There is this essay contest in which you can win $10,000 and a Mont Blanc pen, so I thought I'd enter it. You also get a trip to a writer's conference in Italy, bringing the total value of the grand prize to approximately $17, 775, according to the fine print on the contest website. Even third prize ain't bad--it's $1000 and a Mont Blanc pen. I've taken a few second and third prizes in my time, and while it's not as glamorous as a full-on win, there's a certain pleasure in the obscurity of being the 1997 American Psychological Association Second-Prize College Scholarship Recipient. I am particularly proud of winning that second prize. It makes it sound like I won a college scholarship for lunatics, but I wasn't quite as crazy as some other kid in Toledo.

As I get older and my ideals wither and I become more materialistic and less concerned about Art and Total Autonomy, which seems to have become the main point of my life--wait a minute! That's not true! I am more concerned than ever about Art and Total Autonomy! I have spent the last week in despair because I read the Ben Marcus essay in Harper's which is a response to the Franzen essay in Harper's and Marcus says that to be an artist you have to be truly original and not rip things off and also all the reviews of Zadie Smith's new novel accuse her of ripping everything off, only because she herself accused herself of this in a review she wrote of herself, a simultaneously narcisisstic and self-effacing act of the sort I admire, and after I read these essays and reviews I became convinced that I am ripping everyone off, consciously and unconsciously, and when you come to this website seeking Original Thought you are actually getting an imitation of an imiation of an imitation, a copy of a copy of a copy. Who is the theorist who wrote about a copy of a copy of a copy? Is it Barthes? I remember wandering back to my dorm room terribly stoned late one night and my roommate at the time, Kaveena, who kept even odder hours than I (she would take naps at two or three a.m.) had read whoever this theorist was and she was talking about it lucidly and clearly but all I heard were the words "copy of a copy of a copy" while I spun around inside the swirls of her paisley velour bedspread. A copy of a copy of a copy. That's all I am. But what can you expect? That's all we all are. DNA, after all, isn't it just a copy of a copy of a copy? We are all just copies, and sex is the Xerox machine. Our best hope at an originality is an act of mutation. Should we strive for mutation in art? Or is it mutiny? Can't remember. Can't decide.

But it's just as well. We can't worry about things like that, it slows us down and stops us from Doing Good Work and Having A Good Time.

I tried to write my essay many times, but it wasn't happening. The loaded question was, "What's on the minds of American youth today?"

What a fucking stupid question, I thought. America's Youth is not a monolithic entity and only someone incredibly shortsighted, not to mention old, could see them/us/them--us!--that way. But still, given my day job (tutoring of the Youth) and my level of maturity (seventeen and holding) and my chronological age (twenty-six and not thrilled about it, so totally have I identified myself with being a person who is beginning that I am horrified to find out that I have already, to some degree, become), maybe I have something to say about this. I noodled around with half-baked sentences about iPods and Instant Messaging, materialism and nihilism, unity and individuality, the sensory deprivation of video games, the revoltuoinary power of music, blah blah blah, but it was not flowing.

Trying to do your work when you'd rather be doing anything than your work is excruciating. You can try all your little tricks to get yourself in the Zone but if you are not in the Zone it's like pulling teeth. I gave up entirely on trying to win $10,000 and a Mont Blanc pen and a free trip to Italy and mixed myself a martini and fired up the DVD player for tonight's allotment of M*A*S*H. After a whole episode and only quarter of my martini (ladies sip), I fell most unexpectedly into the Zone, or at least what I perceived to be the Zone. Sometimes what we perceive to be the Zone of our most quality productivity is actually a bargain basement of our most derivative, incoherent schlock. But we can't worry about things like that, it slows us down and stops us from Doing Good Work and Having A Good Time.

So now is the part of the evening where I give thanks to the great martini, uncorker of secrets, illuminator of minds, unlocker of inspiration. I don't think I'm really going to win $10,000, a Mont Blanc pen and a trip to Italy, but at least I gave it the old college try.

Today I fell in love with a song. Its name is "The Bleeding Heart Show" and it is Track 4 on the new New Pornographers album, Twin Cinema. I haven't felt this way since "New Slang" by The Shins.

It's curious, how a new song can be just like a new love. All day, I thought about the song. I was drunk on the song, I was high on the song, I was sick on the song, I was the song.

