May 20, 2011

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel…well, okay really.

I wasn’t really aware that there are folks out there talking about the world coming to an end on Saturday. I guess I’m not on the doomsday distro list, which is just fine with me because if the world does decide to come to an end I think I’d like to be surprised. I don’t want to have a whole lot of time to sit around and think about the impending unavoidable end of everything. Let’s make it quick – surprise! – no time for regrets, or, I knew I should have seen Bridesmaids the night it came out because I really could have used a laugh what with all this the-end-is-nigh talk lingering in the air. 

Make it quick. Like a band-aid. See you.

And then I saw this, a post on Craigslist where some chap from Ronkonkoma (is that even a real place?) is trying to get people to give him all their worldly possessions because hey, after Saturday, you won’t be around to use them!  He’s obviously a terrible person and anyone willing to give him anything probably deserves to be blown away in a shattering cloud of flames straight out of Independence Day.

But that’s beside the point.

The point is I got to thinking about the things I have that are worth something to me that I’d be loathe to leave behind in the event of Armageddon. I guess it’s sort of like the question you ask during that fun game while drinking with friends: if your apartment were on fire, what would you take with you? Well this guy is asking for money, cars, canned food and durable goods, and while I’m not entirely sure what the latter is, I do know I don’t have very much, if anything, of the former (though I do think there is a can of pumpkin in the back of my cabinet from when I got it into my head a few Thanksgivings ago that I was going to bake a pie). 

What I think I’d want to take, in no particular order, are the following: original LP of Dave Brubeck’s 1959 Time Out, a bathrobe, and a laptop.

The album. Well because it’s my all-time favorite jazz album that I spent a long time trying to find, but also because I talked my way into getting it free of charge from a frat boy at a party in college. While drinking Miller High Life out of a red plastic cup I came upon this gentleman’s extensive and amazing record collection (which happened to be his father’s, his son didn’t know Dave Brubeck from Dave Matthews). I began to tell him that it wasn’t really worth much and he would probably hate it if he ever did get around to listening to it, or, for that matter, purchasing a turntable to play it on. The kid had more resolve than I anticipated in the end, maybe the idea of his father getting angry really terrified him. Either way it left with me at the end of the night, and whenever I listen to the record I still find myself wondering how his dad reacted when he found out.

The bathrobe. It’s folded neatly in a plastic bin under my bed where it has been, largely untouched, for five years. It was the last thing I remember my mother wearing, and for a while after she died it still smelled like her. It doesn’t anymore, but sometimes if I put it on for just a moment it feels like she’s still close by. It’s as though this one piece of fabric has the magical power to transport me back to a time when there wasn’t a gaping hole in my left ventricle.

The laptop. I never got around to catching up with where things were in the technology arena, so every Mighty post from when I started the blog in 2006, (along with every college paper, and short story and word I’ve ever written), is saved on the hard drive of my 2004 Dell laptop. I figure there’s probably some pretty terrible things on there that ought to disappear forever in a blinding haze of blue screen of death, but it’s good, I think, to remember the crap you’ve produced to realize how far you’ve hopefully come. 

Anyway all of this doesn’t matter of course, because the world isn’t in fact (spoiler alert!) ending. If it were what I would take with me wouldn’t really be an issue. It does however, remind me a bit about the things that really do matter that we so easily forget about and lose sight of in the daily course of our lives, when we never stop to think, hey, one day this is all going to end, isn’t it?

Because it’s not really about the objects at all, it’s about how they make us feel and their ability to remind us who we are. Maybe the real point (yeah dude in Ronkonkoma, I’m talking to you), is to try to embrace those feelings a bit more and work harder at living the kind of life so that if the world really were to fall into the Rapture (whatever that is), you’d at least know you lived not being afraid of experiencing the whole vast range of the emotional spectrum, (that’s the good to the exceptionally shitty), and maybe then the end of everything would sort of be…well, okay really.

So perhaps tomorrow I’ll slip on the bathrobe and listen to Time Out while transferring all my files to a newly purchased USB drive (one has to start somewhere I suppose). I’ll do it for posterity if nothing else, but also as a testament that I’m still here, for now anyway, so might as well at least start backing up my files.

I might even make that pie.

May 6, 2011

You had me at “so, what’s up?”

