Elise Liu

I know very few people who have not read this commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, on the important of self-awareness, kindness, balance of ambition - not because I exclude my friends by such a criterion, but because I proselytize on its brilliance so much. I don’t even want to quote it. There’s an experiential integrity in facing all of it, even and especially the ugly, mean parts, at once.

Washington, DC, was designed to the scale of Brobdingnagian dwarves, with broad, majestic avenues, and no skyscrapers to speak of. So it’s unsurprising that the social milieu of its young, striving set pretty much reflects the same breadth and stuntedness of ambition. We hail from everywhere, spin conversation about anything, delight in meeting strangers, and rarely move beyond the handshake stage of brotherly love.

Luckily, we have the Washington Post, which with the unseemly seriousness of a national Paper of Record performs several valuable functions in the social lives of its lonely, unsure transplant population. First, it employs the kind of smart, snarky twenty-somethings who could never keep their opinions to themselves long enough to secure a job in government (e.g., several of my college friends). Second, it publishes various guides to indie concerts, happy hours, and public nudity laws - a voice of wisdom in spheres where Yelpers really cannot be trusted.

But when these initiatives aren’t quite enough, WaPo intervenes directly with Date Lab, an ongoing social experiment in first-date awkwardness that “match[es] you up and send[s] you out.” Now running six years strong, Date Lab has seen one couple get hitched, another find out they’d already dated, and many ruined by terrible, terrible trails of shame  on the internet. The dates are always dissected - publicly, with names attached - so the world can see where one person was happy and other absolutely horrified. And so hundreds of the ruthless DC commentariat can make fat jokes.

A chance of total humiliation and notoriety without joining Jersey Shore? Of course I applied. 

I read my answers now with the nostalgic regret of a has-been for a precocious youth. This was written early in my DC residency, when my ambitions were greater and my humor less resigned; when I still had faith that, if house parties and meddling friends would not find me true love, print journalism could.

If you could have any superpower, which one would you want? Why?

I hate to be greedy about hypothetical superpowers. I’d love time travel (taking cultural tourism to a new level), transmutation (fulfilling all my material/culinary desires at once), or mind reading (finally understand men). But I’d settle for something far more reasonable, like a semi-photographic memory. I could finally learn how to read Chinese… and stop asking people for their phone number every time I lose a phone… and stop losing phones.
 

Quick — what’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?

Rummage through the fridge for breakfast, as if wishful thinking will conjure leftovers out of thin air. 

In what ways would you say you are very D.C.?
I still kind of wish Josiah Bartlet were president. 

Aside from my utterly unfeminine grizzly bear tendencies and my embarrassing preference for a fictional Ivy-educated Nobel Laureate president over a real one, I think I came across as pretty cool. I’d date me.

You took a three-hour tour with some friends, and now you’re stranded on this island. Which three foods do you wish you’d remembered to pack? 

Dark chocolate: Both delicious and calorie-packed, which is suddenly a virtue when faced with possible tropical starvation. Plus, pairs well with coconut milk. Granola. See above re: coconut milk. Gummy worms: Nothing is better on a bad day than gummy worms. Plus, maybe they can be fishing bait?
 

Which three DVDs?

Castaway: Instructional. The Wire, season 3: I need to finish this before I die. When Harry Met Sally: Pairs well with coconut milk.
 

Which three people?

I wouldn’t wish an island demise, no matter how idyllic, on anyone I actually like. So: 1) Someone important whose presence on my island is likely to mean a search party is dispatched more quickly, and whose predicament re: being stranded with me wouldn’t make me feel as guilty as, say, that of Malia Obama — e.g., the (new) crown prince of Saudi Arabia, or a known international criminal with a GPS tracking device. 2) My libertarian ex, to see if he still thinks redistribution is a bad idea now that I have all the chocolate, granola, and gummy worms. 3) A really, really badass survivalist who will get us off the f*ing island. 
 

