love,
Jenny

If anyone who lives in New York City or the surrounding neighborhoods is interested in taking an advanced fiction writing workshop with this totally organized and totally inspired lady who e-sits before you now, typing with great conviction and meaning, please sign up for the fiction workshop I am teaching through the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. It starts the week of February 13th, and I will be teaching it in my living room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn! And I have cute teenage writers and equally cute college and college grad-age writers who can vouch for my dedication and weirdness as a teacher.

Holding pommelos in Shanghai. It is winter.

How Shanghai looks in my dreams is how it looks in my waking life or reverse.

Chinese New Year fart fest underway

Wearing a unicorn dress on the eve of the year of the dragon

See? Unicorns

I went to Shanghai last month and visited my grandfather’s ashes in a giant locker room full of the ashes of famous martyrs. Was my grandfather a martyr? I saw my friend Sam, and for two short days I felt as creative as I’ve felt this entire year. That either speaks of a very fucked up year or my friend Sam is not a real person with the usual constraints of mortality and mediocrity, but a vertically-victorious person sent down by a tremendous deity to teach me valuable lessons that I then squander.

I found the tiny, tiny baby ring that once belonged to a boy I loved the most in the world but we don’t speak to each other anymore, and I’m so afraid I will lose the ring somehow, and one day when we talk again, if that happens, I will know that I lost his baby ring with his initials on it, and I will feel sad and pathetic and useless and incorrigible. My book of poetry is coming out very soon, and next month, I will be doing some readings for it in New York and Chicago, and instead of disappearing, I will be HERE, telling you about all things ME ME ME.

Speaking of ME, if you want to see photos of the food that makes me happy and gassy and the occasional pointless, sulky, GPOY(M?) you can follow me on instagram at jennybagel. Also, I recently wrote a few things for Rookie: a story about loving your (my) sibling too much, an essay about the brown and black and yellow girls on Of Another Fashion and why their pompadours and poodle skirts mean so much, and a little essay about being bullied and bullying others in high school. And oh, I made a playlist of my favorite 50′s and 60′s girl groups singing my favorite sassy songs that were about boys and also not about boys. It was for Rookie and also, of course, for you.

Love,
Jenny

On the train ride home, I sat next to this woman and her son. He was so little. Maybe he was six or seven, and he was wearing a little three piece suit and a baseball cap and he was telling and re-enacting the entire plot of Star Wars, except he didn’t know any of the character’s names, so he kept stuttering, like, “And then there was this man who was breathing a lot and very good at sword fighting,” and then the kid jumped off the seat and showed an example of this unnamed excellent sword fighter. There were these two geeky sci fiction nerds also on the train, sitting across from the little kid. They were hanging on to his every word, and occasionally they would interrupt the kid and be like, “Oh man! Are you talking about Darth Vader?” and the kid would be like, “Yeah and then there’s this other sword guy and he’s like pow pow pow pow.”  It was adorable. When the boy and his mom got off at 125th street, one of the sci-fi nerds also got out and he caught up to the mother and said to her, “Man, your son and I have the exact same tastes in movies,” and then started rattling off a list of movies he recommended. The mom was like, “Wow, I, personally, have not heard of any of these.”

On another train, I sat across from a woman who was a trichotillomaniac. She had all of these broken short hairs at the back of her head. She would pull on a few strands of hair until she had loosened one and then she would run her thumb and index finger along that strand of hair like it was a ribbon she was curling with a scissor. Then she would take the curled up broken strand of hair and lay it flat against her notebook and press down on it. Then she would write a few words in her notice, and then finally, she would sweep the strand of hair off the page and start over again. She did that for fifty minutes. By the end of the subway ride, my heart was racing.

2.
Carissa, the brilliant designer of kitten playsuits and party pajamas over at Mandate of Heaven, just revealed the lookbook video for her Spring ’12 collection, and man alive, it’s a thing of beauty. And trust me, I’m not saying this because I’m it. The video was filmed at the amazing Wonderpuss Octopus Ink studio. Check it out if you want to see some killer playsuits, the best possible 70′s vibes, and some demented acting and dancing from yours truly untruly.

