Essay | The Doubtful Recluse

Teach with rancour. Call it success.

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Rob Moscaliuc

I heard on the news the story of a young Italian gymnast who denounced the psychological abuse her coach had subjected her to while a member of the national rhythmic gymnastics team. The coach weighed her along with the other girls before practice. Every morning, her coach would lash her with a tirade of harsh comments regarding her weight. Finally, the young gymnast resigned and went public. Many others came forward to decry similar abuse.

While physical violence is becoming increasingly rare, sexual and psychological abuse has become commonplace. A quick search on Google Italy illustrates this. For example, a teacher in Caltanissetta (Sicily) stands accused of sexual harassment after he groped one of his 11-year-old students. In Cagliari, the Sardinian capital city, a math teacher will have to pay damages to his school after being found guilty of sexual harassment. In Arpaia (Benevento), a 12-year-old student accused his teacher of sexual misconduct after she had forced him to perform certain sexual acts at school and via WhatsApp.

The social and political context in which this is happening feels ripe. In a recent speech, the Italian minister of education and “merit”, Giuseppe Valditara, announced that humiliation is a “fundamental factor in the growth and shaping of personality.” He said students should endure the humiliation of the entire school and engage in community service because it is only in this way that they become responsible individuals. Schools should teach students a “culture of respect” and a strong work ethic so they do not become “deviants” and a threat to society. We need to teach them to mature and grow at all costs. Teachers seem to confuse humiliation with humility and they adopt it as a teaching method.

On Twitter, Fratelli D’Italia (Brothers of Italy), the national-conservative and right-wing populist political party, stated that they are ready to support “sports and healthy lifestyles” because they represent an antidote to deviances such as drugs, alcohol, and violence. They’ve also made a point they’re going to take measures against rave parties. Ideologically, this sounds enticing. We all dream of a society in which everyone is living a happy and healthy life. But such matters also reek of eugenics and corrective measures. They engender images of tall and fit citizens who will one day become exemplars of the culture that created them. A political party that puts that on their agenda sounds somewhat paternalistic, and uncannily familiar.

Psychological abuse often goes unnoticed. We can always take back words, mollify them, and render them innocuous with laughter and a pat on the shoulder. We know from songs and bedtime stories that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us. The thought that someday this distress will help us all motivates us to march over our predicaments. There’s no gain without pain, we’re told. What doesn’t kill you strengthens you, or so the story goes. On a TV interview, the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni once thanked her bullies because it was because of them she became a better person and lost twenty-two pounds in two months. With the benefit of hindsight, such instances might emerge as a watershed in our coming of age. Yet, some choose to end their life before they get to reap that benefit.

Tensions with our teachers are something we have all had. We admire them, but more often than not, we perceive them as unfair, blind to our true talents, cruel, or downright evil. They set the bar too high; they push us to our limits, exploit our weaknesses, and abuse us in ways so subtle they would send shivers down a psychotherapist’s spine. We resent the fact that they already know everything and can enjoy the summer and winter holidays while we need to study and read and write essays. They just don’t seem to understand. So, why have we teachers come to loathe our students so much? How have we come to see them as individuals needing such violent rectification?

*My teacher and her students in 1996/1997. I was about 9 years old at the time. I’m in the top row, fifth from the left.*

I grew up in the nineties in a tiny village in the northeastern part of an allegedly democratic Romania. The village stood about twenty miles away from the Ukrainian border, and my teachers were utterly despotic. My elementary school teacher, a short and plump woman just inches from retirement age, spoke Ukrainian and foamed at the mouth when she got angry. Her hands shook when one of us forgot to do our homework, and she had no qualms about telling us we would fail at life if we didn’t study enough. One of my classmates peed his pants when asked to read a poem in front of the class. When another one allegedly said something inappropriate to another teacher, she grabbed him by the ears, lifted him off the ground, and swung him like a cat. We watched with dismay and hoped we wouldn’t be next.

The fear of disappointing her governed our lives. I woke up every morning dreading her punishment. There was always something I did wrong: my handwriting wasn’t curly or straight enough, or my drawings for the arts and crafts class showed haste. She walked around the room carrying a wooden stick in her hand and slapped the palm of our hands whenever she thought we did something wrong. It wasn’t just the pain that we had to endure. But the shame that came with it. The looks and stares during the breaks and the threat of someone telling our parents about our humiliation infinitely multiplied that pain. In our teacher’s eyes, the slap resulted from a moral failure on our part. We just hadn’t tried hard enough. It was our fault.

Teachers hung the works of those who excelled in my class on the wall of fame. The back of the class had a glass cabinet that held their notebooks. Parents and grandparents used that achievement as conversation stoppers or simply to add insult to injury. It was a competition with winners and losers. They all felt a sense of pride when their children filled notebooks after notebooks of handwriting during the summer or received excellent marks on their tests. It was their success as well, not just their children’s: they were exemplary parents, and they wanted their children to excel. They knew when you failed, because their child told them everything, and they reminded you of that whenever they had the chance.

The entire village knew when you got a shameful four out of ten. It was a mythological creature that also bore the name “upturned chair.” When it happened to me, I ran home and kneeled in front of my mother and begged for clemency. The saints that colonised the walls of our home seemed to watch me with scorn. I felt as if I had disgraced my parents and ancestors. It had branded me for life. It meant I didn’t deserve any Christmas gifts for at least two years. From then on, I had to live a pointless life in which I would pick potatoes and smoke filterless cigarettes.

At the end of the school year, our head teacher ranked us according to our performance. She gave us certificates and placed wreaths on our heads. In return, we showered her with flowers and gifts, which she carried proudly on her arms resembling the wife of a communist dignitary. The parents of those who didn’t make it hid their shame. They all looked as if they had committed some sort of unspeakable sin. It was okay to come in second. But coming in third verged on not getting a new pair of shoes. Not making the cut meant you had to work shovelling manure forever.

The rancour that came with all this seeped into our daily lives. We turned against each other. The top classmates deemed themselves superior and saw my brother and I, who never got first place in elementary school, as losers. They avoided playing with us because their parents had told them to steer clear of us. So my brother joined the group of outcasts. Those who had trouble spelling their last names and thought learning French was pointless. I found solace in books and longed for playmates. Whenever I saw the top students in my class hang out together, I felt a pang or remorse and envy. They spoke a language I had never heard before. In comparison, I acted like a child who still longed for toys and games.

I carried that shame with me into middle school. My maths teacher read my homework in front of the class and laughed at it along with the class. Frequently, he told me I would never amount to anything because I was lazy and my parents had failed to raise me properly. My classmates nodded at this and called me a fatso. One of them, in particular, took pleasure in teasing me about everything I did: the tiny drawings I made during classes or the fact that I sewed stuff in the arts and crafts class. Once, during German class, I drew a tiny devil standing next to a cauldron, and when he caught me in the act, he grabbed it and threatened to tell the teacher. I begged him to give me my drawing back, but he laughed, sadistically, and carefully placed it in his pocket. The teacher told me I should be ashamed of myself and threatened to punish me accordingly.

Yet, the teacher that we feared most was our biology teacher, who also was the school principal. The mention of his name was enough to silence us and send shivers down our spines. Like a hawk, he watched us, and at the slightest trespass, he would precipitate on us as if we were his defenceless prey. He would then grab the loose skin under our chin between his thumb and index finger and squeeze it and twist it until we submitted to his will. He threatened us with lawsuits and police files for even the most insignificant things, such as jumping over the fence or pushing our classmates around during the break. His presence was everywhere: at the park or playground, during field trips, at the back of our minds, in our parents’ and neighbours’ reprimands. He was our archenemy.

The one thing our principal hated the most was seeing our shoes dirty. Every morning before class, we lined up in the front yard of the school to await his inspection. One by one, we stopped by the main entrance and showed him the soles of our shoes. If they were dirty, we would get a hard slap behind our heads and sent away to clean them. And only when they were clean enough were we allowed to enter. Often, during breaks, his cronies (i.e., the balding math teacher who always carried a stick with him on his inspections) raided our classrooms in search of signs of “moral depravity” such as sitting or not enjoying the fresh air outside. “You stink,” his voice echoed through the hallways, “get out of the classroom, get some fresh air!” He later married the physics teacher, who was thin and tall, and delicate, and to this day, I have never understood why.

Discipline and cleanliness are valuable virtues to own. Yet what the hawkish principal and his chums failed to realise was that those virtues were also markers of class and social status. My shoes were always clean because we lived in a part of the village that had paved roads. My other classmates weren’t as fortunate. They had to walk for miles on muddy roads when it rained. Some others worked on their parents’ farm and had to feed the animals before coming to school. For some of them, soap and detergent and clean shoes were luxuries. We bought new clothes only at Easter and in August. Some of us wore the same clothes at home and at school. I, too, fell into the same cognitive bias. Akin to my teachers, I believed that if only people would pay more attention to their shoes and clothes, or simply got a grip on their existence, all would be better. They would get higher marks and finally be successful like the other kids.

Our principal also failed to address the shortcomings of our other teachers, to whom he did not apply the same rigorous and punishing standards. The history teacher, who was also nearing his retirement age, never actually taught anything while I was his student. He came to class, sat down behind his desk, and asked us to summarise a chapter from our textbook. If you filled pages and pages with notes and drawings of maps and charts, you got a full mark. Similarly, if you knew how to sing a song about a certain Spanish bullfighter, you also got a full mark. While we toiled away at our summaries, he sat by the fireplace and ate bananas. He also lived with the idea that somebody brought a radio to class and turned it on just to disturb him. There was no radio, and we had never heard of the Spanish bullfighter.

A PE teacher became a fully qualified “technology” teacher over the summer. Whenever he came to class, which was a rare occurrence, he sat down and read from a book about tractors and ploughing depths and speeds, and expected us to write everything down. Everyone knew he was the husband of the school secretary and had no teaching experience. The principal knew that the village priest, who got paid to teach religion at school, rarely came to class and gave us marks for knowing prayers by heart. The German language teacher soon became the Romanian language teacher. Whenever she didn’t feel like coming to class, she sent her daughter or son to teach. Every once in a while, they taught the arts and crafts class as well. We asked our principal to replace the Ukrainian language classes with English classes, and he said we needed Ukrainian more than anything else.

All of those teachers expected us to shower them with extravagant gifts on the first and eight of March, mundane events that school tradition had turned into special occasions. Every year, teachers clashed with parents over the gifts they received, which ranged from bath products and flowers to microwave ovens and fancy lamps. My Romanian language teacher berated us when the gifts she received were not big or good enough. She said we should be ashamed of ourselves. “These devils,” she would confess to my mother, “they bought me a lamp. What am I supposed to do with a lamp?” My elementary school teacher, the one who foamed at the mouth, told us once that she expected Persian carpets and gold necklaces.

Our parents’ attitude did not help. They condoned such behaviour and seemed to encourage it. When teachers told them we were not doing well in school, they simply said we deserved a good beating. If you didn’t know your multiplication table by heart, you deserved detention and the shame and anger you experienced when everyone else in your class went home. I trust all of us told our parents about the lazy history teacher, or the unfair treatment to which our maths teacher subjected us. We complained about the money we had to raise for gifts every year and our parents simply gave us the money. Looking back, they all seemed as if somebody had drained them of their confrontational powers.

Our parents accepted whatever came their way. They all had anecdotes about the teaching methods they themselves observed at home. My mother used some of those stories in casual conversation. My older brother could not remember what seven multiplied by eight was, so my mother slapped him with a notebook fifty-six times. That way, she explained, he would remember it for the rest of his life. My grandmother’s best friend, who was a teacher, applied similar methods to her students. The trauma and the shame that came with those corrective practices etched that knowledge into our brains. When you coloured outside the lines, there was a wooden stick ready to slap you the instant you did it. So you did not venture into that unmarked territory. That is where the archenemies lived.

*My elementary and middle school in Maritei, Suceava (Romania)*. *This is how it looks today. When I was a student, the toilet was a hole in the floor and there was no toilet paper.*

Everyone held teachers in such high regard. No one, not even our parents, dared to say anything in return. Back then, common wisdom held the idea that teachers were high priests in moral terms. They knew what was best for them, for the community, and for us children. My elementary school teacher publicly humiliated me because my hair was too long or because I didn’t have a uniform. Going to school was a minefield. You had to act a certain way, talk a certain way, otherwise they would scold you or your parents in front of everyone else. My brother’s elementary school teacher often asked for respect from her former students. She spoke of them as if they had become geniuses or millionaires thanks to her teaching methods. She demanded respect, even from those who had not been her students. To her, she deserved that respect, simply because she had been a teacher.

Things changed at high-school and I had my fair share of good and bad teachers. My math teacher got angry if someone wore flip-flops instead of sandals to school. Whenever my classmates talked or laughed during his class, he became tense and told them the kindergarten was somewhere else. Our chemistry teacher was not okay with A4 notebooks and she let us know about that. “University students use these, not high-school students like you,” she told one of my classmates. The lazy-eyed history teacher gave good beatings to anyone who remotely seemed to smirk at whatever he said. The PE teacher, a tall, overweight woman in her late fifties, called us many names. She called me a sissy and reprimanded me when I reported her to our tutor. “It was a joke,” she told me during her class. I was the one to blame because I dared to confront her.

My favourite ones were the English and the physics teachers. They both taught and spoke with maternal kindness. Going to their classes didn’t feel like a chore, and studying was akin to revisiting a place that held pleasant memories. They intertwined notions of language and physics with casual remarks naturally, which helped us to imagine that knowledge wasn’t the preserve of the elected few. I dreamt of once becoming like them: secure in their knowledge and bodies. Contrary to my inclinations, and everyone’s expectations, subjects such as physics and biology, genetics in particular, became things that thrilled me.

Things changed again at university. Most teachers there acted as if they had lost whatever excitement they had had for their subjects a long time before. To them, we were just another group of students to which they had to teach something that had become a Nietzschean vision of the rest of their lives: monotonous and inevitable. The phonetics professor, who students dreaded the most, locked the door when he came into the classroom so that tardy students wouldn’t disturb him. He treated us with utter contempt whenever we tried to approach him. Rumour had it he was gay and lived with another man and therefore unloaded his gay frustration on us. Student magazines referred to him as a draconian teacher whose secret desire was to make students suffer. Out of hundreds of students, only ten passed the exam. Some of them changed departments just to avoid his exam.

I have mixed feelings about my time as a university student. There were professors such as the phonetics professor whom I feared and loathed, but there were also professors whom I loved and admired. The general linguistics professor made us laugh and frequently referred to his dog, whose adventures became memorable stops on our journey through Saussure and Coseriu. The problem is that, even now, I can still recall what they taught me, and I find it difficult to make peace with the fact that such diverse teaching methods led to such similar outcomes. Thanks to the phonetics class, I learned to pronounce unfamiliar words just by looking them up in a dictionary. It also taught me how to explain pronunciation to others. The linguistics class, which I enjoyed and studied for readily, helped me understand how language works, and how interwoven it is with who we are and where we live.

All these experiences helped me calibrate my teaching methods. While I was a student, I pledged to become a teacher who would listen to students and cater to their needs. I wanted to see them as people in search of guidance and support rather than correction. My greatest desire was to become the teacher that I had never had: informed but with a heightened awareness of my students’ emotions; sweet but firm; funny, but in the right amount. On particularly happy days, I imagined myself becoming an inspiring teacher like John Keating in Dead Poets Society. My classes were supposed to make a point about teaching other-wise, and become living proof of the fact that teachers do not have to be dull to be formative.

In reality, things stood differently. When I got my first teaching job at the university, I didn’t know what I was doing, and my insecurity soon morphed into disappointment. My supervisor gave me a set of books and a list of things students needed to know for the final exam. I felt like an impostor. Suddenly, the confidence I had gained during my doctoral studies waned and I struggled with the most basic things. One morning, while I was teaching English grammar to my second-year students, I felt I couldn’t breathe and my knees wobbled. I ran to the bathroom and almost soiled my pants. In the bathroom mirror that morning, I saw a haggard face I could not recognise as my own.

