Everybody knows that when controversial figures lose a family member there are other relatives who you wouldn’t find reprehensible who are also in mourning, yes? If you can’t find any fucks to give when your enemies suffer a loss? Okay.

I’m so glad Mad Men is coming back. I did not purchase whiskey for the occasion like I meant to. 

FEELINGS.

But also! It’s my awareness that those sentences are obnoxious that terrifies me. I am terrified of being obnoxious and totally oblivious of how obnoxious i am, or not being oblivious but also not knowing how to fix it. 

Anyway! So this is the article I’m reading. I’ve been preoccupied with goal-setting lately; I passed the point that I’d planned for in my early 20s awhile ago and my overarching goals are the same but I need to fill in the smaller steps. I’m doing so by working backwards from my ideas about what I think I want at 40. That’s another major difference between me and Elizabeth Wurtzel (my previous post mentioning the first thing is on my other blog): She’s writing from the vantage point of being in her mid-40s and I feel this way at 31. And she’s writing as someone who has the career she set out to have. I feel worse, maybe, because i’m not yet being paid to do the thing I moved here to do. Anyway, these two paragraphs were especially familiar to me:

Please understand: I live specifically, with intent. The intent is, I know now, not at all specific, except that I have no ability to compromise. Most people say that as a statement of principle, but in my case, it is about feeling trapped when I am doing something I don’t like, and it is probably more childish than anything else. I likely do the right things for the wrong reasons. But it has also meant that I have not disciplined myself into the kinds of commitments that make life beyond the wild of youth into a haven of calm. I am proud that I have never so much as kissed a man for any reason besides absolute desire, and I am more pleased that I only write what I feel like and it has been lucrative since I got out of college in 1989. I had the great and unexpected success of Prozac Nation in 1994, and that bought me freedom. And I have spent that freedom carelessly, and with great gratitude. Why would I do anything else? I did not expect, not ever, to be scared to death.

 

I was born with a mind that is compromised by preternatural unhappiness, and I might have died very young or done very little. Instead, I made a career out of my emotions. And now I am just quarreling with normal. I believe in true love and artistic integrity—the kinds of things that should be mentioned between quotation marks—as absolutely now as I did in ninth grade. But even I know that functional love includes a fair amount of falsity, or no one would get through morning coffee, and integrity is mostly a heroic excuse to avoid the negotiating table. But I can’t let go. I live in the chaos of adolescence, even wearing the same pair of 501s. As time goes by.

I’m blogging over here until I’m in a better mood. I don’t wanna fight with that dude but when I feel combative I cannot turn it off and I will reblog EVERYBODY I disagree with and tell them which horseman of the fucking apocalypse they are. 

Is this the article everyone was talking about? By everyone i mean a couple of people. I’m reading it. I’m sure I’ll have opinions. 

He had a stupid response and I pointed out where it was stupid without explicitly calling him stupid and apologized to my friend for stirring shit. When I saw he responded, I asked Non-Tumblr Roommate to read it and summarize because I promised I would not fight on this man’s wall all night. She said he “clarified” (that is in quotation marks because she said it sounded like gibberish and read it to me so I could translate it from stupid jerk to English) that he was referring to Muslim countries (not problematic at all, you see!) and I, by talking about women who choose to cover themselves or who live in other countries, was making “false dichotomies” and “ad hominem attacks.” Which, okay. I called your BEHAVIOR and ATTITUDE paternalistic and sexist because it was but you wanted to try out your shiny new words, I understand. 

And it’s not that the man had a stupid opinion that set me off, but the fact that he needed to post four separate comments on my friend’s wall. My friend was like, “You know some people choose hijabs for themselves right” and this grown ass man did the equivalent of a SO WHAT flounce and ragged on the woman in the photo for spelling Trayvon’s name wrong. She’s not stupid for spelling an uncommon name wrong. Obviously her heart was in the right place. But you just can’t contain your rage because this practice that has not a thing to do with you at all just has you OUTRAGED. Shut. Up. I think this dude’s friends with me and Trainjuice’s friends from the bar. So! Fuck that dude! I’ll let him know when I see his ass Saturday, too, if he wants to have an opinion.

I generally don’t fight on other people’s Facebook walls but i might start today, damn it.