I used to find a lot of things to write about. Life DID feel like magic. I don’t need the entries as evidence, because I remember, but the entries are proof that I used to able to talk about certain-somethings without the slightest bit of irony.

[EDIT] I have posted a bunch of stuff from my paper journals, which has thrown off my post count. I feel the need to note that here [EDIT]

I have written 1,166 posts. This makes 1,167. Some of those are private and I’ve definitely deleted posts altogether, but still, that’s not so many posts for seven years. That’s about 166 posts a year. About a post every three days. When I say it like that, it does sound like a lot, as if my life would be completely and accurately (ha!) documented here. But it’s not. It’s missing the months I spent in Europe in 2003 (although I did write that all down and the journal is Somewhere) and when things are stuck, like now, I’m less inclined to write.  And then there are all the things that I hid from myself that I still can’t bring myself to blog publically about.

So I’m sitting here, on a Thursday morning, blogging about blogging, because NaBloPoMo exists, and gives me an excuse to write things like this. I have to post every day for 30 days, and hey, a post about posting makes one! Great!

But it’s more than that. I thoroughly (and unsuitably) miss my old audience. HWSNBN, for all his flaws, and for all the ways in which the situation with him was bad for my sanity and self-esteem and whatever, got me to write. He is the one who made me feel like writing down all these words was actually important. Which is also ironic, because I don’t think he ever really gave a damn about anything I said. And I cringe when I think of those essays I wrote back in 2004-2005 that I let him read.

Things between us ended so long ago – five years ago, actually. But there is so much of him in so many things I do. He is, after all, how I wound up in NYC in the first place. Five years ago, I remember writing something about how it was so confusing to let the same hands that pushed you away, pull you back up. He was always the master of mixed signals (and I, admittedly, was the queen of selective hearing) and for all the ways in which he made me weak, he made me believe in things again. And for that, I still miss him sometimes.

So Evan, this is for you. Because it’s a Thursday morning, it feels like summer, Skidmore won’t stop sending me emails, I miss the city, I’m trying to cull together words that collectively Mean Something and I’m wearing khakis and that makes me think of you.

Holden Caulfield is the character every angsty teenage boy wants to be and every lonely teenager girl wants to date. Jonathan Yardley refers to the novel in which he stars as “an essential document of American adolescence – the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list.” Aware of its reputation, I was eager to read Catching in the Rye when it was assigned to my sophomore English class. As a sarcastic, know-it-all fifteen year old I couldn’t wait to see Holden stylishly denounce the phonies. I expected Salinger’s novel to give insight into the mind of a wise beyond his years boy, and explain to the world of popular teenagers – the world I despised – what it was like to feel misunderstood and lonely.

Yet, as I slogged through Salinger’s mawkish prose, I had a difficult time figuring out what all the excitement was about. Despite having been told innumerable times that I would identify with Holden, I couldn’t help disliking him. He was quick to label people phonies, but he lied constantly, especially to himself. I became impatient with his poor treatment of everyone he encountered. When I reached the end I was disappointed and uninspired. But, everyone else in my English class loved it – and it is a rarity in high school for students to enjoy the assigned reading. I was convinced I must have been missing something.  Certainly, there must be something to Holden besides his whining and inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Maybe there was something that justified his behavior.

I listened to the class discussion in which student after student expressed how “cool” Holden was. They felt sorry for him; he was so sad! They admired the way he cursed humanity and dismissed those around him as phonies. It’s great they said, to have a character who comes out and “tells it like it is.” I kept quiet. Maybe I was wrong to think Holden was a phony. Everyone else seemed to have sympathy for him, and some were even excited that they had finally found a character who expressed how they felt. I must have been missing something. So I answered the assigned study questions, wrote what I identified with in the text and moved on.

