In Which We Usher In A Beijing Summer

Slightly Pigeon-Toed

by JOANNA SWAN

Davis, California: a veritable Cow-Town where the U.C. Davis Aggies rule the playing field, displaced snowy owls and rabbits foment rage, passionate debate, and press at city council discussions, and Baggins End exists. Davis, California, where greenbelt lanes snake and bike cop citations are a very real threat. Tiny little Davis, my childhood home, where Mom's piano studio was always 98% Asian (to my great delight when Chinese New Year brought moon cakes and recitals brought homemade refreshments and charming extended family).

Yearly hongbao, bi-annual chicken foot-y outings to the New China Buffet, shopping at the S.F. Supermarket in Sacramanto, and a plethora of Guangdong take-out notwithstanding, my small-town schooling could never prepare me for the Mainland itself. From childhood home to college life in Walla Walla, Washington, I traded a small-town high school for a degree in a city known for its sweet onions and Seattle expats, and thus was most green (in the wet-behind-the-ears sense, and also in the where-is-the-azure-sky-and-recycling-program sense, too) upon arrival in Beijing.

Peering out of the Beijing taxi window at endless monstrosities of human engineering, I relished the romantic evocations of Scarlett Johansson's Tokyo scenes in Lost in Translation — and felt very small. This wasn't my first experience with Roth's "man-made sublime that divides and dwarfs," but it was the first time I'd been besieged on all sides by Joy City Malls and Easy Life Malls and Paradise Malls and unfinished subway lines and other things that make David Sedaris' snarky turn snarly.

"Plan of the City of Peking," British LithographIn one of the cafes where coffee is not served to businessmen in a corporate casual atmosphere, I was approached by a small man from a table of The Cools: a Chinese girl with platinum white hair, several subscribers to the black monotone dressing doctrine, and a bald Spaniard who kept giving my boyfriend flirty eyes over his latte. Said small man introduced himself as Juan and asked in adorably broken English if I'd like to model some t-shirts as a "foreigner friend." For want of a more compelling professional life, I consented to do a few jobs for VANCL, a Beijing-based online company that seems to hire hoards of waiguo and nationals alike whose thighs are uniformly much less thunder-y than mine.

This baffling shirt may or may not be an inside joke of the Chinese youth. Either way, it regularly serves as a reminder of why my boyfriend is extra-cool.

VANCL paid better than my teaching job — 600 RMB per 2-or-3-hour job — and visions of free t-shirts with cutesy graphics danced in my head, reminding me that I had yet to purchase a shirt from Threadless.

The first shoot took place at what had been some sort of factory or government compound: firebrick warehouses and snaking alleys now peppered with hints of film and fashion industry gentrification: shiny luxury vehicles, decay-chic rusted doors, an eerie veil of anonymity. The shoot itself was fun, if not a ringer for Bob Harris' "Suntory Time" translation troubles. I was instructed by photographer Han, a most genial young fellow involved with directing and shooting films (many were, he admitted ruefully, "boring propaganda"), to look happy, drunk (I think?) and also that very distinct misty/innocent/pensive pose that's spotted in manga and certain Asian fashion circles — eyes demurely downward or at a thoughtful 45-degree upwards tilt, chin coquettishly jutting, hands behind back, or finger at lips, feet together, or slightly pigeon-toed.

During most shoots, a young man would crouch below me, aiming a hairdryer directly at my head. Half the photos capture my futile attempts to extricate flyaways from my over-glossed lips.

What ultimately inspired the photographers would always be my hair. I'd come with it tied up in a bun, hoping to keep my tresses locked away from the snarls, split ends, and the leonine mane it revels in when freed from ponytail prison; everyone always wanted it down, though — I was to shake, twirl, fluff, flip, twist, braid. I ended up under a curling iron more than once and 45 minutes later the proud stylist would present his creation: Sandra Dee meets Amy Winehouse with bubblegum lipstick.

If I look happy, it's because I thought they weren't going to curl my hair.

I made friends with a girl who'd seen my photos on VANCL, a friend of Juan's. Her job confounded me until I realized that rather than sell clothes, she contracted out photography jobs for companies — they chose the model and backgrounds, she styled and produced the photoshoots. Once, I modeled 60 down coats in June for a big website. It was cool, I got free Victory Vitamin Water.

Sweating under my pancake makeup. Fashion. It's Height.

