I just got back from a trip to New York. I’m one of those people who really enjoys the process of getting somewhere, particularly the bit where you’re not allowed to use your phone, or the internet (I’ve used wifi on a plane once; the thrill lasted approximately a minute, after which point I was a) frustrated with how slow it was, and b) annoyed that I could now see that I had a bunch of work-related emails that I was definitely not going to answer, because I was ON A PLANE, but was nevertheless going to worry about for the remaining three hours of the flight). I’d probably like it if you still had to take ships across the Atlantic. Think about it: two weeks (I’ve made that timeframe up, I have no idea how long it takes to get a boat from England to the USA) of uninterrupted reading, writing and thinking time, all set against the dramatic backdrop of the sea!

Anyway, the advantage of air travel (apart from, you know, the advantage of air travel) is that you get to watch films. As this is basically the only time I watch films, I have to cram a lot into a few hours, so I watched three on the way out. And I know I’m behind the times here, but Bridesmaids? Really?

If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a woman called Annie who gets picked as her best friend’s maid of honor even though her life isn’t perfect. I mean, other stuff happens, but I think that’s the crux of it, and I had been led to believe that it was some sort of brilliant, funny, clever example of how women can be brilliant, funny and clever in films. In theory I’m not much of a feminist, but I’m willing to get behind something that portrays women as independently hilarious and witty, and who doesn’t like to laugh?

So imagine my chagrin when, having reclined my seat back and asked for a glass of red wine to accompany my chicken and root vegetable mush, I discovered that I wasn’t laughing.

At first I thought maybe it was me. I was being judgmental, I needed to loosen up, my brain was too focused on worrying about whether or not I’d locked the back door and turned the gas off. Then I thought it was probably just a bit slow; maybe they were just getting all the bad gags out of the way before building up to a mind-blowing climax. But somewhere during the seemingly interminable “two bridesmaids trying to one-up-each-other-with-not-very-amusing-speeches-at-an-engagement-party” scene I began to think that maybe I was forming what might be called an Opinion.

Here’s what I see: this film is the female equivalent to something like The Hangover (by the way, I almost never read reviews or articles about films – which may make my writing about a film somewhat questionable – but I’m 99% sure that about a million more qualified people have already said that).

I don’t mean female equivalent in the sense that it’s taken the things that The Hangover does for men and adapted them for a female audience, I mean it’s exactly the same, but with women as the principle characters. Which is fine! It’s great, actually. I mean, I guess it’s great. I guess it’s great that it’s now okay for there to be a scene in a film during which a bunch of women vomit on each other’s heads and shit onto expensive dresses, or during which a woman gets wasted on a plane and the end result is not a questionable one night stand but a comedy tackle from an air marshall. So yay! Crass, heavy-handed physical comedy is now gender-neutral! But wait. It’s still crass, heavy-handed physical comedy, even if women are doing it too.

In fairness, there were a few good things. I really like Kristen Wiig. I wanted to give her a hug and then hang out with her. And it was pretty weird to see Sookie from Gilmore Girls not being Sookie (wow, I think this is the most times I have made pop culture references in a blog post, or possibly my life, ever).

My absolute favorite moment in the film happens when Annie, exasperated and exhausted, is sitting at a bar with her cop (boy)friend, talking about how her best friend from childhood is getting married and seems to have all her shit together. “I feel like her life is going off and getting perfect and mine is just like phrrr.. [makes sound of things going bad],” she says.

I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t had a thought like that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have thoughts like that a lot. That’s a good line. That’s a good moment for a film to have.

But it was not really a laugh-out-loud-funny film, not most of the time. There was too much noise and too much padding around something that was strong enough to stand on its own. I’m inclined to like a film about a woman who doesn’t really know how to make her life work in the way she wants it to. I don’t need a scene where her housemate’s Vicky Pollard-inspired sister (see! pop culture!) lifts up her tracksuit top to reveal that the huge tattoo she accidentally got last night is now infected to make me like it. I don’t need a scene where a bride-to-be shits in the street under cover of a merengue-like wedding dress to make me like it. In fact, as you may have gathered, these things make me less inclined to like it.

I keep wondering what happened to subtlety. Why is subtlety not cool? Why can’t we just make and enjoy a film that celebrates how funny it is that none of us have any clue how to be grownups, how funny it is that we don’t all have cup-holders in our cars or a lot of money or a job we like or a sense of what’s good for us? That stuff is funny, and it’s funny because it’s true, and because it’s a little painful but less painful when we realize we’re not alone, not because it resembles the cartoons we used to watch when we were kids.

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About a month ago I went to London for an errand, and after it was done I had a few hours to kill so I figured I might as well walk around a bit. And as I walked around I tried to understand why I never go to London and feel like it’s a place I could live.

