in the next apartment

borrowed glory

2011-11-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

I get such a kick out of having talented friends — especially when they’re getting the credit and attention they deserve. The beginning of this month, I went to three different events, each spotlighting a friend and his accomplishments. It’s enough to make me feel like I’m hot stuff myself.

Thursday the 3rd was an evening in honor of Jock Soto, one of my favorite dancers ever, and now the author of an absolutely charming and honest memoir, Every Step You Take. During my years of utter ballet obsession, Jock and his partner, the glorious Wendy Whelan, were etched into my consciousness with their fierce modernism and gorgeous emotional resonance. I couldn’t get enough, sometimes going to see New York City Ballet three times a week during the season (which I now realize ain’t nuthin’ compared to what the real ballet kooks do, but most of them aren’t exactly role models for even a relatively sane person).

Then, when I worked at NYCB, no matter how hellish my day, I could always slip into a rehearsal studio and watch dancers at work. Without a doubt, the best of those times were watching Christopher Wheeldon actually create ballets on Wendy and Jock — first Morphoses, a spiky, dark, twisty piece, brightened by quick jokes and rich connections, and then, glory glory glory, After the Rain, an unbelievable work with one of my favorite pas de deux ever, made for Jock’s farewell year. That brief pas de deux (not quite 10 minutes long) has so much emotion and love and sadness built into it that when it ends, with the both of them lying on the floor and Jock folding Wendy’s body over his as the curtain comes down, the audience goes absolutely crazy, as if they’d just watched an entire epic unfold in front of them.

After Jock retired (performing After the Rain, along with four other ballets, in his final performance), he wrote a memoir, among other things. Last Thursday, the National Museum of the American Indian (located in the handsome old Customs House) hosted an evening in his honor. First, we nibbled on hors d’oeuvres from Jock’s own recipes and watched footage from Gwendolen Cates’ documentary about Jock, Water Flowing Together. Then, we all filed into the auditorium, where Jock charmed the hell out of everyone, talking about his book, reading excerpts, showing off his new wedding ring, and just being generally irresistible.

(A year or two ago, The New York Times ran [on the first page] a classically ham-fisted article about how NYCB dancers were giving brief pre-curtain, onstage chats to introduce the programs; the gist of the article was along the lines of, “BREAKING NEWS! DANCERS SPEAK!,” with shock expressed that they could be so articulate! so winning! so funny! I was embarrassed, really, on behalf of the Times.)

That was Thursday. On Friday, I trekked over to 192 Books in Chelsea, a gem of a bookstore, where the mighty James Wolcott was reading from his new memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York. Now Jim has become the Fairy Godmother of the blog world (in the Cinderella sense, not the Halloween Parade sense), tapping his shout-out wand to bring light and readers to several lucky bloggers, including myself. He’s also a fellow ballet fan (and fellow hater of the cabal of ballet critics / trolls), and a mean blogger (and Tweeter) himself, especially when it comes to the vicious hypocrisy of the radical right.

He’s also a longtime New Yorker, and Lucking Out chronicles his first years in the city, the gritty and greasy 1970s, and his picaresque adventures that led him from movie screening dates with Pauline Kael, to countless nights at CBGB with the likes of Patti Smith and the Talking Heads, to some fairly sordid and long-gone establishments in Times Square. All this, relayed in Jim’s distinct sentences that loop and dive and leap, and always land precisely on target.

In Jim’s book and on his blog, despite the seriousness of the material or the sometimes blunt language, you always get the sense of delight and effortlessness, as if he’s lightly bounding from one skyscraper tip to another, or gliding across very very very thin ice, no problemo, weaving complicated patterns that deliver thrills to the reader.

Lucking Out is one of those books that, if someone else is in the room with you while you’re reading it, that someone is going to hear a lot of “Oh my god, you have to hear this,” followed by quotes such as these:

On being fired by the Village Voice:
From that point onward, I never worked a regular office job again, soleey writing for a living, something that would have been impossible if New York hadn’t been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes. The availability of affordable, problem-plagued, loosely enforced sublets made zigzag lateral movement throughout the city relatively easy, not like it would become a decade later, when each real-estate decision would pyramid under the worry load of upward mobility. In the early seventies, New York landlords were less choosy about whom they rented to, more laissez-faire as long as you didn’t give off a whiff of arson.

On the birth of the mosh pit:
Pogoing, too, was an English import, an indoor exercise perfect for tight spots, turing the pogoer into a hopping human exclamation mark…. Pogoing was compared to the hopping of the Masai, but the Masai hopped in unison, at least in the African documentaries and dubious colonial-war movie footage I had seen, whereas this indoor bouncing was closer to Whac-a-Mole with shaven and Mohawked heads popping up through the holes.

On the vestiges of the CBGB’s scene:
A stretch of East Second Street was later renamed in honor of Joey [Ramone], the commemorative sign eventually raised twenty feet above ground level after having been stolen so often. That’s where so much creative excitement ends up, with souvenir collecting.

On the aural proximity of the New York neighbor:
The young man in the adjacent apartment to me was having chronic boyfriend problems with Billy, whose name received extra l’s whenever my neighbor was distraught. “Billllllllly, why do you keep doing this to me?” Whatever it was that Billy was doing, he kept doing it, because the same desperate plea bargaining was played out over the phone again and again, as if the plaintiff were stuck to a script written on flypaper. Sometimes Billy would come over, and they would fight for a bit and then go out, or go out and then fight when they got back. I would pound on the wall, they would pound back, and really that’s what being a New Yorker was about then.

Jim gives the reader a vivid vision of his New York in the 1970s, and makes it appealing and exciting without any saccharine sentiment or cloying nostalgia. It’s quite a tightrope act, and one he handles without any apparent hesitation.

My spree of rubbing shoulders with the talented creative class finished up with a terrific performance by SenseDance, celebrating its twentieth season, quite an accomplishment for a small, independent dance company. SenseDance is headed up by Henning Rübsam, a friend from my years in the ballet world (where I was emphatically not a dancer) and an absolutely lovely person who always seems delighted by what the world is offering him. The program last Monday showed his choreographic reach, from taut and modern to sweet and silly to just plain gorgeous. His dancers were wonderful — human and natural, and deeply invested in the choreography. (My favorite was Maria Phegan — what a beauty she is; that's her, pictured at left with former NYCB dancer Max van der Sterre, in an image by Nir Arieli.)

This little whirlwind of fandom served as a helpful reminder that there is a lot of work involved in creating something, and a lot of sacrifices. You have to structure your life around your work, not squeeze in an hour here and there, and you’ve got to crack the whip, and all for delayed gratification: working is satisfying in and of itself, but it ain’t half so satisfying as finishing something. As Jim said in his reading, “Writers write for recognition. Anyone who tells you anything else is lying.” And writers who talk about feeling lost and adrift after they finish a book? “They’re lying. Writing is tough and makes you crazy. Finishing is great.”

It's not much...

2011-04-13T06:20:00.001-07:00

... but it was home for a few days. This is the château we stayed in, which was very quiet, very elegant, very secret. "We don't really want the publicity," the dapper manager, Olivier, told us when we asked why there was so little info on the property.

As long as there's a room available, I don't really care about the marketing outreach strategy. Just please bring me some more baguette and jam and coffee, and then I'm off to stroll along the terrace, and wander through the woods, and breathe in the impossibly clean air.

A typical day in La Loire - part two

2011-04-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

After a tragically disappointing lunch at a little spot in the village, about which I will say no more, we zoomed off to the next château on the itinerary: Villandry, which is known for its astonishing gardens. The story of the château is quite something: it was built in the 16th century, on the grounds of a demolished 12th-century fortress (the keep and the foundation are all that remain); it was "upgraded" in the 18th century, and the traditional garden was destroyed in the 19th century in favor of an English-style park (Arcadia, anyone?).

In 1906, it was acquired by an American heiress, Ann Coleman, and her Spanish husband, Joachim Carvallo. These two non-French people restored Villandry to its earlier glory, and lived there with their children (it's so odd to wander around this museum, looking at both 17th-century paintings and 20th-century family snaps). Carvallo became determined to turn the grounds into gardens appropriate to the château's era, and to make them absolute show-stoppers.

As you can see from the photos, he succeeded. For all of you out there planning your summer gardens, here are a few Villandry-inspired tips:

Design your garden to replicate Renaissance ideals: highest should be a formal water garden (swans included), signifying the soul. On a lower level you'll need an ornamental garden, symbolizing the heart, with intricate arrangements of boxwood-bordered flowerbeds delineating various concepts of love: tender, passionate, fickle, and tragic. And then at the lowest level, symbolizing the body, set up a vast checkerboard of a potager, or vegetable garden, with all the beds outlined in hedges, and each overseen by a single rose bush standing in for the monk who would have tended gardens like this back in the day.

Throw in a maze, a canal, a garden of medicinal and cooking herbs, ancient pruned lime trees bordering every square centimeter, and a belvedere high above it all for the view, and you'll be the talk of the neighborhood association.

After hours spent wandering the gardens and taking zillions of photos, we headed to our fourth château of the day, Château de Noizay, where we had a lovely dinner. It wasn't quite as special as Le Bon Laboreur — a bit too Relais & Château-y for my taste — but nothing to sneeze at.

Then we headed home to our own little château, the one we love best; one always prefers one's own castle, even if it's not quite as grand as Villandry.

A typical day in La Loire - part one

2011-04-12T08:49:00.001-07:00

Obviously, a typical day in the Loire involves châteaux. On Tuesday, we hit four of 'em.

We had a lovely breakfast at "our" château (which included some butter that I could have eaten straight up, with a spoon), then drove over to Azay-le-Rideau, which everyone had told us was the absolute gem of the Loire, so beautiful, so charming, the setting, the mirror effect, etc.

Maybe I was already jaded, one day in, but Azay-le-R, to me, had nothin' on Chenonceau. Or maybe it's just that your first château is always your best, and even after one day, Chenonceau had already acquired a golden haze of loveliness.

At any rate, the best thing about Azay to me was the name, which kept morphing in my head to Zazie-dans-le-Métro — a lovely film, to be sure, but not very Renaissance, perhaps. Of course, Azay is indeed lovely, but half of it was shut up for renos (which they neglected to mention at the ticket desk), and it just didn't have the pizzazz of Chenonceau. (However, it is on a charming little island, and having to cross over water to get to the front door just has such class.)

The weather, however, was absolument parfait — finally. A truly gorgeous spring day that didn't start off with morning haze or trickle off into afternoon gloom. Just bright blue skies, loads of sunshine, and a charming little French breeze filled with charming French birdsongs.

My first châteaux

2011-04-10T10:50:00.001-07:00

On this, my fourth trip to France, I finally took a trip outside of Paris: to the Loire valley, where I found out that fairy-tale castles do indeed exist. We hopped on TGV and an hour later were in a dingy suburb of Tours, where we picked up a rental minivan (my first time driving in Europe!) called, incongruously enough, Le Picasso and headed to Amboise. Just the day before, when we still had not made any concrete plans for our three-day excursion, a friend excited said, "You have to go to where we were married! You have to stay in the château!" No complaints from me — I've always felt, on some level, that I belonged in a château, and this one fit the bill: not too big, as châteaux go, quiet, unpretentious (no cheesy certification from some random corrupt hotel association, no ostentatious "luxury" items), on the most beautiful grounds, and with a staff of invisible workers who we never, ever saw. Our only contact was with Olivier, the manager, who nonchalantly chose a room for us when we arrived, not even asking for a credit card.

The Loire is magical. We visited one château on Monday — Chenonceau, which is privately owned and in excellent condition. It's built over a river — Catherine de Medici's idea — and the rooms are filled with objets and paintings and furniture and so forth, as well as piles of fresh flowers from the gardens.

You approach the château by walking down a long allée of tall trees, with just a glimmer of the castle in the distance: exactly like New York City Ballet's production of The Sleeping Beauty. I just could not get over it. Oh, and you pass an ancient keep, then cross a drawbridge. I mean, come on.

We spent hours there, checking out every room, wandering the gardens, trying unsuccessfully to get lost in the maze. The sun came out (finally!) in the late afternoon, just before we discovered the tulip garden, which was positively aglow. I took about six hundred pictures of the flowers (like I've said, it's been a loooooong winter), and bored R. silly going on about the ancient wisteria.

Then we had possibly the best meal of the whole trip: dinner at Le Bon Laboreur, an auberge right by Chenonceau. Highlights were the amuse-bouche of carrot velouté with cumin cream, the local chèvres, and the roasted pineapple with chantilly cream and sponge cake. Oh, and the local wines: Vouvray pétillant (my new favorite word from the trip, translated as "sparkling") and the Pouilly-Fumé.

Note: All the photos are of Chenonceau.

Dimanche

2011-04-08T13:54:00.001-07:00

Perhaps our top Paris experience was an impromptu late afternoon / early evening Velib ride. On your next trip to Paris, you must rent a Velib and bike around, and please please please, go to the Louvre courtyards after dark, when the exterior is lit up, and the pyramid is glowing, and then ride across the Seing and watch the Eiffel Tower's spotlight shine against the sunset.

PS: I'm back in NYC, and catching up on the blogging -- I'll post a few more "from" the Loire and Paris.

Samedi

2011-04-06T01:53:00.001-07:00

For almost our entire time in France (and I'm writing this on our eighth day), the weather forecast for the coming days has been gorgeous: sunny, 70s, breezy. And then the day comes, and it's grey and windy and damp. It's rather like a "Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today."

However, Saturday was gorgeous — a perfect Parisian spring day, with everyone out and enjoying the parks, streets, outdoor cafés, and plazas. We finally made it to Grande Epicerie (one of my favorites), the huge food hall at Le Bon Marché. For home, I bought preserves, tea, tisane, and crunchy sugar, and for lunch in the adjacent park, we bought roquefort, comté, two mini baguettes (one white, one multi-grain), brandade de morue, marinated baby artichoke hearts, grapes, blood oranges, and mineral water. It was quite a feast.

We then hit Hugo + Victor, a highly hyped modern pastry shop, where I bought more preserves (my luggage is getting heavier and heavier), as well as an exquisite box of chocolates. And then, just to top off the afternoon, we wandered along the Seine, basking in the late afternoon glow.

Saturday night was the birthday party that was the excuse for this trip in the first place: a splashy blowout in a beautiful 19th-century building near Parc Monceau, complete with hip new band, fancy finger food, and a deadly pastry and cake selection.

Vendredi

2011-04-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

OK, I've fallen behind, but what would you rather do in Paris: post blog updates, or hunt down more delicious treats?

Friday was another late start. We picked up formule déjeuner at Erik Kayser, one of my mainstays from my 25 days in Paris two years ago. This time for me: roasted chicken and roast tomatoes with mayonnaise on baguette, eau minèrale, and an insane tarte aux abricots et pistaches. We ate our picnic on the grounds of the Musee Rodin, where the flowers were just coming out. It wasn't the crazy riot of tulips I remembered from my first visit to Paris, 15 (!) years ago, but it was still a welcome sight to my winter-weary eyes.

The museum itself is charming, in a down-at-the-heels way. We noticed the water stains, the crumbling plaster, the cracked glass — and then saw a sign that basically said, We know you've noticed the water stains etc., and we're doing our best with what we have. Understood.

Dinner was with R.'s friends, at their home: more roast chicken (all the chicken here is clearly injected with concentrated chicken flavor, making it so beyond the chicken we get back home — even the expensive happy chickens at Whole Foods. I can't figure this one out — explanations are welcome.

Jeudi: Le Marais

2011-04-02T03:23:00.000-07:00

We’re not exactly springing out of bed and dashing outside to conquer the city. We’re more slowly emerging from a cocoon of jet-laggy sleep, letting some coffee soak into our systems, and only then, after much puttering and researching and wrapping of scarves and packing of notebooks, do we amble outside, in search of the next delicious treat.

Thursday we struck gold, at Au Fil des Saisons, a small, traditional-looking spot in the Marais where we set up camp for a couple of hours. We arrived at the tail end of lunch, but the chef, Loïc, not only welcomed us, he served us, and helped us choose the wine (a snappy and delicious Joseph Drouhin white burgundy), and answered our string of questions about the items on the chalkboard menu. (“Ça c’est egg with mushrooms and cheese; ça c’est snapper, ça c’est ….)

We had the egg (served in a gratin dish with cream and a mushroom puree and plenty of butter, all broiled together into a beautiful mess) and the escargots, which were stuffed into phyllo cigars and served with a cream sauce infused with 18 cloves of garlic (“Dix-huit?! Non!!”) For plats principaux, we had snapper en papillote with julienned vegetables and a “French risotto” with parmesan, and duck breast with a fine layer of crispy fat, served with potatoes and stir-fried vegetables with soy sauce. This is just the kind of meal that has a certain French flavor and quality (and liberality of fat) that you cannot find in the States, even in New York. I couldn’t do it every day, but for a treat, it was certainly welcome.

Then we set off to wander the Marais, one of my absolute favorite places in the world. Hausmann didn’t get his hands on this neighborhood, so it has old winding streets, back alleys, courtyards, vest-pocket parks, a hodgepodge of building shapes, sizes, and styles that you don’t see in the grand and stately arrondissements.

Paris, unlike New York, has museums scattered throughout the city; you’re forever stumbling across some little jewel that has its own lovely treasures. One of the more interesting ones is Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (The Hunting and Nature Museum), housed (of course) in a pair of handsome hôtels particuliers in the Marais. The exhibits have clearly been designed by someone with a quirky sense of humor; the exhibit on the fox, for instance, has a taxidermy fox in a glass case, around which is built a cabinet with various drawers (one has casts of a fox’s pawprints, another casts of a fox’s leave-behinds), some sliding panels that show a mini-installation of fox drawings by a contemporary artist, and a kind of hologram that shows you the fox’s territory.

There was also a room with birdcalls, which you could call up from a vintage-y box of labeled buttons, and then rooms organized by theme (The Wild Boar and the Stag, The Big Game Hunt, The Unicorn), filled with artifacts, taxidermy, and art. Somehow, it didn’t feel creepy, but instead smart and urbane and elegant.

Already in need of fortification, we window-shopped our way over to Mariage Frères for some Assam and thé vert, and a green tea financier and a citron macaron.

We then lingered in Place des Vosges, undoubtedly one of the most serene, most dignified spots in the city. As always when I’m in Place des Vosges, it was overcast, which makes the place even more somber and reserved.

We strolled along the arcades, peeking into hotel lobbies and jewelry shops, before working our way back to the lively part of the Marais, where we had an aperitif at Les Philosophes, a classic corner café on Rue Vieille du Temple (with an amusing sign in la toilette), next to La Chaise au Plafond, where I had my daily breakfast coffee years ago, on my first trip to Paris.

Our last stop of the evening was Breizh Café, where we had maybe a bit too much of the rich, buttery galettes (Bretonese buckwheat crepes). I couldn’t resist trying the famous Bordier butter, especially when I saw there is a smoked version (beurre fumé!), so we started with that, and probably could have wrapped it up right there. But on we went: galette with egg, mushrooms, and cheese for R., and galette with Reblochon, potatoes, bacon, and salad for me.

We had to cab it home, we were so full and wiped out and footsore. In the Marain, even in one day, you can really live a very full and filling life.

I'm baaaaack.....

2011-03-31T03:02:00.001-07:00

This blog is the descendant of another, 25 days in paris, which chronicled a trip I took almost two years ago now. I'm back in Paris, in another apartment — alas, for only eight days — and ready to pick up where I left off: gorging on pastry, cheese, bread, chocolate, wine, and (hopefully) duck confit.

We arrived yesterday at 6 a.m., after a couple hours of fitful Ambien-induced sleep. One bleary RER ride later, and we were at our rental, a sixth-floor set-up one block from the lovely Jardins du Luxembourg.

We took a highly necessary nap, then made our way to Cuisine du Bar, the cafe next to Poilâne, which serves madly delicious tartines such as sardine with vinegar and lemon, and smoked salmon with mayonnaise, all on toasted Poilâne bread. (The smoked salmon is so different from what we're used to in New York — richer, with less smoke flavor and more fish flavor. I approve.) Salad, glass of vin blanc, and perfect café served with a butter-cookie spoon — thank you, Paris, for the lovely welcome back.

Post-lunch wandering included an unsuccessful shoe-buying attempt on my part (they didn't have my size in the navy patent wedges!), a restrained visit to Pierre Hermé (we took only one tarte vanille infiniment, which I will not even attempt to describe [but you can read about it here] and one almond-rose petal croissant, which I ate just moments before scribbling this down), a stroll along the Seine, and a quick stop for staples at Monoprix.

It was rather grey and chilly over the afternoon, and everyone kept apologizing to us for the weather. Meanwhile, I believe New York is entering its sixth month of soul-crushing winter, so to be somewhere with flowers and green grass and a light drizzle, where I don't have to wear five layers and gloves and hat and scarf and boots and STILL be cold.... my entire personality has promptly done a one-eighty.

Dinner was with friends Catherine and Loic and their three lovely (and fun) daughters, celebrating Loic's birthday at their home with delicious food and even more delicious wine, ending with a platter of pastry that, for me, was highlighted by the mille-feuille. This puff pastry / vanilla cream delight, which we call napoleon in the States, is one of my early experiences with the glory of French foods. Back in junior high in Connecticut, my friend Annick and I would head downtown to a rather remarkably good bakery called Versailles and pick up a box of two of napoleons, then sit on a park bench and devour them in a couple seconds flat. Unlike so many of my other childhood food obsessions, this one has held up quite nicely.

a string of words

2011-01-28T17:29:00.001-08:00

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

This week, I tore through Just Kids by Patti Smith, an alternately envy-producing and heartbreaking account of her life in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s, when she lived with Robert Mapplethorpe and struggled to find her path in life. Envy-producing, because of the crazy energy and the primacy of the arts scene back then. Heartbreaking, both because we know what’s ahead for the young Patti (way too much loss, as friends and icons, including her beloved Robert, overdose or die of AIDS), and because she imbues her gritty, clear-eyed book with such delicacy and sweetness.

When Robert and Patti first live together, it’s in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, near Pratt. They have no TV, no money to go out, barely any money for books or magazines, so they spend all their time writing and making art. They’ll draw for hours, side by side, figuring out their styles, incorporating new influences, pushing each other to be better. It’s so sweet, how excited she was by the life she and Robert created for themselves. They were so broke that they’d stand on the street in a state of indecision, trying to choose between a meal at the diner or supplies from the art store; they only had enough money for one or the other.

They move into a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel, where Patti finds a family of sorts, a family of slightly damaged, driven outcasts, an Island of Misfit Toys, or, as Patti refers to it, “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone.” You could get by on very little money in New York in the ’70s. Not only could Patti and her compadres trade art for rent at the Chelsea or for drinks at Max’s Kansas City, but they could find raw space downtown for next to nothing, and maybe get the landlord to give them a couple months for free if they agreed to clean out the junk.

For example, since their shared room at the Chelsea doesn’t give him enough space to make art, Robert finds them a new home: an entire floor above the Oasis Bar, on the same block as the hotel. (Can you even imagine? It wasn’t that long ago that two chronically broke, near-starving artists could rent an entire floor in the heart of Chelsea. OK, maybe there was no toilet or shower, but still. A whole floor, with big windows and lots of light and plenty of space, smack in the middle of NYC. Damn.)

As she moves through the years of her young life, Patti leads with her heart and lays bare the enormous vulnerability she felt then, a vulnerability that must have been visible a mile off, given the way so many people offered help and encouragement. She gets songwriting advice from Bobby Neuwirth, Todd Rundgren takes her to hear music at the Village Gate, Sam Shepard buys her a lobster dinner when she doesn’t have anything to eat, Jimi Hendrix commiserates with her about being shy and awkward.

At one point, she’s scrounging around the Chelsea Hotel room, looking for enough change to get a cheese sandwich. She digs up 55 cents and heads down the block to the Automat, only to find the price has gone up. “Can I help?” says someone behind her:

I turned around and it was Allen Ginsburg... Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed in the sandwich.

Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you a girl?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”

He just laughed. “I’m sorry, I took you for a very pretty boy.”

I got the picture immediately.

“Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?

“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.”

All right, so Ginsburg’s relationship with Patti didn’t start from a sense of protectiveness or altruism, but he ended up becoming a mentor, one of the many who helped her find her way. And now I’m listening to the result of all that encouragement, and all her hard work: her first album, “Horses,” where her fierce confidence comes roaring out at you, showing you everything she’d been through, and how she survived it all.

I don’t want to romanticize the whole starving-artists-in-the-garret scene, but it’s hard not to be wistful for Patti’s world, where nothing was more important than art and music and writing. I have to admit to feeling a bit melancholic about the choices I’ve made, ones that have given me a degree of comfort, but have taken me farther and farther from a life of creativity.

