Fight with knives

What the hell happened this year?

Disclaimer: This post is entirely for me and is in no way intended to be good writing. You can start every sentence with “I” at the end of the year. It’s ok. It’s blogging!

Over the course of the past year, this blog has turned into more of a journal or an outlet than a place to build samples and ideas. That’s a good thing; it means I did a bunch of writing this year. It means I’m getting paid to write this year, it means I’m getting clearer about my career, and it generally means I’m paying less and less attention to the things that anger me and more attention to things that I’m building. 2011 was a pretty wonderful year, if not the best so far, and during the year I did some things:

Twin Cities Runoff. It’s funny how my giant writing project brings out my complete inability to write anything but gushy sentiment on how great it all has been, but I can’t put into words how proud I am of TCR or how amazing everyone who has worked on the Runoff has been in the past year. All the countless hours of labor were worth it, and writing and planning the magazine has taken me in directions I never thought I’d go. We published over 20 new writers and artists as well as put together an event this past May. I wrote nine months of Community News Roundup, an exercise I wish I still had time for (and would like to continue again, some day in the future). Next year TCR is switching gears a little— and I’m still figuring out exactly how that will manifest itself— but it’s a project I sincerely want to keep going because we’re doing work that no one else in the Twin Cities is doing.

I got realistic about my career. I realized that I’m a good writer and a good manager and should get paid for those things— but I might have to shuffle my ideal world around to make that happen. Right now, I’m working my third contract writing or editing job of the year, which has actually been pretty great since I’m getting paid to write. Writing copy is fun, especially when it’s helpful copy! My biggest goals for 2012 are career goals related to getting serious, both about writing and about earning a living, which I’ve finally learned are often two separate things, and will be for me for at least the next couple of years.

I met someone awesome. Will and I started dating in April, and it’s easily been the closest thing to perfection I could have pictured for a relationship. But enough mushy stuff.

I dabbled in the community arts world. One of the primary goals of Twin Cities Runoff is to be inclusive and community-oriented, so I applied for the Creative Community Leadership Fellowship and spent several weekends of the summer attending arts leadership workshops. It was a wonderful experience, and I met a lot of cool people… but it also made me realize that community arts— in the public arts, everyone is an artist sense— isn’t necessarily for me. It also helped me realize that I’m done with school and workshops and conferences and anything where I’m not learning by doing. The best thing I got out of CCLI was learning how to look for advantageous and fruitful collaborators, which is a skill and purpose I want to focus on in 2012… but I can do without the icebreaker games and networking chat.

I learned to get off the internet. On the other side of the not-actually-doing-work spectrum from community arts games is social media, which I have grown to dislike for anything but promotional purposes and a quick chuckle. You can talk all you want about its potential, but it’s not worth sifting through everyone’s awful taste in macros and anger management.

I drank probably 1/5 of what I drank last year. I quit my drunk job on February 5, and it was the best decision I ever made. Not drinking so much has made a world of difference in my world and lifestyle and also my wallet. I stopped drinking every time I was anxious and learned that I don’t work well even after one glass of wine. If I drink two nights out of the week now, it’s a big week for me. Life’s nice without a constant nightcap.

I visited Los Angeles and New York. I love LA, and I could see myself living there. New York is always fun, and there are people there who I love, but I am glad that it’s not where I chose to spend most of my 20s.

I stopped listening to new music almost entirely. I was broke, and I never heard anything that I was stoked about, except 4.

I read comics. Will is a cartoonist, and I’m learning more about his background, so I spent some time digging into Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and lots of artists— some of which I liked, some of which I don’t. I like a lot of the art, but I’ve yet to find a story that really gets me by the short-n-curlies, but it’s out there, I’m sure. Anyway, you can send me recommendations!

I read new fiction for the first time in years. But Just Kids, which is not fiction, was my favorite book this year.

I saw a fuckton of movies. Meek’s Cutoff and Drive were my favorite new movies. Nashville was my favorite older one, but Where the Boys Are was pretty great, too.

I talked about writing. A lot. I’ll talk about it again.

Do you have any questions?

Happy new year, and here’s to an even better 2012!