In fact I go there and I feel like it’s not a place anyone could live, let alone me, even though I know lots of people live in London and lots of people love it. I just don’t see anything there that suggests living on a human scale. The architecture is all mixed up – beautiful things, monstrosities that should never have been allowed to be built, but nothing really stands out, so your impression is never one of either beauty or ugliness or even of contrast, just of some big grey slab that’s muddy and muddled and doesn’t make any sense. The buildings are big but of course nothing is big inside, so you get the impression it was built for giants to look at but dwarves to live in (the opposite of the Tardis, I suppose). And it’s just so disparate, so desperate, so empty even when it’s crowded. In my two mile walk from Pimlico to Chelsea I saw nothing charming except at one point a broad tree-lined avenue which turned out only to be leafy and green because it bordered a hospital, and the lovely garden I could see through the fence was not for public consumption at all. Leafy London. Except most of it seems sterile and shoppy to me. Everyone is shopping, in a way.

***

So I tried shopping, too. I went into a shop, I bought nothing, I went back out again. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of pretty things; it’s that nothing suited me in that moment. I was a traveller; I wore stained jeans and an old flannel shirt and carried a heavy, sweaty rucksack.

It’s funny that even though I have a home I’m still window-shopping for places to live all the time. Every place I visit, even London, is a possibility. I only think of this now because I came across this piece by John McIntyre on André Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, which I haven’t read but would like to read. “Aciman,” writes McIntyre, “views the places he visits not with the wondering, landmark-seeking eye of a tourist, but with the speculative, assessing eye of a potential resident…He examines this habit at length in “The Contrafactual Traveler,” and concludes that, “I ‘connect’ not by saying, ‘Isn’t this lovely, picturesque hill town beautiful?’ but ‘Do I see myself living here?’”

***

The tube was crowded and on the way from Sloane Square to Paddington, an Irish group played live music in my carriage. They were good. They made me smile and think I could get used to that sort of thing. I guess in a way it’s why people live in places like London, it’s why people live in cities, because that sort of thing might happen and make you smile, whatever sort of thing “that” is, whatever makes you smile.

But anyhow I didn’t have any change to give them because I’d spent the last of my change on an artichoke and egg sandwich on artisan olive bread on the King’s Road. So I couldn’t show my appreciation and then they were gone, on the platform, and we were left alone, sweating and close. I did not really want to listen to my music anymore, although my headphones were still in and as it turned out my music had been playing the whole time, but very quietly, so I hadn’t noticed.

***

On the train back to Oxford I fell asleep accidentally, slumped against the window with my hand on my almost-full cup of coffee, my second weak, pointless latté of the day. I had tried to read Hemingway, well, I had read Hemingway, for a bit, but something about the way he described Gertrude Stein as having “immigrant hair” had started to grate on me, even though I had read the book before, and that particular story, in fact, many times, and knew I liked it. But it grated on me and grated on me, and I just sat there and read it over and over and over again – immigrant hair immigrant hair immigrant hair – wondering what does it mean, why does it bother me so much? Until I fell asleep slumped against the window, train crowded at midday, people everywhere, my weak latté still clutched in my hand.

I woke up and it was a muggy day in Oxford. The train station was ugly and for a moment, as I stumbled through the turnstile and stood remembering the way Paddington always makes you feel like you’re on the edge of something, that something new or big is just around the corner, it felt provincial. But I see myself living here anyway.

❧

Last week I went to London to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans. I didn’t have any particular desire to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans, but I did – almost desperately – want to hear Geoff Dyer speak, and I did want to know what The School of Life’s secular sermons are like, so I travelled from the Cowley Road to Conway Hall early on a Sunday morning.

It was one of those lukewarm September days. I sat at the front of the hall, perhaps wanting to be noticed, to be (perceived as) bold. A woman in a red and blue military-style jacket (like a drum major’s uniform, perhaps, if I knew what a drum major’s uniform looked like, or even really what a drum major was) stood before us. She wanted us to sing; this really was a sermon, and there were hymns. She said she had changed a little bit of the first hymn – Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, lyrics printed in our pamphlets – and invited Ed, her small blond pianist, to play a few bars so that we could practice the modified verse.

We sang. It still sounded like a hymn, like an English hymn sung in an English church on a rainy English sunday. It had that hymn-rhythm; which is to say, no rhythm at all. I don’t know much about singing, but I’m pretty sure that the way the English sing their hymns makes virtually no sense unless you’ve grown up singing them that way.

