Something, and Nothing, and Other Thoughts on Friends at the Table Music

The limits of my own words have thus far thwarted all attempts at writing about Friends at the Table and what it means to me. This attempt feels equally futile, as I’m not sure I know enough words to capture the experience I’ve had listening to FatT, but I’ve made this slightly more approachable by limiting my scope to the show’s music, composed by Jack de Quidt. I present to you: an offering of sincere and imperfect love.

Even this limited scope feels far too daunting. Shall I start with the warmth and comfort of the Hieron soundtracks? The sounds of rushing waves underscoring rich and affecting piano melodies, the music of dying gods and a world that’s always ending and a group of friends and former friends and future friends learning what it is to be alive, to fight, to love. The rich and layered clarinets, piercing and warmly full in turns, over gorgeous acoustic melodies, tell of a world in flux and a world worth preserving, and a world to which I shall return again and again. Each Hieron track flows and crackles with a heartache blend of comfort and rupture, legato beauty interrupted with the sharpness of a clap or a pounding chord, fitting for the ever interrupted beauty of the world of Hieron. I find myself moved beyond tears into a state of motionless longing by a high and wailing clarinet note finally falling chromatically into silence in “Velocity,” by the sudden and jarring drama in the piano line of “I Have Seen the Stars,” by the structural, plodding percussion of the audible piano pedals in “Hadrian and His Son,” by the simple and glistening paired piano and clarinet melodies of “Something” peaking and valleying alongside each other.

Shall I instead attempt to start with the Twilight Mirage? How can I possibly describe music that is part shimmering optimism for what could be, and part clamorous industrial backing to clamorous industrial combat, and part warmly and dreamily synthetic waves, and part hope distilled into synths? There is a frightfully exciting part of the track “The Reveries” that screams through the soft matter of my brain as it plays and also when I’m idling away from my phone, spontaneously injecting its particular brand of amplified energy into my being. The hollowed-round synthetic plonging notes of “Our Flaws in a Vacuum, or the Promises We Made to Each Other,” three repeating tones that initiate my favorite song on any FATT soundtrack, likewise dwell in a deep and indelible corner of my mind where they are permanent and welcome residents. Twilight Mirage feels like comfort and strife in equal measure, like knowing a familiar place you cherish will be changed and lost before you can grasp any meaning of what it currently is. It is the music of a failing utopia resolving into a changing utopia, and it is the music of my own body coming to understand its place among my own dying world. The music of Twilight Mirage does not so much rattle my eardrums in a quick jaunt as live embedded in my ribs and my sternum, curling like a warm wisp of smoke as its elements—the whirrs and the hums and the drones—burrow within my own atoms in an alchemical union.

Or perhaps to speak of the music of Partizan is more manageable—but that in itself is oxymoron. Partizan was never a season or a narrative to be managed, its sound similarly wild and racing—the songs in Partizan break through the silent surface strident and screaming for air, drowning themselves and also me, the stunned listener, in a melange of droning synths and flaring wails and percussive strikes. If the music of Twilight Mirage can live within me, and I can carry it in my unbreaking heart, then Partizan is the music I can’t contain within the fragile cavity of my chest; it’s music that bursts free and aims high; it’s music that begs to be unrestrained and dangerous. It’s appropriate that movement—motion, Motion—is one of the defining qualities of the Partizan soundtrack to me, through the drudging drumbeats pushing each song to its unwilling continuation and the splitting, ringing notes that pierce the ambient drudgery with the suddenness and arc of an arrow, slung and released. And yet there is comfort in the fear and menace that these tracks inspire; there are moments when bell-clear melodies emerge from the distortions, following a path that can only be described as beautiful. The Partizan soundtrack is at once overwhelmingly full and shockingly sparse, an onslaught of noise and the depth of a silence, at once the exhilarating sound of an uprising and the mournful dirge of those left to live with the aftermath. When I want music to make me feel like I’ve been torn apart and my pieces scattered into the electric air of a brewing storm, there are few choices better than Partizan.

I had hoped that meandering my way through several seasons and soundtracks might make the final one easier, but I have not found that to be the case. It feels no easier to describe the music of Sangfielle as it did to describe the music of Hieron, as I sat down to do almost two years ago as of my writing these final paragraphs. But I’ve committed myself to a chronology, and that chronology has reached Sangfielle: the season of notes gone askew and chords gone awry and the echoes of something unspoken hulking between the measures, half-completed cracks and analogue chirps and crashes. The Sangfielle soundtrack is simultaneously the most playful and the most terrifying, spinning on the slim tightrope between the entertaining and the grotesque and artfully veering each way, bouncing and skipping along as if a marionette cut from its strings and unable to find its footing. It is haunting and haunted alike, music that can hold a thousand ghosts, and nearly as many memories best left forgotten, in the violin scrapes and clarinet flutters of its clutches. There are moments in previous seasons when the physical act of making the music enters the music itself, but the music of Sangfielle is haunted by the presence of the music makers, that flighty Quartet, so to speak: each sound feels particularly physical in its creation, and each unexpected flourish builds a peculiarly visceral listening experience. And this is all to say nothing of the vocalizations, the gestures at words that are absent, or unknowable, or so obscure and ever-changing and interpreted and reinterpreted as to lack any semblance of meaning, all of them sung by a presence that refuses to assert itself further. The music of Sangfielle can be all margins and edges, all repurposed instrumental sounds and untuned strings sliding out of place, but it too knows how to lie steaming in the sun, learning the warmth of the world. It is music I revel in failing to fully understand, music I can return to again and again without fully holding the center of what it is within me, just as Sangfielle intended.

With that, I supposed I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve. The reflections here are just that, just momentary observations and sometimes the aggregate feelings of years’ worth of listening, just reactions and miscellany that comes to mind when I send the FatT soundtracks through my brain again and again. I tried my best to be both honest and artful, to be faithful to my feelings and to embellish the words describing them when necessary, though without embellishing the feelings they captured. I’m unsure how successful I was at rendering all of the embarrassingly earnest love I have into a format shareable like this, but I present this to you with the assurance that I have written as beautifully as I know how, about a subject that deserves such treatment. Thank you for being here and for receiving this offering in its entirety. Thank you, thank you, and good night.

The Fable of the Burned Twin

This is a transcription of a fable told in conjunction with Ellie Myers and Will Sherlock during a game of The Ground Itself by Everest Pipkin.

Content warnings for arson, house destroyed by fire, implied child death via fire, burning alive, murder.

~~~

Two identical twins, alike in appearance and mannerism, planned to set out on a grand journey. It was to be a thrilling adventure only they, as singular heroes, could accomplish, and it would yield plentiful gold and treasure, the likes of which the twins had never before possessed.

Travelling through the town as they first embarked, the twins came across a woman in need begging in the street. She asked if they might spare a coin or a bit of food, as they were clearly more well-rested and well-fed than most of the people roaming these streets. Rather than help her, both twins cruelly mocked and rejected her, leaving her to starve in the streets without even a shred of kindness to sustain her. However, while the first twin felt no remorse, the second twin felt regret creep into their chest as they left the woman.

Travelling further along the road, the twins came across a man who had recently been injured. He, too, needed a small amount of money or another small kindness to sustain him, but the twins again mocked and shamed the man. But the second twin felt more than just a small twinge of sadness at their cruelty. Their mocking was edged with unease, and their rancor was more forced than genuine. But the first twin still felt no remorse.

The twins continued on, and they came to a woman whose several small children were starving. She stood outside her small and ramshackle home begging the twins for their mercy and their aid. But again the twins refused to help. This time, when the first twin began to engage in their raucous mockery, the second twin remained silent. They soon left the woman with her children and her crumbling house to become grand adventurers.

Being very courageous, resilient, and well-resourced adventurers, the twins’ journey went as planned. They saved the victims, played the heroes, rescued the treasure, and secured the loot, all as they were destined to do. Rich with gold and stolen treasure, arms sagging under the weight of their plunder, the twins returned to the town from which they had departed, wandering the streets as newfound heroes. 

But though the twins had stolen glory and wealth, the unfortunate and downtrodden citizens of the town had found no such windfall. The twins in their return came across the same woman who had begged for their help before their departure. This time, though the first twin protested, the second twin offered one third of their stolen loot to the woman. She took it gratefully, and the first twin burned with anger.

The twins next came to the man whom they had refused help. On the second twin’s insistence, they gave away a second third of their wealth to this man. The first twin fumed at their sibling’s foolishness to give away what they had striven so hard to earn, but they did not stop their twin from giving up the goods.

At last the twins came to the ramshackle house where they had met the unfortunate mother before. The cries from inside told them that her children went hungry still, but the woman was not in the front of her house like before. The first twin told their sibling to check the backyard while they, the older of the twins by three minutes, checked inside.

The second twin followed a path to the back. The first twin entered the house through the unlocked front door and set a fire, quickly and dispassionately.

The fire consumed the small house immediately, and dancing flames fanned the sky. The cries of the children went silent. The first twin exited to safety, smirking at their own wherewithal.

But then the first twin heard a noise behind them as they shut the door. They turned to see their own twin, their identical flesh and blood, burning with the intensity of the house – a house the second twin had never entered and a fire they had never touched. The second twin choked out an incomprehensible plea, but it was too late. The fire had rendered them a charred corpse. 

The first twin whirled around to the house they had set aflame and saw the woman whom they had denied help sitting calmly and unblemishedly in her rocking chair, surrounded by her similarly unharmed children and the blackened, fallen wreckage of her home. The single remaining twin and the woman locked eyes, and then the remaining twin fled, leaving behind every scrap of their loot and every sign of their great misdeed.

Clover Faerie [in progress work]

If not a place to throw half-coherent, semi-edited pieces of weird narration, what is a blog meant for? (This is a work in progress that I may or may not continue progressing to a finished piece.)

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Yesterday was a Sunday, not that I was aware of it. Combined disorientation of being unemployed and quarantined at home and having been awake for twenty-six hours at the time of my walk meant that the day hardly registered, least of all on a day like yesterday, when I had foregone sleep to avoid a depressive episode. If that seems illogical, you’re probably right. But, by my deranged, early-morning logic, staying up too late (like, 5:49 a.m. too late) would lead to sleeping in too late would lead to overall drowsiness throughout the day would lead to an inactive and sedentary several hours preceding yet another night of futile attempts to sleep before it’s six a.m., and then that cycle would repeat for up to a week before I finally got myself in check again. Staying up all night doesn’t just quash the episode on its first day; it also ensures that I will fall asleep easily the next night, a blissful experience that so rarely visits me. And so I was in my twenty-sixth hour of awakeness and my thirtieth or so minute of my Sunday afternoon walk, and I was idly looking down at roadside clover patches.

One of the less fortunate side effects of not having slept is the paranoid certainty that the world is not worth preserving and life is not worth struggling through. This is one of several trains of thought that frequently compete for track time along my neurons, but those trains are speedily deployed when said brain has not rested for too many hours. A solitary and lackluster walk along the side of a familiar road offers multitudinous time to follow those trains, and I was consumed by fears that I would wake up thirty years from today and wonder what made the last thirty years of my life worth anything at all. But, as was my custom, I was also scanning the clovers on the ground, though with an equally lackluster attitude. 

On a more vibrant day, I would have been crouched beside those clover patches, poking through them with a stick and trying to drive my brain away from the certainty that a passing car will hit my crouching form. I would be continuing a search that began before I was aware that it would continue for several years of my life, and that search is the one for the most special of clovers. Approximately one of every 5,000 clovers has four leaves, and that small but not impossible population has drawn my attention. There is little to do with clovers other than preserve them with tape and glass covers, affix them to pages of paper, save them in jars—in other words, just keep them in your possession, passively waiting for a day when they might have a more practical purpose. From another perspective, the search for them is a hobby almost completely devoid of meaning or result, a childish way to pass a few hours. It’s an occupation that draws me in regardless.

In my most lucid of moments, I become aware of my tendency to superimpose the manic pixie dream girl stereotype upon the much more real and flawed form of myself. I suppose you could say I’m invested in making myself seem inhuman. I am entirely and vividly aware of my neuroses, from a need to rearrange objects in public spaces to maintain their symmetry to a flat refusal to ever cut my hair to my clover prowling habit. It’s a type of self-awareness that begs a careful cultivation of the self, a rendering of what is natural and natal to a form slightly unreal and unknown. The awareness I retain when I spontaneously climb a tree or wave to a passing high school classmate as I’m in the trenches of the clover patches is a certainty that I’m distancing myself from an idea of normalcy, shaping myself into something whimsical or confusing or strange, or at least that’s my hope. I have a vested interest in turning myself into a Cottingley fairy, perhaps just a cardboard cutout of a girl, but, to others, a genuinely supernatural conjuration of thoughts.

