since graduating from college, i have been subject to an ongoing conspiracy to drag me into adulthood. There is talk of jobs, of a worrying lack of work ethic. I canvass for two days. I do hot yoga for two days. I am supposed to have a job. I have been given the responsibility to promote my mom's louise log in social media at the dining room table whenever i want, and i wilt and complain about it. i am damned pathetic. I update this blog with something i wrote and then rewrote once and i think i am amazing.

this hit me toady because i went to the bank to deal with some banking i imagine to be convoluted because i cannot understand it. the woman there, audra, smiled at me as you would an 8 year old when i struggled to recite my freshly memorized social security number. i mixed up one of the digits and she corrected me. i then practiced it a few more times. i am marching into the future. there were questions about credit history, about having a job, about what my family's household income was. This last question really threw me in a funny way, launching me into a wondering mood that is probably rarely seen in the premier accounts relationship cubicle. the household income of the green household has become a kind of mystical figure in my mind. I know we live in an enormous, amazing house, and that my dad has been a professor for many many years. But I don't know the number. I don't know my dad's salary, I don't know the rents our two tenants pay, and I don't know how much our house is worth. I don't know how much electricity costs, or insurance. I don't know how much you need to live off of food that is not canned in your retirement. I am at the stage in my life when i think myself a dashing philanthropist for returning movies to World of Video late so that my fees (my parents' money) might keep them open. And anyway, it's something I half made up to justify my inability to remember to return anything on time. I need to know those numbers so that I can have a little panic and realize that money is real and that I have to have it to putter around the house and be alive. I need to see that money, not thought provoking walks where i congratulate myself for noticing the cement pavement and then remember the movie Mystic River and imagine a sinister formula measuring sidewalks built with children's lives destroyed, not watching fireflies in tompkins square park with the swiss tourists, not be a rentier romantic little shit. there's probably a rougher romance in simply being responsible for my shit, something grounded and excellent in that, and i've got to get to know it. i mean, what a goddamn farce that i love down and out in paris and london so much.

But apparently this kind of behavior can't go on. I've started to look at people who look like they work in amazement at how long they've probably been doing what they do for. That they might not like it particularly, but that their work is a means to the end of fun. I am realizing that the means is what life really is, and I am alarmed. Every single day! Everyone I look at looks like a heroic, bedraggled postman to me, rain or shine. They have the same job! One job! Over and over! And they keep doing it! I have got to get my shit together, this is not going to be cute for much longer.

part of the problem, however, is my creeping contentment. i don't like spending money and family is free, i don't cook because my mom does, my house is beautiful. i am a pleasant person except undeservingly so. teenagers are so difficult because they're insecure. i should be insecure, my self-respect is something i've undeservedly stumbled in to. by what right am i not screaming at everyone, wanting to prove myself? i'm the king of my family dinners, as i ever was, and it makes me disconcertingly content.

in short: i'm realizing that a lot of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing stuff they don't really like (working) in order to be able to do other stuff. i've been realizing, getting flabbergasted by the idea that i'm not gonna do what i wanna do always and forever, that these people who work are actually real and what they do is unavoidable. this is heavy shit.

i went over to gc's house, the editor of the local newspaper, who assigned me a job as an investigative reporter. i am to investigate the disappearance of saint vincent's hospital. he has not seen a written word of mine, but he did tell me that i was handsome many, many times. apparently it was bankrupt. there is a difference between urgent care and intensive care. catholic charity will bankrupt you? how did st vincent's get a bad reputation? why did susan sarandon say she wouldn't bring her children there? how did it get to be SO in debt? what are the new ambulance times for people in this neighborhood to the nearest ER?

i've been telling people i want to write, that i do write, and i give them sprawling examples of what i want to write about. i am 22 years old and i have never had anything published and i announce my intention to write treatises on water, or dust, or the bankruptcy and closure of the hospital where i was born. my hilarious luck is having been given that last subject by the Westview, a local newspaper my dad writes for. I was introduced to the newspaper and its editor, was told I was handsome, and dubbed "investigative reporter." It's damningly appropriate that while i'm flailing around in the grandness of my old testament subject matter (water? dust?) i'm told to write about the billion dollar collapse of the hospital of my young life. The assignment smacks of Synecdoche, that awful Charlie Kaufman movie in which the protagonist erects his whole universe on a theater set in order to do justice to the majesty of his miserable little life because he's so attached to all the details. The editor told me i would win a pulitzer after explaining the inadequacy of the New York Times' reporting. I need a smaller frame.


my ambition is sprawling and useless, i lack a frame, as with that diploma of mine, through which to see the world. and that's all that makes anything worthwhile, that which you cut out. anyway, i brought this up because a friend at a bar mentioned that the nytimes was soliciting articles from young people about living with their parents. it's clear that they want stuff about the economic crisis, about the young mired with the old, the young itching to start the future. i don't have that. my parents are great! they're really pushing me out of the nest. i want a deadline. I WANT A DEADLINE

i'm going to be family dinners for life. i'm met with increasing wonderment when i explain how i live at home and don't know what's outside of it. i get depressed, i don't have an itch. i get along far too well with my parents to flee, and so i eat with mom and imperceptibly slide into virginal adulthood, where my parents know my room isn't clean and we have mature disagreements about it. i'm not an adult, i'm a very mature child, depressed at his precociousness. where is my itch? where is my deadline?

Family dinners are an insidious institution in my life. They anchor me to my home, to my beautiful home where the floorboards beneath my seat at the table are worn to splinters. the places in this house where i have bonked my head and stubbed my toes have become dangerously familiar, i am too big a person grown sentimental to the stifling familiarities of my home. I've got to hate the stairs that squeak because they squeak now, not be charmed because they always have. this is difficult in my case because the truth of the matter is that this house in greenwhich village is the best house in the world, so it's all the more important that i cling hatefully to how i can never remember which way the knobs turn on and off in the upstairs bathroom. my growing realization of how desperately i have to get out of here is measurable in the pettiness of my complaints. i have to invent these things. i am domesticated, i am peaceable. my mom tells me i am mature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSAd3NpDi6Q&feature=related

i have to get away.

I have been complaining about these splinters for a long time

so, what are the essential facts? i want a deadline, i'm a more pleasant, reasonable version of my 16 year old self, complete with a messy room and an uncharted future and steady work babysitting and dogwalking; i get along very well with my parents; i'm more inclined to mope than fight with my family; MY HOUSE IS THE PROBLEM. MY HOUSE STYMIES ME. It is filled with light and comfortable and a hammock swings enticingly and the fridge is full and there is nothing i need to do but what i did when i was 16, the only difference being that i now readily unload the dishwasher. But it's the same chore it's always been. i am filled with ambition so sprawling that i'll never get out of here; i need a frame for my degree; this is not going to be cute for much longer;