A year later I met a boy who proudly declared that he was exactly like Holden Caulfield. “I’m writing my junior English paper on Salinger,” he informed me excitedly. “Don’t you just love Catcher in the Rye?” I was trying to get a date there, so I smiled, nodded, and within a few weeks, I was his girlfriend. The next year, Catcher in the Rye was listed in my senior yearbook as one of “Our Top Three Favorite Books.” I never admitted that I, the girl voted most sarcastic by the senior class, could not identify with the quintessential character of cynicism. It seemed that I should like Holden. I had certainly spent a good portion of high school as misanthropic outsider. I had a bad habit of judgmentally dismissing the seemingly superficial behavior of my peers. Besides, there must be something wrong with me if I couldn’t muster up sympathy for a poor guy who was just trying to deal with his brother’s death.  Why didn’t I like Holden? I had wanted to like Catcher in the Rye. Holden and I both had a lot of angst, so why didn’t I hit it off with him? It seemed everyone else had. The novel that was supposed to speak to my typical teenage insecurity had the effect of making me very insecure in my unpopular opinion.

David Rachels writes that high school English is indoctrination, that encourages independent thinking by “letting students explain why he or she accepted someone else’s view on the subject.” Instead of debating whether Holden is a good human being, it is already accepted that he is the victim of circumstances. He is universally seen as hardened to the world; sad and broken. Thus his behavior is accepted, excused, and admired.  He’s seen as heroic for the way he rails against the world and honestly assesses humanity. He’s labeled tragic for being punished by a world that can’t possibly understand him. It is demanded that one sympathize with his plight; to think otherwise about Holden would be insensitive. The only choice that was placed before my sophomore honors English class was whether Holden was a static or dynamic character. Is he able to recover from his depression? Or is he still in the same state he was at the beginning of the book? Acceptance of Holden as a tragic hero is a foregone conclusion. Questions about whether we even liked Holden were never raised. It was already assumed that every high school sophomore would be eager to sing his praises.

Holden isn’t necessarily a horrible person. He’s a seventeen year old who made some bad decisions and isn’t happy with his life.  Everyone has felt alone and misunderstood, and seen their circumstances as unfair. It’s practically a requirement of adolescence to occasionally hate the world around you. But one of the lessons one learns again and again is that you have to take responsibility for your actions. Holden never does this. Students seem to admire that, after being kicked out of school, Holden fearlessly roams New York City, having adventure after adventure. Everyone skips over the fact that Holden was kicked out of school for a reason – it was his fault and it seems he was given a number of second chances. He didn’t take them. Holden chooses not to take advantage of the opportunities bestowed upon him, and then he blames the school, the world, and those “damn phonies.” After page upon page of unsubstantiated whining, I couldn’t trust Holden’s view of the world.

Holden, like a lot of teenagers, thinks that everyone is out to get him. He’s not a very nice person. He’s selfish. He’s whiny. He’s a typical teenager who thinks he knows everything and needs to grow up. Jonathan Yardley writers that Salinger’s mediocre novel is “required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought.” Many of us are embarrassed by an honest look back at our adolescence because we all acted like immature brats at some point, and must often sheepishly admit that our parents might have been right about a couple of things. Thus, the admiration teenagers have for Holden seems misplaced. No one should aspire to stay seventeen forever.

Salinger’s novel appeals to the insecurity many teenagers are overwhelmed by and makes them proud of their whiny rebellion. Holden has been canonized as the patron saint of adolescent angst by kids who admire him because he’s “just like them..”  Unfortunately, no one ever stops to ask if this was a good thing. It is only now, high school four years behind me, that I can say that I wasn’t missing anything back in sophomore honors English.  Hopefully all the boys who declare themselves the Holden Caulfield of their high school grow out of it and all the girls who want to date a Holden Caulfield realize that they’d be better off with someone who isn’t so callow. I still have a lot of growing up to do, but I like to think I’m past the stage of blaming the world for any misfortune I encounter. The world according to Holden is an unfair place, and he is unwilling to accept that. Growing up means accepting the world isn’t always fair. And that quite often, you’ll have to deal with phonies like Holden.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2010/01/30/coming-out-against-catcher/feed/ 2 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/12/14/finally-using-my-essay-page/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/12/14/finally-using-my-essay-page/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:00:32 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=6474 I have posted a VERY rough draft of “The Problem of Replacing Pamie” , the not-so-sordid tale of my experiences at The-Job-That-Wasn’t, is posted over on my Essays page.

