“Former members of Joy Division have hit out at the sale of — and media reporting on — a kitchen table formerly owned by the band’s frontman Ian Curtis. Meanwhile, the man selling the table says he can’t wait to get rid of it…. The man selling the table, Tel Harrop, says that he was careful when wording the listing not to focus on the more macabre aspects of the object, which was present in the room where Curtis took his life in 1980. ‘When I put the listing on I could have said a lot of things but I didn’t want to, you know. I would have bought the table if it had been his lounge table — I just bought it because it was an unusual item. Everyone’s got the records — I‘ve got the table.’”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTUb36llL1g

I always always always feel manipulated by Phoenix, because it is almost as if they have come up with their music in a lab using elements from everything I have liked in the past to design a sound that is completely familiar yet undeniably appealing to me, but then I have to forgive them because their music sounds completely familiar yet undeniably appealing to me and the closer I get to death the less interested I am in struggling to appreciate anything new and unusual when there is so much I am already comfortable with out there. Like this.

“’I have used it in Brooklyn Bowl, the Gutter, Yankee Stadium, many streets, bars, parks, people’s homes,’ one 29-year-old educator, who lives in Crown Heights and teaches classes at a popular city attraction, says of his Iolite, a handheld vaporizer that looks like a walkie-talkie,” is just one of the many remarkable sentences in this article about how “yuppies” are “secretly” getting stoned in public.

1.

“Mr. Vollmann is 54, heterosexual and married with a daughter in high school. He began cross-dressing seriously about five years ago…. He said his wife, who is an oncologist, is not thrilled with his outré experiments and keeps her distance. ‘Probably when the book comes out, it’ll be the first she’s heard of it,’ he said. ‘I always try to keep my wife and child out of what I do. I don’t want to cause them any embarrassment.’ He asked that his wife not be interviewed for this article.”

2.

“We come from very mixed backgrounds. Kitten was raised Christian but is now Pagan. Doll is also a Pagan, and Brynn is Agnostic. One huge challenge was creating a ceremony that included all the beliefs of each bride. Kitten is very traditional because of how she was raised. She wanted her father there and a white wedding dress. Doll, not a huge believer in legal marriages, leaned more towards handfasting and bonding. Brynn, married before, had little interest in weddings at all. We also had to work with in the legalities of the state. As being married to more than one person is not yet legal, we had to combine handfasting, legally binding documents, and legal marriage to come to a configuration we all felt equal in.”

Did everyone go to see Two Boys, Nico Muhly’s new opera, which will have its final performance tomorrow at the Metropolitan Opera? And if so, have you seen any other operas this season, or last, or ever? The reason I ask is that my internet feeds for the past month or so have been filled with an unprecedented number of updates from those who were inspired to wade into the operatic waters for the first time, which, for someone like me — who came to appreciate the form relatively late in life, and has spent my share of time trying to persuade skeptics to join me in this conversion — is exciting.

Even better, most who went (and were tweeting about it) seemed to love the show, and with good reason. The plot, which involves a mysterious murder and fake internet identities, was both easy to follow and suspenseful; I spoke to many people who were surprised (in a good, edge-of-your-seat way) by the ending, particularly in the racing second act. The stage was an interesting and very watchable combination of sparse “real-world” settings juxtaposed with projected computer screens, which often conveyed internet chats (and cams) as they unfolded in real time (but with singing). Most important, the music was beautiful, particularly the gorgeous choral scenes depicting the constantly mutating chaos that is (or perhaps “was”) the internet circa 2001, when the opera is set.

The opera felt very “alive” in the most literal of ways; it’s rare to go to the Met and see the composer bound up on stage to take a bow with the singers after the curtain falls. The audience was relatively young and very gay; a quick check of Grindr during intermission showed approximately 3000 men seeking hookups, all within fifty feet of the phone. (I’m exaggerating but only slightly.) That the opera featured actual webcam sex added to the sense that we were dealing with something very contemporary, but in the most artistic of ways.

Two Boys is at the end of its run, but let’s say that, after seeing it, or, we hope, planning to scarf it down tomorrow, you’re now officially intrigued by opera and want to know what to see next. My completely objective advice is to get tickets as soon as possible to Die Frau ohne Schatten (“The Woman without a Shadow”) by Richard Strauss, which still has four performances in the run.

I will admit to feeling some trepidation before I went to this one, on account of the fact that 1) the opera is long (four hours), 2) I had never seen it, 3) I had never heard the music, and 4) the synopsis of the opera made it sound impossibly complicated. I had just seen Two Boys: did I really need to go to another opera? I felt tired and lazy, apathetic; if the Metropolitan Opera was an old friend, I wanted to postpone our plans for a few months.

Thankfully I didn’t bail and, as it turned out, I saw something rare and transformative; leaving the theater, I felt like I had been immersed into a magic pool of water and been pulled out a different person, somehow new and improved.

