tholitude and theory

So I guess I’ve been home for about a week now. It hasn’t felt like a week, though. More like, I don’t know, an empty, meaningless void. Or something generally along those lines.

No one is here. I have a handful, albeit a small one, of friends from high school I’m still interested in hanging out with, and usually there are a couple around. But no one is here. The only person I know who’s actually planning on spending the summer here isn’t home from school yet. Everyone else will be elsewhere–Oregon, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Australia. Which is fine, because I fully plan on jumping ship and running to New York at the end of May. But right now I’m here, and no one else is here, and it’s entirely possible that no one will be here until after I leave, if at all, and I have to manufacture reasons to leave the house. And my house is like a black hole where every bit of responsibility or maturity or life ambition I’ve acquired elsewhere is buried under the weight of a refrigerator that’s stocked for me and a bright yellow bedroom full of all the things I used to care about.

So there’s that.

There’s also the fact that up until the minute I left my dorm room in Prague, there were at least five other people in my room besides my roommate, and we were all piled on a bed. And that last Thursday night was the first time I ever actually had fun at a dance club, and I had to leave for the airport at 5 a.m., before I was even ready to admit it was the next day. And that I’d been tipsy enough hours earlier to seriously consider walking up to either of the Alexes (I liked both) and flat-out telling him to kiss me. And now I’m alone but for my family and the telephone, which can only do so much.

Then there’s the side issue that all the strangers here speak English, and that’s not something I’m used to. I’ll get over it, but I’ve gotten used to feeling an automatic affinity with anyone I hear speaking native English, and American English especially. It didn’t mean I would talk to them, necessarily, but I’d feel like we were connected just a little. And I would listen, because it was so nice just to understand. I’m used to tuning out ninety percent of what’s happening, because it’s happening in another language, but now everyone speaks English. And my brain still wants to listen to all of them, because it’s so excited that it can understand so much of what’s going on, and it still wants to send out little invisible handshakes to everyone who speaks my language, and it’s a little too much to process when they’re everywhere. It’s already calming down, though. Which is sometimes a little sad.

To recap so far: I’m alone, and I’m bored, and I miss Prague. Okay. Item two: I need a job. Do you have a job for me? I need a job.

I got really excited last night because I found a publishing internship that was just posted this week, and I had thought there were none left. And in fiction, no less. So today, at my new favorite place in Seattle, the downtown public library, I spent a long time composing a thoughtful, interesting cover letter, which referenced, among other things, the power of the written word in the face of communist repression in places like the Czech Republic. Damned if I wouldn’t hire me! Only then did it occur to me that I should probably check out their web site, so that I’d have some idea of what I was getting into. It’s not that I was under any illusions that I’d be copy editing Faulkner; I was fully prepared for shitty trade paperbacks. But oh, man.

Under its AVALON BOOKS imprint, Thomas Bouregy & Co., Inc., publishes hardcover secular romances, mysteries, and westerns for the library market. Our books are wholesome adult fiction, suitable for family reading. There is no graphic or premarital sex or sexual tension in any of our novels; kisses and embraces are as far as our characters go. It is the author’s responsibility to heighten the romantic atmosphere by developing love scenes with tenderness, emotion and perception. The heroines of our romances should be looking forward to marriage at the end of the book. There is never any profanity in any of our books.

And! And!

Every AVALON heroine should be an independent young woman with an interesting profession or career. She is equal to the stresses of today’s world and can take care of herself, yet she remains feminine and loyal to traditional values; when he comes along, the man she loves will take priority in her life, just as she will take priority in his. [So much more here.]

I would actually much rather dig ditches. And probably will. I guess I’ll save that subversive-literature-loving cover letter for someone who doesn’t make me want to puke on myself.

I figured out why trash makes me so angry, though. I’ve come up with an actual, reasoned explanation for why I can’t just let people who aren’t as worried about it as me have their secular family romances and badly punctuated advertisements. Here’s why:

When something carries symbolic meaning for other people, but not for me, I generally try not to do it. I won’t wantonly cross myself, for example, even though it really makes no difference to me whether I do it or not. I’m not a practicing Jew, or a believing Jew, so trying to keep off bread for Passover for the bragging rights would be pretty ridiculous. I feel like if I did either of those things without their really meaning anything to me, it would dilute their significance for the people to whom they do really matter. Which I don’t even mean as reverence, necessarily; if I were to do it for a specific, subversive purpose, that’d be one thing. Even when you’re burning crosses, you’re appreciating that they signify something. But to take something that’s a strong symbol to someone and use it without purpose or understanding just seems irresponsible.

So when people throw language around without knowing how to use it properly, it’s like they’re taking one of the few things that’s actually meaningful to me and dribbling it out in arbitrary combinations until there’s so much vacuous, irrelevant text around that none of my books matter anymore. Whatever meaning they had diffuses away until you can hardly pick it out within the giant sea full of crap.

And that, by the way, is why I am allowed to hate the president. If you say “freedom” at least once a sentence without ever tying it to anything concrete, you’re just watering it down until it doesn’t mean anything even in the abstract, and you do that with every other word that’s supposed to be a concept that you ever use, you fucking smug bastard. And then there’s all that policy stuff, too, but you know. I’m better equipped to get mad at him about language. And oh, oh how mad I get.

I think being a linguistic elitist puts me in with Ezra Pound, though, and he was also a fascist. So, you know. Cool.

Can my summer job be artistic rage? I think I could handle that. Also: entertain me.