For the most part, I say I dig change, but for the most part, I can be a real fuckin’ liar sometimes. I get upset when my favorite show ends, and I have trouble taking different routes home from the subway. I have parted my hair in the middle for three years. I would say YOLO, but that’s a new phrase and so I won’t say it and stop trying to MAKE ME.
I was thinking about change because it was May, and that always makes me think about how eventually, I would get really hot and would have to shave my thighs and I would have to find a decent pair of sandals soon. This is the kind of change I am familiar with. Easy. Constant. Sweaty. Then I thought about it again because one of my closest friends decided to up and move from New York to Los Angeles, and I liked her for it because it wasn’t easy, and I was jealous of her for that too. There are things I could use in Los Angeles—I thought of at least two specific beards, of double doubles and tacos, and palm trees I’ve never seen. I said no goodbyes and I ate a bite of her cookie and I sat in her empty apartment and I missed her already and I thought
“I wouldn’t be able to do this”
I don’t think I could. There comes a point in your life where you realize how willing you would be to change your life, and for many, that probably isn’t much. For me? I don’t think I could switch cream cheese brands.
Anyway, shouldn’t you want to change when you’re older? Guess what. You’re OLDER. You should want to do something now.
There is a routine I am comfortable with. Two Splendas and some skim milk. I take my socks off with my feet not my hands. I drink a beer and I stick my sticky hands in some bags of chips and I watch the television. If it’s Friday, I’ll stare off in the corner of a bar I won’t like but will always go to. I’ll decide I’m getting a cold. I text with one finger. I remind myself to buy eggs. I live a life that is always in forward motion but little shift.
There are dreams, vaguely in the distance, that I think about as if they couldn’t happen. As if going left instead of right, or moving to Los Angeles, or taking a deep breath and taking a plunge are the kinds of things fantasy dramas are made of. “I’M 22 I CAN’T CHANGE MY LIFE WHAT AM I SALLY FIELD IN A MELODRAMA?” As if being young suddenly became impossible, like if getting on planes or telling people how I feel or changing my life is the new kind of daydream. Why? Because we get in a place and we wanna stay in a place. Change is difficult. Change isn not what sloths do, or people who want to nap do, or sloths that take naps do.
It take courage. Some people might say it take balls, but fuck that it takes heart, and heart is the hardest.
I blame my unhappiness or my routine or my disdain on life itself, like everything that happens to me is just baseballs being thrown at me and I don’t have a glove. However, change will come anyway. It’s happening, and it’s gross, and it’s hurtling towards you and you’ve got to get some of it. I remember how comfort and complacency, even if your life is shit, sometimes works as a substitute for “doing fucking SOMETHING.” I just want to say you can always change, and it will suck and also, you can still do it.
What I’m really saying is that change doesn’t always have to be big. It has to be little, and then you’ll get some courage, and then you won’t be 25 and wonder “if only.” You should never have to wonder that, because that’s not fair to you.
Here’s what I think. I think you should take a different route home. I think you should step out of the box and do something for this one stupid life. I believe you have it in you, and I believe being scared shitless is appropriate. Life is big and stupid and always, always yours. Do something about that.
Remember this: Time will always move on. People will always miss you. People will always be proud of you.
It’s time to step over to the other side, whatever that means to you.
September will always, always come.
ELECT ME FOR PRESIDENT I HAVE GREAT IDEAS
For a little while, there was all the things we talked about and all of those things were love.
There was a restlessness we equated to lack of love, to missing love, and oh, god, I am so tired of talking about love. I am not here to talk about love because I don’t know what it is and I don’t know where to find it and I am tired of making up solutions to answer these questions.
I want to talk about dreams, I want to talk about the real things that might make you happy that are also things you can control. I want to talk about the core of you, the bones and muscle and insides of you.
If you’re lucky, which I think you are, you have a passion. You never call it your passion because that sounds pretentious and difficult, but that’s what it really is. For me, it’s sitting in front of my computer and trying to find all the little words I have in my head that want to be big nice words. For others, it’s television or paint or numbers or putting their hands in the dirt or some shit. It’s the REAL GOOD you found between being a child who wanted to be a princess and an adult who just wanted to pay their bills. It’s the burn in your stomach you forget about when you think too hard about your heart, or your brain, or why you should maybe go to the dentist. Gut! It’s the something you are on this earth for, not the somebody.
Remember you were put here, maybe, to make an impression—a billion particles that have the chance to make something of all of it. Remember you are a billion particles and not a missed chance with an idiot boy or a paycheck or anything else that happens again and again. Really, it’s kind of like eating breakfast on a Wednesday—it’s forgotten until it isn’t and only then you remember how damn good it is.
Today, I had a cup of coffee and I walked around in the daylight and I realized how important it was to choose a piece of fruit in the sun and smell the char of the hot dog stands and to simply be out in the afternoon—without the short skirts of night, without the walks to work of Monday, just a lazy lull. I think I wrote an entire something in my head about the subway grates and the bite of egg yolk and the confused calm I always feel at 2pm on a weekend when I have the chance to.I write a lot of things in my head that never make their way to paper, and I think it’s funny and also terrible that these things float around somewhere I can’t find them 2 hours later. Then, I am okay with being a lot of things I put together that I can’t always remember, but always love when they happen. I also thought briefly about how much I wanted somebody to sit with while we sat in our own heads, and also how much I liked both long and clipped sentences. So.
But sometimes, oh sometimes, it is so much better to think about the real dreams. The stuff that gets your motor going, the stuff that you used to think about before you thought about love. I’ll call it passion again, although that word still kind of kicks me a bit.
