Jennifer Patalano Class

WHO ARE YOU IN 2,350 WORDS

I have written this twice. And twice is not enough.

I have written this better.

I have written this shorter.

With fewer words to clutter the shelves.

I have written many sentences aimed at many end points, for many people whose faces are blurred.

I have rewritten this for the sake of propriety and then for the sake of red stilettos and skin-tight jeans.

But this is what I have as of now and is thus what I am posting today.

I don't like to write about what I am and am not. You either want me to be ordinary or entirely extraordinary or something in between and despite your yearnings and despite my own, I am exactly what I am and entirely what I am not. You want my stats in careful clich�s. And I give you curves and switchbacks and excessive adjectives.

And despite my best intentions, or my worst, I embellish myself to give form to shapeless destiny, because I can and because I shouldn't and because nothing gives me more pleasure in all the wild world.

And anyway who I am and who I am not are unfixed and floating, changing ceaselessly or instead of changing, hiding well, waiting for the right window of re-entry, trudging forward with and without intent and with the inevitable turn of the calendars pages and the way the light shines on my left cheek on the way home from Wealthy City, and my estrogen, which now, today, is flowing like a giving river.

Praise the gods of women.

Amen sisters and brothers alike.

I started this twice.

And twice is not enough.

I began with a light little history of me. A story carved of cream cheese and spread on a toasted bagel. Full of fat, high in calories and without any nutritional value.

So stuffed full of my own refined carbs, I packed the scraps in a doggy bag and saved the rest for later and, cream cheese tucked safely away, went back to working my life away in a hefty 12 hour chunk.

And when I got home, I took to writing this missive.

I left work today at 8:30 p.m., my life 12 hours lighter, surrounded by the towering monuments of Wealthy City and its subtlety-free suburbs, feeling poor and angry, feeling distracted from the real life I chase like the devil when my hormones allow. I left work today and got in my car, my dirty, dented car, my famously ugly, dirty, dented car that is 100% paid for and belongs to me and is thus falling apart a spare part a day. And in said car I frantically fumbled for something to expel the Richness from me, for some talisman to will away the smell of genuine leather, the lack of the smell of purified air, to will away the will of the wallets that cost more than everything I've ever had in mine.

Fumbling for something, grabbing at anything, I slid Bob Dylan and his funky hair into my disk player and the two of us sang until we were hoarse about how we were so much older then, about how we're younger than that now.

And we felt smug and proud that we understood just exactly what that meant.

For right now.

We felt smug and we felt proud in the understanding that the particular people we just left behind most certainly do not now and most certainly won't when they're older, understand just exactly what that meant.

And slowly the less than inspired words I am sharing with you now began to form in my accosted head, how I would tell you who I am by way of this typically typical day. This day spent droning along at my usual speed, a speed which is insanely crazy-fast and somehow slow enough that I perpetually get nowhere. How I spent this day trying not to notice that I spent this day trying not to notice things. I who notice, whose existence at soul level is built upon noticing.

It was a good idea.

But it was phony from the get-go. And I knew like I always do, that I wouldn't fulfill its promise.

I knew instead that I'd tell you about my estrogen and how when it is flowing like this I am who I am and when it is not I am who I am required to be. That when it is not I am a model citizen, comprised of responsible notions, and built up and up upon a solid foundation toward a bluish-grey sky, free of dragons. But when estrogen informs my maneuvering I am mother earth nurturer, sensitive sex kitten and dragon slayer supreme and solid at my core as a diamond. Glittering from inside in the sunlight and the twilight. Just as rare and almost as fine.

Or so I wish you to believe for now.

Because I wish for me to believe it for now and for me to find some way to convey it in every way to you forever.

I wish I were always this.

This me who writes her life.

If I could write my life I'd be tall and wise and wear bikinis to the summits at which I would negotiate world peace with stunning delicacy and amazing multipartisanship in between exercises in wild, unfettered espionage. Because a small waist and world peace and spying for my country in leather pants are high on my agenda. As are pretentiously innovative MySpace pages about everything and nothing and above all Love.

Let me say this again, set apart from rhetoric.

Above all stands love.

Love is an agenda. And I have an agenda, I was surprised to discover just a few years ago, when I was starting out and still capable of surprise, before I got stuck here in this loop, cycling back and around, and back around again.

And I was not surprised to discover today on my way home from Wealthy City, that I have more than a few agendas and that some of these agendas have agendas of their own.

At least one agenda is born of my father's era and at least one is born of my own. There are agendas formed before us both that have played out their own potential and have hung on to prove they could. There was an agenda born today. At least one of my agendas is an intrinsic good, born of my intense need and furious desire to do right by the world. And at least one is born of my intense failure and by extension desire to do right by me. And then, as luck would fail to have it, there is that one born of my intense impulse to destroy absolutely everything. Especially those things I have built myself.

And despite myself I find myself with an agenda built of the outsides of things. One that is clothed in American values, consumerism and beauty and simulacrum. It conflicts so noisily with the me I really am, the agenda I advance in the dark corners of my bedroom, when John is snoring beside me and I am quietly crying into the tissue I bought for moments just like these.

