2010 – Livesay Writing

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

A couple kids around a campfire as the sun goes down, speaking Russian; the last day of a long decade.

Happy New Year’s Eve.

2020 confounds me. The strange thing about the future is that it makes you look back and so 2010 is where my head’s at tonight. I was younger, a virgin, had never tried whiskey, or smoking, my vices were less dramatic but more severe. I was an introvert. I was in college but couldn’t stomach it. Classes were fine, but the people – they all seemed to have somewhere better to be.

It was around a decade ago that things changed. They’re always changing, but 2010 was different. We started drinking up each other through the long straw internet. Smartphones. The first iphone was in 2007 but by the 10’s they’d taken off. You’ve got everything in your pocket, all your money, all your friends, too much and too little time. Life got demarcated in ways it hadn’t been, so that the big pictures were clearer than ever while the details got so subdivided into clickbait attention-takers – we all became farsighted. Even while I’m writing this, I’ve checked the time and answered two texts.

I went to Greece that summer in 2010. June, my first trip abroad, first trip alone. It was to study but I didn’t really study. We had classes but we traveled. And the country was in uproar. They were reeling from the same financial crisis that had hit America and there were riots, marches, austerity. I ate a lot of 2 Euro gyro’s on desolate pigeon’ed streetcorners and most were good but one, in Thessaloniki, came without tzatziki and was full of mustard, so that was kind of bad. Otherwise, I remember the beaches, the Aegean, and the sound of rough talking in back bars about things I couldn’t understand.

I’m in love with this year, 2019. Not for anything special about it, but because I look at who I am, at all my surroundings, and things have changed, I’m bolder colors, I’m unrecognizable from who I was before.

Again, happy New Year’s Eve.

Currently Reading: Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

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Kindness, kindness, kindness.
I want to make a New year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.
Susan Sontag

Hi.

Coffee: Cafe Pajaro, Extra Dark Roast, Trader Joe’s Brand

2010 changed me. I spent my summer on Greek oceans, the autumn falling in love. I had my first flirtations with teaching when I worked with America Reads and Counts; I wrote two stories and dreamed up others I wouldn’t write for another eight years. Duke had been rocky the first two years, but by Junior I had hit my stride. December had me sharing beds with the first woman I really loved. I guess you could say I was living a rosy-colored campus life.

Tonight, I went to a showing of ‘The Night is Short, Walk on Girl.’ It’s a Masaaki Yuasa film, animated, vibrant, a spiritual follow up to a short anime series from 2010 called ‘The Tatami Galaxy.’ The characters keep their faces from eight years ago but their lives and personalities have changed. The male lead is brasher; the heroine steals the show. The movie – like much of Yuasa’s work – is like tripping down a flight of stairs with two tall drinks in your hand, only to have a revolving group of strangers lift you up. It was good, not great, but it burrowed into me. I’d fallen hard for – and seen echoes of myself in – ‘The Tatami Galaxy’ as it aired in 2010.

I get stuck some mornings noticing the way I shave my beard. It’s semi-precise, consistent, but nothing like the pictures I see from college. I don’t remember when I changed length and blades, don’t remember why. It can be hard to stick the continuity between then and now. A small change, but keep putting coins in the piggy bank and eventually you have to empty it to make room for something new.

My favorite scene in ‘The Night is Short, Walk on Girl’ has four men stuffing down super spicy ramen in a big red tent. They’re competing to win rare books. Some want money, some want love, one is an old author trying to reclaim his first manuscript. Just as the competition finishes, the God of Used Book Markets pulls a string and the tent comes undone, the red tarp vanishing, all the old books flapping away like squawking birds. “I forbid the hoarding of rare books!” says the God, paraphrasing. The four men chase after their dreams, going their separate ways after having stumbled together. A few find their books. Others don’t.

Currently Reading: LaRose, Louise Erdrich

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“My still-as-of-yet rose-colored self was cut to the quick by that which is called reality.” – The Tatami Galaxy

Tag: 2010

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