Here are screenshots in which everyone is beautiful, and my eyes are perpetually closed. (Probably because I’m ovaries deep in reverie and can hardly believe I’m wearing a locally handmade, one-of-a-kind playsuit with split balloon sleeves with a heart cut-out back and scalloped shorts re-purposed from vintage material!) Carissa’s clothes have this way of making every body type look so divine and babely that it’s honestly kind of unreal…

Blurry iphone photo taken with Aimée. Isn’t she such a babe in that two-piecer?

You can see more photos at Mandate of Heaven’s blog.

3.
The police teargassed peaceful Occupy Oakland protesters and fired rubber bullets. I mean go ahead and read this or this or this or watch this or this if you haven’t already. And if you’re convinced (do you need to be convinced? Or do you already stand in solidarity against the violent repression of community organizing and protest with militarized force?) then sign this.

4.
Are there too many disparate things in this post?

5.
I teach a college course at two high schools in the Bronx. Half of my kids immigrated to America two years ago. I want the 99% to rise up and organize and stand in solidarity for a world that denies no one an equal opportunity for a meaningful, happy life. It’s hard to imagine that isn’t still so so so much left to say about a statement like “We are the 99%.” Sometimes, when I’m walking around after work, I wonder how many of my friends who have lived in New York for ten plus years have ever stepped foot in the Bronx neighborhood I work in.

About half of my students have told me that they don’t think racism is a big deal. Last week, we discussed the Clark doll experiments in class, and talked about the 2005 documentary, A Girl Like Me, where a 17-year-old-girl recreates the experiments with twenty-one black children and fifteen of them choose the white doll over the black doll, just like seven decades ago, when eleven of the sixteen black children said that the black doll was “bad,” and then the Supreme Court decided maybe it was not such a great idea to keep children segregated, but guess what else was and is not a great idea? Movies that always ask us to root for the white characters. Movies where people of color always play supporting roles or worse–criminals, drug addicts, violent losers, janitors, wacky immigrants with exaggerated accents. Also what is not a great idea is a society that has a major fucking dearth of positive examples of people of color doing something interesting or great or complicated or funny or awesome. But how on earth can the Supreme Court “order” a change like that?

One of my students said, “That’s your own fault, if you don’t like the skin color you were born with,” and I thought, But that’s exactly what racism and other structures of oppression want you to believe. When we are oppressed, we are denied the opportunities and privileges that other people have benefit from and have access to. Then, instead of questioning why the fuck does this inequality exist, racism and other systems of oppression tricks you into thinking you’re the one to blame. If you fail at school, if you don’t become rich, it’s your own damn fault! Sure, 15% of Americans are living in poverty, and if you happen to be among that 15%, then clearly you did something wrong. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with the rise of minimum wage paying service sector jobs.  If black men are 5.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white dudes, well duh, it’s because black men are born criminals! They’re fucking deviants and white people are just naturally morally superior beings. Well, BULLSHIT.

All of my students are black or Latino. Most of them do not own computers. Most of them have to deal with bullshit that I can’t relate to, and I don’t think most of my friends, who are in the 99%, can relate to it either. Why does it seem like the people who have the most to be angry about are often the ones who are most hesitant to express anger? Why does it trouble me that the people who are the most comfortable expressing anger, and the most willing to organize that rage and anger into a progressive movement are the people who seem to live in the lap of luxury, at least compared to the people who don’t have the time and privilege to be quite so visible or vocal, at least compared to the people I know, who I think deserve so much–better schools, teachers and guidance counselors who don’t quit after a year because it fucking sucks to be a NYC public school teacher, safer homes, safer neighborhoods… the list goes on, but I don’t want to be someone who speaks for other people. I don’t want to take away someone else’s right to voice their own struggles, but does that also mean I have to be okay with someone not wanting to voice their struggles, not wanting to feel the least bit angry that because of their ethnicity, they are way more likely to be stopped by the police, to go to a shitty, underfunded school, to live in a violent, shitty neighborhood that only has shitty supermarkets with shitty, expired pasta on the shelves?

6.
Are you still with me?

Love,
Jenny

One year and three weeks ago, I arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris and I took this photo. I honestly don’t even remember how I got from the airport to the train station. But somehow, I was there. In stretchy leggings that have yellow stains on the knees because I once cleaned the floors in my Iowa City apartment with this horrible cleaning solution that had a ton of bleach in it, and when I knelt down on the ground to clean, the floor bleached my black leggings yellow, and then when Michael came home, I showed him my pants, and he told me it was no big deal, but two days later, I cried and told him it was a big deal. That was a long long long ago then, and this picture of Gare de Lyon was just the then that was a little bit long ago.

