Intrepid Girl Reporter

I want to return to what I was talking about last time, which is death and where I used to live. I haven’t found the Great Florida Novel yet, and to be honest, I’m not sure that it’s been written; I’ve read Dave Barry, of course, and he’s funny, but he’s more focused on Miami and neither he nor Carl Hiaasen seem to get the darkness, the existential thing, under it all. (Although I haven’t read all that much Hiaasen, so I could be wrong.) And I tried to read Didion’s Miami – ordinarily I adore her – and it just didn’t do it for me.

My town is dead now, or at least that’s what I’ve heard. The town itself, I mean – the businesses are closing, the houses’ prices plummeting. I saw this happening, on a much smaller scale, after we left; the neighborhood cul-de-sac where the neighborhood parents would gather in the lazy heat to drink and watch us run had become overgrown with weeds, and we were only the first family to move away. People got divorced, downsized or left in search of bigger houses (and you’ve never seen a big house until you’ve seen one in the tropics). I wrote a “personal narrative” about it in high school. At the time, I saw it as just the passage of time, a way for me to physically comprehend the ways in which my childhood ended. I didn’t see it as the foreshadowing of something larger. But I wonder now.

The city of Bradenton, however, isn’t the only thing that’s gone. It doesn’t seem right that so many people should be dead – and by right I mean simply that it doesn’t seem correct that such a high proportion should be washed out like so much seaweed into the tide. But I wonder if there’s a sense of nihilism that comes from being, basically, at the bottom of the country, cast out into the ocean like a forgotten trail. From Manatee County, it takes five hours to get out of the state, and the only way to go is up. When the big wave comes, Florida’s going to be the first to go, and living there requires a certain amount of peace with that. That’s what none of the writing I’ve read seems to get: the sandy soil that gets in your skin, the stifling heat, the smell of dead fish that pervades the air during red tide season. The lack of conviction that anywhere else really exists for you.

I wonder, though, if I’m right or if I’m romanticizing all of this, the way you do when you leave a place at the right time. Bradenton to me seems almost too weird to live, with its conquistador festivals and manatees and semi-successful punk bands. The way I remember Bradenton is largely lower-middle-class, a lot of small houses with large boats, a lot of people who drove around getting high and listening to Sublime, who made it to community college or not at all. But I was at my old middle school classmate’s house tonight, talking about why it was that half the people we had known were dead or pregnant or in jail, and the way he saw it was completely different. “It was a lot of rich kids,” he said, “and a lot of drugs…We had things to do. We had a movie theater, a bowling alley, the beach, when you look back on it, but all anyone ever seemed to do was get drunk.” We did have wealthier kids – I was one of them, more or less – mostly the children of doctors and dentists, and there were a lot of them. (We also had famous tennis players, which was weird, and Bobby Bonilla, which was weirder.) So I guess he has a point about that, although none of those people seem to be the ones getting in trouble. But I don’t know that a beach and a movie theater count as enough to make anyone believe that there’s more out there than the endless sea.

It’s Christmas break and I just finished watching Up in the Air with my mother and sister, which I thought was quite good but was definitely one of the more depressing movies I’ve seen in a while. Vera Farmiga’s speech about what women look for by the time they hit 34 made me want to go defenestrate myself:

You know, honestly by the time you’re 34, all the physical requirements just go out the window. You secretly pray that he’ll be taller than you, not an asshole would be nice just someone who enjoys my company, comes from a good family. You don’t think about that when you’re younger. Someone who wants kids, likes kids. Healthy enough to play with his kids. Please let him earn more money than I do, you might not understand that now but believe me, you will one day otherwise that’s a recipe for disaster. And hopefully, some hair on his head. I mean, that’s not even a deal breaker these days. A nice smile. Yea, a nice smile just might do it.

And while if there’s one thing I’ve figured out doesn’t belong on this blog, it’s information about my love life, it reveals very little to say that I found that speech unnerving, the equivalent of picking up what you think is a bottle of water and inadvertently taking a swig of a warm flat Diet Coke. On a related note, it also made me feel old and unaccomplished, which is unsurprising when one considers the fact that I used to periodically chastise myself for not being accomplished enough to skip a grade.

Grad school, too, has made me feel old sometimes, which is funny, because I’ve more or less completely regressed to the lifestyle of a nineteen-year-old: a messy room, a breakfast composed of fruit snacks, jeans worn for days in a row. There are plenty of people older than me, of course, but there are also people who are younger, almost all of whom I once looked at as inexperienced and who now have real job experience IN BETWEEN THEIR TIME GRADUATING AFTER ME AND COMING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL. This is part of what happens when you find yourself in a competitive program, of course, so it’s not exactly a bad thing; I have, certainly, been encouraged to go harder, faster, stronger, etc. But it’s a rather stark reminder of the progress of time.

So graduate school: inducing existential crises, and one reason for my absence from these parts. My loyal-est/loyalist readers have surely noticed that blogging has almost entirely dropped off here, to say nothing of my five hundred side projects, and part of that is the time suck that is full-time attendance. Part of it is that I’m still entertaining the notion of my own website – in fact, I think school has underlined that it is necessary for me to have one, so I can start writing about school-related stuff – but that raises the question: what here? I can get personal but not too personal, as my anonymity isn’t much, and when I want to share stuff I post links on my Tumblr, and when I write about food…you know. It goes on. Unfortunately, the design of my own personal webspace has been delayed by the fact that of course whatever I do has to be Unique And Special And Really Good, so I was going to try to do it all myself, but peeps, I don’t know if I have time for that. I’m here in the interim, at least during this break, because I miss writing.

And of course all of these neuroses – and I haven’t covered the half of them, or anything about what the last few months have been like – are sort of irrelevant comparatively. I had a drink with two guys I went to middle school with in Florida, one of whom (by a total fluke) moved down the street from my parents in Tennessee, and they were telling me about the number of people I had known who were now dead or in prison. (La Sister: “The answer to ‘Do you know how many people are dead or in jail?’ is never ‘None!'”) I googled a guy I remembered from fifth grade, one I used to find kind of cute, on a whim, and he was recently arrested for – among other charges – domestic abuse and false imprisonment. Yes, really. This is the sort of thing that deserves further future reflection, but now I am going to bed. I will, however, be back.

For those of you who have been keeping track, specifically all of the people who have attempted to talk to me and have had their messages unintentionally routed to my phone, I am Here, at My New Graduate School. I can’t seem to shake the habit of anonymity. I think that, to a certain extent, I still enjoy it.

My room is not empty, but the majority of my possessions are three floors below me, in a cobweb-filled basement stacked with boxes and old furniture. I have a dresser that is waiting patiently in the corner for me to finish building its drawers, instead of sitting here blogging like a person who does not know how to manage her time. People are nice, the campus is beautiful, I still don’t know what my eventual job will be and the number of other students I’ve met is kind of paralyzing. I get better at these orientation type things every time, but, you know. However: I live with the two best dogs in Massachusetts and I’ve built a bed on my own, so I’m counting today in the plus category for right now.