From the desk of Maggie Malam.

Dear whoever never used these envelopes
(so that I could buy them from eBay in 2009),
Thank you.
Love,
Maggie

Dear penpals,
Watch your mailbox!
Love,
Maggie

Requiem for a lost friend.

I just read through all the mail you ever sent me. I couldn’t bear to get rid of it. I couldn’t bear to consign it to the recycling bin to form someone else’s future papergoods. You were such a good penpal.

It’s been quite a while since we were close, and over a year since I realized things were beyond repair, realized our friendship was over. It still astonishes me how we made this perfect arc, from strangers to best friends and back to strangers. My heart still aches for the best days of our friendship, and my heart still hurts when I think of how you treated me. For months, you couldn’t muster the words to tell me that there was no love left in your little heart for me.

But re-reading the letters you sent me, I realize that, for a while, we were on the same page.  We were so perfectly attuned to each other. We were deliriously pleased just being friends and being young and silly and snotty. We reveled in our flawless taste and perfect judgement. Good music and good quotations and good coffee and each other’s company were enough to sustain us.

We were full of shit and too critical and high on the sound of our own laughter. I forgive us these sins now, because we were young and stupid and we didn’t know better. We thought we knew everything, but we didn’t know anything. And we meant well and tried hard.

Your letters still made me laugh, and every curve of your obnoxious handwriting still charmed me a little.

I still need you. I don’t need to be friends with you anymore, but the fact that you and I were an “us” still comes up. You’re still part of who I am today—an “important part” of who I am? I don’t want to give you too much credit. You certainly helped shape who I became in college. And thanks to you and our MySpace life and our endless caffeinated Internet time and all that live music and disposable income, and thanks to your boyfriend at the time, I met my boyfriend. He’s coming to share my bed for the weekend and I owe a tiny bit of gratitude to you for the fact that my boyfriend and I met in the first place.

My quality of life was improved by your presence, even though it didn’t last. I loved you as completely as a girl can love her best friend. We’ve influenced each other. I can see that simply in your Internet presence, which is all I have left of you, it’s undeniable… we’ve influenced each other, even if we don’t recognize each other’s every reference like we used to.

And according to your new blog, hooray, you’ve gone and gotten a new outlook and had a most beneficial year wholly devoid of me.

Don’t you hurt for me at all? You seem to have replaced my affections and time and company for high heels and eyeliner without a doubt or regret. Do you wonder about me? Would you monitor my Facebook page if I had one? I had to delete my Facebook profile, because I couldn’t stand to see evidence of you continuing on blithely without me while I was hurting so much. I wish I could get into your head, but I’m also afraid of what I’d find in there. Do you inquire about me from our mutual friends? I ask about you, hoping for a piece of gossip juicer than the last I heard. You still show up in my dreams, but I can’t make you love me when I’m sleeping.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I couldn’t make you love me in real life either. Our friendship always cooled over the summer, but that summer, I barely heard from you. You stopped returning my calls. It was okay, I had boys to worry about, and I looked forward to catching up with you when I moved back to school. But then it wasn’t like it was supposed to be. You were supposed to behave a certain way. You stopped following our script.

We had only two or three stilted, one-sided conversations before I realized that you didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I was afraid to confront you, but I knew I needed to do something as early as Labor Day weekend. I still can’t believe I let you cut off all communication. I can’t believe I didn’t say something right away, but I was scared. I can’t believe I just let you sit across the classroom from me. A year before that, we were getting trouble for sitting next to each other and talking too much.

I remember getting drunk that September and complaining to everyone about how you treated me. You never told me anything was wrong, you never told me you didn’t like the way I was treating you, you never… but that doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I think it matters that I drunk-dialed my mom and cried about you, though.

I still had to see you, everywhere, for months. At school, at work, out downtown, even in my own fucking house, you’d still hang out with my roommate and I’d burn with the shame of being rejected by you.

Finally, I wrote you a letter in December, in which I pleaded with you, my (one-time, no-longer) best friend, to explain why you didn’t like me and why you wanted nothing to do with me. You couldn’t be bothered to reply, even in the medium we were both so comfortable with, words on paper. I got up my nerve in February to ask, and it turns out you felt I criticized you too much for liking “bands and fashions and mascaras” that “weren’t good enough for me.”

