The Four Fundamentals

So I’m a single coffeeholic and I’m okay with that. I’ve yet to find someone who appreciates me for who I am – an addicted, eccentric, twenty-something New Yorker who won’t settle for a man the same way she won’t settle for her coffee. However during this rather long (almost lifetime long, really) bout of singledom, I’ve found a companion in my provider.

Starbucks has been good to me lately – and this newly featured Guatemala Casi Cielo is like the dark brooding man you try to force a moment with (read: stare at) on the subway but would never actually talk to. It’s described as “elegant and intriguing,” and is more approachable (however perhaps a little less formally attired) than the dark brooding man.

Starbucks has an uncanny ability of making their coffees sound just like the kinds of people you might be interested in going on a date with. I mean, who wouldn’t want elegant and intriguing? Or “intense and earthy” (Sumatra)? “light and lively” (house blend)? or even “mellow and well-rounded” (Yukon)?

And while I’d like to find myself a good Gold Coast blend (“rich and sophisticated”), you can never really be too sure what blend is best for you. People are as complex as the beans, and just as there are fundamentals to finding relationship happiness, there are guidelines for finding the perfect cup.

The four fundamentals of coffee are as follows: proportion, grind, water and freshness. Without these you find yourself not only not enjoying your coffee, but feeling let down, disappointed because you’ve unknowingly (or knowingly for reasons of availability, convenience, etc.) settled for “dull and bland.”

Ostensibly, the amount of time the coffee and water spend together affects the flavor elements that end up in your cup, and unless and until you find a blend that is at the right place at the right time, I’m afraid it just might not be in the cards. But filter machines brew for much longer and with more water, making a weaker (albeit good) coffee. It’s the kind of coffee that’s been in your pantry for months. Diluted you say, “it’s fine,” because you just don’t want to bother going out and getting something new. On the other hand, a French press, for example, where the water and grinds have had less time in overall direct contact, however the outcome is a lot stronger and more intense.

In the end, of course, it’s the blending that matters most. What is ultimately needed is the right combination of various qualities found in different regions to form one harmonious, balanced whole. No wonder I’m still single.

Whatever the case, each Starbucks blend offers a cup of coffee that no single-origin coffee can duplicate. Because really, who wants ordinary anyway? Why settle when there’s just so much out there to choose from? When you’ve yet to really find your perfect cut? OK, so maybe I’m getting a little carried away seeing as how a good coffee is a little easier to find in this city than a good man (sadly). And at, what is it now? Like $10 a cup? Some of you average-cuppa-Joe’s out there may think I’m out of my mind to be dedicating so much time to my morning, afternoon, and sometimes nightly indulgence in roasted beans.

I figure that while it may take more effort and time to reach such a seemingly perfect outcome in anything in life, to me, a coffeeholic of the second largest city in the world next to Tokyo (right?), it’s just like what The Way I See It #157 says: “Some of the best inventive moments were born out of ‘wrong thinking.’ Most people start with the right way so they all follow the same path. The wrong way will lead to mistakes from which you can learn and create new discoveries – the kind of original ideas that come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind and have no fear of failure.”
James Dyson said that. And all he did was design a better way to pick up dirt.

Location, location, location.

According to this Times article, I live in the most famous and most desired ZIP code in Manhattan and come to it, in all of America. Who would have thought that when I came here a year ago, poor (and mind you, I am still poor) that I was going to find an apartment in the most desired area of the city, able to get bills (that I have a hard time paying) addressed to the 10021 zip code above which my very own name is displayed. With this new zip code-restructuring only eight streets will be able to remain a part of this coveted five-number-identity, and I’m part of the lucky few.

Not that being in an elite zip code fulfills me (though it doesn’t hurt) but it’s nice to feel like you’ve done something right - even if it was only by chance. Everything about New York is about getting what’s better than what the other guy has – the better apartment, the better boyfriend, the better job, the better reservation at the better restaurant, the better friend with the better connections – and I have to admit I’ve been so far outside the competitive loop since I’ve been here (okay job, okay friends, okay and cheap restaurants, no boyfriend) I’ve been starting to feel like an outsider, like a fraud, like a (gasp!) fake. However now (sigh) all is right with the world as I know that I’m currently sitting, sleeping, and spending in the not even better, but best block radius in the country.

However, like any true New Yorker the irony of this little “swish” moment isn’t entirely lost on me. Just like in New York, the 69th to 76th street range of income varies not only from street to street, building to building, but literally apartment door to apartment door. Dolores, across the hall from me, lives in lush conditions. I happened to knock on her door a few weeks ago to borrow some cinnamon for my apple spice cake (I know, how un-glamorous, do people in 10021 even bake? I’m sure they pay people do to that…) and caught a glimpse of her big screen television (she is old, perhaps she can’t see well), her two couches, (I barely have one) and the realization that she has the whole apartment to herself and her cat. I share my apartment with a roommate and barely have enough money left over after rent to buy traditional spices. So while she fumbled around in the kitchen I did the quick math, multiply by two, carry the one…Dolores is rich!

