Ten. Years.,
published at 10:06am on 06/14/09, with 2 Comments
Ten years ago, just about this time of year, I moved to New York.
One.
Friday nights around one in the morning, the streets of the Village are filled with groups of men and women drifting from bar to bar. The men and women are rarely together at this time of night. The couples have all gone home already, having taken in a movie and a drink, and are now at home, asleep, comfortable knowing that they are together. The couples who have formed at a bar that evening, “coupled” only in that there are two of them, and they are together, have gone home for the evening, awkwardly pushing at each other in doorways, discovering each other in bed. At one in the morning, the groups that are left on the street are the men and the women who do not belong to either of these two categories. They have left their first bar, having found nobody suitable (or perhaps they weren’t even looking) and they have moved on to their second. They are with their friends, and they are talking about women, or men, or perhaps art, or love, but those things are all kind of the same, anyway. A taxi full of men idles next to a taxi containing one of the aforementioned couples, and the man at the window leans out of the taxi to shout “show us your tits,” to the woman in the cab next to him. “Don’t worry about him,” he say, gesturing to the man sitting next to her, “show us your tits.” And the light turns green and the traffic starts moving again and the man in the taxi with his friends is still leaning out of the window making obscene gestures with his hand, his tongue, and his cheek.
Two.
I stand on a street corner giving directions to a friend of mine. As he walks away, a well-dressed couple walks up to me and asks if I can help them with directions. They are looking for a movie theatre. Someone has told them to walk down the avenue until they find one. I name two independent theaters that I know in the neighborhood and they hold out a flyer for a third. “Oh,” I say, “is that the theater you’re looking for?” “No, no,” the woman says, folding up the green sheet of paper. “We want to go see ‘The Hangover.’” Remember to always clarify the question before giving an answer. Later, a man calls out to me “hey buddy, hey buddy,” and I walk right past him.
Three.
New Yorkers have, at their disposal, an almost infinite number of activities to do on any given day. This weekend alone I had on my calendar a talent show, two concerts, a documentary screening, a potluck dinner, dim sum, dinner with a friend and a BBQ event. This is not including the outdoor art festival or the weekend-long music festival. I woke up on Saturday in a state of panic. I woke up not wanting to do anything, but was overwhelmed by the number of things that I would not be doing if I chose to not do any of it. I padded around my apartment for about an hour, worrying about all of the things that I did not want to do and thinking about how I might go about doing them, until I realized that I was under no obligation to do any of it. Instead, I went out for a bike ride and did laundry. As I scrubbed soap into the stains on my shirt collar, I decided that there are worse things in life than having too many options.
Four.
Riding a bicycle is one of the most exciting and efficient ways of getting around this city. In the past several years I have become one of those people who would prefer to hop on a bike than get on the subway in order to get from point A to point B. And in that time I have also discovered that there are two distinct classes of people in this town: those who share this philosophy with me, and those who wish us dead. While pedestrians in this town have no particular respect for automobiles, they do not, in general hate the car drivers themselves. One may dislike traffic, or one may dislike SUVs, or one may dislike the fact that, on occasion, someone will blow through your neighborhood without a muffler, but on a car-by-car basis, people rarely get angry at the driver. Pedestrians hate cyclists, however. People will actively go out of their way to tell you how much they dislike the fact that you ride a bicycle. The other day, as I weaved through a crosswalk that was full of people crossing against a light, someone shouted after me “why don’t you ride on the sidewalk?” And followed this with an expletive. A friend had a man crossing the street walk out of his way to kick her back tire. And when I am forced into a sea of taxis and garbage trucks because a delivery guy decides he’s going to come barreling down the bike line against traffic, I know exactly where these people are coming from. Fucking cyclists.
Five.
I called the city the other day to file a noise complaint about the screeching noise coming from the rooftop next to my apartment. It keeps me up at night and I have considered that if this noise does not stop, I may have to move. I called the city to file a noise complaint and realized that I have become that guy. I am perfectly ok with this.
Six.
I have never felt more at home than I have living here. Well, ok. Maybe one other time.
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with 2 Comments
Happy things,
published at 10:11am on 11/25/08, with 1 Comment
Recently, I spent the day going through old emails when I came across one, from myself, with the subject line “Happy things”
Just like that. No punctuation, first letter capitalized as my mobile messaging device does for me, automatically.
“Seeing people logged in and idle for days at a time over holidays.”
I wrote this to myself two days before Christmas last year. I often write notes1 like this to remind myself of thoughts I may have had, ideas I wanted to commit to paper, things that just made me feel good. This particular thought made me feel good.
