love a little more / treat my friends better

i want to be / at least as alive as the vulgar.

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open. 

- Frank O'Hara. 

we'll have to muddle through

The thing that makes this song so heartbreaking, so unendingly melancholy, is that she knows - Judy knows - that she's lying. "Next year all our troubles will be miles away." Even as she's singing it, she understands that it's not true, can't be true. There will always be troubles. But there's something about Christmas that you cling to with this maddening hope, the possibility that bringing a tree into your tiny apartment and stringing it with the lights over which you had to fight with Jerry at the hardware store down the street and delicate glass ornaments you bought with your best friends at the flea market will correct something, or create something, a balm over all that went wrong, is still going wrong. I play this song and sit on the floor beside Fred and cry because I am so happy and sad all at once, just like Judy, alive with the immensity of knowing that no amount of tinsel and handholding and long tables set with the good dishes can solve everything, but also that it can solve - or soothe - something, and that can be enough. It has to be enough.

idols

We're all reading Roxane Gay's blog, yes? That's a thing we're all doing?

this

I’ve always believed that if you’re truly in love with someone, you shouldn’t be able to answer the question “What do you love about him?” with any kind of real satisfaction. The things you’re able to articulate should leave you at least a little hollow. Contestants on “The Bachelor” will usually have to answer this question for his family, and there will be the usual adjectives like “kind” and “generous” and “funny.” It’s not that I think anyone is intentionally lying, but that they’re describing traits that belong to the set of circumstances more than the person. “The Bachelor” is kind because he has no reason not to be; if he becomes disillusioned with you, he can just send you home. He’s generous because he has a production team purchasing intense, expensive experiences for your dates. He’s funny because you’ve both been flown to a charming village in Switzerland and a funny little cow wandered up behind your picnic. 

Andrea Seigel on the life lessons of "The Bachelor," in the Times. This is just the most brilliant, and also a perfect reference for when I need to explain why sometimes, the only thing that will scratch my itch is take-out and "The Bachelorette." 

To you / I am not speaking anymore.

Dire Wolf

Lucie Brock-Broido

Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. To you,
I am not speaking anymore. Whom

Shall I address?

Now that you have gotten these things off
Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing

Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared
By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum

Bucket of storm after
A great unlovely silvered thirst. How

Nice for me. In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over

Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of

Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt

Of red. There

Are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear

Of loss. Of loss:
You get to speak of it, once

You are its intimate, and not before; it would be

"Appropriation." But in the great white rendezvous, where

I was brooding Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.

here. 

the mysteries

"Turn soft and lovely any time you have a chance."

Jenny Holzer, Survival 1983-1985

One of the things I ask myself often is why it is so hard for us to treat each other well. Do you think it's the basic selfishness of the human species? It might be a survival instinct, really - maybe we are all driven by the feeling that we have to care for our own bruised bodies above all else. People say this is subsumed by parenthood, but I'm not sure parenthood isn't just another way in which we create a personal hierarchy of people who matter and people who don't. That's not really what I mean, of course - I'm only really talking about moments. We have in our power the chance to act out of compassion and empathy in every moment. We very rarely choose to exercise that.

I've done terrible things, too.

Almost three years ago now a thing happened to me that made me brittle and cold and angry in a way I'd never been before. It wasn't even that horrible - or it was horrible in its commonness, I guess - but it changed me, and not for the better. It left me with a lot of questions. One of which was whether I could continue to believe in my previously-held understanding that the world was split into good people and bad people. I felt that if you surrounded yourself with good people, you'd be fairly safe, as things go. What I started to learn, am still learning, continue to grapple with, was that, in actual fact, there are just people: people who sometimes do good things and sometimes bad things.

So everyone around me took on an animal-like unpredictability. Everyone, I realized, had within them the capacity for real cruelty, or a little voice saying, Go. Saying, It doesn't matter. Saying, Why bother. I have one, too. I tried to shut up these voices with a lot of insulation. I layered heavy things on top of the soft parts. I've written about this before, but the last few years have been a sort of reverse cocooning, with the lovely and open and hopeful parts of me at the center, and the cynicism and skepticism forming a crystalline case.