After we sang, I felt good; singing in public always makes me feel this way, as if I have achieved some kind of victory (in preschool I was once admonished to the point of tears for mouthing the words to a song rather than singing them out loud). But there was something unnerving about the whole thing, too. There was something strange about this woman, in her drum major’s jacket, with her Shirley Temple curls and her peppy voice, imploring us to loosen up a little, shake our limbs a little. I did not want to shake my arms or my legs like a chicken; I certainly did not want to do so repeatedly, and I most certainly did not want have to pay the bald man sitting next to me a compliment, not because I didn’t think he was worthy of a compliment, but because the compliment would inevitably be forced, even if meant – I like your shirt, I like your blazer, you have a nice smile – and therefore quite meaningless. Moreover, the first thing that had popped into my head was, “I like your hair,” which was definitely not something you could say to a bald man you had never met before. So I just looked the other way; it was easy, I pretended I was on the tube, trying to avoid looking at the person across the aisle whose knees were touching mine.

And the bald man turned to the curly-haired man behind us and said: “I like your hair.” And the curly-haired man said to the bald man, “That’s a great shirt!” And it was a great shirt; I hadn’t noticed before, but it was a great shirt now that the curly-haired man had mentioned it.

***

Then Geoff Dyer – who, even though he makes frequent reference to being tall and thin, is much taller and thinner than you imagine he is – was on the stage, at the pulpit, preaching, or, rather, speaking. He sounded a little like he might be suffering from the onset or aftermath of a mild early Autumn cold; occasionally he paused to sip from a tall glass of water. He told some anecdotes, about Americans, about the British, about the time he went to Big Sur and stood in silence on a bluff overlooking a bank of fog so thick it obscured the sea, everything, and thought how peaceful it was until an American man appeared on the scene and boomed into the quiet: “Sure is peaceful, isn’t it!” I knew I’d remember that anecdote, not because it meant anything much but because I, too, have been to Big Sur and been impressed by the way the fog rolls in and covers the coast but allows you this God-like view over it, this view that makes you think that virtually anything could be going on below you but you are above it, on the sun-bleached hillsides, in the sun. Well, yes, I thought: that is my country.

***

But then, I don’t really know my own country. I’ve probably seen more of England – percentage-wise, at least – than I have of the USA.

Last summer, on our way to Toronto, we had a layover in Minneapolis, and so, for the first time in a long time, I was in my country – though of course I had never been there before, to Minneapolis, to anywhere near Minneapolis.

I passed through immigration. The officer, who looked about my age, did not seemed inclined to interrogate me, but neither did he seemed inclined to let me through without at least making an attempt to understand the apparently complicated circumstances under which I found myself now here, in our country but his city.

“So you live in the UK?” he said, flipping through passport pages, looking at faded stamps and expired visas.

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re going to Canada.”

“Yes. For a wedding. But not mine,” I added. I laughed, he didn’t. Maybe he was thinking it was perfectly plausible that I was flying to Toronto via Minneapolis for my own wedding to an Englishman. For some reason I started to think, what would happen if I just made a run for it? Would they catch me? Would they detain me? Would I go to jail? How would I explain it?

“So you live in the UK and you’re going to Canada and you’re not staying in Minneapolis?” he summarized.

“Yes,” I said. And he stamped my US passport, and I was home, geographically if not emotionally.

Thirsty in the departures lounge, I bought a bottle of Aquafina water with two stray dollar bills in my wallet. It reminded me of being in high school, buying bottles of water from the vending machine outside the gym during the long, hot volleyball season, which always began in an Indian summer. We would sweat our way through two hours of scrimmages and sprints and inspirational speeches. I was 14 on 9/11 and I remember that afternoon, though we’d spent all day in front of television screens, which they’d produced as if by magic and hauled into all the classrooms, it was business as usual. Drills and sit-ups and bottles of Aquafina from the vending machine. Sometimes it was so hot that we would go across to the pool after practice and leap in. Then I’d spend the long drive home wet, my t-shirt stuck to my sports bra, my hair smelling of chlorine and perspiration.

So Minneapolis is not where I’m from, but in a way, it’s part of where I’m from. The truth is that when I say “my country”, what I really mean is “my parents’ house,” “the farm my best friend grew up on,” “the bit of Boston I used to live in,” “the other bit of Boston I used to live in.” All of these tiny, disconnected places, forming a patchwork map, my map. I love my map. I love those places. I feel patriotic about street corners, particular coves and hilltops, parks and benches and cafés and long winding roads. But I don’t know what Americans are like; I don’t know what America is like. I don’t know what to think of my country as a whole. I don’t even know how to see my country as a whole.

***

I guess the trouble with being an American abroad is that you never know where you stand. Everything depends on politics, and politics cannot be counted on.

