Diary discourse

Diaristic fictions & notes on autotheory

A still from Le Samourai (1967)… I am desperate to learn more about the SET DESIGN here!

MARCH 20, 2024 —  “I FEEL WOOLEN ALL THE TIME”

It was March and when the sun came out on the weekend, everyone went to the park. People are so predictable, except when they aren’t. Maybe it’s just my corner of Brooklyn. We’re hypocrites about predictability, about staying “in character.” Hell, I’m guilty of scolding my dog when he isn’t being perfectly predictable. I suppose we feel entitled for the small things to fall into place when everything else is senseless, haphazard. But when have things ever made sense?

One thing I’ve noticed is that people started acting strange when the weather began to thaw. Yes, everyone acts strange in New York. It’s just been on another level lately. I wonder if it has to do with the lack of outerwear, that in shedding off our puffers and wool coats, people feel alien and invulnerable enough to forsake the cold, polite norms of winter. I told a friend this theory over martinis, and she responded: “I think people are just horny, and the warm weather makes them hornier.” 

MARCH 22, 2024 — DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS IS GOD

While walking to the subway one night with E, a man passed by us and remarked, “Better keep that one inside.” As if I was a dog out on a walk. I had on my nicest fur coat, but still! As if I was a dog. No one has good manners anymore, I grumbled. But come to think of it, that statement made him seem like a dog. Who let him out? Who’s letting the dogs out? Are we all dogs? Then, E reminded me that boys don’t call girls dogs. They call them bitches.

MARCH 25, 2024 — DEATH, TAXES, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (I)

Last year, I spent most of March in Lisbon, a hilly and temperate city that was being stealthily overrun by tech-industry expats in the pandemic’s aftermath. I paid about $2 for coffee and a pastel de nata every morning for breakfast, walked 10,000 steps a day, and upped my Vitamin D levels. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the same happiness in America. I blame the air quality and interest rates.

This March, I paid my taxes, stared at my bank accounts, and considered the ongoing viability of freelance writing. Today, I retweeted a post that read, “Important to realise you can actually be happy in this life you don't have to do ‘freelance culture writing’ or whatever that was” because I found it funny and sad. Funny because I am a lapsed culture writer and believe that culture writers should be mocked for taking themselves too seriously, and sad because it reminded me of what Susan Sontag wrote about Walter Benjamin: “Benjamin thought the freelance intellectual was a dying species anyway, made no less obsolete by capitalist society than by revolutionary communism; indeed, he felt that he was living in a time in which everything valuable was the last of its kind.”