diana vilibert

Maybe There Aren’t Any Secrets Left to Tell

“Even as fully grown adults we remain secretly starved for guidance and instruction. Many of us are walking around with the uneasy feeling that we missed the first day of class and wondering if there are CliffNotes. Most people desperately want someone to tell them what life’s about, what people are for, what we’re supposed to do—how to be a human being.

…Titles such as The Secret, The Rules, and The Game pretty much say it all: Someone’s finally going to initiate us into the select society of Those in the Know, for only $23.95 retail.

…When we’re children, all the books we read are handed down to us, like the Ten Commandments, by grownups, who seem like, and sort of are, a different order of being from ourselves. They’re the gods of childhood, bigger and older and more experienced; they know more than we do, imparting what wisdom to us they think we can bear, empowered to tell us what to do. I’m over 40 now, no longer by even the most charitable definition a young adult, and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do. There aren’t any grownups. And maybe there aren’t any secrets left to tell.”

- Tim Kreider, via City Paper

Tell me how you really feel.

Wrong responses to the statement “this is going to be either the smartest or the dumbest decision I’ve made in a long time”:

1. “Yeah, probably the dumbest.”

So, blogging this means drinks are *definitely* off, right?

A couple of years ago, when I was writing about some good naked times at the local swing club for a journalism class, my professor suggested that perhaps I wanted to consider writing under a pseudonym. I did consider it, but very briefly. I didn’t think I would get the same rush from seeing my byline if it wasn’t really my name. So I put my name on the thing and never looked back.

And by “never looked back” I mean that sometimes a boy will ask me out for a drink and then he’ll take out his phone and Google me right in front of my face and I will try to stop him and then this will happen:

Me: It’s going to scare you.
Boy: I like a woman who scares me.
Me: No you don’t. You think you do but you don’t.
Boy: What’s this…? …Is this a list of people you’ve slept with?
Me: Um, no. That was a joke. Can you please…
Boy: …queefs? Balls?
Me: Oh, god. Please stop.
Boy: …you want to be bent over a kitchen table? Did you write this?!

Then, I kid you not, he actually backed away from me, slowly, with his hands up in the universal symbol for “I surrender” or “I don’t have a gun” or “actually, never mind about that drink.”