I won’t get too deep into the story except to say that it’s about two romantic couples, the first a mortal Emperor and a quasi-immortal Empress (who needs a mortal “shadow” to have children and save her husband from being turned into stone), and the second a working-class husband (the Dyer) and his wife who are struggling, mostly on account of the wife’s frustration with her ongoing poverty and her dreams of a better life. The Empress descends into the working-class residence with the hope to entice the wife to sell her shadow in exchange for a life of glamour and passion. If it sounds complicated or far-fetched or convoluted, it’s really not; one of the great things about this production is that you don’t need to know anything going in; just sit back and listen — it all makes sense.

Like Two Boys, the opera — despite being almost 100 years old — feels very contemporary, especially during the scenes in which the Dyer and his wife argue, with him — good-natured but heartbreakingly naïve — counseling her to adopt an attitude of patience, while she lashes out at him in (understandable) frustration. The music in these scenes is impossibly tender, before it surges forth with a kind of raucous, stentorian fury that characterizes a handful of great operas by Strauss, who was equally comfortable with both lyricism and dissonance, often using both within seconds of each other. Frau also uses a gigantic orchestra, which in addition to providing wall-of-sound bliss means that the singers must have huge voices to be heard. With this cast, it wasn’t a problem; they were all astounding, and especially Christine Georke as the Dyer’s wife, whose voice seemed to gather strength as it rolled over the stage and broke over the audience.

The production is equally massive as it alternates between the two worlds, the upper realm a hall of mirrors and the lower — which rises out of the stage floor like some kind of mythic Gargantua as the music pounds — the decrepit, industrial apartment of the Dyer and his wife. The lights, also spectacular, regularly splay out over the audience like flocks of birds taking off over the sea.

Not knowing the opera before I went didn’t bother me at all (and shouldn’t concern you); if anything, it made me more vulnerable to its power, because I had no expectations about what it (or the singers) should sound like. I also thought about opera-goers 100 years ago, and how they probably went to the theater with little-to-no expectation to ever hear the music again. It was a relief to hear live music completely divorced from the digital reproductions to which we’ve all become so accustomed.

Like Two Boys, but in a very different way, Die Frau grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me out of the doldrums that so often threaten to define life, particularly these days when, if your life is anything like mine, it can feel like an endless, tedious scroll through an infinite Facebook. I have an old t-shirt imprinted with the slogan “LIFE IS SHORT/OPERA IS LONG” and after the performance, as I walked up Broadway to the 1 train, feeling somehow stunned and excited, as the flashing lights of the passing traffic seemed to continue the score, the words had never held more meaning.

Matthew Gallaway is the author of The Metropolis Case.

★★ Up went the shade and there there were: snowflakes, zipping sideways or doing loops against the dark, drab background of the wet city. Straight, heavy rain replaced them, and then a new burst of snow, thicker and roiling, making a white blur of the river. The first-grader’s boots came out; the preschooler wore his hat. Before long, though, the symbolic performance had passed, in favor of mundane gray and cold. A swath of blue appeared over New Jersey, and stayed there, coming no closer, through the afternoon. Manhattan remained overcast, the exhausted clouds going nowhere. The clear sky to the west became a full spectrum, picturesquely dotted by dark clouds, past the ragged edge of the unmoving blanket, now dirty purple.

by Abe Sauer

Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet, new this week from Bloombury Press, is available from all sorts of places:

• Barnes & Noble

• McNally Jackson

• Amazon

• Your local independent

In addition, Minter is appearing tonight, November 13th, at 6 p.m. at the New School.

It’s a book one might call “a lifetime in the making.” For the last dozen years, Adam Minter has lived in Shanghai, writing about the global scrap industry, the fortunes it created, the lives and environments it’s ruined and how its fortunes paralleled those of the pre- and post-crash global economy. The result is Junkyard Planet, a one-of-a-kind inside look at the history and current place of the billion-dollar market for your scrap.

But more than just a junk journalist, Minter comes from junk; the son of a junkyard owner, Minter grew up watching the changes that reached from Guangdong to Houston to the front door of his family’s Minneapolis scrapyard. He longed to escape the industry that he’s still obsessed with.

The result is an infuriatingly enlightening story that will take a little cheer out of your tree’s Christmas lights while at the same time challenging perceptions about “garbage” as a singularly negative term. I spoke with the author in Shanghai about the book, China, and “growing up junk.”

The Awl: Riddle me this, junk man: why was I both depressed and encouraged by this book?

Adam Minter: Over time, I’ve developed a grim analogy to explain it to myself. Think of a terminally-ill patient who obtains a few extra months of life due to a high-tech miracle drug. On one hand, that’s really encouraging. On the other hand, there’s no escaping the inevitable.

It’s no secret that humanity is rapidly depleting the planet’s finite reserves of raw materials. Fortunately, there’s the recycling industry — the high-tech equivalent of a life-extending miracle. That’s the encouraging side of the equation. But no recycling process is perfect, and — in a sense — the recycling industry is just prolonging the inevitable reckoning for our mass consumption. As someone who’d like a guilt-free means of upgrading to an iPhone 5s, I find this all very depressing.

Does it ever boggle your mind as you cruise around Shanghai’s modern subway system, or between the city and Beijing at 302 km/h, that you’re doing it, more or less, in the garbage of your American peers?