OK, maybe more than melancholic — maybe more like in a tailspin about what now look to me less like smart, practical life decisions and more like lame compromises. I’m trying not to beat myself up too badly — what’s done is done, indulging in regret means I’m living in the past, not in the present moment, and I’m causing myself pain. But I’ve learned that I can’t just put aside my regrets; I need to resolve them. So I’m trying to stay aware of the vibrations that Patti’s book set off in me, to remember the sense of loss I felt as I read her story, and to resolve to make some changes in my life.

One way that I can easily derail any resolutions to write more or to make art is to say, “But what’s the point? Where will it get me? Will I ever really be good enough?” Patti had her moments of self-doubt too, of course (and probably still does), but she finds a way forward that I’m taking to heart:

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?... Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

my buddy

2010-10-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

I had some bad news recently: last month, my good friend Damon died suddenly, without warning, at his home in Santa Monica. I want to write about him, but I’m in fear of sounding trite or clichéd, since Damon loathed triteness and clichés. But I’m going to try to get something down on paper, as much of a tribute as I’m capable of.

I’m in that state of shock, of disbelief, of confusion and incomprehension that comes after someone close dies. After all, we know that things don’t just disappear. Maybe in a movie, a magician can make something vanish in a pouf of smoke, but in real life, nothing disappears; it transforms, perhaps (water into steam, wood into ash), but it doesn’t disappear. So how can a person — a personality, a force, a bundle of irony and wit and loyalty and irreverence and love — be here one minute, gone the next? How can it be that there will be no more reminiscing, no more dinners out, no more commiserating over life and its travails… How can it be that we’ll never again talk about Mapp and Lucia, or The Pursuit of Love, or Brideshead or Diana Vreeland or Frank O’Hara or our imaginary gardens or Abbot Kinney or Martha Stewart or moving to Bridgehampton/Montauk/the Springs or Alec Guinness or bread pudding or Palm Springs or Follies? This makes absolutely no sense at all.

Damon and I were neighbors at the beach in Venice for the five years that I lived there. Our building was small, with two units on the ground floor (mine in front, Damon and John’s in the rear) and one upstairs. Our apartments shared a patio, so we could zip from one kitchen to the other, if only to commiserate about the latest dreadful upstairs neighbor. (One trashy couple plagued us endlessly. One morning, Damon came to my kitchen door to tell me that in the middle of the night, he just couldn’t stand the TV noise any more. “I tiptoed outside and flipped the circuit breakers for their apartment. Ah, blessed silence. I stayed up all night, enjoying the quiet. Then at 5 a.m., I tiptoed back out and flipped it all back on.” The brilliant crowning touch was a few days later, when the power went out in all of Venice and Santa Monica. Damon and I were standing in the front yard, surveying the darkness, when the upstairs neighbor joined us. “I can’t believe the damn power has gone out again,” he said. “Mmmmm,” Damon replied, studiously not looking at me.)

Damon worked from home and was known to raid my fridge during the day if he was out of coffee or milk, or if was just looking for a snack. I called him one day on his home phone and got “The number you have called has been temporarily disconnected” — he hadn’t paid his phone bill. I thought a moment, then called my home phone number, and Damon picked up on the first ring: “Oh, hi, Siobhan — I’m hanging out in your kitchen till my phone gets turned back on. I drank your Diet Coke.” It’s not everyday (not ever, really) you end up with a neighbor who feels free to commandeer your apartment, and you’re delighted.

Once I moved to New York, Damon and I struck up a feverish email correspondence; the pile of printouts currently stacked on my living room floor is a good four inches thick. They range from frivolity (shopping as therapy) to angsty (the big life questions) to utterly, delightfully inane (the imaginary adventures of our alter egos, a pair of drug-addled b-list types who apparently traveled the world getting into situations with everyone from Henry Kissinger to Jackie O), with a significant portion devoted to books and theater. Pretend you’re me, ten years ago, working at a bland and dreary job, watching the clock, trying to keep up the hateful billable hours, listening to the woman in the next cube (possibly the most inane woman on the planet) endlessly plan her daddy-funded dream wedding, when *ping!* comes an email that starts off like this:

6/6/00: Furthermore, understand completely about states of dispiritedness as have been in one for years. Have often had trouble with idea that Life Is A Cabaret. More often have felt it to be an 8 a.m. lecture on Applied Physics that goes on through lunch. You fall asleep, you wake up, you fall asleep, you wake up, and still some old bald man is droning on about Infrared Frequencies. Talk about your Gravitational Pull! Talk about your Inertia!

Really, is it any surprise that for years, as evidenced by the printed-out pile next to me, I apparently did nothing but email Damon?

We were as like as peas in a pod. A good portion of our email exchanges would probably be incomprehensible to anyone else, since there’s a lot of “As you well know” and “I don’t need to tell you” and “It goes without saying.” The emails are funny — really, remarkably funny, I must say — but they’re also almost painfully honest and raw, filled with our fears and disappointments and doubts (often draped in irony), and our inability to figure out how to proceed.

Checking in before heading off to therapy, the notion of which now bores me to pieces. Can’t get into a talking-about-myself-and-all-my-little-problems mode these days, so just sit and stare at therapist who, in obligatory therapeutic manner, just stares right back. Tick tock tick tock.

We had an ongoing game of coming up with memoir titles. Damon was a pro at this: he had a whole series of imagined memoirs, starting with “I Don’t Mind Walking” (later revised to “No Thanks, I’ll Crawl”) and culminating in what he saw as his late-in-life look back at everything, “Enough Already.” He also had a title for a self-help book on an as-yet-to-be-determined subject, “Brace Yourself.” In real life, he worked in development for the movies, which involved contact with lots of people — famous and not — who were ripe pickings for his acid pen.

2/22/01: Well yesterday was a garden of earthly delights. I had a 3 p.m. meeting at Warner Bros. which is in Burbank or something. It took me four freeways and one hour to get there. It was stop and go much of the way until the clouds finally broke on the 134 and we got up to speeds of 40 m.p.h. However a truck in front of me lost its tarp and its contents began to rain down upon us. Millions and millions of Saltine crackers and dried corn — I AM NOT KIDDING! — snowed the skies. I had my window open so my car quickly filled with these delicious tidbits — meant, no doubt, for the slaughterhouse chickens of West Covina. I mean I was literally picking Saltines and dried corn out of my hair and sweater during the meeting. Plus, I was meeting with one Paula Weinstein who had a toothpick in her mouth the whole time! I AM NOT KIDDING!

Damon’s boyfriend, John, tells me that he wishes that Damon could have had the garden he always dreamed of, and in our emails, there is a surprising amount of garden talk, given that we were each living in apartments, tending at most to a few potted plants. Gardening, I think, represented a way of life outside the day-to-day concerns of the working stiffs, a connection not to nature, but to a civilized, quiet, private life, away from the travails of city living, and perhaps away from our own time (especially after 9/11), back into some idealized 1930s British idyll:

10/9/01: Nerves decidedly shot as evidenced by huge start at sound of barking dog this a.m. Must seriously consider moving to countryside where plan would be to obtain pair of half-glasses and sweater with elbows out which would indicate to world that I am harmless old he-spinster who is to be left alone to write memoirs. Plan includes learning to put up fruit and veggies (“canning” I believe they call it) with possible cottage (literally) industry such as mail-order truffle business to bring in coin. You know what I mean?

My last contact with Damon was after my most recent blog post. Among our many, many joint obsessions was Marian Seldes and her inimitable, regal Grande Dame bearing; in fact, it was Damon who gave me the copy of Bright Lights that Marian signed for me. After reading the Marian post, he wrote simply, “This, of course, has special meaning for me, for several reasons. Thanks for it.”

Since John called me with the news of Damon’s death, I’ve spent a lot of hours remembering my time in Venice, and a lot of hours reading our old emails. I remember Damon telling me that after his mother died, his friends got used to him bursting into tears out of the blue. I feel like that now, going through the emails. In fact, I feel a bit like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve: zipping from one emotional state (laughing helplessly at some classic Damonism) to the next (in tears at the idea that there won’t be any more Damonisms) and onto the next (so angry at myself that I didn’t keep up the friendship as well as I could have, and thereby depriving myself of the fun and reward of Damon’s presence in my life).

All those emails serve not only as the chronicle of our friendship, but also as a journal of my first few years in New York. Reading them over, I’m struck by how difficult a time it was for me. I was struggling to figure out a career that made sense (still working on that one, but with less angst), struggling to find friends, struggling to meet that elusive “someone special.” I was lonely and isolated, and felt quite at sea most of the time. Our cross-country, 90-percent-digital friendship, it occurs to me now, was probably my most vivid and reliable relationship in those years.

Never having looked back at these emails before, I’d had in my mind that they were mostly just silly, fun exchanges, but I realize now that they played a much more important role in my life. Through his steady stream of emails, Damon shored up my fairly unstable self and helped me through some dark days of the soul. And on top of that, he provided me with a lot of outright joy.

I have a sweet snapshot of Damon and me propped up on my desk, taken during a weekend in Vegas that involved listening to a lot of Abba. Damon is mugging a bit, but I’m just smiling away, clearly so happy — and feeling so lucky — to have such a great pal.

peerless

2010-08-12T05:55:00.001-07:00

Another long absence from my poor, lonely blog. Clearly, expecting the muse to strike without really putting in any effort isn’t working, so here I am, sitting in front of the big iMac screen, determined to persevere, hoping the muse tunes in at some point.

Since my life doesn’t seem like a good subject for a blog post these days (I’m in a work slump, feeling unmotivated; and I’m in love, but not ready to write about that), I’m going to digress down some different paths, writing about people, places, and things that I love. And because I’ve been thinking about her lately, and because she’s the cat's meow in my book, and because I could learn a few things about perseverance and focus from her, I’m starting with Marian Seldes.

If you’re not a theater nut, you may not have heard of Marian, and for that, I am truly sorry. She’s a grande dame of the New York stages, with her first role in 1947, for god’s sake, in Judith Anderson’s Medea, directed by — get this — John Gielgud. An appropriate starting point for us, I think, as Marian reminds me of those great hammy Brits like Gielgud and Guinness and McKellan. No one but no one can declaim like Marian, no one can roll words around in her mouth like she can, no one can arch an eyebrow with devastatingly hilarious effect like she does.

As the ever-brilliant Charles Isherwood puts it, “In my view if you have not seen Marian Seldes on a New York stage, you are not a true New Yorker.” Her stage triumphs include her association with Edward Albee; she originated roles in three of his best-known works, Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, and A Delicate Balance, which brought her a Tony Award. She came in at the last minute to replace Dorothy Loudon (who left on doctor’s orders) as Carlotta Vance in a revival of Dinner at Eight in 2002 at Lincoln Center Theater and got her fifth Tony nomination for her trouble. And, perhaps most famously, she’s in Guinness’s book of world records as “most durable actress” for playing all 1,809 performances of Deathtrap (1978-1982) on Broadway: that’s eight shows a week, every week, for over four years.

I’ve seen her in quite a few things over the years, perhaps most memorably in the unsettling Play About the Baby, which, for all its creepiness, had some of the funniest moments you can imagine, like Marian (as Woman) suddenly making up sign language to accompany Brian Murray (as Man). It’s a scene that is so clearly Marian, you know Albee wrote the part with her in mind:

(Woman begins signing — clearly absurd signing-like gestures.)
MAN. What are you doing?
WOMAN. Signing.
MAN. You know how? You know how to sign?
WOMAN. (Signing.) It would seem so.
MAN. When did you learn? And why? Why did you learn?
WOMAN. (Shrugs; signs.) It came upon me.
MAN. When?
WOMAN. Just now; I just realized I could do it.
MAN. Sign away.
WOMAN. (Signing; smiling.) Thank you.

Not just any actress could pull off Albee’s particular style with the deftly delivered venom and sly complicity that Marian employs. In his review of the play, Charles Isherwood (then at Variety), said this of “the magnificent Seldes”:

“I am a trifle theatrical,” she says in her opening monologue. “And no apologies there.” None needed! Seldes’ ample talents — her mischievous comic instincts, her supple sense of language, her elegant bearing, the hint of sublimated sensitivity in her imperiousness and, yes, that outsized theatricality — all are deployed to extraordinary effect here.

Her deliciously dry wit is evident off-stage as well as on. For instance, in a misguided attempt to evoke some warm nostalgia for the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square shortly before its demolition, the Times asked a few theater types for their fond memories. Marian’s reply: “I have no memories. I only remember walking by it and thinking, ‘I hope all those people are going to the theater.’”

Happily, Marian received a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Tony ceremony, giving the Times Magazine an opportunity to run a profile of her, by Alex Witchel. Alex typically (and with somewhat scathing results) resists the charms of her subjects, but she was obviously under Marian’s elegant thumb from the get-go. And why not? When you’re writing a piece about someone who’s giving you quotes like this one, about her one appearance on Sex and the City, as Mr. Big’s mother — “I’m sorry I wasn’t asked back. I think I could have helped him” — you’ve got to feel some serious gratitude that she’s making your job so easy.

Alex gets further help in her piece from the various theater luminaries who praise Marian and her inimitable style: André Bishop, Nathan Lane, Laura Linney, and Paul Rudnick, who describes Seldes as “universally gracious,” and goes on to say, “She seems genuinely enchanted in the Harry Potter sense, otherworldly in a way that can’t be duplicated. You feel graced by her presence and conversation, like you’ve suddenly been knighted.”

I’m lucky enough to have felt that grace, several years back. It was at Sardi’s, appropriately enough, at a awards ceremony that I knew Marian would be attending, so I quickly accepted my invitation. I wrangled an introduction, and had a two-part interaction, the first part of which went something like this:

I. Miss Seldes, I am such a fan of yours. I can’t even say.
SHE. (Gently resting her hands on my shoulders and leaning in close; speaking in a low, secret-filled voice.) My dear, you are so sweet to say so. You really are so kind.
I. (At a loss.) I love your dress.
SHE. (Leaning in even closer; speaking even more softly; looking about a bit as if to make sure no one could hear.) My dear, you know, I didn’t know what to wear, so I took this right off the costume rack, since I knew it would fit, and it really is such a pretty color, isn’t it?

Really, it’s not the words that matter in an interaction with Marian. It’s her compelling presence, her ability to train her gaze onto you unwaveringly (Alex Witchel wrote, “Now sitting in front of her, even here, I realized that she never moved her eyes from my face. In two hours, not once.”), her ease with the dramatic gesture (at Sardi’s she gave a deep curtsey, hand on her heart, head bowed, upon being introduced to someone she admired), her beautifully trained, exquisitely modulated voice, and, let’s admit it, those eyebrows. You can’t escape them. (Marian’s performance with Nathan Lane in Terrence McNally’s Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams in 2005 must have been quite the Battle of the Brows.)

And now for part two of my Marian experience, which shows that, perhaps because she has never become a celebrity on the scale that many of us believe she deserves, Marian has remained lovably accessible. One of the other guests at the party, amused at my awe of Marian, wrangled it out of me that I had a copy of her memoir —

— and wanted to know why I hadn’t asked her to sign it. “This is why,” I said, and showed him that Marian had already once inscribed it, to someone unknown to me, and it just seemed awkward to show her how this copy of her book, complete with a lovely inscription, had ended up in a second-hand shop.

“Oh, who cares,” Jacques said, and zoomed across the room, calling out, “Marian! Marian!”

“No. Please,” I whispered, but too late, here came Jacques, towing along Marian, who had a slightly puzzled look on her face.

“I understand you have a copy of my book that you would like me to sign,” she said.

“Well, Miss Seldes, yes, but I have to show you… well, see… Miss Seldes, it looks like you already did sign this book, but for someone else.”

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “let me see.” She took the book and peered at the inscription (no one can peer like Marian), then said, “Do you have a pen?”

With that perfect timing that makes her so irresistible on stage, she carefully circled the original inscription and wrote “DELE” (the copy editor’s term for “delete”).

She then flipped ahead a few pages, and wrote this for me:

I mean, really.

Marian’s last New York stage appearance (to date), as far as I know, was in La Fille du Régiment at the Met, which I missed, to my eternal regret, since she appeared thusly:

Her last Broadway appearance (again, to date) was in Terrence McNally’s Deuce in 2007, with another old pro, Angela Lansbury. They played tennis stars from the good old days, making an appearance for fans years after their retirement at the U.S. Open, reminiscing and commiserating and showing a few cracks in the surface that, given the context (how many more times would we get to see these two vets?), were pretty heart-breaking.

Marian looked quite frail at the Tony Awards, and one must face the fact that we may not see her on stage again. But her astonishing career (both on Broadway and off), her obvious sense of herself as a craftsperson, and her clearly evident joy at being part of the theater world — all this serves as inspiration to me, a reminder of the payoff of hard work, of persevering. It sounds corny, but Marian has taught me a lot.

Which I’m sure would please her, since she clearly values her experiences teaching acting to students such as Kevin Kline, Robin Williams, Laura Linney, and Patti LuPone. In the Times Magazine piece, Marian sums up her contributions in her typically articulate, thoughtful manner:

“Well, I love a task, I really do,” she said modestly. “I got scared toward the openings of each play, of course. But I’m not afraid on a stage. I’m afraid in life.” Not today, though, on the eve of a lifetime achievement award. What feels like a great achievement now? “Maybe the teaching,” she said. “I hope so. Because that’s helping somebody. It was the hardest thing too, because it takes an energy. If you look away from a student’s eyes at the wrong moment, you can hurt them.”

Marian is currently on screen in The Extra Man, which doesn’t sound like a particularly great film (anyone seen it?), but which I must see, if only because she plays a character named Vivian who looks like this:

Clearly, there will be swanning about, which is all I need to know.

{From top: as Carlotta Vance in Dinner at Eight; in Ondine; with John Wood and a very young Victor Garber in Deathtrap; in The Play About the Baby; at the 2010 Tony Awards; in La Fille du Régiment; in The Extra Man.}

paint chips and procrastination

2010-06-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

What is it about moving into a new home that sends one completely over the edge? They say that, when it comes to stressful situations, moving is up there with losing one’s job or having a close friend die or getting a divorce, but why? Why can’t it feel like an exciting fresh start? A new adventure? An opportunity to purge oneself of excess belongings? Why does it make one — okay, why does it make me — feel like I want to pick up and flee?

That’s a bit of a prologue to my apology for being in absentia for nearly three (!) months. I’m always a bit of a procrastinator, but three months of stalling is quite an accomplishment, even for me. Here’s my long excuse: When last we spoke, I’d been summarily booted out of my fantastic apartment in the heart of the city, just five weeks after I’d moved in. (Really, it felt as if I had just unwrapped the very last teacup and placed it in the cupboard when the knock came on the door.) And those five weeks of domesticity came after close to two years of trav’lin’ light, with nearly all my belongings in a mysterious storage unit in the Bronx. So I’d been blissed out to have a place of my own once again, and deeply enjoying picking out new furniture, arranging my books, having friends over, getting to know the neighborhood.

For those of you who have gone through it, you know that there’s nothing quite like apartment-hunting in New York. Even in a “troubled” economy, it’s a blood sport: if you find something that looks good, you’ve got to pull the trigger pronto, because it ain’t gonna be there tomorrow. And you’ve got to kiss a lot of toads (gloomy, cramped, dingy toads) before you find anything that’s (a) livable, and (b) relatively affordable. To go through this twice in the span of a couple months was enough to send me in quite the spiral, leading to my neglect of the following: friends, family, books, work, journal, therapy, exercise, and, of course, you.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the Great Apartment Search, Part Two, except to say that I just couldn’t find a place that I clicked with (and comparing everything unfavorably to the One That Got Away). I finally got so sick of the whole damn process that I threw in the towel and signed the lease on a less-than-perfect place (which, however, has more closets than I’ve ever seen in a New York apartment, which is nothing to sneeze at and is, to be honest, probably the reason I took the place). Then I went through agonies of renter's remorse, followed by the conviction that I would love the apartment more if I painted it, followed by agonies of choosing colors and taping walls and painting till I dropped.

And now here I am, in the final stages of cleaning and unpacking and sorting, and trying not to continuously compare the new place to the old, and trying not to let the new place symbolize to me this whole period of upheaval and discombobulation. (It doesn’t help that I keep reading about my old neighborhood, which has become the new “It” zone — it’s like getting unwanted updates on an ex who’s doing fabulously without you.)

What I am trying to do is get back in the swing of things — reconnecting to people, responding to embarrassingly old emails and messages, focusing once again on work, and creating epic, multi-page to-do lists. And, perhaps, looking ahead and thinking about where I’m headed. As part of my re-emergence, I had drinks with a friend the other night who’s going through her own upheavals and crises. We got on the subject of trying to balance living in the present with planning for the future, and she said, “I keep catching myself saying, ‘I just need to get through June,’ and then realizing how crazy that is — ‘just get through?’ Really? That’s the goal?”

The past few months seemed like a kind of limbo as I lived them, with no routine, no real structure, no home base, just getting through the days, flip-flopping between lazily enjoying my lack of responsibility, and freaking out about what the hell am I doing with my life. From where I’m sitting now (my genteelly shabby living room), I have a bit more perspective and can see that this hasn’t been just an aimless interlude, that there were some positives: I re-confirmed to myself that, despite the hassle and the expense and the perfidy of its landlords, I choose to be in New York for the time being. I found that my friends are even more amazing than I’d realized, as they offered help and commiserated and generally stepped up when I needed them. I had the opportunity (*sigh*) to confront some of my chronic anxieties about money and work and the future, since they all rose up en masse and tried to take me down (an experience that also got me back on the therapy track, thankfully).

And, Gentle Reader, there’s this: I met a wonderful guy who turned out to be astonishingly supportive and helpful and sweet during this whole kerfuffle (and who helped paint the kitchen and the bedroom), and you know what? We went and fell in love.

How’s that for burying the lede?

square one

2010-03-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

There are certain relationships that seem so perfect, so meant-to-be right, so love-at-first-sight, that you almost can’t believe it’s really happening to you. Everything just seems to fall right into place, and you walk around in a happy glow, so thrilled that life has given you such a winning hand.

Well, as they say, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. You may remember my lovely new apartment, the one I just moved into on Feb. 1, the one where I was finally feeling settled after nearly two years of shuttling from one spot to another. It had seemed so serendipitous, the way we found each other — it was enough to make me believe in fate, or the universe looking out for me, or something.

I’d loved the industrial feel of the apartment, with its lofty ceilings and huge metal-framed windows — it clearly had started life as a manufacturing space. The owners had taken care to create 54 quite nice apartments, with good kitchens and big bathrooms and great layouts. Unfortunately, in all the to-do of converting the building into rental apartments, no one seems to have taken a moment to officially convert the building from commercial to residential. And somehow, after years of tenants and leases and amenities and staff (and years of annual inspections by the Fire Department), the city apparently never noticed this minor detail, until this past Tuesday, when the Department of Buildings somehow got prompted to take a look at the situation, with the result that the building was shut down on the spot, and I and the rest of the tenants were given a couple hours to pack up some necessities and find a place to stay.

And it doesn’t look like this is a paperwork issue that’s going to be cleared up in a week or so. Not only was the building never zoned as residential, but it violates some fairly serious codes, like the one about residential buildings having more than one staircase or “egress” (no one ever says “exit” in the world of planning and zoning), or the one about residential buildings having a fire escape, or the minor one about residential buildings having sprinkler systems. As the very sympathetic cop said on Tuesday, as he briefed us shell-shocked tenants in the lobby, “I feel for you guys, I really do, but there’s no way we can let you stay here. God forbid [pronounced ‘Gad fehbid’] there’s a fire in the stairwell — you’d all die. This place is a deathtrap.”

Hard to argue with that logic. (And very hard to understand how those fire department inspectors managed to miss all this over the years.)

That sympathetic cop was joined by several other of New York’s Finest, along with a contingent of New York’s Bravest in three fire engines, the OEM, the Department of Buildings, the Red Cross (to make sure everyone had somewhere to go that night), and, of course, a few intrepid reporters who were salivating over the story of an entire “luxury” apartment building (no one told me it was luxury!) being evacuated, and all its occupants being vacated with almost no notice.

So, crazy as it seems, I’m back on the hunt for an apartment, less than two months after finding this place. I have no brilliant insights to draw, other than increased appreciation for Cindy Adams’ sign-off: “Only in New York, kids, only in New York.” In terms of my sanity, I’ve managed to not utterly freak out (after a few minor breakdowns in the first 48 hours), and I haven’t gone back to my apartment for more than a couple minutes at a time, so I’m already moving on, and not getting too stuck in “But this place was perfect for me!”