I dashed this off in late 2011, expecting and receiving no reply - at first. A year later, almost to the day, I was emailed by the (female) editor: unbeknownst to me, I’d been a Worthy Future Date Lab Dater this whole time. And now they’d found me a match.

So, what’s your type? (And don’t tell us you don’t have one — that’s such a cop-out.) 

Intellectual, ambitious, left-of-center, slightly awkward, and wittier than I am. Physically: medium-height to tall, slender-but-athletic, sexy hair, great eyes. I’m a sucker for British-Empire accents, especially South African. 
 

Regrettably, my life is not a chick flick, and I soon learned that my potential DC soulmate didn’t want to meet me, after all. After gleefully telling everyone but my mother about my upcoming brush with Reality fame, I was told by a sheepish-ish Date Lab editor: Sorry. We’ll keep looking for a match for you.

I was disappointed, of course - I might even say I was insulted: Wasn’t I funny enough? Hadn’t I acknowledged adorable quirks and suggested a self-awareness and remarkable distance from previous relationships and their implied emotional baggage?

And then I remembered how he’d rejected me blindly, before we’d even met. Without reading and wincing at any of my jokes. Without seeing a picture. It couldn’t have been a rejection of me! It was the very idea of Date Lab that scared him off!

C’mon, brag a little: What makes you a good catch? 

I’m cute, I’m sassy, and I pay for my own dinner.
 

Which leads me to think he was actually one of those online dating unicorns - not desperate or strange or quietly defective like the rest of us awkward young Washingtonians, but someone with options.

Perhaps he was drunk when he filled in the Date Lab survey - on a dare, probably. Perhaps, right now, he is cuddling with the new girlfriend he has been seeing since the day after that inebriated, forgettable, questionnaire-answering evening. She’s a Senate staffer with knee-length blonde hair and the maturity to make her own breakfast in the morning, and even just a few months into their budding relationship, they are one of those nauseating young couples that belongs in a home security system commercial, vertical-spooning and lovingly reassuring each other with their eyes.

 Pie-in-the-sky time: In your wildest dreams, whom (or what kind of person) would you like to date? 

A political photojournalist with a sexy accent who moonlights as a raw vegan chef and can teach me how to dance. 
 

The end of a year is a reckoning for the introspection-inclined: What have we done? What transformation have we made in the world and in ourselves?

When I began prodding at the belly-lint of those questions, I realized a startling truth: This was the first year I kept all my New Year’s resolutions. I lost vanity weight. I made new friends outside of any network I know. I moved apartments; completely upended my lifestyle; visited three foreign countries; changed careers.

But of course I let the habits slip once I’d reached my goals. I read the beginnings of books, but not the end; I started training for a half-marathon, but never ran it. I started a social tradition of intellectual teas, and allowed it to fade. I gained the weight back.

In one particularly uninspired moment of over-planning, I resolved to take romance seriously. And I did—for about eight months—starting soon after the year began. That my former partner-in-crime and I remain friends, largely un-jealous supporters of other’s audacious lives, speaks more to his character than mine.

Mostly, I started to dream of changing my career—“Someday, I will quit consulting,” I told myself. But that sort of dream creates the reality, and after a brief, deeply inspiring job search, I will be leaving Washington DC for an entirely new adventure in a matter of days.

In January, too, I finally read Eating Animals, a book I’d carried around with me for two years, and became a vegan immediately. By May I was relapsing—an omelette in a fancy brunch restaurant; a fudge brownie from a friend’s grandmother; a slice of sharp real cheese. But I persevered, never buying eggs, reaffirming the commitment after each lapse. “You’re not perfect,” I still remind myself. And this is a resolution I’m staying with.

Everything comes and goes in seasons—love, luck, even moral clarity.

2012 will be the year I learned to make curry. I attended a Rainbow Gathering and a Landmark Forum. I climbed, and camped, and created a new relationship with my parents. It will be the year I earned 150,000 Starwood points on business travel and never needed a visa.

