Between fielding phone calls, emails and making preparations for a three day weekend based around a holiday I didn’t realize existed, not to mention don’t have to work on, I stumble across a piece by Laura Matsue about her reasoning behind (mostly) disappearing from the internet. While I can’t relate on the topics of heavy adult drug use and being an artistic drifter through varying big cities in Canada, I do understand the need to distance yourself from the person you are perceived to be by anyone that thinks they’ve seen your life through whatever glimpses you’ve offered them through the computer screen. It’s hard to sever your own connection to the information super-highway, though the importance of said information is open to debate. And what’s harder than giving up the internet? Getting the internet to give up YOU.

Unlike most people I know, I hate having my photo taken. Sometimes I wonder if this is a generational thing; my 90+ year old great-grandmother looks amazing in every photo that’s ever been taken of her—a smiling vision of perfection, even with a beheaded chicken in hand. For a few years the feeling subsided and I wondered if maybe I’d outgrown feeling annoyed every time I looked at pictures of myself. But I didn’t, and I’m back to feeling like I should have complete control over photos of myself, online or not. As a self-critical individual, seldom do the pictures I see of myself meet my own quality control standards. That’s probably the real root of the issue, but I’m pushing that thought aside for the time being.

It’s less about having the photo taken than looking at it later. Why don’t I look the same in pictures as I do in my head? (Simple answer: in my head I am a gray misty something, and in print I am a very solid something.) As a kid, I hid from my family & friends whenever they toted cameras around in the hopes of capturing some magic moment.

Somewhere in the piles of stuff I haven’t talked myself into throwing out yet is a picture taken on my 15th birthday. I’m on the living room floor, held down by my friends so that my mom would have some shred of photographic evidence that not only did I have friends, but they came to my birthday party. Looking at myself in Kikwear pants and a Powerpuff Girls shirt is no less shame-inducing now than it was then. The difference is I couldn’t disappear then like I can now, after a fashion.

The disappearing started small: quickly deleting of pictures I didn’t like from my Flickr account. The joyful sensation that I was effectively disappearing was instantly exhilarating, and soon I had no photos of my face left. Two days later, I deleted the whole account. As I groomed the rest of my social networking profiles, I got pseudo-high off the process of untagging, hiding and deleting images of myself. “What a strange thing” I realized, “to be virtually invisible on the internet.” (A sign not only of the times but my excessive attachment to them, to be sure.) I’m not interested in lurking or dramatically “quitting the internet”, but there’s something important about the fact that converting myself into little more than text accompanied by a grainy, face-free user icon made the internet fun (again).

As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a default nondescript female head shape. Anything I had the power to remove, I did. A big part of me wants to keep it that way; it’s hard to see myself as being “out there” in a way that I never meant to be, in social circles that I find to be repulsive on the whole. I want to live quietly or, at the very least, keep my business off the internet. You’re smirking as you read this on my blog that I have connected to a few of my social networking presences–but I’m serious; there’s something frighteningly old-but-new (and enjoyable) about exercising strict control over what pieces of my life wind up online. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the internet in the last few years, it’s that less is more.

Clearly, I’m not looking to be anonymous–and, to be honest, it’s a bit late for that. I don’t want to be invisible exactly, but I do want to be a part of the scenery in the least distracting way possible. (Amusingly, my computer tried to auto correct that to “detracting”. Relevant?) Acting as background to my own internet presence just… feels safe. The attention from strangers for what I now think might be the wrong reasons can end anytime. What I used to think was validation just confuses me now. Why so much interest? Why the anonymously harsh criticism at every turn?

Maybe you don’t have that problem. Maybe your self-esteem is like a brick wall and you don’t question yourself, ever, because you’re the shit. Good for you! I’m my own worst critic: harsh, unforgiving, and so on. Whatever snarky comment you have to offer, I’ve already thought of.

Posting this might be breaking my only cardinal internet rule: don’t say too much. Don’t give people the type of insight that they would only have if they had gained my trust in person. But I’ve grown up posting in both public and private spaces varying portions of myself I saw fit to put down. I type faster than I write, edit more thoroughly when words are on a screen in neat little rows and frankly, I get writer’s cramp long before I’m done getting my thoughts down.

Is there a safe space in between super-internet-girl and just being me, via internet? I’m not sure and I don’t expect that anyone who would actually read a personal web blog would be, either. In other words, I might just go back to talking about strangers on the subway and varying fiction snippets for a while. When I first started keeping blogs I thought I was capable of saying something, but now I suspect I’ve said just about enough.

