Reading Into Things Too Much; A Study in Impossibly Stupid Reflections

Dear Ilana Masad,

The members of the fiction admissions committee have carefully review your application, and I am sorry to report that we are unable to offer you a place in [REDACTED]. We have a limited number of openings and must turn away many promising applicants. This year, one thousand and twenty-six people applied for twenty-five spaces.

We wish you well and thank you for your interest in [REDACTED].

Sincerely,

[REDACTED]

Director

[REDACTED DIRECTOR’S INITIALS]/jz

It is 5:37am and I am awake and thinking of the nature of time. Because that’s what writers do. Right? Faulkner did it. I must do it too.

At first I thought the typo in the first line was the missing “ed” from the word “review,” but then it dawned on me that this may not be the case! What if the typo is the word “have” that comes before “carefully?” Strike that word out, and the whole nature of this thing is thrown into question. A 5:40am kind of question. If the members of the fiction admissions committee carefully review my application, that means they are still reviewing it, ad infinitum, and even though they “are unable to offer” me a place, they might totally change their minds, if, you know, they keep reading my application over, and over, and over…
This, at 5:42am, is a hopeful, and far more cheerful, way of looking at this whole situation.
Then again, maybe the missing “ed” is supposed to deprive me of what those two letters are shorthand for – think higher ed, continuing ed, that sort of thing. Maybe they’re just rubbing it in. Assholes.

Or maybe they’re encouraging me to seek the “ed” in other places. Maybe I should get a PhD.

But what’s with the double spacing? Look, REDACTED, I’m an editor myself and I totally notice when there are two spaces between words, mostly because old people are prone to double-spacing because you used to need to do that on typewriters or something. I think? That’s what someone told me. Maybe it was my mom. The question is, REDACTED, did you actually write these letters on typewriters? I mean, that would be on brand, but then again, maybe it’s actually a message hidden in that double space. Are you going to take me on a treasure hunt? Maybe if I look with a magnifying glass, I’ll find a secret QR code there, betraying the nature of temporality and embedded societal ageism (old people double space, young people QR code). Then if I scan the QR code into my phone, maybe I’ll be directed to a link that says PSYCH! YOU’RE TOTES ACCEPTED!

Or maybe, and just maybe, I realize at 5:45am, this is actually a secret Jay-Z marketing campaign. I mean, it makes sense, sort of, in an alternative and paper-killing kind of way. If one thousand and one people are getting this letter (though there’s probably a waiting list, and maybe it’s also twenty-five people long, just in case none of the people who get into REDACTED want to go, in which case it’s nine hundred and eighty-six people getting this particular letter, but I can’t be sure because it’s too early to do math) – well, that’s a lot of shares right there. Every one of us letter-receivers is going to share it with our friends, families, therapists, cats, and neighborhood sympathetic bartenders. Or baristas, baristas are cooler these days. And let’s not forget hairdressers. People talk to their hairdressers, right? Or is that just something from Legally Blond and Orange is the New Black? Anyway, shares. That’s the point. Maybe Jay-Z is going to rebrand himself as jz and is looking to break into highbrow hipster writer culture, you know, the kind that only reads Anna Karenina and e. e. cummings and cries when rats are smushed by buses while smoking American Spirits.

Not that that’s me or anything. (It’s actually not. American Spirits are too expensive and taste gross.)

But if Jay-Z is rebranding, then hey, it’s his own identity and I totally get that. I respect that. Peace be with you, jz.

It’s 5:56am on a Sunday morning, and I have no decided that I’m over you, REDACTED. Because if you really want me to read so much into your letters, you don’t really want me. That’s what they always say about relationships. Don’t be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you. Right?

Or maybe you do want me and just want to play Sherlock Holmes games. Well, I’m sorry, REDACTED. I’m not that smart. Or have that ready an access to opium. Or use the word “ejaculated” to express a way of speaking. No, wait, that’s John Watson writing about Holmes. Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writing as Watson about Holmes.

Things are getting meta over here.

It’s 6am.

Quiet Space Spills

The sound of spilling in a quiet space is never a positive one. Either someone has peed their pants, or their drink has poured all over their computer, or else they’ve vomited up the vodka from last night onto the front of their expensive thrift store sweater.

The quiet space makes every nanosecond, every inch, every gram of noise carry across the ceiling and in between the cubicles like the measles virus. It is a bad place to be clumsy. It is a bad place to have a cold. It is a bad place to let rip a heroic fart or a miscalculated burp.

Our coats spill onto one another, hung over the sides of cubicles and backs of chairs. Boots tumble sideways from their tucked in nooks when the door opens and the entire place shakes. It is a bad place to be heavy. It is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs. It is discriminating.

