March 30, 2009

Catch 22

Do you know what I think is ridiculous? Being successful, owning a home, getting married, having a lot of money, raising children, and being only twenty-two.

I think there was a time that when looking at that age I thought I would surely be a well rounded, successful adult with enough money to buy a house and have had enough time to have found a good man. And I think when I thought all that was when I was about fifteen. Now, a few weeks shy of turning twenty-six, I don’t think I have hardly anything together. I’m still making the same mistakes, doing all the wrong things, saying all the wrong things, entirely unable to afford my own life, my own apartment, and at this point, even get a date.

All of this and many more reasons is why I can’t in all honesty watch One Tree Hill anymore. Okay so I know I never write about anything like a show on the CW, but sitting there watching the tail end of this ridiculous drama, I didn’t realize exactly how ridiculous it was until one character blurted out that she was twenty-two. I almost fell off the couch. Never mind that the actors themselves are older than I am, but twenty-two? I started to panic.

Who at that age has their own magazine, owns a house/a clothing store/a business, is raising a seventeen-year old runaway, and is passing up offers from hot young men to come with them to LA? I’m pretty sure I can safely say that at twenty-two I was an emotional wreck, who had exactly no idea what I wanted to do with my life, was drinking far too much, and was continuously falling for all the wrong guys who never even asked me to go to dinner let alone follow them across the country (some things never change).

I suppose it’s nice in this economic, love and life recession I’ve found myself in over the past few years, (as my age creeps ever so slow further and further from twenty-two), to watch on television how my life could have turned out were I not living in the real world. But what’s so funny however, is that when the above mentioned twenty-two-year-old-success-story turns down the guy at the airport for reasons all viewers I’m sure couldn’t understand (I mean, did you see him?) the gentleman in question said, “You know, if this were a movie, all of this would be ending differently.”

So you see, he knows how I feel. If it were a movie, (or come to mention it my twenty-two year old life), she would have wrapped her arms around him and gone with him. Because there’s nothing like looking back on all that’s gone by and recognizing an opportunity you let pass you by because of obligations you weren’t even ready to make. You’re only young once (and getting older every second) and there’s time enough to figure it all out and find what defines your own success...after you make the choice to take a leap on to the symbolic plane of your life.

Because what tragedy it would have been had those emotional, drunken, aimless and confusing days of my twenty-two year old life never have happened - I’d hardly have been prepared at all for the last four years

March 16, 2009

West Side Line.

I always told myself I never wanted to be that kind of New Yorker who shied away from things far away from the basic radius of my usual life. Brooklyn, okay sure, I’ll go to Williamsburg. Eighty-ninth and Fifth to the Guggenheim? I mean, it's art. Staten Island? Umm, what’s the point. But when friends decide, for their own insane reasons, to move somewhere like West 225th street (literally over the Harlem River!) and want me to take the 1 (local only!) train for longer than I’ve ever been on any subway train since I’ve been living in the city, and show up at their housewarming party with a bottle of Prosecco after having walked ten minutes (lost!) in the wrong direction with not one person (not one!) on the street, and me, looking as out of place as a Midwestern couple with bright neon fanny-packs and huge billowing maps in the middle of Midtown Manhattan...don’t expect me for one up-up-uptown second, not to make the most of it.

Because the things is, you never get quite as drunk or spend half as much time at someone’s party talking to basically everyone in the room, willing listen to the entirety of their life’s story as when a) it took you the better half of the night just to get there, and b) you’re dreading more than anything you’ve ever dreaded in a long while, having to go all the way back home.

March 10, 2009

Various Notes Made on Various Napkins at Various Bars on Various Subjects:

-great song! remember to listen to rumours album again soon

-maybe it will be easier for him to do this thing over the phone because he’s a huge failure in person. so maybe an advantageous loophole?

-just don’t start falling for a phone. that’s if he calls.

-what hasn’t happened yet is far more important than what already has

-am I bitter: yes (crossed out). no (crossed out). it would be rare to diagnose a disease after two symptoms, no?