I remember feeling like I was on the verge of something and also on the verge of nothing at all, and I remember thinking: I will always be about to do something really significant and it will always turn out to be nothing at all, or I will be doing nothing at all, and maybe something significant will happen to me. I was thinking of the ending of “At the Tolstoy Museum” by Barthleme that always makes me so sad, and always makes my students scratch their heads and say, “So was this dude just trying to be weird by writing this story?” And there’s a huge gap that I cannot bridge, like why for me, does this story move me so much, but for others, it’s just some smart-ass trying to be a weirdo?

This is the Paris that I first saw when I turned away from Gare de Lyon to look out onto the street. This is the way I walked in the four hours I had to kill between when I arrived at the train station and when my train was leaving for Avignon, and this what I looked out onto eight years ago, when I was living in Paris for the first time, and falling in love with a Scottish boy who worked at Shakespeare & Company. We were both in love with other people who were not living in Paris and also with each other, and we took a trip together at the end of my summer in Paris and his three years in Paris. We went to Nice and then Monte Carlo, where I climbed up a tree to watch an open-air French dubbed version of The Terminator 3, and I had an urinary tract infection so I peed in the tree and drank cranberry juice and laid my head on the shoulder of the boy I was so in love with and had so little time with, and a few years later we met again in Beijing and then never again, which is okay, because just remembering these things makes me feel lucky enough, especially during these times of profound loneliness, when I think I might not have a lot else to comfort me except little stories about things that have already happened, and during these times of profound loneliness, I can’t help but pity myself for not creating new stories to remember, but I have to remember that ever since I was alive, I have always felt as if I am not creating new stories to remember years later, and then years later, there are always things to remember.

One year ago, when I was walking through the streets of Paris for the first time in eight years, I was so hungry that I couldn’t push open the door to a little Vietnamese restaurant that was owned by a Chinese family who asked me if I was a student, and I said no, and then asked me if had a husband in France, and I said no, and then they said, Well aren’t you brave coming all alone to France at a time like this, and all of this was in Chinese, which is not a language I speak confidently, and I remember feeling lonely and scared and hungry and tired and homesick and excited.

This is the inside of Gare de Lyon. This is what it looked like last year, when I saw it for the first time in eight years, and then over the course of nine months, I saw it twenty more times, and each time I walked out of the train or walked onto the platform, I remember thinking, Something is happening to me. Something is happening right now. I am a part of this.

This was the view outside the window of my first apartment in Avignon. I don’t know if I talked about it on this blog, but I was living with a woman who began to have a disturbed relationship with me and my other roommate. There were nights when I didn’t want to sleep until 5 AM, because I knew if I stayed up, then I would wake up in the afternoon, and the woman whose house I was living in would be gone for the day. I had a roommate across the hall, who I loved and loved, and cooking pasta with her and cooking tom yum soup for her were the tiny parts of the day that made the big parts of my day bearable. Walking around Avignon with Martin and holding on to his shoulder when I felt dizzy from too many glasses of rosé were the big parts of the night that made the interminable stretch of day bearable.This was the gate to the outside world. When le Mistral came into town, I had to push on the gate with both hands to get it to open, and trash cans would fly against this gate and wake me up in the middle of the night, except I probably wasn’t sleeping anyway, so I was already awake and pretending to be woken up as if I were really sleeping. Sometimes, when no one was home, I would lean against this gate and feel the sun on me. Have you ever felt the sun in the South of France? It is the warmest sun I have ever felt in my life.

This is how I felt the first week I was in Avignon, living in that house with the woman who wanted to make me her daughter and who was also cheating me out of a lot of money and who watched me like I was a creature she had never seen before. I felt blurred, inchoate. There were afternoons when I felt so lonely I swore I didn’t exist at all.

This was a night when I walked home from the centre-ville. It was a night when some of the language assistants were having a potluck, and somehow I was invited, and I remember wearing this sheer leopard print dress and a long sweater over it, and walking down Avenue Saint-Ruf and being followed by men on the street and men in cars and men on bicycles. They were saying things to me that I didn’t understand at the time, or maybe I understood a few words and I understood that they wanted me to stop and talk to them, but I walked with my eyes on the ground, and that was why I didn’t see much of Avignon in the first few days I live there because I was constantly looking down to avoid the men who followed me and asked me why I was shy, and did I speak English or what?