Compassion and jealousy and hatred permeate one another. Who has an agent, who has a book deal, who has a publicist. It’s the loud voices that have the most, or maybe the least. How can we tell when we are all so full of hubris as to think we belong?

It’s a paradox, an anachronism, something like that. It’s impossible. A quiet space full of so much noise.

Not Dying

Miranda wasn’t dying. She was standing in the grocery store, in a long line filled with other people who were being multilingual and filling her head with confusion. But she was most certainly not dying.

She often reminded herself of this fact. It was a necessary day-to-day assertion. “I’m not dying, I’m not dying,” she would tell herself when she rolled over in the morning to turn off the Mickey Mouse alarm clock on her bedside table, stolen from her son’s room when he went off to college because it was so annoying that it actually got her up. “I’m not dying,” she would recite over the coffee maker, dancing from one foot to another on cold toes.

“Put slippers on!” Miranda’s mother used to yell – really yell, with spittle flying out of her mouth and veins coming to the fore of her face.

“I’m not dying,” Miranda reminded herself on the way to work and in the morning meeting and the noon meeting and the late lunch meeting and the dinner meeting. “I’m not dying.”

“You’ll catch cold and then where will you be?” her mother would ask. Miranda yearned to ask where indeed that would be, but it was many years before she worked up the courage. By then, her mother wasn’t a force to be reckoned with anymore, and it felt like a cheap, below the belt blow. There were better ways to get to her mother than this, she knew, but it made her mother smile to hear her daughter ask the question. “Dead,” she’d said in the nursing home. “That’s what I meant when you were a kid. You’d be dead. Kids die of colds all the time.”

Miranda stood in the grocery store line and listened to the Spanish and Greek and Russian streaming around her and knew she would never learn another language. One was hard enough for her to contend with. It wouldn’t help her to understand the chatter around her. The mothers were all probably telling their kids the same thing every mother tells her daughter. The men in big jerseys were probably talking about some game involving a ball.

“I’m not dying,” Miranda told herself every night before she went to sleep. She walked barefoot to her bed and tucked her feet into the coldest part of the mysterious temperatures found in crisp sheets and made beds. “I’m not.”

Mindfulness

It’s a hard sell. Mind minus body. The lumbering meaty thing is still there, with all its joints and hemoglobin and heart conditions. It doesn’t leave you just because you decide to value that tangled web of firing neurons and chemical imbalances called a brain.

You do value it. Of course you do. It’s what makes your body tick, it’s what allows you to run on the treadmill and eat falafel from a food truck at 3am with your date,

No, that’s not right. That’s your brain.

Is your brain the same thing as your mind?

It’s that kind of night. The kind where you’re asking stupid philosophical questions and waving a white flag of defeat in front of your responsibilities. You’re done. You’re through. No more tonight. You need a rest.

So how do you convince people to see your mind over your body? It’s hovering there, your mind, above and around and in between all of your bodily functions and orifices and fortunate features. But it doesn’t overlay them. It just sort of shimmers. Sometimes it gets noticed. But not usually.

No, when you walk down the street to the post office to send the birthday present you’ve owed your mother for three months now and the rent check you’ve owed for slightly longer, you are not a mind above a body. You are a theoretical person, with a theoretical mind, but mostly you are simply a collection of limbs and features that are recognized as human.

Are you?

Is anyone?

It really is that kind of night. Shut your mind off. Let your brain wander. Watch some TV. Stop thinking about that girl you saw on the train and wanted to talk to. She’s long gone. She doesn’t exist in your world anymore.

Does she exist at all then?

Does it matter?

Shut up.

Pandora and Schrödinger Meet for Tea

Pandora’s box was full to the bursting when she came upon Schrödinger in 1945. She’d sent him a letter, telling him of her special box, which was actually a jar, and he invited her to have tea with him at Oxford. He’d signed his letter with his usual messy signature but for the first time felt self conscious about it. He knew she would be beautiful.

Think of this, he told her when they’d identified one another on the appointed time at the appointed place. How do you know everything in your box exists? he asked her. He sipped his earl grey and avoided her eyes.

She shook her head and thought he looked mighty handsome for a man of his age. She especially liked his bow tie. It made him look like a little package all wrapped up for her. I know it’s real because of its weight, she said. Here.

He tried to take the jar from her but the moment she released it into his hands, his whole body plunged forward and in that split second he thought he saw the jar breaking, scattering shards everywhere, and a void in the shape of a human face bursting out of it. But no, he must have imagined it. As he straightened up, Pandora already had the jar clutched tight in her hands.

Do you see? She said, sighing. Nobody else can hold it. Only I. And it has gotten so heavy in the last few years. So heavy.

