dearhearts

Occasionally being a bit disorganized and forgetful can actually be a good thing, like when you maybe kinda forget that you had asked for a day off this week and now it’s almost here and this means that 1) now you have a 3-day workweek and 2) you’re gonna spend your day off hearing Michelle Obama speak. (As well as a bunch of other awesome people, including Eve Ensler who was just sick last year.)

Thanks, faulty brain. Now I get to be excited about this all over again.

“After breakfast I went to the National Gallery. I love how the National Gallery is free. You can walk in and walk out and walk back in. When I find something good like that (which is practically never), I try to take advantage of it, so I’d go out one door and back in at another entrance because it felt so good to enter a museum for free. Anyway I spent a lot of time in the museum. It was odd, like I had never been in a museum before. It just seemed weird that you could walk in and look at all these old, beautiful, valuable paintings. You could look at them closely, with nothing between you and the painting. And I was going very slowly, looking at every painting, and I felt that there was something beautiful about each one. Even the ugly still lifes of dead fish or lynched rabbits, or the bloody religious paintings, if you just looked at little pieces of them, like a single square inch, the paint was beautiful, and I kept thinking about the difference between these rooms of paintings and the dinner theater and how good the paintings made me feel and how bad the dinner theater made me feel. And I knew life was not about a choice between the National Gallery and a dinner theater, but I felt that it was in some way, that the two couldn’t coexist, that if you had a world with these paintings in it, hung in these beautiful rooms that anyone could walk in off the street and see, then how could there also be TV moms acting in a terrible play while people watched them and ate chicken paprika? I suppose most people would think that it was wonderful, that the world is so varied, that there is something for everyone, and I don’t know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by things I did not like. I knew I was fucked up and I thought: misfit, misfit.”

[Reading: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron ]

The place I volunteer with in downtown LA (HI PAWS!) takes me right through the fashion district, which is nice since I like to temper my do-gooding with a little shallow materialism.