It’s clear that Orwell is not tooling around on the topic of poorly constructed writing of any variety. I wouldn’t say Orwell attacks the prose-prone writer so much as addresses the shortcomings of his pretty words. It made me feel a bit better about my own writing in comparison to some of my wordier internet brethren—for a minute, at least. I suggest anyone who feels like a writer read through the essay and let me know how much of what you’ve put out there for others to read was loaded with overblown filler words and/or sentences. I’m as guilty as anyone, though certainly not as guilty as some.

Read it here & then get back to me. I want to know who else is second-guessing the education they received, not to mention every five paragraph essay written and turned into an educational establishment of any level. (Yes, this does tie back into the thought process behind this post.)

I fear summer already, the wet heat that will lead to a constant awareness that I am sweating. Already I can envision myself traveling to and from every location necessary to that day’s agenda with visible wet spots on my clothes; lower back, under my breasts and both arms, maybe at the back of the neck of my shirt. I feel negatively about things like tank tops, shorts and skirts–bare skin requires sunscreen and attracts the city grime too easily. The odds of suffering heat exhaustion by July are high, my friends. There’s no winning in the self-inflicted sweaty hell that is sweater season.

Once I delivered a teary mini-speech about all the reasons he was an asshole, the dynamic changed and he had me laughing again. The tears, which I always thought would deter sexual attention, seemed to have the opposite effect. We slept in the same bed but skipped the sex. (What, you thought he was going to change his mind about me being fat? Yeah right.)

I woke up in the morning with a slight headache and lingering memories of the night before–a speedy escape was necessary. Not so much for the sake of my self-worth or respect, but because I didn’t feel like having any kind of uncomfortable verbal exchange in my underwear. I pulled the dress from last night over my head, gathering up my socks and cell phone charger from their landing spots on the floor of his apartment. Doc Martens on and laced, coat in hand, I tried turned the knob several times before realizing I was quite possibly stuck.

Despite my turning and pulling, the door was not opening. I felt my eyes go wide like dinner plates–a pointless expressive display, really, since nobody was witnessing this melodramatic moment in not-a-hookup history. It was the momentary panic you’ve already seen a hundred times in cheesy romcoms–fighting the doorknob, trying and re-trying every broken locking mechanism on an old East Village apartment door.

“Shit. Fuck. Fucking shit!” I whisper-cussed, as if that would do me any good. The knob continued to turn, the locks moved but the latch refused to catch. I became more frantic, a semi-shamed little bird beating herself against a closed window, until a good turn-shove-pull from my wrist cracked the door enough for me to step out into the hallway. I carefully shut the door behind me, avoiding the loud slam that would have rendered my 20 minutes of silent panic pointless. Once on the street I marveled at how quickly the chilly morning air alleviated what I thought were the beginnings of a hangover. Maybe it was just the glee of a successful getaway pumping through my veins. Several hours later my phone chimed, alerting me that someone was awake and looking to discuss the events of the night before.

After realizing just how desperate the better portion of Manhattan is for brunch on a Saturday and being unwilling to wait 25 minutes to be seated (his impatience, not mine) we wind up at some cafe around the corner from his apartment. We made small talk past the arrival of our coffee, until midway through our brunch.

“Listen – I like you it just… it can’t be like this. I promised myself I wouldn’t come to America and get involved with girls.”

The Russian girl seated at the table next to us is obviously listening. She looked at me expectantly as he and I “had it out”, her face giving away that she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more upset at the fact that this guy was telling me–quite bluntly–that we needed to be “just friends”.

Despite being awkward, the conversation wasn’t so bad. It’s not the first time that people got drunk and made questionable passes at their friends–with any luck, it’ll be the last. We agreed to avoid drinking and sleepovers, to still hang out and (non-verbally, and quite possibly only in my own head) that he would continue to pay for my food when he suggests we go out. I’m still not eager to test the limits of this thing, whatever it is. My ego is still bruised after his honest assessment of my body and my ability to shrug it off may have more to do with my own vision of self than his thoughts on it.

ickis: on kafka and other sleep deprived nonsense from Julene Horowitz on Vimeo.

Further clarification while equally as sleep deprived as I was in the video in regards to my Kafka-appreciation issues…

Kafka is one of those authors that, despite numerous attempts, I just don’t “get”. I’ve read his books, books about his books, and books about him–so you’d think something would stick, or spark my interest and generate some deep interest in his work within me. But it just hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it’s going to.