The third of Elsie Wright’s Cottingley fairy pictures, which is much superior to the more frequently posted first of the series.

A clover faerie, maybe. I could say that there’s a realm of tiny and inscrutable creatures whose power thrives on those four-leaved mutants. They harvest the clover for their energy, squeezing water and far less familiar sustenance from their quadrupetal arrangement. They have a queen, perhaps, a regal being with glowing green skin who just slightly resembles me if you look long enough, a tiny and glowing scimitar in her left hand. And each summer and winter they emerge from a parallel galaxy in which colors and luck work differently from ours to harvest the clover, snatching our human foibles of good luck from us for their own good, removing the fourth leaf from each specimen with absolute surgical precision, replanting the ordinary clover once its nutritional value has been drained.

They might build an empire from the clover, attach it with value and worth, replicating systems of wealth and power along the double axes of four ninety-degree leaves. And those with the power to find those clovers live like queens, bathing in clover-infused aloe and buffing their skin into a bright glow, harnessing alligators and hippopotamuses to their bidding. And those who live without the clover learn to embrace the darkness and the dullness of their unfortunate station, hauling inadequate bags of the ordinary three-leaved varietals and trying in vain to construct a life from fundamentally flawed materials. They are trying to live upon a plane of creaky, rotting wooden beams. They are trying to pretend that energy is not pure and singular, that they can pretend their way into survival. 

But maybe, somewhere between the inevitable wealth inequality and unfortunate inequity of the clover faerie world, there might be a genuine faerie who reaches out to her human sister and says, Come home. Who loves the sunshine and the water and who can learn to live with distributing the glow of her skin to those who live in darkness, until her own cheeks and arms grow dull and moldy but still with an impossible resplendence. And she can see those of us who live without the knowledge her world has amassed, without the adaptations that bring them the power of something halfway straddling the line of ordinary and extraordinary. And she flits behind a shrub or renders herself invisible before I arrive on the street of the clover patches, but she has left me a gift. Because I look down through the fog of disturbing dreams that have bled into waking hours and I see that, today, I am a clover faerie as well, because the plant I turn between my first two fingers is not the trickster illusion of two overlapping ordinary clovers, it is genuine and sitting right on the edge of the unforgivable street. And, like any good clover faerie, I pluck it from the ground and harvest it for mine, and I tape its leaves in their splayed arrangement to a pink Post-It note, and I inscribe a terribly human date upon the pink, and I slide it beneath the glass covering of the kitchen table where it will now live a sequestered existence. 

Because somewhere along the line I’ve injected myself with the supernatural, and half-awake wanderings can brush upon a universe I cannot understand, because isn’t that what it is to be human and venture into the world? To accept that I will not understand and I will not learn to live in another mode of reality, but that I can do no more than slide my imperfect fingers upon an invisible glass pane of my limitation and imagine that there will be more. 

Conversations with People I Love: Wendy Gibson

I sat down with Wendy Gibson, who is my mother, at the nicest recording site in a twenty-foot radius. Which is our living room desk. Because we are not allowed to leave the house. The first in what will hopefully be a series of interviews with people I love, in this one, my mom and I discussed the current pandemic, the importance of humor, generally disliking people, her childhood, raising kids, and the patented Wendy Gibson Room Theory.

Grace [GG]: Hello, mother.

Wendy [WG]: Hellooooo. This is Grace.

GG: No, it is not.

WG: No, this is not. Hello, this is Wendy.

GG: Do you want to start by introducing yourself to people who may or may not know you?

WG: How come it just says you’re talking?

GG: Because the – it’s just the one participant is me. And we’re the one talking right now.

WG: Ohhhhh we are one! Okay. I’m Wendy. I’m staring at it like there’s a microphone.

GG: We can – we can talk. There’s no video.

WG: I am…I’m Wendy Gibson. I’m your mother. Hmmm….that’s about it. I’m old…in my younger clothes…in my younger clothes I used to think I was a lot more interesting.

GG: And what else have you done, my mother?

WG: Today or overall?

GG: Hm…yes.

WG: Okay. So, today was a nice lazy day. Watched your show – it was excellent. Last showing. Can you believe it’s over?

GG: This is not my interview!

WG: This may turn into your interview!

GG: This is your interview.

WG: I have control issues, as you can see. Overall…that’s it.

GG: That’s it?

WG: That’s it.

GG: Okay, so, to start out, do you have anything you’d like to share with the world?

WG: Obviously we have been spending too much time home. Together. Nothing to add. So proud of you!

GG: Aw. Thank you. Do you have any wisdom you’d like to share with the world? Or just specifically me?

WG: Wherever you go…

Both: There you are. [Laughing]

GG: Oh gosh. This is not going as well as the last [interview attempt].

WG: No. Alright, c’mon, get serious.

GG: Okay. So.

WG: Alright.

[Laughing]

GG: Alright. Let’s capitalize on this. What do you think about the importance of humor and laughter? In general, and especially at this current moment?

WG: Alright. In general, I think if you take anything too seriously, it will lead to stress. I really do. And I think stress…affects your immune system, and then you feel bad, and stress leads to more stress or anxiety, and some people eat too much, some people eat too little, some people sleep too much or sleep too little. I find that this situation right now, with this pandemic, you better like your family. And if you don’t like your family, you better live in a really big house. But I think it’s just stressful to negotiate what’s a truth and what’s not the truth. The information that you get – probably half of it is half-truths and the other half is lies and interpretation. It’s very difficult, and I think if you can’t laugh about ridiculous nothingness, it’s very hard to get through the day. So I think humor is good. So – I’m sorry, it’s also later in the evening; I tend – my window of being alert and awake is usually – ten…to six. Banking hours, shall we say? …I work best.

[Laughing]

GG: Well, what has been making you laugh and reminding you to keep humorous?

WG: Your show today, Silent Sky [Etown theatre’s last hurrah, performed via Zoom] – very funny. Much funnier than you think. It’s like a historical fiction but funny.

GG: Yeah. Well, they’re very realistic characters.

WG: Very funny. And I just try to lighten up with the male members of the household. And I try not to take anything they say too seriously, and I try just to ask them if they’re hungry and make them food to shut them up.

GG: Is that something you think you’ve acquired over time?

WG: Yes. Yes.

GG: …both that specific strategy and also humor and keeping things light? Is that something you’ve always valued?

WG: I just think – I think that recently I read this book. That said –

GG: What book?

WG: I don’t know the title of anything, or the author, I’m sorry. I go through books like water. But it was like the four truths of life, and the one was not to take anything personally at all, you know, be impeccable with your word, but don’t take anything personally. And I really have a habit of taking things personally and thinking, when people aren’t happy, I’m personally responsible for that, and it’s really just – some people aren’t that smart. And that’s the way they express themselves, ‘cause they don’t have the capacity to understand that there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t affect them or that they affect. And they don’t realize that their lack of aptitude just really influences the people around them. So I’ve learned a lot about myself lately, that it’s not shameful or a bad thing if you just smile and swallow it all. But I believe you’re allowed to think the way you want to think. I don’t think you need to change that or forgive everything and move forward and all that crazy stuff. I just think that, if you take things with a grain of salt, I think it makes you happier. But I do like other people to be happy.

GG: So, one thing we often complain about together is that sometimes, we don’t like people.

WG: I really don’t! [Laughing] I had a socially distant…

GG: Soiree?

WG: …Last night at the neighbors’ in their driveway, and I was irritated the second I arrived. It’s a sin. Well, they started talking about how we should open up the economy again, which – here’s the big thing: it hasn’t shut down. Like, the economy is just fine. So, just get online, start buying shit, refurnish your house, paint your house, do your landscaping – the way people say the economy is closed, it’s like saying that the air outside is closed. It’s not closed, there’s just a lack of, you know, social shopping.

GG: Well, things are shutting down.

WG: But I was really irritated the second I got there, and it was just, after working in the yard all day, after six or eight or ten hours working in the yard, I was tired, and I rushed to get there, and I should have made martinis for the way, or food, and I went with a bottle of water, which is not a lot of fun, and they were drinking. Then your father started speaking.

[Laughing]

GG: We don’t have to get into that.

WG: And I was just tired and uninterested in it. And they were so serious about everything going on, and I really get that it’s all serious, I get it, but it’s after 8:00 at night, and I just want to sit in your driveway and just blow off steam. Can’t we talk about a neighbor? Or can’t we talk about ridiculous nothingness? And then [the neighbor] was saying how he had to drive around to find something. Chemicals to open the pool. And I’m thinking…

GG: Why are you thinking about opening the economy? You have a pool.

WG: Yeah. I just thought, why can’t you order than shit online? [Laughing] Like, I just don’t get people’s focus. So then my head goes to why am I even wasting my time and my energy? I could be home with my muffins [children]. It’s so much nicer to be accessible for your kids when they’re home. I like home. It’s my happy place.

GG: Building off of dislike of people.

WG: It sounds terrible! Doesn’t it?

GG: Yeah

WG: Tolerance. I think maybe tolerance. Lack of tolerance of people. I’m just so different from everybody else. I just find that I’m so different. And I’m happy in my skin, and I’m happy with myself, and – do I wish I was thinner? Yes. Do I wish I was younger? Yes. But –

GG: It doesn’t matter.

WG: It really – I don’t mind being at home all day.

GG: So, is there any dissonance for you between the messaging of “We’re all in this together” and we’re all going through something terrible, and we all have to stick together, and those personal connections? Where you’re just not connecting with people, or you’re just really intolerant of people?

WG: Here’s my thing, is that I have noticed that things are very similar to when 9/11 occurred. And that people all the sudden jumped on the “I’m gonna be nice to you” bandwagon. But I tend to always ride that vehicle. So I always try to go out of my way or do for others and be kind to others. And I don’t know why it irritates me that I feel like it’s phony out of some people. I just don’t – we only have 37 houses in this neighborhood, and people in the past have cursed in my face about my front yard, or the tree that needs to be taken down, or that I put my trashcan in the wrong spot. And now they want to do a wishing tree together. It would have been nice just to apologize. Like, Gee, I’m sorry if maybe in the past we had a history. You don’t have to talk specifics. Gee, I’m so happy to be in the neighborhood with you now, you know, I’m sorry that things were the way they were. People act like – like that never happened. And it’s not – we’ve only lived in here 14 years, or 15 years. So I don’t understand human nature, and maybe I never will. But I just feel like I haven’t changed. But all the sudden everyone wants to be lovey and nice, and people shunned me or were mean to me. Or blackballed me, is what people say.

GG: What does that mean?

WG: That means, when I took you kids out of [the Catholic school], people all the sudden acted like they didn’t know who I was.

GG: Social isolation.

WG: Yeah. In the market – totally acted like I wasn’t me in the post office or the market. And now they want to sing kumbaya. Like, I don’t…but maybe I’ve changed. Maybe it’s me, and my perception of things, and maybe my expectations of things, maybe – but I just feel like it’s great that, as a community, we want to come together during this time, but I just feel like – if you’re a shithead, you’re eventually gonna become one again. Like, maybe ‘cause you’re scared now, or maybe that you might need a helping hand or a lending hand, that maybe you’re a little nervous, so you’re treading lightly, but the same thing happened last time.

GG: Mm-hm. How do you see the neighborhood moving forward as we’re let out of this and as this ends?

WG:  I think people will become self-absorbed again, people will worry about only their own, I just don’t see –

GG: But we do that too.

WG: We do that too. But I will say, to be honest with you, I never, ever ignore if I see somebody in the neighborhood talking or walking, even all the people now that stop and chit chat and stuff. I can’t tell you how many people just put their heads down and try to ignore me. You’re in front of my house! It’s like, walk somewhere else, then, if you want to ignore me. [Laughing] I don’t know.

GG: You will not be ignored.

WG: [growly voice] I will not be ignored! I just don’t understand enough about people. And maybe I expect too much. Or maybe…maybe I’m just wired differently. But I really think if you have nothing to say, don’t talk. I just really…I don’t know.

GG: Well…so…let’s hopefully move on to some more positive topics.

WG: Yeah, that got sad.

GG: It did get sad.

WG: It makes me sound like a tyrant. Terrible mom.

GG: So…what is one experience you’ve gone through that you would not do again but that you are happy has occurred?