Whatever. Maybe I’m too critical and maybe you’re too shallow. Maybe our friendship would have petered out naturally. But you decided you didn’t want to be my friend, and you didn’t tell me. You just gave me the silent treatment. I didn’t deserve that. It still hurts me that our mutual friends didn’t stand up for me at all. They watched you treat me like shit and still got drunk with you every weekend. (You’re cuter than I am, so I guess I can’t entirely blame them.)

I’m so relieved that I don’t have to live in the same city as you anymore, don’t have to attend the same classes anymore, don’t have to avoid you in the crowd of a show I can’t enjoy because I’m distracted by your presence. But I can’t eradicate you from my life completely.

You were my best friend, but now, even though it doesn’t matter and we’re not friends and I don’t like you, I feel competitive. I want to succeed before you, I want to be happier than you, I want you to stay all-talk-and-no-action for longer than I do. I want Brenna and Robin to love me more than they love you. I hope you stay busy drinking too much, wasting countless idle hours on Facebook, lamenting another failed relationship (already), being all “strong” and “independent.” And by the way, they call it Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Wednesday, not Gratuitous Picture of Yourself Every Fucking Post.

You dumped me, unceremoniously, and it still hurts me, but not as much as it did last year, and someday it won’t hurt enough to mention. Someday you’ll just be the girl who was dating the boy who went to high school with the boy I love. Someday you’ll just be a girl who was my friend for a while in college.

Thanks for introducing me to some bands that I’ll love for much longer than I ever loved you.

On feeling small.

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

—Walter Benjamin, from “The Storyteller,” 1936

I just want to know what I should want.

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Reason I like dating you #55, the cold weather edition

I am so looking forward to the fact that, this month, we’ll be seeing each other often. I get to cozy up to you and take advantage of the warmth you give off in three weekends out of four.

Hello, November!

I’m intimidated. I haven’t updated my blog in a while, so this post should be a good one, huh? But now I’m overwhelmed. What’s new?, you ask, nothing and everything. I feel like I’m floundering in a post-grad wasteland.

I miss my dearest friends, and my boyfriend. I live in Minneapolis, and so does Christina (and I have other friends here), but my boyfriend Eddie lives in Chicago and Ashley is in Korea and Brenna is in Chicago and Sarita is in D.C. and Amanda is in Dallas and Robin is in Iowa City, and everyone else is far, far away, too. Heather and her fam are in Des Moines, which might as well be far, far away. Sometimes the pain of missing someone lays dormant until it flares powerfully because of a word or a You’ve Got Mail quote or a perfect piece of mail.

But some people aren’t that far away, and I can’t muster the enthusiasm to call them. And I think to myself, “Well, she doesn’t call, so I don’t call, but I’m not sure if I miss her enough to call, but I can’t afford to do anything if I do call, and I’d rather just stay in with my book.”

I feel like I’m kind of a mess right now. I’m discouraged by a lack of a “real” job but I’m too discouraged to do anything to disrupt the comfort of not having a full-time job. I haven’t applied for a job in a month, I haven’t told anyone who’d want my money that I can’t afford to pay back my student loans, and every little irritant gets under my skin and really pisses me off or upsets me lately. And in the back of my mind, I always know I’m not blogging and I should be.

However, I’m currently enjoying the following:
-listening to live music at The Cedar
-downloading Feist on French radio
-reading Meaghan O’Connell’s blog Life is hard. Here is someone.
-my oh-so-obliging-to-my-every-literary-whim Hennepin County Library, which gets me everything I want to read delivered to my local library with remarkable speed. Last month, it was the new Dave Eggers and the entire Griffin and Sabine collection, this month it’s the new Michael Chabon and the complete works of Lorrie Moore. I spend a lot of time at hclib.org happily surveying the position of all my holds, putting more books on hold, and watching as books go from “In Transit” to “Being Held.” Some days, all I have to look forward to is going to the library to pick up a book.

Reason I like dating you #54

We’re just a couple of over-reacting, negative-dwelling,
worst-case-scenario-imagining romantics.

Thanksgiving in September.

Thank you dear reader, for continuing to click on my blog when I didn’t post for a month.

Thank you Wes Anderson, for making lovely movies.

Thank you Minneapolis Park and Rec, for showing a Wes Anderson movie this evening at the lake.

Thank you my dear Christina, for your pleasant company, no matter my mood. I don’t deserve you.

Thank you my dears Brenna, Amanda and Robin, for sending the wonderful mail that keeps me going everyday.

