aileenmcgraw

[aileenmcgraw]

9.24.2017: PLEASURE

Ring around the rose 

Obsessions are easy.

 Obsessions are crippling.

 They’re the thing, the beat, the craze to focus on in the most stressed, sustainable way.

 Obsessions are an almost-circle. I began my almost-circle with flowers. Flowers are easy because they are objectively beautiful. If I’ve read it once in The Botany of Desire I’ve said it an annoying number of times:

 “Psychiatrists consider a patient’s indifference to flowers to be a sign of clinical depression.”

 I am anything but indifferent to flowers. I wear them, Instagram them, poorly doodle them, sleep on duvets adorned with them, hold onto old shower curtains printed with them, buy an on-sale, two-sizes-too-big trench coat embroidered with them, etc. I just don’t buy the actual, living them – that takes too much time, care, attention.

 But then I pay some—attention, that is. There seems as much research as there are lived experiences of women being flowers. From purity to desire, from innocence to fertility in full bloom, if you take a (far too) simple idea of womanhood, you can map a flower to it all, every part of her. Me.

 When I was in middle school I had a notebook full of my flower drawings. Fine, they were binders full of fashion designs, but nearly every wedding dress and pair of jeans I drew had painstaking pen-and-ink flowers (mostly peonies) on them. Now whenever I draw roses I find myself scribbling down a rabbit hole, ink turning deeper and deeper inwards until petals fold into dark circles, and finally they stop. I can’t keep drawing after the center point. I reach a singularity. A seed, or an end? When writing about flowers, I get distracted (they’re gorgeous, after all, so I get lost in my mind). And so I keep talking about them – the what – and not my why.

 And so I return to a quote from that book by that dude (The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan):

 “It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”

 That’s exactly it. I look at flowers, I love flowers, because they give me easy access to the garden. I can stave off nature, almost. Let’s take my outfit for example. I wear that wisteria, daisy, rose, what-have-you dress and without saying a word or thinking a thought I say and think and know: I am fertile; I am blooming; I am beautiful. Only recently have I realized this acts as visual code for something else: I am sexual. I desire. I love. I fuck. I am a fucking flower, spreading my everything, everywhere. And if that means nothing, it’s because I’m still doodling that rose, focusing on the linework instead of the life itself.

 A flower is easy because it does not feel pleasure. Oh, it gives it, though. It’s like basil in its sensory perfection: looks amazing, smells amazing, feels amazing, tastes amazing (and here I’m extrapolating to honey), sounds amazing (say it with me: chrysanthemum). The Guardian has an intriguing query thread about whether or not plants can “ow!” or “oooh,” and suffice it to say flowers cannot feel. They can respond – grow towards sun, close over a fly – though only to stimuli. Pain? No such luck. Pleasure? Nope. One commenter – Susan Deal from Sheffield, UK – captures the so what? in a single sentence:

 “It is also hard to see what purpose pain could serve for the plant, since they can hardly run away.”

 Damn, Susan. You get my conundrum. Equate pain and pleasure, and you’ll see I’m in love with, obsessed with a metaphor for me that cannot run, feel, do. It’s that classic gender studies quote that I thought was from Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project until I Googled it to no results:

 “Women don’t act; they appear.”

 Imagine a flower reaching full bloom, opening her bold petals in brilliant fashion, and then turning to you and saying, “I like that.” Or, “I want you.” Or, “More.” You want to ascribe human tendencies to her now, though they’re words less like gorgeous and more like selfish, extra, hungry. And suddenly Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” is stuck in your head.

 And so, as Susan so aptly shows, I want it all and I want the impossible. To be delicate. To desire. To feel, and to run to and from pain and pleasure. To be an ornament and to orgasm.

 Obsessions are easy.

 Obsessions are crippling.

 My obsession is an almost-circle. It starts with the flower, goes up and around just how close to womanhood it gets, and then resists a full embrace because I am and want and want to give more than something pretty. I am and want and want to give pleasure.

 In fact, by now I’m feeling rather Georgia O’Keeffe, the famous flower painter. As she once fiercely said: “I hate flowers.”

[aileenmcgraw]

11.3.2016: TREK

Cold makes me emote

I don’t cry often, but when I do, it’s on a logging road in backwoods Arkansas. It’s 2 a.m. and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, I’m in a sleeping bag nowhere near warm enough, and the sunrise is a good six hours away. My shoulders shake. I inhale—quietly, though. Don’t want to wake the others under our shoddy blue tarp. I exhale—a small white cloud winds from my mouth. It’s freezing.

I love to imagine hiking as an escape route from the constant, cancerous clock, phone, and computer, or even bus and sometimes even conversation that powers and plagues me.

And then again, I need to know the time. When it’s that dark, that cold, and that canned-sardines-would-be-comfier crowded, the morning seems to wander further down a trail we’ve already finished. Down a trail we haven’t yet found. I need to know we’re getting closer to light, closer to packing everything—people, food, trash, ropes—and heading out. Heading back. Back to that constant, maybe not-so-cancerous comfort of a shower, of a screen, of a space heater, of a down-to-the-second awareness of time. Back to the comfort of constant.

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” says Oscar Wilde. I love Oscar. I really do. You could say I aspire to Wilde-rness, but this hike—this wilderness—had me yearning for predictable, replicable ease.

What would imagination look like? I could imagine: I feel my toes again, that sharp prickle in my fingers melts away, I obtain some superwoman power to command the sunrise sooner, faster. This swaps one constant (“I’m freezing”) for another (“I’m home”). Yup, imagined consistency. It shakes the unbearable—in this case, something so simple as a chilly forest morning. It fantasized the fixed, the familiar, the floral bedding on my creaky bed back in the city.

For so long I thought of these Wilde words as a call to reckless abandon. But I think it can also mean orchestrated change. It’s Wilde—it’s wild—that reliability can reach and revolutionize any corner of comfort.