Then there was the question of money. Soon enough into my alleged teaching career, I discovered that having just one teaching job wasn’t enough. So I had to take another one, and then another. I also took on translation and editing jobs. During the summer and during the winter holidays, I prepared test questions for private companies that wanted to test their future employees. I squeezed into my schedule whatever private classes I could. In the meantime, student emails piled up in my inbox, each of them with a different story and a specific request. I wanted to reply to each one of them, but I soon found myself copying and pasting stuff from the department’s web pages and previous emails. It dawned on me then that I was becoming one of those teachers, and I was failing myself and my students.

Anger and resentment are also part of a teacher’s emotional repertoire. More often than not, the students just don’t seem to care when you tell them they need to find a learning strategy that works for them. You want to help them, but they also seem oblivious to your attempts to do so. They want a magic trick that would solve all of their problems. I want them to avoid the mistakes I did when I was a student their age, but they seem to be very keen on doing those same mistakes. That can be very frustrating and it often makes me lash out at my students. But as soon as those waves of anger vanish, I resent them. I tell myself they don’t deserve it and I apologise.

Teaching and learning are processes riddled with emotions. They’re not just about the physical discomfort of having to sit for hours on end listening to someone or reading in a library. Both of them result from an accord: between student and subject, and between student and teacher. I’m intentionally avoiding the word relationship here, because relationships entail exchange, a certain do ut des. Accord doesn’t imply that. It denotes harmony, and the relief of being and doing as one wishes. Yes, students need to take certain steps to get to a point, but each of them gets to that point with different emotional baggage. Some of them are faster and some of them are slower. The important thing is to realise that we as teachers will have to deal with a lot of that emotion, and to do that, we need to be emotionally agile.

“There are students,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in Touching Feeling (2002), “who view their teachers’ hard work as a servile offering in their honor […]. There are other students who accept the proffered formulations gratefully, as a gift, but without thinking to mimic the process of their production. […] Teaching privileged undergraduates, I sometimes had a chilling intimation that while I relied on their wish to mirror me and my skills and knowledge, they were motivated instead by seeing me as a cautionary figure: what might become of them if they weren’t cool enough, sleek enough, adaptable enough to escape from the thicket of academia into the corporate world.” (154)

I do not want to be a cautionary figure because becoming a teacher is not a failure, although the pay teachers receive might make it look so. But it can become a failure if we do not address the emotional issues that come with it. What continues to shock me is that in a job that requires such advanced metacognition, we are still unprepared for its emotional side. We know how to solve complex equations, but we silently ignore the emotions that drive us toward the solution to that complex equation. Most importantly, we are unable to teach those emotions to our students. We ask them to find the solution and punish them when they don’t. Then, we ask them to try again. And so we end up with students who know things but are emotionally crippled.

In order for teaching to become sustainable, we must cease to ignore the emotions that all participants in the learning process have. This might seem like an arduous task, because emotions are always complex, and many factors have to be taken into consideration. But expressing our emotions and being honest about them might be a good starting point.

What are we doing here?

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Rob Moscaliuc

A speech given at the end of the semester, in one of my summary writing classes.

This class has been a complete failure and a waste of everyone’s time, money, and patience on so many levels.

In this class, we’ve been reading texts and trying to summarize them to the best of our abilities. Unfortunately, we’ve been honing a skill that will most likely prove useless. And that is because in whatever job you’re going to grapple with in your future, your employer will NOT ask you to read texts and summarize them. No one will stand in awe at your summarizing skills or admire you for having read and understood a newspaper article accurately. Most importantly, you won’t be able to use these skills as pick-up lines on a Saturday night, drink in hand.

Let me give you some figures to show you I’m not being wild.

In terms of employment, we’re on the ladder’s lower rungs. A recent survey conducted by Alma Laurea (the Italian Inter-university Consortium) shows that 82,1% of language graduates found a job within five years after graduation. Those in the literary/humanities group fare even worse: only 77,8% of graduates were employed five years after graduating. That’s acceptable, you might say, satisfactory even. But compared to graduates in the field of information technology (97,2%), engineering (96,4%), economics and architecture (91,8% and 91,6%, respectively), the complete picture becomes rather grim.

In financial terms, in Italy, the situation doesn’t look promising either. Compared to IT graduates who earn on average €1,871 per month, those in our field earn around €1,389 per month. Architects and engineers get about €1,587 per month plus benefits. A five hundred euros difference might not seem much, yet they can make a difference when bills and rent have been paid at the end of the month. To put it bluntly, compared to STEM graduates, our graduates might find that they have too much month at the end of their money. To put it more bluntly, graduates in the humanities place themselves below the average income of all graduates put together, which is €1,552 per month.

When choosing a job, the options are also minimal, to say the least. For example, you could become a tourist guide or an interpreter or translator. On the other hand, if you’re lucky enough, you might land a job in a multinational company, where you will be required to interface with foreign clients or other businesses. Or you might work as a foreign correspondent for a newspaper or news office. Or you might become a museum technician and conservator. Yet, most graduates in the humanities end up working as event organizers or as teachers, jobs in which they are either unqualified or overworked and underpaid (as language teachers are most of the time).

Globalization and technology haven’t been kind to us either. Jobs in translating, interpreting, copy editing, and even teaching are increasingly becoming side jobs. They can be outsourced, meaning you won’t be given tenure or a full-time job, and you will lose all benefits that come with that. You will most likely have several contracts with different companies and institutions with diverse terms and conditions. The taxation regimes of those contracts will also be dissimilar, which means that you will have to give some of that money back to the state in taxes every year.

Juggling jobs can be fun: it means you can do something else every time you get a new contract and build an impressive resumé and a diversified set of skills. But this also means you don’t get any paid leave if you get sick or have a baby. In addition, you will need to work on holidays, and it will become increasingly difficult to separate your job from your private life. For example, I often answer emails from my various employers while on the loo or while brushing my teeth in the morning.

It goes without saying that none of my employers, except for Unito, require me to summarize newspaper articles. So naturally, therefore, I can’t even put it on my resumé.

So, unaffectedly, this raises the rather dreadful question, which, I’m sure, has haunted many of you over the years. And that question is: what are we doing here?

Let me give you an anecdote or two.

When I was in primary school, my math teacher would call me names whenever I found it difficult to understand equations. He called me a goat, a ram, a potato. I even got slapped really hard on the back of my neck every once in a while. “You’ll never amount to anything,” he would say whenever I was in front of the class, “what are you going to do with this thing you have for literature?” The sense of shame and purposelessness derived from that public humiliation has stayed with me for a long time. I can still sense it there, in the recesses of my mind, where it turned to rancour and, finally, to acceptance.

But inherently, it was also humiliation aimed at us, the humanists, the language experts, the literature enthusiasts. More often than not, we’re portrayed as those who escape or hide from reality, only to find haven in the words of someone who died centuries ago. We’re the ones who are afraid of a real job. Men in the humanities are allegedly feeble, effeminate, not men enough. Women are seen as spinsters or obsessive librarians who are only attractive in porn movies.

When I told my high-school English teacher, who had insisted I become a lawyer or notary, that I would study languages at university, she enthusiastically discouraged me from doing that. After all, what would one do with a degree in foreign languages and literature besides teaching? Why toil at something that will eventually prove useless and will only result in educating people who will become just like us?

So let me ask you that dreadful question again: what are we doing here?

The answer is relatively simple, and we’ve been avoiding it or secretly despising it because it doesn’t translate into more money. If you study Information Technology, you are 97,2% sure you will get a job almost immediately after graduating. The same goes for other STEM graduates. But unfortunately, knowing how to communicate effectively in different situations with different people in different languages doesn’t translate into that. It doesn’t equal money. It equals something else, and that something else may turn into cash at a certain point. At most, it constitutes a talent rather than a lucrative skill. And that’s a problem when financial austerity and crises are just around the corner.

I believe that what STEM graduates (and other people) knowingly or unknowingly refuse to acknowledge is that their work would become static without our effective communication systems. They wouldn’t be able to publish their results. No one in this world would be able to move without the humanists and the linguists who painstakingly work, often without getting paid, to streamline communication. To make it easier for us to understand each other.

So please, I beg you, I beseech you: do not bear this shame any longer. You are not less intelligent than your STEM colleagues in any shape or form. Whenever they, or someone else, tries to remind you of that shame, blow a raspberry at them. Tell them that all the knowledge they have about computers, economics, and building skyscrapers was, before all else, a string of words in a book, something that you are masters of.

On 9/11 and Its Aftermath

Posted on September 11, 2021 by Rob Moscaliuc

When Liberty Island reopened to the public three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, tourist information plaques on the island still needed to catch up with the altered Manhattan skyline. A vacancy had appeared where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood. “Amid the glittering impassivity of the many building across the East River,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker a few days after the attacks, “an empty spot had appeared, as if by electronic command, beneath the sky that, but for the sulfurous cloud streaming south toward the ocean, was pure blue, rendered uncannily pristine by the absence of jet trails.” Even three months after the events, one of those tourist plaques, situated just at the edge of Liberty Island where visitors could get a breathtaking view of the tip of Manhattan, still featured the ‘old’ Manhattan skyline in which the two towers stood proudly intact.

The disparity between reality and representation was haunting. It placed the two instances, the old and the new, in a relation of simultaneity, of coexistence. This dialogic simultaneity between reality and its representation gave an ominous aura to “that day”,as 9/11 came to be called in its aftermath, and it reflected a state of mind. It was a showcase of before and after akin to shampoo TV commercials or those brain-fitness puzzles that askplayers to spot the differences. Yet, it indicated something else as well, a shift not just in terms of landscape. The gap in the “glittering impassivity” of Manhattan’s skyline needed more than concrete and hard physical work to be sealed.

The plaque on Liberty Island was not the only one to proffer such uncanny commentary on the changing scenery. In November 2015, while I was staying in New York City, during one of my morning runs in Astoria Park, I stumbled across a similarly ominous plaque. Situated on the sidewalk, approximately halfway between the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge and the Hell Gate Bridge, the green plaque faces the East River and, beyond it, Manhattan’s skyline. It does not contain any images, yet the weather-beaten plaque tells the story of the 1904 General Slocum Disaster, which involved a steamboat that sunk in the East River along with its 1,300 people on board. Out of all those people on board only about 280 managed to survive. However, that was not the information that caught my eye as I was skimming the long commemorative text. What drew my attention was the last sentence of the first paragraph, which tells its readers that “prior to September 11, 2001, the burning of the General Slocum had the highest death toll of any disaster in New York City history.” Besides the seemingly innocuous comparison that this piece of information offers, which is most likely meant to help New Yorkers and tourists get a sense of perspective with regards to the death toll and the importance of such an event, I could not help but think how the plaque is incidentally much more about what happened on and in the aftermath of 9/11 than about the General Slocum Disaster.

The two events, akin to the two versions of Manhattan’s skyline, were also placed in a dialogic simultaneity. Yet, in this case, the comparison between the two was no longer about forceful changes in an otherwise recognizable landscape but rather about how certain events are dethroned by culturally resounding ones in a city’s cultural memory. It somehow chronicled the degree to which 9/11 turned into a watershed moment in the city’s history since most people will not remember a steamboat that sunk on a Sunday afternoon due to “organizational and leadership failings.” The comparison also offered 9/11 as a unit of measurement for the perception of that other disaster, as if the General Slocum Disaster could not have been understood without bringing 9/11 into the picture, and maybe even the other way around.

Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, was making a similar, albeit unconscious association when, while speaking about how violent events are almost always preceded by unremarkable circumstances, she brings together the “ordinary Sunday morning” of Pearl Harbor and the “ordinary beautiful September day” before 9/11 happened. Yet, the mental levelling Didion succumbs to in her comparison is not far-fetched. Akin to Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was an act of unswerving aggression perpetrated on the homeland, and Didion was surely not the only one to shed light on the connection. David Ray Griffin, an American professor and political writer, declaratively entitled his book on the Bush Administration after 9/11 The New Pearl Harbor, and in the days following the attack, politicians of all colors resorted to the same association in their public speeches. In this sense, it is as if there is a transfer of ‘cultural weight’ between these events placed in dialogic simultaneity: the steamboat incident offers the death toll, 9/11 offers the attitude and the solemnity the former somehow fails to trigger, while Pearl Harbor legitimizes a military response.

This transfer of cultural weight could be easily explained and understood in psychological terms by invoking such notions as the “availability heuristic.” If applied, the notion would reveal that whoever conceived the text for the plaque offered readers a mental shortcut by relying on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating, for instance, the death toll of the General Slocum Disaster. Yet, such an approach is limiting, to say the least. It reveals more about the authors and the readers of the text, as well as about the post-9/11 atmosphere, than about the nature of the events themselves, if such nature could ever be graspable.

On this line of reasoning, it is my contention that this dialogic simultaneity indicates a modification in the world’s primal scenes and constitutes a symptom of how 9/11 and the ensuing wars have created a ripple effect from a cultural point of view. “Many people”, George Packer argues in The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, “allowed historical analogies to do their thinking for them.” In the case of the ‘war on terror’, triggered by the events of September 11, the two primal scenes, or mental shortcuts, were the Second World War and the war in Vietnam and many people funneled their perception of the new wars along those lines. However, the General Slocum commemorative plaque indicates a further development inthat mental process. The plaque seems to suggest that, in terms of casualties, 9/11 has become the primal scene for the understanding of the General Slocum Disaster despite the chronological primacy of the latter.

By taking into consideration both fictional and non-fictional texts as well as other cultural artifacts coming from different fields, this article looks at how culturally resonant occurrences such as the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the ensuing ‘war on terror’ tend to become ‘selfish events’. As this paper will argue, this transformation is particularly fruitful when these artifacts enter processes of dialogic simultaneity with those artifacts that have “circulating signifiers” and whose cultural frames could be exported to fit new contexts. To this purpose, by looking at Elliot Ackerman’s novel Green on Blue as well as other texts pertaining to the discourse(s) of the ‘war on terror’, the paper tries to argue that such dialogues result in ‘violent’ interpretative intrusions not only at the level of succeeding cultural discourses but also at the level of preceding discourses. However, the notion of dialogue employed in my argument does not inherently imply intertextuality. Albeit their authors do acknowledge some writerly debt to other cultural artifacts and authors, the degree of influence is never stated specifically within the texts themselves. ‘Dialogue’ hereby implies simultaneity and is most observable when these texts and cultural artifacts are brought together in interpretative processes and their overlaps are pinpointed and discussed.

One way to go deeper into this process of transfer to understand it better would be to look for other instances in which this dialogic simultaneity and transfer of ‘cultural weight’ occur, and post-9/11 literature offers plenty of revelatory examples. One of these moments of cultural transfer is accurately documented, for instance, in Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blazing World. In terms of narrative tactics, the novel strategically builds the story using different points of view thus permitting the reader to see the issue from dissimilar angles. After having lived for so long in the shadow of her art-connoisseur-dealer husband, Harriet Burden, the protagonist of the novel, decides to conduct an experiment by concealing her female identity behind three male artists who agree to present Burden’s work as if it was their own. The purpose of the experiment, as explained by the protagonist herself in the many journal entries included in the novel, was to show the degree to which the art world was biased against female artists, the latter being portrayed as victims of a ‘phallocentric’ perception of art. What interests me most however, is the way in which one of Burden’s art installations, titled suggestively “The Suffocation Rooms”, was perceived simply because it was mounted in the aftermath of 9/11:

The show was mounted the spring after New York was attacked, and the little mutant that crawled out of the box had the haunting look of a damaged survivor or a new being born in the wreckage. It didn’t matter that the work had been finished well before 9/11. The increasing heat in the rooms contributed to the interpretation; the last, hot room felt ominous. At the same time, my debut was an insignificant casualty of the falling towers.

