Ramona Emerson

One false move is all you need to start thinking seriously about leaving New York, since everyone arrives with the idea of leaving already firmly implanted in their minds. They don’t really expect it to go well, so that when it doesn’t they immediately start thinking about getting out. One day your friend seems to be doing okay and the next you’re at their goodbye party and they’re moving to Saskatchewan. New York goodbye parties always feel like celebrating a failure, partly because the guests — people who are staying in New York — have to think of leaving New York as a failure in order to justify staying. It’s also because the person leaving probably thinks of it as a failure, unless they truly hated New York, in which case they are just relieved and elated like I was when I left Boston after one hateful year.

The truth is that where you live doesn’t really matter in terms of happiness, since a place is just a place and can’t do anything personal to you. This is especially true if you are someone I know, since all we do anyway is move in a triangle from San Francisco to New York to L.A. or in the opposite order with the same result, which is to eventually get tired of moving and settle down wherever the last place was and hopefully it is San Francisco, so when you have enough money to move to Sonoma you’ll be nearby already.

In AA they call moving around to try to change your life, “seeking the geographical cure.” They say it doesn’t work since wherever you go, there you are, and in my experience this is both true and not true. Moving, like traveling or almost being hit by a car or breaking up with someone will almost always have the effect of snapping you to attention, at least initially, which is sometimes all you need to change your perspective. It’s like a juice cleanse: you aren’t going to do it forever, but feeling better for 3 days can have the effect of making you want to keep feeling better.

Of course it is exactly this temporariness that makes the juice cleanse completely unappealing to me, since the only things I want to do are the ones which once started must be stuck with forever. So that you have to spend ages agonizing over whether or not to do it, and therefore never have to do anything. It’s why I’ve been intermittently obsessed with the idea of getting a tattoo for nearly ten years, but have never done it and never will, since at the end of the day I find tattoos terminally embarrassing and the act of telling a stranger you want him to stab a line from “Cat’s Cradle” into your arm more embarrassing still.

No one wants to ride the subway with someone they know. When you ride the subway with a friend — or God help you an acquaintance — you have to talk to them. The problem with this is that since no one else is talking, they’re listening to you talk and wishing you would be quiet. No one has ever overheard a conversation and thought, “Wow those people sound smart.” Also, it’s a lot harder to get a seat if you have two people because you have to find two seats together, and if there’s only one the other person will be like, “No, you sit there,” and you will, but you’ll feel bad the whole time because they have to stand and you have to look at them from below. Then if you’re getting off at different stops you have to say goodbye on the subway in front of people so that the goodbye is likely rushed and not very heartfelt. This is particularly unfortunate if it’s the end of a date. There’s no worse way to end a romantic interlude than a subway hug as someone rushes off at the Lorimer stop.

People like to complain about the subway, but the truth is it’s mainly enjoyable — at least for those who aren’t extremely claustrophobic or obsessed with being productive all the time. It’s like an airplane before they got WiFi and people started using them as offices.

You’re moving, literally, between one activity and the other, and there’s nothing you can do to make this transition faster or slower. Briefly cut off from communication, incoming texts are forced to be “sent as text message.” The sender wonders if you are underground.

In yoga they say that the transition between one move and the next is as important as the moves themselves, which could make you think differently about how you spend your subway. There aren’t a lot of options. You might read, which is a great way to spend the ride, you might write in a notebook or practice your answers for a job interview. You might listen to music and stare straight ahead at the blackness speeding by, which is punctuated occasionally by a bare bulb and poorly drawn graffiti. You may be passed by another train, which is a treat, because watching the people in the other train as they go by, only a few feet away but somehow on an entirely different plane, feels like seeing yourself from outside your body. You might feel like this is an illustration of something you already knew about life, but would find difficult to put into words. It’s a little bit deep, which is more than you might expect from the subway but shouldn’t be.

Dear Editor:

I’m out with my friend Amy, and we just had a great idea for a column that Magazine might be really be interested in. It’s called “We Took The Drugs So You Don’t Have To.*” 

This column would appeal to anyone who can read and has ever been interested in what it feels like to have their life go from normal to way better to basically over in one 8 hour period. (It would also appeal to Sydney and Dan who missed out on the drugs tonight when we took them and pretended to go to the bathroom but actually left. sorry!!)  

Everyone loves drugs or hates them or is like, “Is it okay to take three ibuprofen?” but not all of these people are willing or able to experience drugs since a lot of them have jobs or blood disorders or children who are like, “I’m hungry, why aren’t you home?” They can’t just be going out to after hours clubs until 7am with a guy named Cheeto, but we can and literally are right now.

Depending on what’s going on with us, the column could run once a week or once or never. The basic structure would be to start with a goal like “fun” or “transcendence” and end with a lesson like, “You should never take meth at a bowling alley.” The middle part would be descriptions of what’s going (holy fuck jeff is here) and realizations like, “This is what life is ABOUT Amy!”

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Amy & Jane

*and also can’t because they’re gone. 

Sent from my iPhone

Read IT ALL here

I always think when I get a headache or a weird bruise it means I might have cancer. This is called canceritis not to be confused with cancer which is called cancer. Canceritis is not deadly, but can be annoying. It presents as a desire for your cancer to happen already so you can get it over with or die, either way moving on with your life.