I had just logged in to an instant messaging service. I live close to my family, so the holidays are never a time for travel for me. Two days before Christmas, I was most likely blocks from my house, wandering around the city, enjoying the energy that inevitably comes at that time of year. Not since college has the holiday season brought the stress of travel, of waiting at airports and bus terminals, of being with family and not with friends. I’ve never really lived far enough away that the house where I grew up no longer felt like home. In fact, the most holiday travel I have ever done was to pile into the family car (a station wagon, natch) and visit cousins, aunts, uncles or grandparents a couple of hours away.
But so many people do travel for the holidays. It is inevitably the week of December 25th that finds many of my friends taking off from work, packing up presents and a week’s worth of clothing and heading out of town on a train upstate, a plane to California, a bus to Pennsylvania, and all points in between. And much of the time, with the excitement of the holidays, they will rush out of work, computers still on, cursors still blinking, and messaging programs still marking their presence at their terminals. And so it is, days later, that I will turn on my computer and see those names, greyed out, idling on the side of my screen. They will have been like this for days – “38 hours idle, 72 hours idle” – and I will know that these friends are heading home for the holidays, to family and friends, or off on a holiday adventure, away from work, away from their everyday lives.
They will stay like that for days, silently sitting on the edge of my screen until, without fail, on Christmas day, the buddy list lights up again. A few pop on first thing in the morning, before running downstairs to open presents. The rest of the family is asleep, and they are transformed into five year-olds again, waiting, waiting until they can rush under the tree to see what Santa left for them. Or it is mid-morning, the coffee is on, the house is starting to wake up, waffles cooking in the kitchen. Or it is afternoon, and my screen is alive with announcements of gifts given and received, of plans for the rest of the day. Or it is evening, and it is stories of movies watched under blankets with fires in the fireplace, or dinners at Chinese restaurants, because there is nothing else open on Christmas day. And then the day is over, and the final few messages trickle in with greetings and goodbyes and promises to catch up in the New Year.
I love technology and how connected we all feel these days. But in this age of the always-on, it’s nice to be reminded that, at least once a year, everyone isn’t2.
Stumbling forward,
published at 9:03am on 03/01/08, with 4 Comments
The stairs leading up to my office are steep. That I have an office to go to is remarkable enough, and the fact that I ascend those steps several times a week is nothing I would have imagined were I asked, years ago, “where will you be?”
I ask myself that often. I walk up those stairs, my backpack strapped to my back, my laptop and my camera weighing me down. They do weigh me down. The camera is a weight that I welcome; the laptop a weight that I accept as a continued reminder of my independence. It is my laptop, it is my camera. The laptop belongs to me, and when I leave at the end of the day, the laptop comes with me. If I never wanted to walk up those stairs again, I could. I leave nothing behind when I walk out that door. I learned that a long time ago. The camera, the camera reminds me that I am more than what is contained in this computer, more than what I churn out, day in and day out.
I walk up those stairs, with my life on my back. Walking is just falling forward and catching yourself, over and over again. I think I read that somewhere. Walking up those stairs is taking a leap of faith, over and over again, trusting that I will not land flat on my face. I could lean forward and touch the stairs with my hands if I wanted to. If I fell. But I don’t. I stumble up the stairs and plod down them, day after day.
I am on an airplane right now. Literally, sitting on an airplane, returning home, glad for the distraction of being away from home while looking forward to the familiarity of being back. I remember returning to Boston a number of years ago, feeling as though I was ready to dive back in to my life. A few years later I remember returning to New York and feeling that I was ready to attack my work with a renewed vigor. This time, I return home with as little conviction as I’ve ever had, and a sense that something must be done.
Why is it that so many people I know get so agitated so quickly?
We demand so much from the world. We must remember, on some level, the the universe is under no obligation to accommodate our wants, or even our needs. So many people I know demand so much, and are willing to toss away what they have in pursuit of something bigger. Grander, perhaps? More, certainly. More excitement. More challenge. More passion. More intrigue. Is it noble, or just fickle?
I have this discussion a lot with myself.
“What do you want to do with yourself?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not happy with where I am now.”
“Well, what would make you happy?”
“I don’t know.”
The obvious followup, that I suspect I never actually get around to asking myself, is if I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know what would make me happy, how could I possibly know that this isn’t it? But I tell myself that I know.
This is, of course, completely idle speculation, to be mused upon only, and certainly not acted on.
They say that change comes when you least expect it, so for now I will continue to strap my life to my back and stumble forward, step by step. Some day soon I hope I’ll trip, and I’ll be forced to pick myself up, and figure out which way I really want to go.
