15 Layers of Irony

Gosh, I really hope the world doesn’t end on May 21st. For one thing, I haven’t accomplished all that I’ve set out to do—still don’t have a Wikipedia page!—but I’d also be pissed if some nutty fringe group was right. Seriously, look at this billboard. The shadowy dude on the right totally looks like he’s pooping. I can’t live in a world where this is an accurate depiction of what’s to come. (I guess I won’t have to if it is!)

I don’t worry about the apocalypse, which is funny, because I worry about just about everything else. I’d say it has something to do with the fact that a big catastrophic world-ending event isn’t something I can control, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about nuclear war, asteroids, and solar flares (OMG, did you see Knowing?). Obviously, the fact that I’m not a religious person is part of the equation. Being an agnostic Jew doesn’t mesh well with The Book of Revelations. But boy will my face be red if Jesus comes back!

Even so, I’ve been dwelling on what it would mean if the world ended Saturday. You guys, what a bummer. I’m not even the slightest bit concerned about the veracity of the pooping guy poster (“Cry mightily unto God, for ye are constipated”), but that doesn’t mean I can’t get lost in the theoretical. Like I said, the fear of not accomplishing everything I wanted to is what gets to me most. Which is weird, because if we all died, our accomplishments would be pretty damn meaningless. (Unless my accomplishment was figuring out how to thwart the accomplishment. Y’all would love me.) Yeah, I’d like to publish a few books before I peace out, but getting burned off the face of the earth puts us all on an equal playing field—righteous losers aside. I am on par with Jonathan Franzen, basically. When all life has been destroyed, my blog posts will be exactly as important as Freedom.

There are other (relatively) less important things that concern me, like never getting to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 or finding out who killed Rosie Larsen. Do you think they get AMC in Hell? If they do, it’s probably just the same episode of Rubicon aired on a loop. I hate the idea of unfinished business, whether or not the business is really mine. When it comes to movies and TV and books, the conclusions have no bearing on my life—at least not directly. And yet, seeing how it all ends is bizarrely important to me. If the world ends, I’m not going to know if I’ll ever get married, but I won’t know if Leslie Knope finds love on Parks and Recreation either, and that distresses me even more. Maybe my priorities or off, or—more likely—pop culture is a lot easier than real life. I could pick that last sentence apart, but it could get kind of heavy. Feelings, gross.

Do you feel bad for the people who have sold their worldly possessions in advance of the apocalypse? I did a little bit, but they should obviously be held accountable for their stupidity. How do you ever get to that point of certainty, though? I understand faith, but I don’t get trusting anything that blindly—throwing your life away because you’re sure it’s all going to come to a screeching halt in less than a week. And what happens when the world doesn’t end? Odds are they’ll keep making excuses. The apocalypse is still coming. It went out for a pack of cigarettes, but it’ll be back. I don’t know. I guess I do still feel a tad sorry for them: they probably don’t have Wikipedia pages either.

Most of the people I talk to these days are people I met through Twitter. I used to call them my “Twitter friends,” but once they far outnumbered my so-called real-life friends, I realized I might as well lump them all together. Besides, most of the tweeters I’ve grown close to are people I’ve met in person, many of whom I’ve hugged enthusiastically. And unlike some of the other connections I’ve forged on the internet, the friends I’ve made through Twitter generally aren’t too socially awkward to function. We tend to get along right away.

I’ve thought about this a lot, at first assuming it had something to do with how much we know about each other’s lives before meeting. That may be true to some extent, but we all revealed a lot more personal details on LiveJournal back in the day—I say “we” with the assumption that you were also part of that glorious era—and the “friends” I made on LiveJournal weren’t always such success stories. Sure, there are a few I still talk to, but for the most part I prefer to repress that time in my life. (I actually kept my LiveJournal through college—for the sake of this blog post, I’m basically pretending it died when I graduated high school. Please don’t look it up.)

But there is this sense that the people who follow me on Twitter “get me”: they care about what I have to say and, I assume, appreciate my sense of humor. And I only follow people I want to have in my life, whether as friends I actually hang out with or as people who just check in from time to time. Some of the tweeters I follow have a style vastly different from mine, but at the end of the day, we can relate in terms of ennui, internet addiction, and general dissatisfaction with the world. I think Twitter—particularly comedy accounts—attracts a certain type, and it’s a type I’m delighted to embrace.

My first interactions with Twitter people were primarily all about Twitter, and I’ll admit that I still fall into this trap. After all, who else am I supposed to bitch to about stars and follow-backs and plagiarism? But I think I’ve been able to forge plenty of friendships that extend past the “shop talk,” as it were. I’m also trying to talk about Twitter less in general, because being on the site all day is probably bad enough. And I’m more concerned with forging a real-life connection than on getting someone’s attention via @-replies. (Not that I’m over caring about that sort of thing.)

I used to think I had a hard time making friends, which I’m not sure was ever all that true. I have this conception of myself as a shy and awkward person, and while I still don’t feel terribly comfortable at parties, I’m mostly OK at making a good impression. But sometimes the internet does facilitate that—Twitter gives me an outlet to show a side of myself that I might not feel comfortable showing otherwise. (There’s a reason I don’t do stand-up comedy.) And when I make a friend in that context, they’ve gotten to know me in a way that someone I meet at a bar, for example, would not. In person, I stumble over my words. I worry too much about offending someone with a joke. I almost never use hashtags.

