It’s times like these, (Sunday nights when you realize you have to go back to your real life that you’ve just been spending the last two days trying to escape), that you think you can’t be bothered.
You can’t be troubled with things like:
The laundry
The dishes
Not meeting anyone
Meeting all the wrong ones
Drinking too much
Missing the train
Being late to work
That light bulb you’ve been meaning to change.
You can’t be bothered with these things anymore when all you can think about are the massive moments in life that you can’t do anything about.
It’s times like these (with the dishes in the sink and the lights still out), that you think about how you try to say out of it, how you’re told to keep away, to avoid at all costs – trouble.
But trouble is like a rain storm, even when you bring an umbrella (and are prepared enough to have brought one), it still gets you.
April 29, 2007
April 25, 2007
You know things are bad when…
On your desk you have the following:
1 empty (grande) Starbucks coffee (from 8:30AM) with The Way I See It #210 (Raymond Lawson “People should get out of their comfort zones on a daily basis. Take up knitting and boxing. It will make you so much more interesting”).
2 (empty) cans of diet coke.
1 empty (tall) Starbucks coffee (from 1PM) with The Way I See It # 195 (Helen Thomas “Always question the powers that be”).
And you realize:
You’re officially a year older.
It’s only 3:30.
And you have no idea how to knit.
1 empty (grande) Starbucks coffee (from 8:30AM) with The Way I See It #210 (Raymond Lawson “People should get out of their comfort zones on a daily basis. Take up knitting and boxing. It will make you so much more interesting”).
2 (empty) cans of diet coke.
1 empty (tall) Starbucks coffee (from 1PM) with The Way I See It # 195 (Helen Thomas “Always question the powers that be”).
And you realize:
You’re officially a year older.
It’s only 3:30.
And you have no idea how to knit.
April 24, 2007
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
Now that the weather is nice, people are making plans. Of course they don’t realize that this 80 degree streak isn’t going to last for the entirety of April and May. This will change soon, and it will get a little colder before Real Summer settles in for only about one month before it leaves the screen door as quickly as it came in. How easily people forget.
Regardless, they’re excited and talking about how now with the onset of sun and warmth they would like to leave the city to actually enjoy it. No one is ever satisfied. OK, so maybe when it’s hot in the city it can be a little disgusting, what with the millions of people all outside on the same sidewalks at once, sweating, complaining, walking slow (tourists), sweating, making the lines longer at the places you need to go, you know, like Starbucks.
But you have to embrace these people by just accepting and ignoring them. Accept the lines and ignore the slow walkers like you do that guy on the subway (who always seems to end up right next to me while I’m trying to read) who speaks loudly about finding Jesus and how we’re all sinners.
Everyone is dreamer of greener pastures (I think Central Park is just fine). Suddenly all my friends are talking about driving two hours to go camping, to get away from the pavement because apparently the sun is different there. I mean, I guess. I’ve never understood camping, probably because once you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all, and I hate bugs. There are few insects that I can really hang with (I know, I know, I’m such a girl), and those include the standard cute bugs like lady bugs and fireflies, both of which you can find in the Park.
Real Summer isn’t even here yet anyway. This is Fake Summer, also known as Spring, and I don’t think us city-dwellers need to go far to enjoy it. It’s supposed to rain this weekend anyway, and the temperature is slated to drop about thirty degrees. I think that’s going to be about the time all those campers are going to wish they weren’t so quick to quit the city, and had simply stayed here.
Regardless, they’re excited and talking about how now with the onset of sun and warmth they would like to leave the city to actually enjoy it. No one is ever satisfied. OK, so maybe when it’s hot in the city it can be a little disgusting, what with the millions of people all outside on the same sidewalks at once, sweating, complaining, walking slow (tourists), sweating, making the lines longer at the places you need to go, you know, like Starbucks.
But you have to embrace these people by just accepting and ignoring them. Accept the lines and ignore the slow walkers like you do that guy on the subway (who always seems to end up right next to me while I’m trying to read) who speaks loudly about finding Jesus and how we’re all sinners.