Filed under: Personal, with 4 Comments
French fries make the man,
published at 6:11pm on 11/17/07, with 1 Comment
My desktops (both the metaphorical one that sits in my computer, and the actual one, on which said computer sits) are covered in scraps of paper (again, both the virtual and the actual kinds, but I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here) reminding myself of stories I would like to tell. A year ago, a pile of these papers on the actual desk began to come together in something resembling what would eventually become yet another aborted attempt at writing a novel in a month as part of NaNoWriMo. Many people say that they have a novel in them, and many people I know have already written one, or two, or more. I don’t know that I have a novel in me. I’ve thought on occasion that maybe I could have one in me, but all evidence throughout my life points elsewhere. After all, I am the person who would opt out of classes in college simply to avoid the writing requirement.
That said, there is a scrap on my desk that reads “Write a story about: the boy with the french fries.”
So I think that’s where I’m going to start tonight.
I guess we should demand a little more of the story than just that. Perhaps we should demand context. Perhaps we should demand those things that put us right in the heart of the story. Perhaps. Or perhaps we should just jump right in and see where things take us.
The fact is, if his french fries had fallen to the ground, it really would not have made a lick of difference to me, except that I really like french fries, and it looked like he did too, and on this particular night, it looked like he was really, really enjoying them. He was sitting on a bench on the subway platform, waiting for the train to come. The display overhead indicated that the next one was due in about twenty minutes – certainly enough time to significantly wallow in misery had his fries actually taken that leap off the arm rest.
They were balanced precariously as he opened up ketchup packet after ketchup packet, tearing into them with his teeth, his arm bumping the tin of fries on each bite. I took a step toward him and put out my hand, steading the container.
“That could have been a disaster,” I said.
He didn’t thank me. He just nodded in agreement and went back to opening ketchup. A minute went by. And another.
“I really need to eat these fries. I’m about to go and drink a lot of Patron.”
This was not exactly what I had expected after saving this man’s dinner. Unexpected, but curious, nevertheless. He went into more detail, because I was clearly interested in what he had to say.
“I don’t understand. I’m going to see my girlfriend tonight, and we’re going to drink Patron, and I’m going to get wasted. I mean, she’s probably already eaten, and I’m going to have to drink fucking Patron and I’m going to get hammered.”
I suggested that maybe he didn’t need to drink the tequila. That, perhaps, he could stick with the beer that he’d been drinking. I mean, he had been drinking, right?
“Yeah, maybe five or six beers. And that’s the thing. I’m going to have a beer, and then for every beer I have, she’s going to have a shot of Patron. And like, seven or eight shots later, and she’s the one taking care of me, and I’m the one that’s wasted. I don’t understand.”
I realized that it was probably not worth explaining that the fact that he was drinking, and not eating, and that the french fries were the only thing resembling food in his system at all, and that his girlfriend, by his own admission, had probably already eaten dinner already, all might contribute to the fact that he would get completely loaded and that she was going to be fine. Instead, I offered up what I can only describe as an attempt to relate to a drunk person while being completely sober.
“Girls exist to fuck with you, man,” I offered. “That’s all. They’re just there to mess with your head.”
I thought this was a good response. It positioned me on his side of the equation, while offering a sweeping generalization that clearly could not be disputed.
“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
Ah, dissension.
The voice belonging to those words in turn belonged to a young woman who was sitting on the bench next to the young man with the french fries. She had been buried in her magazine, doing the crossword puzzle, but had been listening in on our (incredibly boring) conversation until this point, and finally felt the need to inject her opinion into the conversation. I, in turn, did what most men will do when confronted by logic from the opposite sex: I back-peddaled.
“It was a joke,” I responded. “In fact, I’m heading home now because I was hanging out with my girlfriend but she sent me away because she wanted to have some real fun.” With these statements I hoped to show that while I was capable of maintaining a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, I was also comfortable enough in that relationship to understand exactly how things are supposed to work between boys and their girlfriends, thus gaining the respect of the woman who at this point believed that I was just a dickhead. I looked across the bench at the woman and our eyes exchanged a glance that said: “Besides, this guy is wasted.”
“Maybe you should have eaten dinner, first,” she offered. Precisely what I was thinking! I liked this girl already. “Besides, I don’t know how you can drink beer. I can drink alcohol as much as I want, but once I have a beer I get completely drunk.”
The young man with the fries thought about this a bit. “Yeah, you know, I can drink as much beer as I want, but if I have a shot of Patron, I am gone.”
They batted this thought back and forth a couple of times before the young man sitting next to them, not being able to sit on the sidelines any more, chimed in with his observation.
“I’m the same way! I’m fine with beer, but will get completely wasted drinking shots.”
The conversation carried on from there, talking about drinking, and the possibility that men and women metabolize alcohol differently. It continued on to the discovery that the young man with the french fries had just beaten a DUI charge by pleading it down to disorderly conduct, which means that he gets to keep his license but has to be alcohol-free for the next six months. (To which I say, hey jackhole, next time you’re blotto in Brooklyn, take a freaking car service the 10 minutes back to your house instead of cruising around in a Patron-fueled haze, ok?)