I’ve developed a real interest in reincarnation, especially as it applies to inanimate objects. The power cord on my space heater? A previous life as a phone line in Wichita. The flip-flops I wear at the gym? The soles may have once insulated strands of Christmas tree lights in Duluth.

A few years ago I visited a pachinko machine recycling plant at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan. It’s an interesting business. The average lifespan of a pachinko machine in a Japanese pachinko parlor is around three months; after that, the salarymen who play them every day want something new to dump coins into. Yet those same salarymen have very high expectations for the quality of their pachinko machines, and thus they’re built with the very best components, including super high-quality HD touchscreens.

So what happens to those touchscreens when they get to the recycling factory? They’re extracted, packed up, and shipped to GPS manufacturers in south China who — you guessed it — re-purpose them into new GPS devices that are then exported globally. In other words: it’s entirely possible that the GPS which helps you navigate a cross-country North American road trip may have once been responsible for the financial ruin of a Japanese accountant.

You’re what one (I guess only me) might call “old junk.” Your family was in the scrap business in Minneapolis. You also write: “[T]here’s nothing more enjoyable than sitting at a bank of video monitors with your grandmother and catching your employees stealing.” Really?

Recycling businesses, whether in Minneapolis or Shanghai, tend to start as family operations. My great-grandfather started out with little more than a backpack on the streets of Minneapolis, and over time he learned how to buy and sell waste. That’s knowledge he passed on to his children, who worked in the business, and that my grandmother passed onto me. I guess you could say that catching metal thieves was part of the syllabus.

As family heirloom knowledge goes, detecting scrap metal theft isn’t half as cuddly as making matzah ball soup, or speaking Yiddish. But what it lacked in romance, it sure made up for in hijinks. I was schooled by my grandmother.

This isn’t unique to my family. In Shanghai, I’ve noticed a lot of older women, fifty and above, working as roaming junk peddlers with young kids in tow. Every circumstance is different. But I’m pretty sure — this being China, and grandparents playing a big role in childrearing — those are grandmother-grandchild tandems. The lessons being passed between them probably aren’t much different than the ones that were passed through my family going back to the early twentieth century.

You write, “Until you’ve seen your first auto shredder, you can’t know.” When did you see your first auto shredder?

Can’t forget it. I was six or seven and my dad loaded me and a Taiwanese scrap dealer into his silver Cutlass and drove us over to North Star Steel in St. Paul. Then, as now, it was the only auto shredder and steel mill in the Twin Cities.

Anyway, we get out of the car in this dusty parking lot and I look up just as a flattened junker is dropped into the steaming maw of an auto shredder that — at the time — seemed like it was five stories tall. It was maybe half that. Then it happened again. And again. You have to understand, these machines were steampunk before anybody knew steampunk: massive, complex, steaming, tube and gear-encrusted devices built to fire the imaginations of seven-year-olds. So my dad tells me and the Taiwanese guy to follow him and we go around the back of the thing where fist-sized bits of metal are dropping from conveyors. Then I look back, and more cars are arriving. I was just flabbergasted.

What I didn’t know then, but know now, was that the Taiwanese guy was probably there looking for mixed metal fragments that he could export back home for hand-sorting into individual metals by the island’s (then) low-cost laborers. Ironically, the first Chinese scrap yard I ever visited — in 2002 — was a hand sorting facility for the kind of metal I saw flowing out of that North Star Steel shredder.

You describe some of the demeaning tensions at play between Chinese scrap buyers and American sellers. What is it about the scrap industry that gives it an old world commerce feel, like one might have imaged in the 17th century fur industry, or even the slave trade? Is it the subject matter — “dirty” garbage — or is there a genuine gallery of rogues element?

Nobody aspires to make a living sorting through other people’s garbage. Rather, people generally go into the trade because they lack other options. So, at least on the lowest rungs of the industry, it’s dominated by immigrants — illegal and legal, internal and international, the poorly educated, and those who face discrimination of some kind. Throw that all into a mixing bowl and you’re going to get a very bare-fisted kind of capitalism. And that culture persists, to a certain extent, even in economies where the scrap business has largely professionalized such as the United States.

I remember, one time, telling my great-uncle — a second generation scrap man, and the son of East European immigrants — that the scrap industry is the “boiler room of American capitalism.” He smiled at me and responded: “More like the sewer.” He’d done quite well in the industry, but he didn’t want his kids to have anything to do with it. And none did.

Maybe one of the book’s greatest triumphs is to make me interested in a whole chapter about things that happen in Houston. One specific detail is, despite ingenious technology in other areas, the headache that comes with sorting white polyethylene bottles from colored polyethylene bottles. Would reverse-engineering legislation to make recycling easier — like making only one kind of polyethylene bottle legal — stifle recycling innovations? Like with NASA, do we benefit from the advances in recycling technology without even knowing it?

The fact that Americans have such complicated stuff, and such diverse tastes, has driven pretty much every innovation in recycling technology since the 1950s. Cars are complicated and expensive to take apart; so technology had to be developed to do it. Likewise, red and yellow and white bottles are difficult to sort into their respective colors; so really complicated and technically sophisticated equipment involving infrared sensors had to be developed.

