how to stop sighing in public

How to get to new york, part thirteen

~written on Thursday, October 17th~

A lifetime is a series of mornings and long vibrancies and long sighs and some interspersed evenings bookending a long day’s work, ending in sleep, sometimes a good sleep, the hours interspersed on the edges, entropic distractions like hobbies and parties and card games gathering some nights and longing alone in their apartments on other nights.

photo taken on an iPhone 8 at the Sur Le Lac afterparty for Chicago Fashion Week, taken Friday October 18th

I’ve struggled with this thought: how twisted is it that these lives we live are what they are and nothing else! How awful is it! that we fit so neatly into the hours and minutes and seconds and dates and locations and spaces that box us into our lives whether we like them or not… I can never ever seem to escape the clock. The minutes going by, and today’s date, are as good as a part of my arm.

But in the short, there’s nothing but a pleasant resignation to that cold hard fact of our short streamlined lives here on this earth being what they are and nothing else, — it’s then that comes, through some sort of mechanism in our lives, a sliver in our finger’s tip, or a silver lining, and a feeling, a soft outbreath of the seasons, that we’re, at the very least, going through all of these things together and we can safely assume we can rely on one another to at least have those cosmic restraints, these feelings of good and bad moments.

Being in my twenties, these first couple years of adulthood, — considering that guys aren’t really grown ups until they hit 23, I’ve only really been an adult for like two years lol — been a constant and continuous fluctuation between attempted intimacies with myself and with others, and being hurt, hurting others, being opened up to and not knowing how to respond when others open up to me, going mute in the moment, so many moments, saying so many things that were perfectly alright but also saying so many things worse than saying nothing at all.

I find it so hard to trust anyone, including myself, except in an oscillating wave up and down, the more lived experience I get from the foliages and brushes of my life the more I realize there are as many forms of trust as there are fonts in a word processor, some sturdier than others, some of the ways in which we can trust one another will forever remain intact: just the pure physicality of you and me existing is enough to know I can trust you in that. At least there’s that. We all labor to meet our personal needs, day to day, as per Hannah Arendt, - it’s a reliable component of the human condition, - and we at least make small acts in those shared moments. Even if our lives are uneventful, without action, at least there’s the small actions we make to make ourselves ramen, to make ourselves breakfast, to make ourselves sleep, to make ourselves shower, to make ourselves get groceries, to make ourselves take stock of our own self and our own wants, and to try and make ourselves know what it is that we really want.

Every year in the middle of the summer I drink close to twenty gin and tonics in about a three week period and before the fall comes rolling in I find myself sober sitting in my apartment and reading, not going out much, not doing a whole lot, just mostly looking out the window and trying to put the pieces of my life together or lose myself in a book. These yearly cycles made me feel increasingly manic at one point in my life since it felt like this accute sort of summer exhaustion was a closing of the doors to my life in what should be the prime of my life, but as maturity indicates, my subconscious is shutting these doors and not the world, it’s something that my body calls for in a real way: peace and quiet, tranquility, all that.

The last person you want to agonize is the voiceless murmurs in your head and your body, doing what feels right besides the fact that there would simply be no escape if that relationship with yourself turned too sour.

So I’ve learned to listen to that voice with time; whereas last year I would have gone out two to three times a week, as I did last year, feeling rather miserable at most bars or house parties, so much so that I could only make the most depressive introductions for myself in this city where I had just moved to and where my friends were eagerly introducing me to people. First impressions are important and my first impressions were, a lot of times at night, as the guy who sighs and looks sullen in the corner. I don’t want to be the guy who sighs and looks sullen in the corner. As

Valerie

correctly points out, how you introduce yourself at parties decides what parties you’ll be invited to next. I don’t want to be at any parties for people who sigh too much.

As I’ve said already a couple times here on this blog, I don’t want to be a corndog. Who’s to say what that means but I feel that it’s true. A corndog would sigh.

I do enjoy going out and making connections but I think that staying in and building for myself a personally performed lifestyle and a secure home, a place I can really, actually recharge my batteries, is more important to me genuinelly. There will always come another chance to get out there and mingle with the excited masses of people when I feel confident in myself. 