I took the 991 bus to her studio to model various outfits, and the bus trip alone cost me three hours of my life roundtrip. I'd sit with my magazines and iPod, watching the bus TV and trying to spot horse-drawn buggies on the road and marveling at the tinted, removed insulation of the Audi dashboards and BMW backseats idling at red lights below me. Such insulation was never afforded a bus passenger, leastwise a laowai.

Once, the blue-uniformed ticket collector helped me with some directions and then asked me about my other, less compelling job: how much did lessons cost for each student? (I told her — 100 RMB to me, 300 RMB to boss-lady.) She had a bit of cilantro in her teeth, perhaps from a recent Beijing Breakfast stop, and gestured at my Lapham's Quarterly every time she mentioned teaching or English. On TV there was a video of Michael Jackson performing the Sawing A Woman in Half magic trick while singing "Smooth Criminal." There were also many yelling ads.

Raised voices being frequent and tolerated in most areas except perhaps temples, shrines, and the respectable sit-down restaurant known as Pizza Hut, the promotions heralded the imminent glee of summertime, liberation at hand. Everyone yelled in these ads: old ladies exclaimed about online shopping deals, a young woman called "wu ba dian commmm!!" (online classified ads) to the world through her cupped hands, two young lovers yelled coyly about chocolate popsicles, an actress and popular microblogger rode a CGI donkey and hollered about something that sounded like "ganji-laaaaaa!" All the while, we scuttled past the blue and white corrugated walls of Yah Gee Modular Housing or JH Prefab Housing, the two choices migrant workers seemed to have regarding city lodging.

On the return trip from my last modeling job, I fell asleep and woke up sweaty as from a fever dream, wondering if my stop had already passed. Wrong as always in my evaluation of China's great breadth, I inconspicuously peeled away my false eyelashes, stained my last Kleenex with melted mauve and dripping beige foundation, and settled down to the last hour of the myriad strange smells of public transportation, aircon drips, and a stomach aching for an icy pop to usher in the oppressive Beijing summer.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in California. She tumbls here. Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

"Twenty Seven" - MS MR (mp3)

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In Which We View Scenes From The Drama Of Her Life In College

Crumb Trails

by JOANNA SWAN

Undergraduate education is the territory of inaugural munchies, an exercise in the unhealthy ethos of quick meals, be they Apollonian Ramen, Dionysiac Donettes or otherwise. It wasn't until after graduation that I instigated my snack food experimentation. One night, having grown weary of San Diego psych rock and spoken word, Galen and I tripped across El Cajon Boulevard to 7-11, and inexplicably became owners of "Takis," munch fare of similar breed as: Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Tapatio Doritos, Flamas Doritos, and other variations on a theme of red 40 and corn.

How deliciously they burned the tongue and gums, these indulgences, insipid in gout yet impossible to relinquish! Their stains on the digits and the lips surprised and alarmed me, and I stuck out my tongue in the bathroom mirror that following morning, ears no longer ringing with psychedelic music but still in possession of a stain to be reckoned with. No matter how the night's memories dwindled, the crimson crumbs held steadfast to the epidermis, a landmark of time that has passed.

These Dorito fingers – can we call them Doringers? – hold you to your experiences indiscriminately, tenacious to the last scrub of the washcloth.

Though unrelated temporally they aren't dissimilar, these Doringers, from memories of my college career: a swath of life I find difficult to remember except as punctuated by landmarks and artifacts of growth and fear, these snippets all ultimately lined up on the shelf of remembrances, or – like the small orange New Testaments that those old men (who were they, anyway?) handed out after class in the Holmes Junior High School parking lot – buried in the strata of your childhood bedside table, waiting for you to find meaning within their constancy or else to discard them, wondering, "Why did I ever keep this?"

Famous for sweet onions, a feisty wine tourism industry, and a foundry frequented by Pop Artists and Carhardt-clad metalworkers, Walla Walla sits in the Columbia River Valley and is as halcyon and mysterious as Twin Peaks, population 51,201. Instead of Norma's Diner we had Clarette's and Tommy's Dutch Lunch. I only spent three years there, a paltry sum for a life nearly eight times that length. Of course, more prodigious things have seen completion in similar time (the First World War in four, Beethoven's 9th in two).

There it went, though – a logical progression, an unquestioned ramification for life in educated middle-classdom, where, in the sixth grade, Ms. Cook told us that we had better get to work on our Egyptian dioramas because after all, "in college there is homework every day [insert quantitative gesture to demonstrate quotidian homework demands in their physical manifestation]."

