Made It!

Made it to Belgium in one piece! I’m forcing myself to be lazy…not only is it good for me but this is one of my last opportunities to do that in the forseeable future.  I’m totally having fun hanging out with D though.

I’m happy :)

This Knowledge Could Have Solved So Many of My Relationship Problems…

I had NO idea that breaking up with someone based on literary differences was a viable option. Apparently, it is…this was in the NYT.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: March 30, 2008

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

Peter Arkle

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

Cliché

We have a lot of clichés about love. I didn’t realize just how many until I did a Google search just now. This is just a small fraction of what I found:

“a faint heart never a true love knows”

“all’s fair in love and war“

“better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”

“if you love something set it free”

“love conquers all”

“love is blind”

“you only hurt the one you love”

In spite of all of them, I feel less convinced than ever before that “love conquers all”. Maybe love does conquer all, but if it does, it’s not human love they’re talking about. If it were, things would be a hell of a lot different, and not just in my life.

Leaves and Fishes

In spite of my greatest and book-iest efforts, the bookcase happiness has been fleeting. I’m trying to make the inevitable grad school decision, which is turning out to be a hell of a lot more difficult than I thought it would. I think the root of the problem is that my interests are still too vast. In reality I probably need to go on and get 3 more BAs and then think about grad school. Since that’s not going to happen, its mostly coming down to money. Even though UGA is the cheapest deal, I’m beginning to think it might not be the best school for me. USC is relatively affordable, but their program isn’t perfect. And HU is ludicrously expensive and has a great program. HU lets me incorporate sociology, BUT they won’t let me do my MA in two languages, I have to do it in English only. Whereas, at USC I can combine English, Spanish and French, but no sociology, strictly literature. Like I said, I need to go back to undergrad.

On top of that, I’m trying to find another job to tide me over financially until I can defer my student loans again. And B is having an early mid-life crisis. Wait, here’s where it gets really crazy. I don’t actually feel that stressed out, mostly just exhausted. In an effort to get the heck out of dodge for a bit in the midst of our crazy schedules, I’m trying ton convince B that we need to go hiking at Ft. Mtn. again to see the trees leafing or head up to the TN Aquarium because he really likes the fishes and I really like TN.

I’m exhausted and my entire body feels fuzzy. Its time for a break from here.

Lovelace

They say that inside every fat person is a thin person waiting to get out. I don’t believe that. I think that some people are meant to be fat, or at least not skinny…we’re not all supposed to be the same. What I do believe is that there is something waiting to get out of everyone. I think we all hold back. I think we’re all so afraid of being the fat girl that we spend most of our lives either trying to blend in or to make other people happy. And either way, we’re not making ourselves happy. And its hard to make others happy when you’re unhappy.

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty.

Happiness, that’s it guys. Its about being free in your own soul, in your love, and in your own skin. If you can do those things, you’re going to be ok in life. I’m in no way saying its easy. In fact, attempting to be happy is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Ahem. I should say tried.

Mostly it comes down to this: I have spent 24.5 years wishing I could go home. I have spent about 20.5 years trying to find it. So far, I got nothing. But I have come to understand something. Spending all my time searching for something this elusive has not made me happy.

When I was 12 I fell in love with this unfinished bookcase at a flea market and I happily forked over $20 of my hard-earned babysitting money to take it with me. The bookcase has since waited patiently for me to sand and finish it, sometimes holding books, other times pictures, but recently it has spent a lot of time in storage along with everything else I own as I am “transitioning” (into what, though, God only knows). Today, B and I went to my storage space and dug the bookcase out from underneath assorted pieces of antique furniture my mother has taken the liberty of throwing on top of it. Then, we went to Home Depot and bought some stain, and I have spent the afternoon sanding and staining something I fell in love with more than half my lifetime ago.

That made me happy.

Condensed Geography

I never thought I’d be so depressed to get into grad school. Ever since I met B, I’ve been afraid that I’d be put in a position where I’d have to choose between someone I love and something I love. I’m in love with B. He’s in Atlanta. I’m in love with HU’s grad program. Its in New York. For those of you who don’t know, New York is approximately 883.39 miles from Atlanta. I’m thinking that something more along the lines of 8.83 is looking better. I’d settle for 88.3 though, if pressed.

Obviously, relocating entire cities is the only answer.

I guess the up side here is that I found not one but two things that I love enough to anguish about them for hours. There’s something to be said for that.