Long Conversation: Life Online

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. This month we were asked how our relation to the internet has changed. Here's what I wrote.

Before moving to Edmonton four years ago I didn’t use the internet for much beyond downloading music, reading articles and sending emails. This city gave me may first opportunity to live alone, without the comforting distractions of roommates. As I started my program, I realized most of my academic work and most of my leisure activities depended on the glowing screen sitting on my desk. As some friends of mine pointed out, my presence on Facebook had dramatically increased during my first semester of grad school. I was averaging five Facebook posts a day when I finally joined Twitter, a better home for all the stuff I felt I needed to share.

Work and Facebook consumed most of my days, while my lonelier evenings were filled by Megavideo. I streamed the entire series of The Wire in a few short months and got through most of Friday Night Lights just as quickly. Back then, Megavideo had a viewing time limit (around 58 minutes); once you hit that limit you were forced to wait for an hour or so. Eventually this limit began structuring my study routine. I would go through an entire day, watching 6 episodes of the Wire and reading Derrida for the remaining hours that I could muster the concentration. Each time Megavideo forced me back to work, I knew that after an hour of study, I’d earn the reward of another episode.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t very good at living alone. I needed something (or, better, someone) to give my days structure and with only three seminars a week, the internet was the best option I had. I could watch shows when I was bored and when I was feeling isolated in my basement suite, I could relocate to social media. At it’s best, the internet gave me immediate access to all kinds of data, allowing me to share content and communicate with friends; I could adopt a grammar of sharing. At its worst, it was (and still is) a form of social control that it’s become hard to do without, a place where popularity and visibility are synonymous, not unlike the logic of high school.

Fortunately, I no longer live on my own, but I'm not sure how much my online activity has changed. That being said, my ambitions definitely have. It’s been two years since I humbly entered the world of graphic design, a world built on freelancing, a world that once looked entirely different without the web. I suppose I’m now much more aware of my identity on the internet, in part because I’ve been forced to see it as a place for self-promotion, a place where I can present my work and connect with clients. Over the next 6 months, I’ll be preparing for this to become more of a reality, as I set up a personal website (with my own domain name!) and assemble an online portfolio. The thought of this near future fills me with dread and a degree of excitement. At the same time, it means that I’ve also entered an increasingly precarious work environment. For every illustrator or designer who sees mild success there are twenty more equally talented people who have to pursue their work as a labour of love, or, more realistically, not at all. At least I have some sense of how to navigate the web. In fact, I’ve been thinking about my online identity much longer than I’ve been in Edmonton.

Back in 2008, I started a blog to share bits of writing I was working on and catalogue lists of my favourite things (mostly related to indie music and literary theory). I’ve averaged about 60 posts each year since, and the blog currently figures as an archive of my interests as they’ve emerged over the past six years. Even though writing has become less of a priority, I still make the occasional blog post for no other reason than to extend my archive into the future (and I’m slightly alarmed at how patriarchal that sounds). In many ways, my blogging has prepared me for the kind of online identity I’m now slowly building. It’s allowed me to track hits and views from across the world and see what kinds of posts attract visitors. Every once in a while I’ll find a comment on an old post and sometimes it’s not even spam! 

Last summer I decided the time was right to start two new blogs. One is used strictly as hosting site for mp3s from a radio show I’m part of. The other one is on Tumblr, which I’m finding to be one of the most interesting and surprising places on the internet right now. Part of its charm is the way it accommodates visual media. It also connects with what I do because of how many illustrators, photographers and designers use it to show off their work and process. The structure is more or less like that of Twitter or Instagram, where you have a stream of posts compiled for you on your home page (or “Dashboard”) that’s based on the users that you follow. As a fellow user, you have the option to “heart” or reblog any post you come across. There don’t seem to be many limitations on what you can post, and artists have been known to experience theft of their work or, at the very least, posting without proper attribution. When you visit someone else’s page you see the images they’ve posted or reblogged, arranged according to their page’s structure or theme.

This is what it looks like when you appear on the "Radar," which randomly happened to me just after I wrote this.

