Recently, I saw a Twitter handle I didn’t like. It was something like—but not exactly—@RedHeadWriterGirl97. I clicked on her avatar, which showed a head full of dyed, muted auburn. You are not a redhead, I thought at her. How could I trust anything @RedHeadWriterGirl97 wrote, when she was being so dishonest about something anyone could see with their own eyes?
One of the things that I found challenging about writing on the internet every day is that it nearly always felt like I ought to be angry about something. It’s not that I wasn’t; I just felt so much anger at such frequent intervals that expressing it in writing began to feel like assembling something that didn’t want to be assembled. In The Bathroom, a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint about a man who decides to live in his bathroom, there are a few memorable scenes in which a pair of Polish painters work endlessly to skin six dead octopuses, the rubbery corpses stubbornly defying efforts to impose order onto their motionless glop. Stirring up public emotion about important issues is a good thing to do, but it took me a while to realize that there’s a finite supply of it, and a finite amount of individual emotion available to be scooped up and performed, and pretty soon writing anything at all began to feel like wringing out a dry towel, or painstakingly skinning a half-dozen jiggling invertebrates that no one asked for.
Now that I don’t blog all the time, I suddenly would like to fight.
For a while, anyway. Now that I don’t blog all the time, I suddenly would like to fight. I want to initiate major drama. This may sound unhealthy, but for me, a rigidly tentative person, it is mostly a good thing. My anger has retreated from its post amongst thousands of blogs and reconstituted itself as a breathing thing that lives inside of me. She’s got Picasso eyes and spirals out of my stomach like an undrawable Ursula. We’ve been having a great time together.
Recently, I went on a date with a perfectly nice man who made me want to paint my face blue and crush a brick with my fist. Well into his thirties, he spoke about his college experience and other uninteresting things for a long time. At a certain point, he revealed, to my surprise, that he was writing a comedy script. Occasionally, upon realizing that he wasn’t asking me any questions, he would ventriloquize me with joke-y third-person statements like, “Okay, Sam*, enough about you!” When he mentioned how excited he was for automated cars, I think I hissed.
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