[aileenmcgraw]

8.29.16: EXCEPTION

Unravel

Aileen McGraw

I love being alone but thinking about “together.” For me, this means finding and unraveling “we.”

 I’ve been doing this since grade school, since that sixth grade birthday party when 400-block-of-7th-Avenue bestie gave our landline a ring.

 “We’re going to Target for my birthday. Dessert pizza in my kitchen after.”

 “Great!” I said (did I? “Great” seems too normal, too average, too plain a word for tween Aileen). “I’ll tell Keara.”

 “Mmmm…” she interrupted. “Don’t.” She listed her bday crew—the normals of the neighborhood, a slew of average and desperate-to-fit-in young women to which I belonged—and just left my twin sister’s omission at that. So we is sometimes just me.

 We’re so fucking lucky to be here. Now rise up, unravel. Here: Seattle, Washington. To be: to live, to thrive, to work, to walk up the Belmont hill in bloom, to need and want and drink a four-dollar well cocktail and eat free peanuts (free!) at Streamline Tavern. So fucking lucky: the access to, use, abuse, and honor of newfound disposable income (to afford Whole Foods without worry). We’re: big tech. We’re simultaneously ruining and reviving the city. We make “redefine” a double-edged sword. We are here, but here, my “we” feels like an isolating tour de technology.

 We are family. I write and read these words, and bam, I’m back on the beige carpet with my mom, dad, and sister. We sit, holding hands, ready to start what was then our weekly family meeting.

 “One, two, three, we’re a family, hallelujah, hallelujah,” we’d recite. Twice. Religious? Nope. Spiritual? Sure. Bizarre? Absolutely. Still, we’d sit and somehow word vomit a four-person definition of this “we,” a “we” soon ruptured by a foreclosed home and end in marriage. “We,” here, became both fractured and shared. For my parents, we was not in love but still best friends. Keara and I—my always we—couldn’t make sense of sensible separation. And yet. We were so fucking lucky.

 History is the stuff of us. Us, and US, the U.S., the country and beast and destiny we manifest. The country and community and traces we enjoy, remember, think we remember, forget how we learned. In Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Lauret Savoy asks, does this “we” include me?

 The answer excludes. In Trace, Savoy wonders:

 I couldn’t understand why, in a book so concerned with America’s past, the only reference to slavery, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece. What I wanted more than anything was to speak with Mr. Leopold. To ask him. I so feared that his “we” and “us” excluded me and other Americans with ancestral roots in Africa, Asia, or Native America. […] Did Aldo Leopold consider me?

 She’s also said:

 I think self-protective silence and denial have kept too much of America from even knowing who “we” really are, and have kept a language of possibility impoverished.  By this denial, this not-remembering, we are dis-membered, broken into pieces.

 We can rebuild. But first, rise up, unravel, unwind. Pick out your you, my me.

 A hope flickers like fire. Writing it down is almost like saying it out loud: We are the exception—the we that still works after challenge, doubt, and definition. The we that serves, celebrates, and frees.

[aileenmcgraw]

3.27.16: ROSTER

Aileen McGraw

Roster: a plan showing turns of duty. The best advice I ever received and then repeated and now try to realize on the daily: Plan to unplan. My roster’s in motion.

Tomorrow, come 5:30 a.m., I’ll run.

I’ll love it and hate it and say my mental “hello” to that statue on the corner of Howe Street and 10th Avenue that’s somehow now my friend, if not reflection. She stands on the second floor patio of a beautiful brick home. Her right hand sits just above her brow line, acting as a visor. She gazes into a window, and I love how creepy-yet-unquestioned -- in fact, fully-intentionally positioned -- she is. Designed yet uninvited.

And that’s why she’s my friend. I feel as permanent and lifeless and looking and hopeful and outside and observing as she is. The fact that my morning runs happen before sunrise helps, too. I run past, tired as fuck, thinking, “Damn, she must be exhausted. At least I’m moving.”

[aileenmcgraw]

3.8.16: LIMIT

Approach, reproach

Aileen McGraw

I lay in my bed, open mouth, squeezed eyes, churning stomach. My phone read 4:21 a.m. in sharp, white Helvetica Neue font. Nothing new. I peeled back my quilt and grey sheets (and I say “peeled” because my legs shone sticky with sweat). I mumbled and fumbled my way to the bathroom. Deep breaths. Deeper breath. Deepest. The air wasn’t helping. It wasn’t going down. It fact, something else rushed up my throat. And then, over the let’s-go-with-clean-enough toilet, it happened.

Vomit.

You know those moments where you ask, Will I ever feel whole again? Those moments where, in the moment, your most honest answer is, No. This was one of those. Heaving and hot, my stomach convulsed and I wretched up what I like to think would make a great 1960s wallpaper hue (think Fahrenheit 451).

Heaving and hot, I knew exactly what this was. Hot sauce. Secret Aardvark, to be exact (a delicious Oregon-made variety gracing the tables of any self-respecting Seattle bar). Half a bottle’s worth, to be quite honest. It’s no secret that I love spicy. I’ve baked this obsession into my personal brand and live by the words, “There’s no such thing as too spicy.”

Yet there I was, tasting the unmistakable habanero peppers and roasted tomatoes of what seemed to be a good solution to bespoke-yet-bland cauliflower soup. Was my MO a no-go? Had I reached the singularity of too spicy? After a few minutes (fine, at least 30) hunched over that porcelain seat, I tip-toed into the kitchen (you know, because I’m a considerate housemate who doesn’t want to wake my roomies...never mind the upchuck soundtrack). I opened my cabinet, and there it was. My night’s proudest purchase: a bright, shiny red bottle of Aardvark, bought fresh off the Chuck’s Hop Shop shelf. After a small smile and quick shudder, I shut the door. Returned to bed. And, somehow, mustered up the motivation for a morning run, though I couldn’t quite get the taste of vomit off my tongue.

