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.

when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

Some days, you wake up frozen in a state of what can only be uneloquently referred to as a "really bad mood." You can dress it up if you like and call it "the mean reds", Holly Go-Lightly style, or you can gently couch it in song lyrics and vague metaphors, but at the heart of it...it's just a bad mood.

This happens to me on a shockingly rare basis, and I generally feel blessed for it; however, the flip side of this is that when the bad mood hits, its force can and will knock me down entirely. Yesterday was one of these days, and I felt lucky to have a day off with which to deal with it...but what do you do when you have a whole day to yourself to turn your feelings around? How do you reverse where your head is at, and how do you ensure that your efforts actually work?

These are the kinds of questions I thrive off of, and I love hearing other people's answers. I turned to a few friends for advice on this matter and was told multiple times to get myself to a museum posthaste. This forced me to face a very deep-seated truth about myself that I've never admitted to anyone before: museums make me feel really, really weird. It's not a bad kind of weird, but it's an anxious kind of weird, and as much as they make me want to slow down and look at things and really think about them, I will always find myself slightly impatient for the part where I get to leave the museum and not be looking at beautiful things alongside a bunch of strangers, most of whom are having really horrible conversations about the beautiful things.

So I figured a museum might be a pretty bad idea for my pretty bad mood, and I struggled hard to figure out what to do. For me, productivity is usually the key to happiness, but I knew that if I wrote some awful words or tried to bake something too ambitious, there'd be some serious fail fallback to attend to. Shopping can work wonders for a bruised heart, but retail therapy in January just doesn't seem right. A five-mile run would probably have done the trick, but I'm bound by a blistered foot that just won't heal.

Still, it was sunny and unseasonably warm outside; still, as the morning hours passed into the afternoon, I felt sure that I could grab my mean reds by the throat and strangle them into a land of laughter and mirth. Sometimes, you have take drastic measures; sometimes you have to change things about yourself to change the way you're thinking about yourself.

So I ended up doing the thing I thought I'd never be able to afford (at a time I definitely can't afford it), which is also the thing that I'd actually just convinced myself a few days prior that I never wanted to do. My bad mood has waxed and waned and, honestly, returned since then, but I'm left with a lasting impression of the way that my brain regularly projects my dreams into my actual life.

It's kind of cute, also.

invictus

Despite my general lack of interest in just about every popular sport out there, I have an odd affinity for rugby movies (this is also true of hockey, but perhaps that story is for another post). Now there aren't many rugby movies out there, my favorite up to this point being Forever Strong (it reminded me a lot of my brother's rugby team - more on that below), and then there's that 30 seconds at the beginning of Circle of Friends. But today I went to see Invictus. And I absolutely loved it. It used rugby as a tool in representing the rocky change of political power in South Africa at the time. A little simple? Sure. But compelling nonetheless. And yes, I fully own up to the knowledge that if this movie was about football or baseball I might not be so supportive. That's just the kind of person I am.

Somehow I managed to shed a few tears within the first half. Now it doesn't generally take that much for me to turn the water works on during certain movies, but there was really nothing to actually cry about in this one. Pathetic? Perhaps. But what can I say - it got to me. In all the right ways.

Theme so far of 2010? Hope.

I put full responsibility of my odd little rugby obsession on my brother. He attended a small Catholic boarding school in the mountains of Pennsylvania where rugby was the sport of choice. It became a tradition for my parents and I to attend as many of his games as possible. We managed to fit into our schedule a surprisingly high number of games despite living hours away from his school. The first time I saw one, I fell in love with the passion and comradery. Up to this point I was more of the independent sport kind of girl; horseback riding and figure skating had been the athletic loves in my life. Rugby changed all that. I wanted in. Unfortunately, at that time the idea of girls playing rugby was frowned upon. It apparently wasn't an appropriate "ladies sport".

Years later, when I was a senior in high school, the school district I lived in started a girls rugby team. After spotting a sign on the side of the road, I enthusiastically called the advertised number and signed up right away. Although I only played for one season and ended up throwing my spine out of alignment at the end (an injury that still plagues me to this day), it was one of the most satisfying times in my life. There is nothing like the rush of a full body tackle with no padding between you and your opponent. Having no protective gear on other than a mouth guard, you had to be in complete control of yourself in order to properly take someone down. Every broken toe, bruise, and bloody nose was worth it. It was a way for me to release any excess energy and penned up aggression that I had. To this day I'm still searching for some kind of activity that can give me the same kind of passion, pain and satisfaction as rugby did.

productivity continued

Art: Woodcut & Printing


Food: Vegetarian Sheperd's Pie
This was my first time using celery root. I had to google image it before I went to the market because I had no idea what it looked like. It was probably the ugliest vegetable in Whole Foods.