The period of life after college is difficult to manage. All of you still in school now, especially undergrad, should recognize this fact beforehand because it might help you not be so blindsided by the raw reality of postgrad life in which the connections you had drift away like a step in a staircase that you weren’t expecting to be gone, like tree you might have expected to ignite into an ball of fire but instead is shedding its leaves in autumn colors. 

I’ve found new friends, met wonderful people, I feel like Chicago’s even a home here now that I’ve been here long enough. Everyone finds their tribe to build themselves a new life after college, — especially in a city that’s as purely expansive as Chicago, — but such an entropy of old friends, be it in the city or across the world, is a lonely thing and loneliness hurts all the more in the face of great expectations for adulthood.

I still see the friends I had back when I lived in my college town, of course, and there’s no bad will there, but there’s a feeling that we’re not at all the same people we once were. In our isolation from one another we’ve taken the lessons from the patchwork social lives we lived in college and made our lives into what we wanted them to be, ours and ours alone.

Building such constructions takes time and isolation; social exploration has its season, — there’s a time and a place for each.

And there here’s no escaping it once you’ve become the guy who sighs at parties. There are periods of my life when I sigh and parties, there’re periods when I don’t.

~Written on Sunday, October 20th~

On Friday night I went out. A good friend of mine works at an upstart fashion brand based in the Loop, Sur Le Lac, and him and his girlfriend invited everyone to Sur Le Lac’s little River North afterparty closing out Chicago’s fashion week.

The party was funded by Kylie Jenner’s Sprinter seltzer and Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila; a long series of DJs of varying quality walked in and out and played 2000s pop with a couple adlibs on the microphone here or there, yelling amidst flamenco drums and ear-piercing 808s. Occasionally, a handful of bartenders would come out in a parade with sparklers and sparkling signs advertising 818 Tequila or Sprinter, accompanied by two beefy security guys carrying a child-size lambourghini on their shoulders with the smallest bartender at Joy District slinging sparklers around her head, — and every DJ on the stage, almost like clockwork, said: “Oh shitt they’re bringing out the Lambo.” At one point

ft cald

yelled directly in my ear drum the name of the one direction song playing and I saw stars for a moment.

But it was fun. We were the only one’s really dancing, which is fine. I didn’t worry about looking like I had dead eyes here because I don’t think I did, and besides, if I had it would feel like a natural response to the 818 tequila parades.

Outside of the people who actually work at Sur Le Lac, mostly young twenty-somethings poached fresh out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, we were the only ones there in thrifted clothes.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been to fashion event like this one. I had also cut my own hair earlier in the day and I found myself quietly confident in my thrifted clothes, — I felt like my own self. I don’t know what to say. It was a good night, another piece in this puzzle I’ve been wrestling with, putting the pieces of myself and my worldview together in a way that makes an appropriate amount of sense.

It was good, at least this time, getting out away from the indie circle I’ve been trying so hard to be a part of. It feels pathetic but I’ve really wanted to be like a proper indie guy but haven’t found it in myself to commit to being anything other than who I am. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? At the end of the day I take the bus home and eat and sleep and drink cold water on hot days. That’s not to say this kind of party is where I feel most natural, but that it’s nice to go somewhere new, try on some new clothes, visit friends, support their causes, get out of the house a little bit, and go somewhere you wouldn’t normally go.

Needless to say, I didn’t sigh really at all on Friday night, and around 12:30am we left the party because it had become far too crowded in a short period of time to do much except stand vertically not to mention it hadn’t been an open bar like some Sur Le Lac events, and so we took to the streets where we met Hel and Jen who had just returned from a curated cocktail/dinner party and, while we all crossed the river into the Loop, walking to the train, Hel and I finished our conversation started earlier in the night about American work-from-home expats gentrifying Mexico City.

P.S. This post has a bit more scattershot than my usual. It’s whatever. I’ve wondered what makes a good substack post and it seems to me that to write good substack posts is not too far removed from what it means to write a good blog post, — the emphasis is on consistency and on inviting the readers in to think along with the writer, — and it shouldn’t also be too far removed from the constraints inherent to the Substack itself as a platform, if that makes any sense; Substack represents its own medium. The style of writing that would do great in terms of mass market publication would fall flat more often than not on Substack and that’s absolutely not because writers who are writing for the printed page are bad or anything, they’re just not writing for substack, and good substack writers aren’t writing to be printed. Hence the reason I’m not going to charge for my weekly posts, every one of them’s been a little experiment in form.