A note on the title:
In case there’s anyone reading this that remains uninitiated, Carrie Bradshaw is a columnist who often kicked off her writerly musings by writing that “she couldn’t help but wonder” this or that…hers were cuter, like “Is Sex Better Without Commitment?” or why is breaking up so hard to do.(as a student, I actually tried to write this one, in my then-ceaseless quest to not be “typecast” as a disabled writer—I did attempt to be rigorous and talk to people in the psychology department, but between the relentless innocence I tried to project then, and an epic fabrication scandal in my journalism department at the time, I think they thought I was fucking with them, quite frankly.) Not quite “it’s funny now,” but I can totally deal with the fact that kind of voiceless, bright but slightly inhuman pablum never saw daylight under my byline, not least because, even more than now, if someone tried to explain having chemistry with someone they didn’t like to me at nineteen or twenty, they might as well have talked to their dogs.
But here are the things about people’s response to the soft opening (that’s what he said) of the United States that I Couldn’t Help But Wonder:
Do people really love tubing and stuff that much? Doesn’t look that fun even without the threat of death.
In case there’s anyone reading this that remains uninitiated, Carrie Bradshaw is a columnist who often kicked off her writerly musings by writing that “she couldn’t help but wonder” this or that…hers were cuter, like “Is Sex Better Without Commitment?” or why is breaking up so hard to do.(as a student, I actually tried to write this one, in my then-ceaseless quest to not be “typecast” as a disabled writer—I did attempt to be rigorous and talk to people in the psychology department, but between the relentless innocence I tried to project then, and an epic fabrication scandal in my journalism department at the time, I think they thought I was fucking with them, quite frankly.) Not quite “it’s funny now,” but I can totally deal with the fact that kind of voiceless, bright but slightly inhuman pablum never saw daylight under my byline, not least because, even more than now, if someone tried to explain having chemistry with someone they didn’t like to me at nineteen or twenty, they might as well have talked to their dogs.
But here are the things about people’s response to the soft opening (that’s what he said) of the United States that I Couldn’t Help But Wonder:
Do people really love tubing and stuff that much? Doesn’t look that fun even without the threat of death.
If our government were more generous to its citizens and
less equivocal in its messaging, would people be chomping at the bit this much?
Do they not understand that some of the people we have to
worry about don’t look sick at all, or do they think youth and abledness give
them a pass?
Are they perhaps, and this may be the darkest speculation,
beginning to feel that these momentary pleasures are the best they can hope
for?(sometimes I can get this, especially given the world the twentysomethings
were born into, went to school in, graduated to.) even in my own life, I can’t
be sure if my problem was that I’ve been too future-focused, or that the future
I planned for wasn’t mine, but Rory Gilmore’s.
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