You.

Must.

Know.

I crave love for the sake of love based entirely on the insides of us, love that informs all decisions and infects the world with peace and even more love.

And yet,

I.

Must.

Admit.

I crave a body that would burn the sun, a body that when plastered on a billboard intended to sell denim to Wealthy Citys teens, would stop rush-hour traffic dead, SUVs slamming into small compact cars like mine that get good gas mileage and for some reason always smell like ketchup.

Yet I crave a world where no one cares who has what or who wears what or who is shaped how or who has an iPod or who didn't get around to buying a striped scarf from old Navy.

And in the absence of that world, in its absence of a shadow, I cower and hide another agenda. I hide from the screaming fact that somewhere inside the inside me I crave the means by which to acquire these things without causing harm, to dance like the devil in expensive shoes, and to look like blue hot fire in $200 jeans.

Please know that I feel guilty for this and with great effort push this agenda deep under the bed, which is difficult as my mattress sits upon the floor, as they do here in Poverty City. And like the princess and her pea, it pokes at me in my sleep, prods my dreams and nudges them toward spa treatments. And the pushing and the poking and the lack of sleep, the consistent and defining complete lack of sleep, cause me pain.

There is of course, the pain.

But the pain lives in the dark corners of me, and encourages (compels) me to linger there, in that place where I advance my gentler agenda and where tissue with a potion is always in plentiful supply.

That Agenda is my Sweetest, Most Pressing and, I Fear, Unlikely to Come to Fruition Forever Dream, to teach the sentient creatures of the world what it means to act and react in every way with kindness and with love in mind, not just what it means, but why and exactly how to live for the sake of love, to build upon that love an even greater love and to do it all for the sake of still more love with endless kindness in mind and in the interest of peace.

I wrote this twice and twice is not enough.

The fact is, today has stretched out to a series of long tomorrows and then to the next day and then to this place a few years later. And still my life remains obstructional, a body lying in the middle of the path to my imagined future.

My mother's gigantic horoscopic tome, the one which despite the daytime me, the nighttime me devours, says I tend to miss the forest for the trees.

Amen, brothers and sisters.

I have missed the forest for the trees.

I am very good at my job, for example. Really pretty good, whatever the Headmaster says to keep my curly Head reasonably small.

I'm Good sorta like Bill Gates is Good only Much, Much Smaller.

Im good especially for my tender, laughable age. And also for my lack of excessive formal education. I raise money for little people who someday will be big and will someday, if I did my job well, do big things for small people who need big people to do big things on their behalf.

And I feel good about this.

Good like Ghandi felt Good only much, much smaller.

I do what I do well in part as a matter of course. I do it long and listlessly. I do it like a machine with squishy parts and no right angles. But I do it with intent. And I make sure every corner is turned, every dollar divined, every person who might be asked for anything is asked and thanked for their contribution, because I am overwhelmed with the desire to incent that which we can do for whomever needs it done. I make it my career to give these givers the incentive to give, to make them feel like well-bleached angels sent from a shiny clean-scented heaven.

Because Good is what they do.

Because they are good at what they do.

Because Good is what I do.

Because I am good at what I do.

And thus, by this marriage, of Good and good and Good and good, still more Good is done.

But, when you get down to it, despite all the good, the good I do is not all I dream of doing.

I dream of putting words to page for people like you. People who understand that what I am doing is more important than who I say I am.

I dream of doing what I fancy I was forged to do. I dream of doing exactly this, every day 'til the end of me, sitting in this ridiculously uncomfortable chair which defies the wisdom of ergonomics in every possible way. I dream of waking up to this ugly cheap-a*s JC Penney desk and this computer which we have paid for, for nearly three years, the reason for which Circuit City has been calling me at work and embarrassing me flagrantly. I dream, I admit, of being Great. Not Powerful, but Great in its most well-intentioned incarnation. Something visible from space. Something cast in words and revelations the size of the Northern Hemisphere, or at least as big as Rhode Island (as all things small, but still pretty big, always are).

A Writer.

To be a Writer.

On official stationary, stamped with the universe's seal of approval, the quantifiable, results of the Test of Time.

But, today which is now yesterday, I worked like a machine welded to a donated desk in a freezing gray office space, famously infested with infinite ants, dirty and dented like my car, cluttered with papers strewn about on the floor, tacked to the walls at random angles, an office I can't seem to keep clean because clean is a big, fat lie. Because my mind is never clean.

There is nothing clean about the way I do things or the way things are done to me.

Today, which is now yesterday, I whiled away the hours, under cover of responsibility and was compensated in a small and meaningless way that doesn't seem to compensate for what I've sacrificed to get there.

But on this night, which is still this night, I am a Writer.

And this is all the compensation I will ever need.

I have written this twice.

And twice is not enough.

I have written this better.

I have written this shorter, with less words cluttering the shelves.

But this is what I have today and so this is who I am to you.

For now.