diaryoftherest

[diaryoftherest]

Talking To Dogs, Part 2

“Do you think I’m bad?” I asked Santana seriously. 

Santana, a beautiful golden doodle, couldn’t respond, not just because she was a dog but because she was the type of dog that often had her tongue hanging half out of her mouth. I imagine that she wouldn’t make coherent sense even if she could respond. She sniffed the same three spots in the lawn, examining where the Iowa summer was coming in, grazing the weeds near where she had pissed only minutes before. Santana’s owner, Carma, was my best friend in college. She and her brothers shared a two-story, Victorian-style house painted sage green with the glow of Edison bulbs warmly spreading outside. The house sat on Governor Street, a one-way street that shot people out of Iowa City.  

In many ways, I still see Carma as that house: comforting, reliable, and always an open door. My senior year at Iowa, I used that house nearly every day as a shelter to cry with only the vague judgment of Carma’s brothers. I sat on the window’s edge and watched cars speed out of town, dreaming of driving out and visiting my boyfriend at the time, Murt. 

I met Murt through Carma: a friend of a friend set up at a bar when he was in town for a visit. We started the relationship off long-distance, a sign that I should have read as a red flag but instead took as a half-baked declaration of devotion. In the first few months of our relationship, he called me his dream girl, a phrase that I had been waiting to hear since I first watched a romantic comedy. He said his type was nerdy brunettes and I looked like Liz Lemon from the first season of 30 Rock so I was a no-brainer. He was a proud fraternity man turning burgeoning med student with a coke habit that he thought made him more interesting. 

In the early months, I fancied us as the Romeo & Juliet of the Midwest, distance be damned if tried to hold me from him. He called me every night, even when I was out until three in the morning, and had work the next day. He would still insist on calling to hear my voice. Murt didn’t go to Iowa; no, he went to a much more elite state school and would often flaunt it while we laid up late on the phone. Our flirty banter would turn demeaning with a shot at my intelligence that he meant playfully but always hurt genuinely. 

We stopped talking the first time because he mentioned, in passing, sleeping with two other girls. We were long-distance and this was college after all. What was I supposed to expect? That afternoon, I walked across Iowa City, the never-ending winter clawing at the exposed skin on my face, to the house on Governor Street. I called Carma three times on my way over, leaving messages that I needed to see her. When I opened the door, I discovered that Santana was the only living thing there. 

So, I took Santana for a walk. By block two, I was crying into her curly fur. 

Murt and I continued to date in a way that I swore to all my friends was love but likely looked more like a masochistic game of chicken: he would have sex with another girl and call me right after to say he was thinking of me the whole time, I would do a series of drugs and publish a poem about him that he would use as ammunition to remind me that I was more into him. I started to have sex with other people to even the score but my rampage quickly turned to a mind-numbing parade of men who didn’t care about me which made me care less for myself. Every time I cried, I would walk back across town to Governor Street where I habitually took Santana for a walk and told her everything.

By the time we broke up for good, I was a shell of who I wanted to be and the only person who knew about any of it was a golden doodle who only wanted me to stop crying so I could throw her a stick. My friends and I graduated that spring, all of us getting some kind of merit honors or nods from our houses. Carma suggested a girl's trip as a celebration: a final hurray for our five-piece-friend group that would be splitting for jobs or apartments as soon as June ended. We all agreed on Florida because Carma’s family had a timeshare that was a stone's throw from Daytona Beach. We could tan, drink, beer, play cards, and dance all night with the girl group that we had come to think of as sisters. It was supposed to be perfect. 

The second night there, the girls asked to go out dancing to Coyote Ugly, a bar chain that was meant to serve as real-life access to the sexual prowess of the movie. Within seconds of being inside, I locked in a target. This had been my game since the breakup: walk into the bar, find someone to shamelessly flirt with, get rip-roaring drunk, and then have sex with them. It didn’t matter if the sex was good or if I was having fun, I just wanted to do it as a way to say “see? People want me. I swear.”

