not so much better

still wintry-mixing outside, still static-y inside. all of a sudden january got harsh. dealing with emotional situations is, of course, exhausting. last night i took a break and hopped over to park slope to have coffee with a college friend. see, they still have coffee shops with atmosphere over in brooklyn, possibly because they have less outlandish real estate prices. i spent an entire afternoon circling the east village once looking for just such a place and coming up empty. in fact, the hangout at which i finally landed played distractingly loud, abrasive music, wasn’t terribly warm or comfortable, and had signs posted on the walls saying “no plugging in laptops” and “please restrict to your visit to the length of one hour.”

yes, benefits of living in manhattan outweigh irritations. now that i’ve lived here, brooklyn seems … small. well, anyway. the coffee was nice. or, rather, the pumpkin muffin. i didn’t drink the coffee.

what the hell am i blathering about? new links on sidebar — check em out.

wintry mix

this has not been the easiest entry into a week. no, it has not. first there were House Issues. then Family Issues, Grade Issues, and Job Issues. just because those words have capital letters doesn’t mean they were dealt with Professionally and Calmly, either. no sir.

on the flip side, they were dealt with, and already i can watch the past bear away the worst of the unpleasantness. having invested so much emotional energy by TUESDAY seems a little ludicrous, but complaining about that is a bit like yelling at birds who decided to shit on you all at once, together, instead of one after the other.

today was my first at work in my new position. my new title, XXXasst, when you pronounce it, actually sounds a bit like “jackass.” i should totally put that on my business cards. make it my email address.

my family sent me a congratulatory pot of mini cacti. best ever. cacti set a great example: they’re strong, resilient, persistent, and most importantly you don’t have to get them dry cleaned. no, most importantly, you can’t kill them. come at them with axe, mudslide, torch, it doesn’t matter — cacti will merely raise an eyebrow and render you impotent; you will withdraw with your humiliation and they will resume their business of being impervious and prickly. then birds will shit on you, all at once, together. don’t mess with cacti.

maybe that should be on my business cards. that whole little rant about cacti, in tiny green print. i’d love to hand those out at cocktail parties. and maybe the print could be prickly, and make your fingers bleed if you pressed it! yes, this idea is gold.

i’ve done so much goddamn reading lately. i can’t stop myself. i finished cloud atlas and breakfast at tiffany’s and i need more, more. both were terrific, incidentally. i almost didn’t read the first because i thought it looked like work, and because when i saw that someone’d branded it “postmodern” on the back and my eyes rolled so hard i almost hurt myself. luckily i found myself shut up with it in wanakena over new years and i decided to give it another chance, only to become enthralled. read it so we can talk about it!

or give me suggestions. i’m open to anything, as long as it’s quality.

the coincidence!

for the second time in as many days, i ran into a friend of mine from college. there she was, standing among the fruits ben n i were gathering for an improptu, late-nite fruit salad. of all things, she’s performing in a show in our neighborhood.

the other, first friend run-in happened in a 9:45 showing of the life aquatic yesterday. that that friend chose not only this particular theater but this particular SHOWTIME, when there are 12 possibilities, seemed serendipitous. but now two in a row! that’s extra-special-bonus serendipity, at your service. it’s almost as if the universe were trying to contradict my anxiety about being Friendless. that anxiety, which hovered through the fall, settled in again recently. being in wanakena over new years, surrounded by compatriots, makes not being in wanakena — or college, or cty, or anyplace with ready, varied society — hard to accept.

it is 05 now. 05 is the first year of my conscious life in which i will not be in any form of skool. i will have to accept that, and i will have to find other ways of meeting Friends. like in movie theaters or among melons, or — requiring more activity on my part — while taking yoga and while in a creative writing group that i will actually attend. these are my firm resolutions. yes. i will be firm. reality television is not so important that i should plan my life around it. at least it will not be until someone pays me to write about it.

perspective

a nypost headline i spotted over a gentleman’s shoulder in the subway read “TIDAL WAVE OF DEATH.” that must win some sort of prize: for redundancy, for idiocy, for pure inappropriateness … i know, the nypost prize!