I listened to the song repeatedly. When I wasn't listening to the song, I still heard it and hummed it and sang it and kept time to it. I missed trains just so I could have the run of empty subway platforms to dance alone to the song. I had smiles for everyone in the street because of the song that only I could hear, the song that captured everything I'd ever felt and everything I'd ever hoped to feel, the song that had become the sound of life itself.

I was trying to listen to the whole album, but I had ears only for The Song. If I had listened to the entire album sooner I'd have found the song later on that says "Listening too long/To one song/Sing me Spanish techno."

I shyly showed the song to my roommate, but I couldn't just let her listen to it. "Wait, wait," I whispered, "This isn't even the best part. This is like the prologue to the best part. Now. This is the best part. Because it swells. Do you hear it? Do you hear how sad and happy it is?"

She smiled with the patience of someone who understands the blind, fanatically observant stare of love. "It's a good song," she said.

A good song? A good song? This song has ripped me open and freed my heart from the prison of my ribs to lie flayed and naked to the entire world! Because of this song, I live and breathe again, I rejoice in the pain of being alive, I am alive, and it hurts so much to be alive and be so in love with the world that I can die now, let me die in this state of grace, let me fly to Heaven on the wings of these gospel-tinged backing vocals! O cruel beauty! O exquisite painful temporality! O setting sun, o lumbering train, o man in the madras jacket, o child jumping rope, o homing pigeons, o sunshine, o gathering darkness, o beautiful trannies on Christopher Street, o marching subway drones, O Life, O World!

Repeat One!

One family I tutor for had two bunnies that the pet store promised them were both males. They were hoping that one of them was "just fat." But the fat bunny was not "just fat." He was a she and she was pregnant and she had babies. Now there are six bunnies.

Things were a bit hectic in the household in the aftermath of the bunny birth, and it was hard to settle down and focus on geometry. Friends of the ninth grader were over to determine which of the litter they would pick for their own pet. The baby bunnies didn't have much personality, though. They lay in a pile in the middle of a fur nest their mother made for them, wriggly and pink and scarily fetal. The human, by comparison, appears the most fully formed of all God's newborn creatures.

The fourth-grader and I peered into the cage-turned-nursery. "Why is that other bunny in a different cage?" I asked.

"Because the daddy bunny might eat the babies," said the fourth-grader, seemingly unperturbed by the prospect of infanticide in nature. "And also because he was already trying to get more babies." I didn't press on the issue of whether how the daddy bunny made it evident he was "trying to get more babies."

I bent very close to the nest of fur, trying to get a good look at one of the babies. The mommy bunny started moving around nearby. I remembered something I'd heard about how a mother bird will feign injury to distract predators from her young. I pulled away from the cage, not wanting to worry the mommy bunny. She looked at me warily and settled down. "I'm sorry," I whispered to the mommy bunny. "I did not mean to threaten your young."

When the daddy human came home from work, he greeted the new bunny family jovially. "There you are, you fine beast!" he said to the isolated father, with just the same measure of jocular manliness that embarrasses human fathers, that weird subtly sexual innuendo that is really smirking, "You had sex at least once!"

The daddy human is the animal lover in the house and he knows a lot about bunnies. Through our discussion I learned that the bunnies can get pregnant again on the same day they give birth, that they can breed eight times a year, and that they will only produce a full litter when there is a steady food supply, as there is in capitivty, allowing them to produce four babies at a time eight times a year. "I guess that's why they call it breeding like rabbits," I said. I also learned that the mother bunny grows extra hair on her chest while she's pregnant so she can rip it out and make a nest for the young.

The daddy human then let the daddy bunny out of his cage and he started peeing and pooping all over the downstairs of the house. This was pretty much the end of productive geometry review for the ninth-grader, so I wished the new bunny family well and went on my way.

That same day, I was coming down Christopher Street toward the corner where it intersects with Bleecker when I saw the crowd waiting to cross all looking up at the sky. Without even cognatively processing it, I got a chill down my spine and tensed up in my shoulders. And then I realized what it was--9/11 has made the simple act of people looking up at something in the sky seem forboding and dangerous. That is how we humans are animals ourselves--we respond to perceived dangers at deep, nearly instaneous levels of which we are only faintly aware, not unlike a distressed mother bunny guarding her young in a cage in a Park Slope living room.

You might not think there are a whole lot of nuances to riding the bus, but there are dozens of subtle differences between a good bus ride and a bad bus ride. Having taken up with a man who lives four hours up the crowded main artery of our megalopolis, I ride the bus. I ride the bus every other weekend. He rides the bus, too. We ride the bus.

