I need whimsy but I also need to be taken seriously

The deepest contradiction of the human condition

A lot of things are happening. I’m working on book proposals for a handful of Great Ideas I’ve had in the past five years. I’m revisiting my opera prima, The Pluri Society, which I felt was good at the time but am now realizing is actually brilliant. I’m getting married very, very soon, and we went towel shopping today. I’m mailing my readers a physical letter, fortune-cookie-style. I’ve been slowly liking my martinis dirtier than usual (mmm sodium!) and have acquired a taste for whatever else comes with that. I hope I get Nicole Kidman as a death doula when my day comes.

It has been such a delight writing to you :) thank you for your support!

My contradiction exists in the gap between my two most sincere desires: to be Puckish and elusively witty, and to be revered à la Old Testament. The jester may be near the king but he does not sit at the hand of the father. The expectation is coherence: be one thing and remain as one (for others and for your own sanity). Online, you can be funny or you can be esteemed; you can be entertaining or you can be hero-worshipped. In reality, you can be both, but the medium of the Internet somehow trims off all nuances in your messages, losing them somewhere in those thin fiber-optic strands that transmit data via lasers. Alas, all genius is lost at light-speed under the sea.

Offline, there’s really only one condition that truly helps a budding writer, and it’s a trifecta of bourgeois stability, slight sexual perversion, and a proclivity for alcoholism.

The unpunishable woman—my Übermensch, my teleological argument—she’s too openminded for the conservatives and too prude for the liberals, too timid for entrepreneurship and too feline-feral for employment, too nerdy for the hedonists and too sensuous for the ascetics, too vain for sainthood and too philosophical for vanity, too private to perform and too proud to stay anonymous, too disciplined for degeneracy and too decadent for piety.

And when you don’t belong anywhere at all, and no one can discuss with you about what you want, and no one cares about your opinions anymore, what do you call that? Unpunishable and free? Or estranged and alienated?

So, what do I do?

I’m glad to be here and I wouldn’t take it any other way, which is the closest thing I have to stoicism right now. I may get jealous when I see others getting what I’ve worked hard for, but I’d rather be this porous than sealed off. I may get embarrassed by tiny things quickly, but I’d rather be this impressionable than whatever else. I think I want to stay malleable enough to change like a chameleon without becoming so protean I vanish.

I think the only fate worse than misfit-hood, for anyone, is self-pity. The loser mentality is an insult to God because you’re handed a singular unrepeatable flame of consciousness as a specific individual with specific gifts and are choosing to let it gutter out in self-pity. Feeling small is more like ingratitude than humility. The creator doesn’t make surplus people. The fact that the egg chooses the sperm means every cell in the body proliferated from a messianic selection. Not believing in yourself is against the verdict of life on every level—biologically, metaphysically, theologically, etc. (see: exuberance)

The unpunishable woman, when she gets off her high horse, remembers that she’s just like the other 8 billion people in her neighborhood, that she should unclench her jaws and peel her shoulders away from her ears, because it’s really not that serious. Or, maybe it is. But, whatever, in the end, only love and death can change all things.

~

Soir Bleu, Edward Hopper, 1914