Leaving work early with cramps

My insides are withering. I’m sitting at the conference table waiting for each person's status update and praying that no one has anything to say at all but the small talk of unremembered 80’s movies is unrelenting. “Which version of Harold and Maude did you see, Romy?” “The Harold in the version I saw wasn’t nebbish” I reply. They don’t know I am seeing protons teeming in the air and the table has a blue aura for split seconds at a time. I don’t know if the sterile grey office atmosphere is directing my eyes to entertain hallucinations or if I am bleeding out.

Are there are no words to articulate what I am feeling or am I just a limited girl with numb legs? The pain is not dull nor sharp; it’s localized but not clearly demarcated. Maybe it’s something like horseradish squishing in between your ligaments, and you can’t really identify what is what or where, but it’s clear you need it exorcised immediately.

My friend got me an Elaine Scarry book called The Body in Pain that I never read since I am constantly postponing pain for pleasure, not realizing I’m running in place. Running makes your body hurt. It’s like how your baby hair stops being so delicately soft and your eyelashes no longer seem cartoonishly long and you can’t even remember the day it happened. I’m only 23 and I feel washed up so imagine when my menstrual cramps calcify into menopause.

 
Subway light refractions are shooting from 5 dimensions in space and I feel like I am floating in a rocket ship. The White business man next to me is not seeing what I am seeing. He is on page 377 of a Malcolm X biography.

Spectacular awaits yawns the newspaper in front of me.

Everything is embarrassing

Before I am a feminist I am something far more embarrassing. And that is a vessel for men to exchange their recommendations, like a game of broken telephone consisting of 20-something-year-old hipsters passing down their favorite auteurs and bands.

To be fair, there is a side of me that loves to partake in this, that has always been captivated by men’s demeanors and interests. Not by masculinity itself per se, but its side effects. Dapping, reckless driving, funny interactions with the deli man, and, above all, the media that informs them. I’m going to be using a term as general as “male media” to describe what is, in reality, a niche containing the things I’d expect my type in men (Jewish, intellectual, artistic, edgy) to enjoy or relate to. Think Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq (goy but worth including), Harmony Korinne, Adam Friedland, Ariel Pink, Walter Benjamin (he actually doesn’t deserve to be here and I’m sorry), Woody Allen. I’m not sure if I like this type of man because I enjoy his interests, or if I’m interested in such things due to my attraction to this type, but therein lies the point.

I mentioned Jewish before anything else on my list earlier not only because of generations of genetic programming, but also because Jewish boys— especially the diasporic ones— do it best. By this I mean they exemplify the type with their legitimate feelings of victimization while also being terrorists in their own right. That gives them the best of both worlds, power and impressive artistic sublimation, along with a hotbed of inherited neuroses and intellect. Now that I think about it, I’m describing half of Hollywood, but also ye.

Male media to me seems emblematic of Lacan’s concept of the phallus; that this symbol of supposed control and power actually comes to embody its very absence. In Serotonin, Florent-Claude Labrouste (yeah) is a wealthy French agriculturalist so down bad by modernity that he disappears from society. He still needs increasingly alarming doses of antidepressants, rendering his dick limp, body fat, and mind thoroughly depressed. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Alexander Portnoy goes through three decades of dangerously horny experiments with hot shikses just for his dick to ultimately fail him in the Holy Land. While they are certainly victims of their circumstances, they are ultimately victims of themselves. 

This noxious brand of ambivalence and failure smells like Santal 33 and a shit stain. But, against all logic, disagreeable men often have hot women trailing them whom they chronically mistreat. A man you perceive to be beneath you treating you like you’re below him is so puzzling it’s alluring. You’re forced to prove your worth to this guy who stinks, whom everyone hates, but you alone see the potential and charisma in. That makes you special too. You also want to be him because he has power over you. Sylvia Plath said every woman adores a fascist. I think they must have a rich inner world.

I read from their perspective with begrudging admiration and seething offense. I don’t mind their political incorrectness (their candidness and refusal to follow the status quo is essential to their allure) but I’m jealous that they’re free from the shackles and pretenses of caring about anyone else. They live and suffer only for themselves in a thick decadent stew of dejection, superiority, and nihilism. It is as impenetrable as it is honest to themselves. As much as I’d like to completely indulge, to be part of the club, I cannot separate myself from identifying with their obsolescent hag.

The way out of this inferiority is to shift from object to artist. Joanna Arnow embodies this in I hate myself :), a documentary following her relationship with a provocateur/open mic night host/probable alcoholic/Weird Guy I’m also oddly attracted to. Halfway through production they break up and the documentary becomes about the film itself. Joanna is forced to confront herself as the new subject, ultimately leading her to show her parents her brutally embarrassing project, which, yes, does include a sex scene.

Riding off the high of I hate myself :), I decided to watch The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. It reminded me of this joke Zizek likes to tell: “First, a rabbi stands up and says: 'O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!' After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: 'O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!' After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: 'O God, I am nothing.' The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: 'What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!'” This is all to say that at a time when everyone is chastising themselves for progressive clout— which is flimsily disguised ego— Arnow is at least modest in her failures. 

The spirit fueling almost all advice and discourse today instructs us to be active: we should be on top of all our issues, politically, socially, financially, physically, mentally, etc. The feminine perspective in media is usually concerned with activism and empowerment, understandably, but that doesn’t satisfy my basest desire to have my disillusionment validated. Watching this movie, I finally got it. 

