As if I had all the answers

My friend just had her first one-night stand. She said that apparently the price of getting laid by her is a few 2 dollar PBR's and a taco at 3AM. A “seemingly amazing guy” who drove her home in the morning said he'd call and take her on a real date. So far, no call.

So she asked me for my advice. Now I may not have any clue on how to run my own love life. I may be someone who always likes the wrong people – guys who lead me on, guys who treat me badly, guys who cheat on me, guys who are in relationships. I may not have any idea why this is or how I might go about fixing it. I may be single and alone at 40 with cats, still on the upper east side swigging martini's every night and showing up drunk at all of my friends weddings. Regardless of all of this, other people always seem to come to me for my advice.

She talked about how her and the “seemingly amazing guy” walked around for hours talking about everything and nothing at the same time. She told me how she had never felt such an instantaneous attraction or connection with anyone before in her life. And one thing led to another and the next day after he brought her home, she knew. She knew in her gut the way girls know in their guts that he wasn’t going to call.

We go home with people knowing they’re not going to call because we’re all looking for something and we don’t know how to find it. We think they see something in us that no one else has ever seen. But there’s a difference in looking at a thing and seeing a thing. And people tell lies. They tell them easier than they should and more than they should and we believe them, even though we know we shouldn’t.

So I tell her among other things that there are no answers. I tell her that sometimes things just are what they are in the end no matter how you feel, and there’s no changing that. I tell her that a one night stand is a one night chance to figure out who you are and if you ever want to be a one night anything to anyone ever again. I tell her I’m no good with advice.

Because what you see isn’t always what you get.

There we were sitting in Tea & Sympathy and it was like no time had passed at all. More old friends coming into town to keep me company and it’s hard to think that one would need company in a city so large. We had walked from the East side to the West side through the Park and around the reservoir and could see from the north side, the city skyline. My friend looked at me earnestly and said “how can you look at this and not realize how great it is that you are here?”

Because, I thought to tell him, great isn’t just skylines. Because great can’t just be great views and great restaurants and tall buildings.

From the West side back to the East side we went to Bella Blu on Lexington for dinner where the bartender was burning napkins behind the bar and people were clapping at the flying sparks like they were sparklers on the fourth of July. After drinks uptown we walked home drunk and I thought that great is old friends and conversation and memories and not feeling like such an insignificant blip on the radar of such a massive city.

Conversation on the 1/9

Cute guy next to me on the subway looking exactly like all the suits who pile on the 1/9 express at 42nd street. Blonde hair and blue eyes with a black leather messenger bag with attached hanging nalgene bottle.

I was busy reading the latest New Yorker, the “Life During Wartime” issue. I skipped to the back first, which I always do, to the cartoon contest. I didn’t win the last one I sent in a few weeks ago. Apparently I’m not clever enough. At least not New Yorker clever.

Interrupting my reading of “Yugoslavia 1991” was two girls who were standing next to me:

“She just doesn’t get it. He totally doesn’t like her, it’s like so pathetic.”
“Oh I know, I mean she should take a hint ya know? You don’t just DO something like that when it’s so OBVIOUS that the guy doesn’t like you.”
“I know, like what was she even thinking? It’s like so ridiculous I can’t even believe it.”
“And then to like keep calling him?! Trying to like talk to him and shit.”
“Oh I know! I like honestly don’t get what was going through her head.”
“Me either. But whatever, she’s not even pretty.”
“Ew I know, totally not pretty enough for him. She’s like such a bitch anyway. I don’t even know why we’re friends with her. She’s always talking about everyone behind their back.”

I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. I was eavesdropping because that’s what people do when you’re packed in like sardines on the 1/9 uptown express. They were right there sharing the same pole as me and cute guy with the briefcase and too much gel in his hair. I looked up realizing my outburst, and the two girls shot me a dirty look and got off at the next stop. Cute guy was smiling and holding back a laugh too. The girls weren’t pretty and the guy got off with me at 72nd and walked in the opposite direction, his nalgene swinging behind him.

