the thing about me is

I had an eventful, blissful four days in New York. The weekend's activities are summarized on this napkin from Hooters.

Here is the curatorial explanation:

The End of Days describes the weather. Cheryl's is a restaurant I and Stephanie and my favorite mens ran to to escape the weather, inside which aforementioned favorite mens had a sausage party and compared their impressive understandings of M. Night Shyamalan's oeuvre. A trashbin full of Kleenex is what Stephanie and I left in the Hilton Hotel on 57th Street. Blood on the sheets refers to a little clover of bright red plasma of unknown provenance that I hurriedly asked room service to remove. Central Park South refers to a walking tour that David led Stephanie and I on, late on Sunday night, of public art sites around midtown; David works for the Public Art Fund. Cy pres refers to some stream of funding that I never seem to understand in my capacity as the silent, thumb-sized croissant-eating student member of a board of directors of a non-profit for whose meeting I flew into town. Father's Day refers to the day of the year. James Yamada is an artist whose interactive sculpture sits on the corner of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue; it is a metal detector that lights LEDs in beautiful colors whenever you walk through it. Chris Burden is the artist who created the 65-foot structure out of erector sets that looks to be the shape of Rockefeller Center and is on display in front of Rockefeller Center. Moses is a story that has great significance to David, a former Korean evangelical, because it describes the journey of a man who leads his people to the promised land but dies before he can himself gain entry; David thinks it describes a particular person's function in his life. Tom Sachs is an artist whose 15' painted bronze casts of Hello Kitty and My Melody cry into fountains in the atrium of Lever House. Hooters is the classy franchise bar
where David, Stephanie and I ingested Budweiser, steamed oysters, and chicken wings while cheering the Celtics, or rather booing the Lakers, onto the Celtics' Game 5 loss. Carnegie Deli was a stop on the art tour. The disabled vet outside the deli asked for change by saying, "I was in Vietnam. You don't want me to do what I am capable of doing for money. I could do it, and I wouldn't regret it one second." Bath was what was taken. Sex was what was had, hysterically and sweetly. Study is what I tried to do on Sunday, at NYU. Anguish and defensiveness are self-explanatory. Cynthia's handstands passed the time at Raj's house on Saturday. Dylan's tours of Prospeck Park and Park Slope history were on trial run and sparsely attended in the oppressive Saturday heat, even though ginger-haired Dylan kept it formal (and kept his sephardic Irish skin from burning) with long sleeves and long pants, and after it ended tourgoers Stephanie and David joined a dispersing crew of people from Raj's surprise party. David's flood refers to what David discovered in his basement apartment on Saturday after returning from "The Happening." Jellybeans refers to the comestible I unwittingly inhaled a quart or two of while avoiding bar study. Cellphone refers to my phone, R.I.P., which died in the End of Days downpour. David's apt. is where Stephanie and the mens and I ran to, to dry off and kill some time and stretch, after finishing shared, slowly-served global soul dishes and getting caught in a downpour. I have no recollection of what "killing bairosh" refers to. Howling wind is self-explanatory. As is sunburn. Running down Clinton Street in downpour describes the frantic, futile activity of five people, two in flip-flops, none with umbrellas, all approaching 30 and huffing too hard, trying to get out of a sudden torrential thunderstorm. Lezlie Frye on bike is who we ran into serendipitously in Grand Army Plaza after a day of false serendipity. Raj's failure to comprehend surprise refers to a somewhat-failed surprise birthday party attempt, where instead of Raj being started with the traditional celebratory group yell, Emilou and I engineered several serendipitous meetings with Raj's friends on a putative "random" walk down Flatbush to the park, ending in a picnic on Long Meadow, resulting in Raj's continuing incredulity about his surprise party not actually being a series of happy accidents. Alexander technique and sit bones are what Cynthia showed me and Raj after finishing her handstands. Deli dinner is what I ate all three nights I was there, inside hotel rooms, with Stephanie, to avoid the tedium of dinners out and to accelerate the intimacy of isolation. Nap refers to the 45-minutes total I slept between Thursday morning and Friday late night. NYU shakes was a delicious unfinished meal. YouTube undersea diving was part of Sunday's comprehensive procrastination plan. Community is what I remembered we had created, what I longed for, and what brought me closer to the comprehension of my fault and the faultlines here.