It’s all a matter of perception, Schrödinger said, peevishly. He sipped his tea and fiddled with his shirt cuffs. They didn’t seem to want to remain under his jacket but they also wouldn’t, simply wouldn’t, establish themselves evenly outside of it. He was certain he looked a mess.

Now look, he began again. Think of it this way. If you put a cat in a box, and you close the lid, and leave some food and water inside, but also some poison, and the poison will be released into the air as soon as you open the lid, and then you come back after a week, will you know if the cat is alive?

It depends how much food you leave it, she said. It certainly wouldn’t try to get at the poison. Cats have a good sense of smell.

No, no, you don’t understand. The cat is both alive and dead until you open the lid. It is in both states simultaneously until you try to observe it, and only then will it be either alive or dead.

If you say so.

But then don’t you see? Your jar, the evils of the world, all that. It is heavy because you are certain that all of that is contained there. All of it. But you cannot observe it. Correct?

Yes, correct.

Well, then, how do you know, truly know, that the jar contains anything at all?

I see what you’re getting at, Pandora said. She was disappointed. She knew the evil was contained in her jar, and she knew she was the only one strong enough to continue holding it. She thought of poor Atlas and which one of them was worse off.

I must go, she said, getting up. Thank you for the tea.

Schrödinger waved goodbye and watched her walk out of the tea shop. She seemed to shrink and grow older as she walked away, and by the time she was at the door, she was bent over almost double, her jar clutched in one hand while the other held onto a cane for dear life. Right there, right in front of him, he realized, had been sitting a woman both young and old at the very same time. It was all a matter of perception.

Days of the Week

Shay sometimes felt that she had two sets of eyelids. Like cats. This feeling was especially pronounced early in the morning, every morning, when Shay’s daughter would pry open one or both of her eyes and ask, as if she were already a bitter middle-aged woman, “Is it Saturday?”

Ame was a happy girl overall, but she liked weekends, and nothing Shay could do seemed to help Ame remember the days of the week. As she tucked her in, Shay would say, “What day is it tomorrow, honey?” and Ame would say, hopefully, “Saturday?” and Shay would say, “No, honey, what was today?” and Ame would think, and think and then triumphantly name the day, pleased with herself. Then Shay would say, “So that makes tomorrow…” Without fail, Ame would repeat, “Saturday?”

At least she was right once a week.

Shay wondered why her daughter was obsessed with Saturdays rather than Sundays. They were the same thing to her, weren’t they? Days when she didn’t have to go to kindergarten with all those poopy-heads (Ame’s words, discourage but as yet snuffed out by Shay).

No, Shay knew, this wasn’t quite right. On Saturdays, Ame got to go to work with her.

Shay worked in the administrative office of a zoo. It was a small zoo, not a particularly good one in terms of humanitarian concerns (the tiger lived in a cage, not an enclosure, and was stationed far too close to the birds so he was always agitated and pacing to and fro, even though turning around was an ordeal for him because he’d grown longer than the original cage-designer had anticipated). But it was a happy little place for the parents and children who came there and the occasional tour group that found itself in the small west-coast city that had little of historical, or even contemporary, interest.

It was a good job for Shay. She had her Associates Degree and knew it had been an absolute waste of time to get it, as no one cared about anything less than a BA. The bank didn’t want her, the doctors’ offices didn’t want her (not even the chiropractors), and she couldn’t face another benefit-less job at a grocery store since it reminded her too much of being a teenager and living with her parents.

Shay sometimes wished she still lived with her parents. But they were living the good life in Florida now and believed it was the height of parental support to fly her and Ame out there once a year for a rainy and hot Christmas with them.

What confused Shay about Ame looking forward to Saturday so much was that they rarely went out to see the animals. Saturdays were a busy day for Shay, because the phones would be ringing off the hook. Teachers and tour guides worked during the week and Saturday was the only day they could call to book their tours and buy their tickets. The zoo was closed on Sunday.

What Ame usually did on Saturdays in the small, cinder-block-walled, windowless office that was Shay’s inner sanctum at work, was draw animals in chalk on the floor. It was easy to wash off and Ame was forever running out of paper when she drew at home, so when Shay discovered rather by accident that the cold stone floor (chic in the ’70s, she was sure) worked like a chalkboard (the accident involved her getting a cup of tea for a frazzled teacher who had a new pack of chalk in her purse which spilled out when she burned herself on the too-hot tea and instinctively flung everything away from her), Shay figured that she’d buy some of the big sidewalk chalk for Ame and let her roam around the office with it.

Ame drew animals, but she also drew roads. She drew animals walking down streets, across cross-walks and high-ways and up and down shallow public park stairs. She had a sense of direction that she allowed into her art and which Shay found immensely comforting.