Hopefully, my return to living out of a suitcase will be limited to a couple weeks; as much as I enjoyed some of the adventures of the past two years, and the footloose-and-fancy-free-ness of it all, it had been such a relief to finally have a place of my own again, to start to put together a routine and some (relatively) long-term plans. I must admit that, in the immediate aftermath of the evacuation (the Post referred to us as “evict-ims,” which I thought was pretty cute), a part of me wanted to toss everything back into storage and pull a 25 days in _________, skipping town on the drama and hassles.

But my five weeks in the deathtrap were great, really, and I want to have some kind of focus and direction right now, to set up a bit of a life for myself. So this afternoon (a nasty, cold, rainy, windy, raw afternoon), I’ll be back out there with a broker whose instructions include “no illegal conversions,” looking at apartments and hopefully (please, Universe, please) finding the next next apartment without too much trudging and angst.

hearts and minds

2010-03-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

He was sure that he wouldn't feel at ease for even a moment until he knew exactly when he would once again press her tightly against himself. She said yes. And the sense of relief that came flooding into his soul was so powerful that for a brief moment he even questioned if their getting together the next day really mattered to him at all or not. But that doubt was quickly dispelled, for he had read enough literature to believe that anxiety, even more than jealousy, is the great driving force of passion.
— Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache

There’s nothing like romance for dredging up slag heaps of irrational, overwhelming fears: fear of pain, of humiliation, of abandonment, of need and neediness, of vulnerability, of rejection, of loss — et cetera, et cetera — all leading to an antsy anxiety that makes it difficult to simmer down and focus on anything else (like, say, writing a blog post).

The new romance in my life, while pretty great in many ways, faces a few significant hurdles / potential dealbreakers that leave me feeling very unsure and hesitant about how to proceed: Should I dive in and shoot for happiness, even if it’s short-term and ends in tears, or should I hedge my bets and adopt a cautious, practical, wait-and-see attitude? Should I be open and trusting (major effort for me), or should I be guarded and self-protective? Should I bolt?

How you would respond to these questions probably reveals how much of a romantic you are (it’s kind of like a Cosmo quiz, without the exclamation points and sex tips). My path in the past would have been a demented combo platter: throw myself in full force without any due diligence, committing my heart 100 percent, but not tell anyone, least of all the object of my affection, and instead maintain a brittle veneer that was somehow supposed to hide and protect me.

Of course, that brittle veneer doesn’t do much, in the end. I remember one boyfriend, at the messy denouement of our relationship, saying, “Funny: I’d always thought you were so tough.”

Yes, very funny. Actually, I’m tough in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of situations, but when it comes to romance — not so much. Instead, I veer recklessly from utter giddiness and delight to utter dejection and despair, with occasional forays into a state of being curiously unmoved and resigned — the “whatever” mode.

For example: In this current situation, with the aforementioned hurdles, if he’s being prudent and advocating caution and talking up the importance of behaving sensibly (as if!), I can feel myself, as the words are coming out of his mouth, wanting to say, “No! Let’s go for it! Let’s do that fools-rush-in thing!” and simultaneously wanting to retreat to my corner and get that chip back on my shoulder, the one that indicates that I don’t care at all, fine, do what you want, makes no diff to me. Whatever.

Anxiety might be “the great driving force of passion,” per Mlle Sagan, but I’ve had enough of it, thanks. I’d be happy to move past this stage, into one of happy anticipation of what is to come, with a reassuring sense of security. I hate feeling (especially at this point in my life) that wanting what I want is a mistake, that being vulnerable is something to hide, or to conquer, or to be ashamed of.

I suppose the goal right now should be to live in the moment as much as possible and have fun and enjoy. I mean, it’s a new romance, it early days yet, it could go in a million different directions, why borrow trouble… And yet, I do feel I need to somehow also keep tabs on the potential for serious damage and decide at some point if I need to cut my losses.

This, of course, would involve handing over the reins to Reason, being practical, exercising Good Judgment. Just as I can be tough at times, I can also be rational and reasonable with the best of them, only not when it comes to love and all that. Faced with love and all that, my rational side is tossed into the back seat, and the foolish romantic me is at the wheel, careening recklessly down the highway, flattening signposts and passing on the right.

I don’t think it’s so much about which is stronger, the heart or the mind, as it is about which listens better. Our minds are right there, part of the conversation; we can create compelling arguments, remind ourselves of past mistakes, resolve to act differently from now on, logically and reasonably try to choose a smarter, safer path. Our hearts, however, remain stubbornly deaf to all of this logic and reason and continue to feel whatever they damn well please, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all. The split between the heart and the mind can be a torment, as we toggle back and forth from one extreme to another, trying to find some kind of solution that appeals to both. (How great would that be!)

But when there isn’t a solution that works all around — when our minds are saying “bail” and our hearts are blithely whistling a happy tune and not listening — it can be such a relief to finally admit that you can’t win an argument with the heart (mainly because the heart isn’t even participating in the argument — it’s pulling a Bartleby, calmly stating “I prefer not to” no matter how forcefully you try to engage it in battle). The moment of surrender — of throwing in the towel and letting the heart lead the way — is to feel the relief of giving in: you stop fighting, stop trying to take the wheel, and just sit back and check out the scenery.

Of course, I’m headed god knows where, but maybe that’s not all bad.

Right?

open house

2010-02-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am, finally: in the next apartment! I moved on Feb 1, into a sunny, quirky pad smack in the middle of the city. This being New York, looking for the apartment was incredibly stressful and grueling, and it became another test of my ability to trust my instincts and to keep in mind a sense of what’s important to me. As usual, I didn’t quite ace the test: I forgot that I even had instincts, felt completely overwhelmed and rushed, and got utterly rattled by various brokers doing a hardsell on “building amenities” like roof decks, lounges, gyms, climbing walls (!!), and room service (!!!), or expecting me to be bowled over by a teensy “terrace” or a glam and glossy high-end kitchen.

But I don’t really picture myself sprawled on a chaise on a Financial District roof deck or splurging on room service on a daily basis, and to me, New York balconies and terraces seem kind of sad and gray and grimy, and just something else that you have to furnish and clean. And I have survived my entire life — and cooked countless meals — without the aid of a fancy-schmancy kitchen.

Somehow, despite my feet being so tired and my head hurting from hours on craigslist, and in spite of my near-irresistible desire to just throw in the towel already, I was able to deflect the deals being lobbed my way (free two months’ rent! no fee! no deposit!) and hold out till I found the Mr. Right of the apartment world. After a particularly frustrating morning of looking and not finding, I had lunch with a wise broker friend who told me, “I’ve seen it over and over again: It’s fate, your home is out there, you will find it, it will all fall into place.”

Yeah right, I thought, with absolutely no faith in the idea of fate, and went off to meet yet another broker to take a second look at a few apartments I’d see earlier, in a building on Broadway. Each of the three apartments he’d shown me before had had a fatal flaw; one got no light, one faced the back of another building, and one was on a low floor and seemed too noisy. But they were big and spacious and not too madly expensive, so I figured what the hell, might as well look again.

The broker and I zipped up to the tenth floor, and he marched down the hall into an open apartment. I followed, took a look around, and said, “This is not the apartment you showed me before.” “Yes, it is,” he said, kind of belligerently. “No, it’s not,” I said. “Yes, it is,” he said, peevishly. “No, it’s not,” I said, equally peevishly, “and I’m 100 percent sure, because I love this apartment. I love it, and I want it.” He looked at his paperwork and said, “Oh my God, we walked into the wrong apartment.” We’d barged straight into a recently vacated place that was still being primped and had not yet been listed, and wasn’t supposed to be shown for another week, and… well, you know how it ends. (I apologize to my broker friend for doubting his wise, wise words.)

So here I am, living life in the next apartment! I love the neighborhood — it’s half gritty and seedy old New York, and half buzzy hipster New York — but mainly, I love having my very own home once again. I love having my long-lost stuff* back with me (though when the mover was bringing it all in — box after box after box — I nearly had a meltdown at the sheer mass of it all). I love being able to make spontaneous plans with friends that require only a quick stroll across town, rather than a schlep to the station, a boring train ride, subway hell, and so forth. I love having things delivered — Indian food, a new table, groceries, books — and I love the doormen and porters who make everything so damn easy. I love that my pals stop by for a chat and a glass of wine. I love watching the constant happenings on Broadway. And man do I love the giant industrial windows that are let floods of sunshine into my afternoon.

In fact, overall — despite the fact that I should probably be panicked at the prospect of paying an outrageous Manhattan rent — I’m actually quite relaxed. I have found the elusive feeling of being open to what’s around me, curious about what’s coming my way, not too caught up in anxieties or expectations or fears. And the openness is clearly perceptible to others: I’m meeting people left and right, cool projects are popping up, and my calendar is just full enough to keep me busy without driving me to insanity.

Paradoxically, I want to keep a tight grip onto this sense that I’m not latching onto things. I’m trying right now, as a practice, to let each experience stand by itself. If I can stay focused on the moment, I have a better chance of staying tuned in to what I’m feeling, rather than getting caught up in what it all means, or judging an experience based on what it leads to, or what I want it to lead to, rather than what it is.

Of course, there’s a reason this is all referred to as a practice. Especially during a time of great change like this one, I can get swept up into all sorts of anxiety about what will make me happy, where I’m going, what I should do, what I should feel. When I crawl back inside from that particular ledge, I try to come back to the moment, to stop spinning way ahead of myself, to enjoy the here and now. Yet herein likes another paradox: I may not want to get caught up in a cycle of predicting and controlling and fretting, but I also have to take into account the need to plan ahead somewhat, and the need to take care of myself. It's as if I have to try to create a framework in which to operate, so that I can stop myself from zooming into situations that seem hardwired for disaster and still find a way to be awake and aware and in the present — to feel the flow — and to trust in the fate that helped me find my next apartment.

* Examples of my beloved stuff pictured here — how did I survive without it??

new construction

2010-01-16T20:52:00.000-08:00

Let me give you a piece of advice (and I speak from experience): If you’ve suffered a romantic disappointment, or if you woke up with a nagging sense that love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, do not that very day go see South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater, in which Paulo Szot’s gorgeous, compelling baritone first overwhelms you with the promise of romance (“Some Enchanted Evening”), then destroys you with the pain of lost love (“This Nearly Was Mine”), before you’re completely undone with a last-minute true-love happy ending (orchestra goes mad, music crashes over you, stage goes black — oof). I staggered out of the theater into a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon and felt about as far from a tropical happy ending as is possible.

My romantic disappointment this time around was a minor one, on paper, yet somehow felt crushing. The only loss, really, was of the castle in the air that I’d built in mere moments, out of nothing but a few thrilling moments and promising “signs” and lots and lots of daydreaming.

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you,” my mother always said to me when I was a child. And it’s true: I did feel that once my imagination got started, I had no control over it. If it wanted to freak me out with thoughts of disaster and danger, off it would go, heedless of my growing terror and quickly working me up into quite a state, where a slow creak or a shifting shadow in our old house would make me nearly implode with panic.

That imagination still causes me plenty of trouble. I may not have to check under the bed at night, or fret about something dropping down onto me from a tree in the dark, but give me a little material and I can build a lovely 3D vision of the future—or rather, a future—that is so lovely and captivating that I can find it rather crushing to come back to earth and return to my real—and much more prosaic—life.

There’s nothing like romance for derailing my ongoing attempts to try to follow the Buddhist advice of living more in the moment. Perhaps this is because romance, bottom line, is all about anticipation of the happy future, about projecting into an imagined bliss. Not matter how enjoyable the romance might be in and of itself, the thrill comes from dreaming of what may come, from hoping that what’s happening now is a promise of what we want to happen later.

So a disappointment can feel wildly out of proportion, because it’s not about missing the actual person, or feeling their absence. It’s about mourning the loss of an entire envisioned life, a relationship and a person that didn’t even exist and yet have left a yawning absence behind. It’s about wrenching your gaze away from some glorious vista of love and happiness and enchanted evenings and returning your attention to what, in comparison, can seem as drab and flat as a cold, gray January afternoon.

My other current struggle with my imagination involves my now-active search for that ever-elusive next apartment. I’ve seen literally dozens of apartments; if it weren’t for the stress of having to make a decision, it would be nothing but fun to see all the different apartments—and all the different lives—available in Manhattan. You can do quirky in the West Village, rugged in Flatiron, perfectly nice in Gramercy, mad luxury in the Financial District (lap pool! three roof decks! room service! ping pong! billiards! indoor rock-climbing! free breakfast!), corporate in Chelsea, charming on the Upper West. (Can you tell I’ve been reading a lot of real estate listings? I’m actually having nightmares about floor plans and obstructed views and closet space.)

And you know, it all sounds pretty great. I walk into an empty apartment and instantly visualize my brand-new life—making breakfast in a cool open kitchen, working at my desk overlooking killer river views, kicking back in a sleek design-y pad, all of the above set to a groovy soundtrack and starring a completely organized and with-it version of me.

Early in my search, I found a really fantastic place, which I now refer to as The One That Got Away (damn that broker!). In this one, my fantasies of my future life got seriously out of hand. I had already picked out my outfit for the great housewarming party, had met with clients at the giant metal desk that sat in the middle of the space, had trotted to and from the yoga studio around the corner, zipped over to Whole Foods to pick up some yogurt and apples…. You get the picture. After I had created such elaborate visions, not getting this apartment felt like someone had ripped my whole future away from me. (Again: damn that broker!)

And then there’s the fear of picking the wrong apartment! Of making a mistake! Then what? How will I live with myself and my poor decision?

With all of this pointless anxiety and self-inflicted disappointment, I need strong reminders of why living in the moment is so key. I got one the other night, again at the theater, this one the Sunday following the emotional tidal wave of South Pacific. This time, I had my wine before the show, and this time, the tidal wave was of an entirely different variety.

It was a performance of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, at the Barrow Street Theater. (Go, now—don’t miss it.) Our Town has a reputation, I believe, of being corny and old-fashioned—sentimental nostalgia—but I’m here to tell you that it’s not. It’s lean and poignant and packs a major wallop at the end that smacked some sense of perspective back into me.

For those of you who didn’t pay attention in high school English class, Our Town is set in a small town (Grover’s Corners) in New Hampshire, beginning in 1901. Wilder wrote that, with Our Town, he wanted “to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” He specifies right up front that there’s to be no scenery, no curtain; we’re just plunged right into life as it’s happening, with no sets or props to distract us. As our guide to the town, the Stage Manager, tells us after the first intermission, “The First Act was called the Daily Life. This act is called Love and Marriage. There’s another act coming after this: I reckon you can guess what that’s about.” Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and the final act: That about covers it, right?

That final act is set in the graveyard, up the hill from town, with the dead sitting calmly and patiently, remote from the drama of the living. A young woman who has just died in childbirth—a character we watched in the first two acts—comes to join them, but can’t quite let go of her life yet. She asks the Stage Manager to let her go back and live one more day (her twelfth birthday). He warns her against it (“As you watch it, you see the thing that they—down there—never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards”), the others warn her against it, but she must see for herself.

She goes back, with all her knowledge, and tries to live in her life again—her mother making breakfast, her father back from a trip with a birthday present for her, the cold winter weather—but it’s too much. It’s not only that she knows the future; it’s that now she knows the great tragedy of life. She knows that we all die, and yet we don’t pay attention to life while it’s happening. She sees (and so do we, thanks to an astonishingly powerful coup de théâtre that I'm not going to give away) everything that she missed the first time around, everything that was too familiar to be noticed. And she delivers one of the great devastating speeches in theater:

Emily

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. {She breaks down sobbing.} I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

Stage Manager

No. {Pause.} The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.

Shattered. I was simply shattered, and reading the lines now, I’m hit all over again. It’s so obvious, so simple, and yet so shocking: The clock is ticking, we’re all rushing toward the end, and yet, as Emily puts it, we’re “shut up in little boxes…. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.”

In her brief time back among the living, Emily can only be heard by her family when she is speaking as her twelve-year-old self, so her mother cannot hear her great plea, but we, in the audience, can hear it:

Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it—don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.

upson downs

2010-01-04T16:36:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are: Twenty-Ten. (Such an odd-sounding and -looking year, isn’t it? Very Space Age.) No matter how much I resist assigning meaning to New Year’s, it was still a thrill watching the clock hit midnight straight up, and the calendar flip over to 01/01/10. I suppose, surrounded as we are by top-ten lists and post-holiday diet tips and tax forms (already!!), it’s impossible to stop ourselves from looking back and looking ahead, from taking stock and making resolutions.

My favorite resolution ever came from a friend in L.A., years ago: “No more cheap shoes.” As much as I applaud and support her admirable goal, my 2010 resolution, such as it is, is a bit less concrete: I want to work on my court vision. In basketball, court vision refers to a player’s ability to take in the whole picture—to see everything that’s happening on the court, and to strategize the right moves given the situation and the various ways it could potentially unfold.

I want court vision for my life—to be able to see the whole, not just the parts, to figure out the different ways a scenario can play out. This would be a change for me: I tend to get focused on some fraction of a given situation, and to react solely to that one aspect—good, bad, or indifferent—and to tamp down any distracting awareness of the whole shebang.

This is especially true of high-emotion moments, whether positive (going on a fun first date) or negative (being yelled at by an evil boss). In the past, it’s been nearly impossible for me to step back in such a moment and weigh the situation; instead, I just react out of my own tangled emotional history—in the first example, by projecting way ahead into a happily-ever-after future, in the second by zooming straight into “fight or flight” mode.

I have really tried, over the past couple years, to learn to be “in the moment” as much as possible. For me, this means looking at what is right in front of me, right now—not what it was, or what I hope it will be, or what I wish it were, or what it represents—and, given that, to figure out my options and my best move.

I’ve had a lot of guidance in this effort—from books, from yoga, from therapy, from wise friends—and have managed to get myself in a much better place than I was just a couple of years ago. Of course, a huge part of this can be attributed not to any innate yogic goodness on my part, but instead simply to the fact that I left my hateful job; it’s much easier to be more mindful (and grateful) if you’re not in a continuous state of exhaustion and jerk-induced panic.

But while the lessons I’ve learned are valuable, and while I can see the progress I’ve made, it doesn’t take much to plunge me back into an inchoate emotional turmoil. I was initially going to call this post “nothing but net,” and blather on for the whole time about my astonishing spiritual development, but then I had a setback that forced me to face how far I have yet to travel. Simply put, that fun first date (on Christmas Eve, no less) doesn’t seem to be leading to the finish line of bliss that I’d envisioned. I’m disappointed, naturally enough. The issue is that I’ve instantly taken a relatively minor incident and blown it up into a symbol of everything that’s wrong with me and my life, and, to be honest, I’m wallowing.

Still, I’m trying to put into practice what I’ve learned—to try to create a bit of space where my rational self can step in and prevent my slipping straight back into an emotional mess. I hope I can keep my sense of the big picture—that this one incident has no larger message, that I’m not stuck, that I have choices, that I can act in different ways than I have in the past.

What I’m working to remember right now is that, as much as I wanted this potential romance to work out, the disappointing outcome is not a measure of failure. As the ever-helpful Buddhists remind me, “Your journey is to know yourself.” The goal isn’t romance, or a new job, or a fat bank account. The goal is being aware, and learning, and appreciating. And if I don’t get the outcome I wanted, whether in a romance, or a work project, or what have you—well, no harm, no foul.

Speaking of outcomes: I hope that in 2010, I can more fully understand this concept, so that my sense of the big picture—my court vision—can carry me through rough times, without crazy roller coaster rides like the one of the past couple weeks.

An admirable intention, to be sure. And I’ll get right on it—after a bit more wallowing.

to those of you who celebrate...

2009-12-25T10:26:00.001-08:00

... Merry Christmas from me.

dear jane

2009-12-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

I gobbled down a book yesterday, in two big gulps, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Really, is there anything better than finding a book that so ensorcells you that you can barely tear yourself away, and when you do manage to put it down, it pulls at you like a talisman from a Grimm tale, or something out of Poe, or Bluebeard’s closet, distracting and enticing you until you can stand it no longer.

The book in question was The Man in the Wooden Hat, Jane Gardam’s follow-up to her earlier Old Filth (which I also wolfed down). It’s lying now on the bed, its spell over me quite gone, looking very innocent and calm, with nary an echo of its earlier bewitching power. It’s a brilliant book—intricate, smart, and entertaining—so someday I’ll pick it up for a re-read, and it will hypnotize me all over again.

Which answers my earlier question, about whether there’s anything better than finding an irresistible book. The answer is, yes: picking up a book that you’ve already read and already loved, and flipping out all over again.

In a recent post on the joys of re-watching favorite movies, Self-Styled Siren referenced a New York Times column by Verlyn Klinkenborg about re-reading beloved books. “The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them,” he writes, and you know, I couldn’t agree more. When I was young, I could have made it through all of Shakespeare and most of Proust and a good chunk of Gibbons in the hours that I devoted to re-reading Narnia, and Anne of Green Gables, and the gothic trifecta of Rebecca and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and Where the Red Fern Grows (crying every single time), and Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and all of Madeline L’Engle but especially A Wrinkle in Time. Those books of my childhood: I can picture the words on the page, clearly see the illustrations, remember lines intact, recall the then-unappreciated sense of hours stretching ahead of me, an afternoon spent blissfully isolated thanks to my book and the always accepted excuse of “I’m reading.”

In his Times column, Mr. Klinkenborg writes, “Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens.” Again, nail on the head: knowing what happens means I don’t have to race to the finish line and can instead savor each delicious phrase. I can experience the joy of the page in front of me, rather than reading as fast as I can in an effort to find out what happens on the next page, and the next, and the one after that.

Still, even with a book that I’ve read umpteen times, I can find myself just as nervous as ever on behalf of my favorite characters, perhaps even more so, since I know what’s coming down the line for them, while they remain unaware of their fate. At times it’s almost unbearable to watch them make the same mistakes, suffer the same blows. When I saw Streetcar Named Desire the other night (with Cate Blanchett breaking the audience’s collective heart), I wished the play could come to an end when Blanche and Mitch are alone in the apartment, after their date, and Blanche tells him about her brief and tragic marriage. Mitch says to her, “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too.” They kiss, and Blanche says, “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!”

Curtain, please. Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen, we hope you enjoyed our condensed happily-ever-after version of Streetcar. Exit to the rear.

When it comes to authors that I read over and over and over again, no one holds a candle to Jane Austen. I cycle through her novels every couple of years, spacing them out only enough so that I don’t accidentally memorize them word for word. You’d think these books would be wrung dry for me at this point, and yet every time I return, I get caught up all over again. Those books pull me in so deeply that, when I’m forced to put them down for a bit, I feel only half present in the rest of my life, and I can’t wait to return to Austen’s world.

I am far, far too close to the Austen books to have any sort of critical perception of them. I can’t even explain why I love them. They’re like family, I suppose. Which may be why I was so unexpectedly bowled over the other day, when I went to see the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library: to see an actual letter written by Jane—her thoughts of the moment, her handwriting, her paper, her ink—was so surprisingly moving and intimate that I could barely take it all in. Looking at her letters, I had the strangest and most vivid sense of her as a real person. It was as if she’d walked into the room and said hello—the most thrilling star sighting ever.

Rather like the narrator of The Little Prince, who shows his Drawing Number One (of a boa constrictor that has eaten an elephant) to any new acquaintance to find out if he or she is “a person of true understanding,” I use Austen as a litmus test of sorts. I confess to feeling slightly suspicious of those who do not truly and deeply appreciate Austen, so when someone tells me that he doesn’t love Austen, or that she hasn’t gotten around to reading at least the big ones, I make a barely conscious note that this is probably not a kindred spirit situation.

Unfortunately, these days Austen’s books—perhaps because of the slew of Masterpiece Theatre adaptations and ripped-bodice movies—seem now to be slotted as the original chick lit, not “serious” literature, but barely one step up from a beach read. Austen often seems to be considered a lacy, dainty, missish story-teller, best suited for lightweight book clubs, rather than the sharp, witty, clear-eyed, tough-minded, unflinching writer that she was, and she’s rarely given her due as the precursor to Dickens, Chekhov, Flaubert, even Fitzgerald.

The short documentary that accompanies the Morgan exhibit includes a quote from Virginia Woolf on Austen: “Of all the great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” Perhaps this helps explain both why so many seem to take her for granted (or even dismiss her, as Emerson did—but then, he had no sense of humor), and why it’s so tough for me to put my finger on what I love so much about the novels. Their seeming effortlessness, their no-nonsense pacing, and the utter naturalness of the language, the situations, and the characters—it all combines to make the books a pure pleasure to read, and to effectively hide the sophisticated and utterly rare craft behind them.