The girl pointed at me, and then to another young man who had just gotten on the train.
“You’re both cats,” she said, pointing at the ears perched on top of my head.
“Yes,” I replied, “but at least I’m still wearing my tail.”
And then I started taking photographs of the three of my companions, and the girl hiked up her skirt to reveal that the tights that she was wearing had “pubic hairs” sewn into the crotch area.
It was that kind of night. The kind of night where strangers will get together and talk, because there is nothing better to do when you’re sitting on the subway platform at two in the morning, and a man you don’t know has just saved your french fries and you’re about to go get wasted on tequila with your girlfriend. It’s the kind of experience that I have every so often, mostly when I’m alone, mostly in cities. It’s the kind of experience that one can have when one just decides that whatever happens can happen, that most people are probably out looking for the same kinds of things, and that maybe, just maybe, sharing a word or two with a stranger might help everyone get to where they finally need to go.
In my case, it was back to Manhattan, back to my home.
I got off the subway and saw two angels standing on the sidewalk, holding hands.
It was Halloween, it was New York City, and it was perfect.
The places we go, when we aren’t going anywhere,
published at 12:09pm on 09/02/07, with 1 Comment
I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, but I went anyway.
That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. It used to be that I would go out with the express purpose of going out. Not going out to go back in again, but going out to be in the world, to see what the universe had to offer on a particular night, at a particular moment. As I’ve gotten older, or more busy, or more responsible, my desire hasn’t waned as much as my motivation. Motivation, not motivations. Those are still the same. The former though, the former is what keeps me in, glued to the computer or the television, and occasionally to a book. But not often enough to the latter. In fact, as another year slips by, I find that more and more of life is spent in front of one glowing screen or another, doing the things that I do to make the world a better place.
But what do I do to better myself? Alas, not nearly enough. And so, last night, I found myself walking the streets of SoHo as I so often did in the past, with no particular destination in mind, and found myself, as I so often did in the past, sitting on the corner of Broome and Greene streets, watching the world go by.
It wasn’t too late, and the streets were far from filled. That neighborhood never really gets too full anyway. Mostly people passing through, as was the one man who was looking for his car.
“I think it’s on Broad Street. Where’s Broad Street from here? Oh? Not Broad Street. One minute. Honey! Where did I leave the car?”
He walked away for a minute, and I thought about how strange it must be, walking around SoHo, with its large iron columns and cobblestone streets, looking for your car, and coming across a young man, sitting nestled between two columns on the sidewalk, a camera at his side, watching the traffic go past. Do you approach him to ask for directions? Years ago in New York City? Most likely not. But in this, the biggest small town in the world, everyone is as helpful as you want them to be.
“Wooster and Grand! That’s where I left the car. Wooster and Grand!”
I pointed him in the right direction and continued to sit.
The nice thing about not having anywhere in particular to be is that you have the freedom to not have to go anywhere. My butt was getting cold as I was sitting on that big iron step, and at that moment I had a choice. I could stay there, but shift around so my butt wouldn’t get cold any more, or I could get up and move on. The great thing is that I didn’t have to do one or the other – it was an actual, legitimate choice. One wasn’t better than the other. They both had equally compelling arguments in their favor, and it was really just a whim at a given moment that would lead me down one path or another. It’s rare in life that you end up not only with choices but with choices that have such insignificant consequences. It’s quite liberating in fact.
I ended up staying. I shifted into a cross-legged sitting position and remained on the step on the corner of Broome and Greene for a little while longer. While sitting there, I was approached by two more people looking for directions. The first was looking for a sneaker store that was down the block. The second, and older man wearing a t-shirt with a button-up shirt over it, shorts, very long fingernails and a beard, stopped to ask me if I knew where he could catch the 6 train so he could go home. I pointed him in the right direction, and as he was leaving, he stopped and turned back to me.
“I’m taking a bit of a survey. What do you think of the state of the world today?”
I thought this was quite a broad question and asked him to be a bit more specific.
“Well, what about the United States then?”
Now, the first thing you have to remember when engaging with crazy people is that, in general, they just want to talk. They have their own thoughts and their own opinions and their own stories, and they just want to make sure that as many people as possible are exposed to this information. So it’s best to just go with it, if you’re so inclined.
This particular man didn’t seem to have a particular agenda in mind. I told him that I thought that we all need to respect each other a bit more (I, citing littering, was countered by his argument about post-Katrina New Orleans, and a conversation about bottled water were about the only two lucid moments we had together). He looked me in the eyes after a few minutes and said “What’s your name?”
I told him.
“Your last name?”
Again, I told him, though in retrospect, that may not have been such a bright idea.
“I know you. I’ve seen you before.”