Thank you gold eyeliner, for making my eyes look so blue.

Thank you straightener, for putting perfect creases back into my black pants.

Thank you Iowa, for taking good care of my friends while I am home. I’ll be back for a visit soon.

Thank you everything that is good and holy, for allowing me to see my boyfriend so frequently this summer. I just saw him, and I’ll see him again soon, and I couldn’t be more content (unless we lived in the same city).

Thank you dear boyfriend, for being a wonderful penpal, friend and giving me so much love and so many hugs.

Thank you dear Mom, for calling me “Daughter” when I call you “Mother,” and for always leaving the outside light on when I leave.

Thank you Stephenie Meyer, for writing ridiculously addicting  young adult vampire fiction, and thank you Michael Chabon, for writing sentences that leave me breathless.

Thank you Hennepin County Library, for generously providing me with all the books I desire at the library nearest me. I truly appreciate the convenience.

On the view from my high horse.

Perhaps this constitutes me being outrageously hypocritical. Oh well.

Please take a look at this Telegraph article, listing their favorite “20 worst Dan Brown sentences.” I got a good chuckle out of it. It’s just the sort of thing that rewards me for having “High Standards.” I have nothing but scorn for Dan Brown, and this article allows me to feel good about myself by laughing at his terrible sentences.

Not that every sentence I write is terrific, or that I hold every author I read to my “High Standards.” Okay?

This is coming to you from me, Maggie Malam, aka the girl who just devoured her third installment of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer. I could point to a hundred terrible sentences in every book, but I am still compelled by the vampire drama. The pre-teen in me eats up the sexiness and simplicity.

The sweet sounds of fall 2009.

Some days, I wake up and nothing sounds good.

Suddenly, none of the music I’d been listening to appeals to me. This usually happens to me once a season. But it feels like this lack of music has been a gaping hole all summer. I’ve filled the time with the Savage Lovecast, god bless Dan Savage, but haven’t listened to much else.

However, last week, things turned around. My music sounds good again.

Early in the summer,  Eddie and I saw a Minneapolis band called Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps.  Caroline and her band were all kinds of terrific, and throughly charmed me. I love their CD, Backyard Tent Set. They performed with a Wisconsin band called The Daredevil Christopher Wright.

The Daredevil Christopher Wright made a big impression too. It’s three brothers (Jason, John and Jesse), and they just released their first full-length album. One of the songs they played at the show was called “The East Coast.” It builds to this magnificent layered crescendo, and it blew me away to hear the three of them perform it. Before it was even over, I knew it would stick with me for awhile. It’s up on their Daytrotter session, but that version didn’t really capture the magic of the live performance.

Then yesterday, I found a podcast called Phoning It In. It’s from two guys in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. They call artists, chat, and have them perform, all over the phone. They describe it on the website as, “lo-fi is the right fi: dj talksonthephone calls up all your favorite musicians for live over-the-phone performances and awkward conversation.” A bunch of artists I like have recorded sessions, along with tons of bands I’ve never heard of. They’ve been cranking out shows consistently for a couple years. Nadav has been the host for the ones I’ve listened to so far, and his voice is sexy and soothing. I appreciate his enthusiasm and thoughtful questions.

So The Daredevil Christopher Wright recorded a session, and the first song they performed was “The East Coast.” As Nadav says afterward, “I was unprepared for those harmonies to just take off.” It immediately brought me back to the Des Moines show and reminded me how much I love the song. I checked their tour dates. They are playing Minneapolis (at one of my favorite bars, The Nomad World Pub) with Caroline Smith on September 20th!

This wasn’t the first time music sounded good again, but it really confirmed that this is shaping up to be a good fall, musically. All of the sudden, I can spend all day on mp3 blogs, downloading and sampling and catching up with bands, new and old. It’s nice to have good music stuck in my head all day long, new playlists to delve into, and new downloads that need attention. I feel satisfied in a way that I haven’t all summer. I’m also filling up my calendar with September and October shows from some of the bands mentioned below, and really looking forward to all the live music to come.

My other musical excitement:
-the blog Certain Songs
-more episodes of the podcast Phoning It In: Eef Barzelay, Lou Barlow, Thao, Jens Lekman, etc.
-soon to be released albums and shows from Thao and the Get Down, Stay Down (album, show) and We All Have Hooks for Hands (album out soon, show)