The ending in particular just trails off, but if you are so inclined to read, any comments/suggestions would be welcome. I am posting it long before it is finished, because if I don’t, I will never work on it.

My room is already a mess. I’m tired. I’m not happy with any of my interview outfits. I think I’m burned out. I have not been reading up on foreign policy and my justification for this is that cramming for the interview isn’t going to be helpful.

But mostly it’s that I can’t concentrate. That’s why it’s almost 9:00 and I’m just now writing the last blog entry of the month. Which also means I haven’t read any of your blogs. I’m sorry. This is also why I stay up late for no reason, because I keep putting off doing things that I want to do, because of an inability to concentrate on, say, the entire series of the Alice books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor that I just got. I didn’t know most of them existed! I read about 5 of these when I was maybe 14ish, and I always liked them well enough, but they were not among books I saved.

(Example of my lack of concentration: I just had to get up and clean a few things off my nightstand/shove stuff in a drawer because I could not stand to look at the disarray for one more second)

Ok, I think I’m done. Because while i theoretically have a bunch of stuff going on what with the interview/trip to DC, and work being busy, and the fact that I can drive again, I still DON’T have anything going on in terms of social life/boys/drama or any of the other stuff that I used to fill blog entries about.

Happy Almost December!

I’ve been up for almost two hours, but I’m still groggy from the Benadryll, probably, even though I only took one. I don’t know how my body can handle a super powerful anti-anxiety drug that knocks me the hell out (I don’t take it every night) but can’t recover from Benadryll.

Writing about work on a blog that could be discovered is a surefire way to get yourself in trouble, so I will just say that it was a trying week and yesterday was a bad afternoon. I know where its coming from – everyone is dealing with unreasonable demands and ridiculous deadlines. It’s not going to get any better anytime soon though, so it doesn’t seem worth delving into.

I’ve given myself an assignment to get caught up on general foreign policy news this weekend, because my knowledge is general and out dated. On one hand – I work full time, and while I don’t have much else going on right now, the Libertarian Fellowship people don’t know that, so I think it should be understandable that I don’t have the same level of knowledge about current events as someone who works in the think tank field. On the other, logic is hardly ever a factor in these things, so I better study up.

I really hate having to say “the war on terror” when I talk about my interests, because everyone is sick of the war on terror. People were sick of the war on terror two and a half years ago when I was writing my thesis. I didn’t even want to GO there, but Carl Schmitt, that rapscallion, he made it impossible not to. And I think that my work, and the work that I want to do is valid, and relevant, and hell, even important, but using the phrase “war on terror” seems to cheapen it. It seems dated. But I don’t know what other name to give to the general, overall U.S. strategy/foreign policy stance(s) in the post-September 11th era (another reference that I am loathe to make. I don’t think the event should have changed out policies like it did, but that’s another rant altogether.)

My cat is curled up at the end of my bed, fast asleep. He seems to have the right idea.

I am technically Jewish. When I tell people that I am a Jewish Atheist they usually don’t get it. I don’t believe in God, but I still consider myself a member of the tribe. I don’t have the name and the nose for nothing.

Taking the year from September to September, there are plenty of things for which I owe atonement. This I know. This year is the sum of its mistakes, including one so big that I’m sure David would yell at me for merely giving it the label of ‘mistake.’ So far, I have atoned for it the only way I know how – by one days at a time and by the next right thing, by actions and attitudes I was trying to take at this time last year, and failing miserably.

I’m being purposefully vague. Moving on.

I tried out blogging “for like, the world,” at this time last year, but the idea didn’t quite work in practice. Lack of discipline was one of the reasons, my inability to decide what the space was for was another. I’d written in Livejournal so long, directed those words at audiences that no longer existed, and now with a space where I could create my own audience, I was at a loss for how and what to write in it.