-be brave. be brave. be brave.

-bartender said: "can i just tell you that you’re really beautiful?" remember to come back here. something green? greenhouse? green owl?

-if this guy says "like" one more time...

-when everything changes, i suppose that means we have no choice by to change with it

-shameless flirt. of course he likes her. ppfffffffffttttt!

-c train to clinton/washington (don’t cross atlantic)

-black sweater (cute, brown hair, tall) talk to him next time he walks by

-when did people in new york get to be so boring?

-any day anyone is no other than someone

March 8, 2009

Just another Saturday night.

I think there has to come a point (doesn’t there?) when we all just stop pretending.

We meet people and we take an interest and ask questions in a very where-are-you-from-what-do-you-do sort of way, as though those questions can really help us to better know a person, like our jobs and places of birth define who we are. And it's hard not to wonder after a while, after so many of these conversations and question and answer sessions over drinks with people, if anyone out there really knows you at all.

But we meet people and take an interest and ask questions, and keep going through the motions that are forced upon us in a place full of millions of strangers. So you drift and float from one group to the next, one bar to the next, in an effort to figure out where you fit in.

And there comes a point when you’re standing in the middle of the open back patio at Union Pool on Saturday’s warm night in Brooklyn because the music inside was so loud you could hardly hear your own thoughts and had to escape, holding a beer and smoking a cigarette and staring up at the moon, bored, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, and can’t, for another second, stand the thought of having one more person that doesn’t mean anything come up and ask you where you’re from and what you do because there has to come a point (there must be, there has to be) when we all just stop, stop, stop pleaseforcryingoutloud, pretending.

March 2, 2009

"And now the weather..."

People love to talk about the weather because it’s one of the most universal things there is to talk about. Sun? Yeah I’ve seen that. And rain and thunderstorms and fog and sleet and bad snow storms on the first day of March when all we’re hoping for (wishing for, praying for) is the not too far away days of spring.

We like to talk about the snow because it’s one more thing in this place we can all complain about. Delayed trains and slush on sidewalks and wind (my god the wind!) Time to move to Florida, time to move anywhere, I’m over this shit, I can’t take it anymore, how much are we supposed to get tomorrow?)

People love to talk about the weather because it brings us together. I watched a woman’s hat get blown off her head this morning and as it tumbled down the sidewalk I saw five people (five!) start to run after it as though the hat were a lost child. Today was all very: Watch your step, Look out for that, Here let me help you with that. (What makes me think that tomorrow we’ll be back to: Get out of my way, Watch where you’re going buddy, Who are you telling to move, asshole?

It changes us somehow, makes us like little kids living in a white world where nothing all that bad can really happen. I even got a text message from a friend waking me from sleep this morning before seven o’clock (thanks man) saying simply, "Yay Snow!"

After dinner with friends last night up at Sfoglia on 92nd and Lexington, (my new favorite place in the city) over bottles of wine and some of the best Pappardelle I’ve ever had, we all looked, hands on coffee cups poised halfway to our lips - and there it was. The soft white flakes had begun to fall over dinner, and all hopes for spring were suddenly dashed along with our bank accounts.

After paying the bill (and crossing my fingers that my credit card would go through) we pushed through the front doors and cabs were hailed, but I said no. Only twenty blocks home down Lexington Avenue on what was the first (and maybe last) good snow fall of the season, and I have to admit it was one of the best twenty-block walks I’ve ever had in this city.

You forget what it means to be in a place like this, and why we keep insisting on talking about the weather, until you’re out in the middle of a quiet Manhattan night walking past store fronts and gazing out at the long expanse of Lexington Avenue dotted with lights and realizing what you never get a chance to when you’re walking around Manhattan when it’s loud and snow-less and full of people - that while it would be nice to have someone to share such a great New York moment with, the city itself, even on the stormiest of days and coldest of nights, can make for the perfect companion and the best home in the world.

Yay snow.