You might think this romantic, and if you play the Simon and Garfunkel song "America" repeatedly on your iPod, sometimes it seems like it almost could be. But "America" is about travelling. Conducting a long-distance relationship via the bus is commuting. There is an important difference right there. Travelling means going somewhere you've never been before, where outside the bus window are wondrous new sights and inside the bus are people who think you are strange, and possibly a burlap sack full of baby chickens. Travelling means the windows of the bus open and the smell of earth mingles with the smell of people in a not entirley unpleasant way and you either smell good or so bad that you can't smell yourself at all and maybe you are standing up and holding on for dear life while a refashioned American schoolbus does unthinkable speeds on dirt mountain roads. Commuting means travelling a hermetically sealed corridor, each backed-up exit of which is all too familiar, in an unloveable hermetically sealed pod that smells of fake cleaning odors and the odors they are not entirely successful in masking.

The bus we ride is a Bonanza Bus, which is now a subsidiary of the Peter Pan Bus Company. I just realized yesterday that that explains why all the buses say things like, "Lost Boys Adventure" on the sides. I thought this merely creepy, until I realized it was a literary reference. On a good bus ride, things come to you, answers to inconsequential little questions that have nonetheless been nagging you, and you feel a sense of satisfcation that the calm, liminal space of the semi-open road has granted your brain the quiet to let these answers float to the top of your consciousness. On a good bus ride, you write down what comes to you in your notebook and you are grateful to be on the bus that has revealed itself to be a point of rendezvous with these new ideas.

On a really good bus ride, you get two seats to yourself, near the front, out of view of the television screens and in view of the windshield. On a bad bus ride, you have to sit next to someone with a lot of stuff, who is eating reheated chicken parmagiana out of a plastic container. Just when you decide you would like to see the television screens, so confounded are you by the enormous novel you thought you would read on the bus which you now realize is much too complicated for the bus, someone's enormous head is in the way. On a good bus ride you do not have to pee, but you are not thirsty. On a bad bus ride, you simoultaneously have to pee and are thirsty. On a really bad bus ride, you decide to use the bus bathroom, and find it in a condition that leads you to believe that the bus is also used as a part-time psych ward. On a bus ride that takes an unexpected upturn, you find the bus bathroom space-shuttle clean. On a good bus ride, you return phone messages in a low voice and everyone around you is sleeping and does not wake. On a bad bus ride, a college-aged girl one seat away shrieks, giggles and recounts the story of her Christian youth group's trip to Israel at the top of her lungs to five or six different people. On a good bus ride, the bus is full of gently slumbering adults, all travelling alone. On a bad bus ride, a jovial group of middle-aged or elderly people, on the brink or in the full throes of hearing degredation, are travelling together and really enjoying each other's company. On a bad bus ride, there is a baby or worse, a toddler, and the baby or the toddler cries. On a really bad bus ride, the baby or toddler has a frazzled, borderline-abusive mother who screams at and/or swats the child, who cries and screams louder. On a really, really bad bus ride, the toddler kicks the back of the seat. On a really, really, really bad bus ride, the kid kicks the back of your seat, the mother apologizes to you and then hits and threatends the kid. You contemplate adopting her kid because she is so mean to it. You contemplate irreversible surgical sterilization procedures. You contemplate stabbing your eardrum with a plastic fork.

On a good bus ride, you fall into a blissful, peaceful slumber after the rather interesting ride from Port Authority to the Bronx, during which, if you are having a good bus ride, you think, "New York, New York! What a wonderful town! What a veritable couldron of communities and traditions! What an enormous theater of thousands of tiny, fascinating interactions! What a crossroads of the world! What a heartening mix of strong-willed humans, flawed and insane and beautiful, trying to make their way in this crazy world! What a great and terrible city is my city, my beloved city. Look! The hospital where I was born! Look! The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and beyond that, my grandparents' apartment, and beyond that the Whole Wide World! Look, a filthy river, even that is beautiful in the sunlight!"

If you are having a bad bus ride, you think, "New York, New York, a festering cesspool, a snarl of traffic, a pit of smog, an outdoor loony bin that could drive anyone insane who isn't already, where it costs twice as much to rent half the space as anywhere else in America, and you can never get in or out without two hours in traffic or delayed on the runway at LaGuardia Airport." If you are having a really bad bus ride, and the bus driver has a heavy foot, you can experience not only traffic all the way up the West Side, through the Park and up through East Harlem, but nauseating traffic that rattles that pages of your New Yorker vertiginously before your eyes ("New York! A city in which I am compelled to read this pretentious, relentless, incomprehensible magazine with unfunny cartoons that I will spend my whole life hoping to be published in and fearing I never will be!")