It’s been a great year, but I’m optimistic that the best is yet to come. Though 2013 will bring far fewer hotel nights, I’m already one stamp to Ethiopia ahead.

Here’s to tomorrow. May we fulfill upon all our resolutions. And may they bring us all the wisdom we deserve.

What this is:

Laconic history of the world in a typographic map of the world based on the most common word in the Wikipedia page about the respective country’s history – a literal take on cartography as power and propaganda.  (h/t explore-blog)

Or, in stunning visual clarity, the fact that a short history of nations - and least in the English language Wikipedia - is a history of war, militaries, dynasties. Young and historically-peaceful nations aren’t exempt: Australia gets to be “New”, and Indonesia gets to be “Dutch,” references to colonial pasts. 

I like to spend my time thinking about hopeful things, like the possibilities in human development that modernity enables: ending extreme poverty in our lifetimes; extending and enhancing those lifetimes; restraining climate change in time to make that a blessing. Here’s a sobering reminder that so much millennial optimism is built on the shaky foundation of international stability and a partial/occasional/overall peace.

I would fill it with women
plucked from the middles of homes and sentences
like What you don’t understand about him is—
or It’s my fault, I should have—

I would lift them with the hands they hold aloft
to shield against palms and fists and eyes.

Yes, with women who once were rare birds,
crazy lovely, daughters that flew kites and played harmonicas
and painted each other’s toenails. Girls with names
like Mimi and Elena and a way of speaking
where they are not looking at you exactly
but out of the sunsetting window, with fluttery lashes.

I would fill it with women whose men I don’t understand.
Men who were their mothers’ sons, edged with laughter, sun-dappled.
Who grew fingers callused by guitar strings. Boys with recipes
for chili and such hopeful hair it rises straight up.

And even these men, yes, they too shall be citizens
of my country, where sisters are steel-boned like corsets
and brothers grow wrinkles in their wrinkles
before the anger comes to claim them. 

If they had a country,
some men would fill it with themselves. They would choose
a thousand and one wives. And so be it.
Mine will be peopled with women
that such men keep out. Our husbands will raise mountains
and do their apologizing themselves.

I wrote this around Christmas 2006, as a ‘supplemental essay’ for my college applications. Six years later, my brother Albert hardly trusts our parents or the public education system. But this was a more innocent time.

I was six years old when I stopped believing in Santa Claus. The rumors had never convinced me until I noticed one Christmas morning that he had my father’s handwriting and used the same wrapping paper. My trust, once lost, was lost forever: Christmas was good for getting presents and singing off-key in public, but for me, it was no longer magic. The Truth, though, had a price. Once exposed, St. Nick ended his visits, and his holiday mattered less and less every year.

Christmas returned when my little brother was born. For his sake, we hung lights outside, bought a real tree, and pretended to believe again. But Albert turned six this year, and he has begun to hear hints and whispers that come alarmingly close to the truth.

“Is it true that Santa Claus isn’t real?” he asked me one night. I sized him up – wide eyes, dusty cheeks, and a gap in his toothy smile – and answered the only way I could.

“Yes,” I said quietly, as if confessing a great sin, “Christmas is a lie. All of it.” He stared at me, aghast, as I continued.

“Santa doesn’t really exist. There are no elves, no reindeer, and no naughty lists. I eat the cookies you leave out, and I answer your letters. Your presents are really from Mom and Dad – we hid them in a closet. Christmas is just an invention of the retail industry to sell toys. By the way, there is also no Easter bunny, no Bogeyman, and no magic. Harry Potter doesn’t exist, Albert! Everything is a lie.”

I sighed theatrically, wringing my hands in anguish, and Albert frowned slightly.  “You’re making it up,” he exclaimed. “You’re joking!”

I raised my eyebrows – “Am I, now?” – and winked, just once.

He broke into a grin, and I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Christmas had been saved.

This year, like last year, Albert and I will drink hot chocolate with marshmallows and laugh at each other’s whipped-cream mustaches. We will sing “Feliz Navidad” in funny accents to make our mother smile. Christmas is a time of mutual generosity: I will bake cookies on request, and if they are burnt, Albert will eat them anyway.

