaga sympathetic and aspiring toward Gucci and your compass has gone completely. The correction is unglamorous but necessary. Here’s where I stand, end of March.
What I’m keeping: double cookies dunked in cocoa until they go soft; cycling in the first genuine warmth of the year, which arrives in your legs before you consciously register it; French as both a language and a general life philosophy; checked shirts; Cheddar eaten without ceremony; being appropriately drunk on a Thursday; Zola Jesus making everyone who dismissed her feel the appropriate amount of foolish; Final Fantasy XIII whether or not you asked for my opinion; waiting for the new iPhone as if it will fix something (I know it won’t); long fingers that look like they belong to someone who makes things for a living; melon eaten over the sink; Stockholm; warm summer rain before real summer arrives; those old Bibi Blocksberg audio cassettes from childhood—Germany’s answer to the witch as children’s hero, and a specific kind of nostalgia I apparently still carry—listened to again now with full willingness; humming the Ponyo theme without meaning to; expensive headphones as an act of basic self-respect; sleeping with interns; getting back into anime after years of pretending I was too old for it; the guy with the acid who lives around the corner and has, I suspect, actually figured something out.
What I’m done with: whatever is currently happening; Chatroulette, which lasted exactly as long as it deserved; writing project briefs that no one reads; the slow realization that a job has been quietly remaking who you are; fitness trainers who’ve mistaken their occupation for a personality; Lady Gaga; grown men performing fear of other grown men; treating your own incompetence as a form of authenticity; Star Wars as an identity; no salary at the end of the month; daylight saving time, again, still; Gucci as aspiration; the constant demand to reinvent yourself as though your first version was only a rough draft; North Korea as a punchline everyone is too exhausted to keep delivering; store credit when you wanted your actual money back; nuclear power; The XX, and I gave them a fair hearing; still being awake; Gossip Girl; sunscreen fingerprints on a white MacBook; betting on when Mischa Barton finally gives up—morbid even by internet standards, I know; and the word Abschied, which means goodbye, and which I’m not going to examine too closely right now.