Weeks passed. Slowly but surely, I introduced the sauce back into my life. The flame rekindled and things got hot again. I haven’t changed the words I live by. Had I reached the singularity? Almost. So, so, truly, closely, intimately almost.

But thank the nondenominational Scoville gods: #thelimitdoesnotexist.

I’ve since pandered my friends about reaching elusive limits. What’s one thing you refuse to cap?

My brilliant friend Bex captured this beautifully. Besides the deliciousness of peppermint Schnapps? she began. (She’s right: It’s cute that people think pschnapps are a “seasonal” drink. That shit is timeless.) Bex continued:

I always think of human resilience in a graphical way. Like, mathematically, I always think that people are asymptotically approaching the maximum we can handle. Like, as x approaches infinity, Y approaches the maximum we can handle. And we get infinitely closer, and we always feel a fraction away, but we never get there.

The limit does not exist. If it does, it’s self-imposed. As the sage Instagram-savant-meets-poet-laureate Cleo Wade put it,

My brother looked at me

One day and said, “You

Want to know the

Best thing about misery?

You create it.” If this is

True (and I think it is)

Then everything we

Know how to build, we

Know how to take down.

Everything we know how

To attract, we know how

To let go of. That said,

Today is the perfect

Day to stop creating

That shit, start taking

That shit down, and start

Letting that shit go.

It’s not the heat, but the limit that I purged. I also learned one way to define ridiculous (half a bottle of hot sauce in one bowl of soup). I’ll keep swinging towards opposites, reaching while rejecting, approaching while reproaching. I haven’t touched my limit, but goddamn, I felt something.

[aileenmcgraw]

3.7.16: SCRUMPTIOUS

Being basil

Aileen McGraw

Why can’t people be more like basil? Which is to say, why can’t people be sensory perfection?

Basil looks amazing. Tastes scrumptious. Feels smooth. Smells incredible. Sounds strong (basil’s a trochee, after all).

People look...well, it depends. Some of us look amazing. Others of us try and fail, hacking our way to looking good, whatever good means, and still others of us give no fucks. All of us can be oh-my-God-look-at-that fetishized.

People taste scrumptious. People are the closest this vegan gets to meat. One guy finished his tacos and looked me in the eyes before closing his and leaning in.

“I just ate meat,” he said.

“I know,” I said. I didn’t care. Food is social, and he was scrumptious. And I sat here for a good, good chunk of time wondering what word to use. But I mean it: scrumptious. That intriguing, strange, sexy, delicious and - yes - meaty sensation that a kiss ignites.

People feel. What a homonym. People feel soft, sweaty, dry, like a baby’s bottom, like an ass crack. People feel happy, devastated, terrified, terrific. Which is to say, we feel people who feel (who feel people who feel...and so it spins onward and inward). Physical. Emotional. All the feels.

People smell. Well, fuck: another homonym. People smell people who smell. Verb and adjective. Action and attribute. Let me pick a smell, then, lest this dissolve into a tasteless (yup, pun intended) meditation that gets no farther than, hayyy, we’re all intricate and different, so how could we get on basil’s level? Reject perfection!

People smell like the first five seconds after you walk into a home that’s not your own. Different. Enjoyable (sometimes). Disgusting (other times). In Munster, Indiana, this means people (my people, at least; my family, I should say) smell like Crystal Light (one), tap water (two), pugs (three), convenience store candles (four), and candy canes (five). Short seconds, sharp smells.

People sound like un-tuned instruments. We’re like xylophones that want the familiar love and recognition of a guitar. It’s like when I send #fuckthepatriarchy over Slack. It’s a loud statement, sure, but one that riddles the vocab of millennial women like myself. Still, it sounds strange to some corporate eardrums. I’ve learned to fine-tune my hashtag swag, but I hate myself a little for doing so. It’s a hard stop on conversations that would and should otherwise echo.

And there we have it: an incomplete synopsis on sensory imperfection.

I’m not basil. I love to ugly cry. I might wait a day or two before acting upon an empty toothpaste bottle. I feel like the world is spinning and my body is breaking when my blood sugars are low. I just broke the top of my Walgreens perfume, so I’m stuck smelling like my rainy run before sun. I text my twin sister whines and wallows and use her as an unnecessary sounding board to apologize for being me.

But also, I kind of am basil. I rock a plum lip. I eat spicy, and I’ll love you if you do, too. I feel grateful and balanced and crazy. I finally invested in a candle from a candle store that smells like lemon and - yep, you guessed it - basil. Worth it. I’m getting louder.

What’s the closest to basil I can get with someone else? Perhaps that’s the question on my mind, in my ears, my nose, my heart, on my tongue.

I’ll eat some bruschetta en route to answer.

[aileenmcgraw]

3.1.16: SCOPE

The bits we blend

Aileen McGraw

Growing up, jelly meant “healthy.”

I remember vomming all over the place when I was around 10 years old. It was your standard childhood stomach bug, which means it was the most genuine yet ultimately untrue feeling of the worst. Head slumped over the toilet seat, I couldn’t eat. Wouldn’t eat. Not even those gingerbread men that riddled our pantry, spring and summer months included.

Finally, though, I wrapped my fingers around a gingham metal lid, opened up a glass jar, and stuck a Minnesotan metal knife into Smucker’s grape jelly. I plopped a blob on a saltine cracker* and felt some superhuman strength return. That superhuman strength was simple health, and that jelly was simply sugar.

No matter its vapid nutritional value, once I could slather that shit on toast and keep it down, I knew I could handle the trials and triumphs of early double-digit life.

“Feeling better?” my mom would ask. My answer? Nod and Smucker’s.

Jelly was my scope, my metric. And like scope, jelly changes with time (it changes with thyme, too). As a hashtag-millennial living in a foodie world, I now see unnecessary ingredients. And then I taste them.