My refrigerator was held hostage by mushrooms the two days leading up to preparations

Pre mashed potatoes

So I went a little overboard with how much filling I was able to cram into my tiny casserole dish. My oven will soon be taking revenge when I attempt to clean up the overflow.


Dessert prepared by Flynn

sundays with krstey

I'm not really sure what Tuesdays with Morrie are really like**, but I do have a great deal of experience regarding Sundays with Christiana.

Reunited yesterday evening after a lengthy couple of holiday weeks, two old friends met up in the bitter, bitter Brooklyn cold, had dinner, and went for a beverage on their favorite night (metal Saturday) at their favorite Greenpoint bar. The cold here permeates all things; it's no match for constantly opening doors or public spaces. The only safe havens are tiny apartments with overpowering radiators, and the only temperature decisions one can make involve freezing or sweating.

Last night, we chose to sweat. After the longest five-minute walk home in history, I arrived at Christiana's apartment with windblown tears streaming down my face and the runniest nose this side of the third grade. Moments later, I was face-deep in a hot toddy, re-learning what a fantastic film High Fidelity is. The wind picked up outside, and we could hear it shrieking around corners, and I started plotting routes home in my mind and realizing that I'd be impossibly cold for a possible hour before I got there.

Instead of a fate worse than death, I woke up this morning under a mound of blankets on Christiana's couch, and in the space between waking and preparing scrambled eggs, I did quite a bit of thinking. In the hours between 6 and 8 am in the winter months, you see, you are caught in the moment when it finally starts to get cold after the late-night halt of heater blasts, just before they kick in again for the morning. It seemed prudent to me to pass this time curled up on the couch with every appendage tucked under the covers, thinking hard.

This transitional morning period isn't solely tied to New York's weather patterns; it manifests itself in myriad ways. It's the lengthy gap that occurs the first time you sleep over at a new boy's apartment, while you're waiting for him to wake up and set the tone for the day. It's the way you feel after returning to your family home for the holidays and find yourself in a too-small bed listening to the whistle of a freight train outside. It's the memory of every childhood sleepover you never wanted to go to, and it's still where you do most of your best / most thorough / most disturbing thinking.

The biggest misconception about thinking hard is that there are conclusions to be drawn. This morning, I can't say I thought about things I've never thought about before, and I certainly can't say I came to any final decisions on any pressing life matters. Still, it was quiet and uninterrupted thought at its least structured. This means I spent a decent chunk of time thinking about certain men in my life and what the future will bring, and another bit of time thinking about running down the street and getting doughnuts before Christiana woke up, and quite a bit about mushrooms and the best way to cook them.

I also spent a much larger portion of time thinking about faith and whether its existence is a miracle or a nuisance. I thought about this Vonnegut quote: "Say what you will about the miracle of unquestioning faith - I consider a capacity for it terrifying and utterly vile." Then I thought about William James and his Will To Believe, which I checked out from the library yesterday because it seems to be haunting my dreams at night. That Vonnegut quote was the way I lived my life until I smacked headfirst into philosophy in college, and then I fell in love with James's radical empiricism and outlook on the world, and then from there it was pretty hard not to fall in love with the idea of what James calls a "genuine option."

In James's framework, a "genuine" option in life only occurs when a choice has three components. It must be living, meaning that both alternatives are truly possible for the chooser to take. It must be forced, meaning that the chooser has to pick one or the other (and can't decline to choose or pick indifference.) And third, it must be momentous, meaning that it is a unique choice that will significantly alter the direction of the path chosen, and that it is an irreversible decision that can't later be taken back.

James sets up this framework, of course, to examine the notion of religious faith and suggest that religious belief lives in an arena that doesn't conflict with reason and intellect, but is not really reachable by either power. The question of faith is one of very few opportunities that we have as humans to consider a genuine option. I don't always understand what I think about faith, and I'm not really sure how it entered my thoughts between the hours of 6 and 8 this morning, but I'm pretty crazy about the notion of genuine options, as they seem the only kinds of decisions really worth making.

Also, later on in the evening Christiana made me dinner and it was absolutely delicious.

**Based on title / inspirational classification, I always assumed this book was about visiting a dying man and learning about life, love, and mortality. Can someone confirm or deny this rumor?

2010: day one in pictures

This morning I woke up early and headed to Times Square to take in the aftermath.






From Times Square I walked the 40+ blocks to The Met, which I was informed would be open today. It was not. Wanting to take in an art museum, I scoured museum row for one that was open. This was the general state of things:

...and so the 2009 holiday season ends.