Garfunkel and Oates play the same woman, 2 years apart. Kate plays the 29 year old version of the woman, Riki plays the 31 year old.
A friend sent this suggesting that it was the female version of my life.
My best thoughts often show up when I listen to music. In this particular instance, I was bumping this Jill Scott debut again and thought “the likelihood of me meeting someone here who has any idea how damn good this album is ranges from slim to none.” That thought depressed me briefly.
It’s not even about a lack of relations. It’s bigger than that right now. It’s about finding people who I can relate to in the simplest of ways. I try almost too hard to relate to other people. I think traveling and finding yourself in consistently awkward situations as an adult, has heightened my sense of curiosity that was always there to begin with.
It’s not about other people, but an inability to really understand what I’m supposed to do about it. I think it is just part of an evolutionary process that’s continuing to evolve. One of the things the past few years has been helpful for, is realizing what I’d do differently in situations if they arose and resisting the temptation to take even the most basic things for granted.
I used to think common ground was about liking the same tunes or finding someone who was a poor substitute for what I’d always imagined made sense. It’s not really about a caricature of a person that I think I’m looking for. But I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly trying to adapt something to fit a place it’s not meant to inhabit whether it’s me or someone else. I don’t think picking up and moving will change anything even if it were in the cards at this very moment. And I think there’s a penchant to try to make fetch happen that I’m also avoiding.
But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m souring on the routine, because there’s a real lack of the kinds of energy that keep me going. It’s akin to running a race where no one is watching. You just have to like running to keep motivated in that kind of forest. When I wrote that, I felt like there was a different kind of punchline but as I end it now, I realize that maybe that was the lesson along.
I feel like there’s a middle ground somewhere, it’s just a matter of finding it.
Recently I was talking to my 23-year-old son, Theo, about my nostalgia for LP record albums. Theo thought a moment and conceded that he, too, was feeling nostalgic …for dial-up modem. (He had nice memories of pleasant beeping sounds.) I suppose the point is that we all start to pine for the way things were, once they’ve been gone long enough for us to forget how annoying they used to be.
I don’t know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the ’90s, “Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick” became the new Bimbo. She’s just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that’s supposed to be better, for some reason.
Six more years. I woke up. In six more years, I’d be 42. All this time, I’d been regarding my single life as a temporary interlude, one I had to make the most of—or swiftly terminate, depending on my mood. Without intending to, by actively rejecting our pop-culture depictions of the single woman—you know the ones—I’d been terrorizing myself with their specters.
But now that 35 had come and gone, and with yet another relationship up in flames, all bets were off. It might never happen. Or maybe not until 42. Or 70, for that matter. Was that so bad? If I stopped seeing my present life as provisional, perhaps I’d be a little … happier. Perhaps I could actually get down to the business of what it means to be a real single woman.
All The Single Ladies (via The Atlantic)
It’s very, very long. And the comments are rude as you’d anticipate on a post from a single woman about marriage post-35. But it’s worth reading nonetheless.
