Taking pictures and posting them on the internet

My phone has a lot of pictures in it. Some of the pictures are doubles and triples of the same images, like a flower with bugs having sex in it or a sandwich board with a pita saying “Get in here for a pita!” I want to make sure I captured the images right, for when I’m older and can’t remember the state I was in when I took the pictures.

But the joke’s on me, because you can’t remember states when you’re in other states. Like just the other night I was trying to remember grade 9 French class. I spent a whole year in that class and all I can remember is that one girl told us she had a brain condition where if she thought too hard her head would explode.

As soon as you do something, you will never again know exactly what it’s like to do that thing. If it was a fun thing you did, your brain will start to puff it up like it was the most amazing thing in the world. It sucks that brains do this to us, but in fairness to brains, they make it so that we don’t have to think in order to breathe. Another guy in grade 9 told me that if he touched my back in a certain way, I would have to think to be able to breathe. You know when someone tells you something, and you believe it and never think about it again, and then remember it years later and realize you believed it that whole time? That just happened to me twice in a row.

Because memories are just dreams about things that actually happened, and because it hurts so much to know we’ll never be able to live them again, the only thing we can really do is take a whole bunch of pictures. At least then we have evidence that they actually happened.

Another reason to take pictures is that fun stuff costs a lot of money. When you spend a lot of money on something, you want to feel like it was at least an investment in your future. Unfortunately, it is impossible for your future to involve that fun thing you did again. So the investment has to be in pictures of you looking like you’re having fun and of stuff you saw while you were having fun.

Once you have those pictures, you should post them up somewhere, because if other people know you were doing that fun thing, it’s more evidence that you actually were. And when you die, you will have left more evidence that you actually existed, since you never will again.

The point of deep thoughts

I didn’t do much last weekend, but I did have some deep thoughts. They were about death. I wanted to talk to someone about them so I texted a friend and said, “I got some deep thoughts with your name on ‘em.” When he didn’t write back, I said “Don’t worry, they’re about death.” When he still didn’t write back, I re-read those texts and realized they sounded kind of weird. I texted him as much but he didn’t write back to that, either. Turns out his phone was out of juice.

I would write about the deep thoughts here, but they would take a while to explain and they’re not really that funny. They’re not really that original, either. Instead, they are just riffs on stuff people have been saying since humans could say stuff, as well as stuff I’ve been thinking about and hearing people say since I was a kid. The only difference between these thoughts about death and the thoughts I was having about death at age 17 is that I understand the world better now and am less impressed by how clever I am for having thought deep thoughts. Less, but not not. I don’t understand why even thinking has to be embarrassing.

As I thought these thoughts, I thought about how easy it was to think them. Then I thought about all the times I’d heard them said before, and wondered how so many people were allowed to use up so many words to say the exact same things about death. When I finally found a friend to talk about my deep thoughts with, I realized three things: a) you need a good segueway to talk about death; b) things that make perfect sense in your head make exponentially less sense out loud; c) figuring out how to say them is 90% of the point of saying them at all.

For example, lots of the stuff I thought about was a variation on stuff I’d read in Being and Time. My edition of Being and Time is 488 pages long. I think you could probably summarize the whole shebang in about 20 pages. The other 468 pages are not that fun to read, but they help you to understand the 20 pages that actually make points and aren’t just Heidegger explaining how he’s going to make his points. That’s a pretty simple reading of Being and Time, so it may not surprise you to learn that I haven’t actually read all 488 pages.

But if Heidegger had just written 20 pages of maxims like, “things are the sum of their parts,” not many readers would understand him the way he wanted to be understood. They’d understand him however they wanted to understand him. Those 468 pages are 468 pages of insistence that you see things Heidegger’s way. I wish Heidegger had seen things in a funnier way, and I also wish he hadn’t been a Nazi, but neither wish changes the fact that he was a lot smarter than I am on matters unrelated to genocide. So it was worth the trouble to read however many pages of Being and Time I read.

When I think about Being and Time, I feel a lot like the way I felt this weekend when I stopped thinking my deep thoughts and decided to get some eggs. I had thought through some points and probably understood the world a little better for having done so, but understanding is a very small part of what you have to do to get through life. Furthermore, every point anyone has ever made has been made 50 prillion times in the history of human civilization, in 50 prillion different ways. I say “prillion” because I don’t know the word for that many. Louis CK has probably made points that Heidegger made in Being and Time. He probably made them through jokes about his kids, which makes sense, because kids have made points that Heidegger made in Being and Time.