Notes on a Lifetime of Superfundanceparties

1. Tonight I am going to a dance party, one that, like many dance parties of the past, advertises itself as “new wave / no wave / britpop” (oh cheeky cheeky, oh naughty sneaky). The dj at the party will play Blondie and Franz Ferdinand and Duran Duran and Joy Division, and most importantly, the party is named after a Pulp deep cut that I downloaded onto my desktop with Napster my junior or senior year of high school. This party is named cooler than any other party I have been to so far, cooler than Motherfucker or clubs with names like Lit and Rififi, and even cooler than Misshapes, who djed parties that I missed by a few months when I moved away from New York. Now that I rarely go dancing because I am in my late 20s and prefer movie-watching most of the time, this party will serve as the representation of all the parties I always wanted to go to as a kid, a whole decadent theater filled with dancing debauchers and the guy who looks like Morrissey who always dances crazy at these parties. Before the party I will champagne cocktails with my girlfriends and hear Damon in my head singing “Yes it really really really could happen.” I am going to this party filled with every teenager who spent the last years of the 90s calling him or herself an anglophile. I am going to this party not to party, but to dance and skip around like my body won’t revolt tomorrow, because in 10 years there will be no more Britpop dance parties.

2. I fear that I have become a nerdier dancer than ever before. I have always been a whole body dancer, anticipating every movement of the songs that I know by heart, because I listen to a lot of music on headphones, especially dance music from the 80s and 90s that I have been listening to for years and years. Things people have said about my dancing over the years:

• “You dance like a stripper” (high school)
• “You use your arms too much” (early college)
• “You look like the only person in the room who is having fun.” (60s and 70s dance night, sometime after 21)
• “Who ARE you?” (first visit back to NYC after moving away, attending a dance night at one of my favorite old haunts, during “Common People”) (I don’t think it was because I was dancing so awesome that he thought I was a celebrity.)

Now, since I dance less and less in public, and more and more to Beyonce in my apartment where I live by myself and have a rather large space for dancing, sometimes I fear that I am moving more toward amateur choreography, because Beyonce. Amateur choreography, added to my already don’t-give-a-fuck-if-I’m-flailing style means: I am probably a really nerdy-lookin’ dancer. But I’m cool with that. I get to go dancing, and I don’t give a fuck.

Things I remember from college IV

Something I completely forgot:

In my first semester Writing the Essay class we had to read Laura freakin Mulvey. Once again: all teenagers should be forced to read postmodern and feminist theory. Of course I hated it at the time, but I still will describe things as “really gazey.”

At some point in my sophomore or junior years I took:

Shakespeare or whatever: The professor looked like Jerry Seinfeld. On the first day of class he said, “If you’re shy, you need to get over it. Learn to speak up or you’ll never get anywhere.” So, as a naturally shy person, somehow I took that to heart. I remember zero course content. Sorry, Will.

Yeats or whatever: This half-semester course was in Gallatin, NYU’s school for individualized study, and I found it a really weird approach to Yeats’s poetry. We managed to study everything but Yeats, and I wrote another paper on Lewis Carroll.

Seventh semester: Fall 2004

Space, Time, and 20th Century Physics: A friend had taken this course and said it was all theory, no math, and it really opened her eyes to how the universe worked. This was the only class I ever took intentionally with friends, and I dropped it, because it turned out it was more than a little math and I’d never taken a physics class before in my life, save that Astronomy course. QED is pretty rad, though. I never read the book on Schrodinger’s cat.

Joyce or whatever: Ireland House is the coolest building at NYU. We read Dubliners (yay!) and Portrait (boo!) and Ulysses (mixed feelings!). This class is half gentlemen and half ladies and the gentlemen speak up a lot more. I pretty much remain silent. Yes I said.

Advanced Fiction Workshop: I had read Norwegian Wood over the summer and really wanted to incorporate rock musings into my fiction, so I tried to do so, poorly. I was still writing in what we now call Manic Pixie Dream Girls (because I had read Norwegian Wood over the summer). Another student in this workshop wrote a lot of name-dropping consumer-oriented fiction aimed at the young urban elite, and we used to argue in class a lot, largely because I found his style of writing sophomoric and he thought mine silly and sentimental.*

Final semester: Spring 2005

Introduction to Architecture: Every time I see a building that I remember from this class I say, “Hey! That building is famous!” Barcelona chairs are pretty hideous. All those fucking churches look alike. Never take a survey class your final semester.

