The Gold Standard of Infinity

I wanted to begin with an appropriately misremembered quote—“Why can’t I take pictures of the stars,” which was inexactly followed by, “You can’t take pictures of the best things,” which were both said so unpresumptuously that I had to curb this romantic insanity with, “Damn it, Phuong! Stop spouting truth!” 

The honeymoon, however, is over.  I have reached my adolescence.  Me dí cuenta.  I never used that phrase before this weekend when I heard it so many times and that began saying it so many times because it seemed everybody suddenly realized.  I realized that my worst/best fears will always come true: I have been staying in a little house in the same bed as Ian situated on a little bay that opens up into a larger bay that becomes la bahía de Samaná, a near perfect rectangle.  I remember when I discovered the relationship between self-relexivity and irony: Michael and I decided our party was a party-themed party after Ian showed up with party snacks and I placed them in a bowl on the table.   I also insisted that the carpet be rolled up at every materialization of dancing and rolled back upon its dissipation.  It became very clear at that point. 

            In this instance it became mind-muddlingly clear.  I explained to Ian how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote the show but only Jerry played himself just as George pitches and writes the show with Jerry but is played by an actor.  Jerry thus becomes the gold standard in the land of infinity.  It began though when I explained that my mother gave me all of these pills for potential migraines for the trip because I might potentially have one.  “Are migraines contagious?”  Jessica asked me.  “No, gentic,” I said, initiating the “Oh…” that differentiates the overarching trip, the one bookended by my biological mother dropping me off and picking me up from the airport, from its microcosm, the three day/two night academic sojourn in the all-inclusive resort away from the house of my host mother.  I explained to Ian that, the way I see things, bays within bays within bays will always lead to irony because, while everything in the larger bay is in the smallest bay, it cannot be adequately described if it was the bay of the universe over which we looked and into which we swam.  Comparison rife with truth is the most false thing imaginable.  But of course there is always Jerry: the song heard once in the microcosm is the song heard two-dozen times in reality, for the microcosm must be seen as extraordinary, or seen as a microcosm for being extraordinary and a standard by which reality—though it is never “ordinary”—may be interpreted.  And the song played and the conversation went: “Before I loved every song because I couldn’t tell them apart—I was just excited to hear them.  But now I know them better.  And I know that I don’t like this one.”  “I know what you mean.  Now that we can distinguish, this one isn’t good.”  “Is this the end of the honeymoon period?” “It’s like those habits that you love so much, the quirks, because you’re infatuated to the extent that you can’t differentiate the part from the whole.  But as the marriage goes on it becomes it becomes that fucking thing you can’t stand.”  “So the honeymoon’s over.”  “And in a place where someone would have their honeymoon.”  I tried to explain to Ian that everything about a microcosm, while being asserted as poignant truth about the reality, is a joke—an absurd declaration that the part can stand for the whole and that a truth can be unequivocally true—because everything is a waterslide to infinity, and it doesn’t matter where you get on it, as the ocean is fed by the bay, and the bay within that, and the snow at the top of Mount Everest, the sewage from cruise ships and the tears spent on the inability to conclude.