And then I simplify. What is jelly, really? A fruit. Some water. Some heat. Something sweet that, at its best, is the fruit itself.  

And then, I render it homemade. Creator! I call myself. Creation! I call the formerly-known-as-jelly substance.

And then, because I’m me, I overthink it.

Jelly was my scope, is my hope, is like scope. Just like it. Both start out sweet, move to sickening, and finally sublimate to creative challenge.

When sweet, scope is simple. It’s open opportunity to do or deal with something. How beautiful. I can scope out Seattle. I have, in many ways. The rainy run from Capitol Hill to SoDo. The 27-that-turns-into-the-5 bus back. The Pike Place Market transfer to the 49. The bright green corner in Joe Bar. The growing handfuls of people I’ve Instagram-stalked. The same handfuls of people who now form a beautiful tapestry of inspiration, grocery store advisors, vegan dinner informants, and music literacy.

When sickening, scope is strategic. Don’t get me wrong, I love strategy. It can electrify. But it simplifies. It’s the Josie Grossie of corporate vocabulary. It treats potential as a linear project, despite the beautiful-disaster reality that life--projects and productivity included--is really, really, ridiculously nonlinear. Dare I plumb corporate vocab further? I do: This scalable scope climbs a ladder built upon toxic design. It has a lexicon of its own: scope creep.

When sublimated, scope is tricky and often trivial but always transformative. Jacob Hirsohn, arts and entertainment editor at Santa Monica College’s The Corsair, captures this through (who else?) Kanye West. In “Kaleidoscope of Kanye,” he reviews The Life of Pablo. He sees this album as the aftermath of losing it. Not the sharp cheddar itself, but the liquid on the other side of the cheesecloth. It’s unstable, unpalatable to some, and always chaotic. Truly a kaleidoscope, it spins. Always nonlinear, building and breaking and bouncing expectations. I love this kind of scope.

And that’s how this goes. Scope and jelly sweeten, sicken, and challenge me until I call them something else.

Let’s preserve. Let’s jam. Let’s make this wordplay something real, something unsurprisingly sweet yet unapologetically sour.

*Just in case you missed “Saltine crackers go with everything from cheese to wine,” here’s all you need to know about the snack (and life at large): “By any name, saltines give you a lift – and I daresay can do more to elevate your emotions than aspirin – but not Jack Daniels.”

[aileenmcgraw]

2.23.16: WING

Wings we wear

Aileen McGraw

Eyeliner is hard. I’m a savant at fucking it up, and I’m one of 44 million people and counting who know all-too-well that this cosmetic struggle is so. damn. real. But let me be clear: I love eyeliner. It’s wearable intensity. Consider it the soul’s window panes. The kind made of wood that gives you splinters. The kind that hurts so good. Eyeliner calls attention to my Irish eyes as if to scream, Hey, look! Actually. Literally. Look.

Winged eyeliner is the way to go (dare I say it’s the creative nonfiction of liner genres?). It’s storied. Historied. Fetishized. Smized. Cleopatra first wore this bold stroke, or so our backtracking tells us. From there, we got the Monroes and Bardots. Then came Twiggy, the aesthetic oops of the 1980s, and the nineties’ punk rendition of wings sharper and darker than ever before. And unfinally (because the project changes always), Lauren Conrad.

This history - or herstory, since I feel piqued and tongue-in-cheek - is just the popular one. The easily searched and effortlessly found. But these wings we wear take flight without and with infinite sight and sound. Who do we hear and see?

Barneys New York’s priciest eyeliner costs $75. I don’t know why, but I thought it would be more. It’s gorgeous. Purple, even. Designed for clear and smudged lines. Sharp and soft wings. Lauded as “versatile,” this kohl liner seems like it’d issue a more comfortable command. Look, it might say, if you or I want.

Without a cosmetically-loaded landing zone, we might never make eye contact. You might instead stare at my eyebrows, my purple glasses, or the eye-level Shakespeare graffiti at the bus stop.

Instead of wearing eyeliner, can I just scream, “Look!”

---

Winged addendums:

“Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”

“That’s right, Zuzu, that’s right!��

“This little sea creature managed to evolve the same flight patterns as a fruit fly while living underwater. It just goes to show you that when something works once, evolution is bound to churn it out again somewhere else.”

[aileenmcgraw]

2.14.16: CANDIDATE

A skeleton of the candidate

Aileen McGraw

Candidate. I want to build a body of (with, through) this word. Let’s start with an outline: define.

can·di·date

ˈkandiˌdāt,ˈkandidət/

noun

a person who applies for a job or is nominated for election.

a person taking an examination.

a person or thing regarded as suitable for or likely to receive a particular fate, treatment, or position.

The first wins; the second is surveyed and sheared; the third aspires.

What of the win?

I once answered a very easy question and won very sleazy tickets. The show? DJ Pauly D, the gymmed, tanned, and laundered man of Jersey Shore fame. His real name? Paul DelVecchio. I know that because I Googled it. That’s how I won tickets: Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom posted a Facebook status offering free tickets to the first person who could comment the Italian’s real name. I laughed when I saw its timestamp: Posted fifteen minutes ago. Did no human with Internet access have the faculty to search? I’m pretty sure Bing wasn’t even a thing then, so website options were limited. Website options were easy. My fingers tapped away a simple, obvious entry--the dude’s given name. And bam--I knew it, I typed it, I hit enter. And then I had it. Tickets, won.

I dragged my sister and a friend to the same music hall where my dad saw Led Zeppelin, or would have, I should say, had they been sober enough to go onstage.

“Immediate riot,” my father told me of the crowd’s response. DJ Pauly D conjured no such riot. Was he sober? Perhaps. Was his crowd? Positively not. Cranberry vodkas twisted my tongue (or, more likely, my liver) in its sweet, dark, you-can-get-away-with-five-of-these way. Still, tame by Zeppelin comparison. It was chill (given that “chill” had not yet morphed into the garbage virtue set to destroy humankind).

