Exercise in exhaustion: Filling out new patient forms at the doctor’s office, despite hypochondriac tendencies. Given the encouragement to seek out ailments (check here for x; check there for y), I’m confident I can produce a dizzying array of symptoms—enough to confuse all as to why I’m there in the first place. In other news? Happy Friday, friends.
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Sound the alarm: Hair in a towel with half an eyelid lined, I received a text from a dear friend, C. It was early in the morning, before the coffee pot even started to rev and purr. Everything all right? she asks. She’s just awoken—in a start, she says—from a dream about me. Something very anxious, though she can’t remember the details.
Sympathy pains, she later suggests. And it must be true. Am I that wildly tense that my anxiety is bleeding out onto my friends? (Image)
Let me ask, how can you resist having a love affair with Frank O’Hara from time to time?
“Lines for the Fortune Cookies”
I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.
Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you—even bigger.
You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.
You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.
You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.
In the beginning there was YOU—there will always be YOU, I guess.
You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.
Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.
Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.
Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.
Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.
You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!
Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.
You will eat cake.
Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?
You think your life is like Pirandello, but it’s really like O’Neill.
A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.
That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.
I realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!
You should wear white more often—it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.
Have you been to Mike Goldberg’s show? Al Leslie’s? Lee Krasner’s?
At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.
Now that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?
You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.
You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?
Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.
You too could be Premier of France, if only … if only…
Calling all Chicago-based photographers and graphic designers! As mentioned, a super-secret, super- awesome project is in the works, and Team Ring Them Bells is looking for a few talented people to lend their spirit and creative drive to this mysterious effort. All inquiring minds can ask all the questions in the world and more here: e(dot)ringthembells(at) gmail(dot)com.
*samples of your work are greatly appreciated.
1. Survival Skills: During the lunch hour, I walk as far away from the office as quickly as I can. On alternate days, I’ll buy something. A greeting card, lip gloss, something from the Goodwill. Anything really, just to remind myself that I exist inside of something larger.
2. The quickest way to ensure that a roasted vegetable goes flat and soggy is to wait for B to get home to share it with you. Alternate theory: time is a relative sensation unique to each individual.
3. Would you like to know where I’ve been? Hiding, actually. Practically paralyzed by the notion that by typing I may very well dangle, misplace or squint a modifier against its will. That’s absolutely true. But I’m coming back, promise.
![Calling all Chicago-based writers! A small project is officially in the works and I’m on the hunt for a few good writers to join in. Who’s with me? Secret details will be disclosed via email. If interested, please send a note to the following address: e [dot] ringthembells [at] gmail [dot] com. Please include links to your writing and/or attached writing samples. And if you’d be so kind, go ahead and share this link with your friends. Can’t wait to meet you! Image](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3plyrdQm61qa8q2so1_400.jpg)
Calling all Chicago-based writers! A small project is officially in the works and I’m on the hunt for a few good writers to join in. Who’s with me? Secret details will be disclosed via email. If interested, please send a note to the following address: e [dot] ringthembells [at] gmail [dot] com. Please include links to your writing and/or attached writing samples. And if you’d be so kind, go ahead and share this link with your friends. Can’t wait to meet you! Image
Sunday morning reading: Other than Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, this—the commencement speech David Foster Wallace delivered to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005—is the single most prescriptive piece of writing in my reading for mood adjusting arsenal. Honest, while I type, my middle-aged neighbor is beneath my window gardening and singing at the top of her lungs. Moments before re-reading DFW, I slammed the window shut when instead I wanted to chuck a chair through it. Now? Mood altered. The birds are singing. Perhaps that seems too good to be true, so why don’t you try it out for yourself? No horrible mood or grating neighbor needed.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
If at this moment, you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it… KEEP READING via
The last time I took this advice I landed in Prague in the dead of winter and all alone. Weeks later I was home again, weighing less in a physical and financial way. I started to date the man I would later marry—but the price of my plane ticket, my adventures in the Czech Republic, had set me back in a grim way, and the telephone company, irritated that I couldn’t afford my bill, disconnected my phone. That remains the only time in my life where I’ve ever come across as mysterious. via
In which I embarass a 23-year-old version of myself: Late to the party, I know. Just discovered that a Molotov cocktail is not a celebratory Jewish drink, one where perhaps the liquid is splashed excitedly in time with the perky strumming of a fiddle, but an improvised weapon, a bomb made inside a glass bottle. Who knew? Apparently everyone but me. (What? I told you, I was only 23.)
Today brings with it a whole new level of difficulty for communicating. Last week I overheard my mother describing a workshop she’d recently attended. During this session, the presenter simulated the classroom experience of a child who has a hearing disability. My conclusion: Imagine 80% of your words arriving to you in double layers of woolly, Irish sweaters.
Some days, it’s just smarter to communicate via pictures.