It’s funny that I’m writing this, because I feel like admitting to “not getting it” implies one of two things: laziness (a completely possible explanation) or worse, stupidity. It’s not that I turn to books entirely for the purpose of mental thumb-twiddling, or that I don’t have the mental capacity to understand higher concepts… I just don’t want books to stress me out. I have work, bills, a personal life and a moderately successful blog (not this one, obviously) that keep me covered in that department. That’s what reading Kafka does: stress me out.

The interest I had in Kafka’s work sprouted from a source I probably shouldn’t openly admit to: smart people (women, even!) in photos, showing off their sizable book collection in the background while framing their faces with one of his books. This blatant display of sexy-but-smarty-tarty snootiness made me curious. Over the years the number of girls broadcasting their Kafka love increased, but curiosity alone is not enough to overcome my deep, semantic dislike for his writing.

It’s not that the concepts are over my head, I think. (I mean, I wouldn’t know if I was too stupid to comprehend the material… or would I?) I understand that for Kafka there was no difference between life and art, which meant his art was just life. And life, it seems, contained many run-on sentences. It does in my head, too. But once put down in words there has to be something to break up the bubbles and lines; something short and sweet like an apostrophe or dash that allows the reader to know when they can take a breath, especially when relating your thoughts to others out loud.

Maybe it’s just the fact he was intensely anti-Freud during a time when people eagerly lapped up that psychoanalysis bullshit. I can even understand the great deal of himself that he poured into every story–the deep sadness over his lack of offspring, his desire to feel freedom in the less cognitive thought processes of other creatures.

All this trash-talking aside, one quote of his haunts me, if only for its simplicity (finally!) and how strongly I’ve found myself relating to it:

“The only strange thing about me is my nature.”

… After reading that line to myself time and again over the past few days, it’s the single most accurate explanation of self I can think of. I still think the man was onto something, lack of punctuation aside.

My brain is disconnected from the rest of me, looking out the window from some mid-level floor of a nondescript Midtown office building–it’s 9am and the snow looks like it’s drifting upwards, even though it clearly fell from the clouds overhead moments ago. I force my eyes to stop trying to focus on the individual flakes, the edges of everything gets a bit fuzzy-like the bad basic cable reception on my grandparents’ old TV. With my eyes relaxed it’s easier to take in the movement outside. There are enough windows up here that even without focus, my brain creates it’s own clear field of vision, glossing over the forced line breaks where chunks of big white wall run from floor to ceiling.  This could have been an amazing panoramic view, had some architect not felt the need to turn this place into your typical high-rise.

The similarity of this to any given goldfish’s worldview cannot be ignored. Watching all the nasty particles of meals unfinished and those already thoroughly digested swirling through the tepid water until it settles somewhere below a bulb-eyed field of vision–what would it really be like to see through a fish eye 24/7, anyway? Does it really look like that obnoxious lens every kid uses on their pricey Canon Rebel for party photos? I’ll never know, not like I can ask. Too bad.

From a window on the opposite end of the room, I can see the wind is blowing the fluff-flakes on a leisurely horizontal course. It’s hard to consider that the flakes won’t look like imperfectly pulled apart cotton balls once they make their way all the way to the pavement below. The buildings both near and far look like pop-up book pieces against such a flat gray backdrop, every ornate copper edifice green from the elements, the carefully crafted stonework making eloquent filigree shapes that are never seen except by a building’s neighbors. Who are those types of decorations for, anyway? The people inside the building or those stationed on the upper floors closest to it?

Surely in a few months the desire to smash my face against the glass and drink it all in with my eyes will subside. My brain will follow through with it’s pre-programmed need to adapt to new places, people and things the piles of stonework surrounding me will no longer merit my attention. I doubt anyone but the night cleaning crew will notice the increase in nose prints on the windows, anyway.

People add words when they want things to sound more important than they really are. “Boarding process.” Sounds important–it isn’t. It’s just a bunch of people getting on an airplane! People like to sound important. Weathermen on television talk about “shower activity”. Sounds more important than “showers.” I even heard one guy on CNN talk about a “rain event”.

–George Carlin

In my own head, the wordier I become less intelligent it sounds. Concise explanations are the best proof of understanding any given concept, regardless of how complex it may be. I’m fairly sure that’s the merit Albert Einstein suggested intelligence be judged by, actually. (Correction, he said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” but let’s not split hairs here, people.)