If you are having a good bus ride, you awaken from your slumber--amazingly!--just as you are pulling into town, just as the city of your destination appears on the horizon. On a bad bus ride, you wake up with a crick in your neck and fuzz in your mouth and eighty exits of Connecticut still ahead.

On a good bus ride, you feel well-being and goodwill for your fellow passengers sloshing pleasantly in your belly like cool water running over stones. On a bad bus ride, you hate everyone on the bus. And there are many to hate. Besides the verbose cellphone talkers and the screaming babies and the loudly conversing elderly, there are the pick-up artists. Never have you heard such bland pick-up lines. Who disgusts you more, the overconfident schmuck with the gelled hair and one of those demented cell phones that just sits on his ear all the time or the incredibly bland girl who pops gum and self-tans, you cannot deduce. The two middle-aged women behind you have just made friends and are complaining about quitting smoking and how gentrified the upper Cape has become and how much they overpack. This would be heartwarming if their complaints, you feel at this moment, were not so pedestrian and pathetic. Who cares if you overpacked? you rage in your mind. Don't bring so many of your middle-aged scarves next time you go to the Cape and save us all from hearing about it! There are the boisterous, generic men from parts of the country where men are larger and more manly. These men have belt buckles that cannot be bought in the blue states and what they are doing on the bus, you are not sure, but you can feel their anti-choice tax-cutting values spreading toward your seat like an oil slick. Red state America, you mutter in your spleen, teeth gritting, nostrils flaring, red state America is riding this bus with me. I live in this vile megalopolis that has turned every square foot from the White Mountains to the Blue Ridge into a Staples, a Barnes & Noble or a Target, the one fungus of population center in which people are so closely packed that they are forced to vote for a party that expresses at least a modicum of humanity, and yet red state America is on this bus with me.

The bus is the most democratic and proletarian of all modes of transport. The bus is how everyone gets around, and when I'm riding the bus, I am not sure that I really like everyone all that much, which I find myself in an enclosed space with them and the smell of their reheated chicken, their interest in booklets of crossword puzzles, their delight in straight-to-video movies. What amazes me is how it can go any which way. It's the same world outside the window and the same random permutation on the bus itself and the same person sitting in my seat and wearing my shoes, and sometimes it is beautiful and sometimes it is horrible.

Today is my 26th Birthday. It's also Joan Jett's, Scott Baio's, Nick Cave's, Shari Belafonte's, Eric Stolz's, Tommy Lasorda's and Wally Backman's birthday. Wally Backman was the second baseman for the 1986 New York Mets. Today is also the Autumnal Equinox. At 6:23 p.m. EDT, the sun crosses the celestial equator and fall begins. Today is also the day on which there are exactly 100 days left in the year.

On this day in 1792, the French Republic was declared. I'm in favor of that sort of thing. Nathan Hale was hanged as a spy in 1776. I'm against that sort of thing. In 1789 the office of the Postmaster General was authorized. I am very much in favor of the United States Postal Service. I love all their different possible outfits. The other night, I saw a postal worker doing her laundry at the local all-night laundromat. Just as I'd imagined, she was folding neat stacks of all different postal worker clothes. On this day in 1989 Irving Berlin died at the age of 101. I am in favor of living to be 101, if I don't get too decrepit. On this day in 2000 Kraft Foods recalled all taco shells sold nationwide in supermarkets under the Taco Bell brand after tests confirmed they were made with StarLink, a genetically engineered corn not approved for human consumption. I am not in favor of taco shells or Taco Bell. When I am dictator, franchised restaurants will be the first thing to go. On this day in 2005, I am wondering if I am running out of time to be dictator, but I think that really I'm just getting started.

