My mom won't let me re-read The Bell Jar because she thinks it'll be bad for my mental health, which kinda sucks because I was really looking forward to it. Jia Tolentino talks a bit about it in part of Trick Mirror and it made me realise that I really remember nothing from that even though I think I read it twice when I was 13/14. It's funny how little I remember from stuff: I've seen Inglourious Basterds at least 3 times but when I rewatched it this summer I realised that I always forget that LaPadite betrays the Jewish family in the tense opening scene, and also that Christoph Waltz ends up doing a deal with the Americans. I guess that's a good thing, because I can keep revisiting stuff and get new things out of it each time. I managed to read about 5 pages of The Bell Jar before my mom took it away and whaddaya know, zero recollections.
Heart palpitations, still. I ended up sleeping 5 hours last night because I had a dentist appointment, and then fell asleep on the sofa from 6-9pm which doesn't bode well for my sleep schedule. Right now my heart is just beating too fast and strong for me to really want to turn off the lights and just lie there, so....
Earlier I laid on the floor for a while looking at the light fixture in our living room. It's the same one that we first got when we first moved into this house in 2006 and I'd never noticed it before, really. It's kind of ugly, this Dalek-looking assemblage of concentric rings with golf-sized crystal balls hanging off of it. It felt good to lie on the floor because of the cool tiles. I'd wanted to do it back in Palo Alto but most of the Airbnb was carpeted except for the toilet, and I wasn't going to lie on the poop and pee floor. Also, the toilets are shared, and it would've been pretty weird for someone to see me. More specifically, I remember the evening when I had the strongest urge to go lie there I really didn't want O to come and see me because it would look like some massive desperate cry for attention. I didn't want attention, or at least not more than usual. Just that nice cool feeling. The next morning I sat at the kitchen island, which is covered in these beautiful deep turquoise tiles (but that make the surface of the counter uneven) and just pressed my face against it. I did look crazy, and I felt it, but it was more acceptable. I could just say, "I'm really tired" (which was true because I'd had a Breakdown the evening before and not gotten that much sleep). That's something you can just say and people will accept it. In the movie The Farewell, which I saw twice, they say that a lot so that family members won't probe. In late-stage capitalism I guess everyone's just always tired and other issues are, to some extent, about being tired anyways. Or is that a reach. Anyway, I had my arms on the counter in this frame-like shape and placed my face into the center, like at the massage places where they have a hole in the cushion. Then I took my arms away and pressed by forehead there. After O finished his breakfast and left I cried a little bit, still with my face there. I didn't know what I wanted or needed. I had Mitski's "Crack Baby" stuck in my head because I'd been listening to it on repeat. The most dramatic moment, I'm sure.
Today I finished reading The Idiot and read through Yanyi's The Year of Blue Water, which Lis gifted me and said was similar in some ways to Elif Batuman. I definitely enjoyed it a bit more than I normally enjoy poetry, since I don't really understand much of poetry and feel kinda bad that I don't. Some of the lines in there were good. He talked a lot about writing -- writing as a way to survive, writing as something that he had to do like it was just bursting out of him, he needed it to make sense of his life -- which is also something Jia Tolentino talks about and just stuff I've been thinking about lately. Like, do you have to
need to write to be a writer? I don't know if I
need to write or if I just write because I don't really have anyone to talk to / writing as a way to force someone or something to listen to me. I feel like writing the blog post yesterday helped in some way. Proper punctuation and capitalisation and all that. I guess writing stuff down like this feels better because I'm not really expecting any kind of reply from the void, whereas I tend to be frequently disappointed by interpersonal exchanges.
Sidenote: Why does Min Jin Lee have to retweet basically every mention of her on Twitter? I mean I see why, but she always does them in a huge batch when she comes online and it just floods my feed. I suppose I should just unfollow her.
Thinking, now, about the man in the Economy check-in line at SFO who got upgraded to First Class because the San Francisco - Zurich flight was hopelessly overbooked. As he walked away from the red-carpeted counter he had that expression where you're trying really hard not to smile. First Class -- First, not Business!
