Friends don't let friends watch Lost sans Jameson.
It's getting intense, folks. Oh, it is.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
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)
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)
Sunday, March 21, 2010
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.
"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.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 1, 2010
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.
Heart of gold, that one.
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.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
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.
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.
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