And this stuff is still being developed. So, yes, if Americans suddenly decided that — for the sake of the environment — liquids from salad dressing to bleach should be packaged in bottles made from the same gray plastic, it’d be bad for innovation. It’s odd when you think about it: we make complicated machines to clean up after our complicated products.

Everyone loves a caper and you talk a little about the grifts of the recycling business, like aluminum cans filled with rocks, something I believe I did in the 1980s, and the Chinese paper mill that “unpacked bales of imported American newspapers [and found] each stuffed with a cinder block.” What is the best scam of this sort you’ve ever heard about?

The guy in L.A. who had a hidden water tank installed beneath his truck. He’d go to scrap yards with loads of steel weighing a couple of thousands pounds — and hidden loads of water weighing two or three hundred pounds. I’ve heard different accounts of the weight. Anyway, trucks are weighed twice at scrap yards — when they arrive with the scrap, and after they’ve unloaded the scrap. The weight of the scrap for which they’re paid is the difference.

So this joker, he’d weigh-in with the scrap and the water, unload and then, when nobody was watching, he’d drain the water tank. Afterward, he’d weigh empty and the weight of the water would be added to the weight of the steel he carried. It made for a nice bonus. Until he was caught.

One of your points is that recycling as a business has gone on in the world since the first guy “beat a sword into a plowshare — and then tried to sell the plowshare.” So is America’s careless consumption of swords helping those who pound them into plowshares escape poverty?

What’s the cheaper way to get ten pounds of copper to make ballpoint pen balls? Dig a mine in Tibet, or hand-strip a pile of wire purchased from American electricians?

What’s great about the latter option, in addition to cost, is that it’s something that pretty much anybody can do. Whereas digging a copper mine is something that’s typically accessible only to the rich and well-connected. And that gets to the poverty-alleviating advantages of recycling: lots of people can start scrap businesses in lots of places. Mining? Some mines employ lots of people, but they tend to be very concentrated, geographically, and growth prospects are limited.

You note that plentiful America is the “Saudi Arabia of Scrap.” But actual Saudi Arabia and the Middle East get a mention too. What is the least wasteful developed place you’ve been?

Probably Tokyo. They have the money to buy and throw away lots of stuff, but the limited amount of space tends to make them very thrifty with what they have. Likewise, the Japanese obsession with quality means that they have a less disposable society than most developed economies.

When you took that first assignment to go to China and do a piece on the scrap business, you say you didn’t expect to stay for more than ten years. Do you know any foreigners who have been in China for more than even five years that expected to stay as long as they have?

Not a one. The question is, why?

Speaking for myself, I’ve found that China’s deepest appeal is to the accidental expat. Though there are exceptions, I’ve found that the people who moved to China always having wanted to move to China — and likely invested in learning the language before coming — tend to find their expectations are disappointed and leave.

Whereas the foreigners who stay are the ones who sort of stumble into a relationship with the place. For some people, the relationship-based culture that is China offers that kind of nutrition, if you will, and they thrive in it.

How has reporting on this often bleak subject — like the Christmas tree lights story — oh God, that story — changed your lifestyle over the years?

This Jew has yet to buy his first strand. But lord knows I’ve bought plenty of cheap products — electric razors to hot plates — with electrical cords that eventually went into a recycling bin or, yes, the trash.

To be honest, it was only during my sojourns in Chinese scrap yards, seeing the waves of American wastefulness turning up here, that I started to change my consumption habits. These days I do try to buy things that are designed to last, even if they cost me more. I’ve also become a big believer in buying refurbished products and products that can be repaired and upgraded. But I’ve been around this topic long enough to know that making a real impact means more than buying better-made luxury goods like smartphones. It’s a matter of reducing consumption overall, from hardback books to restraint takeout containers. Those are the hard steps and I’m not very good at them.

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade is available now. Get it in Kindle form and save some paper. Adam Minter is also the Bloomberg View Shanghai correspondent and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Mother Jones, and Scientific American, He writes regularly at his blog Shanghai Scrap. He also tweets. All images above used with the author’s permission.

Abe Sauer’s latest book is “Goodnight Loon.” He is also the author of the book “How to be: North Dakota.” Email him at abesauer @ gmail.com.

“Billions of years ago when the Red Planet was young, it appears to have had a thick atmosphere that was warm enough to support oceans of liquid water — a critical ingredient for life. The animation shows how the surface of Mars might have appeared during this ancient clement period, beginning with a flyover of a Martian lake. The artist’s concept is based on evidence that Mars was once very different. Rapidly moving clouds suggest the passage of time, and the shift from a warm and wet to a cold and dry climate is shown as the animation progresses. The lakes dry up, while the atmosphere gradually transitions from Earthlike blue skies to the dusty pink and tan hues seen on Mars today.”
 — I have nothing to add, I just think this is cool. You may not be as fascinated with it as I am, that’s fine. There’s plenty other Internet for you to go enjoy. Or maybe start your own website instead of spending your time complaining about the choices other people make. You know what? FUCK YOU. Asshole. [Via]

Dear Polly,

I am hoping you might help me with a peculiar personal problem. I apologize in advance if this is a bit vague. To begin with, I am your average 28-year-old fun-time party gal who is often overly drunk/brash, ‘one of the guys,’ sensitive to criticism/weirdo childhood and thus live a smaller life which I’ve overall been happy doing with great girlfriends of my own, cool hobbies, owning my own home, working a well-paying not particularly prestigious helping-people job that affords me lots of free time to do whatever I want. I definitely need therapy & a journal, which I plan to do, soon.

