My parents named me Alex, in part, because it was an uncommon choice at the time. Distinctive, even. As Victor Hugo said, there’s no stopping an idea whose time has come. Tens of thousands of American parents simultaneously came to the same conclusion. Today, if I’m in a social setting larger than an Uber Pool, I can expect surplus Alexes.
My last name, more surprisingly, is also quite common. During my sophomore year of high school, I walked into English class to find that a friend had printed out pictures of Alex Howe, the Toddlers & Tiaras contestant, and placed one on each desk. (According to Pageant Girls Wiki, “Alex enjoys designing her own clothes and starting trends in pageants.”)
So it was no surprise in 2019 when I matched with an Alex on Hinge in Los Angeles. She, too, had been through the trenches:
But that wasn’t her first question. Her first question was her most important.
Alex and I never met up, which is for the best—and not because of the name thing, which I’m sufficiently narcissistic to get a kick out of.
It’s because I’ve heard it’s a bad idea to start a relationship by lying.1
In college, a friend asked me if I would rather be famous or rich. For writers, the answer is famous; otherwise, they would do something else. But I can still see her face when I told her the truth: shock curdling into contempt.
One global pandemic later, I told this same friend I’d been admitted to a poetry MFA with an $8,000 stipend. She said, “Per month?” Given how the rest of the interaction unfolded, I must have been making the same face at her that she’d made at me years earlier.2
I told that story a lot when I moved to Louisiana to begin the MFA. My friend, in her question, misperceived poetry-world as legibly similar to corporate-world. I’d left a corporate job shortly before applying to grad school; I think the story of her misrecognition helped me recognize, by contrast, the story I hoped I was living: the proverbial journey into authenticity—into self-recognition.
But recognition is a messy business. I met this friend, after all, in college; our families each live in the foofy leafy places from which kids go off… to colleges. (The upper-middle class: so narrow in purported scope, so brimming with future socialists. Who’s actually “rich,” anyway? Anyone who makes a dollar a year more than my parents—the perfect place to start the guillotines.)
In other words, I was in a position to go to Poetry School for the same reason I knew that her employer was the third-most prestigious management consultancy—not the second, not the fourth. The reason is that our differences are icing on the cake of our similarities.
Plato banned poetry from his Republic. He felt it corrupted its listeners with illusions—that by having emotional responses to the non-real events of poems, they would warp their real-life lives.
Presumably, he’d feel the same way about movies.
When I went to a birthday party in L.A. last month, I briefly met the Movie Actor, a friend of the host.
My brain said insane things like, “Yes. The face from the things you have viewed.” And, “It’s definitely him.”
In Platonic terms, maybe seeing famous people in meatspace is so arresting, so wow-shiny and hey-face, because we’re so familiar with their shadows on the cave wall. It almost feels like proof you’ve left the cave.
The Movie Actor spent most of the rest of the party in an animated one-on-one conversation. I wasn’t sure who to be more jealous of: him or the woman he was talking to.
As the party dwindled, I was asked to tell the story of the single best quote from my year in L.A. I’d made out with someone, but on the way to our first date we began arguing harshly on the phone, and she canceled. Which gave me a bad feeling about the future, so I declined to hang out again. Later, when I ran into her at a taco spot, she said, making eye contact, “Am I still in dick jail?” (Thoroughly charmed by this, a month later I texted her that I’d changed my mind; she succinctly replied that she had, too.)
The Movie Actor had questions. After answering them, I thought, “He’s very cool and nice” and then, “Is he? Or is he just famous and occasionally making eye contact?” I realized that this must be one of those Pitfalls Of Fame people talk about: eddies of others’ neuroses follow in your wake.
Serious moonlight
Things took a cinematic turn when someone’s former assistant pointed out the lunar eclipse.
Everyone gathered in the parking lot to look. It was beautiful and strange. Could everyone see this? Could New York see it? The Angelenos, astrologers all, were stumped. As was I. Someone said everyone on the planet could see it; someone else said, “Not China.” The Movie Actor adjusted his group text recipients, removing those in China.
The final section heading, implying something like Tune in next week
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What I told Alex was true and not honest: that I lived in L.A. because I was fresh off a breakup in New York and moving across the country seemed easier than going to therapy.
Objectively speaking, an $8,000 annual salary is laughable; my friend’s question was not only reasonable, but probably reflected concern for my well-being. And still I reacted defensively. Grad school: the more ludicrous an enterprise it seems from the outside, the more seriously it is taken by those on the inside.
Hey Alex! I like reading these!!