Tumblr works for a variety of media, but for me it’s a hub for illustration, photography, and design, both amateur and professional. Some use it for documenting process, others for web comics, and still others (like me) use it as a less discretionary portfolio of current work. Like Instagram, it’s a way of sharing the stuff I’m doing with whoever cares to see it. Unlike Instagram, your work can become incredibly popular if the right people reblog it. I have several images from a year ago that are still getting reblogged, and when I think about the network that exists between my computer and the many Tumblr pages where my image currently appears, my work feels infinitely far away. I don’t expect that anyone currently viewing it will try to trace it back to its proper origin, but at the same time I’m flattered that something of mine has resonated with so many strangers.

Suffice it to say that on Tumblr, you can see something of yours quickly spiral out of your control. You can see your work become part of someone else’s visual language. You can, for instance, see how your image fits into the mosaic of erotically charged pictures on the Tumblr page of a high school student who’s used Tumblr to build the visual ideal of her identity. This might, and often does, turn her followers into your followers. But much more effective for gaining loyal viewers is Tumblr’s built-in system of curation. Certain popular tags (“Artists on Tumblr” for example) that accompany your work can be highlighted and used to prioritize a post in relevant searches. Your page might also appear on the Tumblr “Radar” if you’re deemed worthy. It’s almost enough to convince you that all the labour of making your art is actually valued, but the only return is visibility in a system over-saturated with images. Every now and then I remember that, by all appearances, it’s followers like the high school student with a taste for the macabre that I’m really working for. The only real difference between her and I is that I did this kind of collaging before I had a life on the internet.

In junior high, I had a bulletin board in my room that I covered with photos and clippings from magazines. As I got older, I realized that the bulletin board was a sham and covered my walls with postcards and handbills from concerts. A Tumblr page projects that same kind of archive outward, where the gaze of others is more immediate. But both instances of self-fashioning are fundamentally discursive. They each assemble signs and symbols in a way that suggests an audience, even if that audience is, in the end, a reflexive self. Social media now facilitates this, but despite the possibility of updates, the options for individual users still remains frustratingly limited. Our online “selves” remain fixed in order to be recognizable, often skewed in favour of the privileged and popular. For all the possibilities of our projections, some of us can’t help but be consistent.

Long Conversation: Alcohol

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. This month we were asked to explore our relationship to intoxication. Here's what I wrote.

I enjoy the occasional solitary drink, but most of my experiences with alcohol point to an overwhelmingly social drug. For many of us, alcohol is more than just a substance. It names a way to imagine and practice an idealized set of social relations. Alcohol is effective and attractive. It can elevate and degrade. It can help groups cohere just as easily as it can fracture longstanding relationships. As with most drugs, those of us who use it are always in danger of turning it into a crutch, relying on the substance just a little too much. In certain situations, it goes without saying. I find it far easier to be at a club when I’m a bit tipsy, and having a few drinks makes it easier to be at a party where I only know a few of the guests. The conversation flows. Big deals can become small deals, and vice versa. Unlikely friendships are made quickly and forgotten.

Another thing common to a culture of drinking is the idea of initiation. Since the early days of high school, parties and drinking have been bound together but I’m sure many of us can remember our first time drinking in excess.

Even in that first, supposedly free encounter, my attitude towards alcohol has always reflected a certain understanding of my immediate social context. My track record, in other words, has a lot to do with where and when I grew up: in a sporadically dry town—the tightly fastened buckle of Manitoba’s Bible belt—a decade or so before the opening of its first liquor store. Along with all the extra effort involved in acquiring alcohol, its somewhat forbidden nature should have made it more enticing. But unlike the teetotallers in my town, I never really saw alcohol consumption as a moral issue, and by extension I never dreamt about an end to its repression. To me, the alcohol issue seemed symptomatic of the community’s contradictory relationship with the outside world: strictly Mennonite in the petty ways but more than happy to support an unjust government hellbent on going to war and whose policies actively promoted the destruction of the environment.

My parents counteracted the puritanical nature of our town by having a well-stocked liquor cabinet and bringing me up to appreciate a good wine and cheese pairing. Early on, I appreciated the taste of wine and beer but by the middle of high school I was slightly paranoid about what might happen if I over-indulged: an uncontrollable change in personality or, worse, irreparable brain damage. Judging by all the parties I’d been to, people did really act out when they were drunk and, on a few occasions, I was no exception.

Before my first experience of real “drinking,” alcohol was a pretty neutral part of adulthood. However, it quickly assumed a social importance in my grade, and as someone who played on several sports teams, I had plenty of opportunities to become part of the elite group of kids who drank at parties. I had my first night of drunkenness at the end of grade 10. As I recall, it was plotted one evening after a baseball game. My friend’s parents were out of town. We had an older acquaintance who we knew would be willing to buy us a 24 of Coors. It was a weird night, not least because our buyer wouldn’t leave. We weren’t expecting him to actually hang out with us. It definitely put a damper on things. Not long after that, I decided not get drunk again.