“Oh? From where?”
“From, from,” he stammered, and stopped for a minute. “Elementary school. Philadelphia. In the early 90s.”
The fact that I’d not been to Philadelphia until the mid 90s did not seem to deter him, and he pressed on. I was there, he told me. I was in school there. I always had my camera with me. We were part of a commune, my parents and I, and we (from the commune) went to school in Philadelphia. I told him I sounded like I had a good time.
“Oh, you did. You always had your camera, and that’s what you always said – that you had a good time. You were always at the mosque. You know people now. Famous people. Actors and artists. You know them, you’re friends with them. You all went to school together. That’s where I know you from.”
We spoke a bit more about Philadelphia. What did I say my name was again?
“Ka-”
“That’s right. You’ve got it.”
“Ka-. Ker-. Khan… Khan-Miller!”
Well, close enough.
He asked where my parents were living. Haverford? No, I told him. Downtown Philadelphia.
“I’m one of the richest people on the planet, you know? It’s because I made a motion picture when I was two. Mary and the Beetle.”
“And you’re still getting the royalties,” I ventured.
“That’s right. But I don’t get to see any of it. That’s the deal I made before I came to this planet…”
At that point I had to leave, for while I started my evening with no plans in place, in New York City, it’s rare that you can go an entire evening without someone finding something for you to do. In this particular instance, an opportunity for dinner had presented itself, and I had to take leave of my new friend.
“What’s your name, friend?” I asked him, as I was getting up to leave.
“Christopher Wynn, 1786. You know your number, right?”
I informed him that I did not.
“Your BOP number. Ask your parents. They’ll know. Christopher Wynn, the runner.”
“Oh, you’re a runner,” I asked.
“NO! The Runner. So, which way is the subway again?”
And with that, my encounter with Christopher Wynn was over. Was he crazy? Was he just out for a good time? Maybe he was going senile. He’d mentioned that he had been to a photo opening this particular night, and he was just heading home. I don’t recall the photographer’s name, but she was the lover of one or two famous musicians in her time, from what he tells me. He asked if he could come to dinner with me. I told him that unfortunately, it was a closed party, but in retrospect, it could have been the most wonderful night of conversation of my life.
I got up off my perch and headed off to meet my dinner companions. We were the last party seated for the evening and we dined on arepas until we felt like we were going to burst.
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with 1 Comment
Work-life vs. home-life,
published at 9:05am on 05/31/07, with 2 Comments
After finding myself at a job that requests that I actually spend a significant amount of time showing my face at the office, I found myself musing on the aspects of freelance work that I am actually looking forward to once I move on from my current situation (which is not to say, of course, that I am looking to move on, but simply that in this day and age, to stay at any job for more than a couple of years speaks to either your insane dedication or inability to move forward in your given career trajectory).
After college I found myself at two full-time jobs at startups followed by a brief stint working full-time in theatre, before ultimately ending up with a combination of freelance technology work and freelance theatre electrics work. Over time, this shifted more towards the technology end of work and after three years, I found myself completely burnt out on sitting at my computer in my living room, alone, every day, and ready to return to the world of coworkers, lunch breaks and year-end bonuses.
What I found, though, was that this did not jive at all with the way that my brain likes to think about work, and my working environment.
The reasons for my leaving the freelance life are varied (and probably flawed at the time, though in hindsight I would probably have done it again). One of the things that I’ve often said about working freelance is that, schedule-wise, I end up working all the time. That is to say, I can come home from dinner, see an email from a client, and I might start working then and there. Or I might wake up early to work. Or I might work my way through lunch, and forget to eat until dinner, if then.
While this “work always” mindset may seem a bit insane (and is probably what burnt me out in the first place), there is also the flip side to that situation, which is that I can simultaneously “work never.” I can take a two-hour lunch break and not have to worry that someone is banging on my desk wondering where I am. I can leave to go to meet my friends for dinner, or take in a play, or go on a photo outing and know that, as long as I finish everything I need to finish, then my actions impact me, and me alone.
As I found myself rushing about the other morning performing my morning routine, I also noticed that I do not enjoy the separation of work and home life that so many people tout as one of the benefits of having a full-time, “go to the office” kind of job. While there may be something to be said for being able to “leave my work at the office,” in practice, I find that the corollary – that I am forced to leave my personal life at home – is far more inconvenient. I resent that I am forced to perform all of my personal tasks in two chunks, one in the morning, before work, and one in the evening, after work, and that during that middle period, I do not have access to all of the things (my files, my apartment, my stuff) that make performing those personal tasks possible.
When I was freelancing, my morning routine consisted of a bike ride, a shower and then, intermixed, with working for the rest of the day, tasks such as: eating breakfast, updating my web site, doing laundry, making and eating lunch, grocery shopping, making personal phone calls, dusting my apartment, folding my socks, reading the newspaper. All of these tasks would be stretched out over an entire workday-plus, with no discernible difference between when I was “working” and when I was not.
