412. Firsts
September 30th, 2011 § 10 Comments
Ashley took this photo of me at the blogger picnic in Central Park that happened a few weeks ago, and was sweet enough to send it to me. I’m wearing a Mandate of Heaven playsuit, a peach bow given to me by Harry & Janice, an LV bag I borrowed from my mom, and I’m sitting on a scarf I bought in Croatia the summer it was 110 degrees every day.
I find it harder and harder to keep up this blog. When I upload a photo, I worry that the people in it will be upset with me for posting photos of them online. Then I take down all the photos with other people in it and end up with just photos of myself, and then I wonder if people reading this blog think that I’m a lonely, sad person who poses for photos by myself? Not that I’m not a lonely person (or sad person for that matter!) but my loneliness and sadness have nothing to do with not having enough friends or family by my side, it’s has more to do with how possible it is to feel lonely even when surrounded by people I love.
Then I write little stories about my life that also inevitably involve my loved ones, and I wonder how they would feel about me telling stories about them on this little, insignificant blog of mine, and then I have to erase those stories as well. I’m not interested in “branding” myself or securing sponsors and advertising and becoming the sort of fashion blog that is essentially a corporate brand that does a way better job of seeming “personal” and “intimate” because there’s only one person in charge of the content–since that doesn’t appeal to me, and now the thought of sharing too many photos and too many stories is causing me enough anxiety that I find myself holding back, I wonder what can this ‘lil site do? What can it do for you? What can it do for me? Anything?
I’m sure my lack of updates on this site hasn’t brought a complete halt to anyone’s life, but in case you are craving more of my dumb, negligible thoughts, here are some other places you can find me:
I interviewed my first kiss for Rookie, and you can read about it here.
I wrote a short story for Rookie about being a teenager, wanting to fall in love, experiencing all kinds of firsts that are supposed to be scary but aren’t, mental illness, and loving your family and wanting to be loved by them. You can read it here.
I try my hand at red carpet analysis for Jezebel here. I hope I’m not being too snarky or mean or contributing to any sort of girl-hate or body-policing, and if I am, please please please call me out. I’m always happy to be called out and to see if I can’t be better next time.
With love,
Jenny
411. Some (good) news (& not just for the boys with the boomin’ system)
September 9th, 2011 § 14 Comments
Good morning, lil mamas. I’m surrounded by beetles and rose petals I saved from when I was in high school. Speaking of high school, my secret summer project has finally launched, and it’s a magazine for teen girls edited by the super amazing brain pot-au-feu, petite tarte Tavi (I feel embarrassed telling you what you already know, which is that she keeps an amazing blog at Style Rookie, and was profiled by The New Yorker last year, and more recently by the New York Times magazine.) The magazine is called Rookie, and our theme for September is “firsts” and all kinds of back to school stuff, and even though I said it was for teen girls, it’s kind of also for anyone, because when I was a teen girl, I only wanted to watch movies about old people who were scared of dying, and now that I’m getting older, I only want to watch movies about children who are scared of dying and other things. I wrote a little piece about my first day of high school here, along with four other rad ladies. Other contributions from me will include an interview with my first kiss and a short story about family and sex and non scary firsts. So come on all you teens and tweens and weens and peens.
I will be contributing regularly to the magazine, but if we’re getting f’realz here, I’m just a small fry among bigger, greasier, tastier fries. Joss Whedon, Anna Faris, Zooey Deschanel, Jack Black, & JD Samson gave advice on how to survive high school. Miranda July, Fred Armisen, Dan Savage and other sassysissies will be contributing pieces as well. Tavi wrote a great piece about girl on girl hatin’, Jamie wrote a fun article about sticker-love (I have it in spades and my spades have it in hearts and my hearts have it in diamonds and my diamonds have it in clovers!) Petra did an amazing back-to-school photo shoot with knee socks and plaid, and there’s so much more that I can’t possibly tell you everything right now and right here. Please take a look at Rookie mag for yourself and spread the word if you like what you see/hear/feel.
From Petra’s “School Spirit” photo shoot.
This month I also have a story (“We Love You Crispina”) out in Glimmertrain, and another story (“You Fell Into the River and I Saved You!”) out in The Iowa Review. I know that buying literary journals can be as rare as finding dinosaur bones underneath couch cushions, but they are both superb magazines (like the literary equivalent of Sriracha–always always good,) and I feel so lucky to have stories in these two lit journals that I have been reading for years.
Someone recently asked me on my Formspring (I so apologize for taking so long to answer questions on there!) where he/she can read my fiction online. I have a short story, “The Empty The Empty The Empty” up at Diagram magazine. I linked to this year last year already, but when my story was accepted for publication in Glimmertrain, the editors invited me to write a little essay, and I wrote one on “The Truth” in fiction. You can always visit my personal website: Jennybagel & click on “Publications” for more links to my fiction & poetry & non-fiction online.
