branching out on my own.

and so it continues.

falling

It's hard enough when you decide to cut something out of your life; convincing yourself that it's for the best. But to have your decision thrown right back in your face in the most terrible of ways? That's beyond painful.

I recently spent an unexpected week in Burlington, VT. I suppose once upon a time I had thought about ending my life, but never enough to actually go and do anything about it. They were the teenage years, didn't everybody have those moments? In the end, I never really saw the point. But a friend of mine got to that particular breaking point just last week. And I knew I had to be there for him. Walking into the hospitals lock down psych ward with a fake smile plastered on my face was one of the most difficult things I've ever done.

It was a stressful week in one of the most beautiful of cities. I did what I needed to do, and know that without my presence he could still very well be laying drugged up and motionless in that sad little hospital room.

I was strong when I needed to be. Now I'm back. And I'm a wreck. Receiving numerous e-mails thanking me for what I did has only made things harder.

I just want to curl up and forget any of this ever happened.

I think I just might.

just some things

Occasionally, I go through periods of time where writing anything seems very difficult. These periods are usually characterized by a heightened state of delight in everything I do and a crazy-fast sense of time floating past me.

That is exactly what is happening now.

Whilst it happens (and whilst I enjoy it), here are a few things on my mind. I will talk about them in greater detail either through written words of the future or through whiskey pours of the future.

1. I am six pages into the latest Chuck Klosterman book, Eating the Dinosaur, and he has already articulated exactly what it is I find so compelling about interviewing strangers. Say what you will about Klosterman, and hate him because you're supposed to hate him and because he's just too snarky for you or something, but I continue to find his essays more spot-on and compelling than most things.

2. Speaking of compelling and reading books and finishing things, I finally finished Anna Karenina, fueled mostly by a certain Christiana's ridicule. I have a serious and somewhat hilarious aversion to weak female characters (it's a bad idea to ask me how I feel about Emma Bovary or the female antagonists of Hold Steady songs), so it comes as little surprise that I occasionally have trouble engaging with Anna as a character. However, my struggles with this all came to a screeching and irrelevant halt when I reached the passage where Levin decides he's going to mow the fields alongside the peasant workers.

The written word is powerful, and when it works correctly, it makes you want to throw it aside and devote yourself to sweat and labor.

3. I know what I guess amounts to a lot of people. I spend most of my days being amazed at how smart and how fun and how funny and how productive they are. This seems very simple and very stupid but it never ceases.

4. Two days before the onset of my twenty-ninth year, I would like to announce that I believe all previous versions of myself would be really very happy with how I turned out. With the possible exception of me at age four, who would be really upset that I never figured out how to be a professional mountain climber.

To her, I say "there's still time!"

i've got something to prove

I believe everyone has that one person in their life who heavily inspires them to keep pushing forward. This person isn't always a daily presence, and in my case, has only come into my life a handful of times. But the impression left runs deep.

No matter where I live or what I do, in the back of my mind I need to do these things to the greatest capacity. I'm the first to admit that I haven't necessarily been so successful with this in the past. I've been able to explore many paths and imagine where they could take me, but have then decided for one reason or another I didn't want to be where they would ultimately end.

You know those people who get stuck in one town doing one thing for their entire life? They get sucked into a rut and no matter how much they dream of getting out, they simply can't. I seem to have the opposite problem. I can't stand still for longer than a year. I attribute this to the idealistic views I've always held. Everything that I do needs to have some kind of meaning. I'm not capable of powering forward for something that lacks a soul. If it's not exactly how I believe it should be, and if there's no chance of a positive change, I don't want anything to do with it. Naive? Yes. But I can't help it. Maybe this makes me just as bad as the person in the rut. There will always be the one thing that prevents us from crossing the line that so desperately needs to be crossed.

Through all the trial and error, somewhere in my mind I know that I've got something to prove to that person; to my ultimate inspiration. Whether or not I still exist to them doesn't really matter. It's what they have come to symbolize to me. It's knowing that one day I will get to a point where, if life brings them back my way, I can walk up to them and confidently tell them what I've done and what I'm continuing to do; with no regrets. It's using them as that push to keep moving forward when maybe I'm too tired to push on my own. And I think I've finally found that something to believe in. It's a starting place, at the least; another beginning.

And we all know how good I am at beginnings.

remember me

So I went to see Remember Me, which should come as no surprise to anyone. Robert Pattinson, you really are so very pretty. This is probably the prettiest I've ever seen you. Unfortunately, your acting skills are.. well, no. I can't say it. You're just too damn pretty for me to say anything negative about.

There are only two things wrong with this scene:
1. the apartment that needs cleaning (check out those bathroom tiles - gahh)
2. Emilie de Ravin, please don't ever attempt an American accent again, you can't pull it off. I love you in Lost, but please stick to your Aussie roots.

Other than that, in all it's corny and sickeningly sweet ways, it's kind of perfection. [insert a long line of sighs here]



And yes, the movie was quite dreadful (what was up with that ending? seriously). But let's be honest, I probably would have cried if I were by myself. We all know this.

No shame, folks. No shame at all.

lost

Friends don't let friends watch Lost sans Jameson.

It's getting intense, folks. Oh, it is.

spring break

While all my co-workers are taking the next two weeks and flying to exotic places and relieving their stress before the final months of school and the dreaded parent observations and conferences that comes along with them, I'm staying in the city plowing away at my second job. As in entering any new environment, I find myself faced with the one question I cringe upon hearing. The dreaded "so what's your story?".

This is one of the most loaded questions to ask a person. I don't enjoy talking about myself to strangers, and I don't enjoy people prying into my life. Luckily I'm well versed with rotating new environments and over the years have learned how to gracefully side step it. And as loaded as this question is, the reply can be as vague or detailed as you want it to be. My standard answer goes something along these lines "Oh, you know. So what do you do?". Most people love talking about themselves, and I can usually get away with turning the spotlight over without them even noticing.

Due to the large number of employees, It's been harder to shy away from answering. To my great surprise, I have found that by giving a more straight forward answer than I ever have before, the rewards of doing so have been quite fruitious.

Who would have thought?






I leave this post with two pictures completely unrelated to what I've written about. Just because I felt like it.

The valentines I made for my students


The famous Annunciation Triptych from The Cloisters (Art History 101, folks)

wrapped up in books

Currently, my worst habit seems to be reading multiple books at the same time.

"That can't be worst," one might think. "There are many worse habits to have, ones that you've alluded to in the past. There's that penchant for scotch, that craving of cake, and a certain strangeness about you that indicates you're never quite doing what you want to be doing with your life. Those seem like bad habits to me."

Those are pretty bad habits, I guess; they worsen by the day. Still, they're the habits I've always had, and the evils you know are always a damn sight simpler than the ones you don't. As a child, I was a staunchly monogamous reader - cover to cover, usually in an afternoon, picking and choosing from my pile of library treasures as though it were a game.