“We’ve got a show,” a man told me. We stood and swayed next to each other(swagger was not on our side). He tossed his hand through heavily greased (well-oiled?) hair. I nodded. Passed the small glass cup from one hand to the other. Smiled. This was free, so the least I could do was be.

“We’ve got a show,” I said.

What of the examination - the probing, the intellectual, social, physical disrobing?

Massachusetts College of Art and Design professor Steve Locke went to get a burrito before work and was detained by the police. Why?

“I fit the description.”

When we examine, we do not find. We create. Villain, slain, charlatan--we render him, her, them, you so. White fear of, destruction of, erasure of, definition of black bodies and people and personalities has been historically constant. Now, it’s visible. Viral.

This is what it looks like. You know this

is wrong. This is not what it looks like.

You need to be quiet. This is wrong. You

need to close your mouth now. This is

what it looks like. Why are you talking

if you haven’t done anything wrong?

And you are not the guy but still you fit

the description because there is only one guy

who is always the guy fitting the description.

-- Claudia Rankine, “That Were Once Beautiful Children”

Consider it simple wordplay. Candid-ate, wherein we cannibalize the vulnerable, the casual, the relaxed.

What of fate?

I used to want to be president like Paulette wanted that hot dog: real bad. ‘Twasn’t meant to be, though. I’m not your prime presidential candidate: I’m unapologetic. I cave easy. I use the word “hate.” I think aesthetics trump everything, and the country would have to get used to bold lip color before brilliant lip service. And so I abandoned that dream. You got lucky, America. It just wasn’t meant to be.

Find my fate, I feel I should say. Finding that active fit says, You, prime you, are the perfect candidate.

Epilogue: Free Million-Dollar Idea

Candy Date: the dating app where you’re matched by political prospects and dessert of choice.

[aileenmcgraw]

1.24.16: ELECTRIC

Electric Identity

Aileen McGraw

Benjamin Franklin was hip as fuck. We regale him as “America’s First Citizen.” He was into this nation before it was even a thing. He rarely saw the inside of a classroom, attending less than two years of formal education. This lifelong learner found his lessons through keys and kites and clouds. Consider him The Founding Father of the Gates, Jobs and Zuckerbergs to come.

Franklin was so fucking hip that he created his own instrument to get the funk out. A glass armonica, he called it, a rhythmic tool that replicated “the otherworldly sound that a wet finger makes when rubbed along the rim of a glass.”

Franklin was so fucking hip that saying so is this essay’s refrain. But he was. Abolitionist. Electrician. Inventor. French fashion obsession.

“Ben’s my friend” is a few things:

What I wish I could say about B Franks

A song about Benjamin Gibbard by Sun Kil Moon

Male friendship at its most beautiful

Words and art made possible by electricity

At the age of 46, Franklin conducted his infamous kite experiment (electrical pun intended). But let’s charge backwards: As a teenager, he penned wildly popular essays in The New England Courant under the pseudonym “Silence Dogood,” a fabricated widow who spun stories about women’s rights. She (he) was not a petticoat fan. Trivial and tough, Ms. Dogood triumphed with readers. She (he) closes her (his) first essay by copping to a commonness that sounds like the grandmother (or great-great-great-grandmother) of #basic:

Thus I past away the Time with a Mixture of Profit and Pleasure, having no Affliction but what was imaginary, and created in my own Fancy; as nothing is more common with us Women, than to be grieving for nothing, when we have nothing else to grieve for

Dogood came to be because Franklin could not get published himself. Ben was hip as fuck, then, because he suffered the same identity anxiety afflicting many a Macklemore today. Apologize, and if that doesn’t quite sit or settle or materialize, appropriate. Do I even need to add the disclaimer that I’m being unfair? Franklin franchised his own words, too. They’re what rendered him rich.

Ben was so fucking hip that his tongue dealt viral gold. In 1700s terms, this means mass-published, still-quoted witty phrases and wordplay.

Pithy proof from Poor Richard’s Almanac:

Industry gives comfort and plenty and respect.

Women and wine, game and deceit make the wealth small and the wants great.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep and you shall have corn to sell and to keep.

Who is wise? He that learns from every one.

Who is powerful? He that governs his passions.

Who is rich? He that is content.

Who is that? Nobody.

And so on.

Ben was hip as fuck, Franklin was so fucking hip, and any variation of his name(s) and identity proves that our most memorable rags-to-riches feats require careful stitching. They are practiced and published. Many, like Benjamin Franklin’s, are politically charged, and yes, the electricity pun is so necessary here.

I was researching Ben, writing, and waiting for the water heater to finish so I could drink some chamomile tea. Rain pattered the sidewalk outside. The evening sky stayed dark, though. That’s one thing that shocks me about Seattle (yes, again and as always, pun intended): There’s seldom lightening here.

And then I remember.

Lightning counts as electricity, a shock at its most natural. I forgot that powerful things happen beyond and before human hands.

[aileenmcgraw]

1.18.16: BOOT

To boot

Aileen McGraw

I’m tired of writing about sexism. There’s something sticky about oppression I can own (Woman holds a different fighting power than my white, cis, hetero, able-bodied, and newly-stable class identity: Woman is historically vibrant, not violent).

I’m tacky when writing about sexism. Picture that boy with finely coiffed hair in School of Rock. His Jack Black is my writing: You’re tacky and I hate you.

I feel cheesy (yet nothing like the fearless, funky, unapologetic cashew cheese I came to know at Oakland’s vegan soul food festival). I sound repetitive. No, let me rephrase that. I don’t repeat; I join a chorus of women, womyn, and men writing and fumbling our way through identity. With every essay I read (this hurts so good) and graf I write, we climb higher towards words that render our beauty, futility and utility in real time.

It’s like I’m slipping on a pair of heels. (And so the metaphors begin.)