After her “here you go, dear,” I went back to my half-her-size home and felt a pang of sadness. Not only is the person across the hall from me making lots more money than me, (she could afford to give me the entire cinnamon container, insisting that I keep it), she doesn’t even have a job. Can I really live in 10021 under the guise of such affluence? Can everyone else in this zip code detect my lack of prosperity, possessions and cooking powders in my pied-á-terre?

Thirty minutes at 350 degrees later I decided that yes, I can live here, as I have been for a year and regardless of wealth its been working out OK for me. No one has to know I bake my own cakes, or borrow cinnamon from Dolores, or live on a shockingly low amount of money per month post rent (and taxes), or share my place with someone else.

It’s OK that in New York, and 10021, so many people are nouveau riche, and I am nouveau poor. Because any true New Yorker will tell you that no matter what zip code you happen to reside in, perception (over reality), is nine-tenths of the game anyway.

Times they are a-changin'

I think the last of the snow has fallen on Manhattan. The season is ending and people will stop talking now about the snow and the cold and start talking about how the temperature is rising more and more, how soon summer will be here and we’ll all be feeling a lot better to be outside, to be walking around this city and not trapped indoors, in our tall and small apartment buildings piled one on top of one wishing we could open our windows and make the city our back porches.

It happens quickly and the pulse of the place changes, and maybe then when the weather gets warmer I won’t feel so much like all I want to do is simply disappear. Because it’s like the more you dig your hands into your pockets the more everything catches up to you. It’s easy, with your hands reaching for warmth to look at your life and think you’ve got it all wrong, like you should be in some beach house on the water because life’s just too short not to.

Because from street to street you just think - if only I could just go somewhere else and meet new people, things would be better. If only I could just skip town and go somewhere warm, somewhere new, somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past or my face, I could be happy.

Being in a city surrounded by so many people sometimes all you want to do is just disappear, go somewhere where you don’t have to fight to push past them on the sidewalk, those people who always stand in the middle talking, the women with strollers, the tourists with cameras. If only you could just go somewhere where you felt like you could breathe more, and start over and create a new past in those moments when all you want to do is forget the one you already have.

You think that if only you could go somewhere where you wouldn’t be so afraid of what you wanted, where you’d have the space and time to figure it out, you’d get through the rough patches where nothing makes sense, where your life just feels like these endless passing weeks of sameness, of people on sidewalks and in subways and in elevators all trying to get somewhere else all the time, and you – you feeling like you’re stuck in the middle of this moving mass without a clear destination at all.

But you keep on, you keep on hopping over snow banks on street corners, and digging your hands deeper into your pockets to find warmth as you walk from block to block, giving up on pushing past people and letting your own pace sink in, letting yourself take the time to live more deliberately, because you know it won’t be lasting much longer.

And you realize that your past isn’t yours anymore anyway because everything has changed, and no matter how much you may want to you can’t get it back, and as unclear as the future is, as monotonous and unsure as it may look from here, from your vantage point of hopping over snow banks on street corners, you have no choice but to venture into it. Because If Only is always just If Only if you want to live more deliberately.

The city, like life, waits for no one. So you have to believe in it, even when you want to give up, because if you keep living your life on If Onlys you may never be able to catch up with it.

preferred amnesia

I have the uncanny ability of holding onto certain things for far longer than I should. Like the napkin from a bar in which I wrote the note: learn better how to let go.

I still have pictures and clothes and books that I’ve already seen and over-worn and more than three-times-read taking up space in my new life, things that are directly associated with parts of my past that I’m not ready to let go of just yet.

They’re like the stupid souvenirs that the tourists buy, the t-shirts that say NEW YORK on them as though the tourists are going to forget they came here without those letters on their chest there to remind them.

Because you remember NEW YORK like you remember your first love. You remember how it felt, what it meant to you, and how difficult it was to leave it behind. In the city you’ll remember how it felt to be there, to stand among its people, amidst its buildings, in the throes of other peoples lives - and it’s not like you’re going to forget all that when the t-shirt, like love, becomes worn and torn, becomes a rag and eventually has to be thrown away. You’ll still remember even then, with the shirt long gone, how it felt.

NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind are like the monkey bars. I never liked the monkey bars as a kid - legs swinging, hands holding on trying to propel myself forward just to get to the other end. For wouldn’t it have been easier, faster, less painful just to walk? But we come to know, (and sometimes too late) that anything that’s worth anything never comes easy.

And like the monkey bars - NEW YORK and love and the things you can’t leave behind - the tighter you let yourself grip them, the longer it takes for those red marks, those almost-blisters, to fade away.