I'll blame flash drives and cloud hosting for my inability to remember what work amounted to such arduous piles. Nor can I remember being particularly morose about it. In fact I cannot now remember the stress levels encountered in college, though I think they were probably less than the sum total of stress I encountered whilst applying to college.

Selective memory eludes concise recounting. I did find a Design 101 assignment on the back of which I had explained to the grader, "I was drawing this while under intense stress and conflict, and it probably reflects that state of mind. There is a theme of tension and passive versus active forces," – more like notes from a Jungian's armchair than art studio work – "I was also reading about the circulation of blood, so that could have influenced this work as well."

"Everything you know will be challenged," President Bridges told us at commencement, and I tempered his words, meant for others but not for myself, with the self-assurance of an eighteen-year-old to whom "the weight of years" was still just a petty aphorism and "sage" just a plant that smelled like marijuana when it burned. How convenient for me, I thought, that a 23-year-old boyfriend back at home and a longstanding tradition of scholarship precluded these foibles of higher education. One long-distance breakup, myriad crepuscular study scrambles, and fifteen pounds later, I'd no doubt forgotten Mr. President's words but was treated to an almost Zen-like ego raze; as if all I thought I knew was tossed into an industrial-strength dryer and desiccated until it was uncomfortably hidebound and of questionable worth.

Of course, I came to Whitman with my specialties. I could conjure Chopin's Revolutionary etude and graft roses and recite choice Cummings tidbits, but around me were folks who'd started nonprofits, taken high school classes like "The World in Pieces: Cinema, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Fragmentation," knew European history beyond Franz Ferdinand's significance, and could enumerate certain Best New Music reviews from 2007 on.

By grace of cripplingly low confidence or fierce survivalistic competitiveness or both, I quickly lost illusions that I was "special" or "smart" or "Gifted and Talented." Surprised (as I am, frequently) by my intellectual untenability, I engaged in what a psychologist might perhaps call Maladaptive Coping. No one ever told me "this essay's horseshit" or "you're a horrible painter" but I made sure to, in Puritannical frenzies of self-revision or flagellation or both.

Also, I dozed off in Geology class, a victim of prodigious early-morning donuts and coffee – my preferred distractions. The shale and Missoula floods fascinated me, but more consistent was the affair with Halls Prentiss and Jewett, the lands of free-flowing soymilk, ladlefuls of blueberries and vegan waffle batter.

As we first embarked on what has to have been the most leisurely chapter of our relationship, Galen and I would – at that point, weaned from dormitory life and the fount of unfettered food access – sneak into those hallowed halls of all-you-can-eat populated by freshman seated in strange conglomerations, and visiting students with their attentive and resigned parents in tow. Making good on tuition dollars measured in bacon and eggs, we sat luxuriating in our bleary-eyed class-less mornings – Galen healing headaches with electric-blue Powerade and I mentally gathering the facts and figures of the man across from me with the meticulousness of a researcher – unaware of that frustrating impermanence of a relationship's inception, more delicate and weightless than the plum blossoms blown by Berkeley's February breeze.

Growing up in Davis, where the meanderings of 30,000 UC students (some of whom had little compunction about bicycling into traffic or asking a 13-year-old shopping at Tower Records whether she preferred to "spit or swallow") caused frequent consternation, I found it equally strange to be on the other side of the town-grown coin.

I never thought of college as an ivory tower, though many classes centered around critiques of Gazes, Biases, Frames, Interpretations. Once, at a themed party, someone unfortunately arrived garbed in a "Survivor" costume (read: equatorial face paint in the vein of Survivor: Africa, Survivor: South Pacific, or Survivor: Redemption Island.) Campus outcry quickly led to annual Symposia on the insidiousness of prejudice and stereotype.

Worthy discussions that excited a deep respect for Arendt and a love/hate relationship with Paul Gauguin nevertheless led me to dead ends creatively, as if anywhere I turned there were more thoughts to process, dissertations to untangle, theses to glean – where can inspiration grow when it is firmly capped by pre-existing pavements of cultural context and critical theory? The laughing bald head of Monsieur Michel F. found my work as stifled as the Victorian age, while Kandinsky's eye perceived my paintings to be dull, muddier than an out-of-tune choir.

Is our ivory tower where we hide when we are unable to face what academia distracts us from? Or is it guilt – perforating my hermitage as I sit, unsure what to put my liberal-arts-educated energies into and feeling the weight of my years, while the young vagrant outside ties his great heaving sacks of recyclables and curses quietly to himself, glancing every so often at the passing cars (perhaps with the same self-conscious embarrassment I felt when my mother and I would go scavenging for roadside walnuts or fruit) – that drives our buttressing?

