April 27, 2006

Hyperopia

I think I saw New York for the first time tonight. 70+ degrees in Manhattan today and I didn’t make it outside at all. Living within the confines of a 5 x 10 cube doesn’t really sound like living at all, but we all have to work to live and live to work and it all becomes a hazy mess between Monday’s and Friday’s and the tainted Sundays because of the sinking feeling that work is looming just beyond it.

I walked through Central Park after work where people are walking and running and running pushing strollers with sleeping children and walking holding someone’s hand or the leash of a dog.

The park on Saturdays is full of people who are happy on that one good day of the week where they’re actually living. But at 6:30 on a Thursday night as the afternoon is falling into evening and the sun is slipping behind the Essex Hotel, the park feels different.

You know how it is when you walk and walk and you don’t know where you’re going but you know that walking is the only thing that feels right. Maybe it’s because all day we don’t really feel like we’re walking towards anything. We’re getting up and going to work and going home and it’s all static, it’s all the same. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled forward when we don’t even realize. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled towards something when we don’t even know what it is.

In the end, though, we always end up walking home. I’ve decided that my favorite part of the city is 5th Ave along the park because walking down that sidewalk you’re caught in between two worlds, like being in two places at the same time. The fast-paced-passion of the city with its speeding cars and honking horns and gray pavement, and on the other side the calming feeling of nature where you can hear the birds and trees and feel the feeling of grass beneath your feet and you’re being pulled by both but you don’t have to choose.

I may not have seen a lot of the world, a lot of exotic cities or foreign cultures, but I’ve just seen New York for the first time. Maybe sometimes we’re all too concerned with wanting to see what’s just beyond that we fail to see what’s already there, in front of us.

April 23, 2006

Gina and Todd

I couldn’t sleep on the couch of my old apartment last night as Gina and Todd were fighting in the hallway just outside the door. She said, Todd, I can’t believe you chose Kay over me. He said, Gina, you need to get over this. She yelled, you chose your friends and beer over me and he yelled back asking her what she wanted him to do.

So she cried and cried and yelled and cried and he didn’t say much of anything. His friends were out on the sidewalk and they laughed and smoked and the smoke drifted through the living room window and I could smell their Marlborough lights.

Gina screamed, you have no idea how much you’ve hurt me. You don’t know how it feels, you don’t know how it feels, she yelled and he didn’t say much of anything.

So she cried and cried and yelled and cried and then threw a brick at the wall outside the front door that made the windows shake and left a gash three inches deep.

After a long time it stopped but I still couldn’t fall asleep because I was thinking about how Gina and Todd probably used to be happy before he starting choosing his friends and Kay and beer over her and before she started screaming and crying and being irrational.

Every time you turn around it’s always another Gina and Todd getting together. They’re kissing on the subway and holding hands in the street until one starts choosing his friends and beer and Kay over the kissing on the subway and the holding hands in the street and she starts screaming and crying and becoming irrational.

Every time you turn around it’s always another Gina and Todd breaking up.

April 22, 2006

Boston v. New York

I got off the train at Back Bay Thursday night and made the walk down Huntington Ave towards my old home of Symphony Road. The city looked different and the same all at once but I guess that happens when you see something that you haven't seen in a long time.

The streets were almost empty, a far cry from the New York I'm still getting used to where the cars are always moving and the sidewalks are always full. It felt like, and still does, as though my life is taking place in two cities. Friends and a past life in one, a job and a new life I’ve yet to really find in another.

Maybe Boston and New York are always meant to be at odds with each other, and once you live in one it’s difficult to make the transition. Each have their own good and bad sides, like a guy you meet at bar: Boston the adorable sports fan who says hello to you over a pint and lives in a house in Cambridge. New York the financial big shot you meet at a club who buys you a dirty martini and lives in a high rise facing the park.

Both are very different, and while there are all sorts of things that fall in between the obvious distinctions of each wonderful city, I’ve yet to find where I fit in with either of them, but I suppose that will just take time. And I know Boston might be criticized for being small, but sometimes I can't help but think that it’s like what Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee says, “It’s a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd.”

April 17, 2006

Tomorrow Is My Birthday

Time is passing and I think of how I haven’t done nearly half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Haven’t taken enough chances or vacations, haven’t seen the Pacific, or caught a fly ball at Yankee Stadium, haven’t kissed anyone on a sidewalk or have been published in a major magazine.

If I were to look back (and I have a lot recently because birthdays make you do that), to a year ago, I would think about how time has moved so quickly between then and now that I hardly know where my life is going.

I was noticing the other day a small scar on my left knee. I don’t remember how old I was or how it happened or what kind of day it was. I don’t remember how much it hurt or if I cried.

There are times in our lives that for one reason or another, become lost. Days weeks months pass, and as birthdays tick by like the flash of a blown out candle, it’s though those times never existed at all.

Occasionally we come across a picture or a postcard or see a familiar face that makes us wonder. A severe case of acne or love or a fall from a bike, these leave scars. I think about all the close calls that didn’t.

So birthdays and years come and go and the past starts to melt away. I guess those of us that bruise easily, must learn to heal the same way.

April 14, 2006

Good Friday

Every Friday morning when I'm leaving my building, hair a mess because I snagged a few extra minutes of sleep for opting not to shower, brain still non-functioning, fumbling to get out my subway card, sunglasses on in order to hide an exhausted face (especially this week, never making it home before 10PM) my doorman smiles at me and cheerfully says, "Happy Friday."

I do what I always do which is smile back and say thank you. But what I want to say is, why never Happy Monday or Happy Wednesday? You know, when I really need it.

April 11, 2006

Today has been okay.

“This city is really testing me today,” I shouted to International Girl (pls. refer to Dirty Water) over the phone tonight as I was standing on the sidewalk on Central Park West.