There are certain New York days that can make or break you.

And being stuck underground on the subway between 50th street and 42nd street for a half hour can certainly finish the task of making you never want to spend one more minute in a place that can’t handle a little water in it’s underground transportation system.

I had a feeling this morning, with the rain coming down as it was, that it wasn’t going to be an easy commute. Getting on the bus with the windows all fogged and that pungent smell of sweat and soaked wool, I thought to myself: it’s just one day.

Flash forward to 50th street when the 1 train stopped, doors open, so that the train conductor could ask over the loudspeaker for anyone who was a doctor, as there was a “sick person on the platform.” Everyone turned, strained their necks in one succinct motion towards the open doors to try to see the injured civilian. People all tell themselves they don’t want to look at the exact moment they do. Some began to leave the train, (hopefully to assist), and soon we were creeping out of 50th street, when about ten seconds later, we were at a stand-still.

Being underground like that and looking from dark window to dark window, I realized that my supposed fear of small confined spaces was, in fact, real. Everyone around me just seemed exasperated, rolling their eyes as that loudspeaker voice you can never really understand went about repeating the same thing every two minutes:“Mrrrrrwerearrrrestop…momen…rily. Mrrrrrrthank…for…atience.”

Of course of all the people on all the trains in all the world I was stuck standing next to a guy who couldn’t handle himself. He couldn’t handle the fact that this was really happening to him and choose to talk to me (or to himself, I’m not sure) about how he felt about it: “I mean you’ve got to be kidding me! C’mon, say it again man, just tell me one more time that we’re stopped, like I can’t already see that, like I’m some sort of gosh darn idiot, like I was just born yesterday. And thank me again for my gosh darn patience, just do it man, c’mon, just one more gosh darn time.”

I tried to give him a withering smile of camaraderie, to silently tell him that I too was fighting the battle of living in Manhattan.

He didn’t seem to care. And he didn’t say gosh darn, either.

30 minutes and an almost panic-attack later, I got off the 1 at 42nd street after it officially stopping running. The express wasn’t working either and I flew up the stairs into the pouring rain to try to catch a cab. But any New Yorker knows that trying to find a cab in the middle of Times Square in the rain is about as easy as finishing a Rubick’s cube in under 5 seconds. First the red, then the green…

I walked for blocks, soaked, hauling my duffle bag because of course, this is the weekend I’ve chosen to go out of town. As fire trucks scream past me, crowds of people with umbrellas push around me, I thought: this is a nightmare.
A few blocks later, soaked through and not an empty cab in sight, I found myself back at the subway, finally realizing that I could take the A/C/E to Spring street and walk to work from there. On the E, I’m stuck standing next to two guys who’ve chosen to sleep on the seats next to me, by far creating the most unpleasant smell I’d had to deal with so far that morning. Right before I get off at Spring, one of them wakes up, grabs a huge jar of Jiffy peanut butter out from one of his many trash-filled bags at his feet, and starts eating large finger-fulls. Soon, all of his fingers are covered in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and just before the doors open he looks up at me, gives me a smile consisting of about three teeth altogether, points his sticky fingers at me and says, “ya like some butta, hun?”

On the walk to the office I pass a Starbucks and naturally go in to buy a venti house blend because I feel like I deserve it after the morning I’ve just had. I am now officially an hour late for work, and try to walk into the office unnoticed. Of course, soaking wet with running mascara and a venti Starbucks cup( with The Way I See It #184), is anything but discreet. I make it to my desk fearing the wrath of my superiors, while reading #184, “…only an idiot sets out to find the poorhouse, not to mention devote himself to something he doesn’t love. Instead, I discovered an interesting back road to the unknown, and deliberately without a safety net.”

While getting over my anger at the MTA I think that this city is like one huge back road about 100 feet in the air with nothing but empty space under you, and some days it’s easier to let yourself fall than others. But you just always have to remember, that, like today, just two hours later, it stops raining, and the sun comes out again.

I (still) heart NY.

There are 312 hours in a day.

Suddenly it’s Tuesday. Monday seemed like it lasted for about five minutes and the commute from home to office to work now feels like a blur. What is it about time and how it callously functions on it’s own schedule without any regard to people’s lives. I need weekends to be longer, my limited free time after work before I fall asleep (only to wake up at 3AM unable to fall back to sleep) to feel like days not mere hours.

I woke up a 6:59 this morning. You know how you do that, wake up on your own seconds before your alarm is slated to go off? It’s sort of disgusting, really. Am I so trained now that I no longer need that irritating, bone-shaking beep beep beeping of the alarm in the morning to get me going? Is my life on such a regimented track that it’s come to this – my own biological clock subconsciously getting me up and getting me to work without my brain even realizing it?

