“I never thought it was such a bad little tree.”

It’s here. I think I was shell-shocked after Thanksgiving, still in denial (perhaps it was all the wine), that the holidays were much further away than they appeared. But Wednesday morning I realized, as it literally hit me on my walk to the office. Just as I reached Fifth Avenue at 52^ndstreet  - bam! - a guy bumped into me like he didn’t see me at all. My shoulder was thrown back and I turned around ready to yell. Upon further examination I figured he probably actually hadn’t seen me because he was a tourist (made obvious by a lot of things including but not limited to the jeans, sneakers and baseball cap in Midtown on a weekday), and tourists don’t see anything because they walk with their necks craned as though they’ve never seen tall buildings before.

And maybe they haven’t.

“Unbelievable,” I said, my go-to response for all types of frustrating encounters with people in and around this city (sometimes when it’s really egregious there’s a certain bleeping expletive placed before it). “Watch where you’re going, dude.” I opted for “dude” in an attempt to take a bit of the sting out of it instead of, say, “moron” or “blind idiot.”

“Oh my gosh I’m so sorry, ma’am!” he said. I turned around and he had his hands out in front of him as though he were bracing himself for me to throw a punch. I’m not sure what I was more taken aback by, how apologetic he was or that I’m now, apparently, old enough to be referred to as ma’am. I relented taking pity, and simply shook my head at him. It was a chastising but accepting gesture of his apology, and I proceeded to stand on the corner to wait for the light to change.

“I really am sorry,” he continued. “I’ve never been to New York before, and we’re in town for the tree lighting tonight and I’m trying to find where to go…”

My heart seized. The bleeping unbelievable Rockefeller tree lighting is TONIGHT? In all my denial about the holiday season I’d forgotten this annual tourist trap was upon us. Now all I could think about was how from tomorrow until the end of the month I’m going to have to push back against a torrent of tourists all gawking at store windows and blocking the sidewalks with their enormous shopping bags every time I enter or leave work.

“It’s three blocks that way,” I said not turning around, extending my right arm and index finger southwards down Fifth the way the Ghost of Christmas Future points to Ebenezer Scrooge’s grave.

I think he said thank you but I didn’t hear it, I was already crossing the street, leaving him stranded looking for where to go for what was sure to be one of the most irritating nights of his life. What is it about being wedged in with hundreds of people for hours waiting for Justin Bieber to sing a bad rendition of “Frosty the Snowman” that makes people feel like that’s what the holiday season is all about? I guess it’s the same people who eat their Thanksgiving dinners in tents outside Best Buy.

I wonder where they get it, the propensity not to feel depressed and annoyed at this season of emotional and materialistic stresses. Doesn’t it get to them, all the expectation and pressure, how we have no choice but to remember the way things used to be, that time when life was a lot less complicated? I’ll admit that for the rest of the year I’m a lot better at pushing the past and everything else back, keeping it at bay. But for some reason this season goes down like a glass of eggnog laced with melancholy, and I tend to go through December with my head down holding my breath until it’s over. 

Later that night while I was still at the office, I found myself remembering two years ago being at dinner with my friend Matt downtown the night before we were both meant to leave the city for Christmas. It was the last chance we were going to have to go skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park, and we decided as we paid the check that we should go. We hopped in a cab and sped uptown, shoving extra cash at the driver to get us there in time. He dropped us at Central Park South, and we ran through the darkened snow covered lanes of the park until we saw it, the bright icy circle floating in the distance, holiday music booming from surrounding speakers. 

We sprinted to the ticket window, and when we arrived, panting and out of breath, the woman told us the rink was closing in ten minutes, and they weren’t letting anyone else in. Matt and I, still both determined to enjoy this last bit of childhood holiday nostalgia, pleaded with her, reminded her of the spirit of the season. Soon she smiled and gave in, and shook her head at us as she waved us through. It was a Christmas miracle. We had enough time to make about five laps around before they started to turn off the lights. I remember how happy we were to have even that brief time on the ice, how the woman behind the ticket window told us to have a Merry Christmas as we left, and how we reminisced about some of the happier Christmases of our pasts as we walked through the abandoned red and white holiday tents in Columbus Circle on our way home.

Thinking back on that night I realized that's what they're trying to do, those crazy people waiting out in the cold to see the first initial lighting of the tree. They all want to feel something, they want back, even for a moment, the lightness and happiness of youth that Matt and I tried so hard to reclaim that night at the rink. Yes life is difficult and we can't get back the past, but it's important not to give up and lose sight of the good things right here in the present. 