I’m not saying that I always want to use Twitter as an entry-way, but I will say it has given me more confidence when it comes to meeting new people. The fact that anyone gives a shit about what I tweet makes me feel like what I say matters. And so I enter conversations with a smidgen more confidence—I’m working on it—and I think about new ways to relate to people. All the great friends I’ve made have also reminded me that everyone isn’t an asshole, which sounds kind of obvious but is still a concept I have trouble with. Like I said, baby steps.

Anyway, I’m not going to name names, but if you’re reading this and we’re friends, I assume you know. Thanks for talking and listening, or for tweeting and reading my tweets—ideally, I guess, for both.

This picture has nothing to do with the post. I just thought it was cute. You gonna fight me on that?

One of my favorite things to do in high school was watching Buffy reruns on FX with my mom. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but high school is a difficult period for teenagers and parents. My mom and I also didn’t have much of the same taste in television—which probably isn’t even true but was important to believe when I was 16. So at a time when I started to realize that Buffy was the center of my universe (haters to the left), my mom took a pointed interest and began watching with me.

Even back then, I thought that was pretty cool. I mean, it’s not much of a stretch—my mom has always been interested in the fantasy genre. But she wasn’t watching solely out of a need to find out what happens next. It was something we could do together. I remember marveling at the way she became invested about it, suggesting her own theories for the series finale. (Incidentally, she was totally right.) It takes a lot of commitment to not only watch a show with your kid, but to give a crap about it. I don’t know if I could do the same with my child, especially if he/she were super into Glee.

My mom has never referred to herself as a “cool mom,” I assume because she knows what a terrible expression that is. In a broader sense, I appreicate that she’s never tried to relate to me in a way that didn’t feel organic to our relationship. That’s why things like watching Buffy together continue to mean the world to me. I wasn’t always the happiest kid in high school, and I often didn’t feel like I had many people to turn to. If you’d told 16-year-old me that my mom could be a big help with that, he probably would have rolled his eyes like the little shit he was. But she was a help. I had someone to count on. I had someone to watch Buffy with—and that remains, along with food and water, one of my basic needs.

If you’re wondering about the photo, I unfortunately don’t remember the context. I do remember my brief fascination with Frankenstein, inspired by a book report I did in elementary school. My mom helped me cut out the different monsters for my collage. I don’t know where we got all the Frankenstein stuff when it wasn’t Halloween, but I guess I can chalk that up to mom magic. I mean, she successfully predicted the lsat episode of Buffy. She’s obviously got some sort of powers.

I used to resent the term “indoor kid,” which I’m pretty sure is considered derogatory. But I don’t know, it fits. I like being inside. I don’t mind spending most of the day at home. I appreciate the way my futon feels. That having been said, I forced myself to walk over to my local coffee shop so I could enjoy the legitimately great weather and interact with other humans. (By interact, I mostly mean sit next to while I type away on my computer. My earphones are in, but I’m sure I look very approachable.)

Sometimes I forget to do anything with my day, and it hits me at 11 p.m., almost always a pretty shitty time to decide you want to be active. You have a couple options—late-night trip to Safeway, casual internet encounter—neither of which is all that appealing. So you watch endless reruns of The Golden Girls and you convince yourself you’ll get out more tomorrow. That sounds kind of depressing. Maybe it is. The problem is, most of the time I don’t care much about being bored/boring. It’s only when I’m basically in for the night that I decide, hey, wouldn’t it be nice to talk to someone not on the internet?

In a lot of ways, I’m a very social person. I like making conversation, and I think I can be charming enough when I put in the effort. I’ve never really had a problem making friends. But the more time has passed in Berkeley, the more acquaintances have fallen to the wayside. Some have moved, some have lost touch. And I think I’ve gotten a little tired of the city itself. Outside of my go-to coffee spot, I’m pretty much restricted to a couple restaurants, a bookstore, therapy, and my (work-related) jaunts to the city. Since I’ve spent the last few months thinking about a location change, I guess I haven’t bothered trying to improve my life here. But I’m blogging about it, so it must be bothering me on some level.

I’m going down to Los Angeles on Tuesday, which is good for a variety of reasons. I tend to be much more outgoing there and usually don’t spend any nights entirely at home. That’s probably a feature of going on short visits—I don’t know what it would be like if I lived there. I’d like to think that I could maintain a certain active lifestyle and not become too stagnant. Self-diagnosed agoraphobia is super unattractive.

But being a freelance writer is solitary by default. While I’ve tried to find friends to write with, nothing has ever panned out long-term. And I’m often OK with that. I’m happiest when I’m writing—I feel creative and productive—and writing is an independent activity. Sometimes I just need to remind myself of the life outside my apartment, of the connections I’ve made and want to sustain. There are many people I care deeply about; I think it’s important to express that in more than just text messages and tweets. Maybe I’ll form a new game plan once I return from L.A.

I could try to make a friend here, but the only people talking are older dudes hitting on younger Asian women.

Anyway, let’s hang out.