Suddenly it’s Tuesday and I desperately need it to be Friday and I can already tell that time is going to be a real jerk today and take its sweet little time. 10AM will feel like 1PM, 2 will feel like 5, 6 will feel like…midnight.

So trained am I that I was on the subway and almost to my stop when looking back I didn’t entirely remember walking out of my apartment. Or getting on the bus, or getting off the bus on 72nd and Amsterdam and getting on the 1, or putting clothes on for that matter. It’s like those scary moments when you’re driving, cruising at 65 (or really 75, but that’s neither here nor there), and you’ve moved from exit 3 to about exit 15 and you don’t remember passing by 4 through 14? You remember that at one point you were singing aloud to Air Supply, thinking that you really are all out of love, until scarily you pass exit 15 with an open-mouthed look of “wha??” and swear never repeat the incident to anyone, ever again (including the singing).

The only thing that snapped me out of it, causing me to look up from my book, was when the doors opened at 34th street and there was a man playing the saxophone on the platform in front of the cracked Penn. Station sign. The sound of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, not quite at the right 5/4 time signature speed, (this guy was no Paul Desmond), but I realized I was almost at work, and yes, thankfully, had clothes on.

Tuesday had officially begun, and Wednesday, slow to be sure, is only about 312 hours away.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

You like to think you’ve changed, but know that in a lot of ways, you haven’t changed at all. You’re still stupid, still think you can have control over your life, over what happens and who you let yourself care about - as though the heart has some sort of power button, a dimmer switch with the ability to bypass mistakes and regrets and skip out on the bad memories of the past that you can never seem to really ever let go of.

They keep resurfacing. And the time it may take for it all to really go away feels like too much. Infinitely too much.

Until time and feelings are all wrapped together in one hurdling mass, headed right for your heart, causing it to explode. And then you look at it, in little pieces on the floor, sections of days and months and moments. There it is. Your life staring back at you, showing you everything you did wrong, everything you regret, everything that now, seems so painfully clear.

Stay away, the pieces show you. Run. You will only get hurt. But when it comes to our hearts, we don’t know any better, and we always think that we do.

It creeps up on us when we least expect it. The sound of a name or the scent of an old perfume, and suddenly we’re back there, in the thick of our almost tangible memories, when our hearts were still intact, before the damage was done.

We go on. The bruises heal and this strong muscle keeps beating no matter how much you say you don’t care anymore if it stops. It repairs. It inwardly fixes itself, and you find you’re unable to let anything come near it: no caffeine, no trans-fats, not one day without exercise.

You tell yourself you have no choice now put to protect it. And so you continue on. Careful, guarded. Your heart in an icebox. Preserved. Protected. Numb. You don’t know if that will change. So you stop asking yourself the question.

It is what it is and there’s no going back, no stopping the world. And in the time it took for it to fall apart you think it will take five times as long for it to come back together again. Because it’s always easier to break something than it is to rebuild it. In the heated emotional moment it takes to throw a punch - hours have to follow in order for the swelling to go down, weeks for the bruise to fade. And that little scar in the corner of your eye never seems to ever really go away.

It lingers. A constant reminder of our mistakes, our lost opportunities, our bad luck, our bad timing or whatever it is that makes certain things happen to us at the moments they do. But we move forward. We have no other choice. We eventually accept that it is what it is, that there’s no going back, no stopping the world.

Honesty is such a lonely word.

Because no matter how old you get, when it comes to relationships, you still have no idea what you’re doing.

There are two people in my life who have, for as long as I can remember, had the most difficult time being honest. I’m not sure if it’s just honesty that’s the real problem here, or if it’s also due to their combined inability (let’s call them Jack and Jill) to figure out what they actually want. While I know that men and women love, and are very good at, playing games, and that they are so intrinsically different that most of the time I wonder how it is that relationships ever work at all – but you’d think that after all these two have been through (read: heartbreak, waiting out other relationships, drunken text messages, hours spent on carefully crafted emails, planned weekends away, trying to figure out what planned weekend away meant, more text messages…), that they’d want to capitalize on all this effort that they’ve expensed on not making the relationship work, and actually just be together.

But then again, just being together is difficult. No one seems to really know how to make that Being Together thing happen. Before the be-all-end-all of marriage, there isn’t a handbook, a guide, a signed contract that you can simply hand to the other person and say “here, sign this and we’ll, you know, like be together.” However Being Together inevitably takes having to communicate to the other person that you do, indeed, want to be together - and we all know that telling someone how you really feel is the emotional equivalent to standing in the middle of a busy street stark naked.

Remember when you were twelve, and that guy who was playing footsie with you under the table in the library sent his friend to ask you how you really felt about him? And then once the courage was worked up, Footsie Guy actually came up to you and said something like, “Hey Sara, look at me! I’ve got arms! Do think you'd want to be like, boyfriendgirlfriend maybe?” Maybe we all need to go back to such simplistic ways of communicating instead of spending months trying say that exact thing we feel without actually saying anything at all.