I’ve lived in a certain medium-sized city since moving here after college and just last year I began dating someone (great) with a cool group of friends — I’ve had a lot of fun. Recently boyfriend’s Best Friend began dating a new girl with prior connections to the friend group; she just moved to town over the summer. The problem? Whenever I’m around New Girl, I feel like garbage; through no fault of her own. She is nothing but polite and friendly and unobjectionable in every way. Also not drunk and embarrassing at social functions. Of course, in the past, I’ve met/become great friends with women who are smarter, more beautiful, more accomplished but I’ve somehow always been ok enough with my own special-snowflakeness to preserve my baby cool-girl ego. I suppose New Girl might be my particular brand of snow, but hers is Neimans and mine is Marshalls. I went to a smart person school, new girl went to the smartest person school, I’ve always dabbled in writing, new girl was a real writer, I work in a particular field, this person is now going to school in this same-ish helping people field — to basically be the boss of me (if you get my drift). Even our looks are similar. But I feel like that’s not really it?

My boyfriend did once admit offhand that he had a crush on her, which makes me feel bad but not overly worried, as new girl and Boyfriend’s Best Friend appear to be starring in the greatest movie romance of all time. Maybe I am just jealous of her whole life. Whenever I am around New Girl, my jaw is clenched, my fur fully bristled. I have to work really hard to be friendly and not weird or rude or standoffish, while inside my head I just want to move really far away, like drop everything and high-tail it to the other side of the country. I’ve brought it up to my sister, my friends, but they’re all basically like “what’s your problem? She’s so great!” I have never had this problem with another human being before, no jealousy issues etc, so I’m pretty confused about why I’m all of a sudden cruising Craigslist housing ads in low-population western mountain towns.

Please advise.

Greener and Greener

Dear Greener and Greener,

God, I love letters about jealousy. Love them. Because jealousy is delicious and terrible and it’s a gift from the gods above. Yes, it will eat you alive and turn you into a monster and ruin your life. But it’s also really rich and mysterious and not unlike falling madly in love — in its own twisted, deeply dissatisfying way.

Jealousy arouses the passions within. It gives you important information about your identity, your ego, your vanities and what’s missing from your life.

You say you’re jealous of her whole life. What, specifically, do you want that she has and you don’t? Look closely at that. Maybe this small, manageable life that you’ve carved out isn’t really big enough for you, now that you’re comfortable and safe and aren’t really making giant messes everywhere you go anymore. (Um. I assume you’re not making giant messes anymore. If not, that’s something to consider fixing.)

It’s natural for women who are a little wild and unsteady emotionally to relentlessly seek safety in smallness, and in settling for whatever they can get. When I was younger, I was reckless, arrogant, insecure, and aggressive and I sometimes toggled between semi-destructive behavior and extremely hermetic avoidance. Most of all, I never dared to reach for or ask for too much. But after years of this toggling, I could see that the life I built was a little small. Now don’t get me wrong: I love small. Scrappy is comforting to me. Cool makes me itch a little. I feel slightly prickly when I spend too much time in places that aren’t a little middle/working class, a little dive bar. And I like slouching around the house in my soft pants. That’s living, as far as I’m concerned. That said, though, when you spend a good chunk of your time hanging around the concrete yard of a public elementary school, talking about random domestic trivia, you do have to ask yourself: Do I want to grow older and lumpier and more disheveled by the year? Do I want to spend the rest of my life putting together elaborate Lego Friends cruise ships and eating nachos and watching “The Voice”? (I know, nachos. Fuck yes to the nachos.) OR am I a big bright force of fucking nature that needs ambitious creative projects and very tall leather boots and grandiosity and giant icy cocktails and dancing and I AM GOING TO LIVE LARGE, GODDAMN IT, SO FUCK THIS CULTURE AND ITS COUGAR-SHAMING SEXIST HORSE SHIT.

It’s healthy to ignore the SHOULDS: I SHOULD be cooler than I am, and live in a house that looks like a Boutique Hotel. But it’s not healthy to ignore the things you truly want. I want to take on new challenges and feel good in my skin and drink a giant icy cocktail.

So feel what you feel about New Girl. That’s the first step. Let it tell you something about the smallness, the mediocrity, the compromises of your current life. Now ask yourself: What does she do better than you, exactly? I mean, fuck the smartest school. The smartest or best anything is a mirage. What else, though? What does she show you, not about what you SHOULD be, but about what you WANT to be? Write it all down.

This process alone may solve some of your troubles with New Girl. But let’s go one step further, because you’re all tight and angry around this woman. Do you think she’s full of shit and she acts like she’s happier than she actually is? What makes you so mad? DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE SHE’S A BETTER PERSON THAN YOU? If so, why? Is she more generous? Is she more patient? Does she listen more closely?