WG: Hmmm…one experience that I’ve gone through…childbirth? [Laughing] Sorry. I was thinking that…when I was growing up, we only had I think one car for a really long time. And then my mother used to borrow people’s cars if she wanted a car on the weekend, and I remember one time she borrowed somebody’s car but the people came with it. It was like Uncle Pat, and me, and Gramo and then other people – we were all jammed in a car. It wasn’t enough for one person per seatbelt. And I remember that we got stuck on a highway, like, an actual tow truck had to come, and we were all jammed in the front of the tow truck, and somebody has to – the older kids sat in the car that was being towed, like it was just terrible. It must have been…I guess late 70s, early 80s…no, I think it was still in the 70s that this happened. And I always wonder why I’m not very adventuresome. You know how I never want to go anywhere? I like being at home. And I was thinking about it the other day. I wonder if, because I had to…I was the kid smashed up against the tow truck driver. And I’m wondering if –

GG: That specifically or that kind of event?

WG: Yeah, that experience specifically, like, traumatized me that I don’t like to go on road trips or go to places I don’t know where I’m going and stuff.

GG: Well, I remember when we got in that car accident, and then for years you always had to go to the bathroom before you got in the car.

WG: I did. Because that accident I had to pee and I was rushing home, and we got hit, and I wound up going in the ambulance, and they wouldn’t let me get up and go to the bathroom, so I had to sit in the emergency room for hours. Yeah…it’s funny how you become a product of your experiences. And that’s how humor is such – I mean, you really have to go back and – I find myself becoming rigid. I guess with older people, you just don’t have the tolerance for stupidity or the tolerance for intolerance, so you get to an age where you just – I hear other people talk, but it’s like music in my ears, like I just can’t –

GG: You tune it out.

WG: I find that if I don’t agree with people, I like to pose my side of the story, but people, like, argue with me about that. They get to say their whole side of the story, but then if I pose my side of the story, they either don’t call me anymore or don’t like me anymore. But they’re allowed to have their opinions. I just don’t understand how we’ve come that way. So I try to just not take it personally now, laugh it off, to each his own. But it is interesting, hopefully when this whole pandemic ends, it’ll be interesting how many people contact me to watch their kids and walk their dogs and cook or clean and do whatever I used to do for them. You know and now, I’m like – I’ve been dropped. And now we’ll see if, all the sudden when they need me again – it’s just fair weather people. I just don’t – I don’t get, as a society, how we’re moving forward when we act that way. So self-absorbed.

GG: And do you think there’s something specific driving that? Is there a current –

WG: Trend?

GG: …force that’s –

WG: Everybody says it’s because of the cell phone, but I know a lot of people who love their cell phones who are really nice people. And I know a lot of people who love their cell phones who are jackasses. So I – I don’t think it’s the cell phone; I think our society likes to blame technology for kids not being nice, but, to be honest with you, smart, happy teachers make smart, happy kids. Smart, happy parents make smart, happy kids. And I just think you have a lot of people who just don’t feel like they get their due money or their due time or their due diligence. Everyone wants a plaque about it, or an award about it, or how great they are. Just stop being a shithead.

GG: Talking about the teachers and parents, you mean?

WG: Yeah! Stop being a shithead. And, I mean – last night, at the good old soiree in the driveway, one of the kids came out and made a big deal about saying hello to me, and she went back inside, and the mom’s like, “Oh. I don’t know why she came out to say hi to you. I didn’t even tell her to.” Who says that? Just really crazy. I don’t know, I think it’s a generational thing right now; I think that parents really care how their kids look on paper and the accolades they have, but they don’t really care if they have nice kids. But if they have a batting average of over .300 or a 4.7 [GPA], it’s a great thing. And it’s – I just think that it’s kind of going down the toilet.

GG: Were you deliberate about raising us [my siblings and I] in a different way?

WG: Deliberate. Yes. Yes, my whole life has been about raising my kids. I know, that sounds kind of sad now, ‘cause I said something to [your dad] at breakfast – he was saying something about something, and my whole life when I got married was about having children and doing the right thing by your husband and by your kids. And I think it’s really important to make great people.

GG: So, was there anything you would do that – I’m just asking you for parenting advice now, I guess.

WG: Oh good, I would love to have a grandbaby!

GG: No, just the way I was saying it made it sound like I wanted parenting advice. But I more want to know, how do you even approach becoming a parent?

WG: Here’s the thing that I knew. When I was in fourth grade I knew I wanted to be a teacher. There’s just something about how teachers treat people. And because I was very poor, and because my family was very involved in…drugs and weapons – very shitty family. Very big substance abuse problems. In fourth grade, I….the police came to my house a lot, and I knew that if I wanted to become a teacher, and make people…to do better for me, to do better for other people, the only way to get out of that hole is education. But teachers decide very early on what kind of person you are and put you right in a slot. So, in fourth grade, I was treated very poorly. And the only way I knew was to bend that cycle or break that cycle was that…I couldn’t stay in my house for long, and I wasn’t gonna have family support. So I had to find a way to be very likeable. To teachers and administration, and I – somehow I learned that, and I got in with the right people that way, but I think that the hardest part is that you lose yourself a little bit. And I just knew – and I don’t know how I knew so young – that the way that you’re treated in schools really makes that child become that person. It’s like a learned helplessness type of a thing. And my brothers were treated poorly, and they went right down that lane, and they were trying to treat me poorly, and I – I just kind of broke the curve, and I was put in very uncomfortable situations, emotionally, physically, sexually, like it was just a very awkward, terrible time. But, when I made it through fourth or fifth grade, and I knew that I was going to be a teacher, then once you – you know, fast forward ten years, and you see that – as a teacher, you see the kids that have already been pigeonholed early on by their parents, or by their teachers, and you see it full circle – it could have been me. And the difference that I could make. But where’s the biggest difference gonna happen? At home. And so for me it was a logical jump, but had I not had such a shitty household growing up, I probably wouldn’t have been as supportive a parent. So there’s millions of people doing an average job. But I don’t – I don’t know. Is that our endgame? You know what I mean?

GG: We have to raise the average.

WG: I just knew – right – right – and at the end of my life, you know what people are gonna say? They’re not gonna say, “Oh, we miss Wendy so much, she was so great,” they’re gonna be like, “Oh my God, those kids.” They already say that. And that’s really the key to the whole thing. And unless we’re paying attention, it’s just going to be more of the same big jackass who’s in the White House now. It’s just gonna be more of the same. We don’t care about people, or we don’t care about a society. We’re just going to have to teach these people and bring them up, and even only if it’s one person – if I made it out. I don’t know. It’s just hard. It’s hard. Because you want to advantage your kids, and we live in a nice area, we advantage our kids, and it’s a lot nicer than I grew up, but then it’s hard to listen to you guys complain about stuff. So it grounds you when I yell at you – not yell at you, but when I talk about different things, it keeps you grounded. I don’t know. It’s – it’s tough, and you guys will probably be in therapy, and I question everything all the time. But you do the best you can today, and you try to laugh, or you try to make light of it, or…whatever.

GG: Well, I was going to say, before you –

WG: I’m sorry, I went on a rampage about –

GG: Before you reached the end of that, that seemed to be very different from what I hear you say a lot, which is that you have regrets about how you’ve raised us, or you’re scared you messed us up.

WG: Oh, well I think we all mess our kids up…in one or two generations, everyone will be fine…I just know that I grew up very quickly. And I had to make decisions about what I wanted in my life, and I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want you to have to worry about that. And could you have played ball sports? Oh my gosh, if I put you into – and made you, and yelled at you to stay in clubs and groups, yes. We can train kids to be ball sport players. We can train kids to be scholars. But unless you train your kids to use their minds in their own way and discover who they want to be and what they want to be, I just think the tolerance will just open up. And things will be better for our world if we let people use their brains in their own way. Some people call that “the new math.” Discovery math. [Laughs]

GG: So, one thing I want you to talk about –

WG: Oh goodness.

GG: …because I want more people to know about it is your “other room” idea. You’ve got to find another room…

WG: Oh, my other room. I love my other room idea.

GG: It’s something I think about a lot.

WG: I say this every time I sub. Okay, so I am also…I’ve gone back to work recently, so I’m also a substitute. In my former life, I like to say, I used to teach high school math. So now I’ve gone back to teach, to be a substitute or to do long-term substitutions. And I like to start off – usually not if I’m daily subbing, I don’t usually give the spiel at all, but if I’m in there for a week to two weeks or a marking period or a semester, I usually start pretty early on about my room saga…that if you are the nicest person in a room, meaning your group of people you surround yourself with, if you are the nicest person in that room, you need a new room. If you are the smartest person in that room, you need a new room. You will become the people you surround yourself with. You really will. I just think – and even if you think about good, healthy eating habits, or good, health social-emotional health, if you’re in a room, and you’re the only one who’s not eating after 10 p.m., you really need to pay attention to the room you’re in. So, yes, that is my room theory. Be careful who you surround yourself with. And I think the older you get, also, as you go through different aspects of your life is that you see that you need different rooms, you need different people. When you’re starting your career, you need people that are also starting their career. It’s a very nerve-wracking experience. And unless you’re getting paid a fortune, you don’t have a lot of money, and why are you doing so much work for so little money, and where’s my fun time, and me, growing up with so much drugs and alcohol around, like that used to be my go-to thing. That’s what I thought was fun. That’s what I thought was normal. That’s what I thought you did for fun. And so it’s very difficult to break that norm because then you’re treated as an outsider. And – actually, thank goodness I had you kids, or else I still wouldn’t be talking to Gramo, you know. So yes. The room theory. Now we’re all stuck in the same room.

GG: Yes.

WG: It’s a lovey family. Ahem.

[Laughing]

GG: Do you want to wrap up with a final thought or final piece of wisdom or final thing that is making you happy right now?

WG: So. In conclusion. I would like to say…I thank, first and foremost, Grace for her time and energy on this Sunday evening. But also, just don’t take it all so seriously because time heals everything. Whether you ignore it or you don’t ignore it, time’s gonna heal it. So, if it’s that important, it’s gonna come back around. People, experiences…you don’t have to do it all in one year, in one day, in one minute. I don’t know…when opportunity comes a-knocking, you better answer. So thank you so much! Love you!

GG: Thanks, Ma Ma. Goodbye.

Fiona Apple songs, ranked.

In honor of Fiona Apple’s new album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters (out today! What!), I have taken the opportunity to rank and discuss every Fiona Apple song from her previous four records. It will, by necessity, be a momentary and imperfect ranking, but I hope there’s still value in it. Strap in, and let’s go on an adventure.

43. The First Taste

I apologize for this one. I truly do. But I think this is the only Fiona Apple song I can honestly say I dislike. One of the baffling taste differences between me and the rest of the world is that the album the world has deemed her best happens to be the sole one I’d leave off a list of my absolute favorites. There are a few incredible songs on Tidal, to be sure, but there are also a great many that I don’t love (at least not yet—this is the Fiona Apple song that has been my most recent acquaintance, as I unintentionally listened to them in reverse release order). The length that only gives credence to songs like “Never is a Promise” becomes a hindrance when I start to wonder when “The First Taste” will end. Perhaps I am missing something in this song that I will soon discover, causing a swift retraction of this entire post in my heinous wrongness. But, for now, something has to take the last slot, and this song has to be it.

42. Slow Like Honey

I like that this song feels languid, that it sounds exactly like the slow viscous drip of a spoonful of honey, but I’m not sure I have much more to say. For many of the songs on Tidal, I don’t have the same connection that I can claim for the other albums—I like Tidal, and I want to ponder over it more, but it hasn’t captured a few months of my life the way each other album has. I could pretend to have examined and picked apart the songs on this album as much as the others in the

41. O’ Sailor

I like this song. I do. When I’m playing Extraordinary Machine on repeat and this one comes on, I don’t skip it. But it’s not one I typically seek out. I enjoy it for the few minutes it runs, and then I move on. I’m a big fan of the growing echoes of her voice on the chorus, and “I’m undecided about you again” is a delectable line, but this is overall not a noteworthy tune for me. And I think that’s all I have to say.

40. Anything We Want

This is a song that I heard early in my acquaintance with Fiona Apple, with a melody that stuck quickly and that remains strong in my brain, but that nonetheless didn’t fascinate me. I can remember hearing this is the early days of my Fiona education, before the proper awe and love of her creation set in, when listening felt more like rote exercises and less like catharsis. I think this song is still tinged by that somewhat bored notion—nothing is exactly wrong, and it’s not unmemorable, it’s just somewhat… indistinct.

39. Carrion

My most prominent memory of this song is listening to it at work. I am a good employee who gets my work done and also listens to Fiona Apple. I would like to give special notice to Fiona Apple’s complex rhyme schemes and internal rhymes, specifically prompted by these lines: “No sound could simulate the presence of a man / …Your divination should acquaint You with the plan”—in which I am most particularly enamored with the assonance of “stimulate” / “divination.” And that is all I have to say.