People talk about how blogging has changed their life, the real honest to goodness friends they have made through blogging, and that’s something I’d like to do too. The internet has been a source of friendships to me for nearly a decade now. But, just like I stumble socially in real life, I immediately come up with a half a dozen reasons why blogging won’t do for me what it has for dozens if not hundreds of other people. I’m too late to the party with nothing interesting to say and trying too hard.

But I have to write right now. My life is boring and stuck right now, and for the umpteenth time there is nothing I can do about it at this particular moment, but it’s not always going to be that way. I have to believe that, even when I look back on last September, when I was saying such similar things, even though a year later I’m still stuck, I have to believe that this year I’m going to find a way to change that.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/28/atonement/feed/ 4 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/10/the-problem-of-writing-about-the-problem-of/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/09/10/the-problem-of-writing-about-the-problem-of/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:47:44 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=5845 Two years ago today I started The-Job-That-Wasn’t. The casual observer probably finds it ridiculous that I mention The-Job-That-Wasn’t so often. Everyone has had a bad job or a bad boss – usually more than one. What is it about my experience that is any different?

That is, in part, what I have been trying to write about for the better part of the year – because I never wrote about it when it was actually happening.

 The working title of the essay is “The Problem of Replacing [Pamie]” (not her real name) and I’m trying to capture what it was like to try and replace someone, who was, in everyone else’s estimation, perfect. Every single day when I would walk into Important-Boss’s office with the morning report, he would glance up, with withering disappointment that it was me, not her standing there. As if she had disappeared instead of been promoted. 

It occured to me recently that maybe I could throw a love affair into the equation; I mean, the man moped around as if someone had stolen his girlfriend away. I was a poor man’s Pamie. An inadequate substitute. Pamie was now four desks away from him instead of just one, and my mere existence made this my fault. And she in turn, no longer had as many reasons to visit his office, and one could imagine her gazing longingly from her new position down the hall.

But alas, there was no actual affair and what was going on with that job is, I think more interesting than any torrid tryst. It’s just not fitting neatly into paragraphs right now. There is so much I want to write, and it is so hard to get this one without sounding like a whine about the terminally unique way I was wronged at work. 

I have said multiple times that the seven months I spent at The-Job-That-Wasn’t were some of the worst of my life. The job was a macrocosm for everything else that was going wrong in my life and all the negatives just fed on each other. I was deeply unhappy and not being able to find any worth in my work, an area that had always been my touchstone, was devastating. Being held up for comparison to someone else, and failing miserably every day was exhausting. Trying to convince myself that the job was okay and that I was okay just added to the exhaustion. 

I have never denied that I was terrible at my job, that I sunk instead of swam, etc, etc. I have never denied that I did not work as hard as I could have to try and learn a job that I was clearly not qualified for in the first place (the job listing had it dressed up as something else entriely). I screwed up big time on several occasions (so much so that my one friend on the job gently asked me if it was possible I was sub-consciously trying to sabotage myself). But I contend that I was never properly trained nor treated fairly. I was never even given the possibility to be anything but not-good-enough.

Because at the end of the day, I was not Pamie. I couldn’t have known it then, but I walked into that job a hated woman. And not just by my boss either, but by everyone in that godforsaken place. And while I was by no means the only person who had problems with The Important Boss, he saved up all his frustrations, all his anger, all his negative for me. I would stand in front of his desk in his office, the seconds painfully ticking away while I waited for a response or further instructions on a document I’d just given him.  

He had gotten under my skin, and he knew it, and I wish I could write about how I feel like he purposefully tried to trip me up without coming across as paranoid, or refusing to take responsibility. 

A torrid love affair would be easier to write about. But it’s been 18 months since I lost that job, and I am have been grateful every single day that I do not have to work there. There are days when my utter gratitude over the fact that I got out of that job overwhelms me, because while I hated going to work every morning, I didn’t realize how bad it was until months after I left.  Every day that job stole whatever bits of self-worth I had managed to squirrel away from the previous day.