(Some terms are missing because I compiled this list on Sunday night before my bed-ridden, sad and happy hangout with Indian.)

I went to therapy for the first time today. My intro session with the judgmental, sweaty dork in pleated khakis in 2006 does not count. I liked it. The guy was a former professor of philosophy at Stanford on his third career. He listened attentively to my convoluted stories and asked responsive questions for fifty-five minutes, and then at the end of the hour he made a few suggestions that widened my eyes, and I started to trust him. I hadn't seen things that way. What way? You'll never know.

But I am hopeful to be on my way to finishing that sentence that begins, "The thing about me is..." or at least devising some strategies to approach it. This sentence is an archetype for Stephanie, or it stands in for something. See, e.g., Ex. A, from an email she sent years ago:

we got home around 4am last night. i was really grumpy and stood against the wall at catty most of the time. that tall hapa person, A, from your lesbian fem panel was there in a white unbuttoned tuxedo shirt, and we said hello before she returned to licking the face and upper neck of a girl pinned against the wall and much shorter than her. john was belligerently drunk and struck me a couple of times trying to get my attention while dancing "like those kids on the pier...see my mirror? my hand's my mirror. now i'm putting on lipstick. you gotta be 'crazy in love'! that's you, stephanie, you're 'crazy in love'! uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh..." we were there for about an hour and a half, and D scoped out some people but didn't make any moves. mousti and john had primed her up for casual sex after hours of forcing her to drink homemade tequila sunrises and collectively fielding email responses to her craig's list posting --"young and mixed race" in downtown manhattan -- while i was out dishing with M.

at 6pm i had a caipirinha which i had to sleep off immediately on shabnam's futon mattress, and then with only a bowlful of boiled and unseasoned baby spinach in my stomach (i woke to everyone eating chicken pesto pressed sandwiches), i had a tequila drink and then two dark rum shaggies at great jones cafe. i felt really tired-drunk afterwards. i think i told you most of what M and i talked over. she's doing okay, i think. she welcomed my devil's advocate effort. i like instant intimacy, the way (as you know) i love it when people start sentences with, "the thing about me is...or I-i-i- think..." it makes me feel so human. that's why i wanted to hang with her -- not primarily or even tangentially to be nice to her because of you.

And see Ex. B, from about a year ago:

i finally gave in and purchased the Brokeback dvd...very disappointing special features, e.g. the Logo "behind the scenes" fluffy segment. i think i got the shitty version, definitely not platinum edition. but regardless i clutched a kleenex box through it and even my mom was glued to the screen. i'm still puzzling through all the reasons why i'm so seized by this film. it's titillating, and i can't wait until i arrive at firm enough of a conclusion to be able to say to someone, "the thing about me and Brokeback is..."

Stephanie is at the moment in Hanover attempting in vain to convince clueless scholars of pirate literature to think more than just dismissively about race, ethnicity, gender, and border crossing. It is a tedious and exhausting task but it is only so because in the past there was no Stephanie to raise hir (at conferences only) hand and express contrary opinions so it is incumbent upon this Stephanie to make this voice heard, tedious and exhausting as the process is.

Her job is to read closely and comprehend abstractions and then explain, so it makes a lot of sense to me that she would find delight in complete, discreet topic sentences describing people. The thing about a sentence that begins "The thing about me is..." is that the subject of the sentence is more revealing than the predicate. The reader does not put faith in the truthfulness of the adjectives and nouns that a person chooses for herself; just because a person describes herself as a beautiful, strong, sensitive Christian man does not make her a beautiful, strong, sensitive Christian man, except in present circumstances of course. The reader instead finds gratification in the fact that the person has chosen in the first place to make a proclamation about herself, that she is the kind of person who would feel confident or foolhardy or unguarded enough to say, "You should know this is who I think I am!" That person is telling the reader that she is watchful (I have observed myself) and sociable (and I would like to share with you) and okay with the amount of space she takes up in the world (that what you see is what you get). Stephanie likes people who begin sentences with "the thing about me is..." because those people are honest. I guess that's all I'm saying. Sorry it took me so long to get here.

And sorry generally for all the recursive grammar. I find it really assists in my understanding of subjectivity. To explain an earlier blog post, "Fish fish fish fish fish" means "Even tuna, who are eaten by marlins, in turn eat mackerel."