Now, by contrast, I am shameless; I start books, and then I see more of them roll into my library pickup queue. Then, I hit bookstores and find a third set of selections waiting to be purchased; above it all, I start reading texts on useful things like "how to run a half-marathon," which is the sort of information I hate admitting I need. Somewhere down the line, then, I realize I'm reading Anna Karenina (still), a marathon-training book , two philosophy texts, and one of Mary Karr's memoirs all at the same time, and everything inside of me just halts and wonders what exactly my intentions are towards these texts.

The answer is, to be honest, totally unclear. I have yet to uncover the hidden reason why it's suddenly hard for me to work one at a time; I suspect it has something to do with how scared I am of anything that's not an immediately easy read. Still, I wonder, what bridges the gap between the "good" and the "difficult"? Just as my favorite modern rock bands strike simple chords in the guises of Lucero and Against Me!, so too my favorite philosophers speak in plain, ordinary language. Does this make me a simple person, or does it underline the fact that I think it's far more difficult to make people understand conplex concepts in everyday language than it is to speak in what amounts to tongues?

Somewhere in this answer lies the secret to my newly developed and slightly shameful reading habits, I feel; somewhere in me, I'm taking what I know to be true and trying desperately to prove it through language that takes me more time to get through than I'm willing to admit. This afternoon, in a tiny sunny Brooklyn park, I finished one book.

Tonight, I glance at my bedside and see the two I have picked to proceed it, and I know with certainty that my life in books will remain skewed until summer hits with a that sudden precise decision that indicates I will read nothing unbeachworthy till the weather gets old and musty.

when it rains, it pours

the past few weeks have been filled with training, working, and ridiculous amounts of caffeine. Those who know me best are aware of the fact that I rarely drink coffee, as the result tends to be triple the normal for me. Since giving up gluten and sweets, caffeine has become my new vice. And I've slowly come to accept this.

I'm averaging about 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night, and my days have blurred together. I feel as if I'm in a dream most of the time. My day time co-workers have commented that lack of sleep and high levels of caffeine look good on me. I attribute that to the fact that I feed off of the energy of the children. A late afternoon/early evening transition coffee at Grumpy's in Chelsea, a handful of protein filled nuts, and then I'm off to the next stop. It's in these hours where I slowly start to fade. If I didn't like my co-workers and second job so much, I might completely crash. But somehow, night after night, I pull through.

The tiredness feels good. I know that it's all in preparation for the next step. The first acceptance letter has found it's way to me, and now I'm faced with the process of figuring out how to make it all work out.

But I have faith, my friends. I have faith.

making my way back into the 21st century

After a two week hiatus from my computer, I have returned to technology.

Much to say and many pictures to share. But for now, I leave you with the video of one of my oldest friends, who also happens to be one of the most amazing people I know.

Italian Japanese, "Le Pony" from Boa Simon on Vimeo.

Heart of gold, that one.

promise the party

Friday nights in Manhattan have increasingly become strange, forbidden creatures as we've gotten older; one day, the cool scruffy older people turn into the trying-to-be-cool scruffy younger people, and it becomes harder not to raise eyebrow when people try to make you go into crammed bars playing songs that everyone loved in 2002.

Still, there's one thing that can get a borough-adverse old person to a loud Manhattan club on a Friday night, and that is the birthday party of a stranger. Birthday parties (and parties in general, really) of people I don't know are my favorite kind of party, and I find that even when I'm feeling hesitant to attend events hosted by people I know and love, I can usually manage to get myself to the party of someone I don't know with little trouble.

(When you're alone amongst strangers, you're still essentially having alone time.)

And so last weekend, I hit Manhattan on a Friday night with two friends, all of us thinking that at best something interesting might happen. For the most part, it didn't, but crowd-watching offers a unique opportunity for memory. Days prior, I'd put myself in a slightly different alone-among-others setting in both an effort to calm myself after a tough day and to continue the project of aloneness I've been slowly and silently working on for the past month. I went out for a drink at one of my favorite bars, and I remembered suddenly where all of this "parties of strangers" business began.

Here is a confession: I drink for two reasons. The first reason I drink is because I am very, very fond of the taste of whiskey (and beer, to a certain extent.) The second reason is a bit more complicated and a tiny bit shameful: I drink because it's the easiest way to get people to tell you everything about themselves they wouldn't ordinarily say.

There's one other good way to get people to say such things about themselves, and it involves the formality of an interview and the presence of a need for the interviewing. For years now, I've dabbled here and there in some vague form of music journalism; at a certain point, I engaged myself in it enough to actually schedule interviews with bands. One afternoon, I found myself on the phone with a singer-songwriter promoting his band's final, posthumous album, trying to figure out how to ask questions about a project that no longer existed. We ended up engaged in a lengthy discussion about writing processes; from there, writing in general; from there, the school we both happened to have taken the writing program at.

What was meant to be a twenty minute interview turned out to be a ninety minute conversation, and following it I had the weird feeling that I'd made a friend on accident. Emails were exchanged, and at some point a few weeks later, he happened to invite me to his girlfriend's birthday party. I gathered up my begrudging boyfriend that evening and set off for Greenpoint to make some friends of strangers.

The events that followed have been made fuzzy by years (and assuredly, alcoholic beverages), but what I remember best is how astounded I was to be in the presence of such a truly bizarre mix of people from all manner of the arts. Teachers, artists, and theater producers alike were gathered together, and not knowing how any of them fit together in the relationship puzzle was this great, fun mystery to unlock. I can't remember ever putting myself in a more awkward or more intriguing situation, and when I left that bar I felt as though things in my life were really and truly changing.

For whatever reason - probably just the pure awkwardness of meeting someone in person after you've barely but meaningfully connected with them in another manner - I didn't become fast friends with the songwriter in question; I think we sent one or two more random emails and then never heard from each other again. I've never seen any of the people from that night again, and I doubt I would recognize them if I ran into them in the street. Still, there's something so compelling about the stories of strangers, something that feels important in a way that opens up your world.

So when you're standing years later in a shitty Manhattan bar drinking a ten dollar whiskey, you're quite ready to say "sure" when the lumberjack-chic fellow next to you wants to start a dance party, because you in truth have no idea what might happen after that. It can never hurt to find out.

up in the air

"There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage." - William James

It is highly likely that you either had a Valentine's Day that involved a date of some sort, which probably also involved some kind of candy or dinner or perhaps a movie. It is also quite likely that if you did not partake in some form of the former, you spent at least part of your day having negative feelings about the holiday's existence or your relationship status.

I considered following both of these paths, and rejected both options. (Truth be told, I'm sure navigating the first would have been a little bit difficult, but I'm nice enough that I like to think I could get a date if I really tried.) Instead, I spent a large chunk of my evening at my favorite bar with one of my favorite people, getting rather drunk, eating a shameful amount of french fries, and having a pretty serious conversation about faith and religion.

I have written previously about my shocking lack of an opinion when it comes to spirituality, and I surprise myself more and more by realising just how much of it I'm open to. I have always been grateful to have been raised an agnostic, presuming that it's given me the tools I need to question things before I subscribe to them. Still I wonder: what if it has given me the same problem that those who've grown up in organized religion might have? What if I'm stuck in questioning mode and never able to take a leap of faith because I can't see outside of the way I was raised?