Yet, in Hustvedt’s fragmented narrative, Burden’s art installations are not the only ones that fall prey to the cultural violence of the ‘falling towers’. The works of another artist, who goes by the name of Rune and who later becomes one of Burden’s male fronts, are subjected to the same kind of interpretation with the only exception that his works are exhibited well before the events of September 11. The narrative thus chronicles how after 9/11 Rune’s ‘colored crosses’ took on an entirely different meaning. “Modeled on the Red Cross symbol in different colors,” one of the narrators explains, “they could have been an ironic reference to the whole history of Christianity or to the Crusades. After 9/11 they looked prescient: East-and-West conflict, civilizations at war. Or were they just a shape?”

In a similar vein, the novel also accounts how after 9/11 artists themselves felt compelled to change their own aesthetics. Culturally resounding events such as September 11, the novel seems to suggest, not only contaminate interpretation but also engender a need for aesthetic shift and a commitment on the part of the artist that transcends the boundaries of representation. They formulate an ethos of art production and perception, one that must necessarily acknowledge the presence of these events as regulatory ‘primal scenes’. This double shift even became the topic of a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Entitled September 11, the exhibition gathered a series of artworks most of which were not necessarily connected to 9/11 but were close enough to force the audience to come to terms with the idea that while the works themselves had suffered no alterations in the meantime their perception had in fact changed in the aftermath of the events. “The exhibition”, as Michael H. Miller notes in the Observer, “is more about how September 11, 2001 changed the experience of viewing art after the fact, and less about the day itself. This new kind of context gave certain works a more menacing appearance.”

A similarly striking example can be found in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, where a still life painting by Giorgio Morandi, showing a series of household items (boxes, biscuit tins, and bottles), appears to be weighed down by the same artistic prescience with regards to 9/11. It is worthwhile to note that Morandi’s paintings, much like Rune’s ‘colored crosses’ from Hustvedt’s novel, had been conceived and exhibited more than fifty years before 9/11:

Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to. ‘What do you see?’ he said. She saw what he saw. She saw the towers.

The two dark objects in Morandi’s painting could have been any two household objects as the series itself suggests. Yet, after September 11, their obscurity and lack of a definite signifier takes on a precise meaning. The mere resemblance to the Twin Towers makes them appear as representations of the towers themselves and the dark implications that come with that interpretation. In a similar manner, George Segal’s sculpture titled “Woman on a Park Bench” mounted as part of MoMA PS1’s September 11 exhibition corroborates the same kind of interpretation process. When the show was mounted at MoMA in 2012 the artist had been dead for more than ten years, and his artwork first came to the light of day well before 9/11. Yet, the woman in the sculpture, of complete whiteness as if covered in white powder, could have been easily seen, akin to the “little mutant” in Burden’s art installation, as one of the survivors who had fled the clouds of dust coming from the falling towers.

The same process of dialogic simultaneity becomes apparent even in the case of the discourse(s) surrounding the American ‘war on terror’. To include even examples from popular culture, consider for instance the atmosphere of government surveillance portrayed in Netflix’s original series Stranger Things released in July 2016. Though set in 1983 the audience of the series could only perceive this atmosphere from the point of view of the Edward Snowden leaks and the ensuing surveillance scandals that dominated the mass media immediately after. When Mr. Wheeler, the oblivious dad from Stranger Things, tells his wife to trust a pack of shady government officials because the government is always on their side, somehow that does not ring true anymore considering recent events. Much like the works of art in Hustvedt’s and DeLillo’s novels, these images become prescient and almost an admonition directed at those who, in their daily ignorance, ‘had not seen it coming’ even in the 1980s.

Now, taking these examples into consideration one might begin to see a connecting thread. Even though these representations do not make specific references to the events of September 11 or the ensuing ‘war on terror’ along with their subordinate discourses, they do tend to have “circulating signifiers” that can be easily exploited by a culturally dominating event or a ‘selfish event’ (following Richard Dawkins’ notion of the “selfish gene”). This interpretative intrusion occurs not only at the level of succeeding cultural discourses (consider, for instance, the examples from Hustvedt’s novel) but also at the level of preceding cultural discourses (consider, for instance, the Morandi painting in DeLillo’s novel), up to the point where even cultural artifacts that previously bore no inherent connection to the events themselves begin to gain new significance in the aftermath of the occurrence of those events. These become prescient in a bizarre kind of way.

Such was the case for instance of an episode from Van Partible’s American animated television series Johnny Bravo that was aired on April 27, 2001, on Cartoon Network. Entitled Chain Gang Johnny, the episode innocuously shows in the background of one of its scenes a movie poster that features a burning tower. Ominously enough, the movie poster vaguely states that the burning tower is “coming soon”. The movie featured in the poster does not have a title, which further fueled the imagination of conspiracy theorists around the world. The theory was later dismissed as mere coincidence.

Even more ominously and somehow ironically, on September 10, 2001, on a stage in Vegas, George Carlin, the comedian, performed a “red-hot closing bit he planned to use for his latest HBO special” in which he told his audience that he enjoys “fatal disasters with a lotta [sic]dead people.” It is worth noting that before this closing bit of the show Carlin had also joked about Osama bin Laden and airplane explosions due to excessive flatulence. The HBO special was released only fifteen years after its initial recording. Carlin had supposedly withheld the release on matters of taste. The Quiet American, a movie based on Graham Green’s novel with the same title, “had been ready for distribution just after September 11, but Miramax’s fears that the movie might be thought unpatriotic delayed the release for more than a year.” Like Burden’s and Segal’s works of art, these cultural artifacts would have become casualties of ‘the falling towers’ if they had been released on time.

To put it differently, culturally resounding events such as these have the capacity to contaminate cultural artifacts that happen to be in their proximity and change the way they come to be interpreted by an interpretative community, a contamination that is never unidirectional from a chronological point of view. When cultural artifacts with “circulating signifiers” are placed in dialogic simultaneity, be it temporal or spatial, with these ‘selfish events’ they tend to be absorbed within the discourse of those events, especially when the events have not yet had the time to form a stable discourse of their own and they are still ‘cultural stumps’. Like Dawkins’ “selfish machines” they will stop at nothing to preserve their cultural subsistence. To push the concept even further, one might say that such ‘selfish events’ ultimately perform a‘cultural appropriation’ of sorts. Their ‘cultural stump’ enters a dialogue with fully formed cultural artifacts and they appropriate some of their features up to the point where they even contaminate those artifacts. By extension, and due to this ethos of appropriation that ultimately becomes the signature move of culturally selfish events, the cultural artifacts that further stem from this kind of events will tend to replicate that signature move. But cultural appropriation can be a tricky thing. To appropriate one cultural artifact or at least some of its features impliesstepping away from one culture, shedding the characteristics that separate it from the others, and plunging into another. Such appropriation also infers that boundaries between cultures are always clearly set and accessible by intellectual means.

This last assumption is probably what drove Elliot Ackerman, “whose five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him highly decorated”, to write his first novel, titled suggestively Green on Blue. Set in Afghanistan and told from the perspective of an Afghan soldier who desperately fights to maintain his wounded brother’s manly dignity, Ackerman’s novel has been repeatedly described by literary critics as performing an act of ‘cultural appropriation’, an audacious act unheard of at least in the genre of war writing. True, novels about the enemy are common in times of war, but Ackerman does more than that. Green on Blue lets readers linger, at least for the duration of the reading, in the very mind of the enemy, who, in the end, is not much of an enemy after all, but the peon caught in the vicious whirlpool of a war in which money has become a “weapons system”, to use a phrase from Phil Klay’s Redeployment.

Yet, besides the typical reactions that a novel narrated from the perspective of the ‘enemy’ could ultimately trigger, and besides the ideology of the conqueror/winner lurking in the backstage of such denunciations of ‘cultural appropriation’, it is my contention that Ackerman’s novel also offers precious insight precisely into how discourses surrounding such historical events as the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the ‘war on terror’ perform these interpretative intrusions by setting up a dialogue between two cultural artifacts. One way to assess the degree of this intrusion would be to bring two other cultural artifacts, one pertaining to and imbued with the culture of the one performing the ‘cultural appropriation’, namely Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, and the other pertaining to the culture of the ‘enemy’, namely Hassan Blasim’s collection of short stories The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq.

Though Ackerman explicitly stated that “while the American West wasn’t ‘front and center’ in his mind while writing, ‘the American counterinsurgency campaign was, and so by default, the Indian Wars became a layer in understanding how Americans behave in these types of war’.” Worth noting from this point of view are the novel’s frequent covert references to the American West and the Indian Wars, which, besides being pertinent because of the similarities between the Afghan landscape and that of the American West, also attest to a cultural recognition of preexisting narratives. In fact, a great number of vets identify McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as the novel that best describes Afghanistan for several reasons that are not as striking as they look.

The resemblance is mostly visible in the way the landscape is described in Ackerman’s and McCarthy’s novels. On one of his first missions with the Special Lashkar, a military group supported with American money to maintain a balance of power and influence in the region, the narrator, Aziz, describes the Afghan mountains in animalistic terms, giving them the characteristics of a mouth that “swallows” the convoy, the ravine that “rolled out like a sloppy tongue”, descriptions that recall some of those present in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains.” From this point of view, both Ackerman’s Green on Blue and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian seem to portray a geography whose constitution is imbued with fear, a feeling prompted by a nature that refuses to be something other than a stubborn force, that refuses to accommodate human presence. In both novels, nature has its own impenetrable rhythms, it follows cycles and unwritten rules.

Along the roads travelled by the protagonists of the two novels, one can almost hear the same sounds, the same barking dogs, see the same “low mud houses”, and sometimes even encounter the same characters. Consider, for instance, the old hermit whom ‘the kid’ from Blood Meridian encounters towards the beginning of the novel, an old man who is so much like Mumtaz from Green on Blue, both offering comfort to the protagonists. “The family of itinerant musicians” who “were dressed in fools’ costumes with stars and halfmoons embroidered on” reemerge under a similar guise in Ackerman’s novel as “travelling musicians looking for work.” There is even something in Aziz’s demeanor that reflects the behavior of‘the kid’ from Blood Meridian. Both protagonists are young and unknowing, and their education, or lack of it, is not aligned with the violently changing political environment, an aspect which in turn reinforces their malleability. Yet, the references to the American West are at their peak of visibility particularly when the narrator tells of how their military company had been divided into two groups with revealing names, the Tomahawks and the Comanches. The split, Aziz explains, had been done not only for strategic purposes but also because their American sponsor, the ghostly Mr. Jack, “had a great affection for the American West”.

Yet, it is my contention that this is the issue with Ackerman’s attempt at ‘cultural appropriation’. Though the novel is written from the perspective of an Afghan soldier, Aziz is still the beholder of an ‘American gaze’, or, to put it more bluntly, an ‘Americanizing gaze’. Aziz inherits some parts of that myth of the self-made man. This is particularly visible towards the end of the novel, where Aziz emerges triumphant as a spy in an American spy movie, as someone who has reached a superiorunderstanding, despite his limited education, of the very war he had been fighting in and of the forces that come into play. His ‘Americanizing gaze’ is also visible when he goes back to visit his maimed brother under the guise of deceit to tell him that he had been apprenticed to a merchant in Kabul and that he was doing the work of an honest man. Aziz acts like an American when, while still fighting for the Special Lashkar, he pounds on the top of the car to let the driver know that they are all ready to go. The gesture, somehow an awkward imitation of Hollywood action movies, has the same hollow ring as the scene in which ‘the kid’ from Blood Meridian enters a bar and all the men inside “quit talking when he entered”. Most importantly, that presence of spirit is there when he tells his imagined readers that Mr. Jack wrongly assumed that they, Afghans, “did not understand what it meant to be named after the Indians of his country, but we understood. To us, it seemed a small but misguided sort of insult. For our tribes had never been conquered.” For an uneducated Afghan soldier, Aziz seems to know an awful lot about Native Americans.

Still, the novel’s cultural appropriation works best particularly when members of the US occupation forces come to be portrayed throughout the novel. Besides the occasional American soldiers that appear in contrast with the Afghan soldiers due to the size and shape of their bodies, the only instance of American presence that somewhat strikes a chord is that of Mr. Jack, whose ghostly presence matches in tone the almost carnivalesque appearance of the Comanches and the Apaches in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Mysterious, coming and going only during the night in a pitch-dark vehicle, Mr. Jack stands out chiefly because of his blinding white teeth, his ridiculous wardrobe, “his shalwar kameez [that] still held the creases from where it’d been folded in plastic packaging,” and his American way of speaking Pashto.

One way to test the accuracy of this instant of cultural appropriation would be to look for similar textual instances in narratives written by those within the culture that is being appropriated and see how they engage in dialogue with each other. The example that comes nearest to that of Mr. Jack is the representation of “the blonds” in Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Madman of Freedom Square”, included in The Corpse Exhibition. Albeit the narrative does not specify overtly that the two blonds are American, their narrative seems to follow a prescribed structure: two blonds, most likely a reference to the color of their skin and hair, come to town and suddenly everyone is getting a raise, the town’s infrastructure develops, the usual tropes of American financial support within the discourse of the ‘war on terror’. Soon enough, akin to Mr. Jack with his blindingly white teeth and eyes drained of color, the blonds acquire a certain mythical aura around their presence. “The local women”, the narrative goes,

attributed to the baraka or spiritual power of the blonds the fact that their husbands, who worked sweeping the streets or as school janitors in the city center, had all received pay raises. The husbands, who had been skeptical about the baraka of the two men, soon stopped scoffing, when the government decided to install electricity at the beginning of winter.

The very presence of these two men bears an uncanniness akin to the presence of Mr. Jack in Ackerman’s Green on Blue. This mode of describing American presence, however, has apparently turned into a trope and is not limited to fictional representations. In The Assassins’ Gate, while describing a formal meeting between American officials and Iraqi exiles that took place at the London Hilton Metropole in 2002, George Packer resorts to the same vocabulary. “Sprinkled among them”, Packer notes the contrast, “palely lurking, were the Americans. […] These Americans moved through the throng of Iraqi exiles with the glowing and watchful fervor of missionaries among the converted.”

Going back to the notion of ‘selfish events’ and trying to give an answer to the question as to why interpretative intrusions such as these occur, it is my contention that any such event, due to the immediate effects of its occurrence, does not have the time and the cultural resources to create a discourse that could explain the complexity of that event, and as such it resorts to cultural artifacts that happen to be in its proximity so as to sustain its cultural presence at least until a separate discourse, of its own, has been created and culturally reinforced. This process is most visible for instance, in the kind of comparisons that politicians, and other figures that retain high amounts of cultural capital, make in the immediate aftermath of violent and sudden events. Such is the case, just to give an example, of how the attacks of September 11 were frequently compared to the attacks on Pearl Harbor. At that point in time, 9/11 lacked an eloquent discourse that could make it culturally sustainable and therefore it needed another, more eloquent discourse, to act as cultural scaffolding. And until the ‘war on terror’ does not form its own eloquent discourse it will keep resorting to other discourses for cultural sustenance. For the time being, it thrives only within this constant dialogue between cultural artifacts, images, ideas, texts.

Architectural Design: A Novel is now OUT!

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Rob Moscaliuc

It’s finally out!

The novel I’ve been working on for the past five years, Architectural Design, is now available on most online bookstores!

The cover of *Architectural Design: A Novel*

The paperback and Kindle editions are available on Amazon: order your copy here!

The paperback edition of the novel are also available on the following online bookstores:

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Architectural Design: A Novel is also available for review on Goodreads here.

If you are interested in receiving a free copy please contact us by using the form below.

Snapshots

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Rob Moscaliuc

The first time my mother came home from Italy to attend my uncle’s wedding, she brought me a phone with a camera on it.

I took tiny pictures with it: of grandma’s roses; of my shadow against the trees in the forest behind the house.

Before mother’s arrival, my older brother had told me about the phone’s miraculous features. I could watch Cartoon Network if I wanted. Make video calls. Watch porn late at night when everyone else was sleeping. My world thrumming with expectations, I taught myself patience, a virtue that had been growing within me since childhood.

When the phone finally arrived, I stopped eating. There were so many things to do. Mother couldn’t stop looking at me. She hadn’t seen me in years and was now somewhat impressed of my development. “He’s so different,” I overheard her telling my father over the phone, “he sounds like a man now. I can’t believe my ears!”