I told O that I was trying to be more generous to my friends, which is true. I'm usually quite stingy and get stressed about spending money, but I tell myself that buying gifts for friends, whether it's their birthday or I've just been thinking of them, is a good thing. I said this when he protested about me buying him boba, even though I had said I would because I'd lost a Love Island bet. I hadn't thought Amber would pick Greg over Michael, but she did. When she did, it was a moment of absolute euphoria. We screamed and cheered, and O threw himself onto the floor, I think. It was carpeted. I find that a bit gross, because carpets have accumulated years and years of dust whereas at least you can scrub down toilet tiles. But yes, generosity. My friend E, who to be honest I don't know super well but who is just an absolute darling, very sweet and adorable, had a birthday picnic back in May and I went and got her some stuff from Lush. I even paid for a little handkerchief to wrap it in. And it felt really good that I was doing this for someone else.
What I'm trying to say is I'm trying to be kind and generous and open-hearted, partly because I feel like have a slight mean streak or at least used to, partly because I always feel like I'm too self-absorbed and selfish and self-centered, partly because people are always talking about how important friendship is and I agree but I don't know if I really have that kind of Perks of Being a Wallflower type of thing going on and I try to invest in the people I'm around. I always try really hard to not try and expect anything back because interpersonal relationships aren't transactional, they're built over time -- like how whenever E (a different E from the Lush one) pays for me at mealtimes and I try to pay him back, he shrugs and says "I'm sure it'll even out in the future. At some point you'll spot me for something." It's annoying, but it's also very moving. What he's saying is that he likes me, that we're friends, that we're going to continue to hang out a lot in the future and continue to be friends and he'll continue to like me. That's a pretty nice thing. Nevertheless, it always hurts a bit when I feel like I haven't gotten back what I've given. Like how when I'm depressed and it's pretty clear that I could do with some help (sometimes I specifically ask for help, like for help making soup or something) and my friends don't really show up for me. Or I'm just not asking properly. Or I'm isolating myself on purpose. I sometimes don't have the energy to talk, but I always kind of need someone there to absorb the unspoken energy that I have, if that makes sense. I don't have any study buddies.
I'm making myself a bit sad writing this. I hadn't expected to go into how I'm really lonely or whatever. Basically I shouldn't have such high expectations about anything and I should stop trying to make stuff into things and just let it be, and I should be kind. I was telling O (and this is again something like what I wrote on Tumblr like 2 weeks ago and I'm annoyed at myself for wasting time re-hashing stuff but I guess I've led myself here so) that if we'd met in some more organic situation like if we attended the same university, I would've probably made some kind of snap judgment and dismissed him and we would never have been friends. He says he thinks we would've been friends but not best friends, but he thinks that because he's good with people and somehow adapts to whoever he's with. I think he's very different in different contexts, and I would've seen the way he behaves when he's with others just categorised him as some typical American dude who's way too much in his comfort zone, who moved with too much ease. Or, I don't know, I can't really imagine what I would be like at an American university -- probably I would've just become an Asian-American which is depressing as fuck. "So if we weren't friends, it would be your fault", he said, and yeah, basically.