These questions were all posed as I dipped fries into ketchup, knocked back Jamesons, and shared funny looks with the bartender. I came to a weird conclusion that this is an avenue in my life that needs to be studied, and I came to an even weirder one that maybe I should start by giving up agnosticism for Lent. Is it as hard for me to believe in something as it is for me to make an effort? (Are they essentially the same thing?)

Along these lines, I had a relatively stressful and unpleasant sort of week, which was punctuated on Friday by a series of exclamation points in the form of big, work-related news that falls under the category of "good problems to have." Immediately after coming to terms with the idea that I don't know how to try, I have been faced with realities that mean I am going to have no choice but to try. If that's not the work of a higher power, I don't know what is.

So I'm terrified, and there's been a lot of hand-holding done on the friend front because of it, and I've got three days of anxiety attacks under my belt as I cruise on into whatever it is life has to offer me. Friday night I went out with another close friend, the first person to hear the story of my day. "What if I fail?" I asked him with fear in my heart.

He took a swig of his beer. "If you fail, then you fail. But...you're not going to fail."

Here is what I know: I have to try, and I believe in the words of William James far more than I believe in myself. I don't really have a good idea of what Lent is or the story behind it, but I'm willing to start there and give up something that's been a very central part of my life for a long time. I'm not going to convert to a religion and I'm not going to suddenly change the way that I live my life, but for forty days, I am going to give up doubt.

Wish me luck - or, as it happens, belief.

regarding hell and effort.

Part I: Hell

" Four blocks, run and hide, don’t walk alone at night. Cityscape, city change before they die." - Tegan & Sara, "Hell"

A few brief words on what it feels like for a girl - if the girl is me, anyway, which is the only sort of girl I know how to be. Today I walked through the Brooklyn blizzards into Greenpoint, and as I walked I thought about the route I take so often to friends' houses and favorite bars. To me, it's an eventless and innocuous journey, one I use to sort out the contents of my brain and fall in love with whatever's in my headphones.

Then there's the matter of what happens after you get where you're going. Sometimes, you'll find your female friends declaring that you're about to marry someone you've hung out with maybe twice. Other times, your guy friends are willing to grant you temporary dude (or sometimes better, "hot chick who hangs out with the dudes") status, but when you get up to leave the bar, they try not to let you walk the fifteen blocks home because they're certain you'll be raped, mugged, or worse.

"Four blocks, I should mention in a song if I want to get along with change, who doesn’t want to change this?"

Most of the time, you don't think about these things. A tiny percentage of the time, however, you wonder what you're more in danger of, getting married or getting mugged. You hope desperately that there's an in-between.

Part II: Effort

After I walked through the blizzard into Greenpoint, my friend Kate and I headed to the beer store to warm ourselves by a crackling fire (and, well, drink a beer). Somewhere in the course of conversation, I thought aloud about what it is that makes me well-liked at my job, as I know it isn't effort. "I don't think I try," I admitted. "I don't really think I ever try at anything."

This bothered me a great deal, leading me down the path of least resistance to a terrible mood and an early departure. Walking home (still, I might add, through further blizzard), I thought long and hard about things I have tried at, and I made a shortlist.

Things I Have Tried At:

• 1. Modern Deductive Logic. (Hardest thing ever.)
• 2. Boys. Not very many of them. In fact, I can count exactly three.
• 3. Classical Greek. (Second hardest thing ever.)
• 4. Happiness. I can't explain this one exactly but I've had people ask me, repeatedly, how I can be so happy so much of the time. I have never known how to say, "I tried."

By contrast, things I have not tried at include the bulk of those things I consider important: music, writing, most creative outlets, baking bread, philosophy, other people (most of the time)...the list is as long as the first is short.

Here is the part in most blog entries where I come up with an insightful and / or concise conclusion. This time, all I have to say is that this is a problem I don't know how to fix.

a snow day

There is a small window of time where snow in New York City is beautiful and in all it's glory. You have to catch it before the masses enter, muddying it up and turning it into an ugly inconvenience. Since my eyes snap open so early these days, I decided to take advantage of my grandma-like tendencies. And I walked through the beginnings of a snow storm, passing only a handful of brave souls attempting to plow head first into their days as usual.






On a clear day this view looks directly into mid manhattan, as pictured in a previous post. If you look closely enough, you can start to make out the buildings across the river.

i was never bored at all

"Far away they tell me you're not really well, but no one's really well these days -
I will not let this be, if you won't let this be." - Matt Pond PA

"Oh jeez. Being a person is just the scariest fucking thing." - me, in an email to my best friend, approximately five minutes ago

I've been whining about the listlessness, the uselessness, the "why does nothing happen that's good and honest and lovely?" complex that is the month of February. I've been whining in part because it feels true and in part because, honestly, it can be nice to complain and not apologize for it. Sometimes it feels weirdly reassuring to feel bad.

Over the past week or so, I've become obsessed with the archives of a Yahoo! mail account that I stopped using around 2005. In it are some of the most honest, raw, loving letters any person could ever hope to receive. That they are in electronic rather than paper form is a fact that has never bothered me; they've remained a part of me regardless, and their importance is centered around the fact that most of them were written hastily in the computer lab at the New School. Where the art of letter-writing has long been a lamented, lost form, there is much to be said for the urgency of email and our ability to rapid-fire respond to situations with song-lyric subject lines and run-on sentences that give away our excitement.

I have a friend I've written about many times, one I keep sort of tucked away in my consciousness and hang out with rarely considering she lives in a neighborhood I frequent. We have a sliding-scale sort of relationship: sometimes I know that she will disappear. Sometimes I will send her a long, rambly email every month or two for the better part of a year before she responds. Still, we are friends; still, I refer to her as one of my closest, and these old emails are something I have that proves it above all else.

There is so much heartache and confusion in these words that they're painful to read, and at the same time, it's hard to remember how it felt to be in the mindset her responses are meant to soothe. We watched each other get our hearts broken and we hid inside our favorite records to make ourselves feel better about it, and to date there is no person who makes me feel better about having my heart broken than this girl.

And when I say "better", I mean that sometimes being hurt can feel like the brightest, clearest, worth-it thing in the entire world, and when you find someone who can put words together in such a way that feeling bad feels totally amazing, you better keep them forever...even if that means your relationship with that person is unconventional and seemingly improbable in its own lifespan.

Somewhere in between re-reading emails early this morning at the office and arriving home to put words down in written form, I came to a certain acceptance with the knowledge that who I am as a person is someone who is wildly, unforgivably attracted to slightly off-kilter people. These people will never respond to me in an orderly fashion, and their actions may often mismatch their intentions. They will sometimes be damaged in ways I can't fix, or simply just unwilling to give attention to things they're not wholly consumed by at any given moment. They are usually brilliant in some striking and unforgettable way; they are complex and withdrawn in a much more subtle, hard-to-parse manner.