A video I shot in the garden with my new phone was so real that my aunt’s brother said it had been processed on a computer.

Then the phone started running out of memory so I had to cancel some of the photos. Some of them were saved on a computer, which I no longer have. It became my uncle’s computer so I had to delete any traces of my persona from it.

There was no Cartoon Network on it either. In Romania, at that time, there was no 3G connectivity and the phone only worked with one operator and there was no way to bypass that.

The next time mother came home was at Christmas time and she brought me another phone. It had no camera but it had a full QWERTY keyboard and a huge screen.

Though shiny and new, the phone felt like a disappointment of sorts: I had hoped to receive a laptop computer. Father was in prison and I was ashamed to ask for more or show that disappointment.

Mother sat by the kitchen stove and smoked and wept. “Stop smoking, child,” grandma said, “your boys are here with you. What else is missing?” But I knew she was missing my dad and the cigarettes reminded her of him. I knew what grandma thought about father because long before that she had confessed to have asked mother to ask for a divorce. “It was high time she got a divorce,” grandma said. Her words were as soft as wooden smoke: they curled above her nose and went up into the air and turned into a fungus. I imagined men lining up for my mother’s hand because that is what had happened when father left us to go to Italy for work. The men called her and came to our house and mother’s cheeks turned red.

I watched TV on that phone: the connection broke at times and I had to give up trying. We didn’t have a TV in the apartment I lived in during college. Mother asked me to go visit my dad in prison and I followed her instructions. Go to the guard at the reception, tell him who you are. He will take you to your father. The guards rummaged through the bag I had brought for my father. His medicines were in there. We sat at a table in a room that was probably under ground because there were no windows. One of the guards sat with us at the table and I felt as if I had to play a part. I was embarrassed, as was the guard. I couldn’t wait to get out.

The new phone did not have a calculator. One of my classmates drew my attention to that. “You can watch television on it,” he said before a class, “but you can’t do 2+2 on it?” He had a Lenovo laptop computer his brother had bought from the UK. It had facial recognition.

Not having a computer at home, I had to do research and write my papers for university at Internet Cafes and libraries. Since I couldn’t save anything on those computers, I had to email everything to myself and print pages and pages of summaries and things found on the Internet. I printed handouts and lesson plans. The printer was often out of ink…

Unattended children

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Rob Moscaliuc

While you sleep, I imagine ships leaving their harbors unattended. Left to their own devices. At last, the world is free of speech.

On torrid afternoons mother went to work at the telephone exchange and I would call her to ask what time it was. Which was another way of asking: when are you coming home? My brother and I never asked for father. He was at work, somewhere. Late in the afternoon, when mother’s lips turned bruise mauve, he returned and prepared food for the pigs. He smashed the boiled potatoes with his hands and mixed them with bread and water and maize. In the barn, the pigs squealed and hit their heads against the wooden doors.

‘Get off the line!’ Mother would sometimes lose her patience and beat us with the rubber tube from the washing machine. Father never raised a hand and he was proud of that. In church, the gods often had raised hands and I winced at the sight of them, expecting a blow. ‘You’re keeping the line busy,’ mother said, ‘there might be an emergency somewhere.’ The phone was made of shiny red plastic. On Sundays, mother and father slept late and we were not allowed to make noise. My brother and I looked for ways to forget about the time spent in our parents’ absence.

At school, the teacher would place the notebooks of those who wrote flawlessly in a showcase at the back of the class. My notebook never got to that point. ‘If it hadn’t been for this tiny error,’ the teacher said pointing at a smudge with her red pencil, ‘your notebook would have been placed there, behind glass, for everyone to see.’ It felt like a tiny success to me.

‘You’ll get there,’ mother said and I went and hid in the garden and stared at the clouds. ‘Give me a sign,’ I would scream at the cotton candy above, ‘tell me I’m the chosen one, and I will stop being so sad and lonely!’ I wished for infinite knowledge and for everyone’s attention. I wanted to be a boy but not just any boy. Envy was what I pined for.

Instead, rain came and I couldn’t cry because there was nothing to cry about. ‘Stop being such a child,’ mother seemed to be saying.

That one looks like a bunny.

That one looks like an ice cream cone.

That one looks like a cock.

I looked for things to play with in the trash. ‘Behind the bar,’ one of the kids told my brother, ‘there are lighters galore!’ When we got there I wanted to pee really badly so I had to use the toilet behind the bar. There was shit and broken glass everywhere and it had no doors. I told everyone I peed when I had not.

Mother worked at the telephone exchange day and night. She slept on the table because of the mice. People called in the middle of the night. She listened to all of them, helped them connect to the source of their longing. At times she eavesdropped and told grandmother about men and their mistresses. On TV, people sang about love lost and I turned to my brother: ‘why don’t they just get married?’ He said it was not that simple.

Mother never received money from the telephone exchange. That is, I never saw her receive money. We were always running out of money. At the end of the month she went to the slaughterhouse and bought salami, which we cut in thin slices and ate on Sunday mornings.

When the salami was over we went back to eating potatoes and mother seemed to hide within her clothes. Her collars became higher and thicker; her hair grew beyond control. Her shirts seemed borrowed. Grandmother hid behind the tall grass in the garden and mother avoided our gaze. My brother and I searched for food and we found dried polenta and pickled cucumbers.

We ran from home, which was another way of saying: ‘when are you coming back?’. I jumped over fences and bruised my thighs.

My brother said Champagne instead of Spain.

Once, I was so hungry I stuffed myself with green plums until they started coming out through my nose. In between plums I said: if only I could find a friend.

I found him inside the food I wolfed down and in the prayers I read from a small yellow book. I burned incense and googled how to make a pact with the devil. I wrote notes on small pieces of paper and woke up in the middle of the night to read them. I wouldn’t cut my hair and saw myself as a mythological creature. I went to church and asked for forgiveness.

I discovered joy in eating meat and found nothing under the Christmas tree.

‘Stop eating!’ Mother screamed at me. When she wasn’t looking I searched for the sour milk and dried polenta. We ate crab apples.

Unattended, I ate.

Robb’s Last Tape (Take Seventeen)

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Rob Moscaliuc

0.

Let’s start with anxiety, a name whose vibration makes me cringe: it begins with a deep tremor in the chest cut short by a glottal stop, which then explodes into an electric shock, and ends in a condescending cry. The sound of it is ominous, the way Pavlov’s bell must have sounded to his dogs: a harbinger of an alteration in the fabric of things.

It arrives akin to an unexpected guest. It sneaks up on you, which makes it even more odious; it rains on your parade, it precipitates things, it makes you lose patience. You might be on your friend’s couch, watching a movie, enjoying yourself, and then feel a sense of impending doom creeping on you. Anxiety is the ominous lump in the armpit of reality.

Around you, everything turns to paper, and you’re afraid of touching things because you fear they might be props. They are props, true, but in a narrative that is not meant to deceive. You stop distinguishing colors and textures as if they no longer interest you. When people speak, their words do not register. Their sound expands to monstrous proportions, alter beyond recognition.

So you begin to go through a list of things that are supposed to help you.

Name five things you can see: the faces of my fellow commuters early in the morning, moving to the rhythm of their broken dreams. The train is packed, and although the air conditioning is on, hot air sticks to the back of my throat as if I’m hiding under the covers. My heart is racing, and my breath feels uneven, struggling to catch up. My chest is collapsing in on itself.

Focus on your breathing, feel the air going up your nostrils, become aware of the swirl it makes at the back of your throat.

I imagine myself fainting, their worried faces looking down on me, asking me whether I had had anything to eat and I make a list, ashamed of this quasi-confession. A banana, yogurt, cereals. They disapprove of it, they nod at each other akin to priests who have seen immorality unfurl. What else can you see? The guy in front of me is wearing one of those orange vests, and he hasn’t shaved in two days, and I bet he doesn’t worry about fainting. I see him coming in through the door. ‘Honey, I’m home!’ [canned laughter and applause] There’s a backpack on the luggage rack above the guy; it reminds me of childhood and vomiting on road trips.

I feel like throwing up, light beams hanging down from the ceiling like icicles. We’re almost there, I tell myself, just one more stop and everything will be excellent. Something else I see and don’t see: the outline of your face against the pillow in the moonlight coming through the window.

Do I count from one to five or the other way around?

Name four things you can touch: there’s the blue handle on the door of the toilet, the one that looks thick and sturdy as if it’s made to be used as a weapon in a post-apocalyptic scenario. The god in the machine at the end of a movie. That guy’s ass doesn’t count because I can’t touch it. When you’re panicking humor can be refreshing. The red handle of the emergency brake. ‘Abuse will be punished.’ I’m going to faint now, please pull the red handle and call an ambulance, my mother will rush from work when she hears the news that her son suffered a stroke on the morning train on his way to university. Are these enough or do I need more? Your beard, the one I’m touching while we kiss and I moan because there’s not much else to do.

Name three things you can hear: the woman next to me is complaining about something on the phone. ‘He’s an idiot,’ she says bluntly, ‘I don’t know what else to tell him.’

At what point in my life did I get scared of trains and people on trains?

Come on, we’ll get there in no time. This isn’t helping, please stop, I just want to get off this darn train. I’m a horse running down the train tracks. I lose count. I hear the valves of the air conditioning opening and closing above me. I’m inside the belly of a whale traveling underground.

Reality is made of video strips working in unison. I can see where the pieces meet. If I cram my fingers into them, I could open a portal to a new dimension, one where I’m happy and do not need to worry.

Name two things you can smell: I don’t know; I can’t do this, please stop. I want to express my hesitation but that “err” sound people make feels like a loss of control, like falling down in a dream. I can smell your sweat, the softener on your clothes.

And, finally, name one thing you can taste: the salty flavor of your tongue as it explores my mouth.

Moments later, I’m out of the train, the world around me loud, then silent and loud again like the back of a zebra, and I forget it ever came.

You see, I tell myself, it wasn’t that bad after all.

1.

During my outdoor runs, there are moments when I become achingly aware of the weight of the world, and I begin to realize I’m stuck in a body that is, ultimately, inscrutable. This bundle of flesh and bones I carry around with me, which obstinately demands things and is open to temptation and addiction, will never fully reveal itself to me, which is akin to having a bag full of stuff I will never be able to know or use to their full potential.

The exertion of intense physical exercise also reveals how capricious the body can be. Every moment now it might throw a tantrum, object vehemently to something I want to do. My joints might give up at one point, but I can’t possibly know when. And that’s just the first item on a long list of likely ailments. I might develop some tumor, somewhere, and that will feel like an unexpected invasion and a betrayal on the part of the medical establishment. I might lose my hair at one point in the future, but there is no way to know when that will happen. My teeth will decay no matter what pro-expert toothpaste or mouthwash I use, or how many times I make an appointment with my dentist.

Every gesture meant to appease these tantrums or counteract these objections is a form of loitering in the neighborhood of old age, and each of those gestures is somewhat an acknowledgment of defeat. Small physical alterations compound like coins in a piggy bank. A crease here, a wrinkle there, a cluster of Fordyce spots on my upper lip. They all accrue like a crowd at a concert.

Albeit I’m confronted daily with approximations of how this mass of flesh will act in the future, the people around me serving as reminders of how the body develops a palate for autophagy, that reality never truly registers with me. I’m young, I might think, I have my whole life ahead of me. I can still develop healthy habits. There will come a time when a salad for dinner, and not a plate of pasta or a pizza, will seem like the natural choice at the end of a fatiguing day. I only need to get a grip on myself and eat mindfully, like all those highly successful people one encounters in self-help books.

Soon, I might tell myself ominously.

There’s so much potential for improvement hidden somewhere in the depths of my being. Lying dormant, waiting to be aroused, somewhere just behind the sternum, where anxieties cleave black holes that gnaw at my breath. Running reveals all this and more, it is the friction of change. Constructive abrasion. Then, I wake up one morning and notice that my skin sags in certain places or that a vein has decided to break free and blossom beneath the surface of the skin stretching between the talus and the calcaneus. My face, the bathroom mirror tells me in a passive-aggressive manner, has developed a rudimental form of memory, a frown permanently etched on my forehead, crow’s feet from all that squinting and smiling.

That’s all fine, the song goes, all those little imperfections unveil who you are. The secret is not to let rancor seep in, or see these symptoms of time passing as a form of treachery. Accept them, wear them with pride the way you (ought to) wear your heart, on your sleeve, and the others will unwittingly accept them as well. Besides, most of them can be hidden underneath a shirt: clothing flattens irregular forms, standardizes them, generates recognizable categories for us to inhabit. Tapered, slim, skinny, regular, loose, large, extra-large, and other variations. Clothes are the low-cost version of suburbia and area codes. They’re forms of creativity with sutures and hemlines, textured interfaces.

Some of those bodily imperfections will only be revealed in intimacy, which is always a form of exchange. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Meaningful intimacy requires time, which, to me at least, is not necessarily a whim, or a form of procrastination that betrays prudeness or bashfulness, but rather a ritual of preparation akin to tantric practices. Time precedes acceptance; it builds desire. In the flight or fight economy, the time we grant each other is the less aggressive form of the latter. “There’s no such thing as perfect,” a talking fish tells Courage, the pink dog from Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog Show, “you’re beautiful as you are Courage. With all your imperfections, you can do anything you want to do!”

1.5.

“Anxiety is a bully. And like most bullies, the more you let it shove you around, the pushier it gets. […] Fundamentally, you can beat anxiety, like any bully, by standing up to it.” (Rhena Branch & Rob Willson, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies)

2.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a professional runner, nor do I strive to become one. To be frank, everything I know about running is the result of a continuing trial-and-error thing that’s been going on for quite a while. I do read articles and books about running, and occasionally watch some of those YouTube videos, but I’ve never had someone coach me, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Long-distance running is one of those activities you go to on your own; you discover something with each step you take. I learn something new about running, and about how far I can push my body, every time I put on my trainers and press start on my workout app, and I don’t imagine this is going to end anytime soon.

And that’s okay.

Perhaps what I like most about running is its offer of mindful solitude. You are alone, yet always in the presence of something that isn’t usually there: the terror of an imaginary finish line you see yourself crossing, which also feels like controllable anxiety. Your sense of fatigue suddenly becomes urgent in a way that may be unknown to you. It will try to convince you to stop by telling you, repeatedly, that you’re a loser and there’s no sense in persevering. You’ll steadily worry about the future of your run, and obsess over how much there’s still to do. Each mistake, however insignificant, will feel like a proof of your inherent inability to perform such an activity. Or finish what you started. You’ll stumble, slip, hit obstacles, cuss, spit, blow your nose, sweat like a pig, get angry at those who see you coming but refuse to get out of your way. All these trivial things will occupy your mind, and that’s okay because you’ll still be running, and all of them will feel like the ground you’ve covered: flat, and already behind you.

Running turns time into space, which becomes meaty, viscous, dense. Doing the same track repeatedly enforces this transformation. You pick milestones that soon morph into markers of progress. The circularity mitigates whatever anxieties you might have. You revisit places that felt differently. I often look at the distances I’ve covered (I use Runtastic for every run) and see them as anxiety-trial-runs. I’m running with the fear of not being able to finish. Eyes turned inwardly, I see my failed relationships and count all those instances in which I felt unlovable and alone. And they all come and go because running forces you to move away, literally, from everything. You don’t tiptoe around your fears, you face them, head-on, which is what anxiety doesn’t want you to do.

It wants you on your knees, begging for mercy, pining for relief.

Running suggests solitude, one that is free of rancor. I don’t need other people to be able to do it, and no special equipment is required except for a good pair of running shoes. I’ve tried doing it with others, but then I inevitably start comparing myself to them, and I fall out of step, I falter, lose my breath. Soon enough, it feels as if I’m failing them, denying the satisfaction of some elusive expectations they might have of me.

When I run alone, everything becomes porous, space is suddenly welcoming, distances expand, and contract, they become markers of success, not generators of exhaustion. My body carves its way through all this, uncovering layers, refuting hypotheses, and creating new ones. Air becomes functional once more, achingly so, as my lungs struggle for breath.