38. Regret

I think I am discovering, in writing this piece (out of order, I may interject), that I have specific early memories of every song on The Idler Wheel from before the initiation of my true love of Fiona Apple. Thinking back on those days feels like recalling a slightly rocky start to a relationship, before companionship or harmony was guaranteed, when you didn’t quite understand the other person but some magnetic force or interest still bade you to stay. I can remember listening to this one in the car, wondering if I had actually heard the lyrics correctly. Thinking back to that younger version of myself, I’m grateful to have become more than her, and I’m grateful that this better version of me (heh) stuck with Fiona Apple. And this song, while not one of my favorites, is surely one that remains special to me for its place in my former self’s life.

37. Sleep to Dream

I think this is a song that I will place much higher on this list in a few months. I think it, like many of the songs on Tidal, has not yet experienced the shift in my mind from a good song that I will sometimes put on to an essential and important song to my overall psyche. I am going to predict now that I will, in time, think much more highly of this song than I do now, once I hurdle that boundary of unfamiliarity and newness to my brain. In other words, I’ve not yet listened to this song enough to regard it as highly as it deserves or to process it in its full, deserving complexity.

36. Get Him Back

I don’t know if I have a whole lot to say about this song. In true adherence to my typical self, I think most of these blurbs are more about me and my narcissistic self’s response to these songs than the songs themselves. As such, I’m trying not to force anything about them—these are supposed to be my honest reactions. I like this song a lot. I listen to this song often. I’m just not sure I have anything to say right now. Sorry, or something.

35. The Child is Gone

Clearly, Fiona Apple developed and changed over the course of her musical career, but I appreciate that the intro to this song sounds similar to that of “Periphery.” It’s like a wink shared over a period of twenty-six years, a reminder that Fiona’s been brilliant and incredible and sharing that with the world from the beginning. And it’s staggering that she wrote these lyrics as a teenager—I think I could live several lifetimes and never have the skill to write “Cause I suddenly feel like a different person / From the roots of my soul comes a gentle coercion / And I ran my hand o’er a strange inversion.” She’s ironically processing her own lost youth in asserting that very truth with this song. It’s too virtuosic to have possibly been made by a child, but the very child who made it must necessarily have suffered that lost youth to produce what I now hear.

34. Jonathan

Listening to this song now, I regret initially placing it lower on this list. The industrial sounds of the intro are fascinating and unconventionally musical, providing a somewhat unsettling background once the familiar piano lines enter and shift, still changing the entire landscape of the song once you’ve honed in on them. Those sounds remind me of a podcast episode I quite enjoyed about the “music” of rusting escalators in DC Metro stations. The sparse lyrics to this song somehow communicate more in fewer words—both in the relatively short and simple lines and the paucity of words themselves, instead allowing for long piano-and-industrial-percussion breaks. I’m left feeling like I’m sitting about three feet to the left of my body, that something is just slightly off about me rather than just having heard a creeping melody. That’s one of the things I love about Fiona Apple, though: her songs and sounds slink into your chest and set up lasting residence there.

This is also one of the first Fiona Apple songs I can remember hearing. Geographically, it’s placed somewhere on the New Jersey turnpike; temporally, May 2018. The line “take me to Coney Island” stuck fast in my brain even as many of the others surrounding it melted away. Perhaps something about the absurd, bright-lights-and-cotton-candy connotation of Coney Island (a perception of someone who, admittedly, has never been) against the frustration and anger in the song, which, I now know, is a quintessential Fiona contrast.

33. Criminal

I know this is her most popular song. I know it deserves the lavish praise it gets. I know it’s spectacularly impressive that she wrote this is 45 minutes at the age of seventeen. But maybe, just maybe, those facts doesn’t make a favorite song. I love this song a lot, but I think the elements that make my favorite Fiona Apple songs—eminently clever lyrics and a unique musical background as the first and second most important characteristics, respectively—aren’t what give this song its power. It has multitudinous merits that don’t happen to characterize my Fiona Apple tastes. Or perhaps I’ve just not yet experienced the feelings she describes, and the disconnect arises there. Whatever it may be, I still love this song, even if I don’t understand its wild popularity.

32. Sullen Girl

Every time Fiona Apple repeats “oblivion,” I believe that, like a new universe budding from each decision, she reinvents a new understanding of the word. And this song has more depth than even those deep and complex and multilayered oblivions.

31. I Know

This song gets special status for breaking up the common musical themes on When the Pawn, those centering driving rhythms and loud, angry percussion. Especially in contrast to the more frenetic energy tracing itself through most of the album, this song feels almost elegant, sadly so. Relatively short, simple lines containing neat metaphors on a slow, lazing jam of a beat. Her voice is also so delicate and restrained and lovely on this song that it’s almost a different type of anger, the reserved anger that is mostly dominated, now, by resignation. By the bridge, it seems almost possible that this song will build and crest into the outright fury she may be restraining, but it just washes back into the slow carefulness of the beginning lines, back to that floaty elegance. Also, “You can use my skin to bury your secrets in” is one of my favorite lyrics.

30. Pale September

I somehow always forget which song this is. I get the gorgeous tumbling refrain stuck in my head constantly, and it takes me a good minute to remember where I’ve heard it. On the frequent occasions when I find “And all my armor falling down in a pile at my feet” meandering around my head again, it doesn’t always immediately strike me that this is even a Fiona song—and I think that gives it at least some advantage. There’s a Fiona Apple sound, for sure, but it tends to be more of a region than a specific locale. Definitely not a bad thing, as it provides glowing contrasts between so many facets of her work, yet this song still feels different from the myriad other contrasts within the remainder of her music. I must say that I prefer the refrain to the verses, but that refrain is gorgeous enough in itself to make up for some forgettable in-between lines. But, admittedly, the haunting, plodding verses make a compelling contrast to those soaring lines of the refrain. So I guess I’m invalidating every conclusion I reach about this song—it’s good. Just listen to it.

29. The Way Things Are

This song sounds like it’s preparing me to get abducted by aliens, transporting me into a different dimension, or heralding the arrival of a maleficent deity. It also calls my ears to attention in many different ways: the creeping drones and sudden sound bursts of the instrumental, the fascination in layering her voice on “I’m much better off,” the darkly melodic chorus that not only grabs my attention in a vice grip but also has me, once again, crying on the dance floor. I hadn’t realized how much I love this song until I was writing this blurb and continually shifting it higher on this last as I uncovered yet another way to love it.

28. To Your Love

Perhaps the first moment of my love affair with When the Pawn was the chorus of this song, listening to that anger that somehow reinvents every repetition of the titular phrase. I would also like to instate a pre-chorus prize specifically for this song, partially because it leads into the chorus so seamlessly, partially for the feminine rhymes between “distance” / “existence” / “resistance,” and also because of the transition from end rhyme to internal rhyme with “Please forgive me for my distance / The shame is manifest in my resistance / to your love.” I think that song structure is a work of genius. Plus, like, it’s just fun to listen to. Not everything has to be about poetic structure.

27. Not About Love

Like most people, I would assume, I mentally file songs I don’t know religiously under the phrase that contains their title. So, following that, I often hear the two-line “This is not about love / Because I am not in love” running through my head when I’m deciding on a song to play. And I love those lines, I think partially because they feel out of time, in a certain way, not obeying the boundaries of the song in which they appear, though they clearly are. I think my favorite thing about this song is possibly that it becomes a completely different song in the middle, increasing the tempo and intensity after already asserting and establishing itself, and then reverting back into its prior state.

26. Please Please Please

The first thing I would like to say about this song is that I appreciate that it and “Red Red Red” are on the same album. The parallel title structures are pleasing. I like how the first two verses play with scansion in interesting ways, differentiating the line structures a little bit without escaping the bounds of the poetry. I am also a very big fan of the finality of “steady going nowhere.” And…those were the thoughts she had.

25. Oh Well

I’m mostly just obsessed with “What. Waste. Ed. Un. Con. Ditional love.” Is that enough?

24. Get Gone

My favorite line in this song is “Fuckin’ go.” I love the brevity, I love the anger, I love the manipulation of the metrical patterns that allows a short pause before this declaration. Runner-up goes to this line’s counterpart in the previous verse, “So put away that meat you’re selling.” Both lines seem like an initiation, a primer to move into the strength of the chorus from the more contained verses. This song makes me think about how little I can see of myself in much of Fiona’s music when interpreted most literally—but how, even lacking the romantic experiences she describes, I can still find myself in this song. Of course there’s no requirement to relate to music to enjoy it, but, in writing this paragraph specifically, I believe I’m coming to see that I relate much more strongly to these songs than I had initially expected. Fiona Apple puts to music words I didn’t even know described my own self, and there’s some cosmic level of universality without sacrificing specificity and ultimate platitudes coinciding with specific descriptions that make her music unfathomably special to me.

23. Waltz (Better Than Fine)

This song likes to trick me into thinking it’s delicate and nice. It may just be me, but it feels like Fiona begins to sing before she even opens her mouth with the characteristic plodding piano that almost immediately reinforce those deceptively whispy first notes. “No I don’t believe in the wasting of time / But I don’t believe that I’m wasting mine” is a lovely little turn of phrase. But the thing I most love about this song, a quality shared with a few others on this list, is that it starts so insubstantially but grows to be so large and grand.

22. On the Bound

I narrowly avoided an egregious error with this post, as I almost forgot to include this song. The battle cry of this song’s chorus, alongside the fantastic industrial instrumental break at its center, makes this song seem much longer and larger than it is, which I suppose justifies its complete consumption of my mind. There’s something in the pure sound of this song, without any regard for the lyrics or meanings or anything, that I want to hold and cherish like a tangible object. Plus, “I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t know / Should I change my mind, I can’t decide / There’s too many variations to consider” is my personal most relatable Fiona Apple lyric, summarily describing the last few years of my life in just a few words.

21. Left Alone

I can remember thinking that the lyrics to this song said, “How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be loved” instead of “…beg to be left alone.” Which is kind of a great alternative, but I’m not the one writing the song. I think these are some of Fiona’s greatest, dually most challenging and rewarding lyrics, and I’m obsessed with the transition into her upper register on “tears calcify,” and also just the word “calcify,” and I get a thrill each time “And now I’m hard / Too hard to know” comes in, and perhaps I just love this song.

20. Periphery

The song just gets me excited in the anxious anticipatory kind of way. I supposed I’m just anticipating the joy of hearing this song once again. I love the piano line, pounding out over the percussive scrapes. There’s also such joy in hearing Fiona Apple sing the phrase “peripheral idiots,” both in a thematic sense and a purely auditory sense. I remember thinking, the first time I heard this song, that “All that lovin’ must have been lacking something / If I got bored tryin’ to figure you out” would be a repeated line—and I still, after countless repeats of the song, almost expect it each time. It’s not a letdown, though, to hear “You let me down / I don’t even like you anymore at all.” It’s an understanding that this song, and any art, really, doesn’t exist within the confines of my limited mind, that all of this I now discuss is truly much greater than I have the skill to synthesize. That, and this song just jams in unexpected directions, and it’s perfect. I love the upper-register meanderings in the end, I love the lingering scrapes, I love this song.

19. Love Ridden

“No, not ‘baby’ anymore. If I need you, I’ll just use your simple name. Only kisses on the cheek from now on, and, in a little while, we’ll only have to wave.” Perhaps the most devastating breakup lyric I’ve yet to encounter. There’s an understated finality to those lines: I’m not leaving you violently. I’m not leaving abruptly. I’m slipping away slowly, first losing your pet name, then foregoing passionate kisses to chaste pecks on the cheek, and finally, we see each other merely as acquaintances. It’s a slow melt away from love, love dissolving like sugar water, until there’s no trace of what once was. Man, I’m sad now.

18. Better Version of Me

A few months ago, I desperately wanted to listen to this song but couldn’t remember which song it was. I just knew I needed to hear “that one line about Caesar crossing the Rubicon” and could not connect it to a refrain or song title no matter how I strained my mind. Imagine me in clear distress thumbing through all the Fiona Apple songs I don’t know by rote trying to find that one line about the Rubicon, getting more frustrated by the second as it fails to materialize.

Anyway. I love this song. I doubt I’ll forget it again. That delicious first line—”The nickel dropped when I was on my way beyond the Rubicon”—begins a sonic love affair with multisyllabic rhymes and characteristically precise diction throughout. I find equal joy in listening to this song and pondering over the genius that went into some of these lines, that Rubcion one probably at the forefront of my ponderings. Plus, I love when singers take a repeated phrase in a song and change the phrasing on its repetition—not unique to Fiona, but she does it incredibly on the last “Here it comes, a better version of me.” And I believe in the intensity and focus of that line. Here it comes, indeed.

17. Window

This song and “Parting Gift” are paired to me. Both examine little moments, little realizations that absolutely are not large enough to warrant immortalizing, but Fiona makes them reflective and essential and resonant beyond the bounds of their ordinariness. Beyond the contemplation and reflection, though, I think this song just jams. Nothing more to say on that.

