New York Awful Times

"If we cannot stop envying, it seems especially poignant that we should be constrained to spend so much of our lives envying the wrong things." --Alain de Botton

I love reading the Sunday New York Times. On Sunday. It's not the same if you don't get to read it until Monday, which I know because I've spent so many Sundays riding in vans coming home from places like Arkansas. Louise hooked me up with a Sunday-only subscription, and it's like Christmas. Or Thanksgiving, when you can eat nothing but the pie if you want. Sometimes I just work the crossword.

Not this past Sunday. Skipping a step here, blatantly, the one where I berate myself for being hopelessly out of touch and somehow, without noticing it's happened to me, old. I'm neither. I'm just genuinely, appropriately grossed out by the sludge that's settling over our humanity. That's how it seemed to me after reading two articles in Sunday Styles, the Op Ed, Week in Review, Sunday Business and that article about Rachel Zoe in the magazine. 12-year-old schoolgirls sneering at sexual timidity from their east side apartments. 36-year old multimillionaires trying to buy a more interesting life with the help of a publicist. Hedge fund gluttons who can't wait to make their first hundred million -- wait, make that billion -- so they can buy bigger stuff than the aforementioned rich boy. Wasted brain cells that used to memorize things before memory-retention became arcane like, 5 minutes ago.

Are we dead yet? Because the addiction du jour -- to contempt, smugness, ennui, entitlement, attention and pretentiousness -- kind of makes crack look like a cakewalk. I know, I know, leave Britney alone. Boo f-ing hoo. But still. And most of the columnists seem sympathetic, not to their subjects but to what they're writing that they never get to be explicit about: A bunch of stupid crap that readers want to read no matter what else you could offer that might be way more interesting and intelligent. Hell, I read it, didn't I? But I hadn't expected to step into a big stinky pile of it in my New York Times.

You don't get to buy back your humanity. You have to earn it back. And anyway, what if we just competed with ourselves and quit looking around to see who's noticing? It's too bad we all aren't paying more legitimate attention to ourselves and less frivolously to each other. We'd probably be surprised at what we could really accomplish. If you want a sampling of what this might feel like, take a level 3 yoga class. By the time the instructor tells you to wrap your arm around your kidney, grab your foot and then straighten your leg, you won't want anyone looking at you. And you'll be too busy to notice anyway.

And I hate that the quotes that come to mind in these moments are always the CS Lewis ones about Satan and stuff. "To be," Screwtape wants us to convince ourselves, "means to be in competition." Apparently that's how you get yourself on the guest list down there in Hell. Or the one about how money can't buy you love. Sure it can. Doesn't even last long enough to go stale. So eat up and quit bitching.

I guess there are a few illusions we should hang on to, if they make life more bearable. For now I'll be stubborn about my vision that the curse of empathy is real. And that it's not really a curse.

I just realized I never got around to reading Modern Love. Maybe I should go back and do that.

xoxo - thelma