At jury duty. Waiting, thinking, with summer over, it might be time to find a boyfriend, so I might have to online date, so I might need a dating profile. OK. Let’s see. Be cool. You got this. You write all the time. Simple is sexy. Don't overthink it. Here goes:
I’m Dan! I love to laugh! I love to travel. I like cute book stores and I forget my keys a lot and I care too much about everything. I care too much about what people think because I care too much about how people feel and I haven’t figured out a way to have compassion without insecurity. I cry at movies but never in real life because I think that happiness and enthusiasm are the only emotions the world wants to see from me. I’ll spend $800 on shoes but will change cereal brands to save $1.00. I’m a good son. I believe you can tell a lot about a person based on whether their dog is nice. I’m horrible at e-mail and hit or miss on text but my FaceTime game is strong. I stay out really late & get up really early & drink a ton of coffee & you can’t say anything about it. There are two other things you can never, ever, ever mention: my bunions and my lactose intolerance. I'm fun to be around because I’m only around when I’m feeling fun. James Joyce is my favorite author but I don’t tell people that because I think it sounds pretentious. I'm good at math. I don’t smoke or do drugs or even drink but I used to and you should because I maintain stupid teenage delusions that idolize rebellion. I've been arrested and I've been to a therapist and I'm more embarrassed by the 2nd one. I’m happy and I always have been even though I’m anxious and ambitious and in general too curious to be content. I haven’t ever been in an argument in adulthood. I fall deeply, irrationally in love almost every time I take the subway. I still think about a narrow-shouldered man with Scandinavian features and a perfectly-fitted suit reading Sontag on the F Train. I have a lot of love to give but get very nervous if someone appears to need it. The most enduring mystery in the world to me is why so many people have the ingredients for happiness but insist on feeling otherwise. I don’t believe in God but wish I did. I love Broadway and at first I’ll pretend to listen to cool music but in reality I listen to this Bernadette Peters Live CD almost twice a day. I have big muscles. I act really open but it’s a trick. You’ll think you know everything and won’t ask about the things I keep hidden. I’m getting better at letting people in because with age comes evidence that some people like what they find. I could eat cereal for every meal. I’m a cancer but I have no idea what that means.
If you think it’s a match, please try to find a way to make me think I’m the only one you’re messaging.
10
Today, this very day, ten years ago, I stopped drinking. Yes, that’s right, for TEN YEARS I’ve been making first dates feel awkward by ordering club soda. This morning I was thinking that I should probably have reached some sort of grand understanding after ten years of a life unfogged. I'm not sure. But there are some things I wish I'd known 10 years ago:
1. It is possible—with enough Camel Lights, chocolate cake, and strength of will—to have a sober hangover.
2. Almost every problem gets better when you learn you're not the only one.
3. Who you're with matters a great deal when you're really there.
4. The only people who say coffee is a drug never did a drug.
5. You get to do things for the first time. Again.
6. You can drunk dance without a drop of alcohol. And drunk dial. And drunk text. Even beer goggles are within your reach if you believe in yourself.
7. You might miss not having alcohol to blame for your bad decisions.
8. One day you’ll be so happy that the pain you feel today will seem impossible.
9. Life is enough. You don't think it is, but it is. Let me explain. There are a lot of things that alcohol is good for. Some of the best friendships in my life might never have started if we, instead, went out for tea together. “Jungle Juice” is at least partially responsible for most of the fun we had in 2003. And if it weren’t for fake courage from bottom-shelf vodka, you might still be dating girls. Alcohol gives a lot. But it also takes. And for some of us, the balance gets out of whack. And you’re trapped. With something in your life that you cannot control that is taking your life in directions you’d rather not go. If you can quiet your mind for just long enough, if you can stop looking for reasons and workarounds and explanations and justifications and just shut up for a second, something crystallizes. Life teaches you how to live it. You don’t need what you thought you needed. You want fun? Have it. You want courage? Fake it. You want love? Give it. You want adventure? Take it. Life is enough.
10. And so are you.
Notes after the Election
I don’t know what to do. But I know what I’m going to do. I am going to love harder than I’ve ever loved before. I am going to love more expansively and compassionately and enthusiastically than ever before. Get ready. If you are in my life, I am going to love you so hard you won’t even remember the President’s name. If you are not in my life, I am going to yank you in and shower you in show-stopping love you’ve only read about in dime-store paperbacks. I am going to hug my mom and call my aunt and play cards with my uncles and listen to my grandma and take that extra trip to visit my sister and give piggyback rides to my nephews and I’m going to write shitty poetry and walk cute dogs and wear bad drag and be better at e-mailing my grandpa and volunteer for kids who really need help and I’m going to be the friend who plans the dinner and I’ll stop saying I’m too busy and I’ll dance like crazy and stay out late laughing and always wear the outfit I like not the one that fits in. I’ll be the most loving goddamn person you’ve ever seen and I’m going to wake up every morning in this mother-fucking country and send so much love out that the clouds will rain faggoty little hearts all over my Manhattan. I’m going to surround my life with a love shield so strong no hate will break through. My Love Shield. Because love lost the election but I am still an American and I’m staying right here and I have a lot of love to give and my only source of optimism is this: we are all still here, and so is all our love. So for today, Love. I can’t do despair. I love you.