As it stands now, my morning routine consists of a bike ride (if I can fit it into the schedule, for this takes up the largest chunk of time that can not be shared with any other tasks except for listening to NPR), breakfast, updating my web site, checking personal emails and, today, dying my hair and whitening my teeth (man, I am so vain). Note however that all of these need to be performed before I even get to the office, and though I have the flexibility to show up approximately whenever I want, that is still a significant amount of energy that needs to be expended at the beginning of the day, and a lot of my mental capacity that needs to be taken up simply by considering all of the things that I need to do before I “start the day” (and knowing that once I leave the house I am most likely not going to do any of those things that I missed until the evening).
Which is, of course, why I ended up working from home yesterday, and why I didn’t mind working all of Memorial Day this year. In both those instances, I was able to get my work and my personal task completed and was able to get a couple of hours out in the lovely, lovely summer sun at the same time.
While I recognize that I completely burnt out on freelancing the first time around (living a life solely in my apartment, without any coworkers, without the separation of work life from home life), I have finally come to realize that the lifestyle that it enabled me to live was worth all of the headaches that went along with it.
I will definitely get it right the next time around, I promise.
Filed under: Personal, with 2 Comments
Shutting it down,
published at 7:01pm on 01/21/07, with 2 Comments
It’s almost impossible to shut it down these days, at least for me. She’s threatened to take me out of town for a week, to the mountains where there is no Internet, where I can’t check my email, or get phone calls or watch tv. We’ll have to play board games and read books, and this sounds absolutely amazing. I tried to stop my subscription to the newspaper this weekend. I, like many New Yorkers, like to read the weekend New York Times. It makes me feel like I am a part of the world, and it makes me feel like I’ve gone to the gym, just from having to carry it from my front door to my coffee table (ha ha). But even though I told the Times’s web site to suspend my subscription for the weekend so I catch something of a breather, there it was, all thirty pounds of it, staring at me as I went out to check on the washing machine on Saturday morning.
Mercifully, there was no paper waiting for me there this morning or I may have completely lost it.
See, I have a problem. If the paper hadn’t showed up on Saturday, I could have gone through my week, blissfully unaware of the outside world. I would have gotten my news from the local NPR station, I would have read the blog posts that my friends sent to me throughout the days, and I would have been free. Now, though, the paper is sitting on my coffee table, on top of last week’s unread newspaper, calling out to be read. Though, actually, it’s more of a whisper.
“read me.”
It sits there, wearing its own magazine section like a blanket, stretched out across my table like a cat, waiting to be stroked. I could move it, but an object that size demands attention. I had cleared out all of the newspapers from previous months, but since just before the new year I’ve fallen behind again. Work has taken over my life, and when I return home all I want to do is shut down. To make it all go away. But there’s always more to pay attention to. The bills need to be paid. Clients need attention. Projects need work. My desk, for a brief moment a zen garden has once again become that vacant lot, strewn with articles to read, reference materials for my job, catalogs of curtains and mirrors I will never buy, because I am unable to actually take the time to clearly articulate, to myself or Crate & Barrel, what exactly it is that I want in an ottoman. Just today I found the reply card for a wedding that is taking place in March. The plane tickets have been purchased, the hotel paid for, but the reply card, requiring only my name and two check boxes (”attend,” “attend”) was still tucked away in the sealed envelope, to be dealt with “later.”
And the newspaper, all week, demands to be read.
Two dollar rentals from Blockbuster (”what a great deal!”). A bill from Fast Company (”need to get the startup to pay for that”). My membership to MoMA (”I will go to more museums this year if I have already paid for it”). They are all sitting on my desk, requiring attention of some sort. All of my 2007 receipts are sitting in front of me, waiting for me to clear out my 2006 receipts from my desk drawer, the 2006 receipts waiting to be filed away in my closet. Why do I save all of my ATM receipts? I have no idea. Burning Man tickets have been purchased (what the hell was I thinking?) and I am all of a sudden struck with the reality of needing to actually prepare to spend a week out in the middle of the desert, where I will definitely be unable to check my email and where I will be forced to cart around all of the water I need to survive. Someone, please, help me with that, or I will most definitely drop dead on the playa.
The apartment is getting renovated this quarter, that much I’ve decided, and an email is going out to some architects tonight, but that will just open me up to another flurry of emails. It’s getting ridiculous at this point though – my stop top is broken and the oven door doesn’t actually stay closed any more. The minute the refrigerator starts heating my food I’m just going to cry.
