ineffable
content notes: 18+
An actor/comedian I really love has been competing this week on Jeopardy: Second Chances. I was surprised to walk in and see him on TV. Then I was excited.
The caregiver had asked me if I knew him personally or something. "No," I admitted, "but I follow him on Instagram." He 'likes' my supportive comments on his posts.
"It's so much worse than parasocial," I began.
"I was just about to say parasocial!" the caregiver laughed.
"—it's that I have this unwavering certainty that, if we'd met earlier in life, if our paths had ever crossed, we would've been besties. I feel that way about him and Leighton Meester."
"From Gossip Girl?"
"Yeah," I laughed.
From then on, we've jokingly referred to the Jeopardy contestant as my "close personal friend Guy Branum."
Several days ago, at the bookstore, I'd explained to my friend why her mom believed I was mad at her.
"We were watching Jeopardy," I explained, "and Ken Jennings introduced the episode. Second Chances, he said, 'another opportunity for redemption.' I said to your mom, Whoa, could it be any more obvious? Second chances? Redemption? Uttered by the most famous Mormon on TV?"
Then I'd mused aloud that Jennings had gotten a second chance, too: he nearly wasn't the host of Jeopardy at all, because of a specific joke he'd tweeted long ago. My friend's mom's mind had jumped to several worst-possible things to tweet, and she floated them as possibilities, to my horror. No, no, nothing like that, I assured her. ("Tell me," she'd said.)
"She dragged it out of me," I said. So I'd finally recited, from memory, the offending tweet: "Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair." Then my friend and I both stood there uncomfortably, in actual mutual distress at my retelling.
"And then your mom finally said, 'Maybe he saw me!'"
We both cackled.
Up until that moment, it had been hard for me to forget about the joke. I'd thought about it every time I saw Ken Jennings on TV. But something about the way my friend's mom decided to own being hot-while-disabled had given me relief. Finally I felt at peace with Ken Jennings.
Anyway, we'd watched Wheel of Fortune afterward. I'd already been googling various exoskeletons (LOL), and she'd mentioned Kybella to me twice. When she commented on the appearance of a contestant, I'd observed that we were about the same size. Then I told her that I frequently ruminate on my own TV taping: about how distracted I'd been by my own appearance, worried about what I'd look like on air. I'd subsequently choked. If I'd been less worried about my appearance, I might've been more confident and more tuned-in to what was happening around me, inside me. I might've done better on the show.
"What if I'm OK the way I am?" I'd asked her. "What if you're OK the way you are?" Anyway, that's why she'd assumed I was angry with her—because I'd sounded a bit pointed. I wasn't angry, it's just something I'm focused on working on.
"The contestant won, by the way," I said, of the Wheel of Fortune champ.
"Good for her," my friend said.
We'd had a wonderful day at a specific, niche hobby shop, and we'd all planned to go back the very next day. But something kept bothering my friend about the store's proprietor. "I kept thinking, there's something I'm forgetting," she told me later.
So she'd gotten online and looked into it. Oops! He was a felon. It had been big news a year earlier; the details of the case were gnarly enough to enter public consciousness.
We were all very shaken. All the adults compared notes. They'd all noticed something 'off' about the guy.
I was horrified. Had I noticed anything? I didn't think so. "I have no discernment whatsoever," I lamented, maybe more shaken up than anyone else.
I was also shaken because I'd recently read that extremely violent misogyny is typically a consequence of 'gender envy': that is, of having all these traits that have been rejected or repressed for being 'too feminine,' and then getting mad when other people are seemingly allowed to express themselves—including their own vulnerable feelings—more freely and openly. It's a complete lack of self-integration, in other words.
Later I sat down next to my friend on the couch.
"I'd wanted his attention," I said to her. I sighed.
I had noticed the same disconnect everyone else had—the lack of eye contact, of social attunement—but instead of finding it off-putting, or otherwise matching energy, I'd expressed an even greater warmth and interest. And I'd felt like he'd reciprocated. Besides, same age, same niche hobby.
It's a trauma thing, I told my friend, "challenge accepted," still scrabbling to earn love, still believing, underneath it all, after all this time, that love is something you have to earn instead of something you organically receive for being you. The hardest sell.
Maybe I haven't learned anything at all yet.
"That's how I keep getting into these predicaments," I told her, rolling my eyes, slumped, utterly defeated.
A friend asked to call me. It was very nice, as it always is.
At one point we were talking about one of her romantic partners, and about intimacy and gender dysphoria, and I finally said I didn't think it was so criminal of her to wish, on behalf of somebody she cares about, that they could make a sort of peace with their body, that they could just feel at home enough to be intimate in the ways other people are able to be intimate with one another. I respect that this is a difficult ask, that it isn't so simple, that other people project narratives about gender and strange meanings onto our bodies and body parts, but I didn't think it was absolutely horrible of her to wish that she could have a specific type of sex with a romantic partner she cares about, and I wasn't sure feeling guilty about having these feelings was totally useful or fair to herself.
I expressed to her that I'd recently realized one of the great tragedies in life is "having a body you can't use." At the time I didn't expand on when or why I'd come to this conclusion, but it'd had something to do with briefly being fertile for the first and only time in my life—a fleeting phase that made me weep, and which has since passed, which also made me weep. And throughout this time, the phrase "a body I can't use" has driven a groove into my brain, a mental earworm, like a needle in vinyl.
Later, I would consider the Korean word maum, an ineffable word that literally means 'body' but which refers to the spirit, mind, soul—a confluence of hard-to-describe things that make up a person.