That's why I decided to wait. I waited until Mariah Carey and tourists were all gone, and took a detour to the subway home. It was late and the sidewalks were already emptying as I walked down along Fifth Avenue - 50^th, 49^th, 48^th - and then suddenly there it was. It stood tall and proud, an 80-foot Norway Spruce from Mt. Olive, New Jersey that had been growing in the backyard of one Joe Balku since he bought his home in 1973. It had made it through Superstorm Sandy even as the surrounding trees in Balku’s backyard all were downed. Yet this tree remained. It battled the rain and the high winds only to find itself here, pulled from its roots and adorned with 30,000 lights and topped with a Swarovski crystal star.

Some people were still lingering, all posing for pictures, big smiles on their faces with the giant green tree alight behind them. That’s when I felt it - this tree is a survivor. It gave its life to bring all of these people together, and it will stand here as a beacon of hope for forty days, and after its stint in the spotlight it will become lumber for Habitat for Humanity in order to change the lives of others yet again. It will carry on. Because that’s what we do, in spite of or maybe because of the hardships in our lives we carry on, we survive. We may not know what our destinies hold but we adapt, we strive to find purpose and meaning, we aspire to effect change and to spark love in what little time we have to be alive.

We are all undiscovered trees in distant backyards waiting to find our place in the world, and we do what we can to get by. Maybe that’s the true meaning of the season, to find something that brings us together and reminds us we’re not alone.

A young couple both in puffy jackets and knit hats asked me if I’d take their picture. It took a few tries (I’m not handy with iPhones), but I think we finally got one with real greeting card potential. As I handed the phone back to them they thanked me, and I asked where they were from.

The girl looked at me strangely, cocked her head to the side and said, “Queens.”

Such a thing for two New Yorkers to find themselves together here in front of this tree. 

Further proof I suppose, that the brave New Jersey Norway’s lights shine for all who need it, no matter where they happen to call home.

Love (Online) is a Battlefield.

At a bar in the West Village I saw him standing there waiting for someone to show up. He was wearing what seemed to be his first date casual uniform – a blue gingham dress shirt (why do men insist on refusing to tuck in their shirts?), and jeans that had a bit too much flare. I was sitting with friends, and noticed him the way you notice people at bars who are by themselves. 

He, short and blond, was looking intently at his phone thumbing through messages in what I assumed to be an attempt to look occupied, inconspicuous, less nervous. It wasn’t working. She, shorter and brunette, was wearing a black dress and arrived apologizing profusely for being late. I noticed that their introduction was awkward. There was neither an embrace nor a handshake indicating the lack of intimacy of close friends or people who are currently dating, while also ruling out a business drinks meet-up. This, I assumed on a Sunday night in a dimly lit bar, was an online created first date. He ordered a beer, she something with a pinkish hue. They seemed to chat amicably enough, and after one drink they were gone.

Being myself a newcomer to the scene of online dating, (I’m coming up on my three week anniversary) I wondered what it was in their profiles that made them both think they might be right for each other. What was it among those strange questions and rankings of importance of religion, drug and smoking habits that felt so right that they decided to make a date? There must have been something there that made them both willing to overcome a whole array of fears in order to put on their casual first date uniform best, step outside their comfort zones, and meet a complete stranger. All this was I’m sure on top of the fact that they were both deep down hoping this person had the potential to become someone they might be with long term. I mean, isn’t that the ultimate endgame for all this dating, the prospect that at one point you won’t have to do it anymore?

I’ll be honest with you, filling out an online dating profile was probably one of the most soul sucking experiences of my life. I’m sure it didn’t help that I did it over copious amount of Aberlour, and with a crooning Ella Fitzgerald playing on vinyl in the background. I tried to take seriously questions like “what’s the most private thing you’re willing to admit” (as though that’s somehow any indicator of the kind of person I am?). It was hearing Ella’s voice that really started to make me lament for the old days, the ones when the concept of romance didn’t take place over a computer screen. This isn’t how Ella did it, or the folks who fell in love to her crooning voice on dance floors in jazz clubs back in the 50’s. Surely I too could find a better way? 

But the longer I sat there listening to her, the blinking cursor flashing in the empty field before me, the more I realized that women in the 50’s had their own set of issues to deal with, and it was time I started living in the present, no matter how much at times I might happen to resent it.