These are the people I will always love the hardest. These are the people who might not answer my text messages for six months in a row, but will spend three years trying to make me the perfect mix tape and end up with a shoebox full of half-constructed A-sides underneath their bed. I can't predict the future, but I will not be surprised if one day I finally marry one of these people and have weird and unforgettable children who disappear for months on end and then write "I love yous" all over my mailbox with finger paint.

Take the ones who can make you feel really good about feeling bad, and keep them in whatever manner they will allow you. That's really the only advice I could ever give anyone.

oh, tegan and sara

I love Tegan and Sara. And by that, I mean I love Tegan and Sara. To the point where Flynn and I, several years ago now, re-created the above photo:



Sure, we were both working for their record label at the time and were completely surrounded by everything T&S influencing us to the point of actually staging this. But still. This obviously means I'm a tad obsessed. And I'm completely okay with this.

Why, oh why, do I love them so, you ask? Somehow, by chance, these twins have found their way into my life at such impressionable times. And I'm the kind of person who will love certain things, not because they're necessarily good, but rather because I hold a strong autobiographical sentimental attachment to them. I never asked for Tegan and Sara to play such a significant role; I just kept happening upon them. College? Check. Living overseas and working at a small record shop where I played "So Jealous" as much as was allowed by my co-workers after seeing them by chance in college? Check. Moving to NYC and happening to get a job at their record label? Check.
Now I've only had the pleasure of seeing them live five times, but every one has been in a different stage of their career (and mine). Time 1 was at a small bar/venue I worked at in college, where they played to a crowd of about 30 and I manned the soda bar in the back of the room. It was my first time hearing their music. Their on-stage banter and catchy music left me mesmerized. They were witty, talented, hilarious and just downright pleasant. Who wouldn't love that? The next four times would find the crowds and venues getting larger. Every increase in venue size was accompanied by a similar increase in ticket price.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for supporting the artist and actually paying for tickets for bands that I really want to see. I've gone so much as to spend $45 dollars per ticket per night for their 2 night stint at Town Hall a few months back. But recently, they announced an "intimate" show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Ticket price: $75 dollars. SEVENTY FIVE DOLLARS?! At first I thought "hey, maybe they're donating some of their proceeds to a good cause, perhaps to Haiti"? But no. Those twins who I love so dearly have suddenly become greedy animals and are completely screwing me over. I couldn't bring myself to buy a ticket. Mainly because I just can't afford a ticket; times are tough. As much as I want to be at that show, I can't be. Maybe they think that by charging $75 they are limiting this "special" event to the die-hard fans. But it seems they're only alienated us. And in the process are making us feel terrible about the entire situation.

Tegan and Sara, I ask you this: Why?

Thoughts; just a few thoughts.

"When Levin thought about what he was and what he was living for he found no answer and fell into despair; but when he stopped asking himself about it he seemed to know both what he was and what he was living for, since he acted and lived firmly and definitely; in this last period, indeed, he lived far more firmly and definitely than he had before." —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karinina


I relish the moments that I'm able to spend alone. I wasn't always this way, but over the years have become the most content in these times. But with these moments come others where my mind goes into overdrive. My thoughts will almost always take control and over-analyzing becomes the entire days agenda. This usually leads to emotional extremes in every direction, spiraling out of control. But, like Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I sometimes have to stop myself from this over thinking and start simply doing, or else despair will find it's way in. It is at these times that I become most productive. And this morning, after a full Saturday of seclusion and reflection, I once again headed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this time getting lost in 1700-1800 France. As I wandered in and out of these great halls, extreme in their own gilded ways, I replaced my own thoughts with those in the stories and histories I hold so dearly.




While at museums, I am always confronted with the reality that disturbs me to great lengths. As I walk the halls attempting to place my head in that of the artists, I can look in any direction and see someone distracted by their phone. Watching the world become completely dependent on constant communication through devices from social networking to the latest smart phone greatly perturbs me. It has become completely accepted that time spent with friends or family, at home or out and about, will always include more than are there physically. Obsessive text messaging, twitter, and facebook updates to anyone and everyone who will listen have worked their way into our every day, every hour, every minute. When did constant communication over the most mundane things become a mandatory part of our lives? Is everyone out there that attention starved?

Perhaps this stems from me not having a smart phone and not working in front of a computer. I'll fully admit to having fallen into these habits when I did work in front of a computer all day. They were little breaks in my work that seemed innocent enough. But were they? After posting/e-mailing/texting something to someone/something, I immediately wanted results. It somehow boosted my sense of worth that someone somewhere was in-tune with what I said or did at that exact moment. But why? Why do we need this instant gratification and self-assurance through such attentions? Why were my emotions all over the place based on what a person posted that may or may not have anything to do with me? By exposing ourselves we lose our privacy, but I suppose privacy isn't important anymore, is it? My over thinking of this subject has caused me to take a break. I go days without checking facebook, and I rarely use my twitter account, and in fact have set it on private for the few posts that I do write. Don't get me wrong, I can see the benefits. News updates, and keeping in touch with friends who I don't get to see often. But honestly, are people this bored with their lives that they need these constant connections? Are they trying to impress the person they are with by showing how popular they are in answering as many texts/calls/e-mails/twitter mentions/facebook updates that they possibly can? When I'm with someone who does this, I've found that I automatically reach to my phone as some kind of obscure retaliation. I would rather not surround myself with these people who make me feel bad about not checking my phone every 3 minutes. Why would I want to be around someone who's own insecurities make me question my own? To me, I see these people and I instantly judge. I can't help it. In my eyes, by needing this constant companion that feeds its owner with the attention they crave is a definitive sign of weakness. In the past I've fallen into such weaknesses, and in hindsight am completely embarrassed by these actions.

By taking part in this blog, I'm a complete hypocrite. I know this. But for me, this isn't about attention. In fact, only a a small handful of my closest friends who probably will be told everything I write on here in person at some point have been given this blogs address.

There is nothing firm or definitive in these devices and methods. They merely leave things open-ended in the most passive aggressive way. I only wonder what Tolstoy would write about this all if he were alive today...

But here I am over-thinking again.

the importance of being earnest (and writing about it)

Approximately nine years ago, I went to see one of my favorite bands, and their bass player jumped off the stage after their set and introduced himself to me. A little while later, I wrote him this email. It's a little too honest and it's a little too exhuberant and it's a little embarrassing - but if I had never written it, I'd have gone through these nine years without one of my closest friends.

I share it here because I'm pretty sure the best things come from being a little too honest or a little too embarrassing, and I am more likely to forget this fact than anyone.

[He said this morning, about the below, "this is not nerdy. who doesn't dream of the job of being understood!"]

Hey Matt -

First of all, I have to preface this email with the following. (It turns out to be relevant, honest.)

The Posies have been my favorite band for about five years - and while that made me somewhat a latecomer in terms of the band's lifespan, what I lost in time I have always made up for in enthusiasm. And when Ken Stringfellow's first solo record came out at the end of 1997, I shut my ears to all the negative reviews because what *I* heard in that record was more than the wankery of which he was accused. I heard a lo-fi and heartfelt album full of bedroom songs and one of the most sincere broken hearts I've ever encountered, offset by the kind of disjointed drum tracks that splice through the thoughts in our heads. It made sense to me when not much else did, just as the Posies always have; it was there for me when I needed it, and I sometimes feel like that, above all, is what transforms a good record into an amazing one.