Everyone is dreamer of greener pastures (I think Central Park is just fine). Suddenly all my friends are talking about driving two hours to go camping, to get away from the pavement because apparently the sun is different there. I mean, I guess. I’ve never understood camping, probably because once you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all, and I hate bugs. There are few insects that I can really hang with (I know, I know, I’m such a girl), and those include the standard cute bugs like lady bugs and fireflies, both of which you can find in the Park.
Real Summer isn’t even here yet anyway. This is Fake Summer, also known as Spring, and I don’t think us city-dwellers need to go far to enjoy it. It’s supposed to rain this weekend anyway, and the temperature is slated to drop about thirty degrees. I think that’s going to be about the time all those campers are going to wish they weren’t so quick to quit the city, and had simply stayed here.
April 17, 2007
We gauge our lives by years.
I have a birthday tomorrow, and I have to admit I’ve never entirely understood celebrating birthdays. Maybe at one point they made sense, but all they make me feel now is nostalgic for the past, the way things used to be when birthdays were when I invited literally everyone from my grade school class, (even the kids I never talked to), and wore a party dress with a big bow and ate cake with pastel icing on it and played silly games like pin the tail on the donkey, and duck duck goose and that one where you try to drop as many clothes pins into a small jar as possible (personal record: 8).
And everyone brought a present. That’s when presents weren’t clothes but things you really needed – you know, toys. Birthdays were the only time during the year except Christmas where you could stock up on the essentials: Barbies, more Rubik’s cubes you swore you’d one day figure out, board games, fake food for your thriving four star restaurant in the basement, and the latest Disney movie on VHS to add to your collection.
Now it’s just a day where I can see how much everything has changed, (without cake or Barbie’s). A day that reminds me of all the things I haven’t done that I said I’d do by now. Birthday’s for grown-ups is really just one big kick in the face, a whole day dedicated to you to remind you just how much time you’ve actually been wasting.
I know that sounds cynical, but I’m a realist, and any good realist will tell you that birthday’s are complete crap. They’re the holiday equivalent of New Years. Why are we celebrating the passage of time? Shouldn’t we be sad to see it come and go? Another day? Another year? Another 365 days that you hardly feel were your own life at all?
And yet they’ve happened to you regardless. We gauge our lives by years but it seems to me we should gauge them by hours and minutes. That’s when the real stuff happens, the real dirt of life, the real messiness, the real living. I know we can’t celebrate ourselves every second of every day, but we should remember more that it’s not just our age that we should weigh ourselves by, rather, just how we get through every day.
Birthdays aren’t what they used to be because life isn’t the way it used to be either. It’s messy and real and fragile and it’s in those seconds you never think about that it happens. It comes at you fast, before you even have a chance to blow out the candles and wish that it didn’t.
And everyone brought a present. That’s when presents weren’t clothes but things you really needed – you know, toys. Birthdays were the only time during the year except Christmas where you could stock up on the essentials: Barbies, more Rubik’s cubes you swore you’d one day figure out, board games, fake food for your thriving four star restaurant in the basement, and the latest Disney movie on VHS to add to your collection.
Now it’s just a day where I can see how much everything has changed, (without cake or Barbie’s). A day that reminds me of all the things I haven’t done that I said I’d do by now. Birthday’s for grown-ups is really just one big kick in the face, a whole day dedicated to you to remind you just how much time you’ve actually been wasting.
I know that sounds cynical, but I’m a realist, and any good realist will tell you that birthday’s are complete crap. They’re the holiday equivalent of New Years. Why are we celebrating the passage of time? Shouldn’t we be sad to see it come and go? Another day? Another year? Another 365 days that you hardly feel were your own life at all?
And yet they’ve happened to you regardless. We gauge our lives by years but it seems to me we should gauge them by hours and minutes. That’s when the real stuff happens, the real dirt of life, the real messiness, the real living. I know we can’t celebrate ourselves every second of every day, but we should remember more that it’s not just our age that we should weigh ourselves by, rather, just how we get through every day.
Birthdays aren’t what they used to be because life isn’t the way it used to be either. It’s messy and real and fragile and it’s in those seconds you never think about that it happens. It comes at you fast, before you even have a chance to blow out the candles and wish that it didn’t.