I'm not unaware of this, clearly. Or of its tedium, its unoriginality. And its ease. It is so much easier to be hard. Don't you think? I have been considering a change.

And then.

A couple of days ago I received a small package at my office. I opened it to find the most beautiful earrings inside. Earrings that I stared at in confusion before realizing that of course I recognized them - I had blogged about them in October, with the most facetious words about how they might magically appear in my life.

There was no card. I contacted the store; they said the gifter requested to remain anonymous. I emailed my parents, who were the only people I could think of who would do such a thing, but they had no idea what I was talking about. My coworkers and I did a Nancy Drew dance around them, and nothing. I gave up, and put them on, and smiled. They are incredible.

Whoever you are: you did a kind and generous thing. You made me so happy. You reminded me that I used to be a soft and lovely person, capable of warmth. You reminded me how wonderful it feels to love, and to be loved, even in these small ways, kindnesses that can be palmed and held in one hand. If you ever want to reveal yourself, I would be honoured to say all of this to your beautiful face. But in the meantime: thank you.

I am so thankful that you exist.

i hope you find a love / your own designs of love

I believe, I believe that I know you
But we've been a long time,
And now I got to show you, that I - 
Well, I never did believe in time
You know, changin' anybody's mind

Thanks Molly. Thanks Stevie. 

meet fred

I think he's just on the right side of morose. 

haters gonna hate

fragments

My family cannot help comparing South Africa to other places, to the familiar - "These hills look like Ireland, don't they?" "This could almost be Newfoundland!" The damp green, the gentle slope. Why? To own it? I feel compelled to imprint something recognizable onto this landscape. We try to drain the exotic out of it. It makes it easier to look at.

***

All the safari guides with their wide stances, with their moustaches. There's monochrome to all of it. Khakis. They hold their hands behind their backs in locked grips, two fists. Everyone is so solid. Someone once told me, or I read it, or something, about all the women who come to Africa and fall in love with their guides. I can see how this could happen. You bypass or hop-skip that initial period of getting to know a person before trusting them. You have to jump in. They have the big gun. They know the rules. It's an enforced intimacy that is somehow redolent of survival, of getting-by.

***

Animals, in order of awe-factor: #1 Elephants. There is no comparison. #2 Giraffes. The same. We come closer to the prehistoric. Let's put rhinos up there too. There is no reason an animal should look like this. They didn't get the memo. Evolution skipped a beat. Everyone wants to see the lions, but they are really just big, sleepy house cats.

***

There's an emotional there-ness to Africa that I find exhausting. I think about the people I love who love this place. They are not people who live at the surface of things. I could see how these countries, this hard work, could give them a place to put their emotions, when they are not so comfortable carrying them. It eggs them on. I do better where I am the most dramatic thing on the landscape, where I have more room to enact my own daily hysteria. Maybe I am too selfish. The emotional there-ness of a place. Is that a thing?

***

In the jeep I press my feet against the metal like I have brakes beneath me. He pulls us closer to the animals and I stop breathing. No one else is as concerned as I am. My dad tells me that they know what they're doing, can sense when the animals will charge, are incited. Fine. But I know what I'm doing, too - I know that everything is unpredictable. You can't ever predict what anything or anyone will do in any particular moment. This is a truth that no one likes to be reminded of. You can't ever trust anyone. You can't ever trust a 600 pound leopard.

out of africa

editor's note

Yesterday devolved into a pre-election anxiety shopping rally. Tried on the entirety of Zara, including the aforementioned dress, and many other things with leather and zippers that looked so banging on the hanger. As it turns out, one must have the body of the hanger to wear this shit.

Zara, we needs to talk about the boobs, and how I have them. You did not leave room. Perhaps you think they detach? Is that the purpose of your oversized clutches?

I vengeance-bought tights instead, and these little crushed velvet red shoes that I will refer to as oxblood-coloured, because oxblood is the colour of the season. Oxblood.