My point is that having a point is important, but not that important. The way you get to the point is probably more important. That’s kind of one of the points I had about death, and I think it’s one of the points that Heidegger had about death as well, except that he was a serious German who understood Greek and I am a silly Canadian who watches a lot of Louis CK. Unfortunately I am neither as smart as Heidegger nor as funny as Louis CK, which is why I’m not going into my deep thoughts.

Dog nipples

The other day, a friend and I got to talking about bitches. He remarked on how much bitches like it when you touch their nipples. I thought about that for a while and it made me incredibly uncomfortable.

I love dogs a lot. I’ve never had a dog of my own, so I can get pretty gooey around other people’s dogs. Often dogs don’t like me because they can sense my desperation and it weirds them out. That just feeds my love of dogs, because they’re so humany in ways you wouldn’t even expect.

One way that dogs are not humany, though, is their nipples. Humans have two nipples, but dogs can have like ten. Sometimes ten baby dogs will attach themselves to a mother dog’s nipples and that is an incredibly freaky thing to see. It’s uncanny, because the mother dog is doing one of the most human things in a seriously unhuman way. It’s also humiliating, because the mother dog is still five times the woman I am.

More than that, dog nipples are nipples. Nipples are difficult to talk about, because nipples serve two functions that are very separate functions. I would like to keep those functions as separate as possible, but I can’t, because I only have one set of nipples and they have to do both things. I’d like to think that if I had five sets of nipples I could reserve at least one for the function that is not giving nourishment to babies, but I don’t see dogs doing that.

This is probably why I am weird about my nipples. There is a picture of me standing next to my mother and grandmother in which my nipples are hard. It was cold out that day, but I still don’t like it one bit. I also don’t like it when certain people touch my nipples, such as boyfriends who have crossed the intimacy threshold into familyville. The wrongest thing I can possibly imagine is a family member touching my nipples, and yet that’s exactly why I have them.

The worst part is that nourishing family is the primary function of nipples. The other part is just a bonus feature. It’s like nature gave us a paring knife that can also be used as a dildo. Nature is incredibly weird, which itself is weird to think, because I come from nature. But the human brain is like a rebellious teenager who hates its parents and still ends up on the box factory line. Right now I’m having a great time treating my body like an amusement park. But one day a baby might rip itself out of my body and attach itself to my nipples, and then nature will be laughing.

Nature is not only weird, but shitty, because it programmed the human brain to find it disgusting. It programmed us with a concept of aesthetics, and then covered everything with little hairy germs and made us run on slime. It programmed us with a concept of decency, then packed us full of giant wormy tubes that produce shit. It programmed us to not want to have sex with family members and then based the whole family thing on sex.

Dogs are comforting, because even though they’re humany, they’re more natural than us. So even though it’s gross to watch a dog shit in public, it’s comforting to know that I would never do that. Another comforting thing is pleasure, which kind of sticks it to nature by treating bonus features as primary functions. Then I think about dogs getting off on having their million nipples touched and I remember that the natural world is one giant boggy morass and that I’m literally full of shit.

The list of things you think you need in a partner

I am in a single phase of my life right now, which means I have lots of time to spend on my laundry list of things I think I’d need in a partner. I make this list when I could be playing Tetris, or counting all the people I ever truly hated, or making an interactive chart of all my friendships.

When you think about what you need in a partner, what you’re really doing is thinking about all the stuff you want and then mashing it together into a person. For example, I want to have a long and fulfilling career, and I want to have sex on a regular basis. Those things have nothing to do with one another. I’d also like to go back in time and prevent my junior high school principal from referring to permission slips as “passports to freedom,” but no man can do this for me.

Lots of stuff on my dream partner list is totally obtainable on my own. It would just be more convenient to get it all from one source. The only things I’m not getting are back massages and comfort when I’m sick, but back massages I can occasionally afford, and thinking, “Wow, this is it, I’m really going to die all alone from this crazy fever” is sort of comforting, because it means I don’t have to worry about my career anymore.