At the potluck, I wore red lipstick and brought cheese and crackers just like everyone else who brought cheese and crackers, and at some point in the night, I was talking to some girls and they said that they were amazed by “the spread” and I thought, “What spread? It’s just bread and cheese and a huge platter of potato gratin.” You know when you talk to someone and you just know–you just know–that person will never become someone that you will want to share your secrets with, or even worse, that person might not ever be someone who will crack the kind of jokes that make you laugh or be the kind of person who laughs at the jokes you crack, and maybe one night you will stumble out of a strange French club together and maybe on another night or the same night, that person will run across a highway divider and pee in the bushes on the other side of the road and then run back with his zipper unzipped and flowers in his hands for you, and maybe you will feel so old and so strange about it all that you just start walking home by yourself, and the next day, you hear a story about how he gave those flowers to some other girl, and you will think, That makes so much more sense.

I want to explain how strange I felt walking home that night. How I kept wondering, Is this my life? Are these the people who I will grow close to one day? And somehow, it didn’t feel right. Honest to goodness, they were really lovely people. It was nice to split a bottle of wine with them. It was nice to eat cookies with them. It was nice to run into them in the street. But you know when some people seem so many planets and moons away from who you are and how you have been, that it only makes you feel even more conspicuously alone before, during, and after spending time with them? Like, What a fucking weirdo I am. Why do I have to be so fucking strange all the fucking time. And I cringe writing these words because I probably wrote these exact words in my teenage diary, and here I am, far from being a teenager, and feeling no different from how I felt twelve years ago, when I thought maybe I was just too fucking strange to be liked and loved by people who weren’t related to me by blood.

That’s how I felt that night, walking home to an apartment where I was living with a woman who wanted to be a part of my life in a way that I didn’t want, and I sat on the curb and listened to the same five embarrassing songs I listened to on repeat during my first month in Avignon, and a man drove past me on the street and asked me to go home with him, and then asked me to give him a cigarette, and then asked me to at least keep him company, and I wanted to say in French, “Please, will you leave me alone, I was just about to have a poignant moment alone, but now you’ve spoiled my cry,” but I was too shy and too bad at French at the time. I remember the next day, I woke up to the warmest sun that I have ever felt, and a few days after that, maybe a day or two later, I met the person who would later become my best friend.

A few weeks later, we moved in together and spent so many afternoons feeling small and vast on our balcony. We spent so many evenings feeling negligible and profoundly important on our balcony, in our shadowless living room. We drank hot toddies and clung to each other. I went to Paris and Edinburgh by myself and when I came back, I wondered if we were falling in love. We were. I went to Nice. I went to New York. We went to Paris together. I took the train to Paris with someone I loved. I went to Morocco with my friends. I went to Marseille to visit Laura. I went to Marseille to visit Marianne. I went to Paris to see my mom. I took my mom to Nice. I went to La Ciotat to visit Laura. I went to Tarascon to sleep at Claire’s house. I went to Les Angles to play games at Bruno’s. I went to the other side of Avignon to watch the Jersey Shore at Rémy’s. I went to Villeneuve to eat lunch at Cécile’s. I went through Arles to eat beef at Veronique’s, and we walked along the Rhône on a day that was windy as fuck. I went to Nîmes to have Thanksgiving dinner with Hervé. It was an amazing dinner. I went to Paris so many times. I was in love the whole time. And I was scared and scared and happy and not happy.

It’s hard and it’s easy to think about these things. Like what do I do with the part of me that wants to go on adventures abroad because I have always chased and am still chasing after the kind of loneliness that has always accompanied that first phase of displacement? Like my first month in France, when I lived inside my head, but everyone else only ever saw my Chinese face, my visibly femme body. And then comes that period of utter, inconsolable, unrelenting fear, when you think, What if this isn’t a phase? What if my life will always be like this here? And those were my late October days, when Avignon was on strike, and no matter how brilliantly warm the sun felt on my back, I swore I was going to collapse from wanting so much and existing so crudely, and then–to quote the brilliant Junot Diaz–”the nictitating membrane obscuring the world suddenly lifts,” and then–then what?

