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"Yet I still had the nagging feeling that, like Oedipa Maas, I might be the victim of an elaborate hoax, that there would be no Pynchon at her apartment, just an imposter--or perhaps a locked door with a mail slot marked with the sign of a muted posthorn."
Yes.
"Dean, a fellow teaching assistant in English, announced to the entire table that he had been taking acid nonstop for a week, that he had fallen in love while tripping, and that he was dropping out and going to Mexico. No one batted an eye or tried to change his mind; I remember envying his nerve. This was happening all the time; people were dropping like flies, and every semester you had to renew your vows to stay in school. Dean had already given away all his books. "Who wants my watch?" he asked, melodramatically stripping it off. "I`ve passed beyond time." I said I'd take it; I already had a watch, but I figured I could hock his. A lovely woman I'd never met sat down at the table and asked me why I was wearing two watches. Several years later, we got married."
"I often feel that way about the nineteen sixties in America: they were no joke, they really happened to us, and they happened to me, although in retrospect they boggle the imagination and seem too incredible to be real. The truth of the sixties is stranger than fiction. As Philip Roth wrote about the period, "is it possible? is it happening?" ("Writing American Fiction" 121). That's why the sixties have so rarely been captured well in American fiction, except by a few authors such as Pynchon: if somebody told you the history of the decade as a story, you wouldn't believe it. You'd wonder: Is this for real? Is this some kind of joke? Is it supposed to be farce or tragedy? You wouldn't know how to feel, to laugh or to cry."
-Andrew Gordon, "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon"
If you knew which famous person lived here, you'd cry, too.
Do you ever get the feeling that you are the butt end of a joke being played by the universe?
William: I love you but I can't commit because dating someone of my own race is so cliche
Caitlin: nah i feel like dating someone of his own race would be edgy now
Thesis: All relationships are a variation on the theme "I love you but I can't commit."
Bill agreed, but only after I explained to him what the word "variation" means.
I love you, and want to commit, but can't.
I love you, but you don't want to commit.
I love you, but never wanted to commit, and now, after so much unwanted commitment, I am leaving.
I love you, but I'm an alcoholic, which means I can only commit to being a dickhat.
I love you, but I love someone else more.
I love you, but I love someone else more: myself.
I love you, but I love someone else more: my mom.
I love you, and though I thought I couldn't commit, just realized I've been committed this entire time (lucky you!).
I really want to love you, but you aren't smart enough.
If I loved you, I could commit, but (you get the picture).
I have feelings that resemble long-term, dull-on-the-ends-from-so-much-use love, but am chasing a dream of having sex with 100 million women before I die.
I like you, and have been making great efforts to show you my level of commitment, but at the end of the day I am kind of a jerk, so despite it all, I stood you up (shame on you).
I like you, and have been making great efforts to show you my level of commitment, but at the end of the day I am kind of a jerk, so despite it all, I stood you up again (shame on me).
I like you, but not enough, though, in all fairness, I've been doing my best to convince myself to commit; I've failed (oooh, burn).
I'm not sure I like you, but my roommates do. I'm not committed, but they've convinced me not to leave you.
There's not a lot I like about you: you're overweight, you're flaky, you're a bad dresser. Why am I so committed?
I was gonna dump you, but it was easier not to.
Discuss/add.
This is just to say
by [name deleted]
I have been formulating
mental
break-up
escape plans,
even though
you do
and say
everything right.
Sucks.
Can't a dude
get a break
around here?
*
I hadn’t been in a serious relationship in a while, so I asked God for a man who would stick around. But I forgot to add "willingly" and I also forgot to ask for a partner who was intelligent and interesting or like me in any way, and I got [name deleted], who was none of the things I didn't ask for, and stuck with me, never forgetting to let me know how pained he was to do so. So after that, I asked God for a person who was charming and intellectually stimulating, who I would have a lot in common with and who would relish our time together, and I was sure I had done it right this time when God gave me [name deleted]. But all too soon it became clear that I had forgotten to mention that I wanted a lover and not a pet tornado, touching down, fucking shit up, and whirring away, tripping over everything as he went. Next, I asked God for a man who would stick around, happily, who was smart and witty and fun, and who would love me very much and for a long time. I got [name deleted], who was wonderful, and whom I fell in love with, but who made painfully clear that I had failed to mention this thing called "emotional soundness." God, like Keith Botsford, really likes to hold you to your word, I've found. So I asked God, finally, for a man who could play it cool, wasn’t unhealthily attached to his neurosis-inducing parents, and generally just got alone. I got [name deleted], who is all those things and is great in bed and with whom I have found nothing wrong with, who seems to have no secret tricks or strings, and I’m bored.
Once Becca asked God for boobs that were at least a handful, and then God gave her the smallest hands in the world.
It’s like that.
*
[name deleted 1]: like, i'm glad i met you and i'm glad you took a chance on me. i realize that it was a big chance you took. i have a lot of things that i've realize i need to address, and i need to be alone for those things. sorry, thanks. i'd like to keep in touch if you can stomach it.' that sort of thing
[name deleted 2]: that is funny. i started reading that and thought that was a message from you, [name deleted 1], to me, [name deleted 2]
[1]: hahahahahaha HAHHA
[2]: i think im drunk.
If you designed this room and have been thinking recently, "Gee, I'm pretty good at that. I should do it again," please don't.
Drawn to scale. Note how the closets protrude into the room, taking up so much valuable real estate. Note size of bed in proportion to rest of room.
A man I've been hanging out with was named after Sean Connery.
My roommate's given name is Harrison Ford.
What?
SILLY:
An 18-year-old has secretly painted a 60ft drawing of a phallus on the roof of his parents' £1million mansion in Berkshire. It was there for a year before his parents found out. They say he'll have to scrub it off when he gets back from traveling. [BBC]
SERIOUS:
In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.
And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.
...
But it’s the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context.
...
Vaillant’s overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. “Happiness is love. Full Stop,” he says in a video. [NYT]
First read David Brook's op-ed, and follow it up with Joshua Wolf Shenk's considerably longer, more in-depth, Atlantic piece.
1.
I know this is totally not timely anymore, but, it will never stop being the most awesome use of Slate employee time ever:
2.
Great Gladwell piece in this week's New Yorker about how Davids beat Goliaths. His signature really-cheesey-narrative-voice still shines through here and there, but I guess I can get over it, though I'd prefer it if he did instead. [THANKS LEX / THANKS FOR NOTHING]
I have moved into a room so impossibly small that any normal human being would be shocked at its size. But there is something incredibly comforting about living in the smallest, safest cave in Brooklyn, big enough only for a bed, surrounded by an enormous apartment and five other people. Here, there will only be jokes! Cave jokes. Jokes about stalactites and hibernating bears. Jokes about neanderthals. And, in my humble opinion, it is the cutestly decorated cave in the world. Photos soon-soon.
Q: What's a polar bear weigh?
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