If college is where ivory towers are built, mine grew privacy walls to protect me from the world's banalities and mundane atrocities: rent checks, Social Security, internet providers, mind-dulling métiers – compromises that faire passer la vie.

In childhood, I began to imbue objects with sentimental weight, that I may later conjure memory of time past. First, I cried along with the protagonist of Aliki's Feelings over spilt ice cream – less consolable than he, who would smilingly soon receive a replacement cone. Later, my mother would send me care packages filled with strange and novel offerings: basil seeds, homegrown pomegranates, cards featuring cutouts from expired bird calendars, Sees Candy tins to fete various holidays. These tins especially plucked my heartstrings after the last Scotchmallow Egg was polished off, such that I maintain a small collection of them. Artifacts of love, they prove that I'll never fully attain the minimalism I lust after.

At any rate, place, like confection canister, remains stoic and silent. In the seasonal confusion of the Bay Area climate, where Japanese maples hold their ruddy leaves till March, impervious to the white fragrance of spring's floreted buds, I find myself pining over the delineated year in Walla Walla, its seasons measured quadratically with the first snow, blushes of warmth in autumn, croci all violet and hardy through the hoarfrost in spring.

Like the blurry fondness of a vacation past, I miss my college, as if it would or could miss me back; the latter I know not to be the case because if it is anything like revisiting the hallowed halls of high school, nothing is left but flashes and sound bytes flushed through the sieve of memory. The halls repudiate their former associate with a cold stoic necessity, for the fledgling who tripped so enthusiastically from the nest may never return to roost there again.

Thus my memories of college remain, unrequited and fading slowly, willfully, in and (mostly) out of reason and consciousness, like the mind's attempt to regroup in the morning after a memorably decadent night. I had a few of these, though most anything was risque for a girl raised in a home where the liquor cabinet shared real estate with the teacups and consisted of my late grandmother's Kirschwasser for Black Forest Cake, and Amaretto for biscotti. These nights were adventures and stumbles and exhibitions of great careless exuberance; the worst repercussions were temporary dizziness or jettisoned digestibles.

College facilitated new forays into prohibited territory and I was always surprised at the intensity with which we grasped at our new freedoms, most often of the imbibed kind. For me, it was also the fashion faux pas. Proud in my calculated sloppiness, I made the nightly post-supper pilgrimage to the library from the dorms decked in fire engine red sweatpants and Birkenstock clogs.

On other nights, I would visit my friend Kyle, who was of a mysterious age and for some inexplicable reason lived in a fraternity. He and I would listen to Thom Yorke and Bartok and then Deirdre and I would visit only to raid the TKE walk-in refrigerator, a Six Flags Marine World to our paltry dorm kitchen. I flush with embarrassment to think how we must have looked, harvesting swiss cheese and beet slices from the good gentlemen's rations.

Our dorm's freshman year were an incredulous bunch: capricious boys, naked and flushed, pummeling each other with snow outside my window; the Idahoan dip connoisseur who banged on our doors at 3 a.m. hollering "hippies wake up" and who, much like Lady Gaga – and doubtless to potential girlfriends' disappointment – couldn't be tamed.

How can so paltry a sum of years yield seemingly endless cascades of fragmented memory? I am someone who finds herself overwhelmed by the cornucopia of infinite and equally-valuable experiences until I find far too much familiarity with Infinite Jest-ian moments: trying somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something's been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.

And so I thrust toward the faded feelings, tangible artifacts, or photographic evidence of life's moments that are gone, gone, gone. Gone is the admissions counselor with the French-sounding last name who encouraged me to apply and reminded me of a Lewis and Clark fur trader. Gone is the piano teacher with a strict kindness who called my home and in his lovely Texas cadence told me how he'd enjoyed my Haydn and Chopin and made sure my piano helped me pay for tuition. Gone is that piano playing, once a daily ritual, often disparaged as drudgery but ultimately another emphatically maudlin ache of loss. Nostalgia for college is like a nostalgia for those we once loved but no longer do; the lovely memories remain, sterile and preserved in a vacuum-sealed container with silica gel packets and a double-lock Ziploc, but can never, even with the archivist's preservative efforts, render the same fresh fragrances they once did.

Perhaps Camus was right and nothing is more absurd (comforting?) than that "divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting." College is the well-preserved ghost I brace with the ever-unraveling scraps of memory. Yet when the exercise of remembrance seems futile, or runs dry, I think of Doringers.

