Identity Crisis 103: Becoming Charlotte



"Who wants to live forever?"



Knowing my literary bent as you do, you are no doubt wondering, "Which Charlotte?" Charlotte Bronte? Charlotte the spider from Charlotte's Web? Charlotte from Sex and the City?" Yes, yes, yes. All of the above.

Since I change my name every ten years, whether I need it or not, there are only six years remaining for me to grow into my next name. I'm running way behind. I should have started becoming Charlotte as soon as I moved to SoCal. How shall I start?

I'll start with what's most immediate. Charlotte York, the upper West Side brunette from Sex and the City. Time and again, men tell me she's the only character on the show they like. You'd think it would be Samantha, queen of the NSA hookup. Or Miranda, the law partner with whom no one would wonder if he'd have to pay her way. I understand perfectly why Carrie, the writer, has no appeal. Besides, as every man alive has vehemently informed me, she's ugly.

But Charlotte, the prim and proper, cotton sundress, cashmere-for-fall, baby-mad, living by The Rules, Smith College girl? Now she's the stuff of men's dreams. Playing into those age-old stereotypes, she's the brunette, and brunettes are for marrying.

The first step to becoming Charlotte? Hm. Where do I begin this psychic self-surgery? I've got to start small. If I ran out and dyed my hair, restricted my writing to diary entries about my dream home in Encinitas, and took to obsessing about my thighs all in one week, I'd be liable to crack up.

I'll do what any Smith girl would do. Start at the library. I'll check out every book by Martha Stewart, Julia Child, and the editors of Modern Bride magazine.

The baby-madness is going to be tough. First I'll have to save up for Essure, but once that's finished, I'll have to pretend to be devastated to the point of insanity when my hubbikins and I can't conceive. Luckily, my innate love of dogs will provide me with a Baby Beard.

Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.

I'll be so torn up at not being able to breed that my darling man will forgive my running right out and adopting every dog at the Encinitas Humane Society. And buying myself a pair of rust-colored Irish Wolfhounds on top of that. It is the saddest thing IN THE WORLD when a woman fails to achieve motherhood, after all. Oh. So. Sad. In addition to all those dogs I may just require a multi-year jaunt around the globe. You know, to recover my sense of joy and purpose.

Hold it! I'm getting away from zee Essence de Charlotte. She is all sweetness and light, optimism and ladylike elegance.

Fuck. I've got my work cut out for me. That lobotomy's looking better every day.

Identity Crisis 102: Cliche

I first realized I was nothing but a cliched hack when I was 8. It was a dark and stormy night. My mother had just bought the farm and I was in the middle of yet another silent midnight screaming match with God. In a flash, it came to me: "You, my darling little red-haired girl, are such a cliche. Look at you, sitting here in your rural bed, wordlessly expressing an utterly typical, trite, overwrought, contrived, bullshit response to death. Hell, even Freud could do better than this schmaltz. You'll probably soon have a wicked stepmother, be beaten like a red-headed stepchild, endure clumsy molestations by your step-brother, take up secret drinking at school, join a group of misfit stoners, and end up in art school, unable to differentiate between rape and true love."

And so it came to pass. I lived each cliched moment to the fullest in a bold attempt at pure conformity which continues to this very day. My poems are at best pathetic explorations of banality. My novel is a disaster of commercialism. My blogs are Sex and the City reruns. My love life is an echo of a long-dead feeling. My career is the shadow of a whisper of a joke about women in the workplace. My play is such a self-indulgent piece of suicidal shit that even a narcissist would notice it is nothing but a cry for attention.

Essentially and importantly, "I" do not even exist. I never have and I never will. This thing called me is just a recycled bit of electric chemistry programmed to react to its surroundings in specific ways. I am a walking, talking, fucking cliche constructed of all the cliches that have gone before. I will no longer bother to feel or to think or to do. Why waste energy? Why not just float along the stream of time until my battery dies and my chemical components are once more returned to the stockpile of molecules from which all future things--which will also be cliches--are made?

That I was born is a cliche.

That I once had parents is a cliche.

That I write is a cliche.

All I write are cliches.

That I need food, shelter, love is a cliche.

That I love what I love is a cliche.

Nothing originates within me or through me.
Nothing exists but this massive cliche;
the world, life, cliche, cliche.