There are days, moments, when I am overcome by my need for things. Foolish, inconsequential things, mostly, like this:
I am ripe with wanting, often. I go into bookstores and pick volumes off shelves, weigh them in my hands, run my fingers across the covers and spines. And this Sunday, on a lazy walk through Soho, there was a two-month old hound mix, a shivery, beautiful girl with a bridle coat in a small cage in a truck. When he held her, she clung to his neck like a baby. I held his hand and tried to convince him to take her home.
Sometimes I think that if I could perfect a cat-eye, my life would be 50% better than it is now.
I want things. I want Bobbi Brown Long Wear Gel Eyeliner. I want Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. to play a concert in my living room for all my friends. I want the collections agency to stop calling me. I want life to be a little bit easier, even though I know that would make it less valuable. I'm quite good at wanting, really, when it doesn't cost me anything. But lately I've been saying how much I want to feel affection, or intimacy, longing or vulnerability - I want to know I am capable of feeling. And then it's Saturday afternoon, and we're trembling in a bedroom, and I think - Funny how I claim to want to feel something, want to feel it so badly again, feel anything, feel alive with it, and then when I do it's all I can manage not to wish it gone.
I wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured
we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
- from "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul," Frank O'Hara
On Christmas Day, we put together a shadow-box full of photos of his grandchildren for our grandfather to display in his room, since apparently the only thing anyone talks about in those halls is their progeny.
Looking through photographs, we realized that we haven't taken a photograph of the cousins since sometime in the mid-90s, when my brother was still carrying his 30 extra pounds and I had a mouth full of metal. Cue the line-up.
Predictably, not a single one of these turned out. Being the oldest, I blame myself.
In the meantime, see if you can play "Spot the Jews" here.
(At the office, they tell me it's strange how much I enjoy spending time with my family. No one moves to New York unless they're trying to get away from them, they say. I don't mind being the odd one out. I love the bejeezus out of them. I do.)
Go up to the roof to see if you can see the Northern Lights. How far away is the sun? How hard is it storming there? You take a mug of hot chocolate, you work hard for the horizon. Once in France the meteors were so loud they struck the sky in pinks and green, you saw them, you still have that.
You tell him all the things you want him to do to you. You aren't sure if they are true. You wonder how long it will be before you have to do something to yourself.
Goodbye to the busses and the poppies that flew past us behind bus-windows in deep red-orange-dotted- smudges and the edgeless fields where you walked when I wasn’t there, with you, in your head, where you walked, were you alone, were there fields, how alone were you. How
alone can anyone stand to be. Any one of us might be tapped any one lead away when that day comes will you be ready. Will you be prepared for what you have not said.
A little girl sipping juice through a straw in my corner bodega almost ran into me rounding a corner yesterday, and just as I was preparing to be annoyed she looked down at my turquoise rain boots and said, very matter-of-factly, "I like your boots." And I said thank you, and she said you're welcome, and it honestly made my whole week.
I found this photo today over here. She found it here. It is a cabin in France, of course, where everything is perfect, but when I saw it I was rushed back to a small home that my grandfather built, after my grandmother died, on Saltspring Island, just off the coast of Vancouver. He lived there with his partner at the time, the one none of us could quite warm to, but he built a room to house my grandmother's piano and in this tiny cottage that felt like an act of worship, so I forgave him. I took the ferry over by myself once and had him meet me at the dock. We ate soup at a small restaurant in town and then I read and napped on his porch for hours, waking with the windchimes, watching the raccoon he fed as it hooked its front paws on the rung of the top stair and peered at me across the deck. There is something so intimate in my memories of that place, which makes sense, I suppose - a small carving of land that he claimed, built, and cared for until he couldn't care for it any longer, a whole world in miniature. Like a Russian estate, if we were landholding Russians in a Chekhov play.
My grandfather had surgery yesterday morning. They put a screw in his fractured hip. Outside, it snowed, real snow in a city where that is a rarity. He had fallen in his bathroom at 3:00am. He had to use his panic button. I try to imagine the nurses with their small hands trying to lift my rapidly-disappearing grandfather off the floor of his bathroom. Then I try to stop imagining this.
This year has been a bruiser. All 19 days of it.
Recently a guy told me he stopped responding to my emails because he "couldn't find a deeper connection." This made me sad, and then really, really mad. My feeling is, if someone is looking for a deeper connection, they should really tell you first. I've got whole depths unplumbed, buddy. But there are things you have to earn, I believe. You certainly don't earn them by behaving like an asshole. It is strange to be found wanting without the awareness that you were being judged.
Which all goes back to making myself the smallest I can be.