Right now I’m caught in this weird space between fiction and anecdotes. Depending on my mood, hour of the night and potential inebriation my writing style varies widely, which makes coming back to the state of mind necessary to carry any of what I write to completion… difficult. It feels like most of what I’ve put up here lately uses too many modifiers and lacks in the substance department. I’m frustrated with myself and the fact that what sounds good in my head becomes not-so-great by the time it makes its way to my hard drive. There’s a slew of half-finished .txt files on my desktop that I can’t force myself to post but I’m not quite ready to delete, either. Maybe one or two of them will find their way here in the middle of the night with a little help from a red-blooded friend. Or Mr. Tom Collins.

This is one of those times I’m glad my family doesn’t read my blogs, and hesitant to post what’s on my mind  because I know the friends with motherly-type responses to my actions do. Forgive me, mother hens, for I have no viable excuse for the small time stupid things I do.

A year and a half plus some, I caved. I bought a pack of Camel Lights. What I really wanted was unfiltered Lucky Stikes, but apparently that’s more of a specialty cigarette than the bodega I was in tends to offer it’s customers. My pack was $6 – that’s fucking unheard of in NYC. I can’t help but wonder where these cigarettes came from… probably “fell off a truck” somewhere outside the city and made their way into Brooklyn.

That first drag tasted awful. It tasted the way every pack of Marlboro Reds I got off a family I babysat for in middle school tasted: Colorado dirt and Los Angeles mantle dust. (That’s not how I would have described them back then, but being that I’m older and more acquainted with the taste of typical household dirt now I can identify these separate tastes based their on geographic differences.)

As much as I’d like to say that I feel guilty for smoking, there’s too many other vices I abstain from participating in for me to be sincere in saying my remorse was anything more than momentary. The first cigarette was immolative time travel, sending me back to the dusty side of the road I walked from school to the bus stop in 7th grade. With every harsh intake I would remind myself that those Marlboros were my sole vehicle of social interaction. I didn’t get on with the kids in my “special” class, or the neighborhood kids that resented all of us on the Purple Team. (No shit, that’s what we were called. In the midst of semi-homophobic Hispanic suburbia it was a death sentence to any potential I already didn’t have for fitting in.) We only interacted with the normal kids at lunch, on the common grounds or in the hallways between classes. Groups did not intermingle, unless you were a girl rocking just enough boobs to really justify bra purchase at the nearby TJ Maxx.

I wasn’t one of those girls; I was socially awkward and looked identical to my kid brother in the face. Braces, poorly styled and dyed blonde hair, cheap clothes that never fit because my hips were too slim and my legs too long. But those packs of cigarettes? They were my connection to all the kids that got suspended for snorting Ritalin in the bathroom. They made me a viable after-class walking partner, because I always shared and never asked for money. If I couldn’t get people to like me at the very least I could get them to tolerate my presence for the 23 minute walk to the public bus stop.

Smoking started as a social necessity, because without them I was left to the in-classroom forced interaction with my fellow pupils. Even at that age I knew that there’s no such thing as a happy lone wolf within the human world.

Yet now with my cigarette in hand, standing in the cold, I know the game has changed. Fewer people light up and even fewer are willing to accompany you into the chill of winter just to engage in the type of conversation you cannot walk away from with nearly the same degree of ease as you would indoors.

“This is the last pack,” I told myself. I’m sure I’ll smoke every last one of these cigarettes, unaccompanied outside between whatever train station I arrive at and my final destination.

I never would’ve put this much thought into the history of my habit if they’d just had the damn Lucky Strikes. I’m still craving them–RJ Reynolds doesn’t have shit on that  harsh feeling Lucky used to give me.

Several Fridays back I resolved not to be an internet-addicted shut in and took the train into Williamsburg. According to some kid with too much time to wax poetic on Craigslist, this is the borough of lost boys. I fully agree but feel the need to add in that it’s them and their five piece indie bands. Craigslist writer’s oversight: corrected.

I wound up at some venue by the water. I didn’t realize there were still places that let you smoke inside. Stuff like that is only possible in a converted commercial space that may or, more likely, may not have the proper licenses to be operating as a music venue. Considering I was told about an inaccessible room people live in “in the back” in addition to the workshop specializing in guitar parts, my bet is on the latter. My eyes watered as they adjusted to the dark; too much smoke, choice use of patchouli oil and body odor that with a distinctly vegan undertone. (Is it just me, or is there something sickly funny about the dirt and hard boiled egg smell most vegans have?)