Anne, Joanna’s very obviously named protagonist, is a dispassionate 30-something-year-old woman who passes her time being annoyed at her Jewish parents, working a boring bureaucratic corporate job, and having awkward submissive sex with doms from online. The mise en scene Arnow cultivates isn’t so different from those of her male media counterparts in that it is sterile, dull, and dire. Still, and what letterboxd used 4lorn does not get, it is also rife with implicit tension, tenderness, and humor.

There’s this one scene where Anne runs to the subway platform holding a cone of melting chocolate ice cream, only to discover that the nearest F train is 20 minutes late. She takes a seat, licks her ice cream, listens to something through her wired headphones, and laughs to herself. What she is listening to or laughing at is withheld from the viewer; the moment itself is generous enough. Life is full of small losses, but laughing creates a gap for a small win, a mentally-held temporary reversal of power.

Most mainstream attempts of feminism on screen deny us these small wins in favor of unrealistic, utopian, “and-all-peoples-were-equally-represented-and-happy” didacticisms. At the same time, they’re strung together by reactionary and smug fads more committed to outraging the right than having any genuine intent or conviction for equality. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is pathetic and vulnerable, but underneath it is real and brave, like wearing sandals with ugly feet or a tight dress while bloated. 

In the end, Anne is given a chance for a true enduring romance with a cute guy who really likes her, whom anyone would say is too good for her. She passes. Anne is a victim of her circumstances, but ultimately of herself— and she’s a woman! If topping so hard you hit the bottom isn’t an option for you, Arnow is a reminder that you can bottom your way to the top (or, more realistically, stay on the bottom but catch your own vibe).

Beyond right or wrong there is a field. I will be meeting you all there.

 I failed AP calculus in 2018. There is almost nothing I can recall from that class. Given how chronically unpleasant that year was for me, in addition to the likely irreversible effects of fake Supreme-branded Miami carts containing some concoction of fentanyl, glycerine, and cat piss, it is a miracle that I have a single memory retained from it at all. 

I was sitting in a row towards the back, my head resting on my bent arm, when Ms. Lemes casually altered my consciousness. She drew a regular x-y graph, and then, magically, she added a dotted line. This was to be called a z-axis and it allowed for an entire new dimension to be expressed on a two-dimensional Smartboard screen. Now, she explained, we’ll learn how to calculate the area of three dimensional shapes. 

I realize this is an abundantly obvious observation from an equally banal lecture. We live in a three dimensional plane. Flatness is a newer concept in art history than faithful three-dimensional representation. But still, this was the first time I realized: there was a secret third thing, and it existed the whole time.

My psychoanalyst* tells me that I have a tendency for black and white, all or nothing thinking. If you were to check in on me on any given week, there is a split chance that I am either overindulging or repenting for something. He does a good job at catching these flips while they seem completely natural to me. I may or may not be in love with him. I can’t decide and it depends on how well my session went that week.

I vaguely remember the first time I learned about the clear pill. Again, it came to me in a wholly unremarkable context— this time a Based Retard Gang Instagram reel. The content of the video was probably something along the lines of an omnipotent AI girl voice commentating on how she’s no longer a redpilled NEET and has instead transcended into a based clearpilled angel. Ok. Anyway, I was dumbfounded once again. Not that I was considering either option seriously, or was asked to make the choice even metaphorically at any point in my life, but on some level I still subconsciously subscribed to the idea that you either exist in a state of blissful ignorance or cynical awareness. Perhaps the choice of absence— or balance— doesn’t seem intuitive to people who get BRG in their reels. Media is probably the least precarious of their consumption. 

I wonder if the liminal nature of the internet makes for particularly ripe mentions of the secret third thing; the way  its simultaneous ubiquity and physical absence breeds ironic yet self-serious performances that reveal different pockets of our character than everyday encounters. It amuses me that so much of the discourse around third spaces (i.e. places outside home and work to hang out) has transpired on social media. Do they not realize that not only are they in a space that provides them free access to community, but are communicating in the in-between of real and nonexistent space too?

There’s also something to be said about separating real life from online, organic from artificial. In God, Human, Animal, Machine, Megan O’Gieblyn describes how the metaphor likening the human mind to a computer usually implies that mankind is somehow robotic in nature, and that this collapse of the human spirit with inanimate code is ultimately disenchanting. At face value, this metaphor reinforces and laments the binary, ignoring the possibility of a common spirit, perhaps some cosmic intelligence or consciousness, that manifests in both the analog and digital. 

Art has a way of capturing yet destabilizing our at once feeble yet staunch experience of reality. I recently read an essay by Julian de Medeiros about Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych (ha), The Garden of Earthly Delights. He pays particular attention to the middle panel, sandwiched between the scenes of the Garden of Paradise and Hell, depicting a surreal landscape of humans and animals intermingling in splendor and sin. He writes: “… there is something revolutionary about Bosch’s unbridled garden, which might as well be a depiction of u-topia, a non-place, neither here nor there. It is a mesmerizing depiction of this possibility that makes the Garden of Earthly Delights such a riveting example of the way in which Art can help us reshape the possibilities of human life and its depiction as we know it. Or perhaps precisely as we do not yet know it.”

Personally, I’m not sure if my fascination with the elusive third thing comes from a desire for objectivity, a frustration with convention and language’s shortcomings, or an impulse to resolve all the contradictions that plague me.

Maybe that elusive third thing is the key to life, or maybe it’s a denial of that reality. Maybe it’s a secret third thing.

* or should I say my therapist— I’ve been told that mentioning one’s “analyst” comes off as pretentious and annoying, but it also sounds way less lame than a regular therapist. I’ve removed his name but if you are curious about him, the only thing you’d uncover is his marvel wiki page and a YouTube video of him getting a stick and poke by Jemima Kirk in 2015.