Lifestyle: Annie Fay Blog

Orchestra

7/12/2020

"Orchestra" is the fourth of a few pieces I will be slowly sharing from my Senior Capstone, Oh, The Places.

Oh, The Places, is a collection of 15 short, creative nonfiction essays focusing on the theme of place. This project was meant to be like a plein air painting (but with words), like sketches. I wanted readers to feel like a close friend handed over their personal journal or a box of intimate letters. I wanted the collection to be a delicate thing of beauty like a single flower or a rabbit in the night.

I was inspired by many artists (Jenny Slate, Patti Smith, Lauren Elkin, Durga Chew-Bose, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Smithson, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, Lewis Carroll, Maggie Nelson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Charlie Mackesy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Greta Gerwig in particular) and I have immense gratitude and respect for my wonderful professors at The New School for motivating me to refine my voice and use it. This project would not be possible without Rebecca Reilly, Richard Tayson, Timothy Quigley, Laura Cronk, and, of course, the incredible Lisa Freedman.

Music That Inspired My Project:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fA25bbB4fh7KUcUzlBoOw

Behind The Scenes:
This piece was inspired by something someone said to me about sunsets, and by the Philosophy for the 21st Century course I was taking from Professor Tim Quigley at the time. We had an assignment where we needed to write a philosophical letter to someone with things we had been learning and the basis for this essay came about in that process. Technique-wise, I went to the beach to write this essay in the same way I go to the lagoon when I’m writing about it, or a café, or my car, or wherever else. Whenever I am writing, I do my best to write from the place or at the place I am writing about.

Orchestra

I drove to the beach's edge at 5:29 pm to write to you. There is a tantalizing shape of orange in the blue-gray sky but the sun is long gone—it’s December. “Black Sun” by Death Cab for Cutie is playing through my phone. My passenger window is rolled down enough to let in the chilling sea air. My entire car smells like salt and the hairs on my arms stand up straight. My throat is still hot from the tea I just drank. I have been meaning to tell you about the Philosophy course I took this semester. I know you also took Philosophy and I would love to hear about what you learned, too. Did you happen to learn about Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, or his Aesthetic Theory? Looking at the sky and the ocean, I cannot help but to consider it.

You know, light exists in frequencies beyond what we can see as humans—like bees can see in the ultraviolet range and we cannot. Even dogs can hear things that humans cannot perceive and other animals can use sonar to navigate their environments. Our perceptions are limited by our species. So, maybe the colors I see in the sky are not really there, or they look completely different through the eyes of another creature. I wonder what the sky looks like to a bee. Maybe the blue-gray I think I see is actually made up of a million little pixels all in slightly different shades: cyan, cerulean, charcoal, and slate. What do you think?

I can try and imagine how a bee would view the night sky over the ocean, but I can never truly be inside a bee’s mind—unless I am reincarnated as one, of course.

Almost every night I roll what you told me over in my mind—that maybe in heaven (if there is such a thing) everyone gets the chance to orchestrate a sunset. It is one of the best things you have ever said. It makes me wonder who is responsible for nights like this. Nights that begin by obscuring the sky in a dark gray cloak. I look for shapes in the negative spaces between the clouds. The shapes serve as a stimulus, and as I sense something visually without truly knowing what it is, that is when perception has occurred. The longer I look, I intrinsically draw upon my imagination and concepts enter my mind. The gaps in the clouds go from being abstract to concrete and I begin to see a face not unlike the one I drew in my sketchbook. I can barely make out the whitewash on the waves rolling towards the shoreline. The glow of yellow lights outside of the houses makes the sky to the distant right look almost red. Kant said that beautiful objects are perceived as having purposefulness without purpose, and I love that. Don’t you? The sky does not need to look a certain way to function as the sky. Yet, we still hold ideals about what a beautiful sky looks like. And that ideal can change with the seasons. To humans, a beautiful sky might be cloudless and blue, but in a drought, a beautiful sky to the plants might be dark gray and raining.

I can see a house in my sideview mirror too. The little palm trees out front are swaying in the wind and the building stands still. I could fall asleep sitting in my car here watching as the sky goes from gray to pale blue to black. A plane moves amongst the clouds like a runaway star. It is frustrating how I cannot tell the difference between stars and satellites. I just want to know what is real and what is fake—or at least natural and inorganic.