16. Werewolf

Absolutely head-over-heels in love with the line “Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key.” Listening to that line for the first time, I recall, filled me with the same kind of incredulity and awe that I feel when I cannot believe someone could have created something so astounding. And it’s a simple line, perhaps even a simple thought, but I just couldn’t believe a metaphor could be expressed so elegantly and neatly and succinctly. I also just kind of love the discordant screaming sounds (?) that start to overtake the background to this song. It feels like environmental placement, locating this song more clearly in reality, or grounding it among the everyday beat of life, or something like that.

This is the last mini-review I wrote on this list. Just thought I’d mention that.

15. Every Single Night

This is a song that makes people dislike being around me, because, if I’m not inhibiting my natural impulses, I will start singing it every time the phrase “every night” comes up in conversation. But I love that anthemic, harshly melismic (is that even possible?) chorus on “brain,” and I love the infinitely lighter but similarly fluid and proceeding “I just want to feel everything.” The simple vibraphone chords of the beginning also make this a perfect album opener, deceptively delicate but soon giving way to something much more powerful and commanding. I talk a lot about Fiona Apple and contrast, but I think this song may be the best capsule of her multitudes, from those spare, vibraphone backed phrases of the verses, to that huge layered call, to the barely-there but also barely-contained desperation of “I just want to feel everything.”

14. Shadowboxer

I would love to talk to the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Fiona Apple who wrote this song. I have so much sympathy for that girl, knowing what she must have been going through, what horrific experiences gave her the maturity to produce the art she did at such a young age. It’s a delicate balance—I would never want to romanticize what she went through that allowed her to produce great art—but I also stand in awe to the development of her mind, the incredulity that a sixteen-year-old could have written “Once my lover, now my friend / What a cruel thing to pretend.” When I was fifteen I dated a guy for three weeks, and then I broke up with him because I didn’t know what to do with him. This isn’t about me, and I almost want to delete that sentence, but I’m going to keep it as a kind of tribute: that I still can’t match the complexity and incisive honesty Fiona was creating at five years younger than I am now.

13. Largo

I should probably retract everything I’ve said about auditory beauty and Fiona Apple, because the chorus of this song is unreservedly one of the most beautiful I’ve heard anywhere (“When over the rainbow’s too far”? God). But there she goes again, making the verses plodding and meandering and infinitely heavier than the lilting refrain. In writing this post, I realized that my deep love for this song could not overcome the fact that I understood very little of it. I like the kind of opacity she engages here, though—it would take most casual listeners some time on genius.com to understand all of her references, but she still perseveres with them, because that’s the most clear way of expression. It feels almost like she’s writing to herself, a diary entry of a song that seems to recount a specific path she herself once followed.

With all of that said, I definitely spent a worrying amount of time thinking this song was about the musical tempo.

12. Paper Bag

This is another song that has a great type of contrast for me. I love the almost playful bounce and exchange in her voice alongside the damning lyrics. Were I not bouncing to this beat, I would be doing a full analysis of the rhyme scheme and meter of the verses in this song, but I’m too distracted feeling the song wash through me to think about it too deeply at the moment. I love that this song is deductive, general to specific, building a mood and tone and feeling before actually introducing the narrative core to the piece. I’m definitely not doing this song justice, but I hope its influence in writing these meager sentences shines through enough to see that I cannot possibly do it justice.

11. Limp

I’m obsessed with the restraint in this song. The verses enter not only seeming benign but also with a certain slow tenderness to them, no warning to the anger unleashed in the chorus. You could almost imagine this a love song, a sad ballad to romance lost. But then, there is that glorious little spin on “day of doom”—that I often replay on repeat, just that one word for ages—that portents what’s to come. There’s a defiance in it, a defiance of the simplicity and softness that introduced the verse, a defiance of the woman who would have sung that softness. And suddenly “my fingers turn to fists / I never did anything to you,” and it’s building into the defiant angry anthemic shout that this song truly is, emerging from that softness to the fullness of righteous anger. I love this song and its slow decision into its final form, those incredible brass hits punching against the equally forceful “So call me crazy / Hold me down / Make me cry / Get off now, baby.” And I would be remiss not to mention the drum fill, which I, ignorant to the workings of percussion instruments, could never analyze, but I most certainly and uneducatedly love it.

10. Hot Knife

This was my first Fiona song, the one that started it all. I heard a gorgeous cover at a concert (that sounded nothing like the original), and I was intrigued enough to explore its source. I could hear nothing of the cover I so loved, but I fell in love in an entirely new way. That the songs on Fetch the Bolt Cutters purportedly sound most like this one is purely good news for me.

More than any other Fiona Apple song, I love the use of the voice in this one. It’s just fun to listen to—not that the lyrics aren’t deserving of praise; they surely are; I love the catharsis in the transition from “If I’m butter / He’s a hot knife” to “I’m a hot knife / He’s a pat of butter.” But the lyrics and the ideas do tend to step back from the spotlight in favor of the circling, layering vocals. I don’t shy from saying this is a beautiful song: one of my favorite things about The Idler Wheel is that there is no pressure to squeeze humanity and fullness and simple existence into the narrow confines of “beauty,” but sometimes, like a chiefly precise archer, Fiona hits that target anyway. This song is also much more complex than my first time processing it told me. The “Maybe you could teach me something / Maybe I could teach you too” countermelody completely escaped my notice for months, but, most thankfully, I’ve heard it now, and I laser-focus on it every time.

9. Daredevil

There’s a lot of great, weird percussion on The Idler Wheel that I definitely haven’t yet appreciated enough. This song is percussively driven, matched with spare, staccato bursts of piano chords and some more cathartically angry lyrics. This is another song I recall hearing in the car in May 2018, with the desperate “Seek me out” section immediately memorable. In fact, that’s one of my favorite moments on the whole album, when I feel Fiona truly abandons any pretension of beauty and perfection and instead delves into feeling and demanding and understanding and catharsis without the oppressive walls of prettiness to hold her in. Actually, scratch that. I wouldn’t say there’s even any pretension of beauty in most of The Idler Wheel; this line is just where the unpolished and unretouched truth at the core of the work becomes most plain. And you can bet, whatever my own emotional state, I’m ready to scream right there alongside her.

8. A Mistake

This is musically one of the best Fiona Apple songs. When those weird sounds I don’t know how to describe first come in—it’s about to get wild. I love the irreverence of this song, the absolute unabashed admission of wrongness. At the same time, though, there’s a pain underneath the wryness: there’s a feeling that this is inevitable, that the fucked-up-ness can’t be held off more, that the devil-may-care attitude in admitting a sin conceals a deep sadness that this is recurrent. “I’m as full as a tick” is such an unsettling, vivid line. This is also an odd song for me to love so much, seeing as I don’t relate to it in the slightest—this is a portrait of a person who is emphatically not me. I think I can say that about many of the songs I’ve discussed; Fiona Apple’s lived experiences are several universes removed from mine, but I hope my appreciation can hurdle those bounds of divergence.

7. Fast As You Can

Let’s make something clear. When the Pawn is my favorite Fiona Apple album. And this song is the highest ranked song from it. Those are not mutually exclusive. As a complete work, When the Pawn is the most brilliant, cohesive, fascinating album because of the interplay between the songs, the connections in emotion between them, the experience of hearing it beginning to end without a minute’s respite from being bowled over by its mastery. The songs as individuals can’t possibly hold up against the weight and heft and craft of the album as a whole, and rightfully so.

That said, this song is brilliant. Fiona Apple does sad ballads well, but she equally shines against the aggressive, relentless patter of auxiliary percussion, the only difference being that her lyrics patter and fly with the percussion on this one. And, while it never outshines Fiona’s hard-edged, clear-voiced power, that clashing percussion is in itself award-worthy. Bonus points for the weird bassoon runs in the middle that are a particular object of my obsession and have fascinated me since I first heard the song and gasped—the absolute audacity to put a bassoon in there. I experience a love so intense it feels like chest pain when I hear those bassoon lines. All in all, a truly swell song on an even better album.

6. Parting Gift

Like “Window,” this is a song of everyday life. Fiona makes observations in this song that feel like they should be obvious, that feel like they should be facts of an ordinary life, but they somehow aren’t, or else she defamiliarizes them into more noteworthy occasions by stating them so plaintively. “I took off my glasses when you were yelling at me once, more than once / So’s not to see you see me react.” Moments like that seem too mundane to possibly make the subject of a song, not a moment to be crystallized, let alone noticed. But that’s what I love about this song. It takes moments that don’t feel worthy of singing and then makes them sing beautifully. I think it’s a very poetic sentiment, capturing the everyday and making it art. It also reminds me of an interview with Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast) that I heard recently in which Michelle discussed her everyday method of making songs, the specific skill that is recognizing and capitalizing upon small but resonant moments.

5. Tymps (Sick in the Head Song)

If the song following this was the first Fiona Apple song I truly loved, this was the second. It’s funny to remember the times when I would drive around over the summer of 2018 and play these songs before I really knew who Fiona Apple was and, indeed, before I cared about music in general on the level of its importance in my life today. I think this song was much more about the sonic experience of hearing it than the meaning or lyrics for a good while, but I’m taking the step to think it over more fully right now and once again admiring Fiona Apple’s remarkable myriad of ways to transform pain and regret into art. But, anyway, I think this is a perfect song. I love singing it, I love dancing to it, I love ruminating over the lyric “those boom times went bust” until I begin to feel an unimaginable happiness that someone like Fiona Apple exists to place those words into that order in this improbable world. And I love the little flip on “hope” in each chorus. Purely superficial love, but it is true and real nonetheless.

4. Extraordinary Machine

I think this is the first Fiona Apple song I truly loved. Between this and “Tymps,” I think those two songs solely drive the nostalgic qualities Extraordinary Machine has adopted for me. As I recall, I was listening to Extraordinary Machine for the first time because of another song that came highly recommended, but this is the one that stood out to me, that begged me to learn every word. This feels like a very neat song to me—everything very contained and precisely placed, especially the cleanness of the descending melody on the latter part of the title phrase. I love the interruptions to the melodic lines, already staccato—giving weight to simple “and”s. (“I certainly haven’t been shopping for any new shoes / AND / I certainly haven’t been spreading myself around.”) I love the line “I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” I fear I’m not satisfactorily articulating why this song is so highly placed, but I just love it. Also, I find this song eminently satisfying to sing. I sang it in the shower the other night.

3. Valentine

It took a good two years for me to really fall for this song, but when I tell you that fall I have…I would invite this song to a February 14th dinner before almost all humans. There’s the fact that it feels like two entirely different songs, between the slow, melancholic verses (with some of my favorite ever rhymes—”You didn’t see my valentine / I sent it via pantomime”) and the faster, almost frenetic energy of the refrain. I’m obsessed with the lyric “I’m a tulip in a cup”—partially spurred by the pleasure of hearing her crisp “P” diction. There’s also a compelling dual sense of tenderness and frustration, love and anger that I think drives a great amount of Fiona Apple’s best work—and it’s among her best here. The simple intensity in “I root for you / I love you / You you you you” is quite certainly a factor in that quality.

2. Never is a Promise

Song I’ve replayed most while crying in the past few months award goes to this lil number. I think you might just have to go listen to this one to understand. But I’ll attempt to convey my experience of listening to “Never is a Promise.”

First of all, this is a long song. Only a bonus for me; I drink up Joanna Newsom’s ten-minute ballads, so six glorious minutes feels justified. The miracle of “Never is a Promise” is that the six minutes not only feel entirely necessary; it leaves me wishing for the six secret verses I might unlock should I listen to it again…well, maybe next time…and I better try again, just in case. The song opens with a sprawling orchestral accompaniment, but Fiona’s voice enters as a harmonious contrast, a smoky and grounded sound against the stratospheric violins and the agile piano, so honest in its timbre that the words themselves are simply ornamentation to her truth. For six minutes she devastates me with the combined power of that voice, here rich and low and there a silvery brush into a higher register, and the artistry of the song itself. My favorite lyric is one that regularly consumes my brain for full days: “You say don’t fear your dreams…it’s easier than it seems.” May I also offer a possible winner for best single word in a Fiona Apple song? “Undulate.” Of course. And then, just because this song can’t possibly be easy, the ending devolves from poetic ballad into a somewhat discordant finale that I would surely have words to explain were I better at music theory. Alas, as it stands, I can only stare in awe into middle space and somehow drag my prostrate form to press the “repeat” button again.