Honestly, the top item on my list is someone to tell me what to do next with my life and make me the best me I can be. But all the guys I meet are too busy wanting me to tell them what to do next with their lives and making them the best them they can be. I would consider entering an arrangement on those terms, if we could both commit to pulling our weight, but the problem is that twice the lives to manage means twice the fuck-ups and twice the amount of shame.  It’s hard to have sex with someone you’re ashamed of. Or who you know is ashamed of you.

And that’s why it’s good to be single. It gives you an idea of all the stuff you want, until someone comes along and you fall in love just from smelling them and then you’re stuck in a relationship with someone who makes a living appearing in Pepto Bismol commercials.

Becoming nocturnal

One thing about my life is that I am fairly alone in the world. I always feared being alone in the world, but now I see it’s not so bad. It sucks when I feel sick, but when I’m healthy there are lots of things I prefer doing by myself, like eating and working and running errands. The great thing about living in a city is that even when you’re alone, there are always people around.

But the shitty thing about living in a city is that there are always people around, walking slowly and talking too loud and asking me for things like my precious alone time. Sometimes they even ring my buzzer, which is awful because have you ever heard the sound that buzzer makes? It goes straight the part of my brain that tells me my life is in danger, which makes it the same thing as pain.

But lately I’ve discovered that an entire world exists without too many people in it. It’s called “night.” At night, people are usually in bed. Not me, though. Most weeknights I do a thing where I pass out at 10, wake up at 1, and then stay up until 4 or 5 doing work. It sucks having to get up the next morning, but it feels pretty good being up when no one else is up, because it means no one will bother me. No one should, anyway. If any of you ring my buzzer at 4am I am going to call the police.

Another great thing about living in a city is there are actually things to do at night. There is an all-night diner not fifteen minutes away from my apartment. There is also an all-night gym at roughly the same distance. I’m not going to the gym at 4am, but it’s nice to know that I could. And I lied before, because sometimes neighbours come to my window looking for someone to drink with at 4am. It’s OK because they don’t ring my buzzer.

Yet another great thing about living in a city, which brings us to a total of three great things about living in a city, is that when the days start to get shorter, and you leave work in darkness, feeling like maybe you’re going to open the door to your bachelor apartment and plunge into the abyss, you remember that there are still things to be done.

What if you fall in love with a female friend

When I was younger, I thought I was the kind of girl who got along better with guys. I probably thought it was cooler to be that way. Now that I’m older, I realize that old me had a pretty lousy idea of who I am. Or who I was. Or was I different, even? What is the self?

Now that I’m older, I realize that I get along better with other women. For one thing, women and I share a culture, which is the culture of women. For another, I like the way we talk to each other. Some men think that we read into stuff too much, but we like reading into stuff because it makes for good conversation and illuminates the world we live in. I don’t want to generalize, but if you are a man reading this, and you would like to spend an hour workshopping a text message with me, then I will change my tune.

It is easy to fall in friend love with a female friend. Being in friend love is similar to being in love love except that you don’t want to squish your lives together and you don’t want to have sex with them. When I fall in friend love with a male friend, I usually want to have sex with him.

But who knows who they want to have sex with? I once wanted to have sex with a guy who swaddled his testicles in sweatpants. I once wanted to have sex with a guy who started talking to me on the streetcar and then called me six times in a row, each time telling me that he’d call back later. And I have wanted to have sex with people I never felt attracted to until I realized how deeply in friend love we were. So whenever I fall in friend love with a girlfriend, I get worried that I’ll want to have sex with her.

I say “worried” because the wanting to have sex thing is a touchy issue in straight female friendships. I imagine it’s a touchy issue in not-straight female friendships, but I don’t know for sure. I should ask. Anyway, female friendships are very open and often intense. They are also very affectionate. We can spend an hour talking about how much we love each other and why. We do things like hang out together all night alone in someone’s apartment. Sometimes we sleep in the same bed. Sometimes we have occasion to see each other naked. And if you are both straight, there is an assumption, fair or not, that this is all perfectly non-sexual.

If one half of a female friendship falls in love love with the other, and it’s unrequited, and they’re sleeping in the same bed and seeing each other naked, well, they’ve got a pretty complicated situation. The female in love love might feel very frustrated and possibly heartbroken. The female not in love love might feel very uncomfortable. Either way, it would change up the dynamic and possibly ruin the friendship. To be honest, I don’t know if other women worry about this. I have never brought it up with my female friends because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m in love with them.