Sometimes I think that I might be better off if I just threw out everything on my desk, trashed my inbox, threw out all of the newspapers and started over again. I would probably lose something important, but at this point I just need to stem the inward flow so I can actually start sending things out into the world again.
Just as soon as I finish this one thing…
Filed under: Personal, with 2 Comments
2006: A Summary,
published at 11:01am on 01/03/07, with 1 Comment
I think that the year 2006 was summed up nicely in an event that took place on Christmas day at my parents’ house in Westchester County, about an hour outside of New York City, where I have spent every Christmas day since I was little, waking up early(-ish), going downstairs with my sister, having breakfast with mom and dad and then walking (calmly, so calmly) into the room we call the museum to open our stocking stuffers and then to the living room (alternating between the more formal living room, which would have plastic on the sofa, if we were that kind of family, which we are not, and the less formal, but not nearly as intimate living room, which one might call a Family Room in other houses, i.e., the room with the television) to open our bigger presents sitting under the tree.
We had just finished the aforementioned ritual (I got a Roomba! Holy crap! A robot that will vacuum my floor for me! I am totally in love.) and were in the kitchen having Christmas morning pancakes (which, I will admit, I bullied my mother into making because, well, I really, really wanted pancakes) when one of us remembered that A Christmas Story was being shown in an all-day marathon on television. The remote was procured and the television sprung to life.
Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with this movie, it was made some time in the early 1980s and takes place in the midwest somewhere in the 1950s. The protagonist is the unseen narrator of the film providing commentary to his memories of this one particular Christmas. What I didn’t know was that the movie and the book it was based on were both penned by Jean Shepherd, who I had not heard of prior to my father making that connection this year, but who I am sure I would like and whose work I should probably pick up at some point when I a) have more time and b) am not trying to get through a book that I have been working for, and I kid you not, over three months. I mean what the hell is that all about? They’re just words. I should not be scared of words like that. Plow through, young man, plow through!
In any event, we were watching this movie, and the protagonist as a young man has just blurted out an unfortunate curse word and was having his mouth washed out with soap by his mother (and though I recall blurting out that same word when I was of a similar age, I do not remember receiving the mouth washing punishment; I probably just got a stern talking to and was made to feel incredibly guilty for what I had done). He begins to muse, in the voiceover, that over the years, he had become quite the connoisseur of soaps, over the years.
For some reason, this statement resonated with my father, who all of a sudden made the most grotesque noise and as we all turned to look at him, he began drooling tea out through his hand and onto the kitchen floor, which continued until he regained his composure (as much as a man who has tea running down his face can do).
And that is what my 2006 was all about: my father, his eyes bugging out of his head, with tea running down his face.
I am really, really glad that this year is over.
Other Lessons Learned In/Memories of 2006:
1. I learned how to ski this year. In Montana. Nobody learns to ski in Montana. In Montana, they are born with skis attached to their feet, and their idea of the “easy way down” involves a slope so steep that you can not see where you are going when you are at the top of it. Suffice it to say, I loved every minute of it and came back to New York and bought ski pants.
2. If you ever spill wax on your clothing, do not wash said clothing! Instead, gently scrape off the wax that you are able to and then place a dry paper towel over the affected area and use an iron to melt the wax through the paper. The wax will melt and will get wicked up into the paper towel. You can also do this with brown paper, but I found that the paper towel worked better. Also, you’re going to have to move the paper towel around a bunch because once you get wax into one piece of it, you are not going to want to use that area of the paper towel again (otherwise the wax will melt right back into your clothing). Also, make sure the iron isn’t going to start spraying steam all over the paper towel.
A year of significance,
published at 3:11pm on 11/24/06, with 4 Comments
I recently had a birthday, and because my birthday falls towards the end of the year, I tend to equate an entire calendar year to a single year of my life, those two months not withstanding. I mean really, December, in general, is a complete wash, right? No work happens in the second half of the month, and the entire first half of the month is spent thinking about how it’s going to be so nice when nothing is happening in the second half. That leaves the rest of November which, arguably, is a full month, complete with the onslaught of the Northeast’s wintertime jollies, which for the most part just leave me cold and angry at myself for not having bought myself a winter coat. I’ve lived in this part of the country my entire life and the last time I had a winter coat was when my mother bought me one when I was 10.
So now that my birthday has come and gone, I can say with certainty that I am looking forward to this next year of my life. The official end of my twenties is finally here, we are about to tick into a new calendar year, and I can look back and say that my decision to write off almost all of 2006 is probably not entirely unfounded.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote that I wanted 2006 to be a year of significance. Turns out that 2006 was also the year of breakups for me and for seemingly everyone else that I know. Besides the half-dozen or so long-term dating relationships that came apart this year that I heard about (”oh me? Yeah, my boyfriend and I just broke up. What? Oh, six years…”), this was also the year of at least one divorce in my circle as well as a business relationship that just unraveled. More than any other year in recent memory, this one seemed like a year when everything was falling apart, and very little seemed to be coming together. And I, of course, have a theory about this.