To be frank, I might have a slight aversion towards running with others because it feels as if I’m working against a threshold, and this might discourage me from putting on my trainers and going for a run in the first place. I did try it in the past, and the feeling is exquisite, especially when you all get to reap the benefits of a good workout, but I also feel like I need to entertain the other person, which can be a drag. Talking while running feels wastefully extravagant, akin to talking on the phone with a person who is in the next room.

The sounds of exertion: panting, hitting the ground, grunting, the accelerating heartbeat; they outline a vocabulary that commands attention. It is the lexicon of now-ness, reality’s firm grip on wandering thoughts. The mind might branch out; it is the rhythmic breath that brings it back to the ground, rooting it into the realities of the body. The side stitches, the numbing pain in the thighs, the thirst, they all claim dominion over your attention. Running doesn’t let you obsess over your thoughts, however dark they may be.

Running shouldn’t feel like a social activity. I dread the awkward silence, and I’m embarrassed by the fact that I sweat more than the average person. Really, at the end of a 10k, I’m drenched in sweat, my pants stick to my crotch and thighs, and at times it might seem as if I peed myself. Long runs also make my nipples bleed when I wear the wrong kind of t-shirt, and to some that might resemble gratuitous violence. Then there’s the question of tights, which, to the uninformed onlooker, might seem a form of excess, or a way of showing off.

When I’m running with somebody else, I can’t listen to music, and that is sometimes discouraging. Music is, after all, a form of companionship for the lonely. Some runners out there, namely the serious ones, say they don’t need music while running because it distracts them from the pleasure of the exercise. They listen to the beat of their footsteps, birds singing, the wind in the trees and all that. But when the beat drops in that Beyoncé song, my whole body goes fuck yeah I’m gonna crush this motherfucker, and I become a single lady at least for the duration of that song.

When Spotify introduced its running playlists, with music that matches your tempo, I was ecstatic because running suddenly felt like dancing, another activity that is both solitary and blatantly visible.

Sometimes, though, I pause the music and listen to the thrum of my heart the way medical students listen to sound recordings to train their ear for the broken beat, to distinguish the healthy from the defective. The sound of it is meaty, internal, and slightly detached, akin to the speech of an alien race, or the muffled slosh of wet ground. The echo of my footsteps early on a Sunday morning when there’s no one around is somewhat reassuring. Yes, I’m alone in this, but I’m digging my way out of this solitude the way a mole finds its way through the dirt. I’m moving to make that isolation sustainable, to make a living in this economy of the loner.

Running is the sullen travel companion. It’s always there, watching you, following you, yet it never attempts to lure you. It never says, ‘I told you so.’ At first glance, it seems unapproachable, disagreeable even, and it will reveal its secrets only if you strike up a conversation with it. From the outside, runners often remind me of Hopper’s Nighthawks, present but removed, always with their back at you, their sweaty faces a blur, their bodies emotion made flesh, eyes locked on some internal struggle that is invisible to us mortal onlookers. Somewhere deep inside them, hidden dialogue occurs: they’re silently bargaining with their bodies, the ground beneath their feet, the road, the trail, the air, the light. Then they’re gone akin to a saintly apparition.

‘Don’t mind me, just passing through.’

2.5.

Humans evolved to become endurance runners, giving up speed for distance. Dogs can run fast, but they have to stop to cool down after a while, and they do that by sticking their tongues out. We can keep going because our bodies can thermoregulate through sweat and breathing, and in terms of energy consumption, running can be cheaper than walking. We ride the momentum, our legs acting as springs propelling us upward and forward, we jump and fall to the ground, working with gravity the way chemists mix substances to obtain something new.

Don’t mind me, just passing through.

“I’d observed pigs on treadmills for hundreds of hours and had never thought about this. So Dennis and I started talking about how, when these pigs ran, their heads bobbed every which way and how running humans are really adept at stabilizing their heads. We realized that there were special features in the human neck that enable us to keep our heads still. That gives us an evolutionary advantage because it helps us avoid falls and injuries. And this seemed like evidence of natural selection in our ability to run, an important factor in how we became hunters rather than just foragers and got access to richer foods, which fueled the evolution of our big brains.” (Daniel Lieberman, author of The Story of the Human Body)

3.

I began running on a treadmill at the gym about five years ago at the extreme end of a homemade (that is, punishing) weight-loss program that verged on becoming an eating disorder. Most likely, it was that, or it was a dangerous combination of anorexia nervosa, bulimia, sheer madness, and a disregard for my body’s needs. I had reduced my calorie intake to the point where a cup of milk for breakfast and steamed broccoli for lunch felt as if I had indulged myself and needed to be punished by not eating anything else for the rest of the day. In time, the punishment began to feel reasonable, a form of atonement for all those years of gluttony. It felt like adulthood, a way to assume responsibility for how I looked.

I downloaded cooking apps on my iPad and saved tens of recipes. They were all for later, I would reassure myself. I watched videos of other people preparing food with the fascination one develops for a fetish. I couldn’t see their faces, but the way their hands moved while mixing ingredients betrayed a joy that was becoming increasingly extrinsic (and toxic) to me. Do these people know, I often wondered, how much harm food can inflict? Are they aware of how hard it is to shed the guilt that comes with it? I convinced myself that cooking was akin to treading on dangerous ground because through it, I would revert to my old habits of eating mindlessly. There was no way back at that point. I had closed all the doors behind me, measured my life in units, made hunger my friend.

I worked out at home twice a day, lifting weights and doing indoor cycling. Every day, I had to do more. Bigger weights, more reps, lengthier virtual tracks. I counted calories in my head obsessively and looked at cakes on Instagram before I went to bed to feel less hungry. Those who starved themselves became heroes who had the weight of Shakesperian characters. Soon, I would promise myself, all of this would be over, and I will have a slice of that chocolate cake. Just one more day of this. But then the next day, the vicious cycle began anew: I ate, felt guilty, and punished myself.

One apple for breakfast, salad for lunch, sunflower seeds for dinner. I felt my stomach expand and thought of myself as pathetic. I watched action-packed movies to waste time and keep my mind off food. Just keeping my back straight was exhausting. My legs went numb whenever I stood in one position for too long. Lively conversations, and even laughing, made me lightheaded. My grandparents warned my parents that something was off, and my dad kept asking me whether I wasn’t hungry. Looking at the food on the table suddenly felt like yearning for an expensive object I could not afford.

Grandma asked why I was doing that to myself. I told everyone I was doing it to get healthy, yet, secretly, I knew I wanted to be noticed for the right reasons. I wanted to be loved.

Hunger makes you increasingly aware of time. If there’s an organ in the body, or a pack of neurons in the brain, that unconsciously measure time in the background, hunger makes them work full-time. The longer I could go without food, the better I felt about myself. Throughout the day, I would have false starts: I painstakingly prepared the food, looked at it, had a bite, then served it to others. It wasn’t the food itself that I feared, it was how I would feel after I ate it that made me have second thoughts. I couldn’t bear the guilt of it because it was enervating.

Sought-for hunger makes reality acute. It engenders a yearning for sensations stronger than itself. I set objectives bigger than myself, made plans, went out with friends, worked for hours that seemed centuries. Throughout the day, keeping the mind busy by engaging in convoluted arguments became a top priority. I spent time in places where it was difficult to have access to food, and whenever I felt hungry, I reached for my cigarette pack. Coffee was a constant presence, it made me feel tight but shapeless, and it helped me muster forces that were becoming increasingly scarce and therefore, precious.

One more hour without food.

At the end of the day, I felt exhausted, and I blamed it on my lack of resolve. People I knew ate so little so why couldn’t I do the same? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about food? I watched others eat and experienced jealousy. Their ease with food felt like irony directed at me because I saw it as the ease of those who could do stuff I was only beginning to learn. At times, I felt superior because hunger gave me an extra load of lucidity. I wasn’t enjoying the food, I measured it, cut it into small pieces, adding the calories in my head.

I began to suspect eating was a competition of sorts, one in which the less you ate, the higher were your chances of winning. At parties, people were overly conscious of the things they ate. ‘No, I shouldn’t have that, I’m trying to lose weight. I only had a yogurt for lunch, and I feel fantastic.’ After major holidays such as Christmas, they went on diets, much akin to rituals of purification. They prepared for Easter lunch as if it was a battle. I distinctly recall a friend of mine posting a photo of him in running attire. The caption went along the lines of ‘I’m not afraid of you, Easter lunch.’ Everything revolved around food and eating. Walking on a tightrope felt suddenly more accessible, and I resented all that. This is my life now, I would tell myself.

Meals were an alien race, their heads grotesque, their tongues moist.

I fell asleep the moment I put my head on the pillow and woke up in the morning in the same position I had gone to sleep. I touched myself to feel my ribs and hip bones jutting out. My mouth was often bone dry because I knew that drinking water would show on the scale. I weighed myself compulsively, and when the numbers went down, I took it to be a sign of success. Every lost pound was a small victory in the big war against my body.

More often than not, I remember waking up and thinking there was no more joy left in the world, and I should do my best to get used to that. The constant hunger devouring me was no longer a form of longing for the next meal I would have, but rather a sort of disappointment that my body was so needy, that it had given up on trying to survive on the meager amount of nutrients I was giving it. I looked forward to Christmas and Easter because those were the only times I would let myself have a proper meal. I binged, of course, and felt sorry for myself. Then I swallowed laxatives to free myself from the weight of my guilt.

3.5.

“Running also poses problems for head stabilization. Unlike quadrupeds, humans have vertically oriented necks that are less able to counteract the greater tendency of the head to pitch forward at foot strike during running than walking. Such inertial accelerations would be reduced in Homo relative to Australopithecus and Pan by a combination of decreased facial length and occipital projection behind the foramen magnum. In addition, the radius of the posterior semicircular canal is significantly larger in Homo than in Pan or Australopithecus, presumably increasing the sensitivity of sensory perception to head pitching in the sagittal plane, which is potentially much greater during running than walking.” (Dennis M. Bramble & Daniel Lieberman, “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo”)

4.

In his panegyric to running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami calls this heightened sense of body awareness “runner’s blues.” You start to have the feeling that all that hard work might never pay off, that there will come a time when your body will begin to break down, almost systematically, without asking for your permission.

Murakami experienced a version of it after finishing an ultramarathon (62 miles) in 1996. At one point, after completing about two-thirds of the race, he felt as if he had crossed a barrier beyond which his body transformed into a machine that no longer protested against pain and fatigue. His runs, he says, never felt the same afterward. It was as if something had switched inside him.

I’ve never done an ultramarathon or a marathon, but I can sympathize with what Murakami is saying. For weeks on end, a long run throughout which you push against the limits of your body can feel like a record that is hard to beat. Compared to a 27k race against yourself, which is the longest distance I’ve covered in a run at the time of writing this, a 7k can feel like child’s play. Long-distance running teaches you different forms of bargaining with your body, a kind of mental haggling you might never develop under different circumstances.

At times you think the only way forward is up. It doesn’t get easier, trainers often say, you only fight against it more efficiently. Muscles break and rebuild, they begin to remember how your race pace feels, your threshold pace, they engage in a concerted effort to help you get through that sprint. You get faster, your body starts using resources wisely, your breathing feels effortless, and all this gives you the sense that you’re in control of your body. You gain a deeper understanding of superiority, and you inevitably start judging those who might be sitting on their couch watching one more episode of that Netflix series.

Nothing can stop you now.

But then you wake up one morning and your left knee protests against even the most mundane of chores, such as taking a trip to the bathroom. The body can be an obstinate beast, it will take its time to show you the results of all that hard work. It will delay gratification. For months on end, even years, it will offer you only intimations of its internal battles: muscles will grow silently under your skin, fat will find its way out slowly, gradually, as if to test your patience. It’s akin to the promise of an afterlife free of distress or pain. It’s the delayed gratification that pushed Faust to make a deal with the devil.

Since running is such a holistic sport, because it requires both muscles and brains to work together, a glitch in either of those systems can prevent it from happening again. Even a minor injury can force you to stay on the bench for months on end. All the mental energy you otherwise would have put into running morphs into liquid admonition, which further fuels the runner’s blues.

When going for a run ceases to be a part of your physical and psychological routine getting back in the saddle can be an onerous task. In time, you’re left with a bitter aftertaste, the kind you feel when you’re nostalgic about old times. ‘I used to run,’ you think, ‘those were the good days!’ The miles stretched ahead of you like an invitation, and you accepted it, the way a thirsty man drinks the water coming from even the most insalubrious puddles. But then that empty stretch of road, ready to be yours, ceased to be so alluring.

In 2015, while I was staying in NYC and working on my Ph.D. thesis, I stopped running for more than three months because I hadn’t brought my running shoes with me. I had packed my stuff thinking that once I got to NY, I would unmistakably buy a pair and go on with my running routine. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be able to afford them once I paid rent and bought some food. It was incredibly frustrating to know that the only thing that was stopping me from covering those distances was a simple pair of shoes. Albeit there was a voice in my head telling me that if I really wanted to do it, nothing would stop me, not even the fact that I only had a pair of leather shoes with me, I still couldn’t do it.

A guy I had met on Tinder told me I could buy the shoes if I quit smoking, which I continued doing, passionately, despite the prohibitive price of cigarettes. It seemed as if I had made up my mind about not running, accepted it as a form of punishment. Buying a new pair of running shoes felt like a luxury that required a sacrifice I was unwilling to take.

To make up for the lack of exercise and burn those extra calories, I walked a lot around Central Park. I listened to audiobooks and podcasts. I paid excessive attention to what I ate. I became a vegetarian and made sure everyone knew it. But still, it felt as if I was robbed of something that I had claimed as mine. I envied the runners I saw doing their rounds in the park and imagined myself running alongside them, making up for all those miles I wasn’t covering.

If running often feels like lavish purposelessness, not doing it is akin to a refusal to participate in the world’s endeavor to change. It’s an admission of guilt and an acceptance of the consequences that stem from it. If there’s a god of running out there, you’re admitting to being a sinner.

Not running, even for brief periods, also invites doubt and constant worrying. I worry I might not be able to run again, or that my muscles will forget the moves, the amounts of fatigue they can tolerate, lower their threshold. Mentally, I imagine one of those life-bars that characters have in video games: you need to keep hitting something or collect tokens if you wish to progress. It makes you question your determination and ambitions if you happen to have any. You’re pathetic, you think, you always fall back on your old habits. Others can do it, but you can’t because you didn’t stretch enough, you skipped the warming up part, you didn’t listen to your trainer who told you that your body needs to recover after an intense training session.

Your anxiety returns, regal, its entourage of dark feelings in tow.

There’s the runner’s high as well, and though it is as elusive as the runner’s blues, it comes as quickly as it goes. This might be because we experience positive aspects of our lives as fleeting. Time flies when you’re having fun and seems static when you’re wallowing in pain. But I believe this is also because the runner’s high is ultimately an undefined state. You do not become suddenly aware of it and say to yourself ‘oh, there’s that runner’s high again, it’s a beautiful feeling, I will hold on to it for as long as I can.’ It comes, trust me, but it might come when you least expect it. You might be halfway through your run when it happens. You look up at the sky and whatever fatigue you might have been experiencing suddenly vanishes.

I get the goosebumps when it comes. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck go up in unison, and I feel as if I could go on for much longer. Yet, at times, I get those even when a song I like comes on during a run. So I never really know whether it actually is the coveted runner’s high. I also sometimes cry when it comes, which feels odd when you’re running because someone might see you. Tears well up in my eyes, and my vision gets blurry, and I feel like chocking. In those moments I cast my mind back to my failures, that is, to instances when my body failed me, to the times when I’ve been told that it isn’t good enough or it doesn’t correspond to the invisible standards of manhood.

4.5.

“The scale in the bathroom sits partially on the bathmat. I move it to the hallway and set it on the wood for absolute accuracy. Zero. Give me zero. I was 92 yesterday.

“91. One o’clock. Some of that is urine weight.

“Soon, I will disappear into the wall.

“Soon, I will be light as gas.

…

“Just being awake burns calories. Just being awake brings me closer to you.

