The Grave’s A Fine And Private Place

I Would Know

• I got back from LA with my #beloved Anita and we had such a good time! Please recall that Anita and I became BFFs after my long-term, on-off love interest/friend from middle school was her math camp counselor and told her math camp ex-boyfriend to stay away from her because she reminded him of me and then she frantically messaged me when I posted a picture of him on Tumblr.com. The rest is history!!!

• This weekend, Anita got me into Vanderpump Rules after we went to Sur (and met Peter Madrigal there) and for better or worse, I am very much a Stassi. Every time Stassi speaks, I feel personally attacked like my upbringing was also extremely, “You teach me how to behave/I felt you question the way/I was brought up as a baby/Well you don't know fuck about my family!!!” I also think I’m right rather more than I objectively am.

  

• Things That Dhaaruni Has Been Called:

  • Crypto-Republican

  • TERF

  • Centrist

  • A Parental Disappointment

  • Bootlicker

  • Towelhead

  • Unfuckable to white women

• Someone asked me how I came to terms with being alive after all the glamour and the trauma and the fucking melodrama that characterized my life back in the day, and I realized that I don’t have a real answer to that question. Like yes, Anne Carson’s "I am someone who did not die when I should have died" always lives rent free in my head, but I’ve realized that even gun to head, I can honestly say that I don't think about the details of my survival. I’ve become much more of a materialist in my adulthood than I ever was when unable to legally drink, and I go on living because I don't want to give the world the satisfaction of my snuffing out and I want my survival against so many odds to be worth something. Despite the sorrow that makes up the blood flows through my veins and all the inarticulable damage that has been done to and by me, I made a decision some years back to defend life complete with all its accumulated anguish, fury, confusion and most of all, its complete mundaneness.

In any case, here are 5 things I’ve read and enjoyed.

• 10 Things to Love About America by Peggy Noonan: I appreciated this piece because it about summarizes my general stance on the United States of America. I think this country has done reprehensible, unforgivable things that will forever be a stain on our country but I also think that there are so many great things about America and it's a land of opportunity for so many people, including my own family and me.

• 'London Bridge is down': the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death by Sam Knight: I’ve always been fascinated with how funerals, especially state funerals, put ritual and scripture and song and tradition between the living and the dead, and this article embodies that sentiment. I think that if we were permitted to feel loss unmediated by those things, if we mourned in our own way, off the book and with no one watching, we’d start screaming and never stop.

• How Ramona Quimby Taught a Generation of Girls to Embrace Brashness by Rachel Vorona Cote: PLEASE PICTURE ME IN THE WEEDS BEFORE I LEARNED CIVILITY I USED TO SCREAM FEROCIOUSLY ANY TIME I WANTED/I WISH I WERE A GIRL AGAIN HALF-SAVAGE AND HARDY, AND FREE. Or alternatively, my internal monologue approximately 78% of the time.

• Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking by Zadie Smith: I’ve loved and respected Zadie Smith ever since I picked up White Teeth in my 5th grade classroom library and tore through it (don’t ask why White Teeth was in my 5th grade classroom library like I blame Mr. Chaifetz), and for all people talk about [insert white woman author] as the next Joan Didion, I’ve long believed that Zadie Smith herself embodies Didion like nobody else, and I think Didion herself would have approved.

• Would You Trust This Man?: Vanderpump Rules star Jax Taylor lied and cheated his way to reality-TV fame. But he swears he’s different now by Joseph Bien-Kahn: I blame the aforementioned Anita for making me seek out and read this piece but in spite of or perhaps because of its subject matter, the profile is extremely well-written and it being written by a man and not a woman feels significant. Jax is a man’s man despite the majority of his victims being women, and I think that a lot of women don’t really get at the essence of Jax him since quite frankly, too many of them are blinded by attraction to him (which I personally don’t see but YMMV). However, Bien-Kahn quickly and succinctly gets down to Jax Taylor’s essence, his constant lying, which I found interesting.