So of *course* I was ready and waiting for his 2001 release when it came out - a combination of songs I'd already attached myself to long ago mixed with newer and even more promising stuff; I knew that "Touched" would be as fully developed and carefully thought out as it deserved to be. I knew that if there was one thing that I could count on this year, it would be the excellence of that record, and I knew that it would make me smile and cry at the same time, which is always the true test of what matters musically.

And I wasn't disappointed - at all. The new record met and then exceeded my expectations, and I'm still as in love with that voice as I always was. This was never in question.

Here's where the point of this story comes in: I've been caught off-guard. Because I know that at the end of the year when I sit down and write a rambling review of the year's amazing music that only my best friend will give a shit about, not one but *two* albums will be above Ken Stringfellow on that numbered list. The first is one that, frankly, I'd expected - because it's been a while since Drip broke up, and because it would never even occur to Andy LeMaster to create anything less than perfect and Now It's Overhead proves that point with ease.

The second album in question is "The Convenience of Indecision," by this little band called Sorry About Dresden who I've loved since first listen, and whose new album I knew would be really good, but...this is so much more than that. This is "I'm not even going to tell you how long this has been on repeat in my stereo because I try not to frighten people" good. And it's here for me when I need it.

So basically I just wanted to say thanks, firstly, to the Dresdens in general for being the Dresdens.

All of that said, I would also happen to be the girl known to far too many people as "Sienna's best friend," and the first girl to bug you about that Drip radio show (as opposed to Stephanie from WI, who I don't actually know, but I think we've now embarrassed poor Sienna by accident), and I don't think I ever actually introduced myself at the NJ show, so hi, I'm Sarah. Anyway, would you still be willing to make me a copy of the show? I would be happy to send you blanks in return, or I could trade if there's anything I have that you might want a copy of. I don't have much in the way of boots, and I'm not sure how big of a Posies fan you are, but I have a few decent shows of theirs.

So let me know, and thank you, and if this is really incoherent or I've written it in Greek or something it's because I'm horribly sick and I am on so much cold medication I can barely see straight and I'm having one of those nights where I wish I'd never heard the words "grad school". Hope the rest of the tour went well and Matty's head is okay.

-s.

a field guide to being alone.

Life as I know it is a series of birthday dinners and other celebratory gestures. In June, it's a sneaky sort of delight: "I've been out dancing every night - and I'm not getting anything done!" In February, it's a slower sort of regret: "Oh. I'm not getting anything done."

February is the month where everyday ordinary things seem hard: getting out of bed in the morning when you can hear the wind howl and it's still dark, working through your office To-Do list even when the things on it are simple and mundane. You find yourself with clear, bright intentions. This week you have 15-18 miles to run, you have to do your taxes, you have a few story ideas burning in your head and you're actually quite excited to attempt to pin them down and force them into language.

What unfolds instead is this dance of birthdays, the call of happy hour, the simplicity of invites to dinners at friends' homes, the lure of a rock show, and the innocence of "do you want to stay and have a drink?" It is rare for any of these nights to be late or wild or overly drunken, but they manage to suck such a nice slot of time that when you arrive home, you convince yourself of a deeper exhaustion that has you sliding into bed earlier than expected.

You are, in effect, keeping yourself distracted from being alone, but the only reason why is that it's February.

And so you wake up one (still February) morning and find that your day's plans have been cancelled due to a snowstorm that never came, and you note that you have yourself a weekend and nothing to fill it with but yourself and the notebooks, novels, and records that inhabit your living space. Shocked, a bit scared, you send a few messages intended to land you in someone else's world as soon as possible. And then, slightly dissatisfied at having to make an effort, you scale back.

If you're feeling any kind of discomfort about being alone, the first thing you must do is be alone for as long as possible until that feeling dissipates.

Then, from the cold hard ground of February come new signs of life in your brain: you listen to one of your favorite albums for an entire afternoon, you spend the entire day reading one of your favorite books, and you take the sudden Saturday silence of your Blackberry to mean that you're doing what's intended of you.

And then you remember that your entire existence used to look a great deal like this. You remember what it was like to go to rock shows alone, to spend weekend afternoons at the movies by yourself, to do everything in good measure by yourself because no one else's company quite matched what you wanted it to be. There's so much to be heralded about this fact no longer being the case, and about having a world filled with people who act in new and interesting ways every day.

Still, there's something to be said for this variety of alone, and you start googling the band whose record you're playing to see if they have any shows coming up. You might buy a ticket, just one, and you might consider this all part of a new project you like to call Alone.

a slight rebellion off madison

“It wouldn’t be the same at all. We’d have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We’d have to call up everyone and tell ‘em goodbye and send ‘em postcards. And I’d have to work at my father’s and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers.” – Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison”

Last week, my downstairs neighbors were playing a record way too loud. For the first time in my personal history of neighbors, this turned out to be nothing short of delightful. It was a bluegrass record of some kind, and the banjo melodies were all kinds of perfect, and at the end of the day it’s probably some very popular record that everyone knows about but me.

In those ten or fifteen minutes it took me to fall asleep, though, it was the most magical thing I could possibly think of. I hate that I have no idea what that album was, but it awakened in me some small remembrance that the scope of the things I love lies far beyond what’s in my immediate thoughts. A few nights later, a ramshackle sort of jug band played a Haiti benefit at the Bell House and I watched in delight as a saw and a washboard made their entrance.

It’s strange sometimes the things that you forget about: I’ve had a musical saw sitting in my closet for going on ten years now, and I take it out and play it approximately twice a year. My love for the washboard extends back to a time I can only remember vaguely, the kind of memory that gets reconstructed more fully through other people’s stories than through my own mental pictures. Still, it’s there, and it’s a part of me that I keep to myself more often than not because it’s occasionally hard to explain the ways in which one is different.

I had the honor of going to the Morgan Library and Museum with a certain friend and her parents this weekend, and I’d forgotten just why I’ve spent the past seven or eight years “meaning to go back.” The library itself is a thing of brilliance and a testimonial to why being rich must not be all bad. It smells of old books and holds a number of intricate art objects, and I can’t really even put into words how I feel about the ceilings.


(I will say this: they make my knees shaky.)

The first and only other time I’d been to the Morgan was on a trip with my step-grandfather’s graduating Princeton class. It was a strange reminder of both class divisions and the fact that at 19 or 20, I was still unrefined on purpose. Even then, though, I felt that it was likely my grandparents felt more out of place than I did: in a world of bankers, lawyers, and professional nostalgics, they stood out in their career choice as co-owners of a nudist resort in southern Georgia.

This fact is a simple and small one of my upbringing, one I tend to forget until I say it out loud and people find it odd. Alongside this, the memory of the washboard that my parents’ friend Kangaroo used to play with his bluegrass band on our lawn. I have the strange sense that my home as a small child looked a bit like a DIY venue in Bushwick: there were beards and bandanas and beer cans everywhere you looked. I didn’t have a flaky hippie childhood, but it’s hard not to sound like it in the retelling.