Unsolicited Advice: Suggestions for a Happy Life
Recently, for reasons far too specific and out of the ordinary to go into, I was on a bus full of people in their very early 20s. Upon reflection, I have some suggestions.
To the men….
* You will learn more from the world if you stop trying to teach it your opinion.
* Agreeing with someone doesn’t make you sound weak. Disagreeing doesn’t make you sound smart.
* Be as passionate about people as you are about sports.
* Remember there is a human being on the other end of that text (/ snap / DM). You can do a small part to reduce human suffering if you say what you mean and do what you say.
* The world does not owe you inspiration. Find it.
* People do not owe you attention. Earn it.
* If you are not informed, it is appropriate to not have an opinion.
To the women…
* Having a complicated life does not make you more interesting. Starting fights over mole hills makes for high-ratings reality TV, but I promise you actual reality is much more enjoyable if you just flow with it.
* Disliking things does not make you more interesting. Somewhere you learned that disinterest looks intelligent and aloof looks cool. The sooner you stop living above the world, the sooner you will start enjoying it. Remarkable things are happening all around you. Smile at them.
* You are not fat or old. You make people uncomfortable when you say you are. Happiness comes less from what you look like and more from what you look at.
* You don’t need to figure out your whole life today. You just need to figure out your day. Attempting the first makes the second nearly impossible.
* You will never figure out why he does or doesn’t or did or didn’t. People’s motivations are nuanced and complicated and often hidden even from themselves. The sooner you dispel the notion that you’ll figure him out by talking about him, the sooner you can start living that more interesting life.
* You have to, just HAVE to, stop saying “literally” so much
To all: You’re beautiful and wonderful and talented and you’re plopped in a country that undervalues humility and kindness, but I promise, those attributes make relationships last and life a lot more fun.
Love and Sunshine.
Someone in his very early 30s.
A Love Letter to Black Americans
A Love Letter to Black Americans
Looking at my country this morning, I feel perhaps like the mother of an alcoholic son, hoping that this, perhaps this, please god this will be rock bottom, the darkest hour, the turning point or any other colloquial metaphorical oversimplification heralding change.
I do not know if it is, and I certainly do not know how to fix a country drunk on hate, addicted to guns, and living in a constant hangover of pointless deaths. But what I do know is this: in my own little corner of my own beloved country, I can offer love.
To my black friends. To every black person I know or will know or could know.
I love you.
I am sorry.
I am sorry that you and your parents and your children will have fears that are so far from anything that me and my parents and my children could ever understand. Toni Morrison introduced me to white privilege, although I didn’t know it by that name. With my blue eyes I read about “a little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” See the world with blue eyes. Blue eyes. See the world with my eyes. I didn’t fully understand my privilege because, sitting in my protected white suburb, my idols were black. I hesitate to even say this because it feels uncomfortable—like the other side of a racist coin. I would sneak to my basement to watch In Living Color. I played a Whitney concert VHS til the spools fell off. I would stay up way too late to watch Cedric the Entertainer, Sommore, DC Curry on ComicView, wondering why white people were so boring—not to mention couldn’t sing for shit. To this day I co-opt black culture in my expressions, mannerisms, music, dress, dance. I hope it’s OK but I don’t know. The privilege of my blue eyes. Enjoying the joys of the black experience with none of the pain. None of the ugliness none of the dangers of simply living while black.
I read because I don’t know.
I got older and I thought we were making progress and Americanah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie slapped me. “Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
Ta-Nehesi Coates slapped me. When I was a kid, in the summer I went to “Safety Town”—a little camp run in part by the police. They taught us traffic rules, fire safety, and most of all that I was protected and the whole community was here to help keep me safe from bad guys—guys with candy, guys in vans. And Ta-Nehesi Coates told me that black kids of that same age were being taught how to avoid a police beating. And if a father brought out “the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch” in a black home it was because of “the old mantra—either I can beat you or the police will.” He told me that “black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.” I never knew—I will never know—the pain of such constant fear.
James Baldwin slapped me. “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls” you, he warned his nephew. I never read this in high school.
Despite all the pain and ugliness and fear, Baldwin turned to love. To his nephew, on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation: “You were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you.”
It looks bad today, too.
But to my black friends: I love you. I will love for you. I will love with you.
And I will love “in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth,” to keep quoting Baldwin.
To the vast majority of police officers who are wonderful and dutiful and brave: I love you. I appreciate you. I thank you.
To my country: I love you. And I love even more your potential if we stop insisting that so many people live in fear.
To end. Paton. "There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart."
I love you. I cry for you and fight for you and love for you. #blacklivesmatter