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trishThere's a lot of kinky/poly/otherwise-non-normative sexuality stuff going on in my life right now, but I am not dealing with it here until this semester is over and I can write about it cogently. I have a couple of other things I want to write about, though, to get them out somewhere, so I'm going to tell you all a little story about me shortly after I got my undergrad degree. I was living in Southern California (this is actually important) in an apartment with a bedroom so small that my desk was out in the hallway. I was unemployed and desperately trying to find a job and reading a book every two or three days. (I got through Pynchon, Balzac, two or three books by Nabokov... being unemployed does wonders for reading!)
I also read craigslist personals, mostly for fun, a little for actually meeting people (I met a couple of people for coffee but meh), and a little bit thinking maybe I could pick up a sugar daddy or something, I hear that's one way to make a living in LA, right? Most of them seemed terrifying, but a couple of them I bothered to send email to, and one of them set up his post as a series of questions and so I pretended it was an essay test and answered it. Apparently my answers were good, because we struck up a steamy and surprisingly literate email conversation for a month or so. It was almost time to actually meet up and see how things were going to go --- I was a young woman down on her luck working on a novel, he was "in the film industry" with three houses in Mexico, and things were looking good. The last question he asked me (he wanted me to read to him) was what I was currently reading. I answered him honestly: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. He never wrote back.
I don't know what actually happened (maybe he had multiple tentacles out and found someone prettier, maybe he got distracted, maybe his wife caught him) but I like to think that he realized that I was smarter than he was and got scared off by Infinite Jest. At the time I was really frustrated, but then I found a job and quickly got caught up in that and completely forgot about the guy... until a year or two later, when I got an invitation from his email address to join some sort of social networking site. I checked it out and his friends page was just him and 100 girls; apparently it was some sort of thing that went through all of his contacts for that email address and automatically sent them email when he signed up. It also contained his real name. Oops.
For some reason --- I wonder if it had something to do with my super-sketchy anonymous email provider --- he assumed it was my fault and sent angry email about how I had signed him up for this thing. Now, I hadn't even had his real name, but now that I did, I did some Googlestalking. Turns out he's a major Hollywood director (I'm sure some of you have heard of him --- I just checked, but that email provider apparently cleans you out if you haven't logged in for a year, so all I remember are the initials, but someday I am going to run into this dude and just laugh and laugh and laugh) and by tying his "I'm being sketchy on the Internet" username to his real name, I could say all sorts of things about the dude. Fascinating things, like how he was actually horribly racist. I told him so, and that I wouldn't, and that he probably wanted to be careful about that. His response was... terse. :)
So, for better or for worse, David Foster Wallace kept me from being the fucktoy of a millionare Hollywood bigshot, kept in a cat costume in a cage in a mansion in Mexico. I've been thinking about DFW a lot lately (if any of you are seriously news-deprived, he committed suicide this year) and while I don't know if "made Trish get a real job" counts as a life achievement for him, but it does for me, so good job, DFW! I'd rather be in E's cage anyway. In Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote that "there may not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels." Maybe, for a minute there, he was one of mine. Rest in peace, DFW.
I also read craigslist personals, mostly for fun, a little for actually meeting people (I met a couple of people for coffee but meh), and a little bit thinking maybe I could pick up a sugar daddy or something, I hear that's one way to make a living in LA, right? Most of them seemed terrifying, but a couple of them I bothered to send email to, and one of them set up his post as a series of questions and so I pretended it was an essay test and answered it. Apparently my answers were good, because we struck up a steamy and surprisingly literate email conversation for a month or so. It was almost time to actually meet up and see how things were going to go --- I was a young woman down on her luck working on a novel, he was "in the film industry" with three houses in Mexico, and things were looking good. The last question he asked me (he wanted me to read to him) was what I was currently reading. I answered him honestly: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. He never wrote back.
I don't know what actually happened (maybe he had multiple tentacles out and found someone prettier, maybe he got distracted, maybe his wife caught him) but I like to think that he realized that I was smarter than he was and got scared off by Infinite Jest. At the time I was really frustrated, but then I found a job and quickly got caught up in that and completely forgot about the guy... until a year or two later, when I got an invitation from his email address to join some sort of social networking site. I checked it out and his friends page was just him and 100 girls; apparently it was some sort of thing that went through all of his contacts for that email address and automatically sent them email when he signed up. It also contained his real name. Oops.
For some reason --- I wonder if it had something to do with my super-sketchy anonymous email provider --- he assumed it was my fault and sent angry email about how I had signed him up for this thing. Now, I hadn't even had his real name, but now that I did, I did some Googlestalking. Turns out he's a major Hollywood director (I'm sure some of you have heard of him --- I just checked, but that email provider apparently cleans you out if you haven't logged in for a year, so all I remember are the initials, but someday I am going to run into this dude and just laugh and laugh and laugh) and by tying his "I'm being sketchy on the Internet" username to his real name, I could say all sorts of things about the dude. Fascinating things, like how he was actually horribly racist. I told him so, and that I wouldn't, and that he probably wanted to be careful about that. His response was... terse. :)
So, for better or for worse, David Foster Wallace kept me from being the fucktoy of a millionare Hollywood bigshot, kept in a cat costume in a cage in a mansion in Mexico. I've been thinking about DFW a lot lately (if any of you are seriously news-deprived, he committed suicide this year) and while I don't know if "made Trish get a real job" counts as a life achievement for him, but it does for me, so good job, DFW! I'd rather be in E's cage anyway. In Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote that "there may not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels." Maybe, for a minute there, he was one of mine. Rest in peace, DFW.