Today, my parents have grown into softer caricatures of themselves; my grandparents – who I might add were the kindest, most in-love people I’ve ever met – have regrettably passed. It’s only in the context of spending time with other people’s families that I’m reminded of these little pieces of my past. Whether we like it or not, there are parts of each one of us that stem quite clearly from the people who raised us. In me there’s an unrefined brashness that I can’t curtail despite myself. The love of music that so many people recognize at the heart of me originates from a strange mix of Otis Redding and Kansas records with those animal-named bluegrass dudes on the lawn.

And I am quite certain that I didn’t learn my ability to cuss like a sailor “from the other kids at school.”

Whether we realize it or not, we all spend a lot of time rebelling against the unshakeable parts of ourselves that grew inside of us as children. I wanted quite badly to have something eloquent to say about the passing of J.D Salinger this week – as cliché as it seems, it is true that no other artist so clearly paved the way for who I became as a thinker and an adult. His most famous character, Holden Caulfield, felt all too well the constraints of the worlds we grow up in – even in the city he called home, Holden had a hard time trusting what he knew best simply because he knew it all too well.

I grew up, and I left behind the lawns and the washboards and (to a certain extent) the Kansas records. I moved to New York City, and I have a job on Madison Avenue. Every morning, I take the elevator to the 7th floor, and I walk through glass doors and into a hallway lined with gold and platinum album plaques, and I round the corner to my own little office.

Then I dance around a little bit to whatever’s playing in my headphones before I take them off and get to work.

a birthday week

This week I was called to and attended jury duty for the first time. The case was an attempted murder where the defendant allegedly shot his girlfriend ten times. Ten times. Somehow, she survived.

I sat for two days in a courtroom listening to a judge and attorney's question 29 jurors regarding everything you would never want strangers to know. The invasion of privacy was shocking, and I sat cringing as a complete stranger told how her son had been murdered and thrown into the Hudson river; that yes, his body had been found and no, this would not affect her judgment in this particular case. They chose 3 out of the 29 questioned, and excused the remaining 11 they hadn't yet interrogated, including myself. If I had made it to the trial, it would have been a two to three week ordeal. Although my curiosity took over and at one point was eager to be a part of a justice being served, relief came when I knew that the next few weeks would not be filled with horrifying testimonials and haunting pictures of the scene of such a nauseating crime.



Friday was my birthday. I've never really been one for celebrating my own day of birth, as I would rather spend the time in a peaceful retreat. But after a rough day where I barely made it through work, I was treated to a low key dinner planned by a handful of my closest friends. Saturday I was visited by my parents, and we went to a museum that I had never heard of prior, but might just have become one of my favorites. I received many wonderful and unexpected gifts, and am spending my Sunday in a quiet reflection.

ambitions

The past couple of weeks have been draining in all the best ways. Essay and recommendation writing combined with preparing for what might just come next has my mind caught in a state of anticipation and anxieties. I feel as if I'm in a constant test that is administered by those around me to see where their influences end and (if) my own ideas begin. My years of preparation seem to finally be paying off, and the self-confidence that had been in hibernation is growing stronger as the days pass by. I am excited for the future, and know that in order to continue moving forward, I must leave things behind. The times where I'm stuck in a dangerous nostalgia are becoming fewer and further between. And any hope I may have for an emotion that has proved itself unreliable time and time again lay in more capable/incapable hands.

This city has found itself back into my heart more often than not. It may soon reach the point to officially move on. This time, I'll be ready.

i'll write the ending

"Life is an as-is, no-warranty arrangement, and if you want it to add up to anything, you'd better go at it with fire in your gut." [From Wells Tower's excellent short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned]

We rearranged my bedroom today, and I can't stop staring at it.

I can't describe what a completely different world this room is right now; I'm falling asleep in a world that's far beyond the looking glass from the one I woke up in. Nothing has been added, nothing taken away; everything that's here has been here, but it's all ordered in a manner that now makes perfect sense.

I want to say something like "wouldn't it be grand if we could do this with our minds?" In reality, though, this physical rearranging is sometimes what gives us the ability to reframe the mental. The greatest tool we're given as human beings is the ability to edit, and it's alarming to know that most of the time we don't realise this at all. We've been provided with life both inside and outside the mind, but if we can't reframe it, then it's just been wasted.

In 2003, I started editing one of my favorite indie music magazines. It was a tiny publication and a massive labor of love. At the same time, I was in the graduate program for philosophy at the New School; each semester, I sat myself down and spent weeks outlining 10-20 page papers on topics like "The Pragmatic Argument For the Possibility of God." By day, I worked at a record label, but at night, my life was an abundance of words in flux. All I did was edit. I worked to pull meaning from poorly written articles on emerging hip-hop artists, and I worked even harder to patch together other people's ideas in ways that made my own arguments make sense.

This is the thing about editing: you can't have words without some kind of context, and it's this context that gives those words their meaning. When you edit, all you have to do is reach inside someone else's head, pull out what you know their heart is trying to tell you about it, and then recontextualize their words in a way that matches. When you do it right, it feels bloody fantastic.

It feels like falling in love, and this is because it's really the same thing. Whether we're cognizant of it or not, the events in our lives turn on our ability to edit: what is love if not that moment when you look at someone and realize that your brain can piece together what their heart is telling you even if they're not saying it?

Editing is one of my secret skills, something I'm fairly certain I'm good at but never have to prove to anyone. It's something I forget I can do until someone asks, and then I get so excited about the reconfiguration of words and bringing meaning into focus that I can't believe I don't do it as a day job. In this same manner, I'm forever hesitant to consider the possibility, but I have a suspicion that I'm good at editing relationships, at looking at people and figuring out what's in their insides and then pulling out the best bits and making sense of who we are together and what we possibly could be.

Sometimes you're wrong, and then you have to get the red pen back out and start crossing out all the stuff that sounded good when you were three whiskeys deep. Sometimes there are pages missing, and you have to wing it for a few sentences of your own before their silence finally makes sense. You'll always wonder what those pages really said, but the truth is that they were ones you were going to have to rewrite anyway.

When we rearranged my furniture this morning, I liberated an old vanity table from its previous incarnation and for no apparent reason made the executive decision that I needed to have two desks. I've spent my evening hopping from one to the other when extra space is required or I get stuck on a sentence; I've worked a bit on Edit #3 of a graduate application for Christiana, written a guest blog for a friend, ordered pants from J. Crew, and checked my email too many times in the hope that I'd be able to fill in a few of someone else's blank pages this evening. I've also avoided doing a few things that I know could be key to my future happiness, and I've considered my own silence in these matters even as I'm writing in possible excuses for other people.

We have a certain romantic idea about the edit: if the words are already there, and we just have to move them around some, how hard can it be? In reality, it's harder than starting from scratch: you can't invent thoughts and actions that you'd like to will into being. Instead, you have to piece together what you can with what you have, and you have to rely on your own interpretation of everyone else's stories until you end up with a cohesive effort that reads in the shining manner you'd originally intended.