My baby brother was born 24 years ago today. Tonight he will eat short ribs with his girlfriend after driving carefully through the snow to visit our grandfather in hospital. He doesn't really read books, or care about art, or think about his place in the world. And yet he's probably a better person than I could ever hope to be. I wonder how that works.
I run my body on Vitamin C and Zinc. I live off hyphenates: Cold-Eeze, Thera-Flu, Emergen-C. I curl the cats deeper into my lap and I ask them to be still for a moment. I ask everyone to care just a little bit more about each other.
I'm breaking out all my loaded words, lately. If you cross me, you had better believe there is one wrath-filled, strongly-worded email coming your way. It will end with something benign, something along the lines of, "Hope you're well!" but you will know that the subtext there is I HOPE YOU ACCIDENTALLY ROLL IN POOP AND THEN SMELL LIKE POOP FOR AT LEAST A MONTH.
On the subway home, just past midnight, a guy I initially thought to be drunk turns out to be meditating. He slowly moves a coil of green prayer beads through his fingers. He presses his spine straight against the hard plastic seat, eyes closed, breath moving up and down the column of his body. Earlier tonight I was kissing someone in a cab, and I laughed, because I was kissing someone in the backseat of a New York City cab, and doesn't that strike you as strange? And then even earlier than that I was sitting in Lincoln Center listening to the New York Philharmonic play Bruckner's 8th, his last, a symphony that is commonly known as The Apocalyptic, because of how closely it hews to death.
I'm not sure there is much to connect these things, beyond how I'm realizing that just the act of getting up in the morning is often an act of bravery. Just the moment of saying yes.
A friend recently passed along this video. "It'll make you cry," he said, to which I replied:
"Maybe not. I have a hard heart now."
It was a joke, sort of. Except it also wasn't. Because I didn't cry, watching this video, despite its beauty and poignancy. And I was reminded of sitting in the theatre, alone, watching Like Crazy, and hearing the entire audience sniffling around me, and thinking, "Am I missing something?"
A few days ago I opened a letter I had written to myself last winter, a worksheet that was meant to detail where I wanted to be in 2012. I'll be honest, when I finally got to opening it I was all, "Man, I've done so well. I'm sure I'll be right in line."
Except.
The whole letter was about how OPEN I wanted my 2012 self to be. It used words like "vulnerable" and "alive" and "awake." I wanted to be forgiving, to have achieved peace, to be ready and grateful. And I'm reading it going, "Man, that 2011 self sure is one naive idiot."
I work in smaller spaces now. I tried to explain this to a coworker. I only have so much room to move. I have smaller feelings. That is where I am comfortable.
"It feels good," I told her, "because it doesn't feel bad."
There is an element of self-preservation in this, to be sure. And maybe that's just where I need to live for a little while, until I get my footing again. I'm thankful for what turned out to be, in retrospect, a rather difficult fall, if only because it made me see that I can have feelings, still, that I will have them again.
In that spirit I decided to make a list of all the things that did make me cry in 2011.
(This does not include January through March, three months in which I barely stopped crying.)
This past Friday night, I celebrated the engagement of one of my closest friends in the city with my other closest friend in the city. She is also engaged. I walked into the restaurant to find a table set for four with another smaller, circular table attached, set for one.
I am trying to get better about speaking up at work. I've passed the six-month mark at my current job, and as I move into 2012, it's time to start figuring out how/if to get a visa. Because I'm bound by my (totally-amazing, in-no-way-regrettable) Canadian citizenship, I have to put a lot of stock in my current job. Once I commit to a visa, I won't be able to easily leave my position or move to another organization for quite some time. Having never had a job for longer than a few months, it's incredibly daunting to think that I could be locking myself to this particular, not-totally-satisfying one for any real length of time. That being said, it is what I need to do if I want to stay in New York - and for the moment, I absolutely do. (And yay for that realization, by the way.) So I want to focus on making my job the best it can be - the most interesting, the most fulfilling, the most engaging, the most challenging. I want to amass as much knowledge and experience as possible. There is room for me to do that: I simply need to DO it. DOING it is going to be a theme this year.
So I kicked it off today by chiming in on a strategic planning discussion, something about which I feel quite passionately. It felt good, and also totally bad, in that I was running on two hours of jet-lagged sleep and couldn't feel my limbs, and therefore can no longer actually remember what it was I said that, at the time, seemed very RELEVANT and also very IMPORTANT and probably very SMART, and could have just as easily been me blowing raspberries at my boss for seven minutes.