I also ate an entire box of off-brand Frosted Mini Wheats while muttering at polling data. And then at 2:00 a.m., with a bottle or three of wine, we took to the streets and exhaled. For the last couple of months I've been coming back to 2008, and to the memory of that night, when my ex said he was sort of tired, and would rather go to sleep than watch the election. I didn't argue, and I called him weeping when they announced the win, and he sort of murmured that it was good, and then went back to bed. The country was waking up, and he just wanted to sleep.

It is snowing outside, full fluffy flakes. The leak in my bedroom ceiling has finally slowed, leaving a wide brown maw behind. I've been watching the same video of Darren Criss for the past hour. Darren Criss is such a delightfully compact man. I keep thinking I'll cry, but I don't.

when we lead with hope

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

random act of bravery

I spent the days of the hurricane in my apartment with the windows open. I weathered this one alone. It was difficult, honestly. But it was also okay. And all of my friends extended invitations to curl up into their couches or air mattresses. And that is a gift.  And there wasn't much for me to weather, compared to what has been wrought on other neighbourhoods. I live in some sort of triangle of mercy, apparently, where the winds blow gently and the rain falls all in a line, with order, with reserve. Waking up to images of the devastation on Tuesday was heartbreaking. I have grown to love this city and how much it gives to those of us who live here, and I have been fortified by my facebook news feed, which was one long string of invitations, offers of hot water, of internet, of baked goods. We all baked. A lot. That's how we prepared. I had gathered my supplies on my kitchen table: plastic jugs of water, headlamp, matches, batteries, Jane Austen's Persuasion on DVD, and ingredients for various loaves. The next morning it looked sort of foolish and pitiful. When I read stories about babies being swept from their mother's arms and whole houses being uprooted to land somewhere new, it seems darkly absurd, the idea that two aaa batteries could be a safety net.  

On one of the last days of this summer, I walked through Breezy Point on the way to The Boat for Singing Together. Did I tell you about that? A young couple built a tent from canvas and toggles on a piece of driftwood they found, and they've anchored it just off the coast. They shuttle you out there on a little motor boat and you sit in a circle with a bunch of strangers, dangling your feet in the water, singing. Literally singing. Walking to the harbour through the streets of Breezy Point, we were all amazed that a community like that could exist so close to the city - kids playing in the streets, parents with lawn chairs chatting with neighbours. It was a slice of suburbia against the Manhattan backdrop. It was a home. The couple who run The Boat told us that the community had been incredibly supportive. The teenagers kicked up their little sloops and rode around the tent, listening to the music. The night before we were there, one of the kids swam underneath the tent and came up in the center, grabbing one woman's legs and scaring everyone out of their minds. But in a kind way. You know. Anyway. This is what I've been thinking about. Those kids. That community. 

The storm ground campaigning to a halt for a few days. One man mobilized the National Guard, consoled victims, put the full weight of his office and his country behind salvaging what was left behind. Another man bought cans of soup so he could take photos of himself receiving the soup from his aides. He tried to swallow his words about privatizing FEMA and his pitiful, ceaseless dismissal of climate change. Some people say this is no time for politics. There is no better time for politics. 

I can't vote in this country. As ever, the election approaches and I am left with this immense feeling of fury and ineptitude. I read all the articles, re-tweet the horrifying soundbites about rape and rising oceans and the 47%, the same 47% who are now struggling to rebuild their homes and eat and just BREATHE. There is one man who believes the state is not responsible for caring for its citizens. That there is a big white house waiting for him where he can sit and grow richer and not do a whole lot, because that's what government should do: abandon those who can't help themselves, when "helping themselves" means working, caring for your family, staying healthy, loving who you love. To be as blunt as I can be: I do not understand, not even remotely, the sheer cruelty and ignorance and idiocy of anyone who casts their vote for that man. Not ever. Not now. You have to be better than that. We have to be better than that. We have to offer hot water and warm clothes to those who don't have them. We have to bake them some bread. We have to believe in compassion. It's so goddamn easy to care only for yourself, and so goddamn worthless. 