It always happens. Sometimes it happens within someone else's crappy hip-hop writing, and sometimes it happens when you're looking for God in the best words of William James, and sometimes it happens when you lose your words entirely just in time to kiss someone back. In any case, you've gotta edit, and if you're gonna edit, you'd better go at it with fire in your gut.

the nature of maps

I have a map in my head - I assume we all have these, that this is one of those heartening intrinsic signs of humanity - that connects all of my relationships with people, and attempts on occasion to make sense of why certain things are so.

Perhaps what is unusual about this map is the weird range of quotes that get stuck in my head and the timing with which these relationships collide. I went to a friend's play reading this evening, and surrounded by a large group of acquaintances, the usual questions were asked. "How was your trip home for the holiday?"

I shrugged. "Oh, you know, two weeks of everyone going 'You are nothing like us!' You're skinny and you eat vegetables and we don't know where you learned to drink scotch."

"Well, that's you, at least."

And that is me, and that's the kind of thing I can't change even though it's clearly not genetic. There are certain truths that come along with each person. With me, its a fact that the second I recognize I have feelings for someone, I will be more terrified than excited. Its a universal truth that if there's anyone remotely creepy in a room, they will gravitate towards me in a manner of seconds. And it is inevitable that I think dessert is not to be eaten after dinner but instead of it, if it is going to really be enjoyed.

Those are things that form the separating faults and keep that shared humanity in weird topographical form. You can never really figure out all of an individual's rules - you can only gesture at them. It becomes an odd dance, then, to figure out what it is they want from you.

Recently, both at random and in the context of discussing my romantic history, people keep bringing up my most notable ex-boyfriend. It's perhaps a function of this that while searching for an archived conversation with another friend today, I came across one from him:

"I just want some kind of certificate that says that I did more for you than just fuck you up a bunch."

At the time, he got a bunch of saccharine reassurances from me; later, I'd stop talking to him with no fanfare at all, ensuring that no such certificate really existed. Sometimes I guess it's possible that all people do is fuck you up a bunch.

At the same time, though, we are still moving along in this weirdly tentative fashion, overinterested in each other's feelings in an attempt to parse whether they might make as much sense as our own do. They never will; even when someone acts in the same manner we might have in the same situation, we'll probably assume that we'd have done otherwise.

(Which is why, when looking back at our own decisions, the most common refrain is "What the fuck was I thinking?")

I am willing to overthink every situation and to assume that every person who walks into my life is meant to be there in some very meaningful way, and I guess that's because assuming otherwise might mean forgetting to pay attention to the things in front of you. The price I pay for this is constant worry about what everyone else is thinking and whether or not what I'm doing in their lives is meaningful enough in turn.

This is all remarkably stressful, and the peaks and valleys in my relationship map are pretty damn pronounced. I'm pretty consistently being picked on for my in-depth analysis of the company that I keep, and conversely, people tend to make a very big deal about the relationships I haven't made my mind up about because they know how rarely I do anything lightly.

Here is the part that I don't get: after all of the stress and all of the moments where I stop caring because I simply can't be bothered to keep thinking anymore, what I'm left with is this really gorgeous array of people who are immensely talented and incredibly good to me and actually add to the world we're all living in.

How do you get yourself to change overly rigorous processes of people-acceptance if the results you're getting are impeccably good?

this was meant to be about old people.

"When I get home," I said to Christiana approximately an hour ago, "I'm going to write in our blog, and then I am going to go to sleep."

The problem with this, of course, is that any clear picture of words that existed in my head over an hour ago is definitely, absolutely dissolved by now. My favorite time in the world is by far when I have had exactly two drinks in Greenpoint and am walking home to Bushwick; I'm unwound just enough to dance a little bit in the street, and every song sounds better and brighter and more perfect than the last. There's something about every single street that sparks a memory that makes me smile, and I never love Brooklyn more than on these walks home.

Still, they're what make me forget those things I'd meant to write about. It tends not to matter, though, because the part that stays strong is the conviction it was meant with. Conviction, you see, is a tough thing to come by, and for whatever reason it seems to fill up the cracks in my life just as soon as I've forgotten its existence.

Here at Craving Cake HQ, it was a long, hard, grueling week; it's hard to teach the youth of tomorrow when you're dealing with bureaucracy, and it's hard to get people to care about the most important thing in your life when they won't even pay for the art that makes it possible. And sometimes people make you worry about dollars, and sometimes they make you worry about your judgment calls, and most of the time the world makes you worry about what could possibly be involved in its plan, because most of it doesn't make sense.

So there's this:



What does it take to restore some sense of balance in the universe, to make conviction seem like the stuff of the strong and not of the foolish? Basically, it takes the world's most perfect sunny January Saturday and a group of kids going ice skating for the first time. It is soul-crushing to be involved in volunteer work: at the end of the day, you can't change these kids' lives in a way that's truly meaningful. They still won't have permanent homes at the end of the day, and their dads might still hit them, and they might talk now about being scientists and artists but they might also get pregnant far too young and live the same lives their parents did before them. There are a lot of variables, and there are a lot of great things you can't do for kids who aren't your own.

Just about all you can do to really be helpful in this world to other people is feed them, hug them, and take them ice skating. I can't tell you whether it was the air, the temperature, the feeling I get every single time I lace up a pair of skates, or the look on two little girls' faces as I tried to teach them how to move on the ice, but everything else stopped needing to make any sense.

Then I remembered that my life feels like this most of the time - if I lose sight of that in the face of tragedy or in the struggle of personal achievement, then it's only to remind myself that a 45-degree day is only meaningful after a barrage of heartbreakingly cold ones.

fight the good fight

There are good days, and there are bad days. And then there are the days where from the minute you wake up you know that it's going to be a struggle to get through. And today was one of those.

I'm trying my best to stay inspired and positive, but the past 17 hours have managed to knock me down. Hard.

There are two sides to everything. Opinions were raging today, both views were represented with grand statements that my naivety can't yet decode. I knew this was going to be a tough fight, but I didn't quite expect this. I left with a bitter taste in my mouth; that of the reality I had veiled myself from. But I suppose when we start off fresh, our views are always a bit idealistic.

Sights have been set on the weakness they discovered, and attempts at hitting it hard have begun. Rapid fire may have been a successful strategy in the past, but I can take a beating. I'm staying strong, and moving forward the best I can. And there's much to be said about that.

am i food, or am i free?

I'm not sure if it's the inevitable talk of a better and brighter new year, the company I've been keeping, or my own state of mind, but the subject of fate keeps coming up lately in a way that's hard to avoid. Over some unspeakably good pancakes at Maggie Brown on Saturday, I quoted Empire Records to a friend:

"I'm guided by a force much greater than luck."

Because he's not a woman in his late twenties, he missed the reference and nodded seriously. "Yes, but I think luck is also part of it. I believe in luck, and I think it and fate go hand in hand. I do think my life follows a plan."