Several writers (most amusingly the always-entertaining Fran Lebowitz) are interviewed in the Morgan documentary, including Colm Tóibín, who has this to say:

If you said you were going off for the weekend and you were doing nothing except re-reading Emma, or taking Mansfield Park to bed—that image for me would be one of pure happiness. I mean, you could bring maybe a person to bed and that would be nicer in some way, but it wouldn’t be as fully satisfying.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I take his point, and love him for it.

In a never-visited storage unit in the Bronx are nearly all my belongings (at least, I hope they’re there; I send the check every month with the idea that someday I will see my stuff again). Among the furniture and pots-and-pans and tchotkes are boxes and boxes of books, and in one of these boxes are my Austen novels, agonizingly out of reach for the time being. When I do finally retrieve and unpack that box, I may just take Tóibín's advice and hole up for a few days to reacquaint myself with Austen’s worlds—the perfect way to inhabit that next apartment, when I find it, which will hopefully be soon.

Or maybe Santa will bring me these gorgeous new editions....

Top image: detail of a Jane Austen letter; second image: example of one of Austen's "crossed" letter, in which the writer, after filling the page, turned the paper 90 degrees and continued writing, thereby getting as much as possible out of each valuable piece of paper, and saving on postal charges to boot; bottom images: new Penguin editions of two of Austen's novels, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

shop-a-holic

2009-11-30T13:45:00.000-08:00

In his mean post-break-up email, my ex accused me of being shallow (or wanting to be shallow, or heading toward being shallow, or something like that—still can’t bring myself to re-read it), of being concerned only with surfaces.

I wish.

How great would it be to care only about surfaces! Oh, to be shallow, to skip along through life, taking it as it comes, letting all the junk just bounce off, not caring what other people think about you, not feeling a need to self-analyze and self-criticize and so forth, reading paperback best-sellers, seeing blockbuster movies, caring about Jon + Kate. Quel joy!

My friend Laura and I had a detailed discussion about the break-up, in which she offered a classy and helpful metaphor to sum up the situation. “It’s like finding something in an antique shop,” she said, “something that would be great if only, and you think, ‘Oh, I’ll buy it and get it fixed, or get it refinished, or cut the legs down,’ or something like that. But you know it’s not what you really want, and it’ll never be right, and you have to walk away and keep looking.”

I have another analogy, one that shows off my shallowness quite nicely, I think, especially when I develop it into a theory of life. Here goes: You’re shopping for clothes, and you’re in the dressing room, trying stuff on. You try on a black shirt and think, “Nothing wrong with that, I could use a black shirt,” or you try on a jacket and think, “Not bad, I suppose, and it’s a good deal.” Then you try on something else—a sweater, or a t-shirt, or the perfect little black dress—and you look in the mirror and say, “I frickin’ love it. I look amazing.”

Here’s what I’ve learned: don’t buy the other stuff, the “good-enough” stuff. Hold out for something that makes you feel like a rock star. And more important: trust that you’ll know it when you see it.

I’ve been applying my clothes-shopping philosophy to other aspects of my life. I don’t stick with a book unless I love it, I try not to waste calories on something that’s not super-delicious, I don’t pursue a job opp if the initial meeting feels sour… Basically, I try to check in with myself—be mindful, as they say—and make sure all’s well.

As I’ve written before, I have a lot of issues that come out in full force when I’m in a relationship, and it can become very difficult for me to get my bearings. Like this time: I doubted the gut feeling that was telling me to bail; I felt I should keep trying to make a go of it, because maybe, if I worked through my stuff, everything would click into place, and we’d live happily ever after. I thought my doubts could be coming from relationship-induced craziness, and not from the reality of the situation, which was simply that it wasn’t working, period.

During the drawn-out misery that led up to the split, I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, completely at odds with myself. It’s like when you’re wearing a pair of pants that’s too tight, and all day, you’re fidgeting and squirming and you just can’t wait till you can get home, change into your sweats, and breathe easy. That’s what it felt like, when it was finally over: relief.

(Unfortunately, the break-up process wasn’t in fact over, though I didn’t know that at the time. There was a slew of drama awaiting me, including his most recent email, which looks like an apology and sounds like an apology, but, honey, that ain’t no apology—you know, “I’m sorry if I hurt you, but”—in which he said he should have “corrected” me more along the way. Oh, really?)

Bottom line, despite the fact that the relationship started so romantically, and despite the fact that in certain lights it looked destined by Fate, it didn’t fit—we didn’t fit—and there’s nothing I can do about it now except change into my sweats and lick my wounds.

Now, as I do a round of Monday-morning quarterbacking on the past few months, there are a couple lessons for me to remember, the most important of which is this: I have to believe that when the right relationship comes along, no matter how much stuff I have to work through, I will feel in my bones that it’s worth it. I have to trust that I’ll know it when I see it.

introspection's a bitch

2009-11-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

Buddhism teaches that it is not how much you know about yourself, it's how you relate to what you do know that makes a difference.... The common tendency, Buddhism teaches, is to use whatever is happening to reinforce a distinct feeling of self: to take everything very personally. The alternative, as discerned by the Buddha, is to hold that very feeling of self up for critical examination whenever it arises. How real is this feeling that drives us, which we ordinarily take so much for granted?
— Mark Epstein, Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective

Years and years ago, after a particularly bad breakup, my newly minted ex-boyfriend came to my apartment one evening, grimly unpacked a box containing everything I’d given him, as well as the things I’d left at his place, then went up to my bedroom, unplugged the TV he’d loaned me, lugged it out to his truck, and drove off, all without a word. Game over.

Today, I’ll play a variation on that theme: pack up the camera my latest ex loaned me, the book he wanted me to read, the earrings he gave me for my birthday that I can’t imagine wearing now, knowing how he feels. It’s almost a ritual, this type of modern breakup: angry emails, screened calls, bitchy late-night texts, and a trip to Mail Boxes Etc.

I would have thought that, after all these years of practice, breakups would get easier. After all, I’ve got more in my life that can help fill in the hole, I’ve learned that I can take care of myself, and I know I’ll get through the pain. But there’s an added level of dreariness to the whole thing now, a depressing sense that I should have known better — that I should have avoided some of my typical pitfalls and patterns, should have been more in control, more grown-up.

And so 2009 draws to an end with yet another crisis of the soul. (It’s been a year of those, I must say. I hope 2010 is gentler.) As break-ups go, this one initially seemed to be as moderate as possible — not too acrimonious, no big blow-out. Of course, it’s just when you’ve decided that the seas are calm that a giant wave comes out of nowhere and smacks you down, hard.
You never saw it coming.

This particular wave took the form of an unexpected, vividly detailed, excruciating email from my ex. It packed a whallop, furiously listing one after another my faults and failings as a human being. In his anger, he craftily aimed a lot of his blows at what he knows to be my most vulnerable areas, the parts of me that already cause me the most pain and self-doubt. Hence the soul-in-crisis.

I’m terrible at coping when someone is angry with me — and boy, is he angry, a rage that is hard to face, and that makes me antsy, preoccupied, nervous, like I need to be looking over my shoulder. (This is a strange post to write, by the by. It's uncomfortably revealing, yes, but also, it could very well be read by the person who instigated the crisis. I don’t want to hurt him any more than I have, and then my Irish-German pride hates for him to know how much he hurt me, which is making it tougher than usual to scrape together these paragraphs. But this blog is for me, a way for me to try to write through my experiences and find my way out of the forest, so I need to disregard his reaction and soldier on.)

There were definitely a few things in the email that were unfair; had they been delivered in person, they would have sparked quite an argument. There were also a few "huh?" moments, which I guess will always remain a mystery. And then there were a couple real below-the-belt hits, not all of which I can recall, but I’m not up for a re-read. But there was enough in there that tapped into my deepest fears about who I am as a person, and what my life is and will be, that my therapist had her hands full. (As she put it, after reading the email, "I can only imagine the number you're doing on yourself.")

The overarching theme was that I'm selfish, shallow, cold, and incapable of being in a relationship. Of course, on the one hand, this is just the typical angry post-breakup attack — the pouring out of all the pent-up resentment and grievances — and needs to be read in that light. On the other hand, these accusations are not new to me — I've heard them before, and I've worried that they are, in fact, my great failings.

And you know, he's right about a lot of things. I was terrible to him, and difficult and mean and cold. He didn’t deserve it, I didn't want to be that way, but I was, a lot. It seems that in any kind of emotionally vulnerable situation, my more rational self gets shoved out of the picture, and the crazy, angry, frightened part of me steps up to bat. After all, the crazy part has a lot more experience in emotional situations (lived through plenty of those as a kid), while the rational part hasn’t been given a lot of opportunity to figure out how to handle those moments and so ends up pushed aside.

And there’s a good chance that I’m building some fairly horrible self-fulfilling prophecies. When someone thinks highly of me (like this boyfriend did, initially — he put me on a pedestal, it seems, which probably helps explain his extreme anger now: my feet of clay have been a big disappointment), I feel, "He doesn't really know me; if he did, he'd be out of here." Then, to confirm my screwed-up self image, I do my best to drive him away, at which point I say, "See, I knew it: I'm a terrible person."

This, by the way, is why this particular post is uncomfortably revealing for me. I’m afraid that I'll show you, my friends and readers, too much of myself, my ugly parts, and you, too, will turn away.

This is also why god invented therapy. Over the past year, these are the very issues I've focused on (along with that whole what-do-I-want-do-do-with-my-life thing), which is perhaps why my ex's email hit me so hard: after all this work and struggle, I'm still making the same mistakes, falling in the same traps. I have to have some faith, I suppose, that my growing awareness of these mistakes and pitfalls will help me down the line, but for now, I can panic at the idea that I'm stuck — no progress, no light at the end of the tunnel.

So what now. More therapy, more introspection, more attempts to take responsibility for my mistakes without going down the path of thinking that I'm a terrible person. More effort to look at myself honestly, but not to beat myself up mercilessly. And a hope that the lessons I’ve learned from my mistakes will help me avoid similar ones in the future.

As an attempt to begin to change my patterns, I set aside my anger (and my near-overwhelming defensive desire to rebut some of his more unfair accusations, and perhaps lob a few of my own) and tried to write a sincere apology. Once I got started, I found it a relief to say how sorry I am; I felt calmer, as if I got the crazy part of me to quiet down (after all, that part of me isn’t much interested in making apologies) and the more rational part to take charge.

In fact, I found that I was able to thank him for what I learned from him, even for the harsh lesson that his email embodied. That doesn’t mean I’m glad I got that email — it was far too bruising, and I’m no martyr — but I think he’d bottled up his emotions for so long that I hadn’t seen the hurt I was causing. Now, thanks to that tsunami of an email, wow can I see it, quite clearly, thank you, and can hopefully remember it in the future.

Unfortunately, the only reply was a curt text demanding the return of his camera, but at least now I know that there’s not a lot I can do about how he feels, so I can stop trying to figure out if there’s a way to move us past the resentment to a less hateful place, perhaps give us both some relief. All I can do is try to figure out my own lessons — and send him back that damn camera, pronto.

LA, the weird and the wonderful

2009-11-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

A creepy display at a manicure joint on Melrose, Technicolor graffiti, classic mid-century signage, a thrift shop's guardian spirits... as well as the flowers, the palm trees, and my little cottage in the woods of West Hollywood - here are a few glimpses of Los Angeles from last week.

eating los angeles

2009-11-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

Well, it was a wonderful trip. LA really rolled out the red carpet: gorgeous weather, amazing food, more wine than you could shake a stick at, an ongoing conversation about which madly expensive perfume I should buy from Scent Bar / Lucky Scent, and plenty of that helpless laughter I wrote about previously.

Once I get a sense of what 2010 is going to bring, work-wise, I may very well look at making the cross-country move for the third time.

Meanwhile, let me relive some of the food highlights:

- the sweetest uni at Hama Sushi
- pizza with oregano and salami at Pizzeria Mozza
- tacos with potatoes and rajas at Loteria
- escarole salad with almonds and sunchokes at Gjelina
- toasted sourdough bread from La Brea Bakery
- olive oil gelato and butterscotch pudding at Pizzeria Mozza
- spinach and goat cheese omelet at King’s Road
- chocolate-covered dried apricots and tamari-wasabi almonds from Erewhon
- honey-marinated hanger steak and pumpkin cupcakes at Joan’s on Third
- hamachi sashimi with XO sauce at Hungry Cat
- my final meal:scrambled eggs, sausage, homemade english muffin, potatoes, and black tea at bld

- and, best of all, Thomas’s lovely brunch: spinach salad with bacon, tarragon, chervil, and mustard vinaigrette; chicken with mushroom cream sauce and asparagus; a La Brea bakery baguette and fig-anise bread; and cookies with fresh berries. And several bottles of Champagne that I picked up from a store with an unbelievable selection of boutique wines, and an unbelievably rude proprietor. (When I asked if he thought I’d made good choices from his Champagne selection, he said, “I chose them first.” When I asked, “Well then, did I do a good job narrowing down to three bottles?” he said, “At that price point, yes.” Thanks, pal.)

funhouse

2009-11-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

I lived in Los Angeles for eight years, after college. Those were significant years, I realize now: being on my own for the first time, and setting up my own life, and taking care of myself, in a place so utterly different from where I’d lived till then (New England, for god’s sake), and which I felt I made my own.

Of course, during those years, I itched to get back east, to live in New York, to be in a quote-unquote real city, to be around people who were quick and on a mission, who hustled.

Fast-forward a decade or so. I’ve been in New York (and environs) for a good long time now, and it just doesn’t feel quite right, somehow. I mean, I love it and all, but you know, I hate it.

It’s a completely schizophrenic relationship, with dramatic, turn-on-a-dime emotions. For instance, I’ll be walking down the street, think, "I'd like a pack of gum," and presto: a deli. There’s always a deli! I love that! Yay, New York!

And then my pack of gum and I will trudge down into the subway and wait and wait and wait for the train, with no announcements to let us know when/if the train will arrive, and when it does arrive, the wheels scrape along the rails like the world’s fiercest nails-on-a-chalkboard, and the train is so stuffed that it takes an eon for a few bedraggled souls to squirm their way out, and somehow the space they took up is absorbed by the remaining riders, so there’s no room for us. The doors close on a packed mass of people, quashing everyone so tightly together that if you could remove the roof of the train, you could pull out a solid loaf of humanness. The train leaves, my gum and I are left behind on the platform, and the whole farce plays over again.

Boo, New York. Boo.

I’m in Los Angeles now for a week — for the first time in years — and so far, it feels frickin’ great. I’ve had piles of delicious salads for lunch, and an incredible wine-soaked dinner at Pizzeria Mozza (so now LA has amazing pizza — another check in the plus column). I've settled into Thom's adorable cottage, which is right in the middle of the city and yet is so quiet (except for the crickets), and is surrounded by a lovely garden that makes me feel as if I'm a million miles from civilization.

I've laughed for hours at the most ridiculous things with the boys (wow, I really needed a few sessions of helpless laughing, after the week I’ve had), and last night had fantastic tacos at Loteria after cocktails in Thom's swank digs, and am now blogging away in a cafe on Melrose (that's another plus: there are available seats in the cafes, so I can settle in for a couple hours of Earl Grey and free wifi; however, a big minus is the parade of bozos in track pants and skate shoes, and bimbos in leggings and boots, all endlessly braying into their phones).

There might not be a deli on every corner (or a theater district, or City Ballet), but CVS sells Dom Perignon*, and I’ll be hitting Hama Sushi tomorrow, and getting pumpkin gelato in Silverlake, and there’s an entire store of Heath pottery just a few blocks from Thom's house, along with a shop that sells dead-stock vintage shoes (hold me back!), and my perfume source, which I've ordered from for a few years and now will finally visit in person.

I know, I know: it’s vacation, of course it’s fun, of course I’m relaxed and laughing and so forth. On the other hand: it's fun! Why question it. And right now, fun is a priority. I want to be with fun people, drinking Champagne from CVS and laughing loud enough to piss off the people at the next table, and feeling like we can’t talk fast enough, there’s so much to say. That’s a life I could embrace.

At the very least, I need to be here more than one week every couple of years.

*Alex and I in CVS, scanning the aisles: “Hair color, indigestion, external pain…” “External pain? What about existential pain?” “Look: external pain, existential pain,... Champagne!”

bird’s-eye view

2009-11-12T14:55:00.000-08:00

The real voyage of discovery consists not only in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust

Don’t know about the new eyes, Marcel, but man do I want to hit the road again and see some of those new landscapes.* I want to take my new (to me) car for a cross-country solo spin, I want to head back to Mexico for a couple months of easy living, I want to take intensive French lessons on the Riviera for four weeks to be followed by at least two weeks of practicing my new-found fluency (one hopes) in glamorous-sounding spots like Cap Ferrat and Antibes and Nice… oh, and in Marseilles, which just makes me think of cauldrons of bouillabaisse. Then there’s New Zealand, and Barcelona, and Buenos Aires, and Bali… all places I’m dying to visit and where I’d want to stay for a good chunk of time.

What’s stopping me? Well, let’s see. I’m working, for one thing, which, at this point in history, is not something to be taken lightly. I’ve got contracts and clients — and cash coming in — and my own L(ucky) L(ittle) C(ompany). It feels like it took a long time to get to this point, so I’m not sure it’s wise to disappear for a few months and then perhaps have to start from scratch.

However, my contracts expire at the end of the year, and though it looks like there could be more work in 2010, nothing is set in stone. My clients could very well decide that they’ve got nothing for me for the time being — at which point, I’m hitting expedia.com and finding me a ticket to points unknown.

And if it looks like those contracts are going to be renewed, well, then, I just need to build some vacation / sabbatical time into the year. That’s one of the joys of the self-employed way of life: I may not get paid vacation, but my boss tends to cheerfully approve all requests for time off.

To sum up: I’m a lucky duck, and 2010 could be another great chapter in my post 9-to-5 life. So why do I feel a panicky dread creeping up in me? It seems to hit when I feel like I’ve got nothing to look ahead to (cf. here and here and here), creating an opening for all those big Life Decisions to come on over and start tapping me on the shoulder (and/or clocking me upside the head). You know, the big ones: what do I want to do with my life, where do I want to live, who do I want to be, WTF is wrong with me?!

Nice, efficient downward spiral there, if I say so myself. I really have mastered that move in the past few years. Practice, practice, practice!

But I’ve also been practicing a few other tricks: namely, how to put the brakes on the spiral. For one thing, I don’t get automatically sucked into comparing my lot with that of a friend’s, or a colleague’s, or that of someone I read about in my dreaded alumni magazine or even just notice on the subway, for god’s sake. Instead, I’m trying to keep in mind something a friend told me a few years back, when he was helping me figure out how to pull my act together and get un-stuck from my unhappy work situation: Don’t compare yourself to other people; compare yourself to your own potential.**

When I size myself up in relation to friends or subway strangers, I get overwhelmed by a wave of defeat, of my failures and missteps and so forth. When I’m instead able to follow my friend’s advice and think about what my potential may be and how I can live up to it, I find myself wanting to be true to that potential, to care for it, and, actually, honor it (it’s mine, after all), and, by extension, to be true to myself. (Sounds New Agey, I know, but it feels very strong and calm, somehow.)

What that means, more and more, is that I need to write, and take pictures, and have my own projects, not just those of my clients. I need to be okay with not knowing where I’m going or what’s in store, and trust that it will all continue to unfold.

And right now, since the void of an empty calendar seems to freak me out, I’m thinking of the first few months of 2010 as either work work work, or France France France. Voila. Calendar full.

*Full disclosure: As I write this, I’m on a plane, crossing the country (hence the photos), but it’s only for a week-long trip, which is not what I’m talking about here.

**Hindu proverb: There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

course correction

2009-10-18T20:03:00.001-07:00

My friends, I've been a bad, bad blogger, and I apologize, and I thank those of you who have prodded me, virtually and actually, to get back at it. I have two reasons for my disappearance (other than sheer procrastination). The first is a doozy: I've been working! Yes, working — me, the supposedly free-spirited, on-the-road, devil-may-care, ne'er-do-well slacker dropout. All of a sudden, I have a ton of work, thanks to a couple of projects that are big enough and long-term enough for me to go ahead and set up my very own LLC (which I’m hoping stands for Lucky Little Company). You can't believe the paperwork and filing fees and legal advice and accountants involved in setting up even a one-person consultancy (one might think that in this economic climate, the powers-that-be would be encouraging those of us trying to leave the rolls of the unemployed, but one would be wrong; in fact, Connecticut just literally doubled all of its business-related fees), but I think I’m through the thick of it, and my projects seem to be under control, so I can pay some long-overdue attention to my blog.

My current work situation has quite a few strange characteristics. First and most astonishing: everyone (I mean everyone) I work with is smart, and I like them all. Now that's a brand-new experience for me, and one that I don't take lightly, believe me, after my dealings with some of the less-than-bright, deeply unlikeable types who lurk in every workplace. Another new one for me is that very little of the work requires me to be in an office, or to be somewhere at a certain time, or to tiptoe around the various landmines of office life.

I love the flexibility and freedom that I have, and how much more sense it all makes, from a pure productivity standpoint. I can be that prototypical freelancer, working in my PJs, setting my own hours, taking a break when I need to rather than watching the clock. If I’m tired, I don’t have to struggle to keep my eyes open until 5 and then stagger home and collapse. If I hit a wall, I can take a nap or go for a walk, and then return to my desk in a more productive state of mind. And I don’t crave solitude the way that I did after a day of dysfunctional office dynamics, when I sometimes felt I was just counting the minutes until I could retreat to my beloved apartment and shut the door on the world. Now, a lot of the work is solitary, so I don't feel the need to retreat during my non-work hours. Plus I have that nice feeling of ownership: these are my projects, my clients, my company, my headaches. What a difference all that makes.

However. When I originally conceived this post, it was going to be purely about the joys of work, how I feel motivated and reinvigorated, how I find it so odd that people say, “Don’t work too hard” when clearly I’m enjoying working hard, how I’m just soaking up the positive feedback, how helpful it's been for my confidence and sense of possibility (and my bank account). I like the collaboration, the learning, and the fact that I don't have to feel guilty about having zilch interest in finding a full-time job.

However. My blog now appears to act as a conscience for me, and as I thought through the post and what I wanted to say, I had to acknowledge the nagging voice in my head, the same one that I ignored for years but that finally drove me to extricate myself from my unhappy and stressful situation last spring. It’s the voice that reminds me that I want something more from my life — something that remains rather vague, but that isn’t going to just happen on its own.

In some ways (and this is Reason Number Two for my blogging delinquency), I think my mini-break from the blog over the past few weeks was a break from seriously paying attention to my life — to its content, its direction, and its potential - so that I could hunker down and focus on the (paying) work on hand, so that my big question of the day could simply be, "What do I need to get done today?" Now I'm again trying to look at my life in a more comprehensive way, and I've been thinking about what I've learned and how I've felt over the past couple of months. I have a few "key takeaways," as we say in the consulting game: (1) I do want a home of my own once again, and I want it to be nice; (2) freelancing is a good setup for me right now, with the benefits (income with relative independence) far, far outweighing the demerits (like, say, expensive and crappy health insurance, and lots of deadlines, and responsibility); (3) setting up my own company is an incredible and rewarding feeling; and (4) — and this is the most important — I need something bigger, some larger project or purpose, something creative and ambitious and soul-fulfilling. (I have a couple of thoughts about what this something could be, but I don't feel quite ready to share.)

So right now, I need to make sure I don't get pulled back into a life that isn't ultimately fulfilling for me. And there are so many ways that I can get sucked back in: I have a meeting with a successful, high-paid woman with a lot of responsibility and a swish office and think, “I should do this!”; or I pay a visit to a friend with an enviable apartment in the Village; or I think longingly of all my stuff, now stashed in some mysterious storage unit in the Bronx, and how lovely it would be to set up house again, and maybe I should check out the real estate listings, and oh I could have a cat again.... But I’m terrified of ending up where I was a year and a half ago, freaking out at the stack of bills, working too much, feeling like I’m permanently stuck, generally just fretting.

To be honest, over the past two months I’ve questioned the purpose of my blog. I loved it initially, when I was just back from my Paris interlude and really thinking through my "vision quest" and looking at the big questions of my life. It helped me stay in my uncomfortable in-between stage (in between jobs, homes, routines) rather than jumping into something that would have initially felt more secure, but wouldn't be right in the long run. But recently I'd been wondering if the blog had run its course, if there was anything I could say that would mean anything to anyone but me. However, I realize now that the purpose of the blog is to keep me on my toes, that it's a way for me to push myself to keep questioning what I'm doing and where I'm going, and to keep tabs on my journey. It’s all about me, in other words, but I do truly hope that at least some of it is of interest and help to you, since without you, I wouldn’t have figured any of this out.

adult supervision

2009-09-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
- Samuel Johnson

Wow, I've been a bad blogger this month. There are some good reasons for this, which I'll cover in another post, but for now, I'll just apologize (sorry!) and get on with it.