To be clear: what I'm doing is not brave. Yesterday I walked down to Red Hook and spent a few hours at the distribution centre, moving rolls of toilet paper from one place to another place. And again, and again. It was easy and it was nothing. The people who are trying to put a life back together out of ocean-beaten wood? They are brave. But all together, all the small movements from people all over this city, no matter how small, are monumental. They were overwhelmed by volunteers in Red Hook, so much so that they stopped accepting them. I know that not all communities have seen this sort of mobilization, but it was heartening, for a moment, to see everyone in that big room, just picking up things and moving them somewhere else, how such a small act can mean so much. It was easy and it was nothing. You take a small piece of paper or stand in front of a computer. You believe in compassion. It is easy and it is undeniably brave. And all together, it can be monumental. 

hurricane sandy

i know you want to run far away from one more / and that it's comin' at a bad time / some cold place heartless ways for all we know - 

two things

this dress

&

this poem (Several things occurred / that demanded my immediate attention.) 

today is dedicated to

- Chai lattes and corn & pear muffins
- Freedom
- Fall sun
- Duffel coats
- Foresight (ie. mine) (ie. hurrah for extended care and knowledgable young tattooed men at the Genius Bar) (ie. now that I'm tattooed too I feel like there's a language I haven't yet learned, like what do you call someone else's tattoo when you have one yourself? Tats? Ink? Art? I wanted to compliment his but I felt like such a jackass, someone must know the answer to this...)
- The Hudson River Greenway
- Murray's Cheese Shop
- The Cheesemonger at Murray's Cheese Shop who served me at least $10 worth of cheese samples topped with raisins soaked in balsamic, apple butter, fig spread, and for dessert, two blue cheeses showered by chocolate, until I had to ask him to stop -
- A Dance with Dragons (I cannot be shamed)
-  Fresh coats of paint.

gratitude

Oprah reminded me today of the import in keeping a gratitude journal. Oprah is always right (except when she really, really isn't, but those times are few and far between).

To wit, what I'm grateful for this weekend:

1. Pasta e Lenticchie, made vegetarian (added a parmesan rind and smoked paprika) and served with a swirl of basalmic; 
2. Zinnias from the market;

3. Brief Encounter at Film Forum with two beautiful women; 
4. Thick slices of chocolate walnut zucchini loaf; 
5. Season 2 of The Walking Dead instead of those stupid fitness classes because shut up, I'm PMSing; 
6. A plane ticket home for Christmas; 
7. The man who mixed the paint for my cabinets and told me the hints of green in the colour would help me accessorize my kitchen; 
8. Nathaniel, a new life, finally here, and whole; 
9. The Perfect Soft Boiled Egg; and
10. Lovely sofas, even if they won't ever be mine. 

Also I did laundry, wrote, made a major hack of mending a 70s paisley mini-dress, finally covered up the ill-advised patch of yellow on my bedroom door, installed a new doorknob, unpacked ONE WHOLE BOX, bought a friend some tea and listened hard, successfully teetered my way on my Rachel Comey's all the way to the West Village and back, napped, fended off a migraine, made boring but necessary purchases, and ate grapes. It boggles the mind how much more I would have gotten done had I not spent 13 hours with The Walking Dead, but no use crying over spilt zombies. 

(Monday!) 

namesake

Everyone is watching the VP debate right now but I don't have a TV and so instead I'm reading all the tweets and thinking about my grandfather.

We do this thing now where we Skype for half an hour each week, and I ask him about his life and record his answers. Later I'll transcribe all of these conversations, and later still I'll try to turn them into something that approximates even one iota of the grand, strange, epic life my grandfather has led. His story is the one that always lurks around the fringes of my authorial consciousness, my understanding of self. His is the lore I live with, the crib once struck by lightning, the coal mine, the piano in a church beside an ocean. He recently told me about the "call girl" in the small town in the interior of B.C. where he grew up. Not that he had personal knowledge of this, of course - it was all gossip and dirty imaginations. Still, hers is a story I'd like to know.

Today my grandfather and I talked about love. "You've been in love, so you know," he said, although it's hard to imagine that my experience bears any resemblance to his, to loving one woman from the age of 19 until she died, almost 50 years later, withered by dementia. "My love only grew," he said, this after telling me he'd had two girlfriends when he met my grandmother, two young girls waiting for him in different parts of the province, although he promised it was all very innocent, very tame. One of them remembered him years and years later, when, blindfolded at a reunion, she asked if she could hug the man before her, and upon putting her arms around him, cried out: "Oh, of course! It's Gene!"