Experimental History: Hayden White! Hayden White! We read some theory, but mostly we read creative (more narrative-oriented) approaches to history books. Were some of the books we read crap? Absolutely. But some of them were fantastic, and all of them tried something different. Was this class extremely influential on everything I did forward? You betcha. The paper I wrote from this class, about receding hairlines and the 1972 election, remains the only academic paper I ever had published.

Honors Thesis: “Narrating the Body: Sex, Gender, and History in Orlando and Middlesex.” You’re damn right I read a lot of great theory that is completely useless careerwise to write this thesis. I’m still so proud of this thing. I spent weeks in the library, reading anything I could about androgyny, gender change, and corporeality. Yes, it was like heaven.

And… I think I may have taken some other classes! But I don’t remember them.

So. Now you know everything I remember from the college part of college.

*I still find name-dropping consumer-oriented writing aimed at the young urban elite sophomoric. As for silly and sentimental, I don’t write what I wrote in college anymore.

Things I remember from college III

Previously. And.

Fifth Semester: Fall 2003. Prague.

Semesters abroad are more about the full experience (Becherovka, graveyards, Galouises, travel) than the coursework, but there are a few things I remember about class.

Elementary Czech I: One time our instructor mixed up the words “chicken” and “kitchen.” “Jaky je ten hotel?” “Jsem Americanka!” “Dvacet-jeden.”

Eastern European literature: Our professor has a stutter and we call him Mumbles. My favorite book we read is The Arsonist by Egon Hostovsky, and I work on a project for a book called City Sister Silver, which is the only book I read in college that concerned a snuff film. (I am not sure whether I knew what a snuff film was before reading that book.) Most of the books we read I never hear of again, except R.U.R. (which, yes, is a play). My dislike for most of Milan Kundera’s work is confirmed.

History of Nationalism: My professor expressed her dislike that the vendors in the tourist areas sold shirts with Stalin’s image on them because Stalin was never something to be proud of.* I wrote a paper on Nationalism and Communism, which was much harder than I thought it would be.

Culture of Dissent: My professor was one of the most attractive men I’ve ever seen in my life—James Bond-type looks. He would say things like, “I have to fly to Iraq this weekend” and tell stories about his days as a revolutionary. After a while, the class begins to wonder how much of this is ego. In class, we discuss torture and humor. We go to the Samizdat museum, which, as a lifelong lover of zines, is still one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. My final paper was on the role of satire in humor in expressing dissent, and it was a pretty good paper.

Sixth Semester: Spring 2004

Intermediate Fiction: My grade is lowered because I show up for class late so much.

Observational Astronomy: New York is a really shitty place to observe the stars, but the moon looks fucking amazing through a telescope. The Moon Illusion is when the moon looks bigger than it actually is in relation to the Earth. If you take a picture of a really big moon, the camera will reproduce it as a regular-sized moon unless you have a special lens. No one knows why this happens.

Palestine and Israel:  Midway through the semester, the professor leaves for one reason or another and is replaced by an instructor who teaches with a clearly pro-Palestine bent. I am put off by this, without evaluating whether I should be. David Ben-Gurion. Six-Day War.

The Public Role of Poetry in America: Much like my Public History class the previous year, this one is badass. We study little magazines and see Mos Def speak at the New School. A classmate figures Mos Def is stoned. I write one paper 18th and 19th century women’s diary poetry and one paper on Angel Hair, a little magazine that inspired all the others. Both of these require amazingly intense archival research, and we know how I feel about that. We conclude that, aside from slam, there is very little direct role for poetry in contemporary U.S. society, but, for it to be effective, you really have to slip it in someone’s tea or something.

*After this, I somehow still rationalize keeping a candle of Stalin’s bust that I bought in Budapest at the Communist Statuary, not realizing that memorializing terrible things ironically is still memorializing terrible things.