October 15, 2009

Boys — boys I barely knew any more, friends who faded to acquaintances over the years since I’d left Yale — had, unprovoked, written a bunch of terrible things about me and some other girls. Not even potentially generative personal criticism but cruel vulgar things about bodies and boobs.

My disgust and upset took the immediate articulation of hoping none of them were ever loved. As soon as I thought it, though, I made myself overwrite it with the hope that they would be loved, relentlessly, and learn how to shift their basic attitude from defensive to unguarded. Both kindness and cruelty are thought patterns before they become words or actions, and choosing routines that don’t leave you angry with the world is the only way to be comfortably, sustainably good within it; after making the initial choice to want the best for everyone else, the rest is just enactment.

It does raise the question of whether I personally should be kind to any of these boys — not civil, which is easy, but actively generous and involved in averting their misanthropy. I think I should, but I don’t feel like being demoralized just now. Maybe after Christmas.

7:42am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyClCK9
October 13, 2009
"P.S Me and the Portuguese man from the shelter (oh I can’t remember his name I am a terrible volunteer) are going to write you a letter on his typewriter at breakfast on Friday. He is bringing it just so we can write to you. He said for reasons of privacy he would look away when I wrote your name and address on the envelope so, honey, your address, please."

— Heart-eatingly amazing Olivia Fairweather

8:49am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCeVSQ
October 13, 2009

Yesterday I went east to Brighton Beach to hang out with Curtis, easily my favorite person in America. I feel stupidly lucky to have inherited such a good friend with so little effort; Curtis expresses all of Olivia’s kindness and goofy humility, but as a boy, so I get to enjoy both his company and the penumbra of hers. We walked along the boardwalk to Sheepshead Bay, and talked about books and school and families. We agreed — and maybe everyone agrees on this, but Curtis is so far the only person for whom I’ve auditioned the idea — that the family is the primary social unit, and that the behavior inculcated at home predicts all further social and political behavior. Generosity is concentrically amplified, so that what begins as feeling safe and cared for by your parents (and attentive to/responsible for your siblings) grows into a sense of security in the world, and equips you for service work, political activism etc.

Conceiving of things this way does turn anything after parenting in damage control, and severely limits the good that can be done in even early education; but in exchange it makes obvious and essential the responsibility of raising children. I am so stoked to adopt kids, ooga booga!

Also Curtis defined the word “screed” for me, so now I know what I’m writing!

8:47am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCeVFz
October 12, 2009

I have been seeing a lot of improv shows lately, partly to tend a crush but also because few things are as instructive towards social generosity. So much of a successful scene depends upon attentive response to other people; rescuing a foundering digression, or diverting attentionwhen something goes flat-footed. Ritualized goofiness.

9:38pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCc_Zq
October 12, 2009

When I was religious, I believed that the only impulse that defied examination — that grew stronger and gained momentum as a feeling rather than a thought — was faith. Now I’d argue the same thing for generosity. No matter the motives, wanting to give and help are categorically healthy responses to a world that always needs more.

9:25pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCcxo-
October 12, 2009

All practice of nihilism is by definition half-hearted; if one truly believed that nothing and nobody mattered, and stood at that ataraxic peak surveying human relations, it would only be logical to jump. Clear-eyed consideration of the costs and benefits of caring for and trusting other people could only lead to suicide, because there is so much potential for harm and cruelty, so little guarantee of kindness. But for everyone who, implicitly or explicitly, decides to risk caring — and this is everyone who hasn’t killed him or herself, really — there’s no reason to be anything but generous, stupidly generous, in everything you do.

9:12pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCcv85
October 12, 2009

It had been almost a year since I had seen Matt when he appeared in the strobing, foggy melee of Rudnick’s big spring party. I only saw him out of my peripheral vision, and turned away as quickly as my nervous circuit would allow, but had to quit dancing and recede in the crowd to process the fact of his continued existence. It wasn’t especially gutting to see him, just inconceivable: I’d been thinking of him as dead to avoid thinking of him as alive and no longer in love with me.

Josh found me and took me out in the stairwell, where I warbled and sniffled and admitted that I wanted to go home. As we were leaving the building, he suddenly gave me a big protective hug; I realized simultaneously that I had never been as (physically) close to Josh before, and how skinny he was, and then — maybe a second later — that he was trying to keep me from seeing Matt, who had followed us out. And even though I had just said it a few minutes earlier, and thought I meant it, I knew right then with buzzing certainty that I loved Josh as a brother more than I had ever loved Matt as a boyfriend.

7:49am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCapIE
October 10, 2009

If I’m honest, the things that scare me most about being a living donor are the most indulgently bizarre. I saw an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent in which an obsessively self-righteous man tried to sign away his guts to the needy, eventually killing someone in the pursuit of goodness — and while I don’t for a second suspect myself of murder, the connection between aggressive virtue and violence is worrying.

Also, whenever I think about donating part of my liver — I still haven’t decided if I should do liver or kidney — I can’t help but imagine those self-healing cutting boards and the slow slurping noise of the tissue closing up over the scalpel. Slllllurp.

10:10pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCW0lu
October 10, 2009

So rather than existing in mutual exclusion, privilege and integrity are inextricable from one another. Similarly, responsibility and agency seem bound: I would always rather take the blame when something’s gone wrong, because it allows me to change the situation. If it’s my fault, I can fix it!

10:05pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCV-t9
October 10, 2009

In everything, I try to remember what Tamsin Omond’s dad said: “the cost of privilege is absolute integrity”. There is no excuse for me to do anything but work hard for things I believe; in all senses of the word, I can afford to. Practicality has never encroached on my idealism (i.e. I have never had to compromise my ethics to pay for food or shelter), and the idealism itself is a product of an expensive and philosophically grounded education. I can afford to do a low-paying, necessary job; I can afford the psychological exhaustion of service work. Rather than undermine my stability or happiness, the responsibility that privilege demands only makes me feel luckier: I am able, I am allowed, to help.

9:58pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZcGCVyCV_dG