Another Friday night

Without me saying anything he bought me a drink and it came back a small vodka soda with a lime and I realized that I have become a forgone conclusion, something I’ve never wanted to be.

But that’s what’s good about having friends and people who know you well. You don’t have to worry about being another version of yourself the way you do when you’re meeting someone new and trying to get them to buy you a vodka soda.

And there we were amidst New Yorkers on the Upper East Side who made it out in the rain at midnight on a Friday/Saturday looking for something. Every guy had on a collared shirt that was, patterned or not, blue or black. Every girl had on cleavage revealing tank tops with lots of jewelry and were traveling in packs.

Most of the time when we go out looking for it, it finds us and we hardly know the difference.

Two On the Subject of Distance

Over spicy tuna rolls at Sake Haven on 79th and 2nd last night my friend told me that sometimes you have to leave a place in order to escape the memories tied to it.

I said that sometimes no matter where you go your past always has a way of catching up with you.

The Way #71 Sees My Life

I think the Starbucks near my office is cursed. And I say the Starbucks because if it's not the place then it's just got to be me because every time I go there (and it's not often anymore) something strange happens. I have, yes, out of my current financial problems and need for the extra ten minutes of sleep in the morning rendering it impossible to make it from the subway to the Starbucks and then to my office in order to be on time, stopped frequenting my old haunt. I'm now friends with Ralph, the guy at the coffee stand on the sidewalk right outside of my office where I can, every morning, have my coffee ready for me for just one dollar. He asks me about my weekends and tells me to have a good day and his coffee is hot, which is about as picky as I can be these days when it comes to getting anything I can get for a dollar.

An entire two weeks ago when I went to Starbucks in a free ten minutes I had during the day on Friday, my grande non-fat latte setting me back a whopping $3.75 which is like, enough to almost buy me dinner for an entire week (read: a box of cereal). They forgot my order and after re-ordering it on the fly I got a half full cup of whole milk that was barely steaming (whatever happened to, careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot?) and suddenly my world was falling apart. Holding the white and green cup with # 71 on the side by the inarticulate man-hating Maureen Dowd, I realized that perhaps our relationship (Starbucks and mine) is hitting a rough patch. Perhaps it’s time to sever the cord of this love-hate (usually mostly love) union and look for someone who treats me with more respect and appreciates my feelings, can understand the kind of girl I am.

This morning (back again, some of us never learn) I was harassed by the man standing in front of me in line. He wouldn’t stop asking me if I had a quarter. No, I said (which was true) I don’t, but he just wouldn’t let it go. He asked about five other people, all of whom didn’t even bother to acknowledge his existence (that’s New York for you). The man (Irwin) then proceeded to ask me about my weekend plans, what I was going to get, if I had ever tried the bagels, if I was going to be late for work. He, apparently, loves their muffins and isn’t, “damn it,” going to get a paycheck tomorrow. The whole scene was just so awkward for me that it was all I could do from turning around and running away, my only typical response to awkward situations.

When the British guy behind me jokingly asked me if I had a dime, I started to laugh and then Irwin shot us both a hateful look and asked pointedly: “are you laughing at me?”

Well, I guess sometimes life (and Starbucks) is like what #71 says: the minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

I'm Not Easy

There was a girl in front of me drunk and dancing to the music, which was loud and obnoxious and she was the only one doing it and it made me embarrassed for her.

The guy who was talking to me was talking about what guys at bars talk about, and I wasn’t so much listening as I was looking at his hair and how it bounced when he opened and closed his mouth with each word.

As he talked I couldn’t hear over the music all that he was saying, and I just nodded my head and smiled thinking, here he is talking when it all just comes down to whether or not I’m going to go home with him.

I pictured the morning and how it would be after the vodka wore off and how it’s just as easy to be nobody to somebody, so why go out of my way to be nobody to nobody.

Outside a sad scene: the drunk girl falling onto the ground and the guy trying like hell to pick her up.

elbow wrench : directions ::

You want to think you're better at things than you really are. You want to think that you can handle anything life throws at you and when the time comes to really to step up to the plate you'll be able to follow through. And, unlike Alex Rodriguez up at bat two runs down at the bottom of the eighth, you won't cave under the pressure.

