Paper Trench

 'Agoraphobia' by Austin Kleon

Yesterday was not a good day. In fact, it was beyond that -- it was genuinely bad. Without going into detail, let me just say that I at one point felt the need to miss a city bus in order to escape a leering man with ruddy foam headphones and two cases of Mountain Dew, only to end up across the aisle from a man who was shouting at the top of his lungs between licks of the bus window. A scone purchased to make myself feel better was too dry to swallow, and at one point a piece held up to my post-surgery-stiff mouth bounced off my chest and then fell to the sidewalk. I came home and cried until my eyeliner crackled and fell in pieces to my cheeks.

And then, well. I went to Gap. And bought sweatshop-made clothes. With a credit card. And the thing is, it made me so, so happy.

Standing in the golden light of the dressing room, wearing drapey pants and a wrap sweater (both of which I have been searching for for years), I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders. Ever since re-creating Hey There, Lovely as Paper Trench, I've been working late into the night searching for companies that sell sustainable, sweatshop-free clothes that I actually want to wear. There are a number of them out there, but they're not easy to find. And online shopping, I have to say, is a lonely pursuit. I didn't realize it until the girl working the register at Gap ran her gentle fingers over the pants I was buying and sighed, "These are so luxurious."

"I know," I said, giddy. "I'm so excited, they're absolutely gorgeous."

She nodded, smiling. "They're almost French."

Loneliness, Carl Jung wrote, does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important. In a time when we are constantly being bombarded with the message that relationships are dead -- and that, somehow, this is the fault of Young People (a.k.a. my generation), who invented Facebook and Twitter in order to sell fictional versions of their entitled, narcissistic selves -- even the smallest interaction with a stranger becomes a thing of beauty. Sharing my joy over this perfectly crafted pair of pants with such a sweet girl was nice. Really nice.

This is not to say that I am giving up on this whole venture -- far from it. The purpose of writing this blog, though, is not to manufacture a prettier, funnier, happier version of myself and try to convince all of you that she's real. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have deleted my Facebook this week (yes, it's true). I'm a writer because I truly believe in it as a medium that convinces us simultaneously of our ordinariness and our complexity, our plainness and our beauty. It shows us that we are not so unlike other people as we had thought, both in our struggles and in our triumphs.

At the mall yesterday, we ran into our friend Kathryn and when I sheepishly showed her my Gap bag, she said, "You know, it's really okay. We live in ambiguous times." This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Today, on my way to the comics, I read, "Is Tom Hanks falling out of favor?" by Steven Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times. "Genial likability -- the onscreen demeanor Hanks made famous -- isn't common among today's film protagonists," Zeitchik writes. "American leading men do many things these days. Guy-next-door is rarely one of them."

Directly across from this article was "Exclamations make their point" by Aimee Lee Ball of the New York Times. Quoting Lynne Truss, Ball writes, "...on a computer screen, we tend to pick out bits of information and link them for ourselves. The exclamation point is a natural reaction to this: Writers are shouting to be heard." A little further on, she quotes Jennifer Egan: "The more exclamation points you use, the more you need to use in order to create an impression of exclamation."

The one article is about film and the other about emails, but both come to the same conclusion: the days of subtlety, and the quiet certainty that precedes it, are dwindling. The boy-next-door can't compete with Jack Sparrow and Thor just as the understated period can't compete with rowdy, life-of-the-party exclamation points. This dynamic is easy enough to understand, but no-one seems to know where this new reality will lead.

Until someone figures it out, I'm going to put on my pretty new pants and run around the backyard with my own boy-next-door. Who is three years old, and sometimes bumps his head on his dog.