That job shredded me into little tiny pieces and made every day feel like the worst of my life. I didn’t truly understand the depths of “I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning” until that job. It was not the only thing wrong with my life, but work is where we spend so much of our time. I spent the time between waking up & starting work in dread and the hours between finishing work and falling asleep in recovery.

Someone, I have to make that sound more interesting that a torrid love affair. 

There is entirely too much of my life on the Internet. A livejournal, started with the intention of ranting on the political slowly but surely transformed into a spot for navel gazing. Several failed blogs followed as I tried a more grown-up form to display my alleged wit and self-awareness. There are thousands of posts across various message boards.  If you want to go way, way back, somewhere, there are short stories and poems I wrote when I was 11.

My life would be very different without the internet. I have found apartments, roommates, and even jobs (including my current one) via Craiglist. I have joined in on community activities through a neighborhood message board in Astoria, NY. Once, I drove to Chicago for a meet-up with a bunch of Libertarians from an alternative Libertarian message board.

Through the internet, I have met people who share my political affiliation, people who share my love of inanity, and people who understand that Elliot Stabler is smokin’.

Through the internet I have gone on dates (though never through official dating sites), met a guy I wanted to kiss, met a guy I actually did kiss, and met a guy who turned out to be a jerk. Such is internet love.

Through the internet, I have met people who make me laugh a ridiculous amount, who listen to me vent about aforementioned internet dating, and who have become so much a part of my life that I forget that I originally met them on the internet. Such is internet friends.

I need another place on the internet though, because I have been searching for a place that is mine. Which is a perfectly apt metaphor for the rest of my clichéd existential crises of a 20 something life.

Such is internet writing.

Edited to add: I have imported the entire contents of my livejournal (without comments) and a couple of my failed blogs. Much of it I have left private, but some is up as password protected posts. If you were on my blogroll (which I am still reconstructing), my LJ friends list, or you just want to know all the scintillating details send me an email for the locked post code.

I’ve mentioned before that I have trouble committing myself to mussing over my thoughts and emotions and ideas. It forces me to dwell and for the past eighteen months or so, dwelling has been dangerous. It is only in hindsight, as I see my number of entries dwindle, that I realize just how reluctant I have been to face my mind in a metaphorical mirror.

In the past eighteen months I have done some of the stupidest, most self-destructive, most cringeworthy things that I have ever done in my life. Anytime there has been the potential for joy I have ensured that it ends in failure. The exception to this has been my current job, which I still love and has kept me going many a days.

Even as I write this I’m skirting all details.

I do believe that the difficult place I’m in right now is very educational. Being stuck where I am – and really stuck this time, not like before when I didn’t even realize the way in which my dangerous level of freedom kept tripping me up – is what has forced me to change what I’d been doing – really change.

When someone asks me how I’m doing, I generally reply “Surprisingly good, considering.”

I am surprisingly good, in spite of the fact that I spend more hours stressing/worrying/figuring out rides to and from work that I spend doing actual work (well only lately because work has been slow) and still have little to no social life. Because for the first time in I don’t know how long I can soberly say that I think it will be okay.

What do I do?

Well, I figure out rides on week at a time and my parents help me out more than I would like to require, leading to lots of guilt, but I take that as it comes. I spend a lot of time biting the insides of my lips. Sometimes I am proud of myself for the way I am handling things, and sometimes I wonder how the hell I’m going to do this for six more months.

Sometimes I’m a little bit social, although lately not as much as I should, because its gotten to easy to skip out on meetings again.

I talk to Keith a lot about absurd things, and I email with friends from far away. I talk to David and the other libertarian friends.

My concentration hasn’t yet returned to its highest levels, but I’m bringing it back with history vocabulary lists and writing notes I took on books long forgotten.

I watch too much TV. On Saturdays I usually sleep all afternoon. I eat too much ice cream.

Sometimes I miss at this time last year (when I was trying to get Ohio to fall for me from a distance, and scheming about the trip to Chicago with OLB) and sometimes I miss at this time, five years ago. Most of the time, I can’t imagine anything further then one week in the future.