Well yesterday, for me, the time came, and it came in the form of a box from ikea. My New York apartment, albeit on the Upper East Side, is still somewhat small. The two-seater couch I acquired from back home makes just enough room for me and The Texan (my roommate from Austin) to sit snugly next to each other while watching Grey's Anatomy. But New York is the kind of city where you're constantly surrounded by people, pushed up against them in the subway, walking around them on the sidewalk, trying to avoid them (your boss) at the office. People here are everywhere. So in going home you long for a little space, a little time alone, the chance to feel like your life has more breathing room than it really does.

That's where the chair comes in. I bought a chair from Ikea, the only place to buy furniture when you're living in Manhattan and are so low on money you fully believe that two tablespoons of peanut butter out of the jar really constitutes as breakfast. When I hauled the box into the apartment I realized the test was upon me: assembly.

Looking at the one large picture covered with circled numbers and letters that correspond with the key in the lower right hand corner, I started feeling the way I did the morning of my SAT's, that feeling that perhaps I'm not as smart as I thought, that perhaps something that should be so simple, is in fact, very difficult. Thirty-five laborious minutes later all I had managed to do was piece together the two arms and connect them with a beam. That little elbow wrench only letting me turn the screw half a centimeter made me want to kill someone, and, as my hand started to cramp I yelled with frustration to the empty apartment "I can't do this is!"

There it was. I admitted it. I can't assemble chairs that come in boxes from Sweden. So I sat down with a cheap glass of pinot noir and looked more calmly at that one page of directions and accepted the fact that I'm not as handy around the house as I thought.

At least I know that until I work up the patience and brainpower to have another go, I can just put one of the cushions on the floor between the two arms, and have some personal space – because in this city, that’s priceless.

Help, I'm a bookish underachiever

I have to say that im insulted, not only as a woman but as a writer. Okay well I'm not a writer because everyone who is a writer by defintion has to have had something published. If not, then we're all writers and I hate be the person who goes around at cocktail parties eating canapes cooing "oh yes, i'm a writer."

It doesn't, however, stop me from having what i have deemed "bitter writer syndrome." When reading about kavvaya a long time ago I remember automatically hating her. a sophomore harvard student with a book deal. Right. I've been slaving over a book for the past three years and haven't even gotten an agent, but Kaavya was able to get a hefty book deal for what is after all, chick lit, and not just any chick lit, plagarized chick lit. This, by definition means you're not a writer.

This NYT article by Whitney Otto struck a chord with me because it seems as though she dislikes Kavaaya as well - and what self-respecting writer wouldnt. There are a lot of things I have written and looking back on them later I squint my eyes in overall disgust saying, what was I thinking? It's what any writer goes through, you work on it, and it takes time, it takes age (Otto is 68) to really get a grasp on life and what you're writing. Kaavya decided to bypass that difficult stage, the endless rounds of editing, the writer's block, the time it takes to really write something worthwhile and just opt to take it away from someone else and pass it off as her own.

I work on doing what Otto says, drinking heavily (yes) and lazily listening in on other people's lives. If there's one thing I took away from my creative writing classes in college (aside from other peoples seriously freakish stories) is that listening is the key to any writer's success, add non-stop vodka sodas to the mix and I'm pretty sure I've found my calling.

And anyway, according to Kavaaya's school of writing I can just plagarize The Sun Also Rises because yes, I feel like that is a book I could have written - if only I had the chance to write it before Hemingway

How to save a life.

Losing it fast I scream “help!” waving my arms leaning over that scary dark abyss that is in between me and the other side of the station where an express subway is flying past and the sound is deafening.

I want to reach up and cover my ears but I don’t because I’m waving my arms and screaming “stop!” even though I know that the man driving the oncoming subway can’t hear me. It’s like the way you yell at a fly ball as it’s cruising high over center field “go! go!” even though you know it’s not going to help it stay just above the outstretched mit below it.