1. Save your knuckles by using a screwdriver to punch a hole in a wall. 
2. Put the soda tab in the can. When you’ve drunk everything in there, the tab will rattle and you’ll know there’s no more soda.
3. Tell your boyfriend you want to be in an open relationship. When he says he does too, break up with him.
4. Cut the top off a shampoo bottle. Pour the shampoo in the trash, and fill the now empty bottle with flowers. Instant vase. 
5. Use an empty toilet paper roll to know when it’s time to buy new toilet paper.
6. Fill an ice cube tray with arsenic. Never fight with your roommates again. 
7. Use a can opener to open a can. 
8. Turn your cupcake tray over so you don’t eat any more cupcakes.
9. Use nail polish to divide your socks into socks and not socks
10. Instead of opening a banana at the stem, throw it away and eat an apple. 
11. If you need to leave your seat at the bar, put a coaster over your drink so it will be physically impossible for someone to steal your boyfriend.
12. Drill holes in the bottom of your garbage can so liquid doesn’t get trapped in there.
13. Chew on a bread bag clip instead of eating bread.
14. Differentiate between electronics cords by looking at them.

 I recently read an article in The New York Times called “The End of Courtship?” The premise was that dating in New York sucks because 20-something men are too cowardly, horny, sought after and dumb to ask women on proper dates or work at relationships. (It’s no wonder women are renting out entire bars so they can text these dudes. They sound like cool dudes). The author, Alex Williams, interviewed several sexually and textually frustrated (!!) 20-something women to find out just what is going on in the millenial courtship revolution. Let’s take a look.

Maybe if girls didn’t rent out bars so they could be alone with their phones they would be going on more dates.

A selfie is worth 1,000 words about yourself.

Sometimes I sit down at my computer thinking I’ll write something, but nothing comes out and I wonder, “How do you write?” And then I think, “Not at all.” 

Hamilton Nolan recently wrote an article for Gawker called, “Journalism Is Not Narcissism,” in which he urged young journalists to write about other people instead of writing about their own breakup or getting the wrong thing at the coffee shop.

To this I say, what are other people but more confusing versions of me? It’s like if I had gold in my backyard, but instead of digging for that gold I went into someone else’s backyard and asked them what gold is. Isn’t having actual gold better than just asking someone a bunch of questions about gold and maybe writing their answer down wrong? 

Sure, other people probably have lives worth living, but if that’s the case maybe they should be the ones doing the writing, since after having lived in my brain and written about what’s going on there I usually only have enough energy to watch a season of “Prime Suspect” and go to bed. 

Nolan makes the point that writing about oneself is narcissistic, but isn’t writing about someone else just enabling narcissism in other people? By only writing about themselves aren’t today’s Lena and Leonard Dunhams saving other people from secondhand narcissism?

Nolan is concerned that “journalism” has become conflated with “memoir” but isn’t that better than if “journalism” had become conflated with “dick pic.” That would suggest that people didn’t know the difference between journalism and photojournalism, which would be troubling indeed.  

The fact is that writers love it when other writers write about themselves because then you can basically read about yourself without having to write anything. This is a win-win proposition because if there’s one thing writers do truly hate, that thing is writing. Why not make it a little more fun by reading about someone else’s HPV scare?

5 interpretations of, “That was fun. We should do it again”:

• That was fun-esque. If you text me I might do it again, but that would probably be the last time.
• That was fun, but I don’t find you attractive, so this won’t happen again.
• I’m so glad that that’s over that I can’t stop smiling at you!
• Not fun. I do not want to see you again.
• Bye.

I can’t talk. My heart is beating really fast. There’s something weird going on with my eyes. I know my face is making a weird face, and I’m starting to wonder if people die from this and yet I’m coherent enough to know that the most important thing is to act chill. I’m good. I’m cool. I’m molding my face into a totally noncommittal expression that’s somewhere between aloof and asleep. Everyone is looking at me pretty normally as though they’re buying it, but there is like no conceivable way that they are, which must mean they are so freaked out that they feel the need to pretend not to be.

This is what happens to me every time I smoke marijuana, and yet I keep trying it since supposedly if you work hard enough at something you can achieve it. I’m in San Francisco for a month, and I’m staying with a guy who smokes a lot of pot and he has this “tincture” sitting on his nightstand. He told me it doesn’t make you high so much as put you in a good mood like Xanax, which, great. It turns out someone who can’t smoke marijuana should also not drink liquid THC.

I dropped some on my tongue, and within 10 minutes was saying things like  “Why am I even here?” while looking at my hands. He said, “I think you’re just high” and I said, “I’m not high. I’m morose. The bottom has fallen out of my world. I need to go stand in the bathroom and think.”

Which is what I did. I stood there and stared at the sink and thought, “This was a mistake,” and as a person who really doesn’t understand cause and effect, the mistake I was referring to was not taking a drug that I knew made me feel like I was going to die, but every other decision I had made in my life ever — starting with not sticking with piano and culminating in standing in this bathroom. I was still thinking about thinking when I went back into his room and said, “I feel like I’m going to cry.” If I was going to overdose on marijuana I might as well be cinematic about it. It felt weirdly feminine to be having a “bad trip” instead of taking drugs and having fun, which is what I usually do (with other drugs). So, I cried, or rather, I wept prettily on his chambray shirt, while saying things like “Having a lot of sex after not having sex for awhile is a lot. It’s just a lot.”