“To perfection.” (Sarah Gerard, Binary Star)

5.

My earliest memory of body shame: my grandmother asking a mill worker to weigh me on a rusty scale they used for flour and wheat. I don’t recall what age I was, but I do remember staring at the ground when the man told grandma I was a small piglet.

They weighed us at school for statistical purposes. The PE teacher came in with a bathroom scale under one arm, the way one holds a ledger. One by one, we got up on that contraption and waited for it to settle, the numbers on it a truth one can’t deny.

The teacher wrote the figures on a sheet, and the students laughed. I was overweight once more, but the teacher approved because he, too, had a protruding belly and told everyone what a great kid I was and how much he would like to have me as his child.

Shame stays with you the way a scar does. I wear it in my bed every night I go to sleep, and it often wakes me up in the middle of the night. It’s akin to a subdued giggle, the inappropriate kind, the one that might occur at a funeral, or in class when you are little.

You push it down with your hands the way you push a muddy dog away from climbing into your lap. But still, it perseveres, doggedly, until you acknowledge it. Until you muster the force to wave it aside and see it for what it is: an inherited tool for self-harm.

5.5.

“I want to be unique. I want to have a thigh gap.

“I want to see myself on television. I want other people to say they’ve seen me on television.

“When I’m on television, I want my body to look damn good.

“I want never to see the scale again.

“I need to be protected.

“I want to go whole days without looking in the mirror.

“I want not to own a mirror.

“I want to try on clothes at Macy’s, and see myself in three mirrors at one, and look good from every angle.

[…]

“I want them to stare at me.” (Sarah Gerard, Binary Star)

6.

Running unveils your character the way it reveals your collarbones. It is the harbinger of your work ethic and, at least in my case, doing it regularly creates a discipline that seeps into all levels of my life. You start running, and you don’t give up. Despite the pain, despite the constant worrying, despite the heartbreak that threatens to open your chest. You run so as not to cry. Crying is for the weak. Boys don’t cry. It is that resilience to pain and discomfort that proves you can make it after all, even under other circumstances.

In 2017, while I was staying in Berlin and working on my Ph.D. thesis, I ran every day except for weekends. Being able to wake up early in the morning, while everybody else was still asleep, did not make me feel superior. Instead, it felt as if I was doing myself a favor, performing some act of kindness. Shopowners swept the sidewalks, washed them with water and soap, and all around me, there was the smell of fresh bread and freshly ground coffee. The runways of a former airport became my running ground. Every morning I would return to my room with the feeling that I had accomplished something already, and the day had only just begun.

Those days were also my most fertile in terms of writing and working on my thesis. Much like running, writing is about moving forward with each word. You do one more step, and then another until you get to the end. You write one word, and then another until you reach the end of the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the chapter, you get the picture. Both of them are chiefly about the accrual of units, and ultimately of meaning. Seeing those kilometers add up also gave me a confidence boost, each of them a small encouragement. The pages I wrote during those days also added up, and to my astonishment, by the end of that month, I had written just shy of seventy pages.

I also lost a lot of weight, I noticed it in the way my jeans sagged around my waist, and the way my parents looked at me when I returned home. I didn’t have the time to cook, so dinner was mostly crackers and blueberries. Though I felt as if I was overeating, the intense physical exercise and the grueling hours spent in the library drained me of all desire to expand physically.

7.

For most of my life, I have been afraid of showing my body and did my best to cover it. Whenever I went to the seaside, which happened two or three times in my entire life, I would never take my shirt off, or, when I did, I would just close my eyes and pretend I was alone in the entire world. I turned the music up in my headphones so that I might not hear people comment on the inadequacy of my body.

I envied my brother’s ease with his body, a form of boyishness he carries to this day. He still has no qualms about taking his clothes off when the situation requires it. The same goes for all the men in my family, irrespective of their body size or shape. Men in the village where I grew up showed their bodies despite the overwhelming lack of abs or massive pecs. From the outside, they did not seem to question the adequacy of their bodies. None of the other people in the village seemed to do that. As long as you were a hardworking man, your body did not matter.

It was within this culture of acceptance that I grew up with the idea that I would be accepted by others no matter what. People made jokes about my weight, my man boobs, my round face, and head, but I recognized it as a form of communication, envy even. Everyone said I looked healthy, and I felt healthy. Those who had known my dad since his childhood told me that he had been chubby as well, but then he grew out of it. It was within this culture that I took my body artlessly.

Moving to the city during high school was emotionally traumatic. I got called names on the first day. A bunch of older kids laughed at me because I was wearing a leather vest and a short-sleeve shirt. I do realize now that it might have been a bit too much for early September when the sun was blazing hot, but I didn’t know better back then. I was the proverbial country boy moving to the big city. My response to all this name-calling went against that culture of acceptance. What did I do to them to deserve this? I hadn’t done anything to them, they didn’t even know me, but that was most likely their way of asserting their superiority, their place in the pecking order.

Years later, while reading Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, I came across an eerily familiar passage, one that strongly reminded me of my childhood. “The only good thing about being fat,” the Crapulent Major tells the narrator, “besides the eating, is that everyone loves a fat man. Yes? Yes! People love to laugh at fat men and pity them, too. When I applied at that gas station, I was sweating even though I had walked just a couple of blocks. People look at a fat man sweating and they feel sorry for him, even if they feel a little contempt, too.” Perhaps those older kids in the schoolyard pitied me, or maybe they didn’t, I’ll never know, yet, nowadays, whenever I see an overweight person on the street I feel a pang in my chest because I know the ordeal they have to experience every day. I am familiar with the stares and the looks, and the giggle of high-schoolers, the finger-pointing, and the acrid jokes.

Once, while I was getting home from the university by bus, a group of high school students started giggling and talking among themselves. At first, I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying, but then I began to realize that they were, in fact, talking about me. “Look at him,” I overheard one of them saying, “he looks as if he’s retarded. Just look at his face.” I did not raise my head to look at them because I was ashamed, and perhaps I should have confronted them, but I could see them out of the corner of my eye, their faces blurry and directed at me.

When people ask me why I don’t want to teach English to high school students, I usually tell them I find it hard to connect with them, and that’s true, but only to a certain extent. I did practice teaching English to high school students and found it exhausting. They laughed at me and made snide comments about the sweater I was wearing, and one of them cupped his hands around his pecs to point out the volume of my chest. I just couldn’t maintain any authority over them, and there were times when I thought that I just wasn’t cut for teaching.

Going on road trips with my classmates in high school was as mentally grueling as waiting for a significant test result. I hid in the bathroom and behind curtains when I had to take off my shirt. While the others had no qualms about walking around naked and touching their genitals while the others watched, I went to the toilet just to change into my pajamas. Letting others see me brush my teeth made me feel ashamed. What if I wasn’t doing it well enough?

Albeit in the meantime, my body has gone through significant changes, and I have learned to work with it, I still carry that shame with me. Sleeping with other people is a tiring task, and most of the times I resort to old habits: I close my eyes and think I’m invisible, or that I’m somebody else. Knowing that I can’t be seen makes my body livable and desirable once more. My body, the empty signifier, malleable, and ready to acquire new meanings.

8.

There was a point during my weight-loss period when people started noticing my eyes were blue. At the time, I did not pay attention to the remark because it sounded like the type of thing people said when they had some breath to spare. My friends and I were idling at the local library when a girl said my eyes were getting bluer. Truth is, they were not, yet I felt a shift in focus. I no longer was the chubby guy who complained about divine injustice and did nothing to counteract it, but someone who had blue eyes.

Then I suddenly started to show up on people’s radars. On dating sites, people became interested in what I was doing, the things I wrote. I suddenly had content. People wanted to know more and asked questions. I was inebriated with the sudden rush of attention and wallowed in it. They complimented me for my strong will and my ability to overcome mental and physical obstacles. And I played the part that was assigned to me in this narrative of success: yes, if there’s a will, there’s a way, yes, I changed the way I saw food, everything went smoothly. I swept the lonely hours spent thinking about food under the rug.

My thighs became something people envied. When I went on dates, they were the first thing at which guys looked. I welcomed their gaze the way one accepts a precious gift because, for the first time in my life, there was a part of my body I wasn’t ashamed of showing. When they touched my thighs, I flexed the muscles as if I were on a bodybuilding show.

It is not my intention to demonize anyone. I think we do know how superficial we are, and this doesn’t need to be a bad thing. In the lexicon of relationships, be they sexual or amicable, being attractive inevitably refers to how the body works and presents itself to the world. The body is a portal, an interface that offers access to what is underneath, and it betrays your attitude towards the world. The body is the joke at the beginning of a serious talk, the smile that makes the audience relax and open their minds.

Physical changes inevitably reflect internal movements, but I cannot say for sure what comes first. I can recall, though, a moment or perhaps a series of moments in which my body began to feel different because the people around me felt different about it. And the more you perceive that the more you look for it because it empowers you. It’s akin to a snowball. As it rolls down the hill, it grows in size and gains momentum.

9.

The runner’s high is often described as legendary, which, more often than not, paints the picture of a mythical creature observable only by the chosen few. It is therefore dubious, or handed-down from earlier generations of runners. Something to chase akin to precious prey, a replacement for what our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to track and hunt.

Research conducted in the 1980s showed that prolonged exercise caused endorphin levels to spike, and for a very long time, they were believed to be the cause of the runner’s high. But then researchers realized endorphins were too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier and had to reconsider.

Then, researchers noticed that besides endorphins a runner’s brain also releases endocannabinoids, a naturally synthesized version of THC, the chemical accountable for the feelings that smoking marijuana triggers. As opposed to endorphins, which are created by specialized neurons, endocannabinoids, particularly anandamide, can be produced by basically every living cell in the body, and are small enough to get through that barrier and reach the brain.

The much-desired mood is also a question of finding your sweet spot. Go too slow, and it might never show itself. Go too hard, and it might feel like you’re punishing yourself. Stressing your body and mind during a long run is good, but do it in a way that feels controllable. Interval training does it for me. It pushes me out of my comfort zone, and knowing that I can get some rest, be it by walking or doing a light jog, at the end of each interval makes everything seem so manageable. At moments I feel as if my body is going to give up, and that might make me feel anxious, or desperate, but then it’s time to take a break, and those feelings subside.

Perhaps that’s what makes running such a good antidote for anxiety and depression: you panic and start doubting your capacity, you bring yourself down, you suffer, but then you know that at the end of it, a conclusion that you can foresee and control, those feelings will dissipate. Becoming acquainted with the transitoriness of your emotions by going on these trial runs, is much akin to exposing your body to toxicity to build up defenses. If you can overcome the anxiety that comes every time you feel like lacing up those running shoes or the one that occurs when you feel like you just want to stop running, then you can certainly overcome anxiety in the trenches of daily life.

10.

These feelings I have while running, be them positive or negative, are overwhelming and, more often than not, I feel like stopping. I start doubting my running form and technique, my breathing turns shallow, and my shoulders creep up, stealthily as if to shrug or to push up against some invisible force. Most of the times, it feels as if there’s no way out of this realization, that whatever I do to mitigate this sense of doom, whatever mind trick I might have up my sleeve, I will never be able to run fast enough to escape it. I’m like a bear in a trap. I can see the cause of my problem, the rusty teeth of the metal clamp pressing against my shin, but I do not know how to open it.

It doesn’t get easier, running coaches typically say, you just get used to it. Yeah, I think, and you’re so full of shit. Literally, shit is coming out of your mouth. I try and picture them, these coaches, with their protein-shakes in tow and their perfect faces and taut stomachs, and I get angry. When am I going to be like them? When am I going to achieve that ideal form? Is there a point where this won’t feel like work?

Then, a moment later, I shake my arms, I take a deep breath, refocus on the distance I still need to cover, and the classes I still need to teach, and how I could explain, for the nth time, the present perfect. They’ll just feel it, I tell my students. The present perfect is almost instinctual. It’s a gut feeling. My mind goes bonkers, and the speed of my thoughts starts to match that of my feet. My heartbeat harmonizes with the cadence of my pace. Soon enough, I realize that nothing can stop me. I can still go for a while longer; I just need the patience to do it.

There’s this egotistical force wedged between the ground and the soles of my feet that pushes me forward. I don’t even have to think about it and, deep down, I know that if I stop, that drive to move forward will never forgive me, or it won’t show up next time I go for a run. So I listen to it. Lean into it. I am faster than my regrets, stronger than my failures, my anxieties, better than all those guys who rejected me.

Like all runners, I tend to be superstitious. To me, running is tied not just to physical rituals, such as preparing my running gear the night before and getting enough carbs into my system before a long run, but also to mental routines. For each workout, I prepare mentally. I think about how I’m going to feel at the beginning, or halfway through, or towards the end. I know that the first few minutes are going to be harsh, and a voice in my head is going to tell me I should give up because there’s no point in it anyway.

My imagination will run wild. It will throw at me images of hamsters playing on a running wheel, just to make things more exciting. From an evolutionary standpoint, I shouldn’t be running; I’m not chasing prey. I can just open the fridge, and the food I need will be there. Out of the blue, I’ll think about how cardio exercise is an occupation related to excess: there’s too much food lying around, and we’re always in search of ways to burn the extra calories. So we’re running, moving, heaving our bodies, chasing nothing but the fulfillment of the desire to make our bodies palatable to the coveting eyes of our peers.

Every run is a form of education in that sense. Each step is a small victory in the battle against whatever fears I might have, against self-doubt. They start creeping into my mind the moment I open the closet to put on my running gear, which gives off this weird smell even when they’re freshly washed. It’s a combination of burnt plastic and something feral. It makes me want to vomit. That self-doubt is still there even when I put on my running shoes. They’re not tight enough. They’re dirty. The insole feels a bit off, and I can’t seem to find the right position. My battery is low. Why am I doing this to myself when I could just sit and read something, finish that piece I was working on, mark some of those papers that are eyeing me from the pile?

But then I find myself running, the air around me welcoming.

Running is a form of training in emotional agility because it shows how transitory emotions can be. When you’re running, the only ultimate reality worth paying attention to is that of your body. Albeit you might worry about the future of your workout, the best way to deal with that anxiety is by focusing on what you can do to feel better right now: find a rhythm in your breath, relax your shoulders, control your cadence. Sooner than you know, the feeling is gone and you’re still moving, which you’ll always be doing, even when you feel like your life has ended.

11.

There is a scene in the animated series Final Space (S01E08) that brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it. Desperate to close the breach in space that threatens to destroy the universe, Gary and his friends visit Bolo, a Titan trapped between dimensions. Once Gary enters Bolo’s mind palace, he is greeted by other versions of himself: there’s a Construction Hat Gary, an Eagle-Faced Gary, a Cookie-Headed Gary, and a Little Micro Gary. “In order to face what’s ahead,” Bolo’s voice says, “you need to face what’s inside of you.” And what Gary needs to face in that particular instance is the Amazing Mustache version of Gary, who tells the real Gary that he will never be able to get a thick, abundant, luscious mustache like that. “It’s true,” the real Gary says embarrassingly, “I’ve never been able to grow a mustache.”

Amazing Mustache Gary then begins to comb his mustache with his little mustache comb. “But you’ll never know the satisfaction of that,” he says and starts to laugh copiously as he flies above and vanishes. As his voice echoes and fades out, the real Gary begins to be engulfed by some sort of dark gooey thing that grows on him, slowly pulling him down. “Your anxiety is consuming you,” Bolo says, “you know you can’t succeed.” “Because I can’t grow a mustache?” “That’s exactly why,” the voice of Amazing Mustache Gary echoes again.

Of course, the mustache has nothing to do with closing a breach in space. It does have everything to do with how the protagonist feels about his capacity to perform that action. When you live a life in which you are being criticized every step of the way, even the most insignificant thing, such as your lack of facial hair, can become a nuisance and stop you from living a full, healthy, life. And yet, against all vicissitudes of fate, faulty plans, miscalculations, Gary tries to do it anyway, and sometimes he succeeds.