The only reason why we became so close is because we were in this weird situation where we only had each other, 24/7, and saw each other all the time. It made me sad when we both left (and still sad, now, because he's a terrible texter (he had warned me) which doesn't help my attachment issues) because I felt like this was one of the deepest friendships I'd ever had, and it had only lasted around a month, and I was basically never going to see him again and that was that. I knew, again, that the only reason we were so close was because of this highly unique and almost artificial context... like being the only two people on a spaceship, or being stuck at an Arctic science lab during a blizzard, etc etc -- fanfiction setups, almost. In a regular situation everyone has many acquaintances and you kind of cycle them around. Given the choice I would've obviously hung out with different people instead of giving O this impression that I was some kind of unhinged suicidal witch who needed to be looked at all the time or else she would evaporate, like how the Weeping Angels from Dr Who turn into stone when someone is looking at them so you just have to keep your eyes on them all of the time and not blink. So because it was so unique, I know that I shouldn't see this as some kind of indictment of all my other friendships, but I can't help but feel like my regular friendships don't really match up to this. At university, aren't you actually supposed to have breakfast together, watch Love Island in the evenings together, go out for a weekly dinner on Saturday night, late night talks every once in a while, have banter inbetween? I mean these are regular things you do with your so-called best friends, so when you distill it, it does feel like I'm missing out on something because I'm doing them with a handful or rotation of individuals. Like how when I told E (a third E!) that I ate alone all the time and had no hangups about it, it was just convenient, and she said she couldn't conceive of it -- even if she was at home making pasta she had to take it into her friend's room for a chat. This is a weird example but I think I'm bringing it up because my month in Palo Alto I was a lot like this E.
Here I am again talking about how I "don't seem to be able to make connections with my peers" when I was trying to talk about something positive, about how I'm trying to be kind. My point was that I wouldn't've normally given O a chance and so I should give more people chances; and that I shouldn't let my quick closeness with O make me feel bad since it's such unique circumstances and so I should stop fretting over my other friendships' "deepness" and just let them be; and finally that I shouldn't fret about my friendship with O now, because I know a lot about being a terrible texter and bad at maintaining a friendship over text and not having energy and not
wanting to, so I shouldn't let dry texting give me the fatalistic impression that he now hates me/never liked me, wants nothing more to do with me, and that I should just disappear altogether, because what does that achieve, really. What's the point of playing hard-to-get when we're already friends and he already knows I'm needy as fuck? Reading about Selin's exchanges with Ivan I wondered if I could relate to her feelings, and turns out I can't, not at all, because we're in very very different situations. I was mainly thinking about how I spend my days waiting for a Whatsapp notification and then pretending like I wasn't, and feeling excited every time I'm hit up proactively. The only similar thing I guess is just that excitement and uncertainty, like having a crush, but a friend crush -- or since we're already friends, a friend continuation crush? It's not crazy that I'm like this, because underneath is the very human desire to feel like you matter, that you
still matter even outside of those extenuating circumstances, that Airbnb bubble, that turquoise kitchen island, that TV room with the HDMI cable unplugged from the DVD player, Stanford campus and its ugliness and all that unhappiness, Emerson Street, carpeted corridor, Philz Coffee, boba, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Salt and Straw. That you weren't just someone he was stuck with. Just like when I meet people through activities like Isis and really want to become friends beyond that but don't know how to make it work. I need to stop playing this bitter and ugly game of viewing friendship as transactions, why didn't you hit me up first it's because you don't really care about me, it's awful. I'm a terrible friend online, to others, so why freak out when it happens to me. If I see a meme I should send it. If I think of anything I should say it. What's the point of angst and nervousness, it's not like I'll ever express it, it only stays on the inside of me so I might as well just... not. I should give and give and give and give and give and ultimately it evens out in a way that can't be calculated. It's scary because women always do that and get trampled and flattened completely, but surely that's only in romantic relationships, not friendships? I think people need to talk about friendship a lot more.
On one of our last nights in Palo Alto, O and I hugged and he was like, "You're pretty great, I care about you a lot." Obviously people have showed me direct affection before, but not as direct as this. It was a pretty great feeling that this was said, out loud, to me, friend to friend. I just need to be as nice to everyone, be honest and direct. Kind and generous, as I've said about a million times in this post already.
It's past midnight and my mom keeps coming in to check on me because she's worried I can't sleep. I eventually had to admit I was writing a blog post -- I don't think my mom or anyone really has been reading my blog posts recently since I've been so inactive -- but now she's going to read this which is annoying because it's going to change the way she sees me. I've been more vulnerable in this post than I've allowed myself to be -- to myself and to others -- in a long time. I hope she pretends like she never read this.