There is some serious boob-love going on over at east side bride this week. It's really, really lovely, having a gaggle of ladies to alternately bemoan and champion the full-figure, to commiserate about purchasing bras in sizes that don't exist in the modern lexicon. I have been spreading the gospel of the Elle Macpherson Cloud Swing, which may have actually saved my life, or at least my breasts, which I have threatened to have downsized many a time. But these bras, oh, these bras. I am not one to wax rhapsodical about underwear, but SERIOUSLY THESE BRAS.
I won't make a habit of these product placement posts, or of tooting my own horn, but I'll just finish with this: It honestly takes me a good 3 minutes longer to get dressed on a normal day now because I spend those 3 minutes admiring how goddamn sexy I am. I can't think of any stronger endorsement than that.
"Each morning, the sun barely up, I licked salt off the ship's railings, believing by now that I could distinguish between the taste of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. I dove into the pool and swam frog-like under the surface, tumbled over at the end of a length and returned underwater, testing the limit of my lungs, my two hearts. I witnessed Miss Lasqueti becoming irritated with the thriller she was rushing through, preparing to fling it into whatever sea we were in. And with the others, I drank in the presence of Emily as she sauntered by and talked with us."
A few years ago I instituted a new Christmas tradition. As with most of our familial traditions, this one has been successful only because it is centered around eating. So every Christmas morning, I relish the chance to wake up early, make a mug of green tea, and putter around the empty kitchen, lighting the tree on my way in. By the time the rest of the family - eight of us, give or take one of the cousins - makes their way down, the cinnamon buns are in the oven, and the espresso machine has started to whirr, and the last gifts are being slipped under the tree or into a stocking.
This year I was craving something spicier - it's been a spicy year? (what?) - so I added some citrus and cardamom. They were simple and sticky and we wrapped two up to take to my grandfather and then they were gone.
Orange Cardamom Cinnamon Buns Adapted from here and here.
Whisk dry ingredients. Cut in butter with your parents' pastry blender (so grown up!). In another bowl, beat buttermilk and egg. Pour over dry ingredients, and stir until dough comes together. Panic a little because it won't really come together, and then just get in there with your hands. Knead sticky mess on a floured surface. Roll out into a rectangle.
Filling
1/2c brown sugar
2tsp cardamom
2tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp cloves
good thwack of orange zest
2tbsp melted butter
Mix everything but butter in a small bowl. Marvel at the orange. What kind of orange IS that? It's the most beautiful orange you've ever seen. Stop everything to take a photo.
Spread butter over rectangle of dough, then sprinkle with filling. Roll up from long end, or screw up and roll from the short end, like I did, and then just kind of awkwardly pull the roll of dough until it will yield enough buns. Slice rolls into the number of family members + 6. Place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment, and bake for 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
Slowly eat orange - the best of your life - while the buns bake.
Glaze
Mix equal parts buttermilk and orange juice with enough powdered sugar to make a thin glaze. Drizzle over slightly cooled buns. Serve to your family members as they tumble downstairs, pyjama'd, sleep-ridden, hands empty, ready to give and receive.
Kissed a stranger at midnight. Could also be classified as a random act of stupidity, but as I remember it, it was quite bold and a rather sweet way to ring out a year of bravery.
There's this quite brilliant Radiolab about self-sabotage. Perhaps you've heard it? (I feel like there must be a distinct overlap between bloggers and Radiolab listeners. I'm sure if you threw vintage quilts on that list you'd have a perfect Venn diagram.) It is about, among other things, the deals we make with ourselves. I've thought a lot about this since listening to the podcast. I've wondered, for example, what it would take for me to hold myself, firmly, unflinchingly, to my own standards.
And a related confession: I love resolutions. I know in the past I've said I detest them. Well, I was lying. I love them I love them I love them. I love having goals. What breath! What life! A sudden, deep inhale: that is a resolution. There is such a sense of possibility there. And you can make LISTS. Goddamn, I love me a good list.
2011 was a resoundingly difficult year. Almost everyone I've spoken to has agreed on this. There was something funky up in the astral alignment. Who knows. It was a rough, ragged year. But I feel so good about what is coming. An announcement from two beloved friends over the phone from snowbound Montana helped to kick things off. There is so much LOVE in this year already. I can feel it crackling around me. Things are going to happen.
So I made some resolutions. They're over there -->
And here is the big one. I am going to write this year. Every day, for a full year. This can mean anything - a chapter, a sentence, a blog post. But I will show up. There are no more excuses. And the deal I made with myself: If I miss a day - just one day - I can never write again.
That sentence is a hook to the jaw. It feels real. It's bone and gristle.
2012 is going to be a banner year. I am so, so ready.
Apropos of nothing, a photo I took with my old Minolta from my Brooklyn rooftop. Doesn't it make you a little hungry, looking at that city? Doesn't it make you want to dive in?