Jack and Jill are not, I believe, the first people in the world to forgo honesty. Women are too afraid to want what they want at the risk of losing the man they want - so they keep their mouths shut and pretend that “this is whatever it is, ok?” is enough for them. But it’s never just whatever it is. It’s always more or not enough and they’re left waiting it out, waiting and hoping to see if the other person will eventually grow up and mature to the level of the normal human understanding that when it comes to peoples hearts, “whatever it is,” isn’t anything to hang your hopes on.

And while I know men typically stay away from anything having to do with the words “feelings,” “commitment,” and “laundry,” as though they were black death itself, I find it hard to believe that they can be so afraid of honesty that they’d be willing to risk their own happiness because of it.

What we need to do is try to get back to our emotional roots, before we were exposed to the cruel world of rejection and loneliness as adults, back to the time when playground politics ruled and liking someone was as real and straightforward as PB&J.

Because isn’t honesty, when it comes to how we feel, really the best policy? Wouldn’t you hate to be Jack in ten years, waking up only to realize that you had spent the majority of your early-adulthood bouncing around between relationships you didn’t really care about just because you were too afraid (or too stupid) to go after what you really wanted?

Tsk tsk. It’s time to speak up - Footsie Guy wouldn’t approve of anything less.

Today people talked about snow and love.

They talked about how cold it was outside, how the sleet this morning was pelting down on the top of their heads and the black slushy snow was clogging up the sidewalks. They talked about how much more snow other people got, how Rob in Syracuse got eight feet, and their cousin Rita got three in Chicago. “We were lucky, really,” they said. “Rob was out there shoveling snow that was over his car! You couldn’t see Rob’s car!”

Then they talked about their dinner plans and the flowers they got and the chocolates (that they can’t eat too many of) and teddy bears that were waiting for them at home. They talked about all the money they had to spend in order to keep Jackie happy, how the florist was out of roses this morning (that’s what happens when you wait to the last minute), and how now a card needed to be crafted after their 11AM meeting but before their 3PM out of office letterhead cardstock paper and the markers from the dry erase board in the conference room.

But tonight the snow has stopped, the roads (mainly) are clear. Rob out West might still be in trouble as it doesn’t stop snowing there until May, but Jackie will be happy (though her boyfriend won’t be able to pay March rent)

Snow and love makes everyone crazy, and by tomorrow it will all be gone - the snow anyway.

Suddenly.

Life happens suddenly and it’s easy to forget how fast things can disappear.

Because we can’t think about time and how there isn’t enough of it, because it’s better to hold the hands of those we love than the hands of the clock, as they will always and forever move forward into the unknown, even when we don’t want them to - passing minutes and disappearing seconds that we can’t get back, that we cannot change.

It’s easy to find yourself at the exact moment realizing that everything is perfect a second before it all falls apart. And what do we do with change? Creatures of habit who can’t adapt to a life so drastically different than the one we’ve always known. The past and future are holding hands now, and you, stuck in the middle, don’t feel like time exists at all.

So you run. You run towards those passing minutes and disappearing seconds and try to make the most of them. You try not to Waste. Any. More. Time.

Suddenly. Life happens suddenly and it’s easy to remember how fast everything can change.

Only love.

I was eight years old. I was sporting the haircut I had seemingly my entire childhood – short, chin-length with bangs. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car while my mother was driving. My feet didn’t touch the floor and I remember being able to look straight out and see my black and white saddle shoes staring back at me.

She was flipping through the radio stations, trying to find something to settle on for our little journey to the grocery store or wherever it was that we were going that day. I just remember that it was cold, late fall, and I had on my heavy wool navy blue coat that was keeping me insulated and warm as I watched her scan through the FM. I remember how she looked sitting there, the soft profile of her face from my low vantage point, the slow curving of her mouth, her eyes that shifted from the dial to the road to me.

And then she finally found a song - Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart.” As I sat there looking out the window I didn’t understand what Gene was talking about. In fact, it seemed to me that all of the songs she had already passed – actually all of the songs I’d ever heard before – were all talking about the same thing.

So I looked over at her with semi-disgust and asked, “Why are songs always about love?” I remember the way her face looked, glancing down at me with eyes bright, as she smiled before taking a deep breath like she knew something I didn't, and simply responded: “Because what better thing is there in the world to sing about?”

First New York. In 24 hours…the world.