April 12, 2007
You know things are bad when…
The person you went on a date with last week,
You suddenly see in the New York Times Style Section —
With a nice photo of him and his wife.
Whom he just married.
Two day ago.
You suddenly see in the New York Times Style Section —
With a nice photo of him and his wife.
Whom he just married.
Two day ago.
April 9, 2007
Vehicle for hire.
Why is it that in New York, at the exact moment you find yourself needing something you feel like you can’t get it?
Like, say, a cab?
(holding luggage, alone, 35th street, late at night, tired, cold)
You can’t find one. Or they’re all, lights out. And then you can see it in your head like a movie of your life going in fast forward, all those times you, standing on street corners looking at cabs you don’t need and you’ve never once seen so many with lights out. Not once.
And suddenly you hear yourself say, arm outstretched with your best finger-pointing-to-the-sky cab hailing move, out loud to no one in particular: Unbelievable. Is there like a cab shortage in the city all of a sudden? Have we run out of cabs? You’ve got to be kidding me.
And then the guy on the corner with the trendy glasses who heard you, (who you know always gets what he wants at the exact moment he wants it), looks at you with his best oh you poor unlucky girl smile, and shakes his head, and you realize, that you’ve become that New Yorker.
It was only a matter of time, anyway.
Like, say, a cab?
(holding luggage, alone, 35th street, late at night, tired, cold)
You can’t find one. Or they’re all, lights out. And then you can see it in your head like a movie of your life going in fast forward, all those times you, standing on street corners looking at cabs you don’t need and you’ve never once seen so many with lights out. Not once.
And suddenly you hear yourself say, arm outstretched with your best finger-pointing-to-the-sky cab hailing move, out loud to no one in particular: Unbelievable. Is there like a cab shortage in the city all of a sudden? Have we run out of cabs? You’ve got to be kidding me.
And then the guy on the corner with the trendy glasses who heard you, (who you know always gets what he wants at the exact moment he wants it), looks at you with his best oh you poor unlucky girl smile, and shakes his head, and you realize, that you’ve become that New Yorker.
It was only a matter of time, anyway.
April 4, 2007
Write it again, Sam.
When I think Marlene Dietrich all I can think of is her deep seducing voice singing “Falling in Love Again,” about how she never wanted to, but couldn’t help it. It’s so noir, so 1930’s, so in-your-face-femme that it makes me want to cut my hair and iron it into nice, short, un-moveable waves and dye it blonde.
When I think of Ernest Hemingway I think of lots of polydactyl cats hanging around Key West and how much I hated reading A Farewell to Arms in my Major Figure: Hemingway class in college. The book was too dramatic, too ridiculous, too frustrating in how long it took Henry and Catherine to get it together (and by “it” I mean them). I know, I know, love in the time of war can’t be easy, nursing jaundice and fighting Germans and then going AWOL and whatnot. Still, it’s a good thing I kept reading Hemingway long after my annoyance with those two faded away, because he came to be one of my favorite writers of all time (please see The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time).
Anyway, I know Ernest was a bit of a womanizer and never really knew what he wanted - however these letters have aided in brightening my overall already glowing opinion of him. All writers struggle with how to deal with the outside world because they don’t entirely know how to interact with other people. They aren’t good at voicing how they feel because they’re so used to (and are more comfortable with) keeping the world inside their heads. Intrinsically they are better off on their own, so I’m not surprised in a way, that Ernest spent a lot of his time isolated in the woods of Northern Michigan, was married four times and committed suicide at the age of 61. (Ok, so maybe I’m a little surprised - insanity did, after all, run in his family).
In 30 letters to Marlene from 1949 to 1959 (now a complete addition to the 31 she sent to him) Hemingway confesses his admiration for her in what experts have come to conclude as an entirely non-physical relationship: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel.” I guess that’s one of the great things about having a writer fall in love with you – they can express it with more eloquence than most.
However, what I love most about this finding is that they were victims of un-synchronized passion. That even the irritating Henry and Catherine found the right timing, but Hemingway himself could not. Those times when he was out of love, she was deep in some romantic tribulation, and “on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes, I was submerged.”
