DOG DAYS: Happy Bloomsday/Ann’s Birthday/on Sally Rooney 2
I woke up on ann’s birthday/bloomsday to my favorite alarm: thunder. The rainy morning made me anxious to cancel my museum ticket and watch annie hall in bed for the umpteenth time, but nevertheless she persisted through a shower and cup of coffee and toast with butter she bought at the farmers market yesterday. june 16th: Bloomsday, the day in which james joyce’s novel takes place, and also anns twenty second: two holidays uniquely celebrated by me. Almost too good to be true was the exhibit celebrating 100 years of Ulysses being held in the museum that holds my favorite room in all of manhattan: the preserved library of JP Morgan. Wealth is not that alluring to me; and I know i live a blessed life for i do not envy the kardashians for anything, but I would do ugly, disgusting things to be in possession of a library like that of this robber baron. After floating through the Joyce exhibit, properly worshiping and paying my respects, I stared up at the library ceiling and considered that this sight would be just as entertaining to a 18th century child as an episode of Veep is to me today. I tried to inhabit that perspective and I stared for another 10 minutes.
When I first started working at the honeywell, the pandemic was still the primary behavioral motivator and conscientious (neurotic? sorry.) millennials were still fleeing for safety. As a result, I was the diligent hostess of many going away nights out, a ceremonious night of drinking after friends are forced to help pack up an apartment. Then, I shuddered at the thought of ever leaving, and now i shudder at the birthday girl’s looming flight to california. The distance excites me, however, because our friendship will go from roommates to penpals, quite the sally Rooney dynamic if you ask me.
Watching conversations with friends the series while getting through beautiful world where are you has me considering a single question over and over again: why aren't sally rooney’s “best friends”... nice to each other? I know they are all bisexual and weridly attracted to eachtother, so maybe its some sort of sexual tension that I am not picking up on, or maybe the irish are simply harsher in tone, but if sophie wrote me an email like one of those I would probaby cry and send back an apology within 3 minutes. Miss sally is also causing me a little bit of frustration as her writing seems so influential to mine to an almost embarrassing extent, and I wonder if any attempts at writing in a similar voice or with a similar plot will be revered as copy cat-y, and I worry about how anything my contemporaries and I produce will be firmly rooted within the post-sally-rooney school, for better or for worse. But then I consider Joyce, and how we all live beneath that magnanimous shadow already.
And unfortunately the rest of my day will be spent trying to theorize some bullshit about museums as de facto public spaces- not unlike Edina, Minnesota’s own southdale mall in its origin- in a way that will alleviate my thesis advisors anxieties for taking me under her wing. And instead of doing that I’m writing this. How do you know when you're going too easy on yourself? And how many allowances are allowed on the premises that it is my final summer, after all?
Anyways, its a landlords market and soho and I are going through a bitter public breakup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekm6ZCdqwdA