That night, my sights were set on a scrawny white man who likely would have been blown over by a strong gust of wind had I not been sitting on his lap all evening. Carma laughed at me, even pulling me aside after a moment to say “him? Really?” I laughed it off and swatted at her for teasing. An hour later, I was running away with him to have sex on the beach. I was cold, half-naked, and covered in sand when I got a call from Carma, screaming and crying. In my rush to appease a man I met at a bar, I had neglected to tell anyone where I was going. Instead, I left them in a strange city and the vague feeling that my phone was on five percent because that was the last thing I mumbled between tequila shots. 

When I went to rejoin them at the bar, Carma wouldn’t look me in the eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, waiting for her to smile at me or laugh at how dumb I was to rush after a silly man. She didn’t respond. Instead, she led the group of drunk girls home through the Florida fog. She didn’t talk to me until hours later when I sprawled onto the bathroom floor, my boobs squished into a towel and my face pressed into the bathmat to muffle the tears. 

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on with you,” she said. “You didn’t used to be like this… where did you go?”

I couldn’t answer that fully. I wanted to tell her that I just ran down to the beach, unserious and unthinking. But, on a deeper level, I had been gone all spring. Mentally, I was with Murt or missing him or thinking about how he didn’t want me. I hadn’t had a day where I didn’t want to drink myself out of consciousness since we met and now I looked in the mirror and saw only who he wanted me to be. 

When we got back to Iowa City, I met Carma for a picnic at a park nearby. She wanted to say she was sorry for yelling on the phone and I wanted to say I was sorry for the sex on the beach debacle. The rest of our friends came to laugh about the incident, a crazy college story that marked the tail end of my life in college. But, I still never forgot the look on Carma’s face. She brought Santana with her that afternoon. When Carma left to use the bathroom, I walked Santana around the park. 

“Do you think I can be better?” I asked Santana on our third loop around the bench.

She twisted her tongue at me in a mock answer. I took it as a yes but I didn’t know then that she would be right.

[diaryoftherest]

The Things I Say To Dogs Pt. 1

“Maybe I should have been dead by now,” I say to Ellie as the light in our living room fades away. “I probably should have killed myself by now.”

Ellie, a whippet, greyhound mix who spent five years of her life living on the streets of Los Angeles, doesn’t respond. I don’t think she took me or my self-pitying comments seriously until I started sobbing on the floor of my kitchen, ramen pot boiling over and boygenius blasting through my water-damaged computer speakers. 

It came like a wave at work this afternoon. A spike of questioning depression: am I doing this right? Am I dating the right person? What is wrong with me? etc.

I’ve been working at this desk job for nearly a year and I’ve noticed that this happens every so often. It will be a normal day, the sun is shining, the emails are rolling in as usual, the birds are chirping, my boss is complaining about her inability to organize her own schedule and my inability to understand her system, and then the depression will start. I can’t explain what brings it on but I typically spend the remainder of my office time watching my computer clock tick down. When the MacBook numbers blink five o’clock, I rush back to the apartment that I share with a girl I met on the internet; a nice girl who works too much and is barely ever home but has a dog, Ellie, who I have now come to count on as my non-verbal confidant. 

When I got home today, I unloaded on Ellie.  

I tell her about the new boy I’m seeing, the one who she met two nights previously when he came over and took me up to my bedroom. I told her how it felt good to be with him but not perfect. I told her that I’ve never been in a serious relationship before so who knows what perfect is anyway. I told her that I don’t know what good enough is but I think I’m settling for that. I told her that I feel the same way about work: how nothing feels the way it should but I don’t leave because nothing else is coming at me right now so I stay. 