1. Red Red Red

This is the best Fiona Apple song, full stop. Sure, maybe some other songs are more exciting or more radio-friendly or more likely to get you dancing. None of that matters against the sheer lyrical force that is “Red Red Red.” “I don’t understand about complementary colors and what they say / Side by side they both get bright, together they both get gray” is a work of self-contained art and ingenuity that would satisfy me right on the spot. BUT, surprise, that’s just the first two lines of the song—it continues with that same beauty for four minutes. I’m obsessed with “There’s solace a bit in submitting to the fitfully, cryptically true,” all of that paired “I” and “T” assonance and consonance twisting into a lyric that still remains clear and lucid, teetering on an edge but ultimately still meaningful through the games of craft. But, while some Fiona lyrics get all wordy and twisty and multisyllabic in their rhymes (and it’s great), this song also has one of the simplest and deepest emotional punches: “I don’t understand, and I’ll never understand, but I’ll try to understand…there’s nothing else I can do.” Please join me in sobbing, as I have now emotionally destroyed myself with the mere memory of this song. A crowning honor, indeed.

If you’ve made it to the end, congratulations, and please join me in listening to Fetch the Bolt Cutters now. It’s been eight years since we had the opportunity to hear a new Fiona Apple album, and I think it would do you well to take advantage of that fact.

Musical consumption, proving my dad wrong, and what it means to love.

I’ve been on something of a crusade recently. The enemy is my father’s stagnancy; the weapon is my Spotify account.

More specifically: I’m trying to prove to my father that discovering new music is worthwhile, even when you’ve already discovered a great deal of music you love.

Speaking about music feels incongruous to me sometimes. It feels like I don’t have the knowledge and expertise to make strong, supported arguments even about my own personal taste. My deep love for music stands on shaky ground without the honed ears of musical knowledge or experience, and it often seems that there is too much I don’t know in the world’s sonic landscape to make any judgments at all. But if I made decisions and arguments solely in fields in which I’m an expert, I think I would have to stop communicating entirely. So, however fledgling my musical expertise may be, I would still like to talk about it.

I had a short and frustrated conversation with my dad recently during which I questioned his music choices. It seemed to me like he was listening to the same songs all the time, and had been doing so for years, without exploring anything beyond that collection. He confirmed I was right; he felt no compulsion to discover anything new, content with the limited list that he’d had for years.

And I thought that must be a sad state for a human to exist in. I told him I had probably listened to five new albums in just the past week (and shortly confirmed it; I started keeping a spreadsheet of all of my new musical ventures), and I couldn’t understand feeling content with the knowledge that almost the entirety of the musical world has not touched your ears yet. Which sounds kind of Hallmark-y, gimmicky, idealistic. But, for me, there’s truth in that sense of possibility.

I’ll never be able to hear every piece of music that exists. That’s an impossibility. But that doesn’t make trying any less worthwhile. It doesn’t mean I should confine myself to 200 songs I’ve already heard and enjoyed when a song that eclipses all of them could be somewhere in the world, ready to rattle my eardrums.

So, back to my crusade. Thus far, it has largely taken the shape of frantically consuming as many new pieces of music as possible. One thing I try to recognize is what media I would like to hear at a given time—rather than running on autopilot, actually asking myself what I would like to be feeling and experiencing in a given moment. That somewhat goes out the window when I’m consuming music for the first time and don’t know what to expect. But there is an emotional line between trying new music and re-listening, and I’ve been firmly on the former side of it this week. Hearing songs I’ve heard before feels irritating recently. While I haven’t shied from exploration in the past, rarely is it that I will solely rely on exploration—there’s often a balance of old and new favorites in my headphones. It’s a ratio that has entirely diminished as I frenetically skip from album to album, trying to cram as much music as possible into my limited time to hear it.

I still feel I’m on the right side of the argument. There is too much good undiscovered music in the world to settle on just the top-40 hits of the 2000s and early 2010s. But perhaps I’m missing a point here. I’ve been listening so continually and so wildly that I’ve barely given myself time to process. There are albums I’ve loved and wanted to revisit that I passed over in favor of something new.

I’ve been questioning what it means for me to love a song, an album, an artist. With the rate of consumption I’ve forced recently, it feels impossible to love anything. And that feels defining of rapid, shallow consumption promoted by capitalism and “fast” industries. I think at least part of my bid to consume as much as possible is a Western obsession with not only unchecked consumption but also absolute mastery and productivity. If I’m not maximizing every moment I have to hear something new, it must be wasted. I need to somehow accelerate my process of hearing music so that I can make up for time lost not exploring certain genres or artists. I need to somehow get myself to the point of musical expertise that will allow me to unabashedly hold opinions. And so I must consume and consume and consume.

There was a time I would revel in the same song for hours. That time was just a few weeks ago. But now that feels selfish. I swipe to skip song after song on curated playlists. I feel an overall unsettling restlessness about the whole process of consuming music.

Which perhaps signals to me that I’ve gone too far. I think I need to relax. But I think it’s also somewhat incredible that I will never reach the end of the music in the world. I can entirely replace the songs in my headphones every day and still find more to hear. With that mindset, how can I stop looking for more? But, at the same time, how can I balance that wide-cast net with deep love of individual songs?

What truly is it to love a piece of music? How much is it correlated with time listened—have I missed out on songs I love because I never peaked past the activation energy of a second or third listen? Am I devaluing individual pieces of music now in the view of obsessively ramping up the number of albums I’ve heard in my life?

Perhaps there have been missed connections with songs I might have loved on their fifth time through. Perhaps I wasn’t listening closely enough and dismissed a potential favorite.

There’s no better time for uncertainty than now, I suppose. But I remain certain that exploring new music is vital. Stagnancy in music feels indicative of a much larger problem (or maybe that’s just me conflating artistic consumption with life again—see previous post). At any rate, there are many questions and uncertainties that all seem to coalesce in my artistic consumption recently, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about this series of them.

 

 

Things I love, but now in quarantine. (With a side of fan culture criticism.)

I habitually make posts like this, describing many objects of my consumption that have meant a great deal to me in recent times. I’ve been reflecting on the very nature of this idea, though, in the past few days—the idea that much of what consumes my brain and my everyday activities comes from an interest in (for the most part) various types of art. It relates back to fan culture and, most particularly for me, fanart, and how those are no longer desirable communities for me. I’ve been wondering where the self who doesn’t know about the objects of my obsession and interest exists—if she resembles the me who forms her life around being a fan. It used to be a badge of honor, I think, that I loved things so deeply that I wanted to build them into the fabric of my soul. Now, as it stands, I’m slightly repulsed by the idea. Not that being a fan is a bad thing, but more that I’m losing a self who exists outside of that identity. That I’ve spent so many years burying myself in books and music and podcasts and theater that I no longer recognize myself as a being autonomous from those influences.

And I think that goes back to my obsession with transformation and self-betterment. I keep feeling like I can read and listen and watch and consume myself into a different person, like, if I simply read enough of a specific type of book or listened to enough highly lauded albums or watched enough of the right TV shows, I could be some fantastical better version of me. I want there to be a blueprint to becoming a better person. But there isn’t, or at least none I’ve found and can decipher in a way that works for me, so I want to consume my way into the ideal self. If I can provide myself with enough cultural identifiers, if I can hone my taste to the fabled “good,” I’ll be better. I’ll be pleased with myself. I can stop frenetically reaching for the concrete actions that will assert my improvements. And it’s just not true. There’s a me whose essence can’t be expunged by any amount of consumption, and I would do well to try and address that me. Maybe. This is still a developing philosophy.

So, in short, I’ve been questioning the very nature of liking and loving media recently. Which is odd, considering I’ve built a fair few conversations, relationships, radio show segments (shout out WWEC), monetary transactions, and, yes, prior blog posts on the concept. I think the place I’m trying to reach is one of more balance, where I am separate from the art I love and exist without those few designated art objects I love. When I state it like that, it begins to feel I’ve been falling into a dangerous place for years, losing myself to rampant obsession and uncontrolled love. And maybe that’s true. I think it rings true at least a little bit. I’ve allowed what I do to eclipse what I am, even from an internal standpoint. And I think, now, that I would like to lean more into the being than the doing. Not quite sure what it means yet, but it feels right to attempt existence as a prerequisite to consumption.

That said, I think what I’m about to post just contradicts all of those paragraphs. But philosophical ramblings be damned; I want to share multiple things I’ve loved recently.

i. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

It is probably not a shock to find this one here. As many of you likely know, I started reading Tolstoy’s magnum opus in December, about two years after finishing his other master work, War and Peace. I knew I would love it, having been recommended by two separate people whose tastes I highly value and given my extreme love for the previous Tolstoy I had read. I spent considerably more time with this book than with most others, but it never felt unworthy of that time. To the contrary, I found it enriching to read Tolstoy’s words through weeks and months and events and happenings in my own life.

With some further reflection, I think what I love so much about Tolstoy is the absoluteness of his commitment to emotion and the complex humanity of his characters. His writing seems to value an emotional core before anything else, adorning a feeling with words as the chiefest of his motivations, and I admire that. Perhaps it’s closer to an expression of my ideal writing than most any other writer—what I most appreciate as a reader appears to be that strong emotional core and a unique prose to capture the singularity of that emotion. It’s a goal bolstered by the beauty and pain and multilayered nature of his characters, who are the closest to human I think exist within fiction. The title woman of this novel was a particularly fascinating figure for me, as she grapples with many near-universal ideas on a drastic scale. Anna continually strives for a life and an existence that brings her joy. At her core, before any of the ornamentations of morality or virtue or religion or propriety, Anna wants to be happy in her everyday life, but that simple human goal eventually leads to destructive consequences for so many. It’s making me emotional to relive that reading experience now, realizing that I’m trying to answer Anna’s same questions and coming up against many of the same blockages of reality.

ii. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill

Someone needs to shame my past self for (among many other things) her musical selections. I put myself through such a massive deprivation by solely listening to musical theater albums for years, but I think the trade-off is that there are still so many artists I get to hear for the first time. Listening to Lauryn Hill for the first time is…many things. It’s a greater historical understanding—thanks to the arbitrary nature of linear time in the face of music I consume, I saw the roots of artists I already love in Miseducation. Among artists I know, I think Hill’s influence of Janelle Monáe was the most noticeable, but I could hear remnants of many artists I love in her words, and it felt like I was uncovering an essential piece of musical history as I listened to this album. Beyond that, though, listening to this album felt like witnessing a mastery I didn’t even know existed. That probably speaks at least in part to my still-developing musical senses, but I hope it also speaks to Hill’s singular voice and musicality. While I wasn’t immediately gripped from the first few songs, consuming the album as a whole piece felt important—like the first time I listened to it, at my work-from-home desk while resizing files for my thesis, will in time become a treasured memory.

iii. nikki nack by Tune-Yards

Because I can’t just talk about one album I love at a time, this is another I heard and fell in love with for the first time this past week. Tune-Yards’ W H O K I L L is probably on my list of favorite ever albums, and it was a rare one that immediately struck me with its genius—before I had even finished the album, I was replaying sections and songs multiple times, trying in vain to most fully digest the brilliance of “Gangsta” (she harmonizes with a sample of a siren, folks. I can’t take it). I wouldn’t say nikki nack quite reached that exulted level, but I definitely loved it. Merrill Garbus, the woman behind Tune-Yards, has such a fascinating way of using her voice. In certain contexts, if I let myself listen on the aural equivalent of a microscopic level, I think her voice can even veer into unpleasantness, and yet I still love those moments. I’ve never heard a voice used like hers before, and it continually draws back my ear and attention from distraction. I think this album bears repeated listens because the balance of musicality and lyricism tends to draw me towards the music first and its unique qualities, but the lyrics are equally worth attention, and I know my appreciation will grow as I keep listening.

iv. Hidden Brain podcast: “Passion Isn’t Enough” by NPR, Shankar Vedantam, & Eitan Hersh

This interest started, as many of mine do, with Samantha Seely explaining it to me (in a car coming home from Giant). After many such explanations of Hidden Brain episodes, I have finally started to listen to the podcast myself, and I can say it has definitely paid off. Of the episodes I’ve heard, though, this one hit me the hardest. It describes the increasing regard of politics as a game—a need to be informed and to know the facts without taking real action. Eitan Hersh, a political scientist, describes how viewing politics this way removes people from what’s truly at stake: power. Politics, the way he sees it (a point he argued quite effectively), is about securing power, and those who remember that fact are those who make a difference. The most striking example he gave was a man who, by helping to secure citizenship for many residents at his nursing home, mobilized hundreds of older immigrants to America to vote. Rather than being caught in the minutiae of facts and scandals, this man was helping his community and securing a voice for himself and those around him. He was focused on power, not play.