I’ve never really been into superheroes. I know that typically they are stereotyped to be the kinds of things that girls don’t really care about anyway, and it’s boys who have the Superman action-figure and the girls who have Barbies (which, might I add, in their own right are superheroes. Who can keep up a mansion and maintain that figure?). I guess my sister was an exception. She grew up semi-obsessed with He-Man and his female counterpart She-Ra: Princess of Power. My sister had both of their castles and all of their partners-in-crime, including the evil nemeses (for they had several). All birthdays would mean her getting something else related to these superheroes of yesteryear, including birthday cakes with their faces silk-screened on top. I was a silent observer of this trend that she eventually (thankfully) grew out of. Though I have I feeling that even today she misses their significance.

Everyone around me has been talking about this new TV show, Heroes, that in all honesty, I haven’t seen even ten seconds of (something about a cheerleader?). This is mainly due to the fact that I don’t have time to watch a lot of television, and when I do, it’s difficult enough keeping track of the usually ultra-ridiculous and extra-intensive storylines of LOST and 24. Miss one episode and you suddenly feel like you’re the one trapped on a deserted island with that ticking noise pulsing in your ear. Friends make you an outsider when you can’t contribute to the morning coffee pot conversation of: “Oh my god, did you even seen what happened last night!?” (Spoiler alert) “Jack totally killed Curtis!”

We are a television-set culture these days, with more things to see at the press of a button than we know what to do with. Nights, afternoons, weekends are planned around our religious viewing schedules (dear TiVo, thanks for nothing. love, the outdoors). But what I don’t necessarily understand is why these shows (Heroes) need to be based in New York. After I got past the whole concept that these Heroes characters actually acquire their abilities through I’m assuming some form of divine intervention, I learned (as this is all people are talking about) that the whole show is currently pivoting around the heroes attempt to avert a nuclear explosion in, you guessed it, New York City.

At least LOST happens on an island, or in purgatory, or really, wherever you want it to be happening, and 24 (equip with its own nuclear explosions) happens in Los Angeles, which is on the down and out anyway. Can’t this show Heroes pick another location too? How about Detroit? Or Billings, Montana? It’s scary enough living in this city with the threat of running into one of these people on any given day, let alone having to worry about some super kids’ attempt to stop nuclear war.

I liked heroes better when all they had to worry about was defending Eternia and the forces of castle Greyskull from the evil forces of Skeletor. Not WMD’s in the Big Apple. But like I said before, I’ve never really been into superheroes. Jack Bauer’s resilience is about all I can take, always leaving me at the end of every hour asking no one in particular: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

But I guess we need heroes in our lives, in some form or another, because in reality – they’re hard to come by.

Grammar 101

You know how there are things that you do in your life that are so ridiculous, that even years later you find yourself sitting at your desk typing some sort of memo on official-looking letterhead and bam! it hits you, the sudden flash of memory of the very wrong thing you did. You find yourself blushing, shaking your head, even muttering to yourself things like: “boy, was that stupid,” alone in your office. You can’t, for the life of you, remember what possessed you to do such a thing, to say such a thing at such a moment, and then the worst times - the times you never said anything at all.

This mental-muscle-memory reflex happens to me a lot. Maybe more than most people, (unlike, say, Ted Kennedy’s flashes of Chappaquiddick), because the list of overall ridiculous things I’ve done in my life is long, very long (disclaimer: I am not responsible for any deaths).

It starts probably further back than I like to admit, but the exact moment I can see in my head is the time I incorrectly pronounced “aging” while reading aloud in the first grade. It came out something like “agony” or “gagging” (surely this must be a typo, I thought) because at that time I still didn’t fully understand how a word, age, could suddenly drop a letter and still be the same word but in a different context, aging. My little logical six-year-old brain asked: certainly it should be ageing, no?

But aside from my initial difficulties with the English language (I later went on to major in it in college…scary), I’ve behaved in altogether ridiculous ways: acting before thinking, speaking before waiting, misinterpreting social etiquettes, falling down in the middle of crowds the way I have on several occasions – say in movie theatre lobbies (by far the most famous among my friends), and on the sidewalk outside of my pre-school in those thick white stockings and a pleated skirt, caught on video tape by my father as my black patent-leather shoes that I loved so much got caught up on each other, my right crossing directly over my left as I walked, then landed, then cried.

However I try, as we all have to, to make the best of my handicap and learn from the past. But it’s not so easy when you’re suddenly faced with a situation you’re not sure how to handle, the grown-up equivalent of stumbling across a confusing word while reading aloud. Maybe the answer is that if you want to live you can’t take too seriously the syntax of things. In time, we will undoubtedly make it through our own compound sentences and flailing sentence structure and grammatical errors, (I end up speaking in run-ons). Because while these patterned relations may govern what we do, set the guidelines of who we’re supposed to be, they can’t control the mistakes and regrets and lost truths of growing up.

There’s a lot about this city that keeps you out in the cold.