The weather makes me want to hibernate. But sleeping does not actually stop time. Going from summer to summer still involves growing up or maybe just plain growing. And isn’t growth a good thing? Don’t we all aspire to grow? Or is growing scary because it means having to change? I guess it is a little bit of both. Socrates thinks that we should act in our own best interests, that we should do what is best for ourselves. But, isn’t doing what is best for yourself, what forces you to grow and adapt, sometimes the scariest thing to do? I bite at the skin on my middle finger. For no particular reason. Just because it’s there and I don’t know what I want to say.

I’ve been thinking about versions and layers of self lately. Analyzing what I want on various levels of my identity and what’s standing in my way because it’s usually just another version of myself. I want to check in with myself. But I don’t know which self to start with.

As artists, you and I both make subjective discoveries every time we pick up a camera, a paint brush, or push fabric through a sewing machine. Sartre believed that things can be discovered through the process of creating. I agree. Art is like science to me. You go into any project with an idea or hypothesis about how it will turn out and you wind up with a final product or theory at the end. Do we even have control over that? I think I believe in free will but lately, determinism seems more likely. When I see you in person I would like to talk about it all. For now, maybe you can write me back and share something you learned in your philosophy class.

© Annie Fay Meitchik. All Rights Reserved. All content on anniefay.com is my own or credit is given when applicable, please do not use any of my images before contacting me above or @ anniefaymeitchik@gmail.com.

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Animals

7/5/2020

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"Animals" is the third of a few pieces I will be slowly sharing from my Senior Capstone, Oh, The Places.

Oh, The Places, is a collection of 15 short, creative nonfiction essays focusing on the theme of place. This project was meant to be like a plein air painting (but with words), like sketches. I wanted readers to feel like a close friend handed over their personal journal or a box of intimate letters. I wanted the collection to be a delicate thing of beauty like a single flower or a rabbit in the night.

I was inspired by many artists (Jenny Slate, Patti Smith, Lauren Elkin, Durga Chew-Bose, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Smithson, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, Lewis Carroll, Maggie Nelson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Charlie Mackesy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Greta Gerwig in particular) and I have immense gratitude and respect for my wonderful professors at The New School for motivating me to refine my voice and use it. This project would not be possible without Rebecca Reilly, Richard Tayson, Timothy Quigley, Laura Cronk, and, of course, the incredible Lisa Freedman.

Music That Inspired My Project:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fA25bbB4fh7KUcUzlBoOw

Behind The Scenes:
I love the looseness and negative space in the illustration I did here of my cats, Cookie and Gracee. This piece was inspired by eavesdropping. And Googling AR penguins—please do that. (:

Animals

Something new that I love that I discovered recently is AR animals on Google. Type in Penguin and see what you get. It’s hilarious.

It’s funny how we like to place wild things in our manmade spaces. We do it with cats and dogs all the time. These tiny, fur-covered, wild creatures that we domesticate and let trod around our homes and breathe softly on down feathered comforters in our beds.

I think I hear crying. Voices sniffling to be strong. Vulnerability is strong. And so was that last snotty inhale I could feel through the wall. The essence of sadness drifts in a blue cloud up nine stairs to where I am sitting between one gray and one orange cat. The orange light from the hallway beneath me illuminates nothing. I can’t hear the words, but I can feel the tears. There’s really something extraordinarily heartbreaking about a man crying. Well, even a man child. A 19 year-old. A gemini. The sobs remind me of the shrieking yowls emitted from my cats mouths as they wrestle, clawing into each other’s ears with talons. These beautiful, charming little creatures, innocent little kittens I brought from the wild into my manmade space are capable of harm. Maybe that’s some of their beauty though. Remembering that although they lick each other and that’s endearing, and I sometimes catch them with their paws around each other like an old couple in a movie theater from the 20s, they’re animals.

And so are we.

I’ve never been drunk but I’ve made foolish enough decisions pretending to be while drinking a sip of vodka mixed into a hot chocolate in the swimming pool on a summer night.

It’s funny how relationships bring out the animals in us. Here’s this other person of my same species and together we can go from being wild to tame just based on setting. As animals we tear into each other stripping back to the nothingness we entered this world wearing on our backs. We claw and gnaw at each other’s homes until we’re pink and blush colored. And just as easily, we settle down around dining tables or walk around museums and libraries behaving totally civilized.

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Work

6/28/2020

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"Work" is the second of a few pieces I will be slowly sharing from my Senior Capstone, Oh, The Places.