After not having left the office until after 11:30 PM last night, I took the subway up to 72nd to catch the cross town bus. I was there with three other people as the clock rounded midnight, half asleep thumbing through my latest issue of the New Yorker as the man across from me stared at my legs. The other man was talking on the far end of the subway car, at first to himself, and then to us, and then to the people who got on at 18th street, and they didn’t pay much attention to him either.


He was talking about how he was homeless and needed money and food and “whatever we could spare.” I did what I always do, which is pretend like I can’t hear even though I can and I know they know I can and I feel mixed feeling of guilt and sadness and guilt and confusion about how the world is so strange and how sometimes I don’t know how to deal with it.

At 72nd and Amsterdam I waited for the bus to take me to the east side and to home and to bed and it never came. A cab ride and $10 plus tip later I was home and out the money to afford my morning coffee for the rest of the week.

Today was the same late night, followed by having to walk around the upper west side in hurting feet trying to find various apartment buildings to personally hand-deliver them tomorrow’s touring itinerary. The last and final building was on West 61st and impossibly tucked behind Lincoln Center where the numbers don’t go in any sort of order and after walking in circles I vowed to hate west 61st forever. Upon seeing me the doorman said, “Have a hard time finding it? Happens to everyone,” to which I gave him a fair rendition of a withering look and simply said, “yeah.”

I finally made it back over to Central Park West just in time to see the cross town bus pull away from the curb despite my running with arms-flailing attempt to stop it. My heart sank and as a few expletives left my mouth, the proper CPW Burberry-clad woman with her jack russell terrier probably named Forbes gave me a look of semi-disgust.

That’s when, in my defeat, I called International Girl. “This city is really testing me today,” I shouted over the phone as I was standing on the sidewalk on Central Park West. She of course told me not to worry and said that if anyone can overcome the hardships of the city, it was me.


I guess it’s the way any good relationship is, with the bad things and the awkward things and the homeless men (okay maybe not all relationships), and the missed buses and missed chances and the late nights and getting lost and being too proud to ask for directions.

And anyway, it is, after all, only Tuesday.

April 4, 2006

opening day

I remember them clearly, the days when the sun would start to stay out later and my father would be watching the game. Windows open (I grew up without air conditioning), we would sit and watch (I grew up without cable) until even the light summer nights would turn to dark. On TV, though, it never looked like night as the bright lights of the stadium fell on everyone, illuminating the field.

He would talk about baseball when he was younger, the 1962 Yankees with Joe Pepitone, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, 1977 with Thurman Munson, Bucky Dent and Reggie Jackson. He would talk about the way it used to be, the way they used to wear their socks, the way they never used to get into fights the way they do now. And we would sit, windows open in the summer heat from opening day on, and watch.

And I then went to college in Boston, which he didn’t like. People picked fights and made jabs and wore shirts that declared their hatred for the team I had grown to love. So in 2001 New York lost in a year I wanted them to win the most and in 2003 I watched from a bar next to Fenway Park as Aaron Boone made grown men cry.

Whenever he would see me my father would always ask the same question, “So is this gonna be the year kid?” And I’d smile and laugh and say “they always say this is the year.”

Until one time, it was.

Opening day always makes me miss being a kid. This will be my first season in a while watching the games on safe ground. However I will miss the man who would always scream and cheer from the apartment above me every time the Sox would make a base hit. I will miss the drunken fans in their Jeter Drinks Wine Cooler’s t-shirts. And I know it will take me a while to realize I don’t have to hide being happy when Sheffield hits a home run. But a part of me will miss that certain hum that starts on opening day in Boston and doesn’t die until long after the last pitch leaves the mound.

But things change, people move on, say goodbye, take bigger paychecks or more steriods or retire and then come back. So you can’t tell too much from opening day, and it won’t be until they’re home in the Bronx that will I really feel like the season has started. Because it’s like the great Yogi Berra once said, “in baseball, you don’t know nothing.”

April 2, 2006

Recession

Well, it’s that time of year again when writing deadlines are upon me. I spent much of early spring last year working on one short story, slaving over each round of edits, meetings with a writing professor, more revisions, changing the end, then keeping the end, take away this scene and re-shaping the sentence structure in that one.

But that’s what writing is, editing. What started off as an idea about a neurotic girl who can’t help but mentally pair everything she sees into groups of two, suddenly turned into an almost 20 page story about the loss of a parent, a professor crush, mild obsessive compulsion and economics.

By the end of the summer the rejection letters were piling up. In addition, the essay I spent over a week writing for Vanity Fair ended up a total bust and now, with the onset of the Glamour writing contest telling me to, (by May 14) write up to 3,500 words detailing something that has happened to me, a “great real-life story.”

Truth is, I’ve hit a recession. After a stack of rejection letters and hours of wasted time, money spent on reading fees and postage and copies, endless pages of text that still remain saved safely on my key drive (yes, no more disks, my poor old friends), I’m feeling less than inspired. Yes, I could win $5,000, but it’s not about the money, it never is. As a writer (and I’m not being so lofty as to call myself a writer) you have a day job, and when you want to write you do it because you have something to say, and the reward is the simple opportunity to share that story with others.

I’m bankrupt of ideas, inspiration and motivation with no Greenspan of my own to turn to. But this is how life is. It comes in waves, surges of an up-cycle followed by the inevitable crash that follows (remember 1929?). So, like the economy, I'm hoping this feeling is cyclical. Pretty soon I’ll be back on top, riding the wave. And true, the wave will most likely bring me back to the sandy rejection letter shores of yesteryear, but who knows. That’s the thing about life, you just never can tell.

Because really, a bomb could drop tomorrow and result in a city’s economic ruin, but, just as a city is demolished, it is rebuilt, and the cycle begins all over again.