Monday, March 16, 2009

"do something nice." --Mom

Okay you guys, so I didn't have a really stellar day. It was one of those days where my iPod was decidedly not on my side, decidedly not doling out anything resembling good juju. It was a Bright Eyes/M. Ward/Neil Young doing Don't Let It Bring You Down live at Massey in 1971 kind of morning. Seriously, I defy you to listen to that song and not want to crawl into a hole and just off yourself in some kind of lovely way, like smothering yourself in a room full of lilies. I read somewhere that they require so much oxygen that planting yourself in a roomful of them is a very elegant form of suicide. This morning I waited for the light to change at the corner of Laurier and Metcalfe, the windiest, loneliest corner in all of Ottawa, and I imagined myself in some kind of 1920s-style satin housecoat, lying on a chaise longue, waiting it out.

It wasn't a fabulous walk to work.

I'm a little discombobulated today, which is nothing new to anyone who knows me. I've been reading really weird books lately, like The Moviegoer, by Walter Percy. It won the National Book Award in 1961, and someone referenced it during the Oscars. I should not be allowed to drink and watch television and go on The Internet at the same time--I end up spending the night on the library's website, placing holds on everything referenced on the tube. About a week after the Oscars telecast I had this Lost Weekend-esque experience when I checked the hold shelf for my latest arrivals--4 Hitchcock DVDs, Cactus Flower on VHS, and the Percy book. It was like I'd blacked out and had a nerd bender.

Actually, I take that back--I SHOULD get drunk and place random holds on library items. I should actually go into work and staff the reference desk while drunk, because clearly I have good whimsical drunk taste. I'm glad I ordered The Moviegoer for myself, because it's the sort of book you want to read at this time of year when you feel like the winter will never end, when all you want to do is burrow under a pile of pillows and wait for a sign that there's some hope of a thaw. Percy's book gives me the exact kind of hope I need--the slightly depressing kind. In the character Binx Bolling, I found a weary, sincere, superficial antihero, a guy you don't want to like but who wears you down to the point where you hope he figures himself out. I'm about 50 pages in and I'm not sure he's going to have any kind of epiphany; so far his life is all about hiding in the suburbs of New Orleans, going to movies and enjoying himself whether it's a good one or a bad one, struggling to defend and define himself but retreating more than succeeding. And he's a bit of a dick with the ladies, which I know is a product of being written before third wave feminism, but really, dude, ALL your secretaries? Percy opens with a line from Kirkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, which reads, "the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." It's enough to freak out a maudlin girl like me at the best of times, but the passage is even more chilling when it's followed by the story of a man who's living it.

And yet. I'm going to keep reading it tonight, and hope that old Binx Boling figures it out, or at least keeps telling his story in this light-handed, easy way. There's something hopeful about being, at the very least, a good narrator for your own life. It's the least we can do for ourselves.

I talked to my parents on the phone tonight and my mom told me I should "do something nice" with my evening. She can always tell when I am bummed out, usually because I am yelling at her on the phone and feeling guilty about it. Anyway, I took her advice, and I did something nice. I sat in my house with the windows open and watched it get dark so much later than it did a week ago. I looked forward to things, even though I wasn't really sure any of them were worth looking forward to. Everyone deserves a little introspection on the first day of spring, even if it doesn't amount to much.

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