I fear this post is going to be a personal one, folks, and a bit terrifying for someone of my retiring disposition. But as much as I'm tempted to just skip it and instead tell you about my lunch at the fab Mexican place in Port Chester today (tacos! amazingly fresh tortillas! and horchata!), I think I need to tackle this.

... Okay, so about 10 minutes have gone by since I wrote those few sentences. I'm feeling kind of self-conscious and exposed. Let's just write it all out, audience be damned, and then see what we've got.

This post is about what the pop psych people call "intimacy issues"; if this topic gives you the shakes or an overwhelming sense of ennui, please feel free to click elsewhere.

To follow up on crybaby: I'm not being such a waterworks any more (though those sappy commercials that feature lovely young people being sweet and attentive to charming and grateful old people always, always get me). In fact, the situation that sparked crybaby has turned out to be what I, if I were prone to these types of phrases, might call a teaching moment.

I haven't had much success with romantic relationships in my life, and I've fouled up a fair share of friendships, too. It's a cliché, I know, but when someone gets close to me - or more to the point, when I get close to someone - all sorts of "Danger, Will Robinson!" flashing lights and waving robot arms start up, and I put on the brakes so hard that I typically pull a Rockford and end up zooming in the opposite direction. (How you like those metaphors?)

Why, you ask? Well, that's the $64,000 question. (Actually, I haven't hit the $64,000 mark on this one yet, but if I continue with the steady stream of checks to my therapist, it could happen.) It's mostly to do with trust, which is a tough one for me, and the lack thereof, and a lifelong sense that all it takes is one little mistake on my part (or one moment where I slip and show you my real self), and I'm off your list. So instead of sticking around in a relationship and trying to make sure I don't make any mistakes, which is of course impossible, I head for the door myself. Or I perversely create a minefield of self-fulfilling prophecies - finding all sorts of ways to test this poor man, hold him up to impossible standards, criticize him when he fails, until he is at his wit's end and declares, "This isn't working!" Which of course, I knew all along.

Nothing gets my defenses up like the feeling that I'm being rejected, and it's a feeling that can be triggered all too easily, by a prick to the ego, a broken date, a disappointment, a frustration that he couldn't read my mind and know exactly what I needed, even when I was saying that I didn't want it. It's crazy-making, for me, for him, for anyone who gets sucked into my insane parallel universe. At moments like this, I can go from sweetness and affection to utter rage and scorn in no time flat. The interior monologue goes something like this: "I can't believe he did that. This is ridiculous - this person is not for me, this is all wrong, why are we bothering when we can't even get along, enough already, done."

Sadly, once it starts up, the interior monologue is tough to shut down. It gathers momentum, drowning out all vestiges of rational thought, precluding honest conversation and openness. The moment - and the relationship - becomes completely about my being in control: I'm the one who sees all the problems, and who never relents or opens up or shares anything that might weaken my position of power. When I look back at times like this, it's as if I had been possessed by a demon, and my own feelings and judgments and self were utterly erased.

You wouldn't believe how difficult it is for me to try to break these patterns. For instance, when I'm being just a nightmare to someone, cold and critical and distant, and I manage to recognize that I'm doing this and that it's not the ideal course of events, I'll tell myself that I need to start a conversation about what's going on with me, get it out in the open. So there I am, in my head, trying to encourage myself to open up and stop punishing and perhaps even apologize, and it feels terrifying, as if I'm giving away the farm. It's like the crazy girl in the movies who ends up crumpled on the floor, screaming and crying and scuttling herself into a corner, where she huddles and screams some more, terrified that the nice man in the white jacket is going to take away her blankie, or whatever. That's what's living in my head, refusing to budge an inch, refusing to calm down, refusing to listen. Sometimes I can talk her down, sometimes not.

Later, when the crazy blankie girl has gone away for a rest, it feels nigh impossible to acknowledge my behavior, and to apologize. Remember how the Fonz just couldn't bring himself to say he was sorry? He'd stammer and stutter and look as if he was trying to cough up a hairball, but he just could not apologize - in his world, it was impossible that he was ever wrong. I can relate. Trying to explain myself, to account for and apologize for my bad behavior, can feel impossible, as if there is a physical impediment to speaking, a physical inability to bring forth the words.

Oy. What a mess, right?

Happily, I do feel that I'm making progress in my quest to become a better person. Now that I'm more aware of these mechanisms, I'm trying to dismantle them. I'll spare you the therapy-speak, for the most part, not because I don't believe in it, but because it just don't travel well, do it? I'll just say this: My monologue is more of an interior dialogue these days, as I try to talk myself down from this tautly strung state, down to something more human and less frightened and more willing to be open and present. It is so incredibly difficult to try out unfamiliar behavior such as this - it would be so much more comfortable to stick with the behavior I know so well. But that hasn't exactly worked for me in the past.

In the intro to Psychotherapy Without the Self, his book that attempts to reconcile psychotherapy with Buddhism, Mark Epstein writes the following:

In particular, the British analyst D. W. Winnicott moved therapy from a focus on unacceptable instincts and urges to a focus on the unintelligible aspects of emotional experience. 'We are poor indeed if we are only sane,' he remarked once in a famous footnote. [Love that! -Ed.] Winnicott had the idea that the opposite of integration (the state of an apparently cohesive self) is not disintegration but something he termed unintegration. Here he was moving away from Freud and toward the Buddha. He compared unintegration to what it is like for a child to surrender himself in play, knowing that his mother is in the next room providing what he called 'good-enough ego coverage.' He also compared it to a lover's consciousness 'after intercourse,' when the urges are relaxed and the mind and heart are open, and to an artist's mind when unburdened in the studio. He saw the state of unintegration as the foundation of creativity and wrote volumes about the consequences of failing to tap into it. When a child has to manage an intrusive or ignoring parental environment, Winnicott suggested, he or she is forced to develop a 'false' or 'caretaker' self, centered in the thinking mind, in order to survive. This false self (which can paradoxically seem 'really real') is created at the expense of unintegration, and the capacities for spontaneity, subjectivity, and authenticity are all compromised as a result. Winnicott, in his own way, seemed to be describing something akin to how the Buddhist unconscious could be covered over by early experience.

This whole passage is incredibly powerful to me - to the point where I don't think I feel ready to write about how I believe these concepts relate to me - but perhaps most powerful is the parens about the "false" self, "which can paradoxically seem 'really real'." It's fascinating to me how right the crazy blankie girl can sound, and also fascinating to begin to recognize how I can have a different opinion and perspective and approach from hers, that I can try to figure out why she's so upset, and try to calm her down, and try to get her out of the driver's seat. Revelatory, my friends. It feels kind of like growing up - and about time.

Fabulous "madwoman" button from www.cafepress.com.

crybaby

2009-09-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

You know when you're in one of those moods where everything makes you cry? Maybe you're a little tired, or maybe you're weak from the flu, or maybe your heart suffered a blow and you've been crying anyway, so why not cry some more when, say, the winner of the Open falls to the court and starts sobbing after match point? Or when Beyoncé proves herself to be a class act above and beyond what anyone ever expected at an MTV event? Or when a ridiculously corny song comes on the radio and just seems to exactly and unbearably sum up your experience? (My classic example of this is when I was on vacation in Hawaii with Thom and Alex, right after Thom had suffered a devastating breakup. The three of us are sitting at a picnic table, eating shave ice, when a Gloria Estefan song comes over the loudspeaker. The first verse isn't even over, and Thom is already up and hurrying away, clearly sobbing. Alex and I look at each other and say, simultaneously, "Gloria Estefan? Really?" That was the clue that led us to realize what bad shape Thom was in. As Amanda says in Private Lives, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.")

For me, today's waterworks instigator was coming across this passage from The Little Prince, a book that, like The Velveteen Rabbit, can make me cry even when there's not a copy within a mile; all I have to do is picture the fox, asking the Prince to tame him... or the poor rabbit, ashamed that he has no hind legs like the real rabbits... oh oh oh!

A-nee-way, here's the passage:

And he confided further, "In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her."

There are many ways in which this quote from The Little Prince does not at all parallel my situation (for instance, I am not a rose), but when one is weepy, a shortage of parallels is no hurdle to complete identification with another's sadness, especially if this sadness is in one of the great tear-jerker books of all time.

If you're a reasonably good between-the-lines reader, perhaps you can make a rough guess as to the source of my current weepy state. Yes, dear reader, I have a bit of a heartache. I may driven someone away with my "silly pretensions," and I may have lost a chance at what could have been a good thing.

This would normally be the part of the essay where I would try to come up with some wanderings on this subject, accompanied by some interesting and insightful gleanings, perhaps a bit of profundity on the nature of love and loss, along with maybe a funny line or anecdote, and then wrap everything up in a brilliantly deft maneuver that would pack an emotional wallop (note that I said "try to come up with"). Nothing is presenting itself at the moment.

It's tough to think up something original to say about romantic disappointment. After all, it's been covered, oh, here and there, over the years, with various heroines pitching themselves in front of trains or off of towers, a double suicide in iambic pentameter, a hero running through the desert to try to get help for his beloved, who he left in a cave after the plane crash, but then the British soldiers thought he was a spy and dragged him off in chains, and then he jumped off the train and commandeered a plane to get back to the cave, but it was too late... {*sob*}

So, really, what is there left to say about heartache? Basically, it hurts like mad, you try to get through the worst of it as best you can, you try to take something from it that will help you on your journey, and hopefully, you don't let it scar too badly. Because apparently, we need to keep trying, for reasons the Little Prince's fox can express much more eloquently than I:

"My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . ."

roses, sailboats, and the meaning of life

2009-08-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

I recently had a mini health scare. It was just some wonky test results that turned out to be nothing, but it did give me a few days of unease. I'm not a hypochondriac and typically don't borrow trouble (i.e., I'm not fretting about swine flu or Lyme disease; my fears these days tend to veer toward getting clipped by a driving-while-texting nut job who's crossing the double yellow into my lane), but there are a couple of diagnoses that I have a particular fear of, and this was one of them. So when the lab called to tell me I had to come back in for more tests, I immediately tapped into a reservoir of otherwise carefully tamped-down panic and burst into tears on the phone with the poor technician, who tried to talk me down while I gasped about "I knew it, I knew it - I've been afraid this would happen."

For my second round of poking and prodding, I went to the big-deal fancy lab, where they can run tests from here to next Tuesday, guaranteeing that they can find something wrong with you, as my mother puts it. While I was sitting in the waiting area (which was rather spa-like: we were all in robes, listening to New Age music that had lots of chimes and wind noises, sipping ice water and waiting for our names to be called), I could hear the doctor down the hall as he delivered test results to each patient in the various exam rooms. He had a tendency to shout out things like "Everything looks good!" in a big joyful voice as soon as he got the door open, as if certain the patient wouldn't be able to stand the suspense for even the two or three seconds it would take for him to get in the room and shut the door behind him. I imagined he only did this early-warning approach when the news was good and figured that if he came into my exam room quietly and carefully shut the door before saying anything, I'd know I was in deep trouble.

My name was called, I went into an exam room, the tests were done, and then I sat nervously, listening to the doctor's oddly enthusiastic voice as he made his rounds, waiting for my turn. I was pretty sure that, once I got the news, I'd be an emotional wreck again, either because of the terror induced by an imminent death sentence, or thanks to utter relief at a stay of execution, but the doctor managed to pre-empt any display of emotion on my part.

He did his big entrance, booming out, "First of all, you're fine! Completely and absolutely fine!" Then he zoomed right up to me, hand outstretched. "Second of all, do you remember me?"

I was so dazed, I couldn't put two and two together. "I know you?" I said, trying to remember another time when I'd faced a life-threatening disease that brought me into contact with this particular genre of doctor.

"From college!" he boomed again. "Chris [last name withheld]!"

My god, I thought. Chris. Of course. Didn't we sort of date when I was a freshman?

"I saw you sitting in the waiting area and thought, 'Could that be Siobhan?'" he said jovially, clearly ready to kick around some memories and laugh over this bizarre coincidence. Then he must have registered the utter confusion on my face and settled down to give me a bit more detail on the test results, acting the part of a responsible and comforting doctor. Once he got that out of the way, he went straight back to old times, and then asked what I'd been up to in the past 20 years. I couldn't think of one thing, especially when faced with a walking, talking success story: a doctor in a ritzy hospital in Connecticut, married to a lovely classmate, if I recall, with a few bouncing babies to boot. It was all too surreal to me; the scene I'd imagined as a prelude to a Dark Victory story line instead turned out to be part Hail Fellow Well Met, part "Oh my god I'm a failure" freak-out (as if I need any more of those). So much for my big Bette Davis moment - though of course, ultimately I was extremely relieved.

Meanwhile, that very same week, a good friend had a terrifying and completely unexpected heart attack, out of the clear blue sky. He's young, exercises a lot, eats well, doesn't smoke, has a happy and fulfilling life - and yet, he had a very close call and is looking at a long recovery period. It's given him pause, as they say - given many of us pause, in fact. There's a lot of "You never know" being said, especially since he was so healthy up to this point. It reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon, where a very self-satisfied man is strutting down the sidewalk, thinking proudly, "Less cholesterol! Regular checkups! No nicotine! No alcohol! Low sodium! Moderate exercise! No sugar!", unaware that a giant safe is about to drop on his head.

I bring up these two incidents because, after all, the heart of my blog is about trying to live life in the fullest and truest way that I can, and there's nothing like a close look at mortality to make a girl take a step back for some perspective. In the typical narrative, a brush with death (or even the thought of a brush with death) makes one toss out the junky parts of one's life and stop deferring the dream. However, I've already done a lot of the items on this particular list: quit the dead-end and depressing job (check), travel to wonderful places (check), spend more time with friends and family (check and check), buy a sports car (check! just this month! love it! want to drive across the country!), stop and smell the roses (and listen to the birds, and watch the sunset, and so forth - check), and not let the days just zip by (trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not).

It brings to mind a rather odd play I saw a few years back, an absurd (in a good way) monologue by Will Eno called Thom Pain (based on nothing). The character, who viciously skewers everything in sight, at one point says, "What if you only had one day to live? What would you do? That's easy. You'd be brave and true and reckless. You would love life and people with wild and new abandon. If you only had a day. What if you had forty years? What would you do? If you're like me, and - no offense - you probably are, you wouldn't do anything."

It's true, isn't it? We all think we'd scrap our boring old lives and go out and have mad adventures - jump out of planes or gobble down caviar at the Ritz or climb Machu Picchu at dawn or move to Paris or some such - if we knew our time on this planet was limited. But it is limited, isn't it? From the get-go? And yet here we all sit, not swimming with dolphins or blowing it all on red in Vegas.

This could be because we're all cowards, but actually, I think there's another, simpler, less dramatic reason: There's plenty of enjoyment to be had in the day-to-day. I've learned over the past year that I don't need to pack each hour with Experiences and Accomplishments, that there's a lot to be said for reading and hanging out and, even, drifting a bit. So I'm not sure how important the bucket list is, as long as your days bring more happiness than not. (Though you might take a bit of advice from Thom Pain and "love life and people with wild and new abandon" - but in a calm, sustainable way.)

For instance: Ted Kennedy. Here's someone who did get the tap on the shoulder letting him know that his time was almost up, and what did he do? Apparently, he went sailing a lot. Of course, he had a few other things on his plate (like, oh, I don't know, trying to create a system where all his fellow Americans would have decent, affordable health care - you know, little to-do items to cross off the list), but still, he made it a priority to continue with this simple pastime that he loved, something he'd done all his life, in the same waters he'd always known (in, may I point out, a truly gorgeous sailboat). He didn't feel the need to go out in search of new and bigger and more exotic adventures. He knew he had a certain amount of time left, and he just went on doing what had always made him happy.

{Antique botanical prints of "General Jacqueminot" rose, "Baroness Rothschild" rose, "Safrano" tea rose, and "Monthly" rose available from Lyons Ltd; bottom: Ted Kennedy's Mya}

6 days in NM: day 6

2009-08-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

We had a split decision on the merits of the last supper in New Mexico (dinner at Antonio's in Taos), and since mine was the nay vote, and it's my blog, I'm going to draw a tactful curtain over what I felt was a sub-par meal.

So my final thoughts on New Mexico aren't on the food (!!), but instead on the landscape. Coming from New England, I'm always amazed at the sheer vastness, and the palette, and the quality of the light in the West - and those mountains.

We got up early on Tuesday morning, while it was still pitch black, and drove the two hours to Albuquerque to catch our flight home. The drive was so lovely, with the light gradually emerging, a pink glow spreading over all the desert, and dense pillows of fog trapped along the base of the mountains. Despite my deep and absolute loathing of having to get up before dawn, I must admit that it was worth it.

The day before, we drove outside of Taos a little ways, and caught some beautiful vistas as the light came in under the clouds (the first and only cloudy day!). Hope you like.

6 days in NM: day 5 - Chimayo

2009-08-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

On the drive to Taos, we stopped at Chimayo to see the shrine and the sacred dirt, which was being avidly scooped up by believers.

The church itself is lovely - very rustic and rough. Nearby is a spot with the stations of the cross arranged to create a sort of mini-pilgrimage, and each has been decorated by visitors with handmade crosses, strings of Christmas lights, icons, and prayers.

Along one wall of the compound were some newer mosaics. I know it's sacrilegious, but this particular one looked so much like the South Park Jesus that I had to document it.

6 days in NM: days 5+6 - a referendum

2009-08-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the state motto of New Mexico is Crescit Eundo, or "Grow As It Grows."

Bor-ing. I have a much better suggestion: "Smothered in Green Chile."

It seems as if pretty much every restaurant serving New Mexican food uses the word "smothered" on the menu when it comes to chile. This translates into a platter of some astonishingly delicious food which looks a mess and tastes like heaven.

For instance, in addition to the Los Potrillos breakfast described earlier, there was lunch on Sunday at JoAnn's in Espanola, across the way from the Rock Christian Fellowship. I had pork tamales (my goodness, I love tamales) with rice and beans and a blanket of green chile, along with sopaipillas that didn't quite match up to The Pantry's.

Then, dinner last night at Joseph's Table here in Taos, where it was too dark to document my beet, goat cheese and pinon salad, or my buffalo cheeseburger with green chile, both of which were wonderful. (By the by, I believe that was my first buffalo meal, though I may have tasted it during my foodie mag days back in the '90s.)

And then there was breakfast today, at Taos Diner, a restaurant to which I give a big stamp of approval: scrambled eggs with chorizo, positively smothered in green chile, served with potatoes and fresh flour tortilla. If I lived in Taos, I would eat here - a lot.

And there's a convenient pawn shop next door, in case you're in desperate need of green chile but are short on cash.

I'll be starting an online petition regarding the new state motto. Keep your eyes peeled.

6 days in NM: day 4 - I'm almost embarrassed...

2009-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

...but we went back to Los Potrillos for dinner on Saturday. So in the span of four days in Santa Fe, we hit Los Potrillos three times, including twice in one day.

No regrets. I had to have the molcajete al pastor again, and this time we also ordered coctel de pulpo (chilled octopus served in a tomato/lime/cilantro sauce, with saltines) and a nopales (cactus) salad with avocado and cheese. I forgot how much I love coctels - I used to eat them in L.A., at a roadside stand on Lincoln Boulevard by Rose Ave called Mariscos, which also had fantastic fish tacos.

As you can see from the "After" photo, dinner was a success, thanks in part to a round of my favorite beer, Pacifico.

A commenter on an earlier post asked, in regards to my eating huevos rancheros for breakfast and at high-end Geronimo for dinner, if I'm bipolar. I was unaware that one is supposed to stick within one social category of dining; if so, I've been making gross errors of etiquette my entire life. I bring this up because the commenter will love this one: after dinner at Los Potrillos, we went to see La Traviata with Natalie Dessay at the gorgeous Santa Fe opera house. How's that for bipolar behavior?

6 days in NM: day 4 - Indian Market

2009-08-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, we were in town for Indian Market, which was an amazing experience - artists and craftspeople from all different tribes, selling beautiful pottery, blankets, paintings, carvings, beadwork, and so forth. The sun was brutal, but we persevered and wandered around for a few hours, nourished by our Potrillos breakfast, as well as a bag of delicious, fresh-out-of-the-fryer doughnuts.

I bought a few things - a retablo, a pottery bird, a present - and decided that of the pottery traditions, I like the Acoma the most. Unfortunately, the two pieces I liked the most were $2800 and $7000, so I decided to pass this time around.

Another future purchase, somewhere down the road, could be a nice ride like this one.

6 days in NM: day 4 - back to Los Potrillos

2009-08-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to mess with a good thing, so even though this is a quick trip to Santa Fe, we went back to Los Potrillos today, rather than trying some other place. This time, it was for breakfast, and it reinforced my conviction that living in Santa Fe is not an option for me because I would not be able to resist breakfasts like these, and they would eventually kill me.

However, in the meantime: Bring it on. I had chilaquiles (tortilla chips simmered in green chile sauce and topped with cheese) with scrambled eggs, pinto beans, outrageously delish fried potatoes, and a frosty mug of OJ. Yum. Gone.

In my earlier homage to Los Potrillos, I neglected to mention Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog, which is what sent me to the restaurant in the first place. Muchas gracias, Gil.

6 days in NM: day 3 - yes, more food

2009-08-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

First off, for those of you thinking that all I do is travel and eat, I'll have you know that I spent four hours yesterday afternoon at the Santa Fe Library, working away on a project for a client on deadline. Four hours - can you stand it?

Clearly, I needed sustenance after such a grueling day. We went to the highly recommended Cafe Pasqual's, which serves upscale Southwestern food. When will I learn that I never like places like this as much as I like places like Los Potrillos?

The place is quite funky, in that quirky way that some restaurants have that can seem a bit precious. But it's got a good vibe and friendly waitstaff, including our waiter, who turned out to be the wine buyer for the restaurant and was verging on giddy when I ordered a bottle off his list (a Lagaria riesling from Trentino that was absolutely wonderful) that clearly doesn't get a lot of action.

I started with hamachi ceviche that was perfectly fine, but not amazing. Then I had chard and zucchini enchiladas with red chile and cilantro rice; the chile was too bitter for me, the rice was kind of dry, and the filling was good but felt a bit eh.

It was a good, solid meal, in a nice spot, but - especially considering the price difference - I'll take Los Potrillos, thanks.

6 days in NM: day 3 - Reader, this is it

2009-08-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

I know it's shocking, but I actually skipped breakfast on Friday, but for a very good reason: a mani/pedi at the Inn at Loretto, which was très swish. Afterwards, I took my poor food-deprived self to my new favorite restaurant on the planet, Los Potrillos.

It's a no-frills local spot - looks like a Dairy Queen or Pizza Hut that's been reconfigured with a horse theme, and with a menu that's light years away from DQ or the Hut. For lunch, I threw caution to the winds and ordered molcajete al pastor: chopped marinated pork grilled with pineapple and onion, and served in a molcajete (typically used to make guacamole) with tortillas, pineapple salsa, roasted hatch chile, and grilled green onions. The best word to describe this glorious concoction is tasty. I couldn't eat it fast enough, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I had horchata alongside and greedily ordered a second glass, which nearly did me in. FYI, too much horchata can be risky.

But did I stop there? Hmm? Of course not. I absolutely was compelled to try the tres leches cake, which, as you can see, was a hit.

I have to say, despite the extraordinary amount of food that I put away, I felt great afterwards.

6 days in New Mexico: day 2 - earlier that day...

2009-08-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

I was so eager to relive my meal at Geronimo that I neglected to post about my afternoon. We went to the St Francis of Assisi cathedral, which had such a fascinating hodgepodge of iconography, from amazing primitive-style Stations of the Cross,

to altar paintings that looked almost like New England folk art,

to a Crucifixion scene above the confessionals that I bet scares people into some serious "Bless me Father for I have sinned" moments,

to a lurid plaster statue of Christ on the cross that I couldn't even bring myself to photograph (something about the wig really freaked me out).

We also went to the International Folk Art Museum, which has an incredible collection donated by Alexander Girard who, with his wife, traveled all over the world buying up every bit of folk art he could find. You can clearly see what inspired his own designs.

When we left the museum, the sky was doing this.

6 days in New Mexico: day 2 - dinner at Geronimo

2009-08-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

My "research" for my New Mexico trip consisted of not much more than an hour on Chowhound and some Googling. Reading between the lines of the Chowhound entries (a skill I picked up compiling blurbs for the New York Zagat guide), I whittled the list of restaurants of interest to about 10 - a mix of local cheap eats and Plaza-area upscale places.