today was a weird day. for one thing, i was promoted. as you can perhaps tell, i’m somewhat ambivalent. certainly i’m glad to be getting more security, more stability, marginally more money and a swankier email address (all lowly employees get a generic handle, but my new generic handle will be XXXASST — for “XXX’s assistant” — instead of NYFLOATERXX — for “office bitch # XX”). i will miss what i’ve been doing tho and i’m scared i won’t be as good at what i’m about to do.

still, whatever. i’m promoted, and that’s better than being passed over. it’s good that someone in this agency has faith in me, believes that i’m “smart as hell” and that i have “zeal”. and it’s a new challenge. new challenge for a new year. can’t turn that down. (did i mention, marginally more money? about enough to buy a muffin a week, but a muffin is a muffin.)

history rounds off skeletons to the nearest zero

that’s why people should want to be poets. to write lines like that.

my current mood is nowhere near that dark at the moment. for one thing, i’m less sore. on monday evening i took my first yoga class ever and all of yesterday, as i ran around trying to coordinate my busiest day of work yet, i felt the effects in muscles i don’t even know the names of. also, the yoga instructor had this habit of just calling out poses: “plank!” “child!” “prayer!” around me, my fellow classmates had pavlovian reactions to these words; their bodies immediately contorted properly, while mine was stuck at “huh? who? what?”

still, it is blessedly relaxing to turn your mind off for a while. i was too busy scrambling to catch up with the contorting to ruminate on my the bizarre sequence of boy-oriented dreams i had over break.

#1) dating a boy, let’s call him KODAK, from high skool. turned out KODAK was cheating on me! bastard! he begged me to forgive him, following me around until i was exhausted and had to comfort him. bastard! then i realized i could break up with him. oh glory glory hallelujah. i woke up smiling.

#2) met dennis miller. he asked if he could walk me home, although we ended up at his apartment, which brimmed with white furniture. we dated tentatively for 3 weeks and he became fixated on me, asked for my hand in marriage. dennis miller, i said, you barely know me. i do!, he said. but he didn’t.

tried to get away from him but he followed me. ben, i remembered. poor ben! ben was sad i had been dating dennis miller. poor ben! i resolved to be better to him. but dennis miller kept following me, eventually squeezing into a full car and forcing me to decide whether to sit on his lap or ben’s. unhappy car ride.

#3) dating a gay friend of mine from college. why? we always kept our clothes on. one time his father walked into the room. i was mortified but my gay friend started casually talking to his father, like i wasn’t even there.

i’m not sure what any of this means, tho it’s interesting to have such similar dreams one after the other. back in the real world, i’m pretty resolved to keep taking the yoga class and maybe start dry cleaning my clothes, too, if i’m really ambitious. look at me go!

next year in wakanena!

spending new year’s eve in a small, secluded house in the adirondacks with no television and 11 other people, three of whom i knew not at all and three more only a bit, turned out to be more fun than expected. yes, really. there was much cooking and eating and drinking and revelling. one late night we even played charades. my team consisted of three young curvy curly-haired women and one young man — hence we christened ourselves, “Bobby and the Boobs.” with a name like that, how could we not triumph?

our decision to save money and drink sparkling white wine to ring in 05 was mocked this morning when i arrived to work to find a tardy christmas present: Brut champagne. guess i’ll have to do the whole new years thing again. party in new york! 05 is going to be so great, we’ll celebrate it twice!

fo real, i hope 05 fulfills its potential. i hope enough Actually Good movies come out that making a top 10 list isn’t an exercise in futility (i could only get to 5 this year: dogville, eternal sunshine, the 5 obstructions, the incredibles, kill bill 2). i hope i manage to put the past far enough behind me that i can write again without feeling iowa admission demons looking over my shoulder and snickering at my meager efforts. i hope i can learn to hope again, the way i did before the election, instead of descending into weariness and cynicism. especially as the weather gets colder.

my friend rebecca in sri lanka has thrown herself into helping with the relief effort there. you gotta figure, if people in southeast asia can be hopeful, or even, at least, active … visit her links and and send her your well-wishes.