Maybe my fear stems from the fact that part of me wishes I could fall in love with my female friends. It would be nice to fall in love love with someone I am also in friend love with. That hasn’t happened in a long time, and the last time it did I eventually stopped wanting to have sex with him. That makes me think I have a pretty lousy idea of how relationships actually work, and so I don’t know why you’ve read this far.

How you can’t trust the future you

When I was a kid, I was really worried that the future me would start smoking. As soon as I typed that sentence, I took my laptop into the other room for a smoke. The other room is my bathroom. It feels healthier to smoke here, even though there are brownish-yellow cobwebs hanging from the ceiling which I never clean. I expect the future me to clean them, but she never does. My whole bathroom is disgusting because the future me is a lazy piece of shit.

One thing I’ve learned is that the future you is going to do whatever she wants. It doesn’t matter what the present you has in store for her. You can’t even count on her for simple tasks, like doing laundry or getting all that work done at the agreed-upon time so that the future future you doesn’t have to feel all that pressure the night before. The future you might do some of the stuff you demand of her, but very rarely all.

Taming the future you is part of growing up. But growing up is kind of like trying to cram down garbage overflow. It’s not all going to fit in the bag. Some of it will fit in the bag, but the rest will leave a giant slimy mess that you’ll have to come back and clean up piece by piece. Because growing up is a messy process, involving many items of garbage, the future you gets to fuck around while the present you focuses on things like being a considerate friend and behaving like a professional.

Those are things you can do in the moment. But abiding a schedule involves a trust relationship with you that takes a really long time to develop. Just as the brain is actually many brains living in you, you is actually many yous living at different points in time. And just as the many brains are always getting up each other’s craws, the many yous are always letting each other down.

The way I feel about the future me is a lot like the way my mother thinks of the present me. I have great hopes for her, but I also hope to God she doesn’t screw up. I worry all the time that she’ll screw up. I nag her to do stuff and even though I know she knows I know what’s best, I can’t trust that she’s going to follow my advice. It is extremely likely that she will ignore lots of my advice and keep screwing up, and that drives me nuts.

Like my mom I should ease up on her a bit, because at the end of the day she’s gonna do what she’s gonna do, but not too much, because it’s important for her to feel guilty. The future me will never be perfect, but I will always love her as long as she never kills anyone.

Having a pizza all to yourself

Last Saturday I decided to give myself a day off. I did very little until 9 pm, then I went to a friend’s place to watch a movie. Even beforehand I knew that I was going to order a pizza. If you know me, you know that I ordered pizza from Massimo’s, because that’s my kind of pizza. Most pizza not from Massimo’s is a waste of calories, like spiking your coffee with grease or eating an entire loaf of bread.

When the pizza came I got anxious, because I am extremely territorial about my food. Have you ever tried to share a meal with me? Don’t, because it’s a huge pain in the ass. I will not stop checking how much you’ve had, and I will scrutinize the size of each helping so that things are exactly equal. We should really just order two dishes to ourselves, but even then, if you ask me for a a bite of whatever I’m having, be prepared for me to say “help yourself” and then turn my head because I can’t bear to watch you helping yourself. If the spoonful you take has any paneer cubes in it, you are going to get an earful. I’ll tell you I’m just kidding, but really I’m not.

On this particular evening, once the pizza came, I went into surveillance mode. The way I feel about pizza when other people are around is probably similar to the way parents feel about their kids when there are childless adults circling the playground. Even if the people around me didn’t want any of my pizza, and that’s impossible because everyone wants pizza, I would still be distracted because hey, there’s pizza. There’s really no point in me being out with people if there’s a pizza to be had, the same way there’s no point making small talk at a party when you can go somewhere and have sex.

Once we ate all the pizza, we watched a movie and I passed out. When I woke up, I had to walk home in the cold. Even though it was nice to see friends, I probably should have stayed home that night and ordered a pizza all to myself. Ordering a pizza all to yourself is the ultimate way to relax. It is better than a vacation.