Okay, I’m sorry to do so much stroking of my brain-peen. It ends now.
I’ve been wearing my Believer tote everywhere. I’m the kind of person who walks into telephone poles at least once a week, so maybe a thin tote with illustrated portraits of Salman Rushdie & Joan Didion is not the best protection for the hardware I’m totin’, but for now whatevs. I have two of these. One has a hole and was given to me as a present, and the other I received via unlawful means, but I can’t say more than that. This little denim jumpie is from Topshop. I got it the day after what I thought was the saddest day of my life, which was also the day when I met Julia in Manhattan and she changed my life but I still have not yet been able to tell her how so. We went to Top shop and she tried on wispy dresses and I tried on this denim romper and wore it all last summer and now I’m just pulling it out in time to get all dramatic and gaspy about the changing of seasons.
I stopped by a Salvadorean restaurant on my way home from running errands and picked up two pupusas. I started reading The Boston Review’s issue on 9/11, but was distracted by intrusively shallow thoughts. Like how I would love for someone to tell me, “I mean my, my, my, my you’re like pelican fly.” And like how I can’t stop crushing on Drake. Since Biggie, has there ever been a mainstream rapper who wears sweaters as often as Drizzy? Drake, I love you infinitely and inexplicably! Also I keep looking at pictures of Birdman and Lil Wayne kissing and thinking how that was a great moment to talk about hip-hop and fear of a black planet and fear of black men and homophobia and sexism and and the myth of Wayne & what is happening to “underground hip-hop” (is Tyler the Creator our only savior? no!) but instead the hip-hop media sensationalized it and um, just to generalize, white people kinda ignored it. So that’s what I’m thinking about tonight. Hope you weren’t struck dead with boredom.
Love, Jenny
410. Stupid trucs that are important to me even if they are not intrisincally wondrous and also, where are they?
September 5th, 2011 § 6 Comments
Last night, I saw my friends Laura & Jon for the first time since we were all in France. They lived in a really charming seaside town La Ciotat, and I lived in Avignon. One weekend, they visited me in Avignon and we went to a club called L’Esclave (THE SLAVE) where they had a smoke machine and kept remixing that song that’s all like “Tonight’s gonna be a good night” and that other song that is all like, “I just came to say hello,” and I was running a weird fever and was just starting to no longer have the whooping cough, and everything was still new and troubling to me. Then a couple weeks later, I went and visited Laura in La Ciotat, and I was running a fever again and she showed me how the Mediterranean was only a five minute walk from her house and I was amazed. Laura and I met up in Marrakesh during our February vacation and I have so much to say about my Morocco trip that I keep putting it off because I only want to talk about it if I can talk about it perfectly, but of course, I’ll never be able to talk about anything perfectly.
In Morocco I bargained with a man who had very fat thumbs for this silver armor ring that I love love loved for four months before I lost it in the haunted unicorn apartment in Paris where I lost so many things. I’m sure most people would find me very stupid and very superficial and very negligible and delusional in a privileged way (& I won’t argue with any of it) if I were to say that not a day goes by that I don’t think about the ring I bargained for in Morocco and lost in Paris and how the man who sold it to me promised that the very delicately carved lines would always remain straight until the day I died and even if I lit the ring on fire it would emerge unscathed and still retaining its perfectly carved lines. He pulled out a lighter and showed me how unaffected the ring was by fire and then asked me if I had a cigarette. Of course, as soon as I returned to Avignon, the lines on the ring got all squiggly and funny, but I loved it maniacally and wore it every day and felt better every time I stepped out with it on my finger, and felt weak and vulnerable whenever I went out without it. Somehow my jokes elicited bigger laughs and my nervousness felt controlled and deliberate. Again: delusional to treat something I obtained by participating in a transaction bounded and dictated by capitalism as some kind of talisman, a thing of divine possibility, but you know, I do need some way of creating meaning in a world that is constantly thwarting all of our attempts at meaningful interaction and relationships with objects and people and places and things (just to bookend this list with another lazy synonym for “object!”)
I don’t think I have any proper photos of me wearing the ring, just some accidental ones that don’t show at all its fine craftsmanship.
This is maybe the clearest photo I have of the ring. It’s the silver shield on the left. I’m standing outside in Montmartre waiting for my friend Harry to order some strawberry mojitos for us. Or maybe this was the time we were in Saint-Germain-des-Prés contemplating getting ice cream?