I live in Williamsburg now. Now what? What now?

Love,
Jenny

Ashley

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

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

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

‘Case you’re too shy to ask–YES I’M WEARING A SILK ROBE FROM CHINA. My grandmother has been saving it for over a decade to give to me when I’m ‘ready to give myself over a man.’ I put quotes around it, but the translation from Chinese to English is approximate and was done in-house. Two years, she gave it to me, even though I had not yet given myself over a man. She said that it would probably be soon enough anyway, and so now I wear it and think about not giving.

I have so many exciting projects coming up that I can’t tell you about yet, but I’m want to want to want to. Sorry to be that annoying dum dum who is all, I HAVE THE BEST NEWS BUT I CAN’T TELL YOU YET, I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW GREAT THINGS ARE HAPPENING TO ME! The best part about living in the US is that I get have books in my life again. Real, physical books that I don’t have to worry about stuffing into my suitcase for the trip home. Two weeks ago, I went to the Secret Bookshop with Hart and was shameless about purchasing books.

High school has been permeating my life and my work these days. My ten year high school reunion was this week, but I didn’t go (the thought of paying money to spend time with some of the least kind, least interesting, and least thoughtful people I’ve ever encountered in my life made me want to stab walls.) Last weekend, I had a glass of pinot outside with my friend Heather from high school and her mom, and we spotted my brother, who just graduated from high school, and his girlfriend, who is still in high school, and they were adorable and shy and unafraid to be weird. That same weekend, I went over my high school boyfriend’s house and felt happy and secretive and conspiratorial when I saw him and his brother. We watched part of Casablanca and ate chocolate covered peanut pretzels. He’s still so dreamy.

Summer, don’t end yet. I still have healing insect bites, crop tops that don’t want to be stored, and a mother and a father I love so much and want to see in the evening light.

Love,
Jenny

I’ve decided to stay in New York instead of moving to China. This means I can’t sleep at night until I figure out where I should live and how and when and where and what will I do to make some sort of steady income. So if I’m a little silent these next few days, it’s because I’m going apeshit with writing cover letters and emailing potential sublets and rooms.

Martin took this photo of me in Avignon. I think we were reading at Le Cid Café–our favorite place to read and in the winter, sometimes they had vin chaud, which was nice and spiced and always had little bits of fruit. Gosh, is anyone here French and living in New York? I’d love to be your conversation partner. Or even if you don’t live in New York and want to chat with me in French on skype sometime. I miss speaking French and learning bad words.

Love,
Jenny

I still don’t have a battery charger for my camera, so I don’t have any photos to remember these past three weeks. But some photos from my last year in Iowa that have shown up on this blog before and maybe some that have not. These photos are from the year my existence pained me so much I transformed into someone who was all exterior even though everything I felt was interior and I only wanted to talk about the infinite yawn of sadness that I sucked in every morning and night, but I didn’t and instead I took these photos, where I must look a little bit happy and who is to say I was not happy and destroyed all at once.

This day I drove out on some country roads and called my friend Tom and talked to him while whizzing past cornfields and haystacks, and we talked about what it would be like to live on the land, and before talking to him I had been crying so much that I couldn’t help but hiccup through the conversation, which was okay because in my three years in Iowa, I always called Tom after crying, and he was always okay with that. We hung out sometimes in park shelters late at night and held hands because it’s always better to have some part of you squeezed. I wrote a post here, one year ago, about camp ending, and being so happy that I met the marvelous creature that is Julia and being so happy that I was friends with someone as beautiful and brilliant as Leslie.

These were the first photos we took with my new DSLR camera. I wrote about it here. I was rageful and mean with Michael that day and yelled at him for doing a bad job taking photos (see: photo where it looks like I’m squeezing out a few turds on the steps before stepping out for the day,) and then I felt sick to my stomach that I had actually spent money on a DSLR camera just so I could get my boyfriend to take pictures of my clothes that I could then put up on the internet. I felt like there was no love in my life, just things and images and surfaces and some idea of perfection that came from completely outside of me and was, in fact, not perfection but a painful mediocrity reproduced over and over on so many blogs that I consumed like water. I felt so sick that I wrote a letter to one of my friends asking him if I was a horrible person and a cretin and if I should return the camera and accept that what I was doing was worthless and shameful. I forget what he wrote back in reply, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t yes you are a cretin. Sometimes, I wonder if I ought to change the name of this blog because I don’t know how much of this blog is about fashion with a capital F but also what is anything with a capital anything?