"It's all changed," my grandfather said, not mournfully. He was musing on the nature of relationships, because I'd asked him how he could have dated my grandmother for so long, so chastely, biding his time before marriage. "It's all faster now, or slower maybe," he said, and both are true: that I can take someone to bed the night I meet them, that I can spend 8 years in a relationship without a ring. I'm guilty of romanticizing the past - I sometimes find myself longing for the days of the Renaissance - but there is something incredibly intoxicating about the simplicity that seemed to govern romance when my grandfather first met it. And yes, yes, I know, repressed sexuality and female disenfranchisement and blah blah blah, but my god, the ease of asking my parents to invite a nice boy to lunch, the one with the freshly pressed shirt and the clear tenor, the relative sanctuary of courtship and letters and Friday nights at the dance hall with a midnight curfew. His love only grew. His love only grew.

My grandfather made it back and forth down the hallway at the extended care facility on his walker in record time today, as his physical therapist urged him on. 22 minutes, he said, a personal best. It's such a sin, really, the way we live now, it's a sin, a sin, how careless we are. My grandfather is a giant, you see. That is what I know to be true.

west

Mornings when I wake up to the sound of rain, or just to the smell of it. The grey light. I love when someone asks me where I'm from, because I get to say the word. I get to name it. 

Lately I've been missing my home fiercely and actively, but also with a worrying logic: worrying because I don't feel ready to leave, but there's something more tangible and rational calling me back. It feels like an adult desire, counter to the things that keep me in New York - the energy, the potential, the unending surge of human life. There is a part of me that is starting to silently nudge at my collective here, to be less vehement in my protestations whenever one of them mentions leaving. They might have to go first. It's the most concrete reason I have for staying: my community is here. My people. And this is undeniably true, but there's a pull there, too, and I can't help but feel like I'm waiting for something to tip the scale. I've said I will wait out the three years of my visa in this city and then decide, but those three years suddenly seem - maybe - too long. And when I close my eyes at night I have started to conjure up a beat-up old car, the rain on the windshield, familiar green streets, the ocean, lights at the end of a driveway. It's a lucky problem to have, I know: so many places I might be happy. But for someone who has always had trouble being present, carrying the weight of a country on your shoulders isn't the best way to live a life. 

Vancouver, by Cat. 

i will miss your heart so tender / and i will love this love forever

the chestnut trees/the wishing well

Tonight I'm packing my small bag and drinking hot water with lemon and honey. My body is currently 98% zinc. I'm sick, which cannot be, because on Sunday I will put on my navy silk minidress with the gold sequins and stand next to two dear friends as they say their forevers. Tomorrow, Montana.

I'm considering the practice of radical vulnerability, considering these earrings (isn't there a thing with bloggers where they say, wow, these earrings, and then the next post is like, oh my, what kind and generous person sent me these earrings I loved so much? at what point of blogger success does that happen?), considering the playlists I'm compiling for this wedding. It's very daunting, being charged with making people dance.

It may not have been the best time for me to have lifted someone I love out of my life, right in the middle of these weddings, when it honestly becomes somewhat necessary to have someone with whom you can drink a few whiskeys, someone who you can marvel at, someone who marvels at you. At some point, after all of this is done, I'll write a bit about what a horribly selfish person I've turned out to be, or these weddings have shown me to be, and how truly difficult it is to be purely happy for the people you love without any of your own jealousy and sadness and loneliness and anger seeping through. But not yet.

For now, I'll listen to this song, and think about how I hope to sway gently to it, against it, in a barn in the foothills of Montana, thinking of my friends, and the love I have for them, and thinking, as always, of you.

fall list, a sampling

apple picking

go dark

bake

practice sobriety

read more

write, pitch, publish

turn it into something productive

wear more black 

finish the behemoth 

host a dinner party

walk the AT at Pawling

find a couch 

knit

my vagina has no biography

Zimmerman: Right, vaginas are only properly activated by penises, by means of some kind of cervical toggle switch.

In this, the brilliant hate-read of Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography. 

(UGH.) 

