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.