whatsuplou

I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.

“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.”

I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.

“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.”

I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.

“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.”

I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.

“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.”

I decided that perhaps “brave” and “crazy” were not mutually exclusive.

“You think it was Macbeth that fucked us up?”
“No.” She stops at a red light and glances at me. “I think we were all fucked up from the start.”

They ate because they felt less alone when eating. Because they wanted to feel full, then wanted to feel nothing. Dominique said it was like that Bruce Springsteen song “Hungry Heart” from the 1980s. Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.

Talking to his mother bewildered him. He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt by her; the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed.

They call this “temp to perm.” I love this phrase. Not only is it palindrome adjacent, it is extremely useful. All situations in life fall into one of these two categories. For example, the fact you are thirty-seven years old and currently live with your mother in New Jersey, I remind myself, is temp. But the shape of your chin is, sadly, perm.

Accelerated intimacy, that’s what Zoe was good at. She’d learned early that it was quicker to bond with another person over what you didn’t like than what you did, and that the easiest way to feel close to someone was to do something transgressive together. That’s why smokers always made friends.

Another tweed-clad reporter dodged through an opening. “I see you’ve been spending a great deal of time alone with Magister Thorn. Has he declared his intentions?”
“I wish he would,” Elisabeth said. “He hardly makes sense half the time. Knowing his intentions would be helpful.”

“I never did answer your question.” He set off toward his tent. “If you don’t believe in anything,” he said over his shoulder, “then you have a great deal less to lose.”

chest.
“Go on,” he said, growing impatient. “I’m not going to turn you into a salamander.”
“You can do that?” she whispered. “Truly?”
“Of course.” A wicked gleam entered his eyes. “But I only turn girls into salamanders on Tuesdays. Luckily for you, it’s a Wednesday, which is the day I drink a goblet of orphan’s blood for supper.”

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.
Come and get me, I said.

The inside of my body hummed like a piece of machinery

I’ve never worked hard at anything, I said.
That must be why you study English.
Then he said that he was just joking, and actually he had won his school’s gold medal for composition. I love poetry, he said. I love Yeats.
Yeah, I said. If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.

Technology, in fact, has made us less than oppositional: where beauty is concerned, we have deployed technology not only to meet the demands of the system but to actually expand these demands. The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

On reality TV, you need people with zero insecurity. Or else you need someone so insecure that it drives them totally nuts.”

In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.

I am glad, too, for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that professional opinion-havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good.

The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.

In this realm, speech was constantly framed as a sort of intensely satisfying action: you’d get headlines like “Miley Cyrus Spoke Out About Gender Fluidity on Snapchat and It Was Everything” or “Amy Schumer’s Speech About Body Confidence at the Women’s Magazine Awards Ceremony Will Have You in Tears.” Forming an opinion was also framed as a sort of action: blog posts offered people guidance on how to feel about online controversies or particular scenes on TV.

As Werner Herzog told GQ, in 2011, speaking about psychoanalysis: “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.”