Gary is my hero because his lack of confidence reminds me of my own. More often than not, I’ve avoided doing things, such as talking to people who seemed intriguing, for the simple fact that I couldn’t muster the confidence to strike up a conversation. And I’ve always lived with the regret that stems from those missed opportunities. Just like Gary, my anxiety has consumed me and pushed me around. It still does. The other day I accompanied my boyfriend to have his sunglasses done and noticed that the name tag of the guy who served us said he was a writer. I wanted to ask him about that but then never did. And then we were out of the shop, and the world took us to other places, and I might never see the guy again.

And that’s that, and here’s the thing: you might not have a thick, abundant, luscious mustache, and you might not have the abs to show or the perfect hair, but you can try to be like Gary. You can do things against all the odds and still be successful, because trust me, the regret you’ll feel for not doing things is much worse than the embarrassment of rejection. If you don’t feel like running, go for a run anyway. If you don’t feel like talking, do it anyway.

I’ll go for a run now. Have a good one.

Robb’s Last Tape (Take Fifteen)

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Rob Moscaliuc

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We didn’t have much money when we were little. Once, my brother stole money from my mother’s purse and went on a shopping spree that eventually cost us lunch money for almost a week. He bought lots of peanuts for some reason. I distinctly remember watching the other kids at school eat their wafers and chocolate bars while I only had one apple and a watering mouth. I know now that it was the healthier choice, but you know how envious kids can get. When the teacher wanted to know why I had only one apple for lunch, I told her the truth: we were out of money.

To my astonishment today, I didn’t blame my brother for it. At that time, I perceived it as a form of cruelty perpetrated on us by our parents. They must’ve had money stashed away in some hiding place, money they wanted to keep for themselves. We couldn’t be that poor. To my innocent mind, it was the grandmother’s fault because she was the one who took care of the family’s finances. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford that new game console, they just didn’t want us to have it. We had to wear the same jacket two years in a row while the other kids got new ones every year. I wore pants knitted by my mother, which I hated because they felt heavy and made me look bulkier.

People in school were mean for no reason. I was bullied throughout middle-school and high-school, that is, ever since I became aware of the fact that I had an ego that suffered when it was deprecated. Older kids made fun of me because I was chubby and studied a lot. Because I was a geek and spent time making mud pies. Some of my classmates derided my inability to run during physical education classes, which I avoided to the best of my abilities. I even had my parents bribe the family doctor to give me a special dispensation for those classes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, but my grandparents had convinced me that if I forced myself to do something, such as intense physical activity, something would burst inside me and I would die.

Once, I developed my own alphabet and wrote stuff using that. Kids in school made fun of that as well. I kept a diary and brought it to school every once in a while to draft and develop my thoughts. They stole it from my backpack and read it out loud to the others while I cringed with embarrassment. I had written about my first gay crush, who was an older student and a volleyball player. And for all this, the only explanation I could find at that time was that my classmates were inherently evil and that they hated my guts. So I tried to avoid them, get out of class before the bell rang, spend my weekends alone playing stupid online games. My father’s colleagues from work made jokes about my parents feeding me yeast, which made me look bloated like a balloon. My cousin’s grandma once told me I had the head and the ears of a mule. I was called a sissy by random people, on the street, in school, and everywhere I made an appearance.

Casual acts of verbal and physical cruelty were at the order of the day, to the point where even things such as “you shouldn’t sit outside because it’s cold,” took on the tinge of personal attacks. Why couldn’t they just accept the way I was? When my parents went away, I went to live in the city with an old lady (and a cat) who reprimanded me for my slowness and told me to suck it up and act like a man. These acts happened so often that I came to actually give credence to them and reach the conclusion that there was something inherently wrong with me. I didn’t deserve to have friends because I was so obnoxious. With this, there also came the belief that, eventually, somebody was going to accept me for who I was and save me from myself. The only thing to do, I thought, was to find that person and steer clear of all those haters who told me I wasn’t good enough. They were the ones who needed rehabilitation, not I. I was the innocent one.

Since then, I’ve made peace with it, with them, because the resentment consumed me. It still does, especially when I get rejected by someone and I am reminded once again of my own fallibility. It is in those moments that I begin contemplating the idea that perhaps my bullies were right after all. Maybe I am unlikeable just like they told me. Whenever I feel like I disappointed my students, by making an error or by not explaining a concept in the best possible manner, the feeling returns. Why am I even trying? Am I really that stupid to believe that I could actually do it? Yet, whenever this happens, I do my best to develop new ways of halting the stream of negative thoughts at their nascent stages. And it’s not by looking at myself in the mirror while repeating out loud that I am beautiful, that I deserve to be loved, that I am human and make mistakes. I do it by being frank about my fallibility up front so that people around me can identify my mishaps and perhaps forgive me for them, exercise empathy, nurture affection, or just ignore them.

As you can imagine, it takes a tremendous mental effort to do this, and at times panic settles in, and my body starts sending signals of encroaching danger where there is none. I had a severe episode on a Saturday morning in class when I felt I couldn’t go on teaching and had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom because I was afraid I was going to soil my underwear and pants in front of my students. I was out of breath and felt as if my knees were going to topple and I was going to fall over my desk. My heart was racing, and I was sweating profusely. That day, I taught for six hours in this pitiful state, taking frequent trips to the bathroom because I was drinking water like there was no tomorrow, and to this day I still can’t fathom what kept me going, or what, to my despair, was the thing that triggered it. The fear returns every once in a while, but I’ve learned to live with it, and now it no longer bothers me that much.

A similar episode occurred while I was driving the car with my parents in it, on our way to Romania. Our GPS got lost, and my reaction was way out of proportion. My blood pressure swiftly dropped. I couldn’t focus on the road, and I felt my senses receding to the back of my mind while I was desperately trying to focus on my breath. Luckily, I had not entirely lost my ability to make decisions and told my dad I needed to pull over because I was feeling unwell. The moment I did that, and I took a sip of water, I lost consciousness.

I woke up to a beeping sound, which in fact was only in my head, and to my parents’ dumbfound faces. I exchanged seats with my father, and just minutes later, after I had checked whether we were on the right motorway, I lost consciousness again. When I woke up, we were back on the side of the road, and there was that beeping sound still. Reality came back in chunks. First the sky through the windshield, then my mom and dad’s glassy eyes, their voices asking me whether they should call an ambulance. Then the realness of the situation: I had lost contact with reality a second time that day. My chest felt heavy, and my breath was labored as if no matter how much air I sucked into my lungs it just wasn’t enough. What scared me most, though, was the fact that I had uncovered in me this ability to explore, albeit unknowingly, this dark space that was beyond my control, and which ran dangerously close to death.

That summer, once we got to my grandparents’ place, I did a complete medical check-up. Blood tests came back clean. A cardiologist looked closely at my heart, literally, and concluded, somewhat to my chagrin, there was nothing wrong with it, except for the fact that it was slightly, almost imperceptibly, enlarged. I had hoped they could see my heartbreaks, but there was nothing there. Perhaps heartbreaks only make your heart bigger, able to accommodate even more people. Or more heartbreaks. I checked my blood pressure on a daily basis, and it stayed within the prescribed limits. My body was healthy, and all the tests corroborated that conclusion. The verdict was somewhat underwhelming: it was all in mind. My bullies were gone, only to be replaced by a bullying mind, which waged war on my body on a daily basis.

I tried meditation and mindfulness to dissuade my mind from going into a fully-fledged war with my body. My back ached from all those deep breaths I took. There was an urgency to the attacks which confounded me because I felt as if they went against my nature. I had been, throughout my life, a very calm person, so why was I experiencing them? Then, when all else failed, I tried medicating them. My doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, which I took, on doctor’s orders, one hour before my classes, so that the effects of the pills would be clearly discernible from the thrum of my irrational fears by the time I got to class. I panicked when I got on crowded trains, which was almost always the case, and I got lightheaded when I was about to go on a date. I resorted to the pack of pills, whose presence was somewhat reassuring, even when I was about to go out with my friends. My anxiety subsided the way an earthquake would, and I was able to enjoy life once again. I was back to my good old zen self.

The pills emptied me of whatever negative feelings I had. They slowed me down. Reality washed over me in a constant but calming stream, a rivulet really, and everything felt manageable. Whenever I made a mistake in class, I stopped, corrected myself, and apologized. I couldn’t care less about my slips. Yet, in time, I began being increasingly aware of the fact that the pills deprived me of whatever mechanisms I might have developed to work around my issues. They were not a way to do that, the tablets only numbed my feelings, which was akin to me avoiding my bullies in high-school when I asked my teachers to let me out the class before the bell rang. The solution was always the pill. When I couldn’t sleep because of all that constant worrying and dreading, my hand quickly reached for the pills, boxes of which I kept all over the house. I put one tablet in the pockets of every jacket I had, just in case.

I realized that matters were getting out of hand when I had gone out with a friend of mine, and he kept complaining about the humidity ruining his hair, and I was about to lash out at him and tell him that I was on benzodiazepines because I couldn’t deal with reality and he worried about his fucking hair?! I didn’t do it, but just the thought of wounding his ego in that way helped me understand that the medication was beginning to legitimize a side of me I wasn’t ready to call my own: the one that admitted defeat. The part of me which admitted to being unable to work without the pills’ helping hands. The side of me that had given up on trying to recover the calmness with which I had prided myself in the past. It was only a matter of time until I would resort to that chemical succor even for the most basic human functions, such as going to the supermarket or talking to neighbors.

Now, I don’t mean to say that medication is the easy way out of a time-consuming and challenging problem. When it comes to specific mental health issues medication is vital. That is, it saves lives. It helps people lead wholesome lives and prevents them from identifying fully with their affliction. You’re not your depression. Your anxiety does not define who you are. Yet, I believe it is also essential to realize that, in time, it could lead to a defeatist outlook on life, at least when it comes to anxiety disorders. Where do we draw the line between what we do and what medication makes us do? Does it affect our capacity to make decisions? Can we claim full authorship on a decision made while under medication?

Most of us probably know this, but medication does not go to the source of our problems, it only takes care of the symptoms. It sweeps things under the carpet where we can’t notice them, which can be a good strategy, especially when you have a full-time job, or you have to raise children who do not seem to understand your mood swings. It goes without saying that most people don’t understand mood swings because if they can just stop feeling depressed, then you can do it as well. You just have to be happy, embrace positive thinking, and start singing Bob Marley. It also goes without saying that this kind of advice is likely to make things worse because it implies that if one can do something, then all of us should be able to do it.

Over the past year, while dealing with my anxiety and panic attacks, I have also tried to identify as best as I could moments in my life that have led me to where I am today, but that’s always a difficult task. Most of the times the things you think have left a mark on you are not the source of your problems. It might be something else entirely. The abuse that was not perceived as abuse when it was perpetrated on you. Family issues, an alcoholic father, an opprobrious uncle, or a cousin whose sexual appetites were too developed for his age. It can be any number of things, and there is no right or wrong answer in this equation.

I always return to my bullies, which might be my easy way out. It might be that I’m giving them too much credit where there is little credit to offer, or where there is none. I also keep having the nagging sensation that my lingering on the high-school episode might be merely an obsession I have developed over the years and that it might be high time to just let it go. My bully-narrative does fall in line with the current craze for tales of redeeming à la Oprah Winfrey. We’re all looking, it seems, for a traumatic past that would explain why we are the way we are today, to be able to say that, yes, we’ve suffered, but we’ve managed to overcome that. Just look at how far we’ve come. And perhaps I’m vilifying my bullies the way I belittled my family when I felt like they weren’t giving me the things I wanted. I need them to be evil to justify the damage I seem to be doing to myself or to be able to say that the image I have of myself is beyond recovery because of that.

It’s astonishingly easy to vilify those who hurt us, or those who do things we perceive as hurtful. It’s as if we’re hardwired to do so, trained to expect instant gratification even when the rules of the game do not even mention it or are vague with regards to that. The slightest offense, such as reading a text without replying to it right away, triggers waves of resentment. Not getting a like on Facebook from a specific person is often interpreted as an indication of a friendship turning cold. Each gesture, even the most unconscious, is thus soaked with intentions that are, in most cases, detrimental to our mental wellbeing, deprecating to our egos, disrespectful of our investments, be them emotional or physical. The road from peace to fully-fledged war is a slippery slope.

This summer I met a guy I really liked, and it all seemed to work well between us. We both love books and reading, and so we always had something to talk about, albeit our tastes in literature were diverse. He likes Italo Calvino, while I find him cold and distant at times (though the guy swears that it’s not so). I love Faulkner and other authors he has never read, and probably never will. But that never got in between us. The first time we went out we had drinks at a bar in Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and we instantly liked each other. We discussed Camus that time, and in no time we got to touching hands and looking at each other with dreamy eyes. After we had drinks, we bought beers and went to his place and listened to music late into the night. We talked about Virginia Woolf and, of course, we kissed (and…did some other stuff as well; I won’t go into details). Then it was time to go because it was getting late, and he accompanied me downstairs, and we kissed by the main entrance knowing that there were surveillance cameras. We felt rebellious because, I think, we had uncovered something in each other we both liked. I took a rented bike and rushed to the train station all sweaty from the pedaling and the unusually warm night. But I felt happy.

We decided to meet again, and when I went to pick him up from his apartment, I immediately noticed something was off. We had drinks at a different bar, and we grabbed something to eat, and then we took a long walk on the banks of the river Po at night. And we had THE talk. He liked me a lot, but he was unsure about it, because he had felt the same way about his ex, and it was happening all over again, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. He was happy about seeing me, but then he saw me and felt doubt creeping in. I felt humiliated and embarrassed and told him I was going to go because the discussion made me uncomfortable, and it reminded me of other such dates, which had not worked out and they only made me feel bad about myself. Yet, he told me to stay and talk things through. We did discuss things through, and his doubts seemed to recede. My doubts did the same. I have always been of the conviction that whatever issues we might encounter in such cases there was a way out, a compromise that would make things work.

We met, repeatedly, and then he had to go back to the south for the summer holidays. We talked, every day, exchanged ideas about books and writing because he is also a writer in the making. He got jealous when I commented on other guys’ pictures on Facebook, and he told me so. I was happy with that because, finally, there was a guy who likes me the way I am. Then the ominous silences began until I couldn’t take it any longer and demanded an explanation. He told me he changed his mind and gave full swing to his doubts. He was no longer interested in pursuing whatever we had because he never really liked me in the first place. I’m an exciting guy but physically not that attractive, and so he had decided we could stay friends.

I tried crying but couldn’t. Tears never came quickly to me. A friend suggested I took a shower because showers made him cry when the situation required it. I tried writing but couldn’t. I walked around my grandparents’ back garden trying desperately to muster the energy to scream, to be furious, to kick things, punch holes through the walls. I turned the music to full volume hoping that in that way I wouldn’t be able to hear my thoughts. What did I expect? Why had I trusted this guy who was, ultimately, just like everybody else? I should have known better! I tried reading James Baldwin to calm down, but nothing helped. The heaviness in my chest returned, the shortness of breath, the lightheadedness. And all I wanted to do was tell this guy that he was a douchebag. I felt betrayed, sad, and alone, and most of all, I saw my old fears confirmed. My bullies had been right after all.

I didn’t tell the guy any of that stuff. Resorting to negative feelings, I had come to know, was akin to reaching for the pills. A quick way out that would have closed the door behind me forever. And I didn’t want that. Deep down I hoped he would take his words back and we would get back together. So I kept all that resentment to myself. Then, when we met after the summer something was definitely off. He kept squinting at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. He was overdoing his gestures, he laughed theatrically and somewhat nervously. He was intent on showing me that we had lost whatever spark there was between us. To this day we still exchange texts every once in a while. A couple of days ago he sent me a picture of the cover of a book which had made him think of me, and that makes me happy.

Yet, my initial reaction was to vilify him. I wanted him to sense my resentment and feel sorry for hurting me. I wanted him to feel sorry for himself. And although I thought of him in this way at that time, now I realize that it was only a deviation from how I honestly feel about him. I still experience that warmth in my chest I felt the first day we met when I think of him. He may feel differently about this whole situation, yet I choose to stay true to my feelings. I will most likely never know how he felt. I only hope we worked things out, in the best way, for both of us. Resentment returns, of course, and often when I see him on dating sites, I get jealous and imagine him going out with all those guys. But that feeling is only a feeling that is not mine to have. He made his choices. I made mine.