I began celebrating my birthday early this year. So far for my birthday I have received an Oster 6646 Blender (as requested) with 5-cup glass jar and ice-crushing capability, the entirety of The New Yorker magazine from 1924 to 2004 in searchable form on DVD, Yiddish with Dick and Jane, a picture book of surrealist and beautiful illustrations, two woven Guatamalen zip-pockets, a succulent desert plant in a handmade clay pot, a Kewpie doll that resembles me that hangs from a bell on a string, a ballpoint pen in the shape of a spaceman, a pot rack made from a copper pipe, a ceramic milk pitcher, $500, a stuffed fuzzy iPod and a delicata squash. I have received cards with little fuzzy creatures made of fabric on them, a picture of "human spiders climbing the Brooklyn Bridge," and a card that says "I gave a card like this to my roommate once..." on the outside and "He made it into a bong" on the inside. In addition, I have bought myself two birthday gifts. One is a lamp that looks like a lightbulb trapped in a block of ice and the other is a lamp that looks like three branches of white flowers. It has been a delightful birthday so far.

I am very glad to have been alive for 9496 days and looking forward to as many more as I can get away with. Being alive isn't the easiest thing I've ever done, but, as they say, consider the alternatives.

We really don't want to hear about anyone else's dreams unless we're in them, and even then, it's not that interesting. At some point you realize that it's not you who gave this person a broken egg, or flew into a wall, but just another projection of the dreamer's own consciousness. It's never that revealing. "You were in my dream! You were barefoot and then you led me to a lake but you said that the water had books in it and my fourth-grade teacher was there, too, but she had a light saber and a mohawk. I wonder what it means..." It means you need therapy. We all do. The twenty-first century is killing us.

That said, I had an experience last week that goes beyond simple dreaming and enters into the realm of the supernatural. My unconscious spoke to me in the form of Britney Spears, at the exact moment that Britney Spears herself lay in a Los Angeles area hospital, birthing her first child by Cesarean section. What are the odds?

I've dreamt of celebrities before, but for some reason, it's usually Jennifer Aniston. I have recurring, surprisingly not-weird dreams about Jennifer Aniston. I don't know why. She's alright and I wish her well, but if I could talk to any celebrity it would probably not be Jennifer Aniston. In my dreams I promise not to give away her whereabouts to the papparazzi and confirm that Brad Pitt was a total asshole to her.

But what are the odds of dreaming of a pregnant celebrity at the moment that they are giving birth? If Sean Preston Spears Federline was born at 1 p.m. California time, and I get up around 10:00 most weekdays, and I was dreaming of Britney right up until I was awakened, that pretty much means I was dreaming of Britney while the kid was being born. I mean, how weird is that?

It almost makes you think that we are all cosmically connected in some way and that Britney was giving off some seriously powerful vibes as new life emerged from her womb through an incision in her once-fabulous abs.

Dream: September 14, 2005

I am interviewing Britney Spears for Interview magazine. She is very pregnant, as she is in real life, and I am very excited because in Interview famous people are interviewed by other famous people, therefore, I, too must be famous! As in dreams in which I believed I was in love before I ever fell in love, the feeling of dreaming that I am a famous, published writer is so fantastic that though this dream, like all dreams, takes a strange, creepy turn, I try to fall back into it after waking up, but of course I can't.

We meet at her family's compound. I am aware of being in a Southern state that ends in "A" but unsure of where it is. It consists of an old single-story ranch house and a giant new mansion. Everything still happens in the old house, which has shag carpeting and sliding aluminum windows and other trappings of white trashiness.

Britney is kind of cool--goofy and ditzy but sweet. She talks a lot about wanting to join the library and for some reason I tell her about the Great Neck library vs. the Port Washington Library, as if she is going to join a library on the North Shore of Long Island. There are sprinklers sprinkling the lawn outside, and through the rainbows they create I can see a huge, uninhabited mansion, swimming pool and swingset.

As we talk Britney seems kind of insecure and I reassure her a lot, there is a lot of specific conversation which I don't remember now at all. Underneath a piece of furniture, covered by a sheet, is a cage, and when I accidentally stick my foot under the sheet I feel something furry. I lift up the sheet and it's a huge, like human-sized doggish creature, except it's covered in artificial-seeming fur, like a muppet. It's docile and sleeping but also scary and humanoid. Britney says it was a sick squirrel that they took in and it grew into this but there's something suspect about that.

Congratulations Britney. I don't really forgive you for that clip I saw in Fahrenheit 9/11 in which you said "we should support the President no matter what he says" while you were wearing a pink pageboy wig and a lot of eyeliner. I hope you realize that the "President" would say that you are a hypersexualized fag-hagging hoochie who gives the youth the wrong idea. Or maybe he would like it that you are 23, married and mommied. In any case, I wish you all the best. Thank you for taking the time to enter my dream while you were giving birth. I will try to understand your message.