Heels make me work and tone and stumble for balance. How come the shoes that put a woman at a man’s height are the same ones that remove her balance? Never mind the short men. Never mind the women who consider Louboutin height child’s play. I first considered this as a college sophomore, sitting in my first gender studies course wearing crimson lipstick and a cheetah print blazer. Fuck the patriarchy may be the undergrad feminist motto, but I felt like I was pushing back, hair done and lips on, silently saying, Fuck the patriarchy, but fuck it fiercely. This balance really struck me, though, and I’ve since realized this question haunts many a gender studies course. Ask again. Ask different: Heels make me sexy?

Heels make me taller. I love how objectively true that is. When I wear heels - be they those infamous black stilettos that sixteen-year-old Aileen waddled in at suburban Chicago homecomings, or the “sensible” black work shoes that make up the grand majority of my nine-to-five footwear - I never get shorter. Putting on means inching up.

Boots, however, depend. Some keep me at the same, normal (?), natural height. Some prop me up. Boots make me reveal and cover and zip up or tie or slide on power. And yes, boots make me sexy. Others make me adventurous (like those hiking boots I left at that gas station in Superior, Wisconsin). Still others render me gothic or grunge (as I take another step closer to those Doc Martens). And so on.

“Boots are more than just sexy, they’re a little psycho, and anybody who’s wear­ing a pair of them might consider seeing a shrink.”

Agreed. And for better or worse, I aspire to both. And let’s be clear: I’m not talking about boots, not exactly. Not only. These heels and boots (and I better be careful with my metaphors, lest I want to be called a shoebie) and their contradictions are how I tread writing about sexism, which is writing about being a woman. Boots are vessels of beauty or utility, depending on the what and how and who.

“New boots, like really rank broncos or compulsive tobacco addictions,

are not easily broken.”

My thinking and writing and rambling about this needs much greater wear. What and who does it take to become worn in?

[aileenmcgraw]

1.11.16: CORNER

Where Two Lines Meet

Aileen McGraw

I’m at the place where two converging lines meet.

On Summit and Roy, one avenue (Summit) peters north-to-south with a doughnut shop, a consignment boutique (no, not a thrift store - this shit’s curated and would scorn any relation to Macklemore), and increasingly rare brick buildings and single-family homes. The other street (Roy) stretches up (or down, depending on my direction), riddled with vapid, boxy buildings, the very usurpers of Seattle’s brick architecture. Mean Girls logic applies to housing: How many micro-studios can one fit into rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods? The limit does not exist.

Every Tuesday at six p.m., give or take 17 minutes (Seattle public transit is as unreliable as my Tinder prospects), I grab a coconut milk chai latte from that doughnut shop. The barista never charges me more than 89 cents. An Ovaltine container sits on a shop shelf, and I ask the barista if he uses the chocolate powder as an excuse to quote Young Frankenstein. He hasn’t seen the movie. I feel like the film equivalent of well read, which seldom happens because I keep my movie queue short and unvaried: Young Frankenstein, School of Rock, The Iron Giant, and (when the holiday season strikes), A Christmas Story (another great Ovaltine reference) and Love Actually. That’s it.

After lots of Tuesdays and my-day’s-going-swell banter, the barista and I decided to be not just “barista” and “chai lady,” but people with names and goals and boredom. We’re hanging out #irl, and we owe it all to Ovaltine.

On Summit and Roy, I’m at the place where converging lines meet.

In that bigger, messier sense of “here,” I am the place where two converging lines meet. Guilt and gratitude. Midwest and Pacific Northwest. Relaxed and overwhelmed. “A writer,” surely stated, and “A writer?”, constantly questioned..

Cozy and in crisis, I’m cornered.

[aileenmcgraw]

11.2.15: FLOWERS

When Mariah Carey lyrics make sense Aileen McGraw

I think I heard my bedding whisper Mariah Carey lyrics to me the other night.

I was like, why you so obsessed with me?

I soon heard the question echo from the scarf on my doorknob. And then, from the necklace around my neck. The skirt on my waist. The Target’s-attempt-at-Doc-Martens on my feet.

Why are you so obsessed with me?

So here’s the thing. My bedding, my clothes, my mug, my duffel—my everything, really—are floral.

Those who know me well (fine—those who exist within visible distance of me) know my affinity for floral patterns. An obsession, one (Mariah) might say. They riddle my wardrobe. This year, one of my lazy Halloween costumes was “floral and the machine,” a concept piece that involved a black floral skirt, turquoise floral earrings, a rose-covered cardigan, a blue Russian-bloom scarf, and the tagline, “but I work in tech.” After some goading and cheap Sauvignon Blanc (fine—after me saying, “Like Florence and the machine, but flowers and tech culture! Get it?”), some people (a costumed Mugatu and Edward Scissorhands bartender) got it. I thought it was perfect. Pun-y. It fused two favorites: wordplay and blossoms.

And so I ask myself, Why am I so obsessed with flowers?

It’s a common affinity for a lady like me. Flowers mean love. They mean I’m more likely to say “yes” to a date. After all, they’re courtship currency. They’re a shy person’s emotional gold mine because they convey all the feels without saying one word (the Victorians were on to something). Just ask Michael Pollan: In The Botany of Desire, he makes a point that hasn’t left my mind since reading.

“It is possible to be indifferent to flowers — possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient's indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression,” he writes.

Wanna be happy? Better like flowers.

And like I said, floral love is a common affinity for a lady like me. All ladies, actually. Right? Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class imagines that “woman and flowers are equally passive, beautiful, and decorative.”

Women and flowers are equal. Women are flowers, or so art, literature, and thought tell me.

Is my garden love lazy, then? Inevitable? I think my closet, cabinet, and bedding come from something a bit more active. Yes, women and flowers have historically been picked and placed in the same bouquet. But it’s not passive; it’s pressure.