Like this morning, looking right out my window across 72nd street to the wall of buildings in front of me (the living room with the lime green walls on the 12th floor, the man who plays the cello every night on the 7th), and it looked just like any other day. Because if you don’t look down to see that snow has settled on the awnings that stretch out to the road, or on the cars that line up and down the streets – then you wouldn’t know.

Snow in the city isn’t the same as it is everywhere else. There’s something you miss because you never seem to have the time to look down, to catch it before it melts away into pools of dirty water that collect in sewers and on street corners and inevitably in front of bus stops, forcing you to stand back when approaching speeding traffic passes.

And then the bus made it to the end of the street, took its usual left onto 5th Ave and there it was, the first time this year I saw Central Park in the snow. Yeah, sure, it snowed here last week for about fifteen minutes around 10AM, at which point all of my friends bombarded me with emails, (knowing how much I love the snow) telling me, “it’s finally here!” and yesterday afternoon, but of course I work in a huge building, and I’m not important enough yet to have an office with windows, and like most things in my life that are plagued by bad timing - I missed it.

But this morning there it was, the way snow is supposed to be, covering the grass, allowing you to look into the distance and see nothing but white resting on branches, making the park its own little place of quiet peace in the middle of an otherwise turbulent and crazy world.

So I can’t wait for tomorrow, when I’ll have the whole day to walk around the park and go back in time to when snow actually meant something – a day off of school, building snowmen without corncob pipes because no one really knows what those are anyway, and feeling like a kid again.

But knowing my luck, by tomorrow, it will all have melted.

The Chill

I put on a sweater this morning and then a scarf (grey) and a coat (black) and a hat (maroon) and I still couldn’t feel anything when I got off the subway.

A few years ago I swore to myself that I would move to The South. There things are warm and pleasant. People don’t need scarves or hats or coats and drink out of glasses with umbrellas and listen to music that floats up into the hot humid air and dissipates, then disappears into the sun.

Just a few weeks ago I was running through Central Park in 70 degree heat thinking that I made the right choice.
Now.
Now there’s nothing but frozen air and hot cups of coffee with no umbrellas and the only music is the screeching of breaks and the honking of horns from people all trying to get to the next best thing. The next warm place.

I know there are people in other places, all,
Going to work and
Going to bars
And driving their cars and
checking their watches hoping,
hoping for the hands of time to speed them fast into spring,
away from The Chill.

Perhaps someday I’ll take a job anywhere doing anything just to get away from the cold.

It’s amazing the things you take for granted – like – breathing through your nose.

I have had a tissue box permanently attached to my hip for the past 72 hours. My nose has, over these past few days, turned to a bright shade of red, has become sensitive to the touch, and I can’t help but wonder how there can really be that much stuff up somewhere up in my head that is causing me to constantly be blowing my nose.

I don’t believe in the flu shot. I don’t believe in shots in general, or pills, or take this for that or that to prevent this or tablets or things that fizzle in water and promise to deliver me from a sick-free-season, which I guess, is why I got this, regardless of how much I like to boast that I never get sick (I mean, don’t we all?)

In and out of the haze of fever that struck me nearly three days ago, I’ve given up on being on the wagon and have been consuming large amounts of Nyquil, a drug that I have come to know and love. I think I liked being sick much better when I was a kid, when I had someone to take care of me, instead of walking down 72nd street feeling somewhere in the general body temperature vicinity of 102 degrees just to stock up on all sorts of over-the-counter medication.

But I guess that’s growing up, having to learn how to take care of yourself. I mean the overall idea can be pretty overwhelming at times, and some of us learn better than others. Some of us still don’t know how to cook a meal or do laundry (lights, darks, what difference does it make?). Of course I could probably answer the question of whether or not I’ve been doing a good job fairly easily. I’m sure my mother would have objected to me going out for drinks on Saturday night just when this illness was starting to settle in and walking home in the rain. I’m sure that nice guy at the bar, (Jason), would have liked me more had I not been tuning in and out of him telling me how he’s a student at Columbia and a Mets fan (I mean, I guess) because I was starting to feel light-headed from the vodka/Tylenol combination.

Sometimes we’re not as smart as we like to think we are (cough). Because we’re trying to do so much living in what feels like such a short amount of time (youth), sometimes the only choice we have is to throw “doing the right thing” out the window in order to capitalize on our lives (Jason).

And while I’ll probably never see Jason again, and I still wash both lights and darks together on cold (it saves money and time), I might not be learning how to take care of myself as well as I’d like. But I do consider myself a little bit of a grown up – most of the time. I know that once I make it through this flu I’ll once again be stubborn and not take any shots or pills or tablets that fizz and I’ll boast how I never get sick, until, again, I inevitably do. And whatever that says about how smart a grown-up I am, is anyone’s guess.

All I know now for sure, is that I have to go, because I’m out of tissues.

