I can’t seem to read a book lately. It’s been at least three months since I finished one. I’ve tried to start a couple — The System of the World, The Corrections — but I haven’t been able to get past the first few dozen pages of either.
It’s almost as if my subconscious wants me to focus on other things right now. As if it thinks my time is too valuable to spend on committing to a book, when there’s a life out there to live.
I’ll be 31 at the end of this month. Where has 30 gone? It’s been a great, stable year — perhaps the most stable year of my adult life. Steady, non-annoying job, check. Wonderful boyfriend, check. Great apartment (which I will be losing in about a year), check. Don’t they say that you can’t have a great job, a great apartment, and a great boyfriend all at the same time? The job may not be my life’s dream, but it’s very good for me right now. So I’ve more or less hit the trifecta.
I’m sure my medication has helped, too. At my most recent meeting with the psychiatrist, he told me that some people, after their lives improve, are not sure how to deal with the absence of anxiety, and they respond by recreating that anxiety. By sabotaging themselves. I don’t want to sabotage myself. But I don’t know what to do with this absence that used to be filled with worry and messiness.
Maybe, like Pippin, instead of reaching for my own corner of the sky, I should learn to be happy with my own corner here on earth. But I want more. I want some big life goal. (Broken record, party of me.) I want to accomplish something. It’s just that that something always changes.
Walking around in circles walking around in circles… it’s what I do.
Turning 30 wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it would be, in part because I’d prepared myself for any expected traumas, in part because I gave myself closure, and in part because everyone comes together for your 30th birthday and makes it a big happy deal. But 31, I’m not looking forward to. Because if 30 has gone by so quickly, what does that say about the future?
On the other hand, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. You never know when good fortune will appear. You have to put some effort into creating your own future, yes; but sometimes great things just happen, and you have to set things up so that you recognize them when they do.
In the meantime, my aunt has just sent me a bunch of good books as an early Hanukkah present, including The Line of Beauty, a gay novel that just won the Booker Prize. I’ve been wanting to read it, so I’m going to attempt it (I’ve got it in my bag, in fact).
And for now, other that, I guess I’ll just… well… live.
(Jewish Mother Voice)So quite the complaining already!(end Jewish Mother Voice)
When I turned 30 I left New York. That was back in the mid-70’s. My boyfriend Bill and I decided we’d had enough. We decided to come to Los Angeles — and have been here ever since.
Two omens moved me to go.
1) Walking down Columbus Avenue an entire sofa careened out of the window of a flop house hotel missing me by inches.
2) I saw Kay Thompson.
I therefore had no further need of New York.
But that’s just me. You’re living in a different time and a different New York — especially to judge from those blogger dudes.
Haven’t read the new Hollinghurst but The Swimming Pool Library is the best written glory book I’ve ever read. Literary perfection plus HOT MAN-TO-MAN ACTION. What more could a boy ask for?
I also reccomend Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, Malcolm by James Purdy, A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbury and James Schuyler, and anything by Joe Brainard you can get your hands on.