A memorable time

And so, it's been a summer.

This may seem slightly premature, seeing as the actual season doesn't end for another month, but it definitely feels like the end of summer. The weather's changing, I start school again next week (! in America!), and there's already a tree in our backyard whose leaves are beginning to change. I warned it to stop, but it paid no attention. Mark my words, that tree will rue the day it was planted.

Brandon (remember him?) is ready for it to be fall, but I'd like about two weeks more of flat-out summer. It was a long summer for me (I got back from Germany in late April), but I spent a lot of the glorious weather working in an office (there may or may not have been a gleeful "I'm free" dance when I was done). I'd like about two more weeks of heat so I can get in the pool, sunbathe, and wear tank tops to my heart's content. After two weeks, we can commence with the fall feeling. Please and thank you.

That said, it's been a memorable time. It was the summer where "yolo" made almost anything acceptable. It was the summer that I started driving with the windows down. It was the summer that even if you had just met someone, it became perfectly acceptable to hand them your number and ask them to call you, maybe. It was the summer that I truly appreciated Americana, in all its ups and downs and slightly hicky glory, after a year away from it. It was the summer that I got my first-ever real job, and the summer that I really started writing, and the summer I turned 21.

Most of all, it was the summer that I realized how much I've changed. A lot has happened--some good, some bad, and maybe someday you'll know it all. I hope so; it's a great story. All you need to know for now is, I'm proud of the way I handled it all. I would have done things a lot differently a year ago.

I'm happy that I'm settling into my 20s so nicely. It's a place I'm starting to be really comfortable at, and I feel like I could have been here for several years by now. I'm looking forward to it. And there are so many things to look forward to this fall! I was worried that after I returned from Europe, everything would seem dull and bleak. But I'm excited for everything new under the sun. I started packing for school yesterday; it's the first time ever that I've wanted to do it that early. But I'm ready to go back. I like things somewhat settled.

 But, if you have some time before your summer ends, listen to Mumford and Sons. Brandon burned me Sigh No More last night, and I listened to the whole thing in the car this morning. I never realized how perfect it is for the end of the season, especially if you're in a conflicted, slightly melancholy mood. It's so full of defiance and hope and wistfulness; it's great for that unsure between-seasons feeling.

Oh, and go see The Dark Knight Rises, if you haven't already. Call me crazy, but I liked it even better than the second one. Slightly predictable, but it makes up for it with how astoundingly awesome it is. (Astoundingly. I should rename this blog I Like Adverbs.) Forget Fatih Akin, Christopher Nolan is my new favorite director. Plus, it's one of those movies that is ever so much more epic on the big screen, not in the least because it was filmed partly in IMAX. I've seen it three times now, which is the most I've ever seen anything in theatres, and I still get something new out of it every time I watch.

Or, as an alternative, this also looks excellent.

Whatever you do, and even if you didn't take a vacation, get the most out of your last days of summer. There's always more to be done, but for now, I'm fixing a glass of Porch Swing and listening to The Cave one more time...or maybe two...

Stay and save my life

Just a quick post for this evening. I'm packing up for the trip home from Maine (10 hours in the car tomorrow, woohoo!) AND trying to get an internship application done AND thinking about going out for a quick goodbye drink with some of my new friends, but I've wanted to share this essay with you for a while. It's written by Charles Warnke, a fairly young-looking writer living in the Bay Area of California, and it's been circulating a lot on the Internet lately. It's one of my favorites--a sardonic love letter written to the readers of the world, the real geeks among us, and for that reason it's addressed to me. Every bit of it is true. It's romantic and heartbreaking and sensual and disillusioning and thought-provoking and it stings in all the right places.

I should add that the last line isn't Warnke's; someone on Tumblr added it. In my opinion, it's an improvement.

"You should date an illiterate girl.

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life."