swarthmore seems so far away from me now, despite my recent visit and despite the fact that the new years in the adirondacks felt like a mini-reunion. so much has changed in the past 3 months that when i think about this year it’s hard to push my brain further back than august. but as time rolls on, i think i’ll think of 2004 not as the year of demoralizing mfa rejections, seemingly desperate political situations, the tsunami, the blogs, or the sale of my grandmother’s house, our touchstone, in vermont. i’ll think of it as the year college ended and life began.

a good person inside

i just finished reading the excellent empire falls, a novel about small-town maine with a picture of a diner on the cover and also indication that it won the pulitzer prize. too many people i know would sniff at the book for that reason alone because they scorn conventional markers, suspect that they’re suspect, right off the bat. no matter how bourgeois it seems, i’m the opposite: i like approval, i like prizes. in my heart of hearts, i agree with my friend yoni, who once said with a shrug and remarkable air of certainty for a high schooler, “cream rises to the top.” he now takes pictures for the new york times.

although i’ve only ever won one prize, it briefly redirected where i thought my life should go. (my life course-corrected itself, like a car driven by satellite.) several times among the many when i’ve been an also-ran, not winning also made me reconsider my goals. as you may infer, i take these things seriously. so, if a book has a pretty gold seal on it, i’m more likely to pick it up, and over the course of my reading lifetime, i’ve been rewarded for this impulse every time except once.

empire falls was not only excellent, it was one of the more excellent books i’ve read this year. i may as well list my other favorites:

jonathan strange and mr. norrell

vanity fair

life of pi

middlesex

bel canto

posession

the patron saint of liars

although i’ve read an awful lot this year, my memory is hazy as to what else. i remember enjoying the most recent lemony snicket; i found the da vinci code and native speaker gripping, like everyone else. i made it most of the way through wuthering heights before abandoning it to finish the compleat works of jane austen. i mulled over the memoirs the distant land of my father and carrie fisher’s latest life in pink. there was something by fitzgerald too … what was that early one of his? and lots more i’ve already forgotten.

i feel like i should be assessing this past year in some more meaningful way than just by making lists. but too much happened. it’s a comfort that this time last year i was scared shitless of this time this year — yet here i am, alive, healthy, fine. not too different except that for the first time, i have a net worth. i know i have and i know what it is: someone showed me a piece of paper at work related to my brand-new company issued life insurance policy. the guy who showed it to me seemed faintly embarassed it was so small, and i could tell that moment was supposed to be when i turned into scarlet o’hara and shook my fist at the sky, announcing i’d never be hungry again. actually i didn’t care that my life is valued so modestly and i didn’t make a vow to increase its value at an exponential yearly rate. the number ran to five whole digits; what more can i ask for?

luxury also means free food

for the first time ever, i’m about to spend christmas eve with people who don’t think of it as a chance to eat too much and not work the next day (at best) or Someone Else’s silly over-hyped holiday (at worst). not christians, exactly; i haven’t gone that far astray from my goy-less childhood. but one side of ben’s family enjoys the rituals of christmas, and a couple of catholics do play prominent roles. thus there will be stockings, there will be a tree, there will be significance to the night of the 24st.

will it be weird?, i asked ben. it’ll be weird, won’t it?

he promises no. but i’m — aren’t i always — skeptical.

so far this vacation has gone nicely. yesterday ben n i, our houseguest, and a college friend we met up with, went ambling through central park in the rain. i tried to walk myself into a zenlike state wherein the rain couldn’t touch me. after a couple hours, i gave up and took an excedrin. my pant legs had soaked through by that point and my hands, which an assertive israeli salesperson had slathered with dead sea lotion, rendering them soft, scented, and too slick to properly hold my umbrella, were brick red. but my companions showed no sign of slowing down. i had to take drastic action.

