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.