this is bread breadth breath

*On this Sunday afternoon, I am standing in my kitchen, which is collecting heat like a greenhouse on this unusually hot day in San Francisco. September is the beginning of an Indian summer. There are piles of books on the kitchen table, a dusty bin full of ski goggles and headlamps and other outdoor contraptions that now seem more nostalgic than utilitarian, and trails of breadcrumbs everywhere, the memento minutiae of yesterday's kitchen craftwork.

*Like most things in life, the work of cooking ends up having little permanence, but food is glaringly ephemeral because we confront its disintegration and disappearance everyday, biding time as food rots in our refrigerator or as it is passes through our mouths in mere seconds. We fight its transience by preserving, canning, and freezing. I fight its transience by photographing. And hoarding. And collecting. And writing it all down. I struggle to accept ephemera. I'm an archivist.

*I sweep away the breadcrumbs, even though I'm tempted to eat them.

*The stove is unusually crowded today. There's the cast iron skillet that's been sitting around for a week, in cleaning limbo (mostly clean, but not completely due to my compulsion to google "cast iron cleaning" every time I use and clean the skillet, just in case I'm doing something wrong) and the kettle that I never seem to take off the stove. Half of the stove is occupied by my laziness. On the other half: a pot of boiling salted water and a pan on low heat, filled with glistening slices of onion. The oven is heated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I crack open the window so that I can breathe better.

*"Breathe" is on my to-do list.

*The year has passed by breathlessly. A friend once told me, quite literally, you only inhale; you never seem to exhale. He was commenting on the way I breathe, or the way I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to discover, for the umpteenth time, that how I approach my need for air and food is just about how I approach everything. Inhale everything I possibly can; forget to exhale because there's no time.

*"Remember to exhale," I tell myself.

*Breathing doesn't work like that. It doesn't run on reminders.

this is me doing me

*This morning I woke up, ate a breakfast that involved copious amounts of bread and peanut butter, and walked half a block to catch the 33 bus to the Panhandle. The bus was fairly empty, which wouldn’t have been surprising on any other Sunday morning, but it was on this day, the only Sunday of the year when the young denizens of San Francisco are awake before 10 am. Then again, the Bay to Breakers festivities had started at 7 am, which meant I was late to the party.

*You can tell a lot about the cultural pride of a place by the events that they value. Until Linsanity, most people I knew at Harvard had never attended a basketball game (and even then, he was probably held up more as an athletic token than as a reason to be interested in basketball). At Duke, students camp out to get tickets to March Madness (there are regularly scheduled tent checks to prove tent occupancy). In other words, basketball at Harvard? Very little pride. Basketball at Duke? A completely a different story. Despite the grandiosity of events like Oktoberfest (Berlin) or the Royal Coronation (UK), much can also be extracted about the everyday culture of those places. These extractions aren’t necessarily profound truths, like the fact that people in Berlin really enjoy beer and sausages, or that pomp and circumstance and the dignity of the queen are very important to Brits, but all of these things trickle down to the quotidian—the everyday conversations and interactions you’ll have in a place.

*If festivals and sporting events are apt representations of the cities they’re held in, then Bay to Breakers is fairly accurate. Today was the 102nd annual Bay to Breakers, which is one of the largest footraces in the world, running from the Embarcadero (the Bay) to Ocean Beach (the Breakers). It’s known largely for its crazy costumes, nudity, and debauchery, which typify San Francisco events (most events are riffs off of Halloween it seems; nowadays, nudity is unremarkable and costumes less than impressionable). Is it a race that is actually run? Perhaps, but mostly, it’s partied.

*As an inhabitant of San Francisco, I felt a twinge of obligation to participate in Bay to Breakers, which is a factor of both peer pressure and being twenty-two. And by participate, I don’t mean run. I mean, make an appearance, an expectation I imposed on myself which is the result of that silly thing called FOMO.

*Gentle prodding from a friend was all it took for me to agree to go, which is how I ended up on the 33 bus this morning. I met her at Haight and Stanyan, and we walked two blocks to the Panhandle, where throngs of inebriated revelers, clad in brightly-colored spandex, obtrusive costumes made from very cheap and surely uncomfortable fabric, and often nothing at all, were parading down Fell street. Coordinated group costumes, like the flour-covered bakers in chef hats and the secret service agents who were really nerdy dudes wearing plastic wayfarer imitations and iPod headphones and the people wearing cardboard boxes, were mildly entertaining, even endearing for a few minutes or so. For me, the entertainment value is inversely proportional to the number of septuagenarian penises I see hanging out, though arguably, those free-falling appendages are this city’s charms.