noting a prettily situated lookout point, i convinced the fellows to pause for a minute and watch the ducks. ducks! cried ben. i love ducks. arguing ensued over whether male and female ducks bear different coloring, or whether different coloring denotes different species. once they’d been sufficiently lulled, i suggested that perhaps warmer and more solid shelter, the kind with soothing drinks, might be in order. with the help of the suddenly howling wind, i led my band out of the turgid park and into starbucks. with a tall pumpkin spice latte in my still soft and scented hand (huh, not bad lotion), i felt like moses, having successfully led his people to the promised land. if it were not for me, my people would still be walking through central park, turned perhaps into ghosts by the onslaught of the cold-wind-rain and the night, doomed to walk for eternity chipperly discussing irony and bliss, and whether anyone is actually a philosopher nowadays.

less exciting but more nourishing, i’ve slept late, watched movies, written my first poem in a while, shopped at Whole Foods, eaten well, and eaten well some more. this is what i chose when i turned down invitations to dc and to maine and i have no regrets.

luxury means not having to go to work

while ben finishes up his last semester of law skool and the weather blusters outside, i’m luxuriating in old episodes of sex and the city. season 1 is adorable. it happened so long ago! carrie can still manage to go it bra-less, miranda still wears severe shirts and ties, and every once in a while there’s a shot of the twin towers that knocks your wind out.

then there are the funnier aspects of looking back. the episode, for example, where miranda’s law firm thinks she’s a lesbian and because it’s the only way to get into her boss’s dinner party she considers trying it, only to eventually decide, “nope, definitely straight.” except she’s not! well, cynthia nixon isn’t, anyway, and who can tell the difference?

there’s no food in the house except stale wasabi peas and honey bunches of oats. i’ve been dining out on a starbucks gift card i got for christmas. i was supposed to go home to dc today and at the last moment i decided to stay and enjoy all this for a while. a week without work, without ben working, a week to run around the city and hang out at coffeeshops (courtesy of the giftcard) and see if i can start writing again. this year has been wretched in several ways … i’d love to make sure it ends on an up-note and also that i remember there’s also been a lot that’s beautiful and much i have to be grateful for.

moses

holy shit. i finally saw dogville. this is a movie i’ve been excited to see for the better part of a year, yet just any time isn’t the right time to watch a three-hour long anti-epic about what human beings are capable of. i’ve talked about it, since i posess an inate ability to cheerily discuss movies i haven’t seen, notably during my columbia interview. when the gruff, hairy-knuckled interviewer who was terminally unimpressed with me, who conveyed through tone his utter disdain for everything and everyone i loved, asked me what movie i was looking forward to, and i said dogville, even he, this hardbitten, bored, bitter man who was treating the interview like a police interrogation, even he managed to grunt his begrudging agreement with me on the point of dogville. because the movie is that fucking good.

til now, i’ve taken the movie’s goodness on faith. at last! faith, your services are no longer required. in place of faith i have cold, hard experience, three hours of sitting curled-up and wide-eyed on the sofa, whimpering occasionally, certainly enthralled. it reminded me a lot of kill bill v. 1 and 2. in the same way, it reaches inside and twists your organs around; you have to remind yourself it’s just a movie, just a melodrama. you have to consider walking away and decide to stick it out. in the same way, it’s worth it. the conclusion is astoundingly satisfying, considering its content (which i won’t give away).

although people have called the movie christian and grace, the abused main female character, christlike, i thought of it more like a greek myth. still, both versions work. if you go in with an open mind, in fact, i believe you can get any of a thousand interpretations out of it. maybe that’s why lars van trier designed his eerie fill-in-the-blanks set. yet despite the finite, limited set’s resemblance to a black-box theater, and its prominence in the story — it’s essentially a character itself –, the movie is shot very much like a movie and nothing like a taped play. the narration and division of the story into chapters creates another layer over those two, one in which you do have to use your imagination.

the themes stick with you, too: transparency, opacity; blue america’s open criminality, red america’s criminal hypocricy; the guilt of frightened thinkers. arguing about whether it’s anti-american is a bit like arguing whether the passion is anti-semitic. no one’s wrong in an argument like that; you feel what you feel while watching. but don’t let the idea stop you from watching. it’s too much of an experience to miss.