The Folded Clock: A Diary

When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.

In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.

My behavior makes perfect sense to me.

Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You're stuck in a cave with three other people - all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw - and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must be biologically compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust.

At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.

Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.

I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.

Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.

I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn't draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish.

To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.

I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else's head.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You're running down the street and you're screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you're wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.

No one was around to publicly shame me, but I am perfectly able to shame myself. And worse -- around myself it is not a matter of appearing to be stupid and heartless; instead I confirm to myself that I am definitively one or the other.

I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.

I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they’re pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.

Yet when this day has ended my child will be older and I will be nearer to dead. Why should I wish for this to happen any sooner than it already will?

My friend did not want her suspicion—which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair—to disappear by exposing it.

No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more than a few had had abortions. I'd attended two abortions before my own. I'd been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women's work, I guess.

Days were ages. Loved bloomed and died in a day.

Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.

A month is marked, not by a sense that time has passed, but by a series of automated withdrawals. I look at my bank account, near zero, and realize, It must be March.

Sometimes when you are in a foreign country it feels like everyone is in on a joke against you.

Bookshelves of summer houses are filled with dishy nonsense. They indicate how a person understands time is meant to be wasted.

When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks.

Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but that can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring.

The people in our house were my fault. Our fault, but really my fault. I'm not being a martyr. I'm speaking realistically, in a manner reflecting the consensus reality of the situation. No men at this party were standing around talking about quitting their jobs so they could be part of -- sorry, live -- their children's lives. No men listening to these men were thinking defensively to themselves, Fuck off, or, after a moment's reflection, You're so right, actually. No men would be writing about these conversations tonight in their diaries. My husband would absolutely write about these issues in his diary tonight if he kept one. He worries about and buys all of our children's clothing -- the pants, the underwear, the sneakers, the socks. But to the greater world, these pantsless children reflect more poorly on me than they do on him. Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.

In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called “desire lines.” Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly.

I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I’d always worried that I’d naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth.

My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn’t Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he’s been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he’d have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She’d cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services.