Also, my favourite passage from Ariel Levy's New Yorker review: "Wolf claims that vaginal slander - referring to the vagina by its ‘awful' feline moniker, for instance - ‘apparently affects the very tissue of the vagina.' She bases this conclusion on a study of female rats whose vaginal tissue showed signs of change after periods of stress. The experiment did not, however, entail researching yelling ‘Rat pussy!' at the animals; stress was manufactured physically. Wolf's interpretation of the science is, as usual, rather free."

it becomes a lot easier to exist

I wouldn't mind if things were different, but they're not and, truly, I have always enjoyed my space. I love turning the key in the door at the end of the day, being able to decompress, knowing where I left the remote control to the television. I am partial to hot water. I like being able to come home late and collapse into bed without worrying about waking anyone with my drunken shoe removal.

This is not a matter of statistics or trends; it's my life. There is no advertisement for it. Funnily, that's one of the better selling points imaginable: once you realise you're not obligated to persuade others about your existence, it becomes a lot easier to exist. 

                                                                                               - Sloane Crosley, on living alone. 

According to that article, I'm part of a trend, part of a new legion of solo dwellers. Well, sure. Why not. Today I wrestled my A/C unit out of the window and only narrowly missed launching it down to the street. It would have been easier, yes, everything would always have been easier, yes, this would all be easier with someone else. But that is not my life, which is what I keep reminding myself. That is not my life. This is my life. 

On that note: Something happened recently that I'm struggling to get through, or past. A rift. In many ways I think it will change the way I've been living, day-to-day, yes, molecularly. It's not a change I want to make - rather one I have to make, and I feel lighter, if also more heartbroken, for having taken those first, necessary steps. 

And on that note: Someone once asked me if I thought the guy I was seeing was brilliant. He yelled it, actually: "DOES HE FILL YOU WITH AWE?!" And I knew the answer, knew it immediately, and knew that meant the end of us. 

There's a list, there's a rough-knuckled fist of people, and I clutch them with such ferocity, those who have entered my life, and stayed, and who continue to dazzle me right to my core. I will not close my eyes against that light, and if you have it, I'm going to tell you, even if that contains the implicit bargain: I'm asking you to live up to that, now. And for my part, I will wait for that light. I'll wait until I can feel its slow heat thrumming, somewhere out in the crowd. 

And on that note: This fall, I'm going to stop dating men and date my writing instead. I'm going to take my writing out to dinner at the restaurant around the corner with the incredible octopus pasta and I'm going to sit it at the bar and feed it. I'm going to carve date nights into my calendar, long, cozy nights where I woo and tease and coddle my writing. I'll make it tea, or whiskey, whatever it wants. I'll talk softly to it, worship it, give it what it didn't know it always needed. I'll take it to bed early. I'll wake it with the sunrise. I'll maybe even knit it something warm to put around its neck, and then ask it to be amazed. I'll see where we might go together. 

a symphony, and some fish

Some new (or old) words about the cold up over here.

Thank you, in advance, for sharing with me.

we were blessed

and I saw, again, how blessed my life had been, / first, to have been able to love, / then, to have the parting behind me,... / and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have / lost someone who could have loved me for life.

- Sharon Olds

via Emily, who knows. 

preach

"Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."

DFW. 

random act of bravery

I painted the walls and steamcleaned the floors. I hung curtains and shouldered my weight behind a drill. There are holes in my walls and I covered them with thick coats of white primer, with furniture positioned to hide the cracks. Some nights I just walk slowly back and forth along the length of this apartment, feeling the silence around me like something with form, like a new partner.

It's an adjustment, this living alone. I wonder how many times I have to listen to this song before a neighbour calls suicide watch.