These are all things that I should tell someone else, a licensed professional with plaques on the wall. Still, I feel more comfortable telling them to a dog because I often measure out the things in my head before I say them. If I have a confession or a truth I should share, I weigh it on my tongue before it gets out. I ask myself: is it funny? Is it interesting? Is it helpful right now? Will it hurt them to know this? Will it hurt me for them to know this? If I don’t like any of these answers, I keep that shit to myself. 

Yet, in all my life, I’ve never been able to keep these things inside when there is a dog around. It doesn’t make sense to non-dog, anti-pet people. To them, it's weird when you announce: “I can’t be honest with you but I trust a French bulldog until the end of my living days.” Still, I know that the heaviest parts of my psyche feel safer to unclench when it is just me and a dog. 

In the past, it has been so many dogs: my childhood pet, my best friend's college dog, the dog I was dog sitting for six months, the dog I offered to walk in my building so that we could have one-on-one time together. 

Now, it is Ellie. She licks my face as my chest concaves into the kitchen floor. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say to her. “I have good things. They seem like good things. They feel like good things. Then I think about them when I’m all alone and I can’t move.”

Ellie blinks, not explaining a thing but not appraising me either. She saunters back to the couch and nudges a blanket with her nose, asking me to go sit with her. 

I keep crying for another ten minutes while Ellie licks my head. We don’t solve the problems but I know I’ll talk to her about it more tomorrow and she’ll listen the same way she always does.

[diaryoftherest]

The Things I Don't Know About Love

I never saw my parents kiss but I watched Lindsay Lohan kiss Chad Michael Murray in Freaky Friday on loop when I was seven because I thought that I would feel it, that kind of loving passion if I just never turned it off. As an adult, I’m realizing that I have been in love and the idea of it for too long so I don’t know what it looks like in real life.

Still, I’ve dated for long enough to have finally learned what love is not. Here is what I have:

Love is not obsession- it is not staying up late thinking about how perfect they are. That makes them unreachable, putting them on a shelf above you in your mind. 

If you ever get to a point where you see them as too perfect, just think of that person trying to learn how to whip and nay-nay. It will humble your imaginary version of them immediately.

Love is not pandering- if the person is over-explanatory, speaking down to you, or trying to explain Drake lyrics like they are poems, run.

Love is not confusing- it doesn’t have mixed signals or pointed fingers. It isn’t someone saying: “C’mon. I told you that. Duh.”

No, Brian. You didn’t tell me that. Even if you did, I have clearly forgotten. Don’t be a dick.

Love is not demanding- it shouldn’t feel forced in any way. It should never feel like you have broken something and have to replace it. That is fear.

Love is not aggressive- love should never leave you with marks. Unless, of course, you specifically request that in bed. In that case, to each their own and stay safe.

Love is not judgemental- it isn’t cruel or mean about things you like. It is not critical of what you do or how you do it. It doesn’t tear down your friends for fun. 

Love is not impossible- love is hard sometimes but it isn’t screaming at each other in order to have the other person understand you. That is aggressive and confusing. See 3a and 5.

Love is not hard to find- it is a phone call from a friend or a sister when you’re crying. It is your mother saying goodnight. It isn’t invisible in your life. It is around. 

I think about all of this as I get ready for a date with a man who looks nothing like Chad Michael Murray. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I know more than I think. Maybe I don’t. Maybe that’s ok.

[diaryoftherest]

Losing My Cool

A debate breaks out at my office once a week.

It always starts with Brad, the portrait of a male executive, and his booming voice echoing around the space as people join in.

Beyonce or Taylor Swift?

I was new to the office when it first started. It was office chit-chat at first. Water-cooler chatter born from something Brad’s wife saw on TikTok. It was a dumb debate made up of parasocial facts and made-up figures. Easy celebrity gossip. They are both billionaires who probably wouldn’t be affected if an average white guy named “Brad” railed against them.

It wasn’t until last week when Brad came in smelling of condescension and phrased it differently.

“Who is cooler: Beyonce or Taylor Swift?”