I just know that at this point in my life, I can’t have a relationship with someone where I pester him to take the perfectly captured photo of me looking beautiful and sassy and well-dressed and impeccably accessorized and perfectly lit up. I can’t. So maybe that means you won’t see these kinds of photos on Fashion for Writers anymore, and maybe it means it’s hard for me to figure out what I intend to do with this blog, but I hope you are still with me even if I don’t want to take head-to-toe ‘outfit photos’ anymore, and even if my photos are amateur and my thoughts inchoate.

One taken with an old SLR film camera and another with my little point and shout [sic], just outside of my house, near Ace Hardware, the place where Sarah, Anna, and I spent so much time at for much of our first year Iowa. I wrote a post here about what it means for a blogger to be true to oneself, when the blogger ‘self’ is nothing more than a vehicle for marketing and advertising.

One of the many times we went to Mount Vernon to eat po boy sandwiches. I was happy that day but felt scared and anxious and depressed on the car ride home.

We went to Mount Vernon to look at antiques and realized how depressed it made us. I wrote about it here.

This photo was taken in my apartment right before Michael and I went to a Melt Banana concert with Kurt and his girlfriend. These girls who had accidentally wandered upstairs to the show were hella racist to me, and Michael tried to defend me after these girls told me I was a racist fuck for making them feel like racists. I cried in the mosh pit and a man headbutted my shoulder. Later Michael cried too.

I remember I tried to write about this experience, and then not too long after, I got an email from a girl in Iowa City I didn’t know but we had interacted a few times and she had seen me around town, and in the email she wanted me to know that not everyone in the Midwest is some kind of ignorant racist, and she called me out on my ‘loneliness’ and ‘alienation’ and I appreciated that she took the time to write me, but after reading her email I felt even lonelier and more alienated because I had been so scared in the first place to write the post about how alienating it can be to a person of color living in Iowa City, trying to be a writer and trying to know other writers and artists in a place where I have to figure out what to do what someone says in conversation, “Okay, what’s up with all the black people who wait for the bus by the Old Capitol Mall. No seriously,” or what to do when someone who has never been a Chinese American immigrant says in workshop that it’s completely implausible and ridiculous that a Chinese American immigrant would curse and talk about her twat, and then, an hour after I finally talked myself into a writing a post about racism and the way I live it and experience it, someone writes me an email defending Iowa City (defend away! Midwesterners are great people, and even so, my experience of racism can still be valid, no?) and how I have chosen to not get involved in a warm and supportive artist community, and I just kept thinking, Well shit, if I had a choice to NOT feel alienated by racism then I would take it, fo sho. But I don’t have a choice to not experience racism, that’s what so alienating about it. And worse is when I experience racism constantly, every day, and then someone tries to convince me that it didn’t happen, or that my experience of racism was only a singular, exceptional, unusual occurrence.

I stayed in Iowa a third year because they gave me a fellowship and a two-room office in a big, haunted, three-story house to write in. I converted one room into a studio for my Etsy shop (now closed) and Michael and I tried to drag an old couch from the Salvation Army into the other room so that it could be a reading and writing room but the couch had bedbugs and I had ten bites in a row on my thigh after sitting on it for a few minutes. Later, Kate, a poet who lived in the house, held a poetry reading on the first floor and they dragged the couch back into the house for the reading, but when I came down and saw people sitting on it, I yelled out in horror, “No, please!” Sometimes before leaving the house on 111 Church Street, I would take photos in the driveway or in the backyard. The house was right next to a bunch of sorority houses and frat houses. Sometimes a frat boy would whistle at me and one time, some frat boys asked me if they could splash beer on me.

One time, Mary, the playwright who also had an office in the house, had her parents sleeping in the house, and I remember he played all of these songs on the guitar that had mournful lyrics but really upbeat melodies. Sometimes, I stayed in my office until 4 in the morning. And then I went home and wondered if there was anything in the world that wasn’t scary as I crawled into bed next to Michael’s sleeping body.