My daughter will be something, Shay would think on Saturdays, and know she was thinking in clichés. But then, every morning, when she felt her second eyelid being pried up from her eyeball along with the first, outer one, she would wonder how Ame would ever be anything if she didn’t learn the days of the week.

Books by My Bed

Hello bloggy-friends and readers,

A really neat blog called We Wanted to Be Writers has published a piece of mine in their series called “Books By the Bed”. I’d love it if you hopped over and read it!

http://wewantedtobewriters.com/2014/12/books-by-ilana-masads-bed/

Find Me I’m Yours – REVIEW SERIES – Part III

Part I

Part II

The next website I’m brought to is part of the-trying-to-find-Mr-WTF from the video. DogParksLA.com is a feat of true marketing in that it is actually functional, with a bunch of listings for dog parks – using Google Maps listings, but still, so actually useful if one were an LA resident with a dog!

And as the parks get explored, we find that Mr. WTF could basically be orchestrating this whole novel, because next thing you know, Mags has discovered her first clue from him. Another website, about seaside villas. I shit you not. There’s even an application, look:

That’s not all. There are blueprints of the apartments. A flyer for a gym (I have a feeling this will play into something later on. Maybe quite soon even). A grievance committee document with notes. I wonder if one of these two dudes listed there as residents – Jeff S. (#268), Eryk C. (#160) – is Mr. WTF. One of them has a dog that there is a complaint lodged against. But that man didn’t attend the meeting – he is a resident of #316. Could I have figured it out already?!

And, of course, there’s a contact form. Which I used. And will keep using at every chance I get.

Oh no! Page 50 has a mistake – a text is on the wrong side of the screen!

While lots of books try to be “contemporary,” there is still a certain awkwardness in the way most of them manage to integrate technology. Either people are constantly “thumbing” their phones, or they ignore them completely or they’re living in a romantic past where cell phones weren’t a thing (Landline, anybody?). What this book does so superbly is that it integrates tech in a way that makes sense and is realistic for the characters, precisely because it’s so interactive. Get to page 57, you’ll see what I mean (hint: it has to do with using your phone camera as a shortcut).

Page 65, typo 😦 “steak” instead of “stake”. But then again, it’s Shari, the ex-bf-bonking roommate, so maybe it’s on purpose?

Contacted my next website, the Madelyn Evans Gallery. Or MEG. My cat’s name is Meg!

I’m a little in love with Mr. WTF for turning himself into a Cinderella (next mission is find his other boot!) plus, I can’t help but wonder who the person behind the camera who’s shooting his videos is. Could he be the true Prince Charming?

Even better, Mags has (predictably) a super artsy Instagram. Check it out. http://instagram.com/magsmarclay It’s sort of creepy, but awesome, how she’s searching for someone who may or may not be for real, while we the readers are reading someone who might as well be for real but actually isn’t. A character brought to life by the power of the internet, where we believe people are who they say there are in this age of verification.

I wonder if Vrommans’ actually sells Mags’ zine, DIY Collage. Anyone in LA feel like finding out and reporting back?!

A Well-Rounded Roundup

I’ve been neglectful, rather, of this lovely lovely blog, but there are good reasons. There always are, aren’t there, when people neglect things. Excuses, excuses and all that. Well, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Moving to New York City.
Trying to find a job.
Failing, miserably.
Getting into freelance work.
Don’t ask me what freelance work is, because it’s a ridiculous mishmash of things, most of which involve hustling my butt off to try to find more work.
Got me a boyf.
Got me some cats.
Reconnected with old friends in the city (because that’s what we call NYC here, “the city,” rather like San Franciscans call it “the city” too).
Got rejected from a bunch of literary places.
Got accepted to some cool places like McSweeney’s.
Did NaNoWriMo…
…and finished the novel I started over a year and a half ago in Oxford.

What does this mean? That hopefully now that I’m not quite noveling, I’ll be back here more often and updating.

Man on the Subway: A Transcript

On November 5th, I was on a packed subway and I found poetry in an old man’s mouth. The following are not my own words – they are his.

74 year old man need help.
Live to be 74 years old and come back to find another man in your bed.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself right now. I need help.
I need help.
Need a psychiatrist on this train.
There ain’t nothing wrong with reaching out.

It hurts.
It hurts real bad.
It hurts real bad.

Come home find another nigger in bed with your wife.

It hurts really really bad.

71 year old man there getting up for you you lady.
If I were you I’d read the sign up there. Priority for people with disabilities.
Give him space. 71 year old man coming through. He’s getting off. Give him room.
Thank you for talking to me. God bless. God bless…

Not crush, I’m crumble.
I got a new word for it.
I’m not crushed. I’m crumble.

Slightly Ignorant

Ilana Masad Writes

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