No longer are there classes, crunching through snow in unfashionable loungewear, teachers in pink tights, symposia on Primitivistic makeup but even the next morning, after the beer has been drank, the last flamin' hot crunch silenced, those recognizable orange stains remain – under fingernails and in the creases of one's mouth – casually hinting at times already lost to the past. When my gait is slowed and my neck goitered what will endure of college but the vestiges of three years' follies and joys and eruditions? Will the spiciest bits, however reluctantly, slowly disappear with the morning's soapy water?

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Oakland. She last wrote in these pages about fancies. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She blogs here and tumbls here.

"Jigsaw Falling Into Place" - Radiohead (mp3)

"My Whole World's Coming Apart" - John Maus (mp3)

"Life's Zombies" - Lil B (mp3)

In Which We Behaviorally Condition Ourselves

Fancies

by JOANNA SWAN

B.F. Skinner used rats and electricity to prove it. Mothers use cajoling and dessert, with varying degrees of success. For me, the ambrosia of positive reinforcement was chicken pot pie and a clean plate. Now I cannot tell whether it was the polished plate or subsequent affirmation that brought pleasure; ultimately, whether pilloried or praised, being made an example of is rarely as rewarding as it is for those the exemplar serves to motivate.    

At age 9, by way of good parenting or vestigial puritanical roots or both, I had learned to clean my plate; as I polished off my chicken pot pie at the neighbors' while Brittany and Brooke mashed crumble-crust and peas into inedible mire, their mother noted how "Joanna finished her plate," the ellipses audibly suggestive in her voice - I was not cardholding member in the Picky Gang.

the authorUnpleasantness of acting as upstanding dining paragon to my playmates aside, my habits expanded to include not only clean-plate niceties, but also: a fondness for Sizzler and all-you-can-eat, a wish to try all boba tea flavors at Quickly (especially the unpronounceable ones), a small army of exotic herbs from the Co-Op's bulk section, a thirst for collection or aggregation or a comprehensive grasp of any sensation remaining to be archived and experienced.

Being into a lot of things, all at once, can have its perks but sometimes I wonder if I won't end up like Henry Darger with his ten-thousand page epic of weather reports; or like Anderson Cooper's mom, with her impressive collection of food dating from the post-War years. Life in the Bay Area exacerbates these fears, and not only because it's maybe the closest thing Northern California has to New York, or because trash queens and green gurus cohabitate with sybarites and socialites alike. 

It's more that there is this impregnable fount of sensory output, observable in varying degrees of Overwhelming – I could sit in this cafe, at this breakfast nook, on this fucking miniature pastel stool at the Tutti Frutti fro-yo, slowly digesting the ceaseless cascade around me, and synchronously witness the declension of all productive pursuits. The flaneuse par excellence, immobilized by her stimuli.

The busses in Berkeley are quiet. They are, like many surprisingly utopian singularities of the region, segueing towards some definition of sustainability – in this case, hydrogen fuel cell technology – and are satisfied to flit from stop to stop, ebullient like the hummingbird graphic plastered across their sides.  Punctuated with alarming frequency by the sirens of rescue vehicles and police cruisers, the streets in Berkeley are smooth and efficient, until they become the clogged traffic paroxysms found most often between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m. 

Berkeley's streets are not Oakland's streets, and the architecture around the latter's Lake Merritt in particular – a throwback to the Sixties' ranch-style, that Burt Bacharach of architecture (think mauve, sliding doors and plenty of carpeting) – seems on the whole as forgotten as its pavement, pock-marked with cracking maws that if ventured upon by bike lead to some serious coccygeal agony. Oakland is served by many of the same busses as is its northern neighbor. Yet its stops often seem more forlorn, bedecked with indescribable fabrics, soiled articles, and once, the words "dirty n-----" juxtaposed atop an ad featuring a very caucasian toddler and juvenile Golden Retriever. One day I found an unopened pack of unsalted butter near the stop at Franklin and 14th, and many fine comestibles resulted.

In a timely and germane piece on beautiful blogs, Sadie Stein observed that it is possible to fall "down the picturesque-vintage-design-craft rabbit hole and emerge three hours later, bleary-eyed and full of self-loathing." The Bay Area is almost like the physical manifestation of this terror-trip (incidentally, a search for "handmade" Etsy items spawns 40,000 from San Francisco alone) and as Stein notes, it might truly be possible to see "the next twenty years of your life go by" whilst engrossed in the Berklhemian brilliance of a Khitchari Kraut or tea-infused tofu.  