The day we moved out, I went back to my old apartment to drop off the keys, sometime around midnight. Earlier one of the guys who helped me move told me my new place reminded him of his grandmother's home in Puerto Rico, and that allowed me to find its decrepitude charming in a way I hadn't before, and I was thinking of that as I bounded up the two flights of stairs in my old building, slipped the keys into the lock for the last time. I was halfway down the hallway when I realized the new residents had already moved in. Their belongings were piled in the centre of our kitchen and living room, a couch standing on its end, a desk tucked up against the stove. I froze. By some stroke of good fortune they were out, so there was no one to catch me there. But it made my heart lodge itself in my throat - not just the fear of being found in someone else's apartment, but realizing that it was now someone else's apartment - that in less than 2 hours, the rooms I had called home for a whole year, the rooms in which I'd raised two cats, held my roommates as they wept and been held in turn, had sex, had a fever, baked loaves of zucchini bread, broken my heart, broken at least 4 glasses, changed my plans, changed them again - these rooms belonged to someone else now. I was bowled over by the temporary-ness of this, of living in New York City. By the realization that I will only ever be an interloper here.

I slipped the keys from my ring and left them on the stovetop. I turned off the light.

truths universally acknowledged

1. Moving in is better than moving out.
2. Everything is better than moving out.
3. You may have spent the year you lived with the personal trainer self-shaming and resolution-making, but you will be grateful for every ounce of guilt and loathing when it comes time to lift the things.
4. You have too much stuff.
5. With every year, it will become infinitely easier to throw away the crappy jewellery your crappy ex gave you.
6. There is no better album for motivating inane activities than Bryan Adams' 1991 masterpiece, "Waking Up the Neighbours."
7. That apartment - the one for which you signed the lease and paid the security deposit and the brokers fee in a feverish haze because it was rent-stabilized and in your neighbourhood and had a painted red door, the one you thought might need some cosmetic work but it's nothing you can't handle, what's a little grout when you will be able to live alone for the first time in your life? - will be so much worse than you remembered. Open the door to the fridge. See that? That's a fish. Half a fish frozen against the wall of the freezer. That is your life now. It's you and the fish. Mount up.

mikvahs

This is soup. This is the soup I eat at my desk. It's got soba noodles in it and tofu and you get to choose two vegetables. Choosing which vegetables is the most difficult part, sometimes.

Which isn't saying anything about my life. It's just soup, guys.

There wasn't any soup at my desk in Maine. There was, however, a lake just down the hill from our cabin that I slipped into at dawn the morning of the wedding. I went in naked, because that's what you do for a mikvah, and the water was warm from the rain the night before.

There was also this in Maine:

I mean, THAT's a wedding. 

That's me there in the blue chiffon. We were a rainbow of chiffon. And by god, we actually looked lovely. Hear that, ESB? A RAINBOW OF CHIFFON. 

There have been some brave acts lately, like speaking from the heart, but here's the real truth: I'm afraid my bravery is becoming rote. I could publish a collection of righteous emails, I think. Maybe there's not enough doing. Real doing. Real brave doing. Maybe there's a little too much eating soup at my desk while listening to The Walkmen. Where's the line, exactly? I want to see the line, and then I want to put my heart on it. 

Also I want the perfect black dress. Nothing fancy, loose and sexy, with room for my not insignificant chest. Let me know if you've seen it. 

two things

"How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."
                                                                                                                     Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.

Rereading Cloud Atlas as a security blanket, as a gift. This book cracks me open. I keep having to put it down because I feel unworthy of the words.

Also, this song, a whole bunch.

 

I'm heading to Maine this week to watch two of my nearest and dearest hitch their lives to each other. I'm wearing the bridesmaid hat for the first time. Turns out I'm a really shitty bridesmaid, which is perhaps not surprising. Still, I'm all glory and agog and eager, ready to stand up there and witness this, the grandest of gestures.

open wide

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” 

— D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers

I had a revelation recently, a revelation that served as insulation, a bubble-wrapped moment of understanding that will no doubt sound pathetic on the page-ish, but which I think I might cling to for a while to see where it takes me, and that was this: Maybe there are people who are really good at being brokenhearted. By which I mean, maybe I am one of those people. There is a madness in love and I went at it full-throated and wide when I first caught the scent. It sped me up and gave me purpose. Loving - not being loved - was the thing that sustained me. Being loved back was much more difficult, and if I'm entirely honest, I'm not sure it ever really fit. I chafed under it. And when, after eight years, the one guy who had ever claimed to love me left in a pretty ugly way, there was a part of me that said, Of course. 