Geronimo was the first place I made a reservation. The menu looked interesting and smart (sort of Frenchie Japanese), and I read good things from a variety of sources. It's definitely on the pricey side, but well worth it.

We sat on the porch, which was charming, especially as it was a typically lovely night - cool and breezy. Our waiter was delighted to talk about wine and helped steer me to the Drouhin 06 chablis, which was a superstar. (I may have to do a post down the line about the various types of wine conversations I've had with waiters and sommeliers, which range from completely satisfying and successful, like last night's, to unbelievably rude and hostile, like the coked-out sommelier at Babbo who asked Nicole and me, "What's it going to take for you to make up your mind?")

Anyway, the food was wonderful - appetizers of seared hamachi with salad and sticky rice (in a nice theatrical move, the hamachi arrives plated and raw, and then the server pours boiling hot sesame oil over it from a Japanese tea kettle, carefully shielding you with a napkin to prevent lifelong disfigurement), and a pear and butter lettuce salad that had ridiculously delicious miniature grilled cheese sandwiches made with bleu d'Auvergne.

Entrees were green miso sea bass with house-made ramen noodles and a rich lobster and miso broth, and quail with polenta cakes and marcona almonds. Both were delish.

The restaurant has that nice reassuring feel of a place that's got it down - friendly but not goofy waitstaff, comfy chairs, good timing over the course of the meal, lots of filling-of-water-glasses and replacing-of-cutlery and so forth.

Dessert was not possible, as we were stuffed, though I did make room for a glass of 20-year-old tawny port. I was going to have dessert wine, but the waiter talked me out of it by making a very good point: most restaurants that offer dessert wine by the glass don't go through it quickly enough to ensure that you'll get a glass that's still vivid and bright. Good to know. To prove his point, he brought tastes of an ice wine and the Beringer Nightingale, and you know what? He was right: both were pretty close to simple syrup. And as you can tell from the pic, the tawny (on the left) was a hit.

6 days in New Mexico: day 2 - why I can't live here

2009-08-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

First of all, it's so dry here that I can feel new wrinkles digging into my face as we speak.

Second, I would eat breakfasts like this every day, and I would be big as a house. This morning at the Pantry in Santa Fe - a local spot with the friendliest waitstaff ever - I polished off a trencher of huevos rancheros with scrambled eggs, green chile and cheese, along with potatoes, pinto beans, and tortillas. And for good measure, I ordered a sopaipilla, because I love fried dough, and because it's served with a squeeze bottle of honey.

I can barely move.

6 days in New Mexico: day 1

2009-08-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's not 25 days in Paris, but it's lovely and sunny here in Santa Fe, the Indian Market and the opera (La Traviata with Natalie Dessay!) are on the agenda for the weekend, along with a jaunt to Los Alamos, and let me just point out that the food options here are nothing to sneeze at.

Case in point: arrived yesterday afternoon in Albuquerque (a name that I can never say without a Bugs Bunny accent) and headed straight to Frontier, a 24-hour joint with outstanding Southwestern food. I had chicken enchilada with chopped green chile, served with a puffy fresh flour tortilla, along with a 32-ounce lemonade. I would show you a picture of all this deliciousness, but as readers of the Paris blog may remember, I often get so caught up in the excitement of the food arriving at the table that all thoughts of blogging and photographing fly right out the window.

However, I did manage to keep my wits about me last night, at an amazing meal at La Boca in Santa Fe. It's a tapas restaurant that definitely puts together some creative-but-not-ridiculous combinations, like the outstanding rare hanger steak with smoked sea salt caramel. You can't even imagine. We also had grilled baby artichokes with soft goat cheese, mint, and orange zest; perfect boquerones served with avocado (such a great pairing); canelones stuffed with crab and sea scallops and covered with a Manchego cream sauce; and a mushroom crostini with a fried egg that was just eh. Everything else was wonderful, including my dessert: fig-anise ice cream, which I ordered with a glass of rich, dark Pedro Ximenez that I promptly dumped over the ice cream in my own inspired moment of brilliant combination-making.

Even though we're only here for a few days, we may try to hit La Boca again, if only to try the paella, which was so gorgeous.

slings and arrows

2009-08-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

"...Buddhism teaches that it is not how much you know about yourself, it's how you relate to what you do know that makes a difference.... The common tendency, Buddhism teaches, is to use whatever is happening to reinforce a distinct feeling of self: to take everything very personally. The alternative, as discerned by the Buddha, is to hold that very feeling of self up for critical examination whenever it arises. How real is this feeling that drives us, which we ordinarily take so much for granted?"
- Mark Epstein, Psychotherapy Without the Self

I needed to call in all my fledgling Buddhist resources a couple weeks back, when I got pummeled by various commenters for a blog post that I never imagined would offend so. In my short but sweet blogging career (three months and counting), I've had a pretty charmed life; I'm perfectly aware that there are all sorts of people who love leaving nasty comments, or hyper-critical comments, or way-too-personal comments all over the web, yet I suppose it didn't occur to me that any of those comments would come my way. After all, it's not as if I'm writing about wise Latinas, or Skip Gates, or what I think should be done to Bill O'Reilly, or gay marriage (yay, Connecticut!), or any of those hot-button topics that get people so riled up.

At any rate, my (admittedly minor) brush with the Dark Side of the Internet turned out to be a (how you say?) teachable moment. As laughable as it might seem, I was stunned when the negative comments started rolling in, and my first instinct (as always, when faced with any sort of conflict) was "Retreat." In this case, I considered hiding the comments, or deleting the post, or shutting down the whole damn blog.

And from the very first criticism, I was plunged into self-doubt about the merits of the post. "I knew that post wasn't any good," I thought. "That was so stupid of me to put it up, just because I couldn't think of anything else. Stupid stupid STUPID. This whole blog is stupid. I'm totally making a fool of myself. I'm not doing this any more. I quit." Round and round it goes.

Back on Planet Earth... One of the aspects of my attempts to figure out who I am has been to examine how I react in difficult situations. As you can see, I tend to react very emotionally, right off the bat - typically with either self-righteous anger or panicky self-doubt, in each case usually followed by a definitive shutting down and shutting out. For the most part, I spend my life coasting along, fairly happy and stable, but it feels as if there's a black hole of panic and rage and fear right below me, into which I can plunge at any moment with only the tiniest of pushes.

It's helpful for me to remember that "emotional" is pretty much the opposite of "rational," so if I'm swamped by an intense and overwhelming emotional reaction, chances are I'm not going to be making the sharpest of decisions. So the goal is to try to step back in these situations, not do the first thing that pops into my mind (usually along the lines of "I'm going to kill him!" or "Get me out of here!"), and give myself a little space to observe and note and breathe. To practice mindfulness, as they say. Since I'm relatively new at this, it does sometimes take a while for me to find the zone - in the case of the blog attack, it took a couple days to get to any kind of rational territory, where I could think, "Shockingly, not everyone is going to like everything I write," or "It's possible that the post wasn't so great, but I imagine I'll survive," or "Well, not bad: I wrote something that actually provoked a bit of a debate." (I'm omitting the stage between the panic and the calm - the seething-with-rage stage - in which I came up with all sorts of snarky responses to the commenters, most based on the observation that I was being slammed for being mean and judgmental and not-funny, by a series of commenters who were really mean and judgmental and not-funny. Fortunately, some tiny voice of sanity told me to hold off on reacting until I had calmed down, at which point I left it alone. I admit that I did toss one comment into the trash, but, honestly, it was just so crass and ugly, and I did leave all the other ones up, and, after all, it's my blog. Mine.)

It's all a tempest in a teapot, I know, but the hope is that, by practicing mindfulness in these everyday contretemps, I'll be better prepared to handle the big stuff when it comes. As it so inevitably does.

soul food, the conclusion

2009-08-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I could be in the worst mood ever, and a good musical does just what it advertises: takes all my cares away. Putting together this list of my top-twenty movie musical numbers has given me quite a few hours of glee as I troll around YouTube, or debate with myself over just which Judy number is my fave, or pull yet another entry from the dim corners of my memory (which seems to be much better at retrieving song-and-dance numbers than it is at remembering people from my past including, I must sheepishly admit, old boyfriends), or plunk myself down in front of the telly to watch a Fred-and-Ginger classic for the umpteenth time.

I definitely cheated with this half of the list by including lots of runners-up, especially for my most beloved performers. Still, a few numbers didn't make my list, either for lack of space, or because of memory lapse: Jonathan points out that there's no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I neglected Dirty Dancing (how could I forget!), and then there's Rita Hayworth delivering "Put the Blame on Mame" from Gilda. James Wolcott puts in a plea for Ryan and Sharpay's number in High School Musical 3, but I admit to having never seen this undoubted masterpiece of (amateur) stage and screen, so I'll have to take his word for it.

Enough already with my eternal second-guessing. Here are my top ten.

10. "Rich Man's Frug," Sweet Charity

A fantastic number from a mediocre mess of a movie. Shirley MacLaine is, of course, charming, but the movie is just all over the place. But the "Rich Man's Frug"! Fosse packs so much whiz-bang choreography into this three-parter that your jaw just drops at the sheer inventiveness. Suzanne Charney (the lead dancer) does the most amazing things with her arms, and Ben Vereen struts his stuff in "The Big Finish." The first time I saw this movie, I made my friend Alex teach me "The Aloof," cigarettes included. Almost makes me want to start smoking again.

9. "Be Our Guest," Beauty and the Beast

I'm sorry, but it's true: This is one of the great movie musical numbers of all time. The sly homages (most obviously to Busby Berkeley and Fantasia), the wonderful tune (one of the last from Howard Ashman), the clever and charming lyrics (I particularly like "Life is so unnerving to a servant who's not serving"), and the late great Jerry Orbach, doing a delicious Frahnch accent - who can resist?

8. "Cabaret," Cabaret

Liza! I decided Liza with a Z didn't count as a movie musical, since it's really a concert; otherwise, "Bye Bye Blackbird" would have been very high on my list. But "Cabaret" - or, really, any of the numbers from this movie ("Money," "Wilkommen," "Maybe This Time") - is more than qualified to be here. In her Broadway show last year, Liza of course sang "Cabaret," with one small but significant change in the lyrics: "I made my mind up back in Chelsea / When I go, I'm not going like Elsie." From your mouth to God's ear, Liza.

7. "I Like Myself," It's Always Fair Weather

My choice for the obligatory Gene Kelly entry. Of course, one's first thought goes to "Singin' in the Rain," but maybe because I can't roller-skate to save my life, this is the number that leaves me gaping. (And wouldn't it be nice if the streets and sidewalks of New York were actually this smooth and clean?) Gene looks so handsome in his Fifties boxy black suit, skinny tie, and snappy fedora. Plus, he's got a mean arabesque.

6. "Barn Dance," Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I love this movie: the fabulous Johnny Mercer lyrics, the thrillingly charismatic Howard Keel, and Michael Kidd's genius choreography - along with the very young Russ Tamblyn (blue) and Jacques d'Amboise (green) as two of the seven brothers. "Barn Dance" is by far my favorite number in the film; Kidd creates a believable dance vernacular for these frontier folk, and also tosses in some great stunts and acrobatics for the boys.

5. "Finale (Love Is in the Air)," Strictly Ballroom

Take that, Barry Fife. No one can stop Scott Hastings when he's decided to do his own steps at the Pan-Pacific Championships. I challenge anyone - except maybe Evil Warlords like Kim Jong Il and Dick Cheney - to resist the urge to dance once "Love Is in the Air" takes over. I admit, I get a bit teary at this point.

4. "The Lady is a Tramp," Pal Joey

A stunning number from a not-so-stunning movie. Note the gorgeous framing of the shots of Frank with the band in the background, and note the lit cigarette resting on the side of Frank's piano - so cool! No wonder I smoked for years. I'm a lifelong Frank Sinatra fan, especially this period (late 1950s); he was still a cute skinny guy from Jersey, but had developed one of the great swinging styles of any musician, ever, and hadn't yet started his Vegas-era self-parody. Another beloved Frank number is High Society's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," a duet with the incomparable Celeste Holm, who, in my opinion, is far more appealing in this movie than Grace Kelly, who lands with a thud.

3. "The Man that Got Away," A Star Is Born

Judy, of course. Where to start, really - "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Meet Me in St. Louis? "Get Happy," from Summer Stock? "After You've Gone," from For Me and My Gal (oh, her face in that close-up! heart-breaking!)? "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," from You Know What? I chose this one, because it's a killer song, because Judy radiates confidence and joy, because she was at the top of her game, and because it swings.

2. "Small House of Uncle Thomas," The King and I

If anyone has any doubt that Jerry Robbins was a theatrical genius, please, go buy this DVD today (I couldn't find it online, malheureusement, but I can lend it to you), and watch this number. Buddha make a miracle! Praise to Buddha. Further proof of Jerry's genius, in this same movie, is "Shall We Dance," with the lovely Deborah Kerr and seductive Yul Brynner dancing (and Marni Nixon singing, BTW). There aren't any other Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals on my list, not because I don't adore these musicals (hello! Oklahoma? Carousel?), but because the movie versions are typically pretty insipid. I admit that I probably would have included South Pacific if it weren't for the fact that I saw the Broadway revival last year, and it has simply erased all previous versions from my mind.

1. "Pick Yourself Up," Swing Time

I could easily have made my entire top-twenty list out of Fred Astaire numbers, but if I had to limit myself to just one, it would be this one, from my fave Fred and Ginger. You've got a perfect Jerome Kern song, you've got Fred at first pretending to be a bad dancer, in the way that only the best dancers can do, you've got Ginger doing her best jaded gal act in the beginning, and then you've got the perfect symbiosis of two lovely, tap-tapping dancers, in the smoothest, most delightful choreography imaginable. Plus there's the back-up team of Helen Broderick, Victor Moore, and Eric Blore - a '30s comedy trifecta.

Then again, I just re-re-re-rewatched Top Hat, and "Isn't This a Lovely Day?" bowled me over; Ginger looks so jaunty in her riding togs. And then, from the same film, there's "No Strings" (where Fred dances Edward Everett Horton, Ginger, and his own self to sleep) and "Cheek to Cheek." I admit that I also love "Bojangles of Harlem" in Swing Time, despite the (I know, I know) blackface. Other Fred runner-ups for me are "I'm Old Fashioned" from You Were Never Lovelier; perhaps the only golf-inspired dance number in film history, "Since They Turned Loch Lomand Into Swing," from the bizarre Carefree; "A Shine on Your Shoes" and "Girl Hunt Ballet" from Band Wagon... Oh, who am I kidding: If Fred danced it, I loved it.

That's all, folks. Hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into what makes me get happy.

soul food, part one

2009-08-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

Okay, then! It never occurred to me that some readers would get so riled up about a couple of innocuous stories about me fighting the good fight against the forces of evil (aka selfish, self-obsessed people who think either they're important enough to hold up all their fellow subway passengers and then bully someone smaller than themselves, or that their "faux friendliness" [thanks to I Am Not Star Jones for her comment, which gave me this phrase] is just what an overworked, underpaid immigrant worker needs to turn her day around and that it's perfectly acceptable to be deliberately rude about someone's home). So in the interest of turning the page to a bright, cheery subject, I thought I would put together a list of my favorite movie musical numbers.

Notice that I did not say "the best movie musical numbers." This is my highly subjective list, though I did spend some time thinking about parameters. To me, a musical number in a movie is just that: a scene that involves the characters singing or dancing or, preferably, both, without much dialogue - the scene must be structured around the music (though for some reason, it didn't seem right to include ballet numbers; I'm not sure why, but this accounts for there being no mention of The Red Shoes here, when it's possibly my all-time favorite movie). This definition is broad enough that I can include a couple no-dancing numbers, and a couple no-singing numbers. Also, the movie itself doesn't have to be great, but the number must be, and it can't just be that it's a great song, or a great dancer - it has to just bowl you over altogether.

The fatal flaw in my list is that I limited myself to one entry per star (and per movie), otherwise the list might have ended up all Fred, or all Judy. To appease myself and the musical gods, I've included honorable mentions with some of the entries (couldn't help myself, really).

I originally was going to have a list of 10, but that dream went all to pieces in a matter of moments, so I've put together a list of 20, which I'll post in two parts. I've included clips throughout, but as we all know, online clips have a tendency to disappear; if one of the links is a dud, please forgive me, and let me know.

There's a lot of entertainment below, so get yourself a cup of cocoa, and settle in. Without further adoooooo, in very rough (verging on arbitrary) ascending order:

20. "You Can't Stop the Beat," Hairspray

John Travolta as Edna Turnblad, first burning Velma Von Tussle, followed by his astonishing Tina Turner imitation... nevermind James Marsden's fab moves (put to better use in "The Nicest Kids in Town" - I'm still trying to master that funkiness) and Queen Latifah's big moment... The movie isn't perfect, by any means, but this number is a winner.

19. "I'd Do Anything," Oliver!

The songs in this movie are so damn catchy: "Food, Glorious Food," "Consider Yourself," "Who Will Buy," "Be Back Soon." Any one could have been on my list, but I chose this one because it features both Jack Wild (the Artful Dodger) and Ron Moody (Fagin), as well as the angelic-looking and angelic-sounding Mark Lester as little Oliver.

18. "I'm Going Back," Bells Are Ringing

Judy Holliday, comedic genius. Her timing, her expressions, her movement - and that voice. My favorite Judy Holliday moment is the beginning of Born Yesterday, when she's onscreen for three minutes, looking rather sleek and sophisticated, before delivering her first line, a pure Brooklyn "Whaaaaaat!" However, except for a little humming and sashaying, she's not working her musical chops in Born Yesterday, so instead, we have this eleventh-hour number from the Styne/Comden/Green delight.

17. "Adelaide's Lament," Guys and Dolls

Everyone always moans that this movie is so miscast. Meanwhile, I think both Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit and Marlon Brando as Skye Masterson are completely charming and natural, and Marlon even pulls off his big number ("Luck Be a Lady") with a lot of style. But even so, they can't top Vivian Blaine (another brassy broad, like Judy Holliday) as Miss Adelaide, doing a little pop psychology (courtesy Frank Loesser) to figure out why she and Nathan aren't yet married, after their 14-year engagement. The accent alone... and the medicine cabinet... (Note that in this clip - the only one I could find - the song doesn't start till about seven minutes in.)

16. "Ain't It the Truth," Cabin in the Sky / That's Entertainment III

In one of the great editing room blunders of the twentieth century, Lena Horne's bubble bath number was cut from Cabin in the Sky for being too risque. The fact that this amazingly talented performer was in fewer than ten movies is also a sin. I couldn't find a video of this number anywhere, but if That's Entertainment III is going to be on TCM or PBS, set your DVR, and enjoy.

15. "Down Argentine Way," Down Argentine Way

Speaking of underused performers... There's not much footage available that shows off the amazing talent of the Nicholas Brothers, but they do have this great number in a mediocre film. Their tap style is so completely theirs, and so thrilling - makes me feel lucky that some studio guy somewhere had the brilliant idea to include this number, and then the wisdom not to cut it in post-production.

14. "Think Pink," Funny Face

This number is a camp classic, with the Alexey Brodovitch-inspired fashion spreads, the legion of Quality Magazine editors in their Dior and Givenchy ensembles, and Kay herself, in an obvious homage to / parody of Diana Vreeland. Kay Thompson: Not only does she go and write one of the best "children's books" ever (Eloise), but she was a cabaret phenomenon as well; no wonder Liza Minnelli decided to do an entire show last year as a tribute to Kay (her godmother). This is old school show-biz star power. Watch and learn.

13. "With a Little Bit of Luck," My Fair Lady

I was tempted by the "Ascot Gavotte," as I love that song's blaséness (not to mention the over-the-topness of the Cecil Beaton costumes) and often quote the line "I have never been so keyed up," but Stanley Holloway is just too irresistible here. Like Kay Thompson, he's a pro, and attention must be paid. Also, considering my current career status ("funemployment"), I support the song's general philosophy toward the idea of work, introduced by Alfred P. Doolittle with this keeper of a line: "I used to that sort of thing once, just for exercise. Not worth it - takes up your whole day!"

12. "Ya Got Trouble," The Music Man

There are a lot of problems with this movie, namely Shirley Jones (the woman managed to suck the life out of the movie versions of some best musicals of our time), Buddy Hackett, "Ronny" Howard with an irritating lisp, and "Shipoopi." But then there's Robert Preston (also irresistible in Victor Victoria). Try to watch this one without smiling like a fool.

11. "Dance at the Gym," West Side Story

Of all the theatrical choreographers, Jerry Robbins is the one who most consistently thrills me. I could (and do) watch his work over and over and over again. Pauline Kael, in one of the great mis-hits of her career, called the choreography "simpering, sickly romantic ballet." Oh, come on. "Dance at the Gym" simpering? I don't think so. (Meanwhile, the woman goes on and on about Singin' in the Rain, which, I'm sorry, is all toothpaste and Technicolor.) And it's not the only fabulous set piece in the film: there's the opening sequence, and "America," and "Gee, Officer Krupke," and "Cool." And George Chakiris... he blows poor bland Richard Beymer out of the water in both the charisma and dancing categories. Then there's Russ Tamblyn, and Rita Morena.... *sigh*

This is a truly complex and character-revealing number, all told: the competition between the Jets and the Sharks at the dance (MC'ed by sad-sack John Astin as Glad Hand), where Bernardo and Riff and the rest are heart-breakingly alive and joyful, and then the dream sequence, when Tony and Maria first meet. I'm a sucker for the way real life comes back into focus at the end, intruding on Tony and Maria's somewhere.

{Coming up next: my top ten! Can you stand it?}

It's a tough town, kid

2009-07-25T04:12:00.000-07:00

Well, my rooster story brought about such an entertaining set of comments from you all, I've been trying to think of other topics that would encourage more such sharing of amusing anecdotes. I was coming up empty until the other day, at the nail salon, when I was reminded of one of my favorite genres: New York City wisecracks. There are eight million stories in the naked city, and I bet a good seven million of them involve snappy, snarky comebacks. Life in New York - piled on top of each other as we are - can involve a lot of day-to-day conflict, especially the verbal kind; the upside is that a not-so-pleasant encounter can provide the opportunity for one of life's more satisfying accomplishments: coming up with a perfect witty response that psychically destroys your opponent. (Of course, the response must be conceived of and deployed on the spot, rather than later that night, when you're brushing your teeth and still fuming over That Jerk, and I Can't Believe He Said That, and Man I Should've Let Him Have It.)

I've already shared with you one of my more pleasing encounters in this vein, but believe me: I've got a million of 'em. For instance, a few years ago, I'm waiting in a subway that's been idling in the station for a good few minutes (god only knows why, but probably something to do with the ever-mysterious "train traffic ahead," an "explanation" that only comes over the intercom on a train that I waited ten minutes for in the first place, so I know there's no train traffic ahead, buddy, don't try that line on me.... But that's a different tirade, for another time). So anyway, the train is sitting there, doors open, and I'm standing in the doorway, trying to concentrate on my New Yorker and not start fuming about the friggin' delay, when I hear a guy tearing down the stairs, calling out, "Hold the door! Hold the door!"

I have opinions on holding the door, whether it's the subway, or an elevator, or whatever, which can basically be summed up as, "Why should we all be delayed just so you can squeeze on?" So I keep reading my magazine, even though I'm standing in the doorway closest to the staircase, and before the guy can make it onto the train, the bell rings and the doors shut right in his face. I can feel him glaring at me, so I just keep my head down and wait for the train to pull away.

Instead, the doors pop back open (probably because someone in another car was holding the damn door), and the guy steps in next to me. The doors shut, the train starts up, and the guy stands there, glaring and glaring and glaring at me, while I continue to stare at my magazine. If this were a cartoon, I'd be nervously whistling.

Then he says, "Yo, why didn't you hold the doors?"

I pretend to ignore him, though I can feel my face getting a little hot.

"Yo, why didn't you hold the doors?" Now he's leaning right into me, and people are glancing over, so I have to say something. I give him a look and, in a Brooklyn-inspired smart-alecky tone of voice, say, "I don't speak English." I then return my attention to my (English-language) New Yorker, while his mind totally short-circuits and the guy next to me snickers. La la la.

Then there's yesterday, in my favorite nail place (open 24 hours a day! 365 days a year! yay, New York!). I get myself all comfy in the pedicure throne and dive into The New Yorker (my standard NYC reading material, as you've no doubt surmised) while Ivana (per her name tag, though I wonder if this is the name on her Korean birth certificate - but no matter) goes to town on my feet. After a minute, I become aware of the two women sitting a couple thrones down...

