Category Archives: Writing

Oct 28 2013
7 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Open Letters, Serious-ish, Social Media, Writing

What we talk about when we talk about adult acne

Photo credit: Genista

Photo credit: Genista

It gets better, they said. Just wait. Soon it will all make sense. Soon your hips will stop widening, your jaw and nose will grow in equal pace, you’ll understand bra sizes and stop being embarrassed when you buy tampons.

Soon you’ll understand how wonderful it is to be an adult, to choose your own breakfast and buy your own poptarts, if that’s what you want.

Chase your dreams, they said. Soon you’ll be achieving them. Follow your heart. Soon you’ll be making great decisions all the time and relationships will be easier and it will all make sense. Everything will make sense, even the fact that we live on one of 200 billion planets in our galaxy and that the universe is infinite, truly infinite.

And acne – soon the acne will stop. You won’t have to spend 121 hours every year scrutinizing your pores, determining which ones deserve to be squeezed and which ones must ripen.  You won’t be jealous of the girls in the Clean & Clear commercials or spend significant amounts of time imagining where you would send all the pus in your body if you could choose to just have one perpetual pimple.

And I won’t say I was lied to. I won’t say that I was deceived by those people 18+ in my life who knew exactly what was coming to me. I won’t say I was deliberately led to believe in a fantasy no more real than sea monkeys or the first moon landing.

I believed what I wanted to believe – I pieced together the various messages of my childhood and adolescence and came to believe that once I turned 22 or 23, I would have it all figured out. I – and everyone else – would be living our dreams, wearing clothes that fit and laughing together while eating pasta at a restaurant. And our skin would be clear. It would be completely clear, with not a zit, pimple, blackhead, whitehead, subterranean or squirter to have blemished it in many many years.

Photo credit: Garrette

Photo credit: Garrette

So when we talk about adult acne, we talk about the cruel reality of adulthood, the fact that we still don’t have the answers and know we may never have them. We talk about the fact that relationships are still confusing. We talk about how social media and technology has let us down in some unnamable way, and the despair, apathy, or vague outrage that we feel when we read about politics and the NSA and privacy and drones and the daily body count in Syria. We talk about wanting more in our lives, wanting clear skin, wanting a clear vision.

They told us to follow our dreams but never said that almost everything would be put in the way of that. They told us to make

a difference, but they didn’t say that society often villainizes or kills those who try. They promised clear skin, and still I have blemishes, and now I pay for my own face wash.

They didn’t tell us, but that’s okay. They probably didn’t know what they were doing. Now that we know more of the truth, we can move on, complain together about our acne, and get ish done.

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Sep 12 2013
4 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Stories, Writing

Remember Deb? She’s No Longer Cute, But I’m Trying to Love Her.

Deb

Then

On August 14th, 2013, I wrote about Deb, my little succulent, and how much I love her and was glad to have something in my life that I could celebrate instead of myself. I purchased her a beautiful new pot, with colors on it and I’ve watered her once so far, just like I was told to by Karen the plant lady, her surrogate mother.

Since then, Deb has grown up a little bit. Her tender thick leaves have spread to the sides of the pot and show no sign of stopping. In fact, she’s in danger of outgrowing her $20 home. No longer  is she perfectly spaced and symmetrical – time spent growing in a room with uneven sunlight has left her looking lopsided and gangly and, dare I say, awkward.

Yes, Deb has reached adolescence, that unpleasant phase between 10 and 30 (in human years) when kids just aren’t cute anymore, when they don’t do everything you want them to, and when they grow too fast and occasionally break things.

I never appreciated how hard it must have been for my own mother to watch with horror as I transformed from a brilliant and adorable 2 year old with golden hair and an irresistible smile into a moody 14 year old that insisted on wearing clothes from Hollister and spent large amounts of time picking at her acne. All of the sudden, this precious child realized some things were cool and other things weren’t and that the uncool things were to be reviled and the cool things to be worshipped without reservation. All this is in addition to a strange propensity to wear the same sweatshirt/clothes for days on end and refuse to shower after working out before napping on the futon and soaking it with sweat. Yes, this was my adolescence and it wasn’t pretty.

Now.

Now.

Nevertheless, I believe my mother continued to love me though she cringed, and that is what I’m determined to do with Deb. I’ve already whispered this to Deb in the language of echevaria elegans, but I’ve translated it for the benefit of my human readers.