It takes a while for a somewhat old fashioned mentality like my own to come to terms with the fact that the man I might end up with could potentially start out as a thumbnail picture alongside a list of six things he could never live without (most often it seems to include different iterations of beer, football, video games, Breaking Bad, and working out). But I decided, as the A-side of the record came to its inevitable end, to defer to the very smart person who somewhere once uttered the mantra of people who give up everywhere - if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. So I downed another stiff finger of single malt, flipped the record over, and started to tackle how best to respond to the very daunting (and a little bit overwhelming for an online dating profile, no?) question of: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?

Are they kidding me with this stuff?

As Ella started in on one of my favorites, singing, “The radio and the telephone, and the movies that we know may just be passing fancies and in time may go - but our love is here to stay,” I wondered if she, at the time she was so graciously belting out the words penned by Ira Gershwin, knew that the radio and telephone eventually really would go, and love, whether it’s here to stay or not was going to end up being sought out on a medium she probably couldn’t even begin to conceptualize.

What am I doing with my life? Damned if I know, but I guess I have no choice but to take a crack at answering it anyway.

Back at the bar I’d forgotten all about the first daters. I left not long after them and headed for the subway. It was there, waiting at 14^th street for the uptown 1 train that I saw him, blue gingham standing but three feet away from me on the platform. Of all the subway platforms in all the city. He was alone and thumbing through his phone again, only this time there was something about his gaze that made me feel like something was wrong. It was as though there was a spark that had been drained from his face since I first spotted him at the bar a little over an hour ago. And then I realized. He had just gone through what he’s probably been going through for a long time now - a series of first meetings full of potential that ultimately end with the morale shattering answer of she’s not the one for me, and back to the drawing board he goes.

On the train he sits across from me. While the whole car is either listening to iPods, or reading books or scanning the day’s copy of the Times, he’s just sitting there. He’s sitting there staring straight ahead into nothingness as though he’s reliving the date, trying to pinpoint where it went wrong, what he said, what she said, if it was his fault or hers. As we reach 42nd street I think I see despair settle into his eyes, and wonder if he’s asking himself just how much longer he’s willing to do this, to put himself out there with the results always being the same. Wasn’t it Einstein who said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? 

I fear that insanity, and there it was sitting right across from me as I tried to avert its gaze. It’s what I wonder about now that I’m a part of this world of trying to find love on the internet - how long do we go on for, how long to do we try? I suppose I’m too new to the game to really ask that question seriously, but I know it’s an option, lurking there somewhere in my future when I might be blue gingham (I do happen to own that shirt), on the subway heading home after one-too-many-first-dates-to-count wondering how it ended up like this, how my love life became so difficult, a numbers game summed up by how well I can take a picture, and how interesting the most private thing I’m willing to admit is (and just for the record, apparently “I’ve never been in jail,” along with any other trace amounts of sarcasm doesn’t seem to go over too well).

But blue gingham realized a long time ago what I’m only just coming to terms with, that this era of finding love online is the one we live in now, and I’d be a fool to keep pretending otherwise. Ella is meant simply to be listened to, relegated to the past as the way things used to be, not the way things are. And since my track record of finding love offline hasn’t been very successful, perhaps it’s time to take a tip from her other songs like: Who Cares, because eventually I’ll meet Somebody from Somewhere and despite the fact that it ends up being online, maybe we’ll both just say screw it, Let’s Fall in Love.

We’re not a generation comfortable with approaching people at bars or book readings or on subway platforms or dance floors. We like to keep our ear buds in, smile briefly only to look away, to board the subway or leave the street corner wondering what could have been had we only just had the guts to say hello. So we go online. We hide behind profiles and head shots and hope for the best. And I get it. I am that person. But what I’ve also learned (and am still learning), is that it’s all about letting go of the way you thought things were supposed to be. Because supposed to be can ruin you. You can wait forever for it, and in the end the Rockies may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble so you might as well figure out a way to be happy while you have the chance.

To blue gingham I say once more unto the breach, dear friend. Online dating is a battlefield, it is a war of return on investment, a crapshoot pitting your energy, patience and expectations against less than encouraging odds. 

And yet while there may be defeats lurking on the other end of every of the click of the mouse - so too might potential be. All we can do as urban warriors of our own destinies is keep fighting, keep messaging and reaching out and taking chances and putting ourselves and our hearts out there with nothing but hope and the idea that one of these days, if we’re very lucky, we just might be fortunate enough to win the war.

Until then, of course, expect more reports from the field.