In those first few experiences, I treated intoxication the way most young people do: as a way to escape or rebel, an excuse to act belligerent. My identification of booze with rebellion quickly waned when I realized that if something as easy as drinking was the most secure route to a better high school social status, it wasn’t really a status worth having. And if drinking was simply a right of passage, I could move on. Besides, there always had to be at least one person willing to look after all the unfortunate souls who’d consumed more than they could handle. I have a distinct memory of my friend passed out on a couch in another friend’s basement. He was covered in sweat, snoring away while my other friends threw Cheetos at him, trying to get them to stick onto his face. Oh, the joys of high school drinking.

Chivalry aside, my decision to no longer get drunk during this period in high school also came from an embarrassingly narcissistic fear that I wasn’t a very bright kid and I had a vulnerable brain to protect. I was growing anxious about university; I knew I’d have to rely on scholarships and I had the wild ambition to transcend my rural upbringing. So yeah, along with a threat my assets, I associated drinking with a part of small-town culture that I wanted to escape. Occasionally, I managed to romanticize it and see our group participating in something that was rustic and removed; but more often it left me feeling cynical and out of place. Perhaps without that rural association, perhaps if I’d grown up in a more cosmopolitan space, I wouldn’t have adopted such a skewed, elitist perspective about drinking. At that point it was hard think differently.

When the scenery finally changed, I changed with it. But the transition was slow. I didn’t attend any parties during my first semester at university, and when I did I noticed a small group who went to parties but didn’t drink. They were fellow first years, but unlike me they were armed with more altruistic intentions than shyness. They tried to make the point that you didn’t need to drink in order to have fun and do stupid shit. It wasn’t lost on the rest of us, but no one was surprised when these same people started showing up with beer at parties months later.

In terms of intoxication, those years were probably the wildest I’ll ever have. They allowed me the space and safety to figure out my limits and establish a relatively comfortable relationship with my own intoxication. I now know generally what to expect when decide to drink. During my first year I remember being able to count the number of times I’d been drunk. As drinking became a more standard part of my routine, I recognized that this finite number would soon become a thing of the past. I found some small comfort in knowing that. Once I lost track of my drinking escapades, my fears about its consequences would also slide out of view.

Whether you condemned it or celebrated it, drinking played a pretty significant role in my undergraduate experience and was a frequent topic of discussion both on and off campus. There were forums and committees to deal with the issue, and occasionally students involved in leadership roles would draw fire for instances of drunken belligerence. Most of us understood and accepted that it was a contentious issue, but saw no need to change our lifestyles. My university placed a great amount of importance on promoting and fostering community, both publicly and internally. Although my friends and I were at times critical of the way this idea got thrown around, we recognized that our actions did occasionally make others uncomfortable and, at times, made efforts to hold alcohol-free events (one of which I remember being quite successful). I’m glad we did. In a few short years, it had become natural for most of us to assume that social life automatically included alcohol. It even related to what we were studying. We had biblical examples of drinking (the Wedding at Cana was a favourite) and a long tradition of Eucharistic celebration to back us up. At parties, we took it as our rite to celebrate the sacred connection between booze and community, but it was equal parts profound and stupid, like most ideologies are.

The days of excessive drinking are, I hope, long past. But it remains difficult to imagine a social gathering that doesn’t bring with it the expectation that most people will be drinking and the feeling that you are strange for not doing so. The pressure isn’t as overt as it once was: no one is forcing you to drink or mocking your decision to abstain. At this point many of us just drink out of habit, often without the expectation that we’ll get drunk. Sometimes it almost feels like if drinking isn’t going to be part of a social gathering, we expect it to be unmemorable or at the very least, unremarkable. Or, if drinking is involved, new possibilities are opened up (and paradoxically, a tradition is continued); the very idea of alcohol acts to dissolve the mental barriers that prevent us from doing things like climbing onto buildings, playing dumb games, or eating too much greasy food.