For my family, the holidays are more than bells and lights and songs. Though we have no birthdays or anniversaries in December, it is perhaps the one time of year when no one is taken for granted. The holidays may be commercialized, but their spirit is still contagious. Most of all, it is a comfort to know that, at least for children, the stress and speed of the “real world” pale to the indestructible magic of Christmas. As I watch Albert’s eyes glow with the joy of the season, I am glad that his faith lies not in me, but in himself – and not in how things are, but in how they ought to be.

At least for now, I want him to believe in Santa Claus.

1. Integrity

Forget platitudes; remembering to live out values, no matter what they are, is a difficult daily practice. You must contemplate and interrogate the assumptions of daily life in all its mundane and stupendously colorless moments, as honestly and as unpretentiously as you can.

Suppose you are not good at this - thoughtful, unpretentious writing for public view, without the voice of self-criticism invalidating every idea. 

2. Courage

Suppose you are so afraid of your own heart that you can’t quite get the words out with your own name attached.

Too bad. Use the second person. Pretend to instruct an audience when your audience is your own self. Write it anyway.

3. Optimism

From conservative survivalists to Mexican tourism bureaus to climate activists, everyone’s talking about some kind of apocalypse these days. But the world didn’t end yesterday and it will not end tomorrow. If you want to keep going - showing up in skirt that cinches too much, writing thank-you emails past midnight, smiling at strangers - you have to believe that. You have to believe the work matters.

4. Realism

And you have to believe not much more. Because whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, it will always remain shaped as a glass. 

5. Humility

Be grateful for second place. And for last place. Who can predict the shape your contribution will take in the world? You are not, you are never the most - wealthy, beautiful, smart, witty, old, young, kind, charming, thoughtful, courageous, creative, well-loved.

Remember how David Foster Wallace talks about everyone being defeated by who he worships - don’t, for the love of —, don’t worship yourself. Look, no one is paying attention to you when you wave your hands in the air. Remember laughing at MySpace cellphone self-portraits, the trouty lips and arms trunking out of the frame? Remember that you look your worst when you’re just trying to be seen.

6. Curiosity

That’s okay, maybe you just want to see the world. You want adventures, and you should. It’s good, this willingness to accept all experiences for the best within them. It’s good to wonder: what shall you eat for breakfast in every country? This feeling of claustrophobic Mondays you associate with rain and September, what does it feel like in Kenya, if at all? 

Your soul-mate could be a health minister in Burkina Faso. Perhaps you will find him there! Or perhaps you will find her in a coffee shop in Hamburg, an art gallery in Cape Town, a strip club in Des Moines.

7. Commitment

But we can’t all be Kerouac living On the Road. Hearing or seeing dreams lived is not living them. Do not go eyes-first, going everywhere and being nowhere. Even foreign correspondents have a beat; even photographers send their captured visions home. Don’t kid yourself, okay? Your soul mate in Burkina Faso is just another guy. He’s the next person you look at and say, Okay, then, and you create the serendipity of fate and the story of how there was a red silken thread connecting you all these years.

Your calling is just the job you have when you’ve become ready for that choice. This is the worst reason to give up:”It hasn’t worked yet.” And this is the best: “It’s time to let go.”

8. Openness

Let yourself remain a work in progress. Continue questioning without hoping for answers. Leave every manifesto open to revision - even this one. Just as writing “the End” to a story only creates the embarrassment of an Afterword, each final Goodbye merely invites a reunion and the exclamation, How long it’s been! My, how you’ve aged!

Remember Kierkegaard: there is no being without becoming and there is no becoming that is not toward death. Each day, become a little more of the obituary you envision; each day, be worthy of tears from the people you love and will leave behind.

9. Equanimity

Know this: you’ll fail, and you’ll fall short, and every day you get a little bit older, duller, worn down by time and disappointment and free radicals. Acai berries can’t save you from life.