There’s the pressure to be fertile—sexually, socially, and intellectually so. I don’t just grow. Or rather, I can’t just grow. I bloom. I must bloom.

And if I wilt—what then?

After missing my birthday, my manager placed a bouquet of flowers on my desk, vase and everything. It sat there for two weeks—proud, living proof that my team celebrated me. And then, bright yellows became sullen oranges. Oranges became browns. Sharp, erect stems became limp noodles. It died. I did nothing, and I didn’t really notice until the now-black bulbs began dropping onto my desk. If diamonds are forever, flowers are right now. I soon took the now-shedding mass of sunflowers and chrysanthemums (mere estimates—I’m not sure what they were besides from Whole Foods) and popped them into the compost bin. Even in death, they’re on their way to become fertilizer.

So maybe it’s this: Flowers—in all their kitschy, historied, and fertile forms—are my hope, demand, frustration, desire: “forget-me-not.”

[aileenmcgraw]

10.19.15: RAPID

My Best Thing* Aileen McGraw

I do this thing. It's what I don't do, really. After four years of oscillating between "Best regards," "All best," and "Best" email adieus, I shunned all likes of this signature. Since starting work, the real world, or whatever one calls this crash course in creating things #irl, I haven't signed an email with anything close to "best."

Why? Because I give no fucks. Cordial is cute, but bizarre is better.

Why? Let's reconsider. I give lots of fucks. I want to prove that creativity exists against all 9-5 odds. I want an otherwise monochromatic, sans-serif thing you click to actually open something in your mind. I want to be tangible in tech, but mostly, I want you to remember me.

"Be indispensable," my manager told me on my third day of work. I nodded. Made sense. Makes sense, and that's why I say "no" to simple sign-offs. So here you have it -- a rapid-growing list of ways I've sent stuff into the email ether:

Thanks for helping me fuse passion and purpose, From one #girlboss to another, Hope your daughter shows that stomach bug who’s boss, Millennials are like my favorite hot sauce – we change daily, Cheers to conversations on class identity and feminist football, His office was bigger than my Chinatown micro-studio, Now I have the “Circle of Life” stuck in my head, Wondering if autumn exists in Las Vegas, Wondering if #LasVegans would take off in Las Vegas, Tech is stranger than fiction, I can’t say “dig” without thinking of Holes (Louis Sachar and Shia LaBeouf at their best), Putting my Ben Gibbard sightings on an exponential growth track, Glad I now know where to find a bottle of ghost pepper hot sauce (your desk), PNW runs and vegan doughnuts make for stellar #squadgoals, Vegan doughnuts change lives, Ghost peppers got nothing on us, Sent from a floral and sugary-vegan desk, #breakthesilo, Hope the Seventeen Magazine logo isn’t under copyright (it definitely is), Saltines are like hot sauce (they go with everything), Nothing says #weekend like tea, vodka, and Hawai’i, Pickles and peanut butter are on my immediate to-do list, Redmond’s late afternoon sun breaks never cease to amaze me, The iPhone Gods do care, Again and as always, there’s no such thing as too spicy, Sweet corn tamales change lives, Data and creativity are the Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams of tech, Next comes the hot sauce challenge, #hesnotahashtagguy, Nothing says “late afternoon” like the perfect popcorn flavor (mine is kettle), The ideas keep tumbling, Resisting the temptation to make a Will Smith reference, The sunset is unreal from Summit and Roy, Design and content: fraternal twins, A social inception,

Aileen

*"My Best Thing" was the best thing I watched in New Media Art last fall, which obviously means it was an animation of flirtations "with two 20-something Italian men...while taking random strolls through a video sex chat site." Referencing the film in this post-homecoming Re: Word just feels right. *cue undergrad nostalgia*

[aileenmcgraw]

10.12.15: CHASING

Post-consumer Aileen McGraw

I see it every time I buy groceries, but this week, I noticed it. A short sentence fragment, familiar as any Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods paper bag crammed under my sink for future use:

Made from 100% post-consumer recycled content

If you’ve been with Re: Word for a while, you know (1) I believe public transit is profound and (2) my mind works in metaphors. So here we go.

Or, I should say, there I was: riding the 49 bus from the International District to Capitol Hill, mad at the bus driver for being 30 minutes late and wondering if I could take legal action against King County Metro Transit’s unreliability. We -- a teal and pink mohawked man, a woman holding a Whole Foods bag, the bus driver who announced every stop with a “hey there, ho there,” and I -- had just wound our way through Pioneer Square (to which I can’t help but think, #colonialism), downtown downtown (the “I like like you” of Seattle), and Capitol Hill hills (which one is Capitol, though?).

And then I read the lady’s bag: Made from 100% post-consumer recycled content. And then, because “consumer” and “content” constitute my reason-for-being at work, I thought: Shit. There’s potential. (And all the while, the bus meandered its “hey there, ho there, have a fabulous evening” route down Broadway.)

Post-consumer recycled content is made from waste that's been used by a consumer and diverted from landfills -- stuff like the kombucha bottles and old Stranger issues that I place in my recycling bin. Pre-consumer content is manufacturing waste -- the stuff I still don’t want in landfills, but hasn’t seen hungry, hungry human hands.

Content is useful and usable. Content is the cream of my crop (and vegan, at that). Combine post-consumer with content, and bam: you have me audibly mumbling “challenge accepted” on public transportation.

What if our content -- the stuff we use, read, write -- was post-consumer? What would a post-consumer essay look like? Could I make one?

So here we go. Challenge accepted.

Made from 100% post-consumer recycled content

Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Here’s the worst thing I ever did.

A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. I’ve never been able to work up the nerve to see a movie alone, for example, and yet I’ve eaten plenty of meals in restaurants without a dining partner — despite the fact that it’s a much more visible activity than sitting in a dark theater. I guess I’m talking about it because it happened. I came in ignorance, and found I was more ignorant than I knew. My brain shrunk—it must have.