I almost forgot today was today. I kept remembering, and then forgetting again. New tragedies are happening now. But then I saw the big blue ghostly lights towering in the sky like tractor beams for some alien ship and I remembered.

Four years ago it seemed as if the world had changed forever and would never go back. Now everything would be meaningful, or meaningless, or we had moved beyond history, and in an ahistorical world meaning would now be fluid, or gaseous. After 9/11, I read an essay by Jean Baudrillard in Harper's , about events transcending their meaning and the meaning of no meaning and for the first time, I understood a piece of critical theory. I began to wonder if philosophy only made sense in the wake of tragedy, and that was why it seemed too absurd all the rest of the time time, and if perhaps it wouldn't seem so absurd if we came to see human existence as a continual tragedy. I read those prose-poem obituaries in the "A Nation Challenged" section of the Times and cried behind my sunglasses on the train, embarrassed that I was crying for people I didn't know just because the last sentence of their obituaries said things like, "He loved to dance the tango."

My twenty-second birthday was eleven days after 9/11. My friend Ellen heroically came to New York to celebrate with me. We sat at a sidewalk cafe sipping wine, enjoying the beautiful day, talking about how off-kilter the whole world still seemed. "But it feels really good to be in New York," said Ellen. "Really safe."

Just then a car swerved down the street and and screeched to a halt at the stoplight. A cop car pulled up behind it and four officers jumped out, guns drawn. "Put-your-hands-up-and-don't-move-don't-move-hands-where-I-can-see-'em!" shouted the cops, walking sideways and holding their guns with two hands just like on television. They surrounded the car with impressive choreography and grace, like a gang in musical. "Put your hands UP!"

The car was full of teenagers. The cops dragged them out, one by one, and made them lie facedown on the pavement with their hands behind their heads, fingers clasped and elbows winged, until the police officers straddled the teenagers, wearily, matter-of-factly. With their belts thunking heavily and their billy clubs bouncing against their flanks, the cops gathered the teenagers' wrists and handcuffed them together. The teenagers jerked to their feet like puppets and hung there for a moment by the wrists before they were shuffled into the cop car. The cops pushed the teenagers' heads into the car with that touch of the palm to the cranium that is almost paternal.

The waiter arrived with our Middle Eastern Combo Platters.

After that, life picked up speed. Things were strange and poignant. The missing persons posters faded and crinkled in the weather and were not taken down for a very long time. It was still new to have your bag searched everywhere and for the airport to be as tense as it was, for it to smack loudly instead of vaguely of death, or the possibility of death, and then like everything else, it was just the way it was. It was still new for a hole in the ground to be a tourist destination, and then it wasn't. I was amazed by how shameless and ugly a government could be in exploiting a tragedy their greed and militarism had in part caused, and then I came to expect their shamelessness to reach new depths. The rate at which things became more absurd was itself accelerating, and it became necessary to use calculus to describe the absurdity. Later, I found out that people were very offended when Adam Gopnik compared the smell that wafted north from downtown to smoked mozzarella. I could see why.

The momentary illusion of a collective experience gave way to the centrifugal gravity of narcissism. I concerned myself with My Early Twenties in the Early Twenty-First Century. I came to regard 9/11 as the moment I crossed over to some kind of adulthood, though it was an arbitrary designation. We want to say everything changed on a certain day but everything changes every day until one day everything has changed.

After 9/11, I interned. I dutifully wrote articles about the injustices suffered by women without health insurance while I myself was without health insurance. I wrote guides for how to get emergency contraception at your college health center. I got drunk and emailed my friends about the things that had happened while I was drunk, when I was supposed to be writing these articles and guides. I wasn't a very good intern. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I didn't get hangovers. I was younger then.

After 9/11 but before now, four years started to go by, but I was not aware of this until after it happened. I found out about the crazy band and went to see them play in a warehouse. They burned an effigy in the street and for the first time since I graduated college, I felt something resembling hope. I lived in a series of deeply flawed sublets. For a long time I wore my tank tops too tight and too low, but I was oblivious to this and therefore not embarrassed. I tried all the drugs I hadn't tried in high school or college and thoroughly enjoyed them all. The world was ending and my childhood was over and I would do what I pleased. We protested the war but it happened anyway. I haunted a bar many nights until dawn for the better part of a year. We protested the war again but it kept happening.