Your soulmate could leave you. Your funeral could have no mourners at all. None of this changes who you must be.

10. Gratitude

And that person is: always conscious. Always wondering, Why was I chosen for the grand and gorgeous life? Any time you remember it, a smile opening your mouth in greeting, and your hands lifted towards other eyes and towards the heavens, accepting the world as it comes toward you and down.

I don’t love the typography or the placements. But that phrase, tattooed so that it provokes questions: talk about words to live into. 

fuckyeahtattoos:

Mr. Feeny: Believe in yourselves. Dream. Try. Do good.

Topanga: Don’t you mean ‘do well’?

Mr. Feeny: No. Do good.

Creative nonfiction “piece” published on Thought Catalog!

Smacking our lips of pink juice-grit
tonguing veins out of our rear molars, and spewing
fleshy chunks into each other’s hair

We didn’t know our murder
We were five and six
wearing suspenders

eating that watermelon alive.

Beth Petraglia is never the first Beth to come to mind. The strange inability to remember her has afflicted everyone she has ever met, with the exceptions of her mother and father and the hamster she kept in a cardboard box from ages twelve to fourteen. To the rest of the world, Beth is someone whose first name must always be followed by a second, who, despite being quite as odd a girl of nineteen might be, never fails in a room of more than two people to completely disappear.

The first time I saw, her she was standing on my desk wearing only a teal bathrobe and wire spectacles. Nearly six feet tall, she nonetheless perched on the tips of her toes to tape a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the wall. “Hello!” she said, and before I could reply, “Do you mind if I take this corner? Do you have poster gum? I love your earrings!”

As roommates go, Beth was perfect: clean, reclusive, and tolerant of both late hours and loud music, though herself predisposed to neither. She owned every shade and weight of scrapbook papers, die-cut cards, and vellum envelopes, and these treasures were scattered in boxes around our sparse white room, too precious to use. She was a great lover of dried fruit and dark chocolate, and generous with her collection of each. “For the room,” she’d say, placing a bag of fresh gala apples on the pantry shelf, and within days, I would eat them all.

She read science fiction, and I, poetry anthologies; I was a left-wing idealist and she, militantly apathetic. She woke at five AM every day, just after I’d fallen asleep; I never understood her running, and she never understood my makeup. Yet, many nights, we would sit on opposite sides of the room, bathed in the bluish glow of our identical Apple laptops, our faces and sentences blurred with exhaustion. “You know, I’ve never been kissed,” she said, once, as matter-of-factly as such a thing can be said. “Me neither,” I replied, and in that moment we became friends.

She was forever meeting people in dining halls and libraries—bookish types drawn to her earnest smile and her graphic novels—who would stay for a few minutes and then have somewhere to go. “See you,” she’d call after them in her shrill, happy voice, and then we’d never mention them again. In the spring, she brought home a series of boys—Ethan, Christopher, Toby, Oliver—each more handsome than the last.  She’d play chess with them, or watch subtitled foreign movies, and I would join in for a few minutes to filch popcorn and to pass judgment on her choice (“Well?” “Not cute enough!”). When I inevitably ran into him in class or on the shuttle a week later, he’d give me an unsure half-smile, not quite placing where we’d met. “You’re Beth’s friend, right?” I’d say, already expecting the answer: “Who’s Beth?”

When those people who do not immediately think of Beth Petraglia eventually remember her, they recall the sprawl of her handwriting on all the boxes of artisanal chocolate she sends in exchange for their friendship, and the thin striped scarf she wears looped once so that it almost touches her knees. They remember her expensive shapeless clothing and a short poof of blonde hair. But I remember differently: a few muffled sobs when she thought I was asleep, and the curve of her grin from one cheek to the other, like the base of a tulip, sunny and golden and fragile just along the neck.

— Spring 2009

The waning moon glows faintly in the night,
An orphaned child wails earnestly beyond,
The very earth, lamp-lit, seems pale with fright
At all those well-laid plans that could go wrong.