In life, people place demands on people, and people place demands on themselves, and everyone has to work really hard to keep everyone happy. There’s also a limited amount of time for pleasure, so pleasure has to be maximized, which also takes work. When there’s a whole pizza in front of you, though, everything else ceases to exist. No one will demand a slice of pizza from you, and the voice in your head that would be screaming at you not to eat that pizza is muffled because you’ve gone and done it anyway. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about making the most of your slice allotment, because all the slices are yours. By the fifth slice you’ll feel sick, so any whole pizza is basically infinite pizza. And that’s what really makes a whole pizza better than a vacation: you will actually be glad when it’s over.

The other thing about eating a whole pizza is that it’s death behaviour. When your weekends consist of staying in and ordering whole pizzas, you’ve pretty much given up on life. This is meaningful because in life you have to balance wanting to get things done with wanting everything to stop so you can get some goddamn peace for a change.

When everything stops, you are dead. But who wants to actually die? That’s why, when you order yourself a whole pizza, you should skip breakfast the next morning and do laundry instead.

Falling outs

When I was in high school, I had a friend who I loved very much. So much that it didn’t make any sense for me not to be in love with her. I fantasized about wanting to fantasize about her. We had two kinds of friendships in one: a friendship where we went out together all the time, and an actual friendship. Both were the best.

Toward the end of grade 12, she got very into politics, and I got very into working at a record store. We started to drift apart. Often when friends start to drift apart, one or both parties think it would be easier just to kill the whole thing dead with a horrible fight. One or both parties are wrong, because falling outs are really curses that ex-friends put on each other for all time.

I don’t actually know how this friend felt about our falling out. I imagined she didn’t care because I sucked too much to care about. Imagining she didn’t care is part of the whole curse. Another part of the curse is having dreams about her where I wake up screaming the word “cunt” and my boyfriend at the time worries about the neighbours.

Because you’re never talking again, ex-friends are easy to mythologize. They morph from people into angels of righteousness who hate your guts. In my mind, this ex-friend became like one of those ghosts who visit people on Christmas Eve and tell them everything they’re doing wrong.

Unlike significant others, who you get together with because of all sorts of wild feelings that the brain would kill dead if it only had the power, you form and maintain friendships with people because you like and respect them. When you respect someone, you respect their judgment. When they judge you to suck, you really take it seriously. When significant others judge you to suck, you can blame it on them, or on human smells.

Because I respected this friend, and because she judged me to suck, it took me a very long time to stop feeling bad about the ways she judged me to suck. I still feel sort of bad, even though I have also thought a lot about the ways in which she was full of it. I will continue to feel sort of bad about these ways until a new friend helps me feel better about them. Then that friend and I will fall out, and I will feel bad about other things that sucks about me.

Fondness vs. relationships

Two years ago, I started dating a guy. We liked each other so we decided to be together. Unfortunately I didn’t want to be with a guy like him, so I tried to nag him into being the kind of guy I wanted to be with. He didn’t want to be with a girl who nagged him about being the kind of guy he was.

The sex was good, though, as were the other moments where neither of us were talking, so we kept hanging out, and eventually we stopped caring about all the other stuff. After eight months, he got into a relationship with someone better suited to him, and broke up with me via text message. I remember him very fondly.

I remember the other guys I’ve dated with love sometimes, but never really fondness. Fondness is when you have a good idea of who someone is and really dig them for being that way. Somewhere in my head I have a good idea of who my ex-boyfriends are, but it’s buried under all the things I wanted them to be and all the ways they disappointed me. Also, all the things they didn’t like about me and all the ways I resented them for not liking me enough as I was.

There are lots of people I’m fond of. I can be fond of them because I’m not trying to squish our lives together to make a new life. It’s hard to stay fond of someone whose life is rat kinging to yours. People take their lives very seriously and there are a lot of variables to consider. When your life becomes a new life made up of someone else’s life, it can feel like The Thing.

Sometimes when I sleep with someone I’m fond of, I imagine our lives all rat kinged together. Inevitably there are things about them that simply wouldn’t do in my life, and I start to feel embarrassed. Then I remember that there is no such rat king, and that our lives are still two different lives. And then I am more fond of them than ever, because wanting to have sex with someone and not being able to is another thing that muddies up your idea of how they are.

I’m not being all cynical about relationships. Good relationships are great. But to have a good relationship, you need two people who are OK with the idea of rat kinging their lives together. I have no idea where you guys find each other.