The debate was months old, a revival of a hot topic from the summer of 2023 that has now become a relic of a pop culture reference. Still, Brad was so excited that he pounced on me when I didn’t answer.

“Come on,” Brad said. “Everyone knows who is cooler. Just say it.”

Everyone else in the office said it: Beyonce’s cooler. Then, their moment of antagonized fun was over, and they went back to typing. The bullpen of onlookers watched and waited: they wanted me to say that Taylor Swift was lame and uncool, and I would get extra points if I joined in with a “she can’t even sing.”

But, I didn’t say anything.

This is how I learned that I never really knew what cool was anyway.

—

I stopped being honest about what I thought was “cool” when I was thirteen.

It all hit me when I was in sixth grade. I had a mild, middle-school crush on a boy from my math class. In the hallway before class, we exchanged iPods and flirted in the lackluster, sweaty way that only middle schoolers do. One day, he laughed when he saw my most recently played music.

“Beyonce? She always sounds the same,” he said to me. “Try The Front Bottoms.”

I loved Beyonce at that age. The morning before, I had practiced her vocal runs on “Halo” until my brother told me that I was annoying. It was the same year that “Single Ladies” swept YouTube, driving people into a craze of black leotards and obscene moves. That year, I was obsessed with Beyonce.

Then, I was embarrassed. A boy my age spoke with conviction and authority about Beyonce’s value and, suddenly, it all dropped in front of me. He was an arbiter of taste and a definer of what was good. I was in the wrong with him.

Cool was an underground band that no one had heard of, someone on the fringes or up and up that would have a one-hit moment and retire. Beyonce was too Sasha Fierce. She was in a girl band and how lame is that, right?

Every other bubble gum pop icon: Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj, or any other powerful, femme hitmaker was an unspoken no. My first generation iPod touch full of teeny boppers was dull, so banal to him.

That boy never spoke to me outside of class again, but I didn’t try anymore. I learned a lesson I would never unlearn that day: as a girl, you can never do or have anything “cool.”

—

Cool is a judgment on women and non-binary people. It is the chill, subtle way of saying “This is what I think is right. Here is where you are not that. Uncool- bad.”

Most women and non-binary people have defenses against this, an equally subtle counter-move of avoidance. Most men won’t see it in plain sight, but it is in every conversation: an unwillingness to share because they do not want to be contemptuous. It is laid out like a response sheet: if he says A, then the answer is B. A perfect example comes from “What is your favorite movie?”

“What is your favorite movie?”

The answer is not: “It’s Little Women.”

The correct answer is: “Oh. What’s yours?”

If they say “Pulp Fiction,” then the answer is: “True Romance.”

So on and so forth.

It might read like a cheat sheet, but it’s something women everywhere have done since the dawn of time: dodging the judgment of men by omission.

—

I fell in love for the first time when I was a senior in college. Scratch that; I fell in deep infatuation with a boy who called me when he was drunk to tell me how funny I was. He had the look of a tall-dark-and-handsome Peter Parker. That year, I had dyed my hair seventeen times to make sure it was the right kind of Mary Jane red so it felt written in the stars.

Matt was a fraternity boy, obnoxiously always drunk but turning each moment into a funny story that I could relay to female friends later so it felt worth it. Matt would play music constantly: in the shower, in the car, in my bed, as he was falling asleep, and I was wide awake listening to his Goth Babe remixes. He was cool about music in that he had good taste and was judgmental about it. We connected when I said that I listened to Open Mic Eagle.

I never told him that, before I met him on weekends, I blasted and screamed Taylor Swift.

One night, after too many whisky sours, I followed him back home, walking ten steps behind like a puppy waiting to be praised or kicked. Matt played Poo Shiesty on the way home, blasting “Back In Blood” through his water-damaged speakers. We were halfway through the uphill walk through the Midwest winter when the song started for a fourth time.

“Again?” I asked.

