May 8 Daily Entry -- Mother's Day Nonsense

Today was a weird one.

I went to bed last night still made as hell about the landlady cashing the rent check she "lost" after I sent her a replacement check. Buddy was not mad about it, so I sent him a lot of texts to help him get appropriately mad and also because I couldn't sleep. So he called me first thing this morning so we could fight about it for an hour while I tried to get dressed for this brunch and art event I was signed up for.

Should. Not. Have. Bothered.

Maybe Mother's Day threw the energy of the city off, but these women at brunch were intense.

The first cast of characters was three older women who have always lived in New York, don't know how to drive, and couldn't figure out whether they had already paid for their meal or what they were allowed to order off the menu.

One of them spent most of the brunch talking about private schools she went to. The woman was nearing 70 and hadn't seen the inside of a school in years, but I guess the topic of which prep schools teach Latin is pretty timeless

Another woman told the whole table about how she got married at city hall in a $14 dress because she didn't value herself. The husband just wanted to marry her for a greencard, and she was being nice so she married him and had two kids with him and they stayed together for 20 years. She told us that her ex had said she was the only white woman he had ever been with. Someone asked what ethnicity the ex was, which seemed like a fair question to ask. He was Italian, and I got the sense that neither he nor his wife considered that white. So that was...outside of my realm of experience.

Then, when I went to join another group of ladies, I apparently walked into the middle of something because I told a woman that I liked her tights, causing her to immediately turn to the woman next to her, point across the room and say "oh she said she was an acupuncturist? No wonder she has all those crazy ideas about fertility!" Perhaps realizing that she had not responded to my comment about her tights, she then turned to me and said "the fertility industry is a scam! They are all liars! I'm pregnant right now and it makes me so mad! But I don't want to talk about it!" So that was that.

Then we went to the art show. There was an atmosphere of pretentiousness around the whole place, but we got a particularly arty tour guide told us that what made this show different was that we'd get to see all kinds of works from different places and time periods. There were antiquities all the way to contemporary art. He then proceeded to skip every gallery that was not by a mid-century male abstract splatter painter.

The guide was French and would occasionally tell us that something didn't translate to English. He tried to tell us that the title of a piece called "la femme cheval" doesn't translate to English. He said "the woman horse....the horse woman....the mare...well, it just doesn't translate into English." Uh...I think you nailed it, sir. You gave that 3-word title every bit of nuance it needed. Trust.

I was going to leave with TF as soon as the tour finished. We both said we were tired and ready to leave. And we both said that we felt like we needed to debrief from brunch, so we decided to stop at a coffee shop near her place that has a s'mores dip. So we went, we got the dip, and I start to kick us off with "so that brunch...it was intense," and she looked at me as if she couldn't imagine what I was talking about, and then she went silent. I forget sometimes that I don't know her that well, and I'm not sure what she thinks about things like private schools, the fertility industry, and paying $3 million for a Banksy painting.

I was saved, however, from that uncomfortable silence when a dude in a Cat-in-the-Hat hat and blue sunglasses walked into the coffee shop carrying a garbage bag Santa-style. He took a look around the coffee shop, set his garbage bag down, and announced with an air of authority "all y'all's cousin down the street about to get they ass beat." And this gentleman immediately had everyone's attention. One woman sitting near the door was so startled that she broke rule number one of crazy people and made eye contact with the man. He proceeded to tell her about how she and the rest of us weren't real, so it didn't matter if she stares at him, but he said it in a way that made it seem like it mattered to him very much.

At that point, the girl who was working behind the counter came out to square off with the Anti-Santa. She was tiny, maybe college-aged, with pigtails, and she looked him square in the face and said in the most pleading voice "Please leave. You do this every day. Why do you have to do this every day? Can you please just go?"

And after a few more words, he left. And then we left. And I came home and played 2 hours of crappy violin for my neighbors to hear, because I needed to release all the emotion that I'd built up.

Being around people is tough. I use a lot of energy with people, trying to figure them out, trying to do what they want me to do. But, I never know what they're thinking. I feel like I'm walking a tightrope, trying to act in ways that please them, but without understanding how they work.

Maybe it doesn't matter.

Anti-Santa alleged that we weren't real. I don't know. I feel pretty real. I feel tired and sad. I have brain zaps from a change in my depression meds. But, I tried to hide that today, didn't I? I tried to look pretty and ask the right questions and say clever things and act like my brain wasn't having tiny electrical shocks that made me want to cry. So, maybe I wasn't real.

Were the other women doing that, too?

These pictures have very little to do with the arc of the day, but they were interesting. There were two pieces in the entire gallery: one on the wall and one on the floor.

The wall:

The floor:

I don't know what this artist was saying with these sculptures. They are grotesque, but humans are grotesque, aren't we? They are weird and they make me uncomfortable, but humans are weird and make me uncomfortable. Just as I am weird and make others uncomfortable, I'm sure. In some ways, this is more human than anything I've ever seen an instagram.

This is what it means to be human, I guess. We are all born ugly, grotesque little babies, and most of us all die weird, uncomfortable adults. And in between we try to pretend for the other humans that we are not all of those things, while they try to pretend back at us that they are not all of those things. And sometimes we fool each other.

If we stopped pretending would be still be human? Would we become like this art? And would that make us real or unreal?