I met people, shook hands. Quickie introductions are uncomfortable because assuming I continue to talk to anyone out of the group after the mandatory meet and greet, I stand no chance of actually remembering their name. Even if I had remembered name of the guy I wound up talking to, I never would’ve used it. He bore vague resemblance to Macauly Caulkin, a thought which immediately took over whatever brain-space would have been used to store his given name. The red plaid coat he was wearing did nothing but add to the celebrity comparison I was making mentally, either. He had a lot to say about the occult and seemed distressed by the abundance of zombie movies released in the last few years.

I didn’t really want to talk to him but I wasn’t ready to not be talking to anyone either, so I just threw in enough semi-opinionated statements to keep the conversation going. My “everyone in New York has a fucking band” comment was not well received, but he argued against my dismissive statement with a vocabulary that showed he really was just a few weeks shy of graduating. (College, you guys. Pedolene’s been retired.)

Maybe his teeth weren’t actually gray but that’s how I remember them, though I know his adamant hatred of Boston is a fact and not a half-imagined attribute. I tried to amuse myself by observing the crowd over the course of the show, and though the people weren’t all that watch-worthy, the walls were. Painted behind the stage were 1920′s-influenced reproductions of Mickey and Minnie. Minnie’s tits hung heavy, swinging in an unseen breeze, nearly touching the piece of the pearly gates she held in her hands while Mickey’s dick hung low. That little mouse would be proud if he knew about the artist’s interpretation of his junk. Other walls were partially covered in half-finished murals, seemingly abandoned after a full day’s work. Day two of the project is a day that is probably never going to come.

The boy I had not successfully offended was in the last band to play. Once the vocals started it became clear someone had worshiped the Cure in high school. I was pleasantly surprised by what I was hearing and simultaneously pleased with myself for recognizing the musical influence for once. I read The Perks of Being A Wallflower in middle school and took the title to heart–rarely will you find me anywhere during a live show except in the back corner of the room. Out of the way, but in the best spot to see and hear all the action uninterrupted.

I hadn’t had anything to drink but after their set ended he came up to me again. Rarely do people become more attractive after spending twenty minutes on stage–a mild case of Boy With Guitar fever was manifesting. Rather than brave the weird hormonal wave sure to follow, I took his number when it was offered and left knowing one thing: I won’t call. I won’t text. I never do, honestly. I’ve just learned that the outright refusal makes people uncomfortable.

In polite society, it is better to give people false hope over none.

On the subway, homeless people try to amuse you into giving them money. Sympathy is played out so bad jokes like what you used to read off popsicle sticks are the name of the game. After walking around with a cup asking for change, a man with one shoe duct-taped on started in with his first joke.

“How does a fish get high?” Nobody responds, having all been told not to encourage homeless people by interacting with them at some point in our lives. “He smokes seaweed!”

An older man speaks up while filling in boxes in his crossword puzzle. “I wouldn’t've given you that dollar if I had known you were gonna to be goin’ back and forth through the car makin’ all this damn noise.”

Fair enough, I think. He continued to berate the homeless man, not speaking directly to him as he fiddles with things in his pockets and talks about how hard he works for his money. The beggar shuffles to the far end of the car, clearly uncomfortable as the man goes on lecturing him about how rude it is to ask for money and then not quickly vacate the premises. Homeless hands the dollar back to the angry old man, surely thinking the lecture would stop as a result. But he continues, returning the single back to its correct place among the rest of his cash and clipping it into his billfold.

A plastic container of carrot cake surfaced from the recesses of the eco-friendly shopping bag held in place between his feet. He didn’t even stop talking, continuing to complain in-between mouthfuls. I could see the tasty confection in his mouth as he spoke and caught myself thinking too much about other peoples’ business again. Man you have a mouthful of fucking delicious store-bought cake and you’re still complaining. What the fuck is your issue?

But I don’t say anything, because generally that is the best course of action when someone on public transit in Brooklyn is running their mouth. Another crusty old homeless man seated next to him didn’t say anything either, drooling on himself and staring at the floor. I could smell him, see his remaining teeth and wondered if he even really heard what the man next to him was saying. The perpetrator had switched cars several stops before but the backlash continued–his presence was unnecessary for the 20 minute diatribe the rest of my fellow passengers struggled to ignore.

Personally I found the jokes to be far less aggravating than the dramatics that followed from my fellow home-haver. That’s an awful lot of complaining over a dollar. One he managed to get back, no less.