So free butter notwithstanding, baking is all but unnecessary, the finest no-knead home-bake dwarfed by Messieurs Miette, Arizmendi and Semifreddo. The Bay Area inspires and intimidates your senses: it feeds you new rice grains from terra untried; single-origin beans of cacao and coffee that tickle new fancies, and sometimes a hole in your pocket; the finest ferments of kombucha and injera; and a few tousle-haired boys on bikes with drip coffee and a Whole Foods distribution contract at the ready. In Chinatown, there are $2 curry tofu banh mi joints slowly colonized by young urban professionals and Yelpsters galore; and there is Tom's Bakery, whose reviews on that hallowed ratings website run Proustian in their charmed reminiscence: 

You could hear the machines churning and the must [sic] aroma of fresh fortune cookies being made.

As she walks further down 9th Street, she is met with a heavenly sweet smell that only Arizmendi's chocolate things could rival. She discovers a discreet little fortune cookie bakery that is open and making fortune cookies. For $3, a bag of delicious chocolate fortune cookies became her breakfast.

Located right behind my old church, we used to smell the cookies baking all the time. And then, we'd get hungry.

I saw their machines at work.  Smells delicious. 

One can still smell the cookie aroma and hear the machines churning inside.

The goods are fresh and you hear, smell, and see the cookies being made right there. 

Smell! See! Hear! All within one dingy, creaky factory on 9th and Harrison, the pot-holiest of rues.  How, then, to cultivate a Zen-like discipline in the face of such temptation?

They tell me that meditation allows one to train the brain to ignore life's annoyances: street traffic, dampness in the home, innumerable choices, potholes, and high energy bills. Perhaps I set my sights too high. Laziness or hopefulness or both preclude daily meditation though because more often than not, there is a counterbalance to the dolor. Unfortunate that the upside is as frighteningly overwhelming as the negatives it so helpfully nullifies.  

If it's true that hemlines follow history and fashion acts as benchmark, my mien has gone the way of Kate Bush, or the delphic Willie in Altman's Three Women and that means dark lips and long skirts and cable-knit sweaters with built-in belts and wool socks with brogues. Also, myriad scarves.  

More succinctly, this suggests that I'm dressing for dotage because the Kate Bush look is putatively that of an eccentric older woman, more likely than not one with a surplus of dreamcatchers, Tibetan spice mixes, and novelty beeswax candles under her silk obi belt. Since it's as far as I can see pretty unintentional I would guess that it's either some absurd subconscious drive to discourage ne'er-do-wells, a secret admiration for Ms. Bush and hipster sorceresses et al., or else a reflection of my daily distractions: innumerable bicycle boulevards to traverse, galleries to discover, vegan donuts with exorbitant prices and exotic glazes to salivate over, Occupy assemblies to join or impugn.  

Whether reflected in Baba Yaga dressing or no, sensory suffrances and joys alike have a guileful tendency to remind me of death.

Even if I were to make it a distinct goal to "taste every restaurant in Temescal" or "intimately acquaint myself with the finest jiaozi in Chinatown," I'd ineluctably grow in both years and corpulence before realizing said goals. I can finish the flaky pie on my plate; the east bayshore alone could demand a decadal investment at minimum. Given my relative youth, I'm curious as to whether those twice or thrice my age feel any less perturbed by what they're potentially missing out on, what they could be gaining from the cornucopian offerings of the world. Am I simply unsatisfied like Aesop's Fox, longing for his grapes, or the Raven for his cheese? Will there be a point in my true antiquity when the weight of my experiences counterpoises with those left unturned?  

I suspect there is little satisfaction to be found in surfeit of a metaphor. The desire to amass experiences both tangible and fleeting remains intact and in some absurd vestigial pointlessness is probably what powersed me through swaths of Red Baron pizza Friday nights immemorial. Age, I realize, becomes sole signatory to the attainment of greater experience, the hordes of knowledge and sensory titillation we seek: a pandora's box of a broader, tastier, and more brilliant palette, with wrinkles as inexorable partner in crime.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Oakland. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She blogs here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the girl scouts.

Jeff Koons "Easyfun-ethereal" paintings courtesy of the Guggenheim.

"Life in L.A." - Ariel Pink (mp3)

"Too Young' - Phoenix (mp3)

"A Real Woman" - Squarepusher (mp3)