As these conditions persist in certain friend groups, I’m also getting to know more people who opt out of drinking at social events, for whatever reason. In the last couple years I’ve tried giving up alcohol over lent. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially since my birthday usually falls within that forty day period. It can be quite frustrating, both for me and for the people who want me to drink along with them. By this point, some friendships almost require it, while for others it simply serves as a nice addition, a slightly different way of relating. Still, I’ve found giving up alcohol for prolonged periods worthwhile, not just for the perspective it affords, but for all the money it saves me.

Long Conversation: Adulthood

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation.  This month we were asked to explore the idea of adulthood. Here's what I wrote.

Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the release of Arcade Fire’s Funeral. That record arrived just as I was beginning my first year at university and thus marks the beginning of life away from home. While certain rights of passage reinforce the fact that I’ve grown up—or at least that I should have by now—the truth is that I don’t feel much different now than I did at 18.

If you walk in to my current bedroom, you’ll notice a lot of posters and postcards filling up the walls. Most of them are relics acquired during my teenage years. I’ve never had a permanent bedroom (i.e., one that lasted more than three months) without most of them spread around the space. And until I arrive at a place in my life where my bedroom isn’t simply a personal space, I don’t expect this to change. This environment is full of residual signs of youth, now signs that I use, however unconsciously, to reflect my young identity back at me. Yet, as a young person, I certainly didn’t see it that way. The significance of this stuff used to be more aspirational. The images stood for a life that I imagined could exist beyond what I then saw as a dull, rural existence: a youth culture that I could only really glimpse (and sometimes even access) on trips to the city. Now that I’ve been emancipated from my hometown for 10 years, my room looks pretty much the same and I don’t really know what that means.

I’m tempted to draw a line from my bedroom decor to the ongoing condition of being a student; a condition that has persisted off and on for the 10 years since I moved away from home. Of course, I was also a student before I moved out. It’s been one of the biggest constants of my post-adolescent life, but it feels more like a continuation of teenage development than an early stage of adulthood.

Still, I can’t help being reminded of my age at every turn. I’m also aware, however, that many of these reminders are nothing more than projections of my own insecurities. I’m now roughly the age my parents were when they married and I occasionally find myself wondering about what kinds of alternatives might have been possible throughout my twenties. This worry about aging, more than fitting into a certain standard of adulthood, has become a more prominent part of my thinking as I’ve gotten older. In some ways, it’s a ridiculous worry. From early on, we’re trained to see age as a definitive social category, and when you’re young the visible difference between age categories seems to confirm their existence. But after finally leaving secondary school, I quickly realized that age actually matters very little when it comes to things like friendship and compatibility. Perhaps that realization corresponds to a level of maturity or approaches something like adulthood, but I’m skeptical of categories that demand such a linear approach. But there’s something contradictory going on as well: I want to think aging means less in terms of social organization but the weight of years seems to be getting heavier and more daunting as I grow older.

As I’ve considered my own anxieties around aging over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that many of them stem from a linear conception of time as progress or development, from the gap I see between where I am now and where I imagined myself in my younger aspirations. I don’t think I was overly ambitious. Rather, the future seemed open and I saw different possibilities as I imagined myself in different contexts. Like most young people I was pretty naive about my own limitations and my awareness of what came before me was characteristically shallow. Then again, there are plenty of people who fit into the “adult” category who haven’t outgrown this. It leads me to wonder whether the category of adulthood still has influence as an idea. I currently understand it as a way of grouping certain (Western) standards of living, but those standards seem increasingly out of sync with the precarious conditions many of us now experience as we gain independence from the structures of support we were lucky enough to have as kids.

Over the past month, I’ve encountered a wave of media that focuses on the transition we all supposedly make from youth to adulthood. I doubt whether this kind of navel-gazing is unique to my generation, but I am growing increasingly aware of how much speculation on aging and adulthood is regularly produced. A couple weeks ago, I saw Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. It was filmed over a 12-year period and follows a young boy’s passage through puberty and into adulthood, managing to compress it all into about two and half hours. I was struck by how the process of aging differs between the children and the adults. Emotional and physical development don’t necessarily work in tandem, and my own experiences seem to confirm that as well. Then there’s Seven Up, a recent discovery on Netflix. It follows a group of kids starting at the age of 7, and interviews each of them every seven years for as long as they’re still living (the most recent release finds them at age 56). I haven’t caught up with all the episodes, but the show’s argument, at least in part, is that there are certain continuities that stretch though a person’s life: characteristics and dispositions, structures and privileges, that are very hard for individuals to shake. Some glide along without much effort while others try to move against the grain and suffer the consequences. In the case of both Boyhood and Seven Up, we’re presented with a linear narrative of development that allows us to easily fill in the gaps between the moments we see caught on film. The form of documentation appears fairly neutral in capturing and ordering these sequences, but, especially in the case of Seven Up, it also invites the audience to measure each person against their past: to search for continuities which can then be identified as successes or failures.