I think this episode was most resonant for me because I could feel the guilt of a superficial association with the political sphere. I would never say I’m apolitical; I try to keep up with issues and I always vote, but I know I’m more of a political hobbyist than anything else. The types of community outreach necessary for securing power and actually making political difference are obviously significantly hindered right now, but hearing what actually motivates political change—and how I myself am failing to perform those actions—felt aspirational. The game comparison, while it can seem trite, has many applications: the “other side” is not an entity to be shallowly hated and demonized like a rival sports team; it is far more noble and necessary to build communities, share personal stories, and work for overall betterment. Empty words, to an extent, when many of us are just trying to get through each day alive, but (like I said) aspirational.

v. On Being podcast by Krista Tippett, On Being Studios

I could list and describe number of episodes of this podcast deserving of special mention, but I instead want to talk about On Being as a whole first. At times, I feel unworthy of listening to these conversations, because the entire ethos of the podcast is fostering communication, dialogue, and critical examination of topics like religion, spirituality, race, gender, and oppression. It’s a lofty goal done well. The message behind it that pervades each episode tells of a more ideal world than the one we inhabit, one that allows us to more fully see and understand each other, one without the complications of reality. And, well, I’m more imperfect than the inhabitants of that ideal world. That’s just it, though, isn’t it? That’s why I should be hearing conversations about building bridges and reaching cooperation. I like to put on my self-righteous boots and widely, indiscriminately dislike people sometimes, but listening to this podcast reminds me that there is a much more important method of existence.

To spotlight a few episodes I enjoyed recently, Pauline Boss’ interview about ambiguous loss (at the recommendation of Amy Shorner-Johnson) gave words to much of what I’ve felt recently. The Indigo Girls’ episode was a great addition to my love of their music as well as a moving exploration of queer activism and queer spirituality. Erik Vance gave a fascinating look at endogenous chemicals in our brains that can potentially act more effectively than treatments or medication, providing enough fodder for metaphor to last several essays at least. Patrisse Cullors (artist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, a personal inspiration of mine) and Robert Ross (a new voice of inspiration) taught me new ways of imagining the world, however unlikely that seems from an hour-long podcast. Each conversation is guided by host Krista Tippett, and I feel like my own interview skills have passively grown in listening to her skillful navigation and guidance. I would highly, highly recommend this podcast if you want to be challenged and reinvented in the course of an hour.

On the off chance that multiple readers see this, I hope you are all staying healthy and finding improbable pockets of happiness and love. Thank you for being here and reading my words.

Thoughts from Quarantine

I wrote this about two weeks ago. The emotions have flattened somewhat, but the sentiments remain.

–

I don’t exactly know what this whole mess of words will turn out to be. I don’t know, really, what I’m doing or thinking about at all. But it feels impossible to lie here and refrain from creating something in response to our world’s collective crisis.

I’m fairly used to the feeling of hopelessness. I find that my thought spirals often circle my inability to create big change and the absolute smallness of my being, the impossibility of mattering. But I’ve never felt this particular brand of hopelessness. We are all in pain, we are all hurting, and I don’t know where to go from here, where to tuck that feeling and move onto more actionable impulses. We’re all coexisting on a ticking time bomb, and I somehow still need to find space in my brain to complete exams.

I understand the value of maintaining “normalcy,” trying to retain as much of our past life with us, but I’m having a harder and harder time envisioning that possibility. I want to cry for an hour and then sleep until sundown. I want to laugh with my friends at the safe distance afforded by computer screens and hug my mother amid the close distance of co-quarantine. We are living something greater than any of us can imagine, and we can’t even reach out to each other and help. We could kill each other with the so very human desire to hold out our hand and lift up those who struggle. And that feels impossible to experience. There is a rift between myself, living in my own life and trying to weather this odd storm, and myself, a potential vector for a problems billions of orders of magnitude larger than this self. All I want is to live in the world again.

And maybe that world is irrevocably flawed and filled to the brim with pain, and that existence feels no less impossible than this one. But I could at least keep my footing on reality, knowing that I can walk out my front door as myself, and not as future patient X.

99 Percent Identical

I am writing a story, and so I will start with words.

Return. Tolerant. Charter. Gravel.

Linguists argue about the exact number of English words in existence, but my Oxford English Dictionary requires two hands to lift, and so I’m prepared to accept the lofty estimate of a million.

Democratic. Vegetarian. Seed.

I have one million pieces of language at my disposal to tell this story. According to a test I took on the internet last year, I have over 32,000 of those words directly accessible in my arsenal.

Publicity. Activate. Horoscope.

One million words from a twenty-six-letter alphabet. A deceptively finite toolset to build a seemingly infinite vocabulary, each of the words a different combination of between one and 189,819 letters. Each story I tell is just a permutation of twenty-six symbols and the spaces between them.

Trick. Decline. Crevasse. Animosity.

The longest English word is the full scientific name of the largest known protein. At over 189,000 letters, it’s more manageably known as titin. Stories are made of words of letters, some of them long enough to require three hours to pronounce. An even more finite set of those letters spell out the stories in our DNA, the repeating bases that are strung into chains of three billion links, labelled simply as A, T, C, and G. Adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, their letters repeated and sequenced and recombined, spell out the code that tells the world how to create us. We are written like stories with words in four letters; our chapters are our genes. AAGTCGCG is a sentence in a language our bodies read, an instruction that initiates the first spark of our being.

My genetic code gave me my blonde hair and blue eyes, my height, my metabolism. I know that one sequence buried in my genome tells my body to have a predisposition for alcoholism. Because of a gene called TAS2R38, I dislike the taste of coffee. And a group of six genes tells my skin cells to produce a low number of the molecules we call melanin. The thorny societal issue of skin color is a matter of six genes, an enzyme called tyrosinase, and a misattributed significance to a natural range of human possibilities.

The nebulous force that is “society” wants to simplify and reduce the truth in these stories. The truth, though, is that even the story told in DNA is far less simple than we want it to be. Only one percent of DNA actually consists of genes—human genes are a fragmented novel floating around among internet message boards, miscellaneous song lyrics, and IKEA furniture instructions. The detritus of DNA consists of sections that regulate the genes, extraneous fragments, large areas of repeating sequences. There are portions of the DNA that exist to copy and reinsert themselves into other areas of the genome, like a boisterous and unwelcome party guest. Our DNA has to protect itself against its own intrusion. If DNA is a story, it’s War and Peace: no coherent genre, an overabundance of story lines, tangents abounding, philosophical and religious musings interrupting the narrative told within. The impulse to reach sweeping conclusions about genetics relies on an ideal genome with none of the complications of reality. As is often the case, the story is more complex than its popular depiction.

I can’t control that the melanocytes in my skin produce more light-colored DHICA-eumelanin instead of the darker DHI-eumelanin any more than I can deactivate my need for oxygen. But I live in a society that has written stories of how individuals from each group should be, and I am on the kinder side of those narratives because of my white skin. Those stories that start with DNA end in racism.

~

I can’t control my skin pigmentation, but I can control what I choose to do with the privilege it affords me. Retrospectively speaking, I don’t think studying abroad was the right choice to make. It certainly isn’t true that studying abroad is only possible for white students—there were several students of color within my program—but the population of students with the resources to have this experience are, admittedly, mostly white. The stories that have limited opportunities for people of color in the United States since its inception are still at play, reducing wages and increasing prison sentences and affecting lives in ways I will never comprehend. I live in a country that was founded on racism, among a society of wealthy white families whose familial wealth came from slave labor, and I benefit from that history. I can regurgitate facts all I want, though; it doesn’t change the fact that I used those benefits to essentially go on a three-month vacation. Even in the view that my study abroad experience came directly from my college attendance, my ability to attend a private institute resulted from the same privilege. Any way you look at it, being white and from a financially stable family brought me to this place where I am now, and it took me to Florence, Italy.

My time in Florence was constantly tinged with the sense of “I am not supposed to be doing this”—a sense that, if I had the resources and opportunity to run away to Europe, I surely could have done something far more productive with all that time and money. Perhaps I could have aided the fight in worldwide LGBTQ liberation, or organized action against the horrific treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in my home country. But no, I thought I should go to Europe instead.

My first few weeks in Italy felt like I was constantly watching myself and thinking, The audacity!—like an out-of-body experience. Maybe that was a fault of mine, refusing to be fully present in the moment out of disbelief. It was a combination of genuine awe, in the vein of I’m really standing on ground that is not in the US for the very first time ever, and that sense of betrayal, even, that I decided to do this rather than follow some grand gesture of goodwill. Maybe it was, in a way, an insult to all of those deserving people who would have been fully present, who just didn’t have the privilege my story holds. Therein lies an issue with which I grappled for the duration of my time abroad: how to fully accept and enjoy my experience while reconciling the extreme privilege that allowed me to have it.

These are the times when I regret having gone abroad at all. I have no good “defense” for the fact that I did this—I feel like I need to excuse myself for following through with it. No amount of musing or questioning will erase the fact that I am a very privileged person who chose to exercise that privilege in an almost flamboyant way.

There’s this sense that I’m not supposed to acknowledge any of this—that I’m supposed to accept this privilege as my normal and avoid thinking about it too hard lest I feel guilty about it. But that’s part of my story now. I chose this; it’s the narrative I created within my life. I’m not one to say that things happen for a reason, but I doubt I could continue on without rationalizing those reasons and writing those coherent plots after the fact. It’s what I’m trying to do in writing this. I need to find how this fits into my life. I need to pinpoint a place for my time abroad within the larger context of my ongoing life in the states, as an artist, as a student.

I find it vaguely embarrassing to even get into the topic of studying abroad, if I’m truly being honest. What can I possibly say—I decided to hemorrhage my euros in Italy for a few months? That part is true, but nobody wants to hear that, right? We all want to continue believing the myths of white supremacy—that all of this is earned and deserved rather than built from a system of inherent inequality and subjugation.

All humans are 99 percent identical, genetically speaking, but those shared stories diverge when they come in contact with reality.

~

I passed the same Romani women begging on the streets every day in Florence. In English, the common word we have for this population is a slur: g*psy. I came to know the women by their braids, their pink wedge sandals, their long skirts. I stopped wearing long skirts myself, fearing the association that my skirts might have produced in others’ minds, the stories others might read into their folds. The Romani women with their trailing skirts would weave between tourists in the busiest parts of the city, mostly surrounding the Duomo, shaking paper cups full of change and pleading with the crowds in pitiful, half-crying tones. In the orientation for my program, the program leaders told us to ignore them—everyone did. For some members of the Romani community, this was a way of life; they considered begging a career, and even the Italian Supreme Court recognized begging as a Roma cultural practice.

Any research into Romani communities reveals the enormous prejudice and racism they face. They’re repeatedly slandered and their humanity denied; they’re forced out of their homes and communities. Throughout all of Europe, my host country is the one with the most negative perception of the Romani. But those were stories I only uncovered after my daily contact with this culture was a memory, a remnant of a life I no longer lived. In the moments I spent near the Romani, I was always in a race to move further away. The fact that everyone else around me shared the same goals doesn’t make my actions any more noble. I accepted the stories telling me of their untrustworthiness, of the harm they might do. I had enough euro coins rattling in my wallet to buy me a gelato or three on the way to class, coins I could have quickly slipped into their plastic cups, but each day I chose not to. Even when given a daily opportunity to be charitable and giving and open and a force for change, to be the kind of person I like to think I am, I didn’t.

And so I return to wondering what I can truly say for myself. I know with absolute certainty that my story will never consist of their plots. The whole time I was in Italy, the acknowledgement of the begging and pleading people on the street came with the assurance that their story is entirely estranged from my own—theirs will never be my experience. The story granted to me, the privilege and the power, means that I cannot know their truth; I will always be insulated from the reality they inhabit. I will always be traveling down the streets on the way to class, with the ability to stop and buy a gelato should I choose, and they will be desperate and ignored. What started as the story of base pairs and hydrogen bonds transformed into one of cultural misunderstandings and penniless desperation.

All of the English words at my disposal can’t capture their stories. We’re 99 percent identical and a million words apart.

~

Stories perennially undergo simplification. When we tell stories, we’re not just concerned with truth; our tellings are complicated by human impulses of dramatics, and artful language, and understandability. Even when I tell my own stories, I know they’re imperfectly told—to be more enjoyable, to appeal to a wider audience, to fit them into a larger narrative. The stories within this piece are removed from truth even when I attempt to tell them truthfully. Words on a page, even pictures on a page, even both, can’t capture the complexity of a lived story.

It’s like titin. None of us want to wait three hours for our doctors to pronounce titin’s full name—we just need to know that we’re at risk for cardiac disease. We sacrifice meticulous accuracy for the sake of our bodies and their stories, to spend three hours examining potential treatments rather than droning a single word. Likewise, the stories I tell will always be separated from truth by at least a thin film. There will always be some artfulness or forced narration obscuring an objective truth that no longer exists within my telling of it. That’s how we create our stories—trying and forgetting and reducing and simplifying. And trying again, and forgetting and reducing and simplifying.