In his sermon, Dyer alluded to a period – four or five years ago, when the pound was worth twice what the dollar was worth, when animosity towards George Bush was at a high – during which Americans were treated with a much chillier, more patronizing attitude. I remember that period. That was when I first came here. I was defensive, yes, but I always imagined that people looked at you a bit differently if you were American. It was polite in those days (it may still be polite, in fact) to ask if someone was Canadian if you discerned a North American accent. I remember an aggressive and insecure compére at a comedy show, mistaking my sarcasm for genuine insult, telling me I was just another one of these Americans, spending a few weeks here, pretending to know everything, and why didn’t I just go back to where I’d come from? And then, later, realizing his mistake, he was so apologetic (“the cult of the apology,” Dyer called it, this unmistakably British instinct – “the human equivalent of birdsong”) that I couldn’t help but feel some kind of perverse sympathy for him.

But here we are now, and things have changed, and authors are giving talks in praise of Americans. And in a few years, or a few weeks, something else will change, attitudes will shift, and I, who has not moved, will stand somewhere else.

***

Then there is the issue of friendliness. The American smile. Updike’s quip: “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy”. I started to think about this. As I thought, I realized that I was probably, even in that moment, quite happy to be in London on a sunny Sunday morning listening to one of my favorite authors dole out praise for my countrymen, scowling. I am nearly always scowling. When I work, when I sit, relaxed and reading or listening, my face contorts in a way that is comfortable for me but uncomfortable for everyone else; I’m often asked if I’m okay. Yes, of course I’m okay, I say, can’t you tell?

Needless to say, I don’t have an American smile. I was not invited to join the cult as a child, I missed the meetings where the mechanics of the smile were discussed and practiced until they became an instinct.

I used to work at a school in Oxford. About half of our adult students were Americans doing a semester abroad; the other half came from all over the world to study English. One of my many menial tasks was to print student photos onto ID cards. Even before you checked the files, you could always tell the Americans from the rest, especially the girls: they were the ones with shiny grins as big as the moon, wide eyes, flat hair, heads cocked at a flattering angle. They were not prettier than anyone else – very often the opposite – but they always gave the impression of being prettier than everyone else.

As I listened to Dyer speak about the charm of Americans, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t real charm, not always; maybe sometimes it was the illusion of charm, like those girls smiling up at me from their ID cards, pretending to be prettier than everyone else and therefore convincing me, convincing all of us, that they were.

Even I am charmed when I go back to the US; I am always amazed that shopkeepers want to have such long and involved conversations with me, that cashiers want to make eye contact with me, that the girl at the bank is so genuinely curious about my weekend plans. But I feel like I don’t know how to trick myself into being charming. I feel, frankly, like I’m not a very good American, with my scowl and my shyness and my sorries (I may not be part of the cult of the smile, but I am definitely part of the cult of the apology).

Lately, though I’ve been practicing being more American. I’ve been trying to accentuate my accent, for instance, or to raise my voice above a whisper in the pub. I suppose that the longer I’m here the more strongly I feel the compulsion to assert the fact that I’m from there, to solidify my standing as an outsider even while I feel increasingly like I am part of something.

***

After the sermon was over, after we sang a final hymn, I stood in line to waiting to ask Geoff Dyer to sign a book. I hate asking authors I love to sign books. I’m always hoping that, somehow, perhaps by looking deep into my eyes, they’ll discern that I’m special, that my appreciation for their work is special, that we could be friends, even. At the same time, I know it’s a pointless thing to do: I’m not trying to increase the value of my library, and I’m under no illusion that because an author has scribbled “to Miranda” on the title page, we have any kind of relationship.

But as I stood there before him, presenting my book and my nervous smile, I made a conscious effort to try to be more American than I might ordinarily be. I began to smile and to speak. I gushed about how much I liked his work. I said my name so quickly (perhaps, I hoped, so American-ly) that he had to ask me to repeat it. He signed my book. I said, “have a nice day!” And then I sped off with my heart thumping for no obvious reason, sure I’d made a fool of myself.

Later, waiting for the bus home, sipping a too-large chai latté like I used to do in college, the sun shining limply over Notting Hill, I forgot to care about whether or not I had made a fool of myself. I thought of this, by Jawaharlal Nehru: “But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.” I figured that really, the only country I could claim any ownership of was the one that’s made of memory.

❧

Punting, July. I remember this day because it was cooler than it looked, too windy for punting really. In the evening we sat around a fire drinking wine; the jumper I wore still smells faintly of woodsmoke, which is appropriate for the transition into Autumn.

❧

Oh, what a difference a year makes. And maybe that’s just it: maybe it’s circumstantial, maybe it’s related to the fact that a year ago I was there and now I am here, and everything, but also nothing, has changed.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

❧