Last week an article written by the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott went into high circulation on the internet. Its lofty, elegiac title, “The Death of the Adult in American Culture,” gives the reader a pretty good sense of what to expect: a survey of contemporary male archetypes in television and film (many of them baby boomer holdovers) alongside a growing number of examples that purportedly take a quite different approach to modern life and the expectations of the American adult. What all these new shows grasp, writes Scott, “is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable. It isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined.” Scott’s assessment misses its mark for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with his own fairly narrow, obviously privileged perspective; his view of culture takes little account of the social and economic conditions that allow it to exist in the first place.

Articles like A.O. Scott’s paranoid think-piece are part of a growing genre that speculates on millennials, hipsters, boomers, etc. These days, you can’t go far without seeing a headline, debate, or product that has to do with the idea (and in some cases, the “crisis”) of arrested development. It remains unclear whether the paradigm of adulthood has truly shifted or whether the concept was ever truly adequate to our cultural condition in the first place. Development, progress, growth. I find it hard not to see this ideology of aging as a reflection of late capitalism. It’s a relatively seamless fit. Yet those same social and economic forces are also responsible for hollowing out the sort of adulthood that used to inspire a more conventional, middle class way of life.

In my mind, “adulthood” remains remarkably abstract: unattainable but also undesirable, an ideal that used to make sense but now seems like it will be forever deferred. Based on my conversations with friends, I think this has become a common way to understand the category. Less common, however, is the relative security that allows me to welcome that deferral, even with all the uncertainties it brings.

Long Conversation: Joy

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. This month we were asked to describe a recent experience of exultant joy. Here's what I wrote.

A recent experience of exultant joy? The event that first comes to mind happened on a bike, which isn’t very surprising. I’ve found that riding my bike at every possible opportunity is the closest I can come to something like a joyful disposition. Even my daily commute feels worthwhile. This particular case of joy, however, was made exultant because of the way I was riding: communally, stripped down to my underwear, late at night.

That night I was with a group of friends who were celebrating the departure of a companion who had just finished med-school and was leaving to begin his residency in Winnipeg. Easily the wildest person I know, he’s gained a reputation for stirring up shit at bars and getting my friends into fights or injured on the bike ride home. He’s a bit of liability, in other words. Then again, he’s usually able to tell whether or not someone needs stitches. The kind of guy you feel weirdly safe around, despite his track record.

After drinking around a fire for several hours, we decided it was time for cycling (a pretty typical way to conclude a night of drinking among this group of friends). We have a standard route that takes us through Edmonton’s river valley, across the river, and onto an open dock, where we close out the night. On this occasion, it was settled that we needed to do something to make the evening a bit more memorable. Our course of action was to disrobe and ride our bikes in our undies. I’m not sure what prevented us from getting naked, but I probably wasn’t the only one who was relieved to have some (mild) protection from my bike seat.

I should probably mention at this point that it was only the men who stripped down. It’s a pretty homo-erotic, testosterone-driven group, and as you’d expect our collective exhibition that was part of the thrill. At times this group has made me feel like I’m on a varsity sports team, which is, in my experience, an ambivalent feeling, at once familiar and disconcerting. But I digress.

We began our slow descent into the river valley and were getting plenty of looks and a few honks. Together with the booze, the social adrenaline was enough to keep energy levels high. We turned down a large decline called “Connor’s Hill.” It takes about 30 seconds to reach the bottom and there’s a crucial turn-off just before the slope flattens out. It’s a terrifying hill to ride down at the best of times and I’m usually pretty cautious.

There’s no climax in this narrative. We rode down the hill as we’ve done countless times before. It was a clear night. Stars visible. City lights shining across the river. I usually dread going down that hill because I’m sure that, at some point, someone’s going to take a spill. I don’t even have rear brakes, so I’m basically dead if I have to make sudden stop. The rest of the boys ride fixies, and I don’t envy them. We made it safely down the hill, went to our next drinking spot and stood around half-naked for a while, basking in the reflective glow of pale skin in the moonlight. And then we got dressed and our bike ride continued.