What is it about timing that left these two sending ridiculously romantic letters to each other for at least ten years? Dietrich began a 1951 letter, “I think it is high time to tell you that I think of you constantly. I read your letters over and over and speak of you with a few chosen men. I have moved your photograph to my bedroom and mostly look at it rather helplessly.”
This whole finding has made me hate the fact the letter writing is a long lost art form. There’s something about email that doesn’t quite capture the personal quality that comes through with letters. Granted, some people (like myself) have horrible handwriting. For a long time I’d always longed to have those nice, bubbly, perfectly round letters that are directly associate with “girl” handwriting (though I found it highly offensive when they would dot their “I’s” with hearts), however I’ve come to accept my doctor-like scratch. And regardless, handwriting is a part of who you are, barely legible or not, and there’s something so open and raw about that. Writing by hand takes time, takes more thought and means more to the reader knowing that someone took the time to find a pen and paper and didn’t just push keys on a keyboard.
While I’ve never received a love letter, and don’t know that anyone in my generation ever actually has, I have to admit that I was reading their correspondence with one hand over my mouth in rapt-near-silence unlike I ever did while turning the pages of Farewell. Maybe that’s because sometimes just plain life is somehow always more interesting than what you’ll ever find in a book, no matter who writes it.
When I think of Ernest Hemingway I think of lots of polydactyl cats hanging around Key West and how much I hated reading A Farewell to Arms in my Major Figure: Hemingway class in college. The book was too dramatic, too ridiculous, too frustrating in how long it took Henry and Catherine to get it together (and by “it” I mean them). I know, I know, love in the time of war can’t be easy, nursing jaundice and fighting Germans and then going AWOL and whatnot. Still, it’s a good thing I kept reading Hemingway long after my annoyance with those two faded away, because he came to be one of my favorite writers of all time (please see The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time).
Anyway, I know Ernest was a bit of a womanizer and never really knew what he wanted - however these letters have aided in brightening my overall already glowing opinion of him. All writers struggle with how to deal with the outside world because they don’t entirely know how to interact with other people. They aren’t good at voicing how they feel because they’re so used to (and are more comfortable with) keeping the world inside their heads. Intrinsically they are better off on their own, so I’m not surprised in a way, that Ernest spent a lot of his time isolated in the woods of Northern Michigan, was married four times and committed suicide at the age of 61. (Ok, so maybe I’m a little surprised - insanity did, after all, run in his family).
In 30 letters to Marlene from 1949 to 1959 (now a complete addition to the 31 she sent to him) Hemingway confesses his admiration for her in what experts have come to conclude as an entirely non-physical relationship: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I'd bring the nickel.” I guess that’s one of the great things about having a writer fall in love with you – they can express it with more eloquence than most.
However, what I love most about this finding is that they were victims of un-synchronized passion. That even the irritating Henry and Catherine found the right timing, but Hemingway himself could not. Those times when he was out of love, she was deep in some romantic tribulation, and “on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes, I was submerged.”
What is it about timing that left these two sending ridiculously romantic letters to each other for at least ten years? Dietrich began a 1951 letter, “I think it is high time to tell you that I think of you constantly. I read your letters over and over and speak of you with a few chosen men. I have moved your photograph to my bedroom and mostly look at it rather helplessly.”
This whole finding has made me hate the fact the letter writing is a long lost art form. There’s something about email that doesn’t quite capture the personal quality that comes through with letters. Granted, some people (like myself) have horrible handwriting. For a long time I’d always longed to have those nice, bubbly, perfectly round letters that are directly associate with “girl” handwriting (though I found it highly offensive when they would dot their “I’s” with hearts), however I’ve come to accept my doctor-like scratch. And regardless, handwriting is a part of who you are, barely legible or not, and there’s something so open and raw about that. Writing by hand takes time, takes more thought and means more to the reader knowing that someone took the time to find a pen and paper and didn’t just push keys on a keyboard.
While I’ve never received a love letter, and don’t know that anyone in my generation ever actually has, I have to admit that I was reading their correspondence with one hand over my mouth in rapt-near-silence unlike I ever did while turning the pages of Farewell. Maybe that’s because sometimes just plain life is somehow always more interesting than what you’ll ever find in a book, no matter who writes it.
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