“You don’t like Pooh Shiesty now?” Matt asked. He had been dancing in the snow moments before, but he stopped as soon as I spoke, looking at me with accusation.

“I liked it the first time,” I said.

“What do you want to listen to then?” Matt asked.

“Try ‘Cruel Summer,’” I said with a smile. I said it like a joke, knowing Matt would never play Taylor Swift, not even for me. A part of me hoped he would say: “Whatever you want, babe.”

He didn’t. He laughed and then mimed vomiting.

“What the fuck?” he said.

I started to argue but realized I would never win. I let him lecture me on why Taylor Swift was dumb; a graceless lack of musical talent, in his opinion. How could I, someone interested in music, like something like that? Was I so basic? Was I serious? I couldn’t have been serious, in his opinion. If I was serious, that was gross.

He kept playing “Back In Blood” until we got to my house. I told him I was tired and he left, bouncing to a party down the block while still blasting the same song.

I fell asleep crying to “champagne problems.”

—

In 2017, Ed Sheeran released his studio album “Divide.” It had top hits like “Shape of You” and “Perfect” that repeated on the radio until listeners knew every chord. People who worked in customer service at this time could probably recite every word of the “Perfect” chorus like it was slam poetry because that is how much recognition it got.

The same year, Bruno Mars released 24K Magic. This album and its titular groove, “24k Magic,” had high highs: the best example being when Zendaya performed the song on Lip Sync Battle, clad in an ensemble that made her look just like Bruno. Each song on the album is catchier than the last. The album quickly became a part of pop culture, leading teens to my high school to ask each other to prom with signs that read “You’re What I Like” while blasting the song “That’s What I Like.”

Both of these albums outperformed their previous hits. Both of these men launched international tours in March of 2017. Both of these men made millions on their songs, merch, and overall success of the tour.

Not once in 2017 was I asked: “Ed Sheeran or Bruno Mars?”

—

“Just say it,” Brad said. He focused more directly on me this time, leaning against my desk as he spoke.

“Beyonce or Taylor Swift?”

I bit down on my tongue and tried not to react too visually.

I knew I couldn’t say Taylor Swift. I thought this would be over with the overwhelming success and fun of the Eras tour, the release and re-release of records like they were being made overnight, and the obvious love that most women had for her collection of work on full display. Still, most men loved to hate her. The groups of co-workers who stared at me, waiting for me to answer, were the same people who had spent months complaining about how she “ruined the Chiefs game.”

It felt equally unfair to say Beyonce. It was only a decade before that people refused to think of her as anything more than a pop act. The launch of the Lemonade album coupled with an insane Coachella performance and hit after hit asserted Beyonce as a force to be reckoned with always. It also cemented her as a cultural icon. Yet, these men were choosing her as cool now only because they wanted to pit one woman against another.

Could Beyonce not have her success? Did she have to be compared? Or was she being compared simply to bring Taylor down?

Both of these women were billionaires and record breakers and instead of celebrating that, all of the men around me were putting them in a hypothetical cage match and making me choose.

Could we not let both these women have success and celebrate them for it? No, this was America’s new favorite misogynistic pastime and I had to participate. But, no matter what way I answered, I was losing.

I had been losing for years. Every time I’d changed my answer to appease a man, borrowed his opinion as mine to avoid being judged, or bitten my tongue so I’d be considered “cool” came flooding back to me.

I was never cool, but I had been playing it for years. Now, I was exhausted.

Brad looked at me, still waiting for me to answer. I shook my head.

It was never worth an answer.

[diaryoftherest]

Diary Entry 1- On Being 25 and Trying

On the morning of my 25th birthday, I woke up to a text from Honey, my cousin who had just started her first year at college the following year. 

“Happy 25, G,” she said with the unemotional but aptly placed heart emoji acting as a period. “Halfway through twenty! I hope these next five years treat you right.” 