Timing in life, I’ve come to find, is everything. Two minutes before everything was normal and I was heading home from work and thinking about how I hadn’t eaten anything since this morning and how work is exhausting and how its been too long since I’ve been on a proper date, all while reading my newest edition of the New Yorker like the good little New Yorker that I am. And just like any good New Yorker, I know that a train never comes when you want it to. You run and you miss it and you curse yourself for stopping in the bathroom on the way out of the office, for letting that woman push through the revolving door before you, for not running across Varick Street when you saw the light was just turning yellow.

Timing has led me to where I am now, watching the man at the end of the station sway back and forth. I think that he’s just had a few too many Pilsner’s after having had a bad day at the office, (haven’t we all). But when I see him fall onto the tracks I blink and then think that this isn’t my life and then blink again. Frozen in time nothing knocks me out of my stupor but the low rustling sound of the oncoming train.

The New Yorker now on the ground my arms are waving and, losing it fast, I scream “help!” Two other men have joined me now, all three of us leaning, waving, screaming, trying to save a life.

At the last minute the subway car screeches to a halt just like in the movies, two inches from its victim. I see it because it’s right in front of me, and wanting to look away I can’t because my brain isn’t working fast enough to catch up with my reflexes to let me.

Men in uniforms come running in from out of nowhere and push me aside, hopping down onto the tracks. In a daze I watch as they haul him out, his bottle of Maker’s Mark still in his hand. They prop him up against the wall and a pool of red forms behind it. As I stare, slowly reaching down to pick up my dropped New Yorker, I see the man drunkenly take a sip out of the bottle and utter one simple line to the medics who are desperately trying to help him:

“That was a close one, huh?”

As I leave the subway station, deciding to walk off the nerves that are still built up in my body, I start to think about how life’s just one big game of chance. How if you’re lucky you get out of the way in time, or are fortunate enough to have someone there save you. I guess sometimes we all need saving, even if we have a hard time admitting it.

restaurant du jour

Last night over Coronas (leaving the over priced vodka soda on hold for another night) at the Baggott Inn near Washington Square Park, I got to talking with some people and realized that everyone, in their own way or another, is getting over that one bad experience that has yet to fully leave their subconscious. It’s like going to a Restaurant-of-the-Moment in Soho and having a really bad experience with their steak au poivre. Just because you get food poisoning once doesn’t mean you’ll get it the next time you order it, however, it’s difficult not to associate the taste without that memory of having spent the entire night on that bathroom floor come rushing back.

The problem however, is when you can’t stop yourself from subconsciously letting that one night ruin your life, uh I mean, rather, your love of steak, forever.

As I walked home from the subway, the construction workers on Lexington and 3rd asking me how it was possible that I was going home alone, I started to think about how life’s just like one long endless street of restaurants. You move from one to another, feeling betrayed when they close down, and walking back home, your hands in your pockets, the overwhelming feeling of disappointment hits you the way their Chianti did after the third glass.

But in the end you can’t stop life, or restaurants, from happening or closing down. I guess the only thing you can do is take comfort in the knowledge that new places will eventually open up, that menu choices will change and in the end, you can always just go vegan.

The Last 48 Hours

Have been sick for the last 48 hours and have consumed so many liters of Gatorade and so many Nyquil caplets that I don’t even feel like a functioning human being anymore.

Awake yesterday after having had to leave work early the day before due to high fever and exploding headache, I was trying to watch some tv before the massive amounts of over the counter medication kicked in. I don’t know how people don’t work. There’s nothing even good on tv during the day, and, too comatose to read I was forced to sit in front of it for a good portion of the afternoon hours yesterday.

Even sick, I was getting stir crazy, wanting to get back to my real life and away from the world of daytime talk shows and soap operas. I actually watched (regrettably) an entire episode of Date My Mom, which, I have to say, is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen.

I am in no way looking forward to going back to work tomorrow (fever subsiding or not) to the stacks of work that will inevitably have piled up in my absence. Even if I am feeling better, getting back there and frantically plowing through missed work in a struggle to catch up, will bring me right back to where I started two days ago, feverish with a headache.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.