This was when my mom and I went to Nice and my mom said she was starting to feel vomity from all the butter and cream and cheese and then we found this Japanese place near our hotel and we had miso and rice and sashimi and then later that evening ate this big fucking thing of paella that left us so exhausted we both ended up crawling from our beds to get to the minibar because we were so thirsty and so weak from dinner and desperate for a beverage, which if you’ve ever spent some time in France, you know is impossible to get at 11 pm at night unless you are smack in the most touristy parts of Paris and even then you have to be pretty resourceful. I love love loved wearing this ring with the blue nail polish that my best girl Sarah gave me a few years ago.
This is my normal, “resting” face. I wore this ring out on Harry & Janice’s first day in Paris. We had pizza near the Arc de Triomphe.
This is by the Canal Saint-Martin with my friend Delima, who I think about often even though it’s been a long time since I wrote her. She told me about her life in France as we were walking down the Canal Saint-Martin and everything she told me broke my heart in a way that’s hard to forget. I often wish I had spent more time strolling along this Canal, but I was stupid and vainglorious and also trying not to be someone who thought of herself as suffering all the time but also I was suffering a lot and it’s hard to stop experiencing something (such as suffering) when you won’t even acknowledge that thing (suffering!) exists in your life.
I bought a replacement ring in New York not too long ago, but it’s not the same. When I wear my replacement ring, I don’t think about Laura and I trying to go to the beach but being scammed by a taxi driver and ending up at a bus station way the hell on the other side of Marrakesh, and making fun of camels on the street, and drinking freshly squeezed orange juice very morning for forty cents and then watching Laura give the rest of her orange juice to a kid who had a perma-orange juice moustache over his lip and also sometimes went around and selling Kleenex tissues to tourists who were eating greasy breads and stewed meats without napkins.
That’s how it is with most material objects I’ve ever lost. There was the sort of slinky brown skirt with a dragon and a slit on one side that I bought from the XOXO store when I was fourteen and wore it during that period of high school when I was just beginning to overcome my disbelief that there were actually people in the world who wanted to have sex with me (and that’s part of the charm of the sixteen-year-old girl–or at least in the male-gazey-fantasy version of her. That she’s can be so young and desirable and clueless all at the same time, which conveniently makes it easy for dudes who are not all that cool to take advantage of girls who haven’t realized yet how fucking cool they are, not that I was a fucking cool girl in high school, but I was definitely a lot more fucking cool than I gave myself credit for. End of run-on thoughts in sentence form and one fragment that I tortured myself over for an hour and then finally fixed and that is the boring story of how I lost an hour of my life.) I lost that skirt when I was 18 and living Paris for the first time, and I had to shower in these really fucking filthy dorm showers that had big-ass crawly bugs everywhere and mold on the ceilings and this Italian guy was visiting Paris and was obsessed with me and would knock on my door 50 times in one day and follow me everywhere and one time he wanted to show me something and guess what it was? A TURD HE RECENTLY SHAT INTO THE TOILET.
So that’s that and my ring is gone and when I saw Laura last night over fancy drinks and a cheese plate, she was wearing her ring that she had bought in Marrakesh from a man with a birthmark on the right side of his head and led us through the Souks to get her ring resized by this guy who was a total stud at resizing her ring (he took one look at her finger and knew instantly its precise width, whattastud!) Last night, Laura let me wear her ring for a little while and I know it was just a fun, whatever gesture, but sometimes very small things will brain slap me into tremendous realizations, for example that I do miss France and constantly wish I had done more with my time in France, wish that I had been less sad in the beginning and less timid during the middle and less angsty toward the end, and there is always a small part of me that will mourn what has already happened and that small part of me will always be stronger than that other small part of me that can’t wait for what is yet to happen, and then there is that other part of me that worries maybe nothing will ever happen again, and then there is that other part of me, a big big part that is so terrified of what will happen. It’s incredibly selfish, I know. I remember when I was a child, I would ask my parents all the time, “What’s going to happen to me?” as if the passing of time only affected me, as if I was the only one who needed to know how I was going to survive the horrific unknown of continuing to live.
I started this post thinking about my missing silver ring that I bought from a man with large thumbs in the Souks of Marrakesh and now I’m wondering how to manage my constant longing for the past and my constant fearing of the future. At least, no one can accuse me of taking on a teleological view of my own life narrative!
Also, hi Jon if you are reading this! I’m so happy I got to see you last night, and hi all my readers if you are reading this! I’m so happy you are reading this, and I hope you will forgive me for these posts lately that are so crushingly filled with anxious thoughts. I hope I am not an enabler of other people’s anxieties. I hope you are all well and nurturing small and big moments of happiness.
With love,
Jenny