In the two years since, I've pinned my heart to others in a very misguided fashion, sort of blithely, gleefully saying, Oh hey, there's a cliff, go throw yourself off of it. I've made all the choices I shouldn't make. It's not a reckless affection I give to others, and it is terribly rare, but when it comes it is so intense, so consuming, and, for me, truly, so joyful. It feels so wonderful to give love. AND SO AWFUL. All at once! And I am so very, very good at it! If it were an Olympic sport, my mixtapes and love letters would win gold. So full of feeling, the Russians would say, daubing their eyes. What if, rather than resisting this, rather than becoming small and safe or opening only to something lasting, something reciprocal, I just kept. fucking. loving. Loving everything in my path. Friends and books and pie and all the wrong men. Right through the pain and the loneliness and the ache. Let the dawn-kaleidoscopic cracks open wide. What if loving, despite everything, is the bravest work of my life? 

I have these two cats. They're perfect. I've told you about them. It's round two of fostering. They're being adopted by a vet in Long Island. I have loved four cats now who weren't mine. They weren't mine, and I loved them anyway. There. That is the best thing I've ever done. 

i only care about me

So, remember that time I wrote that thing? I thought it might be an interesting experiment to say the thing I'm most ashamed to say. I thought it might be brave? I also thought - hoped - that it would invite discussion. Hey ho, it did. I feel very grateful for that, and also like I want to make a large pot of noodles and then dump then on my face and walk down the street, just to try out a different kind of humiliation.

The most pointed criticism, I think, is "Why are we supposed to care about this?" How could I imagine I have anything useful or interesting to say? It's the concern that plagues all personal essays - if there is no universal question at the heart of the work, why does it deserve to exist? I don't even begin to imagine that my tiny thoughts have any relevance to anyone - they often cease to be relevant to me as soon as I've had them - but creative nonfiction, essaying, memoir, all involves that very measure of grandiosity. It's a very vulnerable kernel: the audacity to believe that there might be one other neuron in the world that will spark the way yours did, even if only for a second. And then you have to capitalize on that small glow and try and feed it (with wine, with Honey Nut Cheerios out of a mug) in order to sustain 1500 words of whim and folly and then you have to have the gall to actually throw it askew on a proverbial wall and then, most horrifying of all, you have to stand under it, beaming, asking someone to come in and tell you what they think. (See also: OH HEY LOOK I HAVE A BLOG.)

It was a good morning to read this: The Shrinking Boundaries of Being a (Certain Kind of) Twentysomething. I have a uselessly heteronormative crush on Richard Lawson, but man, he got a little MEAN. Still, I nodded sagely - because yes! how deeply self-involved to imagine anyone else could be interested in what you have to say, especially when what you have to say is nothing more than a deeply self-involved rumination on the minute segment of the population in which you happen to live - and then I went and clicked over to my article to refresh the comments for the 75th time.

(Please note that the first comment on Lawson's article is: "Oh shut up already and go have an actual life.")

In case I didn't make myself clear: I am so lucky. I want to bake everyone who has ever read any word I have ever written a very large muffin of your choosing. I want to give back your time in baked goods. I want to take you down to Chick-fil-A so we can eat those muffins and make out, if you are a girl. Let's all do something wild and good together.

in defense of

"The tattoo is primal parent to the visual arts. Beginning as abstract maps of spiritual visions, records of the 'other' world, tattoos were originally icons of power and mystery designating realms beyond normal land-dwellers' experience.

The extra-ordinary qualities of the tattoo's magic-religious origin remain constant even today, transferring to the bearer some sense of existing outside the conventions of normal society."

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

lessons from Nora

While watching Heartburn, I realized I want to be the kind of woman who can have a man over to her apartment and, when we get hungry at 4am, duck into the kitchen only to come back with an impeccable plate of spaghetti puttanesca, all briny and saucy and messy, all wild in a large bowl, that we eat together in bed.

*Edited to say I care much less about having a man than I do about having the ability to cook that spaghetti.

random act of bravery

a diptych:

From Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Letter #9: "And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me, life is in the right, always."

random act of bravery

Everything happens in black and white with short hair. It's European, or something.