How easy to ignore the creaking trees
That seem to sway as drunk men on their wives,
The cries of trodden ants, and panicked bees
Who sting us here and there like pinprick knives –

For we are young; tonight, the world’s cruel ways
Are nothing to our smiles, our merry talk.
Amid the limping poor we stride unfazed
And blithely leap the potholes on our walk.

Too blind for empathy, too dumb for schemes,
We are still young! In love! Sirs, let us dream.

When he told me I had “perfect legs,” I just laughed and gave him my number. How could I have imagined that, twenty-two years and three marriages later, I would be walking past them everywhere, in storefronts and sale bins — my black limbs cast into white and kicking at the sky?

(Photography credit Jacob Rus)

That even our clichés were postmodern: how each thought
the other incidental, how between us lust transcends
the skin. Walking down the street, our bodies aligned
with other bodies, we form tessellations. To describe
the angles between us without the word between
I’ll use the image of silvered glass, those one-way mirrors
so common cop films: in them you see me and I myself.
Like this sentence, which is not an allegation
but an apology, like our feet fall silent before us —
you grind my pepper, I spill your salt, we clutch
the insides of coat pockets and sleep with other people.
I’ll confess this poem is wholly fiction, but how I tire
of candles.  And how every facetious statement is true.

- Fall 2010

I often have doubts about whether my reactions to certain things are normal. One thing that could be normal or not is this: though I am always forgetting dates and times, names and faces, I remember the price and origin of every object I own. Either this makes me a more rational economic actor or I’m just grossly mis-allocating memory, because I doubt any cares that a polka-dot print silk scarf was purchased in the South Nanhui Street Market, Row 5 Stall 3, costing 35 yuan down from a posted price of 150 yuan, from a young woman about my age who chased us down the street all the way past Row 7 Stall 5, calling lower prices until we gave her $4.75 for the scarf and an end to her humiliation.

Maybe a few of these acquisition stories are worth the retelling. 

But mostly they aren’t worth remembering, except to reference what I paid for this coat vs that coat, this dress ($198 + tax) vs that dress ($28.49) vs that one (2-for-$10). When I look at my closet, the price tags dance over it like hover captions, a constant reminder that the things I’ve loved most are not the ones that have come at highest cost. 

In fact, many have come at no cost at all: my favorite woolen jacket (a castoff from a college friend), my favorite Oxfords (my mother’s, from the 80s), and most lately a pair of black pumps I found yesterday in my condo building’s “free things” bin, size 36 with extra heel inserts, hardly worn. I paid $18.95 for Sartre Today at Barnes & Noble, but Sartre’s own works — Nausea and The Age of Reason — came to me, free and annotated with the insights of others, at just the right moments in my life. The stories of these things are different. They are stories of surprise, gratitude, discovery. Because I didn’t choose them from a shelf or webform, I can say in a sense that they chose me.

For many reasons, I have been thinking lately about why I still so vividly recall buying that scarf. Maybe it was the haggling, a pointed reminder of how relative and contextual price can be — we’re told a silk scarf should be ten dollars or thirty or a hundred, we hear words like discount and investment piece, and we learn to value it at this much credit card debt at 18.5%, that many hours in jobs we we do not love. Maybe it was the salesgirl’s Minnie Mouse t-shirt, or the desperation in her eyes.

But the world is full of scarves like the one I bought in Nanhui. They languish in closets with their stories, remembered or not, of making, of buying, of giving-away. I only wore mine once — the day I bought it — though I’ve packed it in suitcases in over a dozen moves in the five years since it became “mine”.

Last night, I left it in the same free things bin where I discovered the shoes, among a cupcake cookbook and a stack of wicker baskets. In the polka dots and light fringe of a scarf in which I see one bittersweet story, I wonder what the next owner will find.  

“You Can’t Have it All. Where Would You Put It?” Andrew Junge (h/t firstpersonsingular.org)