Deb, my succulent one, though I only adopted you one month ago, I feel now closer to you than I’ve felt to any other plant. When I first saw you, I knew you were to be mine and mine alone, with the perfect way your leaves extended and reached for the San Francisco sun. You were compact and adorable, and so I paid the 5 dollars and took you home where you now sit next to the globe.

Deb, I know you can’t see yourself, but you’ve changed. Your leaves have elongated and grown less even – part of you appears to be growing faster than others, and you’re lopsided and less attractive to look at. I could call you cute still, but it would only be a lie. Now you just look like a normal plant. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Deb.

I know this is just a phase and that you’ll grow to be more beautiful than you ever were, and until you do, I will care for you just like I cared for you one month ago, just as if you were still the petite echevaria elegans you used to be.

And you will always be mine.

Love,

Emily

Sep 07 2013
3 Comments
Humorous, San Francisco, Travelling, Writing

Dear Bay Area, Give LA a Chance

Venice Beach LA

I went to LA over labor day weekend and expected to hate it, having absorbed the LA-negative attitude of the Bay Area. To many people that call the Bay Area home, the idea of actually enjoying LA is as offensive as the existence of styrofoam.

“Oh LA” they’ll say “Yuck. LA can suck a lemon. The traffic sucks, the people are plastic, they don’t have any culture, they don’t even have city wide composting. Who could ever love LA? ho could ever love a city that wasn’t in the Bay Area. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH I don’t live in the real world – I live in a bubble full of microhoods and local farm merchants that wear plaid shirts.”

So that’s the shtick you get from many Bay Area lovers, and if you believed them, you’d come away thinking that not only is LA a very lame city, but that it’s a moral and spiritual blight on the West Coast that poses a constant hazard to innocent citizens everywhere.

So I thought I would hate it and prepared myself accordingly. Then something strange happened, oh yeah, it turns out LA IS INCREDIBLE.

No one told me about the mountains you can see through the smog on a smoggy day and just see normally on a good day. No one told me about the mysterious magical summer nights where you can actually go outside without wanting to eat your own socks to raise your internal body temperature. No one told me that you could purchase an Argentinian plate of pasta from a movie actress that was from Vanuatu and the 2nd cousin of Leonardo DiCaprio. Or that you could walk into what appeared to be a lame restaurant and get an incredible philipino meal for super cheap while listening to live piano music and using a bathroom that has a shower in it.

And the strange tatooed people that wear hats and different kinds of shoes, where the men don’t just wear blue shirts and slacks and the women have weird piercings in their face.

I don’t know – it was kind of lovely. It was especially nice how unappealing most things looked – I mean, strip malls as far as the eye could see, hole in the wall mexican restuarants with no marketing budget, streets as wide as highways wherever you go. It would be hard to pinpoint something picturesque in LA – was it the bearded lady I saw? Or what about the stick-woman wearing needle-thin stilletos and a napkin? Or the veiny elderly man that hobbled in his walker to sit down while waiting to eat at Norm’s, a diner with some of the most average food I’ve ever tasted.

No – this was something more than picturesque – it was real, and maybe this is the poor-quality tap water talking but I liked how raw the city felt and how it seemed like there were endless opportunities and how it wouldn’t be hard to imagine why someone who just arrived might say to themselves “By gum, I’m gonna make it big here!”

People are willing to live there just because they’re following their dreams. That’s something nice, right? And that’s not everyone even – I don’t know how to say it. There’s more to LA than the smack talk, even though that’s there too. There’s just more there.

That can be LA’s slogan: There’s more here.

So give it a chance, Bay Area. Maybe you’ll like it.

Aug 05 2013
8 Comments
Anecdotes, Blogging, San Francisco, Writing

That’s Just Me Staring at Your Ear

Scowl_earI find myself staring at ears a lot nowadays, on the subway or when I’m standing behind people in line at Peet’s. I zone in on the ear, or the back of the neck, or the elbow of the jacket, where it’s pulled tight but I can still see some wrinkles in it from where it’d been crumpled up and left in the passenger’s seat.

I try to memorize every detail possible, or at least take them all in.

The staring started after I got interested in other people and wanted to swim into their lives and know all their stories and secrets. I’m pretty sure that makes me the opposite of a psychopath, so you don’t need to worry about my mental health, mom. Also, I’m taking vitamin B12 which improves mental function and tastes like candy.

The ear is a very personal part of the body. Only best friends and lovers know the ears of others intimately. I myself don’t know my ears very well. If you stared at one long enough, you might get to know it better than I do, and then in that one way, you would know me better than I know myself.