{A warning: as with my snobby post about the hordes of tourists at the Louvre, this anecdote involves my intolerance of and hostility toward the tourist genus, this time toward a certain type of all-American tourist one often finds in New York. Sorry if it offends, but in the spirit of sharing all my innermost thoughts and feelings and dreams with you, Dear Reader, here goes.}

...Back to the salon. The women are clearly a mother/daughter team, wearing the classic "I'm not from here" outfit of the summertime tourist: baggy tee shirt, casual way-too-short shorts, big white sneakers, white socks (this is not the beach, people! this is New York! dress accordingly!). The mother is enjoying herself by rather aggressively chatting up every employee in the joint - any time one of the salon gals walks by, the mother is all, "Why hello! What a cute shirt! You don't smile enough! You have such a pretty smile!" I stick my nose more deeply into my magazine and try not to be overly judgmental.

But then, she went Too Far. One of my pet peeves (yes, another one) is that people who don't live in places like New York and Los Angeles (the two spots where I've spent my adult life) seem to think it's perfectly okay to complain about these cities to the people who live there, as if this isn't deeply insulting and shockingly rude. I'm not sure if this is a case of protesting too much out of insecurity and low self-esteem, or just the kind of smug superiority that some non-urban people seem to feel, as if it's somehow admirable to not be able to make it in the big city.

Anyway, one of the salon gals makes a little joke with the mother about her in-your-face chattiness. The mother, delighted to be so encouraged, says, "Oh, I'm always just as friendly as friendly could be! Not like the people here. We're from Erie, Pennsylvania, and in Erie, people say please and thank you, and we smile and say hello when we pass someone on the street."

I can't hold back. I turn to her and say (again with the Brooklyn-inspired inflection), "Well, I'm from New York, and in New York, we don't make random rude comments about other people's hometowns."

Of course, that's completely not true, as New Yorkers are always making disparaging comments about Anyplace That Isn't New York, but that's beside the point. The woman kept her trap shut for the rest of her pedicure, and I returned to my magazine, just so delighted with myself.

I would like to point out that if people in places like Erie, Pennsylvania, were so damn sweet and friendly, all the misfit toys growing up in such towns wouldn't feel the need to flee to places like New York as soon as they could afford the bus fare.

I would also like to point out that I didn't say the first thing that popped into my mind, which wasn't quite so clever, but would have been much more satisfying: "Honey, if you don't like it, get the F out. You won't be missed."

Jungle Red, darling.

{top: poster from the 1974 "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three"; bottom: Rosalind Russell (apparently a cousin of mine!) in "The Women"}

city slicker

2009-07-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of nature in my background. I was born and raised in the suburbs, and have spent my adult life first in Los Angeles, then in New York. To be sure, my Connecticut town was something of a wilderness, in a Mean Girls / Pretty in Pink way, and lord knows that the law of the jungle rules in L.A. and New York, but in terms of outright unspoiled nature, my experience is mostly limited to a very few vacations.

Still, for some reason, I tend to think of myself as an outdoorsy person, someone who could easily win Survivor, hands down. This despite the fact that (a) being in the woods makes me think of Blair Witch Project, and being in the water makes me think of Jaws; (b) I know basically nothing about flora and fauna, other than various ways to kill a cockroach; and (c) I'm a total princess about things like nice pillows and a good deli and 24-hour everything.

For instance. During my daily walk through the woods today, up here in my weeklong country idyll, I saw this fellow:

Now, if I were a nature girl, I probably would have froze and noted his behavior, while my train of thought went something like this:

"The beaver is North America's largest rodent and is built for life in the water. Adults can be up to four feet long and weigh over 60 pounds. The beaver has webbed hind feet and a large, flat, nearly hairless tail. It uses its tail to help maintain its balance when it is gnawing on trees. It will also slap its tail against the water to signal danger or to warn away predators.... Beavers live near rivers, streams, ponds, small lakes and marshes. They build lodges of sticks and mud on islands, on pond banks or on lake shores. Beaver dams are domed-shaped and can be as high as ten feet tall.... The beaver has a specialized digestive system that helps it digest tree bark.... Beavers mate for life, but if one mate dies, the other one will find another mate.... Beavers can live to be 20 years old."*

Instead, my thought process went something like this:

"Holy shit, what is that? Is it a dingo? Oh, wait, it's a beaver! Oh, how totally cute! Just like Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe... He was so brave... Edmund was such a jerk in that book; I don't think I ever forgave him, even in the other books, when he was supposedly all noble and kingly.... Selling Mr. Tumnus and his own siblings down the river just for some Turkish Delight.... I'm still not quite sure what Turkish Delight is.... Isn't it weird that 'sweetmeats' are candies, and 'sweetbreads' are meat?... Ooo, that reminds me of that time at Craft, when I had the amazing sweetbreads, and the giant scallops, and the potato gratin in its own adorable little copper skillet, and that fierce Pinot Noir...."

As you see, in less than thirty seconds, my thoughts are no longer centered on communing with nature in the woods, but instead are off having a mad feast at a high-end Manhattan restaurant, and the beaver is long gone.

Perhaps the definitive proof of my inherent city mouse status came a few years back, when I was staying with friends in their farmhouse in upstate New York. It wasn't a working farm, but they did have some sheep (basically pets), and a hen house filled with chickens who laid the most delicious eggs, and two roosters: one fenced in with the chickens, and one roaming the land.

One morning, on her way out the door, my hostess let me know that one of the hens was sick, and, in the evil ways of the fowl world, the other chickens had ganged up on her. "They'll basically peck her to death, poor thing, so I took her out of the coop and stuck her in the barn."

How ghastly, I thought; how very Tippi Hedren.

Not much later, I looked out the window and saw the rooster-at-large heading into the barn. "That little shit," I thought; "he's going after that hen."

Sure enough, when I went out for a recon mission, I found the poor hen cowering in a corner while the rooster came at her. I proceeded to yell authoritatively at the rooster, and shooed him out of the barn. But as soon as I turned away, the rooster came right back in, very aggressive, and very determined to bully the hen. By now, I hated him, deeply, and so I shooed him away more forcefully, kicking at him a bit, and stomping my feet.

And then - sweet Jesus - he turned on me, spreading his wings, making a god-awful noise, and rushing straight at me like a bat out of hell.

I screamed and jumped back, and (and I thought this only happened in cartoons) I literally jumped right out of my shoes. Granted, they were flipflops, but still.

I fled into the house - barefoot and terrified, my flipflops left behind in the grass - slammed the door behind me, and peered out the window to see the rooster arrogantly strutting back into the barn to assert his now-uncontested dominance over the females of the farm. Sheer humiliation.

Can't you hear the crotchety old coot, undoubtedly played by Walter Brennan in the Hollywood version of this story, cackling and scratching his stomach and chortling, "Damn city folk; can't even rustle a rooster; scared her plum right out of her shoes."

(Just in case you're worried about the hen: Once safely back in the kitchen, I calmed myself, found a big broom, basically pummeled the rooster out of the barn, and tucked the the traumatized chicken away in a safe, rooster-free corner. Then I retrieved my flipflops, got in my car, and drove off to the nearest mall for the day, where I bought a ridiculously expensive bag, to remind myself that I do indeed have skills, even if they're more about excellent taste and credit card usage than animal husbandry, or whatever.)

My nemesis - can't you hear him? "Listen, boy, to what I'm tellin' you: She jumped clear out of her shoes! That girl's as timid as a canary at a cat-show."

{*Beaver info (the science-y, fact-based stuff, not the C.S. Lewis stuff) courtesy NatureWorks from New Hampshire Public Television.}

my vision quest

2009-07-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

At lunch the other day, a friend and I were talking about theater and ballet and books (and what else is there, pray?), and he brought up two of his favorite works: Waiting for Godot, which he had just seen on Broadway, and which I know well, and Don Quixote, which was the subject of a print that he had just bought, and which I’ve never read but am familiar with thanks to the ballet and Man of La Mancha* and general cultural osmosis. “That’s an interesting combo,” I said to him. “You must like the idea of the quest.”

“You’re right,” he said, surprised. “That always appeals to me.”

“You’re into the journey,” I said.

Journeys, quests, progress, process… These are subjects that have occupied me quite a bit in the past few months. For the past year, I’ve been in between – in between homes, in between jobs, in between any sort of settled routine. I haven’t had the kind of well-defined life where you can easily answer questions like, “What do you do?” or “Where do you live?” or “How do you spend your time?” This is a tough state to be in – or rather, it’s a tough state to stay in; my impulse is to find something, anything, quick; to arrive somewhere and say, “Here it is; here I am.”

As I write this, I’m sitting in my friend Rachael’s home in upstate Connecticut. She and her husband and their two children are visiting family on the West Coast and very generously offered to let me stay here in their absence, along with their crazy cat, the aptly named Bongo (who just came tearing into the house with a feather in his mouth, looking incredibly satisfied with himself). It’s a lovely spot – quiet and green and remote (no cell phone signal!) – and I’m hoping to get some writing done during my week here.

The past two weeks, I was staying in another borrowed home, this one a gorgeous apartment on West 72nd, taking care of (i.e., being highly entertained by) two adorable kittens and enjoying being in New York. In fact, I kept thinking how nice it would be to be back in the city, right smack in the middle of everything, with theater tickets and sushi delivery and plans every night.

Then again, on the drive up here, I found myself looking at For Sale signs, wondering what it would be like to live a quiet life on a river in Kent, preferably in a small old house with a porch and lots of trees, having people over to dinner and watching old movies and enjoying the seasons.

But the truth is, neither of these visions is an option right now, and if I focus too much on that blunt fact, I can pretty easily spin out into “Oh my god what am I doing??” territory.

Instead, I’m trying to truly understand that being in between isn’t the same as being nowhere, that in fact I have a lot of momentum in my life, and a lot of possibilities. And more than that, my quixotic quest feels infinitely more fruitful and rewarding than much of my adult life to date, where I’ve had the good job and the nice apartment and yet felt stuck and stagnated.

Because really, when do we feel most alive? I’ll answer that: At times of change and movement – a new job, a new home, a new love, even a crisis. These are the times when we peel back some layers, find new aspects of ourselves (good and bad), make new connections, perhaps feel closer to what might be called our essence.

Right now, what I’m trying to grasp is what I told my friend at lunch: It’s all about the journey. There is no destination, really. I’m not going to arrive somewhere and set up camp and be done. Or at least, I hope not. By living my life very much day to day right now, and trying to enjoy what’s going on without looking forward with either dread or expectation, I feel much more settled than I have in the past, even though, on the surface, there ain’t nothing much settled about my situation. I’m trying to experience the moment, rather than trying to capture it, or replicate it, or fret about its passing.

This train of thought brought to mind a passage from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, where Clarissa is looking back on a youthful summer of romance and possibility. The gist of this passage has always stuck with me and reminded me (when I let it) to pay attention to what is right in front of me, right at this moment. Because, ultimately, my friends, that’s all we got.

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book…. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

*In fact, maybe I’ll take Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “The Impossible Dream” as my new call to arms.

Top: Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, by Gustave Doré; bottom, my upstate welcome committee, tonight, 7pm.

on the road in June

2009-07-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

One of the consequences of my big life disruption of a year ago is that I don't really have a home. Most of my belongings are in storage in the Bronx somewhere (at least, I hope they are; there's always the chance my mover sold everything last June and has since been happily depositing my monthly fees in the meantime), and I still feel too up in the air to make any sort of long-term housing decision; even a three-month sublet seems like waaaaaaaaay too much commitment right now.

So I'm always on the prowl for trips and visits - hence the 25 days in Paris, the two months in Mexico at the end of last year, and, now, the house-sitting stints and road trips.

In fact, I counted up the number of places I've stayed in the past year, and the grand total is 21 - not bad for a jobless gal!

June saw a number of excursions, in various locales: from top, Harlem, Morningside Park, a view from Skinner Mountain in Massachusetts, a view from West 72nd Street, post-storm on a harbor in Connecticut, and still life with Henry on the Upper West Side.

"Something Precious"

2009-07-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

"He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds - for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight."
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Last week saw a significant anniversary in my life, an occasion for which I believe there are no gift guides or Hallmark cards: one year sans full-time job. Yes, it was one year ago that I exited my dingy below-ground office, disgruntled and angry and anxious, and feeling as if I'd been peeled raw by the humiliations and aggravations of the past months/years. (Perhaps my fragile emotional state at that moment can be partly attributed to the debilitating hangover I was suffering, thanks to my extremely fun going-away party the night before. But only partly.)

As with any anniversary (other than Birthdays-Ending-in-Five-or-Zero, which make me cower and avert my eyes), I'm using the occasion to check in, see where I am in relation to the year previous, try to figure out what direction I'm pointed in, and valiantly attempt to determine if it's the right direction - the proverbial taking stock. And I have to say, I'm quite pleased with the stock on hand.

First and foremost: I'm not miserable! How about that! I don't feel stuck or trapped, or filled with dread at the start of the workweek (what workweek?), and I no longer have the feeling that I am without options. So, even excluding all other criteria, it's been a very successful year.

I can also see how my thinking has unfolded over the course of the past twelve months, how a sense of where I want to go in my life has gradually cohered, thanks to a whole slew of events and a rather stop-and-start train of thought. I feel open now - emotionally, yes, but even in a physical sense, as if my ribs have unknit themselves and my chest has opened up. I remember years ago, I was in San Francisco with a friend who had lived in that city for quite some time. I kept pointing out things that caught my eye: a particular sliver of view, an old-school sign, a building painted an oddly arresting color. Finally he said, "Siobhan, I've never seen any of this stuff. You're a noticer." I think I'd lost that capacity in recent years - it's as if I were just hurrying along, head down, brow furrowed and all that. In the past year, I've started noticing things again. I must be standing up straighter, looking up and around, not just focused inward on those dark and stormy thoughts.

And I have plenty of opportunities to look around, to stop and smell the proverbial daisies. I have a lot of unstructured time these days, the kind of time that makes some (employed) people shudder and say, "Oh god, aren't you bored?"

Bored? Bored? I'll tell you what's boring: trying to kill time at a job you hate, where there's no momentum, no creativity, where in fact momentum and creativity are routinely quashed. It's not that I'm so madly active now, but it's inactivity by choice, thank you, not enforced inactivity, or worse, enforced activity of the pointless and menial variety. Now, if a glimmer of boredom appears on the horizon, I can either pop up and find something to do, or I can kind of look at the potential boredom, ponder it, poke at it, see what it brings up. Solipsistic, yes, but it's not as if I'm inflicting my solipsism on anyone else (other than you, a little bit), whereas sometimes it seems to me that nine-to-five life is all about someone inflicting their fetishes and neuroses and paranoias on anyone in the near vicinity.

To go on just a bit more about my fascinating states of boredom: what they evoke for me, more than anything, is the boredom of childhood - an afternoon with nothing to do, no one around, a time when I could just futz around my room, looking at my things, reading bits of books, talking to my cat, lying on my bed and daydreaming. Which is perhaps why the above quote from Brideshead jumped out at me when I was watching the series last weekend (for the umpteenth time). Charles Ryder and I have very different situations and circumstances, but like him, I feel that I've had an epiphany (not so much a lightening-bolt epiphany, but instead a rather drawn-out and prolonged epiphany, but an epiphany nonetheless) that has brought my past rushing up to me, making years gone by more immediate and relevant than my recent history. The metaphor of an incessant static being silenced resonates with me: it's as if now that I don't have a constant buzz of anxiety and fear and low-level panic, I can tune into another richer, more meaningful station - some sort of core self that is helping me find my bearings right now.

Among these bearings: I'm being reminded that there are alternatives between full-time office job and no work at all; that there are more soul-satisfying ways for me to live than I have in the past, oh, 15 years; that work can involve creativity in ways other than trying to find new tactics for negotiating office politics. And it's the reconnection to my distant past that is responsible, I believe, for my learning these lessons. It's as if, once the wireless in my head was switched off, I could slowly settle down, in the sense of coming to rest and letting the extraneous stuff drift away, and see what's left.

As a reminder of what was evoked for Charles in that moment cited above (and also just because that first episode is so painfully heartbreaking and gorgeous), let's let Sebastian wrap it up today.

avoiding the "Well, how did I get here?" syndrome

2009-06-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe because it's my favorite genre these days, but I've been hearing a lot of "I was successful but unhappy so I quit my job to follow my dream" stories. The lovely thing about these stories is that no matter how insane the decision looks on paper (i.e., bagging enormously lucrative advertising job complete with fat expense account and prime corner office to enroll in cooking school in the hopes of working 60 hours a week as a line cook, making $15k/yr salary while getting yelled at by Chef), no one ever seems to regret taking this step.

I've done Part One of this process - I quit the hateful job that was making me a miserable slug - but I'm still working on Part Two - figuring out my dream, and going for it. (Though sometimes I worry that, actually, I've found my dream, and it involves lots of reading, traveling, hanging out, and going to the movies, none of which seem to be paying much these days.) Over the past couple of months, however, I've been connecting a lot of dots and feel (finally!!) that I'm moving forward - still not quite sure toward what, but it does feel like progress of a sort. I've been tentatively thinking about making some sort of career as a writer, and I'm not talking press releases and PowerPoint. I've received a lot of support from various corners, and I'm at a point in my life where I can actually hear the encouraging words and not discount them as I would have in the past ("Oh, that's nice of her to say that about my writing, but really, anyone could do it"; or "Well, okay, so what I wrote isn't half bad, but what are the odds I could actually get published?"). Also, I have plenty of role models right now.

For example. Last week, during what was supposed to be a business-type meeting (I say "business-type" because I no longer have actual hard-core business meetings, thank you very much), David and I digressed into a major discussion of "Vocation, Finding one's." David has the classic narrative of the genre: turned his back on a big-shot career as a commercial photographer, went to film school, and ultimately found his calling as an artist, creating intimate, powerful works that connect deeply with their audience. I get the sense that he sees his work and his path very clearly, and the joy and self-confidence and contentment that he radiates are so strong, he can't help but inspire those of us still flailing about in the murky depths.

It takes a lot of courage and faith, I believe, to make such a drastic change, and getting past the fear of what others will think is one of the biggest challenges. After all, following a dream along these lines usually means freaking someone out - a parent, a spouse, a lending institution. A few years back, as one of the many, many, many things I did to try to figure out my life, I went on an Outward Bound sea-kayak trip in the Sea of Cortez - 10 days of paddling around, sleeping on beaches, and (rather to my surprise) organized soul-searching. I didn't delve into the "sharing" as much as I probably should have (not my cup of tea, though I applaud those who went all out and shared like mad), but there were still some deeply resonant moments. At one point, one of the trip leaders read us a list of qualities you need in order to find and follow your own path, and there was one that, for me, rose above self-help treacle: "You must have the courage to disappoint the ones you love." Yowza.

Perhaps one of the reasons it's been so difficult for me to find my path is that there's constantly been a checklist of people I feel I must please, people whose voices I can hear whenever I'm making a big (or even semi-big) decision. It's bad enough when these people are criticizing me inside my head; if one of them questions my choices in real life, I get flustered, and it's difficult for me to stay centered on my (typically wishy-washy) convictions. Nowadays, however, I do feel I'm better equipped to disconcert friends and family with my crazy schemes ("I'm going to Mexico on Sunday!") without getting knocked off track, and I'm less worried about making mistakes and getting a load of "I told you so" down the road.

Because, Dear Readers, if I've learned one thing and one thing only during this process, it's that the big risk doesn't lie in recklessly chasing the dreams of your heart (even the vague and indistinct ones); the big risk is sticking to the safe, easy, well-trod path and realizing much later that you missed out, and then there you are, sitting up late at night, nursing a scotch and listening over and over to Miss Peggy Lee sum it all up for you.

New York's newest-latest hotspot

2009-06-18T06:52:00.000-07:00

OK, ignoring the fact that I saw a very big and very speedy rat the other night, running up the stairs from the subway toward me, I've been having a great time in New York the past couple of weeks. I'm loving "my" Harlem apartment, I'm getting stuff done, and I'm having all sorts of fun social events. And I can avoid the things that were making me miserable a year ago, before I threw in the proverbial towel: crowds of commuters, long late-night waits on grungy subway platforms, my dreary basement office, my job.

Plus, I don't have to lug. I loathe lugging. Trudging home from the grocery store, lugging three or four heavy bags, climbing up the endless stairs to my walk-up apartment - let's just say that at those moments, my life didn't much resemble my childhood visions of life in New York, visions I mainly based on the various glossy white hotel rooms in the Ginger Rogers / Fred Astaire movies. (May I please at least sleep in that bed at some point in my life, even if I never own it?)

My life will never have the glamour quotient of a Ginger Rogers bedtime ensemble, but these days, at least I can travel light: wallet, phone, lipstick, keys, magazine, camera. And instead of rushing to and fro, I can wander, if I like, and let the serendipity factor kick in.

For instance, after our uni extravaganza the other night, Nicole and I ambled over toward the Hudson and found ourselves at one of the entrances to the newly opened High Line. Up we went, and proceeded to be completely undone by the gorgeousness of the setting, the landscaping, the design, the views, The Standard (please may I get drinks here very very soon? and maybe move in?). The High Line is a unique urban space/event that has been instantly embraced by New Yorkers always on the lookout for a new outdoor playground. It's like The Gates, only permanent, and without Jeanne-Claude and her wack hairdo.

It's also quite the mini architecture tour. Along with The Standard, you've got Frank Gehry's building on West 18th, a pair of crazy glow-in-the-dark townhouses, the cool pair of new buildings on West 23rd - and apparently more to come.

I was also struck by the lighting on the High Line; the various ways the plantings, benches, and views were illuminated (or not) was quite fascinating in and of itself.

We sat around for a while, doing some serious people-watching (by which I mean, of course, that we made snide comments about various passers-by, like the couple with the matching frizzy gray nimbuses of hair, straight out of an Edward Koren cartoon). Of the woman in the worst of the unfortunate Friday-night-in-the-Meatpacking-District outfits, Nicole had one word: "Strumpet."

The War of the Worlds, 2009

2009-06-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

ANNOUNCER: Wait a minute, the — the enemy's now in sight above the Palisades: five — five great machines. First one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading — wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook.... Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others.

— Orson Welles, "The War of the Worlds," Mercury Theatre Original Radio Broadcast, October 30, 1938

{pic: The Standard Hotel, at the High Line, Chelsea, NYC}

it's just too good to be true...

2009-06-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

...and yet it's true.

You know when you've got a situation that just seems dreadful - where you're so uncomfortable, or frightened, or doomed - and then a ray of light pierces the clouds and you come out on top?

Well, let me give you a couple examples.

As I've already mentioned not once but twice in my short blogging career, I do not like being stuck behind slow-moving people on a city sidewalk. In one such incident a couple years back, I could not get around two teenage girls who were meandering along, holding up the droves of busy New York pedestrians (i.e., me) who were actually trying to get somewhere. I finally managed to squeak past, brushing up against one of them as I did so. She got huffy, and did that snarky gasp thing that teenage girls do when they're implying that they've been grievously wronged. I thought, "Just keep moving, Siobhan; don't engage."

But then: Junior Miss said, in classic teenage-girl bitchy voice, "Um, hello? There's a word? It's 'Excuse me'?"

I couldn't resist. I turned around and said, "That's two words."

That's what I'm talking about. This could have been an irritating situation that put me in a bad mood for the entire day, and instead, here I am years later, still chortling over it.

The impetus for this little reminiscence was an email I got yesterday, from a man I briefly dated a while back. We had a terrible fight - well, actually, we had an ugly scene where he told me all my faults and issues and shortcomings, and I left. That was five months ago, no contact since then, no need to ever speak again, let's all just move on.

I get an email from him yesterday morning, out of the clear blue sky, that was basically a continuation of his rant. As Liz Lemon would say, "What the what?" I was so pissed and upset, and getting ready to stew over it all day, and then I re-read it, and out shone that ray of light I mentioned above.

One of the various shortcomings he assigned to me, living in Crazy Land as he does, is that I apparently boast and brag about being smart (as if!!). Part of his email yesterday was to let me know that I'm not as smart as I think I am.

And then the last line of his email (and I kid you not):

"I am smarter then you."

{brief pause to let my sweet, sweet triumph sink in}

Okay, so I know I can't reply to the email, especially when he's clearly crazier than I suspected and I don't want to push him over the edge, but oh how I want to send just one little line:

"It's 'smarter than you,' Genius Boy."

Instead, I will savor my karmic victory by sharing it with you.