Maybe you feel like you need to grow up, finally. And maybe some stubborn part of your ego wants to be the most alluring, special girl in the room. But if you’re fixated on being the special one, the smart one, the hot one, it really does prevent you from being a person at all. You are marketing your product. You’re not living.

And when someone is in that state, everyone else knows it. I met someone like that recently. She’d ask me a question and her face would look so beautiful and interested, and then the second I opened my mouth to answer her, her face would turn snarly and ugly. It was incredible to watch. That’s what a ravenous ego-hunger does to people, when they chase down bigger and bigger ego rewards without looking closely at themselves. A lot of the celebrities have this sickness, just from being in the public eye and recognizing how tough it is to stay there. And because we see these people on our TV screens, we sometimes trick ourselves into thinking THAT’S WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE, instead of just calling it what it is: a personality collapsing under the weight of its own narcissism and ravenous ego hunger.

So you have to walk a fine line. You have to make sure that you’re honoring your desires. But you also have to give up on being the special one, the flashy one. Just be a person in the room. Let New Girl shine. Befriend her. Listen to her. Be generous and forgive her for whatever flaws she has. At the very least, behave that way and your feelings may follow. This is an opportunity for you. You are advancing to a more generous state.

But you have to accept that you are not the best, and you will never be the best. This sounds like admitting defeat, but it’s actually one of the finest victories you’ll ever achieve. Start with vulnerability, and humility, and then dare to ask for more from your life.

And keep reading, because I got another jealousy letter this week that takes this New Girl story to a whole new, terrifying level….

Polly

Hi Polly,

This question has been asked countless times before in other advice columns, but you’re my favorite and I would love to hear your take/be the recipient of your tough love. How do I stop feeling jealous of my boyfriend’s ex?

The back story: My boyfriend and I have been together for one year and it’s been great. He is the first man I’ve ever loved and we met through our shared passions (people who follow this column: accepting a lifetime alone and exploring your own hobbies/projects and truly being okay with your single circumstances works wonders on meeting kind, interesting individuals! Not just people you end up falling in love with!). My “problem” is, I’m not the first woman he’s loved. I was perfectly okay with this reality until I met his ex while we were on a wedding-turned-vacation trip a few months ago. She was beautiful and charming, well-traveled and the life of the party. After a few drinks, she pulled me aside during the wedding reception and told me, through tears, that she just wanted my boyfriend to be happy. I knew very little about their time together and was confused by her need to tell me this. My boyfriend quickly informed me that their relationship didn’t end on great terms and there was suspected cheating on her part. He reassured me that he had zero feelings towards her and he was annoyed that she seemed to think she ruined his shot at happiness. It was a really bizarre day.

The second leg of our vacation, after the wedding, was at my boyfriend’s previous city of residence. He loved it there. It’s vastly different from where we live now and he wanted to show me this part of his past. Of course, this city was the city where he and his ex lived together for a few years. He would casually reference things they did together. “This was mine and ex’s street, our old apartment is over there,” “This is where ex liked to shop,” and so on. Their old neighborhood was picturesque and perfect and exactly where I saw myself living a few years out. I found myself hating her for already experiencing the shared life I wanted with him, in this wonderful place. Ugh, it’s so stupid that I spent a significant portion of that trip thinking such negative, ridiculous, jealous thoughts. I couldn’t not think about it at the time, considering I had just met her days before and it seemed as though she was everywhere. After a few days of learning about his life in that city and hearing more about his relationship with the ex, I finally told him that I really didn’t want to talk about her anymore. He got the hint.

So, here I am months later, feeling the occasional pangs of insecurity and jealousy any time something reminds me of her. And then I get sad thinking about how he will never have to experience the same worry about my previous relationships because they were all so fleeting. That sounds kind of terrible — I don’t want my boyfriend to be jealous of anyone! I guess I just don’t like the imbalance that I’m making up in my head. I’ve heard the standard advice, “He’s with you for a reason! She’s in his past for a reason! Your respective paths crossed for a reason!” and that outlook really makes sense. He never gives me reason to doubt his love or his intentions. I guess some some days I just worry that I’m not as exciting (she was a flight attendant and they took frequent excursions to remote places at no cost, how does that even happen!) or as interesting (she’s lived all over the world, I’ve lived in various parts of Appalachia) or as sexy (my boyfriend made the terrible mistake of telling me she was a highly sexual person and could orgasm multiple times during a broader discussion of why I have a difficult time relaxing during sex, sigh). One of his friends posted a group picture from that wedding today on Facebook and in it, my boyfriend is seated between his ex and me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how they looked better together and had a way cooler relationship and that spiraled into more destructive, unnecessary thoughts. I immediately hid the picture and decided to message you to prevent further craziness.

I haven’t really talked to my boyfriend about this because I know it’s wildly unattractive to admit that you’ve been comparing yourself to a former lover. I figured it was something I would just get over and hopefully that proves to be the case in time. Polly, can you tell me how to stop fretting over something that shouldn’t even be an issue?

