the todos santos diaries, #4: late night, come home, work sucks, i know
DISCUSSED: love, racism, why i can't stop telling myself stories about how the world works
I didn’t do anything today. I made myself a few cups of moderately strong coffee and peeled an orange with my hands; I played videogames with my friends, refreshed a few websites, and sat on the couch on my roof to watch the sunset. I tried (and failed, thank god) to do some work. I left the little house once, to get some tacos at a restaurant I’d been meaning to go to. I watched a movie. I drank some beer. It was a day, I think, that I might have spent anywhere. And then I got a call from my younger brother, who went on to say he’d just gotten engaged.
It wasn’t unexpected, but I was still surprised; even if you’ve grown up with someone who’s always seemed more adult than you, it’s a shock when they begin to acquire the trappings of maturity. He’s the youngest vice president the very large company he works for has ever hired — he told me today that the team he manages is currently the best performing one at his firm — and I have to say, I am so, so proud of him. My sister, too: the one productive thing I did today was send her some notes on a grad school application essay she’s writing. She’s about to return from her teaching post in Malaysia, where she’s been on a Fulbright.
In her piece, my sister wrote about feeling discriminated against while she was a kid in high school, just about the same age as her students. In my brother's grad school application — because he's also somehow attending business school on nights and weekends — he wrote much the same thing. They both came to the a similar conclusion, namely that it made them want to help people who find themselves the same bleak situation; I think they both understand how hard it is to be emotionally defenseless. We went to the same hope-impoverished secondary schools in East Texas, and, as I’m finally realizing, all had much the same experiences: it was where we learned that most authority figures can’t and won’t protect you from other people’s racism, or how that prejudice is expressed. When I read what they went through I’m outraged on our behalf, again and again and again.
On our phone call, my brother and I talked about love, and what it means to know what you want. His fiancée is a doctor, and I think she’s impressed on him that life is fleeting — that it could be curtains for any of us, whenever.
“If I die tomorrow I’m glad I at least proposed,” he said, clarifying that he'd always wanted the experience of loving and being loved by someone enough to lock it down forever before shuffling off this mortal coil. Then he told me he’d only looked at the ring he bought twice: once when he picked it up, and once when he slipped it on her finger. (His planned proposal was scuttled because of some inclement weather, but he saved it by asking her to marry him at a place they'd been on one of their early dates.) I think I find that romantic, because is there anything that feels more special than being what someone wants — being chosen?
That said, he’s always known what makes him happy. I told him I thought that was a blessing.
I only know what I want on short timescales, when both the cause and effect are immediately observed. (And no: I don’t know what makes me happy.) Even then I’m not sure how I feel, really, about the outcome. Today I didn’t want to do anything, and I did that, but now the day’s over and I won’t get it back. I’m thinking: did I waste it? Would I feel like I wasted it if it were my last 24 hours on planet Earth?
I don’t know yet. I have this tendency to try and make everything fit into a story, something that’s neat and packaged to sell with all the roughness buffed out — a desperate urge, in other words, to create meaning out of the semi-random shit that happens to me every day. Narrative is only ever applied in hindsight, though, after the dust has settled and the facts are clear, or at least as clear as they can be. (I think this is partially why true crime is so popular; it’s not like you’re going to get seven nonfiction seasons out of one criminal, because they’ve all been caught by the time the production starts.)
I’ve started to recognize this tendency in myself as a reaction to feeling helpless in the face of the things that are happening in the world: I want to know how things are going to end before I have to figure out how I feel about them. I don't like feeling undefended. Unfortunately for me, according to our most current understanding of physics, clairvoyance is not yet possible.
Anyway. It’s late. I could probably square this circle — indolence → happy event → racism → narrativizing — by writing something like: scarcity (of time, of empathy) is the human condition, and the only way to live without unbearable anxiety is to try and bend the stuff that happens to you into a more forgiving shape, while also realizing that most people are doing the same. Deep down, I’d write, we all feel weird about being here even if we experience being alive differently. Or, if you like: it’s never the people struggling with anxiety who need to feel anxious.
But look, I’m tired. I’m just hoping my dreams tonight have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Love,
Bijan