"Giselle, c'est moi"

2009-06-16T04:54:00.001-07:00

Jocelyn invited me to what was apparently the ballet event of the season. Since I used to work in the ballet world (if I were to write a memoir of my time in that job, it would be called "Kooks & Freaks: My Life in Dance"), and I know how the inhabitants of that world can work themselves up into a grand tizzy in no time flat (it's just ballet, people), I take any grand pronouncement like this with mountains of grains of salt. However, the performance did sound exciting, for several reasons:

1. It was Giselle, and I've been a sucker for Giselle since I was a kid (the photos here are of the lovely Yvette Chauviré);
2. It was Saturday night at the Met, which is always a bit of a thrill;
3. The leads were to be danced by Natalia Osipova, the newest latest ballet It Girl, and David Hallberg, who is a prince among men, and therefore quite convincing in the princely roles.

So off we went, and, I must admit, it was pretty incredible. That Osipova (is not "Osipova" the perfect name for a Russian ballerina? Osipova, Osipova, Osipova - like out of an Edward Gorey book) is really something, as they say. Her jumps are incredibly high, but have that floaty look that is so captivating, and so rare. She might be jumping as high as a man, but you never see the effort; she's a dancer, not a gymnast. When she was doing the bounce series in Act 2 - boinging as if on a trampoline - she looked utterly relaxed and unchallenged, as if she were just hanging out with the Wilis, bouncing bouncing bouncing. I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd pulled out a nail file and started in on her manicure. Osipova had clearly thought through the role, and chosen an interpretation, and (for me) fully created the poor peasant girl who dies of a broken heart, then comes back as a ghost to save the man who betrayed her, who's gotten himself into trouble with the Wilis.

Speaking of the Wilis (the ghosts of women who were betrayed by their fiancés), Veronika Part in the role of the queen, Myrta, was supremely icy. Albrecht wasn't getting any pity from her, that's for sure - she barely even looked at him. And poor Hilarion (I always feel bad for this guy: he truly loves Giselle, wants to marry her, gets dumped when she hooks up with the two-timing Albrecht, and yet he's the one who gets danced to death by the Wilis): Part actually looked as if she were smiling contemptuously when she turned her back on him as he begged for his life.

Hallberg, too, gave a fully thought-out performance. His Albrecht was less of a cad, and more of a young man who is impetuously courting Giselle out of his infatuation for her, despite the fact that he's already engaged to that gorgeous gal in the red gown and darling chapeau. I got the feeling that a conversation with this Albrecht after the fact would have been something like,

"Albrecht, you dolt, did you really think you could get away with being engaged to two women at once? What were you thinking???"

"Um, I don't know.... I wasn't thinking, I guess."

"Well, you blew it, big time."

The above exchange (between me and Albrecht) reveals one of my lifelong ballet activities: making up dialogue and soliloquies for the dancers onstage. I can talk you through all of Swan Lake, Giselle, Beauty, Midsummer... I started doing it as a kid, to tide myself over during boring (to me) stretches of the story ballets (you know, peasant pas de deux, or national dances, or the ever-terrifying pas de trois), and now it's kind of a habit. In case you're really worried, I do keep all this to myself. It was irritating enough on Saturday night when the guy next to me was humming along to the score; I don't think anyone wants to hear my running commentary, though I imagine it would be very calm and stately and quiet, almost whispered, like the golf sportscasters when the guy is lining up his make-or-break 20-foot putt.

PS: The final photo here reminds me of a note the Paris Opera people sent to an American tour presenter, after reviewing some promotional materials in which the photos had been rather aggressively cropped: "Please not to cut the pretty feet."

an ode to uni, among other things

2009-06-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

My year off (and counting) has of course been about deep introspection and spiritual growth and achieving a new plane of consciousness. On a less rarefied level, being at loose ends also means I can accept nearly any invitation lobbed my way, whether for a long late lunch on a Friday, my nephew's ninth birthday party (midweek, Connecticut, 6pm - no way could I have made this in past years), or, perhaps, an extended stay in Paris.

Right now, thanks to the generosity a pair of traveling friends, I'm happily ensconced in a lovely, comfortable apartment in Harlem, listening to Vijay Iyer, type-type-typing away, and being distracted by the view (as seen in the photo above). The past couple of days have been quite social - dinners, an extended wine-filled lunch, a farewell party, ballet, a book reading, dates at various drinking establishments; I've caught up with a veritable flock of friends, chatted like mad, and had some delicious food, too.

My Friday lunch was with Pia, who's moving to DC for a job at Politico. Pia might in fact be the only person in the entire country who has just landed a job in journalism. We were meeting at Resto, near Madison Square Park, so I walked down from Grand Central. I was apparently invisible during that walk, as people kept plowing into me, and I was almost creamed by a Lexus with Jersey plates (a deadly combination). I was peevish and hot when I got to the restaurant, and then, as I walked in, water from the a/c unit dripped on my head. I hate being dripped on in New York; in the summer, you can probably assume it's just condensation from an air-conditioner, but really, you can never be sure. The drip was steady and dead center in the doorway, which I pointed out to the host, who said, "It's just condensation from the air-conditioner," and I gave him A Look and said, "It's a drip in the middle of your doorway." Then, to myself: "Let it go, Siobhan."

At any rate, Resto is a very handsome restaurant, and we had a good (not great) lunch of salad and big pots of mussels, accompanied by a bottle of Spanish rosé. The biggest thrill for me was the fresh mayo that came with the fries.

Just a couple hours later, having barely digested anything, I met Nicole at El Quinto Pino on West 24th. Last summer, on one of the hottest days of the year, she and I put away far too many frozen gin-basil lemonades (basically, lethal Slurpies), and with hot weather sort of here, it seemed time to kick off the summer with a somewhat less suicidal reprise (i.e., two rounds, not seven). El QP is a tiny spot, with tiny tapas that are, in my experience, consistently delicious. In fact, if I were to make a list of Top Ten NYC Restaurant Dishes (sort of a desert island list, if one could order take-out on a desert island), El QP's uni panino would be right up there. Skinny baguette with butter, mustard oil, and slathers of uni, pressed, and served hot slipped into a paper bag. Oh, mama. I've been known to order seconds. I think what I really love about it is that you get so much uni - not just the one or two pieces you might have at your favorite sushi joint. And I do love uni. A chef friend in Los Angeles who was similarly obsessed said that, for him, uni is the essence of the sea.

Actually, I think he said that eating huitlacoche was like eating the earth, and eating uni was like eating the ocean, but that sounds kind of horrifying to me, so I've prettified his language a bit, whilst retaining the sentiment, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

my very own house of mirth

2009-06-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

"That was the feeling which possessed her now - the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift on the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them again. ...[The] old life-hunger possessed her, and all her being clamored for its share of personal happiness. Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account."

Among the slew of things I'm trying to figure out about my life is how to distinguish what I'm good at from what I like. I've always tended to gravitate toward what is easy for me - in school, in jobs, in general - with the result that I often don't get much sense of accomplishment from my achievements, even if I'm praised for them, because to me, they're no big deal. (A couple of times, when I've been really adrift, I've ended up in a job that I not only don't like, but I'm not good at, either. Those were the lost years.)

Ideally, of course, I want to figure out where the overlap is between "things I'm good at" and "things I like," so I can start living that fuller, richer life I keep talking about - you know, the one that is so emotionally and intellectually rewarding, with depth and luster and perhaps even resonance, and where I can talk to the animals. It would also be pleasant if my vocation-to-be actually paid something, since I've found I enjoy having money in the bank - something I'd imagined would be a given by this point in my life, considering I've had good jobs and have not blown wads of cash on Manolos or sports cars or five-star vacations. That's the way it was supposed to work, right? Work hard, get rewarded, find your situation growing more secure and stable as the years go on. Instead, I get my annual Social Security statement, and the chart of my lifetime income by year looks like the Great Pyramid.

Sometime in the past few years, I started to feel a bit like Lily Bart, slowly descending into the straitened circumstances of genteel poverty, and fearing a sudden tip into financial failure. (I know: dramatic, right?) I've actually been afraid to look at House of Mirth for a long time since, in my memory, it hit pretty close to home. Today, I picked it up again, and guess what? It's a bull's-eye.

Lily Bart has no fortune and no way to support herself, so she must marry. Her doom lies partly in the fact that she feels herself to be better than her circumstances, and she rejects each of her suitors in turn. Each has a fatal flaw: too vulgar, too weak, too crooked, too tradition-bound, too patronizing. Lily always thinks that she will find some other way of living that aligns with her sensibilities, but ultimately, she runs out of options, her charms fade, and she dies in her sordid little room, either an accidental or deliberate overdose.

Cheery, isn't it?

For me (and I would hope for most women in this day and age), replace "suitors" with "jobs." I can pretty much put each of my jobs and/or bosses into those fatal-flaw categories, and I tended to focus on those flaws in the same way that Lily did. Problem is, like Lily, I couldn't really afford such fine feelings, yet my o'erweening pride made it impossible for me to just put my head down and do my work. Instead, I butted heads with the best of them, and painted myself into corner after corner. Needless to say, I've bounced around quite a bit. My reasons for leaving a job are often pretty thin: basically, I get fed up, some new job comes a-courtin', the novelty and ego-boost are irresistible, and off I go. Rinse, repeat.

Thanks to a bit of a windfall, I broke this cycle last spring: I got rid of my pressing debts, put some money in the bank, and quit what was hopefully the last of the soul-crushing jobs. Now, I'm so resistant to the idea of getting back into that grind that just looking at the job listings can send me over the edge. I think what has crystallized for me over the past few months is this: I don't want to start this next phase of my life by first finding a job, and then fitting the rest of my life around that job. I can see myself right back where I was: scraping by in New York, fretting about bills, hating Sunday night. Not quite as dire a situation as Lily Bart's, but still.

Instead, I want to start this journey by figuring out how to be happy, and then building a life that is in service to that happiness. If nothing else, this gives me a framework of sorts in which to think about my wide-open future; it has been overwhelming, honestly, to have a completely blank page in front of me.

It's not exactly an ambitious career plan, and it's probably not too original a concept (I gather it's pretty well covered by a long line of philosophers and self-help books), but for me, at this point in my life, it's a major revelation.

painting: "Mrs. Charles E. Inches," by John Singer Sargent

it's not Paris, but still...

2009-06-08T16:41:00.001-07:00

After leaving my college town last Wednesday afternoon, I drove through lovely countryside (with Classic Vinyl blasting away) to northwestern Connecticut, where I had a date with yet another long-lost friend. Rachael and I were so close in college, and afterwards we kept in touch for a few years, but we were never living near each other till now, and we're both terrible about corresponding and making phone calls, so we hadn't seen each other in what we estimate to be about 15 years. But since I'm on this jaunt of stirring up the murky depths and so forth, trying to figure out what makes me tick, I was hoping that spending time with someone who had been so important to me in my past would help me knit the pieces together. Plus, she's a gem.

I knew that we would have a great time catching up and chatting, but I would have thought that, after all these years, we might not have known each so well any more, especially since one assumes that one has grown and changed since college, doesn't one? Instead (maybe because Rachael looks exactly the same as she did in college), it felt almost as if no time at all had gone by; we were instantly so deep in conversation that anyone looking in from the outside would have assumed we'd just seen each other a day or so ago. Even though the particulars of our lives are very different, it seems as if we are each asking the same questions, and we each seemed to understand what the other is going through and could offer perspective and advice. I can only hope that my input was as helpful to Rachael as hers was to me.

I've always thought of myself as fairly reserved and buttoned up (and I'd love to think I'm mysterious), but Rachael can see right through me. That's not always the most comfortable feeling, but one I have tried to learn to bear - to sit through the discomfort, rather than saying, "But enough about me! I love your shoes!" (You can only imagine how exposed this blog makes me feel at times.) Rachael's squirmingly insightful observations helped give me a better sense of where the continuity has been in my life, what parts of me are true and constant, and where I've shifted away from that plumb line in directions that are perhaps not right for me. Then there are those ways in which I've consistently sabotaged myself - those are some constants I'd like smash once and for all.

My overnight stay was made even more restorative by the locale. Rachael and her family live in the most beautiful area: a school campus that is about as gorgeous as it gets, especially this time of year. There's a lake, and beautiful grounds, and hiking trails, and it's so quiet (apparently, that's not the case during the school year, but I arrived the very day the students left, so it was rather idyllic).

There's a chance I'll spend some time up there this summer, which will be a perfect opportunity to try out the Thoreau approach to life (you know: solitude, lake, nature, notebook [and/or laptop], and Deep Thoughts). I'm feeling more and more like I'm not a city girl any more, at least not for now, but leaving behind the city and my friends and connections and family is a big step, so an out-of-town tryout could be just the ticket.

(trying to) take it easy

2009-06-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, I met my friend J. for lunch in Washington Square Park, which is slooooooooowly coming out of its interminable renovation. Parts of it are so lovely now, and I was looking forward to grabbing lunch from the Dosa Man and parking on a bench for a good long chat.

It was one of my first trips to NYC since my return from Paris, and the city really had it in for me: New York and I are just not getting along these days. On the plus side, the Dosa Man was great - not only was the Man himself friendly and charming, but the food was fab, and blissfully cheap.

On the debit side: how could I forget what a crazy magnet Wash Sq Park is? I know some of you non-New Yorkers are thinking, Wait, isn't New York in and of itself a crazy magnet? Well, yes, of course, but there's crazy, and then there's crazy. Like the guy sitting very still on a bench, letting literally dozens of pigeons roost on him and climb over him and do god knows what (*shudder*). Or the guy in fatigues, sitting very stiffly on a bench, rocking a bit from side to side, tapping his feet rapidly, and muttering, and from time to time jumping up and spitting fulsomely and at great length into the trashcan. It's hard to enjoy a pile of delicious-but-not-very-attractive Indian food in the midst of such graphic disgustingness.

And then it started to rain.

But we're tough city folk, J. and I, so we persevered. I had some more Paris stories to tell, along with a bag of chocolate-covered pralined almonds to bequeath, and J. had very encouraging news about his job search.

Now, when fellow out-of-workers tell me about their diligent and productive efforts to find work, I tend to have a series of painful twinges. My thought process goes something like this:

1. "Wow, that sounds like a great job."
2. "{Insert friend's name here} is really organized and motivated."
3. "I bet he/she will find something really soon."
4. "I wonder if I should be looking for a job."
5. "Ohmigod, what am I doing with my life???"

Zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds, max.

This time, however (maybe due to jet lag), I didn't stomp on the panic accelerator. I just thought, "That sounds like a great job, I hope J. gets it, maybe I'll have another chocolate almond."

This is either progress (i.e., I'm not letting others' ambitions determine what is right for me), or a serious problem (i.e., I'm deluded in thinking I can continue to coast along like this, or I'm too insecure to even look for a job, or I'm so lost and adrift that I don't even know where to start, or I'm lazier than even I thought). Either way, I was relieved not to be spinning out into a state of anxiety that would typically last several days.

You know, I think I'll consider that progress.

nostalgia-palooza

2009-06-05T16:26:00.001-07:00

I might not have been flooded with nostalgia during my stroll around my college campus, but I'll tell you, the First Wave XM Satellite radio station I listened to in my Pontiac Vibe on the road trip: now that was some serious nostalgia.

I was an "early adopter" of new wave music, back in my sullen junior high years, thanks to "92.7, WLIR: Long Island Radio!", and my musical choices pretty much determined my group of friends in my experimental-hairstyle high school years. It was all about music for us, and our triumverate of musical gods was, at least for a time, Joe Strummer, Ian McCulloch, and Paul Weller (clearly, we had a thing for the Brits).

So XM Satellite radio: Why didn't anyone tell me? It's so perfect for road trips - every single song was familiar, I knew all the lyrics, and I sang along very loudly for basically seven hours, altogether. Sadly, I did find that (perhaps not surprisingly to some of you), a lot of that music just doesn't hold up. Some of it was just so tinny, and then I couldn't get behind "Shock the Monkey," for example, or "Synchronicity II" - just too odd. (Then again, I was completely into "Girlfriend in a Coma," despite its absurdity - Morrissey with a girlfriend??)

Also, as I remember from my college DJ days, I just do not like when a song fades out instead of coming to an end. I mean, really: are there other works of art that just trail off? Novels that finish up with dot-dot-dot in the middle of a chapter, or paintings that just kind of peter out on the edges?

Then there were songs that I scorned back in my super-scornful teen years, but that now I find completely irresistible, such as "Don't You Want Me" and "Hungry Like the Wolf" - I nearly had a panic attack when the satellite signal faded out during this one.

And then there are the ones that I loved back then, and that I love now: "Should I Stay or Should I Go Now," "Boy Meets Girl," "Since You're Gone," "Tempted," "Major Tom," "Tainted Love," "You Drive Me Crazy," "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (OMG, I love this song soooo much) - I was in flashback music heaven. And anything by The Cure or Siouxsie took me right back to The Café, where we went dancing when I was in high school, and where our fellow high school student Moby was often the DJ.

When First Wave cued up something I just couldn't get behind, some song that's nothing but spikey hair and a drum machine, I'd switch over to Classic Vinyl and provide solid harmonic accompaniment to such gems as "Rocket Man," "Aqualung," "Riders on the Storm," "Crosstown Traffic," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Baba O'Riley," and "Oh You Pretty Things."

I am now thinking of buying a car, mainly so I can drive around listening to satellite radio.

the old college try, try again

2009-06-05T09:34:00.001-07:00

Wednesday morning, I picked up a rental car (a Pontiac Vibe, a vehicle that makes one wonder why anyone would bail out the American auto industry) and made my way north to Massachusetts, to my alma mater. I was up there a year ago, for just a day, but that was for a job interview, and so not the occasion for looking back. This time, I was planning to peer bravely into the murky depths. Or whatever.

The town has, of course, like seemingly all charming small towns, changed dramatically. There's a whole strip of shopping centers, replacing such venerable institutions as Stan the Vegetable Man, and lots of those brand-new generic brick storefronts that, in their blandness, make for a depressing streetscape. However, it's a town that cares about food and coffee and books, so it's still a good place for an afternoon wander.

As I drove up into Massachusetts, I was surprisingly nervous. When I look back on my college self, I see someone watching the party nervously from the sidelines, trying to figure out all the steps before jumping in, and then just copying what everyone else is doing. In other words, not the most compelling person. I'm curious now about what others saw in me, especially those who I admire, and who, I realize from my archival diggings, cared about me in return - there must have been something there, right? So I had made a date to see a former professor, someone I was close with a long time ago, but who I hadn't spoken to in about 20 years.

I had been trying very hard not to have any expectations (someone I know refers to expectations as "future disappointments"). I mean, it would be great to have this cosmic-level connection with someone from my past, someone who could fill me in on the blank spots in my memory and tell me all about myself and, to top it off, advise me what to do next. But there was a strong possibility that my professor was just accommodating a request from an alum, and that we'd chat a bit over lunch, talk about mutual friends, and then he'd say, "Great to see you, keep in touch!"

As it so often is, the reality was somewhere in between. At times, I felt I was an amnesia victim, trying to rebuild my memory: "And then what did I do next? And who told me that? And what did you say to me then?" At other times, our conversation would pull a trigger for me, and the past came rushing in with such strength that I felt I was right back in the emotional turmoil of a confused and somewhat terrified teenage girl. It was one of those experiences that makes you truly, intuitively understand that time is not a straight line, and that it doesn't always go forward.

Tom and I spent a few hours together, having lunch (in a great French bistro! yay, French food!), and then wandering around campus. As with many New England schools, the campus is ridiculously beautiful, especially on a pearl-gray June day; you expect to see the Chariots of Fire guys go running past, or maybe Gene shaking Phineas down from a tree. It's changed a lot, and, to be honest, it's not as if there were many spots I felt particularly attached to in the first place, so it wasn't too sickeningly nostalgic, nor did I whip out my checkbook and donate a new wing to the library out of love and pride for the alma mater.

But still, I did get a lot out of the afternoon, I think. It's all slowly sinking in (I typically have to let things settle and ferment a bit before I get the gist), and I'll keep you posted on any insights or revelations. Right now, it seems I'm mostly trying to connect different periods of my life. Looking back, I feel as if each section of my life (childhood, college, L.A., NYC) is completely separate from the others, and the person (me) is completely different each time around. It's helping to dredge up these old memories and have them not be some cold dead history lesson, but instead something that envelops me in old emotions, loves, fears, hopes.

Maybe I'm hoping for some kind of synthesis, some way of fitting together my various incomplete selves. At the very least, it would be nice to fill in some of the blanks, so as not to feel as if I'm in a less-tattooed version of Memento.

Nancy Drew lives!

2009-06-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

I'm being very Investigative Journalist right now, picking through my past to try to figure out how I ended up in this particular spot. The day after I got back from Paris, as I lounged about in that gorgeously deep melancholy that apparently only Paris can produce, I found a big pile of papers from my high school and college years that have been sitting up in my parents' attic, and, insanely, I thought, "This seems like a good time to glance through some old stuff, reminisce a bit, take a look at my past." Twenty minutes later, I was in full-on breakdown mode, crying my little eyes out.

Here's what happened, I think. The person described in these stacks of letters written to me, transcripts and recommendations written about me, and journals, papers, and stories written by me, was so foreign, so far away from who I am now. That person was going places, impressing people left and right, being encouraged and lauded and pushed. And it's as if, at the time, I couldn't hear any of it, couldn't believe any of it. None of it made an impression on me, somehow. So my reaction now was partly, "What the hell is all this stuff?", partly "Huh - who knew?", partly "Hey, check me out!" - and mostly a giant wave of regret and disbelief, an emotion that would be perfectly captured on screen by Nicholas Cage falling to his knees and raging at the heavens: "Dammit, what happened to the promise?!"

Once I scraped myself off the ceiling and unsmudged my mascara, I looked through it all again, trying this time to learn something helpful from my vicious time capsule, something other than, "Wow, I really fucked up." OK, so I couldn't hear the praise and encouragement back then, couldn't lean on the support offered to me - I can try to absorb it all now, and use it in my attempts to figure out the next stage of my life.

Also, looking back over the letters and journals, I was so regretful that I'd let close friends slip away. I mean, I'm basically not in touch with anyone from college, and I loved those people. College itself, not so much - but my friends, absolutely. Thanks to the glories of Google and Facebook, I instantly tracked down a few of my college friends, who I haven't spoken with in 15 years or more (oh, god, yikes). The main reason, of course, was to try to re-establish those friendships, but selfishly, I also felt like I needed to learn more about who I was back then, what people saw in me, what I felt. What better way than to drag a few poor souls into my morass.

Next: Find out what happens when Siobhan reconnects with two former friends, in person...

here there be dragons

2009-06-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

I recently had a lovely and very rewarding experience with blogging, during an extended stay in Paris (it was long enough to be a sort-of staycation, only not at home, so I feel very on-trend). Since I've been back in the States, I've found that I've missed blogging - missed the writing, the photos, the coming-up-with-ideas, the responses and comments. So I'm re-entering the arena, with a less focused, more open-ended structure this time around.

One year ago, I sold my apartment and quit my job (both in NYC), after realizing that I was miserable and stuck. Since then, I've been alternately doing exciting, adventurous things (the trip to Paris, two months in Mexico learning Spanish), and doing not much of anything (a bit of freelancing, a lot of lunches with friends, a lot of reading).

I tell people that I'm soul-searching and struggling to figure out what's next. I tell myself, on a good day, that I'm bravely facing the big questions, refusing to just coast along, refusing to be satisfied with a certain level of happiness, a certain level of accomplishment, a certain level of self-awareness. That I'm clearing my own path, disregarding the influence of what my friends and family have chosen for themselves, and would choose for me. That I'm able to disappoint others to find out what is right for me, and go for it.

On a bad day, I wonder if I'm just lazy and unambitious.

While it's great to be home in the middle of the day to watch as much French Open as I like, I am also aware that this is not a tenable existence, that at some point, I will have to come up with a better plan, whether the impetus is boredom, dire financial situation, or sheer existential panic.

One subject that I've been mulling, as many of us do at this point in our lives, is how I ended up where I am. When I look back on my adult life, it feels as if I just let things unfold, rather than making choices and plans. This has had a definite upside (I doubt I would have lived in L.A. [which I now love] for almost a decade if I'd made a five-year plan after college), but it of course has had a lot of downside as well, especially in the career zone.

So now, after a year of mulling and soul-searching and all that jazz, I feel it's time to take charge of my future, more or less. (How's that for a ringing, bold rally cry?) Hence the blog: I used to write a lot, and not work stuff, but my own stuff. Over the years, however, I lost this habit and, with it, the one way I've seen to get out of nine-to-five and lead a richer, more rewarding life.

This blog, hopefully, will not only document this in-between time in my life, but will help me move on to whatever is next.