I had just moved. It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months. Those who stayed were the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave...the ones who didn’t see the writing on the wall, or who were too stubborn to give up their homes.

But there’s something else happening too. I changed my mind. Am I chasing time? Unexpectedly, I have found a city where actually want to live. I wonder if I will have the courage to allow myself to be happy. Time will tell. Happiness is not a qualifier for home/not-home.

[aileenmcgraw]

9.28.15: SENTIMENT

Postures

Aileen McGraw

A friend of a friend (high hopes that this FoF turns into a real F) explained his thoughts on spicy food to me over dinner. He pursed his lips, sat up straight, and then let loose, relaxing his shoulders as he dropped his fingertips on the table. Every sentence began the same.

“I feel…” he’d start. He felt like the Pacific Northwest was a surprising place to look for heat. He felt like pizza was only pizza when free of crushed red pepper (to which I can only say: untrue).

“People have told me that’s such a feminine thing,” he said. I raised my eyebrows.

“What, plain pizza?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No, the ‘I feel.’ Men say ‘I think.’” He smiled, flattened his hands on the table. “But I feel like that’s bullshit.”

Belief is a mind game, I think. At least that’s what it feels like.

--

I want to live with a style that prompts acronyms. RBF, only active and exempt from sexism. MPDG, only sans Zooey Deschanel dissolution.

This acronym would be like the compostable coffee cups that riddle Seattle’s hole-in-the wall cafés and corporate cafeterias.* It would be a carry all for standout energy and flavor that never gets trash (#pun). It would recycle waste into something useful. This shit would be fertile.

*Seattle’s compost PR strategy is public shame. I’m impressed, I’m terrified and, yes, I’m composting.

--

I repeat stories and phrases like I did “Hold On We’re Going Home” during finals week. No matter how much I tell myself that I live by the words of my boy Oscar Wilde, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” I’m near constant with my communication.

Better than bad. Riddle me that. And recently, against my better judgement, holy cannoli.

It would be nice to abbreviate character yet keep its complexity.

And yet.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I read the William Butler Yeats above and think, he got it. Joan Didion caught it, sparked enough to take a title, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” and spin it into something as unforgettable as a 1968 essay collection quoted beyond and before any mention of a 1919 poem. I want to be like this, or either of those, I should say. Contagious or infected.

--

Happiness is not a state of mind, says UTA philosophy professor David Sosa. Happiness is like knowledge: it relies upon the cooperation of the world around you.

Happiness, he says, is like Aristotle’s concept of flourishing. We flourish when we take pleasure in things that align with life beyond ourselves. We don’t feel happy when we flourish at a new job; we are happy when we flourish at a new job because we relish in outside forces: employment, relationships, our ability to excel at a given challenge.

“To live a life of happiness is to flourish,” Sosa says.

He continues: “A stark contrast is the life of the drug addict.” The addict’s pleasure rings intense.

And yet.

“His is not a life we admire; it is often quite a pitiful existence.” His, hers, The Addict’s life is a life of come-downs and despair. This life is more kin to animal pleasure that human happiness, Sosa says. Happiness is harder than hard drugs because it gets real really quick. Take it from Sosa: happy happens when we "engage in real activities...confront real objects and respond to them.” Happiness is in and of our physical, fleshy world.

Drugs obscure happiness and provide a cloudy-eyed idea of the happy mind. Does this rupture a calm? Good. It should, he says. Happiness is a sort of karaoke footwork that moves from your feelings to the environment around you to the possibility that you are wrong about whether you’re happy.

[aileenmcgraw]

9.14.15: SKELETON

Lonely, chic and bony A 1:1 skeleton:metaphor ratio Aileen McGraw

He (it?) hangs from a doorknob, covered in glitter. If his arms splay too wide, he keeps one cabinet door slightly ajar. His forehead remains ever-pressed against the wood. His tiny ribs sparkle. I see every bone in his body and think, how intimate.

This unnamed, glittering slew of bones is one of 17 skeletons in my September sublet. Just above this shining body hang nine skulls. They light up when I turn on the “stove” (a hot pad with a 30-minute time limit). A bony Bon Jovi strums to the left of the sink (Okay, fine, it’s just a skeleton playing the guitar. Is there a difference?). On the same wall, a framed picture shows a skele-man on his knees, proposal-style, and I can hear and feel his desperate will you? Skele-lady’s arms are crossed and she wears a smile, but her gaze is up and away from this suitor. I can see and feel her happy apathy.

There’s a lonely chic-ness to these skeletons. They portray a perpetual not alone, but not alive. In an unfamiliar city with a new job, I feel much the same. (In the best way, I’ll add.)

Not alone What started as a crew of three flies has grown to five. They won’t leave me alone. My window has no screen, and I want it open. I flap a towel at them because, like front porches, fly swatters have become a thing of back then. My first two weeks in Seattle have been (1) frantic jaunts to meet potential Craigslist roommates and their felt wall art, (2) the spiciest chai I’ve tasted, so kudos to the Victrola barista, and (3) an in-the-works pursuit of the one-sentence answer to “What brings you here?” These weeks have been like joints, tethering and holding me to others, to movement.

Not alive I feel like a fossil. I want to preserve my traces from the remote past (did Wikipedia just get poetic?). I want to keep that Chicago accent with the short a’s. “Data drives everything, even creativity,” is what I wrote to answer, “What key skills/tools did you learn this week?” during Microsoft’s onboarding. Numbers are not alive, but they drive.

I’m building my way into being here. It happens through homemade vegan penne all’arrabiata with a new friend; through telling that man on public transit that, no, he cannot taste my lips; through climbing a mountain with little-to-no traction (prime metaphor for pretty much all of this); through unapologetically not knowing the first thing about PowerPoint decks.

There’s a lonely chic-ness to these skeletons. They make for great décor.