Oh, The Places, is a collection of 15 short, creative nonfiction essays focusing on the theme of place. This project was meant to be like a plein air painting (but with words), like sketches. I wanted readers to feel like a close friend handed over their personal journal or a box of intimate letters. I wanted the collection to be a delicate thing of beauty like a single flower or a rabbit in the night.

I was inspired by many artists (Jenny Slate, Patti Smith, Lauren Elkin, Durga Chew-Bose, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Smithson, Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, Lewis Carroll, Maggie Nelson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Charlie Mackesy, Jamaica Kincaid, and Greta Gerwig in particular) and I have immense gratitude and respect for my wonderful professors at The New School for motivating me to refine my voice and use it. This project would not be possible without Rebecca Reilly, Richard Tayson, Timothy Quigley, Laura Cronk, and, of course, the incredible Lisa Freedman.

Music That Inspired My Project:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fA25bbB4fh7KUcUzlBoOw

Behind The Scenes:
This essay came about from a place of heartbreak and vulnerability and anger—all emotions I very rarely feel. I wrote this first for an assignment in Laura Cronk’s course Essay Writing: Truth and Culture, and I’ve continued to edit it. I worked really hard to include so many sensory details and I was really happy with the result as well as the illustration. I think the use of quotes changes the tone and distinguishes this piece from the rest in the collection while also building upon the ideas presented in “You Woke Up: A Conversation.”

Work

The concept of work stems from a seed planted in a void of nothingness. The many branches of work fill time, consume time, even kill time. As a child, you were taught to play. Playing seems to be the antithesis to working. Time and play are simply incompatible as play can take place in imaginary realms that don’t function along the same axis of reality as the working-world.

As a kid, oftentimes work and play coincided so seamlessly it was hard to differentiate between the two until one day you couldn’t even remember when the playing ceased. Suddenly, everything became work.

Coloring pages and picture books were replaced by arithmetic and literature. Even friendships became harder to navigate when unbound from multicolored bracelets woven with love.

♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀

You’re older now and each facet of your life requires work. You put effort into setting aside time for school, for family, friends, a relationship, self-care, self-love, meditation, eating, showering, and the list goes on. Days are divided into hours, into minutes—seconds to work on becoming the best, most realized, and truest version of yourself. When you’re so busy working on your own, it comes as a shock when he tells you he wants to work on things together.

Your phone screen lights up. You press your thumb to the screen and navigate to iMessage. Black text in a gray bubble floats harmlessly as you read: Go check your mailbox.

You walk outside, bare feet on the driveway, and retrieve the sheets of folded paper with your name etched in pencil on the front. A love letter? Words of affirmation? Your heart races in anticipation.

You carry the note close to your naive heart back up the stairs to open in bed and your stomach sinks as you read the unexpected words.

Because, when he tells you he wants to work on things together, what he really means is that unless you change, he is leaving. Sometimes the truth is sour, deafening, rancid, unclear, and hurtful. But, sometimes letting truth fester within is worse. So, he let his truth build up until it exploded. It was as surprising as a dormant volcano erupting—you knew you were dealing with a volcano, you knew it was full of magma and history, but still, you thought you were safe.

♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀

You knew there were problems. You did. You knew that. But, how do you address problems when you don’t want to change, but you need to remain likeable? Loveable even? In her essay, On Likeability, Lacy M. Johnson hypothesizes that “... perhaps, one reason—maybe the primary reason—that the world tries so hard to pressure you to be likable (and to punish you when you aren’t) is because they are afraid you will realize that if you don’t need anyone to like you, you can be any way you want. You can tell any story. You can tell the truth.”

♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀

The truth consisted of crying and worrying. You drove to his house first thing in the morning after a sleepless night. You ate egg and onion matzo in your car once you were parked in his driveway and took photos of your puffy eyes and tear stained face. Why is that when faced with your own crying image, things feel a little bit lighter? You aren’t sure, so you let yourself laugh and cry at what it means to work.

Working on things tastes like semen at midnight. Hot almond milk that you will wake up tasting on your tongue because you and your toothbrush slept in different houses. It tastes like peanut sauce, cauliflower crust pizza, and the scrambled eggs that you know you will miss—the way he mixes olive oil and butter together in the hot pan, cracks two eggs against the side, and mixes them over the heat. It tastes like the turmeric ginger tea from Trader Joe’s you would never be able to drink again. Even now, viewing the boxes of the tea perched serenely in the cupboard feels oddly confrontational. Through bittersweet lists, rants, long conversations, and text messages you wish to believe that someday you won’t have anything left to work on at all.