I don’t make enough phone calls and I couldn’t go to the wedding of one of my only friends from college and I still cringe at some of the amends I have to make and tuck them away far, far away in the back of my mind. I wouldn’t say I bury anything, but the ADD I’ve developed is a blessed affliction most of the time – it doesn’t allow for obsession or much thought at all, really.

I think I should write more, because I think I might want to look back on this one day, of what I did to get where I’m going to be by then. I don’t have a record of most of the last 18 months. Blessed are the forgetful, but it is my intentional refusal to remember that has gotten me in so much trouble.

It’s a great day to be an introvert (rainy and gray and a Friday) and I should go tonight, but I’m betting I probably won’t, because there’s always next week, even though that’s what I’ve said for several weeks.

I don’t have a way to end this, but an inability to put together a clear beginning, middle, and end is what has kept me from writing, and I should stop letting them stop me.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/06/05/one-of-those-state-of-the-rachel-entries/feed/ 0 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/03/05/thursday-your-stocking-needed-mending/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/03/05/thursday-your-stocking-needed-mending/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:39:00 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/http:/rachelnotrebecca.com/blog I didn’t stop for coffee this morning and therefore did not realize that I did not have my wallet until I got to work. Grrr. Not only do I desperately need caffeine, but it’s also annoying to not have my wallet – I’m going to have to borrow a couple dollars for lunch, because I don’t have food here.

I think I am buying my car this weekend. I will be glad to get it over with. Initially, I wasn’t going to buy until early May, but my hand was sort of forced to do so early. I am okay with that now – I think I am okay money wise, even with needed a new laptop. I think, anyway. I am not very good at budgeting.

I talked to Sarah, a girl I went to grad school with, briefly yesterday afternoon. I was telling her about my essay and bashing our preceptor. She still works at UChicago, so she is literally right down the hall from him, which is weird. The year at UChicago still feels like a dream to me at times.

Anyway, this is yet another entry that I’m writing, where I really have nothing to say, but I hope that by forcing myself into regular blogging, the brilliance will come back to me. If I ever had it to begin with.

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And I’m not sure what to make of the situation. Not because I’m interested in him (I’m not) or because I think he’s interested in me (he’s not. In between casual meet-ups we don’t even exchange emails) but it’s just odd. It’s not quite a professional relationship, especially because we’re not producing anything of professional quality, but it’s only a step above it. I can’t decide if I’d like to hang out with him more as friends, and do something other than go to Starbucks to type away on our laptops and babble about fairly “professional” topics. He seems fairly anti-social, and so I’m inclined to get psyched into thinking “awesome! someone just as bored as me! We should be bored in Jersey, together” When, really, it’s more likely that he doesn’t really need anything to do on Saturday night, thank you very much.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/02/11/professional-relationships/feed/ 0 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/01/09/4660/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2009/01/09/4660/#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:01:00 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/http:/rachelnotrebecca.com/blog As I feared, I suck as blogging, or keeping a blog, or whatever. How the hell did I manage to keep journals in high school? What the HELL did I write about everyday. (Actually, these are readily accesible in the attic on my parents house. The sad thing is that reading them would make me want to be 15, because I would probably be envious of my innocence. Uck. I am shutting up about that now!)

Actually,  given what I know about me at 16, that would not end well.

Shudder.

Anyway, I actually logged into my email and found a comment from an “Anonymous” asking me about what made me go to Hampshire, and bad college experiences in general. This could be a joke from one of my friends who has stumbled upon my blog and wants to roll their eyes at my spiel on the subject. 

Even if that’s the case, I could still probably write something up here, and probably should on the whole subject of “How College Was Not The Best Four Years of My Life, Because If Those Were The Best Four Years of My Life, I Should Just Die Now” especially now that I have survived a few years in grown-up world (And grad school) I was painfully, horribly shy in college.

And I’ll try to write something worthwhile on the subject soon. Or any subject.

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