*Though sixty-four year olds are allowed to say that they don’t like large crowds, apparently at twenty-two, saying so makes me a misanthrope. After thirty minutes of merely spectating the Bay to Breakers parade, I felt over-stimulated, as I tend to be often these days. In my apartment, I prefer silence. Despite my self-diagnosed addiction to it, the Internet is too much noise for me. That I have such an extreme aversion to the environments that I’m told I should be loving as a twenty-two year old living in San Francisco (night clubs, bars, raucous parties) is either the consequence of or catalyst to living inside my head, which is a constant and noisy stream of mostly trivial thoughts. And because I’m mostly alcohol and drug-free, there are very few aids to help with the desensitization. Besides, I like my five senses.

*I left Bay to Breakers not too long after I arrived. For me, the most dreaded part of going to any social event is telling my friends why I want to leave. I don’t make excuses; the truth is that when I leave, I just really don’t want to be there. For people who don’t share my constitution, I am an enigma, and more likely, a killjoy. Though I often feel like a misfit for leaving a nightclub before midnight so that I can go home and listen to a podcast and thumb through magazines, I console myself for failing social expectations by telling myself, “different strokes for different folks.” Don’t get me wrong—I love living in a city and I love talking to people—I even enjoy the occasional chat with a stranger—but I’ve resigned myself to not knowing and not adhering to my idea of what a typical Saturday night for a twenty-two year old is. I refuse to subscribe to the idea that this resignation means I'm wasting my twenties away. I'm just choosing how I want to live it, and it's a choice without regret. 

*One of my best friends tells me, in a coy and slightly mocking tone, “Do you.” “Do you what you do,” is what he means. Do the things you love to do and do the things that make you who you are. Bay to Breakers is the San Francisco thing to do—and I will always love the free, unthinking, and fun-loving spirit of it all, but I’m here doing me: in my living room, typing away, with tea and cookies in reach.

this is shitty writing

*I think about writing everyday. Yet at this very moment my greatest paralysis is thinking about writing, like how reading about productivity is my greatest impediment to productivity. The belief that underlies these distracting activities is that I don’t know how to write or how to be productive, that other people who have mastered the arts I lack somehow have the definitive answers to my problems.

*Increasingly I realize that the pieces of writing I most enjoy and admire (this tends to be memoirs, long-form journalism, opinionated and insightful blog entries) require both breadth and depth of either knowledge or experience. The problem with being twenty-two is that I lack both breadth and depth of both knowledge and experience. When I read other people’s writing, I am simultaneously fascinated and humbled. Desirous of the perfect expression and articulation, I make excuses to myself about not having anything to write about or not having anything of value to write about. Yet the end result of those excuses is nothing. I don’t even have shitty writing to show for it. So the cycle continues, of hungering for more of my own action, resenting myself for lack of action, and seeking relief in the words of others. In times of sadness, pain, and confusion, it’s as, if not more satisfying to find empathy (or miraculous synchronicity) in the words of others.

*I could have written this article myself. Ben Dolnick, we must be soulmates. Reading Paris Review interviews has always been my way of burrowing into a writer’s head while trying to adopt writerly habits, quirks, and skills that I hope will work miracles in my writing life. Again, another distraction from action. After reading an interview with Louise Erdrich, I was convinced that I had to physically tie myself down to a chair with scarves in order to quell my restlessness. I’ve considered taking up smoking many times not to construct a writerly image but to build up a rhythm in which writing sessions would be punctuated by smoking breaks. If this sounds illogical, it’s because it is. And smoking wouldn’t be a functional habit anyway, because I don’t want to smell like cigarettes nor do I want lung cancer. But I do want to write. That last statement has taken me far too long to admit.

*At work I am surrounded by very few writers, and by writers I mean people who hunger to write, not just people who can write competently. I am blessed to share an office with a man who is both an editor and a writer, whose understanding of style and grammar hails from the school of Strunk and White, and who urges me to read George Saunders when my outlook on life is particularly bleak (though he says Saunders will not necessarily make my outlook better). To have someone who can commiserate with the gnaw of self-expression or self-articulation or world-articulation helps me to believe I’m not totally insane for wanting to write but not writing, for only talking about writing and reading about writing but not actually writing. Now I’m writing about not writing but wanting to write, and I’m hoping that in doing so, I’m getting all of these shitty feelings out of me and all of this shitty writing out of me like a friend told me I would need to do before I can produce anything I am proud of. So here’s to days and days of shitty writing, the writing that must be done now and everyday until someday in the future. Bear with me in the meantime.