I wrote down clever thoughts in my notebooks. After 9/11 but before now, I filled sixteen notebooks. I saw shows, I saw movies, I saw an entire subway car sing "Lean on Me" in unison. I slept on couches and I slept in my clothes. I slept with a John and a Mark. There had already been a Luke, but there was never a Matthew and so I did not sleep with all four gospels. I slept with a Frenchman and a Spaniard, but there were no Italians nor any Portuguese, and so I did not sleep with all four Romance languages. I failed completely in my goal to sleep with a complete set of anything. I had one of those relationships that is like a car crash of everyone's neuroses and no one has any fun. I caught one of those infectious diseases that everyone gets. My parents bought me intraveneous Vitamin C and my infectious disease went away with astonishing speed. The IVs left bruises on my inner arms that I enjoyed looking at and pressing on with my fingertips as they went from blue to purple to yellow to green and became my normal skin again.

I went to Chicago. I went to Washington. I went to Providence. I went to North Carolina. I went to Oregon. I went to California. I went to Colorado. I got high in beautiful places. I got depressed at music festivals. I ate sushi in towns all over America you might not expect to have sushi restaurants. I went to Peru. I stayed up all night. I went to a wedding. I stayed up all night. I went to New England. I went to Central America. I climbed and ate things I probably shouldn't have. I took 2216 digital photographs. We protested the Republican National Convention but it happened anyway.

The Red Sox won the World Series and I was more euphoric than I expected to be. John Kerry lost the election and I was more despondent than I expected to be. I got into heated, drunken political debates. My grandmother died. My cat died. My best friend moved away.

After 9/11, I feared they would wage terrible wars and kill many times over the number that died that day, and they have. I feared they would use guns and bombs and very young people to bring upon other parts of the world the kind of destruction that should only come from natural diasters, and they have.

I still haven't gotten used to the Nazi-Germany sized American flags everywhere, though I've noticed they've found more permanent and ingenious ways of affixing them to things, like the multi-storied walls of the lobbies of international banks. Just the other day I was in the lobby of an international bank. The ceilings of the lobby were at least three stories high. I got lost in the mezzanine and accientally walked through the wrong security checkpoint. It beeped. The guard waved me through the right one. Two overlapping glass blades whooshed open to let me in. Behind the front desk of the multinational bank, on a wall at least three stories high, was an American flag the size of a tennis court. The wall itself was made of ribbed plastic, and the flag was stuck into this plastic with enormous thumbtacks wedged in between the ribs. The flag was so large I couldn't see it all at once without tilting my neck so far back my jaw dropped open. One more thing that happened after 9/11 was that a lot of banks had to get flags as big as their multi-storied lobbies.

Linoleum. Dust motes floating in the air. Fake plants. Flourescent lighting. The sound of daytime television turned up too loud. Abandoned shopping carts. These are the things that inexplicably depressed me as a child. Not all of them do now. Dust motes in the air make me happy. Linoleum makes me nostalgic for those rare moments in school when the smell of industrial cleaning products was noticeable but not too strong and the air wafting in through the grate-covered windows from the city streets was sweet and clean and my pencils were all sharp and my teacher was smart and nice and I felt glad to be alive and like I would one day be important and my table was sharing some kind of secret, kicking each other softly under the desks, thrilled and innocent.

Fake plants, flourescent lighting and loud daytime television still depress me, along with a myriad of new additions over the years (poured concrete, office parks, sugar substitues, moving walkways that aren't moving, outdated yet time sensitive yet still recent books in used bookstores (i.e., the 1994 Guiness Book of World Records), email forwards, suburbia. Abandoned shopping carts are almost quaint, and when photographed at dusk by talented artists, can be beautiful.

But what depresses me more than anything these days is business casual clothing. I despise it. Luckily, I almost never have to wear it. But several times a year, some parent actually wants to meet me before they entrust their child and a fair sum of money to me one afternoon a week. They want to "see my resume" and "have an interview." This is rare. The majority of parents call me hurriedly on the phone from their offices and leave checks on the dining room table. But sometimes they want to play "this is a real job" and I have to play along.

My minimal contact with parents means I can get away with wearing almost anything. I try to abide by a few simple rules: Do not expose too much skin to adolescent boys and try not to wear anything torn or frayed. So my business casual occassions are few and far between, and this makes them all the more offensive and confounding to me.

I hate the swishy stretchy sheen of business casual wear. I hate the expense and environmental impact of its dry-clean only rules. I hate its conformtiy. I hate the colors, the cuts, the fabrics of business casual clothing. I hate the 2% Lycra in the shirts. I hate Tencel. I hate collars and buttons. I hate shiny things that aren't silk or satin or velvet or velour, none of which qualify as business casual. More than anything, I hate silk-blend sweaters, and most of all, I hate short-sleeved sweaters, which are one of the cornerstones of business casual. And don't even get me started on the shoes.