Sick of Feeling Jealous

Dear SOFJ,

Oh sweet Jesus, yes. I love your letter, not only because this situation is the stuff of nightmares, but because your perspective on this woman is all twisted. Yes, she’s charming, she travels a lot, she’s gorgeous, whatever. I mean, I get it. I don’t blame you. And maybe she and your guy do look perfect together. But I guarantee you, he doesn’t care about that, and no one else does, either. It might as well be the juicy shame-the-protagonist subplot of a girl movie. Irrelevant.

But speaking of juicy subplots, next we come to the two details that really tell us everything we need to know:

1. Dream girl was multi-orgasmic. (!!!)

2. Dream girl wants you to know that she loves your boyfriend soooo much and all she wants is for him to be happy. SHE’S NOT JEALOUS, NOT HER! SHE JUST WANTS YOU TO KNOW (sniff, sniff) HOW INCREDIBLY HAPPY SHE WANTS HIM TO BE.

So ask yourself this: Why does she want YOU to know this? Why? Why wouldn’t she just tell HIM that?

Here’s why: He does not give a FUCK about her.

And here’s why he doesn’t give a fuck: BECAUSE SHE’S A FUCKING CRAZY PERSON.

Now follow this train of thought with me, uncharitable though it might seem: This exgirlfriend is nuttier than a nut log. You have unwittingly stumbled on the Angelina Jolie of the mortal world. (Angelina’s not mortal. She’s not even human, because she’s not competitive at all, she has a great big heart and an enduring soul and she just happens to look perfect and sound perfect every single second of her life while she’s CARING FOR THE WORLD’S CHILDREN.)

Looky here. Generally speaking, we don’t call other ladies crazy. That’s called Making Bad Choices. We don’t cast aspersions on women who are just being happy and nice — like New Girl in that first letter. Her niceness makes us feel mean, but that’s our problem, not hers.

But this Angelina of yours: She’s different. And we are allowed to fucking notice that she’s a troublemaker. Because only a troublemaker corners you and starts talking about him. You have nothing at all to do with him and her, them! You didn’t know a goddamn thing about THEM or HER before now! She wanted you to think about her, to know that they mattered once, pure and simple. But she couldn’t say, “Oh Jesus, this is weird for me, but I’m happy for you guys.” Or better yet, say nothing. No. She couldn’t talk to him directly. She couldn’t merely smile at you and chat about nothing, real friendly-like. She couldn’t make a joke about his bad habits, or something casual in passing. No. She needed you to know how passionately she feels for him. She needed YOU to know that she existed, that she mattered to him once.

I mean, come on, lady! Why? What kind of a giant stupid sad narcissistic ego needs to announce itself to the new girlfriend? I’m friends with my exes and some of their wives on Facebook. I don’t send them personal notes saying that I just want their fucking husbands to be happy! I am pleased to see photos of their adorable babies and the like. Do I hope that my exes are happy? Yes, even the ones who were dicks. Do I tell their wives that? FUCK NO I DO NOT, because why would they care?

So she waves her hands around — I MATTER I MATTER! — and now you’re like, “Hold on, who is this?” Your boyfriend didn’t say a word about her, did he?

Oh, wait, hold on, he did say something… ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE’S MULTIORGASMIC. Oh my fucking Christ. Look. First you have to know that he was just trying to tell you that he’s good in bed, really really good, so whatever you’re not feeling isn’t his fault. Not very smart of him, but that was accidental. He was protecting his own ego, not reminiscing. He was trying to say that you need to loosen up and get a little crazy, when it’s equally true that he needs to learn more stuff about how to operate your goddamn machinery.

And he thinks he’s great in bed because HIS EX IS A LYING LIAR WHO LIES.

She doesn’t really want him to be happy, and she’s not multiorgasmic. No fucking way. This Angelina of yours is a charming, perfect, world-traveler and she’s A FUCKING ACTRESS.

Now, I’m not saying I know this for a fact. Being multi-orgasmic isn’t so rare, particularly once you have a partner you really trust who adores you and isn’t constantly monitoring your response so he can stick a little gold star on his dick (ahem!). Once you know what you want and how to get it and you’re not worried how you look or act when you’re doing it, it’s possible. But the supreme hotness of sex does wax and wane regardless. I’d sort of like to know if Angelina came three or four times every single fucking time they had sex. Because if she did, I’m going to go ahead and CALL BULLSHIT ON HER RIGHT NOW.

Of course you can’t tell your boyfriend she was faking it. He’s too invested in her as a sign of his mad skills in the sack. That’s his cross to bear, I guess, one that I doubt is helping him in the skill-attainment department.

Anyway, let’s review what we’ve learned by slipping into full-on aggressive combat mode with Angelina: She’s batshit crazy and a liar and she fakes orgasms with great gusto. This explains why your boyfriend isn’t actually all that passionate about her. She annoys him. He doesn’t want her back. He may not know that she’s a faker but he does know very well that she’s a fake and she’s nuts and she’s not what he wants, not even a little bit. This also explains why she cheated on him: She’s a narcissist. Some other guy came along and flattered her a little, she had to fuck him and whip out her multiple orgasms for his benefit, so he’d know just how supremely Best Woman Ever she is. She couldn’t say no to that. She had to prove to this other guy, who didn’t even matter, that she was The Dreamgirl of the Universe.