We got bored during a reading and snuck into the gallery next door to look at some art. This dress was one of the first vintage dresses I had ever bought on Etsy. It was kind of long so I chopped it off and made it a mini. The story of every vintage dress’s life once in the hands of a young girl. I wrote a post here about the dress and about my thoughts on literature. I tried to make a stupid collage because I notice that a lot of fashion bloggers were doing it. I wish someone had told me, “Make your own way in the world,” and I wish that someone had been me and I wish I could tell myself that everyday and actually do it too.

This was outside the railway tracks by the Safeway where we sometimes bought groceries. I would drive out here to get salt and vinegar chips and bad snacks like cheesy balls and taco flavored Doritos. I wrote a post here about it. Looking at that post, I can tell I was still trying to imitate other blogs, and I wasn’t at all myself.

When we started packing and nearly everything was ending. Michael reading before the destruction and resurrection of everything.

This photo I took in the little alleyway behind my house and behind one of the three churches that surround my house. I wrote a post here inspired by Natalie‘s post on responding to hateful bodysnarking comments. My post was about how to deal with hate, and I asked the question, “I wonder how often we are willing to ask ourself: what if the person who left a negative comment isn’t a horrible, pathetic, sad person? Then what do we make of their hateful comment, and how can we reconcile that hatred if we can’t conveniently file that person away as an extraordinarily pathetic loser?”

And lastly, this little photo Sarah took of me when I went over to her house for the welcome barbecue that the Writers’ Workshop holds every year before school starts. Every year, it’s a little awkward and people talk about how it was so awkward and no one is really herself or himself at the barbecue and there’s a crazed out energy that never turns into anything beautiful, and I remember at the end of the first year’s barbecue, we went dancing and I left by myself and on the walk back, a drunk undergraduate tried to follow me but he was so drunk that he walked into telephone pole and his friends had to carry him away.

Michael was there and I wanted to be his girlfriend and I wanted to be in love. The next year, Michael and I were in love, and he came to the barbecue wearing tribal paint on his face and Sarah and I talked to some girls that I never really knew again. I was insecure everywhere. There was not a spot of me that didn’t want someone to save me at every social event I went to. Sarah laughed when I walked into her apartment wearing an 80′s crop top and 80′s Levi cut-offs. The year after that, I don’t remember if I went to the barbecue, but if I did, I must have seemed very distant and very boring.

I love Sarah so much, and when I see pictures of her old apartment in Iowa City, I want to hug something, even if it’s an imaginary something. She wrote this amazing article on Hello Giggles about why there’s no shame in her game when it comes to ‘guilty pleasure’ movies that aren’t guilty at all because they’re all pleasure and no guilt. The post is here, and it’s titled, “My Three Favorite Films; Or, Reasons People (Possibly Wrongly) Assume I’m Stupid After Asking About My Taste in Movies.” Read it, and she’ll convince you of the genius of the movies Housesitter, Baby Boom, and Drive Me Crazy.

I don’t care about getting presents on my birthday, I don’t get excited about holidays, celebrations that are planned around weddings, graduations, and things like that. I love giving presents more when it’s not anyone’s birthday, and I love receiving presents when it’s not my birthday. I love celebrating my friends and family just because I love them, not because they are getting married or graduating from school or turning a year older. And I think of this blog post as a little celebration. It’s not this blog’s four year anniversary, and it’s not the 500th post, and it’s not been exactly two years since Meggy invited me to join Fashion for Writers. But today is a day that I felt like telling you all of this, and remembering all of this. A day when I am grateful for the love in the life, when I am no longer all painful exterior, when the things inside of me are not too scary to be a part of anything I’m a part of, whether it is this blog, or a conversation at one in the morning at Georges, over cheeseburgers with pickled eggs inside, or a poem I write and then show everyone because I want the line between the external and the internal to be careful and performative and fluid and instinctive.

And for a long time, I have been feeling the weight of my duplicity bearing down on me. The deception I perpetuated, that this bit of my life I’ve shown you on Fashion for Writers is my life. That for much of the first year I blogged on FFW, I was a rageful, spiteful, insistently insecure person. And I cared more about displaying a very uninspired, carefully curated prettiness than dealing with unraveling instability in my life at the time. And I want to let you know that if I continue blogging here, I will try to figure out how to run a fashion blog (is this a fashion blog?) and not be deceitful in how I present the world I live in. Will that be possible? What do you think?

Love,
Jenny