We operate on four year cycles. High school is scheduled to last for four year, as is college. Insert your own four year cycle now as I don’t really have any other examples (the Olympics? World Cup?). And I believe I read somewhere that humans do operate, biologically, on a four year cycle, but that’s entirely a lot of bullshit.
The important thing to remember is that four years ago, we were in the middle of 2002. Now 2002 was a funny year. We were all (and I mean, all) coming out of the trauma of 9/11 and the world seemed like a remarkably different place. In 2002, I posit that everything got stuck in time. We, especially the we of the twenty- and thirty- somethings, decided that it was much safer to hole up in our environments as they were at that exact moment in time – say, early to mid-2002 – and just hang out there for a little while. In a relationship? Wonderful! It is safe and it is not going to fall down on you like a big building or a bag of Anthrax. Safety and security trumped everything, and we locked ourselves into our lives.
If that doesn’t float your boat, think about the economic climate of the world (and specifically of the US) at the time. 2002 saw us at the end of the first dotcom bubble, watching businesses implode, watching paper fortunes evaporate and watching jobs vanish. The last startup I worked at was in 2000. In 2001 the last companies in that first wave were just burning through the rest of their seed money and everyone was saying that it was time to grow up, to cut your hair, to get a real job, and leave the business of business to the big boys. And again, everyone locked themselves down with their collective noses to the grindstone and got to work.
Fast forward four years. We are now, four years later, just emerging from our cocoons. The first thing to note is that the calendar made a jump in 2006 to the latter part of the decade. Remember that the early part of any decade is really a continuation of the previous one. Remember the 80s? They really happened in the early part of the 90s. So everything leading up to, say, 2005, was really just a transition out of the late 1990s. Assuming that 2005 was sort of a limbo year for everyone, 2006 is the first time that you can imagine that the end of the decade is actually approaching. Where I live, right near the university, there are students, children, walking around with class of 2010 t-shirts. There is all of a sudden the realization that if I don’t get my act in gear, the thing that I am working on now (that novel, that degree, that start-up company) take any significant period of time, they could bring me into the next decade. Decade. That’s 10 years of my life, missing, gone.
So we sit here in 2006 with this wakeup call that we have just passed the cusp of the middle of the decade are are rapidly running out of time. And all of a sudden people start emerging from the shells that they started building up in 2002 when they were afraid of change. When they were craving safety. And all of those relationships that were formed in the aftermath of tragedy are finally being evaluated on their own merits and in the context of a much longer period of time (”the rest of my life”) rather than in the immediate context of “I really hope I don’t die tomorrow.” And many of those relationships that had their foundations set in that time of uncertainty found that they couldn’t survive outside of that world. People feel free to evaluate their personal relationships for what they are. People feel free to evaluate their professional relationships and are determining why, exactly, they are doing what they are doing. Is it any surprise that 2006 saw the coming of the second Internet bubble? Everyone is finally waking up to their situations and realizing that if they want to move their lives forward, they’d better do it now before the calendar flips again and we find ourselves in the 20-teens.
How significant was this year for you?
Filed under: Observations, Personal, with 4 Comments
Make your own luck,
published at 12:10am on 10/23/06, with 2 Comments
On the evening of March 20th, 2006, on the sidewalk outside of my apartment, I came across six pennies scattered fairly close to each other, clearly having just fallen out of somebody’s pocket. Pennies being what they are (the homeless man on the street imploring “help feed the homeless, help make a difference, even a penny makes a difference” not withstanding), it was nevertheless surprising to me to find so many of them in one spot, like finding a cluster of four leaf clovers in the grass outside your front door after scouring the entire yard and turning up none.
I picked them up, all six of them, and walked down the street towards the subway. Every couple of steps I stopped and placed one of them, carefully, heads up, on the sidewalk, in the hopes that the luck of a heads up penny could be spread across six different people heading home from work that evening. I felt pretty good about myself as I placed the fifth penny down and smiled as I looked back behind me. For the most part I knew they would be ignored, passed by, kicked around, the little copper heads on the dirty city street. But a part of me held out hope that someone, a romantic like myself, would come across it, stoop down and whisk it up. A penny! Heads up! What luck!
Is a penny purposely placed heads up as lucky as one that happens to fall face up accidentally? Is it lucky at all? I heard once that if you find a penny lying face down that you are supposed to flip it over and leave it for the next person who comes across it. Can luck really be manipulated like that, so easily?
I like to think so.
Oh, and that sixth penny? I kept it for myself. It had been sitting face up when I found it.
Filed under: Personal, with 2 Comments