That part is funny.

Working on things sounds like tears muffled by a hyperventilating mouth pressed up against a tee shirt. It sounds like fragmented truths. Each one rises to the surface like a bubble in a carbonated refreshment. Pop. But, there’s nothing refreshing about it. It sounds like crying in the bathtub as your eyes and the faucet run. It sounds like saying the same things on repeat, but always striving to come up with a better way. Almost like when an amateur band covers a classic like “Across the Universe.” Working on things sounds like that song in particular. It meant something to you both, but it is now more depressing than the sad songs you suddenly relate to.

Time to hit shuffle.

Working on things smells like a lit match. Like their parents’ home cooked dinners that your nose tries to remember especially while you’re in the middle of eating cold peanut noodles and lettuce cups filled with sriracha tofu. It smells like the meals you will always remember preparing together—pressing corn tortillas into a heavy metal press or cooking meat and veggies in a fondue pot. It smells like the salt water streaming down your eyes, and you wonder if your tears and his come from different oceans. Maybe when your faces touch it’s like the Pacific and the Adriatic are mixing together.

It’s briny.

Working on things looks like walking through fog. Everything is slightly distorted and blurry. Slightly damp. Your green eyes and his are mirrors that are very hard to look into because the image is realer than that reflected by silvered glass. It looks like a starless sky, a moonless night, a sunless day. A broken ladder, a broken bridge, the broken bracelet with the little white daisy with a yellow center from a vintage shop in Brooklyn. It looks like the emptiness in your habitat where you removed all of the distractions so you could think—gaps on the walls where pictures and cards hung, or the gap on your bedside table where the hand carved wooden mushroom statue from his trip to Bali serves as a home for the air plant you’ll probably manage to keep alive longer than your Love.

Fuck.

Working on things feels like being in the eye of a hurricane. Nothing is actually happening to you, but chaos surrounds. It’s memorizing collarbones with your fingertips and using kisses as apologies. You care about being likeable, lovable, perfect. You worry about doing everything you possibly can to fix anything. Well, anything but yourself. But maybe you’d even give that a try. Because the truth is that all of your deepest insecurities, fears, and flaws have been presented before you and illuminated by your Love. The voices in your head, your inner monologue, cannot help but to sing in unison He has a point. Avoidance isn’t a healthy coping mechanism.

But it is an easy one.

♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀

I think that as women we are told for so long what we want. Yet, how often are we asked? In The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asks “How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?” (Adichie 153). I ask: Do you want to be in a relationship? Do you want to be in love? We are often told it requires hard work, sacrifice, and compromise—but should it have to? Do you want to take control or give it up? Do you want to do both, and can you? Do you want to pursue your own career or live in the shadow of his? In her autobiography, The Power Notebooks, Katie Roiphe points out how “Fantasies of quasimaternal power involve a tricky kind of subjugation to someone else’s difficulties; it is an antique female idea of taking care of things, assuming control, but at the same time erasing one’s own desires,” (Roiphe 88). So I ask: Do you want to erase your own desires? Do you want to be the one responsible for birth control and accept that we live in a patriarchal society that puts more responsibility on women than men yet placing that responsibility on women just serves to demonstrate that men have more power than women?

As Rebecca Solnit writes in “if I were a man” these questions revolving around gender inequality are nearly impossible to answer because, “How do you think big when you’re supposed to not get in the way, not overstep your welcome, not overshadow or intimidate?”

We are inundated by stories of sexual assault, emotional abuse, and misogynistic micro-aggressions so we must pause and wonder: what is the reason for this? Why is this imbalance so hard to shift?

♀ ♂ ♀ ♂ ♀

Maybe it’s because as Solnit says, “Gender shapes the spaces – social, conversational, professional, as well as literal – that we are given to occupy,” or that “Having strong opinions and clear ideas is incompatible with being flatteringly deferential,” (Solnit). But, maybe in addition to those sentiments, it is because working on things doesn’t taste like sugar. It doesn’t sound like a kitten purring. Because it doesn’t smell like freshly baked cookies or look like a sunset. Maybe because hard work isn’t supposed to be feminine—isn’t supposed to feel like a woman’s job.

But here I am, here you are, here we all are…

Working.

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