At another, much earlier point in conversation—while discussing the sanctity of life in all its forms, which I'd suggested is a much broader spectrum of lifestyle choices than "just going vegan"—I'd pointed out that Marie Kondo had assisted in a Buddhist temple before entering the more lucrative field of home organization. Her beliefs about "sparking joy" and giving away one's belongings are underpinned by a general animism: there is a great tragedy in an unused chair. A chair has a limited lifespan and, if it is just taking up space, it is a sad chair, because it is not 'living' according to its purpose. It should therefore be bequeathed to someone who will use the chair as intended, who has need for one.
After we got off the phone, I sat in bed for a few extra minutes, now dwelling on an awkward social encounter from a few months earlier.
At a small gathering, I'd been telling a story about a former primary-care provider of mine, who had been encouraging the use of medical marijuana while trying to not be totally explicit or crass about it. This is to say, she was attempting to lend medical guidance without sounding like Cheech or Chong. This had occurred years ago, back when you still needed a special license to blaze it.
"In my experience," this primary-care provider had said to me, "it's important to use the whole... cow." She kept repeating this, "the whole... cow." As I related this account to a small group, the majority of us were laughing.
The idiom is "the whole buffalo," and I remember I'd nodded, pinning my lips shut so that I wouldn't start giggling. What she'd meant was, for whatever reason, CBD isn't fully effective all on its own for chronic pain relief, so you might seek out and use the entire blossom, rather than relying on a tincture. It's the blossom itself that is unexplainably effective; reducing the blossom to its discrete parts diminishes it in a way that modern science cannot explain.
The same is true, incidentally, of nutritional supplements. It isn't totally clear why they can cause cancer or other deleterious health effects, but it's common knowledge that it's preferable, healthier, to eat whole foods for nutrition: we're missing some sort of crucial, ineffable information anytime we play god with vitamins and minerals, teasing them apart and separating them. There's something we simply do not understand about the cosmic, microscopic interplay of all a plant's parts.
"I've never heard that expression before. Where does it come from," a woman sitting diagonally across from me wanted to know. She looked rightfully suspicious. The table went dead silent.
I'd stared at her and shifted in my seat. It hadn't occurred to me before starting the story that the idiom itself might be considered insensitive, or that my primary-care provider might've been trying to avoid saying the specific phrase for that reason, or that I might not've wanted to share the story with a group of strangers after all.
I'd nervously admitted, then, that I'd always assumed that the phrase was genuinely indigenous in origin, although it may've been misattributed as such. The woman sat back and nodded with her arms folded, visibly satisfied now that I'd publicly exposed myself as problematic.
Cringing at the memory, I thought about the idiom itself. The idiom is about the sanctity of life, and of death: about how, if you have to kill and exploit and consume, the way to honor the act of killing is by appreciating that every part of the whole has its use and its value.
Then I was idly wondering if that's what love ideally is—appreciating all the parts of somebody, all of them at once, and recognizing that the person would lose all their mysterious ineffable efficacy if they were ever reduced and separated—when my best friend texted me.
What she'd sent to my phone was a screenshot from a thread on Threads, about "positive celebrity encounters." There was my favorite actor from childhood; he and his family had invited a girl who was alone on Christmas Eve to spend it with them.
"See, your picker isn't broken!" she wrote—adding she'd liked a different teenybopper actor entirely, who'd turned out to be a "total tool." My favorite actor had persistently "remained a good human," she marveled.
Then she sent me another screenshot from the same thread, this time of a woman posing with Weird Al.
"Awwww," I replied. Then I sent her a screenshot, from the day before, of Guy Branum's post on Instagram about going back on Jeopardy ("full-on non-celebrity Jeopardy"). I hadn't thought of it as 'discernment' before, but I do have a good-egg knowingness, and I've tripled down on my emotional investment in Guy.
The day before, I'd walked in on Jeopardy after my friend had already headed out. I'd exclaimed to the living room that, hooray, it was my close personal friend Guy again.
"I said 'I love him' and your mom asked me if he's married đź’€," I texted (and then, instead of answering Mom's question directly, I'd carefully said "I think he's focused on his career right now").
"From West Hollywood!" my best friend replied. "I meant to point him out to you yesterday and forgot!" She finds it exciting anytime someone lives in West Hollywood.
She isn't the only one. A few days before Christmas I'd gone on a nicotine run. The cashier had gasped when I gave her my ID. "I used to live in Burbank," she told me. ("I-I l-love... beautiful Burbank California," I stuttered back, pathologically unable to refer to Burbank as anything other than "beautiful Burbank, California.")
"What I really miss is Bob's," she said. I nodded. "Bob's Big Boy?" she said. I continued nodding. She used to cross the overpass to walk there. She teared up anytime she received her annual email offering her a free birthday dessert.
Instead of saying "that's the original Bob's Big Boy and wow is it beautifully preserved," I'd inexplicably said, wild-eyed, "that's the one David Lynch always went to."
Anyway, I continued texting with my best friend. Finally I realized it was very late for her to still be awake, and I noted this to her; it had still been daytime in Oceania, where my other friend had been phoning from. My best friend admitted she'd come into the house to check on something, had heard me talking on the phone and had subsequently crept out without saying hi.
I wished her good night and thanked her for her texts. "It's nice to think I have discernment after all," I wrote. "I love you lots," I added on the next line.
You do! You saying your picker is broken hasn't sat well with me. It's not true. You have some really great friends that would drop anything for you, like xxxx and xxxxx :-)
That last part was definitely true, and it dishonors my friendships to act as if it isn't. In fact, it felt so true that I pulled myself up out of bed and typed out this blog entry.