We say “I loved studying abroad” when we mean “Studying abroad was a complicated experience, and I have a lot of complicated feelings about it.”

We say “I ignored the Romani women on the street” when we mean “I thought about the Romani women and their hurt every day.”

We say “titin” when we mean something much longer and more unwieldy, something whose complexity eludes our ability to easily manage. Because that’s how stories are. Just imitations of a life too expansive for these twenty-six letters.

~

One of titin’s roles is to provide structure to the chromosomes, where DNA is located. We invented the longest English word to describe the substance that physically gives support to the origin of our stories, our language, our letters. We exist to make decisions and derisions, to create words and the stories they build, to pass judgments and beggars on the street—to give a 189,000-letter name to titin—because of titin itself.

We can tell stories because of the story that told us.

Speaking Easy

This is a piece I wrote for my thesis.

~

When I tell a story in words, it is, by necessity, in English. It is the only language I have. Writing stories in the English language is easy for me; it has inherent meaning; it is reliable. Even without trying, I can discern the meaning of English words, whether spoken or written, and I can readily speak my own words into creation. I find comfort in my ability to express myself in English words and to be understood by other English speakers, and I am grateful for the fluency and ease with which I can use the English language. 

This intense appreciation for language itself is a recent development in my life. Until being displaced from the English-speaking world of the U.S., I was not quite aware of what it means to be fluent in a language. While I long had an appreciation for the written word, and I reaped the academic benefits of my writing skills, I took English itself for granted. It seemed impossible that one would not understand this language that I had come to know so familiarly. While I had half-heartedly studied languages for the academic and personal accomplishments of bilingualism, English was sufficient for me in all aspects of my life. I needed no other tongue to conduct my daily activities and express a complete range of what I needed to say, and so other languages seemed more recreational than anything. At best, other languages seemed like abstract concepts, some of which I might understand in time, should I decide to dedicate myself to their study. At worst, I dismissed them as irrelevant out of the misguided notion of English superiority.

I only truly came to value my English when I studied abroad in Italy. Living for over three months in a country where I didn’t speak the language was enlightening in many ways, but it was also a challenge that I did not quite rise to the occasion and conquer. 

During my first few weeks abroad, I was desperate to prove that I deserved to be in Italy at all—I feared that I would be dismissed as just another tourist, unwantedly inserting myself into the pace of Florence, and that I would be better off leaving my English-only self at home. There were guidelines and standards I had to meet, in my mind, to deserve the privilege of studying here—guidelines that I certainly did not meet. By my own set of rules, the Italians I encountered would be completely justified in dismissing me and my below-the-bar skillset. 

I felt rude for forcing any Italian conversation partners I met to use a language with which they were not entirely comfortable, but all of their English skills reliably trumped my few Italian words. As expected, skill levels varied—some Italian people I met spoke English comfortably and seemed eager to practice with a native speaker. Others seemed to resent switching out of their native language, but they still reliably made themselves understandable to me, which was more than generous of them. Each of them impressed me regardless of their skill level; if I could understand what they said, I considered that an impressive level of fluency. I gathered phrases in my brain, scraps of paper, the notes app on my phone—vorrei, una studenta americana, non mi piace, due porzioni—collecting as much language as I could. It was not enough. My few scraps of Italian and abysmal comprehension skills felt more than insufficient; they felt like an insult to the people of the country that had been kind enough to host me.

The first time I spoke more than one word in Italian, out loud, to a native Italian speaker, was on my third day in Italy. After managing to get spectacularly lost, I entered a gelato shop in the small town of Orvieto, asked the woman there for a small cup of chocolate gelato, and promptly became worried that I had misspoken. After a second’s hesitation and apparent confusion, though, likely born of my garbled pronunciation, she understood and began to scoop from the chocolate pan. It was so easy—a matter of a few words—and yet so difficult. I had to constantly repeat those words in my head before speaking so that the pronunciations did not slip away: una coppa piccola, una coppa piccola, una coppa piccola. The sounds and shapes my mouth formed had no inherent meaning to me; I just put my face through the motions of what were apparently words and hoped that I was doing it correctly.

From there, my Italian skills grew slowly each day, but I knew I couldn’t learn much in less than four months. Speaking a second language continued to be both more and less difficult than it seemed. It was easy to memorize a few useful phrases, walk into a shop, and test them out, and I became comfortable with greetings and gelateria transactions. Buongiorno, come stai? Buona serrata, a domani. Vorrei un cono piccolo. Posso provare il cioccolato? It was infinitely more difficult, though, to go off script and speak extemporaneously, to use words without careful planning. For every linguistic accomplishment, there was a healthy measure of disappointment that I had not advanced further. 

The accomplishments, though, were some of my favorite moments in Italy. There was the visit to the cheese vendor at my usual market, a man who spoke very little English, when I successfully had an (admittedly short) conversation with him in Italian. He asked me why I was in Florence (Io studio qui adesso) and how I liked the city (É molto bene!) before giving me a free box of rice. There was the day trip with my program in which I was the only student to order our complimentary gelato in Italian, gaining praise from my program leaders. But it still never felt like enough. I could use my adopted language only in specific places, only in specific situations. Every time I compared my limping Italian to my agile English, advancing my Italian to any level of fluency felt further and further from possible.

Coming from a language that I can manipulate easily, it was frustrating to limit my speech in Italian. Needing to switch to English when concepts became too complex, or lacking the words to speak exactly what I meant and having to settle for a half-truth, or throwing some Italian words into being and hoping they translated the way I thought they did—these were everyday scenarios for me. I was no longer trustworthy when I spoke because I had an incomplete understanding of the very words and structures I needed to use. As someone conscious of my words and how I choose to express myself, it was especially frustrating to lack even the ability to speak simple, direct, inelegant sentences. My slow progress towards a more full use of the language frustrated me, and my future prospects as an Italian speaker scared me—because I feared, once I returned to my English-speaking comfort zone, that my progress would not continue.

The good moments continued, though. In the middle of ordering a chocolate croissant, I somehow forgot the word for “croissant” despite having used it multiple times. I stumbled but quickly recalled it, and the kind server laughed a little bit and told me that I had done a good job. One of my professors praised my Italian progress. I asked a man working at the post office parla inglese?, and he responded with un po. “But,” he said in English, “with my little English and your little Italian, we will make it work.” And we did. He even asked me the correct preposition to use as he handed me an envelope and pen. “You write on the envelope,” I told him, admiring his dedication to the correct use of my language for a two-minute transaction. The most special times, though, occurred in a three-room apartment-turned-speakeasy called L’Appartamento. 

~

I am not particularly good at working against my natural inclinations, and I had some strong anxieties and fears conspiring against me on this particular night. But I was determined that I would attend a multilingual happy hour event at this L’Appartamento place I had heard about, so I invited a friend. The pull to cancel and spend the evening in bed was strong, but I pushed myself to go through with it; I knew that it would be a good experience, regardless of the anxiety I felt beforehand. At 7:00 on a Wednesday night, I met up with my friend Dorcas, and we headed to 11 Via Giraldi.

The will to turn back home continued as we marched up the stairs to the speakeasy, fearing not only the company we would find within but also that this wasn’t real, that there was no apartment bar, that we had the wrong address. A few minutes later, though, five euros poorer and red wine in hand, I formally became acquainted with a place now firmly lodged in my heart and mind.

From that first night, it felt like I had always meant to find L’Appartamento. I found myself among others who cared deeply about life—who wanted to supersede pleasantries and know other people on more complex levels, who weren’t concerned with everyday mundanities and who instead wanted to talk about finding fulfillment in life, and artistic accomplishment, and astute cultural observations. It was an environment in which I felt myself thrive. The first night, I spoke at length with an Italian doctor, who shared many of his experiences working (and learning French) in West Africa. Though at a completely different stage in his life than me, and though he was trilingual to my sad monolingualism, I felt comfortable and excited as our conversation progressed. He was as eager to hear my story as I was to hear his, and, though I sadly have forgotten his name, he holds a special place as the first person to connect with me at the speakeasy.

I eventually ended up at a small table on a candle-lit balcony with Elena, who was to serve her first English-speaking client at her job the next morning and who wanted to make sure her skills were up to par. We took turns trading languages—her speaking English, me speaking Italian—and, while her English skills were impeccable, she never discouraged me as I stumbled and misspoke. I taught her the word “bookstore,” and she taught me the words for “class” and “other” and “place” and “want.” It was a series of awkward half-sentences and “come si dice”s and one-word lapses into English, but I managed to communicate. “What are you doing tomorrow?” Io ho una classe. “Do you live with people from your school?” “No, loro sono di alteri posti.” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “No, non voglio!” As I left, she told me that I was “very good” at speaking in Italian, and it felt like I could have outshone all the candles surrounding us with my happiness.

From then on, every Wednesday night was multilingual speakeasy night. There were times when the apartment was crowded, groups of people populating every inch of the cozy space. On one memorable night, I ran into my program director, Chiara, and her boyfriend, and they introduced me to several friends. We talked about theater and food and music and studying in London, and we laughed about the muddled accents of the Italians educated in England. Chiara convinced me to speak Italian for the group, and we ended up talking about the best gelato places in the city—a topic on which I was (and am) highly qualified to speak. 

Other weeks were more sparsely attended, just a few close groups offering plenty of opportunities for deeper and more intense conversation. One of those weeks brought conversations on art and building a meaningful life with Simone and Alberto, both of whom were making their way as artists in one of the major artistic heritage sites of the Western world. I learned about the limitations often placed on Italian youth, the lack of opportunity to do the very thing I was doing—going abroad, exploring the world. I don’t even remember most of the conversation we had, but I remember feeling inspired and grateful and lucky to be allowed to have this experience. At one point, a young opera singer (who had moved to Florence four days previously) started playing “Clair de Lune” on the piano at the back of the room, and the twinkling notes of one of my favorite pieces solidified the moment into a movie-perfect scene.  

Though I was one of the youngest attendees and one of few Americans to frequent the speakeasy, there was no shortage of people who wanted to share their stories with me. Adél from Hungary, the only person I met who was younger than me, had attended school in London before deciding to move to Florence. Isabella came to Florence from China to learn how to make jewelry, and she was jokingly deemed “the prodigy” for the speed with which she picked up Italian phrases. Simone from southern Italy insisted that his dialect was the best form of Italian to learn, sparking a playful and spirited debate among the Italians in the group every time he brought it up. Fabio refused to speak to me in English until I tried to respond in Italian, and his eyes lit up when I haltingly but correctly responded. Eric from Cameroon had just bought a camera. He spoke Italian proficiently after several years living in Florence, and he wanted to make YouTube videos, but he feared that viewers would make fun of his English. I told him he had nothing to worry about, that the majority of English speakers are non-native speakers like him, and that, if it were up to me, I deemed his English fantastic. I don’t know if I inspired him to fulfill his YouTube aspirations, and I don’t know how to check, because I never got his surname. But I hope he did it.

Beyond all of my doubts and fears and anxieties about living in Florence and speaking Italian, these were people who made me feel alive. They got excited about life and learning and art and culture. They collectively created a space where I felt fulfilled and expansive and deliciously possible—the gathering of virtually the whole world in one apartment, represented by its various citizens, energized me with the notion that there is more possibility than I can know. 

My fears of attending quashed, I got into the habit of going alone, and the warm glow of community and true connection carried me through the twenty-minute solo walk home. Though the realities of being a woman traveling alone at night flitted through my mind, I tried to push all of that away in favor of the happiness I had experienced. On the nights I couldn’t find a friend to accompany me, the benefits of the stories I would share and hear at the speakeasy outweighed the risks of going alone. Perhaps it wasn’t the smartest move, but it’s the move that my Florence self decided to make. Whatever the risks, I’m glad she did it.

~

I went to the speakeasy for the one last time the week before I left Florence. I said a last goodbye to every person I had come to know in a series of shared evenings and conversations; we passed hugs and Instagram handles around the room, and I smiled through the sadness of an inevitable ending. Here was a place that reliably attracted twenty, thirty, fifty interesting and dynamic and diverse individuals every week, and I got to be a part of that—I now live in the minds of people from Hungary, and China, and Cameroon, and Germany, and Croatia, and Canada, and all over Italy. Their stories now live within mine. They motivated and encouraged me to continue speaking a language that felt hopelessly beyond my grasp, but they unknowingly did much more: they made at least one of my nights every week a special one. For a few months, I got to live in a world that contained the whole world, it seemed, and that’s a gift I never knew I needed. I hold few memories more special than the hours I spent at 11 Via Giraldi and the people I met there. On the unlikely chance I ever see any of them again, I hope I’ll once more have the bravery to say grazie di tutto.