My joy in the 30 seconds it took to reach the base of Connor’s Hill came from a combination of the view, the warm, summer night air, and the vulnerability we all felt, speeding down a long hill, slightly under the influence. But most of all it was the way the air hit my skin, the way my whole body felt alive and lifted up. Exultant.

Long Conversation: Vanity

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. Each month we get a question and have to come up with an answer. This month the question was: How do you think about your physical appearance? Here's what I wrote.

Even at a young age, I spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the bathroom mirror, inspecting my image and experimenting with it. I’d play at different hair styles and contort my face into something more preferable or more terrifying. Eventually, I learned that, besides simple curiosity, one of the names for this fascination with my own appearance was “vanity.” Although the word first assumed its real (shame-inducing) significance for me by way “Vanity Fair,” one of many dangerous distractions for Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, I was still somewhat surprised when, years later, I later discovered that the English word vanity comes from the Latin vanus, which means empty or without substance. I had equated it with excess, drawing out the obvious connection between Bunyan’s morality tale and the name of what I thought was a risqué magazine whose sole purpose was to celebrate indulgence. Strange as it is, I think this misunderstanding gets at something central to the way I think about my apparent identity.

There’s a sense in which every attempt I make to think about my personal appearance is filtered through the experience of conscious self-reflection. It goes without saying that to be preoccupied, as I am, with my own self-image is a form of indulgence: a luxury, a privilege, an experience that I could probably do without. At the same time, however, the very thought of my appearance requires me to acknowledge a subjective lack. At a very basic level, the way I think I look is a reflection of what others see. Or, to put it another way, to imagine my appearance, I have to think in the abstract or, at the very least, deal with my image as an object, pulling together those barely-remembered photographs and mirror moments and arranging them into an intelligible collage or sequence: a cipher for a social subject who finds it more expedient, perhaps even more natural, to see himself as an individual. I know myself as a living reflection, a reflection of something I can only approach though technology and representation. All the way back to Plato’s cave, we’ve been dismissing images as distractions and dead-ends. This what Bunyan, an iconoclastic Protestant, was getting at when he gave the name Vanity to that prideful city in Pilgrim’s Progress. Vanity, like pride, positions the self as an idol, an object of worship. In the narrative of Christian salvation it is antithetical to the progress of the soul towards God. In other words, vanity turns one backwards. Bunyan’s allegory can ring hollow as an instance of antiquated piety, and by most interpretations it usually is. But apart from the mirror, how is it possible to access one’s appearance without indulging in some kind of retrospection, especially considering the flux and symbiosis of our bodies? When I try to imagine my appearance I defer to traces of photographs, the profile that I’ve managed to construct on Facebook. I get nostalgic.

A photograph can seem so false, so artificial; but it’s often closer to what others see. That toothy smile that seems to align in front of my bathroom mirror appears crooked and ghoulish if the camera captures me at the wrong angle. Of course, it works both ways. When I was much younger, I caught sight of my dad’s reflection through an open bathroom door and thought there was a stranger in our house. Encountering someone else’s reflection in the mirror can feel deeply estranging, but in reality we’re seeing that person as they most often see themselves.

My ongoing attempts to appraise my body and the way it appears are, often simultaneously, attempts to adhere to something else, whether it’s a socialized ideal or a nostalgic impression of a younger, better self. Being limited by my own subjectivity means that I have to isolate my body as an image in order to think about my appearance and the very fact that I can do this (and will do it all too easily) is an effect of my lived experience as a white male, seemingly healthy and well-proportioned, though increasingly vulnerable to accidents of clumsiness. What makes this empty, idealized image—this instance of vanity—so necessary? Why does it govern what I do to my body? And why does my body, in particular, appear so complacently in this privileged form of abstraction? By most North American standards of representation, there are things about my appearance that I simply don’t have to question. This means that I’m free to inspect my chin for blackheads and spend five minutes trying to pluck a stray nose hair; that I can buy four different types of anti-dandruff shampoo before any one of them runs out; and that I can preen and polish the dry patches of skin around my eyes and nose. My daily struggle in front of the mirror is microscopically insignificant, but this fact does not stop me from hunting down that last, visible flake of skin from my hairline, which, incidentally, is only visible under the blazing lights above our bathroom sink. Or perhaps I should call it our vanity.