I was just sitting here trying to think of a book site that I really liked. And then I remembered!
Unpleasant knowledge just gleaned while googling Miranda July to remember what her old website was called: “Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger…”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
(Well I guess this is growing up).
Also the website was called Learning to Love You More and I spent many hours sitting on the floor of my nanny chamber reading it.
I remember watching Me and You and Everyone We Know with my dad, the first time I went to visit him after he moved out. We rented that and—God help us—The Aristocrats (my hands are over my face right now). He took me to PF Chang’s I think, to ask me if I saw it coming. Saw what? my eyes glazed over while I stared at my chow mein, twisting the chopsticks, saying we should rent a movie or something. I learned to shrug probably before I could walk. It’s an epidemic, makes you stare off 30 degrees to the right of your partner’s shoulder in conversations you pride yourself in having well over email. It also made you wander around Blockbuster for too long, carrying empty movie cases back and forth between aisles and generations, when we still did things like that. I don’t know, whatever, I don’t care, it’s fine with me.
“How bout this?”
“What the hell IS that?”
“I dunno, you’ll like it.”
“Okay, whatever.”
Over the years my dad’s place in Orlando became sort of liminal. Flights were cheaper out of there than Tallahassee so I’d always see him on my way out of town or back from somewhere. We’d rent bad movies, hang out in bookstores, have difficult conversations when I least expected it. When I picture his apartment I picture standing in the pantry and staring at the food he had chosen all by himself. Hot dogs, always. He would sort of pull things out of the fridge and freezer as if to brag about going to the grocery store. And maybe he should! I didn’t know he liked pickles, or bologna. He got different crackers than us, maybe out of spite. He cackled, showing me his box of ice cream sandwiches.
After I graduated college I was staying at his place before I left to go um, live in Italy. I kind of got there without thinking any of it through, especially this big concept of needing money to obtain food and shelter, which is something i realized when we were putzing around in a Border’s off the highway and I was picking out books to take with me while he berated my mother. I kept pulling books down and stacking them up and reading the back covers and agonizing over which ones I wanted, and he kept asking me when I was ready to get out of here and I finally started crying in front of Kundera and was finally like, I NEED YOUR MONEY and he says, No, ask your mom and then I was like I DON’T KNOW WHAT BOOK I WANT *CRY* and he was like YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T LOVE ME and I was like, CAN YOU PAY FOR THESE BOOKS PLZ?
And then the next morning he woke me up for my flight and I stood up on this pullout couch thing that was red and I couldn’t get over the fact that my dad had a red couch, because we would never have had a red couch— and he had these weird paintings of women in these like, Grecian robes and their nipples were always showing, and he also had stolen the trash can out of me and Lauren’s bathroom and I was like WHO ARE YOU, and then I also realized I had no idea what he liked because no one ever asked him, and so I stood up on this awful red pullout couchbed thing and signed into AOL and was like, No I’m not gonna go, can you call Orbitz?
And he’s like, What the hell are you going to do, then? And I was like, I don’t fucking know but this Kundera book is really good. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE, YA KNOW? Also, I started a blog with my college friends!”
I remember him on the phone with them and we both were very sad, this air of failure was kind of understandably hanging over everything, in that way only family members can really help exxaggerate and then fortify, and I was lying on the pullout sofa with mattress springs in my back, and his hyperactive, neglected dog was all jumping in my face and he slinks by and is like, Well, we got a $100 fee but we got the money back and I’m thinking like, “Umm, are you going to give me what’s left in cash, since that flight was my graduation present?” But I never said anything and I never got the cash (which, fair), so I was just left with this crazy leatherbound journal he bought me to take on my “travels” in Europe. I remember looking at it with a pit in my stomach, probably because my travels ended up being like, the 4 hour drive home to Tallahassee spent crying to Bright Eyes and talking on the phone to the person I was crying about while listening to Bright Eyes, hoping he felt about me the way I felt about him. He did not but he did always listen when I would sit on a curb in the parking lot of my Dad’s apartment complex and tell him about all of the difficult conversations I had had that day. I remember telling him I felt like going to Italy was delaying the real world, even though we both had recently bought a book called DELAYING THE REAL WORLD and doggy-eared a lot of the pages.
Remember this damn thing? http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/