It was a message that only a nineteen-year-old still in love with the world could send: a birthday message with subtle optimism but undertones of foreboding in the blue spaces of the iPhone messages subtext. I was already on the fence about how to spend that birthday. 

The previous night, I went out with Eva, my best friend from high school and the most beautiful and loyal texter I have ever known. She took me to dinner which led to drinks with her friends, then to drinks with her girlfriend's friends, and then I was hungover and crawling to meet my brother and mother for the birthday brunch they organized, and that I could not appear late for. I was only in Chicago for two weeks, visiting family and friends. This was my first day in those two weeks and I was already sweating Vodka on public transit, an ex-party-girl-style mess.

This was not how I wanted to start twenty-five. I decided on my panicked jog to the restaurant that I wouldn’t drink for the rest of the day. I would stick to nothing harder than kombucha and I would go back to the Southern-California-occasional-sober lifestyle that I had adopted since moving to LA the previous fall. 

My outlook changed when I got that message from Honey.

I promptly ordered a gin and tonic when I met my mother at the bar. 

It took me a second to unpack why this silly message hit me like a cartoon anvil from the heavens but I’ve realized, after two months of realizations, that I am scared of a few things (spiders, snakes, etc) but most notably: aging. 

I’m not scared of aging in the “don’t-let-me-turn-thirty-I’d-rather-vomit” way. I think that style of thinking is a patriarchal reminder that women’s value is tied to their looks which is tied to their skin which is tied to their age which is ranked by golf terms in that you lose points or get worse as the numbers go up. I don’t want to cling to that sexist, pre-Barbie-movie style of thinking or rhetoric. I am not scared of thirty.

I am scared of aging in that I’m scared all of this will end and all I’ll have to show for it is a bunch of unanswered questions. 

What is the next part of my twenties? If my life is broken down into five-year intervals like my nineteen-year-old cousin swears that it is, will it be the same as last year or different? Is twenty-five to thirty just as sticky and winding as twenty to twenty-five? Is anyone going to help me with this existential crisis or do I have to handle it on my own? Is anyone even going to read these questions? Fuck me if they do. 

In short, I am terrified of the rest. 

If life is a highway then my early twenties were a traffic jam. It was like I had somewhere to be, but every time I tried to get going, I saw brake lights. I tried to get things moving by moving myself across the country twice. I accepted every sexy, fashionable job that came my way, bought blazers but kept the hot pants and tiny tops, and had frequent one-night stands the way Carrie Bradshaw would have wanted. Still, I was doing nothing. I got up for work every morning, even when my job was remote and I could have worked lying down and gone to sleep every night, and that was all I had for a few years. Meanwhile, everyone I knew was getting engaged or married or fucked by a guy named Jake. 

SIDE NOTE TO SELF: Research how many Jakes there can possibly be in the world. Are single men always named Jake? Are there that many Jakes in the world? Are we all always dating them?

I know all of this reads like babbles. The easiest response to all of it is to go see a licensed medical professional but I already know what they would say. If I approached a therapist, they would hit me with a simple but familiar response: it’s a quarter-life crisis. This is all existentialism, boiled down and dispensed to me from the pulsing anxiety that lives behind my eyes. I shouldn’t make too many decisions right now. In other words, a therapist would tell me to refrain from buying a sportscar or moving back in with my parents; they would tell me to let this wave ride. 

While all of that is true, a reminder that the only constant in life is to sit tight while things change, I can’t help but wonder if I had the opportunity to put myself out there more, to get myself out of my head and onto a page last year, then maybe I wouldn’t be running from one way of thinking to another. Maybe I wouldn’t have been twenty minutes late to my own birthday brunch. Maybe I would have been able to express something deeper by now. 

So, I’ve made a pact with myself. I’ll encapsulate myself, each week, into a diary entry. I’ll look back on it when I reach the next halfway point and maybe then I’ll be able to make sense of some things. 

If not, that’s ok. I have five years to figure it all out after all, according to a nineteen-year-old.