Here are three strange things about that statement:

1) I nodded, and felt like I agreed with it in a serious manner.
2) I also have no idea whether or not I believe in any sort of god / organizing principle.
3) This disconnect has been present for most of my life and has never bothered me.

In fact, it's my lack of feeling troubled in this situation that has me worried: about a year or so ago, I had a really serious discussion with another friend about spirituality. The "serious" portion was all on his end, as was the "discussion"; for my part, I had nothing to contribute. I'd never considered myself a spiritual person, and when it comes down to it, I don't know what the force behind the universe is and I'm not bothered by the fact that I don't know - either it'll be revealed to me sooner or later, or it won't.

That said, there's something markedly disturbing about not having a strong belief about something people are so passionate about, and I find myself wanting to share in that kind of spirit. I've been known to attend AA meetings simply because they're held in churches and I find something perfect in church ceilings. (If I was the kind of person who filled out the "interests" section of social networking sites, "the ceilings of churches" would be somewhere in between "scotch" and "my friend Mike's love life.") I think the stages of the Bodhisattva's path are really quite beautiful. Franny and Zooey is even my favorite book!

And when you ask me where my sympathies lies, when you wonder where my faith is, I fail to give you an answer that explains my staunch belief that things happen for a reason. I will tell you something about how my faith lies in things I can see, like people and songs and books, and that this to me is more than enough. I might tell you a story about how people fall into my life in ways so bizarre they seem as though they must be predetermined, but I won't be able to connect that to a meaningful set of beliefs that explain the constructs behind that sentiment.

I don't have a grand plan for my life; I find that 99% of the time, it falls into place in ways my tiny mind could never have dreamed. My best friends come to me from the strangest places: sitting in front of me in a class I'm about to drop, jumping off a stage after a rock show and shaking my hand, writing me emails about a blog from 1500 miles away. I started an entire career in the music industry by letting someone I'd just met for the first time in person take me to visit someone's office in the hopes of scoring an advance of a Mazarin album.

I look at people from afar and I want to keep them in my life, and 95% of the time, they end up there without any outside effort on my behalf. This is why I believe that things happen for a reason, and it's also why I'm struck dumb and can't make sense of it when such matters fail the other 5 percent of the time. This week is one of those times, and I'm left sitting here wondering if my belief in a 'force much greater than luck' is just my convenient way of creating order out of chaos.

Does everything work if you let it, or does everything just kind of fall all over the place and let you conveniently forget the things that don't fall sensically?

inspired

The past few days have found me in an productivity whirlwind. An old co-worker commissioned me to paint the largest painting I've done to date. The biggest problem I was faced with was where to actually paint the canvas. My apartment is about the size of a shoebox, and my room is basically a glorified closet. I spent an entire day re-arranging and cleaning, attempting to position everything so I had a good chunk of space to work in. I did the best that I could, and am quite happy with the turnout.

Since it's been a few years since I've oil painted, I decided I needed some inspiration. Sunday I woke up early and found myself walking amidst the old Polish ladies of my neighborhood as I made my way to an early mass. After being both infuriated and inspired by the homily (as it generally goes), I headed up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much like most things in my life, when it comes to museums or galleries I prefer to go solo. I don't understand how anybody can consider the museum-going experience a social activity. I find it to be a very solitary and reflective time. Art criticism leaves me feeling agitated; when I overhear people reciting, usually in a highly pretentious manner, some regurgitated critique they read or have been told, it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

"Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life." —Rainer Maria Rilke

Now as far as museums go, The Met is one hell of an intimidating place. This intimidation is enhanced by the fact that I have only been twice before and don't yet know the layout very well. Not wanting to overwhelm and frustrate myself, I decided it was best to visit just one or two areas that I was comfortable with. The European Painting and Modern Art wing was my muse for the morning (as well as that of about 99% of every tourist who visits The Met). As much as Flynn feels weird and anxious in museums, they are one of the few places where I oddly find myself at ease (well, that is as long as I go at a time where crowds are at their minimum. We all know how much I hate crowds - and yes, I realize living in NYC makes me a complete hypocrite here). I'm somehow able to block the majority of people out and get entranced by whatever is in front of me. I tend to make the security guards a bit uneasy, as I'm one of those people who likes to get very close. There is so much to be learned from experiencing a painting in person. Everything from the texture of the brush strokes to the thickness of the paints is a true inspiration.

A few highlights:

Warhol

Rothko

Corot

Van Goh

Picasso - this Gertrude Stein portrait is one of my favorites

And this guy fell asleep for a good half hour as I was walking through this particular section.. but could have been there for much longer after I left. I couldn't resist taking a picture.


With inspiration oozing out of me, I started carving into a piece of linoleum I've been meaning to conquer as soon as I got home. I bought it a while ago, but after being so used to carving in wood I could never bring myself to use it. And my apprehensions proved correct; as soon as I started I felt like I was cheating. Pretty much the entire experience was a disappointment, from the texture and simplicity to the unsettling smell of the linoleum. I instantly missed the unique complexities that each individual piece of wood challenges me with, not to mention the distinct sweet aroma. Although I'm happy with how the piece turned out, and am anticipating the ease of printing compared to that of un-even wood, I don't think I'll be working with linoleum too much in the future.

i just want you to change my life.

I've spent the last month of my life on hiatus from work; given an extended vacation, I assumed that a great deal might come to pass.

I wasn't wrong; I knew that I'd expect to write a great deal and not do so, and I knew that I'd expect to get done all of the things I avoid doing the rest of the time, and not do so. That these things never got done is less of a disappointment and more of a reassurance that wherever I go, there am. Still, a lot can happen in a month, and as I barrelled my way through cold Midwestern visits and midday shopping sprees in Soho and awkward birthday parties and a changing sea of faces in front of Jameson pours, the one thing that was constantly present was myself. At some point, I figured out how to live in the moment enough to enjoy the moment, and I was glad for it even as I built my way towards thinking about Really Important Things.

One of the important things on my mind is career; I've been blessed with one I love, but it's a complicated sort of relationship and it's one I know I can't sustain forever. To that end, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I might want to do next - what am I good at, what do I love, and what could I actually make a living from? I've posed the question to close friends and come up with some interesting responses. It's important to know who thinks you're meant for the nonprofit world and who would love to see you become a professor of philosophy after all, even if these things seem less than tangible in my own eyes.

In all of this, there is one thing I have realized I'm in love with, and it is both serious and silly at the same time: one of the things I do best is re-imagine other people's lives. Where there's an unhappy friend, there's usually some kind of solution, and I love reaching inside of people and figuring out their best bits and suggesting that maybe they'd be really pleased with themselves if they tried this alternate career or augmented their current job with that extracurricular creative pleasure. I love re-imagining other people's lives, and I like to think that once in a while it actually sparks such ideas in their heads.

And so this evening I recommended to Eddy that he quit life as he knows it and take up an extended train trip around the country, writing about the experience as he goes, and just the thought of it made me wildly excited for such a future and what it could hold. If I could do one thing and get paid for it, it would be this: I would write the imaginary biographies of everyone I know, and then I would let them live inside of the worlds that I dreamed especially for them.