I know many who say that in this world of online dating that romance, whatever that is, is apparently on its way out. We are content with reaching out to each other through computers screens and defining ourselves in profiles, as though we are simply one-sided machines quantified only by the kinds of music we listen to or television shows we watch (well, I could never love a Baywatch fan).

I was recently on the phone with a friend who was looking at her OkCupid profile and she told me that there were currently 66,741 people online. That’s a lot of people out there all sitting inside their apartments surfing through photo-shopped pictures and perfectly crafted profiles describing what people think is the best version of themselves (read: mainly lies). When my friend told me she got an instant message on the site from a gentleman with this lovely request, “want to cuddle?” it was then that I really felt I made the correct decision in getting myself off the site.

Let me explain. Getting online, creating a profile, setting up a series of dates and over drinks talking all about myself doesn’t sound like an activity I would in any way enjoy participating in. And of course I’d have to ask questions too: Where are you from? What do you do? Where do you live? How long have you been in New York? Christ I’m already bored. Of course I know for some it works. My friend from college not only met her perfectly matched husband on Match.com, she met him on her very first Match.com date (like I say, love is like hitting. the. lottery), however I can safely say it’s not for me. I’m not quite yet ready to give up on that perhaps impossible thing called meeting someone the old fashioned way – you know, face to face – a concept of which close friends of mine (I won’t name names) can’t seem to entirely come to terms with. In their attempt to right the wrong of my singlehood – and in pure horrifying romantic comedy fashion – they decided to create an OkCupid profile for me without my knowing about it. For three weeks they secretly managed the account, letting messages filter in from men all over New York who thought my friends having added “scotch” as one of my interests was enough for them to want to date me.

Upon hearing the news and getting an email from OkCupid informing me that I was apparently now deemed in the top 10 percent of the most attractive people on the site and they were now  – great believers in love that they are  – going to start sending me more attractive matches (I bet they say that to all the girls!) I was at once offended and just a little bit sad. Offended, well, for obvious reasons (my friends and I are now back on speaking terms), and a bit sad because their gesture, while I guess well-intentioned, spoke not only to the nature of how we as a society view our approach to relationships, but also to the somewhat disturbing idea that being a certain age and being unattached is in some way, somehow, a real problem.

I deactivated the account, leaving behind what I’m sure could have been great loves of my life, men who had sent compelling messages like, “I like scotch, too,” and went back to the business of thinking about love in the ways of yesteryear.

Then I received the following text message:

“Hey, I don’t really know you, except that I got your number at Brooklyn Bowl in January and I vaguely recollect talking about art…so, what’s up?”

Right. All those months ago I too have a vague recollection of talking to some guy at one o’clock in the morning at Brooklyn Bowl about, above all things, art, a topic which at the time seemed to interest him (well, I had a lot to say on the subject) enough for him to ask for my number and then promptly never call me.  

The more I thought about it the more I realized that perhaps I’ve been telling myself lies as much as the people in their OkCupid profiles (I mean do you really think I’m going to believe you’re a “young” fifty? What does that even mean anyway?). How long have I been in New York meeting men face to face, handing out my number (it must be stored in cell phones across all five boroughs!) never to have it really go anywhere? However much, much more to the point: where did I get this idea that meeting people in the flesh is the answer, or so much better than the alternative? Perhaps yesterday I should have given a chance to the guy who, from the window of his car shouted out to me as I passed him on the sidewalk carrying my laundry bag for drop-off “Hey beautiful, I’ll do your wash and fold.”

I guess it’s hope. Hope and my general unwillingness to stop believing that two people can, through circumstances greater than themselves, find each other sitting over drinks at a bar or being introduced by friends and connect (when a man and a woman see each other and like each other they ought to come together - wham! like a couple of taxis on Broadway - not sit around analyzing each other like two specimens in a bottle), creating a spark in a way that no message over a computer could ever aspire to ignite.

So I put it to you, dear readers, as I find myself at this particular crossroads of my romantic future: what would you do? Ignore the message realizing that surely this isn’t how things are supposed to go, or (!), respond and accept that perhaps the new norm is now a text message sent approximately five months after meeting someone, and come to terms with the fact that while one can hope for more (and one can always hope), perhaps these days we should know better than to be hoping for much more than “what’s up.”