The same applies to certain parts of clothing – the back of a shirt or a coattail. I’m not aware, as I’m going about business as usual, how my clothing sits on me, how the wind is affecting it or what the pattern of raindrops is on my back or umbrella. Only someone else could know those things about me.

In digging into these minute observations, the boring pattern of ear hair, where a certain mole falls on the neck, or the mundane way the fabric appears to be worn at the knees and the jeans are feathering, I feel – and stay with me here – that I’m taking back control of time and adding detail to the blurs that other people can become around me.

earOften, during the past month or so, I’ve wished I could memorize every single face I see, the eyes and the nose and the skin tone and the blemishes, and that I could understand something of the story behind that face, where she had come from and where she was going, what he was thinking about and hoping, and everyone with a different story, all of them distinct but reassuring in their similarities, in the familiar concerns everyone has, the desire for good health and love, the dream of  taking time off to be with family or friends or travel the world, the fears of being alone or not living a life that’s worthwhile.

Jostling, rushing for a seat on the bus, walking past others on the streets – this is the way I have to live in a city. I’ve learned the ways to cope when there are so many people and so many heartbreaks and joys that could burst out and give me some perspective on my life. It’s self-defense, and it’s necessary.

But on the MUNI, when I’m staring at ears and dress pants, it becomes clear that there’s really nothing between me and this other human, that I could reach out and start a conversation with them and they would respond as they would respond. That’s the real fear – that there’s nothing there, no barrier, not a single thing.

We’re all in the same vehicle together with our burdens and curiosities and there’s nothing stopping us from sharing them with one another, except for everything.

And now I’ve overstepped the bounds of this article of talking about my new habit of ear-detail-gathering, and I know longing for intimate conversation on the MUNI is bizarre and would be psychotic except for those B12 vitamins I’m taking, but I guess I just want to remind myself that life is more interesting than the boundaries I create for myself.

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Jul 25 2013
15 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Serious-ish, Writing

Why Do We Woo?

woo_audienceWoo: a verbal affirmation of support, delight, or marvel, commonly used in performance contexts such as rock concerts, improv shows, and evangelical church music; a verbal high five or pat on the back i.e. “Woooooooooo!” Not appropriate for chamber choir  performances. e.g. “WOOOOOOOO! (dirty looks).”

A show just ended and my feet are sweating from the laughter. I’m buzzed from the truth in comedy and inspired to live the rest of my life. The performance demands a response. What do I do? Do I go up to the stage and give everyone firm handshakes? Yes, because I love handshakefulness. Do I go and give high fives? Also, yes, because high fives are incredible.

But mostly, I woo. Before anything, I woo. What a strange thing to do. A kind of shrieking or yelling, it’s slightly aggressive and varied in pitch. I go high but not too high, and I never go too low. A low woo is no woo at all, and middle range woo’s are for woo n00bs.

Could a woo also be called a cheer? In Elizabethan times, when the riff raff became excited by one of Shakespeare’s new plays, how did they give their verbal high fives? Were I to step back in time and become a gladiator in the arenas of Rome, what would I hear coming from the audience? A buzzing sound? Ooooo’s without the W? Unformed screams? Clacks?

Were I to risk everything and build myself a time machine out of old toilet paper rolls and search for the very first woo, what would it sound like?  A moo? Would it be to celebrate a freshly slain pantosaur or skirtcelops? Would it be in celebration of nature, a group of my great aunts and uncles looking at a full moon over the prehistoric forest and grunting or shrieking? And when the moon did nothing but moon right back, what would the response be? Even more grunting because of the mystery and unattainability of nature’s beauty? Or frustration and the first mutterings of doubt, wondering if anyone’s even listening?

Flying down a country lane in Bologna on a rented bicycle with my hair undone, I burst into song, unable to keep it inside. When the adrenaline’s pumping, when the energy is there – it feels good to scream, to belt something out from the gut, to make your internal bliss external and give it back, because if it stays it might grow into a watermelon plant.

Maybe the woo* is the most perfect form of human expression, uninhibited by the burden of forming words. Just imagine, after a particularly moving performance of any kind, rising and yelling, “I really enjoyed this! It was good because it was acted authentically and made sense in its own world! I feel I better understand my own place in the world as a result of this performance!”

That man would be sedated instantly. But the one screaming almost animal-like sounds, “WOOOOO….WOOOO…..WOOOO….” is normal.

The next time I read something true, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

The next time someone says “I love you” and I love them, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

The next time I eat a delicious breakfast, my response will be “WOOOOO!”

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