And that’s that.

I saw his best friend today, on my way to class, and I was reminded of him. The same friend in front of whom he had kissed me once when we met on the street, back when things were still going well, and I was full of hopes, and I couldn’t look at other guys. And a wave of bitterness washed over me. And I took a walk. I often doubt myself, yet I refuse to believe there’s something wrong with me. I’m sure he had his reasons.

Robb’s Last Tape (Take Fourteen)

Posted on September 1, 2018 by Rob Moscaliuc

I used to do drag on stage when I was in high school. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t know how to do elaborate makeup and sew fabulous dresses out of curtains. Doing drag, for me, at that time, wasn’t new at all. When I was little, I used to dress up in my mother’s clothes and put on lipstick and dance in front of the mirror. I thought high heels were just the thing I needed. Pretending to be a woman on stage felt like a natural extension to my daily life: I did the washing up when mother was too busy doing other stuff, and grandpa always added an “a” to my first name, which, in Romanian, is usual for girls’ names, whenever he wanted to be affectionate. I was, throughout my childhood, called all kinds of names and they were all variations of sissy. Or they felt like they were variations of that.

I spent a lot of time with girls because guys naturally excluded me from their group. When I did manage to break through that wall of ice, which rarely happened, they regarded me with suspicion and kept me at arms’ distance. Or they bullied me back to the girls’ side of the room, where I was accepted with the kind of giggle you give a child when it cannot work out how a toy works. I knew I wasn’t one of them, that was kind of obvious, I had the extra thing, but at least I had somebody to hang out with. And that was okay for a while, that is until I was expected to develop a sexual interest in girls. Which is where things started to go amiss. For obvious reasons that were not as obvious at that time as they are today.

My brother did it. His friends did it. My uncle did it. They all spoke about girls with a wink at the end of every sentence as if they had been let in on a secret I was yet to be revealed by actually being with a girl. Often enough, my brother would boast about the fact that he had been taught by my uncle to fuck everything he could get his hands on, no pun intended. As opposed to my brother and his friends, who gathered to watch porn on the same VHS player I used for watching Disney movies (Aladdin is my favorite btw), girls represented a particular class of citizens that, to the eyes of the same group of men, required the implementation of a strategy, an approach. You circled around them, and then you closed in on them.

I was, of course, oblivious to the procedure, and I still am. The first time I went out with a girl, and she held my hand, all I felt was the embarrassment of having trespassed on an act that was not for me to see. She snuggled against me while we were watching a movie at the cinema, and perhaps I knew I was supposed to do something, but I kept watching the film because there were fucking robots and flying drones in it (“only a guy could like such things,” she said). When another girl held my hand, just outside class at university, I felt like disappearing because I was suddenly visible, my interests were revealed to the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel the same about guys. A couple of weeks ago I went out with a guy, whom I really liked, and we held hands and kissed in public. At the bus stop, while waiting for my bus to come, I kept my arm around his shoulders, and a little girl stared at us, and I couldn’t help obsessing over what she might be thinking. Or what the mother, who accompanied the child, might be thinking. I felt the urge to keep my hands to myself, but I also felt the guy didn’t want me to do that, and we sort of met halfway, unconsciously, and decided to enjoy those moments together. That shyness was there, too, yet, it was a shyness overruled by honesty. I wasn’t doing something that betrayed who I was, or who he was. It was the shyness of being awarded a prize of which I was proud.

I felt the same giddiness, though of a different degree when I went to the Pride Parade in Turin this year. I danced in the streets, and there were times when a chastising voice in my head kept reminding me of the fact that I was a university teacher and that a student might see me, inevitably, and think the worst. Or tell his parents who would later storm into my office and point an accusatory finger at me. I found it hard, but I reminded myself that the parade was precisely about that, about being proud of who I was, and that there must be, akin to the lives of famous writers, a separation between the personal and the professional, and that the two do not mix except obliquely and in non-invasive ways. At the end of the parade, my friends and I sat down on the sidewalk in the Vittorio Veneto square, and I felt somewhat empowered and decided to wear the rainbow flag on my backpack. I felt the fatigue one feels at the end of a productive day.

But above all these aspects, there looms an overwhelming fear, which creeps in often enough to make us avoid certain situations and which leads us to long and search for safe spaces. The phrase is often overused in gay-speak, but it defines a place where we are free of the expectations of gender. Where we are not expected to develop a sexual interest in a person of the opposite sex. Where we are able not only to hold hands and kiss with people of the same sex but also where guys can have girl-friends and girls can have boy-friends and not feel the pressure of sexual interest. It’s not necessarily a physical space, akin to those quiet coaches on a train, but it does set boundaries against any type of bullying. It is, quintessentially, a space that makes us less self-conscious.

I’m confident there are people out there, people I know, people you know, who do not see the necessity of these safe spaces. Society nowadays has developed a system of checks and balances that ostracize those who engage in hate speech, and this is, doubtlessly, a positive development. In most European countries today as well as in the United States, gay people are no longer attacked, verbally or physically, for their preferences. But that is not the point. Difference, much like change, is always unsettling mostly because we live in a world that is saturated with the things we trust are normal. When I started sharing my dating life on Facebook by writing short posts in Italian, I did it with the best of intentions and out of the belief and confidence that I should no longer hide. A few days after publishing one of my posts, the father of a friend of mine warned me that I was too naive and that some people, out there, might not be as open-minded as the most of us. He said it was fatherly advice and I accepted it as such, although, for a minute, I had visions of somebody using my words against me. An enraged student, one of my high school classmates, my parents’ friends who might use my homosexuality against them. Since then, I started filtering out, by using Facebook’s privacy settings, those who might pose a threat from that point of view. Friends, except so and so. And that is the point.

You mostly feel the necessity of these safe spaces when you like somebody, and you feel the world is standing between the two of you. It might be something that the guy you’re dating says while you’re waiting to get your movie tickets at the cinema that makes you want to touch his face. But before you take any action, you must always, be aware of your surroundings. The thought process is akin to those habit-breaking techniques they teach you when you’re trying to quit smoking. Take a step back, observe your thinking, and act against it. If you’re straight, you don’t think twice before touching your girl’s face to show affection. We have to think twice. I’ve experienced this a couple of times, but I’ve never felt it so ardently as I did when I met Richard.

[Slight change of tone here. Bear with me.]

Richard lives with his mother, and after meeting me for the first time, she told him that I’m slightly effeminate. He said it casually, over one of our expensive dinners, as if to say that he doesn’t agree with his mother’s first impression. I dismissed this confession with a papal wave of the hand. All first impressions are mistaken, as the saying goes, and to the naked eye of a mother who can only wish the best for her son, I might appear slightly offputting, as all in-laws do. And I might have returned to the thought, perhaps, while I was having sex with her son and she was still in the house one Saturday morning, adding to it, if not scorn, then at least some form of pity. But not the kind of compassion one feels for the unfortunate; instead, it was the sort of sympathy one feels for those who decide to tell you about the latest conspiracy theory they came across on the internet.

The first time I met Richard, which was in front of the Porta Susa train station in Turin, I fell in love with him. Love might be a word too big for what really happened, but I like to think that, finally, and for once, I fell in love with a guy. He speaks English with a proper English accent (not sure about the grammar though), and he dresses like a guy who’s got his own business and likes to look as if he’s never done one hour of work in his life. Which is the cool and slightly-urban-zen-just-out-of-the-gym-and-freshly-showered kind that makes you jealous and fear for your life. The second time we went out for drinks, I was still in love with him and touched his hand while he was showing me a LOTR parody on YouTube. It was also out of love that I decided to tell him the drinks were on me. It didn’t matter that I spent the pocket money I had saved for a week teaching English to a twelve-year-old on two drinks (!!!) as long as it was out of love. We kissed in the car in an underground parking lot, and we kissed when nobody was looking. And when we went out with his friends, I had to pretend I was straight.

Now, acting straight in public should be (and is, presumably) easy, and it’s not really about making comments about girls or talking about how much you like them. It is, in fact, the default label you end up with unless the person observing you has the emotional acumen to detect or understand that you are not straight. I say this from personal experience. A girl I met at the library once told me she had sensed a peculiar sensitivity in me and hence she concluded that I must be gay. A student of mine, a girl, told me she realized I was gay from the way I folded the cable of my earphones. It’s true, I don’t like when it gets all tangled up, but that girl is Sherlock. (Also, she might be reading this.) However, most people don’t have that, and they stick to the default settings: you’re straight, let’s not discuss this further. And Richard wore that label like some people wear their flaws. On his (expensive shirt) sleeve.

We always sat at opposite ends of the table, and if any touching was to be involved, we did it under the table, and only when some heavy tablecloth could cover our trespasses. Richard would always look both ways before doing anything that showed affection towards me. When I asked him whether he came out to his parents, he said yes but that he didn’t really talk about it with them. His friends did not know, and once it happened that one of the girls took an interest in him and he rejected her, not because he was gay, there was no talk of that, but because he was not interested. This created tensions within his group of friends, for obvious reasons, and he kept complaining about the fact that the others sort of avoided him. The problem was, of course, with his friends.

We danced around the topic akin to tribal men around a fire. When I addressed the issue of him coming out to his friends, which, I thought, might have eased the tensions and reinforced the bonds he had with these people, Richard dismissed it and said that he doesn’t want his sexual preferences to define who he is. Which is, rationally, a valid argument. Nobody puts that on their CV for sure, just like nobody goes around telling people, at the bus stop, for instance, that they are gay or straight. Being proud of who you are also implies this, that you can lead a life in which what you do in the bedroom does not affect your daily struggle, that you have a secret life you share only with those who matter. Yet, again, that is not the point.

Coming out is a sensitive topic. When I came out to my parents, I trembled the way I do the moment I’m about to open some blood test results. We all struggle with it, and it is that very struggle that makes the moment crucial, and constructive. Before actually doing it, I practiced everything in my head a thousand times: what I’m going to say, how I’m going to do it, where I’ll keep my hands. Yet I knew that I have to do it because, for a very long time before that, it had started to affect how I acted around my parents. Thinking twice before doing or saying anything in their company became second nature and, for once, I wanted to enjoy the ease of mind and body I could only feel at home. And perhaps that is the point. You come out to the people you care for when you begin to think that what you do in the bedroom stands between you and that ease of mind you experience only when you’re around family and friends. It’s about removing a massive amount of anxiety from your life.

I stopped seeing Richard more than a year ago. We didn’t discuss it over, we just stopped talking to each other. He isn’t much of a talker anyway. I wouldn’t hear from him for months until I would write to him and ask him out. He blocked me on Facebook or deactivated his profile, I do not know for sure. I only know that he disappeared from my life. Searching for reasons would only mean vilifying him, and I don’t want to do that. Then, a few months back, I started to miss him and asked him out again. We had drinks and French fries at this very butch pub in Turin. And by butch I mean that they sell burgers and dozens of different types of beers I cannot tell apart and men go there to watch soccer matches wearing funny hats and flags. We talked, and I was disheartened to notice that he had not changed his mind in the meantime. He no longer goes out with his friends because he feels as if they betrayed him somehow. I asked whether he made any new gay friends and he said he doesn’t need that. I suggested he tried dating apps, we had met, after all, on Tinder, but he told me everyone there has AIDS, and I didn’t broach the subject further.

I was on those dating apps as well. I knew some of those people who supposedly were HIV positive. I saw him again in his pastel-colored suit at my Ph.D. graduation ceremony, but he didn’t stick around for drinks, so we didn’t have the chance to talk that much. I still get that warmth in my chest when I see him, and, perhaps, that feeling will never go away. I hope it doesn’t. And I hope he’ll find what he’s looking for, whatever that is.

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Dear straight people

Posted on October 21, 2017 by Rob Moscaliuc

I get it. You’re in love. But could you stop kissing and touching in front of everybody else? It makes me uncomfortable. You’re doing it while waiting for the bus. You’re doing it on TV. I get it, really, but this is getting out of hand, because there’s no place where I could hide from you. At times, I feel as if you’re doing it on purpose. As if to spite me.

You’re posting pictures of you two kissing by the sea, by the refrigerator, at dinner. Seriously, it’s like watching a sex scene in a movie on TV while your parents are there, right beside you. You’re kissing in my books, in the TV commercials I see everywhere. How can I even dream of wearing a perfume advertised by a man who makes women fall at his feet? I don’t want the women, I just want the nice perfume. I want men to fall at my feet (yes, while I’m wearing stilettos and leather pants). Don’t you get that? Seriously, stop looking at each other as if you’re telling each other you’re gonna have maddening sex when you get home because I can see it. No, I can’t see you having sex, I don’t even want to, but I can see the look and it makes me nervous. As if I’m the one who’s going to have sex with you.

You’re doing it in the library while I’m studying. It’s distracting, because you’re right there in front of me and my eyes tend to drift, especially when there’s a man and a woman cuddling in front of me. It’s a library, for fuck’s sake. It’s where people go to study. If it was supposed to be something other than a library it would have been called “cuddling room”, or some other straight-sounding vaguely-sexual term you invent for tantric reasons. Yeah, I can see you kissing his neck, because I’m right in front of you. I mean, it’s okay to look at your neighbor’s screen every once in a while on a long flight, because it’s so shiny, and it has moving pictures, but you’re not a movie on a screen on a long haul flight. I can hear the sucking noises while you’re kissing, because it’s a library and it’s very silent inside, because it’s supposed to be like that. Even if I’m trying over here, really trying, to read something I can still hear you.

You got married, well, good for you. I’m really happy for you, and hope it won’t end in self-loathing and divorce. But please stop showing me how happy you are, and what a great smile she has in that custom-fit designer dress (which I would so like to wear at one point in my life), and how playful you men are when your best friend is getting married and you feign pity for him because marriage is like a third job, which mostly the woman will have to take because boys will be boys and they can’t stop playing with their pee-pees in the bathtub.

You got an engagement ring? I’m so happy for you, but could you stop shoving it into my face? If you take away the love what remains of the ring? The money you no longer have, because you gave it away to buy a ring. You just had a baby? No picture of your baby is ever going to wash away the knowledge that when they’re little they vomit, crap the shit out of them all day long, and when they’re fully grown they will hate you for not making them more beautiful, giving them more money, or buying them the latest gadget. Nothing will make me suspend that knowledge, not even intellectual curiosity. Love your children, don’t tell us you love them more than anything else, more than everyone else, because we, the childless, are everyone else.

A side note: your kid is not a genius because he can count to five and open a door all by himself. In fact, you’ll be surprised to know that the great majority of kids at that age can count to five and open doors. Your kid is not special. Dogs are smart, too, you know, and some of them can open doors as well. Dogs should be considered geniuses because they don’t have a brain as complex as that of human beings and they can do all that stuff.

You’re having sex, hey, sex is great. It releases endorphins, and those are fucking good, they make your body tingle and glitter in so many ways. It’s great, I can’t even stress enough how great sex is. When you’re the one doing it, that is, not when you have to listen to people moaning and making the bed groan as if you’ve finally decided to pack up your things and leave the house. Seriously, I can hear everything even though there’s a thick concrete wall between us. I get it, you woke up at four am and your little buddy in the basement felt like it, and your woman was in the mood, too, but do you have to wake me up as well? I can hear you’re really into it, the both of you, the pleasure, it’s almost palpable. But a sound so hegemonic triggers rebelliousness in me.

You’re everywhere I look, and every gesture of yours is a negation of the gestures I would like to be free to perform leisurely, the way you do them. In our beds, the ones that epitomize the only sense of privacy we’ve come to conquer and make our own, we speak your language. You’ve colonized our mouths and the way we look at each other, and in our search to be different from you we’ve lost all sense of purpose. You’ve made us ashamed of who we are because we cannot attain a sense a completion that has always been yours.

So please, whatever you do, whether on the bus, or in the library, think. Think that someone out there is not like you and can never be like you.

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