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.