I had this brief moment last week, maybe after all the Grammy hoopla, where I was like, "Meh. I'm kind of over Bon Iver."
Nope.
2.17.2012
2.16.2012
lately
As it turns out, I don't do well in bridal shops. I have a tendency to gag loudly around poly chiffon. These are good lessons to learn. Also a good lesson: your life will appear almost pathetically uninteresting when it is being recited to you in a series of charges by the fraud detection department at your bank. You will wish you were the one spending $600 at sneaker stores in the Bronx, rather than the one buying two discounted boxes of bran cereal at Key Foods for $6.99.
I had a far better Valentine's Day than I anticipated, or deserved. I woke up and unwrapped my gift to myself for the second time, taking exactly the right amount of enjoyment, believing both that I deserved the gift and that I was a moron for believing I could afford it. A bouquet showed up on my desk at lunch and I ponied up the $5 I owed a coworker for betting against people being good enough. I ate a spicy red curry with pineapple in a dark bar over whiskey with a friend, celebrating a relationship that grows richer by the day. And then my roommate and I ran drunk through the rain to the deli, where we bought two pints of ice cream, just the way girls who don't believe in love are wont to do. When I was young my mom used to set out breakfast for us on Valentine's Day, lay real silverware on the table rather than rushing us through cereal at the kitchen counter. There would be small gifts wrapped in tissue paper. This year she sent me a stack of hardcovers, the ones I would never buy for myself.
Brooklyn Anchorage
and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.
Do you want to know a secret? Sometimes on the subway I look at the girls wearing their rings on the right finger and I try and figure out what separates me from them. I think it is the hair. They always have great hair.
***
I had a far better Valentine's Day than I anticipated, or deserved. I woke up and unwrapped my gift to myself for the second time, taking exactly the right amount of enjoyment, believing both that I deserved the gift and that I was a moron for believing I could afford it. A bouquet showed up on my desk at lunch and I ponied up the $5 I owed a coworker for betting against people being good enough. I ate a spicy red curry with pineapple in a dark bar over whiskey with a friend, celebrating a relationship that grows richer by the day. And then my roommate and I ran drunk through the rain to the deli, where we bought two pints of ice cream, just the way girls who don't believe in love are wont to do. When I was young my mom used to set out breakfast for us on Valentine's Day, lay real silverware on the table rather than rushing us through cereal at the kitchen counter. There would be small gifts wrapped in tissue paper. This year she sent me a stack of hardcovers, the ones I would never buy for myself.
Brooklyn Anchorage
and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.
Lisa Jarnot
***
Do you want to know a secret? Sometimes on the subway I look at the girls wearing their rings on the right finger and I try and figure out what separates me from them. I think it is the hair. They always have great hair.
***
Sometimes things happen. Sometimes you say, "I want to go to the beach," and he says, Okay, I will take you to the beach. They happen just like that. Sometimes on a Sunday night you will be studying the way the light hits a glass and learning about the wine they make in the Canary Islands, how the volcanic soil makes it taste of black pepper, and you be so sad and so happy all at once, your body almost not large enough to contain it all. And sometimes you are in bed and a cat who barely knows you climbs up to hold onto your neck like she can't bear to be torn from you, and she doesn't care that you've been sleeping without sheets for almost a week now because you can't muster up the energy to walk to the laundromat. And sometimes you have a headache for three days straight and then it lifts in a dark theatre and you can finally breathe cleanly again and it's all because there is a guy onstage with the most beautiful arms you have ever seen. I can now pinpoint the moment I knew I loved this city. All it took was a car driving by the bar I was drinking in, alone, and the lights on a street freshly slick with rain.
2.12.2012
random act of bravery
On a scale of 1 to that's the most pathetic thing I've ever heard, just buy your damn pie stand in Vermont and eight cats and call it a day, how pathetic would it be to spend Valentine's Day doing my laundry?
Or perhaps brave? That's a much nicer, not at all delusional way to look at the situation.
Or perhaps brave? That's a much nicer, not at all delusional way to look at the situation.
2.03.2012
if you want to
KNOWING YOU COULD IS BETTER
THAN KNOWING YOU WILL
I must see you; let’s meet at the fringes of respectability
at quarter past nine. We could straddle the oft-licked
curb (it’s the repetition we like). I promise not to say
anything louche when you buss the backs of my fingers.
What is that noise coming from the other side of the river—
maybe pavement being set perfectly straight or a woozy guitar.
In light like this we become automatic and can reach each other—
what a difficult noise to hold and clearly making love is all that.
Juiced, I’m sure we’re taller than before and don’t miss
what we’ve lost. Meanwhile the streetlights blush
in their globes as if they could tell how the party towed us
along like a chain of rollerblading kids latched onto a bus.
Later let’s go swimming down by the electrical plant
since as you know the water runs out warmest from its pipes.
Bring on the horse tranquilizers
for my listing heart is pecker-fretted, truculent and true.
I must see you; let’s meet at the fringes of respectability
at quarter past nine. We could straddle the oft-licked
curb (it’s the repetition we like). I promise not to say
anything louche when you buss the backs of my fingers.
What is that noise coming from the other side of the river—
maybe pavement being set perfectly straight or a woozy guitar.
In light like this we become automatic and can reach each other—
what a difficult noise to hold and clearly making love is all that.
Juiced, I’m sure we’re taller than before and don’t miss
what we’ve lost. Meanwhile the streetlights blush
in their globes as if they could tell how the party towed us
along like a chain of rollerblading kids latched onto a bus.
Later let’s go swimming down by the electrical plant
since as you know the water runs out warmest from its pipes.
Bring on the horse tranquilizers
for my listing heart is pecker-fretted, truculent and true.
1.31.2012
things i want
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.
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.
1.30.2012
1.27.2012
i want to be my own valentine
Maybe I could, just to be kind to myself. I could even wrap it up in red tissue. I could be delicate. I could be special.
1.25.2012
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy/we shall be happy
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
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
ruining family photos since 1984
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.)
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.)
1.24.2012
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