5/8/12

Autobiography of Reflex



Spent most of the weekend being indecisive, sleepy, hungry. I feel like there are a bunch of things I used to be good at, or at least used to care about being good at or enjoying doing and these things just don't have the same appeal right this second. These things are getting dressed, picking out an outfit.



But like any New Yorker, what does one do when one doesn't want to choose an outfit? One wears black. There's something so coy and perfect and beautiful about this. It's emblematic of how not making a decision, as my wise friend Caroline recently tweeted, is a way of making a decision. Wearing black is a way of not having to make a decision. A reflex has a story. Shall we let them say it out loud?



In other news I did have a super duper fun reading on Saturday with dear hearts Brontez and Kat Case and Cristy Road and Joseph Whitt oh goodness. Hung out after the reading at a big house in Bushwick. It felt like San Francisco. So many buddies and friends, drinking and smoking and carrying on. I had entirely too much fun and by the time it was 11pm I headed home to bed.



11pm on Saturday night. Cinco de Mayo. The Supermoon night. Not for me. I bought cold noodles and ate them in bed while half-heartedly trying to speed-read my way through the last suite of essays/reviews in Eileen Myles' The Importance of Being Iceland before falling asleep. I woke up, did writing homework, walked around a bit.



My buddy Emma aka The Duchess was in town this weekend and although I did miss her on Saturday night (she came to the reading then we got parted) we had dinner and walked around on Sunday evening. Which was actually not just fun because I love her, but fun because for the last month (or two) I've been sort of obsessed with these fancy people that go out to dinner on Sunday night. Who are you? Why can't my life be like that? It could, I guess, it was.



I think maybe I need to be interrogating my reflexes a little deeper. It just sucks, though, how something can be really interesting and important and then it changes and is no longer those things, at all. I guess that happens to everybody. Probably all the time?



This might be where reflexes come from. The story they would want you to tell is that they're trying to help. They're trying to, have always been trying to, see their ultimate higher purpose as trying to help you adjust, acclimate. When really they hold you back.



It's possible to know something about someone else that they don't know about themselves. And it's similarly possible that someone else could notice or believe something about you which sounds ridiculous to your own ears. Our autobiographies might not be right, they might be holding us back but then what is the alternative?

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