So there’s your very uncharitable, bad-energy explanation. I don’t believe in skipping that step. I don’t believe in saying “She’s wonderful, you’re wonderful, let’s all go in peace,” immediately. This is a learning fucking moment, people! Lean the fuck in!

But now let’s try something different. Let’s assume that Angelina is trying, very very hard, to be happy for your boyfriend, but she’s struggling with it a little. She was drinking and she told YOU this because she knew HE wouldn’t care. He cut her off completely after she cheated, and that was incredibly hard for her. Maybe she is a wonder in the sack, in addition to being beautiful and charming, and because of this, men sleep with her and they almost never break up with her, but sometimes they don’t really like who she is deep down inside anyway. And that haunts her, because she IS a good person, really, but she never feels like anyone really loves her for her. Even so, she sleeps with men too soon because she can’t resist showing them her sexual prowess. She always wins them once she gets them to bed. She can’t help but pull that trigger and seal the deal, even if it means spending her entire relationship feeling like she has to prove that she’s really smart and lovable, in addition to being gorgeous and charming.

See, this story is much more convincing, and it’s also, mysteriously enough, compatible with our more aggressive thesis. She’s either a real Dream Girl or a partially fake Dream Girl, but the bottom line is that being a Dream Girl is much harder than it looks from the outside.

This woman is a robust brand. And we don’t know what it’s like to feel that everyone wants to consume you. We can’t crawl inside her skin. But she made mistakes and your boyfriend dropped her. She is jealous of you. She cried to you. She is hurting. She is in the past and she knows it.

You’re the only one who doesn’t know it.

Let her go. She doesn’t make your life more interesting, and she doesn’t make you smaller and less worthy. Give her your sympathy and release her. Let her teach you a lesson about trying to be the Best Woman Ever: It backfires, and it’s lonely and it sucks.

Here’s another lesson for you: You need to talk to your boyfriend about sex a lot more. You need to work hard to have complex, vulnerable, thoughtful, rambling talks with him about your feelings and his. He needs to let you in, and you need to let him in. He needs to know more about what you want in bed, a lot more. You need permission to be a little unresponsive until you aren’t anymore. He needs to know that you won’t get there if you’re acting or thinking you’re a disappointment the whole time. You have to start with nothing and build something together. You don’t have to go on about the ex — and if you do bring her up, I would be very clear about the fact that she doesn’t matter, except as a symbol of something. She made you worry, and wonder if you really know him, if you really know what he wants from his life, from you. You want to share yourself with him more, to feel truly deeply connected at another, more trusting level, which will help you to understand yourselves and each other moving forward.

Lean into the vulnerability that this jealousy kicked up in you. Don’t stop at “She’s fucking crazy, that ex of his!” Don’t’ stop at self-protection and defensiveness and counter attacks. Something beautiful is opening up to you now. More love, more connection, more security, more possibility. It starts with you forgiving her for trying to make herself bigger than you — and bigger than she really is. It starts with you feeling empathy for her loneliness and her need to matter to you. It starts with you forgiving yourself for not having traveled, for not being more charming, for not being gorgeous from every goddamn angle. It starts with you being chumpy and small and not all that good in bed. That’s so lovable, you don’t even know. You are not that experienced. You are not smooth and unstoppable and swaggery and special. You are thoughtful and easily upstaged and here’s the secret: When you are upstaged, the world loves you more.

He loves you more. He just does.

He needs to figure out how to show it a little better, and when to shut his fat mouth. You need to figure out how to receive it, and believe it. This exgirlfriend of his is bright and shiny, but you are solid and real and you don’t know how to shine more brightly. You don’t know how to lie, and that’s what’s nice about you. You are humble and angry and fallible. He wants you.

Polly

Jealous again? Jealous like a good American? Write to Polly and let’s talk about being jealous forever and ever and ever..

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Laszlo Ilyes.

You know I’m right.

You know who sucks the worst? Well, sure, everybody. Everybody sucks the worst. Everybody will let you down, everybody is always looking out for themselves first, everybody will pretend to listen to you and act like they hear what you say and agree and then go out and do whatever they were going to do in the first place, not giving a thought to anything you tried to tell them. Everybody will get incredibly upset with you for not thinking about how what you do might affect them, but they won’t ever consider how what they do affects you, and if you bring it up they will just get more offended, to the point that it isn’t worth engaging with them and then they’re upset that you’re ignoring them. Everybody tells you they’ll be there when you need them but the day you actually are in need just try and find them. Everybody wants to be thought of as a good friend and a good person but when the chips are down — or even when the chips are midway between being up and down, it doesn’t take all that much — they would just as soon do the things that make them feel better than do the things that make them a good friend. Everybody thinks they’re doing all they can for everyone else, when really they are doing all they can for themselves and to hell with everyone else, and you are just as everybody as everyone else is. Yes, everybody sucks the worst. But especially runners. Oh my God they suck so bad.