What I mean by that is you have this in your hand ALREADY. It’s there, in all the times you are by yourself and you are wrongly using those times by yourself to think about the stuff you don’t have. Love is hard to find, okay, but love is simple. There is more to life than what makes hearts beating—there is what you have for yourself and what you build for yourself and what you can hold in your hand when everything else goes through like sand.
Let all that is inside of you get you through everything else. Let it pulse through your veins like fire, let it move through you like determination and spit and all the things you want to have for other things. Let it be the moving force in you, and let the rest come later. Become the best thing you can be in a million ways other than somebody else and circumstance.
It will be the things you dream about when you remember how to dream.
When I was a real small baby, I used to carry this thing I called ‘a rag.’ Spoiler alert: it was a blanket and I wouldn’t go outside without it. Frankly, to call the most coveted item of my childhood ‘a rag’ is vaguely offensive to my toddler self, but I didn’t know that at the time and that’s what it was named. There’s a point to this..
Frankly, to start a story with a tale of my childhood is offensive to your literary expectations, too. So. What I’m getting at is we all have our thing.
There was a time I can’t remember, somewhere in between high school and listening to Nirvana and The Cure and what I thought was cool and tough that I started wearing pleather jackets. There was a time I CAN remember where I realized being funny was a good idea, and poking fun was a good idea, and jokes were a good idea and I was happy. We’re always coveting the cool. We’re coveting a personal style, a way to handle ourselves, a definition but then OH
did I mention a WHO? There was a who, because there’s always a who who is either a tall dark-haired thing or a monster. There’s a questioning, a confusion, a defiance to become EXACTLY who you are at the EXACT moment you really want to. It’s a panic, it’s a rush at the five minutes before something is due. Suddenly, the pleather become a brick, and the frown becomes the cement, and the funny becomes a wall. It’s what we can make of it! IT’s who I am, mom! Suddenly, in between “I can’t stop thinking about you” and “I can’t do this” there was a thing built. Did I mention a defiance? Did I mention a wall?
Oh hell, It’s not always a WHO. Sometimes and always it’s a side glance. It’s a laugh directed at you. It’s a family who doesn’t approve. It’s a lost fork in the road. It’s the “afraid to fuck up.” It’s a whole bunch of things that build something you can push and push and it won’t collapse.
How do you become who you are like this? How do you become who you are in the pressure vat? Well.
This was eighteen. This was eighteen and young and scared and stupid in a totally different way, because you will become scared and stupid in a different way.
When you get older, the pleather fits. The stupid shifts. When you get older, you spend a lot of time building walls and suddenly spend a whole lot of time realizing you like the jokes, and you like the jackets, and you no longer have time for the people you built those defenses for. You become happy. You mold. You like who you have become, change what you need to, and keep what is at the core. For me, that’s the jackets and the jokes—-just shot at a different dartboard, if you get that.
Basically, they won’t have to break through walls. They’ll see who you are. YOU’LL see who are. They’ll like who you are. They’ll get the jokes—all of them. The difference between eighteen and twenty is that this is scarier than you want it to be, but also realer and you care about that.
You won’t mind being called a rag, is what I’m circling at. They’ll call the pleather a pleather, a spade a spade. It hasn’t happened, but it will.
It’ll be nice
I want to talk about the book. I guess one of the reasons I want to talk about the book is because sometimes I forget that I’m not writing an incredibly long paper for some kind of college assignment. It’s a 240 page thesis? Okay, I’ll do it!
I’m kidding about that, but only mildly. I know the seriousness of this, in the way I know the seriousness of the interest of my college loans: I’m aware that it’s happening, but it scares me like hell. OKAY I’m terrified. It’s released with Plume (a part of Penguin) in mid-2013, and I think about that day like Ben Affleck thinks about Armaggedon…”Meteor!!!!!”
Who gives a shit that I’m scared, huh? Well, I’m scared because of you. Tumblr is my home, my safe place, my comfort zone. You guys are my weird, funny, awkward family and I am so absurdly grateful for you. I don’t want to be a disappointment to you and I think about that all the time, every draft I hand in. For whatever reason you do, you guys read my stuff and I just want you to desperately to know some things-I want you to know that your belly fat is okay, and being single is okay, and getting too drunk and crying is okay, and making mistakes is okay, and being confused is okay. I am all those things. I stare out the window and wonder what the hell, too. I burp burritos and wonder what the HELL, too. I want you guys to be okay. I want you guys to fall in love, to be happy. I won’t ever forget you or that.
I also want you to know that I was pissed I was single and I felt too fat and I felt all too lost before I started The Frenemy. I was a bit sad. However, you gave me a whole lot of confidence and wisdom I DEFINITELY didn’t have before. So thanks to you more than you know—because of you I’m pretty damn hopeful.
I won’t talk about how this book is my dream. Why? Because I’m not a shithead, and because Shawn Hunter used to be my dream, too. Dreams are reluctantly given out and most people don’t deserve them. But hark! The book! I’ve done 8,000 drafts and get little sleep and talk about guys I don’t want to talk about and phases in my life I don’t want to talk about and okay-I’m having a lot of trouble paying my bills because this book doesn’t exactly give me ‘full-time’ bank…
But I’m excited for it. I’m scared for it. It COULD be worth it.
And oh hey, I am so lucky to have it. I am so grateful to have you. I would choose this life over ‘sexy girl at the bar’ any time. I would choose this life over everything, and we should all choose our own stupid little lives over everything else.
P.S. Fuck Cosmo
Love,
Alida