I hate how business casual clothing is made for no other purpose than sitting on your ass in an office all day. You can't wear it on a long walk. You can't travel in it. It wrinkles. It stinks when you sweat. It has no pockets in which to put useful things like bus tickets to far away places or notebooks or drinks or drugs or snacks. Business casual clothing hints at no subculture and has no personality. Its purpose is to obliterate differences and allude to nothing. Its subcultlure is capitalism and its personality is catalog shopping, network television, and forty-five minutes on a treadmill.

And the word. What is business casual anyway? At least a suit is a cohesive garment with its own language and system of symbols. Suits have workmanship and subtle details of personality. Business casual clothing doesn't even have that. It is formality without detail, without language. It is the uniform of ultimate neutrality, made by the employees of one corporation to be worn by the employees of another.

I don't mind uniforms, if they are uniforms of times and places where people were strange and free and doomed and wild. I love when people dress as sixties mods, or seventies rockers, or inhabitants of Weimar Germany, or even some Platonic ideal the Williamsburg Hipster. The achievement of perfection in any form of fashion is an elusive and aesthetic goal. Our clothes can make us feel like ourselves, or better yet, like who we want to be but aren't yet. But the only reward for the achievement of perfection in business casual clothing is that people with money will find you non-threatening, and you won't look unique or insubordinate. Is that who some people want to be but aren't yet? If you wear those pants for long enough, you will be.

When I put on business casual clothing I feel like I am masquerading as everything I hate most in the entire world, like I am dressed to live the life I never wanted. Am I being dramatically adolescent? If I am, it's only because I still dress like one.

It's the twenty-second minute of this month. Already the weather is cool and the leaves are rustling. On the Summer Solstice I left the country for a month, thinking about how when I got back on July 21, it would be midsummer and this would make me sad. I try not to be sad at the end of the summer, since nothing really changes for me but the weather, but I can't help it. There is something sacred about the summer to me, even if it long since ceased to be a respite from the hell that was high school. Maybe it's my anxiety about the coldness of winter, the way it drags on six weeks too long and makes everyone crazy, the way gritty snow and salt destroy boots and every step is icy and treacherous and the world is puddly and the trees are barren and the light, though sometimes beautiful, is weak and everything seems hopeless and like it will never be alive again. And then when it is alive, when everything is hot and sweat cooks with bacteria like primordial soup and we are naked and exposed to the world and life itself is so abundant that it grows too ripe and almost rots, somehow that, too, seems also to imply its opposite, the lonliness of winter tethered hundreds of days away, tugging.

What is at once comoforting and upsetting about the seasons is that they keep happening. September comes and reminds us of other Septembers, or it doesn't remind of us other Septembers. Birthdays come and seasons come and at some point you realize that your life, while it is constantly changing, has a pattern, that you are a person who was born in September and for the rest of your life you will count from that season, that it's where you began and where you begin again. Days and dates become significant, the year is filled with anniversaries both marked and unspoken. An ex-boyfriend's birthday, the day you came down with mono, the day of the blackout but you didn't know because you were camped on a beach in California. Life itself has a pattern, and like all patterns it is both beautiful and disturbing, like one of those cryptic photographs you stare at and stare at until someone tells you it's the highways of Western Oklahoma photographed from space. Or the mathematical formula for the machinery of the Enola Gay, and you think "How clever." How clever that someone has figured out a way to make this mundane or sinister thing seem beautiful, made us able see it by making unrecognizeable.

The people you've met are familiar, the people you haven't met are familiar. Tonight, but last month, when it was still summer, I went to a reading in Madison Square Park. It was threatening to storm and I sat in my white plastic folding chair among the gentry, enjoying the feeling of thinking I recognized the friend who was going to read, and then realizing, when he turned around, that it was someone else. I hadn't seen him in a long time and his hair had gotten longer, and so when bare neck after bare neck swivelled and turned into strangers, I was confused. When he finally stood up and turned it around it was another sort of magic trick; his face had appeared on some long-haired boy's head. Among the recognizeable audience members, the girls with their air of aloof hopelessness and not too much jewelry and beautiful spectacles and serious necks, the boys with their standoffish t-shirts and youthful shoes and halos of ego, something was new.