New York: home of the world’s largest muffins

Like you thought I wouldn’t be on top of this. Seeing as how the Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle is an avid reader of mighty, (which is sort of creepy, yes), I figure I should be the one to tell them that this new oven initiative, while great, is slowing things down. And by “things” I mean “me.”

I know people apparently need their egg and cheese on “some sort of bread carrier” in the morning, but I just need coffee. And when your employees are too busying trying to figure out how to use above mentioned oven that their three large canisters of bold, mild and decaf all run out while I’m waiting in line – well then you’ve got yourself a bit of a problem.

The man in line in front me muttered something using the words “figures,” “capitalistic,” and “pigs,” before huffing and walking out, presumably to the Dunkin Donuts on the corner (sacrilege). I was then left wide-eyed and scared, a whole line of angering not-yet-had-their-morning-cuppa clients behind me asking each other with surprise “is it really…gone?” I had no choice but to wait patiently for a new batch to brew – because love is only blind in one eye from a freak accident a few years ago involving a decaf mix-up and a toaster oven. The other one, addicted, always sees clearly.

Feels like home.

Tomorrow marks my one year anniversary of being in New York. The funny thing about time is that you never realize how much of it is passing. Time ultimately changes how you see things and how initially a thing can look so different from the way it is when you come back to it. The New York I came to a year ago (foreign, mainly) is much different than the New York I’m in now (home, mostly).

And New York is a place that is always changing - new restaurants, bars, plays, exhibits opening every day that if you don’t act fast enough you’ll miss it. So you have to grab on to the little things that make you feel like you’re some small part of the colossus that is this city, that you have some significance in a place that does all it can to make you feel as insignificant as possible.

Saturday in New York felt like Saturday in Florida or Southern California or some place that is typically 72 degrees in early January. All people are talking about is the weather and how strange it is, how bizarre that we didn’t need our coats yesterday, that we didn’t need our sweaters or hats or gloves. It felt like, for a day, you could travel back in time to late summer, and that if you just closed your eyes you wouldn’t think that the leaves weren’t on the trees, that New Years had just passed, that there are days and days and months ahead of us until we really will see green again to help bring the pavement alive.

And then you open your eyes and see that there is another restaurant, bar, play, exhibit closing, and that the funny thing about time is that sometimes the more there is the less there seems to be.

It may not always be so.

There was this guy I loved for a long time. Of course I didn’t really love him because when you meet someone when you’re young you don’t know anything about anything, especially not anything about love. And he was a typical college guy. The problem with that is that like most typical college guys (or just typical guys) he didn’t know what he wanted, so he decided he wanted everything. He wanted everything and nothing and didn’t know how to go about getting either without hurting or lying or cheating on someone else. It’s like he was two people: one, duplicitous, the other decent.

Sometimes I don’t know if guys ever really know what they want aside from a steady influx of burritos, baseball and beer; but at one point this guy made it very clear that he wanted more than that, he wanted me. But we always ran into problems because everything always seemed to happen on his terms. Not because that’s the way I like things or because I didn’t have any terms of my own, simply, it’s how he ran his life - without much regard to anyone but himself. The bad side of his two-facedness always seemed to be winning out - and the irony is (and there always is irony) that that was one of the things I liked most about him.

And then you’re in it. You find yourself in something you can’t get out of, liking someone you almost can’t stand, feeling as though you’re suddenly submerged in water and don’t know how to break through to the surface for air. You find yourself trapped. I was trapped. Trapped on my side while everything had to happen on his - when he wanted to talk, when he wanted to hang out, when he wanted to call back, when he wanted us to be together. And he was always upset at me for one reason or another – either for not loving him enough, or loving him too much.

But it’s difficult to love under someone else’s conditions, on someone else’s terms. Sometimes, all you want to do, all you need, is to simply let love be. And I figure that if it can’t (and even if you figure too late) then it’s not really love at all.

There was this guy I loved for a long time.

Nobody puts Starbucks in a corner.

In this week’s Advertising Age annual, which is essentially a book of stats and facts from the already-over year of 2006 (remember her?), they have the figures of the top consumed coffees in the country. Of course in my mind (and for those of you who read mighty on a regular basis already know the answer) the buck stops at one place and one place only. Call me a coffee elitist (or addict), but Starbucks will always be close to my heart. So where does it come in, you ask? With its holiday cups, its “The way I see it,” and multi-faceted blends? Third. (Gasp!) I know, I’m just as shocked as you are.

Second is none other than Maxwell House, whose television commercials use of the annoying song “Our House” by a British ska/pop band Madness has apparently garnered more drinkers. So who is number one? That’s right, none other than Folgers. With all of the great coffee choices out there today I wonder why it is that people are still drinking from that large blue metal tub of poorly roasted beans. But I mean I guess people will believe anything - and who could really pass up what literally might be the best part of waking up.